Look, I get it: giving money to pandhandlers is not necessarily the best way to help lift people out of homelessness, and can often be counterproductive. Out of all the money that I've given to people, I'd say one out of three of them I could tell benefited from it (for example, one guy immediately bought food), one third were scammers (for example, one "hungry" guy immediately bought alcohol), and one third, I dunno. That's one reason that signs like this go up in public squares all across the country:
But look at the kind of day that this sign was having. It didn't get above freezing until noon. It's too damn cold to be stingy to people who ask for things from you. Jesus said "Give to all those who beg of you" and while sometimes we can't follow that advice given the context, yesterday was not one of those days.
This is part of a whole trend of "hostile architecture" where we structure our societies to make things difficult for people who are homeless - closing the parks, making benches hard to sleep on, stealing the possessions of the homeless (either as a condition of going into a homeless shelter, or outright theft by the police) and eliminating low-cost housing that could provide a path out for the homeless.
I'm not sure what the right answer is, but when it's fifteen below freezing, the right answer is not "no".
We have a black cat, so we got a black cat condo (just barely visible to the left). But of course, our cat-shaped void is a cat, and so prefers the blue couch, where its voluminous shedded fur is easily visible. My wife caught him in the act, so, enjoy this picture of our cat-shaped void, doing cat-styled things.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki on our couch. Interestingly, this picture was taken at an angle, so I rotated it, then used Adobe Photoshop's generative fill to recover the outer edge of the picture. The very outer edge is ... mostly right. Some weirdness is visible in the carpet patterns on the lower left, the brick pattern on the upper left, and whatever it is on the table on the right isn't there in reality. Otherwise, not a terrible job.
It's hard to believe nowadays, but the study of psychology for much of the twentieth century was literally delusional. The first half was dominated by behaviorism, a bad-faith philosophy of psychology - let's not stoop to calling it science - which denied the existence of internal mental states. Since virtually everyone has inner mental life, and it's trivial to design an experiment which relies on internal mental reasoning to produce outcomes, it's almost inconceivable that behaviorism lasted as long as it did; but, it nevertheless contributed a great understanding of stimulus-response relationships to our scientific knowledge. That didn't mean it wasn't wrong, and by the late twentieth century, it had been definitively refuted by cognitive architecture studies which modeled internal mental behavior in enough detail to predict what brain structures were involved with different reasoning phenomena - structures later detected in brain scans.
Cognitive science had its own limits: while researchers such as myself grew up with a very broad definition of cognition as "the processes that the brain does when acting intelligently," many earlier researchers understood the "cognitive" in "cognitive psychology" to mean "logical reasoning". Emotion was not a topic which was well understood, or even well studied, or even thought of as a topic of study: as best I can reconstruct it, the reasoning - such as it was - seems to have been that since emotions are inherently subjective - related to a single subject - then the study of emotions would also be subjective. I hope you can see that this is just foolish: there are many things that are inherently subjective, such as what an individual subject remembers, which nonetheless can be objectively studied across many individual subjects, to illuminate solid laws like the laws of recency, primacy, and anchoring.
Now, in the twenty-first century, memory, emotion and consciousness are all active areas of research, and many researchers argue that without emotions we can't reason properly at all, because we become unable to adequately weigh alternatives. But beyond the value contributed by those specific scientific findings is something more important: the general scientific understanding that our inner mental lives are real, that our feelings are important, and that our lives are generally better when we have an affective response to the things that happen to us - in short, that our emotions are what make life worth living.
Don't you hate it when you think of something clever to say, but forget to write it down? I do. My wife and I were having a discussion and I came up with some very clever statement of the form "if people do this, they don't end up doing that", but now I can't remember it, so please enjoy this picture of a cat sending an email.
Just a moment. Just a moment.
"If you haven't climbed a mountain before, thinking about what you'll do when you get there is a distraction from starting the journey towards it. Climbing a mountain seems hard, but they're only a few miles high, and perhaps ten times that wide; most of your journey towards it will be on the plain, and that deceptively level terrain is the hardest part. Speculating about what parka to wear on the upper slopes does nothing to get you walking towards that slope; set out on your journey, and you can buy a parka when you're closer."
This bit of armchair wisdom was designed to encapsulate why it's better to start work on your business than it is to speculate on how to grow it into a multibillion-dollar conglomerate. Sure, it's great to have a grand vision, but you don't need to worry about mergers and acquisitions before you've found any customers - if you've never built a business before, that is.
If you are someone who has built many businesses, it's okay to build on your experience to guide your steps - but most of us have not, and our grand dreams can actively get in the way of figuring out how to make your product, how to get it in front of your customers, and how to make your product excel in their eyes so that they choose you over the alternatives.
Phew. Strangely enough, that first image was load-bearing: I picked a "random" recent picture for this blog, but it so turned out that our cat had been playing with his catnip laptop right around the time that Sandi and I had been discussing strategies for startups.
Feed your memory with enough cues, sometimes you get a retrieval.
Cogsci out.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, sending emails on his catnip laptop, and resting on his laurels after a hard day at work.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It's fascinating to me how concepts far from our daily experience can help us understand our world. Far out in the galaxy, many planets like Earth orbit far closer to their suns, and can become tidally locked - always facing their parent star, the way that the Moon always faces the Earth.
As you might imagine, the light side gets hot, and the dark side gets cold. But what isn't clear is that the atmospheres of such planets are bistable - there are two different conditions many of these planets can exist in, even traveling at the same distance away from their parent stars.
If the atmosphere is hot enough, then greenhouse gases trap heat at the surface, sustaining the atmosphere so it can warm the night side through convection. But if the night side ever gets cold enough, the greenhouse gases can freeze out into ice deposits, which act as a cold trap.
