busy putting out a fire. this is what you get. ciao, xiao.
No, this isn't a post about family, though it could easily be adapted to that topic. Nor is it a post about generic togetherness - that's why I said "each other" instead in the title. No, this is a post about how we're often stronger when we take advantage of the strengths of those around us.
Often at work we have our own perspective, and it can be easy to get caught up in making sure that our way is the way that's chosen, and our work is the work that is credited. But if we do, we may miss out on great suggestions from our coworkers, or on the opportunity to benefit from the work of others.
Just today at one of my contracting jobs, I had to present our work on the project so far. While most of the machine learning work on the project was mine, a lot of the foundational analysis on the data was done by one of my coworkers - and I called him out specifically when presenting his graphs.
Then, we came to the realization that collecting the amount of data we would ideally like to have to learn on would literally cost millions of dollars. I presented a few ways out of this dilemma - but then, one of our senior engineers spoke up, trying to brainstorm a simpler solution to the problem.
I'd been hoping that he would speak up - he had shown deep insight earlier in the project, and now, after a few minutes of brainstorming, he came up with a key idea which might enable us to use the software I've already written with the data we've already collected, saving us both time and money.
Afterwards, the coworker whose contributions I'd called out during the meeting hung on the call, trying to sketch out with me how to implement the ideas the senior engineer had contributed. Then, unprompted, he spent an hour or so sending me a sketch of an implementation and a few sample data files.
We got much farther working together and recognizing each others' contributions than we ever would have had we all been coming to the table just with what we brought on our own.
-the Centaur
Pictured: friends and family gathering over the holidays.
Huh. I gave myself more time, worked on the construction lines, used better pens (though, blame your tools, I could tell that the older pens produced a worse line) and overall tried to make this come out better. But I don't really like how it turned out ... something is "off" about David Tennant here, more than just my typical need to draw more, draw more, draw more, and don't waste time.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the Fourteenth Doctor.
Took a little more time with this one, but still needed to start it at an earlier part of the day when I had more time. But today was really busy due to work and research, so it is what it is.
-the Centaur
Pictured, Peter Capaldi from a ScreenRant/Guardian article.
I'm a night owl - I'd say "extreme night owl", but my wife used to go to bed shortly before I woke up - and get some of my best work done late at night. So it constantly surprises me - though it shouldn't - that some things are easier to do earlier in the day.
Take blogging - or drawing every day, two challenges I've taken on for twenty-twenty four. Sometimes I say that "writer's block is the worst feeling in the world" - Hemingway apparently killed himself over it - but right up there with writer's block is deciding to call it a night after a long, productive evening of work - and remembering that you didn't draw or blog at all that day.
Sure, you can whip up a quick sketch, or bang out a few words. But doing so actively discourages you from longer-form thought or more complicated sketches. Drawing breathes more earlier in the day, especially in the midafternoon when your major initial tasks are done and the rest of the day seems wide open. And blogging is writing too, and can benefit as much from concentrated focus as any other writing.
SO! Let's at least get one of those two things done right now.
Type Enter, hit Publish.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Downtown Greenville as seen from the Camperdown complex.
Same subject, using better pens this time. I can more or less confirm:
- A better arm position helps reduce the jerkiness of my drawing motions.
- Using the Micron pens beats using Pilot V5 for keeping a smooth line.
- A poor craftsman blames his instruments, as I can clearly tell I need both more practice, and to take more care in tracing lines.
- I need to give myself more time for these drawings, as I did much better when I was relaxed for time on our recent vacation.
Onward!
-the Centaur
I take a heck of a lot of pictures, seemingly way more than most of the people I know other than the ones in the movie industry; in fact, one of my friends once said "your phone eats first". But there's a secret to why I take pictures: it's for something, for the creation of an external memory - and memory is my brand, after all. With those photographs, I can figure out what happened in the past, even sometimes obscure things - like the attachment point of this lightsaber, which isn't just the diamond-shaped piece of wood, but also includes two hooks that seem to have disappeared in the move.
We may not find them, but at least now we know what to look for.
How can you turn the things in your life into an unexpected resource?
-the Centaur
Pictured: the old library, which was very nice, but not as nice as this one:
What strikes me about this sketch is how much better the pencils looked. During the inking, my pen frequently "jumped" around on the paper, causing some of the lines to end up in the wrong place (particularly the right (drawn on the left) eye and the left (drawn on the right) jaw).
Perhaps another recommendation to re-visit my arm position (or perhaps the pen; this was a Pilot V5, which is a pen I love for writing, but not as good as the Microns and other pens I normally use for drawing).
