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processing the past

centaur 0

I'm a pack rat, and this tendency isn't helped by being an omnivorous author and researcher with a broad range of interests - nor is it helped by my tendency to let piles just pile up while I rabbithole on whatever major project I am working on at my primary work. But I'm between contracts right now, I survived the trio of ICRA-ConCarolinas-CVPR, and my wife's mother is moved into her new home, so I don't really have an excuse not to go through the piles and try to return them to some semblance of order.

Also, I'm tripping over stuff.

Now, I don't throw away things because other people want me to: I throw away things when I've decided to. Because my interests are, um, broad, and the projects I use to tackle these interests are even broader, I have a vast number of project folders and project stacks. But a stack isn't a pile: a stack is an organized collection of items of interest that enables you to make intellectual progress on a project, like the "storytelling and the sciences of mind" and "creative endurance" stacks I have to my left, the "mental models and explanation patterns" stack in front of me, and the "taido and jeet kune do" stack I have to my right.

A pile is something different - it's the detritus of "company's coming over and I gotta clear off this table" or "I need space to work on this important thing so these other projects gotta go on hold". Like the "robotics consulting" pile in front of me. It's not about robotics consulting. That's just the top action item on the pile. Below it are my theological studies folder, some bills, some items to file, Thinking Ink Press stuff, and more theology, which it looks like I put in the pile for this week's Saint Stephens in-the-Field Friday Journal entry that I have already written and submitted two days ago. It's a mess.

More specifically, a pile is a stack-like mess that hides its information and actionable content. You can't tell what you need to do to a pile just by looking at it the way you can a stack or a folder. (Folders are also dangerous for a similar reason if you're not strict about what you put into them, but that's a problem for another day). And so, the reason that I don't throw piles away without processing them is that it's all too easy to not realize what's in a pile, and to lose an opportunity - or even money - by chucking it prematurely. In the piles in the banner image, I found roughly $50 bucks in foreign currency and a stack of gift cards.

The rest was easy. 80% of that just needed to be filed (a less pack-ratty person would throw some of this stuff away, of course, but I genuinely enjoy reminiscing over keepsakes from old trips, especially abroad). 10% could be thrown away or recycled immediately. And only 10% or so were actually actionable items.

I learned a lot about my own past going through these piles. I recalled things I did, places I'd been, stores that had closed, people I talked to but had fallen out of contact with, people who had retired or died. The pile processing worked both against me and for me; there were a handful of "action" items that dated back to the last millennium, which was great to harvest for keepsakes, but meant that there literally were several inches of that particular pile that had repeatedly gone through a "company's coming, better move this aside" cycle over literal decades, yielding a stack that mostly just needed to be recycled or trashed.

There's a value to throwing stuff away. It keeps your environment clean so you can feel good about your space and focus on what's important. But if you're a pack-rat person, it's really important to make sure that the stuff you have around you are actual stacks and folders of actionable stuff, and not piles that have been piling on top of each other since the last millennium.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Remains of a pile spread across the kitchen table, exploded into stuff that will be filed into topical binders or trashed; and the sorted remains of the same pile spread over the nearby builtins, ready to be filed into my filing system (or trashed). Now I kinda wish I had also taken a picture of the pile itself ...

it’s a nice feeling …

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... when you're a publisher and you get a book proposal that makes you feel: "This is an important book and I want to publish it." No more details for now - don't count your chickens before they're hatched, and all that - but that feeling, I just wanted to share.

-the Centaur

Pictured: my portable office, with said book proposal on display, and a nice pair of drinks at Brixx. Full disclosure: I had made that decision about the book before the drink arrived. ;-)

with bread, please

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Speaking as a technically-oriented software engineer who's built some pretty crappy interfaces in my day, it continues to surprise me that people build interfaces without thinking through how people will use them.

For example, Panera Bread has a "you pick two" order, where you can get two half-orders of a sandwich, salad or soup, along with a side like bread, chips or fruit. One would naturally think that the interface where the cashiers would enter your order would allow you to specify the two halves, then the side. Logical, yes?

But if you order that way, the cashiers often seem a little thrown off. And if you give your order slowly - rather than just rattle it off because you've probably ordered it a thousand times at this point - they'll ask a stereotyped series of questions which I impute are being presented in this order by the interface:

  • (1) Is this for here or to go?
  • (2) What do you want on your You Pick Two?
  • (3) Would you like anything to drink?
  • (4) What do you want as your side?

