Lunch Business

I met with Glenn today at Oasis, across from Bagdad. Some find this intersection poetic. Glenn says he's camping out, even though he's perched in an apartment complex.

Camping is the geek theme or message of the day (MTOD). Once you've been tossed out of your digs, you get to camp, and the camping laws become important. It's a public roads issue. Sisters of the Road has been at the center of the action.

I wrote Knocking on MIT's Door for the Math Forum. What's somewhat new is to have people on the humanities side thinking they know enough to follow the action. Dr. Arthur Loeb was a Renaissance man at Harvard and MIT whom many respected.

However, when it came time to unveil some of the work by his proteges, he received some ungenerous backlash. People were sure, at that time, that they wanted nothing to do with buckminsterfullerene (not yet discovered, so that can't be correct). Humanities people may get their wires crossed sometimes, but it's good to see they're at least paying attention.

Anyway, Glenn and I talked about our workshop. He's friendly and gets people in a pretty good mood. Some of the scarier amusement park rides seem more doable when the background context is so safe. Martian Math is more like one of those roller coasters, like the Matterhorn or one of those. We call it "getting abducted" -- and some of the math teachers seem to agree.

Lots of torrential rain, hour after hour, day after day. A young woman with all the right gear just showed up from work, full of song and good cheer, ready to pitch in on our vegetables project (squash in the oven, mushroom soup...). That's right, it's a Thursday, and we're at the meetinghouse again with Food Not Bombs. I did hauling, prep and now need to do cleanup.

Lindsey has officially laid down her commission, asking to be "released" (Quaker jargon). She's morphing into a chieftess of a different variety. I've been using her as a model to think about a new kind of math teacher, more energy conscious and politically aware (quite revolutionary actually, in the sense of "adding spin").