Arabs Gone Wild

Portland's Arab-American community turned out in force for this comedy troupe. Our venue: The Aladdin. The crowd was enthusiastic and appreciative, which was galvanizing to the performers. Portland is also sometimes known as Little Beirut after all.

I'd attended the Axis of Evil here in Portland in November 2009, but this was a different line-up. No Ahmed Ahmed this time, nor Tissa Hami.

Two of the comedians, Dean Obeidallah and Maysoon Zayid had been subjects in my friend Glenn Baker's documentary (along with Ahmed and Tissa). I went up to Dean after the show to say hello from Glenn (he knew immediately whom I meant), and to shake Maysoon's hand. I wanted to blurt out how much I admire her but was shy, plus she was swamped with other fans telling her much the same thing.

A quick poll of the audience discovered large Palestinian, Jordanian, Lebanese and Syrian contingents, with fewer from Iraq and Egypt, plus even fewer from Libya. Iranians were present but not polled as Iran is not considered an Arabian nation.

These were in contrast to "whites" (also present) although these categories remain problematic, as many Arabs check "white (non-hispanic)" on the government forms. I'm told "Middle Eastern" is being added to some of the bureaucratic tabulations.

The show reminded me that social comedy is a lot like group therapy. People have an interest in healing by gaining some distance from their pain, and laughter, with a touch of compassion, goes a long way towards creating mental health.

The comedians need healing and therapy as much as anyone, and a friendly audience presents a great opportunity to regenerate one's psyche. Kader's lampooning of Dr. Phil as a source of non sequiturs was funny to me. I was likewise amused when Spears pulled the rug when he tried getting a piece of her that time.

Social comedy traffics in stereotypes, self-consciously and by design. Arab identity has much to do with extended family, food, discussing prices, dressing in various ways. The segment about a TV show adapted from The Price is Right, called The Price is Not Right drew peals of laughter.

A traveling troupe is also in a position to compare notes and update those present with a sense of the times. After some months of relative quiet and benign media, the people now seem angry, with the level xenophobia creeping up the scale.

The comics referred more than once to Ellis Island and the promise of America as a land of opportunity. We embrace newcomers. That's not the mood in California though. Anti-immigrant sentiments are again spiking, especially among "whites".

George Bush has continued as a source of comedy. Aron Kader admitted it's simply harder to turn Obama into a comic figure.

The jokes seemed mostly on the safe side, edgy but not politically all that risky. At a time of such anger, why stoke the flames? Maysoon, who has cerebral palsy, did a sketch about trying to shake Arafat's hand at the UN. As they both quivered, they were unable to connect. Most of her routine was about a new husband-to-be, rescued from a refugee camp with the promise of a visa.

Much of Kader's rap was about gender differences and communication. Guys get paranoid and feel manipulated when gals express their wishes in a round about matter, don't seem to get to the point. Guys don't like to interpret, though may be cryptically brief in their wordless expostulations. The comedy is in the mannerisms and delivery, so I'll not attempt a more thorough account here.

Peace Garden

[ VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE ]

The projects chronicled in the above video, a Rock Beats Paper production, have come along a lot further since then. Camera, narration and editing by Rick Flosi of The Goodbye Party, with Lindsey Walker providing additional narration.

The juniper, which used to look like a phage, now looks more like a banzai tree.

Wanderers 2010.9.14

Jon Bunce is explaining his derivation of the synergetics constant, based on my presentation on Martian Math awhile back. David Tver has joined us, and Trish, a former student of Don Wardwell's. Jeff is working a Javascript gig, injecting more AJAX into some gnarly library.

The PSF Snake (Naga) came along for a photo op. I know that seems frivolous and many wonder why I bother. Anthropologists may be more forgiving in hindsight.

Was I productive today?

I made some follow-up contact with two of my clients. Actually, one was a client of a client, but that's OK.

Does anyone care if there's fast food in Havana? What a luxury it'd be, to get away from ugly strip malls. Some cities should remain blissfully free, of large outdoor billboard advertising as well.

I've been listening to Fidel, agree with his remarks in Iran: studying the holocaust in Europe is more productive than trying to sweep it under the rug. There's no point coming off as ignorant. Edwin Black's War Against the Weak is also a good read (available in Farsi?).

I've got several of Edwin's books on hold through the library. The Multnomah County library system is truly excellent in my opinion.

There's a fine line between "denying" and simply "ignoring", easily crossed.

David Tver is talking about IBM and the holocaust, a recent thread on the Wanderers list (initiated by me). Some curricula visit this chapter more than others, perhaps when introducing SQL (Structured Query Language), the successor to simpler tabulation machines.

A more recent story, less horrendous, involves Russian security services ostensibly cracking down on pirate users of Windows, in this case some opponents of polluting industries and their political allies (similar to Greenpeace).

Thanks to all the negative publicity, Microsoft is backing away from cooperating with these services, by issuing a blanket license to the supposedly offending nonprofits. The latter claim they were using non-pirate copies to begin with, having anticipated this kind of harrassment by the police state authorities.

DjangoCon Day Two

Sometimes I think anthropology departments must be too full of fluff, as we don't seem to attract many field workers to these tribal events, complete with totems, self-government issues, exogenous and endogamous challenges.

How to pass the torch? Who gets a commit bit?

The Django community only has 14 people with a commit bit, and really low bus numbers on some aspects of the code.

A "bus number" is how many people getting hit by buses would result in zero people remaining to maintain, enhance, otherwise work on some feature, application or code. Django's object-relational mapper (ORM) for example: few people are conversant with it among the inner 14, ergo "low bus numbers".

James Bennett gave a great keynote yesterday on the need to open up the core to more committers. These sentiments were echoed in Eric Florenzano's keynote of this morning, which focused on weaknesses and downsides of Django and the community.

These kinds of rants are valuable and expected within any group that expects to thrive over the long haul I should think. One needs to handle criticisms that emerge from deep within the ranks, perhaps with more alacrity than those more casual criticisms coming from outside, from those with less of an investment. Eric is not a core committer, but he does spend many of his waking hours wrangling Django.

Andrew Godwin's talk focused on the non-relational databases out there, of which there there are many, and efforts to make Django work as a front end for some of them. Document stores may have some schema-like aspects, which means the concept of a "model" in Django may still be apropos.

Considering electronic medical records again, an underlying structure is the time-line, as each person's "life thread" (as Greek mythology viewed them) is a chronological sequence.

:: the three fates ::

Medical devices committing data to an EMR need to authenticate patient identity and then find the appropriate point on the time-line to place the data, perhaps with clinician annotations.

Somehow, the URL to this data, being consulted at a later time, will trigger the right viewer to load, perhaps in its own window, thereby decoding the data and rendering a readily decipherable visualization, assuming a trained eye. Perhaps a cine will play; a short video clip of a beating heart, before and after angioplasty.

Hospitals currently store these cines on their own servers. To what extent will EMRs be independent of specific health care systems? Each person accumulates some gigabytes of medical data over the course of a lifetime.

Many bureaucrats have already thrown up their hands, saying the problem is too difficult, can't be done. Other say that, however it's done, their job will be to inter-connect the various implementations, not source any specific solution themselves.

However, given how under-served people are, in so many regions, opportunities for greenfield development are myriad. Doctors without borders aren't required to use HL7 or follow legislative guidelines specific to any one country.

