R0ml's Talk: Why Schools Don't Teach Open Source

I always look forward to @R0ml's talks, as do Anna Ravenscroft of Alex Martelli, in the front row (I'm one row back).  Robert Lefkowitz knows how to encourage thinking.

Java and Bluejay are commonly used in college intro to programming courses, both open source, however neither started as open source and the curriculum did not change when they did, suggesting their becoming free is somewhat irrelevant.  How to make Open Source not irrelevant?

We don't want to stress "free as in beer" nor make OSS esoteric.  We want to share an "open source way".  Programmed Visions by Wendy Chun is one of R0ml's current favorites.  He uses her definition of "neoliberalism":  the notion that individuals acting within their own interest within a framework will generate emergent goodness.

R0ml linked this to Martin Luther and Francis Bacon as fostering individualism, then empiricism versus reliance on faith and authority of the cathedral.  Etienne de Condiac also gets credit for fostering an empirical approach, then Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson with their cybernetic / feedback loop approach to governance of, by and for the people.

Darwinism and the hurly burly of the ecosystem, then Eric Raymond.... if everyone scratches their own itch, things will get better in the bazaar.  That's the current meaning of neo-liberalism.

Sugata Mitra's experiments come in, as showing that bazaar dynamics work in education ("minimally invasive education").

How might we capitalize on all this heritage to make the Open Source Way relevant in education?  Teaching programming, sure, but does everyone really need programming for some "job".  Does learning programming make one a more well-rounded person?  We all need health courses even if we don't expect everyone to become medical.  Heath:Medicine :: Programming:_____?

Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum gets a plug.

Everybody needs to direct automata, make machines do their bidding.  Praxis versus Techne was the old greek dichotomy.  Our praxis is to teach people how to use software effectively.

Software Assessments, Benchmarks, and Best Practices by Capers Jones.

How does one know if one is becoming a better programmer?

The answers have to do with the source code, not with the end user experience as much.  82% of programming does not specifically involve programming.  Becoming a better programmer is about educating one's tastes, one's sensitivity to flavor.

DARPA's MUSE might fill in the vacuum, of helping people master their machines, but to what extent might we really automate the process of choosing, applying judgement?

Why Don't Schools Teach How to Use Open Source Software?  That is the question.

i18n

:: me with sebastopol bosses ::

I chose the i18n tables both tutorial days at OSCON 2014.  I got to meet some of the principals behind interoperability in the realm of sharing medical data (clinical, not financial). I enjoyed the Alice in Wonderland effect of walking into my own textbook, in the sense that I teach TDD all day long (TDD = test driven development) and our whole table broke out into an in depth and extended discussion of how important testing is.  Such an immersive discussion; I mostly sat rapt.

Then my two bosses from Sebastopol came by and joined our table.  One of the Aegis guys graciously offered to take the above picture, me the mentor in the middle.  If my face looks a little smudged, it is, thanks to a smudge on my lens.  The verdict on the Coolpix S9300 is it's harder than my previous Coolpix to get not-blurry pix with (even minus the lens blemish, which I added somehow).  The reviews corroborate my experience.  I should invest in a next camera given I'm such an ardent user of said equipment.  My uploaded to date number well above 20K.

It looked to me like @tati_alchueyr sacrificed the knight on purpose, to give her pawn a way to reach the end and transform to a queen, game over.  This was in the Expo Hall, after the tutorials were all over.

Bagdad Meetup

I met with a Friend at Bagdad last night for a wandering conversation.  He's more the news junky and so conversation turned to the loss of a second jumbo 777, same airline (MH), so soon, under suspicious circumstances.

We know from Lockerbie and TWA800 that (a) it doesn't take a missile and (b) unless you've done some forensics, easy theories are just that.  Minus a black box etc., this remains one of those open cases where minority reports remain welcome.

Speaking of open cases, David Chandler, a well known speaker on 911, will be addressing Annual Session (NPYM) this week.

Ramping Up

We're ramping up to OSCON around OST, as our parent company, ORM, is OSCON's main sponsor / organizer, though with lots of help behind the scenes.  OST = O'Reilly School of Technology. OSCON = Open Source Convention.

Long time readers / explorers in my blogs / journals may know that OSCON started out as a Perl Conference, an inclusive tent that gradually drew in the OSS languages (OSS = open source software), for example:  Perl itself, Python, Ruby, PHP... Apache projects, the GNU stuff (gcc, bash... emacs, vi), Linux, FreeBSD... actually millions of projects count as open source software, so it's like trying to enumerate "the animals of the earth" (Noah's check list).  GNU = GNU is Not Unix.

FreeBSD is a Berkeley (UC Berkeley) flavor of UNIX.  UC = University of California.

Anyway, ramping up for OSCON.  You can tell, right?  ORM = O'Reilly Media.  Got my new business cards today.

Serious About Soaps

Thanks to Synchronofile, a local media archive, I've been reviewing TV detergent commercials en masse, one after the other:  Wisk, Biz, Fab, Duz, Cheer, Exact (early tablet), Tide, Ad, Lestoil, Rinso, Salvo (also tablet)... some of these brands didn't make it to 2014, others are still household names.

Sometimes a fragment of the sponsored soap opera is included for context:  The Guilding Light; Love is a Many Splendored Thing, Death Valley...

