Live from DorkBot

We're at Someday Lounge again tonight, though Backspace (two doors down) in the more usual occasion?

What am I up to?  I've been telling the hospital bosses their patient-facing equipment is crap if it doesn't do Kanji, the Japanese word for Chinese ideographs, a core element in several languages.  I've discovered James Heisig's work thanks to this Youtube by a Nipponophile.  One may have many goals in tackling Kanji, one being to cultivate an associational network that cross-hatches one's own.  Plus you know you're tuning in something of the consciousness of billions.  What's the keyword for "tongue" again?  As in "mother tongue"?  I'll get back with the number. 41: 舌.

James isn't teaching Japanese specifically, in this volume, just the Kanji with their imaginative meanings, which he builds using English.  Their pronunciation in any language, their combinations, are left to future work.  This is particle physics, subatomics.  Or is it bacterial phenomenology?  Yes, that's it.  The characters swallow each other, as well as common elements.  There's an assemblage, a kind of molecular bonding.  Study Kanji to learn chemistry, why not?

I using my cell phone as a Hotspot, talking to my cell provider, getting on the Internet that way.

Holden is with me; we took the bus together.  He's in the thick of getting NA Apachecon booted.  The last one was in 2011 in Vancouver, BC (another state of North America, two to our north, Washington in between).  Homeland Security (US) does a lot of its intake in Vancouver, with domestic flights southward.

I was telling Brenda about Alan and Kati getting married in our living room in Thimphu, how he, the good Jew, had to sit on a swastika, though one innocent of Nazi spin.

Brenda is a Wanderer and role model GSM teacher (Girl Scout Math).  GSM is actually an urban nomad wilderness survival skills program that uses STEM math, not traditional / conventional math.  STEM math tends to be quite geographic, lots of geocaching (treasure maps / hunts), GIS, GPS, and geometric.  If your teacher doesn't say what an Icosahedron is at any point, that's likely not STEM.   GSM inherits from Pentagon Math quite a bit, but isn't as violence-prone.  Brenda, Elise, Deb, Lindsey, Trish... Xtine, you could call them "tom boys" I suppose, as they're not afraid of tools or science.  That's an ancient namespace though ("tom boys", お侠), more characteristic of septuagenarians.

I went outside and took some long shots of the very low resolution (but very bright) being shown.  Other dorks had their various bots.  Mine were commercial devices, not homemade.  I'm more the journalist-blogger than the bona fide dork, more the dork wannabe.   Another mixin superclass for GSM I'd say.

Steve is selling a Raspberry Pi.  Last week he showed up with about fifty.

You can place these units, with solar power, deep in the forest, with loggers (meaning log files, chronofiles -- though some loggers with permits to cut might willingly place them).  They don't need to transmit (can't be traced that way).  The GPS locations get saved and the monitors check them later.  Someone is cutting trees?  Does BLM know?  Record something for the subscribers (a snapshot, a reading), data for the listeners.  Sierra Club maybe.

You're not trying to catch the discrete campers or hikers.  It's broad trends in the ecosystems that you sense, and record.  You might be in a plexiglass box in a riverbed, measuring turbidity.  If they do a clear cut in Bull Run, they'll know, and you'll know.

Next time:  Brain Silo.  Stay tuned.

La Casa

Promised Land (movie review)

A delightful fractal of a movie.

I'm biased to think that way, having just attended a John Driscoll lecture at Harder House, PSU's epicenter of Systems Science.  Plus there's a pun.

Everyone does a fine job of acting in this one, going through the motions.  Just what are they voting on exactly?  It's not clear.  The whole idea is surreal, and as we back away from this narrative we realize that none of this really happened.

And yet the companies are real and the leases are real, and people are counting their pennies, reckoning on having some gas in the bank.  Accounting systems make a difference.

Me, I'd pay people a stipend to just act out the small town life, so people could visit and learn how to take it slower.  Make it a theme park kind of thing.  But then that's how I see it anyway, Sun as our sponsor (by which I mean the nearby star, not Sun Microsystems per se, though I respect Sun's engineers and their contributions).

What play is this?  What theater are we in?  It's a really existential film in that way.  Everyone is so sophisticated, not just the city slickers.  I was taken back to another surreal film with Matt.  Funny, to see them together.

Everything is Under Control

I'd been bragging to some Bible studies teacher of food ethics about my FNB connections, so it was fortuitous to have an opportunity to reinforce those ties.  Jay's bike had been ripped from a private stairwell by some bold theft artist, and so he phoned me as he arrived at OTY on foot, hoping to meet up with TA who had vegan chili.

Well, the long and the short of it is I hauled the day's vegetables from point A to point B, got to be the hero at some level in the Global Matrix.  I got some good body core sweat goin' meaning a definite calorie burn, especially when coming back, fully loaded, and up some fairly steep inclines.  It'd be interesting to know how many joules that was.  My Razr showed my I'd turned the wrong way at Williams and Tillamook (I was rusty, I admit).

Trevor was by today with some excess assets. Yes, RAW's anthology of conspiracies, entitled Everything is Under Control.  Indeed that entry under GRUNCH was to my page, as archive.org will disclose.  Some say one of the more successful conspiracies but I'm not really in a position to judge, being in the thick of it and all.

Given a canine is moving in, and an ET, we set it up to have Sarah-the-dog encounter her housemate-to-be on a walk.  No turf to defend, a public space (in front of Laurie's).  Then she came home with us, with both humans clearly OK with it. This was supposed to set the right tone.  Dog psychology ya know.

Given Pirate Party links, quite unofficial given my US citizenship, it's maybe not surprising I've been waving the Swedish flag a lot.  I was telling poor Paul Tanner on math-teach that no matter how right Paul Krugman might be on the macro economics, USAers were just not smart enough to surge in their own interests, prove me wrong why don'tcha.  They confuse democracy with just voting (if even that), as if that were the limit  of their responsibilities. Then today I was like viva Sweden and Finland, compared to the sorrowful goliath.

To a physics list:

Civilizations making it past various thresholds enter an era where the planetary biosphere becomes of concern.  It's not just warming we have to think about, but radiotoxins and out of the cloud mad scientist experiments such as the ones conducted recently by so-called "cold warring" goliaths and their idiot advisers.  They messed with the Van Allen belts. 

As humans, we are aware of no precedent (legal or otherwise) for the current chapter i.e. as we awaken to our biospheric responsibilities, and eye Mars as a possible habitat, at least in science fiction, and as we think about colonizing the under-ocean ecosystem somewhat more, we have no ancestral role models other than we have many examples of ecosystems becoming untenable.  

We know we might mess up.  

I hope to be available to out-of-towners during Apachecon, then have to high tail it to Philadelphia for the annual meeting.

Fooding at Meeting

"Fooding" is not usually a verb, but it is in the Himalayas, so I'm absconding with it for local use.  Today the Junior Friends had a fundraiser, though perhaps not sufficiently announced.

The theme was "Middle Eastern" and extended to include a lamb stew (even if many Friends are individually vegetarian).  I brought the ingredients for Teresina Lentils and cooked the dish en situ, in our "Food Not Bombs" kitchen (as I tend to think of it, private namespace).

Speaking of which, Walker has re-purposed a portion of her wardrobe to practice as "FNB CEO" (one of many in an anarchy).  Not that different from me being in the Education Ministry, sometimes as the actual Minister (rotating position).  Steve Holden and I are watching In the Thick of It (BBC), which is fun.

Keith McHenry is another FNB CEO who has come through.  He's been in Mexico and Chiapas and places.  I've read some communiques.  Walker is meeting with Unitarians today, after their service.  She's droped her urban survivalist look for something more churchy today.

Today is Business Meeting at Multnomah Meeting.  I should ascend the stairs and continue journaling from there.

Was what happened in Connecticut all that different from what happened in Fallujah?  Crazed mad-cow-like humans hell bent on taking lives, and equipped with the tools for so doing.

I'm curious about whom nominating has added to the slate for Oversight Committee (OC).  We lost four Overseers in a short time recently, including the previous clerk (Debbie has been acting clerk).

Walker thinks a Major Payne type character, perhaps more than one, vets, friendly big guy types whom the kids adore, would be a stereotypical, OK way to add security.  They have responsibilities as faculty as well. We had our armed guards in Manila but they didn't get to teach anything.

I'm used to the idea of armed security around me, on base, in the hood.  Should kids be practicing with swipe cards then?  It depends on the school I think.  School is a lot about preparing for the work place, and a lot of work places are locked down to some degree.  Learning the habits of working in secure environments is worth starting early.

