Wanderers 2011.01.26

Our little meeting room was full again, as we welcomed some newcomers. I'd posted to the Wanderers list that Lew Scholl might be joining us. Jon Bunce brought a friend as well.

We all hit if off in spatial geometry, as Lew, inspired by finding Koski's great vZome in Coffeeshopsnet, had embarked upon duplicating said embedding of several polyhedrons using Google SketchUp. Jon's friend wanted to talk about the unit volume tetrahedron. We were feasting on NeoPlatonism on the Linus Pauling Campus, so apropos.

Lew has been uploading buildings to Google Earth, including the Friends Meetinghouse on Stark Street. He hooked up to the projector, borrowing Buzz's Apple, because of a keyboard issue, and took us through the initial steps of getting the Pauling House uploaded (it's already there, but Lew's was looking more detailed, insofar as it went (nothing new got placed)).

click for larger view

We also learned a lot more about posture and the Alexander Technique. I hooked up to the projector and showed a few things as well, including Kenneth Snelson's newest, with the snakes, and, on Don's request, this older one from animators working for the Whitney Museum in NYC. I also played the trailer for The Economics of Happiness.

Some of the time, I was in the anteroom connecting to the pantry and back porch, as the Toshiba was low on charge. It'd been having some serious problems as of our last Oversight meeting @ Quakers, but after leaving the battery out for awhile (something customer service had once suggested in another context) that particular situation resolved.

I'm thinking about Nick (what news?), my family south and north. Cousin Mary's dad was concerned that one of his research papers be made world-readable via the web. I'd uploaded the PDF version awhile back, but now I've got it in HTML with an embedded hit counter, per Dr. Myer's request. I've cited this paper twice on the Math Forum.

Lew was fortunate to get a tour of Glenn's Global Matrix Studio in its original Pauling Campus location, before it moves down the street along Hawthorne Boulevard. Glenn let me snap together a raw six pieces to form a Sam Lanahan icosahedron, which we gave to Lew. Lew is still wanting to get that rhombic triacontahedron added, ala the Koski vZome.

Pauling House model, 3D Warehouse

Using words you will find are strange...

from Pink Floyd's On the Turning Away.

When the Jitterbug spins down to the first station stop, I might
call that 'Landing on Mars'. We're at a first base camp. The
octahedron is the next platform, everything doubling. The final
four-fold quadrivium (a signalling) happens at the turn-around,
where we flip to the other dorji or whatever we call it (go through
to the next measure, or chapter). You want an Icosahedron closer
in than base camp, right around 5. Having checked Bucky's figures
again I see he's not trying to label said Icosa's edge in his
diagram, so I'm thinking we're OK with said figures. Note the
arrow by the RT. That's his choice for 5 at the end of the day.
I've called it the NCLB Polyhedron but the math teachers haven't
been able to follow that, as they're XYZ qyoobists bouncing around
in their rubber room, like a trapped gas (maybe methane?).


Kirby

The Economics of Happiness (movie review)

This documentary with a message recaps the movie-maker's experience in Ladakh and then proceeds to deduce lessons. An interesting aspect of this film is some of its leading activists are Buddhist monks, other Buddhist authorities.

Helena Norberg-Hodge knows a lot about language and this movie is structured as a kind of language training. We need partially overlapping namespaces going forward. How shall we spin these words "globalization" and "localization"?

The former (globalization) is associated with loss of local control to corporate behemoths and banking leviathans, which also seem to have lost control of themselves and turned into giant machines people no longer comprehend. It's not that the people in them are bad, just locked in, straitjacketed.

The latter (localization) is associated with more transparent and open relationships, wherein its easier to see the difference one makes to a shared ecosystem / economy. More feedback loops are closed nearby so steering actually seems possible. People have ways of judging their own performance and making adjustments.

The giant black box machines, on the other hand, can't be steered and come across more like trains that either go faster or slower along a fixed track. The black boxes externalize costs in order to appear profitable on paper (governments give their imprimaturs) while they're obviously wasting precious resources.

The scene leading up to this movie at the First Unitarian Church on 12th was cinematographic. Lindsey (36) lugged Tara's Casio keyboard on the tractor bike and sang her new political protest song for the first time in public. Satya (41) got it right away: music with a message, just like in the old days. We huddled around our serving pots atop the painted labyrinth, believably who we felt we were, in a near perfect setting (a city park after dark).

Then a posse of us bicycled over the Hawthorne bridge to catch this movie ($15 donation requested, no one turned away for lack of funds -- though maybe for other reasons, such as a full house). I (52) was having trouble with the pump falling off and so lagged a bit, but caught up and just managed to squeeze in.

Indeed, the event was so packed it looked like Lindsey and Whitney would have to go on without me, but then we managed to pack in a few more in the overflow room. I ended up sitting next to Tom Head, the famous Quaker economist (George Fox University) and Gayle of Bridge City Friends.

The FAQ after the movie was quite lengthy and I admit to having an overwhelming wish for fresh air and beer. Part of it was sitting in all my coats in the well-heated overflow room, connected to the main sanctuary by closed circuit TV. I ducked out to McMenamins on foot (not having a key to my bicycle) checking voicemail and messages along the way, then returned to catch more of the Q&A.

Then our motley krew regathered outside, waiting for the rest to rejoin. Alex strolled over to remark how Helen had remembered him. The Aris family had been in Ladakh as well, as Alex's dad was a famous student of the Himalayan Tantric cultures. Simon worked on Sara's bicycle, replacing the brake pads with the ones Lindsey had provided.

Lindsey talked about how local communities (such as hers in Florida) may become oppressive when there's no room for dissent or alternative lifestyles. Some might become clowns or shamans or musicians, but perhaps the others are shot at dawn? The parochially-minded have a track record of intolerance (illiberalism), witness Nazi Germany.

Satya thought truly innocent cultures were open to diversity, whereas bigotry was more a result of globalizing pressures. We'll likely revisit this issue in future debates.

Speaking of debates, Tara is at another tournament this weekend. Last night, she left her cell on a window sill and whoever picked it up wasn't about to track down the rightful owner ("finders keepers" is the law of the sea). Fortunately, I had it insured through Assurion and was able to suspend service and order a replacement for the $40 deductible (probably under the wholesale cost, plus they get premiums). The replacement (same make and model) should be here on Monday.

Per the movie, every action may be construed as a move for globalization or localization (a way of encouraging self awareness), as these poles were defined. Clearly this film is a recruitment drive of sorts. I might show it in sequel with Yes Men if sharing in college reading programs.

Our FNB study group had, two nights before as homework, taken in a previous film based on Helen's book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, and so recognized quite a few of the clips (recycled for this much longer movie). Satya had strolled through Ladakh after becoming a Buddhist monk and had been impressed by the apparent simplicity and sufficiency of the old ways, and the satisfaction level of the people practicing them. He'd done this quite independently of Helen's work.

One of the best parts of the film was that Indian farmer deadpanning about how one can't have infinite growth on a finite planet (audience laughter -- so obvious).

Another was outtakes from "Reality Tours" wherein Ladakhis get to tour "the west" and then go back home with more realistic attitudes. The impression they were getting from western tourists was that these people have any amount of goof off time with money to burn, thanks to all those labor-saving devices. That makes "the west" seem pretty appealing. However, the grim reality is rather different.

They're not prepared for the Wall-e sized rubbish heaps (ala Idiocracy), nor the level of loneliness that's created, especially among those who don't have the right "earning a living" story to fit a script.

The screenwriters have limited imagination when it comes to roles for the more elderly, or those not seeking celebrity status as fashionistas and/or as rebels without a cause.

