Tintin's Great Adventure (movie review)

We didn't make it to a 3D rendering, all the better to compare apples to apples, when thinking of other illumined worlds (anime).  The movie asks, right from the top:  how do you like my Tintin?

Then the movie really shows off:  look what it can do with light.  Mirrors, magnifying glasses.  Serious students of optics captured a lot of it in their mathematics, and it didn't all leak away.  We use it to computer generate and share what's in our imaginations, as well as to prescribe lenses for ourselves.

The movie (a snaking twisting scenario, always fast moving) makes fun of his signature tuft of hair.

We get used to the character, comparing it with our memories of the comic book if we have any.

I do have such memories, as I'd poured over Tintin as I had Mad Magazine and many others.

This new ability to animate worlds, based on characters developed by artists past, is a stellar direction in which to be pioneering.  There in The Avalon, I was seeing the state of the art unfold.  A couple o' geezers (as Jane Snyder calls us) in future-ville.

Then we played retro games.

I got the biggest kick out of being a long haul North American trucker, from a Japanese point of view (some of those trucks you just wouldn't see on a standard stint).

Captain Haddock was formative in my characterization of Captain Wardwell, and that forced me to keep looking at Tintin and deciding what I didn't like about him.  He's eerily action-oriented, this guy, in hot pursuit of his story. He's a story chaser, that's his raison d'etre.

One can't dispute he's good at his job, so he wins high marks for professionalism, if that's really what a journalist is.

One never reads what he writes for the newspaper.  They haven't invented TV yet, in that world.  He's like one of the first one-named celebrities, like Madonna, like Prince.  Everyone knows him, they say, in his home town.

Tintin reminds me of this girl Sintel in the Blender anime -- very single minded and agile in pursuit of goals.  Now that's giving him a lot of credit, more than I usually do.  Credit Spielberg and his crew.

Anyway, I'll be curious to check this out in 3D someday maybe.  Alex, you've gotta see this.  Avalon flashes by in the opening credits of Portlandia.  Consider it a tourist destination if from out of town and doing the off-beat "real Portland" tour.  Go at night, foggy is best, and savor the outdoor lighting.

State of Society

The practice in many branches of the Religious Society of Friends is to reflect on the spiritual health and/or unhealthiness of the meeting and capture some of the tensions, joys, anticipations, in the form of a write-up called the State of the Society report.

You can see where the US Americans might have copied, with their SOTU et al, or maybe we got it from the Iroquois originally, I don't remember.

After several hours of intense discussion, I released myself to walk down the street to inquire about San Miguel beer, a beverage from my young adulthood not often consumed in these parts.  Lo and behold, they had some, so I took it to Steve's place, where he was doing his usual international Skyping and guitar strumming (good to be home again -- he's been away in Minneapolis).

I've got a drive out the gorge tonight, further than Hood River, to fetch some young Quakers and return them to Portland safely.  I need to get out my maps and plot a course.

What we discussed is confidential for now, but of course we surveyed the timeline, pointed to various events.  The delegation to Nicaragua was important, as was our involvement with the Occupy movement.  We're also looking at many recent deaths and memorials.

This is an occasion for Worship and Ministry, and the Committee on Oversight, to get together and compare notes.  The annual joint meeting is written into the script, as is so much of our yearly routine.  We call ourselves "unprogrammed Friends" but of course that's a relative term.  We're all running programs, says the engineer within (who has truth within too).

Friends up here always ask for news from Whittier.  We keep tabs on one another that way.

Touchdown

This touchdown was in contrast to fumbling the ball last time, and forgetting my appointment to present at 3Ms, our noon time potluck for MMM oldsters, mostly (MMM being Multnomah Monthly Meeting).

I'm an oldster now myself, so this was also a welcoming.

A lot of us there went back a long ways, to being almost babies together:  Linda Holling, Lael Pinney -- these were my contemporaries, and long time no see.

