Catching Up

Lots going on.  I watched eXistenZ yet again, with SH and CP, LW drifting in and out, but then forgot to return it to Movie Madness.  I did that today, walking back by the Hawthorne Liquor Store, picking up vodka for me, gin for SH.   

Movie Madness had some oldster stars behind tables, selling souvenirs / memorabilia around the 38th anniversary of Carrie, with an exclusive engagement at The Hollywood Theater on Sandy tonight.  I was sorely tempted to go, believe you me, but it's one of the few DVDs I own and I'm on a budget, time/energy-wise.

Speaking of vodka, I listened in on some "over the fence" chatter (figuratively) regarding the situation in Ukraine, a major Python state.  UA.pycon has been one of the biggest [ cancelled in 2014! ].  US.pycon is not even technically within the 50 states this year or next, but the way I think of it, it's a suggestion to that population center (US) where to go (in Canada) for the Pycon in their area (but wouldn't Canadians go there too?).  I'd say CA.pycon is in Montreal this year, but that's not how it's seen:  a different management team plans each convergence.

It's more the Flying Circus model:  US.pycon is on tour in Canada, a new opportunity for Canadians, to have it close by.

Is there a RU.pycon?  Yes indeed, most certainly.  Russia is a Python state too.

Which topic brings me to NATO (one of my nicknames is "nato professor").  The Quaker meetinghouse was turned over last night to Veterans for Peace and fellow travelers, an inter-generational shindig twixt Vietnam vets and Gulf War vets, among others.  The public was welcome, and for them, the (Netflix-available?) Sir! No Sir! was recommended.

What's Roz Savage up to these days?  Talk about catching up... I should visit her web site.  We had dinner together once, she won't remember.  I was somewhat smitten, but then I'm prone to being smit (smited).

Segue from Smite:  that's what David Koski called "half-a-Mite" -- a pun.  The half-Mite or Smite is a shape at the root of a language game called space-filling with Archimedean honeycomb duals.

Lastly, Lindsey had on loan from her girlfriend Melody, an interesting compilation of Edgar Allen Poe stories on DVD, with young / original talent, including Jane Fonda.  Walker'd seen the first episode with Melody, the last three with me, leaving one left for me to catch up on before returning it to Multnomah County Library.

Jane's right up there with Sissy Spacek as one alluring / interesting babe, many vets would agree (of any gender); not that I'm a vet, though I've spent time on bases.  Ex-marine Gill Gilleland was my scuba trainer.  Another ex-Marine taught me rollerblade skating when I was younger, Tom Connally my spirit guide.  Dave Fabik, a VietVet, member of Bridge City, read the welcome letter from our Portland Quaker meetings.

Princeton Club of Oregon.  I got to visit Julian Voss Andreae in his current studio, to converse about the octet-truss.  Way cool.  I'm grateful for these privileges and that's why I blog: to share my front row seat.  Check it out!

Happy Birthday Alexia!

Life's Beginnings

An ISEPP lecture, meaning STEM-oriented, science, engineering... in a church though.  The Schnitzer is a great venue but when the economy took a hit so did we and this church is right next door.  Our speakers get a kick out of speaking in a House of God I think, more theatrical than just a theater.

Dr. Michael Russell is out of the box brilliant, and although from Britain, he loves LA, and JPL of Cal Tech is lucky to have him (my view).  He knows his molecules really well, in the context of microbiology, and he's willing to risk a big picture theory, regarding life's origins.

In my youth, Genesis had long been superseded by lightning in primordial soup producing amino acids.  In this new narrative, the gigantic convection currents that lead to a parting of the plates on the one hand, and their subduction on the other, with continental drift on the surface, means lots of opportunities for heat to escape, and not just heat, but minerals, catalyzing agents, an environment rich in possibilities once these jetting hot metals reach the deep sea, which covered the whole planet back then (we're going back billions of years here).

His insights into how our cells power the ATP cycle was the best I've ever heard.  Hydrogen ions get pushed out to the exterior creating a disequilibrium, and in coming back in, they're forced to do work.

It's all about hydrolyzing CO2.  That's the essence of life's energy pathway, though he takes it further, he hopes through the "vinegar" stage at least in his experiments.  I'm skipping over a lot of fine points, really the main points of his theory, so just use this to get the flavor then dig into it yourself.

In our epoch, and in many before ours, photosynthesis has been the prime mover, when it comes to producing the organic compounds of life.  But in early Earth, the womb of life would be the ocean floor, and interface between heated basic minerals and acidic solvents -- an life-friendly energy gradient.

We adjourned to the Heathman for another stellar serving, this time of bovine (steak or a vegetarian lasagna).  We appreciate the service this venerable hotel has rendered over the years, to our many venerable guests, to our sponsors.  My sense of privilege is appropriately sky high and I am grateful for our little after-dinner Q&As with these MVPs in their fields.

Dr. Russell is a geologist by training and examining formations in Ireland is was led to a thermodynamic hypothesis that anticipated the discovery of undersea "smokers" and later the million-year-old vents, cool enough to encourage life, places where inner-Earth heat escapes to the ocean in molten form.

At this interface, of mineral and symbiotic sea, the chances of life become high over time, in back of the napkin calculations.  So it's not lightning in the primordial sea anymore.  There's another contender.  I was happy to take that in.

The Lego Movie (movie review)

This movie resembles Robots in developing a consistent look and feel, up to a point.  The theme is the tension between conformity / uniformity versus the celebration of "specialness" as one of the cookie cutter instances.  AI explores this same tension, a concern among children, under pressure to develop a character.

Our hero is a "construction worker" in some happy camper robotic "utopia" of the most uber-controlled kind.  We might as well be in the fevered imagination of some kid with an overbearing business man type father, trying to work it out through play-as-therapy.

I should preface the whole business by confessing:

(a) I'm writing this under some time pressure, self imposed, as there's a business meeting I need to get to, yes on a Sunday these "Christians" do business (you'd think the money changing in the temple story might give pause, but nooo) and

(b) I just prior went to see Johnny Stallings doing a brilliant rendering of Dostoyevsky's The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, like the last thing he wrote, a short story about someone very ordinary (connect to Lego Movie context) having their own special truth to share with the world (a missing puzzle piece perhaps).

Johnny had jiggered it a bit (he's a pro) and delivered a brilliant recital, as a benefit performance for a documentary under way, a movie about taking Shakespeare into prisons, and having prisoners stage plays for one another under Johnny's and his theater crew's direction.

The one-on-one interviews coming from the prisoners are stellar (we watched some preview clips).  I'd say this documentary looks very promising, worthy of a high profile Coffee Shops Network (CSN) listing for sure.  I've been a Stallings fan for a long time, as these blogs attest.  Nick Consoletti was the catalyst for enriching and expanding my network in Portland in important ways.

I was hobbled by a bad heel, a "victim body part" given my hauling like a quarter ton up the mountain every day (talking about my morning meditation exercise / walk up Mt. Tabor).  And I have a bazillion more OSCON proposals to read, but had spent all morning on the day job and felt in a "no battery charge" condition regarding doing more technical reading.