Bucky (author of Grunch of Giants, about globalization in crunchy times) used to cast aspersions on this "earning a living" myth, as if individual humans could prove their own relative worthiness in God's judgement. Like many Buddhists, he had a more cybernetic understanding, saw our destinies as intertwined.

Wanderers 2010.01.19

Duane Ray was our presenter tonight, talking about The Creationists, a legitimate subject of anthropology. These various ethnic minorities, which may cumulatively form a kind of majority, do not all rally behind the same spokespeople, yet there's a taxonomy, a family tree (a set of lineages or pedigrees if you will, right back to the original first couple).

When I got there, a little late (I'd been visiting Dr. Consoletti), Duane was sharing a video clip of some creationist who was disputing that the striping pattern in magnetic signatures in undersea basalt was really evidence of pole shifts. The guy was claiming it showed a cyclic pattern in field strength over time, but didn't prove actual pole flipping.

This creationist also thought long-lived giants once frequented Earth, in communion with the original dinosaurs, which he didn't deny once existed. His goal was to make a 6-Day schema fit a smattering of geography. His "days" were not 24-hour periods. I'm not sure if it starts with a Big Bang as I came in towards the middle.

Some loss of a water firmament over head took us out of the Garden, he claimed. Was this the first fish with legs, coming out of Mother Ocean? I could see where it might feel that way.

All this fantastic storytelling sounded rather poetic after awhile, but I could see where a reality-minded geographer might wanna butt in and explain what the evidence for the pole flips really is. There's obviously more to that particular story, and a literal truth to get to the bottom of.

I bet the Vatican's own astronomer could probably fill us in on that score, as it's hard to beat the Catholics in science these days after all that embarrassment over Galileo. They're really into evolution, given their new Creation Theology puts an eternal light at the end of their time tunnel.

Duane then took us on a tour of many partially overlapping camps, tribes, schools of thought, and their folk beliefs. He paid special attention to hypocrisy, citing the golden rule, kind of rubbing it in if a sinner (usually a male) fell out of faith in some way.

Indeed, many wander from the straight and narrow and find themselves abducted by ETs or corrupted by government mind-readers. Others, like Britney, simply get caught up in sex scandals. Ah, but it's a wild and woolly world out there, beyond the walls of our Linus Pauling House, ground zero for sensible thinking (and dinosaur comic book making -- with kids in 'em, but only in science fiction).

I think if Duane is serious about attracting defectors to the side of reason that he might wanna paint a more welcoming picture of those who would receive them with open arms and overlook their supposed transgressions. So what if you're gay and/or couldn't keep your vows? Welcome to the club, have a cigar. Take a load off. Jesus loves you.

Coming out as an "evolutionist open carry polymath" need not be scandalous if one puts the right spin on it. Some of our Quaker households contain non-nuclear and/or molecular families and no one raises an eyebrow (except maybe Mr. Spock). I'm something of a polymath myself, and an animist to boot.

Also, the Constitution does guarantee religious crazies and cultists access to the wheels of power, just like anyone else (it's called a democracy). There's no "sanity test" nor even a "Turing Test" that everyone need pass, before exercising the power of the ballot.

"Ballots not bullets" is our USA motto, as we choose to hammer out differences through political mud wrestling (campaigning). Or is this apparent commitment to civilized non-violence mainly owing to Posse Comitatus? If so, then it's probably a smart firewall.

Besides, there's an awful lot of "federal land" on those maps (plenty of space to guard, install sensors, monitor parameters), plenty of need for work / study.

Joe Arnold was there, our Wanderer psychiatrist, always eager for clues. If you weigh down a presentation with enough citations to make it scholarly, then how do you avoid boring people, causing them to glaze over? Duane was being more the non-boring sensationalist than an academic, given his intended audience.

Also, Dr. Arnold wanted to know if Duane had encountered many perfectly reasonable people who were two or three standard deviations out along some Bell Curve in some narrowly confined frequency band and/or ecological niche. That seems to be a common pattern, and Duane said that he had.

Hey, good seeing Nirel (back from LA), and Trisha, among others we don't often see.

Nirel is working hard on a motorcycle-centric "for girls" event. She exulted about how friendly and professional the IRS people were being. Is this maybe the best customer service bureau in the whole world? Having been around it (the world) recently, she's in a position to judge.

Walking with Sarah

Glenn and I were at Oasis this morning, touching on multiple topics. I brought up Shining Path and Dr. Guzman, having seen a 1900s documentary recently, courtesy of Laughing Horse entitled You Must Tell the World... by the International Emergency Committee to Defend the Life of Dr. Abimael Guzman.

Not unlike in this Ann Sang Suu Kyi bio I've been reading recently, the voice of the narrator has a hard time staying in the past tense as we approach the then present (late 1990s).

But by now it's over ten years later and Peruvian president Fujimori himself has been confined to quarters, after having his own TV show and being a popular leader. Mandela has been a head of state. Revolution keeps happening.

Sarah is a member of the BH household, is of the canine species. She's literally a bitch, which is not a put down, and in fox world translates to "vixen", which even some humans will cop to being (proud as they are). I grew up thinking humans looked goofy in my early years, but gradually grew to be OK with this species.

The Laughing Horse documentary is valuable in that it provides a collation that's willing to side with Dr. Guzman and his Maoist views (including some Kurds, Filipinos, various human rights activists familiar with the Peruvian government's brutality), even though he's credited with 20K deaths. That's a small number compared to what the opposition will admit, but he doesn't embrace it. Besides, even China has turned on Mao, much as the USSR was turning on Stalin as it cracked apart (actually, it had turned awhile before that).

Navigating a revolution in terms of retired philosophers is a risky business. You forget why it's all about some dead chino and/or white guy euro-anglo or whatever the hell. At least Bob doesn't age, and/or at least he has a long half-life (esoteric insider allusion).

I'm sorry Portland doesn't appreciate Laughing Horse more, and it's astounding video collection. Talk about hard to find! It's all very well to make fun of this place on Portlandia, but how about paying attention to the heritage? I doubt PSU has anything like it. If I were a professor, we'd be mining this goldmine, that's for sure.

Beyond Rangoon (movie review)

No, I hadn't seen this movie before. I took it as a work of historical fiction, even if based on real adventures, in the fashion of Logicomix, about the life and times of Lord Bertrand Russell.

I watched it with a "girl scout" in training (BH/FNB LW), who provided running commentary about what she would have done in similar high stress situations. Build a debris hut? Stay on that train?

Being a wild card tourist galavanting about is not always considered an ice breaker. Laura's desire to escape the city to learn more of the heartland sets off a cascade of tragic events. Thailand ends up being the hospital for her motley crew, escaping the hounds of hell.

We're maybe to think her naive in saying she can't imagine her passport being stolen, with the characters saying over and over how valuable they are.

That little girl in the first demonstration, who snuggled up next to her: wasn't that a golden opportunity to win some prosperity for her family from a rich American who could just waltz into the embassy and get it replaced? That's what Laura ended up doing, by then already off the deep end.

Or maybe she knew very well the little girl was helping herself (why she smiled) and had already resolved, at some level, to stay behind and learn more. Her other life was over anyway. She felt her calling to practice healing (medical arts) among an admirable and wise people, without much need for more certification.

The film seemed theatrical and choreographed, almost like a musical in places, like when the nurses came running out half way between the armed and unarmed, all pretty, young, and uniformed for the child-like sacrifice.

But then Burma seems somewhat that way (caught up in kabuki dances), as does any nation in a war of mass stereotypes (masks): students, monks and soldiers in this case, with shopkeepers and commercial shippers somewhat ancillary, except as weapons suppliers (not a focus of this film, except for that one pistol).

