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.

Wanderers 2011.12.28

We were a small group this morning.  Per recent trends, we veered into an eatery, this time Tom's on Chavez / Division.  A lot of our focus was geographic, the LA area.

George Hammond was teaching chemistry at CalTech.  He would later join Wanderers meetings at the Linus Pauling House on Hawthorne.

He was married to Eve Menger, of Multnomah Monthly Meeting, and daughter of Karl Menger, whom I never met, but whose mathematics I cite sometimes.

Jon Bunce had played with the Shaggy Gorillas (minus one Buffalo Fish), a comedy troupe (mentioned herein).  He and Steve remembered some clubs, Steve the poor grad student, worked with Hammond.

During the meeting, I mentioned my "true Russian novel" motif again, for these blogs, a playful oxymoron ("true novel").  I also play with "Russian" quite a bit.

Speaking of which, at Tom's I explained about the genre of training film I'm envisioning, that explain aspects of capitalism in exquisite detail (better than you've usually seen) so that those coming to assist might have more empathy and compassion for its many types of victim.  We could dub into English, serve on Youtube.

The AFSC work camp idea grew out of the CO movement ("conscientious objectors"), when civilians had fewer service opportunities.  During the civil rights movement, the work camp became a way to compare notes across schools and ethnicities.  Some exciting work in diplomacy was going on in parallel.

I'm not saying we can turn back the clock.  Given today's miniaturized components, a "work camp" might be more like a dispersed affiliation of anarcho-bosses drawn together by a spiritual practice or sport.  Look at FNB for example:  urban based, not headquartered anywhere, chaordic (like Visa).

Alice in Wonderland (movie review)

This is a film about determinism, predestination, destiny, epiphenomenalism.

She's being swept along on fast forward, life overtaking her, drowning her will.  Time to hit pause, visit a wardrobe, race down a hole or whatever.  Check into a facility if you can afford it.

Being a star feels that way too, on the set, off, learn the scene, learn the lines.  Getting typecast, being born for such roles.  It ends in the pirate movie anyway.

The too big and too small is also about too fast and too slow.  And sometimes we do feel like the giants in some scenes, which could mean slow and oafish, but I'm saying so much older.

When you're a kid it seems especially pronounced:  we're off at the starting gate and then mature in different ways at different rates.  Sometimes it feels like they're all ahead of you.  James felt that way (thinking of a friend of ours).

I just want to say, a lot of imagination went into that, with the flashback built in, as the hero integrates and is reborn anew.  It's the archetypes adventure too of course.

The determinism is in the scroll or prophesy, with the dog giving one of the sternest lectures early on, about what is or is not predestined, and Alice having her strongest voice back, a dog like that being somewhat safe to tell off (unlike her mom).

Dogs hear a lot from us humans and their job is to just take it.  Some suggest inter-stellar affairs but that's always in the background among serious star heads.  Sarah-the-dog was on the couch at my feet.

The scroll shows faux Alice consulting the scroll, caterpillar making a pronouncement.  As the audience, we know Alice had those dreams, but our inner loyalties are conflicted as we decide whether we can take an older Alice into our hearts, through this vehicle.

From Alice's point of view, sure it'd be really easy to forget those dreams if they weren't in a universe that had made them a famous children's book already.  Her dad is kind and understanding, but the equivalent of grinning cats in parallel universes tend to fall by the wayside, lets face it.

We should empathize with her older self not immediately reconnecting with her childhood psychosis (psyche, crazy kid, goofy guy), her inner window in to a shared [mad] world, her private line. She's just remembering the "it's a dream" part from the earlier scene.

Audiences know more than the characters sometimes, but then don't really exist in some sense.

The twisted Alice videogame we had for Tara, the voice of the cat.  That was the cat, the cat and the hat.  Dr. Seuss doesn't just fade away in Tim Burton movies when you think about it.

The film succeeds because it doesn't try to do too much.  It tries to be the Disney film that shows our state of the art, with some of our best and most mysterious.  Depp is so used to getting made up as a scary bozo.

The vorpal sword needs to fight the Jabberwocky, we all see that coming, the scroll does not lie.  But what we don't expect also happens around the edges and warps the plot.  Who ever thought those two would become friends?  They know it's their fate at some level.

The dream is hard, is the hard part.  The feeling of expectation is palpable, when we all look back to the castle gate, expecting our hero.  She's under that pressure to perform.  That's life, it's cosmic.

