Burn Out

:: burn out 2009 ::

These anarchist-libertarians or whatever species mix (some pirates) are pretty good at organizing. They're mostly here for each other, even though the general public (GP) is invited.

Thanks to minimal promotion, the event is more like a private party than a tourist attraction. The venue could clearly handle a bigger crowd. As the night wears on, perhaps more will join us [a lot more did].

One of the organizers came up to me saying my daughter had been asking for Kirby at the front gate, but I'm thinking that was probably Laura Cooper of The Good Bye Party, who was standing with Rick when I showed up at the admissions booth.

The sound system is excellent and I'm enjoying the music. Lindsey only gets 45 minutes today and is busy getting set up in the batters' box. She has a prime slot at 7:30 PM on the indoor stage (the various weird bizmos anchor the stages outside).

Lots of crazy costumes, kilts, wigs, clowning.

I'm sporting a low key Dymaxion Clown uniform myself: geek man purse (various company names, including Intel and Microsoft), a Python fleece over an Open Source Lab T-shirt, belt studded with peace symbols purchased at Red Light on Hawthorne yesterday for only $7 (my daughter rolled her eyes when she saw it -- might be a mid life crisis belt?), brown corduroy trousers, very ordinary shoes, wire frame glasses (not the "knows everything" frames -- not sure where those are).

People are being respectful and well behaved. I suppose outsiders imagine all kinds of salacious craziness when they think of "art colonies" but that's just human psychology. Squares project their fantasies on "loose people", not realizing that this lifestyle may also require a lot of self-discipline (way more than many normals would consider reasonable I'm sure).

Yes, I'm sounding like an apologist already, even though I just got here and have never been to Burning Man. I guess I'm just a sucker for people working together to pull off civilian festivals. There's no hate stoking. Quirkiness is not discouraged, on the contrary, we're free to be off beat.

In the Synergeo list, I've been arguing about the "dimension" concept again.

Some of my readers don't want to buy that "4D" could have more than one meaning. If some corpus has built up some inertia, some authority, they just want to leverage that without questioning it, hoping some of that mojo (aka gravitas) will "rub off" on their own presentations.

The fact remains that Fuller was pioneering his own way of thinking in Synergetics, as distinct from Minkowski's or Coxeter's, both of whom had a strong hand in their respective language games. Poker is not Crazy Eights however. Not everyone is playing the same card game, not even within mathematics.

People keep projecting these monolithic authorities where there just aren't any. That's why banks have such heavy columns I guess, such intimidating facades (learned from religions, especially the Roman ones): the weight of their architecture is meant to counterbalance the flimsiness of the thinking within.

Followup: Two YouTubes of Freedom Train @ Cascadia that evening [1][2]

Corruption (editorial)

The neo-liberal / neo-con press likes to talk about how President Karzai is so "corrupt" -- as is much of the "developing world" (used to be "3rd world").

The self-righteous tone, coming from an occupying force with no business being there, is pretty awesome. "What? The Pakistanis don't really want us here either? How corrupt could they be? How unfair, as we're only here to help."

The hypocrisy is too deep to stand up in, as there's no way to explain either "operation" (as in "botched surgery") except as a result of greed, fear and ignorance ("corruption" in other words).

What was the original mission in Iraq?

To oust Saddam Hussein and eliminate any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), although what gave any leader the right to pre-emptively strike, in the absence of clear and present danger, is still an open debate (oh yeah, right: "911" means "debate over").

The Americans were stampeded, against their better judgment, into committing an atrocity. They listened to their so-called best and brightest. Same mistake under Kennedy.

True, some semblance of obeying international law was mocked up by Colin Powell and his team, followed by invasion, occupation and the Bremer Edicts (remember those?).

The WMD thing fell apart pretty quickly, just as Hans Blix and Scott Ritter knew it would, and Saddam was captured by the Kurds and turned over to a vengeful militia.

Some elections were held, with the winners ever promising they'd get the Americans to leave.

So much for democracy.

So what's the pretense today, for hanging out in Iraq? There isn't one really, except one: people need the work i.e. jobs, jobs, jobs.

Americans don't wanna leave Afghanistan because then they "might look weak" -- as if using that rationale were anything beyond the epitome of weakness.

If that's really the game, then game over already. Who's fooling whom?

Again, people need the work. It's a living. Jobs, jobs, jobs is the only reason people flock to Afghanistan.

A crashed economy in the USA provides a big incentive (could these phenomena be coupled? Insightful analysts sometimes connect those dots).

Clearly, the best way LAWCAP knows to "stimulate the economy" is via military spending. This has been true for some decades (since FDR) and the corporate welfare state has become highly dependent on its insolvent Uncle Sam, its dutiful puppet.

"Give us defense contracts or we'll give you death" is the message to cowed politicians, who line up to toe the party line (it's a one party state with an institutionalized opposition -- the better to get nothing done, which is kind of the point).

Now president Karzai of Afghanistan has issued an edict of his own: private security forces should leave or stay sequestered to their embassies. "But that's impossible!"

Immediately we hear about the jobs, jobs jobs that will be lost, by the poor Afghanis as well. Plus Afghan security forces are so corrupt, whereas the occupying "international community" is just there to be professional, to show how it's done.

When politicians talk about a troop draw-down, it's always "redeploy" -- journalists are careful to write that way too. No one wants to suggest a reduction in "absolute numbers" (heresy!).

The broad unspoken agreement is: "defense spending" must go up up up, and eventually the entire population must be in permanent military mode. That's what the War on Terror is all about no? Jobs jobs jobs.

A hard-nosed economist might suggest that paying people just to sit home and watch TV would cost the world far less, in terms of lives lost, oil squandered, opportunities denied.

"Redeployment" should be to vast video-game playing facilities (arcades on steroids), minus the killer drones on the other end. The games could be educational. Real money could be channeled. Sounds like Wall Street.

Could soldiers become bankers then? Having tasted what truly bad investments are like, they might well make better ones. Lets turn some big banks over to veterans and see if they invest in health care and scholarships for themselves. That'd be a bigger stimulus than private security forces. Worth a try?

Crypto Currencies

At the code school last night, I pumped Ben for insights regarding crypto-currencies, as I've raised with NPYM Friends the possibility of accepting bitcoin in some contexts.

Ben immediately directed my attention to Ethereum, a Web 3.0 initiative.  I've been immersing myself in that subculture, mostly using YouTube for that purpose.

For those just joining us, Quakerism is a decentralized role playing denomination, a network application based in 1600s innovations within the namespace of Christianity.  Power is not concentrated in any one individual.  Management is by rotation.

The Monthly Meeting, with a monthly business meeting is the Node for this network.  That our Meetings might want to develop internal currencies is no surprise in hindsight.

Perhaps it sounds paradoxical that a practice with a reputation for encouraging honesty is so interested in systems that do not require trust except in mathematical and physical principles.