Mari, Barbara and I talked about language learning, Arabic in particular.  Mari has been in Egypt recently.  She's finding Arabic hard.  She and Barbara both speak Spanish pretty well.  Mari has noticed Arabic roots in Bantu.  I bought some coffee roasted by Josh, one of our former armed services guys.  I don't speak any Arabic, to speak of, though I've studied it and admire it.

Leslie Hickcox gave the annual report of the FCNL liaison: she'd traveled to DC for the November meeting.  The Friends Committee on National Legislation is a Quaker lobby based in the Imperial City (QUNO represents Quakers to the United Nations).

There's a somewhat slow version of the Countdown to Zero campaign going on around Congress, run mostly by eventualists (not immediatists, i.e. not radical abolitionists).

"Immediatist" is a term from Civil War days, when some people wanted to end the institution of slavery in North America right away. Others, including many Friends, were for ending slavery all in good time, maybe in a few hundred years.  Big wheels turn slowly and so on.

Urban Fashions

"Urban nomad" is not a new concept, yet keeps morphing.

Given Portland's bicycle-centric core youth culture, clothing that won't catch in the chain is a must, but that may mean leg hugging stretched fiber of some variety.  There's no preference for the women's bicycle with the lower bar, as the tunic or skirt doesn't care.   These aren't hooped gowns we're talking about.

Much of the focus in this genre is on accessories, as the ninja nomad needs autonomy within cities.  If you're attending a Food Not Bombs serving, or just wanting to not waste, then you won't need those plastic utensils or paper cups and plates people keep shoving at you, adding to the waste stream.

Your mess kit signals you're a soldier for the environment, on the side of trees and all that is green and good.  In this way, the hippie earth mother tradition is continued, but in a somewhat more superhero vein.  Maybe just chop sticks.  My mom carries those around.

Which brings us to utility belts.  These have been typically worn low on the waste, but there's much to be said for kidney high pouches, or holsters worn high.

The bicycle tools are typically under the seat (of the bicycle) but if you're paranoid or in a paranoid part of town, you need room on your person for small gadgets normally fixed to your steed.

I sometimes wear a money belt around the wrist or lower arm, Cuffka brand by Nirel.

The winterized outfit is the more challenging.  The look derives from EMT work, where the crews need to stay flexible, able to operate equipment, fold and unfold gurneys and so forth.  Para-medical meets para-military:  the place to aim.

The goal is to remain compact, light, efficient, and semi-autonomous.  You may be packing electronics.  You may carry extra glasses, a brief case.

Ideally, this outfit is compatible with the workplace, perhaps a record store or hair salon, some public facing job.  But that's Portland more than some workplaces, in that we're already over tattoos and nose rings.  The fixed image of how the CEO has to look gave way some time ago.

FNB PR Again

The way I see it is as Urban Sport, a lot like GeoCaching, which my friends Chris and Larry play almost every day, at least when in town.  Trevor took me on a geocaching outing a couple times, once to track down the cache, another time to set up a fresh one, or so I recall.

Food Not Bombs as practiced by our chapter is athletic.  Like the Hash House Harriers my dad so loved, mom also a runner, me too when in town.  Not the same meaning of "hash" but you're forgiven if you're confused.  In that one, a small groups lays a trail, with several false branches, all signified in esoteric chalk symbols.  The gang gets unleashed later, and follows the trail like bloodhounds.  The routes may be spectacular as the sport lends itself to all manner of topography.

So here you've got a bike trailer, possibly homemade from a ladder, or bamboo.  You've got artisans in this sector already, with more ideas in the pipeline. Art trailers.  Busking hutches.  Would we allow them?  Curbside trailers are akin to cars, allowed to park overnight, and why not with sleepers?  As usual, the public street and curb are the focus of so many laws, with each "class" fighting for rules perceived to work in its favor.  Yet elegant, high powered shows move around in curbside vehicles.  Why be too biased against small, fuel efficient, cycle-drawn carriages?

In any case, my trailer isn't looking for a place to park.  I got it from the lot.  There's a fleet.  I'm on duty I signed up for, a workout.  This is my time in the "gym of life".  I'm on a mission to rescue perfectly fine organic produce of high quality, just inches from the compost machine, in order to feed an ecosystem of community building food awareness activists who enjoy the challenge of taking what they get.

The values are enough congruent with Quaker values (no outward weapons needed, simple rules, plain speech, egalitarian treatment) to lead me to encourage FNBers to just come by any time, pick up some roles in the meeting.  There's no requirement to profess lifetime allegiance to some religious denomination in order to walk the talk and speak truthfully of one having committee responsibilities, including clearing others for membership (without being one oneself).

Deciding to "wear the tattoo", to advertise publicly one's allegiance, in reciprocal fashion with a Monthly Meeting, is another service or program we offer, called "membership in the Society" (i.e. Religious Society of Friends).  For this role, we don't always self select our most esoteric or nuanced Friends, as their talk may require of them manifold allegiances and obligations, or express itself in principled objections to some status quo among members (slave ownership was at one time divisive).  Be that as it may, participation is encouraged, from members and non-members alike.

FNB is similar in offering dramatic roles.  It's urban theater.  We appreciate our guerrilla chefs, able to turn a combination of dry stores and fresh produce into something delectable.  Would that a noob cook could learn in an apprentice capacity.  This happens.  Many torches to passed.  Had I not lost Ninja David's knife set, I might not be allowing a Cutco salesperson into my home tomorrow.  By now, I truly appreciate the value of a good knife set.  Even if I don't make a purchase, I'll before to remind my fellow urbanites not to "make do" with less than professional cookware, to the extent your budget might afford.  Way more important than beer and cigarettes.

Thirsters Gather

Tonight was a who's who for me in that a lot of my favorite characters were present:  Mark Frischmuth of DemocracyLab, Marianne Buchwalter, Allen Taylor, Bob Bjerre and more.

Thirsters had gathered to celebrate and commemorate the life and times of their anchorman Bob Textor.  These were his salon mates, his chat room, of live, here and now people. Both his adult offspring were there and joined in the speech making, spontaneously emceed by Art Kohn (both he and Allen have cruise ship experience as well as classroom and know how to speak in a group setting).

Wanderers has benefited over the years from our overlap with this group.  Our horizons have been expanded.  Don is our principal go-between, as anchorman for Wanderers.

Thirsters is liberal, academic, and strongly steeped in Southeast Asia.  Roger Paget is another founder and will be anchoring the next planning meeting as this 15-16 year old group seeks its way in the wake of Bob's passing. 

This McMenamins was a tavern and pool hall back when Vaughn Street Park, a baseball park, hosted Pacific Coast League games, with Beavers the home team.  Spectators swarmed through around game time, though the 30s and 40s. The park was demolished in 1956, two years before I was born.

Thirsters took root in a later chapter, in an alcove at the east end, and when McMenamins remodeled the place, their new floor plan encouraged the same growth pattern.  The McMenamin brothers have enjoyed and supported this use of the space and their company footed the tab for the evening, with Thirsters leaving thank you tips to the staff.

A more formal memorial service will be held in March.

I won't try to give a bio of Bob here.  He worked on the original architecture of the Peace Corps, as one speaker reminded us tonight.  He made sure recruits got training in the language and culture of the place they were being sent -- you'd think an obvious need, but Washington DC was still pretty green at outreach via this new form of citizen diplomacy.  He had extensive experience in Asia.

The chatter that developed around Bob and his friends is both erudite and worldly and helps define cosmopolitan Portland, an interesting cross between a world capital (of open source for example) and a frontier town.  Lew Frederick showed up, a regular (and member of the Oregon legislature these days) and Sue Hagmeier, sister of my friend Michael.

A great many other important people were present, but I'm mostly confining my account to characters previously mentioned in my blogs.  Portland is small, but not that small.  Elizabeth Furse had appeared here a couple weeks ago, having spoken at Wanderers earlier.

I talked a lot with Allen, who is as busy as ever writing books and helping a South Africa based company expand its market for substance screening and identity verification equipment.

Bob Bjerre talked about his adventures in Kosovo, Macedonia and like that, in the aftermath of the last Balkan War (the breakup of Yugoslavia).  He helped with home building for World Vision and United Methodists.

Marianne expressed her generic hope in young people and their ability to create a brighter world for themselves (her granddaughter is going to work for Intel). "As long as they don't do something stupid" I said sagely.

@ Thirsters, from 2007 (click for larger view)

Science Pub

I got there early, skipped the beer line, and did some day jobbing using wifi.  The theater filled quickly, yet I still wasn't clear on the topic....

