Chemistry Videos are Fun

No freak outs today---I think the Bad Feeling And Thoughts are gone for now.

It's really strange how the smallest of things can just trigger off a maladaptive reaction.

Anyway, I spent some time chilling in Night City in Cyberpunk 2077. Earlier in the morning [technically], I found out about NileRed, a YouTuber who does complex chemistry experiments.

That's right, chemistry experiments. It is kind of similar to ElectroBOOM's videos, except that instead of electrical/electronics, it is chemistry. The style of presentation is necessarily different due to the more cerebral nature of chemistry, and it went about as well as I thought it would. There is definitely something more physical to observe than pure thought-centric topics in computer science/mathematics, but a lot of the video was just ``I then poured X into the flask and applied heat carefully''. It's not boring as there are many physically visible things in addition to the analytical aspects of chemistry (e.g. colour changes in the pH strip, cloudiness of the mixtures going clear, floating magnets on super-conductors)---the cerebral bits of the reasoning from the chemical equations are tastefully presented in the form of overlays on the video itself.

But I think it attracts a certain type of viewer, of which I think I am a fan of.

I finally made some progress for Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition), reaching page 321/3790, or about 2--3 chapters since the last time I read it (chapter 44/477 if we want to book-keep that way). It's a long book---maybe I should target the completion of part 2 (i.e. completing 62/477 chapters) as the next goal before I continue on with Tools of Titans. I love the book to bits---I've always had an interest in medicine---but it is really long, and is quite dense [in terms of text per page], probably more so than The Dinosauria (2nd Edition) that I completed way back in 2020 (wait, was it really just last year?!).

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I took a little time to write the framework code for tokenising the KJV text for my Bible text mining project, in preparation for some network mining of the verses. It's all exploratory for me, and is a way to get back to some of my old roots. The process did bring me back to an old friend, NLTK, and I am glad that it has finally been updated to run in Python3 with little to no hiccups. I don't need much of the power of NLTK, though the [English] word tokeniser seems to use the Punkt models. There seems to be some segmenters for Chinese, which will be useful when I am ready to work with the CUV Bible, and perhaps set up some kind of parallel text concordance thing against KJV, and even bringing in the older Masoretic and Koine-Greek text at some point.

Yeah, at that point, I'm basically turning into some kind of weird one-man computational linguistics hack in search of the computational equivalent of truth that the Saints have been doing for a couple of thousand years without the use of over-powerful computational devices. But that is for the future, since I have no idea how to interpret Hebrew, and old school Greek. And that there are other slightly more pressing things to handle than to replicate the work of the academics for my own edification.

This week is likely to be spent quietly at home, since my budget for this month has been spent, and the next disbursal of payment to myself from myself is happening only on Thursday. At some point this week, I will be watching The Passion of the Christ, and then Paul, Apostle of Christ, in commemoration of Good Friday and Easter Sunday. No, it's not a tradition or a ritual, just something that had been on my list of things to do that seems most appropriate at this time, that's all.

I don't have anything else to say for now other than time for a quick shower, and then perhaps heading back into Night City for another jaunt. Till the next update then.