I work where artificial intelligence meets biology.

How a robot drives itself for the first fifteen seconds of a match — odometry, path planning with Choreo, and the routines that string it together, built up from zero.

A beginner's tutorial on FRC shooter design — where to point the turret and how hard to shoot while the robot is driving, built from zero with interactive diagrams.

How the whole FRC control system connects — driver station to roboRIO to motor, and the telemetry that comes back — traced end to end with interactive diagrams.

What the new FIRST robot controller changes for FRC and FTC teams in 2027 — the hardware, the new field coordinates, the driver station, and the tools being retired.

WPILib's new command framework explained for beginners — what a coroutine is, why command bodies read top to bottom now, and what changes coming from Commands V2.

Mentoring one of the most successful FIRST Robotics Competition teams in the world, in Davis, CA.

Coaching teams through design, iteration and competition — headed to VEX Worlds this year.

Coached young teams in robot design and core values — winning at the regional championships.

Serving as a judge on the sport's biggest stage, evaluating engineering design and problem-solving.

On the Scientific Review Committee, safeguarding the integrity of student research projects.

Twenty lines of Python grow a cowpea for thirty-five simulated days — then measure its height, leaf count and leaf area, and see why those numbers are free in software and cost a destructive harvest in a field.

Napa County's reservoir, and the Glory Hole — a 72-foot bell-mouth spillway that opens in the middle of the water and swallows the overflow whenever the lake fills past the top.

A working fishing harbour on the Sonoma coast, north of the Point Reyes headlands and sheltered behind its own long sand spit.

Fifty-five acres in Golden Gate Park where the city's fog belt lets cloud-forest and Mediterranean plants grow side by side that could not share a climate anywhere else.

Aquarium, planetarium, rainforest and natural history museum stacked under one living roof in Golden Gate Park.

The national seashore, and the town on the western shore of Tomales Bay — a peninsula riding the Pacific Plate, separated from the mainland by the San Andreas fault and creeping north about an inch a year. We came in pupping season, when volunteers set scopes up at the overlook and let anyone take a turn watching the elephant seals on the beach below.

Point Lobos, Battery Spencer, Point Diablo and Black Sands Beach — the Golden Gate seen from every side but the postcard one.

The tower up on Telegraph Hill, and the city's music school.

A hundred acres of collected trees along the old channel of Putah Creek.

San Pablo and Lafayette — the close-to-home walks of a year that didn't allow for much else.

Science museum in the Berkeley hills, with the whole bay laid out below it.

The reserve just south of Carmel, holding one of only two native Monterey cypress groves left on earth — the other stands a few miles up the same shore.

A tidal salt marsh winding inland from Monterey Bay at Moss Landing — one of the largest left in California, and one of the best places on the coast to watch sea otters.

The stretch of Highway 1 where the mountains meet the Pacific with nothing much in between — and, up a redwood canyon just behind it, the Pfeiffer Falls trail.

The eroded remains of an ancient volcano, carried up the San Andreas fault to where it now sits. Camped in the park.

The 1797 mission, built directly on the San Andreas fault — the scarp runs along the far edge of the plaza, and the ground on each side is travelling in a different direction.

Oak woodland and grassland above a reservoir in the hills south of San Jose, on the eastern flank of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The coast, and redwoods up in the range behind it — including Sanborn's San Andreas trail, named for the fault that pushed the range it runs through up out of the ground.

The eastern side of the Sierra, and the hot springs steaming out of the Long Valley Caldera — a supervolcano of the same kind as Yellowstone's. The trail round Horseshoe Lake passes through a stand of dead trees, killed where carbon dioxide seeps up through the soil from the magma below. Camped at Twin Lakes.

The peak standing over Emerald Bay at 9,738 feet — a 3,300-foot climb from the trailhead near Fallen Leaf Lake up into Desolation Wilderness, with the whole length of Tahoe laid out from the top.

Yosemite's high country at 8,600 feet — a subalpine meadow on the quiet side of the park, an hour and a world away from the valley floor. Camped at the Tuolumne Meadows campground.

Back at the bay fifteen years after the first visit, and down to Vikingsholm, the Scandinavian manor house on its shore. Camped at Fallen Leaf.

Jenkinson Lake in the Sierra foothills.

The largest trees on earth by volume, and the canyon next door. Camped at Azalea, up at Grant Grove.

Half Dome, El Capitan and the waterfalls — the granite valley whose protection in 1864 set the precedent everything after it was built on. Camped at Wawona.

Emerald Bay and Fallen Leaf Lake.

Jedediah Smith and Redwood National Park, Founders Grove on the Avenue of the Giants, and the walk out through Prairie Creek on the Cathedral Trees and James Irvine trails to the Fern Canyon loop and out to Gold Bluffs Beach, where the forest runs straight into the surf.

Lava tube caves and high desert in the far northeast corner of California — and the annular eclipse of October 2023, whose path of annularity clipped the top of the park, watched as a disc projected through a sun viewer. The kids came out of the caves with cave scientist badges.

All four types of volcano in the world occur inside this one park.

The hottest, driest, lowest place in North America. Camped at Furnace Creek, below sea level.

Four sites within a few hours of each other, each a different demonstration of how long rock takes and how much of the work is done by water.

A 366-foot globe on the Las Vegas Strip, with a 16K screen wrapped right around the audience inside it, and the largest LED display in the world on the outside.

Three entirely different arguments about what sandstone can be made to do. Camped at Watchman in Zion and Devil's Garden in Arches.

The deepest lake in the United States, fed by nothing but snow — and a storm that cut the boat trip short and left us climbing the only trail out.

Boiling ground on the roof of a supervolcano, the tallest geyser on earth — and next door, mountains that come straight up off the valley floor with no foothills at all.

A park that begins above the clouds and ends in the sea, in two halves with no road between them — and the summit sunrise you have to book in advance, which we found out at the gate, in the dark.

The statue out in the harbour, and downtown the footprints of the two towers held open where they stood.

The tallest arch in the world, standing where the country pivoted west.

The Mall walked end to end, and a few blocks north of it the theatre where Lincoln was shot.

The chalk faces of the Seven Sisters dropping into the Channel, the standing stones out on Salisbury Plain, and the Roman baths still running hot. In London: the Prime Meridian at the Royal Observatory, the Cutty Sark in dry dock down the hill from it, the Natural History Museum, and Buckingham Palace on the way through.

Up in the Western Ghats in Kerala — the largest earth dam in India, holding back a reservoir studded with islands that were hilltops before the water arrived.

A great green square held open in the middle of Bangalore, and the coffee country up in the Western Ghats beyond it.