Transcript from 507: Turn Our Data Into Predators with Christopher White and Elecia White.

Hello and welcome to Embedded. I am Elecia White, here with Christopher White. This week it is just us, so I am going to get started right away.

(00:00:17):

When we left Winnie the Pooh, I do not remember what he was doing. But Roo was in Rabbit's possession, having been kidnapped, so that Kanga would leave the Hundred Acre Wood. And Kanga had Piglet pretending she did not recognize him. She was making him do horrible things with the full confidence, the faith, that Christopher Robin would not allow anything bad to happen in his kingdom. Okay. Are you ready?

CW (00:00:58):

Sure.

EW (00:00:59):

Shall I just go ahead and read?

CW (00:01:00):

I guess so.

EW (00:01:02):

Do you have other things you want to talk about?

CW (00:01:04):

No. This is fine.

EW (00:01:05):

Okay, then. Oh! I was thinking about starting a new podcast.

CW (00:01:09):

Okay.

EW (00:01:10):

I gave you some-

CW (00:01:11):

Because <laugh> we are doing so well at this one.

EW (00:01:15):

I gave you some suggestions. Did you think about them?

CW (00:01:20):

I did not think about them, except I do not think we should do the podcast about pizza. Because I do not think that is more than three episodes.

EW (00:01:27):

I think we could drag out, "Pineapple or not?" for several episodes.

CW (00:01:33):

I do not think interviewing-

EW (00:01:34):

That should actually be a lightning round question.

CW (00:01:35):

I do not think interviewing people's pets is really a good idea. Because it is hard enough to interview human guests and maintain conversation all the time.

EW (00:01:46):

But the editing you did on that cat podcast was so good. I listened to it recently, and I just once again basically fell over laughing.

CW (00:01:55):

And nobody wants to hear a weekly compilation of my drum practice.

EW (00:02:00):

Does not your drum teacher have to listen to that?

CW (00:02:02):

Yeah. That is not a podcast.

EW (00:02:05):

All right, then.

CW (00:02:07):

Do you actually want to discuss this? Or a set up for a joke?

EW (00:02:13):

<laugh> We did talk about...

CW (00:02:16):

You had "Sleepy Time Science."

EW (00:02:18):

Right.

CW (00:02:18):

Uh-huh.

EW (00:02:18):

Right.

CW (00:02:21):

Okay. Listeners- I have done some research on this. It is very difficult. So, two things. You discussed doing a completely separate podcast, which is fine. That is easy. "Sleepy Time Science," where you would read science stories or something, in a soothing sleepy time voice, for people to nod off to.

EW (00:02:45):

Because one of our listeners said that his wife cannot listen to-

CW (00:02:47):

The periodic table of elements. Yeah. Uh-huh.

EW (00:02:49):

The show.

CW (00:02:49):

You might as well lean into that.

EW (00:02:50):

In the car, because she falls asleep, because I talk about nonsense and my voice is soothing. So let us just lean into that.

CW (00:02:56):

So if we get a thousand people to respond saying they want to do that, we should definitely do that. So write in people listening. I know there are more than a thousand of you. So <laugh> if you want "Sleepy Time Science," let us know.

EW (00:03:11):

I would not read the periodic table.

CW (00:03:13):

I know. No, it would be good stuff. It would be good stuff.

EW (00:03:14):

I would modify things from Wikipedia, and talk about-

CW (00:03:18):

There are plenty of open source or public domain science books that are pretty good. I have got one up there from the 1850s, with a flower pressed in it.

EW (00:03:28):

But yeah, it would be sciencey stuff, 20 minutes, me being soothing. Plus five minutes of, "Take a deep breath. Feel your toes."

CW (00:03:40):

There is some effort involved in producing a podcast.

EW (00:03:42):

Oh, my goodness.

CW (00:03:42):

So I would want somebody to say, not a thousand necessarily, but more than five people to say, "Yes. Please do this."

EW (00:03:49):

And it would be separate.

CW (00:03:50):

Yeah. It would be separate.

EW (00:03:53):

I do not think- The sleepy time podcasts that have ads are just- I do not listen to them. They are too irritating.

CW (00:04:00):

I do not think we would have ads on a Sleepy Time Podcast.

EW (00:04:01):

But it would be Patreon. It would be only one or two was available for public listening. You would have to join to get access to all of them.

CW (00:04:11):

So along those lines- That is one idea. The other idea is if people are interested- We have gone back to a biweekly schedule.

EW (00:04:20):

Yes.

CW (00:04:20):

Other podcasts have memberships. Now I know some people support us on Patreon, which we really appreciate.

EW (00:04:29):

Which we really appreciate.

CW (00:04:29):

They do not really get anything extra, except giving us their dollars. But what if-

EW (00:04:35):

Well, they get the Slack, although-

CW (00:04:38):

The Slack, yeah. The Slack is good.

EW (00:04:39):

You only have to pay a buck to get the Slack. You do not have to be an ongoing member.

CW (00:04:43):

There are some other podcasts that do subscription memberships, like Patreon. Where if you give them your $5 a month, they give you some member special stuff. So they have a special podcast every month, and they have podcasts without ads.

EW (00:05:00):

But the special podcasts are usually not topical.

CW (00:05:02):

Right. The special podcasts-

EW (00:05:04):

Although some of these are things that are not very topical either.

CW (00:05:05):

So for example, for our podcast, we might do a tier ranking of microcontrollers. And have a guest come on, and the three of us would rank our favorite microcontrollers. We would have a set list that we were going to go through. Then we would all talk about them and rank them. That is totally copying this other podcast's idea, but they did not trademark it.

EW (00:05:26):

It is kind of topical.

CW (00:05:27):

Th did not trademark it.

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Movies. We could have a guest on. We could all watch a movie. Not on the podcast, but watch it before the podcast, and then talk through it. Like, something embedded related, some sci-fi movie-

EW (00:05:39):

"Sneakers."

CW (00:05:40):

Or "Sneakers," which we just watched.

EW (00:05:41):

<laugh>

CW (00:05:41):

Things like that. And then there is stuff that is way off in the left field. But once a month we might do something like that. Have an extra guest, and have a less- An out of bound podcast, that is not necessarily educational or a part of our normal interview schedule. Just something fun that people who subscribed monthly would get every month. So that is another thing I am trying to gauge interest on.

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I did mention the ads. A lot of those other podcasts have, if you are a member, you get an ad free stream of the existing podcast. That is rather difficult to manage, without doing everything through Patreon.

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Apple has its podcast subscription stuff, which we could do. But that requires everyone who is interested in subscribing and getting the benefits, to use Apple Podcasts, which I do not want to make anybody do. I do not even do that.

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We can do it through Patreon, but that would mean you would have to get your extra stuff ad free or member specials through Patreon. But there is not a really other central way to like, "Okay. Here is your special RSS feed, person who pays us." I looked. I did some research.

(00:07:07):

Libsyn, which is our podcasting host, used to have something like that, but it does not seem to exist anymore. They push people toward the Apple subscriptions, which I do not think is a very viable option.

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Anyway, if you would be interested, if that is something that sounds good to you, let me know. If you were willing to do it all through Patreon, we might be able to do Patreon and Ko-fi somehow, but that would pretty much be it, without building my own CMS.

(00:07:34):

That is what the people on the other podcasts do. They have their own CMS. They manage all the subscriptions themselves. They can generate private RSS feeds for every member. And that is just something I am not doing.

EW (00:07:44):

Oh! No. No.

