This Ken Russell film came out some time ago and is tame by modern day standards. However D.H. Lawrence was considered racy in his day, and Women in Love was controversial, or at least so I was warned in advance.
Although the film was made in the 1960s, it's set in an earlier time, emerging from Victorian. The one guy, not the coal mine owner's son, is given to strong opinions but doesn't cite many contemporary authors, so from purely a textual analysis, I couldn't quite place him vis-a-vis some of the other luminaries, my fault for being an ignoramus in many dimensions. No one mentions Freud or anything.
I just learned that Nietzsche died the day Hitler was born, is that true, or just the year. Let me go Google... timeline = {"Adolf Hitler":"20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945", "Friedrich Nietzsche":"15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900"}. Not even the year. I've been reading in Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? recently and I guess I'm wondering what these D.H. Lawrence characters think about fascism. Maybe it was the day he went crazy?
I'd look for attitudes towards fascism starting with the father I think, the old man. He's more like an earlier industrial revolution steel and coal Quakernomics dude in wanting to see his workers taken care of, with widows getting free coal to not freeze to death. He's more of a Luddite though whereas Quakers saw reason behind labor-saving machinery. The son is more in the "let them freeze" school (ironic given his ending) i.e. the "not my problem" camp, not wanting much wholism in his diet.
Lack of interest in any "big picture" seems to be a key feature of most these players: a willful obliviousness to their animal context from an analytic perspective, and therefore with only an ability to act out.
Such obviously intelligent people don't manage to get along very well at all. But then what would be the plot if all were daises and roses? There's some happiness in the mix, but these stars sometimes seem disappointed way beyond reason given their many social privileges. They're disappointed that "love" is maybe not really an emotion? Like in some Japanese manga (comic books), lots of soul-searching goes on, and that's part of the charm of the genre.
Given the build-up I'd received I was misinterpreting the title somewhat and expecting more attention to the topic of physical intimacy among cis and/or trans women. One cannot say intra-female relationships go unexamined, however I'd say the film is rather male-centric. That's not a criticism, just an observation. Maybe the title could have been Women in Love with Weird Men as Distinct From Each Other (but who would have bought it then?).
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Lambda Versus Delta
:: algebra student asking herself: what's next for me? ::
I suppose you could say this minor semantic innovation or marketing wrinkle is about leveling the playing field.
In calling differential calculus "delta calculus" in contrast to the already-named "lambda calculus" we're giving the public an easy mnemonic, a hook into the sometimes obscure Math Wars.
The first battle, which the computer science camp won, was to get more computer-related content recognized as credit-worthy along the math track.
The second battle, coming up, is to introduce a fork around algebra, such that going forward students have, in broad outline, these two tracks: lambda and delta.
Currently, "delta calc" is the road hog du jour, with "lambda calc" the competing underdog, angling for more bandwidth / market share / attention.
The CS crowd needs to stay with its strong suit: graphics and visualizations. We get that with the network / polyhedron of nodes and edges, the stuff of graph theory and graph databases.
Stay tuned.
For further reading:
recent posting to maththinking-l
followup on math-teach (Sept 29, 2014)
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Jodorowsky's Dune (movie review)
This documentary bills itself is being about "one of the greatest movies never made". The issue is Jodorowsky is from the "strong director" school and with such an ambitious film planned, investors in the Hollywood community couldn't stomach the risk. I don't blame them and wonder why other movie-funding networks were not approached. El Topo may have been a big hit in Europe, but fewer North Americans have ever heard of it, let alone Holy Mountain (which I've seen, though not on the big screen it deserves).
Jodorowsky comes across as in control of his talent. At 85 and looking back on a dream "not coming true", he now sees in what ways his contribution was completely real and impactful. I thought his son summed it up best: Jodorowsky's Dune is a lot like Paul, slain in the end, only to be resurrected in the souls of others.
What Jodorowksy's Dune did become: a complete comic book / storyboard for the entire film; a platform for future collaborations / relationships within film-making (all that rigorous training in martial arts would certainly have opened doors for his son, cast as Paul). He had approached and was planning to cast in cameos: Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, David Carradine, with music tracks by Pink Floyd. His morning pep talks to the developers would certainly have been inspiring.
Judging the precise influence of these spin-offs (precessional by-products to use Bucky's language) is impossible, which is maybe another way of saying "immeasurably great" in some dimensions (as we say of the space program, likewise a junkyard of unfunded yet influential draft projects). All the big studios got their free copy / proposal of the comic book (the 2D stills rendering, the storyboard).
For example, the idea of a POV shot from inside a robot, how that might render, with foreground information, as in heads-up displays, gets clear graphical treatment in the comic, only to show up quite like that in films going forward, e.g. Terminator and Star Wars.
Yes, such imagery bubbles up through the Zeitgeist and the director himself spoke about "channeling" so there's no need for direct attribution or intellectual property debates. He recruited some of the very best talent in the business around a compelling vision, creating a giant-castle-based "meme factory" for many films to come; the developers literally rented a giant castle aimed at gelling the vision, from script to storyboard -- something we've also done in the software industry for coding sprints.
I agree with the talking heads who say the shared head space of movie-goers would have been different given this alternative past in which said movie had actually been funded. Would this have been the blockbuster game changer Jodorowsky imagined it would be? We'll never know in those terms, but as the director himself makes clear, the comic book is substantial enough to give rise to a the full blown picture, even posthumously, perhaps as an animation. The documentary teases us with the possibility.
David Lynch got a crack at making the film, and Jodorowsky was gratified to see it didn't completely fill the void i.e. another could still be made. Lynch's needn't be seen as the canonical Dune.
The talking heads make a good point though: psychedelic fervor was at a peak when the film appeared most likely to be made. We're a bit like a surfer waiting for a next wave perhaps.
The lower budget yet effective style in Serenity comes to mind. Joss Whedon might do a good Dune. But then maybe he, like me, was never super-thrilled by the novel in the first place. That's not meant as a damning remark, more that of a potential future fan, still willing to be persuaded.
In the meantime, El Topo is now at the top of my queue. I'll look for it at Movie Madness when I return these (a well-made docu-drama about Alan Turing was my other investment this time, having previously plowed through a season of Longmire).