Suzanne tapped me awake.  I'd dozed off, having not slept much.  My finger was doing the "d" key in someone's program ("dddddddd...." over a thousand according to PyCharm).  No real damage, as I could easily refresh with a copy... She was there with a friend.

Chris sat to my left and introduced herself.  We compared notes on culture and music.  She proved quite knowledgeable.   She and Suzanne exchanged greetings.

Then came the quiz, which I was miserable at.

The lecture was all about this neuroscientist's family.  He was doing a lot of the teaching things I advocate, sharing autobiography, telling stories, connecting the dots, but not neglecting to share concepts and findings in STEM.

His slides had plenty of animations.  Larry Sherman, Ph.D. -- hadn't he done a talk here before as one of Oregon's most innovative? Ah yes, It comes back to me now, slowly.  Is it still Deja Vu if you've really seen it (or something like it) before?

The Bagdad's brightest projection bulb had died (exploded?) over the weekend and we were invited to not comment on screen dimness in our OMSI Pub evaluations, as this was a known issue.

Lots of talk about epigenetics.  The animations were of DNA coiling within coils of coils, but still translating, making proteins.  He went over the ultra basics.

Epigenetic factors might include a tightening of some coils, making them less likely to translate, thanks to supporting proteins (animations for this).  This isn't about sequences jumping, but about multiple systems impacting one another, being a part of one bigger process: the passing along of karma.

Yeah, it sounds weird to say "karma" there, so lets say "momentum" which is conserved.  I've been reciting this mantra, "momentum for a distance in a time".  The somewhat blurred picture registers a change in position for the time the film was exposed to the information.

Lights, camera, action.  The units of action are momentum for a distance, whereas energy is action in a time (at a frequency).  I think of cartoons with repeating backgrounds.  Ripple effects, consequences.  "Karma" might sound too judgmental, whereas if you're more psychoanalytic about it then you see most karma as unconscious and not really the ego's affair (unless the ego needs to get heroic and effect some changes -- a new level of "go gettum" in the animal kingdom).

Before the speaker part started, a father and son played miniature ukelele and banjo type instruments.  No singing.  I've already lost the memory of the band's name, which was projected and repeated. The audience was a appreciative, Larry had a good segue into his talk.

Our speaker recounted finding out he'd been adopted and ultimately wanting to know more about his biological parents and siblings.  He was astounded to find his academic career had taken him to his ancestral lands, before he had a clue they were ancestral.

I won't recount the whole story here, as it sounded like, after a couple more presentations, the theater might pick this up.  The neuroscientist is also into theater, music, sports.

His biological mom had been diagnosed with schizophrenia at way too young an age, and given electro-shock treatments.  Her own mother had been traumatized... it's tempting to relate more of the story.

So how much of who we are depends on "free will" and how much on "machinery"?  That seems to be the polarity.  People wonder about automaticity and to what extent they have any choice in the matter.  One has choice in one's level of acceptance.

Chris considerately shared half a Luna bar and cough drop candies.  She even brought me water.   Suzanne was saying I looked really sleepy (she'd awakened me after all).  After listening to the Q&A I stumbled home.

Black Like Me (movie review)

I grabbed this on impulse from Movie Madness.

This film was made in the mid 1960s.  The running joke, if you can call it that, is he continues to look just like himself.  Like Buzz Lightyear out of his bubble.  He's too grumpy for the job of undercover spy.  Waaaay too grumpy. But we can understand, as the audience, that one feels offended.

He's mostly exposed to other men's sexual fantasies, which you'd think, as a journalist, he'd not be unfamiliar with.

The flashbacks are classically inserted.  The jazz soundtrack is emotive.  They smoke all the time, Buzz Lightyear in bed.  The actors are into it.  The Strange-colored Man would be a fun title.  He's having identity problems much deeper than which side of the Civil War he'd fight on.  A deeper nut case.  Fits into America just great.

I used to hitchhike around the east coast, up and down (as they say, we say)...

Scary man.  If that's what white guys are like, line me up for a vacation.  He's properly grateful to that country guy for not being a dick (short ride, hero not on best behavior).

I tell ya, if you're gonna send spies, at least train 'em first.  He was lucky to recruit that shoe polish guy early, but the training in the field seemed to make zero difference.  See this movie in sequence with The Spy Who Sat Next to the Photocopier.

I don't usually write my reviews right as I watch 'em.  This is the hundred and some minute enhanced edition, the 2nd of 2 DVDs.  I'm 99% sure I read the book in Rome, Italy, part of my parents' collection.  But not until now do I see the movie, in 2013.

There's a guy dancing all machine-like, proto robot.  That set of moves went a long way (Michael Jackson a pioneer / popularizer), kept morphing.  007 would have stuck out too, what with those ears 'n all...  just train 'em first, OK?

Speaking of which, I've been brainstorming on Math Future about my rural Oregon school for diplomats, a pastiche / montage of the best from my cullings.  I've got the "math is an outdoor sport" meme going.

A lot of the trauma is more class than race related.  "You're too serious about everything, ruins a fella from having fun" -- yes, girl, your diagnosis is on target.  It's number 3, 2, 1 experiences all the way (invoking est jargon -- appropriate given toilet access is a theme), a bumpy ride.

The business school project where I yak about Yankee types help with the truck fleet twixt Istanbul and Kabul and those:  not a spy ring, just strong STEM, high level training, and risky to some degree, though we hope not from stupid / random acts of violence.  Roads are dangerous enough...

He's being stalked at the moment, prey.  Prays to St. Jude.  Good Catholic, we learned that earlier.  The KKK didn't like Catholics either right?  Uh oh, PTSD melt down.  The Breaking Bad dad, the meth cook, was a little tougher.  "I'd a known you anywhere".  These whites are geeks (meeting up with his friends).

Somalis are having a "black like me" episode in their history these days.  Shelbyville, TN instead of Shelby, TX.  Talking about the documentary, Hawo's Dinner Party.  It's one thing to be black in Somalia, something else to be Somali in the North American south, maybe forced to relinquish at least one of your husbands.  No wait, I got it backwards, at least one of your wives.  You get the idea.

"You might be interviewed on TV".  How do you not offend people?  That's not the liberal's question.  A healthy conscience is worth a high price in Vienna, makes for better music appreciation.  Offend them if you must, with your revelations, be a Freud, a Woody Allen.  Be one of those bleeding hearts.  Be a muckraker if necessary.

Waaay too grumpy (he's strangling his interviewee -- torture is not professional guy).  Yeah, go see a priest, good idea.  You've got problems.  Uh oh, girl on the beach, another bump.  That ticket booth lady at the bus station isn't very professional.  The sets are theatric.  Movie's were still more "on stage" back then, not surprising.  Some are still made that way, classic.  Gas station, Memphis. Uh oh, cover blown, he's in the newspaper.  Reminds me of the Hillsboro, Ohio story.

Nice character review at the end here, a quick look.  The white line on the road again.  Stands for "color line" right?  Yep, the trailer says so.  Thanks to the film restoration people.  I'll check the special features next.

Concluding 2012

We got a card from the Baker family today.  "Looks like the Mayans were wrong..." though of course those "Mayans" as seen in hindsight have little in common with how they viewed themselves.  The geopolitical affairs of 2012 were not their concern, any more than these weighed on the minds of those channeling their one god (aka God) for the Book of Revelations.  Anyway, The Rapture was last year (May 21, 2011).

I tuned in the Mayans in their more New Age chapter back when I met Andrew Frank.  He was steeped in the writings of José Argüelles.  Andrew married, had a son, and moved out of town, much later turning up as a field worker in solar energy.  This had long been a dream of his, stretching back to when he and I drove to Olympia to visit Doug Wood, a reigning prince of solar steam.  Andrew's other focus has been early childhood education.  He's developed some interesting hands-on activities around pipe cleaners (multi-color) and polyhedrons.

Glenn and I saw each other, after some years in between, around Djangocon this year.  That was an Open Source highlight, Open Bastion presiding.  We toured in Georgetown some, visiting the "Exorcist steps".  Glenn gifted me with a copy of Easy Like Water, his newest documentary, also a first person travelogue, about the floating schools in Bangladesh.  The film has a global warming spin.

Food Not Bombs has continued to morph.  I'd hoped to take another step with what I've dubbed our Ministry of Education building (an abandoned high school) by repurposing its kitchen for food rescue logistics.  Then the reality principle set in:   JenQ had already explored the possibility a year ago, and found out there's no kitchen.  Portland Public Schools is likely to sell the property soon anyway, having shut it down in the 1980s (it was down to either Washington or Cleveland that had to close, the latter with disjoint but greater total hectares).  We continue to explore other possibilities.

