Well, I’ve just had solid 3 days of awesome.

I guess I’ll go to sleep, or something.

But before that, I suppose I should tell you about what actually happened, especially since I didn’t actually tell you blog-followers yet. I was very lucky, and got to attend IROS, the awesome-cool annual IEEE robotics conference. I wasn’t insanely lucky, however, because it wasn’t in NYC like Maker Faire was. Instead, it was in Taipei. Well, I guess I was insanely lucky.

So, first a list of what I learned:

• Sitting down for almost the entire duration of a world-spanning plane ride is hell on your feet.
• Dehydration is a terrible thing.
• Not having any purchasing power because you forgot your credit card pin is a terrible thing.
• I know almost nothing. It’s quite pathetic, really.
• Just because you’re attending a technical conference does not mean the internet is great at the conference venue.
• Just because you’re in Asia does not mean the internet is cheap and fast. Especially at some swanky hotel.
• Knowing that someone on Omegle is 12 hours off from you is one thing: actually moving 12 hours offset from most of the people you know is another.
• The rain there wasn’t quite as vicious as the worst NYC rain I’ve seen, but it definitely made up for it by raining the entire damn time.
• City design should account for the weather. This means making sure there are no slippery tiles of death, especially when it rains all the damn time.
• Willow Garage is the shit.
• ROS is the shit.
• Visual SLAM is the shit.
• Repraps are not intelligent robots
• You can include anime in your talk and get away with it.
• Google does not care if you can’t read chinese: it’ll serve up ads in chinese if you’re in Taiwan. Not a complaint, but it was still funny.
• Brilliant people can give terrible talks.

With all the single sentence taglines out of the way, time for some analysis.

Ahem

It is really, really, REALLY inspiring to see all this completed work. It makes me think that I can do something with myself. Hell, it has me thinking that grad school is really something I should do at some point in time. Not maybe, but something that I really should do. Failing that, R&D (and who the hell fails to go to grad school? I mean, the USA imports grad students, and the deficit is definitely due to people just not caring enough to try). I suppose the fact they had to squeeze all their work down into 20 minutes makes it seem a whole lot easier that it actually is has something to do with how inspiring it was…

In that vein, I need to check out some books. I’m attending a huge university with a huge library, there’s absolutely no reason why I’m not taking every advantage of my position. First stop: Probabilistic Robotics. I’m still shaky on my Kalman filters, not to mention particle or unscented particle or rosy-smelling car filters. Then, the best non-linear optimization book I can lay my hands on, and then… well, I’ll come up with something. Basically, I need to start I gigantic book orgy until I graduate, which is fine by me: re-reading old Methods of Rationality yields diminishing returns. </geekgasm>

Speaking of being inspired, I want to expand on one of my previous taglines. Namely, the fact that many of the speakers could not present to save their lives. True, not many of the presenters have English as a primary language, but a presentation is still a presentation, and knowing the speaker hasn’t been immersed in an english-speaking culture for 21 years doesn’t magically endow the listener with comprehension.

You would think that academics would be very good at transmitting information: they’ve been on the receiving end of explicit information transmission for most of their academic lives, and surely they’ve picked up (at least by osmosis) what works and what doesn’t. An academic should know how it feels to be on the receiving end of notes being read aloud, and yet many presenters just read their speaker notes. There was very little engagement of the audience: the professor that sponsored me on this trip was the only speaker I saw that came out from behind the podium while speaking (he’s very cool, and his accessible and engaging presentation only cemented that belief. P(coolProf|coolPresentation) = P(coolProf)P(coolProf and coolPresentation)/P(coolPresentation) where P(coolPresentation) > 0.99, yo, definite positive update).

Maybe an ignite presentation style would be good: we wouldn’t have the guys that fumble around with their slides (the usual ‘oops, overshot: lemme go back, oops again’), and squash the 30 minute presentations. We’d have to make it work with the people that finish their presentation right before they present, but it seems like it should be a trivial problem.

