Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
So apparently fingers look longer from the back of the hand (dorsal side), where the webbing between the fingers is lower than the joins of the fingers themselves, and the palm looks longer from the front of the hand (palmar side), because the webbing obscures the roots of the fingers. Who knew?
Mr. Goldman, that's who. Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
According to legend, the man who built this house died in this courtyard. Well, technically, he's the man who oversaw its most recent renovation; the core of the house is almost 75 years old, and on plans for the renovations we found in an old drawer, the courtyard appears to have been a swimming pool. Regardless, when he passed, this big, rambling old house soon became too large for his widow, who moved out, leaving it empty for quite a while, enabling us to get it for a steal during the pandemic.
While we wouldn't have turned down a swimming pool - we were actually more concerned with getting away from the drought and the fires and the burning than we were about where we were moving to, other than "big enough for an art studio and a library" - we much prefer the courtyard, which we've started calling "The French Quarter." But the excellent design of this house - architecturally, most of the windows have an excellent view, and the landscaping slopes away from the house almost everywhere to keep it dry - has a few minor warts on it, including the courtyard: under the overhangs, nothing will live.
The feature that keeps the water away from the house - the landscaping and the big sofits - makes it hard for anything smaller than a bush to live. When we moved in, and put in that little sitting area using paving stones and chairs from my late mother's old garden, I dug up the monkey grass where I put in the paving stones, and used it to fill in the areas you now see filled with rocks. That grass lasted about a season, and by the next year, you couldn't even tell anything had been planted there. It was just dust and weeds, and even the weeds frankly weren't doing too well themselves and could have used a watering.
So, kind of in desperation, we hit on the idea of putting in more stream stone as a kind of a border, which the former owners had put around the fountain. This is something our termite folks have actually been asking us to do around the whole house to create a barrier, but we decided to get started here.
And I guess the surprise is that this stopgap effort looks really good. We sort of expected that it would have looked better than scraggly weeds and dead dirt, but, actually, it looks REALLY good, as if it was always supposed to have had a stone border around the outside.
I guess my point, if I did have one, is that sometimes you do things that you have to in order to patch a problem, but if you pick the right patch, sometimes it seems like it was on purpose.
-the Centaur
Pictured: um, well, I think I said it.
And Facebook is a perfect example of customer-service hell in which once one has lost one's account, there's no way to talk to a person who can get this unfucked.
What happened? As best as I can figure, someone attempted to hack my 2-factor authentication last night while I slept - I woke up to a text message from Facebook with a 2-factor authentication code.
What did Facebook do? When I went to check, I was logged out of Facebook on all devices, and I was told that my account was suspended for "not following their rules":
Is this possible? No. Since I rarely post, I'm pretty circumspect, and I primarily use it for Messenger to talk to a few old friends, I'm pretty sure that I wasn't doing anything that violated community standards.
And I sure didn't while I was sleeping.
Is there a way to fix this? No. I tried to follow their procedures, only to find I didn't have a linked auth.oculus.com account, because I didn't have an Oculus. And once you do create such an account, there is no mechanism to appeal a suspension - only this reference in the help files:
But, probably because these folks were trying to hack my account, they likely mucked with the email, so I never got an email from Meta about this - not even in my spam folder.
So the hackers did something bad with your account? Maybe? I can't tell. So, the next attempt is to report the account as compromised. There is a way to do that, which takes you to the following page:
But, since the hackers were likely messing with two-factor authentication and trying to break in to the account, we get back to the temporarily blocked state you have above:
Are you sure you were hacked? Pretty sure. The text came in at 2:23am, after I was already asleep.
As a last ditch effort, I remembered I had an open Facebook tab, so I tried to go screenshot it. It quickly logged out, but I got to see, very briefly, my old Facebook page, and could see the last activity was merely me using Messenger to talk to friends.
How could this be fixed? Easily. This is the kind of thing that a customer service representative, looking at the account, can resolve in five minutes flat over chat, just by looking at the calm history followed by a spike of hacked traffic. And it's the responsible thing to do for your customers.
But Facebook doesn't provide access for this - apparently except for business accounts. And, while I'm not happy with a lot of stuff Elon did at Twitter, this makes me more inclined to use services you pay for. X, in contrast, makes it very easy to appeal a decision via an easily findable and accessible form:
https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/suspended-x-accounts
The bottom line? Someone hacked me while I slept, and a decade plus of Facebook is gone - principally because Meta does not provide basic tools for customer support.
Welp, nothing to do but call Zuck out about it on Xitter ...
-the Centaur
UPDATE: There are forums, where people are reporting this issue, and customer support representatives for the Meta Quest are responding. Cross your fingers. But it wasn't at all obvious that this is a solution! We're getting help from people who aren't even support staff for the same product.