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Gender Wars
The gender wars, don't need to call it that, have much to do with grammar, especially around pronouns. I'm familiar with pronoun battles as it is, given how often a speaker assumes the "we inclusive" i.e. including me in some "we" that I either (a) fight or (b) have nothing to do with or (c) maybe have huge respect for but do not consider myself a member of, and so on. However that "we" stuff is a two way street as I learn new ways to use "we" on my side as well.
Nor is it like I'm in any way alone in my appreciation for pronoun battles. The "we" fight, as in "what 'we' white man" is pretty dang old, hence that phrase.
In progressive Portland, Oregon, early 21st century, it's considered polite in some circles (circles I've been in, with people I know personally and appreciate as individuals as well as members of various other circles), especially in a work setting with strangers, to introduce oneself and the pronoun one prefers, the prevalent choices being she, he and they. That's right, a 3rd person plural is more gender neutral and so becomes idiomatically singular.
Individuals with a background in show business are far more accustomed to the idea of a persona, a role, a character. One needs a home base for one's avatar, a person to be in daily life, and then, with that as an anchor, one swings out into various alternative roles, professionally, as an actor / actress (assuming a determinate sex or gender for the character, not always the case, especially in cartoon voice parts where gender may be deliberately ambiguous).
Portland is big enough to attract a theatrical crowd i.e. we have enough readers, theater-goers, music fans, film addicts or whatever, such that separation of persona and avatar has come to seem natural, so if your DNA sex is XX yet you're more yourself, persona-wise, being a male, then the pronoun should go to your character, not to your "horse" ("dog") or physical "piece" (body). Ditto if you're operating an XY, apparatus-wise, but feel home-based in a female persona, then it's the persona that gets the pronoun.
The person's self-declared orientation is accepted and the pronoun goes with the persona. Ergo, in polite society referring to a person as "he" or "him" who is biologically (DNA-wise) not male is grammatically accepted. By many. We might accept it, your group might not.
Just to go into the anthropology a little more, these people who identify with a gender other than their gender at birth are considered "trans" whereas those identifying with their birth gender (i.e. decision as to sex at birth or pre-birth) are considered "cis".
Should it come up whether a sister or friend is a cis-woman, that's meaningful to ask, though may not be polite company discussion in the Victorian sense. Inquiring directly about DNA or one's "cis-or-trans-ness" is quite possibly somewhat intrusive as "does this relationship involve community policing of some kind?" ("What? Are you a cop?" -- "cop" as in "officious busy-body" i.e. a "need to know" person with a perhaps self-assumed right to pry). A trans-woman was most likely cis-male at birth if this grammar is followed.
Helpful in this connection is the mnemonic GLTBQQI, sometimes with L first. The final "I" is for inter-sexed and refers to bell curve phenomena wherein sex is biologically ambiguous at birth, issues of persona aside. The more clinical term might be "hermaphroditic" but that comes with cultural baggage. "Inter-sexed" is not synonymous with "uni-sexed" and "androgynous" though these are all related concepts.
"Asexual" and/or "gender-neutral" are in many ways fixed points of reference regardless of one's personal orientation or persona, but of course we're into "eye of the beholder" country. People come calibrated differently, which is somewhat the point / cause / driver of the gender wars in the first place. "War" as in "tug-o-war" maybe: it's played out in grammar as the battlefield, is semantic in nature.
Obviously in busy street life you do not always have time to learn a person's preferred pronoun and they may dress ambiguously, and in those situations polite society accepts a shared but more rude public space wherein pronouns often fall into the wrong places, and a kind of jarring occurs, as when riding a bus or subway (metaphorically).
People use the wrong pronoun with you, about you, making wrong assumptions or not obeying the rules of grammar you're used to given your ethnicity as a Portlander. We have lots of tourists after all.
Speaking of public spaces and miss-assumptions, gender-typing public restrooms is an age-old architectural feature and gender-queer learn to bend their characters sometimes. Many a trans-male has a fallback or secondary fem character when needed and vice versa. Gender-neutral restrooms are already the norm where a small coffee shop or restaurant has only one shared public toilet. Turning two gender-biased restrooms into two gender-neutral is just a matter of changing signs on the door in some cases (not others -- plumbing also an issue).
Nor is it like I'm in any way alone in my appreciation for pronoun battles. The "we" fight, as in "what 'we' white man" is pretty dang old, hence that phrase.
In progressive Portland, Oregon, early 21st century, it's considered polite in some circles (circles I've been in, with people I know personally and appreciate as individuals as well as members of various other circles), especially in a work setting with strangers, to introduce oneself and the pronoun one prefers, the prevalent choices being she, he and they. That's right, a 3rd person plural is more gender neutral and so becomes idiomatically singular.
Individuals with a background in show business are far more accustomed to the idea of a persona, a role, a character. One needs a home base for one's avatar, a person to be in daily life, and then, with that as an anchor, one swings out into various alternative roles, professionally, as an actor / actress (assuming a determinate sex or gender for the character, not always the case, especially in cartoon voice parts where gender may be deliberately ambiguous).
Portland is big enough to attract a theatrical crowd i.e. we have enough readers, theater-goers, music fans, film addicts or whatever, such that separation of persona and avatar has come to seem natural, so if your DNA sex is XX yet you're more yourself, persona-wise, being a male, then the pronoun should go to your character, not to your "horse" ("dog") or physical "piece" (body). Ditto if you're operating an XY, apparatus-wise, but feel home-based in a female persona, then it's the persona that gets the pronoun.
The person's self-declared orientation is accepted and the pronoun goes with the persona. Ergo, in polite society referring to a person as "he" or "him" who is biologically (DNA-wise) not male is grammatically accepted. By many. We might accept it, your group might not.
Just to go into the anthropology a little more, these people who identify with a gender other than their gender at birth are considered "trans" whereas those identifying with their birth gender (i.e. decision as to sex at birth or pre-birth) are considered "cis".