So rather than get back to work after Johnny's performance at First Unitarian downtown, I rushed to The Bagdad for The Lego Movie, even though it wasn't in 3D, which must be spectacular, maybe again someday.  Awesome.

Steve, I borrowed the crutches from your closet after the movie, as the heel was so bad last night I could barely make it down the sidewalk.  Yes, this means I'm driving to meeting, more peak oil down the drain.  I'll hope to compensate in some way.  I suppose we could say all of Lego-verse (a multi-verse) is a byproduct of peak oil, right?  Plastic and all.  I wonder which hole in the desert or ocean bottom each Lego piece comes from.

Of course the movie doesn't actually use that much real Lego as it's an animation / simulation of a multi-verse, the combination of puppetry and physics engine we've come to call home in the entertainment business.  I'd like to watch "the making of".

Valentine's Day

Regarding the many St. Valentines of Rome we are meant to consider commemorated on this day, or tomorrow, February 14, the great Gnostic writer Valentinus (or Valentinius) is not among them, though he too lived in Rome and almost made bishop if not saint.  But his lineage was later much disrespected by the mainline church and his memory is not supposed to "shine forth" on this day of pink hearts and celebration of intimate relationships.

Lets not be too narrow-minded i.e. uncatholic in our thinking, but rather let's remember that Gnosticism does not "blame Eve" for anything, and is therefore less misogynistic than most preachers of Genesis.  For Gnostics, the local Maker deserved human resistance as Gnosticism celebrates a subversive stance against "local / minor deities" which it associates with whatever institutions abuse their power.  As a breeding ground of subversives, over-throwers, the Gnostic faiths have always attracted the ire of more mainstream authoritarians, especially the more militant patriarchs.

In consideration of the Quaker Equality Testimony, I think adding this earlier first century Valentine to the equations would be consistent with the "romantic love" theme, as there's a special romance where neither player has overbearing responsibility or power, especially not simply by virtue of one's gender.  As Dora Marsden might have put it, a woman with power equal to that of a man will not be forced to participate in institutions that put her beneath the power of men, any more than vice versa.  That's often a premise for romantic relationships, even healthy ones -- if that's not an oxymoron (joke).

Winter Wonderland Weather

Much of North America is blanketed in snow all winter, but here in our rain forest ecosystem on the Pacific Rim, we were having some balmy if misty days, relatively warm weather.

We're almost Mediterranean in some ways, another Alexandria.  So to be suddenly blanketed in snow was a couple standard deviations out for us, a surprise.

What a time to not have my main camera.  I joined Bartons at Mt. Tabor for some spontaneous fun with hundreds of people, some just spectators like me.

A fairly steep hill behind the mid-tier reservoir had been developed for sledding and people were creative in their choice of ride-able object: kayak, rubber dingy with no bottom, snow shovel, one classic "Rosebud" type sled, one classic Germanic toboggan.

All manner of plastic, including Rubbermaid and Tupperware.  Many generations and subcultures represented, some seeing their first snow.

Speaking of first snow, Lindsey has expressed enthusiastic delight for the powdered snow fall experience.  She hails from Florida and although Montreal had snow, it was already on the ground, not falling.

She's currently studying the I Ching in multiple translations, whereas I'm steeped in Gnostic stuff ala Hans Jonas, Tobias Churton, Nag Hammadi and like that.

That's when I'm not screening OSCON proposals on my S3, which Dr. Tag (in Jordan) reminds me I could use for taking pix.  Gnosticism and Subgenius:  a back burner theme.

The Blue House is a scholars' den and proudly a part of the "Buddhist ghetto" rumored to be in SE somewhere.  More accurately these zip codes are somewhat cosmopolitan with many traditions represented, however the Blue House interior in particular tends toward Himalayan motifs given our family overlap with Bhutan.

Speaking of OSCON and its subcultures, former PSF Chairman Holden just managed to squeak past the closing snow storms and high tail it to sunnier weather in points south.  We wish him the best as we try to thaw out.

Welcome to my new LinkedIn contacts, including Leslie Hawthorn, now in the Amsterdam Area.

Neutrinos! (Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture)

Dr. Ray Jayawardhana was good-natured about taking some cliche questions, like had he met Arthur C. Clarke, the famous expat and Sri Lankan science fiction writer.  Yes he had.

A native of Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon going back), Ray turned himself into a kind of astrophysicist.  He's from the University of Toronto these days and has just had a book published:  The Neutrino Hunters.

As a planetologist more than a quantum mechanics specialist, he was not equipped to get really detailed about why tau neutrinos seem harder to trap or only were recently or whatever it was.  The neutrino appears to undergo phases in travel so your cross section is only 1/3rd of the expected -- a way of spending more energy in travel I suppose, accounting for apparent energy loss.

Conservation of Energy was a core theme of his talk.  Quantum mechanics was facing some serious problems with beta decay, as the resulting energy particles did not seem to add up -- reversibility was violated.  Wolfgang Pauli couldn't make the conference but wanted his idea on the table:  another particle.

At that point, for the longest time it seemed they would be impossible to detect, another kind of theoretical dead end, a disconnect from the empirical warp and woof and the substance of science's narrative.  However this barrier to empiricism was overcome in the form of giant tanks in deep mines, all other cosmic rays filtered.  Any weak force interactions (the only kind involved) would have to be owing to neutrinos.  At last they'd been found.

Jayawardhana started his talk with some mock poking of fun at all the Higgs Boson hype, the recently detected empirical blip needed to sustain QM's standard model, an important puzzle piece.

Neutrinos are as mysterious and spooky as ever, lets not become too taken with Higgs.  Neutrino hunters get to go on adventures deep underground, or to Antarctica.  Lets keep their profession alive.

Astrophysics sure could use a nice supernova around now.  All the neutrino detectors are poised to receive data.  A new generation of instruments is in place.

They just don't happen all that often.  Maybe one a century of the kind he meant.

The neutrinos from such an event get here first, not because "faster than light" but because the photons get slowed down by electromagnetic phenomena, have to put on a fireworks show.  Neutrinos are largely indifferent to matter and are just "outta there" so get here sooner, as news of a cosmic broadcast.

Rufus Jones: A Luminious Life (movie review)

Lets get some keywords out of the way up front:  Haverford, AFSC, Transcendentalist, William James, Friend.

He taught philosophy at Haverford College his whole life (after going there).  He helped found the AFSC in 1917, the Nobel Peace Prize winning Quaker service agency (committee).

He was really taken with William James and thought academia should embrace the study of what makes us better, be that Chardin's Omega Point or whatever, the word "God" not out of bounds.

I learned a lot from this short video, which Robert Cooper had brought forward through the program committee.  I sat next to Nancy Irving, former General Secretary of FWCC.  We agreed some of the pictures had him looking like an oriental sage, which made the name of his origin, South China, Maine, all the more fitting.

He was a lot like Bucky in having a home base, rustic and natural, to retreat to in New England.  Bucky Fuller had Bear Island.  Rufus Jones had South China, with a cabin.  Good for writing.  Both were in the Transcendentalist tradition, Fuller inheriting some of his cred from his great aunt Margaret Fuller.