Within a culture of open source, opportunities will develop and get shared. Closed off silos continually reinvent the same wheels whereas those who share more strongly encourage their peers to keep up to date.

Data migration services will evolve to transform one kind of EMR into another.

Yes, what I'm describing is the "messy scrap book" model at a high level (organized temporally), with specific fields being structured, as worked out among various specialists and vendors.

Might a SQL database serve as an outermost wrapper, perhaps with XML fields for less structured data, with patient identity and chronological sequence serving as primary relational keys?

I'm not looking for a single answer or solution.

Researchers will plow through EMRs seeking to generate clinical research records (CCRs), many of them scrubbed of any traceable identity information, yet still associated by case history. Having fragments of the genome decoded does not imply identifiability.

Additionally, those "donating their bodies to science" (a well-known idiom) might nowadays sign a release allowing unmasked identity information to become available to a wider circle of authorized personnel. Medical literature is already full of case histories of identifiable personae, mixed in with the more anonymous.

The data stays authentic, is not some arbitrary mix. Fictional identities may be synthesized by algorithm to mask the actual ones, but in ways that support valid correlations and therefore conclusions. Arbitrary changes to age, sex, weight, history of smoking, should not be messed with, as medically relevant data points.

Open source data sets, freely downloadable, give researchers shared access to common pools.

Intelligently designed viewers and data harvesters with built in anonymizers will facilitate extracting patient data minus patient identity. Data sets packed with thousands of true case histories will be gold to researchers, all the more so because loss or theft of this data will not represent a security breach in terms of patient confidentiality.

Day One at DjangoCon

Steve Holden served as master of ceremonies this morning. I got roped in as mic runner during Q&A, a role with which I'm familiar (I was mic runner for Sir Roger Penrose once, another great mind).

The upshot of the first plenary: the Django community is doing a fantastic job of promoting Python's relevance to the "world livingry service industry" (like hotels, rental car agencies and such) however developers are in short supply.

Universities with "emergent technologies" tracks are more likely to be providing some relevant content. Many remain decades behind. In my own view (it's my blog so I get one): high schools could be doing a lot more. Again, I circle the Litvins' text as prototypical, already retrofitted for Python 3.x.

One footnote: now that the Django Pony has become so woven into the lore, some geeks are feeling leery. Is it too late to back away? Certainly not everyone feels this way, but yeah, there's that potential for teasing, of being teased, because of one's "flippant" (the word used) mascot.

Steve took the bull by the horns by suggesting we're duty-bound to keep it light in some dimensions, and the Django Pony is the very embodiment of lightness (and yet also opens the psyche to investigations of disappointment, being spoiled, optimism versus pessimism and so forth, not to mention the innocence of youth).

Setting Up @ DjangoCon

Yes, some people have to work on Labor Day, especially hard-working service personnel in all those hotels, where some people go on vacation during Labor Day weekend.

One of the first things they teach you about labor is its division. Not everyone gets to go on vacation at the same time. In many submarines, you had fewer bunks than men, because not everyone sleeps at once on a submarine.

Then people sort themselves by skill sets, and levels of skill within those skill sets.

For example, Admirers of Javascript is the name of an actively meeting group here in Portland. HTML5 is getting a lot of buzz. Will it include client-side SQL? Sqlite has been proposed. iPhones apps use it, am I right (I don't have one)?

The Djangocon conference, on the other hand, is less about the user-facing interfaces, and more about what the servers need to be doing, fetching and storing data, returning views. Django is a web framework written in the Python computer language, one of several. The original developers hail from Lawrence, Kansas.

Do these two skills sets overlap? Django and JavaScript + HTML/CSS? You betcha.

Other skills involved in organizing a conference: encourage professionalism among hotel staff; pay attention to your environment, including smells; have a way to print name tags, labels, easily right on the spot.

BuckyBall Day

Google joined the festivities by commemorating the discovery of the BuckyBall. I got some emails from people from whom I don't usually hear (hi Josh, welcome back to the land of Mexican food).

David Koski first alerted me with a phone call, which he placed in the midst of setting up his new Apple.

As those up on their lore maybe know, the discovery of buckminsterfullerene came two years after Fuller died in 1983. His collaborator E.J. Applewhite lived to see the scientific community embrace this new discovery, and nomenclature.

Twas my distinct pleasure to attend the First International Conference on Buckyballs in Santa Barbara, as a representative of both the BFI and ISEPP. I got to meet Harold Kroto and many of the other researchers exploring this fascinating topic. I also crossed paths with a Nanotubes conference in Gothenburg.

The hexapent, or soccerball shape of the buckyball, is one I sought to popularize under the heading of HP4E (hexapents for everybody), an allusion to Guido's CP4E (computer programming for everybody).

Glenn Stockton promulgates this and related memes through his Global Matrix Studios (currently a part of the Linus Pauling Campus on Hawthorne Boulevard). Are we like Mad Men or what?

:: documentary on c60 ::

FNB Food Prep

:: fnb @ mmm ::

Lew Scholl, clerk of Property Management, is yakking in the kitchen with Lindsey and Cera. They're talking about New Thought churches. I'd been out running an errand, though I'm nominally supervising this event, as the key bearer.

There's a conference call on speaker phone going, regarding Quarterly Meeting planning. Food security, urban farming, CSAs... these are themes this year. Lindsey knows a lot of the CSA groups and is coordinating with Joyce on a possible interface, perhaps here in the social hall (where I'm blogging from).

Betsey Kenworthy, now Assistant Clerk of the Meeting, was by earlier and got to meet Cera and Satya when they showed up. Jan Kjerne was here as well. Another FNB volunteer came through with some additional food contributions.

The group brings the food on bicycle trailer, preps it, then pulls it off to be served in a public location not far away. I've participated in the operation, so know some of the ropes.

Lew and I went around testing our laptops, to see if the wifi's radius has improved.

Lew has a new Youtube up about the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage, which recently stopped through, and took over the meetinghouse. I missed being there at any point, so was glad to catch this video.

FNB (Food Not Bombs) is good at logistics, has been doing this for years. There's an Episcopalian congregation helping out as well. Satya is a Buddhist monk.

Pycon / Tehran?

:: trucking route ::

I'm monitoring Diversity for more feedback on this idea. Some of the language specialists (unicode geeks) I'm tracking watch that water cooler for signs of the times.

Vilnius was one I got to (a EuroPython), and really enjoyed. Aieste is a Facebook friend but I don't understand most of what she writes, given she speaks at least four more languages than I do. I've been to Pycons in Washington, DC and Chicago.

Pycons may happen in parallel, although in terms of PSF people getting together, that's not always in the cards. Pycon / Singapore (Asia-Pacific) happened over the summer. I helped mind the (curriculum writing) store at OST while Holden Web took a tour, including Nippon.

People wanting a Pycon in Baghdad or Tel Aviv don't have to worry too much about sequence ("simultaneously" is OK). Even when the distances are not so great (quite drivable by North American standards) it's enough work to get visas to have to pick and choose.

In the meantime, short of full-fledged Pycons, we have local user groups. Some of these are informal, on-campus or off, and may not yet be listed on the community Wiki, unlike Portland, Oregon's or Chicago's, both of which have been going a long while.

Sharing Light

I walked to Quaker meeting on Sunday with the express purpose of attending early morning adult discussion, which exceeded my expectations. The theme was "pride" and was clerked by this new guy.