Should it come up whether a sister or friend is a cis-woman, that's meaningful to ask, though may not be polite company discussion in the Victorian sense. Inquiring directly about DNA or one's "cis-or-trans-ness" is quite possibly somewhat intrusive as "does this relationship involve community policing of some kind?" ("What? Are you a cop?" -- "cop" as in "officious busy-body" i.e. a "need to know" person with a perhaps self-assumed right to pry). A trans-woman was most likely cis-male at birth if this grammar is followed.
Helpful in this connection is the mnemonic GLTBQQI, sometimes with L first. The final "I" is for inter-sexed and refers to bell curve phenomena wherein sex is biologically ambiguous at birth, issues of persona aside. The more clinical term might be "hermaphroditic" but that comes with cultural baggage. "Inter-sexed" is not synonymous with "uni-sexed" and "androgynous" though these are all related concepts.
"Asexual" and/or "gender-neutral" are in many ways fixed points of reference regardless of one's personal orientation or persona, but of course we're into "eye of the beholder" country. People come calibrated differently, which is somewhat the point / cause / driver of the gender wars in the first place. "War" as in "tug-o-war" maybe: it's played out in grammar as the battlefield, is semantic in nature.
Obviously in busy street life you do not always have time to learn a person's preferred pronoun and they may dress ambiguously, and in those situations polite society accepts a shared but more rude public space wherein pronouns often fall into the wrong places, and a kind of jarring occurs, as when riding a bus or subway (metaphorically).
People use the wrong pronoun with you, about you, making wrong assumptions or not obeying the rules of grammar you're used to given your ethnicity as a Portlander. We have lots of tourists after all.
Speaking of public spaces and miss-assumptions, gender-typing public restrooms is an age-old architectural feature and gender-queer learn to bend their characters sometimes. Many a trans-male has a fallback or secondary fem character when needed and vice versa. Gender-neutral restrooms are already the norm where a small coffee shop or restaurant has only one shared public toilet. Turning two gender-biased restrooms into two gender-neutral is just a matter of changing signs on the door in some cases (not others -- plumbing also an issue).
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Ecosystem Software
Announcing
----------
wxPython 3.0.1.1 (classic) has been released and is now available for
download at http://wxpython.org/download.p
updates of the 3rdParty libraries that were left out of the last build
by mistake.
Various binaries are available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and also
for OSX using the Carbon and Cocoa APIs, for Python 2.6 and 2.7.
Source code is also available at http://wxpython.org/download.p
course, for building your own.
What is wxPython?
-----------------
wxPython is a GUI toolkit for the Python programming language. It
allows Python programmers to create programs with a robust, highly
functional graphical user interface, simply and easily. It is
implemented as a set of Python extension modules that wrap the GUI
components of the popular wxWidgets cross platform library, which is
written in C++.
wxPython is a cross-platform toolkit. This means that the same program
will usually run on multiple platforms without modifications.
Currently supported platforms are 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows,
most Linux or other Unix-like systems using GTK2, and Mac OS X 10.4+.
In most cases the native widgets are used on each platform to provide
a 100% native look and feel for the application.
--
Robin Dunn
Software Craftsman
http://wxPython.org
--
https://mail.python.org/mailma
Support the Python Software Foundation:
http://www.python.org/psf/don
----------
wxPython 3.0.1.1 (classic) has been released and is now available for
download at http://wxpython.org/download.p
updates of the 3rdParty libraries that were left out of the last build
by mistake.
Various binaries are available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and also
for OSX using the Carbon and Cocoa APIs, for Python 2.6 and 2.7.
Source code is also available at http://wxpython.org/download.p
course, for building your own.
What is wxPython?
-----------------
wxPython is a GUI toolkit for the Python programming language. It
allows Python programmers to create programs with a robust, highly
functional graphical user interface, simply and easily. It is
implemented as a set of Python extension modules that wrap the GUI
components of the popular wxWidgets cross platform library, which is
written in C++.
wxPython is a cross-platform toolkit. This means that the same program
will usually run on multiple platforms without modifications.
Currently supported platforms are 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows,
most Linux or other Unix-like systems using GTK2, and Mac OS X 10.4+.
In most cases the native widgets are used on each platform to provide
a 100% native look and feel for the application.
--
Robin Dunn
Software Craftsman
http://wxPython.org
--
https://mail.python.org/mailma
Support the Python Software Foundation:
http://www.python.org/psf/don
Tuesday, September 09, 2014
Quoting Nietzsche
Walter Kaufmann of Princeton University, where I met him late in his life -- he'd had a long track record before that -- used to quote with approval Nietzsche's advisory: "be a hard bed for your friends."
Now why would anyone wanna be that? Aren't friends precisely those people with a soft lap, more cuddly?
Well, if you think of cop or doctor shows where there's some conflict -- or lawyer shows -- you get the alpha apes playing racket ball.
They're on the opposite side of some issue at work, so there's a plot. They've been at loggerheads before.
That's part of what drives the season (plots involve opposition and tension).
"These two women are friends" (just to go against the stereotype) one soon realizes, yet they're each into trouncing the other in some professionally recognized way, like in sports. Racket ball becomes a metaphor. Or tennis. The CIA executive director (e.g. Nora Slatkin) is always leaving her 7th floor office to go play tennis with the FBI director (DiCaprio?); the spy novels are full of that stuff.
So in that sense I think Nietzsche was saying to be a strong racket ball partner for your friends, like a coach or better, a sparring partner. What better way to develop your immune system, your defenses, than by working out against a lesser enemy, i.e. a friend. I know it sounds weird to put it that way, which is why I did so on purpose.
When you have someone's interests at heart and yet appear to present obstacles, you're in well known territory where storytelling is concerned.
Married couples often confuse themselves in not recognizing that they're also racket ball partners i.e. well positioned as trainers to play hard ball in such a way as to improve the others' performance. That's the theory anyway. The mindset to adopt is your opponent is not "unfair" or "out of line" but "highly paid by invisible others to serve just exactly in that way". That's a meditation, like when the Dalai Lama says to imagine everyone as your mother. I'm not trying to make you paranoid.
Now why would anyone wanna be that? Aren't friends precisely those people with a soft lap, more cuddly?
Well, if you think of cop or doctor shows where there's some conflict -- or lawyer shows -- you get the alpha apes playing racket ball.