Now, note that a You Pick Two doesn't come with a drink (like Captain D's or Chic-Fil-A's value meals). So the interface. The drink isn't part of the You Pick Two order. Yet if you try to specify your side, the cashiers will have to do a little fiddling in the interface. It's easier just to present information in the order above:

"(1) This is for here. (2) I'd like a You Pick Two, with (2a) a Bacon Turkey Bravo and (2b) a Strawberry Poppyseed (2b1) with Chicken Salad. (3) I'll take a large beverage. (4) Bread as the side. (5) [wait 5 seconds] I don't need the cup - I already have a to-go cup, I just need to pay for the drink."

Note that in (2b1), even though the Strawberry Poppyseed salad normally has chicken on it, if you don't specifically emphasize the fact that it has chicken, sometimes they'll ask if you want to leave it off, and in (5) you have to wait 5 seconds for them to complete the order, or they may delete the drink.

[Why insist on paying for the drink? Because I eat out a lot, and use insulated to-go cups to save on the waste of buying and discarding a cup once or twice a day. But once I was at Panera in Campbell and the Panera district manager complained to me that if I was using a to-go mug I should be paying for my drink. I insisted that I did and showed my receipt ... and found the cashier had taken the drink off the order without telling me. The manager took my word for it, but it made me feel both embarrassed and unwelcome, which is not why I go out to eat - I have work to do, damn it, and need to do my reading in a place where I can't be distracted by doing laundry or whatever - so I always insist on paying for my drink.]

Anyhoo, weirdness of interfaces can be found everywhere. Just today, I was trying to log into a website, and the website authors had put the login button in a popup that disappeared when you hovered over it. Presumably it was meant to go away if you didn't click on it, but the actual effect was, you couldn't log in on the company's home page and had to hunt through pages to find a login button that was a real button.

As another example, the interface for AT&T's voicemail in my area recently changed. Instead of saying "end of message" and giving you an opportunity to delete a message, it just goes straight to "saving message", which means if you got a spam call which hung up rapidly - and silently - there's no way to delete the message before it gets saved. If you try, it will delete the next message in your messages. So this "update" is strictly worse than the previous interface, making you hear each message a minimum of twice.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say here is, don't fall in love with your new interface before thinking through - and testing out - how people will actually use it, OR, as we used to say back in my day:

Old man rants at cloud.

-the centaur

rainbow kitten surprise at ccnb amphitheatre …

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Still not running at full thrusters, but my wife and I did go see Rainbow Kitten Surprise at the nearby CCNB Amphitheatre at Simpsonville's Heritage Park. They were good! Sandi's description made me think they'd be more electronic dance music, but actually they reminded me more of prog rock viewed through an indie lens, with surprising influences from both rap and metal - four, sometimes five guitars were on stage at any one time, and the lead singer memorably rocked a day-glo electric guitar for one number. The opening band was also memorable - Michael Marcagi, a good singer whose band was pretty tight.

The best part was the company, of course.

Moments. Seize them when you've got them. Because one day, they'll run out.

-the Centaur

not dead …

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... but ICRA, Con Carolinas, and CVPR are all now over, so I can breathe again.

More in a bit as I start to dig myself out of the piles ....

-the Centaur

Pictured: Bacon Turkey Bravo and Strawberry Poppyseed with Chicken Salad, at Panera, my fave lunch.

at con carolinas 2025!

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Hey folks, I will be at Con Carolinas this weekend. This year I'm on four panels: "Playing with AI", "Science Fiction, Science Fact, Science Future", "Neurodiversity in Science", and "There and Back Again: A Doctor Who Tale". I'll be moderating the AI and neurodiversity panels (natch?) and the full skinny is below:

Please come join us in Charlotte for a very writer-friendly, fan-friendly convention at the Hilton!

Or we'll send the cow catcher your way.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Events from Con Carolinas 2024, since my time machine is on the fritz, along with a screencap of my schedule, because I'm too lazy^H^H^H^Hout of time to cut-and-paste it and reformat it, much less type it all in if the PDF ends up being persnickety.

now

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The final session of the Advances in Social Robot Navigation Workshop at ICRA 2025 is happening NOW. It's been a great conference so far, with lots of great talks and debate ...

Even though there's no-one in the row in front of me, we've had 50-60 people in person or online all day:

More on the workshop later ... back to taking notes now!

