cat excavator

Cat Sitting

/ August 7, 2019
Jeff Bezos Blue Origin Vision

Jeff Bezos’ Sweeping Vision for Humanity in Space

I’m someone who’s highly skeptical of Jeff Bezos’ greater aspirations for his space travel startup, Blue Origin. While frequently described as space tourism for rich people, his contemporary comments strive much higher: “I’m in the process of converting my Amazon...

/ August 2, 2019
Portland Wild in Willamette Week

Portland Wild Featured in Willamette Week’s “Best of Portland”

PortlandWild, my google maps mash up of the city’s extensive network of beautiful murals, special “Heritage Trees” and Little Free Libraries made it into Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2019 as a Best of Internet! Portland streets are filled with...

/ August 1, 2019
the best two json parsers

My Two Favorite JSON Parsers

For quickly visualizing JSON content on the web, this French website http://json.parser.online.fr is excellent. But I’ve since begun to favor this Atom-based plugin, Pretty JSON, which works within Atom. (Atom has plugins for everything, probably even watching your dog and...

/ July 30, 2019
His arrival was foretold in the ancient murals

The Wisdom of Ancient Murals

His arrival was foretold by ancient murals, via Martha on Twitter:

/ July 30, 2019

Teaching Robots to Walk

This is an excellent demonstration of artificial intelligence, robots made from tree branches learn to walk through use of deep learning reinforcement (DRL), via BoingBoing. Here’s the abstract from the research paper: We present a study in the creative design...

/ July 29, 2019
why is biking dangerous

Why Am I Scared to Ride a Bike?

For the most part, I’ve stopped biking in Seattle. The density of vehicles and aggressiveness of drivers has surpassed my comfort level. I appreciated Vreni’s visual guide to why biking has become so dangerous and how it could be made...

/ July 29, 2019