Hi. Have a story. It’s rough around the edges, but I think the fundamental idea is of at least some interest. No, a foot soldier wouldn’t think like that, but I didn’t want to waste time trying to get into character.

Status: remember it's just a game! you don't have to scream like they're actually killing you every time something hits you or when you fall off the road... repeat after me: it's just a game! ;-) hahahaha!

just a game... just a game...

the controller had visited him earlier today, an unimaginably huge honor for a common foot soldier like himself. he should have been ecstatic to receive his orders directly from the supreme commander of the battlefield, but instead it had somehow left him feeling... empty.

It was very much unlike being briefed by his commanding officers, who seemingly knew exactly how to rile up the squads for battle, calling on their patriotism and honor to gird themselves against the visceral horrors. They talked at inane speeds, and knew exactly what to say at all the right moments. Once you've been through a few battle preps, the patterns fell into place, and it felt so right to cheer at the behest of the sergeants.

On the other hand, the controller seemed to stumble and hesitate over his words. He wondered at the time why this particular officer had risen through the ranks, when those less-eloquent leaders had been retired without a thought. There was something off about the controller: he didn't hold his battle implement quite right, he fidgeted like his armor didn't fit him.

"So," the controller had begun, "I need you to scout out around here" he indicated a point on the map, "and keep in areas where the live feed can make it back to base."

I was only a foot soldier, but I had just enough smarts to know a suicide mission when I saw one.

"Why don't we just use an aerial drone?" Even though he sat on the top of the pyramid, I couldn't just let him send me into the jaws of the enemy like that, especially when there was no need.

He sighed, "We need recon-"

"No we don't, we got the last feed from the area 100 ticks ago-"

"Don't talk back to your commanding officer, son."

"I will if you are going to throw away my life!"

"And I can see why Professor Williams wants to erase you."

What-

"It's all just a game. All of you" he gestured out to the trenches "are AIs running in an academic simulation, and your aberrant behavior happen to be keeping this simulation from optimizing further. We thought we would make your death somewhat useful, but your behavior seems to have gone farther than the prof knows. I'm going to-"

The controller disappeared.

It was all a game.

Just a game.

They were fighting over nothing: there wasn't a homeland, a family at home worth fighting for, leaves of absence or honorable discharge. It felt like it was all real, including the concrete wall his fist was pounding against, but it wasn't. The pain wasn't real, the blood from his knuckles wasn't real, the steel wall behind the concrete facade wasn't real, the locked door wasn't real, the pitiful dents in the door weren't real. The controller, or Professor Williams, or somebody else, had control of the world, and they would-

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Wait, I don’t think I’ve ever told you guys what I was actually studying. So, I guess I better start there, especially since I have a better idea of what I was doing now that it’s over.

The REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) was based in Calpoly, with a focus on robotics. My particular project’s long term goal was to track/follow sharks with multiple AUVs, with the short-term summer goal of tracking/following a boat with one AUV. In short, we (research team had 4 people in it, with two of us ending up branching towards some very different target) failed pretty miserably at attaining that goal. If you don’t mind, I’m going to rant a bit on why that happened, instead of blabbering about the details of the project, which aren’t that interesting anyways.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that speed is incredibly important. It’s not a very good mantra for a plethora of reasons, but didn’t have the raw speed to make up for our other shortcomings. For instance, I only knew rudimentary opamp theory going into the REU, but I spent the better part of a day learning what I needed to know. Now, spending a day learning 30-minutes of information is bad, and that sort of situation happened over and over again. Sometimes it was inevitable, like learning to use Eagle taking two days. Much of the time, it wasn’t. Generally speaking, I was working full time on a series of problems, and once days started to slip by with token progress, I should have known something was up.

Another problem I’m going to peg our failure to score a goal on is the agonizingly slow start we got off to. Now that it’s over, it feels like if we started with what we knew at our 3rd week, then we could’ve really done some damage. Not doing homework before getting there was a problem, certainly, as well as the closely related problem of not pounding our advisors with more important questions. I don’t even think the problem was well-defined in our heads until a few weeks in, which in retrospect was a very, very big problem, and probably why we didn’t know what we were doing for the first two weeks.