"Gaming" or "scamming" or "undermining" a blockchain or other well-designed consensus protocol is difficult to impossible in a correctly implemented system, which doesn't mean bitcoin and ether are prohibiting gamification of businesses (those are different meanings of "game").

Cheating in a malicious sense can't be done against physical laws.  Illusionists give the impression it can be.

Why I in particular am researching in this direction is two-fold:

(A) I'm the clerk of the NPYM IT Committee (Oct 1, 2015 to Sept 30, 2017)

and

(B) DWA (the bookkeeping partnership I worked with) was a trusted third party of the kind Ethereum aims to replace, as no longer necessary.

Ethereum contracts are self-policing one might say.  However the trusted third parties of my generation would do well to wrap their minds around these new consensual systems and sign off, warn against, make claims of various types and so on.  Elders get looked to for such feedback, at least in the Quaker experience.

Dawn Wicca was the professional bookkeeper, the DW in DWA, passing the torch to her apprentice (not me), whereas I was an applications developer (mostly xBase / FoxPro) and curriculum designer (lots of Python).  Nonetheless, a lot of Dawn's bookkeeping savvy rubbed off by osmosis, informing my understanding of business, the socially responsible ones especially (DWA worked for idealistic nonprofits by and large).

Good to hear from Judy Smith as I was heading towards code school, stuck at a freight train crossing.  I hope to get over to Terrebonne, Oregon one of these days, in a code school bizmo maybe, provided Oregon State has a fleet ready, or were those to be 100% private sector?

Think of crypto-currency / crypto-law as ACID-compliance on steroids?  The move to distributed databases, distributed version control, led to this concept of an immutable growing code base, signature verified using hash functions to protect against bit flipping.

These crytographer-actuaries have a lot of euphemisms for people dying and losing access to private keys that way.  Instead it's always Bob losing his private key (wallet), not an instance of Bob not taking it with him.  We could say this euphemism is justifiable as whatever the circumstances, Bob is no longer able to use his wallet.  We hope he's made arrangements for this eventuality.

Wishes Upon Death is considered Oversight business in a Monthly Meeting.  I served on that committee numerous times and always encouraged polling Friends regarding how to manage cyber-credentials.  Do you wish us to retire your Facebook account?  What sort of web presence does a Friend wish to maintain?  In many cases these wishes are handled by family, however a Meeting is generally set up to serve in place of family members when appropriate.

City Politics

I didn't write "big city" politics because Portland is pretty small, still suffers from that frontier town complex, takes its Wild West atmosphere as a mark of inferiority whereas, really, it's a tourist draw. People are still looking for the real deal, that authentic "out west" they see in the movies. Portland isn't quite that cliché, makes more sense when you remember that "Far West" also means "Asian" to some degree (and of course Native American).

On the other hand, we like a somewhat intimate subculture, like that "small town" feel, so there's this reflex to discourage too many immigrants. We scare 'em with stories about our long cold winter, rainy and depressing. That's a lot of hooey, although it's true that seemingly endless rain will feed a bleak mood.

I'm in chauffeur mode again tonight, driving the rock star to a political meeting and her date with a hot girlfriend. She'd offered to take the bus, but we needed to do some shopping. I'm happy using the bar's wifi, now that we're done with the meeting.

Glenn and I met this morning to do some post mortem on the experimental think tank event (aka private undercover party) at Duke's Landing last night, which I heartily enjoyed at least on some levels, as a connoisseur of the weird, as a card carrying member of Portland's techo-occult (yes I invited Trevor of Esozone and Synchronofile fame, but he was otherwise engaged).

At the meeting tonight, of Freedom Socialists, we focused on business class maneuvers to gain control of the sidewalks downtown and sanitize them, remove signs of casualties, families out of options, Charles Dickens on steroids in our land of opportunity.

Poorly planned social systems with few defensible practices often find it easier to just hire thugs, private militias, and keep people cowed about losing their jobs, at least in the short term.

In the longer term, malign neglect simply feeds a next round of conflicts with higher stakes. There's an escalating spiral, as people hunker down and run away from their responsibilities as information harvesters and problem solvers in Universe (lapsing into some transcendentalism here, my bad).

Given I was just the driver and roadie, I didn't ask to be on the stack of speakers, although I later emphasized to one of the leaders that this was "a queue" (FIFO) not really "a stack" (LIFO), my segue into explaining about Lightning Talks, which we hadn't bothered to get fascist about at Duke's, despite my public nod to our Python subculture.

Lindsey spoke twice, the second time spreading awareness of the protest against the ending Fareless Square in January, one of our city's more enlightened policies. The roll back to dark ages management practices is perhaps symptomatic of a failed university system? Did we not get those smart cookies out the other end of the pipeline? I guess I'm just preaching to the choir here, as how many "gnu math" teachers do we really have these days? I rest my case.

Last night at Duke's, we basically encouraged Evelyn to take the floor with her analysis of racism, to say her piece while Lindsey played a little back beat while she rapped (they're both from Georgia). DJ Troy gave us a sound track and kept the fog machine going.

I rolled through Photostream slide shows of Wanderers events for Don and Glenn, and of Claire-a-palooza when James stopped by. Another geek stopped in then left in a hurry. I got one of my XOs upgraded to version 767, thanks to the OLPC-aware staff.

Back to our meeting: the "sidewalk management program" is of course politically sensitive as we're talking about a public right of way receiving forced protection, against both citizens and the undocumented, by private security services with no obvious accountability to anyone but their employers.

Old school social action organizations still see taking to the streets as a viable option, when it comes to proving large numbers, despite the limited to no effect of such numbers in the days leading up to Iraq's occupation. Ignoring public opinion has perhaps become the safer option, given this perception that some cabal or corporate elite is pulling the strings.

But do these perceptions have much of a half-life? Recent events have given us glimpses into the chaos wreaked by unsustainable practices masquerading as "fiscally conservative". Intellectually squalid designs that won't sustain public scrutiny are kept secret for that reason, leading to lost productivity as energy is diverted into covering up the obvious (a bankruptcy at the level of having viable ideas for what to do next).

We had a former leader from Dignity Village at our meeting, as well as some pillar of society types with long experience working with help-the-homeless organizations. I get a sense the (differential?) equations are changing, as the system drives increasing numbers under water. Having some futuristic designs in the pipeline, and a willingness to showcase them, might reawaken a hunger for some intelligent planning. Even free markets need dreams to feed off, and dreaming involves making plans, not just waiting for the next big apocalypse or whatever the hell.

The House of Tomorrow (movie review)

Nana, a Fuller fan, is sheltering her ward (her grandson actually) in an almost-literal bubble, a multi-faceted domicile based on the geometry of an icosahedron:  a 1970s classic geodesic dome one-off, mostly wood, and semi-deep in a quasi-dark forest. Cue "she's some kind of witch" music. 

