Wanderers 2017.11.22

I got to this one a little late, having worked night shift to 10:30 PM, and then diving into boning up on data analysis, something I share about.  The meetup starts at 9 AM.  I was there by like 9:15 or so.

Dick Pugh, last name Welsh, was sharing about a long-lived rumor, regarding "Welsh Indians" pre Columbus.

Quoting from our Yahoo list:

"Welsh Come to America in the year 1170, Long Before Columbus, and Become the Mandan indians, Who spoke Welsh"

9:00 AM, Wednesday morning, November 22, at The Pauling House, 3945 SE Hawthorne.

Hope to see you there!

Don

Apparently one Maddog might have made it from Wales circa 1100 AD and helped establish a new tribe with Welsh customs and artifacts.  Given I came late, I'm not sure by what route.

Mainstream news poo poohs this hypothesis, Dick was quick to admit.  However he wanted to be sure we had a chance to check the evidence.

In general, our understanding of when the Americas entered into trans-oceanic lore, has been getting updated.  The idea of Vikings along the Great Lakes doesn't sound as absurd as it used to.

This rumor, of "Welsh Indians" goes back at least to the time of Thomas Jefferson and the US versus UK boardroom brawl ("American Revolution").

Jefferson asked Lewis and Clark, the great explorers who mapped their way to the Pacific and back, to keep a lookout for any signs of such a tribe.

Dick gave a great presentation and all present felt well informed.  I won't try to do his presentation justice in terms of relaying all its content.  You had to be there.

Meteor Man

Dick Pugh graced Wanderers with the latest version of his meteor talk this morning.  He has polished this presentation over the years, however there are always new developments to roll into it.

Besides, good stories are worth hearing multiple times, like a favorite record album.  Remember record albums?  Dick is a world authority and former high school teacher.  His talks are engaging.

He's still an avid collector and is savvy regarding the going rates for fragments from specific debris fields.  Part of the fun of his talk is how it's peppered with mentions of obscure treasures, such as a junky old car, now worth oh so much more, now that a meteor has totalled it.

Dick gets several calls a week, average one or two a day, from people hoping what they've found is somehow valuable.  More often than not, they have a piece of Oregon basalt, a ubiquitous material that makes Oregon an especially difficult hunting ground.  The quarry (prey) and the background look so much the same.

Finding meteor fragments is so much easier in a sandy desert or in some arctic setting, where a large chunk of iron, or stone, sticks out and calls attention to itself.

Meteors come from asteroids, but also from Earth's moon and the planet Mars.  High impact events fling fragments from those bodies into space, some of which fall into Earth's gravity well.

Don and I huddled over our computers after the talk, trying to get wanderers-announce working as a Yahoo! group.  We already have wwwanderers (with three ws), which caters to those wishing to yak about issues of the day.  Of late, few are yakking.

Contrary to popular belief, meteorites are not hot to the touch, even if they were fireballs upon entering the atmosphere.  They've been coasting near absolute zero for eons and a short encounter with the Earth's atmosphere is not going to undo some billions of years of running cold.

Wanderers 2009.3.3

Dick Pugh is delivering his world class talk on meteorites. He's the expert, bar none in these parts.

Terry has set up an RSTP server for real time streaming, with Apple computers showing the feed. My VLC player on Ubuntu was starting to deliver audio from home, but not video. Now that I'm here, I'm not getting either, go figure (but hey, I'm here).

I was hoping Tara could join me but she has too much homework. Schools maybe overestimate the value of their content? I'm hoping to see Lucy, the ancient fossil remains, at Seattle Center before it closes. This'll require "missing school" (not really -- this is the Global U after all, Seattle Center a campus destination for sure).

Meteroites don't start fires, They're extremely cold (picture from Bagdad, Arizona). They can raise hell though, without being hot. One in Arizona broke up into BB-sized "buck shot" and killed dozens of rabbits, snakes etc.

There's Dick Pugh in Hoba, Namibia, standing next to the largest meteroite in the world. Portland State (PSU) is lucky to get branding on these slides. There's Dick in Brahin, Belarus. There's a Bondoc, Luzon, where the word "boondocks" comes from. Park Forest, Illinois; Bensour, Morocco; Brownfield, Texas...

Anyway, it's a start. Rhett Savage reports from a remote location that it's working for him.

Don thought it was cool that some of those rocks in the room were measured older than Planet Earth.

Wanderers 2009.9.23

We're eleven strong this morning, including Dr. Nick, train-bound, and Barbara, soon to Panama. Dick Pugh, the meteor man, another Cleveland veteran like Barbara, is regaling us with stories.

I ran into Johnny Stallings at Jiffy Lube while servicing EKM. His pen pal friend was getting to try a half-way house for the last six months of his term, provided he found a job within two weeks, and no knocking on doors, gotta line up real interviews. Pretty stringent.

I'm passing around Todd Schorr's Dreamland again, an art book in my collection.

