Old Turbine

:: our tour guide ::

:: old turbine ::

Friends Gather

Friends and admirers gathered at the Laura Russo Gallery on NW 21st this evening, to celebrate the 100th birthday of the late Louis Bunce (1907 - 1983), one of Portland's favorite artists.

I never met the man, though I must have tuned in his airport mural, a source of controversy in the newspapers around the time I moved to Portland in 1958. It's still there, through all the big changes at PDX.

My impression is people liked his spin on the word "artist" and "painter" in particular. It meant suave, debonair, carefree in some respects, yet very self-disciplined and steeped in the art world and its traditions, not just one's own stuff.

He'd studied hard in New York and Chicago, before returning to Portland during the Great Depression. He was born in Wyoming and Portland was his first real cityscape.

Louie helped our Pacific Rim tribes keep abreast Atlantic Coastal currents, from cubism to jazz to surrealism. He made the art world accessible and fun to be in.

I'm friends with his son Jon, likewise a pioneering artist-musician.

Small World

I came across this essay entitled The Theory of Relativity and Geometry in a 1949 compilation about Einstein and relativity theory, in the Multnomah County Library, sometime in the 1990s, by one Karl Menger.

I've cited it off and on ever since, including this morning, for its contribution to "dimension theory."

Karl came up with this brilliant "geometry of lumps" meme, which some trace forward into string theory and quantum mechanics, but which I see continuing as a thread in R. B. Fuller's Synergetics.

The "small world" aspect to this is: I know Eve Menger, Karl's daughter, as a fellow Portland-based Wanderer.

I also knew George Hammond, Eve's husband, and spoke admiringly of the man at his Quaker-style memorial service.

Also small worldish:

Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge was in yesterday's Oregonian, having been dismissed from her job as South Africa's deputy health minister, apparently for being too effective.

Our family stayed with hers in 1999 during the Parliament of World Religions in Cape Town. She was deputy minister of defense at that time, plus well connected within Quakerdom (oxymoronic? -- not if you think of defense as being truly defensive, yet still a form of martial art).

Remembering...

Today Portland remembered Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and again committed to sweeping our planet clean of these subhuman weapons.

Tara and I stayed through mom's rousing speech, then hopped a fareless square Max to Pioneer Place, where we enjoyed Red Bull's Illume, a whole city block of illuminated action photos, with voting kiosks in the tent. Plus we encountered Ben Lansky likewise roaming downtown, way fun!

After drinks at Starbucks, we returned by Max to enjoy the final dance number, performed by children and their handlers.

The emcee for the evening was none other than our Spanish speaking Indonesian Muslim friend, Ronault L.S. Catalan, a guest at Wanderers that time.

The audience was skewed towards older folks, some with living memories of these events, and some, like me, born shortly thereafter, at the height of Cold War hysteria.

sa: Pedagogy

My approach to Python is four-stepped: (0) REPL (1) import this or whatever (2) py files (3) GUI.

More memorable: "birth in the shell" like Venus; personal growth and enrichment (putting some flesh on those bones); savings for the future (crunchy py files, snake food in site-packages); then, more optionally, life as an officer in user space, a diplomat, nuanced and event-oriented.

Decoded, what this means is:

• go for instantaneous feedback first, savoring the joys of a shell, which not every language offers.
• then enrich your default environment with Standard Library and 3rd party imports, still in shell mode
• now take your knowledge of the syntax and start cutting and pasting to more permanent .py files, which Python tries to interpret as job orders, work assignments (remember to schedule R&R).
• finally, in step (3) we explore the event-driven paradigm, which in our stack depends on OO for its metaphors.

For REPL, I've been using IDLE. Yes, there's WingIDE 101, yes there's GNU emacs or any standard text editor. These days, Python is straight ASCII, so standard ASCII-based tools will work well.

In Python 3.x, we're acquiring more "color depth" by giving more nuance to the "color scale" (allowing more characters). I use the color analogy because we've already taken the step from 16 and 256 colors to millions of colors, and know what a positive difference that makes.

IDLE also sports a decent text editor, in addition to shell mode (REPL).

Partly why I use IDLE is it's the IDE most tightly bundled with Python other than the terminal mode shell. Plus it motivates an informative discussion of widgets, as in "widget libraries."

Economists used to use "widget" to mean "gizmo we needn't describe" (just an abstraction), but in software engineering, widgets are those "gooey geegaws" we call popups, drop-downs, radio buttons, check boxes -- all the interface paraphernalia currently associated with standard office business applications.

Python avoids specifying any particular look and feel by leaving it to widget librarians to define their own bindings. By the time we get to step 4, in other words, Python is already completely specified.

IDLE is built on the Tk widgets library. I do some storytelling at this point. Were we using wxPython's IDE, which I'm certainly not averse to doing, we could talk about the C++ widget library under its hood, wxPython playing a similar intermediary role to Tkinter's.

If you find this explanation "clear as mud" (an old Texas expression), consider trying this alternative one, posted recently on edu-sig.

10 Questions for the Dalai Lama (movie review)

This travelogue climaxes with yet another on-camera stress test of His Holiness regarding ongoing cultural genocide, the Middle East, his plans after death.

Per usual, he performs marvelously, living up to his reputation for remaining good humored even in the face of an incredibly brutal schedule of interviews and ceremonies. Left to his own devices, he'd rather just study and get some much deserved R&R.

The film does break some new ground, especially around the Internet's emerging role in the political sphere. The film alleges various companies are dumbing down their services in an effort to curry favor with myopic and unstable elements within the Chinese leadership.

