A Refresher Course

I'm reviewing a shop talk here, one used in IT.  You'll remember .NET (pronounced "dot net") which pioneers the idea of a common low level language to which higher level ones compile.  C# ("C-sharp") and Visual Basic would both compile to the same CLR (Common Language Runtime), which is like assembler language but not right on the chip.

The "chip" here is virtual i.e. there is no actual hardware that talks this language -- but could there be?  To run .NET on different physical chips means getting under the hardware abstraction layer.  .NET is well-established and does business every day.  The Open Source version is known as Mono (or "monkey") with support from Novell.

Anyway, picture .NET as a Great Pyramid (Mono in its shadow) and then add another one nearby:  the JVM or Java Virtual Machine.

Same idea:  multiple languages target the same pile of code, thereby availing of the million hours of labor going into them, we can debate whether to call it "slave" given wages were in the picture.  The JVM was pioneered by another giant of the Silicon Age:  Sun Microsystems.  The Sun ecosystem, including Java and Jython, was not so long ago acquired by Oracle.

So you might compare Microsoft and Oracle as chief sponsors of the two Great Pyramids out there on today's cyber-desert.

Lets look at the JVM more closely and talk about what it means to share a common lower level language.  Java, the main driver of the JVM project, is the computer language most native to this platform, but then consider Clojure, or Scala, or Jython.

These general purpose languages target the same JVM which brings with it the possibility of interoperability, a buzzword that tends to get all manner of coder geek excited, PyLadies included.  Something running in Jython might have applicability in some Clojure namespace.  I've been tracking developments along those lines.

Lets back up and talk about Jython again.  That's a version of the Python language that targets the JVM.

In contrast, Iron Python is a project targeting the .NET pyramid.

Two more VMs define Python:

• it's home base in a C-language version, and 
• PyPy, a Python written in a slimmed down version of itself.  

That's a lot going on and not every language enjoys such a complicated evolution.

Python's story is worth weaving in here though, as it helps us refine our understanding of the relationship between a high level language, such as Python, and the engines on which it might run, which are numerous, each pregnant with different if overlapping possibilities.

Where does Clojure fit in, mentioned earlier?

• One, it targets the JVM (think of Oracle) and 
• Two, it's in the LISP family ...

... a proud (and rightly so) branch in the family tree, which likewise includes Scheme, and Racket, and even the more obscure Hy, a recasting of Python into a LISPish syntax.

Think of caravans converging from faraway places, on some Oasis near some Pyramids.  That will give you a placid vista in which to think about how all these lineages and traditions come together and trade memes.

Even without turning into a Clojure programmer, a Pythonista may learn from the LISPers.

The stories told in the shadows of these Great Pyramids are informing today's IT.  Lets hope you feel somewhat refreshed about these concepts, relevant to computing today.

Trendy Talks

Two versions of an excellent talk by Joi Ito:

TED Talk

@ solidcon

Meat Therapy

I'm calling it that because the butcher behind the counter at the local market called out to me, helpfully, asking if I'd found everything all right.  Personnel at this market are encouraged to ask that, and if the customer strikes up a conversation, they're allowed to follow it, at least a little ways.

My response was to say I knew the market like the back of my hand (which I've barely explored in any detail, but idiomatically it means "know quite well") but thanks to a gift from my moved-away neighbors, I was now developing more BBQ savvy.  "You'd think an old guy like me would know everything there is to know about BBQ" I intoned, using my louder Bartonius voice, "not true, I'm just a beginner."  The butcher perceptively remarked that we forget and grow rusty as well.

"Yes, and the technology is always changing" I agreed, "like I've got this chimney thing..., anyway, expect to see more of me."  I thanked him for his early morning "meat therapy".

As I wandered away from the meats section, I was thinking about my concerns about meat eating, a behavior I indulge in, which quickly led to thoughts on the role of morality.  To make a long story short, some of the best and most interesting work involves a delicate hand and a lot of empathy, and those habituated to bull in a china shop behavior e.g. lacking empathy, just won't have a prayer of landing such assignments.

However I do feel empathy for all of us who are meat, me one of them.  Being meat has amazing properties and many novel ways to suffer.  I'm watching my dog suffer loss of mobility day by day as I blog about it, as this form of degeneration has no cure but to start again with new meat, if one believes in "reincarnation" where "carne" is literally "meat" in Latin i.e. "to incarnate" is "to become meat".

There's a pun in English a lot of geeks use, rhyming "meet space" (the space of meetups) with "meat space".  Per the meaning @ Meetup.com, a meetup is indeed a meat space event, and I would argue even cyber events involve lots of meat, not just silicon and plastic, as the meeters still need to incarnate in order to pilot their avatars.  As long as one has a meat avatar, all events involving one have a meaty flavor.

That's just a fancy way of calling attention to some of the substantive consequences of enjoying ones presence as a mammal, in turn a member of the Meat Kingdom (many of the meats for sale and good for BBQ are not mammal meats, the set of animals being a superset of the mammal set).

BBQ on a T-Day

Right after witnessing Sky Writing and duly buying the advertised brand, to show my support for such stellar acrobatics (and to have ice cream), there appeared in my vista, in New Seasons, a slab of salmon on sale.  Ever since the neighbors sold their house and left, gifting me with two items, BBQ and lawn mower, I've wanted to try them both.

I've tried the mower, it works great, and today is T-day (try-day) for the BBQ, me having purchased a part of that slab at $8.99 a pound.  Carol and I sampled it last night using ordinary cookware, indoors.  Now I'm ready to fire up this Webber and find out what I'm able to do.

I've invited a guest for the occasion.  As I am not an accomplished BBQer in this chapter, or at least rusty from times gone by (our family used to live in Braai Country, Southern Africa), I'm leaving a wider margin of error and not subjecting too many guinea pigs to my culinary experiment.