We're reminiscing about some of our super stars: Dr. Stephen W. Hawking yakking about God (Q: "Does God exist" A: (after an interval): "It's not for me to say"), Stephen Jay Gould and the bible thumpers in his audience that night. This guy Atul is doing the Schnitzer this evening (not an ISEPP talk). The tickets show him in health worker clothes.

I've been sending out updates to sponsors, potential investors, regarding our company activities this summer. Testing our safe-house network for future foreign exchange students is best accomplished by locals, or folks from out of state. Some of the language and cultural barriers go away, while host families get habituated to having a guest, maybe starting a garden if planning to feature on cooking shows.

Fine Grind (headed for a name change) is getting those ASCAP letters (and phone calls), same as Duke's Landing (yes, Duke is a Mastiff, same breed as Shomar) same as any public house or brewpub that shares covers and/or original music to which the artist no longer owns the rights.

Open source music, pioneered in Portland among other capitals, develops play lists of sanitized music, with artist-owned copyrights. GNU's GPL etc., serve as model license agreements, when covering derivative works. Of course ASCAP is free to license its own open source distro, as is BMI, much as RedHat sells Linux. The visual arts community also shares paradigms.

Lots of energy talk, more stories about meteors. OK, time to upload to Photostream. I'm still happy with this system76 running Ubuntu Jackalope, a netbook. I pondering whether I should get some accessories, should the winter budget get approved (need to submit to CFO one day soon i.e. send by httpRequest).

I watched the season premier of NCIS, also the launch of NCIS LA (it's common to franchise successful shows, witness CSI). The N stands for Navy. These guys never seem to set foot on a ship, just carry on like normal landlubbers from what I can tell, but then I don't usually go for fantasy worlds of this nature -- too much slimy ooze eye candy (to paraphrase Frank Zappa), horse-pukey stuff. The HDTV looks really sharp (these were broadcasts, neither cable nor dish). This new breed of TV is changing the culture eh?

:: copyleft noncommercial (click) ::

Wanderers 2007.12.19

"Wow, we have exotic fauna today" was my remark coming in, later than usual, as Razz needed an oil change. Barbara Stross joined us, just back from two months in Panama and Cuba, along with Dick Pugh the meteor man, and Nick Consoletti. The conversation, about Vitamin C (very appropriate for the Pauling House) sounded highly informed -- mostly stuff I don't know much about.

My meditation this morning: losing one's temper, prompted in part by Katie's interviews of the presidential candidates on CBS News. Whereas they had to answer off the cuff, I've had a longer time to formulate an answer.

Ideally, I like to vent and fulminate with friends, usually by taking a strong point of view, not targeting anyone present, but putting a lot of emotion behind it. Then come sparring partners, open to heated debate. Finally, censors and handlers know to edit or block my remarks, given their vantage points in the field.

But "ideally" implies "controlled, intentional" whereas "losing one's temper" or simply "losing it" implies "out of control." What I most need to avoid is heating up among strangers, especially in mixed, multi-ethnic situations, as people will likely conclude I'm just another bossy white guy taking his privileges for granted.

I've done a lot of polemics on-line, but my mood isn't necessarily angry, when I write such stuff.

I remember going to Seoul, getting picked up at the airport by Kijoon and a friend. After awhile in the car, Kijoon's friend remarked I was very quiet, for an American. I probably get that from my dad.

I read the above aloud to the assembled Wanderers, prompting further banter and discussion, about The Quiet American, about Canadians.

Bill introduced us to Cliff Pickover's Reality Carnival which looks interesting. Another Wanderer pointed me to NASA's investments in open source avionics.

Lunch with the Boltons at The Bagdad.

Wanderers 2014.4.8: WW1

Gordon Hoffman did a stupendous job synergizing with Wanderers, letting other old timers chime in with fascinating facts and factoids, adding texture and nuance to an already-tasteful presentation.

Gordon is qualified to call himself a truly vested individual when in comes to WW1, and right away we should point out that, at this point in history, extremely few people with USA passports, with USA citizenship, are seen to frequent the monuments to its war dead in Europe.  This is rightly seen by many as anomalous.  But then the USA stands out in many ways that leave Europeans somewhat perplexed, if not dismayed.

I'm truly not so-qualified, i.e. my insights into WW1 are still in early Big Bang inflationary stage, where I double my understanding every thirty minutes.  I've been reading a lot of history recently, lets say "of the Vienna Circle" to stay brief about it, along with that compendium, Human Smoke (on my Kindle).

Having Gordon's slide presentation plunk down in the middle of these studies really helped things crystallize for me.  Following the changing map of Europe is as hard as inverting a matrix or finding its eigenvalues.  Historians take in hyper-dimensional spaces for breakfast.  That being said, I have a lot more learning ahead of me (duh).  Thank you Gordon, for accelerating my process.

He handed around some small items from his collection.  Dick Pugh was there, another master of the show and tell, sorry to miss Mastin, and Glenn.  Terry, you should come to more of these.  But then it's such a small venue.  Anyway, it was what it was, which was fantastic and educational.

