I judged this movie to be astoundingly good, because it really scared me. The last time I remember being that scared (because of a movie -- life is plenty scary) was in Aliens. Is it because I identify with the protagonists so completely? They each do a good job (Signourney Weaver and Brad Pitt respectively).
I've been doing my homework in the zombies mythology, falling further behind with the vampires, which has also been undergoing strong development in these early years of this millennium. When AMC's Walking Dead started showing for free at The Bagdad, I found a collection and watched several seasons.
The Bagdad, by the way, is about to undergo a transformation, shutting down for awhile as a theater (owned by a brewpub) to reopen as one equipped to show first run films. I'm ambivalent as that means a jump in price and more people wanting parking (think of a way to come by bus or bike people -- no mega-mall parking lots, just sleepy neighborhoods). I can see where it'd be fun to jump on that circuit though, as a brewpub. I hope The Laurelhurst isn't planning to follow suit right away.
The film is scary and not very jokey except when you zoom back to appreciate the ironies: the WHO, World Health Organization, frantically distributing dire sicknesses to children, that they might live. I won't explain. Brad has been hanging out with Angelina (who can blame him) and knows what that world of NGOs and UN people is like, mixed with NATO and all that stuff.
He and the other movie-makers paint with that fairly contemporary palette to make a globalized "good guy" and it's a refreshing divergence from the perpetual US / Hollywood rehash, where the "good guys" are always some Team America World Police (Man of Steel gets it right but that's a period piece, deliberately retro).
In this movie, the US prez is dead already, get over it, that's not even a big part of the plot. When you've got humanity against misanthropists, you have an opportunity to bring us together. Bring Israel back into the fold, why not? They were winning against the undead until becoming over-exuberant, a known pitfall in Judaism (hubris, too sure God is on your side, the "loud Jew" meme).
That was another funny irony: the Israelis were so close to encircling themselves with that stupid wall that just a few more bricks made it a done deal. Most thought it was about the Palestinians but we meet the Mosssad mastermind who took rumors of the "undead" seriously and pushed the wall on that basis.
There's no evidence such a wall had any affect along the Mexican border though (Dallas and Mexico City were equally Zombie-lands). The CIA is probably less vested in that technology for combating the spread of Zombie-ism (they say like Communism but you don't have to know how to read or raise your consciousness). Some things only make sense in the Middle East.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
The Future is Now
If you're looking for a meditation theme, those of you who use meditation themes, or would like to try one, here's a good one: the future is now.
Of course that's obvious. When I was growing up the future was like 2000, wow, and we're well passed 2000 now (OK, 13 isn't a lot, but it's after 2000). So this is that future. Look around. You spent a lot of time wondering what it would be like. This is what it's like.
The problem about "the future" is you never get there, a mean trick in a way, as you're always in suspense even when the thing you were in suspense about is long over. Meditation helps you relax and appreciate how many of your questions have already been answered.
Of course that's obvious. When I was growing up the future was like 2000, wow, and we're well passed 2000 now (OK, 13 isn't a lot, but it's after 2000). So this is that future. Look around. You spent a lot of time wondering what it would be like. This is what it's like.
The problem about "the future" is you never get there, a mean trick in a way, as you're always in suspense even when the thing you were in suspense about is long over. Meditation helps you relax and appreciate how many of your questions have already been answered.
Monday, September 23, 2013
...So Goes The Nation
"The Nation says Occupy is a failure" Lindsey was saying.
"Why is that?" I asked.
"Because some guy walked out of a meeting, said he had to go compost, and another guy behind a web site got a job working for Google."
"Oh".
"They don't know about Occupy Portland, she continued." "I'd send them an email but I'm not really into using computers these days, the I Ching says to practice my music."
And so it goes.
I don't think we're a failure. Tweet or something, if you agree.
"Why is that?" I asked.
"Because some guy walked out of a meeting, said he had to go compost, and another guy behind a web site got a job working for Google."
"Oh".
"They don't know about Occupy Portland, she continued." "I'd send them an email but I'm not really into using computers these days, the I Ching says to practice my music."
And so it goes.
I don't think we're a failure. Tweet or something, if you agree.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
An Introduction to Synergetics
From an outgoing email dated today (hyperlinks added):
Synergetics is a rather strange hard-to-categorize philosophy that tries to turn science into something readable as prose and imaginable in terms of geometric cartoons.
That is not a radical idea as we all watch cartoons of batteries and ions flowing or electrons flowing, while listening to some narrator say what's going on. Synergetics is a lot like that.
But then I would always study it in conjunction with something else, like electrodynamics or computer programming. I don't think it's meant to stand all on its own, as if everyone else should stop what they're doing and focus on this thing over here.
No, not like that.
More like the I Ching, something to consult from time to time, or like DSM V (another reference). Fuller himself was a voracious reader and listener. He took in vast amounts. Synergetics is like Esperanto, or trying to convert what everyone is saying in different language to something more in the middle.
Synergetics is a rather strange hard-to-categorize philosophy that tries to turn science into something readable as prose and imaginable in terms of geometric cartoons.
That is not a radical idea as we all watch cartoons of batteries and ions flowing or electrons flowing, while listening to some narrator say what's going on. Synergetics is a lot like that.
But then I would always study it in conjunction with something else, like electrodynamics or computer programming. I don't think it's meant to stand all on its own, as if everyone else should stop what they're doing and focus on this thing over here.
No, not like that.
More like the I Ching, something to consult from time to time, or like DSM V (another reference). Fuller himself was a voracious reader and listener. He took in vast amounts. Synergetics is like Esperanto, or trying to convert what everyone is saying in different language to something more in the middle.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Version Control
I've been jeering at Washington, DC wannabe government types for not using version control for important documents. No wonder these are not the real coders.
But then some of them do, and when you get down to it, the NPYM Quakers do not, for their Faith & Practice. I've sort of crafted an identity stretched around such a framework and should backpedal from jeering to producing hearty exhortations.
We both should get serious (we in government, we Friends).
Someone with a commit bit is not necessarily hogging the limelight. One commits on behalf of others after reviewing and passing their code. You're a conduit into a shared asset of considerable value.
Needing to go back a branch because the stuff you've committed actually sucks is the reason version control exists, but do that too often and you might lose that commit bit. Stop leading us down blind allies. We'll even forgive a few, but followers have their limits, before their leaders become scapegoats.
Wikipedia is so interesting and would take lifetimes to really study. The discussions that go on over small editorial changes, the feuds. Sometimes you go to the page less for the end result than for the discussion behind the scenes.
Our Faith & Practice would be that much richer with such a background. So would government documents, that could find the time to mature (some official documents are written hurriedly, under the pressure of events).
I'm not just talking from inexperience about matters of which I know naught. I've done a Wikipedia page in concert with others, the one on Synergetics (Fuller's version).
Here's a snap shot that pretty much comprises my total contribution.
If you check the discussion tab, you'll see others played a big role. I was not the originator of the page, it had simply long remained dormant.
The process of co-creation was reminiscent of giving birth in the sense that there was some pain and strife, as well as risk.
Although "version control" may sound cold and "engineery" it's actually more humane to preserve these timelines that register the passions of those who provided content, or experienced their content getting blocked.
Movie making is like this too, inevitably, as ultimately life collapses to what's so versus what it might have been. Even those who work solo must make their compromises (to work solo is also a cost, a freedom lost or not chosen).
But then some of them do, and when you get down to it, the NPYM Quakers do not, for their Faith & Practice. I've sort of crafted an identity stretched around such a framework and should backpedal from jeering to producing hearty exhortations.
We both should get serious (we in government, we Friends).
Someone with a commit bit is not necessarily hogging the limelight. One commits on behalf of others after reviewing and passing their code. You're a conduit into a shared asset of considerable value.
Needing to go back a branch because the stuff you've committed actually sucks is the reason version control exists, but do that too often and you might lose that commit bit. Stop leading us down blind allies. We'll even forgive a few, but followers have their limits, before their leaders become scapegoats.
Wikipedia is so interesting and would take lifetimes to really study. The discussions that go on over small editorial changes, the feuds. Sometimes you go to the page less for the end result than for the discussion behind the scenes.
Our Faith & Practice would be that much richer with such a background. So would government documents, that could find the time to mature (some official documents are written hurriedly, under the pressure of events).
I'm not just talking from inexperience about matters of which I know naught. I've done a Wikipedia page in concert with others, the one on Synergetics (Fuller's version).
Here's a snap shot that pretty much comprises my total contribution.
If you check the discussion tab, you'll see others played a big role. I was not the originator of the page, it had simply long remained dormant.
The process of co-creation was reminiscent of giving birth in the sense that there was some pain and strife, as well as risk.
Although "version control" may sound cold and "engineery" it's actually more humane to preserve these timelines that register the passions of those who provided content, or experienced their content getting blocked.
Movie making is like this too, inevitably, as ultimately life collapses to what's so versus what it might have been. Even those who work solo must make their compromises (to work solo is also a cost, a freedom lost or not chosen).
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Quoting from Facebook
[In the original FaceBook version, comments by others are interleaved. NPYM = North Pacific Yearly Meeting. I am discussing a public document available at that Meeting's website. I've added some hyperlinks, refactored the paragraphs ]
Interesting the NPYM draft Faith and Practice already has renamed Oversight Committee to Pastoral Care Committee. This despite the fact that the largest meeting in the region has not switched to that nomenclature and some actively oppose such a name change.
In the old days, Faith and Practice was descriptive more than prescriptive (said what we did do, not what we "should" do per somebody's blueprint). Clearly there's an attempt at top-down management here, such as we've not seen hitherto?
For me it's about grass roots versus top-down. If individual meetings want to adopt a name change and go with Pastoral Care over Oversight, then F&P should reflect these choices. At the moment though, the meetings I'm aware of in the NPYM region are all using the traditional terminology. This new draft language is very out of step with the standard practice of its people. That's what seems surprising. I don't see it as splintering for some meetings to use different terms. I just don't think we're at a point where such grass roots choices should be codified at the NPYM level. Most of us say "Oversight" and don't assume there's a problem in saying that.
The paragraph I shared around Oversight before sending it off (not presuming to speak for anyone but me -- but it had come up as an agenda item to discuss NPYM's draft): "AFAIK, MMM has no plans to change the name of Oversight Committee to Pastoral Care Committee. I know there's a minority that wants to do that but without real discussion in Business Meeting I'd say F&P has gone beyond its light in making that name change for our region and/or meeting." (AFAIK = "as far as I know").
To me, advocating we drop "Oversight" in favor of "Pastoral Care" is like saying we should stop saying "master / slave" when talking about disk drives, or that tool users should stop asking "male or female?" when wanting to know if it plugs in, or accepts a plug. Bending over backwards to be inoffensive too often means pabulum in place of edginess.
Quakers have diluted their language sufficiently. Loss of "Oversight" looks more like self-evisceration, Hara-kiri.
To "oversee" means to have the big picture view.
"Pastoral" reduces people to seeing themselves as sheep, as a "flock" of bleating brainless (sorry sheep), needing to be led.
Why is that vocabulary less offensive than empowering Friends to be "overseers". Better to have "overseers" (a rotating position) than docile sheep expecting to be patronized by all-knowing (better qualified) "pastors" (ala the religion we divorced from, quite awhile back, no regrets -- or are we hankering for a caste of professional theologians -- clerics -- again?).
I go off Oversight / MMM in 2014 at which time I predict the clerk (continuing) will be expected to push through the name change, neatly dovetailing with Discipline Committee's plans to move us into a more mainstream churchy vein, more like "other Protestants".
Once MMM falls to Pastoral Christian Friends, it will be easier for them to take the Valley.
It's definitely a shift to the right from the point of view of ye old College Park Beanites and their liberal ways. Adopting mainstream churchy language helps consolidate a more "ecumenical" Christianity with less dissent (less outward divergence at the level of theology).
I propose to fight back by referring to churches as "steeple houses" once again (unless they really don't have steeples -- I pay attention to architecture).
I also support the narrative that some Quakers are "forking off" from Christianity, meaning a meeting may well stay a Friends Meeting without identifying as Christian, and indeed some meetings may publicly not want that "Christian" affiliation / moniker / brand for themselves (which doesn't mean they can't or won't study the Bible; no books are banned).
Interesting the NPYM draft Faith and Practice already has renamed Oversight Committee to Pastoral Care Committee. This despite the fact that the largest meeting in the region has not switched to that nomenclature and some actively oppose such a name change.
In the old days, Faith and Practice was descriptive more than prescriptive (said what we did do, not what we "should" do per somebody's blueprint). Clearly there's an attempt at top-down management here, such as we've not seen hitherto?
For me it's about grass roots versus top-down. If individual meetings want to adopt a name change and go with Pastoral Care over Oversight, then F&P should reflect these choices. At the moment though, the meetings I'm aware of in the NPYM region are all using the traditional terminology. This new draft language is very out of step with the standard practice of its people. That's what seems surprising. I don't see it as splintering for some meetings to use different terms. I just don't think we're at a point where such grass roots choices should be codified at the NPYM level. Most of us say "Oversight" and don't assume there's a problem in saying that.
