It’s the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere today, which means our daylight is scarce and precious and should be cherished. In that spirit of recognition and appreciation, I just wanted to share some people and things I am grateful for.
- I am grateful for mathematics and the teachers and students I have learned with over the years. Linear Algebra! It’s cool enough on its own with eigenvalues and null spaces, but think of all the kinematics and feedback control it helps us with. I forget which class it was, but I’ll never forget how my mind was blown while following a Taylor series analysis on the chalkboard involving sines, cosines, exponentials and complex numbers that ended with (spoiler alert)
e ^ (i pi) = -1. A pair of irrational numbers is related to an imaginary number? What a world! - I’m grateful for the open source robotics community for building tools and relationships and sharing with each other. I’m especially grateful for the colleagues I have worked with and built tools and relationships with at Open Robotics and Intrinsic and in the wider community. I’m grateful to the people who serve in leadership roles in our community, such as package maintainers, ROS Bosses, PMC project leads, Geoff and Vanessa at OSRF, the OSRF board, and many others!
- I’m grateful to command-line interfaces and tools, grep, sed/awk, the pipe |, redirecting to /dev/null, wc. Also there is something powerful that I am afraid of and whenever I tap into its power I wonder if it will ultimately be a mistake, but I am also grateful for regular expressions.
Primarily I’m grateful for the people. Thank you for being you, and enjoy the daylight today!