They're on the opposite side of some issue at work, so there's a plot. They've been at loggerheads before.
That's part of what drives the season (plots involve opposition and tension).
"These two women are friends" (just to go against the stereotype) one soon realizes, yet they're each into trouncing the other in some professionally recognized way, like in sports. Racket ball becomes a metaphor. Or tennis. The CIA executive director (e.g. Nora Slatkin) is always leaving her 7th floor office to go play tennis with the FBI director (DiCaprio?); the spy novels are full of that stuff.
So in that sense I think Nietzsche was saying to be a strong racket ball partner for your friends, like a coach or better, a sparring partner. What better way to develop your immune system, your defenses, than by working out against a lesser enemy, i.e. a friend. I know it sounds weird to put it that way, which is why I did so on purpose.
When you have someone's interests at heart and yet appear to present obstacles, you're in well known territory where storytelling is concerned.
Married couples often confuse themselves in not recognizing that they're also racket ball partners i.e. well positioned as trainers to play hard ball in such a way as to improve the others' performance. That's the theory anyway. The mindset to adopt is your opponent is not "unfair" or "out of line" but "highly paid by invisible others to serve just exactly in that way". That's a meditation, like when the Dalai Lama says to imagine everyone as your mother. I'm not trying to make you paranoid.
Monday, September 01, 2014
DjangoCon 2014
Portland is lucky to get so much of the open source world coming through its venues, this week, Labor Day week, being DjangoCon 2014, produced by The Open Bastion.
As per usual, I'm ensconced in the office suite, using Hilton Wifi to perform some tasks in Cyberia.
Today being a holiday, post Burning Man's man burning, and the temple too, I'm also kicking back to watch Little Stewart, Mrs. Swan and other MAD TV offerings. I get my mini-vacations through multitasking sometimes.
At lunch I enjoyed the company of Jeff Tripplett, one of the in-on-the-ground-floor people around Django, a web framework originating from the Lawrence Journal-World and its newspaper culture.
Portia, local like me, and Leah, from Seattle spoke of Angular.js and the morning tutorial. Steve Holden and others joined us later. This is a small conference, which I like.
We talked quite a bit about version control systems as applied not to source code necessarily, but to contracts and legislation. A lot of legal language is about amending this or that, what we call "patching" the code. The gentleman to my left, from Minneapolis, was aware that the practice of using software for version control behind legal contract language was already spreading.
I'm interested in version control software within Quakerism. How might the differing meetings swap DNA around to find the right rules just for them, yet with a family resemblance to the others?
Forking and branching as a managed process makes a lot of sense in this context.
Coming home on the 14 bus, I read Polo's piece in Asian Reporter, about Asians succeeding in mainstream America and needing to maybe adjust to having arrived. He was giving a talk at Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) and seeing that as a metaphor for really making it, as an ethnicity and minority -- but then we all qualify in having those attributes (some minority ethnicity, such as "djangsta") in some dimensions.
I know my daughter really enjoyed her high school summer internship at OHSU, doing some pretty serious lab work for a person her age.
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Comic Material
The English language is too cold with its "it", such that we're considered abnormal if we have a date with an automobile. You're allowed to have a date in your automobile, but not if the automobile itself is your date.
The reason I bring this up is not just that Hindu festival honoring machinery, which I think we should have in "the west" of all places (the rusting side of the globe). I'm encouraging better treatment of our stuff, honoring maintenance, not as a sorry chore but a privilege. We get to participate in various upgrades. Computer people have that enthusiasm for the next version.
Anyway, I took Ms. Nissan, aka "maxi taxi" on a date to Jiffy Lube yesterday. She'd started lurching the other day, fuel filter suspected, long time since last oil change. She deserved it. Rather than be all resentful, I should celebrate this little affair we're having. Sounds crazy, I know. English.
Car talk: the yellow light I brought her in on is still on though, and decodes to needing a sensor fixed. We're talking about a pretty old car here, well over 200K, but in good condition. I'm optimistic the sensor issue is secondary and the fuel line cleaning / oil change will have her back in good running condition. Here's to Her.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Wanderers 2014.8.20
Carol Urner, my mother, had the floor again this morning. She was presenting on "reasons for hope" within the nuke weapons abolition movement, a campaign variously named, sometimes called "Countdown to Zero" in this blog.
Her reasons for hope centered around:
(a) a meeting on September 26, 2013
(b) actions by the non-aligned nations
(c) the World and US Council of Mayors
(d) the lawsuit by the Marshall Islands
Some of her statements were quite pro-Iran as she's in the camp thinking Iran is muscling around the edges of the nuclear weapons club in order to push for a no nuke weapons future, or call it leverage.
The same theory was floated about the USSR before its dissolution i.e. that an uber-goal of the Russian leadership was likewise a nuclear weapons free world.
Such hypotheses do not usually sit well with Americans, as the primary justification for the USA's continuing to stockpile is "crazy rogue nations" such as the USSR, Iran and North Korea. Imputing motives such as "attaining a nuclear weapons free world" to crazies makes them sound sane and US foreign policy is premised on the craziness of its enemies. The idea of any "hope" gets cold water in the US press, for the most part. Encouraging fear over longing seems more like DC's strong suit and leadership style.
Carol is giving a similar talk tomorrow at Thirsters.
During the middle of the Carol's talk, Lindsey and Melody dropped by and I made the brief announcement that this was Lindsey's last day in the US for some months, given her imminent departure from PDX this evening.
Lindsey has occasionally joined us at Wanderers over the years and is friends with many of us. Her official goodbye party was this passed Saturday.
Good seeing Elizabeth Furse again, former US Congresswoman, and David Tver at the table, along with other august attenders, like Dick Pugh.
Dick corrected Carol on a couple of points: the rocket used to launch the plutonium-carrying satellite was not itself a "nuclear rocket" (as in nuke-powered) and the nuclear devices exploded in the Pacific were not technically "bombs" i.e. were not "dropped", even if the tests were indeed atmospheric.
Carol spoke quite a bit about native / indigenous concerns regarding the nuclear industry, which has impacted North American tribes a lot, not just Pacific Islanders who've seen their homelands and way of life destroyed by Pentagon bozos. We talked about how men, more than women, tend to be bozos and how future world summits will need at least 50% women if they want any legitimacy.