Like any congregation (we usually don't use that word), there's welcome turnover, a small trickle of newcomers checking us out. This brand of Quaker stays esoteric in that it doesn't proselytize or otherwise try to make itself especially understandable. There's a library, lots of lore on the Web.

My 81 year old mother also walked the 2/3 mile each way.

Then I met up with clerk of Property Management (a committee) to discuss a pilot test we'd like to run. No amplified music this time, nor much use of the piano. This was a proposal I originally dispatched through Oversight, then subsequently sought to involve Peace and Social Concerns.

We're gearing up for Djangocon in Portland, which is close to sold out. Django is one of the flagship web application frameworks, written in Python. Its design encourages best practices and is consistent with many emerging industry standards, in how it dispatches HttpRequests to view managers, which in turn consult any databases in the picture (model-view-controller). That's all kind of technical, but then lots of my readers are software engineers, other brands of geek.

Another example of a web application framework is the popular Ruby on Rails, which was used for this Urban Edibles web site. A proposal to migrate this site to Django resulted in Rick, Laura, Lindsey and I attending some sprints. Although the spirit of socially responsible coding was present, we were not the right permutation of cards to form a winning hand (luck of the draw) and so we made not much headway as unpaid volunteers. At least Backspace appreciated our business.

Rick has recently been by the Blue House on a work project with Lindsey. Wanderer Consoletti has been a campus guest, also of Portland Energy Strategies (I dispute many of Nick's views, have not used him as my emissary or anything, he does his own thinking).

I've been reading Saying No To Power by William Mandel, which is making the rounds through Friends. I'll have more to say about this illuminating autobiography in future blog posts. He says some entertaining things about Quakers.

The recent back yard party with school teachers was just in time, as the weather turned cold and rainy almost immediately thereafter. I had some Martian Math toyz in tow. Our company included a Fulbright scholar, plus a full time teacher from Beaverton getting ready for a stint in Finland, as a student of that country's education system.

Greater Portland benefits from having such a cosmopolitan teacher cast, is partly what attracts families to work in this area.

Sharing Darkness

Fictional works may engage our empathy or libido, may present us with villains, characters we love to hate. I am not anti-fiction, and yet I do often worry about its abuse, as a way to channel caring away from the real world into various imaginary ones controlled by soap companies (the root meaning of "soap opera").

In contrast, I have been advocating entwining technical skills trainings with historical content, adding back time-lines where they may have gone missing. Consider the WW2 era Holocaust in Europe for example, and its ties to ideologies and literature emerging as a consequence of Darwin's theories.

The story has been told many times, but not usually in the context of studying the mathematics of record-keeping, or the language of SQL (structured query language). Edwin Black helped move us in that direction. Other scholars have followed his lead.

It's precisely when one is learning about "keeping tabs", collecting information about people in data warehouses, that it makes the most sense to investigate abuses, failed civilizations, inhumane applications of these kinds of technologies.

Schools with a reputation for "denying the Holocaust" or simply refusing to give it any focus, might want to try a different tack and actually pioneer a more direct approach. Study the Eugenics movement intently and relate it to the science of record-keeping. Use the topic of SQL as a bridge to these dark chapters, even as we investigate its power to do good.

One cannot change the past, but one might improve one's prospects for a better future by studying it, not forgetting it.

Am I saying a mathematics class should be an unrelenting tour of the worst parts of human history? No, but only because we should also tour the best parts.

History needs to be there though, smack in the middle of all that technical content.

Think of catalogs of pharmaceuticals, which talk about what they're good for, but also discuss side-effects, contra-indications. When we talk about record-keeping, we need to also talk about privacy issues, abuses of power.

The voting process involves record-keeping, databases.

The right to vote is hard won, for men, women, members of oppressed groups. Going over these travails, even while discussing the anatomy of a voting system, would be a more responsible kind of mathematics education than always focusing on fictional and/or imaginary realms.

Always bleeping over the dark side just feeds it more power, by keeping student awareness low and adding to the sense of a conspiracy of silence and/or apathy where nightmare circumstances have taken hold.

Advocating for serious-minded history in the mix is an extension of my "how things work" approach. A mathematics education should aim to explain how things work behind the scenes, often invisibly in ways undetected directly by the senses.

"How things break" is a subcategory of "how things work" and should focus on healing and repair, restoring quality, preventing future breakdowns. If mathematicians want a reputation for being more logical and cool headed, this should be evident in their manner of engaging with real world problems, not in their ability to exempt themselves from even considering our existential predicament as "humans in Universe".

As a radical math teacher, you could say it's part of my job description to make activists feel less lonely, less like the only kid on the block who remembers and feels moved to do something before it's too late.

One might deride such curricula as being "for bleeding hearts" but I prefer to think of them as suitable for present and future diplomats, and in this day and age, that's a highly distributed function, not confined to embassies.

Increasing the student exchange volume within the Global U somewhat depends on heightening awareness of time-lines, meaning one develops the skills to investigate new chronologies and connect them to what's already known.

One also needs to develop the skills to present what one has learned, effectively and economically. Technical skills enter in here, such as how to coherently summarize data, how to blog, how to use social networking media etc.

Source to Sea: The Columbia River Swim (movie review)

Christopher Swain made it his life's goal to bring attention to the state of the Columbia River, which is somewhat horrific, though like a film in slow motion. The radioisotopes and other toxins that leach into this once great wildlife refuge, along with the dams, have brought it to the brink.

This is one of the world's most contaminated bodies of water. A great heritage has been lost. The once vast salmon runs are now memorialized in museums, replaced by cultivated hatchery fish.

It's a story repeated around the world, where humans lack the capacity to self-organize and manage their civilizations effectively. Their engineering is of poor quality, their technology nowhere near as finely tuned as Mother Nature's.

The film includes footage from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, a movie Ken Kesey somewhat despised. In the film, Chief Bromden is put in there for alcoholism, whereas in Kesey's novel his distress is specifically owing to the flooding of Celilo Falls, which took place in 1957 (one year before I was born, so I've never seen them except in archival records).

Suicide rates and alcoholism soared when Celilo and Kettle Falls were destroyed in the name of "progress" (a tricky word), by The Dalles Dam and Grand Coulee Dam respectively.

The prospect of removing some of these dams, or allowing them to simply decay, is broached. Given the current level of greed for power, that may not happen for awhile, but these people are patient.

Barge traffic depends on keeping the river navigable (trains don't care so much). However, if the uber-toxins under Hanford further contaminate the river, those dams may be the least of our problems.

There's a thank you in the credits to Lloyd Marbet, for helping to close Trojan.

Christopher set some records with his 13 month swim in icy cold currents, with interruptions to raise some money. He has since tackled other bodies of water. He reminds me of Roz Savage, whom I've been writing about recently (again), who also ministers about the ecosystem, the interconnectedness of all things.

I include the Celilo Falls episode in my Martian Math curriculum, as an example of terraforming. However I don't imply that terraforming, while transforming, is always for the better or towards making a planet more habitable for human beings. We might like it to be, but humans make mistakes. A few mushroom clouds make that point in this film.

Open Source & Health Care

I read the Willamette Week cover story again, then posted some analysis to the Linus Pauling House list, asking for feedback.

My primary questions revolved around walking one's talk and/or eating one's own dog food. If open source is ingrained within Portland, Oregon's culture, as the article avers, then where is the evidence of that in the public sector?