Mom and I saw this together at The Bagdad and both got homesick for Bhutan, another Tantric culture, although geographically more fertile than Tibet proper, or Ladakh for that matter.

OSCON 9 (conclusion)

The final day was perhaps the most inspiring. Nat is stepping down after eleven long years of chairing O'Reilly's OSCON committee and gave a wonderful three part talk we might entitle "it's too easy to be mean (so try to aim higher)."

Even better than the precept, was his demo of how to do it, taking our respective open source communities one at a time, as if the twisted offspring of your average mom & pop: Perl will change when it has to, love it for what it is; Python is so serious, needs to go to college to discover slacking off; Ruby is youthfully defiant, and so on. In every case, he played a great Dr. Phil.

Beyond that, we had a lot of rousing calls to continue opening, not closing. Searching has become too proprietary (Wikia is fighting back), as well as access to data. Hardware is just beginning to open up.

In one of the breakouts, Robert Lefkowitz made some of the most cogent arguments I'd seen in awhile, about how software is the new trivium of Century XXI, rhetoric being like programming, making it part of the new literacy. He cited Guido's CP4E at this point, other champions, such as Adele Goldberg and Alan Kay.

Lefkowitz mines old books on rhetoric for terms to recycle, to help clarify a muddy meme pool (information technologists have made a mess of their priest craft).

This connects to his interest in word-meaning trajectories, a field he's tagged as "semasiology" (another example of recycling a word). Larry Wall and his wife were in a row in front of me, loving the ride. Anna and Alex were off to my left.

Geeks are always bellyaching that English has this built-in ambiguity between "free" as in "free beer" and "free" as in "freedom," and all because it doesn't have a suitable word deriving from the Latin root "liber." But it does: "liberal," as in "liberal arts."

Anyway, I'm seeing a lot of my Quaker values reflected in the "OSCON community" (synecdoche). Apropos, I just noticed a current thread on Quaker-P about Quaker Meetings in Second Life. Second Life's Philip Rosedale kicked off today's keynotes.

When mom called from Miami, enroute back from Bolivia, speaking of inter-cultural tensions at her peace conference there, I said: "you should have been at OSCON; they were projecting pictures of Gandhi and everything; it was like a peace-maker's paradise here."

OSCON 9: Keynotes (continued)

Ben Fry delivered an ultra competent and intriguing set of slides, animations, demos. Lots of allusions to Elastic Interval Geometry, math through programming, bridging CS to the humanities (art students did some of the best work in this exhibit). He wasn't touting Python, but a competing new language called Process.

Robin Hanson is teaching that although we know we're biased, that doesn't keep us from being biased, leading to warped results that are counter-productive, even speaking purely selfishly. It's like the comic strip Dilbert with the pointy haired boss.

The guy speaks "economist" a rhetoric (namespace) spun more by Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols) than it probably realizes. The "will to truth" is often just a mask, whereas the "will to power" more nakedly describes more biased behaviors (even the ones that backfire). Anthropologists take note.

Bill Hilf is "our man in the inside" helping to create the DNA and synapses of open source within Microsoft, a big company. MSFT has overcome most of its paranoia regarding open source and by now includes an internal culture that understands and feels comfortable with our many liberal ethnicities.

Getting the DLR committed to the community took much less time than getting Rotor injected years ago (an early .NET). The guy quotes Mark Twain, disses politicians, priests and pundits, touts programmers. Kwel.

Although Bill was glad we weren't politicians, the next guy was one, a pro: founder of Pirate Party, Rick Falkvinge. Policing to protect copyrights on digital properties violates centuries old principles of postal secret, carrier independence, other democratic principles around privacy. Lots of applause.

Our final gifted speaker, Steve Yegge of Google, gave an off the cuff lecture on branding that ranked with the best of the best, even with the slides gone kablooey. He thinks "open source" is a problem brand, but I'm not so sure. It's meant to be "backroom boring" so as not to compete with our sexier and/or flashier flagships, such as Python and Apache. Let's keep public attention focused on our illustrious track record, our heritage, not on our various brands of legalese (yawn).

So it's OK if generic discussions of open source send you to sleep. We don't necessarily want that many people fixating on licenses as ends in themselves, endlessly bickering and concocting new ones. A few is sufficient. Otherwise, the field gets too committified and log-jammed. Let's not waste too much talent.

OSCON 9: Keynotes

Nathan Torkington is opening the conference by discussing how open source ethics are spilling over into the fight for transparency and openness in other areas: democracy in places like Guatemala and Florida, open hardware, our own bodies...

Then he introduced "Chairman Tim" (O'Reilly) who is giving a talk on The O'Reilly Radar.

I ran into Guido in the foyer. He showed up last night in time for some low key hobnobbing. Today he gets a field trip to Google's vast new (already functioning) data center in The Dalles. I'm going to a farewell lunch for a staffer at my office.

He and I both know Russ Nelson, also here, and whom I was recently asking after on Quaker-P (an elist).

Does Congress need a version control system? "Free as in freedom" is embodied in the tools. He's talking about how we change culture by changing its tools, OpenID and Ubuntu's Launchpad being cases in point.

There's a race between "closers" and "openers" in many arenas (political and otherwise), with tools making a real difference as to who wins, recalling Bucky's "design science" precepts: let's focus on tools that make tools; don't change people, change their environment.

Open source success factors: free as in beer, redistributable, designed for extensibility, network effects, platform. Web 2.0: systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

Nat is back, pointing us to a broker for charities, suggesting we beat the total raised by the recent Rails conference.