Bob Smith was already an adult when I was a baby, and he was there too.

:: fuller, me, overlap ::

I'd listed my talk on the backs of five envelopes, an ironic gesture to a cultural meme (we're supposed to brainstorm on napkins more than envelopes, Kehrnan signaled his agreement).

Envelope One was about me, the inveterate browser, anticipating hypertext.  I loved Princeton's open stack libraries.  Those international schools left their stamp on my character as well.

The next envelope was about Fuller, the New Englander, expelled from Harvard, loving the Navy, going broke, getting better, the inveterate counter-culture contrarian.

Our overlap (next envelope), and the people I've met as a consequence:  Applewhite, Snelson, Koski, Chu, Kasman, DeVarco, Lanahan... Trevor.  A great ride.

Then looking ahead, how I brand a kind of Transcendentalist / Tantric blend, using LCDs with reveries (as in hypertoons).

:: recap, on ahead ::

We were moving in to Q&A.

Marion asked about shelter, Lew about buckyballs... lots of good segues.  About 25 - 30 of us.

I had lots of books, toys, artifacts, Barrel Tower (also the major Snelson retrospective in my collection).

Marty was there, knows a lot about transcendentalists I'm pretty sure.

A great group to be listening.  I'd packed 'em in, thanks to Sonya, various announcements.

I fumbled later though, in that I got Tara to her driver's ed session on time, but then she left her permit in the car, which I drove off to a wifi spot to work for two hours.

If I'd only heard my phone or checked my personal email (reasonable expectations) I'd have been able to get the permit to her in time.  As it was, she missed getting to drive.

I'd been scheduled to clerk Oversight that night and had made arrangements with Betsey to be late, but to be late on top of having botched the mission (ostensibly) left me a bit stressed, bent out of shape.

I raged at the fact that I couldn't see house numbers on a dark street in North Portland (looking for the meeting in a neighborhood I've never visited).  Never mind the satellite informed GPS device in my pocket, with illuminated maps -- I was too busy being a victim to actually use my tools effectively.

Still, a good day all in all.

I had another dinner with Alex, first in awhile.  He's been meditating up a storm, making use of some of the professional Zen facilities in the region.  The Pacific Northwest is a Buddhist nirvana -- even better if you like beer.

Calendar Dates

No NFL for me this season, as in football, not forensics league.  Athletes in the latter guild I salute as "second to none" in my pro-student rant on Math Forum today, taking issue with some LA Times journalism.  Just another citizen, sounding off.

Sampling the Python buzz, if pycon.org.ir wants a pointer from ir.pycon.org, all they need do is ask.  I've been informing PSF about some of my ventures, both in trucking and no-fast-food.  us.pycon is sold out by the way. I got in under the wire with a promo.  I've paid full price for van / hotel.  This will be your typical Silicon Valley sojourn.  I haven't attended a Pycon since Chicago.  I'll be in Philly the week before.

We'll probably do movie night again at Blue House.  Melody has a sequel to Yes Men I didn't know about.  The DVD on Reverend Billy was truly eloquent and I sung his praises on WikiEducator.

Pycon, for those who don't know, is a brand of Python circus or conference, pioneered by Steve Holden, the current PSF chairman.

I started attending Pycons in Washington, DC, at George Washington University.  You'll find quite a few blog posts from those.  One year, a Pycon was just starting when I found out my wife had cancer and I flew home immediately.  She joined me for the next one.  We commemorated her death after the first in Chicago, with me and the two girls driving all night from O'Hare to Indiana, Pennsylvania.  I missed the two in Atlanta.

OSCON is also rolling around again and I've been reviewing talks.  Really high caliber stuff.  I'm looking forward to again joining.  Will I make the one in Newark?  I have to ask about the next staff meeting, and whether there's a conflict (I'll do that on Facebook).

:: storyboarding new infrastructure ::

Synergetic Democracy

We may not think of ant colonies as democratic.  We've decided they have "a queen" in some cases and that colors everything.  A Bugs Life captures a consciousness.  Ants live in monarchies.