Post WW2 was all about a baby boom, with guys off to the office, gals staying home to master a new life style based on Madison Avenue hyped appliances and new food stuffs.

Washing machines, dish washers, televisions... these appliances hardly get any expensive TV advertising today as they're taken for granted.

I'm not being sarcastic-critical about the need to master new lifestyles, complete with gadgets.  Today it's the smartphone.

Going forward, my idea of a positive show genre is a mix of soap opera / melodrama and reality TV, mixed with adventures in making the world work (est influence).

Watch your favorite world development team trundle around in a bizmo, caravaning to camps, tackling problems in a DIY engineeringly sophisticated way.  Thanks to the web, watching is not just passive, and it's not just money you can send, but advice, paid-for items for inventory.

Announcer voice (1950s tone, for nostalgia purposes):

"Thank you Mr. and Mrs. Johnson of Boise, Idaho for this high volume electric pump, and to Joe and Marge Buxton of Fort Lauderdale, Florida for the solar steam generator from Infinia, used together in today's episode."

Yes, the "nuclear family" itself feels pretty retro by now.  I'm a "love makes a family" guy myself, though Dawn Wicca and I did pretty well at being nuclear.  '

The surrounding society has convenient APIs set up for families in that mold.  Even in 2014, multi-spouse "molecular families" are still a nightmare for social engineers (e.g. database schema designers).

A first step towards matching reality is allowing dependents to show up in more than one household, as divorced parents, some with new spouses, share parenting.  Guardianship is not necessarily the job of biological parents either, and many databases need to show an "authorized guardian" to pick up junior after class (could be an older sibling, could be a neighbor).

In helping Quakers to sort out such multicultural / anthropological complexities on a small scale, in schematic form, I help to come up with more robust, more general purpose APIs.

Shift Happens Rapidly

I'm under the gun at work and regret not getting to the end of Jeff Goebel's slides today, but those that I saw were excellent and totally apropos for a Wanderers meetup, as the content was science.

Lots of STEM.

The topic was global climate change, but from a refreshing new angle.

Jeff works with ranchers, farmers, foresters, tribes, subcultures, to formulate land use and long range resource management plans based on buy-in and consensus.

He's been working with Deidre Schuetz, who presented last week, about her land and resource management projects in Senegal and Guinea.

As his slides made clear, keeping our atmosphere viable is all about the race between photosynthesis on the one hand, and carbon being lost to the atmosphere.

Rather than limit his focus on the fossil fuel problem (peak oil etc.), he understands that increasing biomass in and of itself is a way of countering global warming.

His arguments require only a high school understanding of geo- and biochemistry.  However, unless you've been doing your homework, you might not have the puzzle as put together as Jeff does.

Great talk.  We're still in for rough times though.  Jeff doesn't know how much a difference his approach will make, but he feels good about catalyzing it spreading quickly.

Perma-culture and so on are known sciences i.e. he's not looking to science fiction to save our butts, though I'm sure he'd welcome a few deus ex machina maneuvers, if we can swing 'em.

When Quakers go Trans

By my title you might be thinking I mean "trans-gender" but I'm talking about another kind of transition at the institutional level.  The ideas of "hormone therapy" and/or "surgery" still have application in this extended metaphor.

When a cis Liberal Meeting decides to pass for Pastoral, it needs to embark upon a somewhat lengthy process.  In the final stages, vital committees considered intrinsic to Liberal Friends, including Business Meeting itself, may be put on ice or shelved.  This is sometimes posed as "an experiment" i.e. lets put aside our structures and just have potlucks and family fun, not worry our heads about such worldly matters as Liberals (remember them?) might be concerned with.

A first sign that a change might be looming is when Friends cannot seem to fill their own Peace and Social Concerns committee.  Why should a bunch of middle class white people enjoying their privileges want to busy themselves with fighting the status quo?  Life is pretty good.  Lets focus on our families instead.

If you have a nice meetinghouse, you'll have "event center" possibilities, i.e. a steady income, and with a Pastoral Care Committee, you'll be able to divvy the surplus among the faithful, meaning mostly members, i.e. those who've demonstrated due obedience to the Pastoral team.

We Liberals sometimes call this form of Pastoralism "kiss butt Quakerism", clearly pejorative, but forgive us, the whole of Quakerism owes itself, in large degree, to throwing off any pastoral caste.  That some Quakers fell back into the slime and lost their evolutionary advantages is not tacit permission for all of us to fall from grace in such a spectacular manner.

The meeting I attend and have served for many decades, as Quarterly Meeting Planner when we host that event (WQM), as Overseer, as Peace and Social Concerns person, even as Assistant Clerk, appears to be undergoing hormone therapy with an eye towards becoming a Trans Church.

As a dry run, the Pastor-Clerks assumed record-level powers and made a secret deal with a radical political group many Liberals have real questions about.  Oversight was bypassed, except for its clerk, whom the pastoral team pledged to secrecy until the deal was done and announced to the world on Facebook, i.e. until it was too late.

News of the deal going down was leaked however, and a delegation of Liberals approached the pastors on bended knee, so to speak, to beg for lenience.  They brought a petition.  Don't sell out by committing a trophy meetinghouse, a symbolic property, so easily, and in such a back-handed manner, was our silent plea -- I said nothing during this April 13 meeting, as I was still trying to understand what was happening to our meeting (e.g. what is "CAC"?).