Per Education Automation, the place is wired (pre internet) to "in-cast" (screen) the Bucky stuff 24/7, so both Nana (the guardian) and her ward (main protagonist) are by this time thoroughly brainwashed (Nana has been into Bucky a long time), but without being too dysfunctional, a testament to the curriculum's holism.

The dome is marvelous and well-maintained and both enjoy a high standard of living.  The movie viewer is quickly introduced to Bucky's alternative (aka "parallel") universe, with its own solutions to the problems of transportation, shelter, and social relationships (we use a different world map in Buckyverse, to visualize our global predicament).  The viewer thereby partakes of a bit of the brainwashing, to the point of gentle claustrophobia (think "laughing gas" -- it's a comedy).

Tourists come to see what the house of tomorrow might look like (they all live in the houses of today).  To the young boy, these tourists represent the great outside world beyond the granny matrix, full of people the grandson's own age, some oppositely sexed, all differently programmed.  He recognizes he could learn a lot from these aliens.

Although home schooled, our hero has a bicycle and frequents hardware stores.  He's not a prisoner, except of his own conscience, and is free to leave.

He feels the natural urge for companionship and adventure and ends up landing a gig as a geometry tutor in one of the tourist houses.  Thanks to his STEM-intensive upbringing, he knows his "Mr. Euclid" (as Fuller referred to him), clearly way better than the more humanities oriented dad (which explains why a tutor is appropriate). The movie does not really get into Dr. Fuller's alternative unit of volume, as that'd take us too far off on a tangent.

They enjoy pretty good living standards in suburbia too (including top notch health care), with semi-private rooms for the siblings and a den for the single dad, ample leisure time.  The single mom is a heavy drinker and TV watcher (the dad has custody of the kids), but is friendly and fun.  She helps enable the final party with a donation of alcohol.

Beyond a lot of drinking, the film stays away from the weed economy.  Prohibition was still only partially rolled back, back then. Although police get involved, it's to break up the loud party (on what pretext again? -- lots of citizens were freely enjoying their right to assembly), and not to bust any otherwise law-abiding Lutherans for weed.

No one is sent to a for-profit "Grunch prison" ("Grunch" was a Bucky term, and stood for a dystopian post-nation-states global conglomerate, controlling all the money, that stages a lot of TV shows, including many with nationalistic programming, such as shocking, awesome wars).

The kids pack into state-approved mosh pits and express their rebelliousness in safe controlled ways.

To my ears, the Bucky sound bites on the videos were dubbed in.  What I heard was someone imitating Fuller's voice, saying the kinds of things he said.  Am I wrong?  Was that a permissions issue?  Was the Buckminster Fuller Institute (not of Minnesota) involved?

When it's time to really party, the dome interior is certainly the more inviting. Neither a suburban home, nor a church basement social hall, was as suitable a venue as grandma's bewitching house, for the new punk band's debut. The Rash.  The geometry tutoring was also about practicing chords, recapitulating that age-old synergy betwixt music and math, so appreciated by the Pythagoreans.

The less sheltered geometry tutor and his death-defying tourist friend express their anxieties and desires in an authentic and culturally approved manner.  The police arrive and help catalyze a new bond between the sixties dad and his punk son, as both show similarly defiant tendencies.  A new (vector) equilibrium is being established.  The two cultures have been bridged, and healthy circulation established.

That the Bucky stuff is actually punk-friendly comes as a heartwarming realization at the end.  Good movie. I saw it as the second movie in a double feature, with Fire first.

Book Club Meetup

Our conversation circle touched on some of my Pirate Party planks today, not that I raised them as such, only that boarding school naturally arises once we have our planning hats on. We talked about the ongoing experiment with the dorm, in Mitchell School District #55 in Oregon. Different mixes of gender and subculture have been tried.

Sometimes I try out what will eventually become segments in more formal presentations, about Nietzsche for example, and how his sick and twisted sister helped shape his legacy into a form suitable for Third Reich exploitation. We learned that whole story from Walter Kaufmann. You may have heard me on YouTube covering that segment already.

After the conversation circle, I drove to WinCo, streaming Candace’s Ep 352, which is about how the private sector has replaced the public one in the military. 

In this post nation-state world, it’s private mercenaries all the way down, although some inherited the decals of their ancestral states and still flaunt them. Some people dress up like Romans or re-enact the Civil War. 

We see a lot of creative anachronists using live ammo, and starring in tawdry melodramas written by Urizen’s slaves. You can probably tell I’m not a big fan of today’s military-minded scenario programming, for use “in theater” as they say.

We saw our Republic fading with that Ollie North crowd and it only got worse: “never mind about the constitution and civilian control, we have our own agendas”. But then we had the 1960s assassinations before that. The fragile Union had been on a bumpy road ever since it had become an empire, having been birthed to fight one. Some would say the Philippine-American war was the beginning of the end.

Fictional television played a big role in helping folks jailbreak out of their narrow so-called “thinking caps” which no longer fit. Shows like Breaking Bad for example. Financial fluency also increased thanks to the crypto chapter (another soap). Fictional TV continues to be informative.

Anyway, those of us keen to regenerate a public sector are still allowed to brainstorm about what that might look like. 

It’s not like everyone will be on the same page, nor do they need to be. A common mistake in social engineering is to suppose too large a scope. At the other extreme, an experiment might be too minuscule to really matter. The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears has an obvious interpretation; there’s too hot, and too cold, with a sweet spot in the middle.

The days of “too big” publishing, which takes a “one size fits all” approach to schooling, are ostensibly over. It’s no longer about what they’ll need in Texas and California and let the others accept their choice as a consensus. We no longer need consensus on that level. The technology allows us to localize, even as we import from the various curricula, on tap around the world. 

The personal workspace, or “nerd cave”, has taken over as the place where education primarily happens, punctuated by field trips, more likely by smaller van than big school bus. Their scheduling might eventually be seen as a county level responsibility. In the meantime: it’s private sector. 

These workspaces might be in office buildings, repurposed. You might be learning algebra on some 28th floor of a mixed-use high rise, and getting paid in some form (catalog options?) for your self improvement work. Society benefits from improved selves, which is why it pays to pay the self-improving.

Private Party

This is more live blogging from a music venue, a different ambiance from last night's coffee shop experience. Welcome back to Duke's Landing.

Richard and I sampled the breakfast special, catered by the establishment, after setting up the studio recording equipment trucked from company HQS. Lindsey is laying down tracks, including Free Strippers and Drugs, her newest hit single.

Hardly anyone knows about this event as the posters around town did not disclose the venue. We used a treasure hunt motif to weed out all but the most serious die-hards. We're all cold sober. No booze, no drugs. Just breakfast.

Lindsey started her gig by reading aloud (for the recording) the cover letter going out to the neighbors, aimed at getting them on board with some conspiracy around this Evil Lair:

Plan C is to lure you all over to my evil Dukes Landing lair for an open house to partake take in all future evils such as holding United States hostage by threatening to get rid of the penny, or to create global warming if Bush doesn't resign as president and let a black American become president (this can only be thought of by an evil genius, I am glad I am soo evil).

