Abuse of Power

So here's a clear case of putting undue stress on the indigent who don't pay a water bill on time: you get a reminder every week, to the tune of $10 each time (adds to your balance), but if you mail your check between two such letters, they grind on you to pay that additional late fee, even if the check is post marked and cashed in between.

What they say on the phone is you have to phone them and ask for a waiver, don't understand that a check in between should have bought freedom from any additional penalty charge.

Most "down and outers" won't dare stand up to a bureaucracy so it's up to those of us with some fight in us still, to point out this kind of petty abuse (it all adds up), this kind of nickle and diming that counts on (presumes) a "grin and bear it" attitude, is not modeled on serving proud Americans willing to stick up for themselves.

:: customer complaint ::

Coffee Shop Hopping

Somewhat atypically, I shelled out $9.99 for 24 hours on Tmobile, not my usual habit because so many Portland coffee shops offer free wifi, more like in Whittier.

I'm at my third Starbucks of the day, this one in Eugene, 13th & Alder, enjoying a slice of lemon pound cake (visited the gym this morning, doing that "fool your own metabolism" diet on the sly).

To my gnu math readers: maybe help with these questions about Python? Good chat room topics in any case.

Nick is holding court, shops like this his native habitat. I brought him the shoes he ordered delivered to my address and some literature he may not have seen: the New Yorker article on Bucky (hard copy version, a present from Matt) and the new Whitney catalog, recently acquired from Powell's Technical, capping this Xmas in July (a good one).

We'll be meeting with Nat pretty soon, probably moving somewhere else.

Some Summer Memories

:: Alana and Mary (formerly neighbors) ::

:: a freedom T-shirt tableau ::

:: a heron near PDX ::

:: a secluded scene ::

:: sisters ::

Dead Languages

Over on edu-sig we've been discussing the teaching of math as a language, or set of partially overlapping language games, including with more machines getting into the action, since Turing especially.

Glenn and I walked Sarah this morning, got her toe nails clipped, discussed Alan, working conditions at Bletchley Park, the UK's Navy Department's resistance to this new kind of intelligence and so on -- Glenn is perusing a new biography of the guy, plus we're both Neal Stephenson fans.

Computer programming has been around long enough, since Ada Byron's groundbreaking speculations, to give us "dead languages" already, but that's a somewhat misleading term, as a "dead language" may be very much alive in terms of continuing to run.

It's more just that brand new or so-called greenfield projects tend to go with more contemporary offerings, given ongoing advances in our tools of the trade. You don't start new COBOL projects, but may tend an inherited code pile, keep it "well oiled" so to speak, i.e. in running condition.

Some of the best matrix manipulations still happen in FORTRAN, and there are ways to wrap code in other code, such that a Python coder might hand off to FORTRAN and receive back -- so again, being a dead language doesn't get you off the hook from being in a responsible position necessarily.

So how shall we go about recruiting new talent into maintenance jobs? Aren't those too unglamorous, isn't the danger that dead languages will have no new students? In answer I say, look at ancient Sumerian, how people still study it, even in the 21st century. To be a serious-minded computer programmer might mean knowing two or three dead languages and a few contemporary new ones. It's not either / or.

That being said, some dinosaur operating systems and / or applications run too inefficiently or ineffectively or have otherwise exceeded their warranties, their maintainability.

Especially in light of how open source philosophies have driven down costs, lowering barriers to entry, those with the right skills have many more realistic pathways into the future to choose from, if anything have too many options rather than too few (I'm not complaining).

So whereas I think it's safe to envision some classical FORTRAN packages continuing in operation for decades to come, a lot of the vertical market stuff, especially if aimed at specific hardware, will find (has maybe already found) it has a shorter active duty cycle.

I'm sure many of my peers have come to similar conclusions, although usually in connection with a more specific company, silo, brand or project.

Boat Back in Action

Barry the banker, Peace Corps volunteer, helped our Captain mastermind the rebuilding and installation of a spare maritime internal combustion engine, getting expert assistance with borings etc.

Barry knows his boat engines.

I didn't help at all this time, except with encouragement. This work took several months.

Now that she's back under power (already to Oregon City and back), but with a new engine, a name change may be in order.

MySpace might stick?

Another positive development: DWA is getting its certificate of compliance from the city, having passed the fax test.

Equipment Test

Mom, 78, did marvelously on her giant cot in the Travis's tent, as did we all.

However the rains and temperature were such that we decided this qualified as "not summer camping" even though it's summer.

So I brought them back, dog too, by way of Frys (Hwy 214 through Silverton to Woodburn, then I-5 to Wilsonville), to check on the ailing Sony Vaio, lugged with us, because we took the I-205 route going out, by way of Molalla.

The laptop, mom's main workhorse, had a hard time coming out of hibernation, but did eventually, so good outcome, didn't need to leave it for repairs.

I'm returning to the venue to pick up with the threads around the fire, eat more marshmallows, plus we've had some turnover (e.g. Ron & Liz, Gayle), expecting it'll be fun, has been so far. I've got my own dome, had a wet dog for company.

Anyway, the equipment (much of it purchased at Joe's) performed well, camp stove and everything.