Before I forget, Glenn is all on his own reading up on post WW2 Japanese and American management innovations, which took it to the next level.  The company he'd joined in that ghost town in the southwest (a five year gig) had adopted a lot of those management methods, and was turning out world class mercury-sensing devices, important in mining.

Today we talked about one Sidney Harman, who expressed a lot of the new management thinking plus served as president of Friends World College for three years (a Quaker connection).

Quakers really made a name for themselves in business at one point, no reason they couldn't do that again. The world needs more compassionate business execs.

Rufus lost his first wife to tuberculosis and an adored son at age 10 to diphtheria.  He remained cheerful in his life yet suffered much sorrow.  His memory is treasured in Quaker circles.  He is seen as a healer of rifts among Friends.

Some Comparitive Religion

So yeah, on Facebook I was making a link from Subgenius to Gnosticism.  In that environment, I've been using a Dobbs head as a personal icon, which sounds blasphemous but then Subgenius is deliberately built on blasphemies.  Some call it a "spoof religion" but I'd prefer to say it's more a philosophy dressed up as a religion, and parody is part of its anti-fragile design.  No, that's too much of a mouth full.  I'd say something pithier.  I'd hope to anyway.

To document my assertion, of such a link, I would point to Subgenius texts suggesting we're in some egomaniac's prison.  The deity is but a local deity yet has self aggrandizement issues.  That's an old doctrine of Gnostics, to envision us as The Borg, imprisoned in a Machine World.

I would not limit the Venn Diagram to these two.  Pragmatism is a third sphere to consider, in overlap.  The Bob Dobbsian looks to introduce "slack" as a kind of US American "liberty", a moment or more for oneself, for freedom.  What reminds us that we work together by choice, is that we get to choose, to go away, to come back.  The human imagination asserts its freedom early, in school especially, in the form of daydreaming and doodling, the perennial enemies of the "undivided attention".

Friends have relatively little interest in empire building and so do not tend to gobble up "smaller" religions.  On the contrary, they're more likely to have been "gobbled up by" being Ben Franklin's turkeys in some way.  Idealistic, utopian, out of power before the Constitution was signed, already against slavery.  So out of step.  But not uncoordinated.  Still alive and kicking even, so that's a sign of resiliency if nothing else, meaning a not-too-brittle theology.  We're not huge nor must we be more gigantic.  I say "we" for a host of reasons, lets not waste time in Apologetics.

I'm not doing all the homework for you here.  My work is done if you even half believe there's this literature I'm talking about.  The Gnostic stuff only came to light relatively recently and the translations are pretty fresh.  They're Coptic, a lot of them, from a special part of Egypt.  C.G. Jung got involved with one of them.  If you're interested in stories about old documents, you've come to the right place.  The Subgenius stuff is brand new, relatively, a product of this day and age, the time of Mad Magazine, Mad Men, and Madison Avenue, an age of advertising, of spin, or getting the message out there using new kinds of "mass media".  Marshall McLuhan was one of its prophets.

The Bellman Equation (movie review)

I had a credit at Movie Madness, which I almost used on Breaking Bad Season V, but that's less than the usual number of episodes and was $2.50 instead of $5.  So I saved my credit for whatever documentary next grabbed my attention, just based on reading the DVD case.

In this instance, I had no prior knowledge of what I was getting into, except that it was semi-contemporary.

In retrospect, I thank the Library Angel or whatever synchronistic principle, having just seen Daniel Ellsberg:  The Most Dangerous Man in America.  This could have been the other feature of a double feature as both center on the RAND Corporation and its role in war-making and/or peace-making per the game theory du jour.  I've never been a RAND fan, and I've done more than an average amont of homework, with lots of access to declassified stuff in Firestone Library (Princeton).

Some displaced sense of scientism, laced with logical positivism, begets a steroidal hubris, a steaming soup of memes, which gets generals feeling their oats and wanting to bomb something, anything.  Call it the Dr. Strangelove Effect.  There's a deliberate aversion to "sentiment" meaning a despising of EQ ("emotional IQ"), something less wise than "crazy" (the translation of "beneficial chaos" in dynamical systems theory today).  RAND never got that far and it took Ellsberg, another RAND insider, to finally pull the other way.

I thought the film dodged a deeper dialog by focusing on the hapless Rosenbergs, the easy targets, "green vomits", and not mentioning Ellsberg at all.  Bellman's subsequent reaming by HUAC was undoubtedly traumatic and took years off his life but he wasn't fighting the system, he was fighting for his reputation within that system, the one Ellsberg eventually fought and which we currently see as worth bringing down, with Richard Nixon an obvious bad guy, as hapless as they come.

You get three generations of Bellman here:  the grandson, making the movie, the dad who disagreed with how things were managed in his lifetime (with good reason), and the grand dad, some genius at RAND who more typified the establishment in its worship of new hybrids such as operations research, game theory, GST, dynamical systems (chaos math) and, back then, general semantics (popular in San Quentin at least [ the Youtube is gone -- the warden is introducing Bucky to the prisoners, mentioning they've been studying Korzybski most lately]).  Not forgetting AI.

Spiralling Onward

We're significantly into 2014 already.  I have a prospective Princeton student to interview, in my capacity as alum.  However I'm waiting for this cough to subside i.e. for the antibiotics to finish their work.  I'm day three into a course of five.

I was ambulatory enough to join Friends in a corner of the social hall for a 9:30 AM - 2:45 PM annual joint meeting of the Worship & Ministry and Oversight Committees.  This is all part of a standard calendar we follow.  Our State of the Meeting report to the Quarterly Meeting starts getting sketched in at this meeting.

David is sharing more "brain surgery", a nickname for the kind of geometry he does, dissecting a somewhat head-shaped (actually more spherical) hierarchy of concentric polyhedrons.  He's been inspired by this hierarchy for decades, including the embedded Jitterbug Transformation, a motion that adds dynamism to this standard arrangement of shapes.  As I was reiterating this morning, an attractive feature is the arithmetic isn't that hard.  It's not brain surgery, this "brain surgery", just reasonably engaging play.

Speaking of head shapes, I ran into Paul Kaufman, or he me, at the pharmacy.  I was fresh from the doctor's office.  He was all in green, including the hat.  Paul, for those who don't know, is one of the premier haberdashers in our region.  Those who know hats know about Paul.  I've been a proud owner of one of his black hats, custom made, but now it's gone missing, probably valuable given it has my name in it ("he said, egotistically").  You'll see it in pictures, where I sometimes used it to add to my Quaker aura.  It looks like something a Quaker would wear.

Lindsey, house guest, and I barreled through Breaking Bad Season 5 in one evening.  Earlier we saw the new documentary about Chogyum Trungpa Rinpoche, Crazy Wisdom.

I also watched The Autism Enigma, somewhat ironically given I'm in the process of gut bombing my gut bugs, messing with their RNA.  The focus is my lungs of course, where the unwelcome bugs deserve to be bombed.