Regardless ... keep going.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Porsche the Centaur, obviously.
My wife eats vegan almost exclusively, and I often try to eat vegan when I'm with her. But she's experienced a lot of difficulty in finding vegan food, even at restaurants that claim to serve it; it's not resistance to veganism per se, but a strangely baffling lack of understanding that vegan means "no animal products".
On our recent trip to Asheville, we got a BIG set of clues as to why this is happening: purely by chance, a number of people inadvertently exposed to us why there's so much confusion around the concept of vegan as "plant based food".
First, there's no such thing as an "egg vegan" - but, apparently, there are a lot of people who are going around claiming that they are, and confusing the heck out of restaurants because of it. At one restaurant in Asheville, the host stand told us they had a "vegan southwestern benedict" but there was nothing vegan about it: it had eggs, butter and hollandaise sauce (which is egg AND butter). Our server then let slip that many people claimed to be "egg vegans" and this dish was aimed at them.
Well, maybe they THINK they're "egg vegans," but there's no such thing: the word for someone who eats eggs is "vegetarian", or if you want to get specific, "ovo-vegetarian". Regardless, the FOOD is not vegan if it has eggs in it, so it is really unhelpful to people who have chosen to be vegan, or who are avoiding eggs for health reasons, to mislabel food with eggs in it as vegan.
"Egg vegans" remind me of another group of people: those who say "they're mostly vegan, but they eat fish". The word for that is "carnivore", or if you want to get specific, "pescatarian". I actually knew a real vegan who added fish to his diet for about a month for nutritional reasons, but he was clear to everyone and himself that this was a departure from the vegan diet.
Second, some people literally do not understand that vegan is different from vegetarian - and if that person owns a restaurant, he's going to have many unhappy customers. At one Japanese restaurant we visited this weekend, there were dozens of "vegan" items marked as such on the menu - but a kindly waitress stopped by our table and warned us that the owner did not know the difference and repeatedly labeled food with butter and eggs as "vegan", despite being told otherwise.
This reminds me that some people do not understand that any animal products makes a dish not vegan. My wife's mother frequently tried to get her to eat food cooked with a ham hock in it because "it's just for flavor". The P.F. Chang's we used to go to put fish flakes in most of their vegetarian items, which makes them not just not vegan, but not even vegetarian. And so on.
Third, even when a restaurant is trying, vegan and vegetarian are confusing because they both start with VEG and end with N - and there's no standard abbreviation for either of them which can be used to unambiguously label a meal. I've seen "V", "VG", "VE" all used to refer to both vegan and vegetarian, and if you look around I bet you'll find some menus using "VN" for both purposes. Regardless, at one or two restaurants this weekend, even the waitstaff got confused as to what was vegetarian or vegan due to the "V/VE" issue.
And finally, sometimes the waitstaff just gets it wrong. And at another restaurant this weekend, the waiter didn't write our order down and completely messed it up in her head - but fortunately came back to ask before passing the wrong order to the kitchen. As another example, the staff at a very vegan-friendly local pizza joint told us that one of their pizza sauces was vegan, only to discover months later that it was not.
So it's seemed strange to us that some people can't seem to wrap their head around what vegan is. But if some people are running around claiming to be "egg vegans", the owners are mislabeling the meals, the meals are not labeled clearly enough even for the staff to tell, and sometimes people are just mistaken even when they're trying to get it right, it seems more clear why things get messed up.
But really, vegan is just plant based food, and if it's not plant based food, it's not vegan.
-the Centaur
P.S. Fine, fine, bacteria and fungi aren't technically plants, but they're vegan. Just nothing with a face or a mother, and nothing from something with a face or a mother, okay?
Pictured: Sunny side up eggs, bacon, and French toast, NONE of which are vegan.
SO this is with the notebook held further away and using more arm than wrist motion. I think it worked well.
-the Centaur
2024 is shaping up to be one of the most consequential American elections in recent history, in which our first twice-impeached ex-president is running AGAIN for the highest office in the land. When he ran for office the first time, it wasn't clear precisely what he would do if elected, and Clinton had her own problems.
But now, what Trump stands for - and would do - is clear. Even if you forget the two impeachments (no convictions) and the many indictments (not conclusive yet), Trump was more than just a poor loser hawking false claims of a stolen election: he actively tried to overturn it, and stoked the fires of insurrection on January 6th. He's a proven threat to American democracy.
And, not just a proven threat: he's an openly stated threat to American democracy. If elected, he openly admits plans to purse his enemies, Ron Desantis-style. And he's backed by the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 plan to reshape our civil-service-based federal bureaucracy into a Soviet-style system controlled by the Republican party apparatus.