Carol's bout with pneumonia ironically prolonged her stay into winter, as she gained strength to make the switch to sunnier digs.  The house was again stocked with oxygen tanks and a concentrator, a sign of high living standards and a sharable privilege we should afford ourselves globally, along with eye glasses for all who need them.

An oxygen industry (like Apria's) is benign enough, as are other harmless pursuits, such as fashion, movie-making / theater, arts, crafts, cooking.  Yet these enterprises tend to go begging while the truly toxic endeavors get fully funded by the slavers.  Slavers are those who enslave us to past reflexes that are also suicidal and inconsistent with humans' best interests.  Slavers need to be countered, for their own good as well as our own.

We'd stocked up on tanks before when my wife Dawn was healing -- and dying (like we're all doing) -- and Apria was our supplier then too.  We were able to rent a vehicle and collect tanks in New Mexico, visit Santa Fe in winter.  Again, this was a high living standard experience, a real privilege by global standards in our time.  Most of our collective wealth was being squandered back then, and humans reaped a more miserable harvest for their collective inability to reprogram.

How does one enjoy high living standards without spoiling?  Over-sheltering, cocooning excessively, leads to getting stuck in larval states.  Nerds fail to mature into worldly and socially responsible geeks.  Psyches stay trapped.

Philosophical counseling was not well established and many religions had run out of gas, as we made the transition to 2013.  With 2012 in the rear view mirror, would we continue with global maturation?

Skyfall (movie review)

I'd been meaning to see this one for a long time, plus there's one between I'm still behind on.  I'm talking about the James Bond franchise, now in its 50th year.

Skyfall is more comic book in the Batman sense, a little darker and exploring roots.  My Friendly movie mate (Quakers are going to movies more as a part of their practice) thought it lower budget, or at least slimmed down, but with computers added.  There's an "eternal return" aspect as the formula gets followed, with old parts swapped out for new upgrades.  Moneypenny gets a facelift.  Bond is still getting old.  He and M are somewhat over the hill and their powers are at least half from beyond the grave at this point.  The opening credits play up the dead theme more than most, but then he's into "resurrection" (direct quote).

The archetype of M is celebrated.  She has her posse of freaks, not unlike Picard in a wheelchair, husbanding X-Men.  Octavia Butler novels came to mind, as I contemplated freakishness, a theme with me these days.  Bond has several sixth senses.  The part where he says "stop, go back" when they're looking at the computer, is another bead in the necklace of cliches, but also shows his John Nash like ability to pattern recognize.  We could call it that.  He's seen all the Bond films, by definition, through many lifetimes, and knows the pattern language.

The computer display (what the new Q is using), looks awfully Struck-like, talking Gereld de Jong and elastic interval geometry, Tim Tyler and others (I was an early adopter, had a first Synergetics pow wow about that, with Kenneth Snelson also a chief inspiration (yes, they get lumped together a lot, with good reason)).  This was before I explored Sam's Flextegrity concept and prototypes.

Back to the posse, things can go wrong and agents can swallow their poison and not actually die.  Or rather, who they were somewhat dies.  Bond has some bardo states in the freezing cold water, and the first time is not the last.  He stays in the game though as he senses his talents are needed.  MI6 is soon ablaze in his absence, as the alchemy goes awry and M's posse starts to implode.  Bond was a needed compression member.  Without him, that chapter comes to an end.

Shanghai is as Denny describes it, electrified and bright.  The height of the many skyscrapers plays a role.  Another cliche for the necklace: an elevator on steroids.  We don't get much of a window into why we're here.  Shanghai is not implicated.  Just a backdrop this time.  Chinese are not bad guys, or North Koreans.  The evil is a rogue agent and it's when unleashed and undisciplined by English ethics that we see the freakish abilities more.  Bond is a different mix, has other talents.

My movie mate had a good idea for an English style bar in the neighborhood, that night a victim of a pub crawl so we lucked out getting a last table in the back.  Our analysis continued, turning to other topics.  The movie itself encouraged exploring Freudian themes, or at least probing beneath the surface about this archetype, and its association with freaks on the fringe, in the shadows, and in this world rather uniformly armed and dangerous, though moving towards more computerized.

In the backstory, M had indeed abandoned one of her agents in hopes of smoothing relations with China.  There was some "greater good" reasoning.  One might remember Gary Powers, the U2 pilot, and the anger some felt at his coming back from the dead.  Bond goes straight to M's apartment, knowing that in coming back from the shadows, you need some real friends.  The future M questioned his judgement in not wanting to fade away in what could have been a kind of bliss.  Commitment, and a duty to the franchise, keep him on, past what bureau testing might advise.

DorkBot PDX

Steve Holden and I crashed this subculture on invitation from Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki and now working on his Federated Wiki concept (mostly in JavaScript).  The venue was Someday Lounge, where I'd been long ago for Esozone, and just a few doors down from Backspace (connected management and kitchen as I understand it) where Tim DuRoche was playing jazz that evening -- I found out by happenstance.  SW 5th and Davis.

This event had me thinking of Trevor and his performance as Gadgetto by William Black.  Having mechanical and/or electronic music emerge mysteriously from black (opaque) boxes was one of the themes of the evening.  They called it open mike, meaning OK to fail.  Some seemed to take this literally, making the talk about failure and having the demo not work.  Such discomfort may be therapeutic when properly channeled.  This seemed a good venue for that.  Dork out at DorkBot.

Some of the presentations were quite successful, especially the purely musical numbers (though perhaps with visualizers -- the Wall Street audio collage was amazing, child-sounding voices reading headlines about a moody character).

A full-sized doll house served as the target of a specifically customized projection.  Characters danced in each window and light schemes took over the surface.  The display was seasonally apropos as control of lighting by electronic means is a lot of what winter is about, decoration-wise.

Much of the talk was about MIDI and pure data.  Meanwhile, at our table, the discussion was somewhat deeply into electronics, instrumentation, welding techniques and so on.  I was clearly in the presence of some very gifted and talented individuals.  Many thank yous to all concerned, and to Ward for alerting us about this bi-weekly gathering.  I look forward to being there again sometime.

We drove home past Dukes Landing, now abandoned.  A lot of musicians took advantage of that facility, to share with an audience.  Belmont street kids.  Muddy's.  A mostly vanished subculture by now.  They come and go.

The conversation at our table was educational, not run of the mill.  Much of it went over my head or got filed for future reference.  I like to connect the dots, but sometimes it's more dots than connections.

Winter Coders' Social

I'd not made it to one of these before, to the best of my recollection.  Diana was able to astound me quite easily, with tales of The Bodyguard, a suffragette posse that knew the jujitsu of Victorian England, all about canes and parasols, called bartitsu.  You've got to be kidding.  No for real.  She and I both whipped out suffragette photos on our cells (she had more, I just had the Dora Marsden shot).

I reconnected with quite a few of the good folks of Portland's open source community.  I've always felt Portlandia steered clear of such as Adam the Robot and other touch stone hallmarks of the world community known as geekdom.  That doesn't immediately resonate I realize.  To some, a geek is a tawdry side show act, another trafficker in snake oil.  I understand.  There's a dark underbelly to everything, why not be proud of a dark side?

We had a raffle, free to enter, so I guess not a fundraiser really.  More like potlatch economics in that the chiefs got to thump their brands, their drums.  Open Bastion gave out the top prize, a Nexus 7.  That's Steve's entity, the producer behind some of these conferences I write about.

Urban Airship seemed to have its act together, as did our open source denizens, who dutifully shared potluck.  I filled up on bean burritos (home cooked pintos in my crock pot) before the event, so as not to crave the smorgasbord too gluttonously.  The strategy worked, plus I'd burned 1000 calories earlier, at least.  Even with the beers, it was probably a net loss day, and that's a good thing when you're in my ballpark, stats-wise.

This was not a night for presentations, no Ignite format.  Ward Cunningham was there, as was Amber Case, people with high link counts, as in "weighty Friends" (rough translation into subculture-speak).  Steve and Ward hung out.  I've had some good times around Ward, at that Barcamp especially, but other times too.

Weird donuts were a feature, with the FireFox logo.

Steve heard a rumor that Tiger Bar on Broadway specialized in Blues on Tuesdays, so we made our way there by way of Deschutes Brewery.  No, they'd discontinued Blues some months ago and Tuesdays were movie nights, and tonight was The Watchmen.

We'd sort of barged in, in the middle.  Clearly some characters were having fun.  I don't pretend to be an expert all of a sudden.  I only just got started on The Avenguers, gimme a break.

