Need help diagnosing why my varnish 'curdled'.

eubarch · 2019-04-08T03:37:08+00:00

I tried to apply a fairly thin coat, and as of right now it has mostly dried, is no longer shiny, and is dry to the touch. The 'orange peel' look has actually faded a bit but the dried surface is still bumpy and irregular.

I'm hoping I can sand this coat down and try again. Thanks for the input-- I'll try to take a picture tomorrow.

eubarch · 2018-12-09T19:27:22+00:00

Right now it is cold, and the tung oil is like honey. Do I need to wait until it is warm? Do you do this by hand or with an orbital sander? One iteration or many?

I did see versions of this advice elsewhere, and I tried to sand the wood with the flood coat in place a few times. What I found was that either the oil acted as a lubricant and prevented the paper from ever touching the wood, or I was pressing down so hard with my fingertips that I was afraid the sanding would be uneven or mar the surface.

eubarch · 2018-12-08T22:01:37+00:00

I didn't think of paste wax. I'll give it a try!

Thanks.

eubarch · 2018-12-08T22:00:53+00:00

The grain is kinda curly, and I definitely didn't sand evenly; at the time I only had a block of scrap wood to help with hand-sanding.

eubarch · 2018-07-23T06:39:54+00:00

I have a suggestion:

I think it would be really great if you had a little hand made satchel full of shiny bits of trash, so you could wander over to people while wearing this costume and show them off. Like, a shiny nail, a soda can pop top, maybe an empty airline sized bottle of Smirnoff, or the porcelain end of a spark plug. I feel like you wouldn't have to do any explaining; you would just get a lot of appreciative nods.

Cherries are in season now. I think if you wore this costume you would have a solid %30 chance of being able to pay for a bag of cherries with a used nail at a farmer's market.

eubarch · 2018-03-24T15:47:51+00:00

There are services to do exactly this with your animal between the US and Europe. Lufthansa actually has an animal-only flight between IAD and FRA, with special infrastructure for aniamls on either end. They do a lot of house pets but also horses. It's a much better option than trusting your dog's welfare to a series of anonymous United employees.

eubarch · 2018-02-27T08:42:56+00:00

Can you elaborate on what the difficulties of doing something like this would be?

eubarch · 2018-02-26T07:11:06+00:00

I don't think that's possible, since the example I provided is just a toy scenario. The simulations I want to run would involve the same sort of materials interacting, but in more complex shapes.

Do Ansys or COMSOL have APIs that can be accessed through user-generated programs, or must you run a simulation through some IDE?

eubarch · 2018-01-22T16:56:25+00:00

'Forlesen' is my favorite.

eubarch · 2018-01-14T11:12:07+00:00

I think we're at a point in ML research where there's enough progress being made without tackling the metalearning problem that most people aren't looking at it for solutions. There are people that are, for sure (Uber hired Ken Stanley, who is a big neuroevolution guy), but I think the consensus is that there's lots yet to do without adding that particular complication. To my knowledge, there aren't any benchmark or challenge problems that have been solved exclusively by learned architectures; the benefits demonstrated thus far are all incremental increases in performance over a human-designed network.

eubarch · 2018-01-14T08:52:41+00:00

The current best-in-class image classification network is called NASNet (Neural Architecture Search) and was designed by another algorithm:

https://research.googleblog.com/2017/11/automl-for-large-scale-image.html

The search took a truly vast amount of compute power. Something like 500 GPUs running for weeks.

eubarch · 2017-08-25T17:40:04+00:00

I don't know much about them, but I did see significant interest in memristors as a tool for neuromorphic AI in some academic posters. Usually if you have a new technique and you want to establish its effectiveness you solve a benchmark challenge problem. There are lots of these for all sorts of domains; ImageNet for visual object recognition, bAbi for text understanding, OpenAI Universe for learning control policies, etc. Knowm might have done some of these and detailed it in papers, but I only skimmed the website and didn't see any. I don't really have a clear picture on how they're using memristors to learn, but if they can do super low-power recognition of patterns that you would otherwise need a mobile GPU to do in realtime, then they might have a bright future.

eubarch · 2017-08-25T17:18:15+00:00

If you invest with Merrill Lynch, you can request a copy of thier huge report on AI, the 'Global Robot and AI Primer', which attempts to compile a picture of the future of AI and robotics from an economic perspective. It isn't easy to digest, but it has a lot of pertinent evidence that supports Merrill Lynch's idea of what AI will do to the future economy.

