More Social Engineering

Eri Gentry's DIY "garage bio" talk got a lot of applause. I could see Tara enjoying it, as she's into DNA sequencing these days, at OHSU.

Gabe Zichermann sent a five minute video on the topic of Diversity, bringing up the UK's official apology for the treatment of Alan Turing who was basically harassed to death for being gay.

The next speaker was refreshingly open about his gayness with no sense of shyness. Geek culture, having roots in the carnival, is open to gypsies as well.

Speaking of which, we had a military vet on the organizers list pounding the table that free speech be protected. There's a fine line between "eldering" someone for tasteless jokes or content, other infractions, versus harassment and infringement on freedom of speech.

Our vet brought up the specter of McCarthy and the KKK to make his point, even defending the right to burn the USA flag, despite his finding this personally distasteful and disrespectful, having pledged his allegiance thereto (as have I, starting around first or second grade -- part of public schooling was to elicit a commitment to nationalism in this way).

I'm back on the NoSQL track this morning, having slipped over to the Perl track to catch the Damian Channel. In the exhibit hall, Naga continues to jump back and forth between DemocracyLab and the Perl Foundation. Python heart Perl.

The NoSQL space is really taking off, maturing, including in big companies. The strongest tools in the space seem to be all open source. NoSQL and SQL coexist peacefully. This conversation doesn't have the flavor of a "religious war". Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, Tokyo Cabinet... so many (I've mentioned these before).

Nation-states, as well as some of the larger private enterprises, make use of these technologies. Huge amounts of data are being generated and stored thanks to the affordability of hardware these days.

What people may not understand is the the Web itself may be defined as a NoSQL database. URLs comprise the keys in a key-value store, with values being resources, objects with behaviors and data. Go ahead and credit me as a source of this idea, though others may have thought of it too.

Google is buying us lunch again.

OSCON 2011 Begins

I did some chauffeur duty around OSCON last night. Chairman Steve directed me to pick up this retired Citibank CIO at DoubleTree. He'd gotten started in the punch card era with Honeywell. His agenda these days is to help Google penetrate the conservative banking world with its email service, which world is currently standardized on Microsoft's. Jumping through a few regulatory hoops is not that hard, is his message, and worth the effort.

We talked about the database back ends used in banking. There's nothing to stop or prohibit a small bank, say Swiss, from using PostgreSQL instead of DB2. It's mostly an ethnicity thing. IBM was the safest choice. To this day, cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, where he lives, have little innovation in terms of open source, as indicated by their minuscule to non-existent Python User Groups.

I bring up PostgreSQL in part because the Gotham Tavern was on our itinerary. The local Postgres chapter, headed by Gabriela and Selena, had booked some space, drinks and food. We managed to crash the party after getting lost. Even though I'm a local, I wasn't sure where to join up with Interstate Avenue after coming over the Fremont from the Pearl, where we'd met up with Michelle Rowley and her entourage at Rogue. Steve got his Android chatting in the back seat, telling us which way to turn.

Rowley leads our Python User Group. She's stepping out from her job at Emma as a Django wrangler to work on a new kind of Yoga site. We went over her business plans at dinner. I plan to nominate her to the PSF, as one of the Python community's MVPs.

Having been on the OSCON organizing committee this year, I was given a pass.

Some "code of conduct" issues came up at the last minute on the organizer list, and I shared some perspective as totem bearer. Sponsors, guilds, companies, come here in part to get their coats of arms, other branding signs, included in a flow of unplanned, unstaged photographs.

Geek circuses generate a lot of publicity for the participants. Any decision to restrict photography must be considered with much thought.

In my view, PyGotham is being boldly experimental in all but prohibiting informal amateur photography by conference-goers, by encumbering it with paperwork and warnings of reprisals against any paparazzi-like activities.

This is a complete break with tradition as part of what conference goers feel they pay for is the right to shoot pictures of various other geeks, possibly with swag and various iconography. The PSF snake, a product placement tool, is all about getting its picture taken.

I'm in the HTML5 / CSS3 tutorial this morning.

FNB / Urban Studies

David wanted to talk about Simon Benson as we peddled our way to the park, having prepped the meal at Multnomah Friends per usual. This is the Benson of the Benson Hotel and the Benson Bubblers, our public drinking fountains scattered about downtown.

Later, when I got home, I shared his query with mom: what was his first name and what might we learn about the guy? She came up with an interesting web page.