Now James Reinders of Intel is on stage, the same guy I tuned in yesterday in the Ubuntu conference. His subject, as before, is parallelism. Intel is releasing Threading Building Blocks as an open source project. Clever: Reinders, posing as a director of marketing, starts selling TBB for $299, so this open source geek (Dirk Hohndel , also Intel) comes up on stage and interrupts, no suit, saying how Intel wants to be a part of the open source revolution.

TBB is actually open source as of this week, web site live as of yesterday, although there's still a commercial version (you're buying support).

On this same issue of parallelism and concurrency, our next speaker is Simon Peyton Jones, of Microsoft Research (Cambridge). This is the guy who led the Haskell tutorial on Monday. Instead of locking, let's make blocks atomic, an idea borrowed from the data base people. A transactional memory enforces all or nothing commits, with blocking (retries) and choice.

Now Tim O'Reilly is interviewing Mark Shuttleworth about Ubuntu. The genius of open source is in smoothing collaboration, coordinating developers.

The Q&A focused on the meaning of free in the age of network effects, the possible impact of cheap laptops. The freedom to easily get your data back out of a system was mentioned several times as key.

ciao V!

BOF: Open Source in Education

In a Birds of a Feather, we listen to each other, chatting about a given topic. Various teachers and curriculum writers are talking about their experiences using and/or teaching open source tools and/or languages. Michael Brewer is hosting this session.

The focus here is on college level computer science. Colorado State uses all open source. Elsewhere it's a function of the teacher, whether students boot Windows or Linux.

Alex Martelli is here with his family. Anna is making good comments about teaching group programming skills, sparking discussion about the social skills geeks need, as well as technical skills.

Some guy is making a long, passionate speech about the need for standards, backed by professional organizations.

We finished with some discussion of course management and collaboration tools, such as Moodle and Banner.

A Taste of Haskell

Getting my money's worth on the TriMet day pass, I used my lunch break to train and drive home in order to swap laptops, give Sarah a pee break. Tara phoned from the road, already north of Olympia.

A Taste of Haskell is happening right next to a presentation on the X01 interface, Sugar, which I'm really curious about. So I sample both. The Haskell talk is packed, so I start along the wall, moving to a desk at the break. There's no floor outlet here, and battery power is low [no wait, here's a crew now, adding a new power strip; I have power]. Our trainer, Simon Peyton-Jones, is one of the leading lights of the entire Haskell effort.

Haskell's module and package system is quite similar to Python's...

Jet lag + Haskell source code = a rising tide of unconsciousness. The learning curve is pretty steep.

Community Night

Lots of talent out there tonight. Is it American Idol or what, that the performances have gone up a notch?

Cathy, Luci, Katie -- stunning. Joe, great cajun version of Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.

I've enjoyed getting reacquainted with a few Friends at this session. You think you already know someone then, wave of magic wand, they're someone else entirely, yet still the same.

Compared notes on some deep books over tray meals, like Narnia, plus shared some Blue October, DyxyChyx with Jane

My other Connecting the Dots went to Miriam.

First Day morn I was especially pleased to reconnect with Ron Marson, president of topscience. We chatted some more about Project Earthala, my projected Quaker community with Aimeé Conner its first queen (we're still democratic though).

"dwelling machine rendering"
(by Andrew Owens)

Ron's curriculum writing is used in places as far away as Zimbabwe (a link to "the other Ron" Braithwaite). If I run in to any Kusasa people at the ongoing Ubuntu conference, I'll be sure to mention Ron's "uses simple everyday stuff" approach (which includes lots of computers by this time, at least in the South African context).

Tara skips town today, which is a good thing given how I'm mired in conferences (OSCON too) and she has HP#3 in voice format on her iPod -- a summer project to make it through HP#7 in sequence (HP = Harry Potter, the subject of her Central Friends' community night skit).

Annual Session

NPYM has convened its annual Meeting for Business at Reed College, one of several groups sharing that exquisite east side college campus this summer. Mom did a quick check in with familiar and new Friends, pre her next international adventure, beginning soon.

I'm still in the midst of teaching Pythonic Math via Saturday Academy of course, so I've purchased meals in a pattern around that. Given mom's and Tara's schedules are likewise unique, our registration was like an old IBM punch card, lots of holes in a peculiar pattern.

Quakers like operating at a low detailed level like that (which can drive others crazy), are an assembly language type religion, I suppose one might say. An entirely new software application tends to get written for each NPYM convergence, this time being no exception. It looked to be in Microsoft Access (mine was in FoxPro).

I used to think that was wasteful, but we live in an age of one-offs, more like what happens in the art world around paintings (including the limited editions, poster versions and so on).

Given BCFM sponsors its children, I'd deducted that as expected support from my total, but the algorithm interpreted that as "in addition" to the built-in child deduction, ergo I must be getting a refund, which made little sense, as I'd paid nothing yet. Once we fixed that problem, I wrote a DWA check in the amount of some $128, to cover our costs (check 11730).

a son of sixteen with his mom

Coming of Age

Family Guy

Actually it's American Dad we're watching at the moment, Tara and I, v1s2. Weird stuff, often funny though.

So I made it back, on a big SAS jet out of C39 from Copenhagen. Something of a zoo, but with a lot of the animals wanting to stay, on the airline's tab. SAS, in partnership with some others, manages to not waste a single seat. It's quite the jigsaw puzzle.

Anyway, I needed to be home, and the WLSI got me here, to Seattle, thence to a small plane called a Brasilia for the last hop to PDX, with beautiful views of Mt. Rainer, St. Helens (post eruption, tiny new cone), Crown Point in the Columbia Gorge (Kathy was cute too, SkyWest out of Utah right?).

