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[twenty twenty-five day two six nine]: it’s dangerous to slog alone, take this stack of textbooks

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So I wasn't kidding about the long slog: I am still chewing through the classic textbook Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (PDF) by Christopher Bishop, day and night, even though he's got a newer book out. This is in part because I'm almost done, and in part because his newer book focuses on the foundations of deep learning and is "almost entirely non-Bayesian" - and it's Bayesian theory I'm trying to understand.

This, I think, is part of the discovery I've made recently about "deep learning" - by which I mean learning in depth by people, as opposed to deep learning by machines: hard concepts are by definition tough nuts to crack, and to really understand them, you need to hit them coming and going - to break apart the concept in as many ways as possible to ensure you can take it apart and put it back together again. As Marvin Minsky once said, "You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way."

To some people, that idea is intuitive; to others, it is easy to dismiss. But if you think about it, when you're learning a subject you don't know, it's like going in blind. And like the parable of the blind men and the elephant - each of whom touched one part of an elephant and assumed they understood the whole - if you dig deeply into a narrow view of a subject, you can get a distorted view, like extrapolating a giant snake from an elephant's trunk, or a tall tree from its leg, or a wide fan from its ear, or a long rope from its tail.

Acting as if those bad assumptions were true could easily get you stomped on - or skewered, by the elephant's tusk, which is sharp like a spear.

So back to Bayesian theory. Now, what the hell is a "Bayes," some of you may ask? (Why are you reviewing the obvious, others of you may snark). Look, we take chances every day, don't we? And we blame ourselves for making a mistake if we know that something is risky, but not so much if we don't know what we don't know - even though we intuitively know that the underlying chances aren't affected by what we know. Well, Thomas Bayes not only understood that, he built a framework to put that on a solid mathematical footing.

Some people think that Bayes' work on probability was trying to refute Hume's argument against miracles, though that connection is disputed (pdf). But the big dispute that arose was between "frequentists" who want to reduce probability to statistics, and "Bayesians" who represent probability as a statement of beliefs. Frequentists incorrectly argued that Bayesian theory was somehow "subjective", and tried to replace Bayesian reasoning with statistical analyses of imaginary projections of existing data out to idealized collections of objects which don't exist. Bayesians, in contrast, recognize that Bayes' Theorem is, well, a theorem, and we can use it to make objective statements of the predictions we can make over different statements of belief - statements which are often hidden in frequentist theory as unstated assumptions.

Now, I snark a bit about frequentist theory there - and not just because the most extreme statements of frequentist theory are objectively wrong, but because some frequentist mathematicians around the first half of the twentieth century engaged in some really shitty behavior which set mathematical progress back decades - but even the arch-Bayesian, E. T. Jaynes, retreated from his dislike of frequentist theory. In his perspective, frequentist methods are how we check the outcome of Bayesian work, and Bayesian theory is how we justify and prove the mathematical structure of frequentist methods. They're a synergy of approaches, and I use frequentism and the tools of frequentists in my research, um, frequently.

But my point, and I did have one, is that even something I thought I understood well is something that I could learn more about. Case in point was not, originally, what I learned about frequentism and Bayesianism a while back; it was what I learned about principal component analysis (PCA) at the session where I took the picture. (I was about to write "last night", but, even though this is a "blogging every day" post, due to me getting interrupted when I was trying to post, this was a few days ago).

PCA is another one of those fancy math terms for a simple idea: you can improve your understanding by figuring out what you should focus on. Imagine you're firing cannon, and you want to figure out where the cannonballs are going to land. There are all sorts of factors that affect this: the direction of the wind, the presence of rain, even thermal noise in the cannon if you wanted to be super precise. But the most important variables in figuring out where the cannonball is going to land is where you're aiming the thing! Unless you're standing on Larry Niven's We Made It in the windy season, you should be far more worried about where the cannon is pointed than the way the wind blows.

PCA is a mathematical tool to help you figure that out by reducing a vast number of variables down to just a small number - usually two or three dimensions so humans can literally visualize it on a graph or in a tank. And PCA has an elegant mathematical formalism in terms of vectors and matrix math which is taught in schools. But it turns out there's an even more elegant Bayesian formalism which models PCA as a process based on "latent" variables, which you can think about as the underlying process behind the variables we observe - using our cannonball example, that process is again "where they're aiming the thing," even if we ultimately just observe where the cannonballs land.

Bayesian PCA is equivalent (you can recover the original PCA formalism from it easily) and elegant (it provides a natural explanation of the dimensions PCA finds as the largest sources of variance) and extensible (you can easily adapt the number of dimensions to the data) and efficient (if you know you just want a few dimensions, you can approximate it with something called the expectation-maximization algorithm, which is way more efficient than the matrix alternative). All that is well and good.

But I don't think I could have even really understood all that if I hadn't already seen PCA in half a dozen other textbooks. The technique is so useful, and demonstrations about it are so illuminating, that I felt I had seen it before - so when Bishop cracked open his Bayesian formulation, I didn't feel like I was just reading line noise. Because, let me tell you, the first time I read a statistical proof, it often feels like line noise.

But this time, I didn't feel that way.

I often try to tackle new problems by digging deep into one book at a time. And I've certainly learned from doing that. But often, after you slog through a whole textbook, it's hard to keep everything you've learned in your head (especially if you don't have several spare weeks to work through all the end-of-chapter exercises, which is a situation I find myself in more often than not).

But more recently I have found going through books in parallel has really helped me. Concepts that one book flies over are dealt with deeply in another. Concepts that another book provides one angle on are tackled from a completely different one in another. Sometimes the meaning and value of concepts are different between different authors. Even intro books sometimes provide crucial perspective that helps you understand some other, deeper text.