A comparison might be handy: it was very much unlike the MCM, where we had a concrete goal and a very short time period in which to do something about it. Our project stayed undefined for a while, and stayed murky, and we had a relatively long time in which to do something (bad, since I only pulled my requisite all-nighter (of course! it’s not an REU if you haven’t pulled an all-nighter) on the last night (I do not recommend pulling it the night before a presentation, though). It feels like motivation goes way down when there’s too much time: much stricter goal setting and goal meeting insanity on my part would have ameliorated this somewhat).

So I guess I’ll end my rant here. It was a very valuable experience, and I was glad I got to do it. I just wish…

No. I’m really ending my rant, and going to go do something cool. Hopefully I’ll have something to show by the end of the week.

My gosh, so much happens in a week.

So, I got evicted (not my fault, although now I know that I have to keep tabs on the people I rent from, too), started really whaling on my internship (partly why I haven’t been posting lately), and played out in public. Granted, I sucked, and I’ve been out of practice for about a week (and my god, why can’t they leave a grand where I can get to it, and let me at it when I can get to it?), and there wasn’t anyone around to hear it, but it’s the thought that counts! Right? Right…

But since real life is boring (at least until I start finishing projects, which are all in varying states of incompletion, aka don’t expect anything soon), I’ll be talking about something that I’ve slowly come to realize. It’s been a feeling that’s been with me around a year, starting as something innocuous, but I’ve only recently figured out what it actually means (I know, it’s kind of late, so my word-smithing is somewhat off. Do forgive me).

I realize just how cool of a place UPS was, and I wish (in a way) that I could’ve stuck around for a little longer, or maybe gone back and done some things differently.

Of course, I only realize that UPS was a delightful place to be when I’m leaving it, as such things are apt to happen. In this case, the relationship is not entirely coincidental: getting to know how other schools do bureaucratic work gives me an appreciation for the close knit-edness of us around UPS. For instance, I just need maybe 2 days to a week in a machine shop to finish the mechanical bits of my Mendel. The fact it’s not finished doesn’t mean that I’m lazy, just that it’s nearly impossible to get permission to wrangle around in a machine shop here at Calpoly. I can see why (not a student, summer quarter, safety up the wazzoo (although I think that everyone should adopt metrix:createspace’s liability release, hehe)), but it’s frustrating to be right in the middle of an engineering school and not be able to engineer something. So, I’ll have to use up part of my week back home to hack at it, or figure out how to navigate Columbia quickly and get access to a machine shop there.

But so what? No one cares about how Universities handle machine shop access. Rather, it is indicative of the larger ways and methods of how things are done, and it is with regret that I now know I haven’t been using my professors as much as I should have been. Now that I actually know that, I fear that Columbia is going to be a much different sort of place. Maybe not quite so different: professors that are enthusiastic about teaching are everywhere (the converse is also true, unfortunately). However, Columbia is big enough to have TAs teaching classes, rather than having professors teaching every single class, all the time. Time lost getting to know the actual prof.

Then, there’s the geekiness factor. But Nathan! you may be thinking, Isn’t that one of the reasons you didn’t like UPS? Because geeks that you could engage with were few and far between? True, but not being surrounded by geeks means that I’m not completely cut off from the larger world, that I can have a direct impact on the world of those around me just by being geeky, especially being enthusiastic about being geeky. Of course, I missed this sort of chance to really engage people, although I really wasn’t quite geeky enough most of the time back then… so I guess I’m only partially off the hook. Cause, you know, a real geek would have already been geeky enough.

And there’s some of the usual suspects: leaving behind friends, a familiar place, a familiar admin system, and a campus small enough to sprint across in less than 5 minutes. That last one was still causing me trouble up until last week; this last week of work has been me coming in and working until I get too hungry for dinner, so I haven’t been strictly keeping tabs on getting to work on time. Gonna have to fix that before I get to Columbia.

So, didn’t know what I had until it’s gone.

Mind you, I’m really anticipating a different flow in New York, a new chapter in life, and a whole lot more learning, so I’m not going to change my mind about moving. These are just some thoughts about what insights hindsight has given me concerning the past few years.

Enough rambling. Guy is still playing with his flash editor on the couchahemmy bed, so I guess I’ll get him to move.