The paragraph I shared around Oversight before sending it off (not presuming to speak for anyone but me -- but it had come up as an agenda item to discuss NPYM's draft): "AFAIK, MMM has no plans to change the name of Oversight Committee to Pastoral Care Committee. I know there's a minority that wants to do that but without real discussion in Business Meeting I'd say F&P has gone beyond its light in making that name change for our region and/or meeting." (AFAIK = "as far as I know").
To me, advocating we drop "Oversight" in favor of "Pastoral Care" is like saying we should stop saying "master / slave" when talking about disk drives, or that tool users should stop asking "male or female?" when wanting to know if it plugs in, or accepts a plug. Bending over backwards to be inoffensive too often means pabulum in place of edginess.
Quakers have diluted their language sufficiently. Loss of "Oversight" looks more like self-evisceration, Hara-kiri.
To "oversee" means to have the big picture view.
"Pastoral" reduces people to seeing themselves as sheep, as a "flock" of bleating brainless (sorry sheep), needing to be led.
Why is that vocabulary less offensive than empowering Friends to be "overseers". Better to have "overseers" (a rotating position) than docile sheep expecting to be patronized by all-knowing (better qualified) "pastors" (ala the religion we divorced from, quite awhile back, no regrets -- or are we hankering for a caste of professional theologians -- clerics -- again?).
I go off Oversight / MMM in 2014 at which time I predict the clerk (continuing) will be expected to push through the name change, neatly dovetailing with Discipline Committee's plans to move us into a more mainstream churchy vein, more like "other Protestants".
Once MMM falls to Pastoral Christian Friends, it will be easier for them to take the Valley.
It's definitely a shift to the right from the point of view of ye old College Park Beanites and their liberal ways. Adopting mainstream churchy language helps consolidate a more "ecumenical" Christianity with less dissent (less outward divergence at the level of theology).
I propose to fight back by referring to churches as "steeple houses" once again (unless they really don't have steeples -- I pay attention to architecture).
I also support the narrative that some Quakers are "forking off" from Christianity, meaning a meeting may well stay a Friends Meeting without identifying as Christian, and indeed some meetings may publicly not want that "Christian" affiliation / moniker / brand for themselves (which doesn't mean they can't or won't study the Bible; no books are banned).
Sunday, September 08, 2013
Google Earth as Rear View Mirror
Google Earth + Panoranimo: Quarry in Thornton, IL w/ I-80 Crossing
What was that?
Sometimes you'll be on a car trip, like I was, and do a double-take, as I did. I was going over this bridge somewhere in Illinois, my GPS taking me to O'Hare.
Suddenly, on both sides, steep cliffs, a drop off. Clearly a quarry of some kind.
I wished I had a better view and quickly scanned for exits and a better viewpoint.
In retrospect, I could have found one, but Google Earth, linked with Panoramino, is the next best thing.
Fascinating.
Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Chicago
I'm ensconced high above street level in Hotel World, peaking over Steve's shoulder. I'm one of the speakers at Djangocon.
Django, for those who don't know, was a world class musician, and as such, had some things named after him, one of those things being a web framework known as Django.
Web frameworks rule, in the sphere of eCommerce, so there's a community of geeks associated with this free, open source software, that ekes out a living doing that, to a degree that annual conferences are semi-affordable.
This may be a golden era for the Django community; I'm not saying I'm the crystal ball holder here. Frameworks come and go, as do computer languages. Django is written in Python.
The people in front of me in the Alamo rental car line at O'Hare were appropriately concerned about the escalation of violence in the Middle East, Washington DC a top committer in that regard.
This is 2013 and we're looking back on "shock & awe" plus a president making fun of himself looking for those never-found weapons. The pretext for the war was a sham.
CNN is causing wars, by not ever pulling back and giving the big picture.
Has the USA used chemical weapons recently?
Lets start with white phosphorous in Fallujah. We should also talk about DU and the fine powder people breathe. A lump of uranium as a door stop is not the same thing. Packaging matters.
CNN won't zoom out and adjust the focus and is therefore causing war. You can see it on the serious faces. The journalists and pundits being interviewed know they're the cause of serious and escalating violence. How do they live with themselves?
CNN turned out to be a terrible idea and Ted Turner is not a hero for creating it. CNN caved early, when journalists started telling the story of American warriors on the side of the North Vietnamese and how they were attacked with chemical weapons. CNN caved when attacked for reporting along these lines. That's when we knew it was in the tool bag of warmongers.
You'll say I'm not being fair in criticizing CNN and not Fox, but Fox was never about news or objective reporting. CNN has some pretense in that area. Fox is a joke (a sick joke, but a joke). Al Jazeera is way better than Fox, as is Russia Today, and I'm not saying either of those is that great. Being "better than Fox" takes almost no talent whatsoever.
I'm checking out Chicago. This is a huge North American city, lots of tourists. I recommend it as a destination. Do some homework first. There's plenty of history to appreciate.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Wanderers 2013.8.27
Given I'm swamped at work and boning up for a workshop, and given Lew Frederick is a state representative, so there'd be constituents and interested parties galore, I didn't feel I should grab a front row seat.
Lew knows a lot about education and has the same conversations I do a lot of the time. We were there to learn from him, not me. I sat on the steps on the west side of the Linus Pauling House, our Wanderers venue for many years.
Then I went home to get something for his legislative assistant, something from her bro who moved to St. Louis recently. I delivered that item, then went home again, to work on my Python stuff.
Even though billed as commemorating the I Have a Dream speech, I was glad to see no one nostalgia tripping, even though we were oldsters for the most part.
The controversies were today's: kids getting the message they'll be letting their school down, their families down, everyone, if they don't perform well on high stakes testing. It's a "corporatization" as Lew puts it, meaning there's no empathy in it, no humanity. Corporate persons (so-called "personhoods") are literally soulless, and it shows.
Hey, did you catch the recent Harper's article, Wrong Answer: The Case Against Algebra II by Nicholas Baker?
I've been filing my own summary remarks on the matter, revising and extending for the record.
Long time readers of this blog know I hang out there.
Lew and I go back a long way. He's had a lot of experience and has met a lot of the players. I'm glad we had him at Wanderers again, where he's been many times, always welcome.
Wanderers retreat: Joe Arnold, Lew Frederick, Terry Bristol
(June 2007, at Joe's place)
Lew knows a lot about education and has the same conversations I do a lot of the time. We were there to learn from him, not me. I sat on the steps on the west side of the Linus Pauling House, our Wanderers venue for many years.
Then I went home to get something for his legislative assistant, something from her bro who moved to St. Louis recently. I delivered that item, then went home again, to work on my Python stuff.
Even though billed as commemorating the I Have a Dream speech, I was glad to see no one nostalgia tripping, even though we were oldsters for the most part.
The controversies were today's: kids getting the message they'll be letting their school down, their families down, everyone, if they don't perform well on high stakes testing. It's a "corporatization" as Lew puts it, meaning there's no empathy in it, no humanity. Corporate persons (so-called "personhoods") are literally soulless, and it shows.
Hey, did you catch the recent Harper's article, Wrong Answer: The Case Against Algebra II by Nicholas Baker?
I've been filing my own summary remarks on the matter, revising and extending for the record.
I'll be in Champaign-Urbana, site of University of Illinois, one of the players when it comes to setting the tone and speed of many a high school. I'll be making fun of Algebra II, as usual, not because you have to be smart to learn it but because you have to be dumb. You have to be a sucker for all that musty-dusty stuff that pretends it's state of that art at Musty Dusty High, then it's off to Musty Dusty College. Lots of moola, lots of dough. But do they ever get to the good stuff? A lot of times, no.That's from a recent posting at the Math Forum.
Long time readers of this blog know I hang out there.
Lew and I go back a long way. He's had a lot of experience and has met a lot of the players. I'm glad we had him at Wanderers again, where he's been many times, always welcome.
Wanderers retreat: Joe Arnold, Lew Frederick, Terry Bristol
(June 2007, at Joe's place)
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Policy Debates and Advisories
In a recent public speech by a native American and treaty rights activist, I learned of some government official saying "someday" the toxic radioactive waste from Hanford might make it into the ground water.
She pointed out how misleading that comment was, as that day is already long in the past. People taught to stay ignorant and take their cues from pastoral cattle prod wielders (aka pastors) are not known for their acuity in debate.
Natives confront vast hordes of average know-nothing Americans who take on faith what "the government" tells them. That leaves them feeling lonely, surrounded by a sea of mindlessness.
Anyway, the ability to discuss radioactivity in the environment in scientific and rational terms begins with simple acceptance. Nuclear meltdowns have occurred and that era of safety we were promised by some (most are too young to remember) was never backed by the engineering.
PR is rice paper thin sometimes. If you choose to fall for a false facade, at some point blame yourself, draw that line. If you're a sucker, suck it up.
However, I'm not into "blame the victim" as a favorite art form. The innocent people around Chernobyl were simply not in the loop. Then as now, sensor readings were hard to come by. I just did a survey of Oregon's public sites and so many of them were saying "we're so sure there's nothing to worry about we're just not taking readings."
That's like students saying, these exercises in our math books have been solved thousands of times by our ancestors (yes, our textbooks are old), the solutions are known and shared in teacher manuals. Why do you make us slog through solving these problems the solutions to which are already known? The answer is obvious: so that you might be ready to put out a fire when it comes to your home.
Just develop the practice of taking readings. The art of placing sensors, and reading them, is a skill in itself (not that it's always that easy as sometimes your "sensors" are dead birds and fish).
Place sensors in "perfectly normal" areas and practice reading them and proving a reliable source of data.
Find parameters it makes sense to measure and develop a model of how theses parameters inter-relate.
Draw on existing research and resist temptation to become overly secretive about your findings, condemning yet another generation to rediscovering what you already knew.
I am pleased that resort casinos understand the museum industry as a worthy interface between a specialized culture and a lay public. The Warm Springs Reservation has an excellent museum, as do the Pueblo in Albuquerque. The interpretive center as an institution makes sense to "Indians" as it would to ETs.
The System of Reservations (aka "jurisdictions" or "zones") which the Federation of States United (FSU) put in place -- I'm getting it slightly wrong, close enough -- is well-positioned within the museum industry to keep educating the public about the ecosystem and its cause and effect networks (its "karmic wheels" as some call 'em, meaning they're super-size big and slow-turning, not human, and/or sometimes they're atomic / subatomic).
Call them science museums if you wish. OMSI is a good representative. Where art meets science is in the science of effective presentation, which includes Tufte but also Crumb, Disney, and Dr. Seuss. We use animation and simulation to impart information.
Not all exhibits need take the same broad path or recruit the same public. Highways and byways remain useful. I've got my eye on the Portland Hilton for some esoteric events.
Changing topics a little, I wonder about how the abortion debate would reshape if deformities per pregnancy were on the rise. I'm not saying that's our world at this moment but imagine the moral debates in such circumstances, wherein viable offspring are a rarity and may have to come from implanted genetic material kept in lead-lined repositories deep within the planet (call it Krypton if that makes you feel any better -- I'm fine with generalizing beyond Earth).
Back to measurement-making and sharing results: sensor networks are not intrinsically about "worrying" and/or "not panicking" the public. They're intrinsically more neutral than that, like thermometers and barometers. Their mere presence is not saying anything about what's expected. When people with measuring devices show up, or fly instruments over you in drones, they're not necessarily foretelling doom. They're about providing reliable global data that might be good news as well as bad. The information may leave you indifferent. But at least the information is being collected. "No change" means you're establishing a baseline.
New scouts need to learn to make a fire. To take a reading is routine. To log a result is your habit. Data gathering is something humans do. If they ask you why you're attending to sensors and sensor data, taking readings, ask them why they're not. When you monitor your environment, you are "minding your own business" -- don't let them tell you otherwise. Tell them you're working for a museum, the one that will treasure your data someday.
If you need to focus on the "half full" aspects of the glass, closet pessimist that you are (an "out there" optimist), then subscribe to RSS feeds about happy camper villages where air quality is going up and people are happier with their lives than ever. I'm not saying you won't find such news if you dig. I'm subscribed to a few of those channels myself.
Summary statements:
Just don't let yourself off the hook if you prove yourself gullible. At some level, you need to set your own standards. Suck it up and move on. Don't use the shock of finding yourself hoodwinked (fooled), lied to, as an excuse to stop probing.
You have a right to keep puzzling away, trying to think it through, whatever "it" is. Admit you've been lied to, and you believed, and make that part of your mental model going forward. That does not mean to never again extend trust. That's a decision to keep making: when to trust, when to not.
People lie, some are paid to, and your ability to discern "the story" will be continually challenged. Accept the challenge. Remember computer games. You get to die many times.
If you watched a lot of cop and detective shows, or read those books, you have that scientists' sense that true stories have this advantage over false ones: they cross-check and omni-triangulate, demonstrate internal consistency, to a much higher standard than cobbled-together postpone-the-day-of-reckoning falsehoods.
The latter (make-believe fabrications) tend to fall apart upon probing, which is why a lot of times it's really up to the prober: how much do I want to believe this story?