Parking is no piece of cake in the Pearl on a Tuesday night.  I ended up quite far from the venue, but didn't mind.  The walks in semi-rain were refreshing.

Waling at night in a city is a pleasure I enjoy.

Steve had been planning to include some Raspberry Pi's in the raffle, but Michelle's read was we had enough to give away and she hadn't had enough chance to promote these exotic specimens.  I'd brought a number of them in my brief case.

She ended up with two, and during the raffle ad libbed that this five year old girl and her family might want one, as raffle winners, which they did.  I appeared mysteriously from the crowd and handed them one from my briefcase.  Steve let me carry them (he's their owner).

Judgement Day

I dove back into the world of state high school debate and elocution yesterday.  I paused in route to Ridgefield High, Washington State, to take a picture of my odometer going from 1999999 to 2000000.

I judged a public form about raising taxes versus cutting spending, and an interpretive reading contest.  Then I judged several spar sessions, where the topics are purposefully superficial -- it's the form and delivery that matter more.  "Wiley Coyote > Roadrunner" "Royalty > Celebrities", "mechanical pencil > ordinary #2 pencil", "email > snailmail", "football > soccer", "Star Wars > Star Trek", "broccoli > carrots".  These would be the affirmative "is better than" resolutions.  The Neg side takes the opposite view.

Spar:  AFF chooses from two resolutions:

One minute prep
AFF speaks (2 minutes)
Cross examination (1 minute)
One minute prep
NEG speaks (2 minutes)
Cross examination (1 minute)
AFF gives summary speech (1 minute)
NEG does the same (1 minute)

Maureen had given me the October 2012 issue of Harper's with High School Debate and the Demise of Public Speech by Ben Lerner, a former high school debater (a national champion even).  Ben talked a lot about the spread of "spreading" which is talking really fast like those voices speaking legalese during television commercials, and small print that goes by quickly everywhere.  In making reasoning somewhat unintelligible and intimidating, one creates more space for the slow plodding of unreason, for political sound bites.

Interestingly, he traces the Lincoln-Douglas style debate, Tara's specialty, and which slows it down and relates issues to values, to Phillips Petroleum, these days Conoco-Phillips.  This corporate person, and adviser to the National Forensics League, was having a hard time with "spreading" as well, and designed this newer event format (LD) to slow things down somewhat.

Ben considers that more evidence of the fragmentation of US discourse.  There's dumb slow political talk playing on sentiments, mixed with fast unintelligible legalese, and precious little in between.  He wonders if Occupy with its "open mic" experiments (people repeating others' words) marked the beginning of a revived folk discourse, more oriented towards democratic practices.

Gonzo said he'd read the article and photocopied it for his team captains.

I notice Burgerville is serving beer and wine in Washington.  Do we have that in Oregon yet?  That state is just so much ahead of ours in some ways.

Good seeing Gonzo, Ben and Izzy again.  Hello to Hannah.  Hello from Tara.

I was able to download from a fair selection of stop watch apps to my Razr / M (Android).  This helped with my timings.  Time is taken quite seriously in these events.  There might be a 30 second grace period here and there, but no more than that.

All Nighter

All nighters are frequent at our house, but mostly because the basement musician goes to a nocturnal schedule sometimes.  I'm up all night trying to get IPython Notebooks to work, while yakking with Jean, a Friend, by email, regarding Lincoln, the movie.

This is part of that Quaker Conversations practice I've been outlining on FaceBook ("movie night" is a subcategory).

Awhile back, I checked out what Quakers were saying and doing on Youtube and developed a short compilation.  Having a committee behind this work, at the Yearly level, seemed important at the time and I was getting some positive feedback.

This is a Mac OS that I'm attempting to trick out in ways Holden deems worthwhile.  He's all hyped about IPython Notebooks these days.  He's just back from Vegas, not short on sleep, and we decided on an all night work party.  He's Skyping with his girlfriend at the moment (she's back in the UK).

My installation process broke apparently because I don't have some Mac OS 10.4 SDK that gcc might compile against.  I'm in over my head on that one.  This whole Mac thing is pretty new to me.

The Mac Air I'm using actually belongs to my employer, which is why I felt I should notify a co-worker of a tiny almost imperceptible screen blemish that some sticklers would want fixed under warranty (replacing the screen as all one can do).  They may not care about it.  Just trying to be dutiful in protecting their investment.

Steve is just back from Las Vegas.  He was with the CloudStack people (do they CamelCase it?). That's an Apache project, somewhat competing with OpenStack I gather, and Steve is moving in Apache circles more and more.  He'd never been to Vegas before.

I was inspired to sketch some of the Quantum Field Theory in Python, just parsing out the particles, not computing at all.  I've also been agitating (just a little) to get our edu-sig page upgraded at Python.org.  Lots has been happening what with Python Tutor, Skulpt and who knows what all.

My read on Lincoln was he didn't see any long term solution that didn't build on the Constitution, hence his need for amendments.  Living in a perpetually divided condition based on some "negotiated peace" would be as prone to breakdown as any social order.

ISEPP Physics Lecture

Sean Carroll's talk was somewhat a continuation of Lisa Randall's.  Just as Lisa would shortly appear on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show (after her ISEPP talk), so had Sean just been on the Colbert Report.

Both Sean and Lisa are students of high energy particle physics with high aptitude for explaining their studies to a lay public.  Sean's topic was the Higgs boson, which he's recently written a book about.  The LHR is the world's largest machine ever if you define machine a certain way, really impressive in scale, a 17 mile underground ring that penetrates an underground river.  The process is relatively innocuous:  it collides protons at high speeds (closer to the speed of light than bullets by a long shot) and, just as importantly, collects the results with layers of detectors.

I dropped Carol (mom) and an oxygen tank at AFSC for the seasonal open house and headed downtown, where I was cast in a supporting role as one of the ushers.  A lot of us Wanderers were there for that purpose:  Patrick, Mark, Barry, Jeff, Christine, Dave, Glenn, Don, Lynn, myself.  This was a new venue.  Oregon's chancellor's office no longer has the funding it once did and these civic science lectures needed to squeeze into a smaller less expensive venue.  First Congregational Church is but a few blocks from the Schnitzer.  We still had our dinner in the Heathman, per usual.

The Higgs boson is what the $9 billion supercollider at CERN was supposed to discover, and apparently it has.  The Standard Model now seems uber-confirmed.  Quantum field theory is poised to enter a new era, with the sense that conventional reality has the particles it needs, and now it's time to turn to dark energy and dark matter to find out what makes those tick.

It's less the discovery of a particle that's at issue than the incorporation of a new field, the Higgs field, which is at relatively high energy compared to other fields which average around zero.  Will confirmation of some super-symmetry theory be a next outcome after this?  There's some hope of that.  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is due to shut down for two years and when it reopens, will be upgraded to ram protons together even more violently.  Detecting and sifting then takes place, with an eye towards isolating what's interesting versus what's mundane.  The vast majority of collisions are uninteresting whereas aggregate statistics may tell a story.

As a phenomenon, the Higgs boson is conceived to last less than a zepto second.  Finding it was hard because the signature resultants could just as easily be the signature of non-Higgs decay.  Only aggregate statistics suggest that there's a Higgs field at work.  Once this field is accepted, it helps explain why fermions have mass.  The Higgs is what delays them and prevents any light speed electrons.  The Higgs field may be treated as their source of mass.

The lay audience asked many intelligent questions.  One lady gave a sermon.  It turned out later at the dinner that Sean is not especially friendly towards religionists.  He's not one of those who thinks science and religion need to "get along" although he's quick to admit religionists may do the same science, and just as admirably.  A young woman wanted to know about spin, and whether some particles might have spin greater then two.  Higgs bosons have zero spin, and a consensus seems to have developed that bosons have at most a spin value of two.

Sean's lecture contained an interesting subtext:  it's also about the people.  He dwelt on Nobel Prize winners not just because they're celebs but because one may learn from them, and he had.  Organizational skills matter.  Why CERN and not Texas?  Thereby hangs a tale (several in fact).  But in sharing credit where due, how fair is the limitation of Nobels to like three at the most.  And was it the Higgs field because he had the most interesting name of the group?

He dwelt on the fact we were looking at a guy-heavy roster and addressed that with his scientific assessment that women have in fact been subjugated by their "lesser half" (as some fondly refer to XYs, though I'd say this is more about archetypes than relatively "simple" genetics).  Trends were moving rapidly to overcome and/or heal this rift in access however.  Public libraries have made a difference (they did in his case for sure).  He showed some graphs to make his point.  The audience was cheered and expressed relief and encouragement of these trends with sincere applause.

