Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
Sunlight, shining through the trees behind me, striking just some of the forest ahead. I took a few pictures (and even played with the contrast and vibrance of this one in Photoshop) but none of them quite captured the glow that the unseen sunset was leaving on these leaves.
-the Centaur
To the tune of 'Magic' by Olivia Netwon-John:
I don't believe in gravity
-the backyard snek
Nothing can stop me today
No matter how high I have to climb
Nothing can get in my way!
Seriously, this snake is a badass.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a snake that lives in our backyard, displaying a healthy contempt for gravity.
Still working on the social navigation paper. Here's a cat.
-the Centaur
Have been prioritizing the Social Navigation Principles & Guidelines paper (and helping my wife get ready for her business trip) so no detailed posts for you. Enjoy a sunset and a margarita.
-the Centaur
I saw some people blogging about their 20th blogging anniversaries, so I decided to check how long my blog has been up. And .. So! I apparently missed the blog's 20th birthday, as it started in November 2001 ...
... unless I blogged it and forgot about it. And I also missed my first (recorded) web page's 25th birthday ...
... as I started my website sometime in 1996.
So no birthday post for you. I guess I'll have to wait to the blog's 25th (or web page's 30th) birthday in 2026.
-the Centaur
No sooner than I finish one task than another task rolls straight over me ...
... but we'll still get there.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Moonlight over downtown Greenville.
After truly terrific hailstorms, we were treated to a truly awesome sunset.
And, got some work done on editing SPECTRAL IRON: Dakota Frost #4. FINALLY, getting the rewrite of the slow section rolling with some good Dakota Frost action segueing right into an ambulance ride.
That's more like it.
-the Centaur
I still have misgivings about using AI-generated art to create final designs without human intervention, and I think AI art needs to address the copyright issue in a meaningful way, but speaking as an artist into cosmic horror, it sure can create some creepy images that are great food for thought. Here's a couple of cool ones from a recent project that I've been working on - great design concepts, whether or not they get used.
Bonus points if you can guess which work this art is designed to illustrate.
-the Centaur
Pushing the Social Navigation paper forward. Made progress. Very tired. Lots to do tomorrow. Crashing out. Please enjoy this lovely park.
-the Centaur
P.S. Yes, it really is true that if you "work a little bit harder" you can get way more done than you thought you could ... I was just about ready to give up, pushed a bit harder, and nailed the whole todo list. Now zzzz.
Had some insomnia, got up to work on some stuff, worked until I was tired, am now tired, going back to bed.
Here's a picture of some bricks. Enjoy.
-the Centaur
I finished Camp Nano. It's late, I'm tired, I have church in the morning enjoy a random picture, victory post tomorrow.
-the Centaur
SO! I was super behind on Camp Nanowrimo, so I dropped almost everything and prioritized it, and now I'm not. So I can do other things, like write this blog post.
But, it is 4:12am, so: I'm going to bed.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Me, Loki, some vegan dinner, and some delicious word count.
Yeah, *that* house. The one that doesn't take down its "Christmas" lights. Ever.
Really, they're lights for the paths around our house, lights which would be WAY more expensive if we put them in as permanent fixtures. After all the (unexpected) expenses it took to renovate the place and all the manual work left to do, I think we're going to just have to wait a while before we get around to that bit.
And, unfortunately, the lights we had up got discontinued, so when we had to replace some strings after wear and damage (and re-replace them after we had to take out a tree on the neighbor's property line and a branch cut the strand) we're currently mis-matched. :-(
But it sure does make the front paths and porch nice and cozy at night.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Our old house in California, which we're still slowly fixing up after the move East. It turns out we're not the only one in the neighborhood who's done this, but their setup looks way more organized than ours:
We'll get there. One day.
Yeah, you're gonna just have to put me down in the left column there. No offense to Doc Brown's DeLorean, but The Doctor's TARDIS could BE a DeLorean, if it wanted to. If there was a write-in, of course, I'd pick the Clockwork Time Machine, but the Machine is basically a TARDIS with the serial numbers filed off anyway.
Very tired, working on the social navigation benchmarks paper, no more post for you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Poll seen at a Starbucks while I was waiting on my car to be serviced.
Lent teaches us to learn to sacrifice. We're asked to give something up. We're asked to abstain from meat (well, land animals) on Fridays. And we're asked to fast on Good Friday ... which is today.
I'm not too happy that Clockwork Alchemy is Easter Weekend, but I understand that it's not everyone's holiday (and that this may have been the best weekend we could get). But I get it.
That doesn't absolve me of my responsibilities, though. I don't fully fast as a matter of policy - I don't think it's healthy to go starving your body - but I eat light on fasting days, just enough that my body gets food.
The choice tonight was particularly hard, though: the restaurant had cauliflower steak, one of my favorite meals. It would have been so easy to order that as being somehow "healthier" than other options.
But it wouldn't have been fasting. And, as a favorite, it would have been a gluttonous choice, so, reluctantly, I got the rather smaller hummus plate and had that as my meal.
Christians do these things to remind us of Jesus's suffering, but the Church doesn't want to remind us of Jesus for Jesus's sake - he doesn't need it. No, they want to remind us of Jesus's sacrifice for our own good.