Acknowledge your biases, at least to yourself. Is it shameful to wish for better living standards for sentient beings? Was the mistake that you trusted, or that you were let down? It cuts both ways.
She pointed out how misleading that comment was, as that day is already long in the past. People taught to stay ignorant and take their cues from pastoral cattle prod wielders (aka pastors) are not known for their acuity in debate.
Natives confront vast hordes of average know-nothing Americans who take on faith what "the government" tells them. That leaves them feeling lonely, surrounded by a sea of mindlessness.
Anyway, the ability to discuss radioactivity in the environment in scientific and rational terms begins with simple acceptance. Nuclear meltdowns have occurred and that era of safety we were promised by some (most are too young to remember) was never backed by the engineering.
PR is rice paper thin sometimes. If you choose to fall for a false facade, at some point blame yourself, draw that line. If you're a sucker, suck it up.
However, I'm not into "blame the victim" as a favorite art form. The innocent people around Chernobyl were simply not in the loop. Then as now, sensor readings were hard to come by. I just did a survey of Oregon's public sites and so many of them were saying "we're so sure there's nothing to worry about we're just not taking readings."
That's like students saying, these exercises in our math books have been solved thousands of times by our ancestors (yes, our textbooks are old), the solutions are known and shared in teacher manuals. Why do you make us slog through solving these problems the solutions to which are already known? The answer is obvious: so that you might be ready to put out a fire when it comes to your home.
Just develop the practice of taking readings. The art of placing sensors, and reading them, is a skill in itself (not that it's always that easy as sometimes your "sensors" are dead birds and fish).
Place sensors in "perfectly normal" areas and practice reading them and proving a reliable source of data.
Find parameters it makes sense to measure and develop a model of how theses parameters inter-relate.
Draw on existing research and resist temptation to become overly secretive about your findings, condemning yet another generation to rediscovering what you already knew.
I am pleased that resort casinos understand the museum industry as a worthy interface between a specialized culture and a lay public. The Warm Springs Reservation has an excellent museum, as do the Pueblo in Albuquerque. The interpretive center as an institution makes sense to "Indians" as it would to ETs.
The System of Reservations (aka "jurisdictions" or "zones") which the Federation of States United (FSU) put in place -- I'm getting it slightly wrong, close enough -- is well-positioned within the museum industry to keep educating the public about the ecosystem and its cause and effect networks (its "karmic wheels" as some call 'em, meaning they're super-size big and slow-turning, not human, and/or sometimes they're atomic / subatomic).
Call them science museums if you wish. OMSI is a good representative. Where art meets science is in the science of effective presentation, which includes Tufte but also Crumb, Disney, and Dr. Seuss. We use animation and simulation to impart information.
Not all exhibits need take the same broad path or recruit the same public. Highways and byways remain useful. I've got my eye on the Portland Hilton for some esoteric events.
Changing topics a little, I wonder about how the abortion debate would reshape if deformities per pregnancy were on the rise. I'm not saying that's our world at this moment but imagine the moral debates in such circumstances, wherein viable offspring are a rarity and may have to come from implanted genetic material kept in lead-lined repositories deep within the planet (call it Krypton if that makes you feel any better -- I'm fine with generalizing beyond Earth).
Back to measurement-making and sharing results: sensor networks are not intrinsically about "worrying" and/or "not panicking" the public. They're intrinsically more neutral than that, like thermometers and barometers. Their mere presence is not saying anything about what's expected. When people with measuring devices show up, or fly instruments over you in drones, they're not necessarily foretelling doom. They're about providing reliable global data that might be good news as well as bad. The information may leave you indifferent. But at least the information is being collected. "No change" means you're establishing a baseline.
New scouts need to learn to make a fire. To take a reading is routine. To log a result is your habit. Data gathering is something humans do. If they ask you why you're attending to sensors and sensor data, taking readings, ask them why they're not. When you monitor your environment, you are "minding your own business" -- don't let them tell you otherwise. Tell them you're working for a museum, the one that will treasure your data someday.
If you need to focus on the "half full" aspects of the glass, closet pessimist that you are (an "out there" optimist), then subscribe to RSS feeds about happy camper villages where air quality is going up and people are happier with their lives than ever. I'm not saying you won't find such news if you dig. I'm subscribed to a few of those channels myself.
Summary statements:
Just don't let yourself off the hook if you prove yourself gullible. At some level, you need to set your own standards. Suck it up and move on. Don't use the shock of finding yourself hoodwinked (fooled), lied to, as an excuse to stop probing.
You have a right to keep puzzling away, trying to think it through, whatever "it" is. Admit you've been lied to, and you believed, and make that part of your mental model going forward. That does not mean to never again extend trust. That's a decision to keep making: when to trust, when to not.
People lie, some are paid to, and your ability to discern "the story" will be continually challenged. Accept the challenge. Remember computer games. You get to die many times.
If you watched a lot of cop and detective shows, or read those books, you have that scientists' sense that true stories have this advantage over false ones: they cross-check and omni-triangulate, demonstrate internal consistency, to a much higher standard than cobbled-together postpone-the-day-of-reckoning falsehoods.
The latter (make-believe fabrications) tend to fall apart upon probing, which is why a lot of times it's really up to the prober: how much do I want to believe this story?
Acknowledge your biases, at least to yourself. Is it shameful to wish for better living standards for sentient beings? Was the mistake that you trusted, or that you were let down? It cuts both ways.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Novel Plots
In the old days, according to Glenn, the gentleman farmer Republican, to some extent mythical in his role as founder of this nation (v.2), had a different relationship with his pharmacist than today, under Obamacare and under administrations in my lifetime (I go back to the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition, the one Col. F. Prouty writes about).
The GFR (say Abe Lincoln) could walk into a log hewn pharmacy and consult directly with the Chinese apothecaries running it. Ol' doc Watson down the road was for other squeaks and squrims. You didn't need to bug him for a piece of paper (Rx) or have it faxed over or phoned.
Those days are long gone of course, except in some of the mail eating professions (say psychiatry), where big pharma ships samples to every registered practitioner it might legally mail to, and then some if in Canada (statutes differ from nation to nation, as most are aware).
I'm not knocking trying the samples sometimes, as you're also remiss if you're just pushing to patients with no first hand experience, and is that a psychiatrist you want in your service. At least rattle-bearing shamans could be counted on to have tried before they'd buy. Same thing in anthropology: if you won't drink the kool-aid, what right have you to be "an authority" on these people.
Yes, I'm sampling some long-running debates. Many plot lines twist and turn around polarities like this, any novelist or screenwriter knows.
Of course some GFR want to turn back the clock and return to the old days, when they had more authority to self treat and self heal. All this red tape is for bozos, the "boat people" of all varieties who quickly complicated the scene, and the myth.
This is their agenda behind "legalizing drugs" (which doesn't make much sense given most drugs are already legal, at least the good ones).
Inertia is not on their side though. Huge staffs of migrant workers make a living interdicting supplies and enforcing various codes. Customs and borders have always been this way, an opportunity for families to get their fair share. Call them "bribes" if you must, but there is often risk involved, and the families "on the dole" are proud of their roles in the grander scheme of things.
We could make this about the "pepper trade" if that made it more accessible. Apparently people got a lot more out of pepper than most of us today, simply because we take our own living standards for granted and are always lusting after the "next big thing", aka whatever next "spice" as they say on Dune. Again, these plots have been around for awhile.
The GFR (say Abe Lincoln) could walk into a log hewn pharmacy and consult directly with the Chinese apothecaries running it. Ol' doc Watson down the road was for other squeaks and squrims. You didn't need to bug him for a piece of paper (Rx) or have it faxed over or phoned.
Those days are long gone of course, except in some of the mail eating professions (say psychiatry), where big pharma ships samples to every registered practitioner it might legally mail to, and then some if in Canada (statutes differ from nation to nation, as most are aware).
I'm not knocking trying the samples sometimes, as you're also remiss if you're just pushing to patients with no first hand experience, and is that a psychiatrist you want in your service. At least rattle-bearing shamans could be counted on to have tried before they'd buy. Same thing in anthropology: if you won't drink the kool-aid, what right have you to be "an authority" on these people.
Yes, I'm sampling some long-running debates. Many plot lines twist and turn around polarities like this, any novelist or screenwriter knows.
Of course some GFR want to turn back the clock and return to the old days, when they had more authority to self treat and self heal. All this red tape is for bozos, the "boat people" of all varieties who quickly complicated the scene, and the myth.
This is their agenda behind "legalizing drugs" (which doesn't make much sense given most drugs are already legal, at least the good ones).
Inertia is not on their side though. Huge staffs of migrant workers make a living interdicting supplies and enforcing various codes. Customs and borders have always been this way, an opportunity for families to get their fair share. Call them "bribes" if you must, but there is often risk involved, and the families "on the dole" are proud of their roles in the grander scheme of things.
We could make this about the "pepper trade" if that made it more accessible. Apparently people got a lot more out of pepper than most of us today, simply because we take our own living standards for granted and are always lusting after the "next big thing", aka whatever next "spice" as they say on Dune. Again, these plots have been around for awhile.
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Visiting The Open Bastion
I've mostly holed up in a corner office, not the one at Lyrik, my HQS for the longest time, as that place has vanished, but somewhere in the same neighborhood.
Today though, I wandered down Hawthorne to Common Ground where I opened a tab. Bagels and lox plate for lunch, downed with more coffee and a lemon Pellegrino, followed by, more than an hour later, berry pie for dessert.
I tend to treat myself well when slaving, er slaying. That sounds Buffyesque, intentionally. I enjoy the resonance.
Dave DiNucci was there, a fellow Wanderer, formerly NASA, a computer geek (with CSC for awhile I'm pretty sure, like Lindsey was before reporting to my office).
Then I wandered back to The Open Bastion and slayed some more. A first floor walk up, counting ground as T as Italians do. Tara worked here a lot this summer, recruiting sponsors.
At OSCON she met a young woman crewing a bizmo who boasted she'd be retiring at 23 and "never needing to work again".
That's not the physics meaning of "work", or at least of "energy". Just to breath is to work. Gamma rays are doing work. Work is just change, once you take away its value, a moral and economic quality.
We've been yakking about all this on the PER list, physicists and chemists, with the occasional information theorist, all talking about Entropy, what a mess (smile). This is the Buffalo University archived list I joined with encouragement from Dr. Bob Fuller.
Patrick was hard at work on some art, which I photographed for this blog post, as it's promoting my workshop or talk or whatever. I shared with PPUG and Chipy about it, also edu-sig. There's a group signed up already.
On the way between Common Ground and The Open Bastion, I came upon a colorful kid, tooting his own horn so to speak (I'm not sure if it was his literally, or if borrowed from some temple -- we have a number of those around here).
I've seen other child buskers on the street recently. You don't have to be an adult to be talented.
Speaking of "little people" as Laurie Todd calls them, I've been thinking more about how to bring new life to the grandparent - grandchild loop. These are the people with time on their hands, and a natural tendency to want to bridge generations. The people in the middle, the parents, the teenagers, are just too busy, poor them.
I've been thinking about these Internet BizMos (see BizMo Diaries for more on the "business mobile" concept) that travel between "nursing homes" trying to sales pitch adding more from Cyberia.
You want the old folks to catch up, thems that wanna. And so you run like an anthropology course. You encourage talk about social trends (but not too much talk as they'll have time enough to listen to themselves when the van-like thing, the UDO, has departed). You continually sample the subcultures, letting 'em know what's "out there".
Youtube genres and long-running themes: LOL cats. Fail compilations. Annoying Orange.... Mandelbulbs. Oh, and yes there might be that so-called erotic stuff. We could sanitize a cupid site if the home had a policy. There's a lot of material to get through so it's not like we actually stop at Trevi Fountain. Just throw your coins for good luck and remember it was real.
I forgot to write, in my review of Monsters University, how much the not-scary guy reminded me of Annoying Orange. Scholars take note.
But we don't just skate along the surface. The Global U, maybe via Cyberia, will help you learn Python too, so you can learn it with your grand kids. Study it together. Not just Python (computer language) but all kinds of things cyber.
Which is not to forsake the "real world" of insects and flowers 'n stuff -- is National Geographic avoiding that world, by only having pictures and not the real thing? Nonsense, right? You do what you can, with the media you're given.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Monsters University (movie review)
As always, it's fun making fun of movies that make fun of real life. The idyllic college campus in the fall (autumn), the orange color of the leaves... that all makes an impression.
The formula is a standard for kids: the contradiction. A shark who's a vegetarian; an airplane afraid of heights (preview); monsters that aren't scary...
There's a place called "work" where the monsters scare children enough to power their world, and a place called "school" where you train for that place called work. Those deemed unsuitable for the high prestige jobs start getting that message early: you could never be one of them. Some of them, in the meantime, have a strong sense of entitlement. That's a core tension: the entitled WASP named Sullivan versus the newcomer with a Polish / Eastern European name.
I thought the dean was marvelously scary, perfect for the part. She was so many people for me.
Don't be fooled kids: the adults are programming you big time with movies like this. First there's Smallville, then... wait, Clark never gets into college. He goes straight to the city paper, The Daily Planet, does he not? Well, according to the latest version, he works on fishing ships and stuff, while we wait for him to get older.