These camp sites are in high demand with most of them booked well in advanced, and so are filled regardless of weather, by families grateful for the opportunity. The trees are really big, the vistas spectacular. This was an annual event for us, so a little rain isn't much of a damper, Pacific Northwesterners that we be.

No wifi, and that's fine with me.

Geeking Out in July

As a matter of professional pride, I have to poke around in the guts of my computer now and then, just to stay in practice. Also, I was wanting to walk my talk around "Christmas in July", an overtly secular holiday, all about shopping, like the real Christmas, but with none of the guilt -- just doing our part for the economy, foot soldiers for capitalism and yada yada.

The upshot is I'm pleased with the new 600W ATX power supply (a StealthXstream from OCZ Technology), quiet and with all the right plugs. I mail ordered from TigerDirect.

The Diamond ATI Radeon 4850, on the other hand, bought for cheap at Frys, is too into rebooting KTU3 whenever I try to control it, with consequent bug reports aiming at Microsoft for some reason (I doubt it's their problem). Plus there's this upcoming Quaker camping trip and I'm short on gear.

So maybe this Christmas in July takes a new twist and the video card goes back for a refund and instead Joe's gets my business as a wannabe camper (an easy "sport" likewise popular in Russia especially where eATVs are involved). My 78 year old mother wants to join in the fun, so I'm seeking a cot also (because of injuries, an air mattress is "suboptimal" -- as geeks like to say).

I mention Russians because I'm thinking ahead to our Bearing Strait project, a piece of company lore we Fuller Schoolers tend to rally around, almost as if it had theological significance. I won't try to explain everything in a short blog post though (go Google).

Now if I wanna be really greedy, I might try a different Radeon, on the off chance this one was returned because flaky, whereas a full priced one might not disappoint. We shall see. My sponsors keep me very lean when it comes to unnecessary expenses, a way of keeping me mean I think (hey, it works). Given all the hostility to Bucky type projects, it pays to have lots of hungry Quakers on short leashes, other exotic krew.

Update: Xmas continues, thanks to Joe's, and yes, I'm gonna try a new video card (a different brand though). Tara and Carol: off seeing a Narnia movie. We're planning on borrowing a tent, so delayed getting a new one, but I did get that cot for mom, looks pretty usable.

:: thx to sam by way of trevor ::

Looney Tunes @ Amazon

(click for larger view)

Check out this screen shot, made with SnagIt, just a drop shadow added.

The page is ostensibly about a philosophy of mathematics title, but the Review (cut short) thinks it's about India, whereas the Product Description thinks we're talking about Susan's book on landscaping.

I saved verbatim quotes in the Math Forum, as a footnote in remarks about the philosophy book in question.

I rode TinkerBell to the gym today, hoping to work off those extra NPYM pounds. My fitness coaches, themselves quite athletic, are in consensus that I should keep shedding the dead weight, especially if I'm back to Guinness for protein (smile). Here's a weighty Friend looking to be less weighty. One snore doctor said I'd lightened up some, usually a good sign.

OSU is largely an Ag school, as in Agriculture, so all that wholesome cafeteria food is most welcome if you're gonna go out and "ag", work out on the gridiron or whatever. I'd have swelled up at Princeton had it not been for Rodrigo, my highly talented resident adviser and future exMarine. He got me out running, doing cardiovascular activities, leaving behind infrastructure I depend on to this day.

Once civilian volunteers get more of what their counterparts get, food, shelter and basic training, plus maybe officer training, then they'll have more time for the job at hand, driving those tractors, running those milking machines, laying that track, fixing those pumps -- all jobs that take calories, as well as an education.

Saving Worlds

"Always back up your data" was the rule of thumb, soon after the personal computer showed up in homes, and people started losing work. A single hard drive might've had all this redundancy, multiple writes of the same stuff, but that wouldn't have been a realistic response to the likelihoods. When a hard drive fails, it's often a mechanical failure, a part wearing out. Multiple writes of the same data blocks doesn't help, as the platens themselves are now inaccessible.

Fast forward to RAID, redundant disk arrays. Now it really does make more sense to mirror data across drives, such that a mechanical failure leads to a hot swap (insert a new drive without powering down) and mathematically low risks. Mirroring across independently breakable parts is engineeringly sound, solves a real problem.

Fast forward again, and now we're looking at huge rack spaces, commodity hardware, with attendant problems of dissipating heat, and interconnecting these clusters to mirror data across data centers. Why? Because you want your web services to be in closer physical proximity to users, for performance reasons, and because you want robust mirroring, as before. Frameworks like Hadoop and GFS solve these kinds of problems.

So what's the analogous trajectory in terms of archival or peripheral media? On a personal computer, once you back off to DVD or flash drive, you have a mounting issue. Not all media remain mounted, much goes off line. Sometimes the archived copies are the only copies i.e. we're not mirroring disk content, but saving a snapshot of what a disk used to contain, contains no longer.

The DVD juke box is another good example, hearkening back to those signature tape drives of the early mainframe business, with personnel taking them from passive storage and mounting them on high speed spoolers (serial access to magnetic tape -- one of the earliest storage media).