Meta-note on the conference: why in the world did they have to go and kill all those trees to make those huge conference books? Smartphone apps and interactive webpages not only fit inside a phone/laptop, they can do things like grep and do interactive planning. I’m sorely tempted to write a conference app framework, at least for android (finally dip my toe into phone development).

Another meta-note on the conference: it was really terrible that we managed to DOS the conference center routers. You couldn’t even connect to the router until Thursday, when people realized the rain wasn’t going to let up before the conference ended, and started to go explore the city anyways. I know the conference center doesn’t live and die by the quality of their IT infrastructure, but it’s an IEEE conference. Surely we could’ve whipped up some wireless links to relieve congestion on the main routers, or something (this thought makes me think that there’s some merit in becoming a conference/meetup hacker: someone that notices things wrong with an event, and hacks something up to remedy it before the event ends. Now, only if there were a job in it…).

On that note, I was able to actually get things down without always-accessible internet. Surprise, surprise. And then, those few times I got an uplink were always frenzied moments of trying to squeeze as much doing into as little time as possible. It adds some weight to the notion that I should not have accessible internet everywhere…

I was not impressed with the night market. It always seems like these things have 95% of merchants selling the same old clothing/shoes/jewelry/electronics (maybe the electronics booth is more of a NYC street fair thing), and the rest are actually doing something that you won’t find in every other street market in the world. Like, the bajillion claw-game parlor: I have no idea how they turn a profit with that many claw-games. We might have been in the wrong market: it was pretty tame compared to what  I thought it would be like, and it seemed like most of the shops were just extensions of the store fronts that are always there. So, my thoughts may very well be moot.

Finally, I noticed that I’m a very bad introvert: I seem to get energy from talking to people, especially helping people. Definitely not traditional introvert behavior. Not sure why that happens, when it started happening, or if I ever really was introverted.

Okay, I think that’s enough for a first mind dump. Time to actually unpack and start getting back into doing hw…

So you should note that I moved the blog root, and I’ve figured out how to get my project documentation into wordpress. Not that I’ve actually done that, it might be a while before I get around to doing that.

Before I lag too much in time, HackNY was pretty awesome. Coded up something semi-useful, although it took me way too long to do it, and it screwed up my internals; this will go up on the projects page once I get that up. The week-long awesome next week is going to be even worse on my stability, and I’m already pretty gosh-darn unstable. I need to finish so many things, and make some more time to do some more things, so I probably will have to drop off the face of the earth for around 2 weeks, optimistically speaking.

See you guys on the other side.

So, it’s been a REALLY REALLY REALLY long time since I’ve done a story, so I stayed up to 3AM to bring you guys this one. I’m somewhat out of practice, although no one might notice since the noise in quality is so much more than the signal. Ha. Enjoy!

Edit: man, it’s really short, too. My bad.

—

Status update: misses California

It hit her when she was doing the dishes, flying across years and piercing the veil of the mundane such that the plate jerked to a stop in midsplash.

Her kids would never understand California.

Ever.

Not in the way she knew it: no, they would only read about it in textbooks, hear stuffy teachers pontificate endlessly on the political leverage the different political parties sought to blah blah blah such that the impact on the revolution was blah blah now, let’s assess the validity blah blah blah blah BLAH.

That, and the networks had started carrying features that examined California in detail, alongside those that examined King Tut’s tomb, or King Charles’s left big toenail. It was really a shame, it had only been… well, it had been 9 years ago. She supposed she was getting old. But they would learn about it from there, too, history watered down and marketed to the lowest common factor.

And they had their own California, now, new cultural meccas where the weather was charming (to a point) and would-be-stars tried to make their name. She supposed she could tell them that their Peru was her California, and let that be that.

But they would know California better as a political cry, a cautionary tale, an unmitigated disaster before their time.

They wouldn’t know it like she did, the way lovers know each other. A chance employment, a passionate spark, and she had fallen in love, first with the place. But it wore on her in quiet ways, and the torrid love affair came to an abrupt end. Not a moment to soon, either…

When she heard the news, though, she still cared: still cared for California, now gone. The beaches, the cities, all the people deluded, talented, vain, and brilliant. She wouldn’t live there, and she now couldn’t, but…

She still misses California. Even now.