Of course that's a rather irrational chain of "reasoning", somewhat of the kind Danny Oppenheimer says you'll find if you pull any "ant" aside (say an undergrad at Princeton) and send him through Danny's lab at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs.

What you'll find are things like:  if the subject / ant / village idiot sits in a chair that leans slightly to the right, literally, then their political views are measurably slanted the same way.  Flaming liberals tone it down and sound a tad more like William F. Buckley when right leaning.  Lots of silly circuits like that.  An ant is a primitive creature and mostly just says "duh" when asked to explain its reasoning.  Return it to the hive though, and the miracle of self organization continues to unfold.

I wasn't sure what I was getting into in going to this event, but sort of knew, because I'd been at this tap room at McTarnahan's (a HQS) for a similar Connie-organized Princeton Club of Oregon event some years back.  I'd replied some weeks prior that I'd be bringing one guest, not knowing whom that would be.  When push came to shove I decided to try Facebook, offering to pay the admit fee for whomsoever wanted to join me on short notice, just a few hours before showtime.

Buzz Hill stepped up to the plate.  He's an avid Facebook user and believes in the power of social media and networking tools to transform the ant colony.  He thinks humans are at their best in conversation, different from taking orders, engaging in transactions, or bombing one another.  The new media, like some of the old ones, are fostering transformative forms of interaction, especially in promoting conversations -- Buzz's brief.

Dr. Oppenheimer was right there in the middle of the room.  I introduced Buzz and myself as frequent attenders of meetings at the Linus Pauling House, with Linus Pauling being a proud son of Oregon and yadda yadda.  Danny's and Mike Edward's tome, and the event in general (an opportunity to hear about and buy a book) was taking me back to Mike Satin's presentation at Powell's on Hawthorne.  Had Danny ever heard of that book, I wanted to know.

Buzz and I drifted on back to the beers (he just had diet Coke) and I asked if his smart phone could get us to Satin's book on Amazon, so that when we drifted back to the author we could have a Part 2 discussion of book marketing and how it's smart to visit a few other book web pages when buying, as Amazon pays attention to that and alerts more browsers to the "also bought" option (might be Democracy Despite Itself, our focus this evening).

Danny thinks that even though the individual ants behave in irrational ways that key of metaphors and precessional cues, ala George Lakoff, there's still feedback and participation and the phenomenon of self organization.  Democracies are more robust regardless of how weakly the voting piece might be performing.  You could disconnect all the levers and just randomly toss people into office, but as long as the people felt some sense of responsibility, they would behave more as stakeholders, which means a "sense of the meeting" (Quaker talk) would guide them to support the colony in a push-come-to-shove world.

I bought the book, it's only the next morning so I won't claim to have read it yet.  I checked the index for Bucky Fuller and Ludwig Wittgenstein, something I almost always do for "sweep of history" kinds of books, plus the latter was a philosopher of language and I wondered if psychologists were picking up on that at all.

Couldn't there be some ants, seemingly even more irrational than average, that served as a source of cues.  I was thinking of so-called "opinion leaders" or "movers and shakers".  Danny claimed he used his powers as a psychologist only occasionally and in a benign manner, had only rarely been "tricky" in an almost magical way.  But not everyone has those scruples, or thinks exercising psy-powers is a bad thing.  They feel it's their way of contributing to a democracy -- thinking of spin doctors here, some better at it than others.

Connie said this was the 2nd best attended Club event ever.  My table mates were as one might expect for Princetonians and their others, well traveled and cognizant of world history.  We talked about Japanese prison camps and people we knew who'd been in them.  I mentioned knowing some Japanese with American prison camp experience as well.

The gentleman next to me had had a career in teaching at private secondary schools, ending up at Catlin Gabel.  We talked quite a bit about the Black Mountain contingent there among the faculty.  I'd joined that cabal on a couple of Thanksgivings having tracked them down through my study of Kenneth Snelson's work among others (some Freudian overlaps there).