The funniest scene is the dark knight (bad guy) coming on to the giant Alice, saying he really likes big girls.  That's too literally true here to not be hilarious at the same time it's on the scary side.

Shades of Spirited Away with the warring sisters and their castles.  A Disney callback to Miyazaki (yes, we're here too) who had to authorize the Disney dubbing.

We projected in the living room.  Walker took a break from recording with R2D2 (the drum machine).

Tara and I had gone to Movie Madness earlier.  Gattaca, Tara's top choice, was the one we watched before Alice, the one I was most desperate to see.  Both blew me away.

Dropping a Few Balls

I've just been making contrite phone calls, as in the thick of the action I dropped the baton at a certain place in the schedule:  I'd been invited to talk to the elders in my "church" (we don't actually call it that) about my world domination schemes (as a geek, I'm expected to have those) and about Bucky Fuller in particular, with whose plans I tend to dovetail mine.

Well, wouldn't ya know it that the bookkeeping computer would go into perpetual reboot at the same time as my brain.  Paralyzed with misconditioning, thanks to the Three Kings (thanks guys), I went pell-mell on Hawthorne buying up a storm, from the Dollar Scholar and the high end Tibetan shop a few doors down, Tara my adviser and accomplice, getting some gifts, and books by Asimov.

That was my karma.  My karma is my dharma.

I've got voicemails in with Sonya Pinney and Audrey Metcalf (cherished elders), apologizing and offering to do private interviews instead, if anyone wants to know.  Invite me again by all means.  What I get for being a space case sometimes.  I fight it, that absent minded professor thing.

How can one be mentally present yet have an absent mind, just not possible.  I prefer Buddhism's mindfulness trainings, in my striving to stay on the rails, however often I fly off them.

At least I got some gifts out the door in the game of spinning airplanes and transportation services.  It's a workout and juggling act, that's for sure.

Out with the electric boats last night, with Trish and the gang, noticing all the FedEx flights coming in, laden with Santaware.  The story going around teendom these days, thanks to Facebook etc., is that Rudolph and peers were all girls, as only girl reindeer still have antlers this late in the year.

Not sure if so, but makes sense in a way.

Like with chinlone (a sport), guys just would not have the patience for some crabby old guy in the back with a passion for chimneys.  Same in computer science.  The male egos only managed to grow really big once the ground had been prepared by the patienter sex.

Apologies again y'all.  I have my world dom / mir plan at the ready, when you're ready to audit.

Thanks to Leslie Hickcox for reminding me, inadvertently.  She's with Friendly Care and well knows how to deal with people like me (those who've misplaced their minds somewhere, or their wallets, or passports...).

I bought ten "splat rats" from Dollar Scholar.  I don't know how to rhyme those in the "five golden rings" song but then these were for Hanukkah anyway.  That's our main party this time of year.

We used to do Solstice more, but that's when I had Dawn to help organize things.  I dropped by Alex's (Lindsey and I walked over together) for good food and company.  Tara stayed home applying for college and reading her new Asimov books.

Mystic Ball (movie review)

:: burma night ::

I enjoyed a somewhat optimized venue for viewing this movie.  Alex and his friends had organized a Burma Night, spontaneously conceived the week before, and shared at this Nepalese Buddhist compound that shares the same block as the Linus Pauling House.

I somewhat jokingly introduced myself as being from there (the Pauling House), whereas it's not really a residence, unlike this place.

Appropriately, I've been in touch with John Driscoll of late, erstwhile denizen of the so-called Voodoo House (Santo Daime) I used to write about -- same zip code.  Old Portland homes lend themselves to becoming religious establishments.  Something about all that wood maybe.

So Burma has this pervasive pass time and sport called chinlone.  It's a lot like hacky sack in that you're trying to keep something in the air, cooperatively or solo, but in this case it's a woven hollow ball of rattan.  Alex, who was quite a good hacky sack player, assures us chinlone takes a whole different skill set (one which he doesn't have).

Greg Hamilton, the director and star of Mystic Ball, is a handsome world citizen (also Canadian), your archetypal Global U student.  He's very athletic and is a disciplined martial arts teacher in Toronto.  He sees some guy playing chinlone in the park and is mesmerized.  Something clicks.  The rest of the film traces his increasing obsession with this sport and how it draws him into the cultural life and mind of the Burmese people.

The story line is so simple and innocent, like a children's book.