CW (00:07:47):

Yeah. So there is some stuff we are thinking about, expanding the podcast a little bit, and giving Patreon and Ko-fi members something extra. But it would require a little bit of effort to get the extra things out of Patreon and Ko-fi. I think there is a way to get a Patreon RSS feed.

EW (00:08:07):

Yes. Definitely.

CW (00:08:08):

That might be something that people could do. I know everybody is not in love with Patreon. Guess what? Nobody is in love with-

EW (00:08:14):

We do not have a better option.

CW (00:08:15):

Nobody is in love with anything on the internet. <laugh> If somebody wants to write me a CMS and maintain it for free, then we can talk. So yeah. Does that cover all the stuff on the extra podcast?

EW (00:08:32):

Yeah. Yeah.

CW (00:08:32):

Okay.

EW (00:08:34):

I do not really know how it would work.

CW (00:08:37):

Just gauging interest.

EW (00:08:38):

Yeah.

CW (00:08:39):

Yeah.

EW (00:08:42):

Since Chris is not doing as much technical work, I figured I would just burden him with more audio work. Do you like-

CW (00:08:49):

Work? No.

EW (00:08:55):

<laugh> Do you enjoy the podcast process and editing and posting, more than you enjoy doing contract work?

CW (00:09:06):

No. But it is easy. It is not a challenging thought process task. It is something I can do for a couple of hours, that I know how to do, and it is always going to work.

EW (00:09:23):

And when you are done, you are usually done.

CW (00:09:24):

I am done. Yeah. It is like a household chore. Sometimes those are not enjoyable, but at its best, technical work is way more fun. <laugh>

EW (00:09:38):

But at its worst-

CW (00:09:40):

But at its worst-

EW (00:09:40):

It keeps you up at night.

CW (00:09:41):

Yeah.

EW (00:09:41):

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(00:10:02):

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But you have been trying to do a lot outside of technical.

CW (00:10:37):

Yeah-

EW (00:10:38):

Well, when we say "technical," it is kind of weird, because you are taking-

CW (00:10:41):

Paid technical work.

EW (00:10:42):

All right. We will do that.

CW (00:10:44):

Yeah. I am doing too much. Okay. At the risk of this being a therapy session, I have competing problems with myself. One is that I do not like to work that much. There are times when I enjoy work. But it is like the 15 minutes of excitement, followed- And eight minutes of sheer boredom and stuff. Or frustration. Anyway, it is fine.

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But if I am not working, if I am not busy, I have other problems. <laugh> I get a little weird. I have been trying to fight that, while not having too much contract work, by filling my day with more stuff, and trying to learn more things. And so I have piled up way too many things.

EW (00:11:30):

Well, you had an intensive drum course, but you have finished with that.

CW (00:11:31):

An intensive drum course.

EW (00:11:32):

But now you have a medium intensive-

CW (00:11:33):

Sort of finished with that, but I am- Yeah, so that is over. But I need to actually do music now, instead of practicing like crazy. I have a backlog of songs to work on, for this record that someday will come out.

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I added the Dogbotic course. I took the Dogbotic drum machine course, which I want to talk about at length, separately from this topic. I am doing some electronics. I still have a client-

EW (00:12:02):

And they came back this week and said, "Oops!"

CW (00:12:03):

They are doing field testing. In the last two weeks I have been doing more stuff for them.

(00:12:05):

I am trying to relearn French. I have a stack of French books, and I have been going through Duolingo, which is not great, but it is keeping me- It is getting those cobwebs dusted off my French knowledge.

(00:12:19):

I am trying to read. I am trying to keep up with the house. I am trying to- Yeah. It is just a lot of- I am forgetting a bunch of things. I do want to learn Python better and stuff. And I keep thinking, "Oh, well. Maybe I will write a video game, or screw around with that." Or-

(00:12:38):

Anyway. I have piled on too many things I am trying to learn at once. I have created a situation where I am like, "Oh, if I am not doing all those things every day, or not keeping up, then I am feeling like I am behind on stuff, that I am just completely inventing for myself." So I am trying to whittle it down to, "Let us try to do two or three things a week, as the main focus. And not eight."

(00:13:05):

Yeah, because I have got other projects that are in the garage that I want to finish. And I am not playing guitar. And it is like, "There are too many things I want to learn." It is hard, because it is a weird midlife crisis thing. It is like, "Arh! I am over 50, and I have not learned everything I want to learn. And I want to be good at everything." Which is all stupid.

(00:13:25):

But long story short, I have added too many things to do, and it is too much. It is too much for me. Not from my I cannot do it all perspective, but I cannot do it all justice. And if I do not do it all justice, I feel like I am failing somehow.

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So it is the 12 projects- One project or 12 projects thing. Except it is not really projects, it is 12- It is like I want to go back to college and take 16 classes at once, which is as the advisor kept telling me, "You cannot do that. Please drop some classes." And I was like, "But I am only failing two!"

EW (00:14:04):

<laugh>

CW (00:14:04):

Anyway.

EW (00:14:08):

Well, I should point out that many of these things are not projects. Learning French is not a project.

CW (00:14:14):

Right. Right. No. It is whatever. And even music is not a project. That is just something I do.

EW (00:14:20):

Even your album. It is a project, but it is a super long project.

CW (00:14:26):

Right.

EW (00:14:26):

Each song-

CW (00:14:26):

Should be shorter. <laugh>

EW (00:14:27):

Is a project. And that does not count the intense drum instruction you have been doing. Learning electronics. Yes, the Dogbotic's course is a series of projects. But learning electronics is not a project. It is a lifetime of wondering why you misplaced that wire again.

CW (00:14:52):

Yeah. Well. We can talk about that separately. <laugh>

EW (00:14:56):

So you have been on kind of a sabbatical, although you keep getting interrupted.

CW (00:15:01):

Okay. Yeah.

EW (00:15:04):

I was hoping the sabbatical would be, "Where do we want to take the podcast?" and, "What do you want to do with your time? What makes you happy? Because if you are not happy, then you might as well be working, because then you are happy and have money." The look I am getting right now, just indicates to me I have done this all horribly wrong.

CW (00:15:29):

That is okay. Continue.

EW (00:15:32):

I do not-

CW (00:15:32):

First of all-

EW (00:15:34):

I do not know that I came into it with the right attitude.

CW (00:15:37):

First of all, to stipulate, I think I am learning that my happiness is not necessarily a hundred percent tied to whether or not I am working. I think I would be more unhappy if I was working full-time, than I am right now. Just to stick the level set of-

EW (00:15:58):

Yes.

CW (00:15:58):

Okay. Continue.

EW (00:16:01):

But it is also interesting that you have put so much burden on yourself, that in some ways, even without working full-time, you are not joyfully skipping through life.

CW (00:16:14):

I do not do that. That is not me. I cannot sit down and play "No Man's Sky" for eight hours a day, as much as I want to do that. Because it is like eating pizza and ice cream for every meal. It sounds great until you do it. For me.

(00:16:33):

It would be great for a couple of days to do that. And then at third day I would be like, "Wow! I have done nothing." This is something I am discussing in other contexts, is this feeling of needing to do things. Maybe that is my failing.

EW (00:16:49):

Needing to do things, needing to learn things, or needing to accomplish them.

CW (00:16:53):

Those are all subtly different aspects of the same thing. But I cast it as needing to learn things. But how do you decide if you have learned something? It is whether you can accomplish something with it.

EW (00:17:04):

You pass the final at the end of the class.