The atmosphere has been much a topic these last few days, Metro Portland just getting a whiff of what truly is driving many crazy as these fires are so vast.  No relief in sight for the Bend area right now, where a lot of people have put a lot of nest eggs, in the form of expansive homes.

The Metolius Fire was another tragedy the locals still speak of.  That part of Oregon is a tinder box, relative to say Willamette Valley, a lowland under intensive cultivation.

So Portland is not getting huge sympathy and indeed its citizens are resigned to just toughing it out, as driving to clean air would mean going all the way to Nevada, and that's just not that practical.

Adding a plume from mesquite chips will not significantly impact PPM (parts per million).  We're doing our best to make efficient use of fresh fish, with skills-building exercise.  Like in scouting.  The dad is supposed to know how to grill in this culture.  I'm ready to give it a try, today is T-day.  I'll be the dad in this scene.

Of course I made some mistakes:  not enough charcoal and the fish slabs should have been in foil, though this way I at least got those stripes, like in the pictures, with the foil to follow.  Deke showed up and we did the chimney part again, using that special cylindrical device to get things going.

This time I turned the cylinder over on top of the lower grill instead of letting everything just sit on the bottom of the grill.  Live and learn.

The salmon turned out great.  Mom got some too, along with coleslaw and potato salad from Freddies.

We did a taste test comparing Dr. Pepper made with sugar, versus diet.

Summer fun.

Wanderers 2015.8.19

:: jeff goddard, 2009 ::

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HSF 2015

(def HSF-2015 "Hawthorne Street Fair") in Clojure.  Symbols may have that hyphen, whereas in many computer languages the parser would see that as a subtraction operator.

Anyway, you'll see I focus on merchants and merchandize a lot, which is what a Fair is all about in some respects.  And showing off interesting canines.  I really enjoyed the dogs this year, missed the art cars, not saying they weren't there.

I did two passes through the festival.

The first time, with camera, starting at Fred Meyer's and working west all the way to the Cuban restaurant and the pink Voodoo Donuts food cart in the middle of the street.  Then I cut over to a quiet back street and ambled home, to upload my catch.  Great fun.

The second time I left the camera at home and joined Deke the Geek at StarBucks, already in good company.  I then headed west as before, but zigzagging almost to Belmont, winding up at said Cuban place, by way of the Growler Store, permitted to have beer in its parking lot.

I listened to folk music over a pint of IPA (just one), then ate Cuban food (rejoined by Deke at that point) then headed to the gym for my workout.  Pork mojo, tostones (fried plantaines) on the side, with brown rice and black beans.  Excellent.  My first time there.  Used to be a Taco Del Mar, which I also liked.  Deke took some pictures too (to be included in the above album when I get them).

At the gym I switched from Elliptical A (the model I'm used to) to Elliptical B (why not?), forgetting I'd already dumped my Android in a cylinder attached to A.  I was almost home again before realizing my mistake and hopped in the Nissan to get back as quickly as I could.  Still there.  Lucky me.

I saw several of my friends, including a Quaker or more, milling about, from my various vantage points.  I texted two of them, but did not interrupt their sojourns.  I also met up with a Hanukkah party regular and we talked about an upcoming photography exhibit at Newspace.

I'd planned yet a third circuit, with camera again, before closing time at 7 PM, and a re-opening to motor vehicles.  That was not to be, as I got involved in cyber-projects and let the time fly by.

Alphabet Soup

I read the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) this morning (page C4), seeing spin applied:  Alpha has market meaning, similar to the one in Geekdom.

An "alpha geek" -- not to be confused with anything only male -- tends to be Bullish in the sense of upbeat (Bears tend to be more bullying), and Bet is like betting i.e. taking risks.  "Bet on us to stay Alpha" is therefore the "secret" message.  Fine, that's clever.

I think another spin would be along the lines of how people admit to a veritable "alphabet soup" in some namespaces, meaning the number of abbreviations is going to seem daunting to an outsider, may seem out of control to even an insider. 

Quakers play that game, with their FWCC, FGC, FCNL, AFSC, NPYM and so on and on, a veritable "alphabet soup" of Friendly entities.  When introducing Quakerism to newcomers, that bewildering array of abbreviations is referred to as "alphabet soup" (no, not Quaker oats).

The US.gov plays similar games and actually Indra's Net is infinite for all intents and purposes, but thankfully not all at once.  One tunes in as necessary, to get the work done.

The inevitable cartoon, if Google itself kept buying and owning, would be to call it Gobble, which only dilutes its Search Engine sharpness with the image of some creature with a big appetite.

"Alphabet soup" in contrast, contains the possibility of staying undiluted and dense with nutritious sense (or at least islands thereof).

So making the parent sound soupy, while keeping the successful flagship meaning what it means, is all good planning, at least at first glance.  Seems apropos.

Back to Wall Street, investors like to know what they're buying and don't like it when hidden losses get covered by what's really the driving core.  Using profits to cover losses, all internally, makes it hard for investors to see what's happening (that's sometimes intentional).

The call for transparency is not just from voters but shareholders as well and new activists are demanding nominating powers over the board of directors (also in the WSJ today).

Corporate bylaws are not some ultimate shield against democratization and many of the more successful companies are that way because of their decentralized "everyone responsible" sense of self-governance.

That's another reason it's good to split up.  I think Deke was telling me that, my neighbor, one of the top Tweeters in Portland, in terms of followers.  True, our City of Roses is no nation's capital, but it does have that cosmopolitan gateway status accorded cities of world class.  So hats off to Deke.

