Posts tagged as “Blogging Every Day”

[thirty-seven] minus nineteen: lose yourself in a good bookstore

Published February 25, 2023 by centaur

Even though building up a great library is an important part of my process, getting out of the office is just as important. There's little better in my mind than getting out to some other space where you can't do laundry, pay your bills, or even get distracted by some book you were reading. Out in a coffeehouse or cafe, you can sit, read, and write, disappearing into that state of "flow" you get from engagement with your own process.

But it's just as important to expose yourself to new, unchosen information - not your news feed or blogroll, but a set of information spread out across all possible topics, like reading a great encyclopedia, visiting a library ... or browsing a bookstore. While a bookstore's topics are limited, and even the nicest ones are trying to sell you things, they're not just trying to sell them to you: they're trying to create an information space, one of a completely different kind than I talked about when discussing my library.

In a bookstore or library, it's possible to get lost in chains of thought that you never would have otherwise had, because you're prompted by information that you never would have chosen to see, if it all came from your feed or your previous collection of chosen books and media.

Get out sometime, and lose yourself in a good bookstore. If you can walk there from where you are, so much the better; then you can combine the experience of life with the expansion of your mind.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Moe's Bookstore in Berkeley. Does ... that seem right to you, or am I still woozy from food poisoning? :-D

[thirty-six] minus twenty: on reflection, food poisoning sucks

Published February 25, 2023 by centaur

I got food poisoning Monday night. Admittedly, this was pretty serious (in the top five, or even top three of food poisoning incidents in my life) and it was on a red-eye flight (definitely in the top three most miserable experiences of my life) with serious turbulence (also in the top five or so as turbulence goes) but, even so, DAYS later, I'm still running on backup systems and batteries. I typically can't sleep until 5am, no matter when I go to bed, and then can't seem to wake up until 2 to 4 pm, well more than a solid 8 hours later. And I can't seem to concentrate, reading the same paragraphs over and over again until finally the lawnmower motor baarrrrumphs to life and I start to be able to move through the paper again.

So, in sum, what I'm saying is, try not to get food poisoning on a redeye.

At least I can keep food down now (so far).

Cross yo fingies.

-the Centaur

Pictured: A sunset in Berkeley.

[thirty-five] minus nineteen: listen, you might learn something

Published February 23, 2023 by centaur

Recently, collaborating on a paper, I was convinced that there was a problem in the algorithm we were presenting, and got together with a colleague to discuss it. He saw some of the problems, but had a different take on others, and kept coming back to a minor point about our use of a method in one step.

As we talked, we slowly realized the problem I was raising and the comment he was making, while seemingly unrelated, were actually two sides of the same coin. A minor tweak in the use of a published algorithm, seemingly made just out of necessity to make a demo work, was actually a key, load-bearing innovation that made everything downstream in the algorithm work.

We made the change, and suddenly everything in the paper started to fall into place.

But we'd never have gotten there if we hadn't taken the time to listen to each other.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Nola, the night of another great conversation with a friend.

[thirty-four] minus twenty: the exhilarating sense of freedom

Published February 23, 2023 by centaur

SO! I'm back at the ranch after my business trip, back home after being laid off while traveling for work, back in my office slash library where I worked remotely for much of the past two and a half years.

BUT I was surprised at the exhilarating sense of freedom when I stepped back into my library. I spent fifty years collecting these books and a decade of that organizing them into a kind of external brain, a structuring which only really worked once we had this much larger space on the East Coast, but I never fully had time to take advantage of all of this ... this INFORMATION SPACE, because of the pressures of work.

Well, work hasn't come to an end, even though I've been laid off, because as a researcher it's in my best interest to continue the collaborations I had on papers in flight. But now it's just focused on the important stuff, and the rest of my time is focused on much needed improvements. And as I stood in the library, the outcome of years of work organizing - prompted by my wife, who long since adopted "everything has a place" in her studio, and knew the effect it would have - I felt like, "I can DO this now."

Already today, I read up on probability theory, practiced piano, debugged problems with my bass guitar, and, yes, collaborated on an ongoing paper. (I also continued to recuperate from food poisoning, worked on taxes, let the plumber in to fix the plumbing, picked the brain of the landscaper, and took care of house and cat things for my wife, who's having migraines). And I still have hours left in my day.

Who knew getting laid off could be so liberating?

Maybe it was time.

Back to work!

-the Centaur

Pictured: My "work" workstation, and the "information space" behind it.

[thirty-three] minus twenty-one: thirty hours

Published February 22, 2023 by centaur

SO, I was so sick after the food poisoning (and soreness from retching, and the general lack of sleep on the red-eye) that I slept for over thirty hours. I think I may have gotten up in the middle of that for an hour and blogged or something, but I basically crashed from ~10am Tuesday to ~5pm Wednesday. By the evening I was well enough to do a grocery store run and have a light dinner, but I am still wiped out, and I canceled all my meetings and am going back to bed. Here's hoping rest does the trick.