The article focuses on the private sector and some non-profits, but pointedly points out that the gubernatorial campaigns have not seized on this issue. From a GOSCON point of view (as distinct from OSCON), the thesis for debate might be: if it's government funded, then it needs to belong to the public, meaning open source software should be the result (if software is a result).

Why wouldn't that be a criterion? We're talking civilian applications, like medical records, so if Mercy Corps gets it for free... well, that's what keeps Uncle Sam being a hero, not just some war junkie or spoiled addict who squanders his inheritance -- and the good will of his public.

Imagine for a minute, a university system where students got to study and even hack on the very software used to run that university. They would grasp the difference between public source and private data, already confusing to many.

I've worked around hospitals and know that's a confusion. Some executives suppose that open source means lax about security.

Others suppose it means no one to call when it breaks. I see more legitimate concerns here, even when the solutions are proprietary, as there's frequently disagreement about what's the weak link in the chain: is it a problem with the hardware, or perhaps with Windows itself -- the buck gets passed around, and may not stop anywhere, any time soon.

The argument that more eyes on the source means fewer security leaks has merit, but needs to be encountered in some real world contexts.

Let's teach more about cryptography, not just for the hell of it, but to improve peoples' shared model of what's going on under the hood. We need to focus less on fictional television, which provides fantasy versions of the various professions, and more on reality shows, and not just of the trivial game playing or soap opera variety.

Let's have some community television that does a good job explaining RSA for example, or Diffie-Hellman. Have the source code be public and freely downloadable, through the TV show's web site (with episodes also viewable on line, like with dimensions-math.org -- airing on community television these days).

If you understand how these systems actually work, you know what level of paranoia to dial in, versus what's "over the top" made-for-TV horsepucky. Computer literacy is a prerequisite for authoring sane policies (rules of the road), but how many politicians get the time to sort it out?

I'm suggesting a university background in which these concepts become second nature, because you get ample exposure to working examples via textbook case studies that are also real world.

This kind of education would be what Oregonians need, to not drop the ball.

Given the education system is more an extension of the state, and given the Willamette Week article is not reassuring when it comes to the state's role, the case for vigilance and some political pressure seems clear.

If the Feds are seeking to mandate that doctors automate more effectively by 2015, and if billions are on tap to motivate solutions to these problems, then lets connect the dots and see those billions helping to create software infrastructure that's essentially free to these doctors, not a burden but an opportunity and sometimes even a joy to use (because designed with and by other doctors).

A given practice may want to pay for customization or added features, but this isn't a matter of giving away public money to private companies, only have to buy everything already paid for a second time, at exorbitant prices. That'd be to repeat all the errors of the military sector, which gets ripped off by its cozy revolving door club.

Civilians don't need that high level of secrecy, need the freedom to collaborate in the clear. The liberal arts model applies and universities, not just government labs, are an appropriate venue for doing the work. Teaching hospitals, such as OHSU, are especially well positioned.

That's another reason (the need for openness) to not cast Portland as directly competing with other centers of innovation necessarily (e.g. Prague, Vilnius or wherever). Open source geeks need to pool resources (that's their process), using talented groups in various hubs.

Hospitals able to spell patient names in their native languages will have an edge, and such internationalization will come about more quickly because Portland is well-connected and cosmopolitan (like Cape Town), not xenophobic and not protecting all its secrets from the prying eyes of other states.

Portland has the potential to serve as such a management hub and center of innovation, but only if it pays attention to its own education, teaches about extreme programming, test driven development and all the rest of it. The O'Reilly School of Technology (based in California) might be a role model in this regard.

The public sector needs to keep pace, not leave private companies wondering where all their new recruits will be coming from.

Related story:

Back when I was co-editing Asia-Pacific Issues News and writing about problems with civilian nuke plant designs, in both the USA and Japan, I was struck by how the Japanese protesters were focusing on engineering issues, tracking the details of micro-fractures, paying attention to the technological internals whereas the USA protesters, in contrast, were always seeking to expose a scandal in moneymaking terms, finding villains and/or moralizing, but mostly ignoring the engineering.

Engineering is harder to follow than soap opera politics. The Americans seemed relatively lazy in their journalism, required less of their readership.

Willamette Week openly worries Oregonians might be too lazy.

If we're not teaching digital math with some programming by this fall, in some of Oregon's public high schools, I'd say that's pretty clear evidence the diagnosis is on target. It's more the public sector we need to be watching then.

President Obama has already expressed support for open source at the Federal level. Lets hear what state governors have to say.

Their recent rallying around math standards has not been encouraging, because they contain nothing new, but rather codify and calcify a lot of musty dusty content, put a damper on innovation.

What to remember here is that standards set a floor, not a ceiling, and centers of excellence should not hold back when it comes to embracing the future and covering more digital age topics (e.g. SQL).

Helping improve the health care system will require us to think more like doctors and engineers, and less like lawyers and race track gamblers.

Are we up to it? We shall see. This is not just a Portland problem.

Corruption (editorial)

The neo-liberal / neo-con press likes to talk about how President Karzai is so "corrupt" -- as is much of the "developing world" (used to be "3rd world").

The self-righteous tone, coming from an occupying force with no business being there, is pretty awesome. "What? The Pakistanis don't really want us here either? How corrupt could they be? How unfair, as we're only here to help."

The hypocrisy is too deep to stand up in, as there's no way to explain either "operation" (as in "botched surgery") except as a result of greed, fear and ignorance ("corruption" in other words).

What was the original mission in Iraq?

To oust Saddam Hussein and eliminate any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), although what gave any leader the right to pre-emptively strike, in the absence of clear and present danger, is still an open debate (oh yeah, right: "911" means "debate over").

The Americans were stampeded, against their better judgment, into committing an atrocity. They listened to their so-called best and brightest. Same mistake under Kennedy.

True, some semblance of obeying international law was mocked up by Colin Powell and his team, followed by invasion, occupation and the Bremer Edicts (remember those?).

The WMD thing fell apart pretty quickly, just as Hans Blix and Scott Ritter knew it would, and Saddam was captured by the Kurds and turned over to a vengeful militia.

Some elections were held, with the winners ever promising they'd get the Americans to leave.

So much for democracy.

So what's the pretense today, for hanging out in Iraq? There isn't one really, except one: people need the work i.e. jobs, jobs, jobs.

Americans don't wanna leave Afghanistan because then they "might look weak" -- as if using that rationale were anything beyond the epitome of weakness.

If that's really the game, then game over already. Who's fooling whom?

Again, people need the work. It's a living. Jobs, jobs, jobs is the only reason people flock to Afghanistan.

A crashed economy in the USA provides a big incentive (could these phenomena be coupled? Insightful analysts sometimes connect those dots).

Clearly, the best way LAWCAP knows to "stimulate the economy" is via military spending. This has been true for some decades (since FDR) and the corporate welfare state has become highly dependent on its insolvent Uncle Sam, its dutiful puppet.

"Give us defense contracts or we'll give you death" is the message to cowed politicians, who line up to toe the party line (it's a one party state with an institutionalized opposition -- the better to get nothing done, which is kind of the point).

Now president Karzai of Afghanistan has issued an edict of his own: private security forces should leave or stay sequestered to their embassies. "But that's impossible!"

Immediately we hear about the jobs, jobs jobs that will be lost, by the poor Afghanis as well. Plus Afghan security forces are so corrupt, whereas the occupying "international community" is just there to be professional, to show how it's done.