UPDATE UPDATE: Nope, nevermind, they just redirect you back to the Facebook help center, which as I already confirmed, can't help you.
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Apparently Facebook has someone on Twitter who monitors for just this sort of thing. That is an unorthodox solution, but I've heard of the same thing at the Google. I'll reach out; we'll see. Cross yo fingies ....
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Apparently those people on Twitter are not affiliated with Facebook - there's a huge list people recommending various peeps as people who "helped me" and when you look at those users they don't appear to be affiliated with Facebook. So, no.
I now FREELY admit that what I'm doing with the blog is posting, as much as possible, easy posts so I can get ahead on my buffer. Legendary cartoonist Bill Holbrook started the longest running daily webcomic, Kevin and Kell, after he'd built up a multi-week buffer, a process he's still continuing today.
SO! I find it better if I bunch up posts so that I am working on the same thing for a while - this is not just better for mental focus, but also for dealing with problems with your computing infrastructure (it is REALLY frustrating to try to do a quick post when the internet decides to gum the fuck up).
And therefore, I'm doing short, brief posts on the blog, while I build up a library of longer posts, hoping that at some point I'll get a rhythm where I'm always 2-3 days ahead, and can thus put the effort into new posts that is harder to come by when it is 145am and you need to both blog, draw, shower, and let the cat in.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the late night ritual: eat some pound cake, drink some soy milk, read a difficult book. Currently, I'm working through Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, a book which is available online, and has been almost as useful to me as Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, also online.
UPDATE: This was actually day 54. So I was ahead of where I thought I was.
Quick sketch of a young woman with GREAT hair - I'd say almost Cinnamon-style hair, if there hadn't been a woman with almost EXACTLY Cinnamon's bi-colored hairstyle at the same Barnes and Noble about a week ago - whom I decided to sketch after finishing my last drawing.
She moved too fast through the store to get a really good picture, and from where I was sitting it was hard to see what she was looking at, but I think you've got to go beyond just drawing from practice books and start drawing from life, or you're just regurgitating other people's drawings, like an AI.
And I like AI, but regurgitating other people's drawings is NOT why I am drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Thank you, Mr. Goldman, for sharing this mnemonic for understanding the lengths of the parts of the hand. This has helped me more than anything I can think of to understand how the hand works and how to draw it. Knowing that the length of the fingers is half the length of the hand - and that the knuckles of the middle finger are half that, and half that again - has taught me more about the hand than anything I can think of.
Also, and not explicitly said in your breakdown - but something anyone can confirm, by placing one hand over the other at a 90 degree angle, or placing the middle finger over the back of the opposite palm - your diagram taught me that the WIDTH of the hand is half the LENGTH of the hand. This has been equally useful in setting proportions so, again, Mr. Goldman ... thank you.
-the Centaur
So I'm done with the bulk of my first-round edits for The Neurodiversiverse, and I can report that you can't predict how long an edit letter is going to take. The easy ones end up with a hundred line edits, and the hard ones go smooth as glass.
-the Centaur
So, those are construction workers loading a bobcat onto a flatbed on our driveway.
Except, they're not our construction workers.
Our neighbors are building a big, nice house, but have not been respecting our land while they're doing it. And many people I know have been telling me to give them hell for doing so - in fact, this picture is an example of that, as I was feeding my cat in the morning and saw these guys loading up on our driveway, blocking our housekeeper from getting in (you can barely see her car in the distance) and, generally, making a mess on our property like the neighbors owned it - so I zoomed down there to take these pictures:
But, frankly speaking, I worked for 17 years at Google, and over 25 years in technology, and I quite frankly don't need any more stress trying to solve problems like this. I'm done with the bullshit - I've heard the sob stories too many times, whether it's "oh, we're doing it just using your driveway as a one-off" (no, it's a ten-off at this point) or "no, this obviously dumb thing is actually a good idea" (no, the obvious problem that I just pointed out in your plan will quickly come to pass, like it always does) - and don't need any more.
Yes, I could get mad. (And I did, a little bit). But what good would it do me - or them?
If all goes well, we'll be living next to these neighbors a long, long time. And they've been trying to work with us, quickly responding whenever one of their workers starts parking their cars there (because when one does it, the rest see it, and start doing it as well). Getting angry just escalates the situation, and creates opposition where it doesn't need to exist. Instead, by practicing radical forgiveness, we can de-escalate the situations, and find ways to work together - like alerting my neighbor to the erosive damage done by the torrential rains last month, so they can save the trees they planted as a visual barrier:
Forgiveness isn't just for the forgiven person. It's for the forgiver - it helps us not just set aside the harm done, but also the anger that arises from our perception of injustice. Anger is like an alarm - the first thing a smart person does with an alarm is turn it off, and investigate the situation that the alarm caused. If you don't forgive, slights from the past can live on forever - taking us further and further away from the harmony on Earth that presages the harmony that should become our forever home.