The screen door clattered open, and she blinked. Somehow, all the dishes had gotten done.

Dear Pacific Northwest:

How have you been? I’ve been good, acting as a vector for illness in Columbia has been fun. I think I got my roommate sick… whoops.

Anyways, I have to tell you that while you’ve been close to my heart as a rain-filled moderate clime, I’m afraid I’ve found someone else.

No, I don’t know if I love her yet, I’ve only known her for a month. But my, just today she soaked my pants all the way through. And then my socks and shoes, too. I tried running, but it’s no use: she’s always there, even staring at me through the window when I roll up my blinds. It’s only a tad creepy. But all in all, the rain in NYC is much more passionate than yours, and warmer, too. I can’t decide if I’m happy with this or not, but I guess I’m stuck with her for the next two years.

I’ll talk to you later, or something, after I get into a torrid love affair with NYC and have a messy breakup with her.

So Facebook chat is really dumb, and doesn’t save chat history. If it does, getting to it is non-intuitive, and it’s just giving me another reason to dislike (hahaha) Facebook. As if I needed another reason.

ANYWAYS

Maker Faire was pretty damn awesome.

I could leave it at that, but my god that would be a disservice to everyone that wasn’t there and reads my blog, which translates into maybe 10 people, if you’re optimistic about the size of my readership. To sum up the experience, I don’t think I’ve been somewhere with so many cool geeks showing off cool things all in one place. And now, I’m just going to list what I saw:

• Makerbot crews
• Reprappers from around the area, and even some from Montana or Idaho
• New reprap boards
• A veritable lack of NYC reprappers
• Man, I bet some hip-hop artist is going to pick up the tag ‘reprapper’
• Just watch
• I did NOT get to see arc attack. Quite disappointing, something crazy stuff about ‘room capacity’ and ‘public safety’
• The local hackerspace booths: NYC Resistor (I have to say Metrix’s hobo token is much more badass), Alpha One Labs
• Lock picking booth run by TOOOL. Didn’t manage to crack their locks, but I only spent 3 minutes at their booth
• Epilog laser (should we make our space green, or get a laser cutter?! Oh, the agony!), Autodesk, some commercial 3D printers
• shop bot
• Make Magazine (duh)
• Couple of dudes presenting their thesis work, like interactive music, drawing with computer interaction
• Element 14
• mbed – realized I’d forgotten people are trying to make money with this stuff when I asked ‘are you open sourcing the server code?’ and they laughed.
• huge straw structure
• games, of course. physical games, of course
• rubix cube solving robot
• live music remixer using only sound recorder and windows media player
• arm overlay that lets the computer know how the arm is positioned
• fabric hacking! Especially liked the ball o’ yarn pressure sensor, and the tape bend sensor
• utility kilts
• The human sized mouse trap
• mathematica playing cards. Seriously. They’ll likely be the geekiest cards I’ll ever have
• lots of LEDs
• guy that played guitar while wearing a monitor on his head
• luminescent fluid in tubes
• HUGE LED arrays, with separately attached LEDs.
• monome-like devices
• cart-based youtube video uploader
• the reverse geocache guy
• over priced fair food, of course
• microsoft attempting to shoulder into the hobbyist electronics market
• book scanners: at least two guys were doing it
• guy in a 3-4m tall germ suit
• jet-powered fair ride
• biobus!
• sparkfun!
• open STM (scanning tunneling microscope)!
• lots of people trying to sell shirts and stuff
• 3D light show with yarn and a projector
• hydroponics
• talk by a dude that wants to use the building-top water containers as a city-wide cosmic ray detector
• learned exactly how pressure waves kill people in explosions
• listened to Wolfram talk, which was somewhat disappointing because all he did was do random stuff with Mathematica and push his cellular automata based view of the world
• talk by the creator of scratch
• talk by the creator of lilypad
• talks by lots of people that wrote books
• derived statistic: child would have to work full time on getting kidnapped for some 750,000 years for it to certainly be kidnapped. I have some qualms about this derived stat, but it’s interesting none-the-less
• I thought the talk titled ‘Sustainable hacker spaces’ was going to about making hackerspaces green. Nope! It was about how to keep the hacker space alive, a much more pressing concern
• conductive play dough
• guys that want to stick gardens on the top of buses. They’re not entirely crazy, either!
• floor that generates power from footsteps
• carrot flutes
• wearable, welded together steampunk-ish suits (think big daddy, or fallout 3 cover guy, but much more chaotic)
• science history museum
• computer recyclers
• some kids trying to rickroll the subway car (okay, so this was on the way back home, and they weren’t at maker faire, but still!)