-the Centaur

soon

centaur 0

Still at ICRA, and the Advances in Social Robot Navigation workshop is TOMORROW! Which I suppose means that it is good that I found the room. :-)

https://socialnav2025.pages.dev

Lots of great social navigation work this conference ... we are really seeing some advances. Even in the proliferation of form factors, some of which you can see above, such as the base with humanoid, looks like it will help social robotics. More and cheaper robots - and more varied form factors - should make it easier to find the right robot for the job.

Onward! Three or four more sessions of talks, and then it's the workshop ...

-the Centaur

Pictured: The room our workshop will be held in, and two robots "shaking hands".

Embodied AI 6 Papers are due FRIDAY May 23rd AOE!

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Due to a snafu with the way the date and time were programmed into OpenReview, and having NOTHING AT ALL to do with us getting slightly fewer papers than we wanted (well, actually ....) we have extended the deadline for the Embodied AI Workshop's Call for Papers to Friday, May 23rd, AOE (Anywhere on Earth):

Please submit your 2-page extended abstracts on embodied AI, especially related to this year's themes of Embodied AI Solutions, Advances in Simulation, Generative Methods for Embodied AI, and Foundation Models for Embodied AI!

https://embodied-ai.org/cvpr2025/#call-for-papers

-the Centaur

Pictured: The banner for the Sixth Annual Embodied AI Workshop.

Advances in Social Robot Navigation @ ICRA 2025

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SO! I'm at ICRA, the big robotics conference (okay, okay, ONE of the big robotics conferences, the others being IROS and RSS) and I would be remiss if I didn't point out that our workshop, "Advances in Social Robot Navigation: Planning, HRI and Beyond" will be held this Friday, May 23rd!

Building on our successful series of workshops at ICRA'22IROS'23, and RSS'24, as well as the Social Navigation Symposium, the AISRN workshop aims to investigate key aspects that make robot navigation more acceptable, legible, and social. It's been a great year for social navigation at ICRA; come join us!

https://socialnav2025.pages.dev

-the Centaur

Pictured: One of the performances at the "Arts and Robotics" show at ICRA, which ... I guess is social?

embodied ai six coming in june …

centaur 0

Hey folks, I have been neck deep in preparations for a couple of workshops - the Advances in Social Robot Navigation one I already mentioned, coming up next week, but also the Embodied AI Workshop #6!

The Embodied AI workshop brings together researchers from computer vision, language, graphics, and robotics to share and discuss the latest advances in embodied intelligent agents. EAI 2025’s overaching theme is Real-World Applications: creating embodied AI solutions that are deployed in real-world environments, ideally in the service of real-world tasks. Embodied AI agents are maturing, and the community should promote work that transfers this research out of simulation and laboratory environments into real-world settings.

Our call for papers ends TOMORROW, Friday, May 16th, AOE (Anywhere on Earth) so please get your paper submissions in!

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-five day one oh four]: mischief in three … two … one …

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Almost fifteen years later, with a completely different set of cats who have not had a chance to learn these behaviors from the previous ones, it's somewhat comforting to see that cats do still remain cats.

gabby 5 seconds before whapping caesar just as he relaxes

Although the location of the malefactors has swapped from top to bottom ...

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki above, being awoken from sleep by harassing kittens below; Gabby above, about to harass the sleeping Caesar below.

[twenty twenty-five day one oh three]: delicious but not healthy

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Chicken and waffles with a side of bacon at Nose Dive in downtown Greenville. Not healthy or delicious --- but as for that recent research that suggests that increased hunger leads to less healthy food choices, well, I can attest to its validity within the framework of my own personal experience.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-five day one oh two]: healthy and delicious

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One of the things I like about vegan food is that it can be both healthy and delicious. This is a vegetarian burrito from La Parilla - no cheese, no sour cream, extra mushrooms. As far as I know, this was a suffering-free burrito, and the most unhealthy thing about it was the tortilla, which isn't unhealthy per se, but is just one of the foodstuffs that we can easily get too much of in our modern environment.

As for the chips and margarita (not shown)? Well, they're vegan, as far as I know, but healthy, not so much. I'm not sure James Willett would approve, but they are delicious.