What we come back to, using Fuller's namespace some, is a question of lag times. If one assumes accessibility in principle, i.e. the data is saved somewhere, then it's more a question of "when" does one get access. One might imagine a science fiction story in which some time capsule storage gets mounted only once every hundred years. Trying to mirror the whole shebang is way too energy intensive, so the smart searchers just hone in on the specific puzzle pieces they need, like it's some game with glass beads.

Safe to say in many cases: the answers don't arrive in the same order the questions were posed. Put another way, the "jobs queue" and "results stack" are in need of collation, of sorting.

MapReduce might be the appropriate design pattern here, with the initial key a job number, leading to parallel processes doing the information harvesting, with the reduce process remembering the original job number, so the original submitter has at least a fighting chance of knowing when prayers have been answered (ding!... wish 08-7564 is now granted).

Women and FOSS

Speaker: Emma Jane Hogbin (from Canada). Taking notes live:

Women Don't Ask and Unlocking the Clubhouse are two good titles on women in computing. Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox, new, is also good, also Glass Houses.

In India, there's a much higher percentage of women in the technology sector, Pinker thinks because of pay scale issues. Women can more easily afford a non-technical career in the west. Is she right in her analysis?

Talking about "the lack of women" isn't moving us forward. We need to change the conversation, to world domination by FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). Currently, 98.5% of FOSS projects are headed by males.

The HOWTO for encouraging women's participation in the Linux community includes 26 rules of engagement. In sum: don't be a dick, encourage participation.

She cited Mark Shuttleworth's talk, with his crack about creating sexy software that helps people "get laid" (citing some philosopher). Accept awkward moments and move on?

The challenge of recruiting to FOSS is a marketing challenge, so lets think in terms of branding.

Women are more likely to switch brands "based on a good cause" (men less likely). Women place more importance on brand characteristics and personal assistance than men do -- but FOSS is self serve (no store).

The Red Hat Society provides more of a model -- look for groups of people (especially women) to recruit. Charities (nonprofit sector) tend to employ a lot of women -- there's a group.

Help seniors escape from routines. They have grandkids don't forget. Help forge an alliance across the grandparent / grandkid bridge, based on FOSS -- a way to develop that relationship.

Women are workshop junkies (if not conference junkies): quilting bees, scrap booking retreats. Women will pay for these workshops. Having a cost increases the perceived value and commitment (Larry Dotson).

HICK Tech: How the Internet Connects Knowledge -- a good model? Women predominate at this conference, plus are more likely to register early. The focus is on the impact of technology on rural lifestyles.

Constructive suggestions:

• If we have consciousness on every daily action, we can change the "mainstream" conceptions (Claudia Lulkin) -- mindfulness (do one thing different).
  
• Live in the future, behave as if already surrounded by women (because you are, duh).
• Ask women to be role models (www.geekspeakr.com).
• Ask men to help make change happen too.
• Empower people to make foolish mistakes. Reduced stress will empower you to work more creatively.
• Empowerment eliminates fear (how people deal with foolish mistakes makes a big difference).
• Clearly transfer authority.
• Encourage women to question the software, ask them how to improve it, teach them to change reality.
• Allow for matriarchies to run geek communities, participate in viral marketing etc.

During Q&A I mentioned my "party line" that computer science is already "matriarchal". Perhaps I live more in the future in that respect?

More Geek Anthro

In contrast to yesterday's breakfast, today's was quite social. I started by bragging to R0ml about my 79 year old mom, degree in history from a Jesuit academy in the Philippines, reader of Latin, who now administers web sites, a big fan of Drupal.

Then I got into deep discussions with a gentleman from Philadelphia (National Board of Medical Examiners), with Wanderer Keith Lofstrom joining us (I explained about our designer cult, Terry our fearless leader).

This morning, we're hearing from the legal community, in the person of this OIN guy, about various protection schemes that'll help defend us from patent trolls, especially in the software biz.

One may envision lots of jobs in this area, given the inventiveness of lawyers and their boilerplates (an older kind of code -- he actually uses the word "codify" a lot).

We lose lots of potentially talented geeks to that world and its often higher pay scales.

Peter H. Salus, an historian, is providing great context, focusing on the last 60 years and the evolution of "solid state". Timesharing got going in 1963. December 6th, 1969: Arpanet switched on. First Unix paper, 1973. Ten years later: GNU. 1991: Linux on FTP. Look for The Daemon, The Gnu and The Penguin next fall.

Looking ahead, the web as a platform is giving rise to a new emphasis on open data, not just open software. OpenID, Oauth, OpenSocial are among those inventions helping with B2B and B2C interoperability. The Open Web Foundation is wading in to this area, of working with open specifications and licensing issues.

Danese Cooper's talk on "whinging" (win-jing) was interesting, although we say "whining" (wyn-ing) in Portland. Complaining isolates us and makes rain fall on us, wasting energy. She's addressing the gender disparity in geekdom, suggesting a stronger response than just complaining about it.

Ubuntu ad from Danese's slides

Confirmation bias: what you believe reinforces what comes to you. Move out of your biases, even just a little each day (morph) -- a worthy goal in many cases. Recalibration of language (invention in language) is our solution. Acknowledge others, be the world you want to live in.

