3 thoughts on “Clare Briggs: Skimble Skamble Stuff”
When I am asked to give an example of “sense of point” to non-fencers I sometimes use the last one here. “In the shower, after you’ve washed and rinsed your hair, and before you open your eyes, can you reach out and touch the hot-water knob?”Report
Doing it without thinking is fine. In fencing, you practice moves that require a sense of point for what seems like forever so that when the opening occurs, something below “thinking” knows where your weapon blade and tip are, where your joints are, how they’re bent, and gets the point to the target, all w/o looking. (Traditional robot control solves horrible nonlinear optimization problems to do that. Large neural nets trained on enough data look like they’re going to be much faster than those.)
Now that I have reached an age where the doctors worry out loud about loss of balance, one of my exercises/tests is to stand on each foot in the shower stall while I wash the other foot. If I am thinking about it it’s more difficult than if I’m thinking about a piece of code I want to write.Report
When I am asked to give an example of “sense of point” to non-fencers I sometimes use the last one here. “In the shower, after you’ve washed and rinsed your hair, and before you open your eyes, can you reach out and touch the hot-water knob?”Report
I can only do it when I don’t think about it. When I think about it, I do the wrong one.Report
Doing it without thinking is fine. In fencing, you practice moves that require a sense of point for what seems like forever so that when the opening occurs, something below “thinking” knows where your weapon blade and tip are, where your joints are, how they’re bent, and gets the point to the target, all w/o looking. (Traditional robot control solves horrible nonlinear optimization problems to do that. Large neural nets trained on enough data look like they’re going to be much faster than those.)
Now that I have reached an age where the doctors worry out loud about loss of balance, one of my exercises/tests is to stand on each foot in the shower stall while I wash the other foot. If I am thinking about it it’s more difficult than if I’m thinking about a piece of code I want to write.Report