Derek chauffeured both mom and Tara out to meet me. The bag transferred uneventfully, though we were briefly rejoined through SeaTac customs.

I watched most of Blades of Glory (a skippy start -- I like the "down camera" view, ice there too), The Last Mimzy (very multicultural -- Close Encounters meets Little Buddha plus some other stuff), an episode of the American version of The Office. I'm quite bad with the games (especially mini-golf).

Oh, and Number 23. Jim Carrey does an interesting blend of comedy and "life of the [twisted] mind" films. This movie is quite explicit about its genre, close ups of the underground comic book covers (detective, film noir -- alluded to in Roger Rabbit, a gateway to ToonTown).

And a part of a Chinese romance, featuring an older couple, the woman making it a secret behind some lie, connecting her to pet cemetery memes (dead cat). This one was interrupted by the jet needing to land or something like that.

Anyway, you can tell it was a long flight, over Thule, Great Slave Lake, places like that.

Tara liked the Concentric Dolls, fancy small version (blue theme), nine within one. Somewhat disturbing Lithuanian humor: Concentric Sponge Bobs.

Glass Ship

I enjoyed a last breakfast with Open End staffers, sharing some sense of satisfaction that Europython had been a success, though we hope for more volunteer support next year (even child care?).

Arising from our conversation came this idea of a map giving visual expression to the "linguistic distance" between European languages. For example, a Swedish speaker is likely to understand Norwegian and vice versa, but Finnish is another matter altogether, perhaps as distant as Lithuanian. Maybe such a map exists?

Faced with another day for tourism, I chose the "glass ship" as my objective, thanks to Alexia, who discovered it on the web. I pasted the coordinates into Google Earth and hours later was ogling the real deal. More weddings in progress.

Travel in Europe has become so easy these days. ATMs give me money, the hotel gives me free wireless Internet. What more could I need? There's no sense of "roughing it" in Vilnius. The World Livingry Service Industry (WLSI) is a reality here.

One thing though: Google Earth is significantly out of date, was missing this whole bridge across my good friend the Neris:

bridge under construction

bridge now complete

In the evening, I donned my best clothes, like I wore for my talk, and sauntered over to a restaurant with outdoor seating. As the clear skies turned from twilight to darkness, with street lights coming on towards the end, I enjoyed spicy soup, spaghetti with sea food and wine sauce, and a couple Submarine brand beers.

Having left my change in my other pants, I didn't have quite the right amount for a tip (we tend to leave ~20% in our family, in honor of Carla, Dawn's waitressing sister). Rather than asking the waitress to break a twenty Litu, I left a dollar bill with the coins, hoping she'd appreciate the exotic iconography, which she probably doesn't see every day.

Back in my hotel room, Tara and Alexia both started chatting with me via Gmail, plus with each other. Then Tara figured out how to use Google Talk to make it a three-way conference, complete with smilies.

Slow Food Nation

Coming from the USA, one feature of Lithuanian culture that strikes me is how many people are relatively close to their ideal body weight. The women tend to be slender, the men chunkier but not so much because of fat, more from playing soccer or from construction jobs. Fewer beer bellies, practically no morbid obesity.

Although I did spy one McDonald's in the center of town, posing as a classy restaurant, for the most part people seem to eat smaller and less fatty portions more slowly. On sunny days, the nearby skateboard park is packed with athletic young boys showing off their maneuvers.

Case in point: the Italian restaurant we invaded last night, as a party of twenty or so geeks, took over an hour to serve up the second dish, so long in fact that Jacob asked for Laura's to be struck from the bill, so late had it become, and so exhausting had been the battle with ctypes or whatever during the PyPy sprint -- she was just too sleepy to tuck in when the food finally arrived (I too almost went face down in my spaghetti, jet lagged that I still am, having spent a pleasant day walking many miles around the city with Mike, a summer intern at Microsoft). But the restaurant management considered this the normal rate of service and refused to comply.

I bet the USA based health insurance companies are chomping at the bit to get a piece of this action, as so many USA homelanders have become uninsurable, are ticking time bombs, given all their mega-burgers, big gulp sodas and big ass fries.

Here, the insurance companies could rack up those premiums, handsomely reward shareholders and top management, build more skyscrapers full of expensive computers, while gobbling up other investments, the way their "reverse Robin Hood" business model (design pattern) is supposed to work. Homelanders have become a liability by this time -- unprofitable basket cases maybe the government should now handle.

fat guy (me) at the "KGB museum"

Concluding EuroPython

I didn't sense much unease regarding Python 3000 this time, following Guido's keynote.

This isn't a complete overhaul, like the transition from Zope 2 to Zope 3, or Perl 5 to Perl 6.

Quick summary: the old xrange will become the new range, raw_input the new input, all strings will be unicode by default, all classes new style, and where it makes sense to return an iterable instead of a list, that's what'll happen. Print becomes a function.

Python 2.6 will have plenty of back ported bridging features.

Conference organizers were disappointed with how little help they got this year, meaning the conference fell short of their hopes and dreams. We had an excellent threshing session that will likely lead to greater participation next year.

The venue will be the same: Vilnius. Next year's Europython will hopefully attract more conferees from Eastern Europe and Russia.

We're doing more lightning talks at the moment.

OK, I managed to squeeze in a quick demo of hypertoons. What was really impressive however was the demo of gSculpt by Geoffrey French. Michael Hawker of Mikeware is also a man of many talents. He and I plan to do some sightseeing tomorrow.

I've invited Open End conference organizers to dinner tomorrow night, as a small token of my thanks for including me in these proceedings.