I know I’m leaving stuff out, but I think that’s a good start on enumerating what I’ve seen.

Seeing all those finished projects is a really good motivator: at least, it feels like one. We’ll see if I get things done sooner than later.

My octopart (day 1) and xkcd (code compiling) shirts got positive attention. Woot. Geek status boost!

Okay, I really have to get back to… um, doing homework. And listening to trippy japanese pop. Yeah.

Oh! And Dresden Codak AND Methods of Rationality both updated within a day of each other! Yudkowsky and Diaz must be conspiring together, or something (sadly, this doesn’t even seem to be that far-fetched).

I’m headed out to check out Alpha One Labs, a pretty inclusive hackerspace. Nyc resistor is another hackerspace that I want to check out, but they seem notably more exclusive, so I guess I’ll have to just wait until they hold a class to dig into their space.

Only problem with Alpha One Labs is just how far away out is from Columbia: it’s all the way over in the middle of Brooklyn, which in terms of subway time is about an hour, which really doesn’t bode well as an indicator of how much time I’m going to spend around there. I could do homework like I’m writing a blog right now, but the jerking train isn’t really conductive for even plain studying, so really, I can’t just pop over and spend an hour there.

Note that it wouldn’t matter quite as much if Columbia was really open, in terms of machine shops or even tool caches, but for the amount of money I’m paying to attend this school, they should really make making things a whole lot easier, not less transparent. For example, one cool thing about calpoly was the fact they had a craft center, outfitted with a fair complement of tool, which anyone could use. There might be some equivalent here, but I doubt it (calpoly is very much undergrad oriented), and if there is they do a terrible job of advertising themselves.

Man, this humidity is really screwing with my ability to type. We’ll see how alpha one labs is, and work from there.

A COUPLE DAYS LATER

Alpha One Labs seems pretty cool: the space isn’t quite as organized as Metrix, and it doesn’t look like the scene is very strong overall, but I guess it’s one of the stronger hackerspaces around NYC. We’ll see how things continue to pan out.

Sometimes I forget that I live in the real world, a world full of entropy and forces of nature, so it’s always good when small things like getting passed over for a job or not getting into a music program remind me about that. Getting my map out of sync with the territory is always a terrible thing…

So, not miffed about not getting violin lessons or being part of the university chamber music program: getting to know another violin teacher would be cool, because I’ve only had 3 throughout my life (and more is better, asymptotically), but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep doing classical music when I signed up for auditions. I’ve been doing classical music for almost 10 years, and I’m moderately good at it, but it’s nowhere near good enough to even make a small local impact. And ultimately, this is bothersome: I’ve spent maybe a solid third of a year playing the violin, and for that much playing, a minimal number of people hear my playing. No, I’m not trying to become a professional musician. Yes, I’ve personally benefited from all the practice and musical thought patterns drilled into my grey matter.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that if it doesn’t move people (emotionally or in dance), then it’s worthless. Thus…

Ah, screw trying to fill up a blog post. No one listens to my playing, no one cares about my playing, and I’m tired of it. I’m going to try my hand at more pop-ish music (ha. Anything next to classical is pop), and try writing my own music.

We’ll see how that goes.

Back on the original tack, I’m a bit more miffed about not getting that sysadmin position. Ah well, time to apply to those tech support jobs…

On a different note, there seem to be a large number of geeks around here (good indicator is the fact I attended a talk by a speaker that blogged something a read a few days before). I’m just not sure how to get them to come out into the open: maybe RAM on a stick?