Even if QFT (quantum field theory) is getting work done, in the way of glass beads, simply re-presenting existing content with remapped terminology could be done for exercise.  Calling them quarks was quirky and quirky sticks, like I'm not saying "muons" and "gluons" aren't cool, as phonemes (phonemic memes), just that we could remap the constellations the same way, wrap them with alternative namespaces.  And sometimes do.  Or we look at it as other civilizations did or do, or will or might or might have already (same diff in some ways, civs are flip sides of cosmic casts of characters).

A whole subculture has grown up around high energy physics, with its own ethos and characters.  Although the economy has gone through a lot of resources, it's mostly value added.  They're not trying to kill anyone, just figure out what makes things tick.  The demands / stresses placed on tooling, data processing, constructing, planning, collaborating, yield benefits outside of CERN, certainly.  Take the World Wide Web for example, to which the CERN ecosystem gave rise, in complement with Tim Berners-Lee and the hypertext true believers (count me a young convert, reading Ted Nelson's book in Jersey City, hoping the Web might really happen (and it really did)).

Wanderers 2012.11.28

Elizabeth Furse spoke knowledgably and from much personal experience at the Linus Pauling House this morning.

I came late, as pre-arranged, given Sarah Angel (a nonhuman) needed to be left at the vets for a procedure.

The subject was treaties and do they matter.  Article 6 of the Constitution is quite important here.  Elizabeth, an immigrant from South Africa, served three terms in the US Congress as one of Oregon's representatives.

We learned a lot about the "termination movement", which got rolling in Congress in the 1950s when people grew tired of honoring treaty obligations.

Oregon had much valuable timber along the coast.  Simply ending a tribes existence, a kind of "de-listing" was the easiest way to get at those resources.  Governor McCain help free up a lot of land for deforestation by commercial interests.

In many ways, the Federal government is defined by its interface with other sovereignties, including these internal ones.  Tribal populations, of necessity, have steeped themselves in both the lore and the technical arcana, the better to further prevent erosion of their rights.

We had a lengthy Q&A period (in which I didn't participate), touching on many issues, including casinos and the Indian Gaming laws.  Elizabeth is masterful with this material and a font of relevant information.  I'm so glad I managed to stop in.

Plain Speech: A Meditation

A myth (or story with teachings) within the Quaker world, is success in business followed the early period of persecution (special prosecution).  Enough members of the nobility, celebs, had publicly joined to make the sect respectable even in Court (somewhat like Scientology in that way).  At that point, a reputation for plain truthful speech would get you far, as this quality was sorely missing in business and gave the practitioner, the Friend, an edge.

However, what is "plain speech"?  Quakers prided themselves on pretty much purging their grammar of notions of class.  The familiar "you" (back then "thou") was used towards everyone.  We should pause to remember how many languages, outside of English, inflect the "you" according to rank in society.  The grammar tells you your place, which helps keep it unconscious.

English becomes peculiarly frustrating in that it fails to obey the rules, is not inflected to read "inferior speaking to a superior", not by default.  You have the Quakers to thank for that to some degree.  They pioneered a kind of egalitarianism that was highly compatible with the spread of democracies and their rhetorical bastions.

But speech may be classist in other ways.  An accent packed with dodgy euphemisms that seems to not "cut through it" has the aspect of "not plain". What will it take for Quakers to stay plain in both dress and speech?  I don't think it means unappreciative of highly fanciful.  There's a unity of opposites here.

The plainness is to allow the bigger moves to become apparent.  People willingly suspending their individuality to help some "will" be expressed:  that's where things may go awesomely wrong or awesomely right depending.  In making a movie, the stars work together to create a story as conducted through a director, screenwriters and so on.  The whole is not just some sum of the parts.  Or: "summation" is not just the simple operation we think.

Musical events have this channeling ouija-like ability, other shared works of art, even TV series (coming out in "serial" is how Charles Dickens made a living -- back when people relied on their own imaginations instead of telecasts).

If you come across a Quaker cussing, talking like a pirate, swearing a blue streak, is that "plain speech"?  Should this man or woman be eldered?  She or he may be an elder.  Perhaps a psychopath?  Perhaps, but since when are we called to serve as judge before Judgement Day?

My definition of "plain speech" would encompass the standard est vocabulary for example (a late 1900s philosophy talk and workout), easily, wherein metonymy (synecdoche more specifically) was sometimes used to equate people with their anal orifices.

No, this was a real philosophy, and not necessarily lobotomized (unintelligent) just because crass or crude.  More just TV-14 for language, sex and violence (people told their true to life stories, though the emphasis was on Logic more than History, in the Hegelian sense).

I saw Tommy Chong and his wife in a live performance last night at Helium, one of Portland's many comedy clubs.  I learned from them too.  I found them plain spoken enough.  More than many, lets put it that way.  I was happy to bask in their non-hypocrisy, far from the euphemisms and perpetual pussy footing of many a meetinghouse Friend, more straitjacketed by their matrix.

Tonight it was The Walking Dead at The Bagdad.  I saw at least one other member of the meeting there.  I won't officially propose this AMC tele-drama for the syllabus though (the Adult Education program), at least not for the "meetup" format, as it's a serial, still ongoing, so a bigger commitment in terms of time.

Our practice is starting with the "all in one go" event, though Lord of the Rings is a trilogy, and I hear they're extending Star Wars as well.  I say lets start with bite size and work up to it.  If a group wants to peel off and do a series, fine, but I'm not volunteering to convene such a thing.

Bopping About

I missed Wanderers last night, lost in work, though I'd meant to go.  Sometimes Don reminds me but he knew I had Tara visiting for just a week.  She was elsewhere though.

Oh well, I ran into Glenn at the supermarket and he updated me.  Yes, I'd heard this guy before, at an Ignite, right?  Interesting.  He helps advise on the voting infrastructure aspects of democratic governmental forms.

Voting isn't the whole picture, but a true secret balloting system is great infrastructure.  I've suggested every high school needs one, with open source voting software the students are free to, encouraged to, dissect and discuss.  Which is not to mandate electronic voting to all experiments, no way.  So many ways to go on that score.

This is ricochet week in terms of bouncing around, or bopping about as we might say in the UK.

Sam Lanahan hosted Urners at Bread and Ink for a fine get together.  I haven't seen him for a long while.  He was looking forward to having two of his three kids visit (a little younger than Tara) -- with his third on a sojourn in Brazil.  He was looking forward to seeing Lincoln.

Good seeing Alexia, Sam, Reed, wish I'd popped in to say hi to Lea, the Valsquiers... we won't make it as far north as Stillaguamish country this year I don't think.  That's been part of our ritual in the past.

We still celebrate NavAm heritage though, regardless of itinerary, and toast to a bright future for original peoples of the Pacific Northwest (and by extension, peoples elsewhere who've live through really hard transformations, killing fields).

Great Kachina dolls at the Hyde residence.

I've welcomed the opportunity to see the inside of more Quaker homes.  Josh and I overlapped on committee work.  We're already Facebook friends, why not meet in person.  We had coffee together at Fresh Pot, after which I stayed on to keep working (have wifi will work).

Food Not Bombs is back to using the Quaker meetinghouse under Lindsey's direction.  I played a key role yesterday, per my report to the listserv.

Lincoln (movie review)

I'd been delving into pre US Civil War history already, fleshing out my sketchy knowledge of the Quakers' saga, which forms a fine trunk through which to branch out into much of US history, as Human Smoke is disclosing (I'm reading it on my Kindle).

As David Prideaux explained it at meeting (Stark Street), this is not an epic battle movie, like Waterloo, nor a biography of Lincoln, so much as a dramatization of the machinations surrounding the the passing of the 13th amendment to the US Constitution.

How did that come about?

Lincoln is well spoken, and played as an intuitive by Danny Day-Lewis.  He's loved by the people but, as important, he is respected by his inner circle, even as they feel free to open up to him with divergent views.

He lives with a democratic demeanor, not as a lord or superior.  He tells stories.  He seizes the moment, and takes control.  There's a chief executive aspect, which comes out in his lengthy soliloquies about the law and his doubts about the lawfulness of what he has already done to set the slaves free, as property of a rebellious enemy.  He's confiscating enemy assets by using his war powers, but now he wants a longer lasting civilian version that will long outlast these more freakish circumstances.

African Americans have already been fighting and dying in Grant's army.  How could any peace be developed which involved returning former slaves to their original estate?   Unless some law could decree an end to and/or outlaw slavery, a ratcheting back might solidify a state of disunion, rather than unify a state under a shared standard.