Here is a nice story about Simon Benson, the Benson House, Benson High School, Benson Bubblies and Benson Hotel. Sounds pretty good for an entrepreneur.

http://www.pdx.edu/alumni/history-simon-benson-and-his-house
--
in peace, Carol Urner

His house was the one Nirel was photographing that day, as it was being moved to its new location.

Food security and food safety were themes in the kitchen this afternoon, as well as on the list.

• From: Simon Walter-Hansen
  
• To: pdxfnb
• Subject: Re: [pdxfnb] Re: Thursday status update (SE/Belmont)
• Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:18:55 -0700

Regarding safe food handling, you can also get a 30 minute review and take a food handler safety test online for free. http://www.google.com/m/url?ei=-MAoTph1jLqpA6Hy__cD&q=http://www2.co.multnomah.or.us/foodhandlercard/&ved=0CB0QFjAA&usg=AFQjCNFa7fqrdHmguKPUfeeYdHmP_QHccA if you want a food handler card, good for three years, the cost is $10. You don't need this to volunteer with Food Not Bombs, but it is a good thing to know about food handling and bacteria and how it affects the health of you and others.

Cheers!
-Simon

On Jul 21, 2011 4:17 PM, "kirby urner" wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 3:08 PM, kirby urner wrote:
>
> << skip >>
>
>
>> Lugging new bag of rice for stores, a Quaker contribution.
>>
>> Kirby
>>
>>
> Someday we should have Food Not Bombs school
> again where we go over all the rules. These Quakers
> (Qs) are pretty conscientious when it comes to following
> food handling guidelines, same with SDW I'm sure.
>
> Anyway, it's just donated space, not like Qs regard
> this as their own outreach program, making them
> liable as an institution. Our servers know how to
> keep it sane, using covers and utensil protocols.
>
> If you need to review (as a server) talk to a chef. Lindsey
> is quite sharp on these matters.
>
> OK, time to get to work. The crew has assembled.
>
> Kirby

Not everyone coming to a serving is in the best of health always (all the more reason to seek nutritious food). Some are self treating. We also have a triathlete in training.

We follow some protocols to keep the food safe during serving time, as well as during prep time.

This isn't like a Quaker potluck exactly, where people file by and help themselves. Your server will tell you to keep your receiving bowl outside the perimeter of the pot and below its rim. The receiver's bowl cannot spill into the serving bowl, nor should the receiver be hovering over the pot. People assume safe postures instinctively with a few nudges and hints. We're all watching and monitoring one another reflexively as well, offering comments and corrections where needed. FnB strives to be a safe operation.

There's no insistence on face masks or plastic gloves. If you're highly germophobic, just the idea of eating in a park may be too much, especially with dogs around, including sometimes sitting among the group.

FnB creates the casual ambiance of a church or neighborhood picnic, events that may be going on in parallel at the same time in the same park.

Having read up on Benson some, I'm thinking he might have had direct dealings with Sam Hill. Something else to research. "Simon Benson was good friends with Sam Hill... and the rest is history."

Road Warriors

Meal time again. I snagged a polish at Costco, while grabbing sundries, same Costco I'd missed by a long shot on July 4. So I'll just dip in for coffee, not frequent the food bars (speaking of PLU cafeteria).

Hey, a trippy thing happened this morning: a government fleet vehicle followed me for many blocks, right to my disabled parking space (chauffeuring mom -- though not at the time (was getting supermarket sushi for breakfast)), all just to give me a lecture about young people killed (not by me), the implication being by people "like me" (black white or whatever).

Yes, I'd only slowed at the stop sign, but only to keep this waiting government truck behind me, giving him room (he looked slow). We're talking 8:30 AM on a Saturday morning in a campus neighborhood that's rented out in the summer. The place was desolate, absent of people, flat parking lots everywhere, our vehicles the only two in the picture. Chirp chirp (cricket noise).

Not an excuse to break rules (full stop better), but not a case of reckless endangerment either (I later saw a city bus make the same slow rolling-turn maneuver). Isn't chasing a private civilian when you're not the police a bit of a transgression also? That was unbudgeted gas mileage. What if I'd freaked and had heart palpitations?

This quiet empty morning scene was not the setting in which those others had been killed, I would venture.

"[ Homicide ] is the 2nd leading cause of death among 10-24 year olds", I think was the question, but I forget the scope or the source. I helped a health teacher do some grading, using a simple answer key.