Nat Torkington is recounting his adventures as a volunteer teacher of future hackers in New Zealand.

Programming is a basic skill, like pumping gas and driving a car, and you'll have a lot more fun in life if you learn some -- pure CP4E talk by the sound of it.

He started with the latest Lego Mindstorms, and discovered that "robots are dorky" -- and Logo blows. scratch.mit.edu is the better way to go with these kids. Show them the ropes and let them invent. Students came up with jokes, stories, books, games using this package.

Moving to processing.org is a next logical step, doing pair programming with his son.

Lessons learned: lectures suck (two minutes max); at 8-11 girls are way smarter and more focused, boys too unrealistically ambitious; keyboards are a challenge; not much in the way of math skills at that age (in NZ anyway); robots = lame; even the teachers need teaching.

Immodest proposal: volunteer in schools; share courseware; don't expect to make a profit. Sounds familiar. He ended with success story involving a Lego robot, for balance.

Geek Anthro

I'm in the vast Expo Hall in the Oregon Convention Center, with coffee, melon, bagel & cream cheese, coffee (other options available). O'Reilly treats us well.

Geeks think nothing of spreading way out among tables, deliberately choosing a very remote one, flipping open a laptop, and getting lost in some world (Uru?). That's me for ya. But other times we glom together for social networking (as some call it) i.e. there's no penalty for flipping between these behaviors.

Some geeks just gaze into space. You don't really need a laptop to get lost in a world.

Once I'm on-line, I have access to friends who might be in this very room. For example I see Robin Dunn of wxPython sitting three table hops away, gazing into his Powerbook.

In theory, I could Twitter about that and, if Robin subscribed to the right feed, he could notice I'm mentioning him in real time, and check the relevant blog link. That'd likely be interruptive of his train of thought though. Mostly we're "asynch" in geek world, more like in Twisted.

Razz turns into a pumpkin at 10 AM (the parking meter expires), plus I have a lot on my plate today. I'm hoping to meet up with DemocracyLab folks in the exhibitors' area at some later time, maybe blog about it some.

OK, so I just walked over to Robin, waving my Ubuntu Dell laptop, babbling about my blog and about needing more coffee, said I'd send him a link. Ah geekdom.

Business Buzz

Mark Shuttleworth is rattling out a high bandwidth talk about "software cadances," the rhythms of development in a permission-free, multiple suppliers environment.

He's passionate about facilitating collaboration across communities and tools within our global free software ecosystem. I'm squeezed between Steve Holden and Duncan in the front row of the Portland Ballroom.

Canonical is interested in the economics of funding this stuff. On the demand side, the advantages are obvious, but how do we innovate on the supply side? He doesn't see how "just advertising" is going to accomplish this, but on-line services just might (I'm thinking "learning a living").

He just got sporadic applause for sharing his vision of raising the Linux desktop to the level of art (beautiful, elegant), blowing right by Apple even. "Software that helps people get laid" as he put it, quoting a favorite philosopher (other bloggers will have the citation).

Prior to Mark's talk, Steve whipped through a State of the Snake report, doing about ten slides in 30 seconds, briefing everyone on where we're going in Python Nation, what with 2.5, 2.6... 3.x.

Jython is going gangbusters these days, with support from Sun Microsystems, with a 2.5 alpha just out recently. He then presented the Frank Willison Award, to Martin von Loewis, a major contributor to Python culture (Steve himself is last year's recipient).

A few Google O'Reilly awards were then granted. Angela Byron was actually present to receive her Best Contributor award, for her work on Drupal. Martin Dougiamas was awarded Best Education Enabler, for Moodle.

R0ml talked next. Then came the White Camel Awards, to Republic of Perl MVPs.

Interest Group

Key: Qs = Quakers, Ws = Wanderers

The children were off enjoying DaVinci Days, a Corvallis tradition, so I heisted their meeting room, given the retractable screen, ethernet... the perfect venue.

I lugged the Saturday Academy pack from Portland: Logitech X-230 speakers; Optoma projector; Ubuntu Dell laptop -- but not so many geometry toyz this time.

I felt privileged to have some very relevant peers present: a sociologist (Jim), a media pro (Steve), a treaty enforcement expert (Jennifer), a company coach (Larry), a health educator (Leslie).

I separated my talk into four Z-layers: personal, metaphysical, situational and historical, with an eye towards interconnecting them.

We mostly went on a tour of my blogs, pausing to watch a few YouTubes along the way. I also projected my Quakers on Youtube, itself not on YouTube (yet).

Q-Meter (oops, spelled hopeful wrong)

The idea of a Q-meter is somewhat tongue in cheek, a play on Scientology's E-meter. With the Q-meter, we ask ourselves where we stand on the utopian to dystopian spectrum, like are we feeling more like Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde today?

A "corporate query" is where we ask about Quakers, not just about ourselves as individuals, although of course it's ultimately as individuals that we freely seek, discover and speak.

Here's a dynamite title for some futuristic interest group: James Nayler: Cold Warrior. Think about it anyway, not saying I have to lead it.

Quaker Portal?

Ed Averill led an interest group focusing on the computerized infrastructure Together Friends might develop, with an emphasis on strong security. Not everyone attending Quaker events wants this known to the public, or at least isn't advertising this fact.