September 26 is a new UN official day.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
The House I Live In (movie review)
What this documentary brings to the foreground is a trick has been played with people's fear of the drug-crazed. Rush Limbaugh was drug-crazed and on national radio for years, but the point is to demonize those "other people's drugs": opiates in the case of Chinese, hemp in the case of Mexicans, and Blacks got blamed for everything else, but crack especially, the CIA's favorite under Reagan.
The unfairness of the "crack laws" and mandatory sentencing rules, which bypass the whole idea of judges (only robots need apply), has eroded both the police force and the justice system behind it to a mere shadow of what it could be, were "trust" still a word in the English language (only in translation maybe). The movie draws the analogy to the holocaust quite adroitly: first you confiscate their property, because they're "bad people", then the people themselves, leading to incarceration and concentration, then annihilation. The pattern is played out over and over, against gypsies, gays and Jews (but it doesn't stop at that point).
The US emerged from its Civil War bruised and battered, optimistic about democracy still, but terrified of what "equality" might really mean. What if blacks were allowed to play baseball? The KKK was not amused by such suggestions. The Henry Ford Museum memorializes the story in glass cases. Part of the solution: deny them the vote by establishing a criminal record, which in turn hinges on which of the many drugs to make illegal to blue collars without health insurance or legal representation.
The movie opens up a wider debate around prisons for profit, i.e. prisons motivated enough to give your neighbors a "finder's fee" if they catch you sodomizing some sausage or whatever, through their prison-paid-for night scopes. Before you know it, enticement and entrapment become number one sports, with for-profit prisons hosting the Hunger Games behind the scenes. Are we far from that now? Not really.
The USA is still a dystopian nightmare, but it's still better than the Civil War, and Prohibition is at least partially lifted, while slavery is officially outlawed, even if practiced against the undocumented aka stateless and/or houseless population. As a Quaker with a lineage around prison reform, I would have no trouble suggesting high bandwidth Internet to all offenders with uncensored access to Youtube at least. That's a starting point. Reintegrating the prison populations via social media is the job for coming generations of social media engineers. Facebook for Inmates? Don't call it that, but sure.
The unfairness of the "crack laws" and mandatory sentencing rules, which bypass the whole idea of judges (only robots need apply), has eroded both the police force and the justice system behind it to a mere shadow of what it could be, were "trust" still a word in the English language (only in translation maybe). The movie draws the analogy to the holocaust quite adroitly: first you confiscate their property, because they're "bad people", then the people themselves, leading to incarceration and concentration, then annihilation. The pattern is played out over and over, against gypsies, gays and Jews (but it doesn't stop at that point).
The US emerged from its Civil War bruised and battered, optimistic about democracy still, but terrified of what "equality" might really mean. What if blacks were allowed to play baseball? The KKK was not amused by such suggestions. The Henry Ford Museum memorializes the story in glass cases. Part of the solution: deny them the vote by establishing a criminal record, which in turn hinges on which of the many drugs to make illegal to blue collars without health insurance or legal representation.
The movie opens up a wider debate around prisons for profit, i.e. prisons motivated enough to give your neighbors a "finder's fee" if they catch you sodomizing some sausage or whatever, through their prison-paid-for night scopes. Before you know it, enticement and entrapment become number one sports, with for-profit prisons hosting the Hunger Games behind the scenes. Are we far from that now? Not really.
The USA is still a dystopian nightmare, but it's still better than the Civil War, and Prohibition is at least partially lifted, while slavery is officially outlawed, even if practiced against the undocumented aka stateless and/or houseless population. As a Quaker with a lineage around prison reform, I would have no trouble suggesting high bandwidth Internet to all offenders with uncensored access to Youtube at least. That's a starting point. Reintegrating the prison populations via social media is the job for coming generations of social media engineers. Facebook for Inmates? Don't call it that, but sure.
Saturday, August 09, 2014
Outdoor Art (Quaker Meetinghouse)
No, I had nothing to do with its production or placement, just stumbled upon on a morning walk, and yes, I usually carry a camera (not just a smartphone), so I was ready to capture the scene. Caption: "You will see him picking at the delicate fibers of his own reality".
Thursday, August 07, 2014
Henry Ford Museum
My geography is not that good and where Dearborn, Michigan might be, relative to Detroit, was not "recall knowledge" though my smartphone ("him or her", "the Android") would know. Once I found out, just eighteen minutes from St. Regis Hotel, twas a no-brainer to go there, as seeing Fuller's one remaining Dymaxion House had long been a "bucket list" item. Here were Tara and I, freed from the WILPF bus tour by reason of it was completely booked (good reason), which would have been interesting, but hey, what better time for this outing?
The museum was way more intelligent and charming than I'd anticipated, as is the whole of Motor Kingdom and what it had wrought from wrought iron. The size of the steam engines was impressive and I'm not just talking stereotype rail car pulling engines. I'm talking about the mother of all steam engines used to make motor-vehicles, around which Ford had the museum built. At least that was my understanding. Such breath-taking wonders.
Shortcomings? Well, the AC versus DC chapter is followed the The Revenge of DC, i.e. HVDC across distances, such as from Oregon to California. But I'm sure those exhibits will be updated one day. You're not trying to hurry it along, as a museum, more you're wanting to linger. "Here was my childhood bedroom" many a stroller-pushing parent might think, seeing a realistic-enough diarma, set in the 1980s (I was already post college by then).
Best of all were the heartfelt and lavishly curated exhibits on overcoming slavery, oppression of women, and the US Civil War, with Lincoln an icon, but also Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks. Her bus is right there. I sat in the back (by choice, for the longer view camera shot).
I should have expected such an intelligent museum knowing the one Dymaxion House had been done up like new and showcased. The museum guides say nothing bad about organized labor, when giving reasons for this enterprise falling through. Did it really fall through or just take a few detours? The mobile home age, the RV age, was coming up on Peak Oil. Here's the prototype just as Bucky might have envisioned it, sprung from a time capsule, inspiring imaginations to think big in terms of what technologies we have today.