Speaking of bombing, we also watched Daniel Ellsberg:  The Most Dangerous Man in America.  This was essentially a double feature with the Wikileaks documentary, a latter day declasssification project of a somewhat similar nature.  Tara chuckled at Nixon's funny potty mouth.  What he was saying wasn't very funny though.  Compared to fictive Walter Wright of Breaking Bad, Richard M. Nixon was far deeper into the criminal underworld of nation-state machinations, plotting the deaths of literally millions.

The Autism Enigma suggests brain function is impaired by things going on with bacteria in the gut.  It also implicates propanoic acid.

Micheal Sunanda, 70, came by on his bicycle.  Some moron in Eugene kicked him unconscious in his sleeping bag recently (he's pretty sure who the perp was).  He's now in Portland looking for legal advice regarding settling his affairs and having a plan for the ritual dispatch of his body when the time comes.  I helped him download an advance directive form to his thumb drive.

Xmas 2013

click through to album

As some friends and family already know, our family syncs winter celebrations with Hanukkah at Laurie's and, for the last nine or so years, the Wanderers solstice party.  The Hunukkah date is at the families' convenience, which this year meant December 21st, Saturday.

Christmas itself is a day to kick back and play with toys, me reminiscing with Dr. Kent (whom I met at the London Knowledge Lab) about ISETL (a didactic gizmo) on Math Future, before ascending Mt. Tabor (sounds impressive but it's just a bump).

Tara is catching up on Hitchcock films this season and I re-watched most of The Birds.  I thought I'd seen Vertigo but watching it today left me wondering:  is my memory really that bad?  Yes, probably.  Now that I've read the murder mystery around Mary Meyer (friend for Jack Kennedy, former wife of Cord Meyer), with its beckoned witness, its patsy, its assassin, I have more ways to remember.

Alexia, being service sector, like me in some ways, is working today.  We get our hours off other times sometimes.  I'm actually not doing anything except to enjoy the time off.  Most of Portland is doing the same, with most businesses closed, streets thinly trafficked.  Safeway was open though, meaning I could resupply with bay leaves, an onion, detergent and other sundries.  Some ciders.

We're looking after two additional non-humans these days, a poodle and an unseen cat.  The cat is somewhat theoretical, but I swing by its outdoor encampment and refill its bowl from time to time, with no visual proof that another animal isn't doing the munching.

The poodle belongs to Alexia, Dawn's daughter by her dad Tom.  I was not a custodial parent if that's what "step" means in the eyes of the law, though she did come and live with us from about age sixteen until college (starting at Willamette U., one of Oregon's best).  Then she married into the US Army and moved to Clarksville, TN.  She came back after a subsequent marriage.  She lived here (Blue House) this summer in fact, in Tara's room, before moving to current digs.

Lindsey has been picking up more Buddhist practices (not surprising in this zip code) and weaving a wreath for her girlfriend Melody.  Tara and I plan to drop by Melody's later. then hang out with Alexia.  I'm baking Teresina Lentils for the occasion, as I sip ciders, blog, and upload to Photostream.

Carol, my mom, is with my sister in Whittier, CA.  She's been discovering more relatives on her side of the family, meaning Goldens.  Goldens and Urners have likely overlapped before according to Grandma Margie Reilley's research.

I ate at Fujin on Tuesday, wanting to have a last cold sesame noodles and crispy eggplant (brought some home) before they close at the end of this year, lease not renewed by their speculating landlord.  Fujin has been an institution on Hawthorne since before my own scenario began here, in the early 1990s.

Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (movie review)

My daughter was the prime instigator in our seeing this one, at Living Room Theaters, not far from Powell's downtown.

Chomsky and I are contemporaries, though we've not met in person.  I've got him linked into my writings on the web in a suitable context, given where AFSC was politically.

There's lots I don't know about his philosophy or world view, and this animation, kind of like Khan Academy on steroids (not intended as a sleight to either), was quite informative, as well as fun.

I hadn't realized to what an extent he's an anti-representationalist, like Rorty, which makes him very on board with Wittgenstein.  The generative grammar phenomenon is true to life:  a small enough rule set snowballs into a seeming infinity of permitted possibilities, like the game of chess (so many games, a tree).

That the animator is also working in his second language, French being his first, provides some of the humor, and other pathos.  And it's relevant because communication is after all the topic.

This is one of those films to be quoted as we develop our ability to quote films more seamlessly within our writings and other films.  A resource.  In the sense that a book is a resource.  Because the man is right there and it's an interview, you get a lot of autobiography.  Michel Gondry did not waste Chomsky's time, given this little gift of a film.  I don't think Ali G. (Sacha Beron Cohen) wasted his time either -- that was only a short exercise.

Chomsky stresses the importance of the concept of "continuity" in "identity".  Subjectively, we're more like getting film clips and assembling them mentally.  The salt shaker is seen in many shots and is assumed to be a persistent object.  

Our systems break down in the face of too much unaccounted for swapping, i.e. if she's really her twin and this really isn't my laptop (I'm thinking of that time Patrick was flying to HQS and was already in his seat when we realized (with a little help from the police) that he had the wrong computer, due to a mix up at security...), then we realize we have lost the thread of the narrative and our current reality unravels.   

He stresses how tenuous it all is, and how words coexists with discontinuity, a swiss cheese of possible holes.  Another way of saying it maybe:  cogitation itself provides much of the continuity.  Language is a glue, not a mirror.

The Desolation of Smaug (movie review)

I've gotten over my initial prejudice and narrative, poking fun at how this blew up into three, with a lot of foot dragging by the original Lord of the Rings director, who had planned originally not to make any of them.  In fact, I'm not against lots more tellings of this story in various styles and am intrigued by what I've read of where other directors might have taken it.

I was in a sparsely attended Monday night audience for a 3DH performance, meaning the double frame rate, like last time.  I had the curious sensation that I was watching really good quality television, and my rational lobe tells me that's because TV is higher frame rate than the movie industry's 24, i.e. 24 < 30 < 48.

Although that sounds sensible (some people call their smart phone a "third lobe" -- or was that their tablet?) I'm no expert, and maybe MPEG obsoletes the whole notion of frame rate to some degree?  It's not like there's a raster beam, or is there?  The details have gotten murky, post CRT.  Companies are not as interested in junior having a clue.  Bruce Adams has shared that worry, that we're too closed with what we know, to the jeopardy of civilization itself.  It doesn't pay to be smug about everything you know.

Back to the movie:  I'm glad they got to play with the dragon that long, really stretch it out in those caverns.  Having the luxury of more time is like TV also.  They get whole seasons for character development.

I agree with Tara that the she-elf reminds of the Lost woman -- you're right Tara, she is.

I'm glad this is all shot and in the can as they say.  Really smart, all you people.  You get my High IQ award, which I've never given before and may never again.  I thought I invented DENSA (for recovering Mensaholics, but then Wikipedia doesn't even mention me).  Really epic you guys.  And fun.  I think I'll leave it at that.

Ongoing Logistics

We got it to the point in the Buddha Room where it looks like mudding all the walls would be better than trying to just mud one of them.  "To mud" is to add texture, making the wall more orange peel like.

The movie director turned landlord I sometimes write about is flying off to Germany and I just got some training to help with her cat while she's gone.  I'm not the primary care guy, more the supervisor who relays how it's going.  This is a stray.  The Humane Society reports no extra cats.  People are giving them homes.  I blame effective PR.