There's a similar lesson in MU: if you flunk out, it might be because you're really too good for that place, and if you apply yourself in that Monster Factory instead, you might work your way up, starting from the mail room. Then you work in janitorial, cafeteria, and before you know it, you're "discovered" and it's just like they said Hollywood would be: from waitress / waiter to celeb -- and without the expensive Scientology classes.
When the team is losing hope, they study the adults and each finds a role model, a Scarer they might become. I found it poignant that they had to risk their necks to such a level to get this message, whereas the school, left to its own devices, would demoralize without restraint.
Back to stereotypes, the studious nerds are the butt of jokes at this party school of obviously mediocre quality. Its grads are trained to just pick on children. When adults are targeted, the economy proves unable to harness that level of energy. Adult fear is something too intense and therefore verboten. As a cartoon by Disney, it's OK to hint about those things, but lets remember some of the scariest people have been nerds, and I mean that in a nice way ("scary" = "bad ass" = "worthy" in this namespace).
The formula is a standard for kids: the contradiction. A shark who's a vegetarian; an airplane afraid of heights (preview); monsters that aren't scary...
There's a place called "work" where the monsters scare children enough to power their world, and a place called "school" where you train for that place called work. Those deemed unsuitable for the high prestige jobs start getting that message early: you could never be one of them. Some of them, in the meantime, have a strong sense of entitlement. That's a core tension: the entitled WASP named Sullivan versus the newcomer with a Polish / Eastern European name.
I thought the dean was marvelously scary, perfect for the part. She was so many people for me.
Don't be fooled kids: the adults are programming you big time with movies like this. First there's Smallville, then... wait, Clark never gets into college. He goes straight to the city paper, The Daily Planet, does he not? Well, according to the latest version, he works on fishing ships and stuff, while we wait for him to get older.
There's a similar lesson in MU: if you flunk out, it might be because you're really too good for that place, and if you apply yourself in that Monster Factory instead, you might work your way up, starting from the mail room. Then you work in janitorial, cafeteria, and before you know it, you're "discovered" and it's just like they said Hollywood would be: from waitress / waiter to celeb -- and without the expensive Scientology classes.
When the team is losing hope, they study the adults and each finds a role model, a Scarer they might become. I found it poignant that they had to risk their necks to such a level to get this message, whereas the school, left to its own devices, would demoralize without restraint.
Back to stereotypes, the studious nerds are the butt of jokes at this party school of obviously mediocre quality. Its grads are trained to just pick on children. When adults are targeted, the economy proves unable to harness that level of energy. Adult fear is something too intense and therefore verboten. As a cartoon by Disney, it's OK to hint about those things, but lets remember some of the scariest people have been nerds, and I mean that in a nice way ("scary" = "bad ass" = "worthy" in this namespace).
Monday, August 12, 2013
Man of Steel (movie review)
I think I'll skip making any critical remarks about the film as a film. Thoroughly competent, nothing to complain about. A confidant and comprehensive rendering of the myth.
More I'm just meditating on the whole matrix of filmdom. Once you've lived to be my age, you've seen a lot of films and recognize the signature patterns. You see the pattern language.
I want to highlight what I saw as an homage to Marco Spitoni's CodeGuardian, which I've shown often in Saturday Academy classes, as an example of what can be done with rendering and a small competent crew. The appreciation for film making is there too. The word "Guardian" is used even as a truck is thrown at an oncoming airplane by some robot -- or close enough.
Like the most recent Star Trek, Into the Darkness, allusions to 911 infuse the crashing building scenes. We have these views etched in the collective psyche and here they surface.
Contemplating what it would be like to be contacted by another hominid, landing in space ships. That's etched in the psyche from surface ships landings too. One day, the Spanish ships were there in the bay, and life was never the same. Or they came to Plymouth Rock.
Smallville is small town midwest North America, amidst fields and railroads. Familiar brands fill in the mindscape: IHOP and Sears. What time are we in? Vaguely before now. There's no concerted attempt to make it the 1950s, but then we don't see cell phones. The NORAD type place seems way ahead of it's time, as does the satellite. No international space station. There's a subtle nostalgia, but only because Superman Comics have that baked in. They come from that place.
Spending a generous amount of time on Krypton is a good investment I think. That's a fairly tough angle to take given we have to create a whole world. Somehow an alien world has got to segue to the hokey uniform and somewhat embarrassing caped look, made fun of in The Incredibles.
A great dream in the chest of our child, caped crusader, jumping up and down in bed, slaying dragons. We come from there. Superman is an ego struggling to master being in a body, having senses. I need to be a hero in the face of anxieties, one of the hardest ones being aging and dying parents, who also seem more like strangers. The family argues in the truck. Alien means alienated. Dad is soon gone, mom more fragile. We meet Lois in the cemetery, someone willing the share the grief.
My thanks to all the talented people who advanced us to a next iteration. Good work.
More I'm just meditating on the whole matrix of filmdom. Once you've lived to be my age, you've seen a lot of films and recognize the signature patterns. You see the pattern language.
I want to highlight what I saw as an homage to Marco Spitoni's CodeGuardian, which I've shown often in Saturday Academy classes, as an example of what can be done with rendering and a small competent crew. The appreciation for film making is there too. The word "Guardian" is used even as a truck is thrown at an oncoming airplane by some robot -- or close enough.
Like the most recent Star Trek, Into the Darkness, allusions to 911 infuse the crashing building scenes. We have these views etched in the collective psyche and here they surface.
Contemplating what it would be like to be contacted by another hominid, landing in space ships. That's etched in the psyche from surface ships landings too. One day, the Spanish ships were there in the bay, and life was never the same. Or they came to Plymouth Rock.
Smallville is small town midwest North America, amidst fields and railroads. Familiar brands fill in the mindscape: IHOP and Sears. What time are we in? Vaguely before now. There's no concerted attempt to make it the 1950s, but then we don't see cell phones. The NORAD type place seems way ahead of it's time, as does the satellite. No international space station. There's a subtle nostalgia, but only because Superman Comics have that baked in. They come from that place.
Spending a generous amount of time on Krypton is a good investment I think. That's a fairly tough angle to take given we have to create a whole world. Somehow an alien world has got to segue to the hokey uniform and somewhat embarrassing caped look, made fun of in The Incredibles.
A great dream in the chest of our child, caped crusader, jumping up and down in bed, slaying dragons. We come from there. Superman is an ego struggling to master being in a body, having senses. I need to be a hero in the face of anxieties, one of the hardest ones being aging and dying parents, who also seem more like strangers. The family argues in the truck. Alien means alienated. Dad is soon gone, mom more fragile. We meet Lois in the cemetery, someone willing the share the grief.
My thanks to all the talented people who advanced us to a next iteration. Good work.
Thursday, August 08, 2013
Star Trek: Into the Darkness (movie review)
I'd call this a "meta Star Trek" in that it truly starts over with a new cast, yet gets back to its roots in the collective psyche, where it has its roots in the first place. The space of comic books, of fantasy, day dreams, children at play.
The Federation has always flirted with military aesthetics, what with the usual male-dominated hierarchy of obsessed-about-rank, rule-governed bureaucrats. We flirt with this big time, alluding to all that's fashionable in uniforms, a familiar theme in the films. There's the Darth Vader admiral, wanting to pilot a Death Star in wartime. His daughter is disgusted. Savagery just doesn't cut it with the newer generation.
This finding of too much war abhorrent is set early in Star Trek history. The crew is young and looming war with the Klingons, Cold War foes, would give way to a truce in future chapters, a token Klingon on board. Universe gets more and more into Civil Rights. The 1960s fade in the rear view mirror. But first we need to live through it a little, encountering the Battle Crazed Galactica -- the warrior archetype, frozen in time, eternally a possibility. The dark father thaws one, a symbolic opening of Pandora's war games again. We go back to 911, more nutty times. The audience is not necessarily happy about all this. So much death and destruction, with so little comic relief.
The comedy is in adhering to the formulas, with a guest appearance from Leonard Nimoy.
There's irony in working hard to sound the themes, even when they're so well known. Kirk is all too human, a bundle of bravery and intuition, whereas Spock is more geeky but not without dignity. These characters know how they go together. More comic relief with the twist though, of Spock in a lover's quarrel. The original Star Trek was always testing his character in that way somehow. Jim is bravado and hubris. Spock is rule-bound. As aspects of the Personhood (what corporations wish they had), we recognize familiar faces.
The credits salute post-911 vets, a nodding acknowledgement of the dive into militarism the culture experienced, with darth vadery types coming out of the wood work. There's a claustrophobia in this eternal return. For all this rushing into the future, it's still so Art Deco, so much our own projection. Our collective imagination hems us in, knitting us a fabric of spacetime.
The physics is familiar: the airlessness of space, a suction, its debris, the shedding of heat shielding upon re-entry. The frenetic parade of planets at the end suggests those comic book origins, the "outer space" of our inner imaginations. The theme music is boldly operatic. Universe: a place to feel at home, but not free from danger.
The Federation has always flirted with military aesthetics, what with the usual male-dominated hierarchy of obsessed-about-rank, rule-governed bureaucrats. We flirt with this big time, alluding to all that's fashionable in uniforms, a familiar theme in the films. There's the Darth Vader admiral, wanting to pilot a Death Star in wartime. His daughter is disgusted. Savagery just doesn't cut it with the newer generation.
This finding of too much war abhorrent is set early in Star Trek history. The crew is young and looming war with the Klingons, Cold War foes, would give way to a truce in future chapters, a token Klingon on board. Universe gets more and more into Civil Rights. The 1960s fade in the rear view mirror. But first we need to live through it a little, encountering the Battle Crazed Galactica -- the warrior archetype, frozen in time, eternally a possibility. The dark father thaws one, a symbolic opening of Pandora's war games again. We go back to 911, more nutty times. The audience is not necessarily happy about all this. So much death and destruction, with so little comic relief.
The comedy is in adhering to the formulas, with a guest appearance from Leonard Nimoy.
There's irony in working hard to sound the themes, even when they're so well known. Kirk is all too human, a bundle of bravery and intuition, whereas Spock is more geeky but not without dignity. These characters know how they go together. More comic relief with the twist though, of Spock in a lover's quarrel. The original Star Trek was always testing his character in that way somehow. Jim is bravado and hubris. Spock is rule-bound. As aspects of the Personhood (what corporations wish they had), we recognize familiar faces.
The credits salute post-911 vets, a nodding acknowledgement of the dive into militarism the culture experienced, with darth vadery types coming out of the wood work. There's a claustrophobia in this eternal return. For all this rushing into the future, it's still so Art Deco, so much our own projection. Our collective imagination hems us in, knitting us a fabric of spacetime.
The physics is familiar: the airlessness of space, a suction, its debris, the shedding of heat shielding upon re-entry. The frenetic parade of planets at the end suggests those comic book origins, the "outer space" of our inner imaginations. The theme music is boldly operatic. Universe: a place to feel at home, but not free from danger.
Friday, August 02, 2013
More Ruminations on OSCON
I try to get to R0ml's talks, and as one of the screeners, I bring my experience of "what's an OSCON". We like Perl people. Larry and family like R0ml talks. So do Alex and Anna (fellow Pythonistas -- she had the Google glasses this year).
This year he was talking about the reflex-conditioning around "secret source" and how it still impacted open source practices. Aren't "config files" just a holdover from not being allowed to compile in your favorite settings? It takes less code to say it in source, he showed in slides. And what about testing? If you're doing that because the source itself is closed to you, then you're a good little monkey, but studies prove more bugs are found by people reading code with comprehension.
On this last point I could feel audience unease and we had a hand go up. Defense of testing runs deep and R0ml was uttering deliberate heresies. Even though we knew that, it was hard to not formulate a come back, right there and then.
As background, I should come clean that I take the podium in favor of "test driven development" for money. It's a soap box, with examples, and I know in the business world that strict TDD was never king of the hill. What's TDD? You actually write the tests of your code before you write the code, and then your code is all about passing your own tests. It's like playing chess against yourself. The testing is looking for weaknesses. You do counter-intelligence against your developer self, and that makes your developer self develop, which is why TDD is a valuable plank in the "agile" platform.
The other talk I've been thinking about is the one on Race and Racism. She was good at making us endure a little awkwardness as the theory is Race is best confronted with such a willingness. Your first moves as a ballerina, as a wannabe, might make you feel awkward, given you're a blundering oaf. Shrek trying to play Tinkerbell.
However much I appreciate the Gibbsian / visceral approach to self analysis, I think we should also provide road maps, topologies for these topographies, ala Euler (I'm using these names with a Buckyesque spin). She was always asked "what are you" in terms of race and she was force fed the usual answer of "mixed" having had a "white" father and a "black" mother. The idea of "mixed" implies "pure" a kind of phenotype, and then we're back to the five, seven or eleven "races of man" depending on which Bible-informed Social Darwinism or other Anglophone pseudo-science we happen to be reading.