-the Centaur
Pictured: well, I more or less said it.
When we finally get superintelligence, I want it to explain to me what cats are thinking. Loki clearly wants something, but it isn't clear what it is. He wants your attention, he wants to go outside, he wants to go somewhere not too far from the house, but he doesn't seem satisfied with you just standing there, nor with you bending down to scratch him, nor with you going anywhere else.
What do you want, for me to just stand here, so you feel safe rolling in the dirt?
There's no pleasing some people.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, in the external cat condo which we got as part of our successful "cat sitting solution".
Me drawing from yet another Midjourney character sheet for Porsche. Misproportioned, and I am still having trouble on the eye placement and face proportions, something I've seen on a fair number of old drawings; once I finish the hands and feet book I think it's probably time to go back to practicing faces.
This certainly is rendered better, but if you look closely at the edges of the hair, especially where it meets the armor, it doesn't make too much sense. Oh well, it's still inspirational.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
So I recently came across a tutorial for game development that seemed pretty interesting, so I decided to give it a try. The tutorial was in Rust, a new language that I’d been hearing about, and so I thought it would be a good idea to learn that too.
I even found an online playground, https://play.rust-lang.org/, which lets you try out the language in the browser, much like the Go playground: https://go.dev/play/. I quickly started trying out some simple functions that I use a lot in a variety of languages …
… and got stuck right away on Rust’s lack of function parameters.
There’s a whole blogpost https://www.thecodedmessage.com/posts/default-params/ on why this antifeature is actually, in the minds of “Rustians,” is a good thing, but even that admits that the alternatives that the language provides “might seem worse than useless.”
I’m sorry, I’ve gone through this kind of Stockholm Syndrome thinking before, where users held hostage to the good features of a language start coming up with excuses for its warts. For example, take the Go programming language. Programming Go felt like a breath of fresh air, but it was literally worse than useless for my use case - I had to write the software I wanted in C and then call it from Go. And the language itself had terrible warts from the terrible choices made by the core Go team - at the time I used it, no support for generics, endless proliferating error checks, and worst of all, an overly verbose unit test style which threw out everything we’d learned from Java and Python about how to write tests using semantically meaningful methods like assertIsNotNone or assertIsEmpty.
I’m not saying I’m not going to not learn Rust, nor that I’d never use Go again. Hey, one day I may be a convert! But, based on what I know now, I would never recommend these languages to anyone. My recommendations for programming languages remain the same "Big Three, Plus One":
Many of the alternative languages that you can use - Go, Rust, Scala, Clojure, even my beloved Mathematica, Common Lisp, or J - are actually worse than useless for most tasks, for two reasons.
That doesn’t mean we don’t try new things. C++ has mostly replaced C, and TypeScript is edging out JavaScript; who knows, perhaps, one day some variant of Go or Rust or Swift will become the dominant paradigm. (But, honestly, I hope not).
Nevertheless, I remember talking to a programmer friend about a refactoring I wanted to accomplish, and he angrily sketched out a better build system which could have solved the problem using a Turing-complete constraint language to figure out the dependencies.
I just remembered the famous quote from the creator of ANTLR - “Why program by hand in 5 days what you can spend 25 years of your life automating?” - and handwrote a script to solve the problem in an hour, and got on with my life.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Some of the older programming language books that I have in my stacks, most of which are now worse than useless for getting things done nowadays - though if you really love programming languages and learning how things work, they're more than priceless, now and forever.
Ya know, I actually am starting to get a little bit of what's up with the anatomy of the arm. Huh.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Which is not actually true at all. What I am ACTUALLY doing in "drawing every day" is drawing several day's worth of drawings all at once, then posting them one at a time, trying to keep a large enough buffer that I am always drawing when I have time to sit down and really draw, and am not scrambling to sketch at 2AM.
More Goldman studies. Drawing sort of every day, at least rate-wise.
-the Centaur
So this is the second 2010 Toyota Prius we've owned that reached 100,000 miles. The one we still have on the Left Coast is closing in on a quarter million miles, if it isn't already there - far enough to reach the moon, if one could drive it (and even if you could, it would take half a year, and +5000 gallons of gas.
We got this car when we moved from the Left Coast after all the drought and the fires and the burning, but needed to leave the old Prius out there as I was still working for the Google remotely, visiting several times per year to perform on-robot experiments and sync with the team.