A lot of memories came flooding back, which is part of the fun of conversation.

Joseph, who found my hat that time greeting me upon arrival, accepted my funds (these events just break even).  Since finding my hat (again missing) and realizing it was by Paul Kaufman, he had made contact with Paul, mentioned my name, and had a hat custom made.

Tim's mom Lori was there, from a class behind me.  Todd had mentioned she'd be there on Facebook, interleaving with Buzz and I on my wall / profile.

Dr. Oppenheimer didn't say a word about ants by the way, that was my resorting to metaphor, with the example of literal ants.  Vote for me.

:: from buzz's smart phone ::

Memorable Meetups

Twas my distinct pleasure to join a party of earnest high school teachers in a meeting with the PSU Middle East Center at Tarboush this evening.  I showed up late, given other pressing engagements, but one of the teachers, from Lincoln High, had decided to stay on and have a real dinner (this is a top notch Lebanese restaurant).  I joined in with Dr. Tagrid Khuri, who had invited me to this event and whom I'd not seen for quite a long time.

We all had our stories to tell, our adventures in that part of the world.  Dr. Tag, as she is affectionately known by a large Arab-speaking community, has the most up to date experience, being Jordanian (currently) with plenty of reasons to visit friends in Amman.  The high school teacher and I hadn't been to the Middle East in a long time.  Not counting Egypt, the last time I was in the Jerusalem area was when Bobby Fischer was contending with Boris Spassky for the title of world champion at chess.  That was a long time ago, I think those still living might agree.

Next, I adjourned to Greater Trumps for a meeting with Synchronfile, if metonymy may be permitted.  As usual, the futuristic gadgets were on and ablaze, at least for part of our meetup.

Trevor is a serious scholar and top ranking Esozone type here in Portland.  His interest in the restoration of Dymaxion Car 2, the model for the newly minted Dymaxion Car 4, a project undertaken by Lord Norman Foster, has been more than just casual.  Not atypically, Trevor expressed his admiration and respect for Joe Moore, another independent scholar doing valuable work.

A Scholar Talks

:: opening number ::

I showed up at the Unitarian Church prepared to enjoy Rabbi Michael Lerner and was not disappointed.  I did some speed reading in his book through the opening numbers and then pretty much listened in rapt attention, through the Q&A.

I surprised myself in electing to drive the taxi, which I rarely do off duty, not that it's a registered commercial taxi or anything.  This blog has its namespace.

The guy won me over when he went out on a limb and expressed his fondest hope, which was that statism would go away and we would finally start dealing with the planet's ecological issues in a more mature manner, more befitting this self-professed "sapien" status.  In the meantime, we could stay in the dark ages with some two state solution for the Israel / Palestine identity problem, keep it schizo.

Einstein had hoped for a similar scenario.  I noticed Michael didn't include Einstein in his index, and yet his fear-versus-longing analysis (we're each somewhere on the spectrum) is pure Einstein, through Bucky.  So in announcing his "no state solution", I thought Lerner was overtly joining the transcendentalist school, a mark of his spiritual progress.

The book is a winding tale from the crusades forward, to just a few months ago.

Lerner, like Kierkegaard, rejects the voice of the Objective Historian as a mask, and admits his bias up front: to tell the story in such a way that greater happiness might still be a possibility.  He's not about closing doors.

His message is a lot like the Dalai Lama's when it comes to happiness, so I could easily see why Bishop Tutu liked his book (the latter being a big fan of DL XIV).

On Lerner's view, we each oscillate between a dog eat dog hell and a heaven wherein people actually love one another and are adept at community.  Both world views are self-reinforcing.  He names them the right and left hand of God respectively.

Thanks for another great cue Suzanne, and bon voyage.