The Quaker Portal idea got some heads nodding (nodding off?), perhaps prototyping as a sandbox (a simulation) using only fake data to begin with, giving Friends something to talk about (a conversation piece, a first draft). Lots of randomizing web services provide such infill automatically:

Lorem ipsum in legimus apeirian quo, mea in elitr percipit dissentias. Noster sententiae inciderint mel an, qui quot albucius at. Disputando adversarium cum in. At delicata salutandi efficiendi quo.

The Directory is another perennial challenge. Some just want their email addresses listed, whereas others specifically don't want that shown (because of spammers mostly).

Ed is quite familiar with the issues involved, heads up our IT committee. He's been focusing on the General Secretary position and the need for encryption on laptops, which might be lost or stolen.

Running a secure data center is a separate can of worms in some ways, although not if you're using the laptop as a front end only, saving nothing special on the local drive, keeping anything sensitive at the central office, connecting by VPN or whatever encrypted tunneling system.

P.O.S.H.

One of my valued sources, a Together Friend, informs me this morning that this "port out, starboard home" etymology is considered an urban legend by sticklers, as the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang decoding well post dates first occurrences of the word.

The colorful and embellished stories of where this word really originates, leave the gatekeepers highly suspicious. Anything "gypsy" is not to be trusted, unless also verified (cross-checked and peer reviewed).

Speaking of posh, I'm ensconced in an Oregon State University dorm room and finding it comfortably spartan. As long as there's ethernet I'm a potentially happy camper. Excerpting from the Wanderers eGroup (me posting yesterday):

One perennial proposal is to bring in a safety net that assumes "the life of the mind" as a desirable component, i.e. "being in college on a scholarship" sets the base line, and includes work amidst study, including sometimes at dirty jobs (as seen on TV -- doesn't mean "unskilled"). You don't get to live in high style necessarily, but you're not in any danger of starving.

Just talking up the Global U again, per my usual rap, an updated version of what came out in Education Automation quite a few orbits ago (about 46).

More Quaker Futurism

Excerpt from Quaker-P (Mon Jul 14 08:02:49 PDT 2008):

Part of the falling home values slash retail housing crisis is Americans are fed up with a stupid, unplanned lifestyle involving urban sprawl and strip malls, exorbitant commutes to work and really shoddy workmanship in the case of a lot of these McHouses (like living inside of fast food). On the horizon: genres of positive realism that promise much better lifestyles, including in places like the Andes, where your Verizon call center might feature a high tech cosmopolitan village, lots of gringos amidst those call center personnel, the better to serve those fussy gringos back home who can't abide "broken English" when calling their bank or whatever, get really nasty about it, tsk.

WRDL: Grain of Sand

click here to visit applet

Quaker Roots

In doing the research for my upcoming interest group on American Transcendentalists and their influence on Friends, I'm discovering how useful it'd be to not confine my attention to the western hemisphere and the Americas. For example, Emilia Fogelklou of Gothenburg contributes strong writings. Plus Margaret Fuller, friendly to Friends, wrote some of her best stuff as an expat, so once again we're outside of Walt Whitman's favorite stomping grounds (where he sang of himself).

I think I'll start off by looking at barbs and/or spoofs aimed at Quakers, for example this one blog alludes to Quagans, our Quaker-pagan subcultures (not like others haven't played with exotic hybrids), whereas this other contains an hilarious review of a first person "non-shooter". What's especially revealing is the following paragraph:

Multiplayer Discussion
Rainbow Six: Quakers features online multi-player that lets you and the opposing team talk it out in a variety of highly-detailed maps like Village Café, Modern Boardroom and Comfy Mattress.

In other words, the tools of diplomacy have a transcendentalist flare, hearkening back to the "make love not war" aesthetics of the 1970s. One of our best "east meets west" collaborations was Yoko Ono's with John Lennon, a couple who helped us awaken from the Vietnam nightmare. I'm not saying either is Quaker (not my call), but that their personal testimonies well fit with such as we find in Lives That Speak.

Of course in practice I'm rubbing shoulders with only a tiny minority of Friends, a wandering (if not lost) bunch of Beanites and fellow travelers in the Pacific Northwest, circa Seattle.

IDLE Language Games

:: Python using Akbar font ::

When teaching for Saturday Academy, one of my first moves is to show students how to customize IDLE to better suit their personal needs. This includes choosing a font.

Some students like a more informal look and feel, such as shown above (click for larger view).

IDLE is Python's "batteries included" text editor, making use of the Tkinter module which provides bindings to Tk. John Zelle has contributed graphics.py, a yet simpler API letting Python programmers control Tk widgets, such as window-framed canvases.

IDLE (Interactive DeveLopment Environment) is also a pun on the name Eric Idle, one of the original cast in the Monty Python troupe, for whom Python was appreciatively named.

Dog Tubes

dog agility tunnel from canine concepts

Some of our XRLs (remote bases) will be pet friendly, yet designed to contain pets to the designed environment, by keeping the wilds outside relatively free of alien species.

"Leave it as you found it" is the prime directive in many a protected wilderness.