An "alphabet soup" is otherwise known as a namespace.  Whereas Google (a childhood word for huge number) connotes a kind of brute force infinitude, a search engine plowing through giant mounds to get at what's critical, Alphabet connotes permutations starting with only a small set, like DNA.

Infinitude stems from a few core rules, an alphabet, creating the chaos, the welter, the many words, which Google then explores.  Such is the Alpha and Omega of at least one company's business model, no doubt more than one.

Speaking of Omega, the Unicode tables are sensitive to differences in meaning (but maybe not to a great enough degree in some cases?).  The Ohms Omega and the Greek letter Omega have two separate code points.

In principle, the distinction provides a freedom for these two to get further apart, even in appearance, although I'm not saying that's a prediction, simply what "different code points" allows.

That dive into Unicode may seem a non sequitur but think again:  when it comes to permutations and abbreviations, nothing's to stop us from intermixing more alphabets than just one.

Plus Unicode extends to cover beyond what most people call "alphabets" i.e. this is ideogram country, but mathematical symbols as well.

So lets expect our alphabet soups to get more interesting and experimental.  That doesn't mean they'll all be tasty or catch on.  Some people prefer specialty soups, which may be just as wholesome if not more so.

Speaking of Wall Street Journal, here's another example of it's applying spin this past April in: 
A Test Drive of the Death-Trap Car Designed by Buckminster Fuller by Dan Neil.

Here's some counter-spin from an Archdaily some years earlier:   Video: Norman Foster Recreates Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Car by Kelly Minner.

For more on the topic of Fuller's weird car and its misadventures, see Trevor Blake's recent narrative account.  Also see Poor Slob Bucky for more analysis of LAWCAP's anti-Fuller PR.  To say these squares feel threatened by an advancing Grunch is somewhat a truism in this namespace.

Health Talk

I'll mix body and home, anatomy and domicile, in this one.  Indeed, for say... termites and ants, and also humans -- especially the city-dwellers -- distinguishing where "organism" leaves off and "not organism" begins is a tricky prospect, best avoided.

I like what Glenn reminded me to think:  habits and habitat go together.  They inform each other, two way street.  If possible, being humans, we'll typically attempt to transform an environment to match our habits as a first strategy.  If that doesn't work, there's always adapting, developing new habits.

But that's not always the first option you choose.  "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" is a pattern you've sometimes followed with Nature, not just with your fellow humans.  In other words, you try to beat 'em first.  Maybe think about joining first?  You can always beat 'em later. :-D

On the home front, given the neighbors, here for thirty five years, have sold the place and moved away -- kindly gifting me with both BBQ and lawn mower (gas powered) -- I had a smallish timedelta (Python object) to tackle the east side of my garage, with ladder, gutter scoop, broom, hose, bucket, before the new neighbors moved in.

Wow, talk about ant farms!  That gutter, never cleaned in N years, was a super ant habitat and I came along and messed it all up for them.  I was covered with ants in no time, as was the ladder, which is where the hose came in handy, slung over the fence, so using only my water.

I also raked up afterward to make it all spic and span, buying a new Black & Decker rake at Fred Meyer's just this morning.

On the body front:  got a six month physical today, monitoring various parameters.  The Achilles tendon has become chronically tender (a previously blogged complaint).  Almost poetically, this condition has become the Achilles Heel of  my weight loss and maintenance program.  I'm up to 279 lbs, still holding the waistline at 40 inches.  I'm drawing the line.

I've discovered recently that using the Elliptical, at the gym, does not inflame the tendon further and that that has become my newest form of regular exercise.  I bench press about 70 lbs while I'm at it, as a way of cooling down (it's a smooth machine, no free weight aspect).

Aside from that and "swimmer's ear", other minor issues, I was good to go until next January.  I am not taking any medications beyond the usual non-prescription supplements.

In between home and body:  my Internet connection.  Once, when a truck yanked my DSL line from the house -- it was hung too low -- I felt I was witnessing an umbilical cord being severed.  Home or body?

I've been seeing the CenturyLink vans around the neighborhood leading me to think gigabyte optical fiber speeds are now attainable.  Deke thought they might be.  They are.  I've been waiting.

That's going to cost me a lot more in phone bills which means I need to cut the fat elsewhere, literally.

A good way to accomplish that is to take the Alaska Airlines Visa off line for awhile and go back to habits I picked up in Food Not Bombs days.

Expect FNB to feature more prominently, as I get back into that lifestyle, not necessarily a step down in any way.  More bicycle use predicted.  Blogs are good for declarations like that as one never knows when the Pope is reading it. :-D

I should mention the dog's health:  she lost most of her mobility but still has an appetite for life.  I'm keeping her company, the Chair of Computer Science (inherited from Steve Holden) being in the coolest room in the house, not counting the basement.

Knock on the door:  a realtor representing a possible buyer on the other side is scoping the sewer.  That's right, title is changing on both sides of me.  Hmmm, sewer talk:  that's for a future blog post as well. I did have my first colonoscopy last season.

Concurrency Again

:: by Dr. David DiNucci ::

Hot languages such as Clojure and Python are building concurrency structures into their basic grammar.

Sure, you might want to talk to the operating system about threads, but maybe your language uses different concepts, such as "start this now and get back to me" or "do this later".

Let the translator talk to the OS, while you the coder stay blissfully in your native language sphere.

As I was planning with Glenn, we need to converge computer science with theater a lot more, if folks are to understand at a deeper level what operations research and general systems theory are all about.  Business executives need these concepts as much as coders, if wishing to avail of economies of scale.

It's not just that a website is like a backstage, with JavaScript puppets keeping a user amused, it's like when you direct films, or plays, with casts of thousands, the extras cannot all wait on each other for cues.

