The Shape of Things to Come

7 minute read. I've gotten this moniker from a number of sources over the years and at this point in my life/career I'm willing to embrace it. How did I become a crusher of dreams? I might say it's because I value skepticism and the hard truths of physics. My wife would say it's because I'm not very agreeable . Really, I was set on this path in grad school. I would never recommend getting a PhD to anyone - if you need a recommendation, you're not in love with it enough to endure it. First you need an advisor, who is expected to be 1) brilliant in their field, 2) an excellent lab manager, 3) good enough at writing grants to keep everyone paid, and 4) ideally a decent teacher. I have no idea why universities expect to have all of these criteria met by a single person, much less every professor they tenure. The tragic stories of most grad students show how often 2) and even 3) cannot be taken for granted.  The biggest academic challenge is not the qualifying exam o...

7 minute read. If I had known it would take this long, would I have started? This is a question I asked myself when looking back at the development of Manifold , and I honestly don't know the answer. Certainly taking on this challenge was born largely of naivety in software engineering, especially when realizing I worked on it for almost eight years before it saw the light of day.  Why did I take on this project? It started with 3D printing, where I found out that much of the lack of reliability stemmed from models that had non-manifold mesh data. Manifoldness is what allows a mesh to represent a solid, with a clear inside and outside, so without this the computer is left to guess what your intentions are. In many cases there is simply no clear way for an algorithm to proceed when it encounters a non-manifold mesh.  At first I thought these non-manifold meshes were simply the result of bugs, but while working at Microsoft I got to work with experts from many of the major CAD ...

5 minute read. I was raised by back-to-the-land hippies, so I grew up with a pretty negative view of capitalism, but also with no clear idea of what the word meant. My parents were distrusting of rich people; a bias I still carry with me even as I'm becoming one. They considered debt to be evil; they never even had a mortgage, having bought five acres in the 1970s for $10,000 which they borrowed from my five-year-old brother's inheritance. They paid him back, though I have no idea if interest was involved. So anathema was debt that I honestly believed I couldn't go to college without a free-ride, since they had no money to send me. I managed to get enough scholarships from writing a dizzying array of application essays, but upon arrival I realized my stress was probably misplaced given everyone else had taken out student loans.  One of my closet friends in college had the opposite upbringing, where his family not only discussed investment at the dinner table, but played Mon...

The cabin I was born in. I grew up in the sticks, on a tiny island in the Puget Sound. My parents moved there in the '70s as back-to-the-land hippies and built the log cabin my mom still lives in (I wrote about my late father here ). I had it easy with power and running water by the time I was born; my siblings had ten years without. But there are some funny things about the country, as illustrated all too well by an article entirely too close to home: The True Story of the Antifa Invasion of Forks, Washington . It's a long read, but I highly recommend it; while I don't know any of the people referenced, I feel like I could have. It's a good portrait of a world far outside the urban bubble.  Now, my town was actually closer to Port Townsend, a tourist metropolis of about 8,000 people that served as my bright, shining lights. Port Townsend probably has more artists per capita than anywhere in the state and has attracted hippies like my parents for decades, so it's qu...

My boss and I had a career conversation where he asked about what motivates me. I realized it’s not really money, as I’m already so far beyond the financial position I grew up in. I eventually had to admit, to myself mostly, that I’m actually motivated by fame, or more generally by being respected in my field. The funny thing is that I am almost certainly well past my high-water mark as far as fame is concerned.  I achieved my modest internet stardom through an unexpected avenue: 3D printing design. I discovered 3D printing through my first job which sent me to a UAV conference (back before everyone called them drones) and I saw a printed radio controlled samara (one wing helicopter) that some college students had designed. They crashed and broke it, then went over to the Stratasys booth with a thumb drive and had them print a replacement. They were back flying the next day. My coworker mentioned that a new company called Makerbot was selling a kit to build your own 3D printer for...

I gave my father's eulogy a year and a half ago. It was the midst of a very dark year. He was very fit and healthy, recently cured of Hepatitis C that he'd gotten from a blood transfusion when he was 20. But he suddenly got crippling back pain that was quickly diagnosed as cancer. He had always joked about getting Do Not Resuscitate tattooed on his chest (he was an ambulance driver for our local volunteer EMS), but he allowed us to convince him to do the chemo and try to beat it, mostly because he hoped to get more time with his grandkids. As it turned out, it gave him only about four months, and it's hard to say if it could have been any worse without the treatment.  Those four months turned out to be the same four months I was interviewing at Google. I was the first employee of a small startup where I'd been working for almost two years, when the founder suddenly laid me off. That turned out to be the same week we got my dad's diagnosis. I started doing a lot of i...

I feel oddly at peace in this pandemic. Really, this comes down largely to luck and privilege: my wife and kids keep me from feeling lonely, my wife and I have jobs we can do remotely, my son's daycare is tiny and so has remained open through most of the shutdowns. I live in a beautiful city in a house I love with people I love. But, if this pandemic had struck a year and a half earlier, it would have been considerably more awful, for me at least.  This reminds me of how serious the situation is for so many, and that no matter how much I like to think my good fortune is largely of my own making, the reality is a lot is also dumb luck. If this pandemic had struck when my wife and I had both suddenly lost our jobs, times would have looked much more dire, and that wasn't so long ago.  Still, aside from luck, I find this pandemic oddly comforting and I think I finally understand why. It feels like home, like my childhood. I grew up in a log cabin on a tiny island; I had never hear...

Who am I? If you want to know, just Google me. An interesting side-effect of having an uncommon first name and an uncommon last name from different language roots means that I can say with confidence that my name, without even bothering with a middle initial, is internet unique. So any reference you find to Emmett Lalish is in fact referring to me, which may have something to do with why I never really attempted anonymity.  What is this blog about? Primarily myself and my hobbies, which have a tendency to blur into my career. In searching for a common theme, I found shape to permeate my various endeavors. I love sculpture, and though I didn't take to pottery like my father, I found a medium in 3D printing. It allowed me to combine mathematics and art with a precision I couldn't achieve in traditional media. But even long before that, I made modular origami, chainmail armor, and forged knives: all fundamentally sculptural.  My original career, aerospace engineering, drew me bec...