This doesn't mean there's not a beautiful girl to offset the handsome man.  She's one of the best chinlone players in the country and performs solo.  She's ridiculously talented and a sweetheart.  Watching her in slow motion, kicking that woven ball, rivals any martial arts sequence.  The guys are good too, really good.

The room was a hubbub of interesting conversations.  As a somewhat large guy, I can't just "flit about" like Tinkerbell, but I did my best to tune in a number of fascinating threads, about Buddhism, Alex's coming of age stories, and remarks on the new movie about his mom (none of us had seen it yet).

My wife Dawn would have loved this community and I'm sorry she didn't live long enough to enjoy it with me.  She was serious about her practice, and loved sharing about the dharma (teachings) with her shangha (community).

Terry of ISEPP has this vision of how the Pauling Campus might one day encompass this whole city block.  He publishes the artist's conception of this campus in the various programs handed out at the Schnitzer.

These drawings predate the temple though.  It would make a lot more sense for any peace-focused campus to include this Buddhist HQS as a core campus institution.

The synergy with the Paulings, in terms of connecting their anti-nuke pacificism with a world religion of many branches, looks really propitious.

My Reincarnation (movie review)

This was a movie about family, somewhat reliving a dream for me as so much of it was set in Italy with people speaking Italian. That was my boyhood.

But the focus is a Tibetan diaspora family, which takes me back to Bhutan, and the matter of fact way in which reincarnation is dealt with there.

To top it all off, I met family by happenstance at Andy & Bax earlier. Alexia and David were shopping for esoteric sporting supplies. I was drawn there by rather strong visions and ended up going from army to navy in my surplus look.

With the new boots (Bogs) I look like some fisher fleet captain, maybe a lobster guy. I should wear this outfit on Meliptus. Anyway, we ended up all going for Thai food, Tara too, at the new place on 38th and Division (first time for us with the new owners -- good dishes).

I took a break after ordering appetizers to buy mice from Twin at Rose City Reptiles, for Barry-the-python, so even more of the family was included.

Back to the film: the son of the Rimpoche is not that easy with his reputation for being his dad's reincarnated uncle or brother or teacher, or one of those. He's just another Italian kid wanting that kind of warm Latin family, a dad more there for him.

But dad, a Rimpoche trying to keep Tibetan culture alive, has somewhat heavy responsibilities, in the sense of lots of people looking to him to not drop the ball. He'd been pressed into monastic service early, as a reincarnation himself, and had escaped Tibet when the country was invaded and occupied in the 1950s.

Dogzchen is an important lineage, including in Italy these days by the looks of things, in Russia too.

The son grows into a man, marries, has kids of his own. He works for IBM. He's a hard driving executive. The cameras don't follow him into his business life much. We talk to the dad a lot, who likes floating in pools. The years fly by.

Having a documentary made of oneself, somewhat in the style of the Up series, does have an impact. The family is self-conscious anyway though, so the addition of cameras doesn't seem that obtrusive. These are unpretentious people willing to make a lasting document with their lives.

Flash forward and the son finally decides to go with his gut and his visions and start practicing his Buddhism more. He'll let his dad be his teacher in this chapter.

What drove him to this decision? For one thing, the job stress is getting to him and he needs to trance out while driving just to stay sane around work. Then come the dreams again, like when he was younger. Pretty soon he's realizing he might be on the path to becoming a Rimpoche himself.

The expectation that this reincarnated teacher might someday return to Tibet, to a major homecoming and welcome, is never far from the surface.

One might compare it to the fictional Little Buddha (I just did), but it's a much more in-your-face documentary about the everyday messiness of life. It's a teaching, a lesson in keeping it real (with forays into the surreal).

The Buddha's story is alluded to, but we don't escape into the big budget mythographic portrayals with Keanu Reeves. Instead, we have a real, worldly family, of wives and mothers, husbands and fathers, siblings, children, grandparents, the whole nine yards. And lets not forget students, colleagues, peers.

We get older, we get sick, we get well, we die, then we get young again and start over. Did the subtitles get it right, saying "conscience" instead of "consciousness"? Would either work? Lucid dreaming plays a role (something Dawn was into too).

The human family has gotten a lot smaller all of a sudden, and a lot bigger. We number in the billions, yet the planet is so small.

I thought maybe the funniest line was when the reincarnated Italian-speaking Tibetan Buddhist community organizer IBM executive is trying to get things going in Moscow, and says: "why are you Russians so complicated?" Who's calling who complicated again?