C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I made a new personal website, matt-arnold.com. I have now completely migrated 21 years of blog posts from here to the blog section of that site, with improved full-text search and filtering. Let me know if you find formatting issues from the migration process!

I've set up a commenting system, although comments here won't transfer over to comments there and vice-versa. I'd appreciate if you'd test it! I know I can count on Sarah Elkins to do so. :)

For several years, every site I've built has used a static site generator, and this one is no exception. It's all focused on Javascript, Markdown files, and YAML flat files, which means I don't set up my own server or database. Instead I use Netlify for the back end (contact page, blog comments, forms, automatically-triggered events, and so on). For this site, I used Github Copilot AI to radically accelerate the development process.

The site also has some galleries of my projects and illustrations, as well as a page of my podcasts, and one collecting my talks and other videos, and links to external websites about board games I've made and events I run.

Expect much more content as time goes on. The Updates page will automatically build a changelog of all content updates, so that you don't have to wonder if you missed some.

The process of testing the blog migration has re-exposed me to an enormous amount of my own past, so I've been quite contemplative about it lately. I might blog about that soon.

A few weeks ago, I applied to Grand Circus as a Javascript instructor. They asked me to fill out a questionnaire about my teaching style. Answering the questions was very thought-provoking, so I'll share my answers with you. Let me know what you think.

You're teaching an 8 week adult bootcamp, from 9am-5pm daily. *
One of your students is very, very overwhelmed. It's week 2 and he doesn't feel that he is understanding the materials or that he will ever catch up to his classmates' progress. What do you do?

One factor in a bootcamp structure is the level of energy-- therefore, the approach of staying afterward for more learning is of limited use after an exhausting day. Very little information is retained when tired. Instead, I would pair students of different achievement levels, to solidify their learning through teaching it to someone else.

I would walk this student through the process of narrowing down each problem he is encountering, until he finds the question behind that problem-- more specific than just "Why doesn't this work?"

I would not be one of those teachers who says "You are all really quiet. I'm not sure whether to back up and explain it again. Someone nod if you understand." Instead, when I am uncertain that a student is following me, I would say "How would you rephrase what I just said in your own words-- if it made sense?"

During the second week it's a bit late in the process to emphasize keeping a TXT file with notes, but it still can't hurt.

I would encourage him to not measure himself against others, but against his past self. No one was born knowing how to do this. There is no one global standard of minimum adequacy. At each level of his development in the future, he will find places where that level fits.

If I get the sense that he has been inculcated with the tech culture's odd standards, I might remind him that software development is a job for normal people. He is going to be competent, and that's all that matters. You know the tech culture I mean. Constant use of terms like "rockstar" or "ninja" imply that you're either a super-genius, or worthless. It's not reality. Apply for jobs anyway, and do them proudly, with an understanding that 99% of devs provide plenty of value to their employers without being superhuman miracle workers.

You're teaching an 8 week adult bootcamp, from 9am-5pm daily. *
There are only 3 women in a twenty person class. Does this affect how you prepare group projects? If so, how?

I would ask other instructors I know, to find out how they have approached this. If I directly ask the students for feedback on how they would like me to approach it, this might discourage them, as studies have shown students perform more poorly when it is pointed out that they are in a disadvantaged group, in an effect called "priming".

It might be better to assign all three women to work in the same group to avoid one woman being in a group with two men, and being talked-over or dismissed. On the other hand, I don't want them to feel segregated. I would need to do more reading and ask for more advice from women who are software developers.

You're teaching a 10 week public course, offered 2 nights a week from 6pm - 8pm. *
One of your students is not showing up regularly but he is still handing in work on time and his work shows relatively thorough understanding of the concepts you're teaching in class. Do you do anything about his lack of presence in class?

I would ask him why he is absent. Is it due to life circumstances, or because he feels it is unnecessary? I would tell him that collaboration with others is one of the most important skills in software development, and that he can greatly improve on where he already is if he helps students who know less about it than he does.

If his absences continue, I would work within the school's certification policies regarding those who did not take the course they signed up for-- for example, is it a graded class in which I can reduce his grade based on number of missed classes? Or is it a "pass or fail" certification?

You're teaching an introductory programming class. *
One of your students clearly has had programming experience in the past. She finishes independent projects quickly and frequently helps classmates understand concepts. However, she occasionally asks questions during class that introduce higher-level concepts than you plan to teach and that the rest of the students do not understand. This often leads to confusion and derails your instruction. How do you handle this situation?

I would thank her for the question and explain that we don't have time to cover that. After class, I would ask her when this happens to jot a note to herself, reminding her to ask me one-on-one or email me. I would then respond either with explanations, or with blog posts which lead to more self-directed learning materials.

You're teaching at a high school for one of our youth programs. The course you are teaching is part of the students' daily schedule. *
One of your students seems distracted and regularly goes on random websites while you are teaching. Her grades are low, which seems to match her understanding of the material. She refuses help from the TA and occasionally falls asleep in class. What do you do?

That's me in high school, in any class I was not interested in. I have been thinking about this ever since. When a student doesn't get a choice about whether to learn, they often don't want to. Without the student's consent, teaching is effectively wasted, especially when they see it as capitulating a power-struggle over their own right to their own lives. Establishing the student's consent seems like step one.

I would make the material as engaging and approachable as possible. I would ask what she does want to do with her time, and springboard from that to see if any of her activities can be improved by creating a website about it.

