Wait long enough to write and the updates are bound to be interesting! I’ve gone through many lives since I last wrote, back in July of 2020, mid-pandemic. Leaving Google for… Computer Algebra? I quit my job at Google at the end of 2021. I’m not sure I ever wrote about starting this job back in 2019. Yes, for about 15 months I was a *Staff Research Engineer *at *Google X, *a dream job on paper! In reality, fairly pedestrian and factory-like. ...
I’m a big believer in off-the-couch adventures, and the idea of the “spot check”. If you invite me on an adventure for which I’m mildly unprepared, I’ll use my brain and say no. But if you ask me to do something that is obviously stupid given my lack of regular training, I can’t help but take it as a little test, a spot check from the universe, and say… yes. Please, please yes. ...
Humans have a strange relationship with reality. We’ve developed a large body of mathematical tools that sometimes seem to let us beat time. We can send spaceships out to take photos of distant planets, and be almost totally sure that they’ll make it. It takes minutes (seconds?) to simulate voyages of thousands of years. We can examine light from stars millions of light years away, and make good guesses about the stars’ ingredients. ...
I’ve had an odd, intellectual fever dream going for years now; I’d like to learn enough advanced math and physics to make my way through Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, and not just understand it, but feel in my bones what it’s like to intuitively get our current best guess about how reality works. (If you haven’t heard of this book, or Roger Penrose, go check out the Amazon reviews, then listen to Penrose’s appearance on “The Portal“ podcast. He allegedly wrote this tour of all modern physics as a popular science book, but Penrose is so mis-calibrated, or optimistic, about non-Penrosian math ability that physics and math professors routinely flame out.) ...
I hope you’re all doing well during these strange times of quarantine and uncertainty. I’ve been passing the time by playing my guitar, and the experience has generated a few insights that I think are worth sharing. First, some background, then the nuggets. I played as a teenager for a few years, and had a fairly cramped relationship with music. I was good, technically, but I didn’t have much feel for music, and compensated for this by learning really difficult solo jazz arrangements of songs I didn’t listen to, like Autumn Leaves or Lullaby of Birdland. I can still feel the prickling shame and performance anxiety I’d feel at big family gatherings when my uncle or mom would ask me to play something. A test! And I had no repertoire that was fun for anyone else, no chords, no ability to lift myself or anyone else up with music. ...