Now that's up in the air. 200,000+ miles, maybe closing in on 250K - even though we had to rebuild the whole engine at around the 100,000 mark. That gave us the confidence to purchase this used Prius at the 80,000 mile mark - we knew what this type of vehicle is capable of.
This is a completely different strategy than my father used. He used to buy a new car every two to three years, like clockwork, to try to preserve as much trade-in value as possible - and to ensure that the car was reliable. Perhaps this made sense back in the day, when cars didn't last as long, but I'm not sure.
I think it was just a strategy. He enjoyed having new cars, and could afford it. I enjoy having new cars, and maybe we could afford it, but I enjoy being environmental more, and getting a very efficient hybrid car and running it into the ground to recoup the energy that went into its manufacture feels like the way to go.
Now, I told myself that I'd consider trading in the California Prius when we'd driven it to the moon - but my experience is that cars eventually do give up the ghost, either from sheer mechanical weardown (my old Isuzu Rodeo) or from collisions (my first car, the Mustang, and my last SUV, the Pathfinder).
So I'm in no rush, here or in California.
So, congratulations to your first 100K, East Coast Prius. Here's hoping you make it 100K more.
-the Centaur
You're staring. Were you working here? I feel like you were working here.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, being very helpful, as usual.
A brief thought today, as I'm trying to get back on an even keel after a weekend of draining stuff. I found this "alphabet of goodness" for a few bucks at a nearby Restore, and recently hung it where I could see it before walking into my office, to help remind me to have the right attitude towards the world.
But it reminds me of the unnecessary opposition many Christians have towards the good things of this world. Many of the Christian authority figures I grew up couldn't admit that something that they'd heard from our culture was actually a good thing, and would invent reasons why it was bad.
Even recently, a priest at the local Church was complaining that "Jesus wasn't asking people to go live their best lives, but to get out of the boat and follow Jesus." Well, in one sense that is true, but in another sense, it isn't. When Peter got out of the boat and walked on water, he soon was floundering.
Self-care is an important thing. It's possible for people to literally work themselves to death if they aren't careful - either by causing themselves long-term health problems that shorten their lives, or by causing them to take risks that cut their lives short more abruptly.
Taking care of yourself is important. Jesus didn't give us a spirit of fear - nor did he wish us to cultivate habits that cause fear in ourselves. He told us to repent from our evil ways, yes, but also to be not afraid - and that following Him could be an easy burden if we took up his yoke.
It's not wrong to take care of yourself, even if you are a Christian trying to serve Jesus. If your body is a temple, it should be a well-tended place, one that functions. If you are God's instrument, you should make sure that instrument is in good condition.
Yes, sometimes following Jesus is a difficult path, but we don't have to make it harder than it already is by embracing bad choices - or ignoring good advice just because it's not coming from a church leader.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A nice framed inspirational stone I found for something like 3-5 bucks at Restore.
More drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Again after Goldman. Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
When it rains, it pours. I missed a few meetings last week due to work on the Neurodiversiverse - we were working through edits, and needed more time, and decided to extend our meeting, ultimately taking three and a half hours. But I had an afternoon meeting I was supposed to schedule - we hadn't put it on the calendar yet, and were going to schedule it over email after my Neurodiversiverse meeting. But since that scheduling hadn't happened yet, I didn't see it on my calendar when we were deciding to extend the NDV meeting, and since that meeting didn't end for several hours, I completely missed the window my colleague and I were planning to meet in.
What's worse, I forgot what evening of the week it was, and completely spaced on the Vestry (church board) meeting scheduled for that night. I've added a recurring meeting for that, but the damage is done - and cascading. Since I missed that meeting, I missed the discussion at the Vestry meeting of when we were supposed to meet with the bishop - a retreat that I just found out is scheduled in just thirty minutes, when I had already booked this time to work on Neurodiversiverse edits, which are time urgent.
Sometimes I think it would be easier to be a cat.
However, I feel the need to point out that our capabilities often exceed our estimation of them. I was wondering how I was going to get everything done. Well, now, I am still going to get everything done - I'm just, somehow, going to do more than I thought I was capable of. Funny how that happens. We often imagine that we have less resources available to us than we do - this is an adaptive self-defense mechanism that keeps us from burning out. But it can make us feel that we can't handle things - when we can.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a cat, in comfort. Actually Loki had a very terrible, no good, bad night as he wanted out around midnight, right when I went to bed, and was forced to sit on his warm heating pad, unable to get crunchies for SEVERAL HOURS while his human slept. Imagine the injustice! When FINALLY let in, Loki went to every bowl in the house in turn, sampling each one, before finally settling down to warm and fuzzy sleep.
Moar moar arm anatomy, after Goldman.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