So a friend of mine recently-ish filled out one of those Q/A lists about books on tumblr, and it got me thinking about books I haven’t read, and it got me thinking. Specifically, one of the books mentioned happened to touch on an anomaly in my reading habits, one of the few books that I’ve read out of sequence in a series without going back to read everything. I do believe I read it for a book reading contest in my junior high days (Battle of the Books, I do believe. Came close to winning the school-wide contest a few times, but those last couple rounds were always too tough to break), which meant that I wouldn’t have spared thought to reading an entire trilogy just to get at the last book.

However, this recent touch rekindled my interest in the Abhorsen series (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, by Garth Nix), since, well, it sounded like there was a whole lot more character development happening than the last book let on (you mean that warrior was a librarian earlier?). So I grabbed the entire series, sat down, and started reading last night. And well, now it’s tonight, and I’ve ended the last book in the last hour. Not sure if my game is slipping speed*comprehension-wise (yes, I’m multiplying them together), but any reading should help, right?

So thoughts… I’m actually not that tired. Sitting all day and reading doesn’t drain that much energy. Yes, this is what I did all day rather than go to San Fran.

Oh, you mean about the actual books? First, I should say that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has completely ruined fantasy genres for me. Okay, maybe not completely, since the Abhorsen series has a particular sticking point that engaged my mind, but I’m sure can’t read about magical worlds without hearing “I do now claim this territory in the name of SCIENCE!” echo through my head. Particular to the Abhorsen universe is the fact that magic and technology do not mix (not unique by a long shot, but useful as a category). I can’t help but think of a quote from the Clark, who said “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (or something like that). From that perspective, you have one magic, and another, and they oppose each other. Since one is ‘deeper’ than the other, it wins when the two conflict. Simple enough. However, when one can see (or at least outline) all the steps involved in making a grenade, then it’s much less apparent how the tech-magic conflict works. Decomposing all the steps leads to mechanical steps you can undertake anywhere (or else swords couldn’t be smithed in the Old World, for instance), such that it doesn’t make sense that there is any tech-magic conflict.

I know I’m complaining about a fantasy story not making sense. Shush.

So, the plot makes so much more sense now. Nix tries to recap at the beginning of each book, but they really have to be read in sequence, as separate volumes of a large work. Actually, the first book and the last two are fairly decoupled, and the recapitulation from the second could cover for not reading the first (although it would smooth out the story telling to just read everything; sometimes obscure cross-references are made).

Forgive me for skipping through, I’m getting pretty tired.

However, I must say that this might be the first time I’ve consciously noticed character development. I personally think that it’s just due to heightened awareness, and Reading Marathon powers, but I’ll have to burn through a couple more stories before I figure out if I got the hang of it or not.

Anyways, I’m really tired. I’ve been staring at the screen for a few minutes, so I’ll take my leave here.

So, not 20 minutes ago, I decided something. I was very confused, and probably didn’t make the best decision. Nothing life changing, mind you (in the way that you don’t expect significant life changes from the mundane), but importantly character revealing.

Have some background: I am still in SLO (San Luis Obispo), which is between LA and San Fran, which also means it is essentially in the middle of nowhere (comparatively: it’s still California after all). I’m doing a robotics internship at Cal Poly, and our professor suggested we check out some of the labs over at Stanford. Plans were made, and while a bunch of us research dudes were going to Yosemite after checking out Standford, a couple of us just wanted to get home after poking around San Fran and San Jose. Since I’ve been to Yosemite before, and know just how long the drive up there is, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of driving all the way up there and then climbing half dome, especially on a minimal amount of sleep. So, we plotted about how to get home from San Fran, since cars were in short supply among us. Coming home by bus seemed like the most attractive option, although it left San Jose at around 10PM.

So I wake up this morning, earlier than usual in order to get ready to go. I get out to the pick up point, and then I find that the rest of the guys skipping Yosemite had flaked out, effectively leaving me alone for the 2nd portion of the trip. That threw me into a slight panic as I tried to figure out what I should do, and I eventually decided to flake out, too. After I spent some time on top of a toilet contemplating what just happened, I finally figured that I should have gone. But then, my butt was parked on a toilet, and the caravan was already 10 minutes away.