American democracy is the light of the world. Whether you're Democrat or Republican, you should register to vote, and vote for almost anyone else than Trump. And if you're a Republican, you should contact your congrescritter and state your opposition to Project 2025.
Democracy is a wonderful thing - if we can keep it.
-the Centaur
Some people wonder why me and my wife are so strict about not using pesticides and weedkillers in our yards. Well, there's the general principle of not contributing more toxic chemicals to the environment, and in San Jose there was the concern that our cats walked in the yard, then slept in our beds, and we didn't want them tracking in chemicals (other than dust and pee and poop, but, oh well).
But in South Carolina? We have a well. Our yard is our source of drinking water. And the recent unexpected excess precipitation event really brought that home by making the water drainage channels visible:
We get enough chemicals from our neighbors poisoning their lawns. We don't need to add any more to it. In fact, we're busy enough trying to slowly clean up the waste that the previous owners left on the property ... it's a nice house, but someone seemed to think that the woods around it were a dumping ground.
One step at a time. But one of those steps is, don't add pesticides or herbicides to your own drinking water.
-the Centaur
P.S. Yes, I understand a lot of chemicals get filtered out by the dirt. There's still no need to add to it.
More from the Goldman book. I have a tremor in my hand which you can most readily see on the lower left; I traditionally have attributed it to the RSI that I picked up back in the late 90's during grad school (a combination of an internship with a bad ergonomic setup at work and at my apartment, during which I was also writing a proposal for the PEPE robot pet project and playing Dungeon Keeper at night; I woke up one day with a throbbing wrist and couldn't type for nine months).
But my wife pointed out I'm drawing in my wrist, not with my arm, and that can also cause wobbly lines. So I'm going to try the next drawing with a slightly further notebook position and more arm movement. Perhaps the tremors aren't something I have to accept after all. We shall see.
-the Centaur
Moar Goldman studies. Now far into the book enough to start reading his section on tools, which normally I ignore as I have my own preferred methods; but this time, I felt I could see what he was saying. Who knows, maybe I'll actually try some of his pencil methods this time, and not just ink.
-the Centaur
When we decided to live in a place where water falls from the sky, we didn't realize how much we meant it.
The good news is that there's more places to go swimming. The bad news is that you can swim in only one direction, much like a muddy simulation of the interior of a black hole.
Honey, I hope you didn't need anything at the store.
-the Centaur
Still working through the Goldman book, which has the inspirational quote: "I hope you wear this book out from overuse!" And that's what you need when you're practicing!
-the Centaur
P.S. My wife and I were talking about learning skills, and she complained that she hadn't quite gotten what she wanted to out of a recent set of books. It occurred to me that there are two situations in which reading books about a skill doesn't help you:
- It can be you haven't yet found the right book, course or teacher that breaks it down in the right way (for me in music, for example, it was "Understanding the Fundamentals of Music" which finally helped me understand the harmonic progression, the circle of fifths, and scales, and even then I had to read it twice).
- It can be because you're not doing enough of the thing to know the right questions to ask, which means you may not recognize the answers when they're given to you.
Both of these are related to Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development - you can most easily learn things that are related to what you already know. Without a body of practice at a skill, reading up on it can sometimes turn into armchair quarterbacking and doesn't help you (and can sometimes even hurt you); with a body of practice, it turns into something closer to an athlete watching game footage to improve their own game.
So! Onward with the drawing. Hopefully some of the drawing theory will stick this time.
Loki, trying to pull off his best Le Chat Noir:
He moved before I could get a good closeup, though, because Loki is a cat.
-the Centaur
More sketches after Ken Goldman's "Drawing Hands and Feet". Generally, when I do construction lines in pencil, then ink it, then erase the lines, it usually comes out much better than when I draw freehand ink. This should not be surprising, but it is something that I need to come back to again and again, given that I am trying to squeeze a new drawing practice into an already packed day.
-the Centaur
The star Dilmun, its planet Tylos, and the hypothetical exo-Io Failaka, to scale. For comparison, if our Sun, Jupiter, and Earth took those positions, this is what they would look like:
What's funny about the Dilmun system is that normally you have to say "planetary distances and sizes are not to scale". However, Tylos is so close to Dilmun, orbiting only 4 million kilometers away with a year of 1.25 days, that the top diagram IS to scale. And this is in real life, not fiction.
What an amazing universe.
-the Centaur
Again from the Goldman book, this time the frontispiece.
-the Centaur