Hi, I’m Anthony Francis, and I teach robots to learn, particularly deep reinforcement learning for robot navigation as well as the intersection of memory, emotion, and planning for contextual control. …
SO! I love to write, and four of my novels are published – FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK, LIQUID FIRE, about magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost, and JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE…
So I read a lot and write a lot and occasionally edit what I write and even more rarely, something gets sent to an editor and turned into a publication.…
“Robots in Montreal,” eh? Sounds like the title of a Steven Moffat Doctor Who episode. But it’s really ICRA 2019 – the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, and, yes,…
So, this happened! Our team’s paper on “PRM-RL” – a way to teach robots to navigate their worlds which combines human-designed algorithms that use roadmaps with deep-learned algorithms to control…
SO! There I was, trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, learn about deep learning, and teach myself enough puzzle logic to create credible puzzles for the Cinnamon Frost…
Wow, it’s already here – my flash fiction short story “One Day Your Strength Will Fail” is about to appear in the very first issue of the Bay Area’s new…
Wow. After nearly 21 years, my first published short story, “Sibling Rivalry”, is returning to print. Originally an experiment to try out an idea I wanted to use for a…
Why yes, I’m running a deep learning system on a MacBook Air. Why?
Yep, that’s Python consuming almost 300% of my CPU – guess what, I guess that means this machine has four processing cores, since I saw it hit over 300% –…
(Self-deprecating note: this blogpost is a rough draft of an essay that I’m later planning to refine for the Write to the End site, but I’ve been asked to share…
Let me completely up front about my motivation for writing this post: recently, I came across a paper which was similar to the work in my PhD thesis, but applied…
In many ways, Howard Philips Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges are different. Howard Philips Lovecraft wrote dark, atmospheric American horror at the dawn of the twentieth century. Jorge Luis Borges,…
Hey folks, as part of trying to get my act together on my writing and my blog, I'm working with the fine folks at Inkslinger PR to try to beat my blog, social media, and even my long-defunct newsletter back into some kind of reasonable shape. So I'm participating in a "Stock up for the Summer" giveaway in which you can enter to win a gift card (and possibly paperbacks!) for signing up to the newsletters of me and a bunch of other authors! Sign up here! https://geni.us/SummerStockUp
... which is great, because when you stop learning, you're dead.
Even for someone like me, who periodically takes wrong turns on purpose just to see where the roads go, you spend most of your time going over the same routes in the same ways.
And - forgive me for being a navigation researcher - if you primarily walk walk or drive purposely, rather than for recreation or exercise, those routes will make a branching tree coming out of your primary residence, with rings of cross-routes between frequent destinations. The grocery store, the office supply store, and the dump; church, a brunch joint, and again the grocery store.
This habitual spiderweb means we rarely explore intersections in a systematic, exhaustive way, except when walking or riding for recreation, or doing some kind of specific neighborhood patrol. Area rises as the square of distance, but we only have so many hours in the day, and so many trips in each neighborhood we live in in our lives; some intersections will naturally get left out.
My wife took a wrong turn coming back from the dump (we live on a "flagpole lot" with an extremely long driveway, so having garbage service would involve carting the garbage can 1000 feet and back every week, which not only I don't want to do, but also I think would wear out the wheels on the garbage can, which is not a long distance vehicle, but I digress), I SAY, she was coming back from the dump and missed her turn onto our street ... and made an interesting discovery.
She didn't have far to drive to the next cross street, and quickly made it home ... but as she did so, she found a fire station with aluminum can recycling three minutes from our house. She'd already told me about another fire station, ten minutes away on the drive to the airport, that accepted aluminum cans for recycling as a fundraising effort; this one was far closer.
We had a microwave die recently, and our mother-in-law did too; so after I took them to e-waste recycling at the Enoree dump, I then followed the same wrong turn my wife had. On the way, I saw the backsides of many landmarks that I knew from the drive. I soon found the fire station, three minutes from our house as predicted, but when I got there, I found something else: the local cell phone tower, looming over an empty lot with an excellent view of the nearby region. No wonder the cell phone coverage is so good where we are.