They have their instructions, some of which may involve waiting for other processes to finish.  Once you get the ball, run with it.  Many relay races, many Olympic events, are all going at the same time, perhaps with some kind of scheduler (the OS itself?) with a sense of priorities (changing?).

The mirror of a multi-process or multi-threaded back end is an event driven front end.

If a process dispatches a whole lot of worker bee processes to tackle some task, with a "report back when done" instruction, how will the program know when to check back?  Waiting for the teapot to boil is just another form of blocking.

How is work accomplished in the meantime?

That question is often more intuitively answerable when we use a control panel indicator, on some dashboard or in a cockpit, to show "percent complete" and leave it to the human controller, the driver, the pilot, to initiate some next action.

The human controller is likewise a multi-tasker, as is that human's own anatomical infrastructure.  The human body is about as parallel (concurrent) as it gets.

"This work is now done, so you have the option to do this other thing".  Just an option.

Just because a gun is loaded, doesn't mean you have to fire it.

Yes, military planners confront these same concepts.  A lot of these concepts were initially hammered out in some war-fighting context.

Dr. David DiNucci has done extensive research into concurrency as a topic and has come up with what amounts to a graphical language even choreographers or theater directors might use, to organized dances or plays with lots of non-blocking calls, lots of not waiting amidst waiting.

Many patterns pertain in concurrency diagrams.  A cast of threaded workers, awaiting tasks, is a well-known pattern.  Workers pick tasks off a queue and go off on their own, reporting back when complete.  These workers are also known as "listeners" or "subscribers" or "agents" in the design pattern literature.

From the description of Dr. DiNucci's Scalable Planning @ Amazon:

A new graphical representation called ScalPL (Scalable Planning Language) is then introduced for building even complex concurrent activities of all kinds from those elemental activities, one mind-sized bite at a time. For programmers, structured and object-oriented programming are extended into the concurrent realm, and performance techniques are explored. For the more serious student, axiomatic semantics and proof techniques are covered.

In today's world of Containers and Micro-services in the Cloud, the emphasis is on freeing up components to get work done regardless of the various critical paths through the network.

A given job may get hung up somewhere, waiting for Y to finish, but X and Z have already moved on, free to take on other work.  A well designed ecosystem does not freeze up or get paralyzed when a particular process seizes.  Just make a frozen process back burner and move on.

Disarm Day 2015

:: Portland's Disarm Day Ceremonies ::

Disarm Day was fantastic this year.

I had a plan going in, which was to make forays into contemporary surrounding Portland, to celebrate its vibrant interpretation of the "city" concept, complete with Right to Dream Too, a north campus that's evolving quickly.

I was heartened to hear on the radio that some cities are close to "functional zero" where homeless vets are concerned, which doesn't mean vets won't fall out of housing and wind up on the streets from time to time.

New Orleans of all places was talking about this level of service.  This was on NPR.

The public NPR radio stations and the BBC have a close relationship, weaving in and out of some of the same stories, but hours apart on the same 91.5 frequency band in this neck of the woods (KOPB).

"Who'd be crazy enough to nuke a city?" is my implicit question, in compiling this Album.

Carol (mom) delivered a keynote.  She practice it in the living room and I gave her some feedback, but we both agreed she's the extemporaneous sort, a product of years of training to keep it spontaneous (Quakers are not supposed to rehearse their messages to the meeting).

Voodoo Donut got some air time in my shoot.  Mostly I focused on the entrance of Veterans for Peace, abetting by NPYM Quakers with their Peace Dove Puppets, across the Steel Bridge, with colorful large origami cranes hanging therefrom.

The drumming was spectacular and the turnout just as anticipated.  Thumbs up to Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) for a well-organized event.

Player Test

Not very player support the start and duration tags offered by the iframe format.  Here I'm testing those parameters by starting at start = 157 seconds (2 mins, 37 secs) and playing for 4.4 minutes (end = 419), a way of quoting or citing a part of a video.

My thanks to John Denker for calling these parameters to my attention.

Ecovillage Storyboard (continued)

Glenn and I have been brainstorming about the made-for-TV campus in rural Oregon, the EcoVillage, a long running theme in these blogs.

Picture lots of Climatrons, like in St. Louis, just to keep it Lost in Space futuristic, then add lots of retro touches, allusions to our own times.

I'm influenced by The Funny Company, an old TV series with lots of cutaways to black and white documentaries.  Animations were the hook, in an attempt to interest young kids in the documentary format.  I gradually became a fan of the genre and enjoy documentaries (including in color) to this day.

There's a kind of science fiction that's so present day, the viewer is left guessing if these are Hollywood movie props, the real deal, or what.

Some technologies we just know don't exist, but others do exist and we just don't know it yet.  That's partly what this campus is about:  showcasing some of the newer stuff, which is also product placement.  We might place product in lieu of advertising rather than in addition to it, but a combination of both is possible too.

My garage has long been the target of some vine-like parasite that, left unchecked, would likely pull down the whole structure.  In any case it was unsightly and finally I purchased a real ladder, one of those twenty position step and straight ladder Werners.

That got me up on the garage easy and with Glenn's help I was 70% done.  Just need to tackle those gutters again.  When the neighbors move out (leaving me mower and BBQ), I'll maybe have a window to tackle the east side.

Then we checked out a new recycling store where I bought some off beat T-shirts (long sleeve turtleneck like, not suitable for summer, but under a jacket maybe OK), and a couple kitchen things.  Large Mona Lisas adorned the wall.  I took some pictures.

The Ecovillage would be like a Breitenbush mix of long haulers hosting tourists, apprentices, friends in residence...  there'd be turnover at different rates.  What goes to Youtube or whatever is not necessarily something in real time.  Editing with segues to documentaries, animations, is more what I envision.