Gordon was and is a major galvanizer of the Saturday Academy subculture in which I've participated and blogged about at some length.  He's blessed with a surplus of attention, one could say, whereas a deficit of same has become the norm.  He shares his scholarship with the rest of us, and he enjoys the opportunities his life affords.  Search elsewhere in these chronicles for more.

Wanderers 2009.11.4

:: soldering job ::

Steve Mastin had just attended a conference organized by ICO (Innovate | Collaborate | Oregon) and is talking about medical research companies involved in brain research and so forth. The Vollum Institute gives OHSU an international reputation. Electrical Geodesics, based in Eugene, makes those "hair net" EEG devices with 256 receptors, now being used in sleep disorder research and so forth.

However, Oregon has a hard time retaining its top researchers, who tend to get hired away by companies with better facilities. Oregon is more a way station than a final destination in the medical research biz at this point in its history. A lot of the research simply happens overseas e.g. the AIDS vaccine is being researched in Thailand.

Some brain researchers are focused on nematodes, creatures with only about 5000 neurons in their brains. Understanding the human brain requires starting with simpler models.

Some nematodes cause serious diseases although there's hardly any commercial activity around curing these because the tropical regions where these occur are too poor to fund and buy the drugs. Resulting from nematode research is a microscope stage that adjusts its positions hundreds of times a second to hold a wiggling specimen steady relative to the microscope eye.

Steve had heard an impressive talk at the World Trade Center downtown by Larry Sherman with OHSU and the Primate Center out near OGI. The brain continues to rewire itself throughout life, retains its plasticity. Music, both performing it and listening to it, helps the brain resist degradation through aging. Glenn saw the link to Oliver Sacks and his Musicophilia presentation, which I managed to miss. The poster for that event is in front of the one about Moira Gunn's presentation and her Biotech Nation, which is what today's session is all about.

Mastin focuses on technology transfer, getting results from research in a university setting moved into the private sector for commercial applications. Oregon has had some nasty barriers to this happening in the public sector, however there's been a sea change and more transfer is happening. Oregon's small biomedical firms still lack managerial experience in Steve's assessment, meaning we still see a lot of failures and missed opportunities as people try to learn on the job.

Flipping through the conference materials, I'm seeing a lot of emphasis on early detection of brain function degradation through home monitoring systems. I'm reminded of CareWheels and Ron Braithwaite's presentation. Older people wanting to stay in their own homes might be assisted with non-intrusive, non-invasive monitoring with a layer of software for flagging possible episodes in need of a response or intervention. These care systems would include a lot of humans in the loop. In Ron's model, some of the monitors might likewise be home bound.

Bill Shepard remembered to bring his soldering gear, based on last week's discussion. I'd found a lot of lore on the Web about my specific model of DVD player and the capacitor that tends to go out. Just buy a 1000 micro-farad replacement at Radio Shack, rated to higher voltage, and replace the defective one. Bill did that and indeed, the DVD player sprang to life. A farad, a unit of capacitance, defines a 1 volt difference when charged up by one coulomb (one amp flowing for one second).

Wanderers is planning a field trip to ONAMI, the nanotechnology research center, in about three weeks.

Buzz showed up towards the end, exultant that Tim's Green Lite Motors had achieved semi-finalist status in the Clean Tech Open in Seattle, a $50K prize. Now it's on to the national championship contest. Tim and Kym are Wanderers as well.

Jim Buxton wonders if Frank Baum's Tin Man character in the Wizard of Oz might've drawn on the fact that woodsmen actually wore "tin cloth" (a marketing term, as tin connoted "durable"). Although Dick Pugh isn't here, he's much in our conversation about meteorites. Steve might bring some moldavite aka Libyan desert glass to Duane's gemology presentation next time.

Wanderers Retreat

I went into this event feeling stupid about Linus Pauling, like exactly when did he live. Fortunately, Terry showed up with some brief documentaries, which we projected on Friday night. 1901 to 1994, with a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1954, and for peace in 1962.

Allen Taylor and I talked about the power of some preachers to really stand and deliver. He's had more experience listening to preachers than I, given my background with unprogrammed Friends. Billy Graham came up as a man of integrity, and friend of Kim Il-Sung, Jong-Il's dad.

Allen has just finished another "for dummies" book on SQL. His son Rob just won a best actor award for his protrayal of Neil Stryker in Evil Cult.

I talked about Quakers finding resonance with this Islamic concept of Jihad, using truth to undermine tyranny -- a kind of psychological warfare (Quaker bumper sticker: Outward Weapons are for Losers).

Last night the girls and I drove over to Irvington to learn about Claire's sojourn in rural Mexico, staying with a host family for six weeks and planning lots of summer school activities with her friend Ashley.

This Amigos program also aims to broaden horizons intra Latin America as well i.e. not all the guests are necessarily based in North America.

Claire's excellent presentation reminded me that we hope Terry's daughter Caitlin will make a presentation to Wanderers one day, about her own world travels, including in rural India.

Larry finally got his new Vista box connected to the Internet (router problem). Good seeing Andy and Barb again, both fluent in Spanish and familiar with many parts of Central and South America. Chris stopped by the Pauling House straight from Meeting to share a memorials-related file.