CW (00:17:06):

Yeah. Well, they do not have those for me anymore.

EW (00:17:08):

I know. Is it not weird that it is kind of sad that we miss finals? I mean, it is weird to miss finals.

CW (00:17:15):

Miss finals.

EW (00:17:16):

Oh. Sorry. Just me.

CW (00:17:19):

I have still have horrible memories of trudging up to the eighth floor of the library with my six hour take home final, and sitting there and not moving for six hours, while trying to answer complex analysis questions. I do not want to do that again.

(00:17:34):

Or my favorite at the grad school finals. It started out as a 50 minute in class. And then when it was clear that nobody in the class had gotten past the first of eight questions, the professor says, "Well, it is now a 24 hour take home. See you tomorrow."

EW (00:17:50):

That is no good.

CW (00:17:53):

Hard to judge how hard tests are, especially at that level. But anyway, you were going somewhere with this?

EW (00:18:03):

There is seldom a, "I am done."

CW (00:18:05):

No. There should not be.

EW (00:18:06):

That was one of the things talking to Dmitry recently was nice, is that he had, "I am done," posts. I so seldom actually have those. Even with clients, it is not always a, "Okay. We have shipped it." There is always a little bit of trickle.

CW (00:18:25):

No. The only done I ever feel with companies or clients is when I quit. No, and that is not a joke. Like, "Yep. I am done. This project is done, because they are not paying me anymore, and I do not talk to them. That is it. I do not have to think about it anymore." Any other situation is there is always something that could happen to your product, the thing you have worked on, that could require you to work on it. Right? And that is always true.

(00:18:49):

Full-time companies, it is like, "Well. Something could still go wrong. We shipped that. But now I am in support mode. Okay, I am in support mode, and I am working on the next thing. Okay, I am supporting the next thing." It is that roller coaster of never- The reward for a job well done, is always another job.

(00:19:05):

I do not know. I am slowly edging into something that looks like retirement, and I do not know what that looks like for me. So I am trying to figure that out. But we can talk about- Are you trying to help me solve my problem? <laugh>

EW (00:19:23):

No.

CW (00:19:23):

Okay.

EW (00:19:24):

Explore it.

CW (00:19:24):

Yeah.

EW (00:19:24):

Yeah. I do not think there is a solve. I do not know that there is a problem.

CW (00:19:35):

One thing I have been trying to do, which is- I think to some extent my brain is addicted to information. And it does not matter what information it is. I can fill it with garbage. I can fill it with reading a book. I can fill it with working on a project, or doing music or stuff. But it always seems to be I need some kind of input into my eyes or my ears or something. Go for a walk, I will put a podcast on.

(00:20:04):

What I have been trying to do in the last few weeks, is not do that for at least a few minutes a day, and have zero come into my head. Doing that is very surprising, because it just reminds me how often I have something in front of my face. A book or a game or something in my ears or something I am doing. I so rarely give my brain a break to not be shouted at.

(00:20:35):

It was really good, because a few of the times thoughts started coming into my head! Those things that come out of your brain with words and pictures, that are not coming from the outside. It was weird. So musical ideas just came up, after I sat and did not do anything for a while. This is not meditation, necessarily. It could be meditation, but those are distracting during meditation. But just sitting outside and staring at the trees for 15 minutes, with nothing near me that is giving me any words or stuff.

(00:21:13):

I think I need to give my brain a break more often than I do. A real break. Not so that it is not doing anything, so that I can actually see what all the stuff I have been putting into it, maybe comes together into.

EW (00:21:30):

I think, and do not take this as a...

CW (00:21:35):

Already have.

EW (00:21:36):

Right. Okay. I think daydreaming is super important. What do you mean, you do not daydream all the time? <laugh>

CW (00:21:42):

Do you?

EW (00:21:43):

Oh yeah.

CW (00:21:44):

Okay.

EW (00:21:47):

Sometimes it is outside. Clouds always play a part for me if I am outside. Being at the beach, without the little dog, is usually some element of daydream.

CW (00:22:04):

But how often do you not have origami or a book or a podcast?

EW (00:22:10):

I think more often than you think. Because I will have my headphones in my ears, but I will not be listening to them. I do often have a book. But sometimes I will have a book, and I will unfocus and daydream.

CW (00:22:26):

Anyway. I am trying to experiment with doing nothing.

EW (00:22:30):

Daydreamers anonymous.

CW (00:22:32):

No, it is not even daydreaming necessarily. I mean, it gets daydreaming, but it makes it sound- No, that is good. That is a good word for it. That is totally fine.

EW (00:22:44):

No. But there are probably more official sounding...

CW (00:22:50):

No, it does not need to be official. Yeah, it is fine.

EW (00:22:53):

Less obviously-

CW (00:22:54):

Just letting your brain-

EW (00:22:55):

I am intentionally floating...

CW (00:22:57):

Just letting your brain do its thing, without trying to stuff more into it. Yeah. Which if daydreaming is what is happening, then that is good. So the title of this section was, "Burnout." I thought I was doing better, until some work came up. It was some support work, remote support work.

EW (00:23:22):

And it was not actually a lot.

CW (00:23:24):

It was not a lot, but it was stressful because the stuff I-

EW (00:23:27):

It needed to be done.

CW (00:23:27):

Had worked on, was not working. And it is very difficult to support. So it was not so much that it was a lot of work, it was just I got super stressed about it. I am still kind of stressed about it.

EW (00:23:38):

There was a time aspect. People were waiting on you.

CW (00:23:40):

There is still a time aspect. This is ongoing. <laugh> It is not over.

EW (00:23:44):

Well your part is for now, until they tell you the next bit.

CW (00:23:47):

Yeah. I dealt with that more poorly than- It is not I am overworked. It is not, "Oh, I had to work a lot." It is not, "Oh, I had to work two hours. What a baby." It is I just am having still emotional reactions to work, and connection to projects that is not super healthy.

EW (00:24:09):

Whereas I took on more work, even though I was fully loaded. I am an idiot!

CW (00:24:18):

You are not an idiot. <laugh>

EW (00:24:18):

Past client came and needed some help. Their timeframe is pretty big, so I am squishing in what I can. But I visited the client site, and remembered why I love this client. It is just- I go there and the-

(00:24:38):

I did not participate in the lunchtime conversations, because I was off to my side and what I was eating was- I did not really have lunch. I had a snack that I was pretending was lunch, and I did not want anybody to comment on my food. I was being weird. I was being very awkward. And yet I was eavesdropping.

(00:24:59):

There were some people and they were talking about camera traps. I wanted to go and talk to them. Talk about what they knew, and what I had learned from Meredith and Akiba. Then they were talking some about sampling. I wanted to go over and talk about this compressed sensing that I had been reading about. I just wanted- And then that group left.

(00:25:22):

Another one came in, and they were talking about science communications, and I wanted to ask so many questions. Man! I just nerded out for the half an hour I was there to eat my lunch. It was so fun. The rest of the day was actually really fun too.

(00:25:38):

I do not get to spend a lot of time on this client, but I am glad that as long as I am going to accept a little bit of overwork, then I am going to be doing it with people I really like. So. That was fun.

(00:25:49):

I did not really mean to take on more work, but I do not have any mentoring clients right now, so that is probably going to fill things out. But I am also trying to make sure that I do not work too much. Definitely the number of steps I got yesterday as I was mind melded with my computer, indicated I needed to move around a bit more.

