Writing

What a strange, fantastic little book! I recently read Douglas Harding’s “On Having No Head” after hearing Sam Harris mention the book in one of “Waking Up” meditations, and then many times on subsequent podcasts. The book is a long look at an insight that blew Harding’s mind — from the first-person person, as a matter of subjective experience, there was no evidence around that he had a head. Put another way — if you try not to read into what you’re seeing, and just describe exactly what’s in front of you, not only is there no head on display… but the whole picture of who you are, of the person doing the looking, looks quite strange indeed. ...

The RV10 has windows! And a windshield! I’ve got everything attached and mostly cleaned up. Here’s what it looks like now: I used three tubes of Lord 7545 A/E adhesive from Aerosport Products, one for each pair of side windows and a full tube for the windshield. The process was stressful; I’ve been mildly dreading this for a couple of years now. Compared to much of the metal work, this step is one-shot with permanent results. ...

I’m out here working on the plane today - I haven’t made it out much, lately, but I’m in the garage spending the time. This project will end up taking roughly five years, three years longer than I thought it might when I started. I’ve gone through so many oscillations of excitement and frustration out here. Some days I feel like I’m flying through tasks, and I think about how close I am to the end. Some days it is just such a grind and I feel exhausted, sanding away yet another coat of epoxy, trying to get the curve of the cabin top just right, knowing that I’m probably aiming for a level of craftsmanship that I’ll never notice once the plane is up in the air. ...

Well, here we are, close to 18 months after I left my job at Stripe and put out the call for subscribers to this newsletter. In the future, expect notes on my new, strange identity as an “AI research engineer”, working on machine learning and evolution; notes on information theory, set theory, linear algebra and friends, squeezed through my mind and decorated with as much non-symbolic intuition as I can manage; how to take a run at difficult things outside the usual set of difficult things everyone thinks they want. Today, a note I wrote after a day out working on the RV10 4-seater airplane I’m building in the garage. ...

I spent a while this summer reading math books and popular science, trying to figure out what a life in “research” might look like; in late Spring I began to sense that it was time to wake up my brain and start thinking again, and the best way forward seemed to be to find examples of lives-well-lived in science and study the cases. I’m so glad I found “The Second Kind of Impossible: the Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter” by Paul Steinhardt. The book is a trip report of Paul’s decades-long relationship with a peculiar type of matter called a “quasicrystal”. I’ll give a short summary, then discuss what struck me as so wonderful about the book, and finish out by including my more detailed notes in case you want to dig deeper. ...

I’m obsessed with sbt-microsites. Sbt-microsites is a fantastic plugin for SBT (the Scala Build Tool) that makes it easy to generate a beautiful sidecar site for your software project, full of code checked by your CI! I recently built a microsite for ScalaRL, my in-progress functional Reinforcement Learning library, and found that adding support for Mathjax (a javascript math equation renderer) to the microsite was not obvious. It’s not hard… just not clear from the Mathjax docs how to get past some limitations with sbt-microsites. ...

I’ve just finished retooling my development environment, and the process was annoying enough that I thought I’d write it up here, for myself in the future, and for you in the present. tl;dr; I ended up porting my old Emacs config, based on the literate emacs24-starter-kit, over to Spacemacs, and ended up with a great Scala and Python setup. Read on for the details. Goals I’ve been an Emacs user since my first days with Clojure, and I’m hooked, fully in love. Those Clojure days were a long time ago; as I’ve spent more time developing in Scala and Python, I’ve made do with basically just code formatting and syntax highlighting, delegating to an external build tool like SBT in a terminal window to give me compilation feedback every so often. My Emacs config is crusty and old, and way out of date. ...

Welcome back to my report of the 2018 Tahoe 200. If you haven’t read Part 1 and care about background and context, go check it out and come on back. Otherwise enjoy the tale! Table of Contents Heavenly Aid Station (102) Heavenly (102) to Armstrong (117) Armstrong (117) to Housewife Hill (135) Housewife Hill (135) to Sierra at Tahoe (142) Sierra at Tahoe (142) to Wright’s Lake (161) Wright’s Lake (161) to Tell Creek (175) Tell Creek (175) to Loon Lake (182) Loon Lake (182) to Barker Pass (199) Barker Pass (199) to Finish (205) Conclusion Heavenly Aid Station (102) We slept for about two hours at Heavenly. I woke up drenched in sweat; Jason claims that I spoke to him in the night, but I remember nothing. Jason couldn’t fall asleep at all, and finally woke me up at the two hour mark to get our stuff together and head out. ...

I never suspected that 100 mile races would be a gateway drug for… 200 mile races, but here I am, polishing off my race report for the Tahoe 200. What went wrong in my past? Neglectful parents? A broken home? The answers lie buried somewhere in the following account. First, the glorious Strava art I spent over 90 hours painting across the California landscape: And then my detailed account. Table of Contents Why? Pre-race in Tahoe Start to Stephen Jones (10.4) Stephen Jones (10.4) to Tahoe City (30) Tahoe City (30) to Brockway (50) Brockway (50) to Tunnel Creek (65) Tunnel Creek (65) to Spooner (82) Spooner (82) to Heavenly (102) Why? I’m going to describe why I ran the Tahoe 200, and the reasoning is going to sound unhinged. Ready? ...

I’ll present this here with little comment for those who track it down. This is a story I wrote in 7th grade for Henry Edwards’s english class. I’m most proud of the cover art, designed by yours truly. Enjoy! Introduction “… And today for lunch, we will be having apple Juice, macaroni and cheese, and SLOPPY JOES, bwa ha ha ha!” A maniacal cackle could be heard throughout the school grounds of Platypus Boarding School as the intercom clicked off. ...