The pastor-clerks eventually relented, after taking a few days to consult with advisers (the CAC), saying they have great compassion for all members and if anyone feels bullied by any group, they're here to protect them.  A series of special meetings was called, to prove the sincerity of our protectiveness.

This about face totally pissed off the first group (understandably) the radicals with whom the secret deal had already been struck, but their wrath was probably worth the price, as the main point was in terms of internal Quaker politics:  Business Meeting must beg, not decide.  The pastors were in control and were making all key decisions, not the laity, i.e. the surgery was almost complete.

As an Overseer at the time, and of the Liberal persuasion, I understandably went ballistic, and that's where an Eldering Committee comes in, instigated directly by pastor-clerks against any lingering dissident Liberal: lets make an example of this dissenter, by loving him to death ("compassionate listening" they called it).

Likewise Oversight -- soon to be renamed Pastoral Care Committee if the kiss-butts have their way -- was not really a factor in making this decision, either to go with the radicals or to cancel.  The hormone therapy was almost complete.  We're a Quaker Trans Church in the making.  That's the fashionable trend these days.  Pastors rule!

True Liberal Meetings are a vanishing species perhaps.  Don't assume simply checking the Faith and Practice will get you the truth.  Ours is riddled with misleading inaccuracies and, at this point, I'd say outright lies.  It says we have a Peace and Social Concerns Committee.  That's covering up the fact that we don't (no meetings in ages, nothing on the calendar going forward, AFSC ex oficio... gone).

So yes, I see our Integrity testimony as falling by the wayside here, but minus any Peace and Social Concerns, who's to be concerned about it?  You see how it all fits together, in an almost hermetic way.  Quakers are brilliant around process, that much is clear.

Membership Matters

A friend of mine was asking about membership in the Religious Society of Friends.  How does that work?  I was recounting a story of a fun little family that got rejected for membership, which is what triggered the question.  How does it work?

The way it works normally is a Monthly Meeting will want to clear you for membership, in return for your demonstrating loyalty to that particular meeting, paying your dues so to speak.  If you live far away, you won't be able to participate much, so you'll be directed to a more nearby meeting most likely.  At least that's how it was at Multnomah until recently, when we branched out and offered long distance membership to someone in Canada, without the labeling of Isolated Friend.

Once a Monthly Meeting clears you for membership (write a letter to Oversight to get the ball rolling), you're on the hook in terms of coming to business meetings and serving on committees -- unless you attain Released status.

This coveted Released status lets you (a) retain your membership in the Monthly Meeting and (b) keeps Nominating from tapping you for chores, or Oversight from snagging you for clearness duty.

Obtaining elite Released status requires having some ministry or testimony the meeting adjudges worth taking on the road.  You're a spokesperson for Quakerism at that level, and that gives you an alibi, a justification for being "off the hook" vis-a-vis regular membership duties.

Finally, there's what I call Walt Whitman Friends, which are people who eschew the shackles of any particular Monthly Meeting yet manage to worm their way into Quakerism nonetheless.  Walt Whitman never joined a Meeting but walked and talked like a Quaker and Quakers would like to claim him as one of their own. 

Birthright Friends used to be in this category, not subject to a clearness process, but most Monthly Meetings no longer accept such an entitlement.

On the other hand, if your currency as a Quaker is relatively weak, your lack of a formal membership in any Monthly Meeting may be used to demote you.  You'll have the rank of attender.  You'll find members sometimes being snobby towards you; they can't help themselves usually.

Both non-members and Whitman Friends have a fair amount of clout in a Liberal Friends meeting.  Liberal Friends are serious about not taking titles too seriously, including that of "member".  Jesus never invited us to form a membership club after all, that's just after-the-fact bureaucracy, added-on infrastructure, like a fan club.

So non-members will oft be found riddling a Liberal meeting, providing walk-the-talk integrity to the Equality Testimony, showing the world that the whole "membership" thing is to be taken with a grain of salt (member = officially cleared cheerleader in large degree).

Having members is important though.  It boosts the morale of a meeting to have a few pillars of society step up to the plate and roll up their sleeves.  These pillars don't see committee work as a chore or obligation so much as a privilege.

Both members and non-members may share this more enlightened perspective.

Like, how often do you get to do serious role playing in a 350+ year old language game that encourages personal and corporate growth, one centered around a shared business (the meeting itself)?  What a great sandbox to work and play in.  And you don't have to be rich.

Prying Open a Generator

A Python generator is very like a function but is characterized by the keyword yield, and preserves state between calls.

For example you might have a generator that keeps spitting back a successive digits of Pi, but to do that, it needs to keep track of internal values between called to pi_digits.__next__() or whatever.

Do we have a way to take a generator that's already been advanced through several yields, and study the internal values of its state variables?  Yes.

Steve Holden wrote some code like the following to show me how it's done:

The output is:
3
42

... the current values of i, and n, respectively.

Using a FrameType object, you get to act like a debugger and get into the current state. This technique applies to more than just generators, but I think generators are a good example of something the guts of which you might want to peek into.

Lifetime Achievement

Carol got her lifetime achievement award from US Congressman Earl Blumenaur today.  She's a rallying figure in the nuke weapons abolition movement, which I blog about here a lot, like mother like son (dad was anti nuke weapon too of course, ours being a pacifist / Quaker family).