And on the drive back, I passed an Anglican church, in walking distance of our house. I'm kind of aggressively Episcopalian, and go to the church where I was married and whose rector buried my mother - but this Anglican church had a prayer labyrinth, also within walking distance of home.
I like where we moved to during the pandemic: we now live on the road my father taught me to drive, forty years ago. But today I took a turn that I rarely did, because I listened to my wife; and so today I learned that the place where we live is filled with amenities - a fire station, recycling, a cell tower, a church, a prayer labyrinth - that make it even better than I thought it was.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The cell tower, the fire station, and the recycling bin.
Truly epic vegan dessert pairing at Maestro's Entre Nous speakeasy in downtown Greenville. Probably our third favorite vegan-friendly restaurant in Greenville after Sunbelly and the 07, but tonight's menu they really leveled up. This was a vegan chocolate torte - much creamier than in the past - and a really great sorbet with fresh fruit, all paired up with great sauces and yin-yang plates for date night with my lovely vegan wife.
We had a wonderful hike in Asheville last Friday, though we had to keep the pace manageable due to my broken toe. After breakfast at The Smokin Onion - and those great croissant muffins - we decided to work off the dessert on a nearby trail attached to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Our hike began at the Folk Art Center, which unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of, because I was doing quite a bit of limping. Even though I switched to normal shoes to protect my toe, I brought my flat-bottomed shoe just in case the pain got too much and we had to turn around.
There was no need. We had a long hike, with a nice Lovecraftian green tunnel (up top) and despite getting turned around a bit when we turned around, we nevertheless made it back in time to get a cocktail at Battery Park, a fantastic wine bar and bookstore in downtown Asheville, before going to the even more fantastic vegan restaurant Plant for a wonderful dinner and even more dessert.
The above amazing example of a vegan dessert is a close relative of a "cronut" - where a cronut(TM) is a croissant donut, this is something like a croissant muffin, and it's a decadently delicious dessert often found at The Smokin Onion, a vegan restaurant in Asheville that my wife and I like. Once I suggested that we split one of those desserts, and she's like, "get your own!"
Now, I thought THAT was a donut(-like food).
But that's not a donut.
THIS is a donut.
These are apparently from Parlor Donuts in Greenville, SC, "made in small batches every day." They are absolutely not vegan in any way, shape or substantial form. They looked beyond delicious; they looked Cinnabon levels of absolutely unhealthy, and I declined to wreck my blood sugar with them.
What even is that atop the upper two donuts? A fried egg?
Blogging every day, not eating those every day, that's for sure. Would you like a wafer-thin mint?
So a sale just dropped out of the sky at https://bookshop.org/shop/TIP ... bookshop.org is apparently running an Anti-Prime Day Sale with free shipping and discounts across the site, and you can get Thinking Ink Press books at 20% off at the link above. This runs through Friday!
We found out, I quickly met with Betsy via Meet to discuss how to promote it, and the rest of the team weighed in with copy ideas on Signal. A quick sprint to Canva produced these graphics ...
I'm sure this is obvious to most people who are not dumb that the key discovery of the person known as the world's greatest smarty pants might be a difficult subject, but I apparently have the dumb. I have been studying general relativity ("Einstein gravity") on and off, for twenty years, and while I get some of it, other parts still just keep breaking my head.
Like, why does time slow down when you accelerate? That's, like, almost THE key prediction of GR. The explanation seems so simple, but yet, when I try to work through the links of the chain, I just can't get it. I read the words and then try to recreate it in my little black grid-ruled notebook and end up right where I started, asking the question, "What does baffled mean?"
The current attempt involves having literally about a half-dozen books that have useful-seeming explanations of gravitational time dilation, which I am going through in quasi-parallel, trying to get a grip on the key feature which just doesn't make sense to me (why particles emitted in the roof of a rocket or elevator seem to "run fast" compared to an observer sitting on the floor).
I feel if I could just get this, then I'd have a much deeper understanding. But the understanding I do have gives me two wrong answers: one, it shouldn't work at all, or two, it's always been there in the equations, and Newton should have discovered it, but simply didn't because he didn't think of it.
Hopefully I'll get there. Wish me luck.