As I was saying at NPYM, I really don't trust the Anglophones to puzzle their way free of the Race concept, because they base so much on it. The investment is still there. Getting "beyond" race does not mean deconstructing the concept as anthropologists, but being "tolerant" of other races and such bull crap, buying into the basic premise, which is there's some essence or blood substance we're keeping track of, and fractional bookkeeping applies.
1/32nd Native American is supposed to make sense. And it does, after a fashion, when it comes to family inheritance, legal rights and so forth. Membership in a tribe may hinge on proving that 1/32nd is "real".
But this is not really genetics. The genetic code has no specific "race" gene and the kind of mixing that goes on is not captured by our feeble words like "white", "black", "yellow" and "brown" (or "blue" if you think aristocrats are divinely "blue bloods"). Those are kindergarten concepts, for politicians who choose to avoid science. But they're also very embedded in English, these concepts, which taints it and limits its utility.
This year he was talking about the reflex-conditioning around "secret source" and how it still impacted open source practices. Aren't "config files" just a holdover from not being allowed to compile in your favorite settings? It takes less code to say it in source, he showed in slides. And what about testing? If you're doing that because the source itself is closed to you, then you're a good little monkey, but studies prove more bugs are found by people reading code with comprehension.
On this last point I could feel audience unease and we had a hand go up. Defense of testing runs deep and R0ml was uttering deliberate heresies. Even though we knew that, it was hard to not formulate a come back, right there and then.
As background, I should come clean that I take the podium in favor of "test driven development" for money. It's a soap box, with examples, and I know in the business world that strict TDD was never king of the hill. What's TDD? You actually write the tests of your code before you write the code, and then your code is all about passing your own tests. It's like playing chess against yourself. The testing is looking for weaknesses. You do counter-intelligence against your developer self, and that makes your developer self develop, which is why TDD is a valuable plank in the "agile" platform.
The other talk I've been thinking about is the one on Race and Racism. She was good at making us endure a little awkwardness as the theory is Race is best confronted with such a willingness. Your first moves as a ballerina, as a wannabe, might make you feel awkward, given you're a blundering oaf. Shrek trying to play Tinkerbell.
However much I appreciate the Gibbsian / visceral approach to self analysis, I think we should also provide road maps, topologies for these topographies, ala Euler (I'm using these names with a Buckyesque spin). She was always asked "what are you" in terms of race and she was force fed the usual answer of "mixed" having had a "white" father and a "black" mother. The idea of "mixed" implies "pure" a kind of phenotype, and then we're back to the five, seven or eleven "races of man" depending on which Bible-informed Social Darwinism or other Anglophone pseudo-science we happen to be reading.
As I was saying at NPYM, I really don't trust the Anglophones to puzzle their way free of the Race concept, because they base so much on it. The investment is still there. Getting "beyond" race does not mean deconstructing the concept as anthropologists, but being "tolerant" of other races and such bull crap, buying into the basic premise, which is there's some essence or blood substance we're keeping track of, and fractional bookkeeping applies.
1/32nd Native American is supposed to make sense. And it does, after a fashion, when it comes to family inheritance, legal rights and so forth. Membership in a tribe may hinge on proving that 1/32nd is "real".
But this is not really genetics. The genetic code has no specific "race" gene and the kind of mixing that goes on is not captured by our feeble words like "white", "black", "yellow" and "brown" (or "blue" if you think aristocrats are divinely "blue bloods"). Those are kindergarten concepts, for politicians who choose to avoid science. But they're also very embedded in English, these concepts, which taints it and limits its utility.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
OSCON XV
The Open Source Convention, produced by O'Reilly Media with help from many stalwart sponsors (more every year), is always a blast of streaming data for the napkin-sized (when unfolded) neo-cortex, where, according to Jeff Hawkins, the equivalent of the CLA (Cortical Learning Algorithm) is running in distributed fashion.
Numenta's mechanized version, at the heart of Grok, is maybe the most important breakthrough in AI in a long time, we shall see.
Clojure is making more of a splash with me, and I got it working over a break on my Apple Mac Air running Lion 10.7.5. I have Clojure and Node.js books open in Safari in tabs, and flip to them when blocking on other tasks (writer's block, web slow... multi-tasking, even if sequential, means not waiting for water to boil -- domestic tasks are oft done in parallel, yet one at a time).
Guido's keynote at Pycon, plus chatting with Yarko, has me realizing that PEP 3156 aka the Tulip repo, is Python's hat in the ring, where asynchronous I/O is concerned. The flagship there has been Twisted, but now the language itself is building in more awareness -- not the first time Python has baked in some of what might have started 3rd party.
Speaking of concurrency, David DiNucci wandered through. I saw him listening intently to Tim O'Reilly, of whom I took several photos as he held forth on Open Government (a topic). Other Wanderers present: Christine and Patrick. I saw Mark Allyn from our Meeting.
There's also a bevy from work. We hung out, at Planet OSCON, at a table, Tara again joining us, along with O'Reilly author Steve Holden of The Open Bastion, the conference organizing company (Apachecon, Djangocon, Apache Cloudstack Collaboration Conference and more).
Clojure is a LISP-like mostly functional language that runs atop the Java JVM (not unlike Jython in that respect). Clojure also controlled the quadcopter drone, which appeared remarkably stable. Its programmer: a whiz woman, Carin Meier, who'd always wanted a robot friend, and with a degree in physics. Perfect for Tara, sitting next to me through the keynotes. She'd always wanted an Aibo, downloaded the manuals for one as soon as she could read at that level.
My philosophy of putting speakers to work at OSCON (have them deliver more than one talk if possible) seemed personified by Tim Burgland, both our Git trainer (as in Github) and our Discrete Mathematics teacher, where Clojure was featured. He walked us through Euclid's Algorithm in its recursive form, and talked about the Euclidean Extended Algorithm for getting an RSA d from an e, given knowledge of phi(N). I walked up to him after to mention Mathematics for the Digital Age, a high school discrete math text, featuring Python, that shoots for RSA as its grand finale.
The functional languages will likely grow a larger footprint at OSCON, as the incoming chair, Simon St. Laurent, is getting more into 'em. He promised as much from the stage this morning.
Mark Shuttleworth had no sharp delta to surprise us with, just a continual phasing in of his (Canonical's) flagship products: Juju, and maybe, if it gets the green light, Ubuntu Edge.
Juju shares a space with OpenStack, Puppet, Chef in that it's about spinning up combinations (bundles) of services. The glue is in the "charms". Mark's Foundation flew me to England that time, to discuss curriculum topics for three days (a select group) in East Kensington.
Speaking of Ubuntu, the Chinese government has selected that as its official OS of choice going forward, fairly recent news. I attended a talk on OSS in East Asia (which doesn't include the Philippines). Japan and Korea enjoy a freer Internet than mainland Chinese, as the latter are behind a great firewall, protected by Big Nanny.
I met the incoming chair Simon St. Laurent in the Skyview Terrac, a 7000 square foot gathering space at the base of one of the Oregon Convention Center towers. Numenta was there too.
When it comes to East and West hemispheres growing more of a shared brain, the nexus formed by computer science, OSS (free / open software), and global English (one might call it an evolving dialect, or family of dialects) is something of a bottleneck. Piracy is also a problem as stealing what people want to be paid for delays mature development of competing projects. If all you do is steal Windows, you will never acquire the skill set needed to hack on open source software.
Better translations out of English and into Korean, Japanese, and Chinese are sorely needed. Even with a core / kernel in this shared code (Anglo derived) the user space (student space) needs better expression in local terms and characters. Unicode is helping as well. Japanese folks are proud of Ruby and lots of curriculum is being written for that language in Japanese.
Given the Philippines is already Anglophone in large degree, one might expect more of an explosion there.
Patrick Barton is especially interested in the Numenta stuff because of its focus on energy grids, where Grok is already used to predict the near future demand patterns, based on timeline data constantly streaming in.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
A Major Monday
I had two major meetings on my calendar for today, each quite different.
The AAPT is back in town, at the Hilton, enjoying one of its two conferences a year. The last time AAPT met in Portland, in 2010, I was the invited guest of one of its past presidents, Dr. Bob Fuller emeritus, University of Nebraska / Lincoln. This year, 2013, we gathered to remember Bob and to listen to some of his collaborators and former students recount their experiences.
I met with Margaret Fuller again, and other family. Margaret and Bob had long ago planned to attend the first reunion since 1964 of the Methodist English High School (MEHS) in Burma (Myanmar) this January. Bob did not live long enough to see it, but Margaret was there and able to immerse herself in another side of her life partner. Among the 670 alumni was Aung San Suu Kyi, another one of Bob's students (he was there from 1958 to 1961).
Had I been one of the speakers my story would have been somewhat similar to theirs in emphasizing Bob's eagerness to leverage digital technologies for their physics-teaching potential, including but not limited to interactive simulations. I had worked with his team turning simple Excel spreadsheets from motion sensors, pasted to a ballerina, into ray-traced animations, with a pipeline of Python + POVray. Our work was a free CDROM at the AAPT conference one year.
I was not aware Bob had developed Playground Physics and Amusement Park Physics to quite that degree. I came along much later with my First Person Physics, a somewhat umbrella term for a kind of physics you learn through visceral first person experience (subjectively, in your bones) not just "objectively". I can see why Bob found his thinking so consistent with my own and considered me one of his team.
The second meeting concerned the brick and mortar structure we call "the Pavilion" in the Buckman neighborhood. Several religious groups and lineages, as well as non-professing, have structured relationships through community meetings there. We're like an EMO. I showed up in my Reverend Billy mode, prepared to sound churchy with my prepared remarks.
However, I did not feel a need to steal the show and merely introduced myself from the back of the room, donning an AFSC Corporation Member name tag (left over from the last Philadelphia meeting). Lindsey (Officer Walker) was doing fine in her Betty Crocker outfit (in turn somewhat suggested by Sketch, who'd advised her to "dress normal, like Betty Crocker").
Since the meeting was scheduled as a potluck and was our regular meal time, we just folded the two events together. FNB turned up in large numbers, Satya and Fallon included.
Given I was in a suit coat on a hot day, and that I weigh too much, I was finding the meeting room hot and stuffy. I hoofed it over to the McMenamins, the Barley Mill, where I explained to the bartender what we were meeting about in that nearby stuffy room. She uses the pavilion too and wished me luck keeping it open.
I snarfed down a Boneyard IPA, like I'd done with Patrick the day before, and then grabbed a free Yerba (non-alcoholic) in a can on my loop through the Buckman park back to the church. A perimeter vehicle (human powered) was giving them out for free.
I'd missed the Art Hendricks presentation and only stayed up to where they were going to consider padlocking our meeting structure. They've already padlocked the one at Powell Park, meanly excluding thousands of non-voting high school teens from congregating there, so I know they're cruel and heartless, or at least poorly managed. Why any building calling itself a Christian church would allow such a meeting on its premises... don't get me started.
That was just too sacrilegious a discussion for me to want to sit through it, especially wearing a suit in a stuffy room, so I absented myself before my Trimet ticket had expired, sharing my prepared sermon with Miz Melody later (she's the Reverend Billy fan).
I hadn't realized the Hinson Church had a full indoor gym with a basketball court and everything. I didn't get a look at the kitchen but I bet it's more than adequate. These privileged churchgoers have a lot of assets.
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Zoning for Scouting
How might scouting relate to the local and global problem of refugee camps. In Portland, we have R2D2 (R2Dtoo), an efficiently run protected area for tent users. Tents in the city are considered "bad for business" by business owners, at least those not involved in the camping business. Some of ours, such as REI, are, and urban chic does include the ninja sub-branch, with people living in trees if necessary, while the city planners pass them by, no zoning imagined, except perhaps by the airport.
Public facilities, the world around, are a hallmark of a society's willingness to support itself with public spaces. Sanitation duty is a "dirty job" (one of many) though may be connected to jobs of high repute, such as sanitation engineer. Lew Scholl of our Quaker meeting is a sanitation engineer and joined the team to Managua. Much was learned of peoples needs and some collaborative achievements were engaged in. My daughter went on that trip and helped mix concrete.
Teresina Havens, whose work I've been reading in the meetinghouse library, served on clean up crews for Tokyo's public restrooms. Some Buddhist trainings involve taking on civic duty with gusto and learning humble tasks. That's not unlike scouting, with its ethic of cheerfulness and helpfulness to others. All without some Nazi / KKK pledge to "racial purity" or other dogma to weigh it down -- Buddhism has lasted thousands of years for a reason.
Scouts on snazzy bikes complement the ones in crew carts or bike carts, peddling warez (wares). These might be non-commercial, like Freedom Toasters (a hybrid -- branded / sponsored open source CD / DVD copiers). Helmet cams? GPS? I'd expect the chapters to work out their own best practices in response to actual conditions, as Food Not Bombs must. Like our leadership is currently split on whether Buckman has enough relevance, given the siege at R2Dtoo and its "bad for business" tents. At least there's a common front line. Which is not to suggest tents in Colonel Summers.
In fact, people need ways to recycle and reinvent themselves, even within the space of a physical lifetime, more than once maybe. Christians use "rebirth" talk, as in "born again", which should be enough of a hint that life changes are involved. Tokyo currently has maybe 6K people living full time in "Internet Cafe" shared facility booth motels. These are not a result of optimum planning.