When politicians talk about a troop draw-down, it's always "redeploy" -- journalists are careful to write that way too. No one wants to suggest a reduction in "absolute numbers" (heresy!).

The broad unspoken agreement is: "defense spending" must go up up up, and eventually the entire population must be in permanent military mode. That's what the War on Terror is all about no? Jobs jobs jobs.

A hard-nosed economist might suggest that paying people just to sit home and watch TV would cost the world far less, in terms of lives lost, oil squandered, opportunities denied.

"Redeployment" should be to vast video-game playing facilities (arcades on steroids), minus the killer drones on the other end. The games could be educational. Real money could be channeled. Sounds like Wall Street.

Could soldiers become bankers then? Having tasted what truly bad investments are like, they might well make better ones. Lets turn some big banks over to veterans and see if they invest in health care and scholarships for themselves. That'd be a bigger stimulus than private security forces. Worth a try?

Hawthorne Street Fair

I've been thinking about Senator Ted Stevens a lot, not like I'm some know it all or something. The headlines, several days ago, took me by surprise.

I might glance at a hard copy of The Wall Street Journal now and then (eclectic reading), but I fall behind sometimes, on many stories. I sometimes read The Nation in hardcopy as well.

Then there's Common Ground, where I used to read Z, sometimes Mad. Television is packet switched or off DVD for the most part. That dish you'll see driving by: not decoding. However sometimes I visit the neighbors and watch their hi-def.

The car has been mostly for Quaker business, such as ferrying mom and her walker, sometimes only one way. Tara's Jamaica commute was handled by train and another Quaker family, with plane hops through Phoenix. The trips to Reed, first week of August, were also to haul teaching supplies, stereo speakers. LW, co-owner, doesn't drive it, pulls a bicycle trailer, does urban and bike farming.

I've been looking at storyboards for math teaching cartoons. The imagery Glenn gave me, from his time on a big dam construction project, blended with my memories of the Lesotho construction site, other hydro, to come up with this Martian versus Earthling vista: a chasm across which a crane is suspended, delivering buckets of concrete.

Various narratives branch from here, many of them involving multiculturalism occasioned by having Martians in the picture. Saturday morning time slot? Maybe not.

We ventured forth into the street fair, mingling, routing by a spectacles shop, a place where you might get your eyes checked. Close to Noah's Bagels on the north side of the street.

They fixed my sunglasses for free, so now I look a little more like my blog picture.

Most of the rest of the day, I was writing my cartoony scripts, looking for early adopters along the lines of this Martian Math curriculum, a module in this bigger Digital Math thing that I'm doing, in cahoots with various schools and teachers. I blogged at the BFI about some of this stuff.

Richard Hawkins and I worked on ClockTet a long time ago. He did all the heavy lifting with the Silicon Graphics workstation. I was doing these scripts, much as I'm doing these days, and dreaming of hypertoons (since implemented in Python, albeit in prototype form). This geometry cartoon featured at the Fuller Centennial in Balboa Park, San Diego, the subject of my GENI write-up.

More Martian Math

Mary Roach led a festive and scatological conversation regarding "life at the limits" (as Walter Kaufmann might say). Being an astronaut, especially in the Gemini / Apollo Era, was pretty grim, in terms of the tortuous conditions one needed to put up with. Putrid body odors, flatulence, elimination in zero gravity... these challenges only begin to tell the story.

Mary has a track record of writing outside the lines of prissy politeness, having already produced Stiffs (about corpses) and Bonk (about sex). She's a pioneer in her own right, in the tradition of Ms. Applewhite somewhat.

Our youngest, a minor, was permitted entrance given she was in the company of an adult, even though alcohol was being served. OLCC permits this. She was able to stay through to the end, found the evening amusing. Had she not been allowed to enter, I'd have skipped it as well.

Aside from empathizing with the astronauts and feeling what an ordeal it'd be to really go to Mars (a one way trip?), I was dismayed to not have an "a" key on the Starling-1 netbook. We'd gotten to the venue almost two hours ahead, to be sure of seating, and I'd been hoping to catch up on email.

Apparently the keyboard is always spewing out "a"s, which I could see on the bootup screen, but once in Ubuntu, any use of the "a" key is denied me. That's a pretty important letter.

So when I wrote back to Zubek, responding to one of his routine rants against Synergetics, I had to sacrifice using the "a", which made the email look funny. He suggested I share our thread on Synergeo, so feel free to check it out -- this is more Martian Math after all, the way I spin it at least.

Mary was quite generous with her stories and time, taking one question after another with good humor and grace, long into the night. She expressed sincere appreciation for her husband (I don't think he was present), a good sport in more ways than one.

After space sickness and adapting to weightlessness, there's Earth sickness upon returning to the gravity well. It's less that your muscles have atrophied (although they have some, despite the exercise) and more that your reflexes have been reprogrammed. Those who've spent a long time in space become spastic back on Earth and have to relearn old habits of motion.

The Bagdad was pretty packed for this event. The OMSI Science Pub is a popular event, co-sponsored with Powell's, which offered Mary's book, Packing for Mars, at a 30% discount.

We got the sense from her Q&A that the Russians were more laid back in their approach. The USAers tend to be more uptight and puritanical.

Did Mary think she'd live to see a mission to Mars? She hoped that she would, but admitted it'd be a tough sell, given the extravagant expense. It'd probably only be worth it if it gave humans more reason to pull together and stop starving themselves to death with incessant feuding and flailing, per these lingering dark ages. We'd need to get our act together. The ship itself would probably need to have centrifugal spin chambers to simulate gravity, and permaculture for growing food.

NASA in general seems to be floundering, as the Shuttle program draws to a close. Terraforming Earth with more aerospace know-how, getting our own spaceship ship shape, is what might make the most sense. But how does one get the public to agree that we're already collectively involved in a space program (Planet Earth), one that needs imaginative work to stay viable? The public is kinda slow to appreciate its delicate situation (is "in denial" as the psychologists put it), doesn't think "in the round" all that well (Synergetics might've helped with that?).

Some in the audience asked about varieties of religious experience that astronauts had experienced and been willing to share about. She'd only interviewed a smattering of astronauts and cosmonauts for this book, so wasn't pretending to omniscience. An oft reported sense was of the fragility of the biosphere and its need for our care and protection. Given all these people have been put through, they deserve to be heard. But is NASA listening? Is EPCOT?

Wanderers 2010.8.11

We projected some far out "fractals" today, which I put in quotes because they're way beyond what most people have projected. The Athena fractal made my day and then some. Tower of Babel also good.

I get updated on global weather and climate changes through these meetings. More news from Pakistan.

There's some interest in shifting gears and doing more of a rescue operation, suspending the slaughter to serve humanitarian functions. That the gears need to be shifted is telling, though obvious.

Along those lines, I heard some cynicism regarding State Department plans to source the chain of command -- talking about those "permanent bases" that cost a fortune.

Once built, you want your Global U facilities to have a half life, especially if they're not just more "torture castles".

Saddam's castles would have served, were more stylish. I don't see much in the way of boldly innovative architecture here, not even domes.

The airports are nice though, could help with disaster relief.

Exchange student programs will keep the transfer bases from being one way streets. You'll have Iraqis training in New Mexico most likely, some Russians going through. Civilians mix politely and diplomatically for the most part and do not require armed escorts.