(00:26:10):

But then after I worked, I conned Christopher into going to the beach for a walk. I think he thought we were just going to go and take a short walk. But I took the dog. The dog and I went off and played and ran around and generally got our fidgets out. Chris was just there in shorts and a T-shirt shiver. It was very sad.

CW (00:26:32):

It was cold! It was like eight o'clock!

EW (00:26:36):

Did you know where we were going when we left the house?

CW (00:26:38):

It was 80 in the house when we left, so I was not aware that the beach would be cold.

EW (00:26:45):

<laugh> Really?

CW (00:26:46):

Yeah, really!

EW (00:26:48):

Anyway. You had a jacket.

CW (00:26:50):

I had the emergency puffy jacket.

EW (00:26:53):

So embarrassing to wear the puffy jacket. So, yeah. Working too much, which is why I have not read the chapters for the technical book club. But I have to do that really soon. I am enjoying the technical book club.

CW (00:27:09):

Do you want to talk about that?

EW (00:27:10):

Yeah. On Patreon, we have the book club channel. We are reading "Data-Driven Science and Engineering: Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control" by Steven Brunton and Nathan Kutz. We are, oh, I think we are in chapter four. We are about to finish chapter four. Yeah. Regression and model selection.

(00:27:35):

It has been interesting. There have been a couple of mind-bending pieces that I did not really expect. Thinking of control systems, PID loops, motor control as data problems, like neural nets are a data problem.

CW (00:28:00):

What is a data problem?

EW (00:28:05):

You have a bunch of measurements which represent a system, that you do not really know all of the system. How do you make it so that in the future you can make determinations about this system you do not know all of, based on the measurements that you are reading?

(00:28:31):

So in machine learning, that would be you are going to get pictures, and you have a system that ideally tells you what the pictures are, that maps actual images to names. But you give it this new data, which hopefully will, if it is a tree frog, will tell you it is a tree frog. But you also know that there are imperfections in that.

(00:28:55):

In doing a motor control, you cannot model all the friction. You cannot model all the damping. You can model the static friction, but it is hard in your equations. Anyway, I really like that aspect of it. It is one of those things that just keeps coming up.

CW (00:29:24):

Is that not- Not to belittle it or dismiss it, but is that not partly because everything boils down to linear algebra at some point? <laugh>

EW (00:29:33):

Yes. Yes, that is true. It is a book that is a lot of linear algebra. In fact, one of the recent sections' heads, "I am going to show you six different ways to solve ax=b in MATLAB." It is like, "Okay. Is that really necessary?" But it turns out that there are different reasons for solving different things.

CW (00:30:01):

So this has been going on a while, and you have had a good group.

EW (00:30:05):

Yeah. Had a dozen. Few people have wandered off for vacation. But I have a couple who say they are coming on for one of the future chapters. We are doing about a half a chapter a week, which is about 15 to 20 pages.

CW (00:30:21):

What will you be able to do with having gone through this book? What is the average person in the book club looking to get out of it? Or, what are you looking to get out of it?

EW (00:30:30):

Okay, so <laugh> Tom mentioned the weekly book club meetups as, "Fancy Math Anonymous," which I thought was pretty funny. Because this is the fancy math that I was talking about before. This is being more comfortable in approaching things in an analytic method.

(00:30:49):

One of the things that I have gotten out of this, is the next time somebody hands me a machine learning regression model, I have the words to say, "It is really dumb that you have two of these things that are essentially the same, and they have different weights. It should choose one of them and use that. It should not randomly choose all."

(00:31:20):

And I have the words to talk about how important interpretability- How important it is to interpret the models. That they should not be black boxes. And that the regressions that give you a black box full of terms, are usually provably not as good as a model with fewer terms that are more specific. And I can suggest algorithms that will help make them more interpretable. Make them simpler.

CW (00:31:50):

Okay. Now is this mostly control systems focused? You mentioned PID and I think there were some other things like that.

EW (00:32:01):

No.

CW (00:32:01):

Okay. Because that is what you are working on for work. Were these two connected in any way?

EW (00:32:08):

Well, this is how the control systems and the data part are somehow interlinked, in ways I never considered.

CW (00:32:15):

Got it.

EW (00:32:17):

It is a lot of linear algebra. And it is linear algebra in a way I did not expect. Like- Okay, so you have x, y, z as a coordinate system.

CW (00:32:28):

Mm-hmm.

EW (00:32:29):

We have talked about normal vectors. If something is in x, y, z, [then] x, y and z are the normal vectors, the unit vectors.

CW (00:32:40):

Unit vectors. They are normal to each other.

EW (00:32:42):

They are normal to each other. So if you want to put something in space, you could put it in x, y, z. Then maybe that is in your person frame, and you have a car frame. You can translate between the car frame and your person frame with a rotation matrix.

CW (00:32:57):

We have already lost half of the audience.

EW (00:32:59):

Okay. Anyway. You can move things around in space, and you can describe how they are moved. That form of linear algebra is fine with me.

CW (00:33:10):

Okay.

EW (00:33:10):

What if, and hear me out here, instead of x, y, z, we use Fourier.

CW (00:33:22):

<laugh>

EW (00:33:22):

We use Fourier as unit vectors. Like one hertz, two hertz, three hertz, four hertz, as unit vectors. And we use DFTs- We use fast Fourier transforms to put our image or data or location into Fourier space, instead of 3D space. And treating Fourier as just another-

CW (00:33:51):

I tried to explain to you how cool this was 21 years ago, but now you finally agree.

EW (00:33:56):

I finally agree.

CW (00:33:57):

Spectral methods for solving DEs.

EW (00:34:01):

Yeah. We went through spectral methods for solving DEs. But also the idea of all of these different basis vectors.

CW (00:34:10):

Yep. Yep. And there are not just the Fourier ones. You can develop offshoots of Fourier ones.

EW (00:34:16):

You can invent your own.

CW (00:34:17):

You can invent your own, as long as they form a-

EW (00:34:20):

Orthonormal.

CW (00:34:22):

Orthonormal basis.

EW (00:34:23):

Basis. The book actually is headed towards- I mean we started with SVD.

CW (00:34:31):

Mm-hmm. Singular value decomposition.

EW (00:34:34):

Which is basically inventing your own basis. Inventing your own axes.

CW (00:34:40):

Right. Based on your system.

EW (00:34:42):

Based on your data.

CW (00:34:44):

Your data. Yeah.

EW (00:34:46):

You can now put new data in the basis of the old. Just like you could put a position in the car's frame, versus your own frame. And switching between frames, and all of that. This is, again, we are switching between a bunch of tools that I knew for data analysis, and we are applying them to complex systems.

CW (00:35:18):

I tricked you into liking physics. <laugh>

EW (00:35:21):

We are looking at data analysis, which I already knew was related to machine learning. That I understood. The regressions, all that, makes sense as far as machine learning. But now we are also applying them to this other systems thinking, which is just bonkers to me.

(00:35:37):

Oh! Oh! Will you talk about the bird PNG thing?

CW (00:35:41):

<laugh>

EW (00:35:46):

This is a separate video that Chris brought up, and it turned out-

CW (00:35:48):

I feel like you were going to hand me a dollar. Okay. Go!

EW (00:35:51):

And then it turned out that it had a whole bunch of stuff, that we talked about recently in the book club.

CW (00:35:55):

There is a YouTube video. I do not remember where I originally saw it. Maybe a few YouTube recommendations. But the YouTube thumbnail and the headline is, "I uploaded a PNG to a bird." It is very silly headline and thumbnail of course.