EuroPython Day 1

So we're off to a running start. The additional wireless access points appear to be working. Aistė (POV) and the Open End team have been putting in a lot of overtime, and their efforts are paying off.

Feeling my jet lag, I was starting to stumble back to my hotel yesterday when I spotted Guido in the lobby, sitting with other geeks. He waved me over and I ended up joining in a lengthy conversation that persisted well past midnight (even after Guido himself had gone to bed).

Some old James Bond movie, Sean Connery era, was playing on the flatscreen in the hotel lobby.

Guido yet hadn't heard of the Python Bridge in Amsterdam, which I showed him in my slides. Using his knowledge of Amsterdam's geography, he was able to spot it from above, using Google Maps on my new Ubuntu laptop.

This morning I chaired the track in Zeta (all the rooms have greek letter names), introducing the speakers -- except the first guy never showed, meaning Christian Theune got some extra time to share about persisting objects in the ZODB. He was modeling how application developers might want to save state between processes using the infrastructure, completely independently of any Zope application.

Gustavo Niemeyer of Canonical talked about Storm, a system for talking to more traditional relational databases in the tradition of SQLObjects and SQLAlchemy. Questions focused on why these latter two systems weren't "good enough."

Now I'm listening to Max Ischenko from Kiev, discussing his experience rebuilding what had been a PHP website in Pylons, a web development library. He likes Mako for templating, which supports Unicode quite well (important for internationalization). TurboGears will probably move from CherryPy to Pylons in the next release. Babel will be a new i18n library. WSGI will be important.

Jeroen Vloothuis is introducing KSS, Kinetic Style Sheets, a way to implement AJAX with a lot less JavaScript. The events to trigger a JavaScript library get defined in a CSS-like file. KSS has been integrated into Plone.

Graham Stratton is discussing FormEncode, a module for validating HTML forms from within Python.

After lunch: my own talk, followed by an excellent presentation on optimizing MySQL by David Axmark, a cofounder of the company.

Vilnius

:: vilnius pix ::

Yikes, my Blogger control panel is in Lithuanian! Today is a Saturday and hardly anyone was strolling in the rain early this morning. I took a first few pix with my waterproof camera (my wind breaker proved less than waterproof).

Yesterday, July 6, the day of my arrival, Balts commemorated the crowning of King Mindaugas in 1253.

The main street next to the hotel is torn up for replumbing. The hotel itself, Centrum Ratonda, is quite satisfactory, with wireless in the room and an ample breakfast buffet (included).

Laura, the main conference organizer, flies in from Sweden late tonight. I volunteered to help stuff bags and do other conference stuff. My hosts were very kind to fly me here.

All my puzzle pieces rejoined on this end minus the white 3-ring binder which I kindly (OK, unintentionally) left next to 31A for Lufthansa management, or the dumpster as the case may be.

The Vilnius lost and found women kindly sent a query in teletype language to Frankfurt, using some virtual TTY running on Windows (no one really uses teletypes anymore right? -- but the old language games persist).

My Independence Day

Hot Spot

I'm at an I-5 rest stop in Washington State. That there's a Wifi Hotspot is pretty cool, but if I want to access anything outside of WA's Dept of Transportation's websites I need to fork over at least $6.75.

I guess that way taxpayers don't have to pay for me to dial in to my Google Maps.

Of course it's my own dang fault the plastic sheet from my binder blew away or whatever it did. I hope my hand drawn map works as well. I saved an image file just in case it doesn't.

We drove by way of Hwy 30 to Rainer, bridge to Longview, hoping to avoid bottlenecks. So far so good. The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is working flawlessly.

Sicko (movie review)

Unlike many of my fellow Americans, I don't reflexively use the word "propaganda" as a put down. Nor I have noticed do the various psychological warfare units within the Pentagon. Like of course we use propaganda in the battle for hearts and minds (seeking new recruits, always).

That doesn't mean all propaganda is created equal, in terms of its benefits and/or effectiveness. A lot of it backfires or runs into unanticipated counterintelligence, just like on a real battlefield, except here we're content to work it out through the media.

Sicko unabashedly splashes around in the meme pool, stirring up yesteryear's hot button imagery: a Karl Marx bust, a hammer and sickle -- anything to push a button or two.

Taking 911 heroes to Havana for health care and cheap meds was close to mocking the whole genre, another way of not taking itself too seriously, even amidst all these life and death concerns.

I consider Michael an honestly caring and compassionate person, as well as mischievous and rebellious. He's a rabble rouser and makes no bones about it. America has a long history of pamphleteers out to make a difference and a name for themselves. Archival footage and slick editing add new dimensions to the craft.

On the subject of health care, it's hard to find anyone with any integrity defending the status quo. There's a hunger in the medical profession to remain faithful to higher callings that comes into conflict with these contrived, pseudo-human puppets, these so-called "corporations" explicitly designed (by complete idiots?) to be heartless in their pursuit of the currencies of the realm.

These very shaky houses of cards are quite vulnerable to these little air puffs, these heartfelt wishes for change.

But then there's the hard work of needs assessment and systems analysis, coding up the namespaces, enforcing the logic. Making a system run smoothly takes a lot more than just comic books and storyboards. But we need those too.

Another Milestone

:: michael mcmenamin ::
cake caption: drinkin' & thinkin' for the good of mankind

I encountered a large turnout at Thirsters last night, and at first just stood listening as people compared notes. I butted in that this White House had set some records for weirdness, despite Clintons, citing the Jeff Gannon affair, a source of guffaws and good cheer. I was offered a chair at that point, across from an Irish therapist, and next to her French husband.