Although women were proclaimed to be equals (by the professor) they seemed more like flight stewardesses asking if you'd be wanting a pillow, slim and secondary. The only woman brandishing a gun, unholstered (though still in a pillowcase), was our not-so-quiet, freedom-loving American, still grieving and a tad reckless, and now caught up in a first person shooter with bad guys, a Jodi Foster, a Neo in The Matrix.

The irony here is that vesting all one's hopes in one personality is, in some sense, the antithesis of democracy. A democractic architecture distributes the load, is more sphere-like than apexing to some bottle-neck pinnacle. But then so is a faceless company of armed controllers antithetical to democracy. These seem more Brazil-like.

Lindsey remarked that the weapons looked American-made, which was probably on purpose. When our hero goes to the embassy for her passport again (sheesh), it's the Burmese army which is both guarding it, and denying her access, symbolizing how Uncle Sam is in bed with the bad guys, perhaps with hands tied.

Democracies tend to be polytheistic in the sense that Hollywood is: one celebrates many celebrities at once. Like Christianity, Buddhism has many bodhisattvas or saints. That's the more democratic layer. Burma probably has all the right ingredients, if any nation has them.

Aung San Suu Kyi is in the company of other Nobel Prize winners, such as Linus Pauling and the sitting president of the USA, but that's a fairly lonely club at the top of the world. One wishes her plenty of R&R with the blessings of her people, already the beneficiaries of her selfless example.

As for "new nations" coming into being (not that Burma isn't one already, at least in English language science fiction), the whole claptrap of nationhood has somewhat lost its luster. One may covet a territory with a flag, some staff cars, a front row seat at the UN, but does this prove really soul satisfying at the end of the day?

We know we're Earthlings, a species of two-legged (like ostriches) and that the true the front lines are not between us, but between a round campus and airless space at some -451 Fahrenheit degrees. The biosphere itself is our shared fortress, and promised land (samsara).

The movie contains a lot of dharmas about suffering and appreciating happiness if you're lucky enough to have any, and accepting change. There's an implied foray into Buddhism for newcomers, starting with a more superficial tour guide, then learning more from the horse's mouth as it were (the void of existentialism), from life itself.

As a contribution to our spiritual literature, it's working hard to teach some hard lessons. When we lose another crew member off the bridge, but not the professor, our American hero is diplomatic, saying "I am sorry for your loss" or something to that effect. Anyway, the movie is about her, not these extras.

There's too much suffering in Burma, that much is obvious. Just having a lot of foreign journalism going doesn't necessarily address the underlying problems though. The whole world needs to be a lot safer, as these outwardly violent student-military confrontations are not isolated to Rangoon.

Office Note

I was the sole FNB guy on duty today.

Speaking of which, I thought Deb (at the meeting at Kell's) had a good way of using the word "guys" in a gender neutral manner. No need for "dolls". Just as easily, I could see using "dolls" but not "guys" down the road, if the guy dolls don't mind too much.

I used the carrots and potatoes Cera brought by, fresh from some plot, still dripping with dirt. These were cleaned and divided, with the potatoes going into a mash and the carrots, mixing with celery, turnip, other vegetables, going into a vegan soup (no meat broth or anything like that).

The trick to staying on schedule is to begin cleanup right away, and devote quite a bit of time to it throughout. By the time the meal is about ready, there's nothing left to do (except type in one's Quaker journal).

Rendezvous @ Bagdad

Dr. Bob Fuller and I enjoyed catching up, over beers and appetizers. I stayed on after he left to join family, time alone, before rejoining Sarah-the-dog and Titty-the-kitty (Barry-the-python etc.).

I don't recall if I'd known that he taught school in Rangoon, under auspices of the British, a course in morals circa 1959. Aung San Suu Kyi was one of his pupils. He'd not realized her status, as daughter of the nation's father, until seeing the limo pull up one day. Would she remember him? She'd have been in 9th grade or thereabouts. He'd talked a lot about democracy, drawing on his USA and Methodist heritage.

This was a small world moment, as I had Willamette Week along with me, open to page 16, a story about Satya, who knows Alex, Aung San Suu Kyi's eldest son.

Bob hadn't found the exhibit on Identity I'd been writing about (2nd level). They went to the physics room at OMSI and learned about Eadweard Muybridge. Dr. Bob's research, especially Understanding Human Motion, echoes back to that corpus. Twas my privilege to contribute some Python on that one, and some rather extraordinary renderings.

I haven't solved the drip in my office yet. We should have a two-floor control room with lots of LCDs, but that's for the science fiction shelf.

My loop for Food Not Bombs was entirely in the rain today. Why pay for cardiovascular workouts at the gym, when you can haul X pounds of produce up and down hills? I filed a log post with the official e-list, but didn't make the park dinner, having chosen to work with McMenamins this evening. Looking forward to Thursday.

Scholarly Xmas 2

Our Xmas was low key again this year. We played with the symbolism some, allowing allusions of more ancient religions and philosophies to percolate through, augmenting the advent calendar with dragon symbols.

Tara and I opened gifts from family and friends. Gayle, that's a mighty fine wooden jewelry box for Tara. Mom and Julie, those were perfect and thoughtful kindesses. Thanks to the Nally family for all the homemade cookies. Carla, we think of you and Stevie. Have you been hearing from cousin Pat? Greetings to relatives in around Seattle and Bellingham.

For intellectual fare, Tara and I looked into the darkness, where the Light of Peace is most needed, watching two of Michael Moore's classics, interesting for their "speech and debate" techniques. Tara had just discovered his blog posts about Wikileaks and was interested in his movies, plus last year's Xmas had also featured historical scholarship into the barriers to world peace.

I'd not seen The Big One before. Tara thought Phil Knight of Nike came off OK for taking this bull by the horns. Most CEOs seem on the shy side and find Moore too much the extrovert (he's more like a politician in that way).

North Americans are still in much the same pickle as this pre-2000 movie depicts, over-relying on the military's welfare payments to corporate contractors, extended from borrowings against future work. The Global U is still bedeviled by debilitating meme viruses that weaken our curriculum. Rewiring to make cleanup ops pay more bills requires significant upgrades in our trains (habits) of thought.

It's that "knowledge economy" we have trouble understanding, given all that open data, all those free bits flying around, informing and misinforming. We pray we're becoming more enlightened on balance, that the net is in our collective favor. I agree with the Dalai Lama that it's more about realizing the value of empathy and compassion than about wrapping one's mind around lots of data. Western philosophy came to the same conclusion in Wittgenstein's work. Not that it's either/or, but you need to have a heart to keep your head.

Our prayers to family in western Pennsylvania and to those providing health care to our clan in those parts. We think of relatives on their maritime voyage, their near and dear in Alaska (hi Ricky).

Greetings to others here around Portland, in Tennessee, Florida, Minnesota and of course Whittier.

Greetings to Friends in Arcata, Myrtle Point, and to the Olarte family in Vancouver. Thanks for the greeting from DemocracyLab.

Best wishes, fond memories. May we continue pulling together to make this a better world.

Close to Solstice

Tara and I chose to celebrate Xmas at OMSI today. We each picked out gifts for ourselves. I got The Martians by Istvan Hargattai, while Tara selected a well-fitting OMSI hoody, black. Then I chauffered her to Alexia's apartments, which I'd not yet visited.

The OMSI traveling exhibit from The Franklin Institute was most interesting. I felt almost quoted with that "there's no race gene" display, all about how "race" is a social construct (check out those check boxes). The Transparent Lady and beginning of life exhibits, old timers at OMSI (especially the TL), are well integrated. What an interesting exhibit, I look forward to going back.

We each solved a couple IQ puzzles in the foyer (I wrangled those metal pieces a long time, and the attendant said he wasn't worried about me, but every so often some tourist would try prying it with his boot, a funny image).

