Today is action packed. Sam Lanahan and Mark Martin shared the floor at Linus Pauling House. The production values were impressive, as usual. My attention was somewhat divided as I'd become exercised over the inclusion of a lot of cruft on the Wikipedia page about Synergetics. I went ballistic on Synergeo.
Mark's solution to the Flextegrity problem uses like 29K lines of C++ and beaucoups differential equations. I think research in this direction will inspire more confidence among the 99%. I'd like to see Elastic Interval Geometry applied to this problem as well. EIG engines have much simpler guts and Gerald de Jong's commitment to writing beautiful code, in Java especially, has launched this new discipline on a promising track.
Mark pointed out that his solution uses quaternions, consistent with his claim that his simulation is like a gaming engine in a lot of ways (those use quaternions too, faster than matrix ops in many cases).
Like I had this guy shouting at me recently (no, not at this meeting), saying stuff about "old man" but I wasn't worried about it, as I'd been eldering him about terrorizing a driver. The car had stopped suddenly, not seeing him and his pal, almost hit them. The guy was now standing in front of the car going on and on (and on, and on) with a screaming rant, not letting it go, pinning the driver to the scene (reverse might have worked -- or caused an accident). I thought he was being too self-indulgent and told him so in so many words. The situation broke up and the car was able to drive off. I didn't mind trading insults. Shades of Italy.
Wanderer and Friend Leslie Hickcox showed up in her Honda vehicle, partly on the promise of free chanterelles. Jim Buxton was being generous again. I hitched a ride, with computer and 'shrooms, to the Quaker meetinghouse on Stark Street.
A brainstorming session was in full swing, lots of Friends mixing with Occupy Portland players in small groups. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of Quakers' involvement, as I was learning from Lindsey's and Melody's reports last night (they're on break from FNB/PDV for R&R).
The Occupy Portland groups were varied in quality. I thought the group of all women, which mom and Leslie attended, was the most coherent in the summary session.
The thinking was rather nationalist in flavor, with discussion of Bhutan and Germany, but that's OK. People don't know how to talk about geography without these hooks. Besides, according to Chris Hedges, it's the 1% that are supranationalist in outlook (the Grunchies), whereas the hoi polloi 99% have no choice but to think within their Matrix.
We have Diversity people here, who feel highly offended by various things people say. The special talent of such folks is to have their sensitivities tuned up really high. One person started crying about all the run-ins with creeps, and why doesn't anyone do anything about it? Feelings of loneliness and abandonment I well recognize.
Like I had this guy shouting at me recently (no, not at this meeting), saying stuff about "old man" but I wasn't worried about it, as I'd been eldering him about terrorizing a driver. The car had stopped suddenly, not seeing him and his pal, almost hit them. The guy was now standing in front of the car going on and on (and on, and on) with a screaming rant, not letting it go, pinning the driver to the scene (reverse might have worked -- or caused an accident). I thought he was being too self-indulgent and told him so in so many words. The situation broke up and the car was able to drive off. I didn't mind trading insults. Shades of Italy.
My next meeting: Lyrik again. A hotel support shop, offers useful software at a decent price, but it's built in FoxPro and there's wheel turning about how to go forward. I've encountered this challenge before in college course registration software, and in truck routing software. An important sector of the economy is being abandoned by the parent, left orphaned, or at least that's how many feel. I could empathize once again.
I outlined a path using Django or some similar web framework, with an MVC architecture and ORM connecting to an SQL engine. Could be LAMP stack, Windows or OS X, I was platform agnostic. Not sure about BeOS or its successor.
So are any hand-held computers, so-called phones, doing Python these days? Nokia had one. As these are Quaker journals ("shhhh!" like a library), I don't have comments turned on. Just letting you know it's a topic I care about, in case you're interested in sending me links.