O-volving shelves? Brilliant. Great to see them operational. And the one-piece bathroom (not just the shower stall, but the whole thing), very 747.
The Imax film about penguins was truly excellent, family friendly and somewhat sad. Nothing really bad happens, it's just that being a penguin looks like such an ordeal. I think if a human feels maudlin she or he should be given space, as projecting one's own sense of a "daily grind" onto the big screen, and working some alchemy with it, is a big part of what the film medium is all about. Lets hear it for IMAX.
Saturday, August 02, 2014
WILPF Congress / Detroit
Tara and I were privileged to join Carol, my mom, Tara's grandmother, at this meetup of peace-makers. Some thousand plus years of cumulative experience were packed into that room, partners in arms against war with outward weapons (as Quakers put it; inward weapons, e.g. satire, is OK, as an alternative to violence).
Medea Benjamin of Code Pink was a part of the opening panel. She'd been beat up in Egypt recently yet is outspoken against persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood, as chronicled in a recent issue of Harper's. She spoke appreciatively of WILPF for educating American readers about Hamas and thought John Kerry (a chief emissary of the City of Morons -- my spin) was missing crucial peace-making opportunities by not publicly meeting with one of the two major offenders / defenders in the obliteration of Gaza.
The meeting opened with a welcome from Wayne State's director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, Fred Pearson. He invoked the memory of Helga Herz, the librarian for this program for some twenty years. Her mother, Alice Herz, was likewise a strong peace activist during the Vietnam War years and in solidarity with Buddhist protesters self-immolated herself on March 16, 1965.
Given this meeting focuses on corporations and their abuse of humans, now that they've gained human rights themselves per Voodoo Economics (zombies come to life), a lot of the talk focused on water cut-offs.
City managers in Detroit are hoping to sell off / privatize infrastructure as governments abdicating all responsibility for anything has been the name of the game since FDR in North America. To make the water bureau seem like a profit center, human beings around town are seeing their services cut off due to an inability to cough up sufficient dollars.
Detroit has shrunk from two million to 800K people in just a few years and much of the city has a post-apocalyptic appearance.
The move to privatize as in "for profit", allowing money grubbing to reign supreme, is world-wide, with Detroit but an obvious symptom. Zombie Economics, with its walking dead corporations, is working its wonders (sarcasm on) across the nation, with politician-puppets lining up at the microphone to sing its praises while lining their wallets with campaign donations.
Carol knows a lot of these women of course, and has worked with many of them over the years. The always-ebullient Dr. Linda Richards showed up, a happy surprise. She was at mom's award ceremony as well, has spoken at the Pauling House, and helped arrange a tour for Wanderers of the Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Archives at Oregon State University. Ava Helen was an ardent WILPF member / supporter.
We didn't get to stay for more of the conference however. Tara and I drove back to Richmond, Indiana the next morning, after a breakfast with Carol at a nearby diner. That's when I got the $45 parking ticket.
Earlier that first day, WILPF conference attendees went on a bus tour about the labor movement in Detroit, an historic hub of labor activity. The bus was full however, so I used the time window to visit the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, in particular the restored Dymaxion House by Buckminster Fuller. I'll do a separate blog post on that visit shortly.
Medea Benjamin of Code Pink was a part of the opening panel. She'd been beat up in Egypt recently yet is outspoken against persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood, as chronicled in a recent issue of Harper's. She spoke appreciatively of WILPF for educating American readers about Hamas and thought John Kerry (a chief emissary of the City of Morons -- my spin) was missing crucial peace-making opportunities by not publicly meeting with one of the two major offenders / defenders in the obliteration of Gaza.
The meeting opened with a welcome from Wayne State's director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, Fred Pearson. He invoked the memory of Helga Herz, the librarian for this program for some twenty years. Her mother, Alice Herz, was likewise a strong peace activist during the Vietnam War years and in solidarity with Buddhist protesters self-immolated herself on March 16, 1965.
Given this meeting focuses on corporations and their abuse of humans, now that they've gained human rights themselves per Voodoo Economics (zombies come to life), a lot of the talk focused on water cut-offs.
City managers in Detroit are hoping to sell off / privatize infrastructure as governments abdicating all responsibility for anything has been the name of the game since FDR in North America. To make the water bureau seem like a profit center, human beings around town are seeing their services cut off due to an inability to cough up sufficient dollars.
Detroit has shrunk from two million to 800K people in just a few years and much of the city has a post-apocalyptic appearance.
The move to privatize as in "for profit", allowing money grubbing to reign supreme, is world-wide, with Detroit but an obvious symptom. Zombie Economics, with its walking dead corporations, is working its wonders (sarcasm on) across the nation, with politician-puppets lining up at the microphone to sing its praises while lining their wallets with campaign donations.
Carol knows a lot of these women of course, and has worked with many of them over the years. The always-ebullient Dr. Linda Richards showed up, a happy surprise. She was at mom's award ceremony as well, has spoken at the Pauling House, and helped arrange a tour for Wanderers of the Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Archives at Oregon State University. Ava Helen was an ardent WILPF member / supporter.
We didn't get to stay for more of the conference however. Tara and I drove back to Richmond, Indiana the next morning, after a breakfast with Carol at a nearby diner. That's when I got the $45 parking ticket.
Earlier that first day, WILPF conference attendees went on a bus tour about the labor movement in Detroit, an historic hub of labor activity. The bus was full however, so I used the time window to visit the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, in particular the restored Dymaxion House by Buckminster Fuller. I'll do a separate blog post on that visit shortly.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Visiting the Heartland
By "heartland" I mean the so-called "mid-west". Because of how the Anglo-Euros migrated, from east to west, one has the mid and far west, with the east a kind of home base, like Greenwich in England. Nowadays, an unkind term for the mid-west is "the flyover states" because so much air traffic is from one coastal region to the other. Many business class travelers only see the mid-west from an airplane window, if at all. But then O'Hare in Chicago is one of the busiest airports in the world to this day, so "flyover states" is hardly an accurate phrase in jet travel world either.
Anyway, our connection from Portland to Detroit was through Phoenix, leaving at 5:20 AM, meaning getting a taxi at 3:30 AM. Some large sports teams, each with matching packs and uniforms, were sprawled around the Portland airport (PDX). Carol checked her bag just in the nick of time as the line grew tremendously behind us while we checked in at US Airways, still in the process of merging with American Airlines.