Since I was already tooling around in Suburbia (Beaverton, near the Nike Campus) burning up peak oil in the torture taxi, I decided I should save and go shopping at Costco. That sounds oxymoronic, but in purchasing wholesale, one is making an investment.

As I told Glenn later, it reminds me of buying at a Px on one of those military bases (Asia-Pacific in my case). The further back you get to the supplies, the more it seems like one big world order, doesn't it? Lots of factory scale engineering, replication of quasi-identical items (making copies).

So yeah, I pushed a cart through the NWO and picked up most of the same things I get retail, plus a few garments, then was back in the neighborhood in time to score some Willamette Weeks to read and share lore about Satya. I'd dropped a hint on the FNB list that this was coming, and it's a fine write up, with good input from Cera (Sara) and Simon as well.

Costco supplies included brown rice, pinto beans, spaghetti and sauce, soy sauce, some cheese, some cereal, no booze, no bread. Coffee beans. Some garments. This was dead of winter stocking up, which may seem out of rhythm. What's actually more characteristic of Xmas are impulse buys and non-utilitarian luxuries, stuff you normally wouldn't find in your average manger scene (frankincense for example). That's more what the OMSI sweater was about (20% off thanks to Tara being a member).

The Identity exhibit doesn't come right out and say that your propensity to laugh at certain jokes is genetic (that'd be pseudo-science). On the contrary, as the exhibit unfurls, you get an increasingly nuanced teasing apart of genes and memes.

Your meme self is more plastic in a lot of ways, more that "dress up doll" of your younger years. Regardless of your physical characteristics, you have a lot of freedom to position yourself in a metaphysical vista.

However, there too, you'll also find yourself in various circumstances, not able to change your core identity on a whim, no turning on a dime in some dimensions. Inertia isn't just about physical gravity, there's the weight of tradition, of lineage and calling, of karma and happenstance.

I was the solo provider at Food Not Bombs on Tuesday, doing prep at the Blue House instead of Pink. About 7-8 of us mingled, or stood apart. Sketch was there, and Simon. Also the bamboo bike trailer engineer.

Some people mostly kept their own counsel, ate in a meditative mood. Here's a solitary dude who said OK to my snapping his photograph (no, that's not Satya).

More XRL in Bhutan

I was reading about the Dalai Lama's priorities today, via Facebook. Politics takes a back seat to the ecosystem (= economy), not a new story. Ecosystems are the most precious, and money can't buy them back, once they're lost. We're looking at that in the movie Gasland.

The cleanup industry is destined to be one of the biggest, or engineering failed us in the imagination department.

Anyway, more of these somewhat esoteric "schools for diplomats" could sprout up around Paro, or where the Bhutanese think is best. This would be a hosted enterprise, not an occupation and / or invasion. The purpose would be, among other things, to amplify people's appreciation for the ecosystems of the Himalayas. This would not be just casual eco-tourism however.

Our family was based in Thimphu for many years and it was my privilege to check out much of this rugged and vastly beautiful country. Attending some school there would be a real privilege, and the program's design would need to be especially valuable to the locals, the people of Druk-yul, to offset any downsides.

XRL = Extreme Remote Livingry, some of which is available today, other still science fiction or in more need of prototyping.

"Livingry" was Bucky Fuller's coin, cast opposite "killingry" (perhaps the flip side of the same tool in a "dual use" category). We're basically talking about "camping gear" but sometimes with shelters more substantial than canvas, yet just as removable.

We'd probably like to see prototypes on Catalina (part of a Martian Math camp?) before testing them in Bhutan. That's another pristine ecosystem with an aversion to colonization by urbanites.

What passes the smell test on Catalina is more likely suitable for the Himalaya, although I'm sure you can think of other testing areas. Should Ecotrust be involved?

Dymaxion Home

:: by Steve Brown, June 29, 2013 ::

(click picture for more details, other photos)

Gender Studies Continued

Many threads coming in around "girl scout math" versus "boy scout math". Here's what I posted to Wanderers recently:

I'll repost my recent rant when I fix a typo (mine = mind). haha.

in other news, the dead juniper tree behind my house, the detritus
from Peace Garden **, is now an igloo, dubbed a "debris hut" by
the fabricator.

She claims no violations of the Flextegrity patents were observed,
although the principle is in evidence. I'll have some photographs
later.

I know I told Keith it couldn't be done (tensegrity greenhouse),
but then he and I are mere XYs, so I stand corrected.

Kirby

:: girl scout math project ::

Related posts:
Gender Studies (2 of 2)
Gender Studies (1 of 2)

re: end of men (Synergeo)

Quaker Business

I just shoved Carol's mailing address across the table to Betsey. She's passing it back to Western Friend.

Quakers were in my thoughts earlier today, on an archived discussion list. I've been working with Marty, Tim and, by extension, the Yearly Meeting on matters of data base design. I'd call it "membership tracking" (a well known genre, with many templates available), except "member" has a specific meaning in the Friendly namespace, and our database tracks others besides them.

I go back to those anthropological concepts of "nuclear family" and "molecular family", suggesting a variety. The database fields also encode wishes upon death. Keep the Flickr Photostream alive? How about Facebook? Blogs? These might be family decisions, and yet some might wish to record their preferences in the meeting's electronic records. A blog is a lot like a Quaker journal -- some treat these concepts quasi-synonymously.

An Overseers or Oversight Meeting is a fairly confidential process. In the theory of operating system design (thinking of Unix or one of those), a "process" is a pretty well defined notion.

Cross-pollination twixt Quakers and geeks is not an especially surprising development. Any memologist (memeticist) -- a student of memes and their propagation and association (into "memeplexes"?) -- could have predicted this outcome. Hari Seldon maybe (a fictional character).

We have a couple memberships up for consideration. The process here is for Oversight to accept a letter from an individual requesting this status, upon which a Clearness Committee may be formed for meeting with that individual.

If membership is recommended, then Oversight brings the matter before the Monthly Business Meeting for seasoning. Final approval, if obtained, will be minuted a month later by this same Business Meeting. Those with doubts or concerns may in the meantime communicate these to Oversight (not the Clearness Committee, which dissolves upon submitting a recommendation).

Some of us may be heading to Nicaragua next year. This place isn't labeled on all of our maps, but on many of them it is. Most of us are geographically literate enough to place most nations, given a jigsaw puzzle challenge (might be of wood, a present under the Christmas tree). I even know where Bhutan goes, and Lesotho, and Lithuania, and Borneo (all places I've been).

We do tend to talk about death and dying a lot, in these Oversight Meetings. Perhaps not surprisingly, we're somewhat older adults. As in most subcultures, it tends to fall to the elders to grapple with these equations. Younger people pull some weight though (we speak of "weighty friends"). Death is a phenomenon for all ages. We are holding Tina's family in the light. Thank you for your friendship, Peter Saint James, and letting me read your book.

I mentioned caskets were available from the Costco website, suggested we might stock up in the basement. Betsey recommended cremation. You can get urns from there too.

Lunch Business

I met with Glenn today at Oasis, across from Bagdad. Some find this intersection poetic. Glenn says he's camping out, even though he's perched in an apartment complex.

Camping is the geek theme or message of the day (MTOD). Once you've been tossed out of your digs, you get to camp, and the camping laws become important. It's a public roads issue. Sisters of the Road has been at the center of the action.

I wrote Knocking on MIT's Door for the Math Forum. What's somewhat new is to have people on the humanities side thinking they know enough to follow the action. Dr. Arthur Loeb was a Renaissance man at Harvard and MIT whom many respected.