The House of Representatives is another main theater or continued scene / setting for this film.  Here we listen in on the patriarchs who seem so like these anthropomorphic animals, cartoon characters.

I'm thinking of Blacksad, the comic strip and graphic novel.  The scene here was comic in that same way, in the sense of exaggeration or caricature -- not because of unfaithfulness to the true past.  Lets remember Dante's "divine comedy" is a book about Hell.

The audience laughed when everyone in that chamber (except the Tommy Lee Jones character and some others) loudly booed the idea of a vote for women -- what might happen after black men got the vote, heaven forbid (if ever, centuries from then).

Sally Fields was strong, and again the audience laughed, with empathy, when she said "all history will remember of me is I was crazy".

Indeed, when history gets tightly focused and everyone knows they're in the eye of the storm so to speak, there's a tendency to play to the unseen audience, the future if you will.  To vote for the 13th amendment was to make a statement in the eyes of some anonymous future America, another tomorrow, a projected United States.

To enshrine anti-slavery edicts within a standard bearer for democratic forms of democracy, was to answer the call of logic and self consistency.  How could a democracy with an "all men created equal" premise forever deny itself the consequences of such a philosophy?  The war would end when cognitive dissonance was lowered -- that seemed the gist of Lincoln's therapy.

I was seeing this as a 2nd exercise of an emerging Quaker practice involving seeing movies together (maybe plays, standup comics) and discussing them, blogging about them.  Robert joined us in that capacity.  I hope to get him together with Steve for some followup conversation.  Cloud Atlas was our earlier trial run and has resulted in some emailed group discussions.

A Bright November Day

Cloudless, rainless days in November need to be enjoyed, or rather we have a need to enjoy them.

I went to Belmont early in search of wifi, and to join a lunch meetup and share culture at Laughing Planet.

I showed some Blacksad to a young reader to be.  Blacksad is film noir style manga / comix.

Nirel:  "That's James Brown" (restaurant sound track), Me: "that's Frank Zappa" (artwork on the wall).

Passing the torch, as it were.  Plastic dinosaurs everywhere.

Some of today's writings (Nov 15):

edu-sig:
more news 'n views

math-teach:
Digital Math
STEM stuff

synergeo:
Cywars in Cyberia

Armistice Day 2012

Some have taken to calling it Armistice Day instead of Veterans Day, remembering when it was a day to celebrate the end of wars on this planet.

Since then, war racketeers have cynically puppeted their spineless DC government to return to glorifying equipment and marching men in uniform; back to dreary parades of fascist vintage.

They want their version of "Veterans Day" to serve as a recruiting device and photo op.

However, some elders still remember president Eisenhower's warning, that these Business Plot types would bring death and suffering to a post WW2 America, and that's exactly what they did.

Smedley "fighting Quaker" Butler also called it as he saw it in War is a Racket.

And they're still eagerly going about their business to this day, these war-mongering uber-cowards.

Hunting them down is a full time job for many in the intelligence community (such as there is one) as a part of its ongoing Countdown to Zero campaign.  This "world game" has lots of computer power at its disposal.

Reading Human Smoke is edifying.  Movies really do make a difference, judging from how the Nazis hated certain films and banned them.

WILPF has taken to honoring an obscure treaty that nations signed, the US included (Senate ratifying), that buried the hatchet after WW1.

That particular treaty has not been rescinded, just relegated to obscurity, but then the US, like many sovereign nations, has a habit of breaking treaties whenever it feels like it.

Veterans gathered at Pioneer Courthouse Square to wave their banners and ring their bells.  Carol joined with her oxygen tank, representing WILPF (Barbara was there too, and some others).  I took some pictures.

Later, at the Quaker meetinghouse, some vets got together to watch a fellow vet on screen, plus he was there in person for the Q&A. Wray Harris, a private in the US Army, honorable discharge etc. is not afraid to speak his mind.

I was reminded of the patriots during the Vietnam War who refused orders and packed the jails.  Thinking for yourself is more courageous then letting others do it for you.  Muhammad Ali told the DoD where to put it.  I admire his courage.

Thanks to AFSC staff for logistics / equipment.  I was out of the building after intermission for awhile, as was Wray, each handling our respective business (he said more about that during the Q&A).

I hadn't known Simeon, one of our members, was acting headmaster at Phillips Academy in Andover.  I snapped some pictures of a biographical account during intermission.

Then I took off down the block, seeing the tow truck get loaded etc.   I left Joanne & Co. to close up, after using the office computer to post to the Math Forum.

Catching Up at Meeting

Denny of Shanghai and I compared notes on antebellum Quakers, meaning pre Civil War.  He's done a lot of research as well and inherits from the Abolitionist lineage.

Many meetinghouse Quakers back then were inquisitional against abolitionists (into disownment) and protective of the rights of the KKK types to own slaves.  "They had their spies everywhere" Denny said in disgust.  He'd done some reading in the archives, at Swarthmore I think it was.

Leslie Hickcox persuaded me to see The Seven Pyschopaths, given a prominent Quaker character. I'd earlier read a review on The Mercury that perked my interest.

Had a great time yesterday, in a man cave (Broadway Cigars) watching college football (Oregon doing great).  Transfer of some gigabytes of data (no, not a dead drop).

Lew and I realized the headphone option might be used to gain more silence and no one has to know.  Bring your own ear covering studio device and borrow one of the amplifiers.

For all they know, you've turned it on.

Carol was at meeting to attend the Peace and Social Concerns committee.  Jesse, the clerk, had announced at business meeting, that we'd be surveying the meeting to uncover its concerns.

I found out today that said survey had been "dumbed down" in advance to just be about homelessness as an issue (not what I'd understood from business meeting).

That's great, but as a household I feel we're already doing more than any other household in the meeting on that score, so I'm not personally that interested.

I do support the partnership with Human Solutions, however, and have Facebooked to that effect.  The focus on families with children is complementary to what we're doing at the Blue House.

Halloween 2012

A core activity of the evening, in the upstairs apartments, was the matron of the house, resident activist extraordinaire, age 83, taking her supper in the living room, usually doubling as my office, and watching Easy Like Water, Glenn Baker's travelogue / documentary, about Bangladeshis pioneering new ways of coping with global warming, a good example to learn from then.  Carol exclaimed several times "this is wonderful!" and gave Glenn really high marks for that movie.

In the meanwhile, we kept getting knocks and / or rings of the door bell, as we were signalling the availability of treats, by means of high end decorations and a bright porch light.  The expected result, upon knocking on such a door, is wishes for a Happy Halloween and commercial brand candy.

The actual witches in the house had provided some decorations, JenQ in particular.  When I say "high end" I don't mean extravagant.  We had customized one-of-a-kind art.  I contributed the pumpkin skull at the last minute, well into the evening, debraining it in the kitchen.  Check the pictures.

Around this time of year and St. Patrick's Day, we tend to honor non-Christian or pre-Christian (post-Christian) roots. To one Friend I wrote:

A backstory re Witches is my wife's name was Dawn Wicca, and although not a practicing Wiccan (it means "wise woman" -- a chosen name to help her be one) she was quite distrustful of Christianity, but not of Jesus (whom she liked reading about -- a voracious reader).  When she felt led to become a member of our Religious Society, she did so in such a way as to leave a clear audit trail (she was a bookkeeper after all):  no, you don't have to identify as Christian to be one of "our brand" of Friend.

What do I mean by "our brand"?  I mean "Beanite", named for the Bean family that came West, escaping the sweeping evangelism of Iowa that was changing the character of the people.  Kinda scary. They founded what was called College Park Association in California.

When it comes to Christmas itself I have my Fourth King ideology (mythology).  There's an acceptance of "Festivus" which is "A Festival for the Rest of Us" i.e. not-Xmas is holy too.  From the Parliament of World Religions I learned to celebrate "days in common" i.e. it's not essential (to me) to distinguish the various winter holidays in denominational terms.  Winter can be a hard time to get through, especially in the farther northern latitudes, a tunnel with precious little light seen at the end, going in.  There's some blind faith involved, plus an inability to stop the cycle except by migrating south.

The latter is what Carol is planning when she sees a way open for an entourage (perhaps).  Could we get a posse together, for intra-Quaker visitation?  Portland Friends are always visiting faraway places but what about Greater LA?

Letting a Western Friend editor do all the work of piecing it together is too lazy for words.  We should host some serious meetings amongst ourselves that aren't always following established patterns.  Some good might come of it.

Carol's ethnic bias is anti-Halloween as she associates it with cruel taunting and worse by Protestants against Catholics.  Her dad was Irish and perhaps this lore came down through that branch.