Pet owners have long used plastic tubing to vector hamsters into harmless holding patterns. Dogs may also be coaxed into traversing short distances through tunnels, Dachshunds especially.

In other words, structures needn't directly connect in order to provide safe passage to controlled species, by means of appropriately sized tunnels. Humans needn't be restricted in this way, having trained themselves to obey the appropriate rules even when set at liberty.

Given RFID, some systems will offer fancier control paneling for monitoring pet whereabouts, whereas other communities might consider this overkill, an invasion of privacy, and opt for stronger training instead (like our pets don't "get stuck" thank you very much -- or if they do it's none of your business).

rover

An Amnesty Proposal

The Canadian Friends Service Committee (Quakers) sponsored a letter from many of Canada's faith communities requesting the federal government stop deportations. "Canada has always been a country of citizens who prize peace and peace making. We hope that public policy will reflect those aims," said Jane Orion Smith, spokesperson for the organization. "Corey's case and that of all the soldiers are based on substantive rights of conscience under international law that must be respected."
[ from CNW Group earlier today]

If the Iraqi legislature passes similar legislation for a post pull date amnesty, for USA soldiers left behind past their pull date (timetable talk much in the news again [1]), then soldiers closer to the action will have their own "underground railroad" and won't need to escape to the homeland first, where domestic sentiment is also in their favor (plus family members). [2]

Not saying this'll be for everyone, especially as most soldiers are scheduled to rotate home under ordinary duty, are looking forward to an honorable discharge etc. However, given the usual sense of disarray in fog of war conditions, we might anticipate some units on the ground getting confused, like Japanese in the Philippines post WWII, still trying to hold out for their Emperor, long after the switch to Indochina as the new theater, and start of the cold war. [3]

Iraqi legislators have reasons to want to stay on good terms with their USA counterparts and passing such laws on the model of Canada's would help emphasize the point that friends help each other in times of need. Canada has always been there for us.

Bar Hopping

I'm using the term somewhat tongue in cheek, as these are family friendly and more healthy hippy than those smoke filled taverns in other zip code areas, even if both have pool tables (this one doesn't, Centralia's does).

I'm patched in through the company WiFi, from my Ubuntu Dell, awaiting a Lynchburg Lemonade (just sampling the Jack Daniels, No. 7 -- if anyone ever takes my order, not a given seeing as how I blend in with the decor). Most customers are eating outside, but I'm into darkness and airconditioning, on this beautiful blue day.

On my plate this morning, Darwinism again, and this idea of randomness. What's true about random is it might just be pseudo-random, perhaps even signaling a close encounter of some kind -- but how would we know for sure?

Wolfram's A New Kind of Science studies this question, among other books in the chaos tradition (dynamical systems theory). Eternally incommensurable medio-phase seems optimized for problem solving in some important ways.

As I post in the archives, the idea of "an alien intelligence" becomes oxymoronic at some limit, given ye old "man is the measure of all things" cliche (is all too human in other words). Like, we don't recognize what we don't recognize, if "passing the Turing Test" is not the criterion.

Ned's Excellent Adventures

ned likes twinkies... bigger cake in the wings

My cousin Ned celebrates his birthday at our annual July 4 family picnic, as does my sister Julie.

This year he told us this joke: a man is fishing with a stone for bait, hits an eagle after the same fish, accidentally killing the eagle, a protected species. When the game warden comes by to investigate, our man tells a good story, about not wanting to waste a national treasure (he has cooked and eaten the eagle), which the game warden buys. But upon leaving the warden asks: just curious, what does eagle taste like? Reply: oh, somewhere between a spotted owl and a condor. Oops. Kaboom.

Ned hasn't been shy about traveling the world, including the Amazon Basin, tells many good stories, many of them true.

More cuRRiculum writing

phi from fibonacci numbers
(click for larger view)

Per Math Forum and other venues, I've been pioneering some Pythonic Math in the context of a free web delivery framework.

Some assume use of "distance education" tools means the teacher isn't on site, or that the students are remote from one another.

This may well be the case.

On the other hand, there's no reason a teacher can't have small, intimate classes, and yet still make use of the very same web frameworks, for in-class use (as when projecting).

If each student has a personal screen, then using a web framework to deliver content, even with students in the same room, may be the teacher-preferred modus operandi (M.O.), i.e. it beats making 'em squint at a chalk board, listen to squeaking.

Wall-e (movie review)

I was pleasantly surprised by this film, a work of art right down to the closing credits.

The allusions to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 Space Odyssey are transparent, more subtle are the ones to Idiocracy (a lesser known film) and even more subtle to The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, a story that really got the ball rolling on this whole genre (future as satire) in some ways.

Eve is this hyper-spy Morlock, designed to self protect at any cost, whereas Wall-e is living the philosophers' dream of always replacing the next broken part, and so immortal in some machine world sense (very Archie, to have a cockroach as a fellow traveler, the proverbial bio-survivor -- might as well be mechanical).

The machines are the Morlocks, humans the Eloi, a twist Wells would likely have much appreciated, plus the rendition was exquisite I thought. Wonderful to cast Sigourney Weaver as the voice of the space ship.