Camp grounds with decorum, like scouting camps, with sanitation and organization, were what US tourists wanted to find in Germany after the war, and did. Tourism means sharing the camps, what my own family did, especially in summers, the car's rooftop (a station wagon) crammed with gear, including a family-sized tent from Stronmeyer, the German manufacturer.
Yes, things are different in the winter. The idea of a giant dome, with tents in it, is cliche in science fiction, but then there's a reason people migrate, north to south, south to north. I'm suggesting we don't all have roots. As Bucky Fuller pointed out, humans are not trees (though I bet others have noticed that too).
One summer, between jobs, we had given up the apartment and were in transition back to Florida, with a stint in the Middle East as AFSC camp leaders, working with Palestinian "boy scouts" (a rough translation as they could easily be fully grown men). We drilled a swimming pool in the rock crust, hauling boulders to the dumping space, mostly in the morning hours when it was cool enough for such work. But we camped in Rome that same summer, Camp Monte Antenna I think they called it. By the end of the summer we were living in a mobile home estate in Florida (mom's parents). Next stop: the Philippines.
The government already has a network of public lands and campgrounds it tends, but you need a motor vehicle and lots of gas, or lots of time on a bicycle, to get to them. We are finding more and more youth with more and more time for the bicycles, which have improved in their design. But the destinations need to be near cities or in them, as often as far away.
But then US cities are afraid of those "shanty towns" of sheet metal and no sanitation service, unplanned communities (like unplanned pregnancies). Which is why I'm suggesting a planning style or zoning solution which raises expectations for these camps, and in some cases commits them to civilian service, and not just "dirty jobs".
You could have a mayor's family in such a camp even, or at least immediate offspring. People in tents have responsibilities. Many of them are idealistic and study science. Some help place eco-sensors at leaky sites, places where potentially dangerous gases are emitted. They're trained in the use of safety gear. Important work. Monitoring, advising, comparing notes, publishing findings.
Activists don't want sprawling mansions with a pool. They want adventure and improved prospects for those with few. You don't need to call it "missionary work" to make it worthy. Nor must you call it "a pilgrimage". But if you do use such religious language, and maybe manage to rope in Burning Man, that's not to your detriment either.
Wandering troupes of troubadours, sharing a bus, is an old meme in this ecosystem, pioneered by the Grateful Dead in the electric guitar era.
You don't need to burn a lot of biofuel and if you share cultivation in rotation, tending the crops in your care, as you travel, then you have access to a rotating cafeteria, year round. You farm and you travel and enjoy your good health.
This does not make you a "threat to society" so much as a "strand of glue" in keeping humans informed and up to date, with time to plan rather than panic and freak out ("future shock" should be thrilling more than chilling, an opportunity to heal from something).
Will freeways get a bicycle lane? That sounds horrific to truckers. More likely are smaller single user electrical solutions, more solar power stations. With an electric cycle with paniers, you've got something to get you around.
Trade for a fuel powered hog at the station or share a van, or follow the cyclists and their special high energy diets, ultra light gear. That's certainly an athletic lifestyle and a great way to see the world.
Leave the freeways to buses and trucks that take both the travelers and their gear for longer hops, wheels up in Portland, wheels down in Salem. People take their bicycles back and forth, to ride on either end.
Some have lightweight tents and are hopping from city to city, sometimes as troupes (as in scouting).
Public facilities, the world around, are a hallmark of a society's willingness to support itself with public spaces. Sanitation duty is a "dirty job" (one of many) though may be connected to jobs of high repute, such as sanitation engineer. Lew Scholl of our Quaker meeting is a sanitation engineer and joined the team to Managua. Much was learned of peoples needs and some collaborative achievements were engaged in. My daughter went on that trip and helped mix concrete.
Teresina Havens, whose work I've been reading in the meetinghouse library, served on clean up crews for Tokyo's public restrooms. Some Buddhist trainings involve taking on civic duty with gusto and learning humble tasks. That's not unlike scouting, with its ethic of cheerfulness and helpfulness to others. All without some Nazi / KKK pledge to "racial purity" or other dogma to weigh it down -- Buddhism has lasted thousands of years for a reason.
Scouts on snazzy bikes complement the ones in crew carts or bike carts, peddling warez (wares). These might be non-commercial, like Freedom Toasters (a hybrid -- branded / sponsored open source CD / DVD copiers). Helmet cams? GPS? I'd expect the chapters to work out their own best practices in response to actual conditions, as Food Not Bombs must. Like our leadership is currently split on whether Buckman has enough relevance, given the siege at R2Dtoo and its "bad for business" tents. At least there's a common front line. Which is not to suggest tents in Colonel Summers.
In fact, people need ways to recycle and reinvent themselves, even within the space of a physical lifetime, more than once maybe. Christians use "rebirth" talk, as in "born again", which should be enough of a hint that life changes are involved. Tokyo currently has maybe 6K people living full time in "Internet Cafe" shared facility booth motels. These are not a result of optimum planning.
Camp grounds with decorum, like scouting camps, with sanitation and organization, were what US tourists wanted to find in Germany after the war, and did. Tourism means sharing the camps, what my own family did, especially in summers, the car's rooftop (a station wagon) crammed with gear, including a family-sized tent from Stronmeyer, the German manufacturer.
Yes, things are different in the winter. The idea of a giant dome, with tents in it, is cliche in science fiction, but then there's a reason people migrate, north to south, south to north. I'm suggesting we don't all have roots. As Bucky Fuller pointed out, humans are not trees (though I bet others have noticed that too).
One summer, between jobs, we had given up the apartment and were in transition back to Florida, with a stint in the Middle East as AFSC camp leaders, working with Palestinian "boy scouts" (a rough translation as they could easily be fully grown men). We drilled a swimming pool in the rock crust, hauling boulders to the dumping space, mostly in the morning hours when it was cool enough for such work. But we camped in Rome that same summer, Camp Monte Antenna I think they called it. By the end of the summer we were living in a mobile home estate in Florida (mom's parents). Next stop: the Philippines.
The government already has a network of public lands and campgrounds it tends, but you need a motor vehicle and lots of gas, or lots of time on a bicycle, to get to them. We are finding more and more youth with more and more time for the bicycles, which have improved in their design. But the destinations need to be near cities or in them, as often as far away.
But then US cities are afraid of those "shanty towns" of sheet metal and no sanitation service, unplanned communities (like unplanned pregnancies). Which is why I'm suggesting a planning style or zoning solution which raises expectations for these camps, and in some cases commits them to civilian service, and not just "dirty jobs".
You could have a mayor's family in such a camp even, or at least immediate offspring. People in tents have responsibilities. Many of them are idealistic and study science. Some help place eco-sensors at leaky sites, places where potentially dangerous gases are emitted. They're trained in the use of safety gear. Important work. Monitoring, advising, comparing notes, publishing findings.
Activists don't want sprawling mansions with a pool. They want adventure and improved prospects for those with few. You don't need to call it "missionary work" to make it worthy. Nor must you call it "a pilgrimage". But if you do use such religious language, and maybe manage to rope in Burning Man, that's not to your detriment either.
Wandering troupes of troubadours, sharing a bus, is an old meme in this ecosystem, pioneered by the Grateful Dead in the electric guitar era.
You don't need to burn a lot of biofuel and if you share cultivation in rotation, tending the crops in your care, as you travel, then you have access to a rotating cafeteria, year round. You farm and you travel and enjoy your good health.
This does not make you a "threat to society" so much as a "strand of glue" in keeping humans informed and up to date, with time to plan rather than panic and freak out ("future shock" should be thrilling more than chilling, an opportunity to heal from something).
Will freeways get a bicycle lane? That sounds horrific to truckers. More likely are smaller single user electrical solutions, more solar power stations. With an electric cycle with paniers, you've got something to get you around.
Trade for a fuel powered hog at the station or share a van, or follow the cyclists and their special high energy diets, ultra light gear. That's certainly an athletic lifestyle and a great way to see the world.
Leave the freeways to buses and trucks that take both the travelers and their gear for longer hops, wheels up in Portland, wheels down in Salem. People take their bicycles back and forth, to ride on either end.
Some have lightweight tents and are hopping from city to city, sometimes as troupes (as in scouting).
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Make Them Fat!
padlocked pavilion: students keep out!
Fast forward and you find the large proud structure at Powell Park is closed, padlocked. The public high school is still there, with a Burgerville directly across the street. There's a McDonalds or is it Wendy's (or both) a little further away. You know the scene: get teenagers obese, like the adults, milking them for easy profit.
I'm not saying Burgerville is bad or unhealthy actually. Of all the fast food chains, it's probably the one I'm least worried about. It helped our Cleveland Cannibals (speech & debate team) raise money, whereas the district itself is too starved, its funds blown away by other governments on worthless munitions, million-dollar soldiers etc.
Health conscious kids go to Burgerville and find things on the menu. This isn't really about Burgerville as the villain, but about those who padlocked the park pavilion, forcing kids to become consumers whether they wished to or no. It's the surrounding ecosystem that reeks.
It's the American way, to be of service to commercial establishments. Just standing around in a Gazebo or Kiosk or Pavilion is considered "loitering" -- unless its a public park ("a loophole! -- must close it" thinks the idiocracy).
Repeat this story a thousand times. Public facilities, non-commercial, not making a buck on fast food, are accessible to young healthy bodies. Fattening food is placed directly in front of a school and options to stay slender are physically closed off by Parks and Recreation.
How do you spell "ugly", how do you spell "mismanaged".
What does Cleveland High School think of the closure? Were the neighbors asked? How many and when? What was the process? Were the students polled?
These questions are pertinent now because the very same mismanaged bureau, complicit in making teens fat and less thrifty, is now thinking of applying the same treatment to another health nut space, another public Pavilion in another public park.
People show up on bicycles and enjoy themselves, get out of the rain. They share healthy food, have a picnic.
"They're having too much fun, they must go to Burgerville, they must be commercial consumers!"
The hive mind is buzzing again.
Come to Hinson Church at SE Taylor and 20th next Monday if you want to hear the hive mind buzz.
Saturday, July 06, 2013
Fourth of July, 2013
This was a memorable event in that we had a guy physically wrapped in the stars & stripes shouting stereotypical patriotic slogans in a drunken yahoo style, a kind of folklore exhibit.
We were standing atop a high building with only intermittent guard rails so being truly falling down drunk (I managed to stumble, but because of a rooftop projection, not the beer -- it was getting dark) would have been dangerous.
The Waterfront Fireworks were not "on the dot" at 10 pm. We amused ourselves watching other, more distant displays, we thought Oaks Park and probably Lake Oswego. We could hear the Blues Festival, where a number of my friends were. Then the closer fireworks got started. I rediscovered the fireworks setting on my camera and experimented with technique.
These were mostly geeks I knew from around town, Python coders and so on. I was accompanying our colleague from Brazil, Henrique, who was here for a World Domination Summit. That maybe sounds threatening because most of us won't have been at said summit and don't want to be dominated, however I suggest one should translate it more as Self Mastery (world = self experience).
To have dominion in this world is to have a sufficient skill set to enjoy some satisfaction in piloting through life. I'm not going to the conference either though, so I shouldn't talk.
"Jihad" has a similar translation BTW, as "inner conquest" or "transcendence of pettiness" (yet another spin). In the Quaker tradition we similarly speak of "inward weapons" when using our war metaphors.
Independent... in the realization of "no one thing is Self" i.e. selfhood is not a thing (nothing). Repose in being "alone as everything" is different from the loneliness of separation and abandonment (isolation, confinement). Each nation needed to see itself as responsible for its contextualizing world, and so transcended its borders to become a part of the "space program" (our shared campus, the "global U").
The withering of the state has been correlated with that growing sense of "globe-hood" many humans have experienced. Thanks to global climate change, pictures of Earth from Universe, better telecommunications, more circling, we're more aware of our spherical selfhood, a network of convergences.
Average humans seem like blood cells in that they circulate, sometimes in cars and trains, planes and ships. They may be likewise (like the blood) transporting substances of high potential ala 12 Monkeys.
Memes have the easiest time traveling, face the least resistance, but they're also ephemeral. Neutrinos flood out of the sun as lighter elements bake to heavier ones, hydrogen to helium, a fusing process.
Enormous energy gets thrown out but a lot of it is so close to not mattering, and yet has its significant role in cosmic bookkeeping. That's lucky for life, as DNA is delicate. Cosmic rays punch real holes but neutrinos are extremely unlikely to interact. A giant tank of liquid, shielded from all else, only detects a handful.
Monday, July 01, 2013
Dancer in the Dark (movie review)
At first I thought this might be like Donkey Boy in another gender, but as we get to know the character she seems less and less alien in some dimensions.
Dancer is more a continuation of my previously reviewed film by this same director, Breaking the Waves, which focuses on a woman of unnatural innocence who gets everything fubar as a consequence.
Selma Jezkova's loyalty to secrecy and "keeping mum" is too strictly translated into her native Czech I think. She should have been more forthcoming in her own defense at the trial. "Yes, I lied my way through the eye test, I just didn't want Jessie to worry" -- which explains how the conflicted / confessing cop got to the cookie jar.