Yeah, kinda wild and crazy. Management is trying to get folks around here to lighten up about stuff, but then this brand of humor is coming from an unauthorized source. Most Americans only trust David Letterman or Jay Leno or that Comedy Central guy to be funny. Home grown humor is considered too wacko by the rank and file. Yes, I exaggerate for effect -- not everyone finds that funny, I realize.

Solstice Party (Wanderers)

I'm sure I'll have more to say about this gathering, Sol Day, 2005, officially where the sun reaches its southernmost drift vis-a-vis my current private sky coordinates, or where we're at this extreme in orbit around Sol (the sun, one possible proper name for her), and have the northern pole maximally tilted away, creating a sunny, shining climate in places like Cape Town, where I've enjoyed some happy days.

So far, I've invented this rule: a Wanderers solstice party should have nonhumans invited. I was thinking how David, Rick and I all have dogs, plus there're more pets out there. Not that we should turn the place into a menagerie. Just have one or more selected delegates or representatives from the nonhuman kingdom (which kingdom Wanderers forever respect, appreciate, hope to learn from).

In that sense, we'd be proud to be monkeys: as sisters and brothers to the great apes, because they, like we, have to survive here, on a wonderful planet. There's simply no shame in that. And no, I haven't seen King Kong yet, just read about him flipping through Willamette Week, in the East Broadway McMenamins.

We want to save it for them too (the so-called "beasts"); we respect that it's not just for us. This teaching is embedded in the Nativity Scene. Baby Jesus loved animals (including goats, yes), and never changed his mind. He pointed to them as examples to emulate sometimes.

Somehow, sin is for Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve to worry about (this tendency to blame snakes is symptomatic of the condition (Nietzsche: so resentful, these humans)). Maybe it's some Machine World thing. The denizens of Narnia can't know about it (never having "exited" the Wardrobe). The IQ merely defends against it (humanity might be disloyal to deep magic: let's test).[1]

Only Aslan seems to have been around the block a few times (he wanders on up the beach, maybe to enjoy a transit strike somewhere, make a movie).

God to humans: don't destroy my planet. Humans to God: mixed reaction, but mostly yes, sir! (as if God trained Marines for breakfast).

We're still here at least. That's something.

Must we say "sir!"? Not in my book. Some might salute a female icon. Yes, idolatry comes into it, pretty much inevitably. Idolotry: love of dolls -- a sin that defines us.

Part of our job: to make it safe for dogs to be dogs here (nothing more, nothing less). We lose some, but let's not plan on being too abusive, OK? Same goes for other cast members. No torture allowed.

And so: Sarah (our dog) got to prance around in the party space for a bit, just during setup (Jon Bunce showed up with musical instruments). Then she was gone. Our smiley dog exits, cheerful in disposition, glad to have had a moment on stage with the rest of us.

[1] IQ = Ice Queen, Narnia's counterintelligence chief. See my Narnia analyses of earlier this month for more info.

DjangoCon 2012

We met in Crystal City this year, adjacent Reagan Airport.  I came and went on US Airways.  Election fever was in the air, or at least lots of political theater.  I took a break from the MVP party in Steve's suite, to see what the prez had to say.  Then back up the elevator for more jocular banter.  I'd supplied the booze, though I knew my taxi driver had religious practices that forbade him to deal in alcohol.  He wasn't, these were separate transactions (cab fare versus supermarket).  Hyatt again.

I was most fortunate to reconnect with Glenn Baker, high school chum in the Philippines.  He'd been in Vienna, Virginia before Manila, in India, Turkey and Pakistan before that, another expat brat, like me.  His dad was USIS when I knew them, mine USAID, former UN, a free lancer.  My dad'd also worked for the Libyans, the Egyptians and the Swiss.  Glenn stayed with our family that time we were living in DC and I was rather newly into the Bucky stuff.  Glenn got a job with CDI, and formed better relations with Cuba.  I went on in software, developing applications in a proprietary Microsoft language (acquired, formerly FoxPro 2, another in the xBase genre), then migrated to Python, which is what brought me here, courtesy of The Open Bastion and my day job.

In supplying some drinks (including Dead Guy Ale) for this party, I was contributing as a private citizen to an event.  The Django Software Foundation (DSF) never commits funds for alcohol purchase (I think that's a bylaw) and some of its core developers have no use for the stuff.  This doesn't mean Django the product can't be used by gambling establishments that serve drinks.  The software license is one of freedom, and open source.  Coffee shops that offer games of skill and practice for charitable cause funding, are welcome to use Django.

Glenn and I checked out The Artisphere in Rosslyn, closed on Labor Day, where he spotted a friend of his in the lineup of exhibitors.  Then we found ourselves in Georgetown, almost by accident, exploring the "Exorcist steps".  This will be the topic of my presentation at our next staff Show & Tell I'm pretty sure.  These don't happen often (last one:  Bodega Bay, backdrop for Hitchcock's The Birds).  As The Story of Film remembers, The Exorcist pioneered new ground in helping audience members go crazy and faint or whatever it was (some kind of religious frenzy, as if possessed by some spirit).

I learned a lot about the limitations of current web technology.  Stuff I thought had become seamless, is far from it.  The question, from an engineering standpoint, is whether you're looking at JSON or HTTP stuff on the wire.  A Twitter or one of those will load the HTML and then just puppet with JSON, using web sockets or whatever.  That's right, up to our ears in geek speak as usual, happy to have our own language.  I sat next to such creatures at Princeton in the cafeteria, shyly with my tray, wondering what they were yammering about.  Was it English?  Maybe not quite?

At least the gender gap is closing.  Many other gaps are strongly in evidence.  PyLadies invited Steve for breakfast.  I was "slaying the Q" that morning (shop talk).  I was grateful to sit in on many of the talks.  FoxPro was SQL intensive, still is (a language for writing thick clients -- can also work server side).  I think a lot about Trucking (as in Truckology) in this context, not exclusively about medical data.

The talk on credit card industry standards, PCI, and the difference between A and D status, was enlightening.  To certify as a D, meaning you warehouse credit card info, is no easy task.  The Web offers many solutions, with more to come, whereby an A status merchant can sell to a cardholder without card numbers ever hitting her or his persistent storage devices.  This makes life much easier, should auditing happen.

I actually managed to space out my return date and lucked out, thanks to Expedia guy and US Airways.  Usually same day fares on busy flights are unavailable to exorbitant.  I was glad to help with ground control remotely by cell, when Lindsey's mom's plane came in late (LW, our visiting scholar and blog character -- and strong athlete in the "lifestyle Olympics").  I kept burners warm at the Math Forum, cooking up some steamy STEM stew (I think with a good aroma, healthful fare).