I do grading anyway so it's not like I did it unprofessionally. I should join the graders' union. That might mean, to some, that I drive a grader (subclass of tractor) and work on public roads.

Other questions were about the difference between "aggravated" and "simple" assault.

To what extent do lawyers get to tell us, the private users of this heritage, what these words "really" mean. Every discipline has its "push campaigns". Like doctors without borders and so on. We learn to share the road.

Diversity / Python World

Excerpt from one of my posts from earlier today (some hyperlinks added):

We don't force the Amish to have a Rainbow Gathering
on their land. We don't force Disney World to have
Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). We don't force people
in Mecca to welcome Christians and build Christian
churches there. We don't force armed uniformed bossy
types into every area, telling local people what to do,
how to behave. We don't force Havana to open itself
to McDonalds. We don't protest every "Boys Only" sign
we come across and say "if you use Python, you must
be non-discriminatory". We are not bullies of that flavor.

That's the "we" I'm a part of and represent to this group.

Your "we" may vary (YWMV).

When it comes to diversity, I'm really into freeing the world
of bossy armed forces types who seek to control by brute
force. I favor Unicode because it diminishes the leverage
of the Anglophone club. I find the English language (its
thinking patterns) too dominant for my taste, even though
it's the only language I speak (unless I call it American
and twist it in various weird ways-- I'm quite the twister,
by necessity).

I'm into defying the power some thinking they have to control
the intellectual heritage of the species using a control
language called "law" that is not only unfair but waaaaay
too slow and smug about itself.

I see free and open source cultures starting to world
dominate by displacing lawyers as a controlling elite.

That's the big picture I'm looking at.

<< snip >>

Of course many white males are anything but privileged. Some
have been stop-lossed and are dying in slavery. White males
die in death camps etc., their skin color no protection.

I like 'My Fair Lady' as ethnography in that it gets to the nub
of many issues: it's not that she's "a she" so much as that she
talks and acts a certain way, has various mannerisms associated
with a certain role, class, category of person. These reflexes
can be reprogrammed whereas physical features are more
fixed. We call it education. Elites learn to act entitled in various
ways, assert their privileges. Do we begrudge them? Shouldn't
everyone be entitled, not just a few? Sounds wrong in English?
So much the worse for English if so?

People with privilege have sometimes just learned to act entitled.
That sounds like a bad thing, but what if you're a child laborer
and join a union because you're entitled to longer breaks? Now
it sounds OK. Traditional peoples about to be displaced from
their native lands *should* act "entitled" lest the lawyers come
in with eviction notices and simply tell them to leave, because
of the dam they want to build.

http://www.kewa.org/project.html

People are entitled to say "no" a lot more than they do I think.
I'm not a big fan of being endlessly patient and passive in the
face of adversity until its too late. Fatalism and "just getting
through the next day" aren't attitudes befitting people calling
themselves "programmers" (an activist-sounding verb).

Wanderers 2011.07.05

:: from July 3-5, 2011 ::

Happy birthday Julie.

We left them carless at the Issaquah Motel 6, with advice from Uncle Bill about some express bus service to Seattle. Back to Centralia.

On the way up, I'd caught the Vin Diesel movie. It was either that, or listen to the sound track from my lower bunk. You might think, as some kind of Quaker, that I'd be against this romp through Rio, tearing things up by dragging a special effects bag of tricks though an amazing number of obstacles. It's "kinetics" in that 14 year old sense of wanting to know more physics, see what might happen if... action fantasies fulfilled, using someone's sense of what's believable.

The relatives were hardy and fun once again, a kindly clan.

Floyd pilots those triple-7s to way distant airports. Boeing has always been big in this region, since I was born anyway, which was not all that long ago (1958).

We made a side trip going North in Puyallup to the Costco on 512, a big fuel-wasting mistake on my part, or maybe a commercial. It was closed of course.

Albertson's and Baskin-Robins supplied our contributions to the picnic, including some hard cider selected by me.

I was doing some work on the laptop. PSF business as well. That's ongoing.

Pauling House: Barbara was with us, telling us about her life tending to her almost-100 years old mother. Dick Pugh. Dondi. Me showing up late from Food Not Bombs where the native chanting was heartening. Wave to Melody (one of our chiefs).

I talked with Derek's friend about televising-while-building-out the FNB infrastructure. He was closer to my age, with a lot of experience running big institutions.