-the Centaur
Pictured: pound cake, almond milk, two general relativity textbooks, and buried between them the little black notebook where I'm trying to work all this out. Thanks, Albert.
So in our mushroom farm, some of the logs are producing shiitake mushrooms, some are producing oyster mushrooms (not pictured as something ate the latest buds), some produced nameko (which I was not fond of), there was a fourth variety that didn't come up, and I think we have recently buried some maitake mushrooms logs which won't come up for a few months.
But that doesn't stop other organisms from trying to colonize the logs.
On the right is I believe turkey tail, which some people make into a tea (if it's the right variety) but which we don't eat (and didn't plant, so I don't trust it). On the left is allegedly not a mushroom, but a giant false-puffball slime mold. I did not cut it open to find out.
I believe these are chicken of the woods on the lower center, and possibly another slime mold atop. Again, this isn't what we planted in this log, so we're not going to risk eating them (at least not until we are much, much better at identifying species, which will take a long, long time).
On some of these colonized logs, we can see clear signs that the shiitake mycelium is still colonizing the logs, so we'll give it time. After a year, however, we might pull some of the logs if they are not producing (normally it takes six months to start to fruit, but we're deliberately experimenting with much larger logs, hoping to pay a longer onset to get a longer producing period).
Still more "Morpho: Simplified Forms". There are roughly 100 pages in the book and 5-8 drawings on most of the pages, so we may be churning through this one for quite a while.
And today's edition (well, not today's, as I blog a little ahead) of cats on workspaces includes Lily I think, bringing one of her favorite balls to one of my favorite workstations, a high-topped bar table made by my wife to look like a giant coral. Enjoy! I will work elsewhere.
Back in 1997, I drove across country for HAL 9000's birthday (yes, THAT Hal), held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where a friend was a graduate student. They called it the Cyberfest, and Arthur C. Clarke joined us for the first transatlantic video call at 1 frame per second.
But on the drive, I recall watching the time zones change around me. I calculated how many degrees across the Earth I had driven ... and the shift in time due to the curve around the Earth matched up.
No, it's not flat, and you cannot fake reality in any way whatsoever.
-the Centaur
Pictured: an Old Fashioned at the One Five, where we had a nice vegan meal after my urgent care visit for my broken toe.
On the note of unblogged posts, here's picking up my missed posts from 2025 - day 68 I believe was the last one I blogged, not counting one or two done out of order.
Unblogged torso study from day 1 of this year. Well, actually, this was drawn in September, since I draw pretty far ahead; but it's the drawing scheduled for January 1st.
Drawing every day, on average, backfilling missed posts, when I can.
It may not look like much, but it smarts where it counts, kid. One of our coffee tables decided to make some special modifications to my middle toe, including a lot of soft-tissue soreness and a tiny chip in the bone which took four X-rays to fully figure out. Flat-bottomed shoes make the world go round ...
Adulting is one of the most important, and pernicious, tasks adults are called upon to undertake. The laundry must get done, after all, but if it's a choice between doing the laundry and maintaining your marriage or caring for your children or loved ones, the hamper can just continue to fill.
In this case, adulting is rather simple. My wife and I use the "80-80" rule: a partnership is not a 50-50 proposition, because we're rarely operating at 100% of our capacity. Even if your partner is awesome and pulls off a 90% success rate, if you rely on your partner to do half the work, inevitably that truly awesome partner will only deliver 45% of the needed work, falling short of your expectations.
If, instead, you ASSUME your partner will sometimes fall short, and take on MORE than 50% of the effort - and they do too - then everything is fine. Your partner's turn to toss the compost on the heap, but you're standing in front of it? Toss it. Your turn to fold the laundry, but your partner sees the laundry in the dryer? She does it. And then everything gets done, and you both feel great.
So my wife mentioned that we're out of litter, and I volunteered to go while I was having lunch at Panera in Greenridge, next to a PetSmart that has our two cat litter brands. Since I knew I was going, I asked her to let me know if we were low on anything else, and she pointed out we were low on 2 of the 9 (!) cat dry food brands we use to distract our very finicky cats.
I was there, I got it done, it all worked out great, while she had folded the laundry I had run last night.
80-80 for the win.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the empty bags/cans of the two cat food brands we were low on.
