Dear Senator

In hopes of doing a good deed and sharing a constituent viewpoint, I gathered up an email directly to Senator Merkley's office. I say "gathered up" because I included a cut and pasted posting to someone's timeline on Facebook, a comment.  Obviously such cutting and pasting brings over a lot of invisible HTML, and the submit process barfed, saying what I'd sent was a security risk and could I please just use plaintext.  I also linked to this blog post.

My hope was to represent a more Russian point of view from Oregon, given we have an extensive Russian heritage right down along the coast, to Sebastopol, near the Russian River (or along it?) and where I used to work (remotely).  Onion domes dot our landscape.  Eastern Orthodox Christianity is not alien in Oregon, it's part of our sensibility as homelanders.

However I'm not counting myself as ethnic Russian.  I'm fascinated by Cyrillic.  I still remember touring the "KGB museum" in Vilnius that time, the token American fatso among what were still not yet fast food fed Lithuanians, looking forward to long lives, getting married in droves.

Maybe the email with the security risk HTML made its way through some channel or other to an office and someone will forward from there.  I was sounding pretty anti-NATO in my rhetoric which is really nothing new for me.  That has to be OK under free speech rules, so I'm not worried about NATO push back. What can they do?  Bomb my house?  Maybe in the former Yugoslavia they could get away with that, but Portland is a veteran when it comes to defending itself against Marriott Marionettes.

Besides, I'm a NATO professor (one of my brilliant disguises).

Boot Camping

I'm participating more in the global economy, but I'm still a "butt worker" as I label my sedentary class.  I think of truckers as butt workers too, but with defined tasks away from piloting their rigs.  Scholars have always been butt workers, bent over too many books, with shelves to the ceiling crammed with more, cobwebs everywhere -- that's the stereotype at any rate.  That's not one I fit exactly, but I'm in the neighborhood as stereotypes go.

Actually, once you throw in the weekly commute to a brick and mortar day school, I at least get to practice the hand-eye-foot coordination associated with operating heavy machinery (a lot heavier than me in any case).  I'm closest to truckers out there on I-26, which connects Greater Portland to the Pacific coastline.  That's not a trivial drive.  Some movie I saw made it some just a hop, skip and a jump from the everyday city school yard.  At the final bell, teens would rush to the shoreline to make out.  Not so.  Not in droves anyway.

Glenn has been on a beer fast for reasons other than weight loss and has seemed pretty bright eyed and focused. But then he's always that way.  He's a scholar too, but not one to neglect housekeeping.  I was over at his place again for lunch, discussing Graham Harman's hyperobjects and Peter Sloterdijk (both philosophers in the Continental dimension -- hardly a true geographic distinction at this point).

"Continental philosophy" has meant European, descending from Hegel and like that.  The UK-USA faculties have tended to gravitate more to logic, with a border on computer programming.  The continentals have been disregarded as too mushy, but then language grows fallow if unexercised and trying to compete with computer sciences just leaves philosophers in the dust a lot.  

Investing in prose is not necessarily unproductive, as Wittgenstein, an ordinary language philosopher, showed clearly.

I'm thinking of a university with a lot of parking space devoted to the trucks our students use, to ply the roadways, performing their duties on many levels.  

Mixing ethnicities on the basis of informed consent versus smashing them together, helps with the gear shifting and cuts down on the fireworks. 

I enjoyed our multi-continent orientation this afternoon.  Sitting in the back, on Zoom, I got the flavor of the boot camp I'll help lead over the next couple weeks.  

Again, we're talking butt work, the opposite of boot camp from many a more military viewpoint.  

The psy folks adopted a lot of the same terminology, with committing to the same lifestyle.  So many geeks talk about foo camp this and bar camp that, yet couldn't pitch a tent to save their own lives.

My hope is we'll fix that rift in the culture and get the programmers out under the stars a lot more, out from under those less than full spectrum lighting fixtures.  

Instead of cubicles in towers, why not sprawling "golf courses" of cubicles, where the "cubes" a more sphere shaped, and much bigger than actual golf balls?  

 Call it a campus, dotting with Fly's Eye Domes.  Old themes in these blogs.

The talk on moire patterns at FSI Institute this morning reminded me of those windows sliding shut, with the two polarized planes controlling the flow a photons through each portal.