Jessie is her son and the metaphor for their blindness (both use thick glasses) is strengthened in their mutual caring mixed with alienation. They're not on the same page in a lot of ways.
That the mother feels guilt or even actual responsibility for Jessie's karma is something the court would respond to, but why not just tell it like the movie we all just saw? Spill the beans already. Relay each conversation. Having secrets means you're capable of sharing them.
The film is scary. Showing the state committing murder and the eeriness of the prison relationship... is it progressive blindness or madness, as the musicals become more hallucinatory in quality? The music comes from another time, closer to our own.
But then imagining an audience of voyeurs to one's life is like madness, but then so is a sense of being "on stage"... so then who isn't mad in that sense? The eyes of others are upon us, if not literally in a theater.
The movie twists around to ask that question. It also asserts something about the musical: the opera uses music and dance to express an underlying story that the banal plot lines of cinema verite (and real life) would not capture. The surreal mirrors the real. Art shows us other angles.
In treating serious darkness with musical numbers, the genre is fighting back against rumors of being antiquated.
The musical episode, of the Buffy series, is a another one to link in.
The women in both these movies are "too child-like for their own good" one might say. On the other hand, both are dealt a rotten hand of cards and it's easy to armchair-criticize.
These films encourage empathy, but with empathy comes a desire to coach, to offer advice. Many a sports fan knows that impulse. You feel in their corner.
Dancer is more a continuation of my previously reviewed film by this same director, Breaking the Waves, which focuses on a woman of unnatural innocence who gets everything fubar as a consequence.
Selma Jezkova's loyalty to secrecy and "keeping mum" is too strictly translated into her native Czech I think. She should have been more forthcoming in her own defense at the trial. "Yes, I lied my way through the eye test, I just didn't want Jessie to worry" -- which explains how the conflicted / confessing cop got to the cookie jar.
Jessie is her son and the metaphor for their blindness (both use thick glasses) is strengthened in their mutual caring mixed with alienation. They're not on the same page in a lot of ways.
That the mother feels guilt or even actual responsibility for Jessie's karma is something the court would respond to, but why not just tell it like the movie we all just saw? Spill the beans already. Relay each conversation. Having secrets means you're capable of sharing them.
The film is scary. Showing the state committing murder and the eeriness of the prison relationship... is it progressive blindness or madness, as the musicals become more hallucinatory in quality? The music comes from another time, closer to our own.
But then imagining an audience of voyeurs to one's life is like madness, but then so is a sense of being "on stage"... so then who isn't mad in that sense? The eyes of others are upon us, if not literally in a theater.
The movie twists around to ask that question. It also asserts something about the musical: the opera uses music and dance to express an underlying story that the banal plot lines of cinema verite (and real life) would not capture. The surreal mirrors the real. Art shows us other angles.
In treating serious darkness with musical numbers, the genre is fighting back against rumors of being antiquated.
The musical episode, of the Buffy series, is a another one to link in.
The women in both these movies are "too child-like for their own good" one might say. On the other hand, both are dealt a rotten hand of cards and it's easy to armchair-criticize.
These films encourage empathy, but with empathy comes a desire to coach, to offer advice. Many a sports fan knows that impulse. You feel in their corner.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Recent Meetings
The Portland Peace Prize ceremony was at Mercy Corps this year. Roz Babener, a founder of the Community Warehouse won the award. Ibrahim was a nominee this year, another community leader. I'm not that familiar with the prize or who has won it before. Polo?
The film Authority & Expectations continues to make the rounds (Joanne's report). Veterans for Peace was prominent in Christopher's report.
I'll mention about the "celebrating Mossadegh" event when it gets to be my turn. John Munson, a guest here tonight, was also at that event at the Peace House. He's involved in planning a fundraising event on September 14 at said Peace House.
This was just a short excerpt from our meeting. The other meetings I'm thinking about include the Oversight Committee meetings and staff meetings. Staff is spread around so we tend to use cyber-stuff and meet in Cyberia.
The role of email in supporting meetings is interesting, also discussion lists. The ability to advance things in parallel is a focus of GST (general systems theory):
Mom's report sounds like Linus Pauling's reminding us that humans have irrevocably changed the environment for all future life on Earth thanks to carelessness with radio-toxins.
That's is hardly news in 2013, but is a theme of this year's ceremonies (Disarmament Day, August 6), which are shaping up. Mom was just at a planning meeting at PSR.
I'm not a huge fan of the If I Had a Trillion Dollars campaign, which is hardly a problem as it has lots of trackers and backers already. It encourages the kind of contrary-to-fact thinking associated with Washington, DC.
However, I did enjoy Gavin's project to do "A Periodic Table of the Presidents" which he kick started on KickStart.
Apparently AFSC has already budgeted money for the QVS intern, application due in February. Quaker Voluntary Service is only this summer opening a house in Portland, I don't know where yet.
I've modeled the Blue House as somewhat similar in design: a platform for engagement in both planning and carrying out vital operations. Several of us reported on The Door Project. I left the check from Multnomah Meeting / Junior Friends program for our door.
I forgot to mention in my report about Lindsey continuing to run a Food Not Bombs serving, in support of the vigil at City Hall, and making use of the kitchen at Right to Dream Too.
Having some loose criteria about casting is a good idea, but a strong director often has a deeper knowledge of her or his actors / agents / objects than merely broad brush stroke ideas. The devil is in the details, but in this context that "devil" is an angel (in terms of providing leverage).
Organizations with lots of actors but few directors or casting advisers (the job of HR) experience different kinds of failure.
Effective activists learn how to work in parallel and asynchronously. The action does not necessarily stop or bottle-neck just because one's focus has shifted elsewhere. This focus on concurrency is important, and hypertext is one of the ways to acclimatize to concurrent organizing.
The film Authority & Expectations continues to make the rounds (Joanne's report). Veterans for Peace was prominent in Christopher's report.
I'll mention about the "celebrating Mossadegh" event when it gets to be my turn. John Munson, a guest here tonight, was also at that event at the Peace House. He's involved in planning a fundraising event on September 14 at said Peace House.
This was just a short excerpt from our meeting. The other meetings I'm thinking about include the Oversight Committee meetings and staff meetings. Staff is spread around so we tend to use cyber-stuff and meet in Cyberia.
The role of email in supporting meetings is interesting, also discussion lists. The ability to advance things in parallel is a focus of GST (general systems theory):
With my students I use theater as a good metaphor. You have actors or agents and scripts. You also have many stages, not just one, and characters that go between the stages. This is management theory or it's channeling electrons, depending on how tightly you want to tie it to actual microprocessor controlling.
David's main examples are macroscopic such as "making waffles". You need the waffle maker to be hot and empty before you pour batter in, and you need feedback that people still want more. Several waffle makers might run in parallel, just as many people eat simultaneously and so on.The main line of the thread I'm copying from above is over on Math Forum, where math teachers and others are discussing a recent article in the New York Times. However the branch I'm citing went to Synergeo. That quoted passage is a reference to Dr. DiNucci's report a couple weeks ago.
Mom's report sounds like Linus Pauling's reminding us that humans have irrevocably changed the environment for all future life on Earth thanks to carelessness with radio-toxins.
That's is hardly news in 2013, but is a theme of this year's ceremonies (Disarmament Day, August 6), which are shaping up. Mom was just at a planning meeting at PSR.
I'm not a huge fan of the If I Had a Trillion Dollars campaign, which is hardly a problem as it has lots of trackers and backers already. It encourages the kind of contrary-to-fact thinking associated with Washington, DC.
However, I did enjoy Gavin's project to do "A Periodic Table of the Presidents" which he kick started on KickStart.
Apparently AFSC has already budgeted money for the QVS intern, application due in February. Quaker Voluntary Service is only this summer opening a house in Portland, I don't know where yet.
I've modeled the Blue House as somewhat similar in design: a platform for engagement in both planning and carrying out vital operations. Several of us reported on The Door Project. I left the check from Multnomah Meeting / Junior Friends program for our door.
I forgot to mention in my report about Lindsey continuing to run a Food Not Bombs serving, in support of the vigil at City Hall, and making use of the kitchen at Right to Dream Too.
Having some loose criteria about casting is a good idea, but a strong director often has a deeper knowledge of her or his actors / agents / objects than merely broad brush stroke ideas. The devil is in the details, but in this context that "devil" is an angel (in terms of providing leverage).
Organizations with lots of actors but few directors or casting advisers (the job of HR) experience different kinds of failure.
Effective activists learn how to work in parallel and asynchronously. The action does not necessarily stop or bottle-neck just because one's focus has shifted elsewhere. This focus on concurrency is important, and hypertext is one of the ways to acclimatize to concurrent organizing.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Breaking the Waves (movie review)
On advice of a film school veteran, I queued this one up (no, not Netflix, Movie Madness). Lars von Trier directs Emily Watson and others through a Midwinter Night's Nightmare one might say.
Emily is torn by religious convictions and her joyless parents have little of the "cheerfulness" of the Eagle Scouts. They have a brain dead religion and there's not much available in the way of big city alternative lifestyles.
The girl and her beau are well on the way to reinventing the entire sex industry, from phone sex to other kinkiness (A to Z) thanks to their powerful mutual attraction yet separation by circumstance (he's got an oil rig gig, no option to bring women friends -- pre-Internet you know).
The film bears rewatching though I admit to getting squirmy when the camera I'm in barges into somebody's bedroom or bathroom when I haven't been invited. They likely wouldn't appreciate me standing there gawking. Part of it is preferring Narnia creatures maybe, like that Ice Queen isn't bad.
Anyway, back to the soap: she's ridiculously innocent and so the lamb to the slaughter theme seems inevitable. I'm glad I saw this in close proximity to Mr. Lonely, with the Marilyn impersonator still resonant. Yet she's selfish as well and punishes herself for that in true schizophrenic style. The corny ending is just that: how sailors have always dealt with tragedy; they weave a tall tale.
The hypocrisy of the audience position is pretty farcical if one shares the puritanical disgust for the fantasies of a paralyzed man. The best way he knows to continue a sex life is in is head and how can we blame him in that sense. It's just he has no idea how terribly unsexy are the scenes she's throwing herself into for his sake, i.e. his imagination is not up to remote viewing at this point or he'd use a long cane to pull her off stage (she claims a psychic bond, but it's hardly hifi -- not their fault as they were just getting started).
She's selfish with regard to the doctor, who does have feelings for people, but walks his talk as an ethical guy. He's not about to be entrapped in some awkward (compromising) situation. The story has to hold water (eventually). But here she's done a full frontal assault on his person without much empathy for any relationship but hers and Jan's.
He wants to talk and get to the bottom of things, be authentic, but she'll have none of it really, because her intent is to use him, not love him. She stops hearing from God right around that point, but then the connection picks up again -- low bandwidth as usual (I know, I know, who am I to judge).
The scene I'll call "the medical inquisition" is important as the good doctor wants to express the basic goodness of this woman who has all the churchmen throwing stones (at least mentally) -- their younger selves personified by the boys who push bicycles, taunt her and throw physical stones.
Those boys are the next churchmen, well along the way in their brain dead religion. We see that as the "priest" role models his disdain and disgust for the hapless Lamb of God (he might have felt like kicking her and didn't, so lets give him points for self control).
As the audience, we know what the good doctor means, and we're not sitting in high judgement like the others. We're voyeurs too. The ship she got roughed up in is beyond the inquisition's jurisdiction. There's no talk of arrest or seizing the vessel -- that's just not in the cards. These landlubbers know their place as but peons.
The irony is how her prayers keep getting answered i.e. her narrative is upheld,. Between herself and her sister's heartfelt wishes, there's Jan, a good fellow, staggering back to his feet, a knightly champion of his wife's memory. However because it's not during some church event in response to "receiving Jesus", people just shrug it off. Sometimes people get better, so what? Better to taunt the joyless churchmen with the Miracle of the Bells.
She's the saint in this picture, which doesn't mean should couldn't have benefited from more therapy.
Emily is torn by religious convictions and her joyless parents have little of the "cheerfulness" of the Eagle Scouts. They have a brain dead religion and there's not much available in the way of big city alternative lifestyles.
The girl and her beau are well on the way to reinventing the entire sex industry, from phone sex to other kinkiness (A to Z) thanks to their powerful mutual attraction yet separation by circumstance (he's got an oil rig gig, no option to bring women friends -- pre-Internet you know).
The film bears rewatching though I admit to getting squirmy when the camera I'm in barges into somebody's bedroom or bathroom when I haven't been invited. They likely wouldn't appreciate me standing there gawking. Part of it is preferring Narnia creatures maybe, like that Ice Queen isn't bad.
Anyway, back to the soap: she's ridiculously innocent and so the lamb to the slaughter theme seems inevitable. I'm glad I saw this in close proximity to Mr. Lonely, with the Marilyn impersonator still resonant. Yet she's selfish as well and punishes herself for that in true schizophrenic style. The corny ending is just that: how sailors have always dealt with tragedy; they weave a tall tale.