-the Centaur

[backfilling twenty twenty-five day one oh oh]: still seeking the perfect tomato sandwich

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This one is kind of a BLT, with the Bacon replaced with vegan cold cuts (I have vegan bacon, but I wanted to finish going through the cold cuts first). The base is an heirloom tomato, cut into two big slices, with the remainder roughly chunked to make an ersatz tomato salad:

The tomato slices are seasoned with garlic salt, dill, Italian seasoning (or parsley, oregano, and basil) and maybe nutritional yeast; the chunks are seasoned with salt, pepper, and Old Bay or Tony Chachere seasoning and maybe some flavored olive oil (this last time, basil and sundried tomato olive oil).

I toast Nature's Own Artisan Multigrain Bread, then add a thin layer of veganaise seasoned with dill, onion powder, garlic powder, and tarragon. Atop this, you layer to taste cold cuts or bacon, cheese, tomato, and lettuce (two layers of tomato when I skip the cold cuts and/or bacon).

The outcome is pretty delicious.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Shots from two different days of making these sandwiches patched awkwardly together, so if you notice the bloody handprint on Kirk's vest moving up and down in these shots, that's why.

[backfilling twenty twenty-five day ninety-nine]: all cats, all the time

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So for a while all three of the kittens were a little skittish around me. Not that they didn't want to hang out, but especially when I would take a trip or something they'd get standoffish, hanging out more with my wife.

I do believe they have now "warmed up" to me.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Me taking a much-needed break from projects, and then attracting two (or three?) kittens. On that note, I was going to post this but got swarmed with work, taxes, writing, cleaning, and what have you, but I am not going to give up on posting every day this year, even if I have to backfill to get caught up.

[twenty twenty-five day one oh one]: there … are … four … cats!

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Lily, the collared one, chose to hide when a friend came by today, so they never saw more than three cats at any one time. With apologies to Captain Picard, here is visual proof that there are, indeed, four cats.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Top to bottom: Loli, Lili, Loki, Luna.

[twenty twenty-five day ninety-eight]: the appearance of done doesn’t mean you did it right

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One by one, trees and bushes on our property have been dying. The property is large - when we fled the fires in California during the pandemic, we lucked out in finding a large place that had been on the market for quite a while - so at first we thought that was simply par for the course. But they kept dying.

Eventually, what we discovered is that many of the trees on the property were planted without the removal of their transport cages. This can cause the roots to get choked, to turn back on themselves, and as the tree grows, the increasingly packed root ball topped by the increasingly heavy tree turns into a weighted ball bearing, waiting to tip over in heavy winds, heavy rain, or just from the tree's own starved weight.

But it's easier to not remove it, the problem is practically invisible, and the tree looks good for a while - and by the time the tree falls, it will be almost impossible to identify who made the initial mistake.

This is a beautiful house on beautiful land, but many of the things in this house are like that. Trees are planted with their transport cages still on, so they eventually fall over. Gutter drains were buried without covering them with fabric, so they fill with dirt. Soil pipes are buried without cleanouts. Drywall in access rooms has random holes punched in it.

And, most spectacularly, a door was installed in a storage room which was too small for the safe stored in that room to be removed. I mean, what were they thinking? I guess they weren't - or, perhaps that was a security feature, to prevent it from being stolen? Certainly, you can't sneak it out of the room, but, also, it likely weighs around a ton, so no-one can run off with it - they didn't need to wall it in.

But, regardless, hey! We get a safe.

Now, we were dealing with the problem with our drains, and the foreman told us he'd need to take up the last man standing in a row of bushes near one of the drains. These had been dying, one or two per year, since we arrived, and the last one was literally held together with zipties. So I agreed.

And when he dug it up, he found that it - and all the bushes in that row - had cages on their root barrels. You can see him holding one of these in the banner image from this post. The root system was so tight inside it that he was surprised that it had survived that long.

So my point, and I did have one, is that doing a job that looks right from the outside may not be doing it well enough for the job to be done right. And right, in this case, I define as not failing unexpectedly long before its time because someone simply didn't want to finish the work.

I suspect that the people who managed this properly previously were focused on forcing it, no matter how much money it took. As my wife put it, you put in a lawn, let it grow, then cut that growth and take all the nutrients that it harvested out of the soil away, forcing you to fertilize the lawn with chemicals to keep it alive. You can do that, but it's like driving down a mountain road at too high a speed, constantly riding the wheel, brakes and accelerator to keep yourself on the road. We prefer a healthier approach, where, when possible, things are left to biodegrade where they are, or you create compost out of the clipping.

