So I happened into a design class at UCLA and it turned out I fell in love with robotics. By the end of the quarter, we ended up with this bad mamajama:
His name’s Killbot and you can make one of your own!
In this series, I’ll cover all the basics to get ya started!
“The essence of the Bayesian approach is to provide a mathematical rule explaining how you should change your existing beliefs in the light of new evidence. In other words, it allows scientists to combine new data with their existing knowledge or expertise. The canonical example is to imagine that a precocious newborn observes his first sunset, and wonders whether the sun will rise again or not. He assigns equal prior probabilities to both possible outcomes, and represents this by placing one white and one black marble into a bag. The following day, when the sun rises, the child places another white marble in the bag. The probability that a marble plucked randomly from the bag will be white (ie, the child’s degree of belief in future sunrises) has thus gone from a half to two-thirds. After sunrise the next day, the child adds another white marble, and the probability (and thus the degree of belief) goes from two-thirds to three-quarters. And so on. Gradually, the initial belief that the sun is just as likely as not to rise each morning is modified to become a near-certainty that the sun will always rise.”
-The Economist
Daaamn. Smart babies come outta the economist. When I was a baby, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t like: WHAT? WHERE THE HELL DID DAD GO??? IS HE COMING BACK? oh. “Peakaboo”. Phew. I don’t have to apply fuckin Bayes’ Rule to find out if he’s gonna disappear agai- WHAT THE FUCK? HE’S GONE AGAIN?!
Do people hashtag in tumblr? If so: #WTFtheEconomist
—Owen Liang
—I Would Do Anything for You (Accoustic Cover)
1. Burned electronics have the worst smell in the world. It’s has the bitter smell of defeat, regret, and long nights ahead.
2. Defeated, regretful and restless, I took a programming musical interlude!
“I Would Do Anything for You” (Foster the People) accoustic cover. I can’t drum for shit but I hope y’all enjoy anyway!
I’m such a crappy programmer.
My prof. for design sent a pretty sweet “ABCs of Engineering” as an inspiration to us. I don’t think I’ve got enough experience to really get all of it, but I can only really speak to the one letter that applies to me most: F.
Failure. This thing that designers want most to avoid should always be first and foremost in their mind. Otherwise, how could they design against it?
Kay so I’m not only a self-proclaimed Fuck up, many many others have gotten a chance to voice their opinions on the topic. Failure’s all too real to me, but before you’re like “Mo, you’re SOOOOOO not a fuck up,” (and others of you, “yah, you hit it on the head”) I think ya oughtta know that I’m pretty proud of this.
We’re human and we fuck up all the time. Henry (the guy that wrote the article) says failure oughtta be first and foremost on engineers’ mind and we all wanna design against it. But that’s not the whole story. My little nephew’s got some great experience here and, maybe you don’t know it, but you do too.
Little-B is into Pokemon. He’s just at that stage of his life (the one that lasts between ages 7 and 24) where Pokemon is fuckin TITE. It’s great, he’s got all the cards and videogames and stuff and his Uncle Al sometimes gets to sneak onto the DS and get in some hardcore battles. Okay…there was a point….ah yea failure. So the kid has a temper. Whenever he doesn’t do something perfectly, he’ll throw a tantrum and start crying. There was one day I was at my bro’s place and A-man was tryin to get Little-B (don’t you love my family’s nomenclatures? This is what we actually call each other…) to try a NEW game on the Wii, tearing him away from his nice safe Pokemon game. Byron was all jazzed while we played, dancing all over the room, but treated the Wii-mote like a cursed relic when A-man gave asked him to try something new. Well, eventually, Little-B gets in on it and messes up. He gets a real bad score and turns to me and my brother in a huff and unleashes a giant “SEE?!” That’s all that could escape his mouth before he started bawling. Aaron grabs him, gives him a deep hug and says “look, let’s try it together.” and puts his hand over Byron’s showing him the movements. Aaron messed them up a bunch of times, and said in his falsetto-cheer-up voice “Oh no!” which inevitably put a smile on Little-B’s face.
It was beautiful. It was simple and loving and fuck me for not having a camera cuz that’s the DEFINITION of a Kodak moment.
But, as my nephew eloquently put it: “SEE?!” The point is, there’s no such thing as adulthood. If paying taxes and being on time to things are adulthood then, hell, any kid raised with a sense of responsibility is an adult. But in reality, we’re all little Byrons, just messing up once in a while. We get frustrated, we cry, we throw temper tantrums and we get over it. Sometimes we need people to show us how it’s done but fucking up isn’t something to be designed against, you’ve gotta take advantage of it; B coulda not played the game at all and been okay, but we can’t avoid failure forever. Look at what he got out of it: a new appreciation for a game, of course, but, beyond that, love and the chance to grow a little.
Don’t spend your life tiptoeing around failures. They suck. Trust me, I know. But they give us a chance to look back and really appreciate where we are after all the trials of the past and sure as hell make great dinner conversation.
Expect failure, greet it, learn as much as you can from it with a light heart, and then send it off so you can greet the next one.
HELLO WORLD! Off to immerse myself in coding but, before I do…
That’s it for your quick update. From here on out, back to your regularly scheduled programming; more food, songs, and tech stuff comin atcha!
So last Friday I came into work, tasked to melt the ice in the freezer, a job that I’ve come to accept is in my job description (following the ANYTHING is SOMETHING philosophy). I’m happy to say that after I melted the ice, it was clean as hell AND I even attached the little door on the ice box (these are the things I get excited about. Don’t judge.)
Needless to say, I was beaming on the way home, had a fuckin awesome weekend and came in fresh today, ready to receive my praises.
“hmm…the refrigerator doesn’t seem to be running” started my boss.
These are the things that screw up your beautiful mornings. Something in your mind suddenly turns to lead and you think “uh oh.” like “uh oh…did I do that?”
This would be my third week on the job an so far my legacy might be “the guy who cleaned that beautifully broken fridge” or “mr. Unemployable”
I write this sitting on the bus, half panicked and returning to work from home with a box of electrical stuff…here’s hoping my call sign after today is “the handyman” and not “THAT fucker…”
feels kinda like this lately:
Lotsa changes have gone down over the last month or so and it kinda feels like a mess in my brain but I’m slowly gettin into the groove of things (Even tho I’m pretty sure my boss hates me.) One of my (kinda) better adjusted friends even said “Ya know Mo, you and I are the stable ones.”
MWAHAHA! I’m one of the stable ones! Whaddaya think of that, World?
Middlefingersinyoface.
Now off to LinkedIn/CleanRoom/UpdateMyResume/Indeed/LearnToCrossCompile/ChugCoffee!