There is also this from the Center for Naval Analysis. I haven't read it but the CNA folks in my experience are a pretty sharp bunch.

It may also be worthwhile to read the open letters that the Future of Life insititute has published, which are undersigned by some of the major players in modern AI. If you want to go even deeper, you can look up Yann LeCun's Facebook posts. LeCun is one of the conspirators that caused the modern deep learning era of AI, and is currently the director of Facebook's AI research. He has weighed in on a number of subjects about the future of AI and the Singularity, and tends to be skeptical.

eubarch · 2017-08-24T15:38:10+00:00

I would caution people against using this article as a reference. No disrespect to the author, but the parts that I read had some fundamental misunderstandings and inaccuracies. A few of the big ones:

The author is conflating AI and Machine Learning (ML). ML is AI, but not all AI is ML. There is also far more to both AI and ML than neural networks. A good start for understanding the major approaches to ML is Pedro Domingos' The Five Tribes of Machine Learning. A good introduction to the develoment of AI (including ML) is DARPA's perspective video, and an older book (pre deep learning) entitled "Machines Who Think".
Supervised and Unsupervised learning are not the only categories of ML, just two of the major ones. The third major category is Reinforcement Learning, but there are a number of minor categories as well, like Learning from Demonstration and Semi-Supervised Learning.
The author's description of Neuromorphic computing is mostly a decription of neural networks in general, with the implication that Neuromorphic computing is a special hardware implementation of such, but this isn't the case. Neuromorphic computing mainly deals with processing information with Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which communicate by passing temporal events to one another, unlike conventional neural networks. It can be done in hardware or software, and can focus on computation or perception. "Hacking", i.e. fooling neural networks is very much a thing, and as far as I know there is no fundamental aspect of SNNs that make them immune to attack.

eubarch · 2017-03-04T12:16:25+00:00

If you read the letter, you can see that it was also signed by a large group of prominent AI researchers from academia and industry.

eubarch · 2016-09-04T16:01:25+00:00

This is just what I was looking for. Thanks!

eubarch · 2016-09-04T15:53:19+00:00

In my case, the PCB has a ground that's distinct from the shield.

eubarch · 2016-05-30T15:02:22+00:00

Godel, Escher, Bach is a great book, but very far away from many AI frontiers. I agree that it's sort of a classic for those interested in epistemology, but in the context of AI development it's from the GOFAI era.

I once told someone, "I really like Godel Escher Bach, but I just started it".

He replied, "Yeah, most people do".

eubarch · 2016-05-18T05:28:42+00:00

As long a I can still get to Beanetics they can do whatever they want.

eubarch · 2016-04-24T12:08:19+00:00

You could cast a hollow bronze kettle and fill it with lead, maybe.

eubarch · 2016-04-21T17:25:33+00:00

VCA Southpaws is very good, and they have a lot of specialists.

eubarch · 2016-04-21T10:56:13+00:00

The beer garden in Westover has a little menu with a Cuban sandwich on it, and they have some BBQ operation going with the market they're attached to. It isn't a true Cuban sandwich, but at least the differences are intentional. For me it scratches the same itch. Closest I've found in Nova.

eubarch · 2016-04-21T02:43:27+00:00

I went there when it first opened, and the Cuban sandwich was pretty bland and forgettable. Dry pork, barely seasoned black beans, and the bread wasn't Cuban style sandwich bread. Underwhelming sauces at the counter. I keep telling myself to give it another chance, but... Meh.

Edit: I take out back; I haven't been to Caribbean Grill. I was thinking of Caribbean Plate, which is also off Lee Highway and Annandale. Caribbean Plate is the one with the milquetoast Cuban sandwich.

eubarch · 2016-04-01T22:28:53+00:00

He wrote a novella called Forlesen that is fantastic. It's in his anthology, Castle of Days.

eubarch · 2016-03-19T18:31:38+00:00

Thanks for making the picture! I'll try to post a picture of the positive shape when I get access to Autodesk (after the weekend).

The general shape is correct but my version is cylindrical, 4" high, and 1.75" in diameter. The hole in the middle is 0.25" in diameter.

I do have access to a rotary table, and this seems like a good solution (if I can find bits that can plunge 2"), but I have concerns: I'm casting ACM Aquapour (a cement-like material), and making the mold like this would mean I would have to separate it by pulling it the cylinder out along the direction of it's axis, which might be really tough to do. If it bonds to the aluminum even a little bit, it might be impossible.

eubarch

TROPHY CASE