Learning to sacrifice during Lent is like cross-training your moral muscles: it helps you exercise your decision making on small things, so that muscle can be used properly when we face larger things.
Tonight, for example, I was able to call upon that muscle to help me make the right choices. After dining with my friends, I reluctantly bid them adieu, and went to go deal with my missing costume.
I'd forgotten part of it, recall, and had to drive 45 minute to get it. But when I did so ... remember what I said about knowing you're doing the right thing when you end up being where you need to be?
A package had arrived - a trellis, purchased to help save the branches of a beloved tree. A package far too large for our house sitter, who has hurt her back. A package that almost certainly would have been stolen.
So, doing what I needed to do that evening may have helped me be where I needed to be to save the package from the neighborhood's package thieves, for starters, but there was much more.
These are little things, but every time I do the right thing and am rewarded for it, it seems to become just a little bit easier to do the right thing again the next time.
-the Centaur
Pictured: tonight's hummus, my cauliflower steak, and the late-arriving trellis package.
Yeah, I know, that doesn't look like much of a sacrifice. But I needed to focus on getting a scientific paper edited, and posting about Clockwork Alchemy, and so I put aside blogging and even Camp Nano to make sure that those things got done. And the consequence? Why, I was right where I needed to be to meet some friends who just happened to show up at Cafe Venetia the same time I did, and we had a long and productive conversation about large language models, the nature of intelligence, and the human condition.
And color blindness. Did you know you can use perceptual tricks to fool the human brain into briefly perceiving colors that are visually impossible to see with the human (or any) eye, like stygian blue, a pure black that is also somehow blue at the same time? Neat. The Colour out of Space, here we come.
-the Centaur
Now, I don't think we live in a simulation (except I have strong evidence that we do - ask me know I know) but I do believe in providence, that idea that God is trying to arrange things in the world in a way that works out for us. And I think we can see providence (or the simulation, or synchronicity, or simple pareidolia) most clearly when we are where we need to be, for then things somehow all just work out.
Like, how, day before yesterday I decided to drop by a nearby coffeehouse after brunch, and stayed there until I finished beta reading a book; that put me at the right place to give some spare cash to an apparently homeless man, who looked like he needed it and promised he'd go buy food. Then I decided to grab a soda on the way out of town, which put me in just the right place to see the same homeless man try to buy alcohol. I need that reminder - that most of the time helping the beggar isn't actually helping - but still, Jesus says to give to all those who beg from you, and another errand placed me right where I needed to be to help another person. I hope they did something good for themselves with it, whatever it was.
Later that night I worked through another problem, planning to eat a light midnight snack instead of dinner, until, frustrated, I threw up my hands and went to grab dinner at BJ's brewery. That cleared my head, gave me the opportunity to run a few more errands, and I even got some writing done.
Seeking the good can help you find more of it. So I try to pay attention to what I was doing when things just seem to work out, so I can hopefully make more of the same choices in the future. Which, coincidentally, is what I was reading about over brunch today: a book on the Thomistic philosophy of free will, which has nothing to do with woo-hoo non-causal "free choices" and everything to do about building up the right resources within ourselves to make the right decision when the time comes.
So pay attention to providence: it may be trying to tell you something about how aligned you are with what you should have been doing in the first place.
-the Centaur
Pictured: fish and shrimp tacos at BJ's, and another chapter read of a deep RL book.
Even though it can be backbreaking, there's something strangely satisfying about getting out of your conditioned environment and into "nature", just kneeling there listening to the winds blowing, the birds chirping, and dogs barking as you pull weedgrass out of your yard before it kills all your succulents. Because the succulents will survive and look nice come the next drought, but this kind of hill grass will turn to dead but pointy weeds with barbed seeds so sharp they actually gave one of our cats a bloody nose.
A lot of work left to do, but it was a productive day.
-the Centaur
Pictured: One of the areas I cleared today trying to rescue our succulents, and the integrated sum of all of today's work, prior to being dumped on the compost pile.
That is all.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Gordon Ramsay's "Finally, some good fucking food," adapted for the Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie, which was, at last, a good fucking D&D movie, and which had, at last, a good fucking gelatinous cube. It also apparently had cameos of the kids from the 80's cartoons, though for my money my favorite D&D adaptation is the late-80's-early-90's comic Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, because it has a centaur and it's set in Forgotten Realms. Anyway, this most recent movie was awesome, go see it, so it will make a lot of money, and we get sequels with more of Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith and especially Sophia Lillis doing their adventuring thing.
Alright! +400 words added to THE PLAGUE OF GEARS, and I have a next step in mind. Enough work for the day; after coding, two meetings, yardwork, debugging, dinner with friends, and blogging, and writing, it's now Miller Time. Or, since I gave up alcohol for Lent and they gave us free dessert for dinner because a salt shaker exploded into almost everyone's food, it's time for a Diet Coke and some Dungeons and Dragons.
Moral of the story, if your salt shaker explodes, tell your server, because they may take the shaker out of service before it kills again, and they may even give you a free donut.
-the Centaur
Pictured: My picture of downtown Mountain View came out blurry, so you get last night at Morgan Hill, plus a picture of the churro donuts, dusted with cinnamon, which I loved and my buddy almost gagged out because he hates cinnamon so much (no worries, his wife and daughter finished his donut).