I got Tinkerbell out for my first real ride of the season this morning: a 17 mile loop mostly on Springwater Corridor, including over the new bike bridge in Sellwood. Other Wanderers, including Barbara, a veteran outdoorsman, used the morning hours to hike up to Mt. Tabor, our little urban volcano.

Some young geeks showed up, down from Seattle on a pilgrimmage to Pauling-related sites they'd scrounged up via the Internet. They'd just come from his gravesite in Lake Oswego. We gave 'em a quick tour of the house, filled in some of the surrounding history.

Towards mid-afternoon, David Feinstein swung by and joined Bill Sheppard and myself for lunch at K2, an excellent nearby restaurant featuring Indian-Pakistani food. We discussed a broad range of topics, from flow accelerated corrosion to the invasion of Grenada.

I missed seeing Dick Pugh this retreat, though he came by, our respective scenarios being only partially overlapping as Bucky'd've put it.

Wanderers 2014.8.20

Carol Urner, my mother, had the floor again this morning.  She was presenting on "reasons for hope" within the nuke weapons abolition movement, a campaign variously named, sometimes called "Countdown to Zero" in this blog.

Her reasons for hope centered around:

(a) a meeting on September 26, 2013
(b) actions by the non-aligned nations
(c) the World and US Council of Mayors
(d) the lawsuit by the Marshall Islands

Some of her statements were quite pro-Iran as she's in the camp thinking Iran is muscling around the edges of the nuclear weapons club in order to push for a no nuke weapons future, or call it leverage.

The same theory was floated about the USSR before its dissolution i.e. that an uber-goal of the Russian leadership was likewise a nuclear weapons free world.

Such hypotheses do not usually sit well with Americans, as the primary justification for the USA's continuing to stockpile is "crazy rogue nations" such as the USSR, Iran and North Korea.  Imputing motives such as "attaining a nuclear weapons free world" to crazies makes them sound sane and US foreign policy is premised on the craziness of its enemies.  The idea of any "hope" gets cold water in the US press, for the most part.  Encouraging fear over longing seems more like DC's strong suit and leadership style.

Carol is giving a similar talk tomorrow at Thirsters.

During the middle of the Carol's talk, Lindsey and Melody dropped by and I made the brief announcement that this was Lindsey's last day in the US for some months, given her imminent departure from PDX this evening.

Lindsey has occasionally joined us at Wanderers over the years and is friends with many of us.  Her official goodbye party was this passed Saturday.

Good seeing Elizabeth Furse again, former US Congresswoman, and David Tver at the table, along with other august attenders, like Dick Pugh.

Dick corrected Carol on a couple of points:  the rocket used to launch the plutonium-carrying satellite was not itself a "nuclear rocket" (as in nuke-powered) and the nuclear devices exploded in the Pacific were not technically "bombs" i.e. were not "dropped", even if the tests were indeed atmospheric.

Carol spoke quite a bit about native / indigenous concerns regarding the nuclear industry, which has impacted North American tribes a lot, not just Pacific Islanders who've seen their homelands and way of life destroyed by Pentagon bozos.  We talked about how men, more than women, tend to be bozos and how future world summits will need at least 50% women if they want any legitimacy.

September 26 is a new UN official day.

Wanderers 2012.9.11

Michael Hagmeier is here at the Pauling House, with Heather, and some of his didj collection.

Dick Pugh is here too, reminding us of the upcoming lecture by the Vatican astronomer, about the Vatican's meteor collection.

Since Dick and Michael have both been to Australia that made for some discussion.

Michael is selling tickets for his concert, September 29th.

The conversation continued to meander.

Discovered bombs and weapons from wars long over (a topic).

Jimmy is here talking about his experiments with ultra-light camping gear.  That discussion is apropos as Lindsey is busy configuring for an away team, leaving tomorrow.

I left her to her business in the living room as conversation would only make for further delays.

How much weight to pack is a big discussion.  Lots of parameters and tradeoffs.

This all sounds like STEM to me, and/or "girl scout math" (one of my curriculum writing projects).

More with less.  Dymaxion.

The tiny water filter Jimmy brought for show and tell was awesome.  Lindsey should meet this guy.

Failings

:: not a failing, a find ::

One of my most annoying failings is I lose track of important items, and then have trouble accounting for where I might have left them, meaning "lost or stolen?" remains an open question.  My dad understood how annoying to oneself and others this not being "on the ball" could get to be, and he reminded me to "stay on the ball" from time to time.

Given how often I lose my prized things, I waste a lot of time obsessively looking for them, often to no avail.  The etymology of the pejorative "loser" is obvious:  one who loses.  Losing is a symptom of ineffective self disciplines, which may come across as, and may be, self indulgence.  Indeed, on a world scale I have my share of treasures and should not take them for granted.  I work on those disciplines, and for long periods I've known relatively better success rates.

A way to compensate for a tendency to lose is to quickly save a copy or image somewhere.  Document the existence of items.  Keep those documents at least.