However, when it came time to unveil some of the work by his proteges, he received some ungenerous backlash. People were sure, at that time, that they wanted nothing to do with buckminsterfullerene (not yet discovered, so that can't be correct). Humanities people may get their wires crossed sometimes, but it's good to see they're at least paying attention.

Anyway, Glenn and I talked about our workshop. He's friendly and gets people in a pretty good mood. Some of the scarier amusement park rides seem more doable when the background context is so safe. Martian Math is more like one of those roller coasters, like the Matterhorn or one of those. We call it "getting abducted" -- and some of the math teachers seem to agree.

Lots of torrential rain, hour after hour, day after day. A young woman with all the right gear just showed up from work, full of song and good cheer, ready to pitch in on our vegetables project (squash in the oven, mushroom soup...). That's right, it's a Thursday, and we're at the meetinghouse again with Food Not Bombs. I did hauling, prep and now need to do cleanup.

Lindsey has officially laid down her commission, asking to be "released" (Quaker jargon). She's morphing into a chieftess of a different variety. I've been using her as a model to think about a new kind of math teacher, more energy conscious and politically aware (quite revolutionary actually, in the sense of "adding spin").

Schools for Diplomats

We see a pun of sorts in the title, in that "diplomats" were simply "those with diplomas" who seemed therefore more civilized and therefore better able to get closer to the court. Having higher degrees was roughly equivalent to having a powdered wig or top hat, if male, and able to lord it over others in some high horse manner (possibly literally, as equestrians tend to wear head gear for safety, much as cyclists wear helmets, while many motorists literally encase themselves in metal armor).

In a more modern context, the diplomats in question might be the speech and debate teams of my previous post, multiplied and cross-pollinated around the world to create a more even sense of a spherical playing field. These exchange student circuits do not undermine long established demographics however. There's not much a handful of outsiders might do, to tip any big scales. These are not the invading hordes. Just because your community hosts a few Africans or Asians or Americans or Australians, doesn't make you a "sell out" or a "shill" for some competing continent. That's just too stupid a game to merit our diplomats' talents. They've got bigger (and better) fish to fry.

In recent storyboards, I'm back to eying those former USAF and USN bases in the Philippines, thinking how "girl scout math" could gain a footprint in that ecosystem. This is a variant on the GIS / GPS intensive curriculum elsewhere called "off your duff" math, and involving geo-caching. I've got a couple new essays in this genre on tap at Math Forum: Of Backpacking and Sphere Packing, and Of Mathematics and Outdoor School.

Judging Day

I dove head first into my daughter's world today, caravaning behind Gonzo to Clackamas High School, ferrying three from the Cleveland debate team. Cleveland's team has grown big and strong under Gonzo's leadership. He and Tara formed a natural alliance, as Tara, a Cleveland student, had started out on the Lincoln team, given Cleveland had no team. Gonzo was moving over from Marshall, so the timing was propitious. Cleveland started a new team right when Tara was ready for a leadership role. This was Tara's anniversary of sorts, as her first debate tournament was here at Clackamas, two years ago.

The first event that I judged was a series of 10 minute speeches which students had researched and mostly memorized. I used a stop watch, took notes, then scored and ranked the students relative to one another, per instructions.

The first speaker spoke passionately in favor of a boycott against one-dimensional autotuned pop music such as stuff by the Black Eyed Peas. In contrast to the golden age of folk music and rock and roll when real values and edgy viewpoints countering the mainstream's were expressed, today's lyrics tend to glamorize binge drinking, drug use, and sex at a young age.

Today's music industry is transparently about exploiting youth and making money. Corrupting messages delivered by bands of little talent gives foreign nationals a bad impression of America and attacks the integrity of future generations. Let's boycott bad music now. I could see where this message would get some agreement from senior-boomers like me. I did like that BEP hit Boom Boom Pow quite a bit (a kind of geek anthem).

The second speaker took a strong line against giving psychologists greater powers to prescribe controlled substances (medications) more like psychiatrists do. She argued that states providing these expanded powers have tended to experience more malpractice lawsuits from patients and their families. The added schooling is expensive and that reduces the choice to the public in terms of fees i.e. if prescribing psychologists cost as much as psychiatrists, where's the choice?

She did not address the idea of giving patients more powers over their own treatment, no doubt because it would seem counter-intuitive to give more control to the more incapacitated. Taking more responsibility for one's own medical records and treatment would entail more public education all around, assuming access to treatment options to begin with. Making everyone more like a medical doctor with respect to their own conditions sounds like more pie-in-the-sky utopianism I'm sure.

The third speaker spoke passionately about the evils of ethnocentrism and America's reputation abroad for being extremely ethnocentric. She was Muslim herself, but did not thereby share the anti-American views she had encountered overseas. Racial profiling is simply not helping Americans live up to their own values. America is in danger of living up to the negative stereotypes being applied by those most suspicious of her motives.

The fourth speaker spoke about the situation in Palestine and the plight of the people there. He quoted Ronald Reagan challenging Gorbachev to take down the Berlin Wall. He advocated a two state solution, not the no state solution of the anti-nationalists. The latter position doesn't in itself offer any details about how to decide water rights or how to prevent land grabbing by any given faction. A need for governance remains, even when "nations" aren't considered jurisdictional.

Yes, I'm inserting my own editorial remarks. The speaker felt America's foreign policy blunders in the Middle East might be so severe that recovery of international prestige would be impossible. Being on the wrong side of history has its disadvantages, he argued.

The fifth speaker counseled moderation in all things and ridiculed those who artificially pump busyness into their lives in order to avoid really dealing with the deeper issues. Being over-busy simply leads to frivolity and unreflective living. On the other hand, his recommendations on how to take it easy seemed a tad on the superficial side. Also, whatever happened to "doing what needs to be done" i.e. using one's "free time" to engage in "what matters"?

Although my editorializing may give the impression that I was scoring based on how much I agreed or disagreed with a given position, this was not my role as a judge. I could have my own thoughts of course, but my criteria were based on speaker effectiveness. Speeches are supposed to be delivered with some passion, some intent to persuade, but without seeming too forced or artificially pumped up with rhetorical tricks of the trade. There's a fine line between passion and artifice, I agree.

I also judged two public forum debates. One had to do with Americans' right to know. Many references to Wikileaks were made (one of the stricken resolutions was about that explicitly -- each side, aff and neg, gets to eliminate one of three choices).

The other debate had to do with going green, versus the costs. China figured prominently in the latter debate, as a nation to whom the USA owed trillions.

The former debate eschewed all mention of the Vietnam War and parallels between Wikileaks and the Pentagon Papers. I was interested to read a school-posted time-line regarding the Vietnam War in one of the USA history classrooms. Diem's failure to hold elections, per the Geneva Accords, given Ho Chi Min's evident popularity, goes somewhere between I Love Lucy's debut and Elvis Presley becoming the King of Rock and Roll. The time-line sets this war against the backdrop of American popular culture (an ethnocentric approach).

I judged a radio event, which is about reading prepared editorials as if on the radio. Topics included: bed bugs; frivolous lawsuits; airport security procedures; taking care of one's aging parents.

I also found one chapter in the library by Bucky Fuller in an an anthology called The Futurists, edited by Alvin Toffler. Bucky's chapter consists of excerpts from congressional testimony and includes his bizarre cosmology, which I don't understand, wherein Planet Earth is destined to become a star someday, by which time the humans will have presumably moved away to "avoid incineration" (Bucky's words). This is not the expected fate of the Earth according to any of the other contemporary models I know about. The sun is supposed to engulf the Earth as a part of its life cycle. Whether humans have found somewhere to go by then, or will exist at all in a recognizable form, is not for my century to know, although speculation is always a source of science fiction.

