Category: Misc

Google is shutting down Google+ in the next few days. I’m archiving my G+ stream here for posterity.

Over 7 years I posted exactly 1,001 times to Google+. I know it was never an especially popular social network, but somewhat to my surprise I found that I enjoyed it a lot. There was a strong set of people on G+ interested in deep learning, robotics and related topics, at least for a period of several years. The unlimited post length meant your could have meaningful conversations in a way you couldn’t on Twitter. For me Google+ was a thoughtful place, with high quality people, interesting content and meaningful discussion. The fact that it was a small, ignored community mostly interested in technical topics provided the conditions for that.

I have now reluctantly moved to Twitter, and I also have this blog for occasional long form content. Twitter is (alas) not much of a substitute for G+. No matter how carefully I curate who I follow, my Twitter stream is invariably full of political anger and culture wars. I am as susceptible to this as anyone else, and a Twitter session is a pretty sure way to make me feel angry and unhappy. I very much wish there was a way to turn down the emotion in my Twitter feed. Unfortunately I am yet to find that setting. Nevertheless, I do still get some useful technical and professional news from Twitter, so I will likely proceed with it and accept the unhappiness tax that it imposes.

So RIP G+, you were not much loved by most, but I will miss you.

Imagine you’re a road engineer and you’re designing an access road for a new town. The town will soon be built in a previously uninhabited area. You’ve managing the construction project, but unfortunately no one can tell you what the population of the town will be.

Taking your job seriously, you sit down to design the best road that you can build. You settle on constructing a seven lane highway with regular flyovers to minimize traffic. The road will be fully lit with a state-of-the-art LED lighting system. You add crash barriers and regularly spaced emergency telephones. After much consideration you decide to also include a rest area with parking and toilets. This involves designing a self-contained water and sewerage system, but it’s obviously worth it.

With three months to go until launch day, you discover problems with road drainage. After the panic subsides, the construction team agrees to work around the clock to refit a completely new system for surface water management. By a minor miracle, the work is completed on time.

Opening day finally arrives and the excitement is intense. Everyone agrees the finished product is an engineering marvel. The new town will have the best road in the world.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the town is a remote settlement with a population of 57. The road is mainly used by an old man and a donkey.

The next year, you are again given a road construction project for another new town. Having learned your lesson, you build a modest single lane road. It’s well constructed but nothing special.

Opening day comes again, and it’s revealed that this time the “town” is in fact a major city with a population of 14 million. There are 50 mile tailbacks for six years before a larger road can be built. Your face appears on wanted posters throughout the nation, and you flee the country in disgrace.

Twitter, I forgive you the Fail Whale. And I hope to always walk the middle *ahem* road.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Willow Garage. So as they get ready to ship their first PR2 robots, here’s a gratuitous video of the pre-release testing:

This second video is a nice overview of what Willow Garage and their open source robotics program is all about:

As I make arrangements to close down things in the lab and prepare for a bit of turkey and ham, I thought I’d put up some of my favourite blog posts from the last year:

• Top of the list is Bob Mottram‘s “The Industrial Ecosystem“. A lovely thought experiment and a very satisfying answer.
• For my friend Niall, “Resilience or Why there are so many of us“. The most memorable TED quote you’re likely to come across.
• Paul Graham writes many great essays,  but I particularly enjoyed this one called Cities and Ambition. To understand why Paul’s answer is so good, compare Paul Kedrosky’s piece on the same topic.

Finally, for a bit of fun, check out the Austrian Hexapod Dance Competition:

I’ll be at Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford all day today. This has been an excellent event in previous years, and there is a strong line-up again this year. Anyone interested in visual search technology, do come say hello.

Update: I heard some great talks today and met lots of interesting people during coffee. Chris Sacca’s pitch workshop was especially good. No bullshit. The most valuable thing was the perspective – all those bits of knowledge that are obvious from the inside but very hard to come by from the outside. And of course hearing Elon Musk was just fantastic.

For those people who were interested in our lab’s visual search engine, there’s an online demo here (scroll down to where it says Real-time Demo). The demo is actually of some older results from about a year ago by a colleague of mine. Things have gotten even better since then.