-the Centaur

Pictured: This just popped up "From Three Years Ago" in my photos app. Thank you, Google Photos, for this truly bizarre picture, which I cannot even find again due to the way they clear the recommendations once you look at them (again, thanks, Google Photos, for this truly bizarre anti-user feature). I present to you ... a robot alligator, atop a Coke Zero, with ... a pen for scale? Perhaps this was nine years ago, from the Google Objects project? I really don't recall. Enjoy.

[thirty-two] minus twenty-one: because it works on them

Published February 22, 2023 by centaur

You know, I posted this a few days ago, but didn't post what I thought of it. I do think that it's pretty crummy that some people think that aid should be needs-tested. The rationale, mostly on the right, is that giving out assistance after someone misbehaves creates a "moral hazard", that is, a chance people will exploit the help in an attempt to behave without consequence. And this, of course, is absolutely true - there are some people who do exploit help to allow themselves to avoid taking consequences. Any system that is created can be exploited, and some people live by, literally have as the method of their living, exploiting others.

But someone who's starving and cold on the street is starving and cold on the street, and it's also true that we have an obligation to our fellow human beings to help those who need help. When someone collapses in front of you, you don't know whether that person was on drugs or just had a heart attack: you need to help them. Our human society works because we are social animals who factor the needs of others into our decision-making. (This is as useful for robots as it is for humans, so I suspect this is more than just a human-bleeding-heart thing, and is instead a universal property of successful intelligent civilizations).

And, not surprisingly, I know many rich people who understand this. It isn't a big issue; many members of my family are well off and they didn't need to be told to contribute to the needy or to step up providing food and water when there was a disaster, they just did it.

SO, back to the quote:

What is it about rich people that makes them think they can starve poor people into good behavior?
David Wong

I know the answer to this.

Because that kind of thinking works on them.

I know a lot of people who are affluent. Some from inheritance, some from hard work, some from a combination of the above. Not all of them managed to keep it. The ones that did were frugal - perhaps not all the time, not on everything, but when it came down to it, they were always worried about running out of money, even if they had a lot of it.

They knew if they behaved the way that "the money" wanted them to, they'd have none of it left.

Many rich people behave responsibly only because they fear the consequences of their own misbehavior. And, I think, that's why they're so concerned about "moral hazard:" they know if they didn't have a backstop, they would behave terribly irresponsibly.

Well, fine. Good for them, if that keeps them being responsible.

But that's no excuse to project their experience out to the whole world.

If someone is sick, homeless, or otherwise in need, we should help them. That's what humans do. That's how our civilization has become such an amazing success: we live in a world where life events can sweep away our entire foundation, and when those things happen, we all help each other stand back up.

As it should be.

-the Centaur

[thirty-one] minus twenty-two: well, that was a miserable experience

Published February 22, 2023 by centaur

Food poisoning and a red-eye flight: two great tastes that go great together. Or not. I will remember this one later, in, like, my life and stuff. No more blog for you today.

-the Centaur

[thirty] minus twenty: why i wouldn’t work for elon musk at twitter

Published February 19, 2023 by centaur

Because he took Twitter private. Look, I'm not against private companies per se: I'm part of one (Thinking Ink Press) and have started another (Logical Robotics). And I'm not against Elon Musk per se either: I have some criticisms of how he's running Twitter, but those criticisms are not material to my point, and, hey, he has made me a great deal of money over the years as a Tesla and Twitter shareholder, so, perhaps he knows what he's doing in this case (though, based on how it's going, I seriously doubt it.)

No, my issue is, it's not a public company anymore. I strongly believe most large companies should be public, and that I would not work for a large private corporation if I could possibly help it. Private corporations exist to serve their shareholders; public corporations exist to serve the public. We structure them for the benefit of shareholders to encourage people to create companies and improve the economy, but going public places the company under increased oversight to ensure it is serving the public interest.

Public corporations place structure between the shareholders and the business: shareholders elect a board, which selects a CEO, who selects the employees of the company and directs its business. So at a public corporation, both the lowliest employee and the CEO work for the company, not the shareholders.

This insulation creates a great equalizer. In the end, everyone at the company, from the CEO to the mail room temp, are all responsible for serving the company. At a public company, you don't work for your manager; you both work for the company, and you both should act in its best interests.

