Lianrui Zuo
Outside Work

The Long Way Around

A Travel Journal of Sol & Moss1 chapter so far

  1. Chapter OneA Cat Between Two Worlds

    A seaside town, a stubborn pair of sunglasses, and a photograph with one cat too many.

    To be continued

Before the journeyan author’s note

Sol and Moss did not begin in a storybook. They first appeared in the fall of 2026, on the title slides of ECE 6357, the advanced image-processing course I was teaching: Sol, the orange cat who never takes off his sunglasses, and Moss, the thoughtful gray one. They were only there to introduce some mathematics.

As the semester went on, they kept landing in more ridiculous situations: a photography studio, an archery range, a roller coaster, two icebergs. Somewhere along the way I began to wonder what they did when the lectures were over. The half-orange, half-gray cat in Chapter One, for one, started life on the slide for fuzzy c‑means, a lecture about points that do not have to choose just one group.

The slides are where they came from. The rest is new, and it begins on a quiet Saturday night.

Fuzzy C-Means title slide: Sol, Moss, and a half-orange, half-gray cat between them.Fuzzy c-means Gaussian Mixture Models title slide: the two cats with bows, two archery targets, and one stray arrow on the wall.Gaussian mixtures Bias field correction title slide: the two cats sitting under a studio light.Bias field correction Canny Edge Detection title slide: the two cats in a cart at the top of a roller coaster.Canny edges Snakes title slide: the two cats in a tug of war around a rock.Snakes Gradient Vector Flow title slide: the two cats with a torch and a compass in a canyon.Gradient vector flow Level Sets title slide: the two cats on two icebergs, most of each hidden under the water.Level sets

L. Z., October 2026

Written by Lianrui Zuo · revised by ChatGPT (grammar and language) and Claude (formatting)