And yes, I got to sit in on a Lincoln-Douglas (LD) debate wherein my daughter faced off with her opponent on whether drug abuse should be treated as a medical or criminal matter. She was assigned the affirmative position, which didn't mean advocating zero control over controlled substances. More responsibility would be placed with average people perhaps. As it is, the criminal justice system is manifestly unjust (she argued) as those with serious drug problems need medical treatment, not incarceration. Her opponent painted a picture of profligate drug use and a society in chaos, not unlike today's. He argued that criminalizing drugs provides a deterrent.

Of course I was not a judge in this debate or for anyone from Cleveland (that'd have been a conflict of interest), nor did the judge know I had any relation to a contestant (not that this would have mattered). Plus I was not the only non-judge adult present with undisclosed relationships. Tara was awesome, better at keeping her cool than her more flustered opponent. I'm pretty sure she won that round.

Regrettably, I missed two other opportunities to sit in on Tara's LD debates. Finding her in this mob and figuring out where the rooms were... I just didn't have it together. Instead I wandered between the Judges Lounge and the Media Center, eating too many bagels and cold pizza slices, drinking too much coffee. Whenever I encountered Tara, she was excited and clearly enjoying her sport.

Listening to student banter in the hallways, especially with regard to global affairs, was most enlightening. "Russia still has a KGB, it just has a different name" and "the CIA won the Cold War" were two overheard snippets. Both sides wanted to keep it cold (the colder the better) so I'd say the victory was shared in that sense. I also listened in on the judges' banter (being one myself). I heard a lot of praise for the students and their phenomenal performances. Many of us were first timers as judges. However some of the more seasoned judges were having a problem with how the LD format is going, though they blamed the coaches, not the students. There's really quite a bit of jargon to wade through, a somewhat elaborate metaphysics.

Speech and Debate is a great multi-generational event. Adults experience teenagers being well-dressed, polite, intelligent and friendly towards one another. They're also good sports. Tara said I should have attended the semi-final LD event were her opponent "kicked my ass, but he was really good". She has sincere admiration for worthy opponents and learns from them. That's impressive right there.

At the end of the evening, I got to join two other judges in a final round of Dual Interpretation, a kind of drama, with pairs of students both introducing and commenting on their selection, then performing in a somewhat ritualized manner. The event was ranked novice, yet I was frankly blown away by the excellence of these performances. Ranking them was a hard thing to have to do. Teenagers, when encouraged to excel, really rise to the occasion. I am inspired and thank Gonzo (and of course Tara) for affording me this opportunity.

The awards ceremony was awesome as well. Cleveland won the best overall debate team award (not the first time) while Tara came in 2nd overall in LD (she'd actually won her semi-final event). The people in the tab room, who have to design and score all this stuff, have my lasting admiration as well. This is quite an advanced little subculture to have stumbled upon. America: there's some hope for her yet. She delivers beautiful children. Now if she'd just stop eating them, squandering their talents.

What's an Engineer?

We've been having some spirited debate in one of the think tanks about exactly what constitutes an engineer. We're an interesting mix in that some of us are proud to call ourselves engineers, whereas others think engineering epitomizes everything that's messed up in the human psyche. A mixed bag, to say the least.

I'm asking about film-makers and whether they're engineers. The standard answer is "no" but is that more ethnic, more anthropological than anything else? Some of the Illuminati I track recommend STEAM over STEM, i.e. to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, lets add Anthropology, not to dumb it all down, but to keep it more worldly and wiser.

Game designers are also engineers, especially when we call them "simulations" ("game theory" in systems science added respectability for games, as did "language games" in philosophy, yet there's still the need among some people to find a more serious-sounding word than "game"). These "countdown to zero" games require a lot of background. "Do your homework people" -- shades of Alex Jones.

To some degree, I tout philosophy as competing with engineering, following the unoriginal assumption that competition counters excessive complacency. I champion General Systems Theory (GST) versus Economics for the same reason. When it comes to bread and butter issues, we'd be foolish to put all our eggs in just the one basket.

I'm listening to a piano serenade at the Quaker meetinghouse as I blog this. One of the FNB guys. Walker is off with her tractor bike retrieving the cooking utensils and produce from the Pink House. We both missed out on the Thanksgiving festivities. Satya shot by with his own trailer, bringing bread. He's scooting off to somewhere not far from Scappoose, via St. John's.

Deke the Geek and I met at Fred Meyers this morning for coffee. Although Portland has a reputation for being a geek capital of sorts, the print media such as Mercury, Just Out and Willamette Week are pretty weak on technicalia. The Oregonian barely even tries, nor does the Portland Tribune.

This is why Geek Out should have an instant market, especially as a free 'zine, hard to find, strategically distributed. Topics might well be retro. Figuring out how we got here and from there is what we call "lore" in the business and PDXers have no shortage of lore, nor our we confining our sources to Portland, Oregon. It's a big world out there.

I added a comment to Chris Fearnley's ruminations on Bucky Fuller and Existentialism. I'm glad he's taking the bull by the horns and actually talking about Philosophy for a change. Too many of Fuller's commentators think the only topics we care about have to do with Physics.

Philosophy Bar

I'm cheating a little in saying I was just at a philosophy bar. Yes, we discussed philosophical topics. Anna's boys (men) are really into those. Belief in a god, in a self, were topics of conversation (I prefer directing skepticism towards a "belief in self" than a "belief in God" as that tends to hit closer to home, sparks deeper debates sometimes -- plus who cares about "beliefs" anyway sometimes (Karen Armstrong an influence)).

However, the giant LCDs were all devoted to sports events. We actually needed to request a more out of the way table so that our philosophy talk might be more focused.

Just before heading down to this "philosophy bar" (on the 2nd floor of this hotel), I'd been adding to some thread on precisely this topic. In part I was keying off some stuff Nirel had been saying regarding the Netherlands. They're feeling burdened in Holland, yet realize their bars have become a tourist destination, owing to less prohibition in that neck of the woods. Are the trade offs worth it though? Lots of debates.

Another way we intersected philosophy today was at the University of Washington, where we toured the campus. Savery Hall is where the philosophy department is headquartered. Then we went to the bookstore, where Tara browsed in neuroscience. I mostly perused angry political books by people taking issue the what they imagine to be the president's programs. These angry taxpayers would probably never support Operation Starry Night, my utopian science fiction about helping students escape light pollution, a way of investing in the future.

I was meeting with Anna Roys in this philosophy bar (really just a sports bar) in downtown Seattle. We're both into education reform in our respective ways. She's become a certified teacher since I met her the last time, when she came through Portland. Her Thunderbird Academy is still in the works, although it may piggy back on an existing public charter, rather than launch a new charter of its own. Anna is here to visit with two of her four adult sons.

I went over my thoughts about philanthropic gaming again, and my history as a buckaneer, starting with Walter Kaufmann's endorsement of est as an interesting exercise in applied philosophy. I become more aware of Bucky Fuller through Erhard's collaborations therewith. These collaborations maybe didn't sit well with E.J. Applewhite, at least at first. Bucky was already facing PR problems without this. That's all water under the bridge by this time though.

We also talked about the bizmo idea. The Pacific Science Center is running one that brings a "dog and pony show" to Washington State schools. Anna had even thought of applying for the position at one point.

OMR Again

A recent thread on the Math Forum regarding multiple choice testing got me thinking about OMR again, and the energy simulation games that might use it. SimCity could add this module with practically no changes to the underlying framework I bet. Perhaps I should write to Maxis. Or should we start over from scratch, using open source Python, perhaps Blender?