I missed Keith's visit to Red & Black, part of a tour.  Food Not Bombs (FNB) is a global NGO with a large following, and I'm locally one of the lynch pins, though in a back office sense, given my bicycle was stolen.  I used to haul vegetables, two trailers at a time, even with grey hair in my fifties, a way to stay fit.

However I've been engaged in follow-up archived correspondence, with Keith in the CC, regarding a Seattle Weekly article vaguely alleging FNB was an unwitting vector for botulism.  Or rather the allegation was potatoes wrapped in tin foil may sometimes be a vector, and FNB has been known to distribute potatoes in tin foil, QED, or at least sort of.  "Sloppy journalism" I called it.  Let me dig out a quote (from RiseUp):

I agree there are detractors of FNB out there, and smear campaigns, but I can't prove Seattle Weekly is working off one of those "programs".  Sloppy journalism is endemic in this culture.  The standards once upheld were all changed once entertainment in the format of news (Comedy Central, Fox News) could exempt itself from the standards of news journalism.  This has had an eroding effect on news reporting more generally.

The local FNB chapter is doing a "how to make vegan tamales" workshop this coming Sunday.

At Quakers today (Multnomah Meeting) we looked at slides of events in Washington, D.C.  We're seeing more collaboration between FCNL and AFSC than usual, which most take as a good sign.  I don't mind being a minority voice in many of the internal debates we Friends enjoy.  That reminds me, I need to renew my subscription to Western Friend.

Snow!

But what does that mean in terms of getting my Buddha Room mudded?

High Performance Homes phoned me last night with a sudden opening in their schedule.  I'd been dilly dallying on the last bit:  more sheet rock bashing (gypsum wall substance) and insulating with "the pink stuff" (R-21, but sliced because no batting comes that narrow, about 10" between beam insides).

So I said "let's go for it" and swung into action, already four pizzas into it, child labor laws skirted (Patrick was passing on useful skills to his son, with Steve directing the 2nd time, given knee surgery, me staying out of the way).

I used one of those retractable razor things to slice batting, careful with your hands, like sheering sheep (which I've never done).  Then stuff it, paper down, between the beams, which in my case hold up a slightly sloping fenced deck area, where people can stand outside and scan the neighborhood, drinks in hand perhaps.

Bashing with a crowbar:  that's for removing the old sheet rock, which had to be done to rebuild a good percentage of the back office.  Then there's prying out the nails and getting the last remnants of gypsum from the cracks where the new gypsum will fit.  By "gypsum" I mean "sheet rock" as it's called, a favored interior surface material for these old wooden homes.

I call it the Buddha Room because of the Bhutanese tankha that hangs there (a likeness of the Buddha), and because of the joke I make about my home being a registered non-profit temple with this giant inflatable Buddha in the back, so if the IRS comes for an audit, I can throw a switch and have "instant temple" (the Buddha Room in action).

What's closer to the truth is that has been my office (Dawn Wicca and Associates -- she and I worked as a partnership), and as a self-employed person was entitled to claim some floorspace on my taxes, and to account this rebuild due to water damage as an expense to that office.

Presumably, the HPH team will arrive promptly at 9 AM, regardless of snow, and make the interior paintable in short order.  The guy on the phone said his team was experienced with "hot mud" meaning they wouldn't be using a lot of hours.  The cost is already fixed anyway so it's to their advantage to not squander time.  The same company built my deck railing, a wooden fence, which I am also quite happy with.

HPH just phoned again to say the snow is causing delays but the plan to start work today is still in place.

Hunger Games Two (movie review)

Fair warning, this is not a mainstream review.  First of all, our main neighborhood theater, The Bagdad, prominent in these blog posts, had just gone digital and first run, and I was there for the first time to experience the new screen, projector, seats, and sound system.  That puts me in a head space of checking out a theater, which is already a spin.

The other thing is Global Matrix swag / paraphernalia is signature in the Capital, which we're being programmed to hate, by Donald Sutherland (Snow).  I'm talking about the hexagon sky (a dome) and the hexagon uniforms.  The Evil Empire is all hexagons.  So now we've got that to deal with, as the colors of Rome, Coliseum, Roller Ball, Gladiators, and Fascism, all blend, using our carbon chemistry / graphene theme.  That's OK.  We do holodecks, fine.  Up to you what you tune in.

I appreciate the Uru quality of the games.  Uru was in the Myst series, and closer to my name, so I made some puns over the years, again in these blogs if still extant, Ozymandias Syndrome says maybe not.  Blogspot can't last forever etc.

Anyway, Cyan Software, out of Spokane, Washington, brought us Myst and Uru.  I wonder if they have a YouTube... Here's what I'm talkin' about:

Donald Sutherland was a great Man X in JFK (the Oliver Stone movie) and the real "Man X" is also a blog persona. Poke around, check it out.

The new Bagdad price:  $8.50 versus the $3.00 it used to be.  Judging from the crowd and the lines, people are more than willing to give that a go.  I appreciated their having the secondary drink service window open.  I got a Hammerhead then saw the fresh grapefruit and asked if I could order a second drink as well, thinking Greyhound.  The barista wisely said (per OLCC) she'd need to see whomever else I was ordering for i.e. the rules are against buying two for oneself.  Hey, I'm not trying to be a lawbreaker here.  I'll get my Greyhound another time, no problem, thanks for having this window open, means I won't miss even the previews, some of which were interesting.

So if you see some hexagons sometimes, including in the sky (a common experience among some shroom heads -- or they'll see rhombs maybe), don't necessarily freak out.  Like maybe you should, I'm not Harry Seldon, but there's intelligence in using hexagons... a few pentagons.

I want to say that The Hunger Games, as a phenomenon, took me by surprise.  Suddenly, everyone had read it and knew all about it and I'm not really in the mainstream.  How did that happen?  Harry Potter was much more observable.  And I see the connection.

It's eerie how the culture veers when you're not on the same page, and blam, you're off the merry-go-round and on to something more like a roller coaster.

Thirsters: A Retrospective

Peter Bechtold was an area specialist (in the so-called Middle East, pretty much from Spain to Pakistan today) who could appreciate both the academic and governmental worlds.  He gave a two slide presentation at Thirsters this evening.  I brought Steve Holden, former PSF Chair, as my guest.  The venue was again packed. Ishtiaq from last week was there as a guest, and spoke at length with Dr. Maria Beebe, someone my mom enjoyed meeting.

Peter told a story wherein, as at first an academic outsider, he was one of the chorus who decried Washington, DC for always getting it wrong.  Then he got on the inside more and climbed the rungs of power or so it seemed, and met people he really could respect, for knowing as much has he did about an area, and then some.

However, we somewhat top out at this point, as mid-level people, such as presidents, prove themselves not quite able to steer a clear course.  They end up fudging a lot, making do with murky language.  So it seemed at the end of the day we were back to not finding DC's apparatus all that well designed.  "Only the president makes foreign policy" he said.  That seems a bottleneck right there.

