I love wildlife, math, and fantasy, and have way too many interests — Origin Story I’m secretly a Texan. I don’t remember living in Austin, though, since we moved to New York when I was quite young. I spent most of my early childhood in Ithaca with my parents and grandparents. My sister was born when I was seven. …

About my art journey — Every now and then, I get the art ‘bug’ and do a whole flurry of art back to back. It makes a nice break from the intensely verbal and analytical activities I spend most of my time on. …

You wouldn’t get a toymaker to build your bridges, would you? — Software engineering is an outlier among the types of engineering*, in that software engineers are comparatively exempt from physics and consequences. When you make a mistake in other types of engineering, you fry a circuit board or break a support beam, and have to cool your heels and think about…

Lies or plagiarism — take your pick — Why do we read… anything? Any statement I read has two forms of communication. There’s the message (or literal content of the statement) and the meta-communication, or additional information you infer from the circumstances of receiving a message. For all of history, any written word has had the meta-communication of…

(This is an annotated transcript of the TEDx talk I gave in April 2023. It’s 10 minutes long. I’d suggest watching it first and then coming here for supporting materials.) Does climate action feel impossible? When I was a kid, I was interested in everything. I’d need about 10 careers…

A roundup of the coverage: paranoia edition — This is part 2 of my research roundup on the concerns surrounding generative AI. I find it useful to put the risks into categories, to better understand the range and scope of potential issue and think about potential solutions (especially regulation). I give more background and context in Part 1…

A roundup of the coverage, part 1. — I’ve been following the news and opinion coverage of generative AI since it first came on the scene. Writers have raised a variety of concerns over potential risks of widespread use of text and image generators like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, and the many applications being developed on them. I find…

And learning about ‘birbness’ — To help demonstrate July’s Weeds & Wildflowers prompt, I drew the charming little bird from the photo by Christine Morris Ph.D. I chose to draw it in a stylized manner rather than trying to be realistic. You can see my drawing on the prompt: Shake It Up! July Weeds & Wildflowers Promptmedium.com It occurred to me that I’d…

The characteristics the successful ones had in common — In the space of about a year, I set myself five personal creative challenges. You may have heard of popular challenges like Inktober and NaNoWriMo, where you aim to write or draw every day, or reach a certain word count in a month. I sensed the excitement around these challenges…