Stopped at Office Depot on the way back, got Tara some office furniture. Then it appears her HP Pavilion is dying, younger SATA drive reporting immanent failure direct from BIOS. Is it the iMac that moved in, a work/study program item? No, that doesn't explain it.

Lots of talk about scuba diving tonight (Dondi is getting certified). I bragged about my NAUI certification, my wreck diving in Truk Lagoon. No, I'm not above bragging, like to strut when others are doing it.

That Vin Diesel movie was funny in that way. The heroes made off with the cash, to which the bad guy was not entitled, and were living their dreams. Fast cars. A kind of Mondo Unisex in the behavior codes. The movie had like a role model for everyone. You could like cops, you could not like cops, you could be Asian...

I'm seeing movie-making as more of an alternative to violence. Instead of actually having these bruising battles between superheroes, we act them out and save lives. We're heroes ourselves for just making this an idle summer fantasy in Centralia. They see more of Rio, and favelas rising.

Like the Bond films in that way. Another topic tonight around the table. Dondi had been learning about Ian Flemming, how he got it out of his system. She hadn't known he wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I got to be the font of knowledge about something (like explaining "geek" to Steve -- he took it as the straight man).

Brazil: that's where Keiko is from, our lovely Lyrik owner.

Wanderers 2011.06.29

:: Wanderers Talk, June 29, 2011 ::

Accelerating acceleration is evident, as usual, tip of the hat to Toffler. "The roller coaster is normal" seems a lot like Bucky's "rest speed is top speed". Bob McGown was there today, even gave me a check in appreciation. He appreciates the significance of the polyhedronists, of tensegrity, even of flextegrity (Sam joined us, and spoke at length after my talk).

Yes, this was my time in the sun, to focus on Minneapolis and environs. We had a 27 year veteran of that country, Connie Wynn, raised on the East Coast, who came to reflect on life in this great city, or Twin Cities as it's called, Minneapolis / St. Paul.

My presentation was non-linear, but pretty tight, as I'd hand-drawn two road maps on 8.5 x 11. I will photograph and upload these if they still exist. I wanted to weave a story and a fairly abstruse one, as befitting the topic: my visit to St. John's Abbey and University to visit with Father Magnus Wenninger and to contribute to the pool of shared video in appreciation of this marvelous man (not to mention an interesting busy campus). MVP David Koski was the producer and organizer of this event.

I brought along Barrel Tower, my Kenneth Snelson original. This got discussed and passed around quite a bit. Another name that get coming up: Popko. His book Geodesics had been a subject of discussion yesterday, in my meeting with Trevor and Tim. Tim actually came to this talk at Linus Pauling House, on really short notice. I was impressed, as we'd only just met.

Dondi, good friend of Trisha, also managed to make it, having sampled the retreat (the one I missed while in Minnesota). Don skipped the lunch a few of us attended, eager to move his boat from the usual moorings to the Blues Festival venue.

I pretended this was a road trip even though I was just blocks from my house. I lugged my own sound system and projector, as well as a big chunk of Flextegrity (without pre-arrangement). As a road show, I imagine myself as a part of an "away team" more than as some solo standup (I mostly sat, controlling the laptop).

The video and slides went over well I thought.

I played up the interesting features of campus architecture, including the Foucault Pendulum in the science building. Bob McGown said something about it taking 33 hours to go around at this latitude. David Tver chimed in about vibrational fields in the Sun, independent of its swift period of rotation. The Sun, unlike Jupiter, unlike Earth, is not oblate and there's a reason for that.

Anna of Thunderbird Charter, still influential as a drawing board construct (Alaska), is making her way from Seattle for another meetup, having just attended the Charter Schools Conference in Atlanta. She's another Internet collaborator (in the sense of fellow traveler) who found me through math-teach, a Forum I frequent. We tend to take a more open ended futuristic position vis-a-vis our more conservative posters, though I have to admit that's a gross oversimplification of all that goes on in those sometimes tempestuously snappy threads.

During lunch (Steve Mastin, David DiNucci, Glenn Stockton and myself), I was eyeballing the CNN screen, showing embedded camera action amidst the kinetic warfare in the human terrain systems, showing ongoing riots in Greece (thinking of Nirel's report), in Egypt. David shared the story of his brother, maker of famous DiNucci bike frames, and of his sister, one-time winner of top-level Jeopardy and a significant sum. A talented family.