EW (00:36:11):

It looks pretty bad.

CW (00:36:11):

But it is actually a really good video from somebody who does- I do not know what they do. They do a lot of field audio stuff, it seemed like. That is their channel. And a lot with wildlife.

(00:36:23):

They talked about- Mostly the video was talking about recording birds, and looking at their bird song on spectrographs. And some of the anatomy of birds, and how they can produce multiple fundamental frequencies at once, not just- I mean, humans can sort of make more than one tone at once, but we only have-

EW (00:36:44):

The Gregorian chant.

CW (00:36:46):

It is all based on harmonics. We can-

EW (00:36:48):

That is normal voices are based on.

CW (00:36:49):

Based on normal voices based on harmonics. But birds have a couple of anatomical features, where they can produce two or three or four sound.

EW (00:36:55):

Chords.

CW (00:36:57):

If you like. Yes. Chords. So he was looking at that. He was talking about how they go up to ultrasound. So if you want to do real field work recording birds, you should get- There was some technical discussion of the equipment and stuff that you can get. But anyway.

EW (00:37:12):

AudioMoth.

CW (00:37:13):

He had this idea, since he had all this stuff, of playing back- He met up with this person who does animal rescue. They had a starling?

EW (00:37:22):

A starling. They are very- Learn all of the audio.

CW (00:37:27):

Yeah. Starlings like to learn and mimic sounds and things. He put just kind of a stick figure drawing of a bird in a spectrograph, and then he played that.

EW (00:37:40):

It sounded junky.

CW (00:37:44):

Basically since it was two lines, it was two fundamentals. They were sort of warbling as the outline of the bird continued. Whoo-ooh-oo-oo-er. Or whatever.

EW (00:37:52):

But it was two fundamentals.

CW (00:37:53):

Yeah. Because he had the bottom of the bird, and the top of the bird. And I think maybe there were some other parts of-

EW (00:37:58):

There were a couple other features.

CW (00:37:59):

Yeah. Long story short, he plays this to the starling, not expecting anything to happen, and nothing does happen for a while.

EW (00:38:05):

I mean, he wants something to happen.

CW (00:38:07):

He wants something to happen. But plays it to the starling, hoping it would mimic it and play it back, so that he could see the bird in the starling's spectrograph.

EW (00:38:15):

Mm-hmm.

CW (00:38:17):

I guess he decided it was not happening. They recorded a bunch of stuff with the starling after doing this, and did not sound like it was happening. But as he was reviewing it, there it was.

EW (00:38:28):

The bird was-

CW (00:38:29):

The picture of the bird was in the recording of the starling. So it had played it back.

EW (00:38:34):

He just had not identified it at the time.

CW (00:38:36):

And he did some other very specious data analysis, of how many bytes he uploaded to the starling. Which is just no. But it was pretty interesting. It was a strange idea, and it actually worked. I suppose you could put secrets into a starling, in some sort of encoding, if you wanted. It is hard to get it out on demand, I think. <laugh> So that leads into something?

EW (00:39:05):

It was just a really good video, that had a lot of different techniques put into it. It was not like you needed to understand the math and all of that, because he did a good job of hand waving over it. And yet it was really deeply technically interesting, the methods he used.

(00:39:24):

And he went through all of the hardware, and what he liked and what he did not like. And for 30 minutes it was packed full of pretty good information, from spectrograms, to frequencies, to starlings, to AudioMoth, and BirdNET-Pi.

CW (00:39:45):

And Merlin.

EW (00:39:47):

Merlin and databases.

CW (00:39:50):

They talked about how to set up a permanent field recorder in your yard, to just give you a listing of every bird it hears all the time.

EW (00:40:01):

And audio cameras, which are cameras that then find where the audio is coming from. Although that was a more expensive and difficult proposition. That somehow made it back into the book stuff, because it was relevant and cool.

(00:40:21):

One of the other things that went into the book stuff, from Hristo, one of the people there. He found in a book, "Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors," a resource called the Datasaurus dozen.

CW (00:40:40):

Mm-hmm. Data saurus dozen.

EW (00:40:42):

Data saurus dozen.

CW (00:40:43):

Like a dinosaur.

EW (00:40:44):

Like a dinosaur.

CW (00:40:44):

Uh-huh.

EW (00:40:47):

It is a dozen, obviously, small data sets. Really small. 40 samples each. But these different data sets, if you plot the x and y, they have different images. One of them is a dinosaur. One of them is a star. One of them is a circle. One of them is two circles. One of them is two parallel lines. Blah, blah, blah. All these different patterns that you see when you plot x, y.

(00:41:21):

But they all have the same means for x, same means for y, same standard deviation for x, same standard deviation for y, same correlation between x and y. Now these are our basic stat set. This is the stat set you start with. And yet they have these dozen sets of data that are obviously quite different, but have the same essential stats.

(00:41:52):

If you said, "Give me the essential stats," these would be the ones. The means and the standard deviations. And yet they lead to such different data, showing us that maybe our stats are limiting, and that plotting the data is always the right answer.

CW (00:42:11):

It is hard to see things as visual creatures, without looking at things from different perspectives. Whether it is transmitting it to a plot, or even making things audible like birds. <laugh> Or making things that are audible visual, like spectrographs. There is a reason we do all those things. It is because our brains are funny. We are designed to...

EW (00:42:36):

We are visual creatures.

CW (00:42:37):

Look for food and predators. So we have to turn our data into predators.

EW (00:42:44):

<laugh> And that is how you ended up with the datasaurus. The history of the Datasaurus dozen was cool too. There is a set of four, with some name that starts with "A", which I will put in the show notes.

(00:42:58):

But these dozen were found with simulated annealing. Starting with the dinosaur, and trying to find other things that had the same statistics, but were very different shapes. It is just amazing to me that they are not- I understand you could get a dinosaur, and then random set of data to match. But then you have the star and the circle. It is bonkers.

(00:43:32):

Let us see. One other thing that we did in book club, was looking at mathematical functions. This was again from Tom. He has a bunch of books, physical books, although some were online as well, that plot out functions.

(00:43:53):

I mean, okay, I kind of know. I know what a parabola is. Go me! And I know that there is an equation that makes a heart, because I am pretty sure that was one of EMSL's valentines.

CW (00:44:14):

Yep. The cardioid.

EW (00:44:14):

Cardioid. Sure. There are a few other functions that I know they exist, but I actually do not know what they are. But he had these books, multiple books. Multiple big books of curves and surfaces and the equations used to generate them.

(00:44:32):

I have to admit, I was looking at them like going, "I wonder if that could be applied to origami," because I get a little bored of some of my wave patterns. I am ready to level up on that, but my Python script is a little out of date right now anyway. Anyway. Anybody wants to change my Python script, so that it outputs Bézier curves instead of points, I am all in.

CW (00:45:02):

Now you should be able to do that now, doing all this fancy math.

EW (00:45:06):

Yeah. But every time I try to do it with one of the AI helpers, it goes very badly.

CW (00:45:15):

Huh!

EW (00:45:15):

<laugh>

CW (00:45:15):

Are you enjoying the book club? Do you think you will do another book? Should we say, "If you are interested in doing another book, join us and discuss what book to do next"?

EW (00:45:25):

Well, we are in chapter four, so when we get to chapter eight...

CW (00:45:30):

So it will be 2017? Wow. What year do I think it is?

EW (00:45:33):

I do not know.

CW (00:45:33):

Who cares? 2029?

EW (00:45:38):

Maybe 2026.