So why is Google down in Edmonton, Canada today, or is that not the problem? Turns out it wasn't.

Blast from the Past (movie review)

Brendan Fraser plays like a Tom Hanks in Big, a doofy big kid out to lose his virginity, and with his father's fear of adult book stores and all things communistic ("dirty hippies" were still to come).

Alicia Silverstone plays an endearing been there done that type, disillusioned with role model alternatives, not sure where to turn (the "cultural malaise" president Carter was talking about?).

We get more satirizing of the atomic bomb era's Nuclear Family (a mostly anglo-suburban demographic), of which later Americans were manifestly not proud, on many levels.

So I can think of worse fates than 35 years home alone with Sissy Spacek, but that's just a fan talkin'.

More Media

Left to right: Amy, Hunter, Jaime, John
Democracy Now!

I'm blogging a lot about Bucky Fuller in the news these days, reviewing the articles I've run across in the New Yorker, New York Times, Herald Tribune and like that.

Amy Goodman did a piece on Fuller today, timed with this show opening at the Whitney Museum in NYC in a couple days (through September), and making a bigger media splash than the retrospective @ Noguchi Garden Museum last year.

Hunter Lovins, Jaime Snyder (Fuller's grandson), and John Todd were her three luminaries. Thanks to Wanderer David Tver for the heads up on this one.

I like the quote from Bucky himself they dropped in, something about how increasing world literacy moves us past a tipping point, to where we have a different more democratic relationship to one another, needn't feel subordinate to political leaders, much as we continue appreciating strong leadership, found in many walks of life.

I've been drumming up some interest among the math teachers I hope, via the Math Forum's math-teach and geometry.pre-college.

:: cool hat! ::

Energy Economics

Students interested in computing come to see "sorting" as a kind of "work," in that imposing or discovering an order among items takes joules, calories -- how many depends on both the field to be sorted, and the algorithm's efficiency.

"Sorting" as a metaphor for "organizing" more generally has that anti-entropy flavor of "work" per information theory i.e. adding signal versus noise, with the two extremes hard to tell apart sometimes (undeciphered pure signal looks just like pure noise).

Linking to business education, we see world trade as a kind of sorting, getting the right antiques to the most interested collectors and so on. This sun-powered enterprise takes real humint to keep humans happy i.e. you can't "do it all" with "just AI" (too anemic).

July's Scientific American shows an uptick in graphical sophistication in its latest article on hypercross physics (Quantum Universe): lots of triangles, hexagons etc., "very synergetics" in some ways. The Menger Sponge on page 48 is named for Eve's dad.

Of course when it comes to energy, humans harness and channel only a microfraction of nature's relatively vast pattern integrities, such as typhoons. Design science is not about "conquering nature" so much as about "learning from nature" and respecting her powers.

From my iGoogle quote of the day service:

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. - Umberto Eco

Major Barbara (movie review)

I snagged this 1941 classic from Movie Madness owing to some recent discussions on Synergeo.

The film, based on the play by George Bernard Shaw, follows the career of a rebellious heiress who fights the establishment (her father), only to attract the worshipful attention of a classics professor (nicknamed Euripides) who makes no secret of his wish to hook up and be her #1.

In the mean time, Major Barbara eventually comes to see that her dad (nicknamed Machiavelli) sponsors a lot of positive assets, including her own Salvation Army. The transformation isn't easy though, plus future morphing seems likely in her case.

Bottom line: the Shaw era UK may export death and destruction (it still does), but there are enough benevolent ideologies at work to get Barbara through her dark night and into the right mood to stick with Euripides, who inherits the dad's arms business.

Back to the Synergeo context, I'd have to say the film reminds me of Laurie Anderson's concluding lines in O Superman (#2 on the UK singles chart in 1981), which I read as an ode to mother nature first and foremost, our ultimate sponsor:

So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms.
In your electronic arms.

According to commentary at IMDB, the arms merchant Undershaft (a dark father or "darth vader" archetype) was loosely based on Shaw's contemporary John Cadbury, the Quaker chocolate factory dude. However, for the purposes of this play, a Quaker Machiavelli would have been a less effective foil for our principled princess.

Random Zine Covers

:: tragic ::

:: comic ::

:: deep ::

Father Still Learning

It's Father's Day again, with many of us remembering and appreciating someone dear, perhaps near.

We listened to Weird Al's White & Nerdy enroute to and from Quaker meeting today.

Some Winterhaven kids enjoy this as a spoof of their own ethnicity. Me too, though I'm more a geek than a nerd, plus I suck at JavaScript.

I just added it to my iPod, along with the Chamillionaire original (Ridin' with Krayzie Bone).

Gayle presided over the ritual handing out of peacock feathers today, to our most youthful Friends (Dave Fabik got one). A special congratulations to Rachael, a stellar player on our team.

Poor Slob Bucky (PSB)

Probing... R. Buckminster Fuller
Herald Tribune, June 12, 2008

Here's one of those "poor Bucky" articles, making it his failure that the world is still so ugly, despite all that fun with the patents, awards, honorary degrees, trips around the world, stellar students, hot books, groovy gigs etc. "By conventional measures he accomplished little" says our journalist.