Eric Sterling proved an interesting interlocutor, one of our keynote speakers.  He joined our party at the top of the Hyatt, with our friends from Brazil, other places, and held forth on Quakers and Quaker history in an engaging manner.  His first job upon leaving college was with WILPF, where my mom works to this day.  Fascinating guy.  That's the kind you'll meet around DC if you're lucky.

Burning Man proved a theme, somewhat unexpectedly.  Ties within the Django community were somewhat anticipated (by me) but in the rear view mirror it makes sense.  "More Monty Python jokes and allusions in the literature" was one of the popularly agreed upon resolutions, at least in the circle I was lurking in.  My perspective is limited, as always.  Good hearing from Gagus (his Google name), my student in Indonesia.

Open Secrets

:: Steve Holden in Portlandia ::

Steve Holden knows how to throw a good party. Elizabeth Mazzara knows how to find a good venue. The Secret Society, as it's now called, has a long history as a HQS for fraternal organizations, i.e. mostly men.

Overcoming any "color barrier" in Masons was a part of its history. Thursday evening (February 17) we were breaking new ground by inviting many digerati and illuminati of Portland's legendary (and diverse) open source community. No, this wasn't the most wheelchair accessible of venues (Wayne couldn't have joined us).

Portland has this reputation, for being an open source capital, but is it for real? Steve assured us he'd be sorely disappointed if there was little substance behind the hype. He's shoved a lot of poker chips onto Pioneer Courthouse Square, one might say (metaphorically speaking). He's gambling (banking) on Portland's walking its talk, still being somewhat pioneering, brave even.

A party is also a switchboard, if properly designed, with the live music not too loud, drinks flowing freely. Steve and Elizabeth had seen to the chemistry, and I think we achieved critical mass. Many reported having satisfying encounters.

For my part, I had illuminating conversations with the new dean of PSU's School of Engineering and Computer Science, Renjeng Su, D.Sc., and with Bart Massey, one of the associate professors.

We talked about the proposed digital math curriculum for high schoolers, and the possibility of PSU eating its own dog food when it came to nuts and bolts course management software (currently outsourced, but amenable to a consortium-based approach).

Speaking of consortia, I got an ear full regarding the electronic medical records picture. The USG is using Medicare / Medicaid reimbursement as a lever. If you want to participate in a USG medical expenses reimbursement program, your software will need to meet certain standards, in terms of the reports that it gives. It's not enough to simply register events (e.g. patient X treated for condition Y). One needs to show one followed an accepted protocol, and provide information about outcomes.

In order to ensure compliance, it's not sufficient just to buy the "certified" software and have it sit on the shelf, unused. A doctors' office or hospital has to show (prove) "meaningful use", meaning said certified software has to be up and running for a specified length of time, with more than token patient coverage. The goal is to have the software gradually accommodate more and more of the USG's strict reporting requirements. As you might imagine, many vendors are happy to add to the cost of health care by providing this software at exorbitant prices.

Of course it'd have made more sense if the USG had ponied up early, put its money where its mouth is, and pumped some free and open source solutions of its own into the mix. Business bookkeeping software might have taken the same route.

Perhaps it's not too late.

In the meantime, small groups of early adopter doctors have seen the light and have begun to champion the idea of open source medical records software. I had the good fortune to meet a few of the core players in this domain.

Adam Lowry of Urban Airship was quick to offer good reality checks, when I shared with him my vision of a noSQL "scrap book" approach to medical records keeping.

My concern has been to keep it multi-paradigm and multi-lingual, such that "a witch doctor in Nepal" (a purposely incongruous image) could get a word in edge wise, should the patient wish such analysis (Dx and Rx) in the "scrap book" (EMR).

Perhaps most future doctors choose to avoid this patch of esoteric recordings, while one or two experts might mine that section, following related URLs, not just to devices with long memories (more expected in "western" hospitals), but to entire theories of health and illness, perhaps alien to most readers.

Lets just say I start out from a "zoomed out" point of view.

Anyway, Adam assured me that it was API and UI that I needed to think about, not so much the back end, as SQL / noSQL will generally co-exist in some complicated ecosystem (ala Facebook).

One measure of a system's efficacy and power is its ability to export to other systems. Vendor lock in is one of the biggest challenges facing any given patient, as if you commit to having your records stored in System A, yet later want to copy them to System B, you may or may not be out of luck.

This is mostly science fiction from the standpoint of current patients of course. We still live in the dark ages using 1900s IT. I'm glad the USG is trying to spur us on, much as it worked to expand the HDTV standard.

Yes, industries share these same goals and may be realistically modeled as having partially overlapping agendas vis-a-vis the USG.

Other systems may evolve in a more spectacular fashion, given the USA is not widely respected for its health care programming. Canadians do it better in many ways.

Speaking of democracy, or the lack thereof, we had a strong representation from political players, including from the Bus Project, Congressman Wu's office, and the Democratic Party of Oregon.

Private foundations were also represented.

Specific technologies also had their reps, or so one might presume to categorize. I think of Selena as a Postgres avatar, whereas Urban Airship sing's Python's praises (not that it's either/or obviously -- open source technologies form an ecosystem). OpenEMR is a LAMP stack project with P = PHP.

After our open bar and appetizers experience, some of us joined Steve for further conversation and edibles in Toro Bravo downstairs. The venue was packed, but not uncomfortable.

Our group proved adept at trading chairs, ala eXtreme Programming practice, the better to have more varied conversations. The switchboard experience continued, even around a long table.

And the communications continue in cyberspace, and are leading to follow-up meetings.

Steve made a splash, and scored a tactical victory of sorts, for our community as a whole. Thank you Steve. You're a world class catalyst.

Yes, "open secrets" is a bit of an oxymoron, as is The Open Bastion, Steve's newest company. Or think of it as a koan. We're open and freedom-loving, but we're not undefended and not without friends in high places. "Don't tread on me."

Birthday Party (Spring 2013)

Sarah and Bob are dear friends from Wanderers circles, although Glenn and I first met them at Esozone.  Don met them at Terwilliger Plaza, where he was part of an inner circle caring for Doug Strain.

Glenn, Don and I, as an older posse of Wild West types (it seemed) joined Bob & Sarah, her sister Katie and partner Scott, Michelle and Jessie (the later of The Modern Golem, a Portland band) in a reserved room at one of Portland's best Japanese restaurants.  We enjoyed a fantastic time together.  Bob, like myself, is a Bucky Fuller fan and our memories drifted back to the D.W. Jacobs play in 2006, when I got to have breakfast with Allegra.  Bob had come to Esozone in 2008 to catch Trevor's talk on Bucky.

Yikes, first I started entering the special room in giant clod hopper shoes, such that I felt awkwardly like the monster in Young Frankenstein trying to play his role.  Then, upon removing my shoes (exposing big fuzzy white socks) I fumbled the camera, sending her crashing to the floor.