Well, I wasn’t planning on putting more than a week between blog posts, but I’ve realized it takes a whole lot of discipline to blog regularly. Sitting down and finding time to document life and riff on it is actually kind of hard, even for a shut in like myself. I suppose being in the middle of New York isn’t helping (moving to Iowa might…).

Social skills have gotten better, although they’re below par. I still can’t figure out what normal people talk about: usually, I rely on the ‘year/major/dorm’ question list, and after that it’s hard to figure out where to go from there. Note that sometimes I pick up on things like musicality, but many times I don’t have too many threads to pick up and run with. An obvious first effort would be to try to talk about music with everyone, but that doesn’t quite work: for instance, trying to talk about classical music with most people is somewhat painful. Additionally, you have to stick with semi-universal subjects. I have a feeling trying to get people to talk about what they love is a good approach (Feynman once commented that you have to have asymmetrical information for a discussion. Or, well, he said something like that. I suppose he would say something more like “you can only talk when someone knows something and someone else doesn’t”. I’ll have to find that quote… and I have to work on being clear in communication. Drat!), but I have no idea how to draw people out and get them to talk about their passions. I tried it with an English major during orientation, which led to quite the failure in interesting communication. Ah well, I’ll get it one day.

On a tangent, church went okay, big take away thought is that I need to get back into debates. I’ve forgotten how fun they can be, and I have more ammunition than ever! Granted, I had no idea what I was doing with it, so it didn’t actually help. One very, very bad thing that I found when debating, though, is the fact that I am scared of losing. Honestly, it took me about a week to realize this, and another 5 minutes to get myself to stop rationalizing. If Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has taught me anything, it’s taught me that honest self-examination is progress: you have to train yourself to stare at the pain instead of flinching away. So, I’ll say it again: I am afraid that Christianity is right, and I am wrong.

So why is this bad? It means that I’m not internally balanced, rationally off-kilter, basically unable to examine evidence without bias. I undermine my own basis for debate, undermine my own credulity. Now, I’m not saying that there’s a bunch of evidence that Christianity is right, and I’m afraid to acknowledge it because it’ll undermine my atheistic position and I can’t go on sinning, but rather that I’m afraid of being wrong, especially after I switched sides already. Hogwash! you may be thinking. Evidence has compelled you in one direction, and more evidence may compel you in another: there’s nothing wrong with going where the evidence leads you. True, but I never said the basis for this fear is rational. I feel I must point out that the fact that I’ve singled out Christianity is not rational either: there’s a whole pantheon of pantheons to choose from, and I’m still fixating on the religion I’ve been brought up with. Ah well.

Moving away from abstract topics, classes seem not-too-hard, the city has cooled down considerably, and I’m starting to really get the hang of walking across the street. Attended the New York Tech Meetup, which was enlightening: I feel it lends credence to Paul Graham’s musings on city environments.

On a completely unrelated note, I hope this program I’ve been working on for the last week or so will get finished soon, so I can show all of you and… uh, be done with it! Whoooooooooo.

Anyways, it’s time to find some food.

Okay, so I suppose I should finish up my chronicles on my adventures in New York, especially now that I’m situated at the beginning of orientation.

Not too much happened on Sunday, just hung around Columbia and went to church (NOW I’M GOING TO TALK ABOUT RELIGION, SKIP DOWN IF YOU DON’T WANT TO DEAL WITH IT). It’s still awkward to hang around Christians (in church, where they expect mainly other Christians to be), especially when family is around (which makes me Christian by proxy unless I say something; I usually don’t). It feels like I should blurt out the fact that I’m an atheist as the second thing out of my mouth, just to make sure that there aren’t any misunderstandings: I mean, I think that religious memes in general need to die. We’re working from different axioms, and the people I talk to should know that.

It doesn’t have to be awkward: I could announce I’m an atheist, see how people respond, and church hop if I outstay my welcome. Maybe be kind of a reverse-evangelist. That particular course of action, though, is only possible if I develop my social acumen (orientation has shown that my social acumen has fallen a bit, and I’ll need to see if I can change that).