Peter told his story well, reaching into current events of right then.  Secretary of State John Kerry had been saying something about drones, not apologizing or whatever, and immediately the spin doctors were sending a different message.

The audience wanted to talk about whether it was true that North Americans were "isolationist" in quite the way stereotyped.  They might still be world savvy or cosmopolitan in a different sense that could even be more dangerous, one questioner remarked (not me).

Dr. Bechtold made fun of the Portland-centric who think we're a hub.  In Boston they think we're near Michigan (like Detroit) and can't even say the name of our state correctly.  He meant that as a humbling remark, a reminder of how no on knows who or where we are.  But I took it a different way, as more evidence of an ethnocentric Atlantic culture that still thinks it runs things.  Empire State and like that.  Not my problem if Bean Town is a tad on the slow side.

Anyway, I enjoy friendly rivalry among capitals (what I call "capitalism"), Portland being an Open Source capital.  That's why Steve is here, ostensibly, to take advantage of Portland's being at a crossroads in global computing.  But were we living up to that reputation?  I think Steve is ahead of his time, and that worries me some.

A Khan at Thirsters

Ishtiaq Khan @ Thirsters / McMenamins

I thought this was a well placed punchy talk, just right for the audience, some of whom could share responsibility for getting him there, with his two kids, in the first place.  This is a real Pashtun overlord with "serfs" (bad translation) and so on.  Cool.

Most of what Ishtiaq had to say was new to me in detail but not in principle:  some incompetent admin types had sketched a few "countries" in the wake of a failing empire and lazy North American textbooks continue sharing this Anglo heritage, another way of continuing what white supremacist Rudyard Kipling called "the great game".

The border between two of these Stans, Afghani and Paki, never mirrored the reality on the ground, and was set to expire in 100 years anyway, according to some records.  The Pashtun, with a 4000 year lineage, have enough organizational memory to know that line is going (has gone) away.  Not if you consult lazy American textbooks or globes or National Geographic necessarily, but that's because Americans are basically politicians at heart.  They think locally and act even more locally (parochially).  World-savvy USAers are somewhat hard to come by, although we had a few in that room.

Back when Medard Gabel ran World Game they'd talk about how insane was the use of distorted maps, by which they meant the physical distortion of the landmasses, such as Greenland.  But equally distorted are these awkward ideas about "sovereignties" tiling the planet, with 2nd and 3rd tier "wannabe nations" in the wings (Kurdistan for example, or Tibet, which used to have more status), followed by all the virtual / cyber nations that are coming along (what the wannabes oft revert into -- and maybe find congenial).

We're swamped with national identities by this time.  Yet millions fell through the cracks, with more falling through them every day. There's nothing engineeringly "sealed" about this system.  It leaks everywhere, running mostly on suspended disbelief.

Washington DC is supposedly pulling out or holding back or something in 2014.  I'm not sure anyone really knows what DC is doing, including DC, a joke government in a lot of ways, with the attention span of a... well, you know how I get insulting.  That's just my lineage, back to Mark Twain and like that.

All Hands

Our ranks both grew and shrank since last year's May meetup at Bodega Bay, backdrop for Hitchcock's The Birds.

I stayed with other media savvy males in the Appian Way place, this time closer to Mother Ship.  The CEO handed me a key to a rental Impala, picked up and returned to SFO, which is where most of our party flew in.

Patrick and I took Alaska Air directly to STS, only minutes away from the gathering point.  Georgia picked us up in their Turkish-made commuter van, a Ford.

The president and operations manager, our founding couple, figured they'd completed the visionary part and demonstrated an ability to pass the torch in a way that did not delay or retard our progress along the timeline, in itself a feat of administrative smoothness.

In the slide show above, you will see us gathering by day to perform our jobs in a shared workspace at the Mother Ship.  There's also a regional HQS in Champaign, Illinois which I showcase elsewhere.  By night, we gathered more informally at one of the rental houses or local eatery to catch up.

Finally, after a day of inspection by an outside accrediting group, we went to Show & Tell (a company tradition) and learned a lot more about one another that way.  Two shared about the process of giving birth.  Others shared about life-changing travels / adventures.

We still have more steps along the timeline but are so far still on track and on schedule.

Admin was beefed up after the top level turnover, plus the Mentors added to their pool.  This was my first opportunity to meet some of them.  Finding out who one's peers are is an important step towards discovering one's organizational identity, I think most managers would agree.

Blue House Party Mix

Book of Rhombs

Glenn Stockton was regaling me with stories this morning, as we hiked around Mt. Tabor, stemming from all the Megalithic Math he's been studying.  He's been devouring Keith Critchlow's new book Time Stands Still.  At one point in our conversation he mentioned finding it very British to hear diamonds described as "rhombs" as if this latter word were so familiar.

Meanwhile, David Koski has been pushing this triangular book covers demo from several angles.  Start with any rhombus really, but some have more interesting properties.  We started with the two book covers being equilateral triangles of edges D, then right triangles with edges D, and now, in this latest video, the long diagonal of the rhomb is D, while the short diagonal is sqrt(2).

This D is the diameter of the unit-radius sphere.

I'd actually written quite a bit about these two rhombs defining a Coupler when placed at 90 degrees, but it took David's nudging for me to finally realize I was again covering this same territory, now with the "triangular book covers and two oppositely flapping pages".  Putting the Coupler at the XYZ origin is a great way to build a bridge to the IVM and Synergetics way of thinking more generally.

In massaging the source code for this demo, I realized that my code for the inadvertent tetrahedron was hard coding around all edges being D except the green and magenta, so needed to fix that for this video to have the right volumes.

Towards the end, I start mentioning the Rite, though it might not be clear that's actually the name of a specific tetrahedron.  The Rite and quarter Rite are both space-filling tetrahedrons.  Aristotle said tetrahedrons fill space and is often criticized on the theory he meant regular tetrahedrons.  However irregular tetrahedrons do fill allspace with identical copies of themselves and without left and right handedness, the Rite is one of these, as is the Mite.

To recap a theme of the last three "triangular book covers" videos:  the flapping triangular page defines two equal volumes, with a 3rd "inadvertent tet", again of equal volume, supplying a space-filling complement to the other two.  Indeed, any two of the three tetrahedrons formed, may be used to build an octahedron (two and two needed), with the third tetrahedron playing the role of the complementary space-filler ala the isotropic vector matrix model, but skewed and/or stretched (same topology).

In this case, starting with the rhombus of the rhombic dodecahedron, when the page is at 90 degrees, all three tetrahedrons are Rites and the octahedron formed by any two is the Coupler, of unit volume in Synergetics.

The rhombic triacontahedron hovers as tantalizingly relevant.  A next video might get into five-fold symmetric space-filling more, David's forte.  The page tip needs to click stop at "4/8" on the way to its vertical at 9/8, where 8/8 is the regular tetrahedron.  Length-determining volumes are the 2nd roots of these fractions.  That's back to when our rhombic book has edges 2 (i.e. D).

Link to source code on Github.

Satori

I spent a lot of time reading Alan Watts as a younger person, none of which time I regret; he was / is a good teacher of what we may legitimately call "Buddhist thought".  For those who don't know, this intellectual guy lived in Sausalito.  The Wikipedia picture shows him in full guru costume, which at the time was a trendy form of rebellion against establishment Western dress.  People were re-balancing their relationship with Asia, especially around the Pacific Rim.