This was my third, count 'em 1, 2, 3, Nikon Coolpix S8200, the best camera ever for me.  Fortunately, a corner of the plastic housing took the brunt, cushioning the delicate internals as she hit the concrete. With an over-abundance of super-glue applied the next day, she is probably sufficiently repaired to last well into 2014 if not longer, InshAllah.

The quality of the pictures appears undiminished.

I posted to dev@democracylab this morning, after breakfast with Steve Holden, emeritus PSF chairman, writing:

"""
I have worked in the voting industry by the way, for Project Vote! aka
Americans for Civic Participation, based in DC at the time (I was support
staff for field people).  That was the Reagan-Mondale contest.  I learned a
lot about electioneering then.  Here in Portland I've been active with
DemocracyLab, which pioneers new forms of social media which might be
considered democracy-advancing.
"""

Kirby, member of Python Software Foundation, to David Mertz, Elections
Administrator, Python Dictatorship

Context:  PSF members recently voted by secret ballot, David Mertz
administrating.  We had record participation via an eVoting mechanism.
However the ballot itself was changing up to the last minute and that
confused some voters as to what they were voting on, such that the members
private list is filled with debate about whether to re-run the election.  I
say "Python Dictatorship" because we use the title "Benevolent Dictator for
Life" (BDFL) with respect to Guido, the guy who got the ball rolling and
continues to guide Python-the-language as a work in progress.

The members list archives itself is private and that's OK. Most of the content would bore those not vested to some nitty gritty level in the future of this group.

Likewise some AFSC lists and meetings are by invitation or come with a role. In government, they use the word "classified" which is short for "restricted access".

Software provides micro-management over readability and writability, such as via the POSIX ownership infrastructure (chmod etc.). At higher levels, within CMS frameworks such as Plone, administrators have all sorts of ways to curtain off and refine views.

The whole idea of "need to know" is the basis for any great piracy (enterprise) as we learn in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (one of Bucky's).

Speaking of AFSC, the scoop there is I've been circulating some Linus Pauling House research into the roles Quakers played with regard to "Indians" (in the sense of native Americans). I'll share more of that in these blogs at a later time.

Psychoanalyzing Pythonistas

By some principle or other, the computer languages one learns have a bleed-through effect on one’s psychology. Now that Python is so prevalent, we might as well study its effect on humans, psychologically, meaning psychoanalysis is apropos.

Implicitly, everything has a self in Python, because everything is an object and objects usually have a way to talk about themselves, to themselves, internally, by means of a “self” moniker (a placeholder, not a keyword). They don’t need the usual pronouns the way humans do, as they’re all “its” (keep it simple). We’re free to add attributes (such as gender), either to the “private bag” (self.__dict__) or to the type itself (class.__dict__).

The self, however, is a clone or more accurately “an instantiation” of some “archetype” (we just say “type” in software engineering), so that when we know the type or types of something (multiple inheritance is allowed), we already have a good idea of how it behaves. 

The duck type objects all behave like ducks and so on.

What we learn about these selves is they depend on others to keep them alive. If no other needs them (by keeping at least a token, soft linking somehow) then why waste memory on entities no one will resurrect? That’s when garbage collection kicks in, when a self’s reference count reaches zero.

This “self only because of others” philosophy is very consistent with the Buddhist model, so lets say Python, in terms of psychology, qualifies as Zen-like, Zen being a psych discipline, a technology, not a belief system in the Protestant sense, unless we count Quakers as Protestants.

This type of psychoanalysis will only flower if other languages are subjected to the same treatment, and insights are gleaned. 

Java and Python are close relatives, however the former has placeholder APIs called interfaces when multiple inheritance is called for. In general, Java is a more bureaucratically well-endowed language, not as spare or sparse as the original Python, which is advancing faster in terms of 3rd party packages than in its core grammar, which has more or less settled down (more than JavaScript’s, although maybe JS is finally seeing its end-of-tunnel light?).

In 3rd party world (beyond the Standard Library), Python has a reputation for being general and all-purpose and therefore suitable for web development and data science, astronomy, molecular biology, artificial intelligence (ala natural language processing) and so on. 

What the Pythonista brings to each discipline is a common mindset, based on these entity-selves of various types, keeping each other alive as long as there’s still work to be done.

Superbowl Sunday 2021

Today is Superbowl Sunday, but I only caught the last 10 seconds, nothing in play as the Buccaneers were up by a lot.

My day was spent doing office work, bouncing off a new guy, and writing a piece for Medium.  Then I was in Python teacher mode, and online, with my bevy of teens.  After that ended, I composed a thank you for Session 4 email, then tuned to CBS on my upstairs digital receiver ancient television (not flat).

I've been using the term "buckaneer" somewhat informally, meaning "someone into the Bucky stuff", aware of the pirate motif.  I've got my pirate ship USA party also, no candidates, only planks. Only structure and substance. Mostly ghosts.  Appropriately.

I haven't made sense of the Biden Administration's position yet, on where the grid is to get its nuclear fuel. We're not giving any cartel a monopoly on enrichment, the last anyone checked.  

Is nuclear fuel a problem?  The percentages we're talking about are less concerning than the ignorance of the journalism surrounding the whole issue.

The Quaker prof in an elite school, is how I rattle around in Blue House these days. The Oregon Curriculum Network has had a headquarters here for over 25 years by this time.  The products are everywhere online.

They were talking about activist profs working with Antifa in recent maneuvers.  You've got my blogs here saying I haven't met any leadership, and my circles around Occupy Portland in 2009 were different. I'm not trying to be in the streets or in any rallies or meetings.  Portland treats the pandemic seriously.

However I still get to be an activist prof, even if I'm not taking my cues from locals exclusively.  I've stopped trying to contribute to the racism conversation, for example, given how rickety that whole concept is. Once the house of cards starts falling, there's no need to stick around to watch them fall. You know how entropy works.  

It's hard to be against something that doesn't exist.  They say "atheist" is a misnomer for that same reason.  However I can be against apartheid, such as I've come to know it.

Speaking of apartheid, my Class of 1980 at Princeton still takes some pride in pioneering the BDS movement against apartheid South Africa at that time.  Our focus was the D in BDS: Divestment. The holder of investments:  Princeton University.  The nature of the assets invested in:  companies making money on the basis of that apartheid business model.

The attitude to take towards the nuke supply chain, is stringent vigilance and note sharing. We know the nuke weapons are illegal per the UN, and expect collaborating agencies to take stock in which private sector business are willfully rogue.  Their use of nationalist symbols as a thin cover helps to call attention to the job sites (the inventories of banned radio-toxins).

Iran's role in all of this is not that different from anyone else's.  Comply with the TPNW and assist in the spread of prohibitive costs to the Dr. Evils out there.