So if you're digging into something difficult ... don't try to go it alone. When you reach a tough part, don't give up, search out other references to help you. At first it may seem an impossible nut to crack, but someone, somewhere, may have found the words that will help you understand.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Again Bishop, and again pound cake.

[twenty twenty-five day two six eight]: the long, long slog

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I once told my wife I was patient - and it was indeed four years from our first meeting to our marriage - but the truth of the matter is that I'm terrible at delayed gratification. I have a kazillion things I want to do and I want them all done now, now, now - but if these things I want done are MY creative projects, then I can't really hire anyone else to do them. I've got to do them myself.

This is a big bottleneck if I haven't yet learned the skill to my own satisfaction.

I've talked before about one of the techniques I use - reading the difficult book at the dinner table. I eat out a lot, and do a lot of my reading either in coffeehouses, at dinnertime, or sitting on a rocking chair near my house. But those places are useful for books that can be read in pieces, in any order. At the dinner table, I have one book set aside - usually the most difficult or challenging thing I am reading, a book which I take in a little bit at breakfast, a little bit at late night milk and pound cake, one bite-sized step at a time.

At the dinner table, I have read Wolfram's A New Kind of Science and Davies' Machine Vision and Jayne's Probability Theory: The Logic of Science and even an old calculus textbook from college that I was convinced I had failed to fully understand on the first readthrough (hint: I hadn't; I had inadvertently skipped one part of a chapter which unlocked a lot of calculus for me). And now I'm going through Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, which has taught me much that I missed about deep learning.

Here's the thing: having gone through (most of) two whole probability textbooks and a calculus textbook that I read to help support the probability textbooks, I no longer feel as unexpert about probability as I once did. It was my worst subject in college, hands down, but I have reached the point where I understand what I did not understand and why I didn't understand it, I know how to solve certain problems that I care about, I know where to look to get help on problems that I can't solve, and I have realized the need to be humble about problems that are currently beyond my framework of understanding.

[Whew! I almost said "I have learned to be humble" there. Ha! No, I don't think you can really learn to actually be humble. You can however learn the need to be humble and then try to achieve it, but humility is one thing that it is really difficult to actually have - and if you claim you have it, you probably don't.]

Now, I know this seems obvious. I know, I know, I know, if you read a buncha textbooks on something and are actually trying to learn, you should get better at it. But my experience is that just reading a textbook doesn't actually make you any kind of expert. At best, it can give you a slightly better picture of the subject area. You can't easily train yourself up for something quickly - you've got to build up the framework of knowledge that you can then use to actually learn the skill.

Which can lead you to despair. It feels like you read a buncha textbooks about something and end up more or less where you started, minus the time you spent reading the textbooks.

But that's only because the process of learning something complex can indeed be a really long slog.

If you keep at it, long enough, you can make progress.

You just have to be patient ... with yourself.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Bishop, sitting next to my breakfast a few days ago.

[twenty twenty-five day two six seven]: living in a vegan paradise

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Anyone who knows Greenville, South Carolina would NOT describe it as a "vegan paradise". The closest place I can think of that fits that description is Las Vegas, which explicitly features vegan and vegetarian dining thanks to Steve Wynn ( https://www.wynnlasvegas.com/dining/vegetarian-dining ). Asheville, North Carolina, Montreal in Canada, and the San Francisco Bay Area are neck-and-neck behind.

Greenville? I'd snarkily say "not so much", but actually my home town has a fair share of vegan restaurants (Sunbelly, the Naked Vegan, and the Vegan Farmercy come to mind), as well as those which have a vegan menu (Entre Nous / Maestro, the 07, the 05, and the One 5 leap to mind). But actually we live in a time where many restaurants have vegan options, including our favorite, Brixx.

Veganism is an ethical necessity for some, but a luxury for most of us: most humans have not lived in an environment in which they could choose to go vegan even if they wanted to. Fortunately, even in traditional Greenville, South Carolina, we've reached the point where many places have a vast selection of vegan food items, and me and my wife can have a meal together, entirely cruelty-free.

-the Centaur

Pictured: hummus trio at Brixx.

[twenty twenty-five day two six six]: gracious to simply say thank you

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I think I've mentioned before that I once got into an argument with a friend over whether you should complain about something you got for free. My friend said, "If someone buys you a steak, you don't complain about how well it was done, you just say thank you." No, that's how bullies give gifts: with the expectation that they can unilaterally create a debt with an expectation of gratitude.

In real life, it is, of course, gracious to simply say thank you when you receive a gift, even it isn't something that you wanted - or, even if it is not something you approve of. For example, my wife, who is vegan, used to simply smile and say thank you if she has been given something that she would not normally eat, because she's an ethical vegan: the animal has already died, so she would rather it not go to waste.

But she's found herself doing that less and less: some non-vegan food makes her sick, some non-vegan food simply doesn't taste good anymore, and, some non-vegan people are just being dicks. Once we went to a friend's house for Thanksgiving dinner, and they assured her that there would be many vegan options; when we got there, the only thing that was vegan was salad, no dressing, and they literally told her to "suck it up."

The entitlement of the giver gets drawn into even sharper relief when it comes to food allergies. More than one friend has ended up sick because waitstaff lied about what was in their food - and I do mean lied, because in more than one case they specifically asked about it, and then when the food arrived the waitstaff said something like, "but it's chopped up finely, you'll never taste it." Taste isn't the problem, buddy.

But bad actors do not fill the whole world, and the positive side to my friend's argument is that if someone has done something nice for you, it can ruin their day to find out that their extra effort wasn't wanted. Case in point is what C. S. Lewis called "the gluttony of delicacy": where you're super particular about what you want, but don't see it as being demanding or gluttonous because you're "not asking for much."