The hypocrisy of the audience position is pretty farcical if one shares the puritanical disgust for the fantasies of a paralyzed man. The best way he knows to continue a sex life is in is head and how can we blame him in that sense. It's just he has no idea how terribly unsexy are the scenes she's throwing herself into for his sake, i.e. his imagination is not up to remote viewing at this point or he'd use a long cane to pull her off stage (she claims a psychic bond, but it's hardly hifi -- not their fault as they were just getting started).
She's selfish with regard to the doctor, who does have feelings for people, but walks his talk as an ethical guy. He's not about to be entrapped in some awkward (compromising) situation. The story has to hold water (eventually). But here she's done a full frontal assault on his person without much empathy for any relationship but hers and Jan's.
He wants to talk and get to the bottom of things, be authentic, but she'll have none of it really, because her intent is to use him, not love him. She stops hearing from God right around that point, but then the connection picks up again -- low bandwidth as usual (I know, I know, who am I to judge).
The scene I'll call "the medical inquisition" is important as the good doctor wants to express the basic goodness of this woman who has all the churchmen throwing stones (at least mentally) -- their younger selves personified by the boys who push bicycles, taunt her and throw physical stones.
Those boys are the next churchmen, well along the way in their brain dead religion. We see that as the "priest" role models his disdain and disgust for the hapless Lamb of God (he might have felt like kicking her and didn't, so lets give him points for self control).
As the audience, we know what the good doctor means, and we're not sitting in high judgement like the others. We're voyeurs too. The ship she got roughed up in is beyond the inquisition's jurisdiction. There's no talk of arrest or seizing the vessel -- that's just not in the cards. These landlubbers know their place as but peons.
The irony is how her prayers keep getting answered i.e. her narrative is upheld,. Between herself and her sister's heartfelt wishes, there's Jan, a good fellow, staggering back to his feet, a knightly champion of his wife's memory. However because it's not during some church event in response to "receiving Jesus", people just shrug it off. Sometimes people get better, so what? Better to taunt the joyless churchmen with the Miracle of the Bells.
She's the saint in this picture, which doesn't mean should couldn't have benefited from more therapy.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Eagle Scout Ceremony
We were privileged to attend this ceremony put on by BSA Troop 24 in Oregon. I know one of the two new Eagles from both AFSC and Food Not Bombs work.
I've been mixing some of this experience into my writing at the Math Forum, thinking more about "virtual presidents" and "USA OS" etc.
The ceremony included a leader of the Elks, a fraternal organization, and of Veterans for Peace. They both made speeches and presented gifts.
After the ceremony we adjourned downstairs. Carol climbed at a couple flights, even though she carries oxygen tanks in her walker.
Wednesday, June 05, 2013
Transitions
"Transitions" might be a euphemism for "altercations" in some cases, some of which I'm party to, others of which I only observe, or contribute to more as a coach, someone else the boxer in the ring.
Under "smooth transition" might be Carol's annual migration, arriving last night, Inogen in tow (an oxygen maker). Delta, then Alaska helped her get here. Who didn't help was the Washington party who blocked egress from my driveway. Fortunately my neighbor was observant enough to identify another car we could get moved and I didn't have to call the towers. I left a trenchant note on the windshield. A minor glitch in the grand scheme of things.
No, the CoC (Code of Conduct) was not conceived with reference to the EEOC (I had a front row seat watching its evolution) much as people trained in the latter's view of things might want to ape their cultural imperialist brethren and try to lecture us on what we "really mean" by terms like "harassment" and/or "discrimination" and/or "don't be mean" -- as if we needed schooling from Washington DC in diplomacy (as if anyone did -- OK, some could benefit). That was my reaction to the working group proposal, but I'm not one to rain on a policy wonkers' parade, let them wonk.
Then I got testy with Hansen again and got into seriously tooting my own horn. The censors decided to give him the last word in public, with Anna in on the CC'd reply.
For one thing, the EEOC stuff is all about employer-employee relationships, but when strangers aggregate in a business hotel or campus to update one another in their shared profession, that's not about supervisors and supervisees. Attendees are guests, of the hotel, of the conference program. They are not slaves of, they are not employes of. The guests are also "respecters of" various rule books, some unwritten. There's always new space to carve out, old space to reclaim, so all of this takes work and role playing. I favor "rotation" as a management style, which is also effective against typecasting (though some embrace an image).
There're lots of CoCs out there, lets not forget, so we also should not over-indulge the illusion that only ours is in force, as if the board game were entirely ours to set the rules around. Not entirely true is it? So whatever your CoC, remember you live in a hybridized world, which is not a bad thing, it's what keeps you from being a dictator, and that's a good thing (for you included). In science fiction, each school of thought gets to sketch its Utopia, like Quakers did in Pennsylvania. In practice, no one agenda trumps the rest. Most European immigrants preferred to invest in Indian Wars and/or Slavery, at least in some regions. Philadelphia was less a capital for those institutions than say... you guessed it, Washington DC again.
However, as astute historians have picked up, it's not smart to completely discount other cities and their roles. Chicago has made a huge difference in academics, right up there with Boston. Las Vegas took some games that were cooking in Havana and recreated them close to LA, reaping a bonanza. New York City is way more than a financial capital, but then so are London and Tokyo, not forgetting Paris and... this is sounding like a game called "capitalism" don't you think (what world capitals do you know?)? What's the hog capital of the world? Where is "Toon Town" really? Cities vie for reputation, form alliances. Portland (Oregon) and Austin (Texas): keeping each other weird.
Such talk excites a rebellious peasantry, suspicious of being typecast as country bumpkins, like Scarecrow of Oz, presumably a metaphor for the farmers, who knew more than they could afford to let on (this is a theory in literary criticism, linking Oz to the gold versus silver debates, theories about money).
The University of Illinois, with its advanced computer science and Mathematica-based teaching, cannot be cast as second fiddle.
But "there there" I say in mollification, I'm making use of metonymy, synechoche to be precise, wherein "Chicago" really means "the whole of that bioregion" and its peoples -- many dating back for centuries, well before the recent waves, the self-styled "documented" and their gang lands (Mafiosi, Yakuzi, whatever WASPs (a real West Side Story and of course a source of endless graffiti (some of it quite alluring))).
I talked to David Koski tonight for 95 minutes, from my side a few updates, from his a circling of the "T & E Module express", a fast train into the ticking center of the synergetics concentric hierarchy. The T and E are both the same shape but sizes come apart based on surface:volume ratio, much as triangles come apart in spherical trig, as never similar unless congruent. The E is a little bigger, but is likewise a logical slice of the golden cuboid and 1/120th of a rhombic triacontahedron, our NCLB Polyhedron for those following the thread of Pentagon Math (and about a thread is all there is sometimes).
Blowing up the T-made Triaconta from 5 to 7.5 creates the meetup with the volume 6 rhombic dodecahedron. Blowing up th E-made Triaconta, by phi, is what gives the phi rectangles PV edged Icosahedron of 18.51, husband to the smaller Pentagonal Dodeca, both in the Platonic Five if we wish, this "super RT" their marriage. Volumes are in tetravolumes with unit tet as one (edge PV). The T-modules have volume 1/24, just like the A and B, but their Triac is .9994+ the radius. E and T come apart, as E's radius is one exactly (it's diamond-face to diamond-face diameter that of the IVM ball, again PV).
Altercations I'm in the sidelines on:
(A) Should AFSC plan on changing digs in Portland, Oregon any time soon? Staff seems happy where it is and there's no room back at the Stark Street meetinghouse. However, our committee seems unsettled about the issue.
(B) Should SE Chapter FNB declare itself an athletic event wherein car use is a foul, out of bounds? Of course these rules only extend so far. Lindsey and Satya have both set an example of what vegan powered bicyclists might contribute, were they given at least one chapter. But it's not a matter of "being given" where anarchy reigns (no King to appeal to). The leadership simply challenges people to not bring their car-based lifestyle onto this particular stage. They get to everywhere else. Where's the "no car use" town, or just part of town? Europe seems way ahead on that one.
Under "smooth transition" might be Carol's annual migration, arriving last night, Inogen in tow (an oxygen maker). Delta, then Alaska helped her get here. Who didn't help was the Washington party who blocked egress from my driveway. Fortunately my neighbor was observant enough to identify another car we could get moved and I didn't have to call the towers. I left a trenchant note on the windshield. A minor glitch in the grand scheme of things.
No, the CoC (Code of Conduct) was not conceived with reference to the EEOC (I had a front row seat watching its evolution) much as people trained in the latter's view of things might want to ape their cultural imperialist brethren and try to lecture us on what we "really mean" by terms like "harassment" and/or "discrimination" and/or "don't be mean" -- as if we needed schooling from Washington DC in diplomacy (as if anyone did -- OK, some could benefit). That was my reaction to the working group proposal, but I'm not one to rain on a policy wonkers' parade, let them wonk.
Then I got testy with Hansen again and got into seriously tooting my own horn. The censors decided to give him the last word in public, with Anna in on the CC'd reply.
For one thing, the EEOC stuff is all about employer-employee relationships, but when strangers aggregate in a business hotel or campus to update one another in their shared profession, that's not about supervisors and supervisees. Attendees are guests, of the hotel, of the conference program. They are not slaves of, they are not employes of. The guests are also "respecters of" various rule books, some unwritten. There's always new space to carve out, old space to reclaim, so all of this takes work and role playing. I favor "rotation" as a management style, which is also effective against typecasting (though some embrace an image).
There're lots of CoCs out there, lets not forget, so we also should not over-indulge the illusion that only ours is in force, as if the board game were entirely ours to set the rules around. Not entirely true is it? So whatever your CoC, remember you live in a hybridized world, which is not a bad thing, it's what keeps you from being a dictator, and that's a good thing (for you included). In science fiction, each school of thought gets to sketch its Utopia, like Quakers did in Pennsylvania. In practice, no one agenda trumps the rest. Most European immigrants preferred to invest in Indian Wars and/or Slavery, at least in some regions. Philadelphia was less a capital for those institutions than say... you guessed it, Washington DC again.
However, as astute historians have picked up, it's not smart to completely discount other cities and their roles. Chicago has made a huge difference in academics, right up there with Boston. Las Vegas took some games that were cooking in Havana and recreated them close to LA, reaping a bonanza. New York City is way more than a financial capital, but then so are London and Tokyo, not forgetting Paris and... this is sounding like a game called "capitalism" don't you think (what world capitals do you know?)? What's the hog capital of the world? Where is "Toon Town" really? Cities vie for reputation, form alliances. Portland (Oregon) and Austin (Texas): keeping each other weird.
Such talk excites a rebellious peasantry, suspicious of being typecast as country bumpkins, like Scarecrow of Oz, presumably a metaphor for the farmers, who knew more than they could afford to let on (this is a theory in literary criticism, linking Oz to the gold versus silver debates, theories about money).
The University of Illinois, with its advanced computer science and Mathematica-based teaching, cannot be cast as second fiddle.
But "there there" I say in mollification, I'm making use of metonymy, synechoche to be precise, wherein "Chicago" really means "the whole of that bioregion" and its peoples -- many dating back for centuries, well before the recent waves, the self-styled "documented" and their gang lands (Mafiosi, Yakuzi, whatever WASPs (a real West Side Story and of course a source of endless graffiti (some of it quite alluring))).
I talked to David Koski tonight for 95 minutes, from my side a few updates, from his a circling of the "T & E Module express", a fast train into the ticking center of the synergetics concentric hierarchy. The T and E are both the same shape but sizes come apart based on surface:volume ratio, much as triangles come apart in spherical trig, as never similar unless congruent. The E is a little bigger, but is likewise a logical slice of the golden cuboid and 1/120th of a rhombic triacontahedron, our NCLB Polyhedron for those following the thread of Pentagon Math (and about a thread is all there is sometimes).
Blowing up the T-made Triaconta from 5 to 7.5 creates the meetup with the volume 6 rhombic dodecahedron. Blowing up th E-made Triaconta, by phi, is what gives the phi rectangles PV edged Icosahedron of 18.51, husband to the smaller Pentagonal Dodeca, both in the Platonic Five if we wish, this "super RT" their marriage. Volumes are in tetravolumes with unit tet as one (edge PV). The T-modules have volume 1/24, just like the A and B, but their Triac is .9994+ the radius. E and T come apart, as E's radius is one exactly (it's diamond-face to diamond-face diameter that of the IVM ball, again PV).
Altercations I'm in the sidelines on:
(A) Should AFSC plan on changing digs in Portland, Oregon any time soon? Staff seems happy where it is and there's no room back at the Stark Street meetinghouse. However, our committee seems unsettled about the issue.
(B) Should SE Chapter FNB declare itself an athletic event wherein car use is a foul, out of bounds? Of course these rules only extend so far. Lindsey and Satya have both set an example of what vegan powered bicyclists might contribute, were they given at least one chapter. But it's not a matter of "being given" where anarchy reigns (no King to appeal to). The leadership simply challenges people to not bring their car-based lifestyle onto this particular stage. They get to everywhere else. Where's the "no car use" town, or just part of town? Europe seems way ahead on that one.
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