Afterwards, I joined Glenn for some archaeological studies thanks again to our neighborhood Dollar Scholar. The Etruscan ink well, etched with the Phoenician alphabet, was an especially good find. Glenn regaled me with stories (as Dawn would say) of the relatively high status of Etruscan women, meaning they were allowed to carouse with the guys and weren't expected to only go outside wearing sacks (from whence derives Saks Fifth Avenue, just kidding of course).

Steve Holden was telling me that Ann Sang Su Kyi was giving the BBC Reith Lecture this year. I need to check into that next, after captioning more Photostream. I shot a few from the head of the table, where I was positioned as speaker.

I walked back to Pauling House after hauling my stuff home in the company car (just a few blocks). First though, I got involved in a car chase, nothing over the speed limit. Accelerating acceleration.

Solstice Wanderers

The balance of our evening was devoted to learning from Allen Taylor about The Mad Scientist, a work in progress by his talented sons, and still raising funds. This kickstart site is pretty interesting.

This is the prequel to their Evil Cult, which I saw in a movie theater in downtown Portland years ago.

Craigmore Creations has done a splendid job redecorating the interior of the Linus Pauling House. Any signs of ISEPP are now gone or more subtle. Julian's sculpture is still outside.

I'm glad I still have the Photostream set, preserving a bygone era.

I'm at OS Bridge at the moment, official nametag and everything, in my usual role of "geek about town" (no cane or top hat this time, trying to shed any lingering Mr. Toad imagery for more Pythonic fashions).

The talk I attended today was all about making maps, lots of influence from Tufte. Yes, back to the ESRI world, with a strong plug for GeoDjango, even though the speaker was more of the Rubyesque persuasion.

Cartographers use different standardized spherioids, with a datum to anchor them. Geodetics help align the data as well. This is all the omnitriangulating Fuller was talking about in Critical Path, still ongoing. I grabbed a DVD on my way out the door, after asking about open source licensing.

The math of geodesy could easily plow a digital math track right back through K-12. The "tentacles" would emanate from this geekdom of "world masters" (those who've done a lot of homework on themselves). Sounds romantic. Octopus's Garden.

Visiting a Geometer Priest

:: visiting Father Magnus Wenninger ::

David Koski had visited Magnus before, as St. John's Abbey is only about 1.5 hours from Minneapolis where he lives and, in our little world of polyhedrons, he's a super star. He wanted me to share this experience and graciously hosted my visit to Minneapolis so I might do so.

David was especially concerned that Father Wenninger's life was not well-documented enough and wanted us to explore making a documentary of some kind. As it turned out, at least one short biographical DVD has been produced. He's also one of the most cited authors in polyhedral geometry books.

Magnus received us in the Great Hall, formerly the main church on this campus, before an architect named Breuer changed everything.

Magnus has been connected to this place since his young adulthood and perhaps even his teen years, having trained here for the priesthood from a young age. His mother had suggested he become a priest, and he was ordained in the 1940s.

He later went to Canada for more training in mathematics (as it turned out) and then to Columbia University for a masters in mathematics teaching. He was assigned to the Bahamas by his abbot and spent many years in the monastery and high school there. He later returned to St. John's and has been there ever since. He is now 91 years old.

Magnus took us to his quarters. He navigates stairs rather easily. We got a campus tour, taking in the library, which is due to expand, and seeing the patch of grass where perhaps, if sufficient funds are raised, a bronze version of Order in Chaos, one of his sculptures, will be rendered in an 11 foot high version. It's made from multiple copies of three pieces. We visited the brass version (smaller) in the monastery recreation room, down the hall from the cafeteria (where we ate lunch together).

Another high point was touring the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, which is exhibiting a newly completed St. John's Bible, hand lettered and illustrated by a creative team headed by Donald Jackson.

St. Joseph University and Abbey is quite a headquarters, in a beautiful setting overlooking some lakes.

Father Magnus is cheerful and is relaxed about sharing about his spiritual leadings, thoughts on divinity, on life, on death, on life after death. We joined him for the mid day worship service, where a congregation of visitors and monks went through a programmed liturgy. I sat next to Father Wenninger who guided me in which hymnals and prayer books to pull out, and how to use them properly.

A high point for David was finding a certain pattern of triangles tiled into the floor of the science building that is used to generate the 59 stellations of the icosahedron. He had just been using that pattern the night before to show me how he quickly develops stellates in vZome. Finding it on the floor, with Magnus our guide, felt very "Da Vinci Code".