Then we had lunch in Hollywood (our Hollywood) and Columbia River Brewing, one of my favorites.  I promised the waitress, doing a schools supplies drive, that I'd bring around a whole lot of 3-ring binders (left over from Synchronfile's large archiving project).  I bought two bottles of War Elephant IPA.

PWS: Personal Workspace

Setting up a PWS in the form of a remote desktop on AWS is not that crazy-making, per this Youtube demo.

Your school may want to provision these setups to students automatically, with lots of stuff pre-installed besides bare Ubuntu. I-Python Notebooks + VPython, for example, for 2D and 3D computer graphics, lots of user activity.

Core to any school is the workflow around sending work round trip to / from a mentor:  your school, like ours, may already have solutions for how to accomplish that.

Typically, a mentor would expect a task queue for notifications of submitted student work (in order received or in some other mentor-selected order).  The mentor opens a copy of a student project and runs it, then provides feedback.  Quizzes may be dealt with much the same way.

Our school uses iterative feedback and multiple attempts in lieu of grades. Why settle for a B- when, with more practice, your work could be perfect?

Some students take more time to get through the obstacle course than others.  With a self paced learning model, that's perfectly OK.

:: mentor dashboard (ost) ::

Tasks per course are marked not started, complete or still in progress, with "percent complete" (tasks per course) part of the student dashboard as well.

Our school has not used AWS to host student remote desktops.  The cloud was not that sophisticated when our blueprints were drawn up in Traction Station, Champaign-Urbana many years ago.

We went with Windows servers back ended into a Linux file store and a bash shell accessible through Terminal in Eclipse (our choice of IDE), but the idea is similar.  Java, Python, C++, Android... all learned in the same development environment.

Choice of IDE is sometimes critical.  Emacs?  IntelliJ?  Atom?

A Clojure plug-in for Atom is under active development.  However feedback from the Clojure list suggests Eclipse or Emacs might be better.

The way one might work it is when a class fills (a certain minimum is required) then a begin date is set and the meter starts running.

Some students will finish quickly, however the course as a whole is of finite duration. Some students may not complete the course in time. That's their prerogative (a refund is not implied, YMMV).

The diagram below shows a seating diagram such as people see on Expedia when booking airplane tickets.

A class is metaphorically a flight of finite duration, with a cockpit dashboard for the mentor and other support staff, and a per student dashboard (GUI) as well.  Some models of airplane may offer more videos or whatever.  The metaphor extends.

For further reading:
Asynchronous Learning Engine (ALE)
PWS on MathFuture list (April 2016)
More PWS on Mathfuture (after Portland Pycon 2016)

Wanderers 2015.7.28

Dr. Peter Bechtold is speaking to a packed Linus Pauling House (Gordon Hoffman is here) about his career and world view.  This is Part Two of Two whereas I missed Part One, two weeks ago.  I'm doing my best to put together a picture.  The topic is ostensibly "the Middle East" -- what "Orientalists" study.

Dr. Bechtold thinks the greatest threat to US security is not terrorism but the foolishness of voters.  They have a poor track record of electing fools, which begets silliness in government.  The quality of debate in Canada is simply much higher.  The clowns here would not have such currency in a smarter country.

Today's speech by Congressman Ed Royce (Senate Foreign Relations Committee) was typical of the laundry list of misinforming BS that everyone in Washington DC is supposed to recite, according to Bechtold.  I didn't have much quarrel with his reading.

So what the US has some of the top universities in the world; we're talking about averages.  Keith:  Americans get one PhD dumber every seven years, thanks to television.  Voter turnout is abysmal. Lots of veterans sucker for expensive on-line degree programs, running up student debt.  Oregon as a state has been plummeting in the caliber of its educational programming, per various measures.

"Why are we talking about education levels, isn't this about the Middle East?" asked Steve.

Bechtold:  the connection is ignorance and misinformation.

Carol (mom) is here.  She wanted to compare notes on ISIL, a Sunni group inheriting from old Ottoman networks, and not the only group into beheadings (with or without guillotines), whereas bombs, such as dropped on Laos, render bodies into parts more randomly.
 
Because the US is uber-dumb, politicians are able take advantage of that fact.  The thesis here reminds me a lot of the Power of Nightmares.  The fear-mongers are the cheapest sort of politician and get a free ride when the voters are idiots.

The bar is very low and the kind of people attracted to Washington are the same people we'd normally want to lock away in Asylums of various kinds.  Instead, we indulge them in their fantasies of "running the world" -- they're armed and dangerous, so that's about the best we could do I guess?

Hey, kudos to politicians for at least voting, right?  Assuming voting rights still pertain (prisons are a lot about stealing away that right).

Military bases are a jobs program.  Bechtold painted a rather sanitized picture of how bases contribute to the economy based on his experience at Fort Campbell. I'm not entirely a stranger to bases either.

So what about the Congo?  Do we care about oppression there?  Saddam was maybe only the 18th worst dictator at the time he was deemed intolerable.

Only misinformation could get "us" to attack Iraq (I was against doing that myself, so don't revert to "we" that easily).  The monkey-brains got their way because of GIGO (garbage in garbage out).

Misinformation results in misbegotten adventures that should have been aborted, nipped in the bud early.  Instead, these crazy fantasies get out of the bottle to become self-fulfilling prophecies.

For lack of sufficient containment of powerful nightmares, humanity has paid dearly, in lives, in treasure, in prestige and in friendships.  Why did all that stupid stuff happen (e.g. Bremer Edicts and so on)?  Because of public enemy number one:  willful stupidity.  I think we get the point.