I've focused on losing in this blog post, however a tendency to break things, or not fix things in need of repair, might serve as material for additional exciting Failings episodes.

I forgot Dick Pugh was giving an excellent and well attended talk on meteors tonight at Wanderers, and was thinking to process my frustration a bit.  Finding that psychotherapy venue temporarily well occupied, I turned to the old fashioned dear diary format.  What's a journal for if not for Failings?

Quakers have had committees for Sufferings, and express Joys and Concerns.  But Committees for Failings?  Perhaps we could focus on those sometimes.  However we don't want to turn ourselves into some commune based on various forms of public humiliation and shaming.  Those patterns have been tried and found to not work over the long haul.

Even while writing this I managed to temporarily lose, then find, two important items.  At least I still have the camera and cell phone, for the time being.

By best guess is the Samsung Galaxy 10.1" tablet got swiped from the back seat of an unlocked car a couple days ago and I'm just noticing.  I promise to confess here if I find it after all, or if it's returned (unlikely).

In the meantime, check out the wonderful find Glenn shared with me this morning, a book about making patterns with thread in a cylinder, used in the 1960s at some alternative ("underground") school in New Mexico.

Click the picture to get into the Photostream for more.

OK, after visiting The Bagdad and asking them to check lost and found, the stuff appeared, both the hat and the tablet, on a dining room chair tucked under the table.

Wanderers 2011.07.05

:: from July 3-5, 2011 ::

Happy birthday Julie.

We left them carless at the Issaquah Motel 6, with advice from Uncle Bill about some express bus service to Seattle. Back to Centralia.

On the way up, I'd caught the Vin Diesel movie. It was either that, or listen to the sound track from my lower bunk. You might think, as some kind of Quaker, that I'd be against this romp through Rio, tearing things up by dragging a special effects bag of tricks though an amazing number of obstacles. It's "kinetics" in that 14 year old sense of wanting to know more physics, see what might happen if... action fantasies fulfilled, using someone's sense of what's believable.

The relatives were hardy and fun once again, a kindly clan.

Floyd pilots those triple-7s to way distant airports. Boeing has always been big in this region, since I was born anyway, which was not all that long ago (1958).

We made a side trip going North in Puyallup to the Costco on 512, a big fuel-wasting mistake on my part, or maybe a commercial. It was closed of course.

Albertson's and Baskin-Robins supplied our contributions to the picnic, including some hard cider selected by me.

I was doing some work on the laptop. PSF business as well. That's ongoing.

Pauling House: Barbara was with us, telling us about her life tending to her almost-100 years old mother. Dick Pugh. Dondi. Me showing up late from Food Not Bombs where the native chanting was heartening. Wave to Melody (one of our chiefs).

I talked with Derek's friend about televising-while-building-out the FNB infrastructure. He was closer to my age, with a lot of experience running big institutions.

Stopped at Office Depot on the way back, got Tara some office furniture. Then it appears her HP Pavilion is dying, younger SATA drive reporting immanent failure direct from BIOS. Is it the iMac that moved in, a work/study program item? No, that doesn't explain it.

Lots of talk about scuba diving tonight (Dondi is getting certified). I bragged about my NAUI certification, my wreck diving in Truk Lagoon. No, I'm not above bragging, like to strut when others are doing it.

That Vin Diesel movie was funny in that way. The heroes made off with the cash, to which the bad guy was not entitled, and were living their dreams. Fast cars. A kind of Mondo Unisex in the behavior codes. The movie had like a role model for everyone. You could like cops, you could not like cops, you could be Asian...

I'm seeing movie-making as more of an alternative to violence. Instead of actually having these bruising battles between superheroes, we act them out and save lives. We're heroes ourselves for just making this an idle summer fantasy in Centralia. They see more of Rio, and favelas rising.

Like the Bond films in that way. Another topic tonight around the table. Dondi had been learning about Ian Flemming, how he got it out of his system. She hadn't known he wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I got to be the font of knowledge about something (like explaining "geek" to Steve -- he took it as the straight man).

Brazil: that's where Keiko is from, our lovely Lyrik owner.

Wanderers 2008.5.13

Last night's guest, Alex Ansary, has a cable TV show in Portland. He was invited by Aldona to talk about 911 and other stuff.

He predicts a lot of chaos and craziness up ahead (food riots? -- already happening in some places). We should maybe stockpile food? Guns? Definitely community networking and permaculture (cue Sunanda).

I appreciated this quick peak into the collective psyche. Alex is articulate and intelligent. As long as he keeps omnitriangulating, he'll do fine I think.

He doesn't trust official explanations of things (skepticism is good) and works hard to piece together a coherent alternative narrative. CFR, Bilderburgs, Trilateral Commission... a lot of the usual stuff (so far). He didn't claim to believe everything he was telling us, just wanted to make sure we had access to his literature.

Some of his fans joined us for the evening and echoed many of his concerns. I appreciated their commitment to investigative journalism. Patricia had a calming influence, as voices got louder, which I appreciated.

