Jason Doucette – Toronto Technologist

The shop is the work

Here is Adam Savage’s ecstastic tour of his recently redesigned shop in San Francisco — now home to the last fugitive scraps of the legendary ILM model shop.

You get the sense that for many of the mechanically-enthusiastic — the home drill press operators of the world — the shop IS the work. The artwork, almost. All the little projects, no matter how elaborate, are just excuses to keep the big one going.

Having spent several hours of a rapidly vanishing weekend rewiring my desk setup (and only ordering 4 new cables!) I can probably align with that on a smaller scale.

AI: Training data to get more training data

Ensign! Prepare the Venn diagram! On the left: “virtuous circle.” On the right: “ML training data.” And put Tesla in the middle.

In all honesty, I thought there’d be funny Venn diagrams easily available to fill the blank above after I wrote the intro sentence. Turns out there’s probably a Venn diagram in the works with the words “funny” and “Venn diagram” in two completely isolated circles.

OK, some terminology:

Webster’s dictionary describes (yes, I’m doing that thing!) a virtuous circle as “a chain of events in which one desirable occurrence leads to another which further promotes the first occurrence and so on resulting in a continuous process of improvement.” In business land it’s often mixed with a flywheel metaphor, often tied to Amazon’s practices.

ML training data, on the other hand, is a core concept in machine learning. These algorithms generally work best with lots of examples to build from, so the more examples you have, the more likely you are to be successful. Most ML courses have sections on how to boost your training data set by making small changes to existing data, like flipping a picture horizontally, etc.

Now the diagram reveal, courtesy of The Batch:

Engineers understood that AutoPilot was having trouble recognizing occluded stop signs because, among other things, the bounding boxes around them flickered. Using images from the existing dataset, they trained a model to detect occluded stop signs. They sent this model to the fleet with instructions to send back similar images. This gave them tens of thousands of new examples.

Obviously it helps to have a fleet of networked cars out there that can roam the earth, but this particular feedback loop has haunted my imagination for a week or so now, not so much from a “good going, Tesla” view as much as the implications of mobile networked cameras and incentives. What happens when this gets linked into navigation software? Will minor deviations to optimize for data collection start to be a thing? Will Tesla owners start a side hustle running Uber Data runs? How fast could maps, street view, etc shift if it turned out Waze was only the bottom left edge of the hockey stick?

Escaping for the summer

Buckingham Palace has an escape room. Closer to home, so does The Diefenbunker, which is a venue worthy of a post on its own. And a visit.

The Elder Boy has been talking about doing another escape room soon, despite the fact that the one he did nine months back scared him (it wasn’t zombie- or post-apocalyptic-themed, it was set in a horse stable, and the sound of horses neighing without the site of an actual horse apparently got weird for him. Again, 9 months ago, which is a significant percentage of his time on this planet.)

Unfortunately, the best window for him to do one, e.g. the time period where the family escape expert is in town, happens to coincide with his first week of overnight summer camp. Which I’m sure will be awesome and take his mind completely off of the topic.

Or will it? Apparently escape room summer camps are a thing now, because in the age of the internet, everything is or will soon be a thing. I don’t think his camp will have one, but hear me out, because in the “will soon be a thing” vein I can see something like the following happening soon, somewhere:

Hacker camp. Take your basic learn to code curriculum, wrap it in some kind of spy theme, and then put escape room elements in the dorm rooms. Of course, when one thinks “camp” one thinks cabins, and this kind of setting (the setting is key, I think) would work best in an urban area, which could take away the whole sleepover aspect (though for the right camp, I assume people would come from miles around.)

But the setting! Getting the right environment is key, and it always has been, but maybe more so in recent years. Without getting all “when I was a boy,” I can’t help but feel that our imaginations got more of a workout back in the day. There just wasn’t as much media out there to consume, and what there was had to be physically brought in from a library or book store. I used to binge on Tom Swift (Junior) novels, not because they were new, but because they were the closest thing to the world I wanted to be in.

It wouldn’t take much back then to create an ambiance that our brains could fill in with details. A “control panel” with two switches, a dial, and a light would have been enough to launch a rocket to Mars. Today, I’m not so sure, because the vision in your head has been replaced by the vision provided by umpteen movies and episodes, but on the flip side, the parts to make something really cool are so much cheaper and more available, so maybe there’s a balance to be had.