Back to the Future

I did some lesson planning for my futuristic math class today, filing some fragments here and there, as I'm not trying to hoard. This is free and open source culture after all, much the same as the ambient academe, in terms of not copy-protecting what needs to be shared.

The stack goes in layers, from chip to cloud, with some floors public, others private -- not that hard to visualize. Where it's stuff we all share, like the operating system, you like to check into it, see that it's not doing anything against your best interests. That's why we have SELinux and such distros, or just Linux in general (anyone may double check the source code -- not that that's easy, but some people can, find they learn from doing it).

Of special interest is the mini-language that are Python's format specifiers, newly back ported to 2.6, and the way to get your string outputs the way you like 'em. The cool thing here is your specifiers know how to dig into the guts of the objects sent, using dot notation, dictionary syntax or whatever, just unquoted.

In using Python as a calculator, we're not forbidding ourselves short class definitions, such as something to instantiate a dome, for use on Mars (Earth... Moon) in various ecosystems. One example showed inputting frequency and edge length, say from any pentagon center to a neighboring hub. By the provided algorithm (imported in one line), that's sufficient information provided you're also given the frequency. The result is deterministic at that point. And what you get back are various attributes, such as volume (both in tetra-units and cubes), temperature, cabin pressure, stuff like that. The student isn't expected to write some long script. These aren't necessarily typists we're talking about.

I think I told the story pretty well, of how we made the leap from 2.x to 3.x. I'm also consistent in my view that mono-lingual is worse than bilingual. In the age of unicode, we encourage ogling the full character set. However, here I'm talking about multiple computer languages, and I circle J, inheriting from APL, as a good example of something completely different. Compare it with Python and you'll have a better appreciation for how various are these languages. Don't stop there if you're interested.

Hey, wanted to listen to Good Bye Party music after work but upon stowing the gear I realized I was famished and needed to cook something (rice, potato, broccoli etc.). My daughter is off with a peer group of elders, women from her mother's circle.

Wanderers 2015.8.19

:: jeff goddard, 2009 ::

Jeff Goddard found time to join us, and it turns out his career and mine have brought us closer together:  we're both into Clojure.  He's using the Reagent based approach to working with React, the Facebook-supported JavaScript library.  My needs are more primitive so far as I'm doing curriculum writing in early STEM, looking at the concept of Vectors.

The discussion wandered all over, as is our wont.  I wrote on the white board with a colored marker clearly labeled as "not suitable for white boards" and had to put some work into getting everything back to pristine, which I did.  Lesson learned I hope.

Those other pens are for butcher paper presentations, not white board presentations.  I had a new domain to share, sounding vaguely shadowy in a DC Comics kind of way (4Dsyndicate.net -- just a placeholder right now, complements Grunch.net and 4Dsolutions.net, used for curriculum writing and DHL shipments (just shipped an art book to Nepal)).

Having access to Safari Books On-line as a perk of my employment means I might find a lot more on React and Reagent if I go poking around.  I'll plan on doing that soon, also wearing my IT Committee hat with NPYM (NGO community service role).

My schedule opened up during Wanderers owing to a rescheduling by the party interested in visiting Costco with me, a sometime Wanderer herself.  We can do that another time.

We talked about Uber, with me reminiscing about our Clackamas County experiment, funded by cigarette tax money through TriMet, who's mandate was to get people from here to there regardless of by what means.

Transportation Reaching People (TRP) showed how a non-profit -- a GO in this case, not an NGO -- could participate in the same space as Uber, tapping mostly retired folks with their own cars and dispatching them to help various parties keep doctor appointments, go shopping etc.

I also mentioned Ron Braithwaite's presentation years ago, about "urberizing" eldercare with a system of passive sensors and human monitors, some of them clients of health care in other ways, perhaps wheelchair bound.

Doing this work in public-private space was Ron's vision for Canada at first, but whether that idea ever went anywhere I know not.  My impression is we're still in the dark ages, Canada too.

My rant this morning was humans were very much an unfinished work, and were aliens to visit they'd likely say:  "not fully matured yet, we'll check back in a couple millennia, good luck."

That attitude derives from my latent case of misanthropy I'm sure.  Likely there's a pill for that in some catalog or other.  Mostly I've got it under control and have a lot of empathy for people.

In fact later today I for some reason (no reason?) took time off from teaching Python to plunge into some Youtubes looking back on the Tsunami in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka.

I also studied the sinking and refloating of the Costa Concordia, before meeting Carol's flight from Boston (JetBlue).

Music as Water

"Music like water" will be a paraphrase of David Bowie, with a screen shot in my slides.  That was from my Spotify meeting.  Tara and her peers appreciate what this company is doing.  It all started in Sweden, with a couple of friends wanting to stream music at a private birthday party.

Echoing Graham's talk:  what's "property" is fluid.  On Luna ("Luna Park" -- our moon), they'd sell you the smells of Planet Earth, but we get those for free here (duh) -- or used to.  I've not seen the biosphere without its layer of human industrial gases at any time during this trip.

That we've morphed the planet, beyond all recognition, like a Borg, is not debatable, whether the "climate" (chuckle, what's that?) has changed or not.

I'm in the chairman's suite at the moment, having just met Julie in-the-real for the first time.  I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel with my queues.  This was not a paid-by-work conference.  I have only Ewa to thank for the promo, and Steve.

Would I have been here otherwise?  Maybe.  Parallel Universe talk, best to leave it alone ("other tomorrow" -- hello Trevor Blake).

What I saw today:  the guy who invented Selenium is well on his way to having a "magic fingers" with eyes, that tipples through your phone apps looking for bugs.  He controlled it with Python, as it played Angry Birds on his tablet and managed a decent (I thought -- not being a player) score.

As I was explaining to some of my colleagues, I'm busy losing my virginity in several dimensions here, such as in letting my Droid scan some garbage that led it to eat a 4.5MB application.  eXistenZ again.

A high point today:  I grabbed the mic after an ESRI guy called the Fuller Projection crazy.  This was after lots of reminders that the Mercator is nuts.  We had a jovial exchange.  He politely paused while I took a picture (ESRI has the Fuller Projection as an option), saying I'd put it on Facebook & Twitter (which is true).  Julie Steele (O'Reilly) tweeted the buzz, which I retweeted.

Congrats to Carl Trachte for the Community Award this morning, presented in absentia.

I'm pleased with the new Nikon Coolpix S8200.  It has a lot of built in intelligence, and as a guy with bags, swag, on the move, huffing / puffing, there's not all that slow motion time to set up a shot, use the gauges.  The approximations taken by the on-board algorithms seem pretty on target.  See what you think.

OMR Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equinox Retreat

Temperatures are dropping. Summer is done. The thermostat in the refrigerator conked out. I was lucky to find a repairman on a Saturday.