I skipped joining folks for lunch, as I have a refrigerator full of fresh vegetables and I don't need to be squandering funds, much as I enjoy their company.

I joined some of them later though, before heading to work on the farm.

Meeting Trevor's dad was a high point of my day. By that time I had a lot of my geometry supplies out. We had some excellent discussions and I gave Trevor his copy of the new Flextegrity book, exotic, well-executed, and hard to get. Given Trevor traffics in esoterica some, I knew he'd be pleased.

Hiroshima Day 2010

My Martian Math class finished today. Students brought their parents or guardians by the computer lab in the Education Technology Center, for the open house in the afternoon. They showed off some of the computer projects they'd been working on, using Python + VPython.

This was a part of the Saturday Academy summer camp at Reed College. Glenn Stockton was also a teacher. Our theme was time, as in "time travel" and my class represented "the future", though what that means was open to interpretation (by design). I'll be posting more about this class and the philosophy behind it in other posts.

The evening was Portland's annual commemoration of our planet's first and only nuclear war to date. Polo was our emcee again tonight, on a lovely summer's day. He was sensitive to the presence of multiple generations, saying kind and inspiring things about young people, and respectful things about old people, many of whom have worked assiduously to rid the world of nuclear weapons (even as others have worked hard to develop and deploy them).

This was the theme of the evening: the heart felt desire of people around the world to end the nuclear threat, and the price already being paid for having developed these weapons in the first place. One keynote speaker spoke of Hanford as the biggest eco-catastrophe in our hemisphere, with the glassification plant alone taking over 20 years to construct. Another spoke of SGI's longstanding compassion for those suffering from nuclear madness, a brand of fiendishness. SGI used to be known as NSA Buddhism and has joined the campaign to rid the world of these underworld devices.

The event was rounded out with a hip hop performance. This same Zulu Nation group had joined visiting Friends at the meetinghouse last Friday according to Eddy Crouch, who sat next to me for part of this event (she's our new Clerk of Oversight, protege of Annis Bleeke).

I got to talk with Marco (formerly with AFSC) and Mike D. as well. And Crystal came by, talking about Portland Free School, just like old times.

Countdown to Zero (movie review)

This movie is in the process of making it's debut across the land. Physicians for Social Responsibility was giving out free tickets (one of which had my name on it). One wonders if it'll hit the ground running. Unlike a Michael Moore film, it lacks much comic relief, other than the excerpt from Dr. Strangelove. However, the production values are high and many of the latest cinematic techniques are exploited to good advantage.

There's some Philip Glassy type music with slow and fast motion, reminiscent of the Qatsi films and Why We Fight. The weapons-based culture is endlessly eerie and ominous, that underworld or Hades that kills and maims for a living. The root meaning of "terrorism" is deeply rooted in this dystopian (sinful) Hell. Appropriately, one of the previews was for the horror movie (Rec 2) showing later in the same theater.

Count Down to Zero is a quick tour of the dark side, wherein exhausted, suddenly awakened, and/or possibly intoxicated world leaders have only minutes to decide the fate of an entire planet. Surrealism runs high. Every day is another 911, an ongoing debacle somewhere on Spaceship Earth. The energy spent on feeding the planet's "killingry addiction" sets up the conditions for nightmare prophesies to become self-fulfilling, as humans "eat their own dog food" (i.e. reap what they sow).

Subtract the nuclear weapons part (which is unfair, as that's the whole point) and one gets some interesting views of the global ecosystem (economy), with its huge container ships and their amazing docking facilities (the interface to trucking and freight trains). We get lots of ariel views of cities (like on Google Earth), other reminders of our shared cosmopolitan existence (Times Square, other tourist destinations).

The film reminded me of a James Bond movie in that sense i.e. it's designed for a global audience and comes across as "worldly" (even if surreal).

The audience is also being conditioned to accept that surveillance cameras are everywhere, taking us all in. Much of the film plays with this theme of the omniscient voyeur, the anxious eye in the sky, in the subways, looking nervously at backpacks, wondering if they really contain bombs or lead canisters of HEU (highly enriched uranium).

Some of the historical footage seemed in the hard-to-find or rarely seen category, with an assorted selection of exotic talking heads telling esoteric stories about actual catastrophes and/or near misses, flirts with mass death: NORAD goes nuts on a training tape; Yeltsin is faced with pushing "the button" after the Americans fumble the football yet again (with excuses); a stray computer chip starts sending the wrong signals... the list goes on and on (nukes lost overboard, nukes crash in farmer's field...). There's no mention of the "hot line" -- not clear that's believed in anymore (1950s technology).

Speaking of oo7 (Bond), the film is top heavy with spooky CIA types, with Valerie Plame Wilson leading the pack as our anchoring narrator. The physicists seem to all come from Princeton (my alma mater as well), plus there's this Harvard dude (no Yale?). Countdown to Zero is somewhat antidisestablishmentarian in flavor, meaning you're allowed to like it and agree with it even if you're an avid right winger supporting those whom you imagine are running the show (what establishmentarians do for a living).

There are no John Lennon types among the talking heads (disestablishmentarians) although Linus Pauling is shown briefly. The film's aim is to get "we the people" up in arms again, about how ultra-stupidly managed we all are. It's a green light from the authorities to the dutiful rank and file, like "OK you can get upset now" (like the applause light in a game show TV studio). Some in our audience felt patronized, you could tell from the subsequent Q&A.

Even the suits are against nukes. They're hoping more activists will pick up the ball and run with it, because without political pressure, the status quo idiocracy will prevail.

Many of our Portland-based activists were at this premier at Cinema 21, which included a short panel discussion at the end, with mom one of the panelists. She spoke encouragingly of some victories in the 1960s, such as countering the bomb shelter duck and cover craze (so-called Civil Defense), and getting a comprehensive ban on atmospheric testing. Women were in the forefront of that movement, whereas the guys were mostly in "go along to get along" mode (except Pauling, a few other heroes).

The Nussbaums were in the audience, and we compared notes on the sidewalk after the showing, as mom and the PSR director were getting interviewed for a KBOO youth program (Underground).

Another of the panelists was a well-known and respected Iranian activist about town. Although not a fan of the current Iranian administration, he wasn't happy with Plame's axiom that Iran's self evident core strategy was to gain access to the nuclear club, thereby redundantly adding to the 23K arsenal of weapons of mass suicide. The US is always pointing the finger, finding fault with everyone but itself, is/was a prevailing criticism of this film.

What if Iran's plan were to expose nuclear club members as hypocritical, to prove technical prowess without incurring the loss of prestige and credibility associated with being a bully-sociopath -- which is more how the US is coming across these days (a Great Satan), as a front for organized war criminals (working hand in glove with organized religion in many cases).

The idea of an Islamic state leading a jihad to criminalize nuclear weapons, with no exceptions, even while building advanced civilian nuclear power plants, is too far-fetched a plot for most American moviegoers though. The party line in the US is that Iran is out to get even with Israel (in terms of building a nuclear arsenal), not to shame the latter into going along with the Nuclear Free Zone concept ("nuclear free" w/r to weapons, not w/r to electromagnetic power necessarily).

Given the vast majority of nations are still free of enslavement to the global nuke weapon trafficking syndicates (masquerading behind the iconography of sovereign statehood) it's little wonder that many humans long for "the good old days" they claim to remember, when the threat of mass extinction was less of a clear and present danger.