A highpoint for me was looking at the book called Divided Spheres, as yet unpublished, but ready to be. The bibliography is extensive and I was able to find my name in it. My friend Kenneth Snelson wrote a blurb on the back. The tome also talks quite a bit about Waterman polyhedrons, which I named for Steve Waterman, their conceiver.

Systems Science (PSU)

Captain's Log...

I'm here at the meetinghouse with two of the striking women of Food Not Bombs, Lindsey still on the way.

The trick is to not get tricked into taking trash, yet it's a fine line and sometimes it's OK to err on the side of caution. The Village Building Convergence was a source this week. The board is always lighting up.

"Just in time" inventory means no, we don't want a truck load of Dave's Killer Bread (which we all like), but we'd love it if one of our cyclists (say Cedar) made it her mission to routinely share some excess already given to charity (not every NGO can use everything it gets and swapping around may sound like "socialism" but it's what Americans do at swap meets of all shapes and sizes). "Just bring it to the park" is what I posted to the archives.

I see FNB / Orlando is having trouble. I'd think all those NASA engineers working for the Mouse would be more like us here in Intel country. Optimization of excess food streams is a diabolically difficult problem, city-centric and endemic. To have the elemental solutions, with people willing to pony up and volunteer, is what any healthy city would encourage I'd think. We sure do in Portland. I'm glad Fallon is coming back to Portlandia (she did some of the videography regarding our ethnicity for a college project, before moving to Mexico).

What's somewhat amazing to me is PSU's systems science department doesn't do more with such ethnography. Maybe absorption into the Urban Studies department, School of Government, will bring more focus to the systems aspect of architecture. It's all about resource flows and optimization, time as well as energy.

Techno-Invective Reloaded

EJA saddled me with inventor status versus this "art form" as he called it, which is similar to what Quakers call ranting, but about highly esoteric subjects in rather technical ways. You can call it polemics, but then the content tends to be rather dry. Imagine a shouting match between engineers over SQL schemas, or a steamy sex scene: either way, the "EQ" seems out of proportion to the "IQ" (or something like that).

Rather than practice literary criticism on my own art, frowned upon in some circles as "self indulgent", let me conclude by linking to another recent example. This stuff is highly polished, a result of working in a domain, hammering away. Role models might be underground comics writers, some of the shock jocks, and certain comedians when it comes to doing it live. Tends to be somewhat funny in other words. Sounding off about nothing, but in ways that may leave an impression. Others will be less charitable I'm sure.

Fuller Schoolers

Two of our celebrities, as featured in our growing archive of free on-line courseware (Global U).

Victor (above) is one of the main videographers in our tribe.

Joe Clinton has been a stalwart and irrepressible explorer, collaborating with many individuals.

Amy isn't talking about Synergetics here, but gives a sense of what she's like.

Re: Paulings on OPB (Wanderers List)

Thank you very much Lynn.

It is my fond hope to be able to share that with family members. We don't subscribe to television services at this time.

I saw it myself on a big bright HDTV and thought it was well crafted and packed with interesting facts.

They did a good job recreating the chem lab in the basement.

So that was a rooming house run by his mother then? I could see where having all those rooms would come in useful.

The show emphasized the importance of diet and nutrition in some of his own chapters, helped us see why orthomolecular medicine would be a lifelong focus.

But then we all have a body (yeah I know I know, speak for myself), so the real question is why aren't we *all* more into it like he was?

He comes off like the smart guy in the room, that's for sure, with a partner who recognized his talent (and vice versa).

Kirby

- Hide quoted text -

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 10:30 PM, Lynne Taylor <lynne@laurelwoodart.com> wrote:

I have taped it on a DVD for those of you who missed it.

Lynne M. Taylor
Laurelwood Art
(503) 985-7374 (503) 317-4003 (503) 985-8765
www.laurelwoodart.com
art@laurelwoodart.com (for art business)
Lynne@laurelwoodart.com (for personal mail)

A Gathering for Bill

:: celebrating bill sheppard ::

Yakking on Facebook

I was anticipating Donald Trump's withdrawal from the race shortly before I caught up with the story.

His reasons were different of course, but I think siding with the "birthers" against the first native son of Hawaii to become president, just reminded everyone of the tricky sick stuff people do around legal documents.