So what’s the big deal? I missed out on a day trip to a larger city, so what? I’ll soon be parked in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, for at least 2 years to boot. What I think is the big deal is that while I came up with the right answer to ‘What is my utility for going to Standford?’, I came up with it much too slowly (while sitting on the toilet no less). An event that I hadn’t considered (the rest of the non-Yosemite team flaking out) blindsided me and (I’m guessing) temporarily overwhelmed my utility function, causing me to make a decision that I didn’t want to make in retrospect.

It was also clear in retrospect that I should have seen it coming, and then pre-cached my thoughts about it (humans think relatively slowly, so we (probably) cache a whole lot of our thoughts to keep up our mental quickness. In this case, trying to come up with a 30-second utility evaluation wasn’t so stable). The guys I was going to be coming home with have had a history of flaking out, and the time/cost investment of the trip would only have raised the probability that they would flake out. In retrospect, it was so obvious that the probability was going to be high that I can’t figure out how I missed it entirely. And if I can’t catch obvious branches like that, then what else am i missing?

So maybe this episode wasn’t character revealing; oh well.

Now I have an entire day ahead of me. Wiped empty. Well, better get to filling it.

Here’s a thought: similar to how martial artists strive to not use their skills, printmen should strive to not use their printers.

Why do I say this? Well, printing is based on the idea that we can make any object our minds can think of, to fill needs that aren’t so easily met by the larger market; moving fulfillment of the long tail out to the long tail, in a sort of lingo-speak. Us print-dudes* believe that this is a net win, that the costs of printing adoption and sustaining a printing public are less than the benefits of having more creative power and flexibility available in the goods available to the public.

So if printers are a good thing, then why the proposal that print-dudes try not to use them?

Back to my comparison with martial arts**: the master and the novice know that their art is a last resort. To think otherwise would mean an abuse of power, a violation of the societal trust that restrains people from using firearms to settle petty disputes (usually). The difference between the firearm and the martial art is about 10 years, assuming that martial arts are among those things that take 10 years to really learn; then, one can imagine that a martial artist would struggle with himself over whether to invalidate all the effort put into learning the art, versus settling a dispute turning nasty in the quickest way possible.

Now, what does this have to do with us print-dudes? Now, I can’t add up all the externalities, but I am quite sure that printing is not a net-green-gain. For example, the reprap*** runs stepper motors and a heating element for a couple of hours in exchange for one object. True, it is custom made, but that’s still a whole ton of energy for one object. The reprap has other things going for it conceptually****, but the point is that if we can go without it, we should. Better would be recycling objects: not melting printed parts back down to filament, but re-purposing ready-made, old objects, and scraps to fill functionality we normally think ‘3D printer’ for.

So my thought went something like that. Meh.

• I’m trying to figure out what the signifier for print-men should be: print-men seems somewhat sexist, and printer refers to the actual machine itself. Hmm…

** Note that I am not a martial artist. You should essentially assume that I am bs’ing this entire paragraph.

*** I’m building a reprap, no offense intended. Also take this as a plea to ignorance about the true power consumption of the reprap.

**** On a different note, printers like the reprap can help decentralize the economy to the point that regions can nearly decouple from each other. Maybe I’ll write on this particular vision later.

So I’ve been a lazy butt, and I haven’t been keeping up with my favorite pet blog as well as I should be. Over the last week or so, I’ve been screwing around with interfacing a wii nunchuck with my laptop. Have some videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koXZ20MdEt4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ro-Lz3BUOo

They’re pretty self explanatory. I’ve also done some work with moving the mouse with the nunchuck, but I haven’t actually gotten off my lazy butt and recorded it for a humiliating posterity yet.

The next step is to… do nothing with it. It’s very much less useful as a HID device than I thought it would be, to the point that I would curse working with such a thing if I had to use it as a mouse for every day activities. It might be useful as a gaming device (as Nintendo intended), but I can see the intention of the nunchuck as an accessory showing itself in such a function. So, it would be better to just use the entire Wiimote as an input device, or to use the nunchuck as a control device for the arduino itself.

In short: it was fun, but ultimately useless (as of right now). Having the functionality mapped out might prove to be useful later, but not yet.