That doesn't always work, and, in a way, it's a luxury all its own. But regardless of how you run your lawn, if you take the time to cut the root balls off and to properly wrap your drains, you'll find yourself spending less money in the long run fixing problems that should never have happened in the first place.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The cage that our foreman discovered once they dug up the bush, and the gutter downspout drain that our foreman replaced for us once we all figured out what drains needed to be replaced.

[twenty twenty-five day ninety-seven]: the biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it took place

centaur 0

So, yes, it's late and i'm tired, but i couldn't just leave it at that, because the above quote is so good. I ran across this from George Bernard Shaw in a book on mentoring (which I can't access now, due to cat wrangling) and snapped that picture to send to my wife. In case it's hard to read, the quote goes:

The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

This was a great quote to send to my wife because our first vow is communication, yet we have observed problems with communication a lot. Often, when the two of us think we are on the same page, frequently we have each communicated to each other something different using similar-sounding language.

I was struck by how hard it is to get this right, even conceptually, when I was skimming The Geometry of Meaning, a book I recently acquired at a used bookstore, which talks about something called something like a "semantic transfer function" (again, I can't look up the precise wording right now as I am cat wrangling). But the basic idea presented is that you can define a function describing how the meaning that is said by one person is transformed into the meaning that is heard by another.

If you pay attention to how communication fails, it becomes clear how idealized - how ultimately wrongheaded - it is. Because you may have some idea in your head, but you had some reason to communicate it as a speech act, and something you wanted to accomplish inside the hearer's head - but there's no guaranteed that what you said is what you meant, and much less whether what was heard was what was said, or whether the interpretation matched what was heard, much less said or meant.

But even if they took your meaning - even if the semantic transfer function worked perfectly to deliver a message, there is no guarantee that that the information that is delivered will cause the appropriate cognitive move in the hearer's brain. Perhaps we're all familiar with the frustration of trying to communicate an inconveniently true fact to someone who stubbornly won't absorb it because it's politically inconvenient for them, but the matter is worse if your speech was designed to prompt some action - as Loki and one of the kittens just found out, when he tried to communicate "stop messing with me, you're half my size, you little putz" as a speech act to get the kitten to leave him alone. It had the opposite effect, and the kitten knocked itself onto the floor when it tried to engage a sixteen-pound ball of fur and muscle.

So what does that have to do with drainage?

My wife and I have had a number of miscommunications about the cats recently, ones where we realized that we were using the same words to talk about different things, and didn't end up doing things the way each other wanted. But it isn't just us. The cats stayed indoors mostly today, because workmen came by to work on a drainage project. I went out to sync up with the foreman about adding a bit to the next phase of work, and he offhandedly said, "sure, now that we're finished with the front."

"But wait," I said. "What about the drains in the front?"

"What drains in the front?" he asked.

We stared at each other blankly for a moment, then walked around the house. It rapidly became clear that even though we had used the same words to talk about the same job related to the same problem - excess water tearing through the mulch - we had meant two completely different things by it: I had meant fixing the clogged drains of the downspout of the gutter that were the source of the water, and he had took that to mean fixing the clogged drains where that water flowed out into the rest of the yard. A rainstorm soon started, and we were able to both look at the problem directly and agree what needed to be fixed. (The below picture was from later in the night, from another drain that was clogged and in need of repair).

It turns out the things that I wanted fixed - the things that had prompted me to get the job done in the first place - were so trivial that he threw them into the job at no extra cost. And the things that the foreman had focused on fixing, which also needed to be fixed but didn't seem that important from the outside, were actually huge jobs indicative of a major mis-step on the original installation of the drainage system.

We resolved it, but it took us repeatedly syncing up, listening for issues as we spoke, and checking back with each other - in both directions - when things didn't sound quite right for us to first notice and then resolve the problem. Which is why I found it so apropos to come across that Shaw quote (which I can look up now that the cats have settled down, it's in The Coaching Habit) as it illustrated everything me and my wife had been noticing about this very problem.

Just because you've said the words doesn't mean they were heard. And just because they're said back to you correctly doesn't mean that the hearer actually heard you. If you spoke to prompt action, then it's important to check back in with the actor and make sure that they're doing what you wanted them to - and even if they're not, it's important to figure out whether the difference is their problem - or is on your end, because you haven't actually understood what was involved in what you asked them to do.

So, yeah. The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place - so rather than trust the illusion in your mind, take some time to verify the facts on the ground.

-the Centaur

Pictured: "Shaw!", obstreperous cats, and a malfunctioning drain.