The First Unitarian Church has this useful Eliot Center where I've been to a Johnny Stallings fundraiser to help prisoners, and at least one BarCamp, maybe two.

Today the place was packed with Quakers, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Womens International League for Peace and Freedom, Columbia Riverkeepers, and observers from myriad other groups (see slides).

We had a panel which yakked about the Marshall Islanders' lawsuit against the slothful / inefficient / incompetent Nuke Nations, who under the NPT have agreed to shed these signature hallmarks of an idiocracy in the making.  Some Nuke Nations are outside the NPT though, understandably skeptical the others will abide by it.

When people lined up at the microphone, I took off to get some neighborhood context shots and catch up on correspondence.  I'm getting pretty good using my thumb to keep the business flowing.  However my day job is not doable on a smartphone.  I digress.

Carol's role was to accept our appreciation, which she did gracefully.  I will refer to this event more in future.  Hanford and its impact on the Columbia River was a big focus.

People are still slow to absorb that seepage is not a danger that might occur, but an actuality.  They're still thinking the price is avoidable.

The challenge is to expend wisely.

The Congressman's speech was in part about getting a handle on what's really being spent.  Big expenses are not that easy to track sometimes, as you might imagine.

Friend Barnes reminisced in the background about this being the 25th Anniversary of Tienanmen Square.  He was there, saw what happened.  Around him, mostly denial.  I was glad to provide a listening ear.

Art Piece

For those of you who want a conversation piece, this is a sculpture of myself pole dancing at The Last Supper.

 Thank you Mark Allyn, for adding some light and levity to my day. Very Burning Man.

Tapping Away

Still stumbling along. On a tablet tonight, from some apartment. So slow.

VBC site visit with Sunanda today, old hippie much recovered post Eugene incident. Lives in a 12 x 6 Calistoga unless I have wires crossed.

Village Building Collective is in its 14th year.  Was at Saint David of Wales where Food Not Bombs was also welcomed, same chapter. Now it's Sunnyside Methodists who get the focus. Cool.

We had lunch at New Seasons after I slept through a staff meeting, duh. Up to 3 AM in my defense.

Enough for this tablet tonight.

Final ISEPP Lecture

I am hoping this was the season finale and not the grand finale, but much is beyond ISEPP's control.

That's the tiny nonprofit behind the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series which Terry organizes, and Mentor Graphics sponsors, in tandem with other sponsors, including schools such as Oregon Episcopal.

Terry gave the wrap up talk and did manage to connect the dots for people, especially if one had been to the other lectures he referenced, which I had for the most part. Terry might be described as less apocalyptic sounding than some, even in the face of ongoing climate change.

The Heathman Dinner was excellent. Good catching up with Buzz, stroke victim recovering with Final Cut Pro.

Another good restaurant nearby: Southpark next to Arlington Club across the street, where Applewhites stayed that time they came to visit (in 1996).  I ate there today (at Southpark), discussing Oversight business with a Friend.  The wait staff stopped serving water owing to a public health advisory.

OST Summit: Lake Tahoe

Connected Comments

commenting on Quaker practice unbound



commenting on Multnomah Friends Facebook page

Double Whammy

May First was a big day for yours truly.

The May Day mobilization went off without a hitch, me the photographer, like last year.  The AFSC Portland page is even better as another photographer took over from me once the march got underway.

Then Trevor had a book signing at Mother Foucault's, also well attended, with the author reading from his Confessions of a Failed Egoist.

Tragic Loss

Our neighbor and friend.

Coast tightrope walker swept into ocean
By Associated Press: April 25, 2014, 8:22 PM

PACIFIC CITY, Ore. — Authorities say a Portland man trying to walk across a homemade tightrope between two large rock sections on the north Oregon coast is missing after a large wave hit him and swept him into the ocean.

Tillamook County Sheriff Andy Long said Friday that 25-year-old James Michael Alejandro was climbing on a rocky area of Cape Kiwanda with several others Thursday afternoon when he connected a single rope between two large rock sections above the water and tried to walk it. Witnesses say he was briefly seen in the ocean but they lost sight of him.

A Coast Guard boat and helicopters searched by water and air but didn’t find Alejandro. Long cautions that coastal ocean currents are strong and large waves are common in the area.

Cogitations

Everyone's a spy now.

I'm probably the last kid on the block to get two-step verification, the Google service where if you log in on an untrusted computer, you get a text message to your cell phone for verification purposes.  You need to enter that too, or you're not you.

Since I'm on a company computer borrowed from another staffer while mine's in the shop, I took the opportunity to make it not trusted, meaning really no computer is (to me).  There ya go, welcome to spyville.

And yet we're just truck stop Joe and Jill.  There's future shock for ya, hello Alvin Toffler.

What's been happening?  Lots of course.

Dave Koski is legitimately excited about this number 2√2ø^-2  as in Emod * 2√2ø^-2 = S mod.

These so-called "mods" are tetrahedron shapes, components defined in Synergetics 2.  That's the magnum opus by Buckminster Fuller in collaboration with E.J. Applewhite since transplated to the web.  Dedicated to H.S.M. Coxeter aka King of Infinite Space.

