It is now Sunday of the second week, welcome to the review of last week.
The goals set for last week were not bad, but unfortunately not all of them were completed. The papers that the thesis values have a deep theoretical foundation, so it takes longer to digest them. In addition, I always slacked off last week, so it is normal that I didn't finish reading the papers.
Meditation#
Since April 8th until now, the habit of meditation has been maintained for a month. I increasingly rely on this process to clear my mind. I remember during my undergraduate years, including when I came to Germany later, I had many failed attempts at meditation. Analyzing the reasons for the previous failures, I think it was because my mindset was restless, and I had more purpose in the process of meditation. I always associated meditation with perceiving my own internal sensations. In the process of meditation, I pursued the ability to control my breathing and also hoped to understand the various internal sensations that occasionally arise. The biggest change that allowed me to persist this time came from implementing the practice of doing only one thing at a time, either focusing on my breath or experiencing various sensations in my body.
From this experience, I realized that truly understanding something is much more difficult than understanding the words themselves. I have also studied the theory behind meditation in a systematic way before. I vaguely remember the secrets of meditation, and I also remember a book called "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment." This book integrates many cutting-edge psychological findings, which inspired me a lot at the time.
But reading a good book doesn't teach me how to meditate. After I finished reading this book in my undergraduate years, I didn't meditate for a long time. The reason, of course, was that I didn't benefit from the meditation process because there were many malpractices in my practice. I believe that if I go back to read the first book now, I will find that I still remember the key points at that time, but the way I connect these points has changed.
Sport#
This semester, I haven't found a good sport. After returning to Munich, I have been quite busy, so I have been postponing my exercise plans. Seeing my body fat percentage starting to rise, and without exercise, I may not be able to sustain the high-intensity daily work, so I put finding a new sport on the agenda last week. Before leaving Beijing, I had a habit of skipping rope every morning, which was a time-saving and effective daily exercise. Unfortunately, it rained every day in Munich in April, so this plan was naturally postponed. Recently, the weather has started to clear up and it has become warmer, which is a good opportunity to pick it up again. Last week, I basically stuck to skipping rope every day (except Thursday).
Last week, I also watched a Bilibili video about running and found the ideas in it worth trying. Simply put, relaxing the muscles as much as possible during running can achieve a better running posture. It also mentioned a method called "knee-drive" (swinging the knee instead of controlling the foot) to control the landing point of the foot and reduce the vertical amplitude of the running process. The video also mentioned a set of warm-up exercises to help optimize running posture, which I listed below:
Warm-up exercises:
- Rhythmic running in place to relax
- Sticky hop (single-leg jump), try to minimize changes in the knee and buttocks when landing
- Single-leg deep squat, can be done with support from a wall
- Toe raise and leg extension to train core foot strength
I haven't found a chance to run every day for now, so skipping rope is enough for my daily exercise. But if I can make this process more enjoyable, I believe I can make time for it every day in the future.
What is not good enough...#
First of all, most of the evening plans failed, and there were basically no effective executions. The reason may be that the goals at night felt less significant. If I really want to accomplish more goals, I really need to meditate once, and that was lacking last week. Another minor reason is that there were more activities scheduled in the evening.
Other Interesting points#
- I started using Baserow for bookkeeping and found that I really spend money like water. Using a basic tool like a database has high scalability, and Baserow has indeed provided me with a lot of convenience in data entry. In the future, I hope to combine it with LangChain to do more advanced things (such as automatic summarization and database interaction).
- I found that the workload of the PaLM-E paper is greater than I imagined, and it solves many problems. It seems that I need to spend more time digging into it.
- The progress of the student job is going smoothly. I hope to start with ViFi-CLIP and gradually try to fine-tune a BeIT model. However, the issue of spending time on the thesis makes me hesitate to increase my working hours.
New desires#
- I want to be more active in Anki review. Currently, I'm not closing the loop of learn -> create card -> review -> learn. Therefore, I would like to spend a dedicated amount of time daily on creating new Anki cards based on what I've learned today.
- In order to alleviate the pain of too many tasks at the end of the semester, I want to delegate the task of learning MMK and MSA during the semester. This means I need to learn/review one chapter weekly.
- (optional) Several new promising papers in the field have emerged during the last few weeks. Follow them up if you have time.
- More detailed daily review: move unfinished tasks to tomorrow and add a "P" (postpone) label to them.
Goals for 2023-W19#
- MMK Chapter 1/2 & Anki for that
- Daily one hour for Anki card creation
- Daily rope jump
- Finish a research proposal for the Thesis based on discoveries from PaLM-E, MMM CoT.
- (optional) Finish one causal representation learning paper, get the gist from it.
- (watch) Daily meditation
Update: It seems that everything has failed. I'm feeling a bit down this week.