Still, when I hang back in the room and quietly watch the boys create an epic space battle with whatever bits of plastic and metal happen to be around the blast area of the toy chest, I have hope. They’re going to be in charge of inventing the future, and with any luck the raw materials they ingest today are going to make for richer dreams to come.

(Image via thevaultoftheatomicspaceage)

The Dungeons & Dragons 80’s cartoon gets a live action… something

I have no idea what the story is behind this, and I’m sure it’s available, but I’d rather keep the one that’s in my head, which is related to a possible future of advertising: give a production company a bunch of money, a few simple guidelines like “show the damned product, maybe being used,” and get a spot that you can use online.

In this case (spoilers!) it’s a car company, and since you really only get one shot at this, I’m hoping this means the director fulfilled a childhood dream:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmCTtom62HM

Telling ten year old me that this would be A Thing would’ve been a tough sell, but mostly the “and you’ll watch it on something called an iPad, which is kind of a glass clipboard that doesn’t have any wires coming out of it?” part.

Fun fact: while not so much “researching” as nostalgically procrastinating, I found an archived history post by Mark Evanier, who developed the show:

The kids were all heroic — all but a semi-heroic member of their troupe named Eric. Eric was a whiner, a complainer, a guy who didn’t like to go along with whatever the others wanted to do. Usually, he would grudgingly agree to participate, and it would always turn out well, and Eric would be glad he joined in. He was the one thing I really didn’t like about the show.

So why, you may wonder, did I leave him in there? Answer: I had to.

…Consultants were brought in and we, the folks who were writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain “pro-social” morals in our shows. At the time, the dominant “pro-social” moral was as follows: The group is always right…the complainer is always wrong.

This was the message of way too many eighties’ cartoon shows. If all your friends want to go get pizza and you want a burger, you should bow to the will of the majority and go get pizza with them. There was even a show for one season on CBS called The Get-Along Gang, which was dedicated unabashedly to this principle. Each week, whichever member of the gang didn’t get along with the gang learned the error of his or her ways.

We were forced to insert this “lesson” in D & D, which is why Eric was always saying, “I don’t want to do that” and paying for his social recalcitrance. I thought it was forced and repetitive, but I especially objected to the lesson. I don’t believe you should always go along with the group.

…What a stupid thing to teach children.

Anyway, the commercial people skipped that part, and nailed the rest:

On Quinjet privileges in New York City

Reading a reddit comment about helicopter rooftop landings being banned in NYC, apparently following a 1977 accident at the former PanAm building in which 5 people were killed (4 on the rooftop, one on the ground,) my immediate (and frankly, obvious) reaction was “ha, not even the Avengers can land in New York.”

But I didn’t have the details to back up the claim until an awful lot of Googling, so I share them with you now.

First, the Avengers’ jet of choice is called a Quinjet, which you might (?) recognize here:

But probably are more familiar with here from the movies:

These things used to take off from the third floor of Avengers Mansion (I think part of the wall would flip down) but in 1985 the FAA revoked their privileges, as seen in Avengers 261. So they got 8 more years than the non-super people did in their helicopters, though this change wasn’t due to an accident as much as blowback from an overall loss of security clearance, I think because the Vision tried to take over the world a few months before.

The Mighty Avengers had to trek over to something called Hydrobase (which at one point was the HQ of the evil Doctor Hydra because comics) to launch from that point onwards. Well, “for a time,” anyway, according to everything I read. But when did they get their flight capabilities restored?

As near as I can tell, it was around 1991 or maybe 1992. Around that time, the Avengers got a charter from the UN (as seen in Avengers 329) which presumably came with some power. They also just finished rebuilding Avengers Mansion, which had been badly damaged or destroyed a while back in a, uh, final battle.

While I didn’t find any direct references to Quinjets around this time, there’s a mention in 1992’s classic (?) New Warriors 22 where the New Warriors plan to steal one from the Avengers’ headquarters. So my best guess is the UN charter combined with a new mansion (and maybe a short memory on the constantly changing creative team around that era) led to a restoration of flight privileges. I’m going with that anyway.

Siri totally should have been able to answer this for me.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner: pick two

To be fair, I don’t know if they even serve dinner. Though maybe it’s a super-cool secret menu. If I owned a restaurant* I’d have a secret menu where you could order any item burned to a crisp, which would be extra funny because it’d be a raw foods place.

