Princeton: crossing the road
People have inexplicably started asking me to give talks all the time. Sometimes on topics where my entire knowledge of the area would be conveyable to them in one sentence. Like, I ran a survey of machine learning researchers, where I asked them a question about when surgeons would be automated. So I am doing cutting edge research on automation of medicine, in some sense. So I am an expert on automation of medicine. But if I just told them that researchers think it will happen in, uh, however many years, then they would know more than me, because I can’t remember that off the top of my head. This probably isn’t quite true, and that particular person did seem a bit concerned that I wouldn’t know enough after we discussed it, but probably that’s because I pointed that out or something. And it still feels like striking evidence of something.
Anyway, I should probably be happy and exploit it. At the moment I am exploiting it by lying in a nice hotel bed. Which I guess is a common approach to exploiting it, if I recall various conversations with philosophy faculty correctly.
My hotel bed is across the road from a hospital, which I thought would be very convenient last night, when I was instructed by a doctor to go to the emergency room. This may have been the least apt application of the concept ‘very convenient’ in my life. I walked up to the road, but it had a concrete barrier in the center, and trucks shooting down it even at 4am. And this was all on the East Coast, so the sides were so slippery I fell over just approaching it (away from the road at least). And maybe it was a freeway, or at least something freewayish.
Google told me it was a 20 minute walk around to a crossing and back. So I set off. But I’m not sure the relevant paths existed and it involved a lot of darting between sides of secluded ramps and walking on the edge of dark forest, and I got to the wrong place on the other side of the road. I was so cold my legs were going numb, so I ran a bit, even having fallen once. I eventually found my way into sparse saplings in the end of a parking lot, which seemed to open into another parking lot, which seemed to contain a giant EMERGENCY sign. Hooray!
When I got out in the morning, I tried this again for five minutes, learned that the path definitely did not exist, and called an Uber to take me back across the road.