Watts was in turn a student of D. T. Suzuki, a Japanese Zen master, and a lot of the Watts stuff works at translating such words as "satori" as "enlightenment" and so on.  But then what does "enlightenment" even mean in English?  You have the "Age of Enlightenment" which points back to such French luminaries as Voltaire.  You have the several dictionary definitions.  "Enlightening" can mean becoming aware of a more inclusive or elucidating way of looking.  That's a link to Wittgenstein, who baked "ways of looking" into his core "language games based" elucidation.

One has times in life wherein dots connect and circuits flip on.  Epiphanies may be fleeting, hour-long, ongoing themes.  Salvador Dali had some lengthy epiphanies.  He didn't worry, like a Viagra commercial, about an epiphany lasting too long.  In hindsight, surrealism benefited enormously from Dali's willingness to experience "satori" quite a bit.

One of the things the enlightenment literature tends to recommend is maddeningly complex practices of some kind, lots of tedious, repetitious, stupid, boring stuff.  This is no accident.  The mind is more prone to produce breakthroughs when forced into some corner and made to fend for itself.  Koans were / are like this:  puzzling little sayings and mantras designed to produce "aha!" experiences, more than one.  But then just life itself induces these "aha" experiences.  You don't need to go looking for koans.  They're in your face at all times, if you know where to look.

That being said, it's also true that communities need dishes washed, pigs milked, goats tended, fish smoked, or whatever the tasks of a subculture.  Were "enlightenment" to be reserved only for those on vacation or in retirement, that'd be droll.  Busy home owners need "enlightenment" as much as anyone.  An egalitarian flavor enters in, but also in reward for some kind of meekness, or humble submission to "chores" (doing your share of the work, participating in building / sustaining community).  The Buddhists call this Sangha i.e. Community.

Westerners often get bent out of shape by the word "Community" as it rhymes with "Communist", and yet they pay lots of lip service to "Fellowship" and "Church Community" as a good thing. It's disbelief in any God that made Communists a bad thing, but then Buddhism was never attacked in this way, at least not directly.  So Alan Watts could be rebellious and anti-establishment and not-communist at the same time, which was doubly subversive.  I was / am a fan.

Lots of movies use "satori" in that they help the audience experience revelations about things.  The plot twists and turns, and by the end there's a satisfying resolution, or not.  The ending may not be what matters.  Satori is found in films, that's what matters.  No wonder Japanese cartoons (anime) are often so philosophical / spiritual, so Zen in some cases.

The Quakers have "satori" too, which I might talk about another time.  The mode of "expectant waiting" is precisely that cultivated by many a devoted seeker.  To somewhat personalize the provider of insights as "God" (in place of "the muses") is the monotheist mode, but you need not be a "believer" to appreciate the power of intuition.  Kant's obsession with the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori is no less a meditation on whether moral truths might share something with the logically imperative.  You don't need to be a believer in some "God" to experience satori, as any atheist might tell you (whether Communist or not).

IVM 1-2-3

Given how I wrote the code for these demos, spreadsheet style, with governing globals up top, it wasn't hard to stretch the spine of the book, to make the two book covers make a square, instead of a rhombus.

In the previous "book covers" video, two equilateral triangles lay flat against a plane, with a triangular "page" flapping between them.  In this one, it's two right triangles laying flat, and when the page reaches 90 degrees, the half regular octahedron shows up, each of the complementary tetrahedrons a quarter of same.

Then there's the "inadvertent tet" made from the purple and green rods, others red.  Right when the complementary tets are equal, it turns regular (they're produced together) and the "octet truss" is born (the pure IVM).

Let's be clear though:  the IVM was there last time too, with the equiangular book covers.  The regular tet's complement, the "iceberg tet" is a quarter octahedron, just like the two "iceberg tets" forming here in complement (see Fig. 987.210D).

So this time the inadvertent is the regular tet and both complements are icebergs.  Last time the IVM formed when both the inadvertent tet and one of the complements were icebergs, with the other complement a regular tet.  So two views of the same thing.  A little dance.

Here again, even with the different book covers, you have the option to pair the inadvertent tet with an iceberg (1/4 oct) to get an oblate octahedron of volume 4 + another iceberg to fill space. That's not the focus, but is a consequence of the generalization in the earlier video, that any two of the three may be chosen to build the octahedron, leaving the third tetrahedron to complete the "IVM-like" space-filling matrix.

It's not hard to see that the IVM gets to "waver" in some affine ways (to become "IVM-like").  Picture a layer of squares, like a checkerboard, then another layer above, but with its squares offset to have its corners above the others' centers.  Keep stacking that way, corners over centers, and connect each center to the four corners below.  The distance between layers is just right such that these slanted intra-layer members are also all the same length, the length of the square edges.  That's your IVM.  No shortage of squares.

Now picture the squares "wavering" to become rectangles as the distance between layers also wavers.  All the rods have become stretchy but we're keeping the layers parallel and no rods are disconnected, so the same 12 from every hub.  The familiar topology.

Space Filling Triads of Tetrahedrons

Do we say "tetrahedra" or "tetrahedrons" for the plural?  My spellchecker prefers the latter, but through long habit, I tend to use the "hedra" ending.

Tetrahedrons in the plural is what this video is about.

My technique was to code in the PyCharm IDE by JetBrains, to which I subscribe, while importing the visual package from VPython dot org.  Then I turned on QuickTimePlayer on the Apple Mac Air, which does a decent job of screen recording.

Finally, I pull that recording into iMovie and talked over it, before uploading to YouTube.  These are skills within range of a broad audience and are also increasingly the skills associated with academic studies.

David Koski provided most of the brain power in terms of providing the original insight I'm endeavoring to communicate.

What's somewhat interesting about this video is what's not shown, or what I leave out of the narration.

For example, I don't make it abundantly clear that the "inadvertent tetrahedron" with four red edges, one green and one purple, also has the very same volume as that of the two complements with which it is associated.

These three, the two complements plus the inadvertent tet, are what comprise the space-filling triad.  Any two will assemble an octahedron with two copies of each (for a volume of 4x whatever volume we're at), and the remaining tetrahedron will complete the space-filling, with a volume 1/4 that of the octahedron at all settings.

In the video, I use the term "isotropic vector matrix" somewhat loosely, as it's the topology of this simplicial complex that I'm focused on, whereas clearly not all the rods are the same length, as they are in the pure IVM scaffolding (as they are in the XYZ scaffolding).

In the IVM topology, every vertex has 12 rods emanating therefrom and tetrahedrons combine with their partner octahedrons in a ratio of 2:1 i.e. there are twice as many tetrahedrons.

Do the triangular book covers need to start out as equilateral triangles?  No.  In a future demo, I will start with 45-45-90 degree book covers lying flat to make a square and go through the same transformation.  A triumvirate of space-filling tetrahedra are made that way as well.  Indeed, we can make the pure IVM rather straightforwardly.