For example, I hate for stuff to go to waste, and don't use straws, or lemons, in my iced tea, so I ask waitstaff for "unsweetened iced tea, no lemon, no straw." Now, I don't really sweet tea anymore---originally for health and now for taste reasons---so I would send the wrong drink back; but if they give me a lemon and straw, I don't say anything. Thankfully, results from NASA's space probes show the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle, not a giant camel, so hopefully, getting one extra straw will not cause the end of the world. (1)

But not wanting things to go to waste can ... interact ... with generosity. Another case in point: hot peppers. At one restaurant I go to, you can ask for a little extra sauce, or light cheese, or whatever, and it will happen. At another local restaurant, the kitchen is a little more ... granular with their generosity. I asked for an extra hot pepper on a dish ... and the kitchen sent out an entire plate of extra peppers.

My server buddy always knows what's up and once warned me: "you know, for this kitchen ... let's not make the order too complicated." So we try to keep things simple for them. They've got our best interests at heart. And when they do send out an entire plate of hot peppers when I want just one, I smile and say thank you, and do my best to eat as many of them as I can ... before my mouth catches on fire. (2)

-the Centaur

Pictured: Bistec y camarones con pimientos adicionales.

(1) NASA results actually show that neither oversized tortoises nor dromedaries play any significant astronomical role, making the apocalyptic potential of extra drinking straws even more remote.

(2) I did not, indeed, finish the entire plate of peppers - there were like 200% more peppers than I wanted.

[twenty twenty-five day two sixty five]: can’t see me

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Cats are so colorful and varied it's easy to forget that part of the function of coloring is camouflage. I almost didn't see this little gal sitting in our front foyer! But the camera never lies:

Meet Lovi(licious(ness)), the fifth member of our increasing series of L-named cats. This little lady started coming round our house in San Jose, and after Sandi started feeding her, she soon won her over (it is not clear who won whom over). Sandi welcomed her inside, where Lovi started using the litter box like a pro. We suspect she was someone's kitten who was scared away from their home by fireworks at the Fourth of July, and after unsuccessfully attempting to find her owners, Sandi brought her back to South Carolina.

Crazy cat people here we come.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Um, I said it: our new cat, in our new foyer, trying, unsuccessfully, to hide.

nineteen and twenty-three

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Sandi and Anthony at 23 years.

No, not 1923: the numbers 19 and 23: the number of years my wife and I have been married, and together! We met on September 13, 2002 and married a smidge over four years later on September 16, 2006. I always love the fact that we got married so close to the date that we met (I argued we should hold it on the same date, but everyone told me "we're not attending a wedding in the middle of the week" so, eh, the 16th).

Vegan cheese spread at Battery Park Books.

For our anniversary, we went to Asheville, North Carolina for the weekend, which we really enjoy due to its wide range of vegan restaurants, great bookstores, nearby hiking, and spectacularly walkable downtown. My wife and I really enjoy places where we can walk everywhere - New Orleans' French Quarter, San Diego's Gaslamp District, Montreal's Old Town, Monterey, even smaller places like Davis, and of course London.

Sandi in a long flowing dress in downtown Asheville.

So for the weekend, we walked, and walked, and walked, and walked. We visited all the bookstores and all the art galleries that we could, and looped around downtown maybe a dozen times. Unusually this visit, we chose to try to go hiking - we spent so much time our first five or six trips there in the downtown we rarely got out to do anything else. But we did the Blue Ridge Parkway and Catawba Falls, which has a truly epic staircase tracing its way to the top - 580 steps, which is more than enough to put a crimp in anyone's climb.

A small part of Catawba Fall's 580-step staircase.

No, that's not computer generated, but it did feel like I was in some infinite stairwell in a computer game after a while - it just kept going up and up and up! There's a tall observation tower at roughly the middle, which triggered my latent fear of heights - something I haven't quite debugged; it triggered leaning out over the Hoover Dam but not standing at the Grand Canyon, and leaning over the rail of the observation tower, but not leaning over the rail of the staircase just a few feet away. I think it has something to do with my body detecting "there's a big drop and it might be behind you" - or perhaps I'm just worried I'll lose my hat.

Anthony with a extra dirty martini

Regardless, the food was the real standout on the weekend. At two of our favorite restaurants - Mountain Madre and Strada - we found there were way more vegan items than were listed on the menu, which enabled us to get some really great things we'd never tried before - vegan nachos at Mountain Madre and vegan bolognese at Strada, both excellent. The Smokin Onion was a great new find - we went there for breakfast before our hike, and liked it so much we went back on our way out of town. The pumpkin spice "cruffin" was superb - yes, decadently sweet, but actually also fluffy and not overpowering.

A pumpkin spice "cruffin" - croissant muffin.

But the real anniversary dinner was at Plant, one of the best vegan restaurants we've been to - easily the equal of our favorite restaurant, Millennium in Oakland. At Millennium, we often get a high-top table near the front window, but at Plant, you can actually reserve a spot at the "mini-bar" - a two-top counter next to where the drinks are prepared, which feels really intimate even though it's right out in the middle of the restaurant. The waitress remembered us and hooked us up on our anniversary dessert!

Our anniversary dessert - vegan key lime cheesecake and vegan blondie sundae.

Here's to twenty-three more years.

-the Centaur

view of a hotel window

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Sometimes when I travel I include picture from my hotel room, but by chance my wife and I recognized and took a picture of our hotel room. It might not be immediately obvious to anyone else - except I'd looked out the window minutes before, we were one of the only hotel rooms with an open curtain in more or less the right place --- and, tellingly, I could see the same bags piled by the window. Even zoomed in it's pretty small, and I can't go and check right now to confirm --- my wife crashed out early while I took a West Coast church board meeting --- but as best I can reconstruct it, here's what I see in that window:

My laptop bag is what I call my "portable office" - containing the book(s) I'm reading, my writing notebook, my drawing notebook and tools and any reference materials, the top scientific folder and notebook I'm working on, and a bunch of laptop gegaws like a power supply and various USB plugs. I think this doesn't look like a laptop bag because my hiking shoes are piled atop that, but whatevz. The other half of the "portable office" is a stack of books and a clipboard with my "todo paper", a heavyweight copper parchment or blue linen paper I use to organize tasks, all shoved into a tote bag for easy transport.