OMR, for those who don't know, is a stadium-shaped city projected for middle America back in the time of the Union Tank Car dome, the apogee of that kind of technology in North America, at least until EPCOT. Actually that Baton Rouge dome opened for business in 1958, the year I was born, so I guess I'm a little off on my time line. The plan for Old Man River City came out of the civil rights movement and was part of the "war on poverty", envisioned as a public work fueled by a "peace dividend" (although that wasn't the term used).

The prime contractor irrigation system, set up during WW2, proved too lucrative to just turn off, and indeed was ramped up under Eisenhower under the direction of Congress, which saw pork barreling of defense spending (so-called "ear marks") as the ticket to staying in power.

ICBMs became cruise missiles which then morphed into drones. Each generation of technology required its "theater" for live guinea pig testing, usually overseas, although paramilitary goods had their domestic applications as well, among police forces, private security services, hunters, and survivalists.

After-market military equipment remains an important ingredient in most scouting programs. Many homeless people use military grade sleeping bags.

President Eisenhower could see the writing on the wall and realized that war, once hugely profitable, could be commodified and sold to the American people as a permanent way of life. Robert McNamara, fresh from a job with Ford Motor Company, helped "create the space" for all subsequent secretaries of defense.

If allowed to build aircraft carriers, tanks and missiles (along with a defense against missiles) white collar voters would prove grateful and loyal, regardless of any party affiliation. These were the family wage jobs one needed to pursue the American dream of happiness, preferably in a suburban setting.

Not all Americans would sucker for this plan, but enough of them would to keep LAWCAP in ascendancy through the arc of the Cold War, and on into its War on Terror.

The architects of this economy took Europe's religious feuds as their gold standard, a time-tested recipe for prolonging hostilities. As long as Jews and Muslims couldn't see eye-to-eye, the money changers would have a field day in the temple, while Christians could be counted on to arm all sides.

The term "beltway bandit" was common currency in the news stories and referred to that privileged cast frequenting the "revolving door" twixt the arms bazaar and DC-based agencies. "Privatization" (a euphemism for cannibalizing public resources) transferred much of this know-how overseas, helping "level the playing field" as billionaires spread around the globe more evenly.

The hoi polloi made do with their impoverished schools, decaying infrastructure, and nursed their hatreds for the designated scapegoats du jour. They were told that any living standard advantages they enjoyed were a consequence of weapons research, and for many decades this folk myth was accepted.

As America fell further and further behind in the standings, some deeper thinkers came to question this central dogma, including many CEOs of well-known companies, who saw the mindless waste more in terms of its opportunity costs.

OMR, a symbol for any number of futuristic projects, large and small, stayed in the closet, amidst other esoterica. Not even the science fiction writers out of Hollywood dared touch it, lest old civil rights memes get reactivated. Positive futurism had the potential to "go viral" and the advice from PR firms was to "keep a lid on it" if serious about getting sponsors and advertisers.

A Visit with the Architect

Nick reconnected me with the architect John Discroll, this evening. He'd been in Oklahoma recently, at another convergence celebrating the work of architect Bruce Goff. His own chief mentor had been in that lineage. We shared a meal prepared by Hannah.

The house they're staying at is connected to the Santos Daime church in this town. I took some pictures of the interesting decor.

Carol (my mother) is leaving tomorrow, to stay the winter in Whittier, her other home with my sister. We sent the shipment of eleven boxes by UPS today, files and clothes.

Tara won best in show (best overall speaker) as well as first prize for Lincoln Douglas debate at her meetup today -- four awards in all, plus a ceremonial cape. I'm grateful to Gonzo for putting so much heart and soul into this vestige of civil society, which the public schools barely have funds to support. In a more enlightened society, we would have more of these debates on television and the Web. These cerebral sports don't get nearly the attention they deserve.

Lindsey has ordered up a storm of outdoor survival products, spending literally days in the Web doing the necessary homework. She's been describing to me all these purchases and how they fit into her vision. Solar charger, lights, water filter, kelly kettles... repair kits.

Her plan is to strike out in the dead of winter to test her metal as a cyclist-camper. If these early tests go well, her radius will steadily increase. If all goes per plan, we'll be seeing a lot less of her around Portland, is her latest news. At her request, I contributed an OLPC XO to her on-the-road inventory. Tara has lent her a battery-powered keyboard.

More action around the Blue House tomorrow, preparing food for the homeless and then distributing sleeping bags by bicycle, a Laughing Horse project started by Lindsey last winter. Food Not Bombs is invited to join in. Lindsey has been an effective community organizer during her chapter in Portland. She will be missed, and not just by me.

Thanks to cues from Nick, a current guest, I watched David Kaiser's lecture How the Hippies Saved Physics. This MIT-based history-of-science guy gives a lot of credit to Werner Erhard (and to CIA spooks) for funding a transitional (and talented) cast of characters who took physics from its Cold War phase into its more philosophical phase. I filed some pointers to Synergeo. I've been echoing the thread on Verboten Math from a Math 2.0 list.

I had Noah over again today, age 12, for some Python computer language lessons. His mom joined in for part of the lesson. We like to share Youtubes and explore little known aspects of Google. Did you know about the Google version of Pacman? Noah was quite ready to code up a Python class/blueprint, a template for any number of objects. He's already studied some Java, so had some questions about public versus private variables. I showed how we do this in Python in my sample code.

Fashionistas

I recall the term "fashionista" from the Bruno DVD. Much of what motivational psychology is about is this drive for "coolness", which is of course a moving target. Sometimes a style will make a come back though. I'm reminded of the movie Being There. Our hero (played by Peter Sellers), had just the right look when his time in the limelight came around.

These games around fashion may seem the apogee of self-indulgent nonsense a lot of the time. The narcissism may be intense, as the pro models learn to strut the latest stuff. One needs to not only look good, one needs to feel good about looking good, to perform in the groove, to stay in the zone. William Burroughs spoofed this as DE ("doing easy").

The flip side is feeling awkward, inept, out of one's depth, dorky.

One needs to go through these "I'm not cool" experiences in some chapters, when adapting to new styles. If one's resistance level is too great, then one gets stuck in a rut, and maybe hopes the old music and dance numbers will at least have a niche. One finds one's flock, one's natural audience for a finite set of karaoke numbers, perhaps even written by one's self, in a past chapter.

Here at the Blue House, we have these same growing pains. Just when I'm at the top of my game in some dimension, a superseding technology or better way of doing it comes along. Take Visual FoxPro for example: that used to be my bread and butter. If it weren't for using Python, I'd be looking more reptilian (more like a dino -- and yes, I know they were more like birds).

In terms of having the right credentials for this zip code, we're gold at the moment, maybe platinum, and yet there's a sense of imitators nipping at our heels.

We're surrounded by serious urban gardeners, community organizers, radical teachers, star debaters, other IB students, other Quakers, other cool individuals who sew their own clothes and make yogurt out of soy milk, made directly from ground soy beans. Not needing electricity may be a next trick, cooking with sunlight at some tailgate party for bicyclists / tricyclists (semi-clothed) and their sensor-equipped trailers.

We hold our own as fashionistas, but the competition is intense.

On the activist front, criminalizing nuke weapons has never been trendier, even among so-called conservatives (sometimes just a euphemism for "among the last to catch on"). Carol was interviewed for KBOO after Countdown to Zero, like how cool is that? The show has since aired.

To keep ourselves in the zone, it becomes necessary to tap into that 73% of the universe (aka the collective unconscious) known as "dork energy". This is where we talk to God (or Bob Dobbs as the case may be) about our deficiencies, our uncoolness, our sins. Confession is important, the Catholics got that right. You need to find a good ear, as just talking in your head will not necessarily do the trick.