David and I have yakked about such things for years, fun shoptalk (namespace, whatever).

I've been looking at a new title:

Back to the Future

David Pearce Snyder is on the ISEPP board so has behind the scenes influenced Terry in ways we'll never know about (grin).  He's lectured for ISEPP before and was as lucid as ever, in bringing us his view of the future, which is very metrological, in the sense of "metrologist", one who measures (Doug Strain was one of those too).

Demographically speaking, the North American population is aging and youth will be at a premium. But beyond that rather well know fact was the good news:  the gigantic onslaught of new tech that really takes time to accommodate, has been accommodated to the point where we might even thrive again.  We were in a dip, if you look at the numbers.

I really appreciated this big picture perspective.  My dad was a futurist and would have loved these ISEPP lectures, this one in particular I think.

Bravo Mentor Graphics and other sponsors, and Terry for picking winners way more than chance would allow.  We must be doing something right, eh?

What the talk was really about was the future of higher education, a topic of keen interest to me, given I'm in the teaching business, in Cyberia (cyberspace).  MOOCs started off on the wrong foot maybe, but much was learned.  Universities are adapting or going under, the usual thing.  I'm being vague as you had to be there.  These lectures get recorded, Glenn on camera.

The Heathman dinner was excellent as usual.  I let Christine have my other ticket as she's a stalwart and adds perspective to Wanderers a lot.  I get two tickets per lecture as another board member, but not an advertised one i.e. I'm not the big name futurist David is, though I did get two write-ups in The Oregonian as a futurist (only Metro section I'm pretty sure).  Small potatoes so far.

You don't have to go to a four year college to have a good life, but neither should you regret going if that's what you did or are doing.  Many doors are open.  This is not a bad time to be alive.

State of Society

During a our final review and approval of our State of Society Report during Meeting for Business recently, one Friend asked if membership issues had really been "divisive" as the report states.  The clerk called on a member of Oversight to test the validity of that word.  "Divisive is what fits" came the reply, in paraphrase.

I followed up later, as another member of Oversight, with more details, as there's no reason to leave Friends in the dark on this matter.  I wrote (by email):

As another person on Oversight besides [X], I can vouch for membership being divisive in the following sense:  

some see [sic] witnessing others becoming members should be only observed and conducted by other members, whereas others have no problem with non-members witnessing the entire membership process, even convening the clearness committee for that purpose. 

I'm one of those who sees no contradiction here as we value transparency and have no secret rites in our faith and practice i.e. members-only (other than to satisfy the state that we map to their corporation laws).  As a non-member, I have convened many a membership committee with no qualms about my ethics.  I celebrate people's heeding the inward call to serve, which takes many outward guises.

Recorded membership is one of many practices Friends engage in to signify their loyalty to the Religious Society of Friends.

Unlike the Tallahassee Friends, who according to our documents see becoming a member as a kind of detailed vetting, an integrity test, almost an initiation or hazing, I look for a willingness, an eagerness, to publicly identify as a Friend in a way that deserves the backing of some Monthly Meeting.  The meeting will not disavow so-and-so when they publicly proclaim to be a Friend.  That's the social contract.

However, we do not certify, as a meeting, that so-and-so has met a lot of deeply spiritual criteria.  Presumably so-and-so wrote a letter to Oversight and a clearness meeting was convened.  We do not require any criminal background checks, e.g. we are not assuring the public that Y is not a child molester.  We hope not, and will be surprised if so, but let us not mislead the general public into thinking a member has somehow been through some thorough quality assurance program in order to "come out" as a recorded member.

We do not hire expensive Internet services to study the public record, as we might if you want to work in the children's program as one of two supervisory adults, as required by our insurance company (another item of business during the same meeting).  As a third adult in the room, you would not need a background check or social security number.

No, that's not how the process works, in the case of something routine like membership.

We're encouraging people to come forward as Friends and deal with the consequences in the aftermath (for the rest of their lives perhaps).

We're not saying all of those consequences have already been dealt with, nor that so-and-so has reached the top of some spiritual ladder, nor even a higher rung.

We do not pretend to having criteria to measure your "rung level" on any spiritual ladder, though individuals on the Clearness Committee, or anyone, during the seasoning period between meetings for business, may express their reservations about Z e.g. if Z seems too immature and / or clueless about Quakers and Quaker history and/or does not behave in a way consistent with Friends testimonies, that's something to point out.

Given it's a social contract between the meeting, and the individual, both sides get to think about it.  Then to agree to this contract is not to make a lot of corollary claims about Z other than that she and/or he is now accepted as a recorded member.  He and/or she is willing to publicly identify as a Friend in a way a meeting agrees to back or certify.  We hope Z will not be hypocritical then, going forward.

Wanderers 2014.4.8: WW1

Gordon Hoffman did a stupendous job synergizing with Wanderers, letting other old timers chime in with fascinating facts and factoids, adding texture and nuance to an already-tasteful presentation.

Gordon is qualified to call himself a truly vested individual when in comes to WW1, and right away we should point out that, at this point in history, extremely few people with USA passports, with USA citizenship, are seen to frequent the monuments to its war dead in Europe.  This is rightly seen by many as anomalous.  But then the USA stands out in many ways that leave Europeans somewhat perplexed, if not dismayed.

