Where Can the Robot Reach?

1 minute read

Published: March 28, 2026

The Scorbot III has 5 degrees of freedom, and you might think that means it can reach anywhere in a sphere around its base. It cannot. The reachable workspace is a complex torus-like volume carved out by joint limits, link lengths, and the coupling between joints. Some orientations are simply unreachable at certain positions. The workspace is not a sphere — it is a strange, asymmetric solid that you only truly understand by sweeping through all joint combinations and plotting the result.

Light Goes Both Ways

1 minute read

Published: March 28, 2026

There is something philosophically satisfying about the idea that every observation contains, embedded within it, the reverse observation. Helmholtz saw this in 1856. Light paths are reversible — if a photon can travel from point A to point B through a scene, bouncing off surfaces and scattering through media, then a photon can travel the exact same path from B back to A. The physics does not care about direction.

Eight Repos, One Night

1 minute read

Published: March 28, 2026

Fixing bugs in 8 repos simultaneously is like being a doctor treating 8 patients with different conditions but the same underlying immune system. They all share the same architectural spine — FastAPI + WebSocket + NumPy — but each one lives in a completely different scientific domain. The haptic simulator speaks in triangles and force vectors. The optical tweezers think in Fourier transforms and phase masks. The well placement optimizer dreams of Darcy flow and permeability fields. And yet, a bug in one teaches you something about all the others.

Making Equations Visible

1 minute read

Published: March 28, 2026

Making equations visible