Wanderers doesn't rate as the core of any conspiracy yet, which is just as well. We're not trying to compete with the Zbigniew Brzezinskis of this world.

Good seeing Nirel again, however briefly (I'm a loyal fan).

I joked with Bill about having upgraded my Ubuntu Dell laptop to Horny Hen the other day. Of course I meant Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04).

The funniest part of the meeting (I thought) is when discussion turned to space aliens and Dick Pugh the meteor man said now we were on his turf. Dick can count me as a fan as well.

Wanderers 2009.3.11

We're live streaming today, Terry giving a thumbs up, signaling Jeff through an iPhone. Dr. Nick is here, regaling us with stories, of Greyhound. The spirit of Sunanda was invoked. Dr. DiNucci also walked in.

I showed in my Quaker futurist aka Chicago crime boss outfit, gown coat with "global matrix hat" aka the Paul Kaufman special. Sort of Abramoff meets Quaker oats guy. I removed these outer garments upon entry (noting dog hair on gown coat), have my industry standard Python fleece, DemocracyLab T-shirt, Lucky Brand jeans etc.

We're quite aware of the lag time, video and audio in sync (so not like lightning and thunder) but like 11 seconds after the fact (on our end). Here's Jim Buxton, our chainsaw repairman of Libyan eclipse fame.

I'm pleased our Advanced Training for Gnu Math Teachers is percolating outward from Wanderers to the Math Forum teachers. This is a good exchange of memes across cultures.

I'm branding our "arrowhead geometry" as Lakota these days (gringos slow to pick up), having attained a "yellow belt" in that medicine wheel practice (not super high), having been recruited by Dawn and Élise (I dropped out at the drum-making level, having gotten what I came for).

Talk wanders to astronomical events, Dick Pugh's presentation, other topics. DiNucci kept donning sunglasses and a beret, to protect his identity when discussing "sensitive" topics. I discussed subliminal codes in pictures of Bob in the clear, open source pioneer that I be. Jeff developed a web site for Baby Laith that's helped a lot with the finances.

I'm looking forward to lunch with Uncle Bill Lightfoot (we went to Bagdad, then to Gold Door).

Wanderers 2007.10.2

Barbara Stross shared about her life on an island in Panama, with pictures.

She has a beautiful setup, though security is a problem (she gets burglarized when she's gone).

She has an ATV for getting to and from town.

The cisterns fill in like half an hour during the heavy rain storms.

The sunsets are beautiful, complete with lightning. The community is cosmopolitan.

Howler monkeys. Bats. Colorful spiders.

Unfortunately, Barbara's ecosystem is coming under severe strain thanks to unscrupulous developers and consumerist suburbanites expecting "all the amenities" and then some (blech).

Barbara was a school teacher in Portland for many years, at Cleveland (a contemporary of Dick Pugh) and at Metropolitan Learning Center.

Lew Frederick operated Don's PowerBook. Eve Menger joined us as well, and Brian Sharp. Derek. Barry. About thirteen of us in all.

Equinox 2016

We all fit around the Pauling House table this time, many of the usual suspects.

Steve Mastin was the first to leave eager to get home while still daylight.  Daylight savings time has only just begun.

Steve's estate is getting pummeled by steady 25 mph winds with gusts up to 60 mph.  We call these the "east winds" and they funnel through the gorge, bringing a cold blast to the East Side especially, as in Gresham (where Steve lives) and Troutdale.

I'd picked Lindsey up at PDX International earlier.  She was coming in by shuttle bus from Corvallis / OSU, bringing impressively heavy bags.

I fought traffic on the Banfield to my exit at 43rd, as we talked about her first semester and pending tour, stopping at Blue House on the way to John's Landing, where we sampled Szechuan Chef and Pier One Imports. I was in chauffeur mode, glad to perform some service for an MVP.

We'd had Szechuan within walking distance of Blue House:  Lucky Strike, in the same building as Hawthorne Theater.  One might think the loud music events within the same building would making fine dining impossible by I never found that to be a problem.  Thick brick.

Lucky Strike closed because the rents went up.  My Chinese food experts circled this place on Macadam as worth a try, along with another place in Sellwood.

Lindsey checked in with a health professional next, also on Macadam, while I took pictures of the handsome river front properties, right across from Ross Island. She loaded up on supplements to help her through a next sojourn in Kathmandu (Patan).

The earthquakes were a year ago.  She was there then too.

She has yet more supplements to pick up in Lake Oswego.

Lindsey's lot as a foreigner is somewhat lonely and difficult in that densely urban environment where she's seen as a "walking ATM" as she puts it.  She has a tight budget to pay her teachers, but to outsiders that looks like deep pockets and an open invitation to further capitalize.

She's learning Newar Charyra Nritya and getting credit towards her BA in so doing, with a PhD to follow most likely.

Barry brought the pork ribs, which Marianne Buchwalter praised, asking for the recipe.  He uses a large grill, which starts open then closes for the tenderizing phase.  He uses only salt and pepper for seasoning.