Then a German lady sat next to me and pumped me for information about what I was up to. I wisely stayed with high overview, lots of circus metaphors (which she got), instead of diving in to what was really concerning me: how to get xorg.conf working with not-free nVidia drivers, so I can both spin my Beryl cube of desktops and share this with an audience via some computer projector. Too solipsistic otherwise.

So anyway, it was this birthday party, for some institution I'm not sure which, either Thirsters or McMenamins probably. One of the McMenamin brothers cut the cake. Fred (on the right, above picture) gave us a wonderful toast, while Mike Hagmeier (across from me, to my left of the corner therapist, Matt later to his right) played his didj.

:: michael hagmeier ::

:: didj player & therapist ::

The Jerk (movie review)

We already know from scholarship that Ludwig Wittgenstein, the ordinary language philosopher, liked going to the movies. I'll bet he'd have liked this movie in particular, as it takes everyday templates we're familiar with (from other movies if not from personal experience), and twists them around in curious ways (like Wittgenstein did in his investigations), thanks largely to the ludicrous spin added by Steve Martin's "jerk" character.

For example, in the midst of romance we often encounter speeches about time dilation, as in "hours seemed like days." The Jerk has a long soliloquy of that nature, appropriately delivered to his sweetie in bed -- except she's completely out of it, unresponsively corpse-like, while his account turns into this long and tedious chronicle that quickly loses its romantic edge and takes us into yet another twilight zone, a language game gone off the rails.

Another template: the rich man becomes a prospect for charities looking to fund their causes, and the fund raiser shows up with some moving propaganda, hoping for a big donation. Cruelty to innocents is the theme. I see from the credits that Steve plays the cat juggler.

In another scene, Carl Reiner, the movie's director, plays himself.

Part of the humor here is Steve Martin looks so "normal" in a 1950s Pleasantville kind of way, typified by that pipe smoking icon Bob Dobbs, or by Dick Van Dyke. "How could someone who could so easily pass for normal be so off the wall?"

Swedenborg So Far

I'm doing lots of house work today, like running the vacuum cleaner, concentrating on Tara's room (with her permission), so I have time to process some of this Swedenborg syllabus I've been plowing through.

Some contemporary authors like to bridge Emanuel's visionary writings to modern particle zoo physics, casting him as prescient regarding the quantum machinery of today. Ursula Groll, author of Swedenborg and New Paradigm Science (translated by Nicolas Goodrick-Clarke), falls into this category. Her approach to Swedenborg reminds me of Alex Gerber's to Bucky in his Wholeness: On Education, Buckminster Fuller and Tao (ISBN: 0963536710).

Quantum mechanics, many writers feel, rescues "consciousness" from mere epiphenomenalhood, from any second class status as a purely passive passenger "just along for the ride" vis-á-vis some all-controlling roller coaster. They see in particle physics a way to fight fatalism in other words, and in a science-endorsed language.

I'm sympathetic to those wishing to break free from any such straitjacketing views and encourage them to do so. If Swedenborg helps with that, so much the better. And apparently he has helped many in this way, starting way back in his heyday.

Other authors focus on Swedenborg's historical matrix. He's firing booster rockets, trying to revector the Church, by reminding readers of the symbolic nature of the Book of Revelations.

Probably the designers of the Bible were acutely aware of their limited ability to see into the future, and in hopes of keeping their good book relevant, allowed in some of this highly imaginative material as a kind of psychological mirror for any age.

As Wittgenstein would later point out, the idea of a Final Judgment is orthogonal to our experience of A World in Time (like a soap opera). If we judge its Logic to be "shoddy," then that's really an eternally valid condemnation, as any later fix won't address the fact of a deep existential flaw on that particular day. Our experience of the world then wans accordingly, in light of this judgment.

Christians have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with power structures, given their Jewish roots in reaction against Egyptian and later Roman excesses. For the first few centuries, Christianity played the underdog against all odds, only later coming to inherit vast institutional powers of its own, after which turning point came whole new forms of temptation.

Swedenborg, having established his credentials as one of the cognoscenti, according to some of the strictest criteria of his day, then risks his reputation by talking to ghosts, who merely tell him what today we all know: that the Book of Revelations is meant to be used as a mirror for steering contemporary affairs, and that it works in this way because we read into it according to the aberrations of our day.

In other words, if you really think a literal dragon is going to show up and stage bloody orgies of lions literally eating little lambs for the benefit of some ruling mob idiocracy, think again (see: pp. 295-96 in Emanuel Swedenborg : Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason, 2002, by Enrst Benz and translated by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke).

Are Video Games Addictive?

Well of course anything can be addictive, when the opportunity costs become high enough. What else might you have done with your life? The subjunctive weighs heavily.

On the other hand, I'll say "she's playing with her dolls" meaning The Sims on her computer, which is exactly what "playing with dolls" means, with added features from puppetry and the simulation sciences.

Since when was playing with dolls for hours and hours a symptom of a psychiatric disorder?

Since a long time, actually. Girls might lock themselves in their rooms and do nothing but dolls, dolls and more dolls for days at a time. The family doctor with the black bag might recommend a little alcohol (just a teaspoon or two) and maybe Alice would become "more social" again.

Here's another question for you parents. Why not join them, by picking out mutually agreeable games, such as Uru in our family, and explore together? Television may likewise be a lone body tranced out on a couch, or people engaging in social activity, with what's on TV more of a side show, given the company.

Maybe we need more philosophers into family feng shui, coaching folks through those endlessly varied addictions. "Cold turkey" is not always advisable. How about some Nietzsche or Swedenborg instead? Just kidding (only sort of).