I read old Wiki pages by students in Israel, talking about elephants and whether they had a sixth sense that warned them of tsunamis (not that adding a "sense" really explains anything, might as well add a "dimension"). One of them wrote about Gaza. This was on Wikieducator and I was conversing about conserving elephants with Mr. Wong (a Wikieducator user) in China, saving elephants being a theme of his business school curriculum. I shared about the Global U recruiting campaign to get more people seeing themselves as global university students (giant spherical campus).

Walt has hooked me up with an interesting new correspondent, a deep thinker in Canada named Ted, Lakota heritage, who writes about site-based situational learning, versus a more western model based on cookie cutter jobs (template roles) and individual volition (as if "place" were not a causative field, as if only "the individual" were the locus for action). Walt and I had been yakking about the Zeitgeist... We've been talking about David Peat and Blackfoot Physics among other topics.

My post to Synergeo from earlier today (while the repairman was working, including out buying parts) includes more on the bamboo bike trailer delivery network from some hypothetical Unilever ice cream factory in Cuba. That company has been working pretty hard on getting more recycling and composting going, including in the Lipton tea making process.

The Synergeo post connects back to the Math Forum for more details. This is a Harvard Business School type project in that we're recasting metaphors to better align with modern computer science concepts. The API between an enterprise and government is up for redesign, given all the changes in Cuba these days. The population is highly literate and attuned to such challenges. The rest of the world could learn from work / study programs along these lines, perhaps without disrupting Havana's status as a "fast food free zone" (a commercial edge, attractive to tourism).

Trish joined Glenn, Don and I for some more Youtubes on the big screen for the 2nd night of the retreat. I was drawn to WW2 era Private SNAFU toons by the great Dr. Seuss. Laura Cooper (Goodbye Party) was again influential. We also watched that 7 minute Blu toon again, and listened to Leonard Cohen (Don is his fan), also Mad World. Trish pointed us the the sand painting artist Kseniya Simonova, as well as to her own toon-like drawings on Facebook, pictures of her handsome young son, and the amazing sidewalk art of Julian Beaver.

I was glad to hear back from John Belt, who dropped me a note while in the middle of teaching a class for SUNY / Oswego. Sam, Glenn and I were in a meeting at Bridgeport, connected in real time by wifi. John had recently been staying with Joe Clinton and had showed him Sam's book. Sam Lanahan and Joe collaborated over about a two year period in Elizabeth, New Jersey some decades back, both having been students of Buckminster Fuller at different times.

My writing to Ted, the Lakota guy, included a sketch of the bizmo concept, which has somewhat blended with the Holden Web flying circus idea at this point. Geeks and circuses go together, what can I say? What institutions would (or already do) sponsor bizmos? What control rooms would (or already do) dispatch them? I saw some plans for Afghanistan bizmos go by in Dr. Beebes slides, but when I asked about 'em she said they weren't there yet.

Dropping a Few Balls

I've just been making contrite phone calls, as in the thick of the action I dropped the baton at a certain place in the schedule:  I'd been invited to talk to the elders in my "church" (we don't actually call it that) about my world domination schemes (as a geek, I'm expected to have those) and about Bucky Fuller in particular, with whose plans I tend to dovetail mine.

Well, wouldn't ya know it that the bookkeeping computer would go into perpetual reboot at the same time as my brain.  Paralyzed with misconditioning, thanks to the Three Kings (thanks guys), I went pell-mell on Hawthorne buying up a storm, from the Dollar Scholar and the high end Tibetan shop a few doors down, Tara my adviser and accomplice, getting some gifts, and books by Asimov.

That was my karma.  My karma is my dharma.

I've got voicemails in with Sonya Pinney and Audrey Metcalf (cherished elders), apologizing and offering to do private interviews instead, if anyone wants to know.  Invite me again by all means.  What I get for being a space case sometimes.  I fight it, that absent minded professor thing.

How can one be mentally present yet have an absent mind, just not possible.  I prefer Buddhism's mindfulness trainings, in my striving to stay on the rails, however often I fly off them.

At least I got some gifts out the door in the game of spinning airplanes and transportation services.  It's a workout and juggling act, that's for sure.

Out with the electric boats last night, with Trish and the gang, noticing all the FedEx flights coming in, laden with Santaware.  The story going around teendom these days, thanks to Facebook etc., is that Rudolph and peers were all girls, as only girl reindeer still have antlers this late in the year.

Not sure if so, but makes sense in a way.

Like with chinlone (a sport), guys just would not have the patience for some crabby old guy in the back with a passion for chimneys.  Same in computer science.  The male egos only managed to grow really big once the ground had been prepared by the patienter sex.

Apologies again y'all.  I have my world dom / mir plan at the ready, when you're ready to audit.

Thanks to Leslie Hickcox for reminding me, inadvertently.  She's with Friendly Care and well knows how to deal with people like me (those who've misplaced their minds somewhere, or their wallets, or passports...).

I bought ten "splat rats" from Dollar Scholar.  I don't know how to rhyme those in the "five golden rings" song but then these were for Hanukkah anyway.  That's our main party this time of year.

We used to do Solstice more, but that's when I had Dawn to help organize things.  I dropped by Alex's (Lindsey and I walked over together) for good food and company.  Tara stayed home applying for college and reading her new Asimov books.

Media Campaigns

To label the above TV test pattern a case of “cultural appropriation” is one gestalt one could apply. My view is closer to: oh good, n8v America has taken over television i.e. the “appropriation” is going the other way and now maybe the weather reports will be more bioregional, not cutting off at these arbitrary “white man” borders, not that I believe “whites” form a race e.g. the Aryans, the Pueblo of the Caucasus, with me somehow a member of their tribe.

My “media campaigns” don’t tend to have a lot of voltage behind them. My Pirate Party doesn’t rake in the dough, given the esoteric nature of our planks and platform. 

We support new forms of public schooling geared towards building democratic institutions and training future diplomats. As it stands, private prep school alumni remain over-represented in the diplomatic corps (including the Peace Corps) and under-represented in the rank and file military i.e. the Smedley Butler racketeers, employees of USSA-style military socialism with capitalistic characteristics i.e. privatized profits.

In another campaign, I poke fun at the Qyoobists (hint: “Cube-ists”) and no one has a clue what I’m talking about. I like to denigrate and lambast a pseudo-ethnicity, science fictional at best, that no one believes in: people who worship the cube as their golden calf, and make it their symbol of rationality. Sure being “against” these people sounds surreal by design. Talk about straw men!

Another campaign involved taking a test pattern such as the one above and replacing the steady tone soundtrack with something more auditorily interesting: Azan. Why not immerse any viewers tuning in a test pattern in some American heritage of that flavor, Islam having been present in the Americas for some centuries, as a consequence of slavery especially although not exclusively?

However the TV stations mostly eschew test patterns these days and viewers are forgetting what they are and how they would appear in the wee hours of the morning, when a station had no other programming to offer. 

At least we’re free to publish share those Azan segments on YouTube, perhaps unlisted, and perhaps with creative modifications of the test pattern design.