Next to that are more creative piles - a tote with the portable music keyboard and some music theory books for my electronic music practice, and next to that is a larger tote with the "active pile" of the fiction, comic and technical books that are near the top of my pile. I don't always get to all those piles, but the longer I stay in any given place, the more glad I am that I've got that pile with me so I can quickly switch gears to whatever task that sparks my creativity in the moment.

All that seems a lot, but it's way downsized and organized compared to the stuff I used to carry around everywhere. Someone once said they thought I had some kind of caching system that I just can't quite turn off, and I agree - except the only way I seem to be able to do all the things that I do is to keep a big pile of stuff near me so I can turn spare minutes into accomplished tasks. I ... don't think I'm that great at it, honestly, but it does enable me to get closer to where I want to go, step by step, piece by piece.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Um, I said it already: our hotel in downtown Asheville.

how is this comfortable?

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Back from Dragon Con, but still scrambling from thing to thing due to our upcoming 19th anniversary. So, in lieu of a serious update, I present one of "the Originals" ... one of our three recently adopted kittens:

I understand cats are boneless, but this is a bit much! How does this not break something?

Anyway, lots of news, and hopefully getting back to it next week ...

-the Centaur

Pictured: either Lily(pad(ski)), or Luna(tic(les)). Can't quite tell from this angle, but I think Luna.

Dragoncon 2025!

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It's that time of year again - Dragon Con! And I am super stoked that two episodes of Jeremiah Willstone and the Plague of Gears will be performed by the Atlanta Radio Theater Company this Dragon Con!

  • Friday, August 29 7:00pm Hyatt Regency VI-VII
    Jeremiah Willstone: The Plague of Gears – Ep01 Hour of the Wolf
    Written by Anthony Francis, adapted for audio by Tony Sarrecchia.
    Two fisted steampunk adventure! Victoria cadet Jeremiah Willstone battles clockwork monsters and time-bending ghosts in a whirlwind of romance, danger, and daring heroics!
    Also featuring Maid of the Mirror Written for audio by Ellie Cook
  • Sunday, August 31 7:00pm Hyatt Regency VI-VII
    Jeremiah Willstone: The Plague of Gears – Ep02 The Time of Ghosts
    Written by Anthony Francis, adapted for audio by Tony Sarrecchia.
    Two fisted steampunk adventure! Victoria cadet Jeremiah Willstone battles clockwork monsters and time-bending ghosts in a whirlwind of romance, danger, and daring heroics!
    Also featuring Nothing-at-All Written for audio by Kelley S. Ceccato

The stories behind these were written by me for the Twelve Hours Later anthology, adapted by my friend Tony Sarrecchia, and performed by ARTC, my favorite radio theater company. I am working with Tony and ARTC to put together full audio dramatizations which we're hoping to bring to Dragon Con 2026.

But that's a bit far out! This year, my full schedule is:

  • Fri 01:00 pm ~ Hyatt Embassy EF
    From Story Seed to Plot
    Tyra Burton(M), Gerald L. Coleman, Anthony Francis, Paige L. Christie, DL Wainright, Nancy Knight
    How do you go from having your initial story idea---which may only be a character, scene, or setting---to a full-fledged story plot? Our panelists will share their tips and tricks.
  • Fri 07:00 pm - Hyatt Regency VI-VII
    ARTC Presents: Maid of the Mirror & Jeremiah Willstone Ep01

    Atlanta Radio Theatre Company, Anthony Francis(O), Tony Sarrecchia(O)
    An audio drama extravaganza: Deep below the mountains of Ireland, a faerie warrior guards a magic mirror & its occupant, the Knight of Scars. By Ellie Cook. ALSO Cadet Jeremiah Willstone battles monsters & ghosts in two-fisted steampunk adventures. By Anthony Francis, adapted by Tony Sarrecchia.
  • Sat 04:00 pm ~ Hyatt Learning Center
    Reading Session: Anthony Francis

    I will be reading from my latest work!
  • Sat 07:00 pm ~ Hyatt Embassy CD
    IP Here, There, & Everywhere! Intellectual Property!

    James P. Nettles(M), Anthony Francis, Courtney Lytle, Dwayne K. Goetzel, Scott Macmann, John Goodwin
    Its great to have an idea or create a new world---but how do you go about that while still making sure your shiny stays yours? Join experts in a discussion about what this means for creatives. Can you trademark a genre? How about a term? Game mechanics? If one person can dream it, what comes next?
  • Sun 01:00 pm ~ Courtland Grand Augusta Courtland
    A Master Class: Introducing Technology to Alternate History

    Henry Herz, Robert W Ross(M), S. M. Stirling, Steve Saffel, Anthony Francis
    Join our masters of writing as they discuss how they decide what technology they keep, what they remove, and what they completely reinvent for their novels. What influences these decisions, and how do they make their world feel like a shift from the real world? Joint with the Writers Track.
  • Sun 07:00 pm ~ Hyatt Regency VI-VII
    ARTC Presents: Nothing-at-All and Jeremiah Willstone Ep02

    Atlanta Radio Theatre Company, Anthony Francis(O), Tony Sarrecchia(O)
    When a healer with no name, a patient with no hope, and a Wizard with no heart cross paths, will magic, love, and redemption follow? By Kelley S. Ceccato. ALSO Cadet Jeremiah Willstone battles monsters and ghosts in two-fisted Steampunk adventures. By Anthony Francis, adapted by Tony Sarrecchia.
  • Sun 10:00 pm ~ Hyatt Embassy EF
    The Evolution of the Vampire in Speculative Fiction

    Anthony Francis(M), Violette L Meier, Patricia L. Briggs, R. E. Carr, Elizabeth Donald, DL Wainright
    From Carmilla to Sinners, vampires have been monsters, heroes, and everything in between. This discussion aims to break down how vampires have evolved in our entertainment, why they're so alluring to readers and viewers alike, and how to use them in our fiction effectively.