At a private company, this is no longer the case. And at Twitter, this is definitely no longer the case. Elon Musk is removing security features and artificially boosting his own engagement and firing anyone who contradicts him, much less disagrees with him, which is a big problem since he doesn't realize he's incompetent at running software companies (this kind of nonsense is what got him fired from the company that became PayPal, after all) and he's desperate to cut costs and boost revenues before the debt payments eat them alive.

At a healthy company - a public company - you have the moral right to say, "No, sir, that doesn't work that way," or "No, ma'am, I won't do that; that's harmful to the company." Admittedly, this can get you fired, but you still have the moral right to do it.

At Twitter, however, it's Elon's show. And he has the right to run it the way that he wants - he certainly paid enough for it. So, if I worked at Twitter ... I think I would have to have taken the severance, if offered, because while I will work for a public company, I won't work in a feudal kingdom.

The King can boost his own tweets.

-the Centaur

Pictured: More graffiti, from an undisclosed location.

[twenty-nine] minus twenty-one: what’s up with these titles?

Published February 19, 2023 by centaur

In case it isn't clear, when I took on the Blogging Every Day project, I hoped to get at least one post a day for the full year. Today, the 19th of February, is allegedly the 50th day of the year (according to On This Day in Math, this is the smallest number that can be written as the sum of two squares in two different ways, 1+49 and 25+25 ... who knew? Pat Ballew, apparently). But by my count this is only the twenty-ninth blogpost in this series (not counting blog posts done for other reasons), so it's twenty nine, minus twenty-one behind what the goal should be for the day. And I need to be doing at least two of these a day to get back on track.

Just so we're clear.

-the Centaur

Pictured: What was behind my head when I was taking that picture of King's Fish House.

[twenty-eight] minus twenty: re-ju-ven-ate!

Published February 19, 2023 by centaur

Oh, look, it's a Dalek acting as a security guard! Nothing can go wrong with this trend. :-/

Though, as a roboticist seeing this gap between terminals, I can't help but wonder whether it just undocked from its charger, whether it is about to dock with its charger, whether it needs help from a human to dock with its charger, or whether it has failed to dock with its charger and is about to run out of power in the dark and the cold where all the wolves are.

-the Centaur

[twenty-seven] minus twenty-one: this is a good restaurant

Published February 19, 2023 by centaur

King's Fish House is a good restaurant. This one is in Santana Row, but I first fell in love with it in San Diego.

Good food is to be had here.

Good drinks too.

That is all.

-the Centaur

[twenty-six] minus twenty-two: found it

Published February 19, 2023 by centaur

In the "beyond the last place you'd look for it" department, I found my wife's laptop. It disappeared during her last trip to renovate the old house, and she could not find it, any place she looked. I couldn't find it either, until we had to re-do the floors and I had to move everything out of all the side rooms. Before I put everything back, I staged it into another room and started methodically going through every box. No dice. But then, while moving some of the spare suitcases we'd left here, I noticed one of them was strangely heavy. Huh. What's this I feel in here? Could it be ... a laptop?

So it turns out my wife apparently had used the above small suitcase to transport her laptop and all of its accoutrements (charger, case, etc) but ... perhaps forgot that's where she put it, in all the chaos of moving things from room A to B to paint stuff, only to move it from B to C to fix things, then from C back to A again. Regardless, it was in the wrong room, with the empty suitcases, so it doesn't surprise me that it was hard to find. But I found it ... by methodically searching every place, whether it made sense or not.

Blogging every day.

-the Centaur

[twenty-five] minus twenty-two

Published February 17, 2023 by centaur

Did you know Bernard Cribbins, who played the Doctor Who companion Wilfred Mott in David Tennant's run ALSO played companion Tom Campbell in the Peter Cushing "Dr. Who" movie Dalek's Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.?

Me neither. But apparently David Tennant did, as you can see him here checking up on his old companion (or, technically, his alter ego's companion) as they faced the Daleks ...

Ain't Photoshop grand?

-the Centaur

P.S. Typing the title "Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D." hurts me. It's grammatically correct, but hanging onto that by its fingernails and is SO clunky. "Dalek Invasion of Earth: 2150", please, or just the original "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" from the TV show.

[twenty-four] minus twenty-one: renovations in progress

Published February 15, 2023 by centaur

Busy working on a revision of a paper for the HRI Workshop in Academia and Industry, so enjoy this picture of our renovations instead. My other task for the day was working on our house out here in California, which we have to fix up if we wish to sell, rent, or even just really live in it. Not much going on in this picture, but earlier today I was crawling all over the floors with waterborne Color Putty, filling gaps in the slightly dodgy wood flooring. The installers left some, um, pretty substantial gaps ...