I would gently ask questions which might indicate whether she has an adequate support network, because of sleeping in class, and I'd see if maybe she needs to go somewhere quiet during my class and get an opportunity to sleep. Maybe give her some food that increases blood sugar.

If none of that works, well, I'm going to be completely up-front and honest with you about my position on high school. The bodily autonomy of being in my classroom is a consent issue. That matters to me more than her parents paying me. I want to be a resource, not a jailer.

Both a conversation and a document, Google Wave is truly amazing! It won't replace email, instant messenger, and online collaborative document editing tools, but when you need all three at once, it can't be beat.

For instance, Catherine Devlin and I have been collaborating on the InForm source code for "Penguicon The Text Adventure" and I think Google Wave is an ideal space for it. So I would like to move our collaboration there.

The first Wave I have received was a group of roleplayers brainstorming how to run a roleplaying game as a Wave.

I'll also use it for game design documents, because it can import images and videos, and has wiki-like revision control.

It's perfect for collaborating on refining the Lojban language standard and automatically having a record of why each document got to where it ended up.

It's ideal for convention sign-up sheets, once enough of the population have their own Wave accounts. And proofreading a convention schedule in a Wave? Absolutely!

I'm sure to find far more uses for it.

Let me know if you would like an invite. However, I only have a few.

Gather round and listen to a story of me, self-surveillance, entrepreneurship, and a miniconference about the Python programming language.

I have always charged a flat rate for art and design.* This time, I wanted to time myself to find out what I earned per hour and adjust my future rates to what I need to bring in, based on accurate estimates of different types of assignments.
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I'll post a thorough report of my weekend tonight. In the meantime here's a quick post.

Has no one else noticed that the breakthroughs which led to the motion-sensing technologies in the Nintendo Wii can be applied to robotics? Robots have almost never had the slightest clue where their bodies were positioned in space, except through dead reckoning from their memory of commands they sent to their moving parts, from a presupposed starting position. If an exterior object moved them by bumping them, they usually could not tell at all-- or at most, barely. My Robosapien has no idea when he's not standing upright.

Now that ultra-sensitive mechanical accelerometers have been wildly miniaturized, and more importantly the infrastructure is in place to mass-produce them at radical cost reduction for the new generation of game controllers, some hardware hacker is probably already planning to repurpose them for the vestibular (inner ear) and proprioception (body pose) senses of robots.

Goatchurch on the MundaneSF blog posted about his skepticism of molecular nanotechnology. He asked why we think a self-propelled miniature machine can exist, when we still don't have a robot that can vacuum the living room. (Given the existence of Roomba, that's another claim which, in itself, I would highly debate.) Here is the response I put there.

The failure of modern robotics is a software problem. But whether or not that is solvable is not relevant to nanotechnology, which rarely considers molecular robots. There is vast potential in nanotech products and materials that are not only dumb, but downright inert and permanently motionless. The potential of nanosystems which, while not motionless, are nevertheless dumb and sessile, is even more vast.


Look at this computer animation concept. Note that nothing in the assembly line depicted here involves individual nanorobots with independent self-propulsion, self-guidance or decision-making. Independence and intelligence are not required of molecular machinery. Don't confuse the "Universal Assembler/Disassembler" myth with the nanosystems that are actually being proposed.

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I hadn't previously heard of a few of the speakers at Stanford's Singularity Summit, but I know every single one of the following eight names, and it's the most exciting lineup of Guests of Honor ever. It's interesting to finally find out from their photos what some of them look like.

- Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, author of "The Singularity Is Near"
- Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive scientist, author of "Gödel, Escher, Bach"
- K. Eric Drexler, nanotechnology pioneer, author of "Engines of Creation"
- Nick Bostrom, director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute
- Cory Doctorow, science fiction author, blogger, technology activist
- Eliezer Yudkowski, Director and Research Fellow, Singularity Institute
- Christine Peterson, VP Public Policy, Foresight Nanotech Institute
- Tyler Emerson, Executive Director, Singularity Institute

The "What others have said" section shows Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec, Vernor Vinge, Ben Goertzel, Jamais Cascio and Jaron Lanier. I wonder if they'll be at the summit? That section also lists Bill Gates, Bill Joy and Stephen Hawking.

But it's not a science fiction convention, it's an academic conference. These aren't really Guests of Honor, because that implies the presence of their fans at the event. This is by RSVP only. That's fine-- it's important that specialist professionals gather to do valuable work on the problems and promises of the Singularity in peace. That having been said, it would also be fantastic to get any of these to speak at Penguicon, especially since it's a Linux and Open Source software expo in addition to a science fiction convention. Many of them would probably demand an appearance fee, which all-volunteer not-for-profit SF conventions don't pay. And many of them probably would not want to be seen to be associated with a science fiction event (except for Cory Doctorow, who has already been our Guest of Honor). But Christine Peterson says in her Singularity Summit promotional blurb "If you're trying to project the long-term future, and what you get sounds like science fiction, you might be wrong. But if it doesn't sound like science fiction, it's definitely wrong."

I enjoyed reading the comment by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Professor of Law, University of Tennessee, which is extremely signifigant to me as a non-specialist:

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Ray Kurzweil is a guest blogger on Non-Prophet, to promote the ideas in his latest book, "The Singularity Is Near."
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