CW (00:45:38):

Okay. All right.

EW (00:45:39):

But yeah. Phil Koopman has a new book coming out about AI and safety. This one has been really good, because it was stuff- Going through the table of contents, it was mostly stuff I knew how to use. So even if I do not follow all the math, I am not really falling behind, because I know the next chapter a little bit.

CW (00:46:07):

Right. You know the outlines of where this is headed.

EW (00:46:10):

That is been really good. And then the support for this book, with the videos and their website, have just been fantastic. I do not know if I would be able to find a book as good as this. I would like to know a more deep Python.

CW (00:46:25):

You could go through "Nand to Tetris" with a bunch of people. Or something along those lines.

EW (00:46:33):

That one does not- I went all the way through "Nand to Tetris," so that one does not appeal to me. But yeah. Right now we have one book going, but there is no reason why we cannot have multiple books going, if people want different ones.

CW (00:46:47):

Yeah. Well, unless you want to run every session.

EW (00:46:51):

Oh, no. Somebody else has to be the lead on some other book. But I am enjoying this book. I would consider being lead on another book club choice. But I would also encourage someone else to- It does not take that much more time being the lead. The hard part is committing to actually doing it. And then coming up with jokes when nobody wants to say anything.

(00:47:13):

Okay. Sorry. That was really long. Do you want to talk about your Dogbotic course?

CW (00:47:22):

Sure. Do you think we have time? So yeah. As mentioned in my discussion of my continuing something, I am taking this Dogbotic's course. We had Kirk Pearson on the show a few months back, and they are the founder of Dogbotic.

(00:47:42):

This is a place we have mentioned before, has various workshops and things for electronics. And visual media, and audio media, and other things you can do. They are about eight weeks, a couple hours a week. They send you all the materials, and it is pretty cool.

(00:47:58):

I decided to take one of these, after getting re-energized by Kirk's episode, and getting their book. Yeah. <laugh> It is not an ad. They did not pay me. I did not even use our coupon to get a discount. I just paid for this myself. But I am really enjoying it.

(00:48:17):

The one I am taking is called "Do-It-Yourself Rhythm Widgets," I think. It is basically a drum- Making an analog drum machine from discrete parts. Well, and some ICs. But logic ICs. CMOS-

EW (00:48:31):

Through-hole ICs.

CW (00:48:32):

CMOS logic ICs, inverters, logic gates, phase lock loops and some op-amps and things. It is all breadboard based stuff. We are building oscillators to make different sounds. We are building different triggering systems, to make the sequence happen. Making a little mixer with an op-amp to put all the sounds together, so they can be- Adjust the volume.

(00:48:57):

So we are doing all that. It is very fun. It is very <laugh> hard, because some of the circuits are- I do not have a lot of experience doing slightly more complex circuits on breadboards, going from schematic to breadboards.

(00:49:13):

Some of the op-amp circuits have multiple low and high-pass filters and things that are big- Not big, but they are networks of capacitors and resistors that are all going to the same points. It is difficult for me to translate that to the Tetris that needs to happen on a breadboard.

EW (00:49:29):

The electronics of it.

CW (00:49:32):

Yeah. Not really learning the deep electronics. I am learning modular circuits that I can put together to do things. So I know how to make an oscillator with an inverter, and I kind of understand how that works with the electronics.

(00:49:46):

But the oscillator we make out of an op-amp that has two low and high-pass filters, I do not really understand what is going on there with the feedback and the op-amps. I have a vague idea of what the filters are doing, but I do not really have a deep understanding of the electronics there.

(00:50:04):

I still have some big holes in my electronics knowledge, for how things work and how current flows and things like that. But I am getting experience with it. I am building circuits. They are working. It is fun.

(00:50:15):

It is giving me directions to go look up other stuff. Like, "Oh. Now I know I need to learn more about op-amps. Here are some things to look up. Like, how does a Twin-T oscillator work?" And that will take me to, "Okay. That is too complicated. Well, how do a simpler oscillator with an op-amp work?" And then I can learn that, and move up.

EW (00:50:34):

Gives you curiosity.

CW (00:50:36):

Yeah. And playing with a simulator a little bit on Falstad, to try to build some of these circuits and see how they work. Well, that is not working that great on some of them, but. It has been fun. I highly recommend them. They are about $600 for eight weeks of instruction. That includes all the parts, which was a lot of parts.

EW (00:50:54):

The box was pretty big!

CW (00:50:58):

Yeah. I got tons of capacitors, resistors, a bunch of ICs, three breadboards, three small breadboards that you can gang together. Everything you really need to do all the projects for the course, at least on a breadboard. Plus a whole bunch of extra parts for experimentation.

EW (00:51:16):

It is two hours a week.

CW (00:51:16):

Yeah.

EW (00:51:16):

But you also have done some extra time outside, rebuilding things when you were not happy with them.

CW (00:51:22):

Yeah <sigh>. Yeah, well, the drum machine that we are building, got so complicated on the breadboards, that I actually bought a bigger breadboard and started rebuilding it. Because I ran out of space and everything was- I had flying wires everywhere. Jumpers.

EW (00:51:34):

Big ones, too.

CW (00:51:36):

I got some of those variable length breadboard wires, that are straight. That cleaned things up a lot. But I had- Basically I just, "Okay. Some of this works. But I cannot make it work the way it is now, because I cannot even see under the wires." It was such a rats nest. So breadboards are hard. But yeah, I dismantled all that and rebuilt it.

(00:51:55):

You do have to spend some time out of class, if you want to get the most out of it. Although it is a build-along course. He builds circuits, and you can do it in real time. He explains as he goes. A lot of the first- At least for the first few weeks, it was like, "Yep. I am building this as we go, and it works in class." So that was cool.

(00:52:13):

They have a lot of their courses. I am probably going to take some more. I have enough knowledge now that I can take this drum machine and actually build a drum machine out of it. I am going to probably either-

EW (00:52:24):

Replace all those parts with an Arduino?

CW (00:52:26):

Well, not all of them. No. Well. It is not Arduino. The triggering stuff is really cool and complicated that we are doing. You generate an LFO from an inverter, and then that goes to-

EW (00:52:39):

A low frequency oscillator.

CW (00:52:41):

Yes. A square wave at a certain frequency. And this is generating a square wave that triggers the drum sounds. It is at...

EW (00:52:51):

Some number of beats per minute.

CW (00:52:53):

Four hertz, or something. Right. Yeah. So boom, boom, boom or whatever. You generate a low frequency oscillator, and then that goes into frequency divider. Either a binary or a decade. Then you can choose which outputs. That will generate different frequencies for the different drum sounds.

(00:53:11):

And then those triggers go out to the oscillators, to make them go at different rates. Trigger at different rates, not play different frequency sounds. So the bass drum might be every fourth beat. The high hat might be every beat. The tom or snare might be every second beat. So you can arrange your clock tree to do that. It is very much a clock tree. That is all fun.

(00:53:37):

Yesterday we talked about using phase-lock loops to do similar thing. Where you can, instead of frequency dividing, you can frequency multiply. Which is really cool. Because now you can get subdivisions of the main beat, and do fast things.

EW (00:53:49):

Thought it was weird that frequency dividing and frequency multiplying kind of mean the same thing. Flammable, inflammable.

CW (00:53:53):

Yeah. Well, it is like wavelength versus frequency, right? One is- That is all fun and I enjoyed learning it.