... but were nice enough to come back for free and spend several hours fixing most of it, leaving me with jars of the product to fill in any gaps we found later. As they explained, the gaps we were seeing were natural to this product and we can only see down to the tongues of the material, but, still, there's a pretty marked difference between the gaps we see on this new flooring and the tightly joined hardwood floors in our new house, or even the damn near hermetic pergo floors in the rest of the original California house, and we don't think "Oh, just don't ever spill anything, ever" is a reasonable answer. So I'm going to go over them carefully before putting our boxed belongings back into the rooms ... one crack at a time.

Oh, joy. Don't get me started on the work I had to do to try to rescue the path beside the house, which nature firmly decided it wants to reclaim ...

-the Centaur

P. S. I promise all this work is necessary, and is not elaborate avoidance behavior of the manuscript, as my subconscious hunts for other things to work on in an attempt to hide my writer's block from myself.

[twenty-three] minus twenty-one

Published February 14, 2023 by centaur

Restarting the numbering a little bit so we're capturing 'blog per day' (day of year: 44 - blog series: 23 = 21 behind). Up late doing various stuff, so here's a neat shot from a parking garage in downtown Berkeley, after I did my traditional artist date "visit a couple of cool bookstores, get some nice food, find a coffeehouse to work on my book." The road in question is just chock full of theaters and other artistic venues, so there's often quite the interesting crowd milling about when I'm heading from the garage to grab some food.

-the Centaur

It’s my birthday and I’ll read if I want to …

Published February 11, 2023 by centaur

SO! I just turned *AHEM* a year older and decided to go to my favorite restaurant, Nola, in Palo Alto. Nola and I go way back - logically speaking, I must have first gone there in something like summer of 1997, near the end of my internship at SRI (formerly, the Stanford Research Institute) on hierarchical planning. Nola was the first place I ever got "drunk", or more honestly, slightly buzzed from a very powerful margarita, the first on-the-rocks margarita I had ever had. I had even ordered it by accident; normally, at the time, I was drinking the equivalent of watered-down alcohol slushies, and ordered on-the-rocks on accident. My tastes in drink have ... considerably evolved ... since then, though I still stick to the one-drink-per-day limit.

Nola's a truly magical place. I'd put it in a novel ... if I hadn't already. (LIQUID FIRE, as the vampire-friendly restaurant our heroes retreat to after a nasty dustup with some evil firespinners). Look at their decorations for Mardi Gras! Beautiful.

Welp! One more spin around the sun. Plan to keep doing those as long as I am able ...

-the Centaur

[twenty-two] minus seventeen …

Published February 11, 2023 by centaur

Another neat little place in downtown Palo Alto. It's amazing how special a place downtown Palo Alto is; for being a part of a vast megalopolis, it's a charming downtown with a small-town feel and a surprisingly connected place. I ran into at least six people I knew in the short time I was down there tonight, and got an introduction to a robotics group at MIT just by sitting in a chair and talking to some friends.

This is kind of the experience I had when I first came out to the Bay as an intern, 25 years ago (more or less); I had just arrived, was hungry, but restaurants were busy, so I took a seat at a restaurant bar, the only space available ... but no sooner had I sat down than I got offered a job.

Well, technically, I sat down and cracked open a very technical book, and the person sitting next to me didn't offer me a job, but did give me their card and let me know their startup was hiring.

But you get the picture ...

-the Centaur

[twenty-one] minus eighteen

Published February 10, 2023 by centaur

A colorful auto-generated effect from Google Photos showing the profusion of succulents in our xeriscaped yard. They've really taken off in the past couple of years, and are quite beautiful even when not blooming.

Blogging every day (ish).

-the Centaur

Ripping Off the Bandaid

Published February 10, 2023 by centaur

After almost seventeen years at Google, I've made the difficult decision to get laid off with no warning. :-) Working with Google was an amazing experience, from search to robotics to 3D objects and back to robotics again. We did amazing things and I am proud of all my great colleagues and what we accomplished together.

However, my work in robotics is not done, and I will still be pushing for better robot navigation, large language model planning, and especially social robot navigation and embodied AI. I'm spinning up an independent consulting business and will announce more details on this as it evolves - feel free to reach out directly though!

-the Centaur

P.S. Sorry for the delay - this has been up on my Linkedin forever. But for some reason I just wasn't ready to post this here. Avoidance behavior, however, has gone on long enough. Time to move on.

Pictured: me and Ryan at Sports Page, the traditional hangout you go to on your last day at Google. It was a blast seeing all the friends, thank you for coming!

[twenty] plus eighteen: time to rip off the bandaid

Published February 10, 2023 by centaur

Image apropos of nothing. Nevertheless, avoidance behavior has gone on long enough ... soon it comes ...

-the Centaur

Pictured: Another shot of the real place in Palo Alto which must have subconsciously inspired the Librarian's Favorite Ramen noodle shop, from an unpublished story.