As greenhouse gases disappear from the atmosphere, the atmosphere loses its ability to retain heat, and the night side gets colder and colder, harvesting more and more of the atmosphere to the cold trap. Eventually most of the atmosphere freezes on the night side, creating an ice cap.
Either of those states - a hot greenhouse world with a thick atmosphere, or a hot light side world with a thick frozen ice cap on the dark side - is stable enough on its own. An active greenhouse world stays hot, and an ice cap world stays nearly airless. But the transition from greenhouse to ice cap is a vicious cycle.
So many things in our world are like these cold traps: we don't always see good things when we have them, and once the runaway process is started, it's hard to stop.
Belief is one such thing: an open mind can interrogate itself, but once an ideology starts to take us over, it actively attacks conflicting information, until we're left with nothing but a thick crust of conspiracy theories.
Where's your cold trap? It may feel something like a blind spot.
Dilmun is a yellow-white star hotter and brighter than our Sun (itself white, not yellow), and Tylos orbits so close its parent star that its orbit takes one and a quarter Earth days, cooking the planet to a sizzling 2500 degrees Kelvin (about four thousand degrees Fahrenheit). Failaka is a cometary remnant, and if it exists, it could only survive in the shadow of Tylos, which itself appears as a bright orange, hot as a hot coal.
SO, to make the story more grounded, I worked out where Failaka would have to be (Tylos's L2 point, currently calcuated as about the distance from the Earth to the Moon), how relatively bright Tylos and Dilmun were, and how large Tylos and Dilmun would be in the sky, as well as their colors.
The above renders this in Mathematica. Tylos is the orange circle partially occluding the white disk of Dilmun behind it, and Failaka is the blue plain of ice below - ice which, if it really was this exposed to Tylos and Dilmun, would be rapidly sublimating away, as the plot demands that the planet "roll" due to an orbital shift, leading to plains of former darkside ice shifting into the light and rapidly disintegrating.
Oh, and the tiny dots to the right of Dilmun? The white dot is the Sun, in natural color. The next dot is the Moon, rendered in grey, as the moon's albedo is actually kinda like charcoal.
And now, a helpful safety tip: do not stand on Failaka where you can see this view of Tylos and Dilmun. The radiation would be thousands of times as bright as the Sun seen from Earth, and you would rapidly have a very abbreviated day.
... or you're not blogging every day. And I even went down to the library TO blog, but forgot what I was supposed to be working on when I got here, and did a whole buncha other tasks.
So, anyway, here's a margarita. It was strong. Enjoy.
One of the productivity tools I use is a technique called "plan for success." I mostly use it for todo lists, and for that topic it's worth a blog post of its own, but, briefly, when taking on a task, I like to start off with a "plan for success" sheet where I list:
What the project is (e.g, going to Dragon Con)
Where I currently am on the project (e.g, about to leave, just arrived)
What the context of the next work block is (the next 4-5 days, or the next month)
What success would look like (e.g., attend all my panels, meet all my friends, hit the dealer's room)
Once I have that, I start listing todo items, then categorizing them into the four Stephen Covey quadrants - Urgent and Important, Not Urgent yet Important, Urgent yet Unimportant, and Not Urgent and Not Important. Making sure that the "Not Urgent yet Important" stuff gets done is the hardest part, so I usually tranche the TODOs into "do immediately, do today, do before I leave".
But the whole "plan for success" idea came from an artist - I don't remember who - talking about the difference between professionals and amateurs. An amateur may produce great art, they said, but on accident, even if they're skilled, because they don't know how they're doing what they're doing. A professional, on the other hand, makes a plan to ensure that their art piece succeeds. They may not always succeed at it - plenty of professional artists have to start pieces over - but they don't paint themselves into a metaphorical corner as much because they've taken steps to ensure the piece comes out well - for example, by getting reference art, doing perspective or construction lines, or practice drawings.
I wonder if this idea also works for learning art? Let's find out.
Okay, I'm going to start out with the best of the images that I produced trying to create Porsche the Centaur using ChatGPT's DALL-E interface. The above is ... almost Porsche, though her ears are too high (centaurs in the Alliance universe have ears a little more like an elf, but mobile like a dog's). And, after some coaxing, the ChatGPT / DALL-E hybrid managed to produce a halfway decent character sheet:
But both of these images came after several tries. And when I tried to get ChatGPT / DALL-E to generate a front and back view of the same character sheet, it just disintegrated into random horse and human parts:
Similarly, the initial centaur image came only after many prompt tweaks and false starts, like this one:
There are legitimate questions about whether the current round of AI art generators were trained on data taken without permission (they almost certainly were), whether they could displace human artists (they almost certainly will), and whether they will have destructive effects on human creativity (the jury is out on this one, as some forms of art will wane while new forms of art will wax).
But never let anyone tell you they've worked out all the bugs yet. These systems are great renderers at the image patch level, but their notion of coherence leaves a lot to be desired, and their lack of structural knowledge means their ability to creatively combine is radically limited to surface stylistics.
One day we'll get there. But it will take a lot of work.
The Neurodiversiverse submission window has finally closed, Liza and I have triaged the art and assigned the stories, and I'm now digging into my first chunk of the slush pile. Onward!
-the Centaur
Pictured: A universe of science fiction books from nearby Angel's bookstore.
Now, it's not true that I have writer's block: I wrote +600 words on a new story, "Plains of Deathless Ice", a sequel to my recently-submitted story "Shadows of Titanium Rain". But I do seem to have blogger's block, as I had two or three ideas for posts but had great difficulty writing them.
This is not one of those post ideas.
Pfui on you, writer's block.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Some books from my "books wanted" album.
