The work always gets done.
Yeah, it's winter.
Whenever I take pictures I try to think about what it is I'm trying to achieve, because it's important to be intentional.
Usually it's simple. I'm just trying to remember the way things looked.
But sometimes its different than that, because you can never get it exactly right.
I was reading a book about photographs taken of mars, and the author described the astrophotographer's intent as their 'quest to capture the spirit and stories of the land.'
And I think that's a bit romantic, but it's more accurate.
These pictures are from Willem's family's cabin in the middle of nowhere Vermont.
We went up there before heading home for the holidays. I spent most of the time staring at my computer working, so that wasn't great.
But there was still time to enjoy the outdoors.
For my project we built a cloud based facial recognition system for home security. It was a lot of work, but in the end (aka the night before presenting) we got it to work pretty well.
The work. always. gets. done.
It's impressive what machine learning models can do these days. One group had a similar project, except instead of monitoring whether or not someone lived in the house, their system monitored whether or not people were wearing a mask.
Upon detection of a non-mask wearer it alerted the authorities and noted in a database that you made a mask infraction. Obviously wearing a mask is considerate and helps prevent the spread of germs, but it's important to think through the societal impact of compelling people's behavior through AI enforced rules before making something like that.
Also, if you needed a reason to delete twitter, here's an article about depression and social media.
On a brighter note, here is a video of our new cat.
Boston → Beaufort
My journey home was nothing short of a nightmare.
Because of COVID, there are only a fraction of the flights each day that there normally would be. That means when something goes wrong, there's not much that can be done.
My flight got cancelled, and somehow every other flight out of Boston was full, so I spent the night in a Hampton Inn while a wicked nor'easter ravaged the flights for the next day too.
Eventually, after 2 days and by the grace of the universe, I made it home.