For me, the Linus Pauling House group has been a good source of feedback. We know we're dinos in some dimensions, unable to roll back every sign of obsolescence. On the other hand, as committed scholars and thinkers, we're able to stay up to speed in other respects, plus have the benefits of long and varied experience. That's not my only source of feedback though.

Speaking of feedback, I was privileged to catch up with Dr. Tag recently, my Palestinian friend. She's off to Malaysia in the near future. We talked about visas, other complications of world travel. She's a fan of Yemen in much the way I'm a fan of Bhutan: people don't freak out when the electricity fails them. Not that either of us have much access to our respective ideal countries. Neither of us has much use for idle tourism, and the free open source eco-villages ala GOSCON etc. are still in storyboard phase.

A still rustic, simple way of life keeps people honest and in touch with their physical environment, their integrity. There's no need to spoil this, by adding too much glitz and faux glamor, much as the media moguls might like to pimp it out more, add more crass consumerism. There's a big difference between being a consumer and a connoisseur.

Yes, I'm connecting back to our theme of encouraging Havana, the whole of Cuba, to stay free of fast food franchises, and to continue nurturing a more well-rounded way of life. That would be strong PR, attractive to Global U students seeking meaningful experiences in collaborative environments, making and delivering ice cream or whatever.

Driving gas guzzlers past the fast food window was cool at one time in El Norte, but is today a more reptilian activity, neither romantic nor even warm blooded. On the other hand, reptiles are cool in other contexts (like Jurassic Park), so I'm not about to fall into the trap of demonizing them across the board.

Speaking as a Pythonista, that'd be somewhat counter-productive.

The Cult of Athena (so-called) remains enamored of Pythons, Apollonian atrocities notwithstanding.

GNU World Order

I told Marian, Multnomah Meeting's Recording Clerk, that I thought the Food Not Bombs policy of feeding anyone who showed up was about a commitment to community and besides, what would be the alternative? A test of low "net worth"?

USAers have this pathological way of talking about people as having low, no, or even negative "net worth" -- which makes sense in terms of some of the board games they're playing (like Monopoly), but then they tend play by those rules no matter what the walk of life, don't they?

Like, everyone is poor in the USA, spiritually speaking, given all the inferiority conditioning that goes on.

As RBF would point out, the flip side of "earning a living" is "not deserving one" by default. You've got to "prove" your right to freedom. You're born into a state of servitude. That's not what the original coders of the USA operating system intended, but then the counter-revolution has been unrelenting. Many new bugs have been introduced.

I really liked this fast drawing cartoon (above), but couldn't help thinking the economists it depicts are overly mystified. Our "gnu world order" did not emerge inexplicably. On the contrary, engineers know that tool use creates life support, whereas money is merely a measure of same.

Take away the skilled tool users, the Morlocks, and your Eloi money becomes worthless.

The last FNB meetup featured a skills sharing about building bike trailers from bamboo. Some of these same folks took off for a skills share this weekend, put on by some of the same personnel doing the first aid trainings. FNB is also about learning how to community organize and cook healthy food for medium sized groups.

I wrote another gossip column for the folks on Synergeo, using my chattier writing style. I like to switch gears a lot, like in some of this Willamette Week stuff I've seen. In the meantime, math-teach is seeming downright political in this thread about political humor -- I'm reminded of the Other Russia movement.

PPUG 2010.11.10

For those readers unfamiliar: PPUG = Portland Python User's Group. If you word search on my three blogs (worldgame, controlroom, mybizmo), you'll find plenty of prior write-ups.

So tonight was our last gathering at WebTrends, at the top of a Portland skyscrapter adjacent to Pioneer Courthouse Square, a prime location. Next meeting: Urban Airship, their new digs in NW. Looking forward.

Wow, tonight was esoteric, about extending Python in multiple directions.

Ctypes is a great module for importing a DLL or Unix/Linux so (shared object) and using it directly. I asked if this'd work with COM. Not sure. Anyway, it's cool.

Did you wonder about extending Python with FORTRAN? That's a whole cult. FORTRAN has hardly gone out of style, even if the punch cards are no longer (lots of chuckles). f2py is truly awesome. Wrap your FORTRAN compiled object with C, and import it into your Python scripts. NumPy is of this genre.

Then we learned about GMPY and GMPY2, the extended precision modules. Such awesome tricks. Mutable integers? Amazing. Extend precision to 1000 bits (or more), and ask about pi. There it is, to many decimals. Impressive.

The most esoteric talk: extending Python with OCAML. It's that C-language bridge that eats up cycles, translating data types from this language to that. If you really wanna multiply two 100 x 100 matrices in the shortest time, consider NumPy (back to FORTRAN). Ocaml is cool though, no question. Brilliant talk.

IronPython is dead they tell me, wow. Seems like Microsoft really missed the boat then. I'll have to think about that one.

Good conversation with Jason, about women in computer science. I say they own it. Not the majority (male) view.

Thanks again Michelle. You're a great leader and a lovely individual.

Runaway Universe

Alex Filippenko is a popular lecturer who knows how to engage a lay audience. Our Pauling Memorial Lecture series folks are more sophisticated than average, as Alex readily pointed out, so we might not have needed as many cosmetology vs. cosmology jokes, but those were the slides, a part of the script. Ironically, I was wondering if his hair was dyed (so dark), but Tara said professors weren't that vain. Or maybe they cultivate the gray look.

Cosmology is still in its infancy, it's probably safe to say, as is humanity, which isn't to say humans are guaranteed a long trajectory. During Q&A, Alex expressed his opinion that humans, broadly defined, are a rarity in the universe, even if microbial life maybe isn't. Their intelligence may not confer sufficient advantages to keep them in the game. Here we are, only about 160 million years into the homo sapien experience, and we're already giddy and teetering, devoting zillions to weapons of mass suicide (WMSs).

"Dark energy" is mostly a placeholder these days, as is "dark mass" (these two are not the same). Plain old Newtonian gravity isn't providing a satisfying explanation for the galactic clusters cohering, which is where dark matter comes in. Dark energy, in contrast, is repulsive (or repugnant -- more jokes), and is responsible (in a theoretical sense) for pushing the clusters apart.

The bulk of the lecture was about detecting supernovae of a particular chemistry (A-1 type) and using these as "standard candles" to register distance. The work is tedious, but software helps. Monitor a few thousand galaxies a night, superimposing successive frames, and find the deltas, the bright spots. Two teams were doing this work, which was productive, both for the competition (a sport) and for corroboration once the results started coming in. These results were surprising: the receding of galaxies appears to be speeding up, starting around 5 billion years ago. Before that, the expansion was slowing, or so measurements seem to show.

Dr. Filippenko has his visuals. He threw a bright red fake apple into the air numerous times, to illustrate points about gravity, expansion, contraction, Einstein's cosmological constant. The rubber band with the balls strewn along it simulated an expanding universe. He also had a small blue balloon to inflate. Much of the banter was "by the book", is what you will find in introductory textbooks on cosmology.

The very meaning of "the universe" seems to have broken down, now that we have talk of multiple universes, with some philosophers proposing communications between them. Partially overlapping universe scenarios might suggest eternal regenerativity to some minds. Each universe would be another way the game could be played, a set of realized possibilities. Such talk is purely speculative of course. Alex asserted his credentials as an experimentalist, not a theoretician.

Tara joined me for this outing, an expanding universe in her own right, an active thinker eager to learn from her world. I so wish for a better civilization for her and her peers.

My own universe seems to have settled into a combination of sorrow and love. I'm deeply fond of these people, awed by the suffering. Thinking of Paul Tillich and his "courage to be".

Good seeing Juliet and Jerome in the auditorium. Jerome went to middle school with Alex. Juliet was my contemporary at the International School in the Philippines.