Had it not been for the wheel chair pushing guy who met us at the gate in Phoenix, we probably would have missed the connection as Terminal 4 has two separate concourses, both with A gates. We came in near A4 but left through A27. The plane was was boarding when we finally got there. Carol isn't allowed to use moving sidewalks with that walker, so left to her own devices, she's pretty slow. The Portland trek was also long, to C18. I almost left the Mac Air at the security choke point.
I thought Expedia said the Hertz counter was in the airport, but none of the rental car companies have that in Detroit. We grabbed the free shuttle, with the bus driver warning he would be singing to his music, which he did, but quietly and in tune. "This is Motown, this is what we do" he said. Very friendly and helpful. Melvin I think was / is his name.
While waiting in line at Hertz, my Android asked if I wanted to upgrade. I've been saying "no" for over a month but this time my fingers got confused and I paid the price in terms of time and stress (the upgrade was free), waiting for the new system to download and optimize my 233 apps, media and contact databases. All before I could use Google Maps to steer us out of the parking lot. I've come to rely on my smartphone's GPS and Google Maps quite a bit. How else would I know to get to I-75 down to I-70 just north of Dayton, Ohio, then another 50 miles or so to Richmond, Indiana? The queue for getting out of the Hertz parking lot moved very slowly, giving my phone the additional minutes needed to finish the upgrade process.
After so many hours of flying with only expensive snacks on the plane, both Carol (my mom) and I were hungry. She and my sister are used to eating at Denny's a lot so we went to one of those, somewhere between Detroit and Toledo. They were out of Caesar salad dressing, so I went with the Cobb salad as my second choice. Both meals were ample. Yelp comments had been mean to this Denny's but I found nothing so objectionable. People tend to have a lot of "first world problems" around here, a phrase my daughter says is a commonplace nowadays. I'd just seen the Weird Al take on it.
Also according to my daughter, in its former glory days, Richmond had been famous for manufacturing pianos and coffins. Neither are mass produced here now I gather -- or am I wrong? There's a big Purina dog food plant. Richmond High looks substantial, as does Seton Catholic High.
We toured her college campus, checking out the new science hall (Stanley) and admiring the lasers she'd been working with, careful to not touch anything. She assured as the main laser was sparkly / pretty when fired but she didn't switch it on, saying that was only done with proper permission and supervision. We were understanding. Just seeing the equipment as thrilling enough. She had been working on a kind of laser-based camera that analyzes the reflection patterns to assemble a picture of the original object, using various advanced mathematical techniques for which Python, the computer language, had proved useful.
During our visit to the campus library, mom got interested in a new book on the Vietnam War years and in the car back to the hotel we talked about Kissinger and what level of war criminal he was, along with Nixon. The book is about the formation of Bangladesh, where Carol used to live. I turned devil's advocate and said we should scapegoat the Quakers instead, as they always talk about ending the conditions for war but never seem to come through. Lay these war crimes at their door then. This was just banter / debate-talk (pro and con). My daughter was a national champion in Lincoln-Douglas style debating. She just listened to this conversation though, riding in the back seat of the Mazda 2. Then we all went to Red Lobster as mom had been thinking about having a crab feast for some months and here was a golden opportunity.
Anyway, our connection from Portland to Detroit was through Phoenix, leaving at 5:20 AM, meaning getting a taxi at 3:30 AM. Some large sports teams, each with matching packs and uniforms, were sprawled around the Portland airport (PDX). Carol checked her bag just in the nick of time as the line grew tremendously behind us while we checked in at US Airways, still in the process of merging with American Airlines.
Had it not been for the wheel chair pushing guy who met us at the gate in Phoenix, we probably would have missed the connection as Terminal 4 has two separate concourses, both with A gates. We came in near A4 but left through A27. The plane was was boarding when we finally got there. Carol isn't allowed to use moving sidewalks with that walker, so left to her own devices, she's pretty slow. The Portland trek was also long, to C18. I almost left the Mac Air at the security choke point.
I thought Expedia said the Hertz counter was in the airport, but none of the rental car companies have that in Detroit. We grabbed the free shuttle, with the bus driver warning he would be singing to his music, which he did, but quietly and in tune. "This is Motown, this is what we do" he said. Very friendly and helpful. Melvin I think was / is his name.
While waiting in line at Hertz, my Android asked if I wanted to upgrade. I've been saying "no" for over a month but this time my fingers got confused and I paid the price in terms of time and stress (the upgrade was free), waiting for the new system to download and optimize my 233 apps, media and contact databases. All before I could use Google Maps to steer us out of the parking lot. I've come to rely on my smartphone's GPS and Google Maps quite a bit. How else would I know to get to I-75 down to I-70 just north of Dayton, Ohio, then another 50 miles or so to Richmond, Indiana? The queue for getting out of the Hertz parking lot moved very slowly, giving my phone the additional minutes needed to finish the upgrade process.
After so many hours of flying with only expensive snacks on the plane, both Carol (my mom) and I were hungry. She and my sister are used to eating at Denny's a lot so we went to one of those, somewhere between Detroit and Toledo. They were out of Caesar salad dressing, so I went with the Cobb salad as my second choice. Both meals were ample. Yelp comments had been mean to this Denny's but I found nothing so objectionable. People tend to have a lot of "first world problems" around here, a phrase my daughter says is a commonplace nowadays. I'd just seen the Weird Al take on it.
Also according to my daughter, in its former glory days, Richmond had been famous for manufacturing pianos and coffins. Neither are mass produced here now I gather -- or am I wrong? There's a big Purina dog food plant. Richmond High looks substantial, as does Seton Catholic High.
We toured her college campus, checking out the new science hall (Stanley) and admiring the lasers she'd been working with, careful to not touch anything. She assured as the main laser was sparkly / pretty when fired but she didn't switch it on, saying that was only done with proper permission and supervision. We were understanding. Just seeing the equipment as thrilling enough. She had been working on a kind of laser-based camera that analyzes the reflection patterns to assemble a picture of the original object, using various advanced mathematical techniques for which Python, the computer language, had proved useful.