But is that news?  Aren't we just talking about the human predicament?  We're in over our heads, collectively, and it shows.  Philosophers know this already.  Policy analysts are finally coming to the same conclusion?  Welcome to Spaceship Earth, right?

But there's more to think about here, mainly how Affluenza spoils one's capacity to think.  Given we're a species that values cogitation over conspicuous consumption (?), raising education levels while reducing the ugly blight of consumer waste may well go hand in hand.

On Super and Uber

Not that many of us got to listen to Dr. Walter Kaufmann talk about his workflows when translating Nietzsche.  Translating is not simply transcribing.  With Nietzsche's uber-mensch:  to what should he map that?  Many scholars went with super, creating "superman", in name collision with the comics and superhero complexes.  Kaufmann went with over, as in oversight, with "overseer" so similar to "supervisor" in English, with the former sounding more antiquarian, though we often speak of providing oversight (supervision).

Switching gears a little, we teach children about synonyms and homonyms.  Synonyms "mean" alike whereas homonyms "sound" alike and may (usually do) "mean" quite different things, as with "vain" and "vane" (and "vein").  However, more confusing if not sufficiently discussed, are different meanings of the very same word, often with bridging connotations.

Probably the biggest difference experience makes is it potentially deepens one's appreciation for context and the limited scope (or radius) of any specific meaning.   For example, the technical word "vector" tends to mean "some permutation of dialed in values" such as (apple, pear, pear), but then takes on more distinctly geometrical properties in some language games.  In Clojure, a LISP-like computer language targeting the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), Vector is one of the core data structures, along with Lists.

Change channels to Python and Vectors drop away as a core data structure with Python's Lists taking their place, then having tuples as an immutable type whereas in Clojure all collections are immutable.

Readers of Computer Science have more context i.e. more space, for words to wander, yet within constraints.  The meaning disease monitoring and control experts have for "vector" is another one yet.  An influenza might travel by bird, malaria by mosquito, such that infected or host species become "vectors" (enabling media) for some pathogen.

And yet all of these meanings of Vector convey the notion of momentum / inertia in some direction, against a backdrop, and therefore deltas (differences).  Even the lowly permutation, like a one armed bandit readout in a casino, may be seen to converge or diverge from specific (as in "winning") patterns, thereby defining a notion of movement through distance, perhaps purposeful movement, within some "vector field".

Ironically, I managed to miss the themed intra-OSCON party event, the night tutorials end.  This year that theme was superheros.

Tim O'Reilly talked about augmentation; Amber about the fears that come with new tech, concerns about differences and disparities.  If we're all privileged, that's different.  We're each super in different ways.  Lets not forget "extreme" as in "radical" which is rooted in "root".  We're each "root" in our own system, would by a geeky thing to say.

Uber has been considered a disruptive technology in the Greater Portland sphere, but then in geekdom, "disruptive", like "hacker" and "lazy" tend to have positive spin.  Geekdom, a subculture, has its own lingo -- so again, back to namespaces and their vectors (of propagation).

Snapshots from OSCON

Our opening session, with tone-setting keynotes, began with a representative of the UK government explaining her enterprise's commitment to serving the UK.  Digital Services is leveraging open source by insisting on open standards.  These two drive each other.  How to best share street address information, geographic location and so on?

Now I'm in a talk on what every programmer should know about floating-point arithmetic, by Java Floating-Point Czar Emeritus, Joseph D. Darcy, currently with Oracle.  From here, I'll be heading to the HP sponsored lunch.

Before this talk, I enjoyed a first visit to the Expo Hall, heading straight for the O'Reilly booth on Debra's instructions to make sure our school's new catalog / brochure was displayed.  Yes it was, with Natalia on the cover.  Bravo.

The HP booth speaker wanted us to all know about HP's huge commitment to "keeping it open" (we got a free mug for listening).  The Facebook keynote was along the same lines, as was Allison Randal's talk:  it's not just out of altruism or some bleary-eyed thinking that companies embrace open source; they do so out of economic necessity.

Allison would like to see reluctant joiners becoming more effective users.  Holding on for dear life is less enjoyable and rewarding than contributing as a full participant.  Facebook:  the discipline required to make projects suitable for public consumption is likewise what makes them robust enough for in-house re-use.

At one point in the early days it looked like F/OSS might always be the hobbyist version playing catch up to the grown up stuff.  Whereas many proprietary solutions are best of breed, in some domains the free tools are also the only tools or simply the best tools available.

The Linux Foundation guy was super excited about containers, the next big thing in data center development.  Again, open standards is the name of the game, as the skeleton key unlocking our perennial dreams of total interoperability.

They call floating point numbers an "approximation" of the reals (ℝ), but since when did anyone multiply π times itself in pure real numbers?  The reals have always seemed pretty unreal to me.  To what precision do the real number people multiply π?  Real reals have no upper limit on precision right?

N ⊆ Z ⊆ Q.  That's a field.  Then came the leap to Algebraic Numbers as a subset of ℝ.  "They threw the guy over the boat who discovered Q was insufficient" (paraphrase).

The Lindesmann-Weierstrass theorem 1882 proved π was transcendental, not algebraic, so Real Numbers include both.  Another field.  ℝ ⊆  C ⊆ Quaternions (⊆ Octonians).  Surreal Numbers, invented by Conway ("the other Conway" some say, given OSCON began as the Perl Conference and ours is first-named Damian).  Donald Knuth wrote a novel entitled Surreal Numbers.

Floating point numbers need to be deterministic, reproducible etc., i.e. the rules need to be clear.  The significand is multiplied by 2 to some exponent.  All floating-point numbers are rational. CPU specifications often defer to IEEE 754.