On the other hand, once the nuclear equations start changing, more conventional weaponry needs to be looked at as well, as likewise criminally cruel. Smaller nations cling to nukes as a counter to superpower bullying from New Rome (aka Washington, DC). They want some respect, as Pervez Musharaff makes clear (lots of Pakistanis are "dancing in the streets" in this film, jubilant that now their voice must be heard).

If "little countries" (like North Korea -- mentioned a few times) can't boast of big bombs, will they be occupied and overwhelmed, stripped of resources by those with an overwhelming advantage in conventional weaponry? Look what happened in Tibet (where the director of this film has done another documentary). This movie has little time to address these concerns directly -- perhaps the spawned study groups and teach-ins will address them?

I'd say there's a longstanding and not-so-subtle propensity within the intelligence community (as evidenced by this film) to semi-secretly despise outward weaponry of any kind, as the last and/or first resort of the fraudulently phony and/or unintelligent.

Ian Flemming's concept of "spy as gun toter" has been far more convenient for Hollywood though, in building on expertise inherited from the Wild West shoot 'em up genre. So much of USA culture is about gun play machismo (a flavor of homo-eroticism in many cases).

Still, the "real men don't tote firearms" prejudice runs pretty strongly in more rarefied circles (ala John le Carré), which is maybe why women still make better spies and diplomats (much as they're encouraged to dumb themselves down, to be more like the XYs).

Computer Scientist

Physics Conference

Instead of OSCON, I was invited to AAPT this year, the semi-annual meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers (all levels). They're meeting at the Hilton downtown, taking over the conference rooms, including two across the street in the executive tower.

I've been bouncing around with Dr. Bob Fuller, made it a few minutes late to his talk this morning, where he yakked about First Person Physics some, even had my name on a slide (woo hoo!). Yesterday, he made a special point of asking to see student project six in a lecture, a Youtube about the Geodesic Dome. This was from Dr. Milner-Bolotin's project, University of British Columbia, wherein students get to make Youtubes about their projects.

Yes, physics teachers are on top of the new tools, way more tools than I'd heard of. Not all of them use Youtube or Facebook, but a lot of them do, and are encouraging their peers to craft an ePortfolio, not just for themselves, but for their courses. I was impressed by the gung ho attitude. Future shock is to be taken in stride.

When one high school physics teacher was asked about the frequent practice of blocking Youtube at the district level, even for teachers, the panelist pulled no punches: start a revolt, she said. Schools can't claim to be institutions of learning if they censor to that degree, are day care centers at best.

Dr. Fuller thinks it's important to tell more compelling stories when setting up some iconic physics situations that are going to yield up a wealth of insights into principles. He is also very supportive of using physics to support life sciences majors. This was a theme of First Person Physics in the form of Dr. Urone's work as well. He was there, showing off the new electronic textbook software behind his latest work.

I know Tara would have enjoyed some of these talks, maybe the one on microscopy especially. The woman delivering that talk, Jennifer L. Ross, University of Massachusetts, came across as one truly brilliant geek. I also watched Duane L. Deardorff, at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, juggle five balls (with some fine physics to go with). The talk on bridge failures, which Dr. Fuller was keen to see (Tacoma Narrows is one of his foci), was likewise engaging. Physicists / physics teachers, are an eclectic and dedicated group.

In terms of state standards, there's already some chafing at being normalized as a Physical Science (like chemistry) as opposed to a Life Science. That's an opposition the AAPT seems eager to deny, as Physics and the Life Sciences are closer than hand-in-glove these days. The human heart kept being a focus. EEGs, MRIs... physicists want to help with the practice of medicine. So having the state standards draw a line in the sand... oh well, there's still room for individual schools to best the standards (they set a floor, not a ceiling).

On the way back (I walked home), I stopped into Lucky Lab and had a meeting with a community college software guy. Their shop rolled its own administrative software, starting with a mainframe running FORTRAN, all home grown. Just as he was leaving, a vendor product raised its ugly head, some political wheeling and dealing forced it down their throats. The old guard was still seeing ways to work around it though, as this product was truly lame. They'd stuff it with data at the end of the day, but from more authoritative in-house sources.

Forgive the shop talk, this was a theme on edu-sig this month.

Finish Line

We concluded our Programming in Python today, with students connecting over the web to fill out their evaluations. Each had a student ID number, specific to Saturday Academy (I also have my instructor number and filled out my own evaluation for later mailing, along with the attendance sheet).

Student achievements were considerable. In just five 2.5 hour meetings, they were able to produce some serious computer graphics while wrapping their minds around an industrial strength, state of the art programming language.

At one point, I was in the odd situation of having sound through the speakers, until I'd engage video as well, in which case sound would cut out. I rebooted and ventured to get some staff support. Within a few minutes, we had it working and I was able to show Warriors of the Net, per usual, which, contrary to reader impressions, is not about cyber-warfare, though you could say it's about cyber-crime to some extent.

Toward the end of the class, I also screened Macro Spitoni's Codeguardian (something I've done in this class previously, as well as at OSCON as a cartoon feature before my talk). What did that have to do with Python?

My usual spiel is to use Python as a means to an end, with the goal being a better understanding of computer animation in two senses: (a) real time game engine renderings and (b) render farm renderings. VPython models the former, POV-Ray the latter.

However, we didn't have POV-Ray going this time, so my reliance on "ray tracing" as an excuse for showing this movie may have seemed a little thin. They seemed to enjoy it in any case.

Spitoni's craft is exquisite in that his camera angles and motions pay homage to the best of that war time genre. The attention to detail is likewise impeccable. I enjoy sharing good work.

A large chunk of the class was spent on the notion of a "generator" in Python, often written as an infinite loop, as these are benign once there's a pause-with-result feature (the purpose of the new yield key word -- not all that new actually, as we've had generators for awhile now, along with "generator expressions" (similar to "list comprehensions" but just-in-time iterables, not pre-computed lists)).

I've shared some of my doings, including source code, on ye old edu-sig at the Python official site. Tim Peters himself reminded me of Pythonic virtues. We'd been doing import this as an easter egg, so having him nudge me back from some stupid blunderings was most apropos.

1, 12, 42, 92, 162...

I talked about Linus Pauling a lot, as the context for our generator was the number series 1, 12, 42, 92, 162..., looking it up in the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. We also did Fibonacci numbers.

I had a chunk of Flextegrity in my bag again, a 12-around-1, plus another model of the same concept (from my considerable collection). We watching the animated GIF on my crystallography page, plus followed the link for the OEIS entry back to my page on the morphology of the virus (icosahedral numbers == cuboctahedral numbers).

Pauling fits in by bringing a strong sense of spatial geometry to his chemistry, discovering many concepts familiar from Euclidean geometry yet made directly from the atoms of Democritus. I mentioned about his boyhood home on Hawthorne (some of these students were about that same age). I also talked about Ava Helen, OSU having her papers as well as his.

It was through the Pauling House that I became involved with Saturday Academy in the first place, I explained, as that's how I came to meet up with Joyce Cresswell, the SA: director who took this school forward from some house at OGI, through basement status at PSU, to its own agency, currently across from the venerable Multnomah County Library downtown (great location).

Gordon Hoffman was also my contemporary. I was happy to see him at David Feinstein's recent talk (at the Pauling House).