But my point is this: don't pass up on every chance to develop those lexical skills, those 3Rs, and in ways that're honestly fun for you a lot of the time. I'm suggesting it's an option, no matter what your special walk of life.

And it's not strictly either/or either. Sometimes the next best thing to an addictive video game is just a window away.

Basket Case Nation

North Americans take pride in self sufficiency, savvy around tools, rough and ready survival skills... or call 'em pioneer values.

This superficial veneer somewhat masks the deeper historical truth of accepting a lot of help from indigenous peoples upon first arriving, and not ever really stopping. Lots of help is still given, daily.

If there's a North American nation qualified to be advising the world on world affairs, that'd be the one north of the USA, but Canadians are wisely humble, aren't strutting and puffing in the guise of a superpower, armed to the teeth, ready to rumble.

The superpower gig is very expensive, leaving nothing but scraps for Katrina's victims, which included a once major world class city. "Our Chernobyl" as some describe it.

The USA should develop a greater ability to accept foreign aid, psychologically as well as institutionally. There's no shame in getting some help when you need it.

Calling the USA a basket case nation doesn't negate the reciprocal truth, which is that the USA does a lot of good in the world. But it'd do even more simply by admitting the obvious, that this pose of "superpower" is an immature cover for deep insecurities.

Techie Chatter

Jon "maddog" Hall wrote an eloquent tribute to machine language, as "the Latin of Computer Science" in the current issue of Linux Journal (Sun's Phipps on the cover), column starting on page 32.

He opens and closes with reference to his boat Agape. Shades of Meliptus, which is back in the water by the way, after a mishap, fortunately not too serious, and another stay, a short one this time, at Gary's. Although relatively unskilled, I helped roll some paint.

Jon Bunce the musician (and Wanderer) was kind enough to comb through Connecting the Dots... scanning for syntactical issues. I incorporated many of his improvements in the most recent edition, though I didn't turn the endnotes into footnotes.

I'm circling in on Pygame, including on Ubuntu, which is more my speed of "low level" programming i.e. where I get the most bang for my buck. VPython is also still fun for me.

Today our bike route took in the Hawthorne and Steel Bridges, per usual, then Springwater Corridor, from its Ross Island beginning as far as Oaks Bottom, then back along Milwaukie stopping this time at True Brew, thence Ladd's Addition and on home.

I'm glad to have reconnected with Deb, am looking forward to Liana's bat mitzvah. Glenn said his premier showing went well and he's had several offers from distributors. Russ, where are you?

:: tara & vera ::

Our Global U (advertisement)

Served by state of the art geographic informations systems, our classrooms are bringing a higher awareness to our students at Global U...

...of our planet, of our role in sustaining it.

Please join our other sponsors in giving generously to our school.

A message from the Global Data Corporation

Yesterday

Midday I had another power lunch with Arthur Dye and brought along the above dog-eared file folder, a souvenir from my days in Bhutan, for show and tell value.

I gave Arthur another one as depicted: an old Kuensel, still in its envelope, with the original Bhutanese stamps.

We talked about North Carolina's Apple Valley, where we both have family connections, and about the expansion of Legacy Emanuel Hospital, a project of the PDC during the early days of Multnomah Friends.

Those were the days when "urban renewalists" still took a lot of cues from Robert Moses and company: condemn first, then "compensate" against already plummeting property values.

Quakers worked hard to derail such unfair brands of (sometimes state sponsored) tycoonerism, mixed with a Wild West style land grabbing mentality, holding out instead for fair compensation of the soon to be uprooted.

Native Americans faced a lot of the same issues and AFSC helped them too.

The upshot: more people went away happy from the negotiations, and Legacy Emanuel enjoys better karma to this day, is really a great hospital in fact, right up there with Sisters of Providence.

Later that same day, I took Tara on her first bridge pedal, heading down Harrison, over the Hawthorne, along Water Front Park to the Steel, then back along the Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade. She had no problem powering back up Harrison, after a brief pit stop in Ladd's Addition for iced teas.

Nightmare Alley (movie review)

I rented this 1947 film-noir from Netflix upon learning it puts a spin on this word "geek."

Having just plunked down my credit card to gain access to O'Reilly's Safari, tempted inside by virtual books on Python's TurboGears & SQLAlchemy, and having just registered as a speaker at O'Reilly's OSCON this summer, I'd say "geek" pretty well describes my ethnicity, after sixty years of further spinning.

Knowing the movie was based on a novel, I was a little apprehensive that this perhaps obscure geek reference wouldn't have actually made it from the book to the movie. I needn't have worried. Right from the opening scene, that word defines the entire arc of the story.

Skillful carnival mentalists, in some respects forebearers of modern psychologists (as the film cleverly suggests), may feel tempted to cross the line between giving 'em their money's worth (hard work, like acting) and simply duping those with real money to lose.

Psychological manipulation, for those with the knack, becomes a hustle, and given the associations of so-called mentalism, going back to ancient Egypt and before, the big time version of this hustle, the so-called "spook business" in this movie, involves recruiting new true believers, especially among skeptics with bucks -- another way of taking cruel and cynical advantage of people's deepest vulnerabilities.

However, psychological forces are real, and tricksters weaving complicated webs based on lies mixed with secrets, have a way of going off the deep end long before their intended marks suffer the fully intended consequences of their deviousness.

The geek in this movie represents the abject fate of a dirty trickster turned monster, now so desperate he'll bite the heads off live chickens just to stay in the game (back to hard work again). His life has become a form of punishment, proving that it's not smart to screw with people's minds for ill-gotten gains. So yes, the film has a moral message, even for geeks of today: if you have circus level skills, use them wisely. Honest work will get you further in the long run.