Lights, Camera, Action

Various scene changes are in progress.  Lindsey is methodically whittling away at her stash of accumulated treasures.  She kindly donated her Gulfstream pen collection to Blue House, along with a DVD on the G650, which I filed on the top shelf next to Torture Taxi, a Gothic tale.

Melody is wearing gas station looking overalls like from the movie eXistenZ, which she's seen, and agrees we should share with Lindsey.  Jen has been working hard too.  I don't always know what's going on as I'm part time in the MJ Chair of CompSci over at Open Bastion, either grading for OST or reading this new book on Wittgenstein and Weinenger, or some other treasure.  Not watching TV, that's for sure.

Dave Koski has been doing an interesting toon branching off the Richard Hawkins hypertoon at Grunch.net, involving that flapping tetrahedron (the opening sequence).  He'd unearthed Piero della Francesca's formula for the volume of a tetrahedron given its six edges, and whittled it down to one edge changing (f, for flap), the others set to the constant 2, as in 2 radii.

The two equilateral triangles flap in the wind, like butterfly wings or pointy book covers, with a shared hinge or spine.  When f = 2, we have our regular tetrahedron.  There's a parabola of volumes as all-but-f are held constant.  Derivations of P, Q and R modules (mnemonic: peculiar) were forthcoming, leading off into other areas (as hypertoons do).

These are the kinds of reveries to pipe to the Coffee Shops Network, to shared screens or laptops, from Youtube playlists, from secret sources (like with secret sauces).

One needs that bridging talent space found at Bridges (the conference) between art-math and science, and that includes the arts of computer programming and animation (anime).  Python.TV is a likely stash point if you want to check back.  Hypertoons were originally implemented in Visual Python after Hawkins encouraged me to enter a contest for an SGI workstation.

Tara is planning her scene change as well, with the so-called "common app" staring her in the face.  We both had to get government PINs to sign the FAFSA.  Parents of college aged North Americans get to wade through a new labyrinth hammered together in cyberspace, though it's probably different in the state of Canada.

I've got the Facebook scrolls for working with Friends, in addition to these journals.  Most my remarks on recent news, with citations to stories, are happening there.

If Pakistan renounces nukes and asks to sign the NPT as a non-NWS, that could undermine India's credibility as a moral leader in the West, where the Countdown to Zero campaign has taken hold with a vengeance.  I don't think that's likely at the federal level (in Pakistan) but the desire among young Muslim faithful to ban the bomb is quite sincere, and currently consistent with Iranian rhetoric, which is why some Christian recruiters have had to flip their position, even among the evangelicals (to be Christian and "for the bomb" just sounds moronic as a wine and cheese party line among officers, holds more water in like NATO's "worst-of-occupy" LoserVilles maybe).

DiNucci was jokingly accusing Nirel at Wanderers yesterday of getting her friend Julia psyched about Paris, the latter being a valued member of his humanist circle.  Also it sounds like Bader (who also knows Alex, part of this other circle) is off to Germany for a spell.  Scene changes everywhere.  DiNucci is fine tuning his book, almost finished.  He's caring for an elder so isn't traveling much himself.

I've connected Koski's recent studies back to Martian Math on Synergeo, which subject I'm slated to teach again this summer, for Saturday Academy.

Testing Math ML

This formula by Ramanujan is being rendered by MathJax. The equation was derived from the handwriting-to-MathML utility, Web Equation, and then hand edited a bit.  This formula served as a basis for our Python Pi Day contest last year, at OST.

 

${\displaystyle \frac{1}{\pi }=\frac{\sqrt{8}}{9801}\sum _{n=0}^{\infty }\frac{\left(4n\right)!}{{\left(n!\right)}^4}\left[\frac{26390n+1103}{396^{4n}}\right]}$

Right click on the equation and choose Show Source to look at the MathML.