During our visit to the campus library, mom got interested in a new book on the Vietnam War years and in the car back to the hotel we talked about Kissinger and what level of war criminal he was, along with Nixon. The book is about the formation of Bangladesh, where Carol used to live. I turned devil's advocate and said we should scapegoat the Quakers instead, as they always talk about ending the conditions for war but never seem to come through. Lay these war crimes at their door then. This was just banter / debate-talk (pro and con). My daughter was a national champion in Lincoln-Douglas style debating. She just listened to this conversation though, riding in the back seat of the Mazda 2. Then we all went to Red Lobster as mom had been thinking about having a crab feast for some months and here was a golden opportunity.
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Thursday, July 24, 2014
OSCON: Slides + Promo + Keynote
OSCON promo
Shadaj Laddad OSCON 2014 Keynote: "The Wonders of Programming"
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
R0ml's Talk: Why Schools Don't Teach Open Source
I always look forward to @R0ml's talks, as do Anna Ravenscroft of Alex Martelli, in the front row (I'm one row back). Robert Lefkowitz knows how to encourage thinking.
Java and Bluejay are commonly used in college intro to programming courses, both open source, however neither started as open source and the curriculum did not change when they did, suggesting their becoming free is somewhat irrelevant. How to make Open Source not irrelevant?
We don't want to stress "free as in beer" nor make OSS esoteric. We want to share an "open source way". Programmed Visions by Wendy Chun is one of R0ml's current favorites. He uses her definition of "neoliberalism": the notion that individuals acting within their own interest within a framework will generate emergent goodness.
R0ml linked this to Martin Luther and Francis Bacon as fostering individualism, then empiricism versus reliance on faith and authority of the cathedral. Etienne de Condiac also gets credit for fostering an empirical approach, then Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson with their cybernetic / feedback loop approach to governance of, by and for the people.
Darwinism and the hurly burly of the ecosystem, then Eric Raymond.... if everyone scratches their own itch, things will get better in the bazaar. That's the current meaning of neo-liberalism.
Sugata Mitra's experiments come in, as showing that bazaar dynamics work in education ("minimally invasive education").
How might we capitalize on all this heritage to make the Open Source Way relevant in education? Teaching programming, sure, but does everyone really need programming for some "job". Does learning programming make one a more well-rounded person? We all need health courses even if we don't expect everyone to become medical. Heath:Medicine :: Programming:_____?
Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum gets a plug.
Everybody needs to direct automata, make machines do their bidding. Praxis versus Techne was the old greek dichotomy. Our praxis is to teach people how to use software effectively.
Software Assessments, Benchmarks, and Best Practices by Capers Jones.
How does one know if one is becoming a better programmer?
The answers have to do with the source code, not with the end user experience as much. 82% of programming does not specifically involve programming. Becoming a better programmer is about educating one's tastes, one's sensitivity to flavor.
DARPA's MUSE might fill in the vacuum, of helping people master their machines, but to what extent might we really automate the process of choosing, applying judgement?
Why Don't Schools Teach How to Use Open Source Software? That is the question.
Java and Bluejay are commonly used in college intro to programming courses, both open source, however neither started as open source and the curriculum did not change when they did, suggesting their becoming free is somewhat irrelevant. How to make Open Source not irrelevant?
We don't want to stress "free as in beer" nor make OSS esoteric. We want to share an "open source way". Programmed Visions by Wendy Chun is one of R0ml's current favorites. He uses her definition of "neoliberalism": the notion that individuals acting within their own interest within a framework will generate emergent goodness.
R0ml linked this to Martin Luther and Francis Bacon as fostering individualism, then empiricism versus reliance on faith and authority of the cathedral. Etienne de Condiac also gets credit for fostering an empirical approach, then Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson with their cybernetic / feedback loop approach to governance of, by and for the people.
Darwinism and the hurly burly of the ecosystem, then Eric Raymond.... if everyone scratches their own itch, things will get better in the bazaar. That's the current meaning of neo-liberalism.
Sugata Mitra's experiments come in, as showing that bazaar dynamics work in education ("minimally invasive education").
How might we capitalize on all this heritage to make the Open Source Way relevant in education? Teaching programming, sure, but does everyone really need programming for some "job". Does learning programming make one a more well-rounded person? We all need health courses even if we don't expect everyone to become medical. Heath:Medicine :: Programming:_____?
Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum gets a plug.
Everybody needs to direct automata, make machines do their bidding. Praxis versus Techne was the old greek dichotomy. Our praxis is to teach people how to use software effectively.
Software Assessments, Benchmarks, and Best Practices by Capers Jones.
How does one know if one is becoming a better programmer?
The answers have to do with the source code, not with the end user experience as much. 82% of programming does not specifically involve programming. Becoming a better programmer is about educating one's tastes, one's sensitivity to flavor.
DARPA's MUSE might fill in the vacuum, of helping people master their machines, but to what extent might we really automate the process of choosing, applying judgement?
Why Don't Schools Teach How to Use Open Source Software? That is the question.
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
i18n
:: me with sebastopol bosses ::
I chose the i18n tables both tutorial days at OSCON 2014. I got to meet some of the principals behind interoperability in the realm of sharing medical data (clinical, not financial). I enjoyed the Alice in Wonderland effect of walking into my own textbook, in the sense that I teach TDD all day long (TDD = test driven development) and our whole table broke out into an in depth and extended discussion of how important testing is. Such an immersive discussion; I mostly sat rapt.
Then my two bosses from Sebastopol came by and joined our table. One of the Aegis guys graciously offered to take the above picture, me the mentor in the middle. If my face looks a little smudged, it is, thanks to a smudge on my lens. The verdict on the Coolpix S9300 is it's harder than my previous Coolpix to get not-blurry pix with (even minus the lens blemish, which I added somehow). The reviews corroborate my experience. I should invest in a next camera given I'm such an ardent user of said equipment. My uploaded to date number well above 20K.
It looked to me like @tati_alchueyr sacrificed the knight on purpose, to give her pawn a way to reach the end and transform to a queen, game over. This was in the Expo Hall, after the tutorials were all over.
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