I’m pretty wiped out, mostly from sitting and staring at a screen for most of the day. That usually isn’t a problem, but my old age is getting to me, gosh darn it, and I can’t just push myself like I used to. Where was I?…

Oh, right, dumping core or something. I have blogger guilt (again) so ya’ll are going to have to put up with my whining and complaining about absolutely nothing.

With that out of the way…

I’ve been loathe to update because nothing has happened. Well, nothing exciting. Reprap stuff is flowing in, and I have a nunchuck to play with once a breakout board gets here, but I’m still overextended and not very happy. My mind didn’t listen to my plea as put out in the end of my last blog post, and now I’m way too comfortable with these surroundings, and I just don’t want to do jack. Now that I think about it, this always happens when I’m on vacation, even though I’m really not this time around. Shoot, I don’t even want to finish this blog post.

Thought: I’m ruining my writing style (formal, informal, w/e) by writing stream-of-consciousness blog posts. However, I’m not going to start editing and revising my blog posts, so I guess even if it is true, it’s moot.

Oh, and apparently going to church makes me… feel guilty. Not in the traditional way, though. I’ve forgotten how inviting church communities can be, and it’s kind of strange since I haven’t really outed myself as an atheist. Oh, hi, I’m going to eat your food and socialize even though my goals are at least orthogonal, and perhaps opposed to yours.

And this sort of mental lethargy I was talking about earlier is also affecting this; I mean, I haven’t gotten thrown out of multiple churches yet. Well, I’ve never been thrown out of a church, so I guess I just lack balls. I mean, shoot! 2 mormon churches in close proximity!

I can’t think.

Blarghkeibat

Oh, and happy 4th of July. Not.

Because it’s the 5th of July now. Ha ha ha

Oh, hi. I’m in California now, and it’s been way too long since I’ve made a post that wasn’t a story, and I’ve been in Cali for almost 2 weeks now and how can I call myself a blogger when I can’t even post when I dump my life upside down for two weeks? Hell, my internship thingie is almost 2/9ths of the way done, and I haven’t made a blog post about it. Okay, so I’ll quickly attempt to remedy this dire situation before going to sleep.

So, first things first: I’m in cali, but in the middle of nowhere cali. Okay, that’s not a very nice description of San Luis Obispo, but when you consider the neighboring cities of San Fran and LA, then SLO seems very much like the middle of nowhere. Even if it is the middle of nowhere, it’s a very nice middle of nowhere: there’s maybe been one fully overcast day, and yet the air is cooler than cucumbers. Get something of a tan (I’m indoor much of the time, so I’m not really being exposed to this famed Californian sun, but I guess I get enough from just walking around) while not roasting: I like it. I managed to score an apartment that’s close to the school and some shopping places (realizing in retrospect just how far all that other housing was: Google maps seems to do the distances less justice than it should). Note: walking everywhere is a pain in the butt (walking downtown to the farmer’s market… good berries, but it took a while). I’m still wondering if I should get one of those collapsible bikes, although it might translate to a literal pain in the butt…

Okay, so that’s where I am: but what am I doing? Well, we’re not sure, so I’ll hold off on explaining that. Although, I’ll comment that I’ve found use for my optimization class: it might involve very nasty non-linear optimization, but that’s even better! Now, if I can figure it out before my 9 weeks is up is a good question… Also, the pace of doing 9-5 research is much slower than the MCM. I have a feeling that the MCM is going to be my benchmark for frenzied progress from now on…

Since I have an aversion to breaking up posts into consecutive topic posts, I’ll just mash on some thoughts to the end of my update.

So I don’t think it’s the context switching that’s causing me problems (ref. 5 posts back): at least, context switching isn’t such a big problem as compared to others. For instance, just dicking around instead of doing things. Again referencing my previous post, I came up with this ginormous list of things that I want to do: it turns out that I have no will to do those things. More rigorously, it turns out that I have limited will to do those things while I’m working on research for around 8 hours each weekday, and I have a pretty strong compulsion to screw around and waste time rather than do something I’ll remember and have use for twenty years down the line.