I also spent a goodly portion of the time giving my perspective on the development of the Internet, with special attention to http or hypertext transfer protocol. I suggested Computer Lib / Dream Machines by Ted Nelson was by this time a collectible (watch for 'em at Powell's). The birth of the World Wide Web at CERN was a dream come true for many of us, even though smtp, nntp and ftp were already pretty cool.

Teaching Again (and Learning)

I'm back in my teaching clothes, PSU facility, small windowless computer lab with fan, about ten students.

Today was a blast. I showed off Virtualbox, so one student promptly installed it, burned a Linux iso to CD, and hosted this other operating system. Another student brought her Apple laptop and wanted to get VPython working. She was expertly assisted by another student, who even knew where site-packages was hiding (I'd never have guessed it, under "frameworks" somewhere).

That's not to say it's always easy.

Some students get bored when everyone else is looking so busy. I had some geometry toyz strewn about, such as Mag-Blocs and a Yoshimoto necklace of Bites (as in Sytes).

One of my students seems obsessed with the difference between securely random and pseudo-random, knows there needs to be a seed, promptly zeroed in on os.urandom( ) -- which takes a hit off the computer clock or something -- and random.seed. This guy has done some reading.

os.urandom(n)

Return a string of n random bytes suitable for cryptographic use.

This function returns random bytes from an OS-specific randomness source. The returned data should be unpredictable enough for cryptographic applications, though its exact quality depends on the OS implementation. On a UNIX-like system this will query /dev/urandom, and on Windows it will use CryptGenRandom. If a randomness source is not found, NotImplementedError will be raised.

There's no serious need for cryptography in this course, which is geared for beginners, despite some advanced students taking it. However, knowing something about the subject and its history is relevant to many walks of life. We also talked about The Turk (as an "apparent chess playing automaton" -- brave staff), as well as Ada Byron and her role in the advent of contemporary computing. Grace Hopper (USN): also moved us along big time.

Mostly I let them work at their own pace today on self-chosen projects. We've done a long slog through data structures, elementary functions, class/object syntax.

More than a couple turned to Pygame as a possible source of interest. I should find something runnable for the next class. Others have already spent many hours in Pygame. A mixed bag, to say the least.

My thanks to the friendly staff.

Mom got off early this morning, via PDX. Light traffic. Tara has been sharing philosophical observations by text messages:

You know, after reading 1984 I can see connections with Nietzsche. The people in 1984 are like Zarathustra's "last man".

Pretty nifty. I think that 1984 is a portail of what happens if we never become overmen. That's the right plural right? Yeah... Have fun!

She's 15 (about the same age as these students), with Friends in Montana.

Coffee Shop Capitalism

I call it "capitalism" out of deference to Bucky Fuller's meaning: using your own head, doing your own thinking. Even Marx was into that, though he didn't mind borrowing from Hegel here and there.

More doodling today, even while paying close attention in Oversight Committee meeting, a potluck. I'll upload to Photostream. I got a bank loan for this project, but there's been no press about my projects since those two Peter Carlin articles in the 1980s. That's OK, we don't have to rely on The Oregonian for everything.

The idea of charitable giving as a character building exercise is not news to Foundations, but many kids of no privilege don't get to serve as "benefactors" to anyone. They're institutionally defined as being on the receiving end of programs.

This Coffee Shops Network plan puts you, the player, in the driver's seat.

Play a wicked game of Tetris and benefit some Save the Whales group big time, with the blessings of your sponsor. The payload at point of sale originated in the vendor's charitable giving slice in the first place, so you're basically using your skills to funnel funding as you see fit, with the proceeds of future profits or some portion thereof.

You might object this is no more than "Church Bingo" and you'd be correct. That's not an objection though, and our games range through many levels, some serving a didactic purpose (you learn stuff by playin' 'em). If you really just wanna play Bingo... I'm sure there'd be options.

Einstein @ OMSI

This exhibit is largely biographical, although it does make a sincere attempt to explain the science.

What was Einstein's relationship to the Manhattan Project? He wrote that famous letter to FDR, but had no direct involvement in the development of the atomic bomb. He likely wouldn't have gotten a security clearance in the first place. The FBI was tracking his every move, looking for Commie connections. The McCarthyites were on his case. Intellectuals in general were against the wall in those days, as Nazism and hatred of Jews was hardly confined to Germany.

He hated the fact that the bombs were used ("Woe is me" said the poster). He was thinking in terms of deterrence, hoping humans would get their affairs in order with this threat hanging over their heads. Nationalism was a disease, a mental illness. Yes, he wanted Jews to have a safe haven, supported the formation of a Jewish state. He was even offered the presidency thereof, which he wisely turned down. He didn't trust nationalism though, nor the United Nations really, as its components were nation-states. One poster used the word "supranational" (versus "inter" or "trans") for the kind of cybernetics he thought might work.

Einstein suffered from being so intelligent, endured being aboard a Ship of Fools. He wasn't arrogant about his intellect though. On the contrary, he was forever humbled, given his inability to crack nature's most secret codes. He lived modestly in Princeton, used his fame to speak out on the issues. He had a lot in common with Linus Pauling, and indeed the two men show up together on one of the posters, as co-supporters of a peace group. He was a big fan of Mahatma Gandhi, Einstein was.

I don't suppose the exhibit was designed with Oregon in mind specifically, but it was good to see Pauling's name, and to see McCarthy pointing at our state. I permit myself some pride in Oregon, as a way of expressing my own values, in Princeton too.

Earlier, on the Wanderers list, I was continuing to spell out the view that only organized criminals harbor nuclear weapons these days, using nation-state decals as camouflage, a way of dodging the glare. Non-proliferation means aggressively rounding up and dismantling these abominations, with the full support of our fearless leaders.

The USA flag is like an art supply: anyone can wrap themselves up in it. Racists, classists, bigots-- all the usual suspects pose as patriots. It's a masquerade ball. "Takes all kinds" as they say.

Note: a lot of good people take the position that nuclear weapons are a crime against humanity, so anyone harboring them is ipso facto a part of a terrorist organization. Such organizations often hide behind nation-state iconography, like those drug smugglers in Central America, really just mercenaries, but quick to say "working for the government" if caught red handed (not that drugs should be illegal -- it's those hypocritical Puritans who are destroying the planet with their phony self-righteousness, but that's for another thread...).

Partial Recovery

The laptop takes forever to boot (not sure how long, as I was out walking both times). Pathological.

I've added back a Sun VirtualBox containing Ubuntu, got Eclipse Helios going, Pythons 2.6 and 3.1... VFP9.

Too many happenings to catch myself up. More when I get the time, or check Facebook.

Recent polemics:

The fact is, few if any public schools are lifting a finger to get any concentric hierarchy on the map, whereas it's pretty simple to teach and comprehend. This thinking is also a gateway to grand quasi-utopian visions, a strong strand in American literature up to (but not including) the present day. What's pumped out there now is mostly pessimistic "endless war on terror" Orwellian poopka, with a constant drum beat to start a new war (with Iran they hope)

Sounds like NCLB or something. "Concentric hierarchy" includes that Pentagon Math stuff.

Koski has been doing good work on the Archimedean dual honeycombs, conversing about it with Guy Inchbald on the Poly list. Scotts reply to DK was also to Synergeo. This was a high point in this esoteric thread.

My thanks to Trevor Blake for the Youtube below. Thanks also to Joyce Creswell who just phone from her last day at work with Saturday Academy (she's retiring). I encouraged her to visit Wanderers to give us the benefit of some of her insights.

:: from synchronofile ::