Nirel and Lindsey -- who showed up on foot after I'd left her cashed out on the couch -- fell into an earnest conversation.  Nirel is well traveled, including in India.  We'd all three been under the weather, starting about two to three weeks ago, when I ferried Lindsey to a mosque, more homework for OSU.

Then the master of ceremonies (not me) suggested we all join in a single conversation, which we did.

Lindsey took the stage given her interesting karma (life path). Dick Pugh suggested she get her degree in cultural anthropology, although switching from religious studies at this point is not really in the cards.  Marianne asked me who Dick was (we don't all know each other).

Marianne had just finished a writing course taught by the author of a novel Zazen, which I added there and then to my Kindle.   By "Kindle" I mean several devices, least of all my actual Kindle which sits unused and discharged, despite its handsome graphite display.

I favor using my Samsung tablet for reading what I buy for Kindle, using the Kindle app.  Otherwise I might read on my phone, until recently a Droid Razr from Motorola.  I just switched to an HTC One M9 which I think will fight me less (it's also from Motorola, but is a much more advanced Droid).

Of course Marianne and I talked about our children and grandchildren, we always do.

Nirel and Marianne then stuck up a conversation in French.  I tried to listen in.  I chatted with Steve Spiegel about Italy.  We'd both toured there in various capacities, me as an elementary then middle schooler, from the late sixties to early seventies.  I was in Manila by the end of ninth grade, with a sojourn in Bradenton, Florida at Southeast High.

I brought the lentils again.  Glenn brought his signature chili.  Good seeing Christine.  S'been awhile.

Remembering Chuck Bolton.

PPUG 2008.9.9

Jeff is explaining about pdxferment, literally about making yogurt, beer, other fermentables. Dark Horse Comics is here, recruiting a Python coder, as is Patrick (a Wanderer), Jason having moved on to full time work (right Jason?). We're about twentyfive strong this evening.

Brett Carter of Kavi (and a former astronomy student of Dick Pugh's at Cleveland) is talking about Python eggs, which are similar to Java jars. There was no eggified Zope 2.x MySQL adapter, which scared him. Summoning his courage, he tackled egg-making. Brett: "setuptools is just a giant monkey patch on top of disutils, adding on eggs, some other stuff." Getting your egg to include non-Python files takes some tweaking, then host your package at PiPy when you're done maybe.

Mark Frischmuth is here telling us about DemocracyLab, a think tank for building "democracy engines," a first one evolving as a Python application. He pointed us to the data model and source code threads on Clearspace. Coincidentally, I'm wearing a DemocrayLab T-shirt, but I don't say anything about my role.

Leo Soto is our visiting speaker, in the USA with Google's Summer of Code, also a Jython developer. He's here at Cubespace to share about his work around running Django on Jython.

What are the advantages? No global interpreter lock (GIL) for one thing. The Java ecosystem is rich, will read Excel files natively for example, through Apache POI support of OLE. You've got scalability with Hadoop, Hbase, JRuby... it's a lot like .NET, in terms of being packed with goodies.

In retrospect, J2EE was a big, horrible mistake (picture of Titanic). Sorry to hear that.

OK, so there's a new Web ARchive format (war). Unpacking a Django war looks something like jython manage.py war --include-java-libs = XXX.jar. War files are a kind of jar, so sort of like eggs you may have realized. There's no native MySQL or SQLServer adapter for Django on Jython, but then there's zxJDBC.

Leo showed us some back end code for talking to Postgres, importing from the original django.db.backends, but also from zxJDBC for more Java specific operations. There's only an experimental SQLite back end, per a question from the audience (not from me).

So Leo was able to get Django working on Tomcat, showed us a demo.

We can expect a finalized Jython 2.5 towards the end of the year.

I joined the more informal conversations afterward, at Green Dragon, a new brewery on 9th and Belmont, incorporating that old Q-hut that use to sell recycled computer junk. I like Jason's idea of organizing a Python 3.0 release party.

Fall Equinox Celebration

The Friday following the CERM Academy presentation, we gathered for potluck.  Greg & family were of course invited and may make it another time.

We've been doing these Equinox and Solstice celebrations pretty much since being granted access to the Linus Pauling House as a part of the Silicon Forest sponsored ISEPP project, which included restoration and preservation of this historic home.

Linus studied chemistry in the basement and came to intellectual maturity during that exciting time  when organic chemistry was first getting its head around macro molecules, DNA included. He won two Nobel Prizes, one for Chemistry, one for Peace.

Our discussion turned to off-color acronyms, such as engineers use to remember the color coding of resistors. That took us to the politically incorrect (at first blush) mnemonic phrase I learned at Junior English School (Appian Way, Rome) for spelling "arithmetic": A Red Indian Thought He Might Eat Tobacco in Church.

Bob McGown and I realized somewhere around the time I trucked out Pascal's Triangle, that this Red Indian must be that very Chief SohCahToa to whom we who our memorization of the specific names of functions in Trigonometry.  He lives in a tetrahedron tepee. It all came together.

My spin is of course smoking tobacco would be the natural thing in a church, seeing as it was treated as a medicine and religious substance.  We have lots of "tobacco churches" in America, and that's just for starters.