Most of the talk was on the non-field properties of floating point numbers.  They're not associative for example.  Like in the 3-bit signficand "toy floating point" system introduced in the slides:  2.0 + (0.1 + 0.1) != (2.0 + 0.1) + 0.1.  Best to not use floats for money given a true Decimal type is more likely to obey established rules for rounding, that predate electronic computing.  Java and Python both offer extended precision Decimals, as do many other computer languages.

After lunch:  the future of mobile payments, by Jonathan LeBlanc from PayPal.  The payment industry is shifting to serving the mobile environment in a big way.  Location and habit awareness, browser uniqueness, device fingerprinting, all help with user authentication.  When a user deviates from patterns and falls outside the trust zone as a result, additional challenges may be provided to provide additional checks.

The key term this year seems to be "at scale" which means "not diminished" as in "using the full data set".  For example, graph analysis "at scale" implies doing something computationally intensive. Kenny Bastani showed us how to use Docker to get Neo4j talking to Apache Spark to run PageRank and Centrality algorithms against toy amounts of graph data -- but he assured us the same techniques would work against all of Wikipedia (i.e. "at scale").

Item lost:  Neoprene case for the Mac Air.  Lets hope that's the extent of my losing stuff this year.  I dashed downtown to grab a replacement at the Apple Store then grabbed a couple pints at Yardhouse, adjacent, before reboarding Max to return to the Expo Hall.  I ended up talking to a satellite guy with UCAR in the process of developing his Python chops, coming from Perl.

Steve, Cynthia, Patrick and I took the Max back to my car and ended up on my back deck, talking over events of the day.  Patrick gives a talk tomorrow.

Elementary Friends Program

I'm with the elementary school aged kids.

They're learning about pronouns in the Bike Farm sense i.e. starting a meetup saying who wants to be a "he", "she", "they"... One kid, not clear on the concept of second person pronoun, said "awesome" -- they're in elementary school, not big on grammar yet.  We're not to dispute one another's choices i.e. it's up to each person what pronoun they pick, which they may tie to character or persona more than to DNA.

"I like to keep 'em guessing as to my gender" one of the mentors said, pretty funny.  But since that can get awkward she'd settled on "she".

I'm not here to talk about gender though, I was invited by Glee to talk about my hat.

I'm sporting a black Stetson, much smaller than the one in my closet.  Both are hand-me-downs, and in my possession thanks to Glenn Stockton.

My earlier beaver felt hat, with my name embossed, also black, with horse hair band, was lost (by me)... twice.  The second time, it didn't come back to me.

We chatted about important hats in kids' literature:

• The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
• the man with the Yellow Hat in Curious George
• the talking hat in Harry Potter
• the bowlers sported by Thompson & Thompson in Tintin comics.  

I passed my hat around.  I also mentioned a pronoun for me could to "he" but also "it" as that made me more a genderless robot (machine) at the core, with gender features added to the basic chassis.  In being mechanical in nature, I was not giving up on the Light within, which I also see as gender neutral.

Historically, the Quakers of classist England were anecdotally opposed to hat doffing, the practice of signifying one's lower social position vs-a-vis a deserving individual with a title, say some Lord or a Bishop in the Church of England.

Obstreperous Quakers were anti others "Lording it over" them based on what they regarded as essentially false or phony credentials (e.g. "Bishop").  They would flaunt their disdain for "superiors" by being rude, which landed them in jail over and over, their reward for bad behavior.

George Fox, a co-founder of our religious society, was hauled before a judge on at least one occasion over this hat business and he demonstrated his practice of not doffing for the benefit of the judge, saying Scripture said nothing about doffing, so what up?

The judge retorted that people in Biblical days were not hat-wearers so duh, of course hat doffing is not mentioned, so not a good excuse.

However Fox, literate and self taught in the Bible, responded that in the Book of Daniel they mention throwing some people into a fiery furnace wearing their cloaks and hats, so there!

I'm sure it was quite a spectacle:  George Fox, reportedly intense, in a battle of wits with a judge, testing each others' mettle.

Then I brought up other forms of headdress besides hats, thinking of crowns and what chiefs wore at pow wows -- lots of eagle feathers.  And what about bonnets?  Why do hats keep coming into vogue but not bonnets?  One kid theorized that bonnets had become full-bodied i.e. bonnets and morphed into burkas, which are indeed still popular in some circles.

Glee steered the discussion back towards the style of hat the Quaker men wore.  She had a lesson plan in mind, that involved making brimmed hats out of paper.  The brim itself connoted "working class" whereas brimless hats were "indoor hats" like the Bishop's miter, meaning they were mainly for people too high and mighty to get their hands dirty working outside, where brimmed hats prevailed.

So was the time where Fox refused to doff his hat the same time he refused to swear on the Bible?

Joe said to me later this oath stuff likely happened quite a bit later, after the Restoration when they brought the King back, post Cromwell.  Courts were more nervous about Quakers' loyalty to the crown at that point.  Cromwell and Fox were good buddies.  Life got harder for Friends after 1660, before things got easier again in the 1700s.

Anyway, I connected those dots in our discussion, saying George didn't wanna swear on the Bible to tell the truth to the court because (duh) that implies other times he's likely to lie, all part of the corrupt classist England that had yet to see how Quakers did business; truthfully and accurately as it turned out.  Quakers thereby verily invented socially responsible Capitalism (e.g. the utopian "company town" wherein everyone is cared for, people before profit), now in vogue in the early 21st Century and somewhat consistent with Islamic values.

Thanks to this second insult to the established order, not swearing on the Bible, individuals today are free to "affirm" rather than "swear an oath" in a court of law within the US jurisdiction.