I hope to see you all there!

-the Centaur
Pictured: Fans on Thursday morning, watching Star Wars robots!

you don’t have to go home …

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Worldconners closing out the Fountain bar last night

Worldcon is over, and people are now returning to their lives. I've got a day and a half here to enjoy Seattle, but the funny thing is, right now I'm in the same hotel bar where the above die-hards were closing out Worldcon last night - it's got a great high-top table at the window, which is great for writing.

The window seat at the Fountain bar where I'm writing.

Which I need to do, after reading more of Dwight Swain's Techniques of the Selling Writer over breakfast. You'd think I'd have finished this book given that I lecture on Swain, but I got introduced to him through his audio lectures, so the lead up to my Worldcon talk was my first time to go through this book cover to cover, and even then I focused on the scene-and-sequel stuff that I was discussing. His discussion of openings - focusing on where, what's going on, and to whom, with what conflict, expressed with showing through immediate action - got my brain thinking about how to rework the opening of WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY. My room's being cleaned, so I decided to sit down and write my notes on these ideas right now.

Breakfast at Alder and Ash - smoked salmon omelet, dry toast and fresh fruit.

Even though I'm a night owl, sometimes it's good to start the day with food for body and mind.

It can inspire you.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The Fountain bar last night, the Fountain bar this morning, and yet another breakfast at Alder and Ash - smoked salmon omelet, dry toast and fresh fruit.

Worldcon 2025 Day Five

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Me at the photo both of the con.

So! Worldcon 2025 is at an end! And what a wild blast it was. I enjoyed the previous Worldcon I attended in San Jose, but I wasn't really prepared to take advantage of it. This year, I couldn't swing a sonic screwdriver without bapping a friend or colleague, or without making a new business or academic contact. I credit at least some of that to the prepwork that I and the Thinking Ink Press team did, and at least some of it to having the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop table as a "home base" to go back to.

The Elephant and Castle bar.

After the Hugos, the Fountain bar at the Sheraton was so packed they couldn't even take my order before close, but I wanted to get more writing done, and I was just up the street last year for CVPR 2024, so I remembered the Elephant and Castle bar, right up the street, open until 2. I got a goodly chunk of THE WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY done right here in the table in the center, until roughly 1am.

Fresh fruit for breakfast.

BUT! Even as a night owl, I understand the value of early to bed, early to rise, and to convince myself to do that, I try to get up for a hearty breakfast. I don't always make it, but I made it today. The TIP gang has been keeping tabs of each other on Signal, and so my colleague Liza Olmsted and I realized we were at the same restaurant, got together (as I was starting my breakfast and she was finishing hers) and during our discussions came up with the idea for a brand new anthology! Woohoo.

A clockwork raven!

The simple expedient of bringing Clockwork Edgar (Sandra's messenger raven) attracted a lot of people to the Clockwork Alchemy table, and the backstory Sandra had built around Edgar's messenger bag (complete with spare gear, compass, message and a few other items) was very entertaining.

The academic track.

After a neurodivergence talk at noon, which was very productive for me and Liza, I returned to the show floor to close up and found that we had two more hours before close due to a typo in an email. So, I had one last chance to attend a talk by my new friend Dr. Paul Price, who lectured on "exponential plots" (think Goku getting more and more powerful in Dragon Ball Z) with a strongly evidence-based lecture built on a close read of old space opera.

Paul showed that cyclical (episodic) plots work well with no-growth (think Sherlock Holmes versus case of the week) or slow-growth plots (think a slowly learning protagonist) but can get out of hand if a ridiculous enemy attacks every week with a similarly ridiculous growth in the protagonist's power - nevertheless, if you build in humanizing elements from the start, it can still work.

The coolest thing in his lecture was his critique of gender roles in the old space operas - I don't remember the precise numbers, but the gist was, in an entire space opera series by John Campbell, there were 25 instances of the pronoun "she" - but 18 of those referred to a ship, 6 to love interests, and the remaining was a stenographer who was alien, but was nevertheless depicted in a stereotypical gender role.

The table, all packed up.

After that, we did close, and even as we did so, I kept on making contacts, meeting people, and so on. Even trying to buy a last-minute gift from a friend ended up with a vendor taking my card and inquiring about my writing as they were a voracious reader and were interested in my series.

Paul and I, who just met, nevertheless found many similarities in our research styles, and got together tonight to discuss next steps on using his data in our corpus or our code to analyze his data. A laser-guided question from an audience member at my talk got me thinking about DEI issues with our corpus, and Paul's "usages of the pronoun she" analysis sounds like a perfect candidate for implementation by an LLM.

A giant statue.

On the way back, we had an interesting conversation about religion, mortality, transhumanism, the weird giant statue we saw in front of an art museum, and the crowd of filkers still filking away in the hotel when we finally got back.

Lots of filkers.

I ended up retiring to the hotel bar - which I interpreted as the right thing to do because on my way down there I ran into someone I had wanted to run into at the con but had only passed and waved. We had a great conversation, and I got a lot of work done at the hotel bar before closing it up.

Centaurs at dinner.