For me, orange and black imagery, and the hexapent ball (called a "global matrix" by some), go back quite a ways.  There's the "skinning a cat" discussion of how to make a flat map from a globe, where said cat would be striped were Princeton colors involved (OSU uses those too).

Safe to say, I have owned it in my own way, but then in the traditional way as well:  as a time for "traffic between the worlds".  Not about teasing Catholics in this zip code.

Tigers feature in Glenn's movie by the way.  Bangladesh is tiger country, all the more reason to scrutinize the action.

Lindsey took off with a bike trailer to pick up her order from Peoples, long in the planning.  Our attempts at efficiency as a household might earn us the label Dymaxion in some dimension.  That doesn't mean we're without lag, slack or waste.  Just that there's some discipline.

Happy Halloween.  I think I'll sip some Jack Daniels.

Maureen came buy earlier with an article from Harper's Magazine about high school debate.  That was Tara's sport in high school and Maureen knows that and is looking for a Blue House reaction, preferably in writing.

I showed her some opening frames from Resolved, the documentary, just to acquaint her with "spreading" (which Lincoln-Douglas does not do).  By the sound of what she read to me, the author's criticisms lay elsewhere.  I may have some comments in a later journal entry.

Nirel came by earlier, eluding my sensors.  In my "landing space for jets" mythology, she's one of the stealthier, puts down and leaves, refueled and resupplied, before anyone notices.  More power to her, another "witch" in this story (or "elvynchyk" if you prefer).

Enjoy your winter scenario (if in the north).

Functionalism Versus Objectivism (again)

Yes, the title is a joke, as there's no global fixed namespace for these "isms" -- you can read whatever you like into these inkblots.

However, I have a definite Versus in mind, the semi-feud between the Haskellians, the Knights who say "Ni!" to the Objectivists, those who are object oriented, and proud of it I might add (come to our Proud to be Objects Day parade sometime).

By Haskellian, I mean the broader camp of Lambda Calculus lovers who discourage side effects and hidden state changes.  Pure functional programming keeps the expressions just saying what they mean, whereas Objects are capsules of secrecy, making proof quasi-impossible; the transparency is just not there.

Objectivists are in the "wizard with wand" school and the Actions (spells) may be redolent with side effects, especially on globals (environmental variables).  Since structured programming days, we've been discouraged from hanging ourselves with all the slack that we're given.  Perhaps too few of us took heed, and now the frustrations of end users are aimed at us, for all our bugs.  If Windows had been written in Haskell, we wouldn't be where we are today (I don't disagree by the way).

My lurking suspicion is if the compass needle had flipped the other way, and functional programming were more at an apex in power, there'd be a counter-culture of Objectivist die-hards exclaiming about the purity of their new mental model, the one with state machines passing messages around, networks of agents, like "turtles" (or was that "tractors" and miss-translated?).

In any case, I'm quite admiring of Haskell's implementation of a type safe system with a kind of inheritance or polymorphism.  I find some similarities with Python, not just differences.  I also find it charmingly steam-punky in its retro neo-Victorian-sounding metaphysics.  "Don't be afraid of Monads, they're just where we get more imperative-seeming with our do [not dot] notation and stuff."  When they need to "talk to the real world" they let the Monads come between them, and their Shangri-La of pure functionality.  "You from the real world?  Talk to the Monad, please".

I don't mind "teaching the controversy" as some Creationists used to put it, but to steer clear of computer languages in general, scared away by this feud, is just too high a price to be paying.  We're sacrificing way too many ready-to-learn-somethings.  "Better both than neither" will be my Mantra of the Day (MOTD).

Revisiting Slavery

I've been studying several books on the history of slavery in the USA including:

Fit for Freedom, Not Friendship (2009)
The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity (2008)
Slavery and the Meetinghouse (2007)

On my Kindle / smartphone / laptop:

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006)

Quaker neoliberals of the pre Civil War period were quasi-uniform in condemning slavery but not in a "right now, get rid of your slaves" sense.  Government had legitimized slaves and the rights of slave owners should be protected against religious zealots who might impose other forms of zealotry once given the reigns of power.  Quietists don't trust the shrill.  Plus the immigrant pioneer settlers had a similar solution for all social ills:  send the troublemakers elsewhere.  Recruitment into evangelist churches had much to do with preparing slaves for God's plan to send them to Haiti and Liberia.  Quakers who couldn't abide slavery moved west and north.

Slaves tended to embrace Christianity for its promise of Liberation, ala the later Catholic Liberation Theology of Central and South America.  The non-slave class needed countering pro-slavery arguments to bolster Christianity as a slavery-justifying religion.  As the Bible is but clay in the hands of a skilled minister, it comes as no surprise that both pro- and anti-slavery extremists sought comforting words from this book.  This has continued to be the way to win friends and influence people in North America:  thump the Bible like a drum, but with a characteristic beat pattern that attracts your own kind (anti-gay, white-supremacist or neoliberal or whatever).

Many settled, well off Quakers did not like the "immediatist" position, whether they held slaves or no.  In social theory, slaves should be free, but until a new homeland could be found in Africa or someplace, some "Israel" (a promised land), they'd have to put up with 2nd class treatment as guests in this New World.

True, the slavers felt a different kind of relationship to the slaves than to the native peoples (Pueblo).  The pueblo had not been "invited" as in forcibly removed from their homeland and brought to America by boat.  Anglo-Euros and Africans were both here as boat peoples.  The Christians put a lot of pressure on themselves to "convert" their guests, so they would "think as we do".  Interracial church services were the norm in many counties of Virginia, as slaves were encouraged to take in the English view of themselves.  The Pueblo, on the other hand (I'm using the term inclusively, not just for the folks near the Rio Grande), were going to be a more classic enemy to be fought with weapons.  "If they won't join you, beat 'em" was the rallying cry.

The Quakers mostly disagreed with this philosophy and were ostracized as "people lovers" i.e. "lovers of human beings".  Their "no human being is illegal" campaign typifies their belief in a universal Inner Light, whereas most North Americans have a knee-jerk impulse to criminalize the undocumented and oppressed as a source of cheap prison labor (slavery is still going strong in the USA, by these other labels (one might argue the South won)).

Dot Notation Again

I'm somewhat the short order cook or maybe Chinese chef (that'd be a stretch maybe) in that I keep hopping around twixt the same simmering pots.

Back burner becomes front burner, then back it goes, and so on.  No, not so simple as "round robin".  More "interrupt driven".

So on Math Forum, I'm back to:  "sharing 'dot notation' with K-12 is overdue."

That sounds somewhat cryptic right off the bat.

K-12 is jargon for the ethno-cultural torch passing that goes on up through "coming of age" young adulthood.  Kindergarten through 12th grade, in the USA system, with four years of college sometimes called 13-16, making K-16 a rather complete induction into adulthood, by academic means.

"Dot notation" means different things to different web pages.  The chemists have a dot notation for indicating electrons, valence patterns.

There's a "dot notation" associated with Principia Mathematica, by Russell & Whitehead (I start my thread with an allusion to their approach), borrowed from Peano according to Wolfram.

Newton used dots for his "fluxions", first, second and third derivatives.  That's considered a bit unwieldy.  Typography went for Leibniz notation dx/dy, though Spivak had some problems with that too right? (thinking Calculus on Manifolds, my text at Princeton).

However, the "dot notation" to which I refer is "none of the above".  It's the "dot notation" of the object oriented family, i.e. C-family including Java, ABC / Python, JavaScript.  Smalltalk is considered a parent as well.  I've not been comprehensive (Simula, OCAML.. FoxPro).

Plus one could argue that using a "dot" is not that conceptually critical i.e. you can use an arrow or double colon or... yes, yes, I agree.

I'm casting a net and pulling in enough fish to at least point to substantive content.

"These fish, lets share them, with loaves too, why not?" -- these languages are free and open source and replicate faithfully to the bit.

But saying the software is "free" in the Stallman sense (of four freedoms) implies an ability to read and modify source code in the first place.  "Computer literacy" we were calling it in the 1980s.  I'm just calling it "literacy" and, under STEM, I don't see the need to decide which pigeon-holes.  These memes bounce around.

The key point is to share them, not pretend we only care about Leibniz notation, or Riemann.  This bias against machine executable languages was surely overcome by Mathematica and Mathcad.

We're over that prejudice: that it can't be mathematics if it runs on a machine.  On the contrary, Mathematica had to tighten up the old notations, with yet more precision.

Machines have helped us take our mathematics to a new level.  Lets teach "dot notation" in K-12 to help share about this breakthrough.  More SQL too while we're at it (different topic).