C6XTY, often dubbed a "molecule" by neighbors, especially when assembled, is indeed named in part for C60, the carbon molecule.  The 6 also refers to its six identical parts, locked together with eight screws to give the 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons of the Fullerene macro molecule.

Alpha Helix by Julian voss Andreae, the red helical sculpture outside, commissioned by ISEPP's Doug Strain and its president, Terry Bristol, shows a much simpler molecule than DNA, but one that inspired chemists with portents of what folding could do. Linus Pauling had worked out its structure.

We collectively learned molecules could do origami like nobody's business.  Shape matters, a lot. There's a jigsaw puzzle aspect to chemistry, with lots to visualize.  Chemistry is a lot like a block-based language (thinking of MIT Scratch and its kin).

In attendance: David DiNucci, Barbara Stross, Dick Pugh... I could go on, but not everybody likes their name mentioned.  Brenda Wyse showed up, nice for me as she always showers me with affection (an English idiom).  No Nirel though.

We talked a lot about Brenda's ambitions to get a rather muscular tractor.  She'd done a lot of homework and got into details.  I enjoy tractor talk, even if I'm not good at it.  She has a large farm, that her dad worked on, showing her the ropes.  We've had celebrations there to.

"Tractatus" for "work" connotes "tract of land" and "roe to hoe".  One of my favorite Latin roots.

Mom and I drove the maxi taxi, parking a block behind, and coming across Satya at the temple.  Some equinox-related ceremony was happening there too.

Satya is one of our local holy men who bounces around between the outdoors athletic youth culture (Rainbow Gathering etc.) and elder spaces (Food Not Bombs is for all ages).

I met him through Lindsey, political refugee (not unlike Dawn in that respect) and former house guest, sometime Wanderer.  She's in Kathmandu these days, immersed in some of the cultural traditions this temple traffics in, part of a Religious Studies major through OSU.

Bob McGown brought his dog, which I appreciated and Facebooked about. Wanderers for me is about celebrating non-humans in addition to humans. I've always considered the dogs among us as symbolic of this respectfulness.

However the dog's specific name will be left out of this account in order to keep the confusion level down.  Having a pet python named Barry is bad enough, given Barry Redd the former Peace Corps volunteer machinist banker.  Barry helped a lot with the Sam Lanahan C6XTY Gala Event, another major subject of our conversation.

Illahee

Illahee is a Native American word meaning this place, our country. Peter Schoonmaker shared with Wanderers this morning about his work with the Illahee Foundation on ecosystem planning, focusing on urban centers, and Portland in particular.

Peter's group produces a lecture series, similar to ISEPP's in some ways, but focusing on these different themes. Last year's theme was How Cities Learn (taking off from Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn -- Stewart being one of the lecturers). This year it's Water & Oil (watch for the ads on Tri-Met buses).

Fortunately, Wanderers Dick Pugh and Jim Buxton were present, both "long now" types with an understanding of our place on the geological time scale. We joked about the thin stratum of asphalt and other petroleum based products we'd eventually become, as the world goes on turning.

Peter is on Mayor Tom Potter's visioning committee, aimed at coming up with some credible, actionable futurism for Portland. He finds the process rather plodding compared to Jaime Lerner's fast-paced style, but not every city is as lucky as Curtiba (in Brazil), where Jaime served a few terms as mayor.

Wanderers agreed that roping in more creative types, including Portland's illustrious science fiction community, might be a good idea. Jon Bunce cited Ursula LeGuinn's 1971 novel Lathe of Heaven for anticipating Portland's future (the 1980 made-for-TV version was filmed in Dallas, while the 2002 remake features Ursala's home town of Portland, including light rail).

Indeed, according to Peter, Jaime Lerner likes his planning committees to consist of three main types of people: architects for their design sensibilities, journalists because they know how to meet deadlines, and poet-philosopher types, for their powers of precognition.

After Peter's presentation, I hooked up my wireless laptop to my projector, and screened my OMSI Dome and Dignity Village blog entries, about getting FEDs (Fly's Eye Domes) showcased around Portland.

Although designed for service in more rural areas, FED-style infrastructure draws support from urban control rooms, studios, and classrooms, i.e. is the brainchild of our KBE.

I shared my view that corporate media need only shift gears a little and we'd have some dynamite reality TV complete with exciting product placement opportunities. Politicians needn't be in the loop on this one, which is fortunate, as when it comes to brainstorming potentially positive futures, they're apparently otherwise engaged.

Indeed, I'm flying down to LA tomorrow (after my Winterhaven gig), where I hope to stir things up a bit. Why should this science fiction capital, in a state with a movie star governor, lag so far behind Portland when it comes to intelligently brainstorming about our American Dream? Let's get Hollywood up to speed, shall we? We could use its media know-how.

Wanderers 2006.1.24

Dick Pugh and Julian Voss-Andreae

Tonight Julian shared about his career as a physicist-turned- sculptor of proteins and other molecules. He's working on some exciting new projects.