I'm truly not so-qualified, i.e. my insights into WW1 are still in early Big Bang inflationary stage, where I double my understanding every thirty minutes.  I've been reading a lot of history recently, lets say "of the Vienna Circle" to stay brief about it, along with that compendium, Human Smoke (on my Kindle).

Having Gordon's slide presentation plunk down in the middle of these studies really helped things crystallize for me.  Following the changing map of Europe is as hard as inverting a matrix or finding its eigenvalues.  Historians take in hyper-dimensional spaces for breakfast.  That being said, I have a lot more learning ahead of me (duh).  Thank you Gordon, for accelerating my process.

He handed around some small items from his collection.  Dick Pugh was there, another master of the show and tell, sorry to miss Mastin, and Glenn.  Terry, you should come to more of these.  But then it's such a small venue.  Anyway, it was what it was, which was fantastic and educational.

Gordon was and is a major galvanizer of the Saturday Academy subculture in which I've participated and blogged about at some length.  He's blessed with a surplus of attention, one could say, whereas a deficit of same has become the norm.  He shares his scholarship with the rest of us, and he enjoys the opportunities his life affords.  Search elsewhere in these chronicles for more.

Thirsters 2014.4.3 and 2014.3.27

We've been learning a lot about land use and land use planning at Thirsters recently.

Oregon is blessed with some forward-thinking zoning laws that most "states" don't have, being states more in name only.

Developers don't have as free a hand in Oregon to blemish and blight the landscape with their suburban monster malls and chintzy McMansion subdivisions of short half-life.

Our coastline is relatively unmarred with human ugliness, compared to California, the scarred state.

However, Washington County has been suffering from extremely weak leadership and went whining to the legislature when the District Court slapped down it's illegal land grab beyond the boundary, stealing class one arable land.   Most of Helvatia was saved, but only just, and the rapacious are angry over their defeat.

That land grab (rezoning) would have been a no-no in Governor McCall's day, but the Thoughtless Generation doesn't believe in planning ahead, as we've seen with Mt. Tabor and Tri-Met both recently.

A dumbing down has occurred. 

Boomers and younger are turning out to be semi-retarded in many ways, might be all those For Dummies books, hard to say.  More likely too much milk and super-size fries.  A fast food diet makes ya stupid.

Last week we learned about how Portland State University is staying remarkably respectful as a kind of go-between between Federal agencies and native populations of the North American southwest (e.g. Nevada testing area) with long term land use and sustainability on their minds.

Oregon has not yet fallen prey to the depraved, at least not as much as in other states where zombie "walkers" (corporations feigning personhood) stalk the landscape, imprisoning humans for profit and despoiling the landscape.  Arizona comes to mind, with a shudder, a state likely already lost to greed and terminal myopia.

E Module Mensuration

Quoting from Dave:

T = 1/24 = .0416666
E = (√2/8)(ø^-3) = .0417313

So, the T & E modules are close in volume, and the difference was what Fuller expounded on in Synergetics 2.

If the Rhombic Triacontahedron is 120T modules, it has a volume of 5 tetra volumes. Alas, the "radius" was not exactly 1, but .999483.

So, the Rhombic Triacontahedron's volume was really 5.007758 or 120 E modules, when the radius is exactly 1. Kirby figured that out, how to get the radius for the exact volume 5 Rhombic Triacontahedron, which is .999483 or (2/3)^(1/3)((ø^1)/√2)).

The radius in question for the Rhombic Triacontahedron is from the origin to the center of the rhombus. The radius to the long leg to the short leg is ø^1:ø^0:ø^-1 or 1.618034:1.000000:.618034.

This was an epiphany for me since the E module derived from the Rhombic Triacontahedron had a radius of 1, so the legs were .618034 and .381966.

Increasing the edges by ø^1 we have a long diagonal on the Rhombic Triacontahedron that is the same as the icosahedron's edge of 2, which fully inscribes within the Super Rhombic Triacontahedron.

By increasing the radius by ø^1 for the 5.007758 E module Rhombic Triacontahedron, we get the Super Rhombic Triacontahedron.

Thusly, an E module is 120th of the 5+ volume Rhombic Triacontahedron or (√2/8)(ø^-3), and the next larger sized E module derived from the Super Rhombic Triacontahedron is ø^3 larger or √2/8 expressed as E3.

Quoting from me:

The blue icosa is the standard 18.51 of Synergetics, as is the yellow cubocta ("VE") of volume 20. The other shapes are all non-standard in having that 1.851 edge, 1/10th of the volume number, but here an edge.  The green cubocta, has those smaller edges, which is in turn the interval for the whole 4F tetrahedron.

Which is why the yellow cubocta sticks out. What defines the "non-standards" is the tetrahedron to which our standard icosahedron is flush.  The small green cubocta has a volume between 15 and 16 whereas the yellow one has volume 20 as you know.

The icosahedron + its dual = rhombic triacontahedron of whatever size.  In the jargon Koski and I have been using, the "super RT" would be the standard (18.51) icosahedron + its dual, combining to form this rather large combo.

It's when you scale down that super-RT by 1/phi that you get the RT mother-of-Emods i.e. 120th of such is what is named an "E module" in Synergetics.  David measures in those, and phi-up, phi-down versions of those, in terms of place value (base).  The video expresses volumes in "super-RT sized Es" plus standard Es, one could say.
  