Plus he apparently experienced lots of despair, so couldn't really be the god he thought he was etc., probably even faked that egocide event, just to win fans and blah blah. Looks like there's a whole book of this stuff in the pipeline (probably several). I call it the "Bucky-as-Britney" genre and, as a big fan of both, am looking forward to more (including on HBO).

More seriously, I think part of it's cultural: "saving the world" was branded "crazy messiah talk" (ego maniacal) back then, whereas "saving for a rainy day" was considered acceptable, sounded sane. Nowadays however, it's considered perfectly normal to be working to "save the world" from global climate change, pollution, overpopulation... terrorism, so yesteryear's "crazy messiahs" just blend right in, as more everyday heroes, more decent human beings. Times change.

The guy didn't last at Harvard because he was a rebellious contrarian who didn't find his professors Olympian enough, preferred sneaking off to study visionaries, liked show biz. Sketching him in a pathetic light, skipping over Annapolis and military service, in a rush to this 1927 personal crisis, sells readers short, makes the maudlin lighting and dime store psychology more plausible. The easier interpretation is he anticipated the counter-culture, had a way of getting "beyond squares" (both literally, and psychologically), and Harvard wasn't ready (still isn't most likely -- not our problem).

A Literary Investigation

Casting Bucky Fuller as a New England transcendentalist, in the same lineage as his great Aunt Margaret, is fairly easy to do (dare I say a no-brainer), given his far out metaphysics and Bear Island beginnings.

If we zoom out from these New England beginnings and start talking about American Transcendentalism more inclusively, then whom might we add to our cast of characters?

I think many would agree on Walt Whitman. Nick thinks Gary Snyder and Thomas Pynchon more recently, and I've been asking about Edgar Alan Poe, because of Eureka!, a proto-Synergetics in some ways.

But if we include Poe, then what else might be said about the relationship of Transcendentalist to Gothic writers? Taxonomies have their dangers, can get in the way.

As one approaches the present day, it's a lot about television and film, not just printing presses.

Going back again, there's also the question of Unitarianism and its roots in Transylvania -- lots of overlap with the transcendentalists there too, notably in Emerson.

I touched on these questions in my paper for EuroPython last year: Connecting the Dots: American Transcendentalism Meets Pythonic Math (Vilnius, 2007).

Thank You Winterhaven!

Transitions

So many happenings today: Tara's 8th grade graduation party, and birthday, Rachael's high school graduation party, Ron's photography opening at Clinton Street Cafe, Kathy taking the helm at Western Friend, me driving around like crazy in Razz, enjoying all of it, including ribs with Dave.

Also today: Glenn sent me some pix from decades past, uploaded a few, including this one from our Jersey City days:

Staying Weird in Portland

The title for this entry alludes to a recently published Weird Science slide show in the on-line version of The New Yorker (magazine) as well as to Portland's Keep Portland Weird slogan, maybe pirated from Austin.

Here's how I linked them, in a post to Synergeo (#40427), subsequent to a fine Wanderers meeting, full of lightning talks, Thai food after (hyperlinks added):

The whole 4 page article is there too, just finished reading it, by Elizabeth Kolbert, a talented and eclectic writer (was just checking into some of the other stuff she's written, like on CCD, some "disorder" that makes bees not respond well to major changes in their environment (like, let's blame the bees, make it be their problem)).

The missing thread in this account is how his back to the drawing board near suicide experience led to vows about doing one's own thinking and starting up with this deliberately remote vocabulary and way of thinking, the word "Dymaxion" just a superficial aspect of this somewhat crazy-making language reinvention project.

But whereas postmortems focus on all the "failures", how many men both wrote great philosophy and scored all these engineering breakthroughs? Is that because he knew how to "think different" (recalling Apple's marketing campaign)? Could be. Just maybe.

Also, people make far too much of Brand's damning the dome. They don't all leak, lots of expensive radars entrusted to these skeletons. Yes, some domestic custom builds had problems, but here I think J. Baldwin tells the better story, about smuggling still unverified numbers out of Joe Clinton's lab. Some of the tables in Dome Handbook had significant errors, hence the propensity to leak. Of course there are other reasons some domes lack integrity, but is the goal to be boring, or to tell a good story?

Mostly I think North Americans squander their opportunities to tell good stories around Bucky. It's all about what a big failure he was, whereas he got to be good friends with some of the most interesting and engaging folks on the planet, Marshall McLuhan for example, very generous in crediting Bucky for his ideas. Arthur C. Clarke, Werner Erhard... what a trip! Not my idea of a "failure story" no matter what these cold case autopsies show.

On the other hand, I appreciated the light touch, the humor, the fact that we're not doing hagiography here (Applewhite never liked that genre much).

On balance, I'm happy to see something in the pages of The New Yorker, giving analysts a reality check on where we're at in some circles, when it comes to party talk, even pillow talk ("did you remember to empty the drips bucket dear?").

Good to see what people are thinking, a whole quarter century after his passing, to sample some Talk About Town in some towns. Also, given our Keep Portland Weird campaign (in tandem with Austin's), I'm happy with the "Weird Science" moniker -- definitely something we can work with. So thank you Elizabeth, for the kind and welcome boost.