In another addendum, in connection with the Truth Testimony, I emphasized that Quakers also keep silent a lot and that being truthful is not inconsistent with keeping secrets, per Underground Railroad lore.  Friends need not be blabber-mouths, though some of them are.  I've been known to blab on occasion, but it's the exception that proves the rule:  discretion is the better part of valour.

A highlight for me is I showed the kids how a "Spanish ambassador" might have shown respect to the Queen by doing a swirly hat doffing combined with a bow, lots of arm motions.  Then when Joe Snyder walked in later, also with brimmed hat, he did the same "Spanish ambassador style" doffing without any cuing from me (then I asked him to do it again to make sure everyone appreciated the segue twixt me 'n Joe).

Speaking of Joe, I was also in his Bible Study breakfast table this morning (he sat right in the middle of a long table, "very last suppery" I remarked in good humor, wish I'd taken a picture).  His study session yesterday inspired me to sling Bible quotes around on QuakerQuaker last night, in some thread with other scholars.

Big History

Carol was very aware that today is the 70th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first really public atmospheric test.  "The Iran deal is a reminder that these weapons remain very much a presence on the planet" remarks Joel Achenbach in today's Washington Post.

Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was the management hub for that experiment.  The Hanford Nuclear Reservation got more involved later.

Movie footage from the Trinity Test is all over the Web.  The negative health effects of dumping radioactive fallout into the ecosystem was not the headline in those days.  Linus Pauling would help to inform the public about that side of the story.

Carol is 86 and still says "our" nuclear weapons or "what we did" regarding nuclear testing.  I'm more discriminating with my pronouns and don't want the stigma of having done any of this engineering, not my bailiwick.  I have no nuclear weapons and do not condone anyone having them.

To have them is to have the headache of needing to dismantle them.  So many white elephants!  Humans will be dealing with these waste items for the rest of their career here.

My thanks to Junior Friends and their advisers who shared about the Guatemala trip.  My daughter traveled with Quakers to both Nicaragua and Jamaica.  She's also been to South Africa (twice) as my parents were living in Lesotho when she was born, in 1994.

Overlays

Those of us into GIS understand the importance of overlays.

Actually the "overlays" concept is from Graphic Arts; consider Photoshop's layers, which get juxtaposed to form the picture we see.

Anatomy books likewise feature plastic transparencies showing different systems within a body.

Politicians schooled in international affairs understand the namespace of nation-states as a way to get things done.  Wheels turn in this namespace.

However, a supranational corporation might see things differently, having "internal organs" in a number of nations.

Transferring goods from warehouse to warehouse is not necessarily seen as "export / import" in a conventional sense, so much as "intra-company".

The political overlay has been working hand in glove with the Arms Bazaar and continues to do so, meaning fueling fears (trading in fears, as a commodity) is a salient feature of political discourse.  But then just about any discourse (namespace) is capable of channeling fears, if evolved enough.

Fear of environmental catastrophe, macro, micro, and anywhere in between, may lead to pro-active planning.  For example, the Oregon legislature has just allocated some funds towards alleviating the affects of a major earthquake, such as Nepal recently suffered.  Oil spills:  another source of anxiety.

Sometimes politicians over-react upon discovering any network of control rooms that appears to ignore information considered critical to a solution, involving nation-state agreements.

Environmentalists investigate the effects of oil spills and toxic atmospheric pollution regardless of which rig or smoke stack is the source.  The maps do not highlight political boundaries as physical barriers to the spread of toxins -- because they're not (physical).

The goal is not to steal away that nation-state layer, from those occupying this namespace.  This ethnicity (of politicians) is entitled to have a discourse, operating within its own layer of the Global Matrix (a way of diagramming and juxtaposing layers on a spherical construct).

When we say "the nation-state layer has been deprecated" that's simply to acknowledge other governance languages (discourses) wherein some of these older concepts may have less currency or relevance.

A good bridge between the two layers (nationalist and supra-nationalist) is to picture the whole world as being Nation X, e.g. Israel.  Spaceship Earth = Promised Land = Homeland = Home Base.

In the imperialist grammar, that sounds like global conquest e.g. what happened to all those other nations?

However mastery of the global context is also consistent with being responsible for self governance i.e. one needs global awareness to act locally with integrity, so everyone needs to take in the Big Picture, not just Israelis.

It's all Iran.  It's all Holland.  It's all China.

So now what?

"External" versus "internal" goes away.  We have "out towards outer space" and "in towards Earth's core" along with "around the surface, in layers" (partially overlapping systems, juxtaposed).

Engineering languages may be cast as namespaces vested in global governance (management of global affairs).  In an older model, engineers worked as minions, under Pharaoh, the Sultan, some King or Great Pirate.

Thanks to a global university system and much more connectivity, engineers were able to network outside nation-state lines and come up with such as Linux and Python, collaborative results as impressive as the Great Pyramids if we could only see them as architectural wonders.

Both engineers and lawyers write "code" to manage business.

In education, within STEM in particular, we have the kind of mathematics one might eyeball and cogitate about, and the kind that actually runs on electronic chips, managing their internals.

Legal codes tend to be implemented as business rules in software.

The convergence of the legal and Information Technology (IT) spheres is helping to drive the formation of these new layers, many of which seem more devoid of nation-state thinking than was usual hitherto.  Some call this a "new world order".

NPR had a relevant story this morning on trucking logistics in what I'll refer to as the Macedonia region (as distinct from Mesopotamia).

Trucking routes from Istanbul to Kabul are characteristic of the region in being interrupted by many political borders.  Barriers to the free flow of trucks has to do with checking their cargoes.

One way a nation-state enforces its authority is through "customs".  However, with better infrastructure, a truck's manifest and "flight plan" may be relayed electronically.  The container shipping industry has come a long way in the last few decades.

Internet User's Lament

:: make it stop! ::

:: kid prez ::