On that note, that's a wrap for Worldcon 2025. I may have more to say about it ... but it's gonna have to be tomorrow.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Me at the photo booth, the courtyard of Elephant and Castle, fresh fruit for breakfast, Edgar the clockwork raven, Paul giving his talk at the academic track, packing up our booth at the con, a giant statue on the street, a giant crowd of filkers, and me and a giant tray of oysters - all rendered with my "make it look like an illustration" series of Photoshop filters.

Worldcon 2025 Day Four!

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The fan tables with a sunbeam

Well, we made it through WorldCon Day 4! My talk apparently went well, as I was mobbed when it was over and a half-dozen people actually dropped by the poster session - some of them, interested in serious academic followup! And one guy said, "Your talk was the fastest thirty minutes of my life. I loved it."

Me at my poster

Mission accomplished!

Sandra Forrer talking to a steampunk fan

The Clockwork Alchemy contingent finally arrived in force, so we at last had a proper table setup!

The Clockwork Alchemy fan table

So I got to head out to see the show floor, which was pretty amazing! There was a Star Trek Jack Skellington, holding what appears to be either a Babylon 5 Shadow Ship or a modified Klingon batleth sword.

A giant Jack Skellington in a Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform holding what looks like a batleth or maybe a Babylon 5 Shadow Ship.

There were too many cool things for this post, but, I always have time for ... robots!

A youth robotics team

Sonic screwdrivers!

A sonic screwdriver collection

Wand duels!

A wand duel with a cross-dressing  Seventh Doctor facing off with an anime character

Our books continuing to sell! (The stack isn't shorter, but we've been replenishing it)

The Neurodiversiverse at the Liminal Fiction table

Later that night I attended the Hugo ceremony, which was pretty awesome, with singing by Nisi Shawl that is still echoing in my head because they did it as a "bit" between the different presentations ("Down, down, down the Hugo road ...) and a really funny video bit from the actual Hugo Best Novel winner.

The Hugo Awards

Afterwards, some of the award winners came to the Fountain bar in the Sheraton for a victory lap!

Someone carrying a Hugo Award through the Fountain bar.

I also got to see a lot of friends at the con. All in all, a pretty good day!

-the Centaur

Pictured: The fan tables, me at my poster, Sandra Forrer talking to a steampunk fan, our table, the giant Jack Skellington in a Next Generation uniform, a youth robot team, a sonic screwdriver collection, a LARP wand duel, the Neurodiversiverse at the Liminal Fiction table, the Hugos, and the hotel afterparty.

Worldcon 2025: Day Three

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Not a lot of pictures from today proper because our Friday volunteer had an unexpectedly rough trip in, and I'm again stuck at the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop table:

But the costumes have been great! I've seen a fair bit of Oz this year ...

Oz costumes

Some Star Trek / Steampunk riffs:

Star Trek meets Steampunk

And whatever these folks sitting at the far table are:

More costumes from the bar

My buddy RM Ambrose gave a good talk on framework for discussing violence and nonviolence in fiction:

Ralph's Thursday talk

I have even finished a rough cut of Saturday's presentation, and despite the fact that it is +110 plus slides, because many of my slides are sequences that add elements to existing slides, there are only like 30-40 content slides, and I was consistently able to get through it in ~20 minutes, well under time.

Slides from my talk

Don't you think he looks a little tired?

Anthony, sleepy at breakfast.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The WorldCon Bar, our table, various costumes, Ralph's talk, my slides, and the Centaur, sleepy.

Worldcon 2025: Day Two

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The Neurodiversiverse on display at Liminal Fiction

Day Two of Worldcon! And The Neurodiversiverse is already selling out at Liminal Fiction! (Apparently someone mentioned it at a panel!) But if you want forty-plus hopeful, empowering own-voices stories of neurodivergent people encountering aliens, conveniently packaged with poetry and art in an award-winning anthology, please drop by their booth and buy up the rest of their stock of the NDV!

We still don't have a fully staffed table as some people couldn't make it to the con (one, yesterday, held up when their train stopped while the police resolved an active shooter situation (!)). But I am getting work done on my presentation for Saturday (and on my blogging!)

View from the CA/Milford table, featuring Anthony's laptop

Some great costumes and t-shirts this year, even though traffic near the CA/Milford booth is a bit thin.

T-shirt reading "My body is a temple: ancient and crumbling, probably cursed or haunted"

I particularly liked this Oz guardsman!

An Oz guardsman.

Also met many authors and friends of authors I know. And, at breakfast at Alder and Ash this morning, I got in line at the host stand, only for the guy in front of me to step aside and say "Sorry! Still waiting for my party to arrive." I was seated promptly ... and then, moments later, the guy saw the woman sitting at the table next to me and joined her, saying "You were seated at the only table I couldn't see from the door. THEN this random dude starts mentioning that The Shattering Peace was doing well and discussing panels, and a quick glance confirmed it was John Scalzi, my favorite blogger, who apparently also writes books or something, which some of you may have heard of, discussing publishing with someone in the industry.

Breakfast at Alder and Ash with the book "Techniques of the Selling Writer" by Dwight Swain on the table, and John Scalzi NOT visible just to the right of the picture.

I let them eat, and finished my delicious breakfast so I could staff the table.

-the Centaur

Pictured: NDV at the Liminal Fiction booth, the booth itself, the view from the CA/Milford table, a t-shirt, an Oz guardian costume, and breakfast at Alder and Ash (with John Scalzi just outside the frame to the right).

Worldcon 2025: Day One

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A tiki Dalek, an old-school Dalek, a modern Dalek, and the TARDIS.

SO! We're out at Worldcon. I've already run into fellow TIPster Betsy Miller, author Clara Ward, and several other folks who either knew me or I knew them.

