Nerdy Google inventor to share his passion for towel rods and other stuff on Thursday

James McLurkin is a really fun guy. He’s also an engineer.

If that sounds like a contradiction, McLurkin — who’ll speak Thursday at South Puget Sound Community College — has news for you.

“You could think that as an engineer, you’re sitting around doing a bunch of math and papers late at night, eating potato chips in your dorm room,” he said in a recent phone interview. “That’s not engineering.

“Engineering is way more fun than that. Engineering is model trains and robots and sewing machines and music.”

McLurkin is best known for his work with small robots inspired by ants and bees — robots that aren’t too smart individually but that collectively can accomplish a great deal. Now a Google engineer in Seattle, he won the prestigious Lemelson-Massachusetts Institute of Technology student prize in 2003 for his bee-like swarm robots. His accomplishments landed him on PBS’s “Nova” in 2005.

“James is a clever and inspired inventor,” Rodney A. Brooks, director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, wrote in a letter recommending McLurkin for the prize. “In the future, the world will be full of teams of mobile robots, and they will all trace their ancestry to those developed by James McLurkin while still a student at MIT.”

Ah, “inventor.” The word comes a lot closer than engineer to capturing McLurkin’s iconoclastic spirit.

In the “Nova” episode, he sings “The Flight of the Bumblebee” and sits on the floor working with robots he programmed to play the “Star Wars” theme. For 13 years, he had as pets a colony of carpenter ants (“Camponotus pennsylvaniacus, if you must know”).

“They’re really cute,” he said. “I say that in all seriousness. When you get them under a magnifying glass and look at them, carpenter ants are really quite attractive animals.”

The ants are gone (the queen died), and that “Nova” profile was filmed a long time ago, but the self-proclaimed geek’s delight in building, creating and playing hasn’t changed.

At work, he invented Google’s AIY (Artificial Intelligence Yourself) Voice Kit, a $35 kit that lets you build your own smart speaker from a microcomputer (not included), cardboard and what McLurkin calls “a glorious button.”

He sees lots of fun ways to use such a speaker.

“If I say, ‘Model trains run,’ my computer will get the text, and that is very easy for a computer to analyze,” he said. “It can look for the word ‘trains’ and look for the word ‘run’ and then turn on the model trains. So now I’ve interfaced speech very easily to some physical thing in the world.”

Another recent invention, a towel bar for his bathroom, is relatively low tech. But — perhaps like a director whose latest film is always her favorite — McLurkin got more excited about the relatively humble piece of stainless steel than about anything else he talked about in this interview. (The ants, though, were a close second.)

“The way the bathroom is laid out, there was no good place to put a towel where I could reach it from the shower,” he said. “If you forget to put your towel near the shower, you have to walk across the bathroom making a wet sloppy mess to get your towel. This is clearly an engineering problem.”

The solution: “a fantastic towel rod,” created from 2-inch stainless-steel pipe and a custom mount he had made at a shipyard. It sticks straight out of the wall between the shower and the tub and is bolted into the studs.

He calculated all the details — how much the bar would give under stress, the ideal placement, the proper size. “This is what being an engineer is,” he said.

The original idea did need some refinement, he admitted. “Turns out the weak link in this whole equation that I failed to consider adequately was the wall. The wall was not stiff enough to hold my towel bar, so I had to reinforce the wall, but we’re in good shape now.”

So proud is he of the result that he offered to share a selfie he’d taken with it. The accompanying text read: “A towel bar only an engineer could love.”

The kits he’s creating for Google are part of his work helping to “build more engineers,” as he says. His speeches are part of that, too.

“In an ideal world, people would be able to figure out what they really like to do and also figure out what they’re good at and find the best combination of what they like to do and what they’re good at,” he said.

Embracing what you love to do is at the core of what he calls nerd pride.

“What it boils down to is, be yourself and be comfortable in your own skin,” he said. “Let me phrase that a different way: Go out there and have as much fun as you can.

“I’ve been nerdy all my life, and I’m just too old to care anymore,” he said. “I’m having a lot of fun.”

This story was originally published October 17, 2017 at 4:22 AM with the headline "Nerdy Google inventor to share his passion for towel rods and other stuff on Thursday."