(00:54:01):

However, there is one path you can go with that. You can make your drum machine so you have all this clock tree, and then you either use rotary switch to adjust which drum gets which division, or a patch panel. So you are patching the oscillator triggers to the outputs of the dividers that you want. So you can change the pattern with the patch panel of wires.

EW (00:54:27):

But your patch panel right now is a breadboard of wires.

CW (00:54:29):

Which is horrible. But stipulated I am getting off the breadboard. You can solder it to perfboard. Or if I am really ambitious, try to do something on KiCad to make a bad PCB for through-hole parts. Do not email me.

EW (00:54:45):

<laugh> Or just email him the solution.

CW (00:54:48):

So anyway, but I will get away from perfboard. The question is, do I want to do it that way? Which is interesting because it is all discrete parts, and there is some error involved with the triggering and stuff, so it makes it more human.

(00:55:00):

Or I can throw all that triggering stuff out, and stick a micro on there and a bunch of DACs. Trigger that way, and have more flexibility and a digital triggering to an analog drum machine. That is probably the way I will go, but I have not really decided.

(00:55:21):

There is a lot more I could do with the micro, like if I am using a PLL, I could use the micro to output a voltage which adjusts a clock, and do stuff like that. Or I could convert some of my drum sounds to have voltage controlled oscillators, which would change their sound frequency based on a voltage. But.

(00:55:40):

Anyway. It is cool, and I am trying to give myself permission to not fully understand everything, which is the-

EW (00:55:47):

That is hard for you.

CW (00:55:48):

Really hard for me. Because if I do that, I am not going to have fun. Because I will spend six months learning how an op-amp works, and then I will be like, "Well. That was boring." When I could have just said, "These are the standard circuits people use. There are a lot of ways to tweak them, to make your own cool sounds and stuff. Let us focus on that, instead of the details of-"

(00:56:10):

I know how to calculate, given the Twin-T oscillator and the parts, what notch frequency band that is going to correspond to. But I do not really understand how the loops are all working. There is stuff I do understand, but-

(00:56:29):

I do not know. Does everybody doing electrical engineering, know at a fundamental level how those sub-assemblies work? I would hope so, but maybe not. Maybe I am being too hard on my electronics knowledge, by trying to understand everything at a not quite a physics level.

EW (00:56:48):

It has been so long since I took electronics, I would not remember any of it. I do not remember any of it. Analog stuff was always kind of...

CW (00:56:57):

It has been a good course. I have enjoyed it.

EW (00:57:01):

In your drum course?

CW (00:57:03):

My actual drums course.

EW (00:57:04):

In intensive drum- Yeah. You talked about metric modulation.

CW (00:57:10):

Mm-hmm.

EW (00:57:10):

Could you do that on your?

CW (00:57:14):

Mm-hmm. Well, <laugh> with great difficulty evolving clock trees, and things like that. And yeah. I do not know how I would do it. But you can do polyrhythms pretty easily, which is a similar concept, where you have one meter playing against another meter.

EW (00:57:28):

I just want you to turn the drum machine into your drum course.

CW (00:57:36):

Well, that is some other fun stuff I could do. Because one thing we learned as an aside was how to use piezo- Piezo? I do not know how to say that. I never know how to say it. Triggers, which are the little- They are little flat discs with a crystal in them. When you touch them or hit them, they generate a small current. What?

EW (00:58:03):

I just like the way you are hitting your hand, as though everybody can see that.

CW (00:58:05):

Anyway.

EW (00:58:06):

And you are making this little circle.

CW (00:58:07):

We learned how to take one of those triggers, which is- And put it through an op-amp to generate a trigger signal, that you could use to trigger the oscillators. Which is exactly how electronic drums work.

(00:58:19):

They have, with slightly greater sophistication, piezo sensors in the drum heads, or near the drum heads, that when you hit it with a stick generates a current or a voltage. I cannot remember if they are- Whatever. Generates electricity <laugh> that is detectable by an amplifier, that can go to a module that decides whether or not to make the sound.

(00:58:42):

So I could take my electronic drums and plug them into my drum machine, and trigger the sounds with my drums and sticks and things. Which is something I plan to try to figure how to do.

EW (00:58:58):

Or you could take a MicroPython, add a MIDI library-

CW (00:59:01):

Yeah. But that is back to the sequencing I was talking about.

EW (00:59:05):

Well, cool. That sounds interesting.

CW (00:59:06):

It has been fun.

EW (00:59:07):

I keep looking at their- They have one about textiles. But then they say something about being able to knit and I am like, "Yeaah."

CW (00:59:17):

That is a prereq? Yeah, most of them do not have super strong prereqs.

EW (00:59:20):

I do not know that it was a prereq. But I think there were five things I did not know how to do, that you would know how to do by the end of the course. But they all seemed like five things, that each took six weeks to learn.

(00:59:31):

I felt like I would go in without knowing any of the- I do not know. It is kind of the opposite of the "Data-Driven" book, where I technically know this information. You are just reconfiguring it into a better system.

(00:59:47):

I think I talked about journaling the last time it was just us. You will all be happy to know that I have fallen off the journaling wagon.

CW (00:59:59):

<laugh> Why would they be happy?

EW (01:00:00):

Despite the sticker addiction.

CW (01:00:02):

You had a pretty good habit going. What happened? You have written it all?

EW (01:00:06):

No! There were two things that happened. One, we had friends come and stay, and I did not want to spend the time away from them. And then since they have left, I have not started again.

(01:00:16):

The other part is that I got stuck on a particular journaling prompt, and not being able to answer it, I feel like I can never go back to my journal.

CW (01:00:24):

Oh. <laugh> That is okay.

EW (01:00:26):

It is kind of sad. Yes. I tried to get you to answer the journaling prompt, and you did not either. So I could not even- Every once in a while, when I journal

CW (01:00:35):

It is my fault.

EW (01:00:36):

I would ask Chris the journaling question, and then I would journal about his answer.

CW (01:00:40):

Yeah. That is my fault.

EW (01:00:40):

So that I did not have to answer.

CW (01:00:42):

Yeah. Okay. Now we understand how this works.

EW (01:00:46):

There are a ton of stickers I have not gotten. We have been seeing whales at the beach. So not only would I be getting beach stickers, I would be getting whale stickers. Anyway. Are you ready to answer that question now, so I can go back to journaling?

CW (01:00:59):

Go for it.

EW (01:01:00):

Okay. You have to come up with three to five role models.

CW (01:01:05):

All right.

EW (01:01:06):

Have you done that?

CW (01:01:08):

Let us go with, "No."

EW (01:01:10):

Yep. That is where I stopped too. Okay. So...

CW (01:01:15):

All right. Yeah. So. What is a role model? Is it somebody in your field, who you admire their accomplishments? Is it somebody who you want to act like in your daily life? Is it-

EW (01:01:29):

Someone who inspires you to be a better person?

CW (01:01:32):

Because the danger of picking role models just out of the randos that exist in the world, is that they turn out to be terrible people. And then people are like, "Why are you using that person as your role model?"

EW (01:01:43):

Okay. So the example was Mother Teresa. Because there are following questions that just make this harder and harder. The next question is, "Name a particular thing you respect that inspires you about this person." So for Mother Teresa, it may be compassion. And then the next part-

CW (01:02:09):

Do not email us.

EW (01:02:10):

See. This is very long. Then the next part is to think about the opposite of that thing that you just said. So for compassion, it may be selfishness. Then the final- In this final part, think about what the good things are in that characteristic. So if for selfishness, you might say, "It is important to understand your own needs and to take care of them, as well as being compassionate about other people." Okay. So. Yeah, I get to role models- I have found a few.