Anthony at the Clockwork and Milford shared table

Today and tomorrow I am volunteering at the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop joint table! Compared to the GeekGirlCon and LARP booths around us, our table display is a little underwhelming as a lot of the Milford and Clockwork contingent either couldn't make it or were delayed. So we just have the brochures and stands I could fit in my suitcase, which was a fair trick as I brought 30 books to the Book Nook!

Anthony with his book FROST MOON at the Book Nook table.

I'll be signing there today at 3pm. Then on Saturday at 11, I'll be in Room 320 presenting on "The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels," joint work with my colleague Kenneth Moorman of Transylvania University. The poster session will be from 12-1 on the fourth floor Paramount Lounge:

Anthony standing in front of his "Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels" poster.

I hope to see you there! You'd appear somewhere in the image below ...

The view from behind the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford joint table.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Some Daleks and the TARDIS, the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford shared table, my book at the Book Nook, my poster up at the Paramount Lounge, and the view behind the table.

[religious reflections]: Red-Letter Readings from a Red-Letter Bible

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This series began because I was recruited by my church board to pinch hit while our leader was busy. In more detail if you need it, the Vestry (the church board) of Saint Stephens-in-the-Field Episcopal Church (the church right up the street from my house in San Jose, and on whose board I still sit) asked its Vestry members to contribute "reflections" to our church newsletter (the Friday Journal) while our leader (Janet, the "Senior Warden") was busy teaching summer swimming classes.

SO! I wrote some things. And, now, present them to you! Please enjoy these thinkerly ruminations ...

A Red-Letter Reading from a Red-Letter Bible

This June began with a red-letter day: June 1st, the Seventh Sunday of Easter … where the entire Gospel reading would have been printed in red in a “red-letter” Bible.

In a movie, that red text would be foreshadowing: Sunday’s Gospel was Jesus’s farewell address to his disciples, immediately prior to his arrest and execution. And perhaps that red text is foreshadowing for us as well, as all of us will face trials and tribulations in our lives.

But in a Bible, that red text draws our attention to Jesus’s words. And Jesus’s farewell draws our attention not to trials and tribulations, but to love. Jesus reveals the Father’s name so that the Father’s love for Jesus may live in his disciples, and the disciples may live in Jesus.

I inherited my red-letter Bible from my parents. It’s a big, heavy Catholic Bible, with a somewhat intimidating picture of Pope Paul VI staring intently out of the frontispiece, and is copyrighted the year after my birth, so I often like to think that my parents probably bought this Bible for me.

But they forgot to fill in the page titled “This Bible Is Presented To,” and I like to think that’s another kind of foreshadowing. The Bible is presented to everyone, and its red letter text draws our attention to the words of Jesus, which culminate in a message of love in the face of death.

Earlier in the readings, Paul is jailed for curing a woman of demonic possession, then sings hymns to his fellow prisoners. When an earthquake frees them, the jailor is so distressed he wants to kill himself; but rather than escape, Paul ministers to the jailor so he can be saved.

We often think we need to rescue ourselves from the situations we find ourselves in. But the Psalm in Sunday’s reading reminds us that God saves his faithful from the wicked … and Paul reminds us that God can even help us save the wicked from themselves, with God’s help.

In this world, we all face trials and tribulations. But Jesus’s red-letter words help us focus on what’s important: not our immediate challenges, but our relationships with each other, and how those relationships should be not aligned with the world, but in mutual love guided by God.

-Anthony

Pictured: The third edition of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which is my favorite Bible, even though it is not the version of the Bible that my parents got me as a kid. But I'd rather post this post with a related, if not completely on-point image, than wait for a picture of the right Bible, which, no sacrilege intended, only God knows when I would actually get around to taking.

Anthony at Worldcon!

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Hey folks! I'll be attending WorldCon as part of the Academic Track! My presentation is on "The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels" - an exploration of the real science behind writing teacher Dwight Swain's theory that you should write stories in action scenes followed by reaction sequels - and will be held Saturday, August 16th, at 11am, with a poster session in the Paramount Lounge from 12-1:

Many of my colleagues will also be there - Liza Olmsted and Betsy Miller of Thinking Ink, and our Neurodiversiverse authors Clara Ward (author of Be the Sea) and Cat Rambo (author of You Sexy Thing). Fellow Taos Toolbox alumnus RM Ambrose, editor of Vital: The Future of Healthcare will also be on a panel.

I hope to see you there!

-Anthony

The Lorentzian Argument and its Impact on Transgender Narratives

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I'm working on a paper on "The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels" with my friend Kenny Moorman. We're attempting to harmonize "scenes and sequels" from professional writing craft with the findings of the cognitive science of story understanding ... and I'm presenting it at WorldCon in a little over a week.

It's been slow going due to the amount of research involved---at least seven narrative disciplines affect our work, and relevant papers and projects go back fifty years---not to mention my periodic struggles with writer's block whenever I switch projects (as two other writing deadlines are overlapping this one).

SO! I've been working on the paper a lot of late, scribbling on printouts over coffee, then editing over dinner, staying up late at night to harmonize details. And I was plugging away at the "WC:AD" (WorldCon ACademic) paper when I hit a new section my collaborator had added on "the Lorentzian Argument."

Huh, I thought, I've been working on general relativity, where Lorentzian metrics show up; I wonder if this is the same Lorentz? Surely, I thought, I could take a stab at the section. Then I saw Kenny had moved the section on "Implications for the Transgender Narrative" to just after "The Lorentzian Argument."

He'd done so on purpose. There were notes there. There was a deep connection between them.

I realized there was no way I could fill out this section; I had to move on.

Then I woke up.

-Anthony

Pictured: Working on WC:AD at Monterey by the Mall. I wonder if the strength of the margarita has any effect on the bizarreness of the dreams?