In LaTex (I didn't need to edit this one): $$ \dfrac {1} {\pi }=\dfrac {\sqrt {8}} {9801}\sum _{n=0}^{\infty }\dfrac {\left( 4n\right) !} {\left( n!\right) ^{4}}\left[ \dfrac {26390n+1103} {396^{4n}}\right] $$ 
Ramanujan's crazy-making identities get mentioned by me a few times in this debate thread on math-teach.

If you're not seeing equations for one-over-pi, click here for a picture of this blog post to see what you're missing -- provided Flickr still exists.

Hectic

Glenn suggested the family condo homeowner's association might sue the linoleum company, over all that asbestos, which everyone has in their bathrooms.  Property values just dipped.  The banks should adjust their mortgages downward accordingly, like finding out there's a sink hole, like in Guatemala City, but the banks never do.  They'd rather we not blab with each other about property deficiencies, but in fact they can't stop us.

Speaking of which, the ceiling is still slated to go, just haven't figured out if we're going two-story.  This isn't the condo I'm talking about, but the Blue Tent (really a wood frame structure with lathe and plaster walls, wood siding), which has an amateur's 2nd floor deck, some pet project of former owners we'll never know.  We bought a neighborhood hand-me-down built in 1905 and felt lucky.  Yep, always lucky to be in America, no matter how they treat ya (spam up the wazoo, full body scans, pee checks, rigged elections... hardly what we signed up for as kids, so blame the terrorists right?).

Anyway, I'm ranting.  The bookkeeping pooter is still in eternal reboot mode.  That's not the end of the world but I want what's on those drives.  First step is to bust the dust bunnies and see if she recovers.  Before that though, I'm hooking up the Toshiba to the printer that only works with the other Toshiba that just up and died the other day, while we were watching.  No kidding.  Tara adeptly switched to the Ubuntu laptop and upgraded the heck out of it, but we're still down a machine and don't want to get Win7 when they're about to roll out Win8.

By the way, this LG phone they strong-armed me into getting, said use it or lose it on the credit, is the worst phone ever.  Tries to sell apps, freezes, just doesn't get it in general.  I'll get more specific with the model number when I get the time.  I'll not blame Verizon this time as they can't know some of their models from reputable companies are just plain junk really.  Who has the time to test them all?  Not the government certainly, oh no.

I'm back on Synergeo even after the big fight, which left a lot of us flocking to a different group (a Google one, no reflection on Yahoo! in terms of what we were fighting about).  A similar farce brought SWM back on board in Wittrs-Plus/Ex, Sean's station.  He narrated some of the haps on Analytic, the fighting there.  I was happy for the synopsis as I don't subscribe to Analytic nor really have the time.  Sean's station has been great though.  I've been posting about this fictive BBC broadcast they could actually pick up on if they wanted, based on a famous (if somewhat nefarious) book about the great master (the quintessential late millennium philosopher).

The Europeans seem to be getting all goofy given they can't figure out their finances.  Anything for a welcome distraction, like saber rattle at Iran.  Talk about a dysfunctional family.  I'm glad their footprint is confined to Washington DC in a lot of ways, a kind of containment.  North Americans are free to go about their business without having to fixate on what Euros are thinking.  We'll catch up on Youtube later.

In the meantime, I've been watching the Occupy Chile movement and understand they blame vouchers for some of their problems.  In a lot of ways, it's Chicago that's no longer obeyed, when it comes to macro-economics, but that back had to break further north first probably (talking neocons, remember them?).  "Allende couldn't hack it but Obama could" or something like that? -- too early to hatch a full blown narrative.  Anyway maybe Obama is for vouchers I can't remember -- time to tune in the elections a little more.

Once the Republicans snubbed the Governor of Louisiana by disallowing him time in the TV circus, I knew I'd made the right decision in killing my TV.  Dumbs ya down really bad, clinically.  Chomsky is right, Nader too.  Geniuses protect themselves better, develop antibodies.  If it weren't for the NFL (no, not talking football, duh) I don't think as many would survive public school, that's for sure.