CW (01:02:46):

Maybe just skip this one? <laugh> I do not know why you are still there.

EW (01:02:50):

Do you have any role models? Come on!

CW (01:02:53):

Like I said, they are more like avatars of how I want to play drums. Or-

EW (01:03:00):

Yeah. Taylor Swift is one of mine too.

CW (01:03:03):

I do not know that she plays drums very well.

EW (01:03:05):

It does not matter. She does everything really well.

CW (01:03:09):

Yeah. It is probably that you are overthinking the question. You could just list some people who you admire, for reasons that you want to aspire to. That they do not have to be perfect people, or accomplish everything, I guess. But I can list probably a dozen musicians.

EW (01:03:28):

Come on! Well, okay. Not all musicians then. But go ahead. Go ahead, go ahead. Come on.

CW (01:03:34):

Gavin Harrison, Nate Smith, Vinnie Colaiuta, Neil Peart.

EW (01:03:41):

Okay. Neil Peart. Let us talk, since he is the Rush drummer, and I know who that is.

CW (01:03:45):

Yeah.

EW (01:03:46):

He did not quite make my list, but he was in the top 20. What is a characteristic you like about him, or find inspiring about him, or that is the reason he is on your list?

CW (01:04:00):

Well, he was a very good drummer, at the time that he was professional drummer. Things have changed in drumming. 14 year olds can play like Neil Peart now, because of YouTube.

EW (01:04:13):

That is just bonkers.

CW (01:04:13):

Anyway. But he was very innovative in what he did. He was the first person- He was in rock. A person who took the instrument very seriously, and thought about it analytically. Thought about what he wanted to play, and how he wanted to approach it. He often took his playing and deconstructed it completely.

EW (01:04:31):

So he was very thoughtful.

CW (01:04:34):

And went back and relearned things with different technique. He was very thoughtful. He was a writer. He was good at writing, and he had a very literary background.

EW (01:04:46):

And very lyrical writing.

CW (01:04:49):

Right. And he wrote the lyrics for the band. But he also-

EW (01:04:51):

Oh, that was not what I meant. I just meant his writing is very pretty.

CW (01:04:53):

But right. But right. But he wrote books also.

EW (01:04:55):

Yes.

CW (01:04:56):

But. Yeah. He was just sort of an interesting guy from a musician perspective, because he was very thoughtful, he was innovative. He had very high caliber professional technique.

EW (01:05:14):

He was also very resilient. His life was so hard.

CW (01:05:15):

Very resilient. And he did what he wanted to. He did what he wanted to. Yeah. He was very resilient. He lived through several personal tragedies. And he stopped playing when he decided he was done, which was interesting. Like, the band was really-

EW (01:05:34):

And there were things he did not enjoy. And yet he found joy in the things that he did enjoy, and managed to continue through that.

CW (01:05:40):

Yeah. Unfortunately, he did not live long past his retirement, which was not connected to his retirement. But. Yeah. He kind of-

EW (01:05:51):

Sum that all up in one word.

CW (01:05:52):

Uhhh!

EW (01:05:52):

See! I cannot do this question.

CW (01:05:55):

Why would you sum these up into one word? That is why we have more than one word.

EW (01:06:00):

Because then you have to find the opposite word.

CW (01:06:03):

All right. The opposite is Lars Ulrich. I am going to get so many emails.

EW (01:06:09):

I do not know who that is.

CW (01:06:10):

He is the Metallica drummer <laugh>.

EW (01:06:12):

Is this the one that said, "I am the most humble person ever"?

CW (01:06:15):

No. That is their guitar player.

EW (01:06:16):

Okay.

CW (01:06:20):

<laugh> Anyway. Lars is great. Yeah. But he is not a bad person. I do not know what the opposite would be. I do not like this prompt, and I think you should ditch it and do something else.

EW (01:06:33):

And go back to just giving myself stickers.

CW (01:06:35):

Yeah. You always used to skip prompts you did not like. I do not know why you-

EW (01:06:38):

I just got stuck on this one.

CW (01:06:39):

Yeah. All right.

EW (01:06:39):

No, usually I make fun of the prompts that I do not like.

CW (01:06:44):

If you are a Lars Ulrich, you can email me your hate. If you are anyone else, I do not want to hear about it.

EW (01:06:50):

All right.

CW (01:06:52):

And that is it for the show! If you want more shows, let us know.

EW (01:06:57):

<laugh>

CW (01:06:57):

Because you can have more of this for a low, low price of $5 a month, let us say.

EW (01:07:08):

We do have some good guests coming up. A couple of authors, a couple of make types, some-

CW (01:07:14):

Lars Ulrich.

EW (01:07:15):

Yes, Lars will be on the show to defend his honor.

CW (01:07:20):

Just want him to practice.

EW (01:07:23):

Ouch! Wow! Mrow!

(01:07:27):

Thank you for listening. Thank you to our Patreon subscribers for giving us questions, which they did not actually do this time.

CW (01:07:42):

They did. We were in the middle of it, by the time they arrived.

EW (01:07:48):

Ohh. "How does one start to do things in a self-motivated way?"

CW (01:07:52):

I hear Ritalin and other ADHD drugs are good for that.

EW (01:07:55):

<laugh>

CW (01:07:55):

Otherwise I have no answer. We can take that up as a real question next time.

EW (01:08:04):

Yeah. There is no shortcut, sadly. Sorry.

CW (01:08:09):

Bribes. If you can bribe yourself, or have somebody else bribe you. Stickers.

EW (01:08:15):

It is funny, I was thinking recently about how many people are far more accepting of lots of different things, which I think is great. I think being accepting is good. But that there have been times in my life, where I needed the structure to force myself.

CW (01:08:34):

Yes.

EW (01:08:34):

And then once I get past that forcing, I find the fun. But, I mean, engineering education is not something- There are days when you do not want to continue. So, I do not know how to balance the-

CW (01:08:56):

It is accountability. For me, motivation is something that requires accountability. I need somebody, something or someone external, either keeping tabs on what I am doing, or encouraging me, or getting me over the hump when I am stuck on something.

EW (01:09:12):

Yeah, the book club. I have a lot of accountability for.

CW (01:09:15):

That is why instruction is good. That is why schools exist. Because most people are not great at being autodidacts, unless they are really into stuff. But yeah, for most of the things I have done- Jobs are an accountability.

(01:09:30):

I think most people, given the choice between doing whatever they want, and working for a company, doing whatever you want and having everything provided for, and working for a company every day. A lot of people would choose the former, I think. Yeah. That is what the money is for!

EW (01:09:55):

That is what the money is for. Anyway, thank you to our Patreon subscribers.

CW (01:10:00):

Thank you to your glasses.

EW (01:10:02):

For falling.

CW (01:10:03):

Thank you for the dog.

EW (01:10:06):

<laugh> So much gratitude here. We do appreciate you listening, and thank you to Mouser for-

CW (01:10:12):

If you have made it this far <laugh>.

EW (01:10:14):

For sponsoring the show. Let us see, I guess that is it. Oh, if you have any comments, questions, or are Lars, you can contact us at show@embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. I will have show notes with whatever links I remember, which probably will not be all of them. So feel free to contact me, and make me put up some more links.

(01:10:38):

And now, as I mentioned, Roo has been kidnapped, and Kanga knows that Piglet is not Roo, but is very calm about that.

(01:10:56):

[Winnie the Pooh excerpt]