Exhibit the first: I got a nice idea to work on an introductory video for git when I realized that no one teaches scm, at least in your usual comp sci curriculum. You have dozens of blog posts detailing why you should care about git (or hg or svn or w/e), and plenty of videos detailing how to do things, but nothing that just introduces the basics about why you should be interested in using a s(ource) c(ode) m(anagement) system like git. So, using Ignite’s (argh! I just remembered that SLO’s ignite night was tonight! argh! again!) slogan ’enlighten us, but make it quick’ I set out to put together a short and sweet video animating the principles behind git.

So, I allocated myself a little more than an evening to finish it, reasoning that if I used some sweet icons from the Tango icon set, I could stick this thing together reasonably quickly. Well, now I’ve been sitting on it for more than a week, and I think I have all the blocking nicely done. Yup, blocking. I haven’t even thought about how to do the custom music track I was planning on doing.

Looking back, it’s glaring how obvious positivity bias (I’m pretty sure this isn’t what it’s called, but I don’t want to dig through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality just to find it: I won’t sleep all night if I try it) was present in my time allocation. So am I really that bad an animator? Well, not really: out of most of the days in the past week, I’ve maybe gotten less than an hour in working at the video, mostly because I wouldn’t let myself have at it until around 10 o’clock (Which reminds me, having a regular sleep schedule does not work wonders). Sometimes it’s because I’m context switching around and trying to get some reprap stuff done, or otherwise, but all this incidental work + dinner should take a maximum of 2 hours. The other drains are from surfing around the web: I would hate to see my productivity if I hadn’t blocked reddit, digg, and slashdot, although I still tend to stare at the screen and mentally scream for those mental sinks.

I wonder if it’s a withdrawal effect: if so, it’s a pretty long lived one. I’ve ditched most of those social aggregators a while ago, although I suppose it’s more like developing a taste for candy: you might go back to chicken n’ rice, but you never forget the taste of people catering to bored dudes on the internet.

In the end, I just want to make and know things. Please. Come on, mind, you should be able to pull this off. I think we can put aside our differences. For science. You monster.

Oh, hi, have a story. I’ll talk about California when I’m not cramming my head with tutorials, trying to be productive, or being depressed that I’m not productive. Something like that.

Status update: I don't think I can ever get back up..

.. It had just been so *long* ago: it was years ago that she had fallen down this solar system's gravity well and just happened to run into a hospitable planet instead of the star's fiery atmosphere. Just the right probabilities had worked out in her favor, and she had survived planet fall.

Then, she had to learn how to live on the planet, full of strange ecosystems and geological formations. She still remembered... the day she was caught in a sand storm, the week she spent sick from the brightly colored fruit, the month she spent nursing her broken leg, the countless battles against the dogs determined to rip the flesh from her bones, the moment of realization that the planet was probably devoid of sentient life...

And those were only the very lowest points of her stay so far.

Well, she survived. She was built to win, and by golly, she had won out over the planet.

However, her past upsets blanched and cringed when set next to her current challenge.

She wasn't an engineer in her past life, that much was clear. She lost most of her technology in the crash, though, and the world soon reclaimed the scraps that were left. If she were content with living out her life on this planet, then that would have been fine.

She wasn't content with that.

One night, she couldn't sleep, and as she looked up-well into the alien constellations, she remembered her life, flitting among the stars.

The next morning, she dismantled her thatched hut, retrieved the small computer that had survived the crash, and began to re-derive astrophysics.

Her first rockets had gone a measly 10 feet; later iterations went farther, and started to light up the sky with their failed excursions. But they were still that: failed, with a tendency to explode in the upper atmosphere.

She fired off 3 rockets of the same design last month: 2 of them failed. It didn't bode well that she was sitting in a rocket sharing their design, with a few last minute tweaks thrown in.

It's not like she had the margins of error that space farers of old had, lacking the huge organizations trying to extend human achievement. Chances of 2/3 were enough... for her to dismount her flying death machine, return to her hut, and wait, hoping that some space farer would pick up her distress signal (she had created her own antenna array!) and fly down-well to find her, with a rusted rocket sitting on the launch pad, ready with some tea to regal the traveler about how she had re-derived astrophysics, and look! There's proof on the wall behind you, where I carved a particularly nasty result into my hut, aren't you impressed? My, my, am I glad that I'm here to share this achievement with you, rather than blasted to smithereens and floating through

Okay.

Enough of that.

She gripped the flight control, and rested her finger on the ignition.

It was time to fly.