Then in Synergetics we have the "T module", a fine distinction, in that the T's volume is exactly that of the A's and B's, whereas the E's is only really close (the exact ratio being a focus in Synergetics 2 another number with phi in it, though Fuller avoided greek letter stuff).

The Thoughtless Generation

The horrific mutilation and scarring of Mt. Tabor, an historic site, is due to begin this October.

The Southeast Examiner ('The Fast Track Reservoir Disconnect' by Midge Pierce, April 2014) pleads with neighbors to fight this elective mastectomy / self-disfigurement, but for $7 million, the contractor-mercenaries are lined up behind one of the most loathed politicians in Portland's history, Nick Fish.

This ignorant and suicidal attack on our own infrastructure and water system is psychopathic to the core, yet citizens already know that governments will run amuck and commit to policies more damaging than any army of vandals could ever hope to imitate.

OMSI, a once great science museum, has not heeded proposals to model the civic water system to its citizens.  I think by now it's too late.

This sell-out, once great museum is complicit in the denigration of Portland's living standards, in its refusal to go with place-based education.

We all learn to overlook what's happening locally in exchange for the fiction of "caring" globally.  Sappy liberals are as much to blame as butt-ignorant ditto heads.

Our "environmentalist state" is in the process of being betrayed at the deepest level, by the odious Nick Fish in Portland, and by a weak / spineless governor, all set to let the coal economy exploit our infrastructure for the purely private gain of greedy idiocrats.

Politicians:  the scum of the Earth.

Speaking of betrayal by mercenaries, the fast tracking of the Transpacific Partnership trade "agreement" has attracted nothing but scorn from Cascadians.  This is the process by which governments delegitimize themselves and commend themselves to the ash heap of history.

We aren't surprised to see Washington DC first in line to self-disembowel.  That city has been a gutless wonder for longer than I can remember, a ceaseless source of bad / depraved decisions.  Why do people listen to DC anymore?  I know I don't.

May the family names and company brands of those who participate in the war on Mt. Tabor live on in infamy as traitors to our city.  Historians, do your homework.  These were among the truly depraved of our planet, as bad as Blackwater.

Remember not to be like them.  Have some self pride.  Be a generation the world celebrates, not an execrable monster of which history is ashamed.

HB2U YouTube

As We May Think...

If we watch enough commercials...

:: with thanks to DK ::

Episode Two

:: sleepless in Portland ::

Bravo on Episode Two, an effective video.

I think we might get some jail terms for certain cops pretty soon.  Worth prosecuting.

The miss-assumption of the propertied that they own the public lands and infrastructure, and that the police work for them, against others also entitled to public access, is here acted out in a kind of high stakes street theater.  Private wealth versus democracy.

As soon as the police side with private wealth against an entitled public, they become goons and thugs, regardless of outward uniform.

The City of Portland is not getting the police protection it deserves, so long as the mayor behaves like a hostage to the Business Plot er Alliance.

Here's a link to Episode One.

Cramming on Unicode

I floated the idea of having Unicode a theme for OST during OSCON this year, with OST a subdivision of ORM.  That got me cramming on Safari, plus I've been looking over Holden's shoulder as he blasts a set of I-Python Notebooks out to Amazon for review, some of which focus on Python 3.x's byte, bytearray, and str type objects.  That's my focus here.

To recap:  I have a somewhat roller coaster like curriculum that gives both an encouraging and a grim look at humans and their history.

The story of Unicode, its development, is more or less a story of collaboration against the odds, laying a kind of Tower of Babel foundation, but without the intent to build toward a pinnacle, with one language winning out.  On the contrary, there's still room for entirely new languages.  This was forsightful planning and so an encouraging story.

The negative dip into grim times is the rounding up of peoples in extermination camps, working them to death in poor conditions, with "keeping tabs" using "Hollerith machines" by IBM, the beginnings of our vast databases, both SQL and noSQL.  Using computers to hunt down and destroy entire ethnicities, to commit genocide, is one of those dark patterns, as it keeps happening in history and engineering has served to amplify and intensify the pattern's efficiency and viciousness.

Back to the Unicode story, UTF-8 is what saved its bacon, as ASCII-users were not about to bloat their files with little payback.  But then we should remember about patient names and the ability of Unicode to represent a patient's name in a native language on the monitors, perhaps with a romanized phonetic reading ("romanji") for the nurses and doctors.  Unicode lets you display fluency by quoting multiple languages in the same document.

In UTF-8, the boundary between ASCII proper and the encompassing Latin-1 is at code point 128.  With the first bit now occupied, two will be needed (at minimum) from now on, and the leading byte will show 110, 1110, 11110, 111110, 1111110 indicating up to "six cars total" (including the "engine" or leading byte).

Like a train of three bytes would go:  1110 0001 + 1010 0000 + 1011 0000 where I'm using + to separate the bit patterns.  Payload bits would be the xs in 1110 xxxx + 10xx xxxx + 10xx xxxx i.e. there's room for 16 payload bits for a total of 2**16 or 65536 code points, all within in reach of this three byte encoding, with more bytes waiting in the wings.

What is 0001 10 0000 11 0000 as a decimal number?  Unicode is just a consecutive numbering of a huge inventory of font-provided glyphs.  Turns out its 6192, which happens to be the Mongolian letter sa.