If you've been on the receiving end, you know how they show up with a "title" to your ancestral lands, and "prove" that it's theirs. This used to be called the Doctrine of Discovery, though of course it's nothing more than naked imperial aggression, as practiced by any number of empires, including the Vatican's, with its Emperor-Popes.

I can see where politicos are on the defensive these days, about holding on to Hawaii. North Americans of Anglo-European heritage have no natural right to these islands and their dissing of a native son president by seditious Lower48 low life just reinforces that obvious fact. "Why submit to such obvious inferiors?" There's no good answer to that question.

However, rather than simply drop out of the union, I think calling any income from Feds "reparations" on the books (in the history books) will go a long way towards leveling the playing field. Empires finally paying their bills looks like an end to their vicious tyranny. Lets get on with the reckoning.

Philosophy Talk

I've repaired to TaborSpace for the weekly Wittgenstein Study Circle.

Some may think I'm a naughty geek for embracing some brands of quasi-nonsense as pertinent to philosophers. Many had hoped to be free of nonsense, meaning say Heidegger, thanks to logical positivism.

Wittgenstein was to be one of their heroes when, Krishnamurti-like, he turned his back on his following, or at least dispelled notions of his being heir to some crown of the crowd pleasers. He had too much integrity for that.

Aris kindly lent me Sex At Dawn, borrowed through Satya and making the rounds among Portlandia's cogniscenti. I've been writing a lot about anthropology and ethnography lately, ever since our previous meetup, where one of our guests was an anthropologist (this was prior to Dr. Sonnenfeld & son), and on through the C3 event at Reed, which has continued to have repercussions.

Wanderers happened this morning and a lot of it was animist talk, music to my ears in some ways. Trisha spoke of her hummingbird problem, while I regaled people with stories of rats.

On Monday night, Tara and I were pleased to show up at the Bolton residence on invitation from Maureen, to celebrate Dr. Charles Bolton's 90th birthday. Actually, his birthday isn't until December, but this was an opportunity to get together with Erin again. Erin is the son of Maureen and a talented architect, Harold Long. This is a family I've watched evolve since returning to Portland in 1985.

Erin spends a lot of time teaching scuba, putting students at their ease in some of the still destination worthy parts of western Thailand. We shared lore about that part of the world quite a bit, extending into stories about Burma, where some of us had been. We had to leave early because Tara is studying a lot and I have a full plate of work.

Anyway, I've been a naughty geek in not seeing this brave new cyberspace as somehow by default a product of analytic philosophy. Some of their champions take too much for granted I'm thinking, and convey that sense in some of my posting.

Now I'm attending a webinar, organized by Maria Droujkova and hosted by Gizem Karaali (Pomona College) and Mark Huber (Claremont McKenna College). I'm wearing my hat as an OST curriculum writer these days. I was showing Alex the ASCII art version of the Mandelbrot Set we've developed, a pedagogical device taking advantage of Python's expressiveness.

Wanderers 2011.04.26

:: Peter Donovan ::

Looking back three days later: I'd "raced" (who with?) to Pauling House on reminder from Don, from the park where we serve, to the lap of Mt. Tabor. I hadn't remembered we had an invited speaker, from Eastern Oregon, from even beyond the high desert where Sam & Judy take care of Judy's mom (of Unity church, a New Thought manifestation of the American Transcendentalist variety).

But I wander.

Peter Donovan is what you might call a "deep ecologist" although that sounds a bit too ten-years-ago (or was it twenty?). His concern for the Earth is evident. Someone told me later he has a lot of background in the shepherding, in Hell's Canyon or one of those. Which brings me to Bill Sheppard (means "sheep killer" more like a wolf), whom many of us are visiting these days. I included Nirel in the huddle via Skype, used in IM mode (what a lot of users do, same at work).

He talked about the whole carbon cycle and went through a lot of classic experiments tying it together: where carbon comes from and where it goes. The net loss of coal to the Earth has changed the atmospheric mix and it's clearly getting hotter, humans or no humans. Lots of fires, many of them deliberate. Stewart Brand worries about the Venus future, if humans don't take self organization to a next level. And clearly humans do effect the climate in the plastics department, if we admit that climates have such a thing as plastic. The word "biosphere" was in many ways more prescient, as humans clearly are affecting that. Our presenter spent some time praising the Russian who came up with it, has had Margulis on one of her visits. It all comes down to coal and nukes and oil and solar and wind and rain. There's a vast Phase Rule computation going on, with degrees of freedom, pressure, temperature, all viscerally accessible. It's not like planetary changes can't mess with your head.

