Self-driving car problems

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, partially because I’ve gotten into the trap of trying to make the posts too serious, and they turn into essays never to be finished, and partially because I’m more self-conscious about posting about myself and family to the general public. So I’m going to write this one out just in thoughts and restrain myself from digging up research and falling into that rabbit hole.

Grammar notes

I will return to an early theme of this blog in this post: strange grammatical phenomena. Let it be known, first, that I do not speak English very well. I speak it well enough to get through the day, but I am not a great expert in the language. This is ironic, since I just applied to a CELTA course to get certified as a teacher of English as a second language. Part of the application for the course involved correcting erroneous examples. The last was “His dog’s really slender. Does he feed it enough?” I struggled to see the error here, though my guess was that the word slender is slightly misused: generally it has a positive connotation, but the context implies that the speaker intends a negative connotation (compare “skinny,” which can be positive or negative, or “scrawny,” which is normally negative). A cousin of mine suggested that the use of the contraction “’s” is in error here. I responded to her that there is a difference between erroneous and informal, especially since the example might be intended to be spoken rather than written.

Equipment

Since the beginning of April I’ve been living nomadically full-time. Everything I’ve got I carry on my person from place to place when I’m on the move. I’ve gotten pretty fast at packing (twenty minutes when moving leisurely). My relationship with stuff has shown up several times in this blog, travelling (travelling, travelling) and in my Chicago apartment. There might be others; I’ll link them as I find them. The summary is that I find having stuff stressful and love to get rid of things. When I was in high school and using Reddit still, I loved r/minimalism and its associated websites. People would post manifests of all their posessions, or better yet, photos of everything they had. It seemed ideal to me to have such a life in a capsule; I think of all my stuff as the accessories that come with the Preston action figure. So here’s the current list; I’ll try to keep this updated over time, and add in stories and details about each of the items as I feel like it.

Yoga Training III

It’s the last weekend of the yoga teacher training: yesterday we talked about the business of yoga and marketing oneself; today and tomorrow we teach our public class as a group. My portion is the backbends at the end of the standing series and before final cooldowns.

Yoga Training II

I’ve been struggling to complete projects lately. I’ve got most of a memoir that I’m not able to finish because I left the hardest parts for last; I’ve got the first part of a sci-fi adventure in Esperanto I’m slowly moving forward on; I’ve been not really learning Sanskrit. Yesterday and today I’ve been playing with DJing, because I wanted to prepare some playlists for yoga classes. I’ve always got more photos to develop (digitally), and I just recovered my camera from Sacramento, so I can take more pictures. Avaryl Halley died two weeks ago, so I’ve been rewatching episodes of Movie Bitches because there are never going to be any more.

War and Peace

I just finished War and Peace, and I have notes.

COLM

I’m in the last moments of my first academic conference, COLM, the conference on language modeling. Since last fall I’ve been working with a lab at the University of Illinois that focuses on constrained generation. I wrote a paper about the relationship between byte-level tokenizers and UTF-8 that was accepted for a poster at this conference (tl;dr: Unicode is very a leaky abstraction that doesn’t play nice when you manipulate it at the byte level) and came here to present it in the poster session. I’ve met several heroes and colleagues and hopefully not humiliated myself too much. I’ve got some disparate observations I may find order for in the end, but for now I’ll write them out independently.

Yoga teacher training I

Last week I started a 200-hour Yoga teacher training course in San Francisco. It will last 10 weeks for an average of 20 hours a week, which is a part-time job as my friend Zach said to me. This training is an introduction to instructing yoga classes in the Vinyasa/Flow style, taught at the Yoga Flow group of studios in San Francisco, owned by Kathleen and Steve Holms. There are thirteen in the cohort.

Meddlin' in Medellín

Baby bear and label