The demo I'm showing here does have the pure IVM within range.  When either complement is the regular tetrahedron, the inadvertent tet and complement are the same 1/4 "orange slice" of a regular octahedron (four wedges =  1 octahedron).  David and I call these wedges "icebergs".

In XYZ accounting (cube based), when the page tip is at 90 degrees, the octahedron and tetrahedron have a volume ratio of 4:1, as always, but the volume actually is 4, the tetrahedron 1.

I'm assuming red edges of 2, my value for D, the Diameter of the four unit radius spheres that might pack to create and all-red-edges tetrahedron when their centers were interconnected.

Synergetics accounts this as a model of D to the 3rd power, which is why the volume numbers differ by sqrt(9/8).  When the complements reach their highest volume at 90 degrees, that's sqrt(9/8) more than the regular tetrahedron volume (= that of its iceberg complement).

Afghanistan Revisited

Maria A. Beebe is back.

Wanderers are getting an update on the state of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), from someone who has lots of on the ground experience.

Dr. Beebe has met with us before.  Carol (mom) joined us this time as she's tasked with making a public presentation on the current state of Afghanistan.

Cisco has quite a bit of market penetration.  Curriculum writers have clamored for less brand-based training.

She started off by showing us this World Bank video about ICT in the recent past.

Getting university curricula ramped up, as well as providing mobile phones to an increasing number of subscribers are the primary goals.

Afghanistan suffers from a syndrome similar to China's:  in pirating Windows, the ICT population is both stymied by virus prone platforms, and their skills development is being retarded, as they struggle with black box software.

I was curious about the level of censorship of the Internet, e.g. whether opposition groups fighting the US occupation could have their web sites.

Others asked to what extent phone calls were being surveilled.

Pacific Rim (movie review)

A change of marquee at The Bagdad and I'm back for more "mindless entertainment" as it's called.

Lets watch some monsters rip up some cities.  Spectacular.

And it is spectacular.  Loud professionally-mixed sound has everything to do with it, plus there's that audience complicity we bleep over called "suspended disbelief".  How come when we go to book stores there aren't whole shelves on "suspended disbelief" -- isn't that an amazing concept and doesn't it ultimately cover so much outside of just movies?

A less nice term for it is "being in denial" but that's so unfriendly.  Doesn't it just mean having a good imagination and willfully coloring one's own life with what "special effects" one might bring to the picture?  If movie-makers do it why can't we?

Why do they call it escapism?  Yet at the same time "curling up with a novel" is a healthy thing?  No consistency there then.  If you wanna believe you're doing something "wrong", you will always have evidence, built in to the very fabric of the universe.  But "right" is there also.

Reading (fiction or non-fiction) actually keeps you in practice as a reader.  If you stop reading, the habit erodes, as it has for many non-reading TV-aholics.

Anyway, it's really rainy and stormy here after a pretty summer and people were packing the theater big time.  Indoor entertainment this weekend, not hiking, not exploring the great outdoors.

I don't like missing beginnings, especially holes opening into other dimensions, but I wanted my beer 'n pizza (this was dinner -- though I'd snack more too), so I head tripped about how they weren't firing on all cylinders (some cashier positions were open -- and some filled as I got closer) when I should have gotten there earlier.

Which reminds me, I need to give my mom her meds that I picked up on the way... hold on.  OK done, she has them.

Code Guardian on steroids.  With the Chinese Restaurant from eXistenZ, just a little.  These ugly bugs have parasites that are just as ugly.  It's ugly all the way down... but for sale and prized in Hong Kong (conjure the laugh track).

This movie knows to get a little goofy sometimes (I've not even mentioned the science types).  It's not as seriously scary as World War Z (also with its science type, just the type to slip up), which is more horrific by far.  The UN was at it again (like in WWZ) appearing to make the big decisions ("build walls!"), with the US fitting in, not playing the standalone "superpower" so much.

The fighter pilot hero seems American idol like, but most around him in command seemed Australian, see below.

This is just epic science fiction and fun with special effects.  Alexia had already told me it was so silly it was satisfying, just the mind-chicken one might need after a gnarly day at some office.

Let's just watch the world ending and see some bold heroics to save it, why not?  Lots of allusions to Godzilla.

I'm largely skeptical of Jaegers by the way.  I suppose they're more believable than Transformers and believability ain't even the point.  Just I don't think that super heavy metal with hoses the pneumatics is ever going to achieve that level of gracefulness quite, certainly not at that scale -- even the level of grace depicted, which is still pretty lame.  Sound is what makes it believable.

All that clanking.  Definitely heavy metal, yep yep.

I think it was Saving Private Ryan where the movie-makers suddenly paid more attention to bullet and gunfire noises, not using Hollywood stock effects.  Breakthroughs occur on that level.  I'm not saying this film had such breakthroughs, or that it didn't, just it gets me thinking about movie-making wizardry again.  So much goes into these productions.  I'd gladly watch The Making of Pacific Rim on special features.

Another plot element that gets me is you don't get to practice "drifting" (mind melding) with your battlefield partner, you just dive into it, already aboard a giant robot.  And when did you get training with that?  Learning to drive is hard enough but here you get converge your memories with someone else's and pilot a skyscraper all in one go?

Seems like you'd want to gradually build up to such onerous real time duty with the drifting and start more casually?

But that'd turn a science action film into a romance or other voyeuristic nonsense (as she and he got to know each other better, other than by fighting that is).  Nope, not what you came to see.  It's a monster movie for gosh sakes, not about adults doing lots of kissing (but then you're supposed to get how you might wanna, if you're only fourteen).

Probably the deepest aspect of this movie is its title, and the blend of East and West it concocts as a backdrop (not forgetting "down under").  This clearly can't be the present, as we don't have Jaegers yet and the UN doesn't cohere all that well (no external threat is really that big I guess, no "other dimension").

Speaking of the UN there are some big talks on nuclear disarmament going on even now yet it's hard to dig up stories.  The US isn't wanting to be "told what to do" and has not yet embraced the view that it can afford to lose the business, though Countdown to Zero -- the campaign (aka Critical Will) -- continues to make inroads, including with top intelligentsia.

Code Guardian too seems set in the past, and has these giant retro robots, as the popular mind back then might have imagined them (projecting its own technology).  It's this "retro futurism" that informs the ambiance of this film, Aliens no question an influence (open homage is paid).

It's not the job of science fiction to always believably situate itself, in either time or in space, as an other tomorrow.  Here's another way the ability to "suspend disbelief" comes in handy.  Then disbelief can come flooding in again, as your lonely planet whirls its silent way along some geodesic.  Nothing unbelievable about that.

Another similarity with Code Guardian (a tiny budget film, entirely computer generated) is precisely this Pacific Rim focus, in some ways furthering the peace it projects, with a nod to lingering sparks of hostility.  Many Asian countries get left out though, as many as are included.  This isn't a documentary on Asian cultures.

I met Derek walking back and we talked about coming changes to the neighborhood.  He was on his way to a sports bar to watch a game.

World War Z (movie review)

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.

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.

...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.

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.

Leveraging Python

:: Special Feature | Director's Comments ::

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).

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).

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.

A Crossroads