Hominins (ISEPP lecture)

I shirked my responsibilities as a member of Oversight Committee to attend this alternate church venue for a science lecture on 4.4 million year old fossil records of hominins.

Dr. Tom White is an expert, and he correctly praised Terry of ISEPP for the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture series, which has brought the best minds to Portland, to edify our populace.

Best if Cascadia has a literate capital, don't ya think? -- unless our capital is Seattle, which I'm all for, in the brochures for public consumption.

Anyway, we learned a lot.  Africa seems to be the matrix for early homonin development.  A "homonin" is a human lineage specialist species whereas "hominid" includes the apes, which are seen as branching off just a million or so years before this latest species, Ardi's.

Ardi's species predates Lucy's and so is probably Lucy's ancestor type.

Chimps spring from a branch that forked earlier, in that great Github in the Sky we call "evolution" (or "goalless morphing in response to feedback" if you want to remove the "march of progress" spin that adheres to much of the evolutionist talk).

I will piggy-back my thanks atop Dr. White's, to Terry, for helping make Portland a capital, an intellectual gemstone.

Too bad about the impending earthquake.  Maybe with less of an ice age thanks to global warming it'll be deferred?  Hope springs eternal.  Plate tectonics don't care that much about ice or no ice.

Tom did a lot to promote evidence and reason as the two prongs of science.  People are welcome to generate and publish texts on a different basis, just don't call it science, was his warning / advice / plea.

Speculations sometimes go off the deep end into pure storytelling and myth,  as we find in Fuller's Critical Path and later Tetrascroll (subtitled "a cosmic fairy tale").

Fuller is capable of doing science (applying reason to evidence) and contributing to it, however he's more of a literary figure, like Mark Twain.  "Bucky" aka "Dr. R.B. Fuller" made forays into science but in some dimension only camped there.  His literary base was more a latter day Neoplatonism, a philosophy, not in the sense of "Christian" so much as "Geometric" i.e. concerned with Platonic Forms.

Some of Dr. Fuller's wild speculations, about human prehistory for example, explore in a surreal space of mytho-graphic imagery, exciting to the intuition perhaps, but at best proto-scientific.

Someday we may have tools to "transmit life-forming information" to other planets, other than I Love Lucy, and thereby beam ourselves (and favorite "pets" e.g. dolphins) to a post Earthian location, not talking about Mars.  But such is the stuff of science fiction, not science per se.

Corporation Meeting (2014)

This is my final year as a Corporation Member of the AFSC.  I've served at least one earlier three year term.

On the theory that Yearly Meetings appoint whom they choose, and AFSC receives these appointees without approving them, I was able to "sneak in" as an attender (and former member), promoting my theory that attenders may be as actively Quaker as members and should not be treated as second class in principle.

So in that sense NPYM is flaunting the AFSC's by-laws, which insist, implicitly, that "a Quaker" be defined as a "a member of a Yearly Meeting".  I've recorded my non-member status in the surveys sent around to us and no one has raised a fuss.

The board, which is more central and more powerful in terms of AFSC's governance, does allow non-Quakers to serve (up to 20%), which I suppose might cover people such as myself, who claim to be Quaker, but choose not to signify this attribute through the institution of recorded membership.  I'm not on the board however.

Attenders, sometimes more active than members, and on occasion more "cutting edge" in their practice, should not be overlooked when it comes to serving on the AFSC corporation.  One reason some have not sought membership -- as when a same-sex couple finds the local meetings still refuse to take their marriage under its care -- is their practice is ahead of the curve.

I shared these concerns and perspectives at one of the breakout sessions.  Lucy Duncan agreed these were relevant and important concerns.  I also reiterated my view that FCNL and AFSC need to maintain distinct identities.  Succinctly:  FNCL is about changing the law, whereas AFSC is about "breaking" the law (think civil rights movement).

In another meeting we played a board game about the horrifyingly silly-fascist nation-state game, wherein humans are penned in at birth and disallowed much freedom of movement unless especially economically privileged.  I played an undocumented Polish guy with no possibility of US citizenship.  I worked in a restaurant in Philadelphia or somewhere, with no other family here.  Most of us weren't going to reach the citizenship goal.  The game is rigged that way, with an outer loop that just goes in a circle.

I'm thinking of the philosopher Rene Descartes wandering around Europe with has valet, a cross between a tourist and military journalist.  With an EU passport, he might get away with that today.  Jesus Christ would have no hope of getting an employment-based visa to the US in our day, having only low level carpentry skills -- "Rabbi" wouldn't qualify as a skill unless he had a baccalaureate degree -- and coming as he did from an ethnic minority background.

So why doesn't the AFSC make more use of the nation-free Dymaxion Projection?  Chris gave a slide show on that at a math-GIS meetup, which I missed because of our program (malesh -- too bad).  But shouldn't Fuller's anti-nationalism (along with Einstein's) get some notoriety from Friends?  He, like Bayard Rustin, was also a Medal of Freedom winner.

We have this myth that the US does not export a large number of migrant workers to the rest of the world i.e. that it's a one way street.  That's because migrants in Okinawa, Afghanistan, Germany, and Korea, Marshall Islands, and so on, are accounted as "US military personnel" vs. "migrant workers".

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.