P.S. In case it wasn't clear, our paper doesn't have implications for the transgender narrative, nor is there a Lorentzian argument in narrative theory---at least, that I am aware of. My brain made it all up probably because I'm also studying general relativity and transgender issues in the background for other projects.

viiictory … forty-two!

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Whew! What a few months it's been. I've been so busy I haven't even had time to publicize some of the stuff that I'd naturally use this blog for (like the Embodied AI Workshop). But, we're through most of that now. And the most important thing is completing my 42nd successful Nanowrimo challenge!

The Nanowrimo organization imploded this year, but the challenges roll on - and for me, this year, it was working out the complicated plot of JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY. Finding out what the Watchtower really was and what the bad guys were up to was hard enough, but weaving into the plot all the threads of inspiration that led to the story was ... quite the challenge. But I got there.

Still, it led to another blood-in-the-water month, which felt pretty bad, but which (after I fixed a bug in my tracking system) doesn't appear to have been too much worse than other bad months: other than a few blips around the 22nd to the 24th, it seems to have been slow but within the envelope:

And, oh great, images are doing something weird again. Joy. Okay, that seems to be fixed. But I will say, this month felt like the research required on this novel was much greater than normal. No matter! I finished! Oh yes, the traditional excerpt. Sometimes we're our own worst critic:

“What an untapped well of self-loathing I have discovered,” Jeremiah wondered. “Yes, I’m a thirty-two year old three-star general and award-winning athlete, and that’s exceptional. But I’ve cracked my skull, broken my arm, even broken my back through my own carelessness—”

“Oh, the hard life,” Firamiah scoffed, “of the decorated veteran—”

“—and, also, I’ve been exiled, dismissed, even temporarily blinded, because I’m such a whiny Cassandra,” Jeremiah said. “I don’t understand how I rub people so the wrong way that they’d rather stand on their heads than help me fight a monster standing in the very room—”

“Ever consider,” Firamiah barked, “it’s because that smug, annoying smirk of yours annoys people so much that they want to punch you straight in your smug, punchable face?”

Firamiah got nose to nose with Jeremiah in a roaring display of righteous flame.

“If you’re quite done browbeating me,” Jeremiah said stiffly, “please get on with delivering your nodes of the directed acyclic graph, so I can connect the dots and get your self-righteous, unfortunately not-punchable face out of my suitably-chastened, yet still-punchable one.”

Anyway, no celebratory dinner yet: time to move on to the two scientific papers I need to finish editing, one due tomorrow, one due in a week.

Onward!

-the Centaur

processing the past

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I'm a pack rat, and this tendency isn't helped by being an omnivorous author and researcher with a broad range of interests - nor is it helped by my tendency to let piles just pile up while I rabbithole on whatever major project I am working on at my primary work. But I'm between contracts right now, I survived the trio of ICRA-ConCarolinas-CVPR, and my wife's mother is moved into her new home, so I don't really have an excuse not to go through the piles and try to return them to some semblance of order.

Also, I'm tripping over stuff.

Now, I don't throw away things because other people want me to: I throw away things when I've decided to. Because my interests are, um, broad, and the projects I use to tackle these interests are even broader, I have a vast number of project folders and project stacks. But a stack isn't a pile: a stack is an organized collection of items of interest that enables you to make intellectual progress on a project, like the "storytelling and the sciences of mind" and "creative endurance" stacks I have to my left, the "mental models and explanation patterns" stack in front of me, and the "taido and jeet kune do" stack I have to my right.

A pile is something different - it's the detritus of "company's coming over and I gotta clear off this table" or "I need space to work on this important thing so these other projects gotta go on hold". Like the "robotics consulting" pile in front of me. It's not about robotics consulting. That's just the top action item on the pile. Below it are my theological studies folder, some bills, some items to file, Thinking Ink Press stuff, and more theology, which it looks like I put in the pile for this week's Saint Stephens in-the-Field Friday Journal entry that I have already written and submitted two days ago. It's a mess.

More specifically, a pile is a stack-like mess that hides its information and actionable content. You can't tell what you need to do to a pile just by looking at it the way you can a stack or a folder. (Folders are also dangerous for a similar reason if you're not strict about what you put into them, but that's a problem for another day). And so, the reason that I don't throw piles away without processing them is that it's all too easy to not realize what's in a pile, and to lose an opportunity - or even money - by chucking it prematurely. In the piles in the banner image, I found roughly $50 bucks in foreign currency and a stack of gift cards.

The rest was easy. 80% of that just needed to be filed (a less pack-ratty person would throw some of this stuff away, of course, but I genuinely enjoy reminiscing over keepsakes from old trips, especially abroad). 10% could be thrown away or recycled immediately. And only 10% or so were actually actionable items.

I learned a lot about my own past going through these piles. I recalled things I did, places I'd been, stores that had closed, people I talked to but had fallen out of contact with, people who had retired or died. The pile processing worked both against me and for me; there were a handful of "action" items that dated back to the last millennium, which was great to harvest for keepsakes, but meant that there literally were several inches of that particular pile that had repeatedly gone through a "company's coming, better move this aside" cycle over literal decades, yielding a stack that mostly just needed to be recycled or trashed.

There's a value to throwing stuff away. It keeps your environment clean so you can feel good about your space and focus on what's important. But if you're a pack-rat person, it's really important to make sure that the stuff you have around you are actual stacks and folders of actionable stuff, and not piles that have been piling on top of each other since the last millennium.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Remains of a pile spread across the kitchen table, exploded into stuff that will be filed into topical binders or trashed; and the sorted remains of the same pile spread over the nearby builtins, ready to be filed into my filing system (or trashed). Now I kinda wish I had also taken a picture of the pile itself ...