So going to church doesn’t have to be awkward. It doesn’t have to be boring (ex. could write responses to sermons as they are being preached, which is way more interaction than a passive intake of knowledge), and as a ‘fallen child’ of the faith, I know the culture and society of the church (evangelical) and can handle it. I won’t talk about how my parents insist that I attend church, though, because I smell a 3-hour long essay and no sleep for me. I’ll spill everything in a mega-post someday.

OKAY, I’M DONE TALKING ABOUT RELIGION. YOU CAN COME BACK NOW.

Orientation was okay: got moved in, cleared up some things, and started to meet people. Really, routine orientation stuff. Thankfully, not quite as insane as the last orientation I attended…

However, I did notice that my social skills have deteriorated a bit. My response times are noticeably lagging, and I’ve forgotten what normal people talk about. Please don’t tell me I have to immerse myself in pop culture to make friends: I was hoping for a mecca of geek-dom, but none is yet forthcoming. Ah well, should have known better: the geek-dom doesn’t reside in the place, it resides in you (is this pattern-matching wisdom, aka, filling in something that sounds wise?).

Random thought: I had been thinking that lying to my children about Santa Claus wouldn’t be something I would do, but it might put a good amount of weight towards anti-authoritarianism, which should balance some of the implicit trust in the child’s main authority figure. In other words, lying about Santa might be an important part of growing up.

Have I mentioned how much I’m going to miss Washington weather?

Before we start the next iteration of our scheduled New York blog series, I would like to note that the score is currently 2 TV, 0 Nathan. I thought that since I could listen to music and blog, and since blogging in a room with a TV shouldn’t be all that different from blogging with music, that I should be able to blog with the TV on. Unfortunately, I had never watched the series House before, and I managed to catch what my brother told me was one of the more mind-bendy episodes. Note: I think that shows like House can be addictive for me, because it feels like I’m learning something (there’s something intellectual going on somewhere in here, I know it!) when I’m really not. Rather, I’m learning with something that’s been diluted somewhere between useful and homeopathic. Anyways…

Sorry if I cut this one short, I couldn’t sleep last night, so I’m running short on it now. Probably shouldn’t have eaten that chocolate, because now I don’t feel quite so low on energy. Rawr.

Thus ends day five of the adventure.

To remedy our previous skip over Korea Town, we hit it this morning. In comparison to lil’ Italy or China Town, Korea town is much smaller. However, it’s a whole lot less grubby than China Town. There’s none of this open fruit and fish stall business, for one, and let me tell you that all the Korean restaurants I passed by so far have been pretty gosh darn immaculate. Oh, and the random-stuff shops that are pretty prevalent in China Town? There might’ve been one in Korea Town (not counting that book store). So what does this say about the Chinese vs. Koreans? Next to nothing.

After that, we hit Grand Central Station and the UN, both of which weren’t all that impressive. What was impressive was the street fair that we walked into on the way from the UN to lunch. From the end we were standing at, we could see booths stretching for a fair number of city blocks, with the street shut down all along the way.

A street. Shut down. In New York. For a street fair.

Didn’t expect that to happen.

Of course, we immediately ditched our plans to get lunch in Korea Town and got some gyros from a street vendor, and proceeded to shop around. Unfortunately, like all street fairs, it suffered from a pretty uniform booth makeup, such that once you saw part of it, you saw most of it.

After figuring that out, we ditched the fair (of course we bought stuff! To uphold the American way!) and tried to find Broadway theater. Surprise! There is no one Broadway theater, it’s a bunch of theaters. Learn something new everyday.

To wrap up most of our sight-seeing, we went and walked around on Brooklyn Bridge, which wasn’t the best idea after we spent the entire day walking to everywhere else. Like everything else, it wasn’t that impressive in person.

Moral of the story thus far: immersive VR can kill tourism.

And the way people take pointless pictures of things is… not cool. Taking another picture of the Empire State Building is pointless, since you can grab photos from the web whenever you want. Taking a picture of the Empire State Building while your family jumps off because they can’t handle the familial insanity any longer is much more unique.

End rant. Time to sleep.