Ironically and somewhat paradoxically, ethnicities wherein communicating with the dead might be considered routine would appear less amenable to such ruses than the high society types depicted here, so desperate to believe and projecting occult powers onto others in order to compensate for their own sense of ignorance and doubt.

This design pattern of an authoritative elite, priest-like in its powers, vis-a-vis some exploitable army of "chumps," is what makes these abusive indulgences more likely to occur. Stronger philosophy for children programs in the schools might help inoculate future generations against becoming easy prey for cultists, charlatans, snake oil salesmen of all description.

More Meetings

Two Wanderers forwarded the NYT story about Richard Rorty, a contemporary philosopher and very good teacher for me at Princeton. I learned much from the obit I'd never known about the guy, including about his being a birder and spying a Grand Canyon condor on one of these recent trips.

X3D continues as a thread in my meetings, along with Flickr and Python. The string.Template approach I took when generating Scene Description Language for POV-Ray could easily be adopted for outputting in this new flavor of XML (which still tastes a lot like VRML, and I'm not saying that's bad).

Regarding Flickr, I'm just saying here's a way to share slide shows, like they did in the burbs. Yes, the Internet presumes a degree of friendliness, seems for a world beyond reach on some days, but high ideals remind us to keep working, on becoming more pleasing in the eyes of the gods (star athletes, movie stars, you name it).

Also, I rejoined the monkey chatter on a lonely monkey island, soc.religion.quaker around now. I hope a brief enough visit. I've also rejoined Quaker-P, knocked on the door of Quaker-L.

Last night Laura Martin of Port Townsend filled me in on some Quaker history involving Ann Arbor Friends, from whence hailed the Bouldings, other meeting stallwarts. Dawn, Laura and I were at Gatherings of Young Friends together in Camp Myrtlewood days. Pan, Lisa, Lisa's brother, Ross... Anne Friend.

Laura was good friends with Multnomah Friends' Tina, and both are alums of Argenta Friends School in Canada. Laura is also familiar with Lake Sammamish, swam across it with a friend and a row boat that time.

Poem for Dawn

(shared well before she died)

Tara Turns Teen

Wanderers 2007.6.6

I was cued by IM that Bill had a smooth Game of Life going on his new Ubuntu laptop (Dell brand). I mounted Tink and headed over to the Pauling House.

Bill indeed had a cool Life program, knows a lot of the lore. He uses a toroidal model, such that gliders going off screen reappear at opposite edges.

The program is in assembly language, with DOS presumed, so he ends up booting the laptop with Win98's DOS version, loading off a memory stick. In the meantime, he's learning Ubuntu Linux.

Jim Buxton, a ham radio buff, was holding forth on FCC regulations when I got there, which seemed topical given CBS News did a piece on that last night.

In Tver's neighborhood, some Christian radio station is interfering with TV reception at the low end the dial. The station had sent him a filter but it wasn't helping. Jim advised him to contact the FCC and showed him a web page listing the kind of information to send along. David already knew whom to contact.

Here's a link to some anti-human propaganda sent to me from somewhere, a rather clever cartoon, even if intensely misanthropic (some humans will likely find it offensive).

Pro Python Propaganda

snipped from today's paper

Guido originally named his new computer language after the British comedy troupe Monty Python, and those allusions will remain hardwired into the literature.

Monty Python's Flying Circus was the full name of the long- running BBC TV show, and this association with "circus" forms a natural bridge to this word "geek," with "geekdom" being roughly synonymous with "hackerdom" in early 21st century parlance, i.e. the dominion tasked with and/or occupied by those responsible for keeping the infrastructure going, at the software level especially.

geek
"sideshow freak," 1916, U.S. carnival and circus slang, perhaps a variant of geck "a fool, dupe, simpleton" (1515), apparently from Low Ger. geck, from an imitative verb found in North Sea Gmc. and Scand. meaning "to croak, cackle," and also "to mock, cheat." The modern form and the popular use with ref. to circus sideshow "wild men" is from 1946, in William Lindsay Gresham's novel "Nightmare Alley" (made into a film in 1947 starring Tyrone Power).

Somewhat paradoxically, many geeks-to-be get stereotyped as nerds and/or dorks in high school, which connotes "unpopular" and/or "without relevant social skills," whereas a mature geeks is expected to know how to use social networking applications to collaborate on open or closed source projects with peers around the world. A geek is expected to perform circus tricks involving lots of ephemeral tools and unseen helpers (more like a stage magician).

Given OLPC kids won't necessarily be clued in to the British comedy scene right from the get go, we can't count on Python stirring up those particular associations right off the bat.

They might just think of a snake and, depending on the surrounding culture and lore, that'll play out in various ways. Some ethnicities are more snake-averse than others, whereas some families keep Pythons as treasured pets and/or protect them in the wild.

Likewise in USA schools, you'll find teachers and administrators who unconsciously and spontaneously associate Python with scary gang imagery (despite python.org's friendly-enough logo) plus think only in negative terms about "hackers" as those who disobediently hack in to places where they don't belong (the DoD for example).

In the meantime, their geek-to-be students may seem rebellious and "up to something" in terms of studying stuff on their own, Googling after hours for example.

These self-motivated kids aren't content to "just get by" vis-á-vis the typically unchallenging material that passes for "mathematics" in mediocre classrooms. They're troublemakers in that sense.

Rose Festival

:: twilight zone ::

:: nighty night ::