* Fun fact: I once wanted to open a juice bar called “Freshly Porn” but it turns out that a funny name isn’t a 1:1 replacement for a business plan. Though I suppose I could focus this so-called-by-me talent into a gig as a branding specialist for other companies with actual plans, but I suspect I’d save the really hilarious ones for myself, or at least that’d be my excuse for having zero sales of zingers like, uh, “Freshly Porn.” (Yeah, like I’m going to give away all my best ones in this post!)

Mercator puzzle

Kudos to the creators of the Mercator puzzle for putting this together. And double plus thank you for not putting a timer on it. The last one (for me, your last one will possibly vary) had me dragging the country all over the place and suspecting the whole thing was just a prank with an impossible piece in the batch.

1982

I’m watching the trailer for Pixels, because Angela says it was shot in Toronto and there are recognizable landmarks. There are (it’s possible the entire film was shot on University Avenue) but that’s not what grabs me. It’s these three frames:

And I am momentarily confused. Does it seem horribly backwards that we sent human beings into outer space before we invented Donkey Kong?

It’s the following night. I’m watching the first episode of Halt and Catch Fire, because Angela had to go help our youngest fall asleep and I wanted to save Daredevil for the both of us. The show is set in 1983, but 1982 is still on my mind. It’s mostly laughable technology references (ahem desoldering a chip and then pulling it out of a socket) but there’s line near the beginning that catches my booze-addled mind:

Joe: Now tell me one thing that will be true about computers ten years from now.

Cameron: Computers will be connected across one network with a standard protocol.

I had been prepping myself for some crazy too-fast or too-slow answer, but wait a minute, it really was only about ten years from the mass release of the PC to the introduction of the world wide web. It only seemed like much longer to my then-teenaged self because, perhaps, I was a teenaged self.

It is 2015. More than 40 years since the moon, more than 30 years since Donkey Kong, more than 20 since the web. Almost 10 since the iPhone, if we’re picking random technological milestones, so another one should be coming soon, but it’ll take until I’m at least 50 for me to see it or at least decide what it is, apparently.

In the meantime, I build robots with my four year old son and wonder if he will tackle the hard problems that I never noticed until they were solved.

Aquaman is a jerk

OK, so this came out this week – the teaser image of Aquaman from the upcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice movie:

I’m told the actor’s from that Thrones show or something. It’s possibly he’s really tall. I think that show has a really short guy in it too. Is that diversity? I haven’t seen it, because I’m too busy keeping track of other pop culture, mostly in the form of really bad movies that I know nobody in my house will want to watch so I can enjoy things on my own weird schedule.

ANYWAY.

I guess it’s exciting? Aquaman gets a lot of flack for being relatively useless (he can swim and talk to fish, blah blah) but as with all things it comes down to how he’s written. And do you know how he’s written?

As a total jerk. Observe:

Yeah, that’s Aquaman using his fish mind-control powers to bring all the fish into a cove, and then he’s telling some fishermen to go there and kill them all. And it’s not a trap for the fishermen, and you can see even they’re like, “dude, what the hell?” because they’ve got that “!?” at the end of their sentence.

Nobody thinks a lot about what Atlanteans eat, but part of me always assumed they’d be more into mosses and stuff. OK, maybe not everyone, but mathematically speaking, I figured Aquaman wouldn’t be eating fish, because if I ate fish and had the ability to tell them what to do, I’d be sitting on my aqua-couch all day with food just floating into my mouth. I’d have a massive aqua-gut pretty quickly, is what I’m saying, and while Aquaman’s design varies, as you can see from the movie picture it tends towards the other side of the BMI continuum.

Now, DC has a pretty horrible track record with movie sequels where they try to put more and more characters in it, and we’re seeing the same thing happening with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, where it started as a Superman sequel, and then they added Batman right there in the title, and there are reports of Wonder Woman and Cyborg and Aquaman and who knows who else getting some screen time, so unless it’s 47 hours long there probably isn’t going to be enough time for a lengthy Aquaman dietary subplot, but I’d like to see at least a little bit where his secret identity is as a sushi chef. A really, really big jerk of a sushi chef.

Metric, schmetric

From a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article – whoever came up with the metric system is kicking himself for not thinking of the soda cans and babies system.