My question was about glaciation and what he felt about the remineralizing role the glaciers might have, and of returning the Earth to cold storage, after another age had burned through its metabolite and made a junkyard of the place. He seemed to agree it came down to soil richness as so critical to the equation. If we want to prolong the life of metabolite, we should maybe not worry if lots of pavement returns to grassland, simply as a natural process. The homeostatic tendency is a real one and there's no reason every mile of paved road needs to be preserved as vital infrastructure, let alone parking lot. Major ecosystems of the future will include abandoned industrial sites as much as they include sunken wrecks of seagoing vessels, many of WW2 vintage. Suburban subdivisions have their various trajectories, as campus facilities, co-housing cube farms (study studios) and whatever. People will still find ways to make use of them.

We talked a lot about those fires, those hectares of jungle sacrificed to a few seasons of growing, then grazing of scrawny beef, turning pharmacopias into carnage for the fast foodies. North Americans took the same route and denuded vast tracts, some still under cultivation, though heavily dependent on fertilizers.

The FNB crowd tends to be seriously vegan, and athletic. I kid you not when I mention a triathelete in training, who comes to us for his calories and proteins. Fresh organic produce direct from the Earth is hard to beat and Friends have a pretty nice kitchen, although that St. David of Wales one is quite a bit bigger (as is the congregation).

Our Wittgenstein Study Circle met at Lyrik next time, a variation on the theme (of a Coffee Shops Network). I became the proud tender of a larger flock of tomes by or about Ludwig Wittgenstein, to be corralled on the Time Capsule (our art deco hemicylindrical book case in the foyer). Alex enjoyed getting to meet Keiko. I showed him my corner office.

The Horse's Mouth (movie review)

The art of movie watching has changed since the advent of the DVD and its random access through a front end menu. This one goes to the original opener, Daybreak Express, a random "documentary" set to a Duke Ellington piece that is truly a great work of art.

Horse's Mouth is the filmic world making fun of the static frame oil painter's, in some degree. The movie's director is likewise teaching his art ("the sculpture is so big, it's out of frame") in the longish interview. You'll want to see that, and the documentary on the documentary (Daybreak Express), so get the DVD.

As fluke would have it, I'd gone to Movie Madness for this DVD, only to find it checked out. Since I was in the Alec Guinness section (they file by actor quite a bit, as well as by director and genre), I settled for Hitler's Last 10 Days. In some ways, I couldn't have picked a better pre-quel (in historical terms), as here was a frustrated artist, Adolph, who would have been so benign as this later bass voice fulminator, same guy in a lot of ways. I'm remembering how Aguirre became that "rubber baron" in Fitzcarraldo, a later lifetime. If only these guys could have waited?

Another thing to see on the DVD is the original trailer. How did they tease their audiences in 1958? The film world, inheriting from vaudeville and penny alley, was titillating the neo-Victorians. There's a nude, from the back. Maybe if I pay my tuppence, they'll turn that camera around. Those gutsy artists, with all their angst. Alec Guinness sure knows how to play 'em.

The poignant story is about the youngest most earnest actor in the film, paying tribute to Alec Guinness as the "artist wannabe", only to die of a sudden illness before the movie was done shooting, and needing to recruit a voice to finish the dubbing. Like I said, you'll want the DVD version.

Yes, the fulminating Hilter character couldn't help but connect me to the carousing introvert in that stage play movie about Nixon, again on DVD. That's only to praise the acting. It's hard to really "be" these "responsible" men (and women).

The world of actors and directors, promising new talents, only partially overlaps the world of painters. They grab a "big tubes" guy off the street, on advice from Kenneth Clark, and he goes nuts with the canvases, knowing his art will live on, as that of a fictional character's, by some talented novelist. Holy smoke, what an opportunity. But to have to commit to that wall, that the filmmakers had intended from the beginning would be knocked down (five cameras, from every angle)... he understandably had a hard time with that. The world of transient media, committing to film: it's like jumping out of an airplane (one gets attached to one's creatures).

The director does a long riff on his "God's light" theory of illumination. Too many light sources, and you've doomed your look and feel. How intriguing, to hear from these pros. Our world's intersect, partially overlap, almost touch.

Just Use It

From an ad campaign I've been orchestrating: