Tar pits

Went to La Brea Tar Pits (Page museum). Bad traffic.

But nice museum. Wall of 400 wolf skulls, and there are 1200 more.

Nice skeletons, including birds. Pointed out large sternum on birds.

On the timeline, its clear that a lot of bigger mammals died out
as humans started taking off. Funny, that.

Best part for me: I found tar seeps outside of the chained in
lake, and figured out that all the seeps are in a line --just like
Hawaiin fumaroles or yellowstone geysers--- along a fault. Also
saw tar-bubbles grow and pop, which was like slow-motion mudpots.

Friends

Son of a los alamos scientist. Extremely civil engineer.
1400 SAT. Insanely independent cal tech physicist, and crazy
friend thereof. Profs of cs, and other disciplines.. Potassium
channel scientists stricken with MS and then cyanide poisoning..
an interesting life so far.. I appreciate steadiness and lack
of change.

Time

thinking about time.

I knew a few profs.

A woman philosophy prof; computational linguistics; and neuroscience.

And a number of guys who are CS profs.

Me, just a practitioner, continual student.

optometricist

Saw the eye doc today. Need a new script so I can replace my
glasses, which currently are at version 3 of my field improv.
I have a stiff nichrome wire looped around vestigital stubs
of the old nitinol templepieces. This does not provide adequate
constraint of rotation about the horizontal axis. My nose does.
But the loops of nichrome fall off the cm long stubs. So loops of
very flexible soft wire wrap the ends of the stubs as keepers
for the nichrome loops. "Sometimes" they also are wrapped around the
NiCr templepieces. But they break, so my nose is useful for horizontal
axis control. As stops, they seem to work fine --must be how wire
wrap used to work, soft wire around sharp edged pillars.

The eye doc's tech asked to measure my glasses, so I gave her the loop,
after a caveat not to laugh (which she laughed at until she saw my
hack). Then she showed the other receptionist declaring, "he must be
an engineer". I was impressed that she figured that out 8-)

nerd reading

Borrowed the Payload planners guide for the Delta III rocket.
Showed it to my 10 year old (found a good graphics page) but he
didn't care that much.

Pretty interesting reading to me. I'm reading some Asimov right now,
so maybe I'm in a retro scifi mood. Also watched some random Shatner
stuff.

Yep, retro. Or solstice moods.

ground truth

Graduating MIT in 86 in EECS and cognitive science it was clear I was
into AI. But I had become interested in perception, the grounding of truth
that all the logical / propositional layers were built on.

I went to UCI to study human and machine perception, esp vision.

Nowadays I work in firmware. I scope electrons and control them with
words. The ground truth of software, of information.

Flying code

So I have found out that soon some complete hackery I wrote a few years
ago is going to fly. The code runs on an NT system that runs an In
Flight Entertainment system. It bypasses NT security to directly access
hardware. It patches a new hardware board (with new video controller)
to display live video, so the flight attendants can see what the passengers
see.

Its a kludge. We couldn't build the original software, which was a mess,
and incomplete. So my kludge looks for a big black box on the screen and
maps live video into that space, if it exists. We do so cleverly so as
not to use too much of the 100 Mhz x86 cpu. The software runs in parallel
with the regular software which no longer controls the video overlay.

And finally, after 3 years, it will fly, and enable the company to sell
the boards that have had enormous amounts of time and effort put into
them.

Please put your trays in their upright position..

Flying code

So I have found out that soon some complete hackery I wrote a few years
ago is going to fly. The code runs on an NT system that runs an In
Flight Entertainment system. It bypasses NT security to directly access
hardware. It patches a new hardware board (with new video controller)