BizMo Diaries

Fidel: The Untold Story (movie review)

2012-01-29T22:30:00.000-08:00

I've not been to Cuba. My friend Glenn has, several times, in connection with his work for CDI and such. I've taken to crafting a brand of science fiction that's rather close to investment banking in some ways, and Cuba appears in that, growing its ties with the European and Canadian firms that have a slice of the US economy as well.

This file was itself distributed by Mongrel Media, which is more aimed at Canadians than Movie Madness in Portland, but DVDs get around. First Run Features is also a distributor.

I'm motivated to see other Estela Bravo documentaries. She gets talking heads you don't see in just any documentary. Philip Agee, Angela Davis... Harry Belafonte, and of course Fidel himself, speaking candidly with the director (not a screen presence).

We also get great footage of Nelson Mandela, Ted Turner, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nikita Khrushchev, Mike Wallace, Jack Nicholson, Malcolm X, the Pope and many others. Lots of Che. When it comes to having a front row seat on history in the making, Fidel has that "box of chocolates" guy beat (hello Tom Hanks), without being such a drifter. He's a world leader we've been lucky to have in many dimensions, making the 1900s a little less of a nightmare.

Fidel was seriously disappointed he didn't get to meet Ho Chi Minh, though he did get to Vietnam, against which USA presidents were squandering lives, as prisoners of collective fantasies.

Islands have different dynamics than vast contiguous landmasses, like continents. Always speaking of the USA as "a giant" to the North reinforces this sense of a monolith, but that's largely an illusion of statism. As Roger Paget was pointing out at Wanderers, shipping patterns have changed in Indonesia to where no one port controls all the others (a new pattern). Statism is giving way to more organic evolutionary patterns in many dimensions. We go around the embargo by importing web site bits.

Relations with Cubans is a proposition Oregonians are free to explore independently of New Yorkers or citizens in the District of Columbia or Guam (both non-states). There's some irony in having the highly interconnected space of private companies (with private jets) re-shaping capitalism and doing social engineering at the same time.

I'm interested in building Portland's reputation as a source of anime and manga, and see the University of Havana as a possible ally in this regard.

Cuba is well positioned stay a trusted brand in ecologically aware tooling and investing, as well as schooling, medical care and disaster relief (lots in common with Portland). We shall see.

On Air

2012-01-28T17:41:00.000-08:00

I missed Glenn's presentation at Wanderers, owing to the serious leak in my upstairs bathroom, and my needing to work with Mick the plumber. I was pleased to learn that Nirel had contributed her professional services and recorded the proceedings. I'm hoping to catch it on Youtube one day soon.

For you Lindsey fans out there who check these blogs mainly to find out about her, I am pleased to report she's blissing out with her drum machine.

Some complain drum machines are soulless, but that might be said about any instrument. She's made check lists of all the features and made sure to use each one. She has researched the lore connected with this model, including about the machines emulated within. Her research helped me decipher the reference to "808" in that Boom Boom Pow number. The 808 was a drum machine.

Her nickname for this machine is R2 (as in R2D2) and she loves it dearly. Her process is to create drum tracks for three entire albums before going back to add keyboard and vocal tracks. This is what's going on in my basement, amidst the occasional flooding or rat visitation.

This is my first posting from the new work computer, a Macbook Air, pretty sleek. I don't have the reflexes for this machine yet, POSIX-based though it may be. I'm liking it though, and plan to be a quick study.

I've got a couple vids from Movie Madness to take in, one on Fidel, the other on birds. More details later.

Proving I'm a USA citizen is the new language game. I've got another I-9 to do, but in setting aside my expired passport and SSN, I think I might have pushed them off the radar. The current plan is to show up at the Social Security office downtown on Monday with my driver's license. It looks that that might work, in which case I can meet the deadline and FedEx the forms, per Kathleen's request.

Lindsey is a huge popcorn fan, with or without the videos / movies. She jumped into this pose as a statement of her approval, half in spoof of herself for so doing. That's a 25 pound bag of popcorn on the left, sea salt, and oil. The basic ingredients of life.

Simon was offering some of his accumulated stuff as giveaways at Colonel Summers Park last night. I grabbed a Make: magazine. He said he once had a whole collection of those. His DIY bike trailer, made from a ladder, with a custom hook, is paradigm DIY in my book. Simon lives the dream, as do many on this FNB circuit.

Dots of Light

2012-01-22T23:22:00.000-08:00

I'm continuing to weave a story wherein two of my favorite philosophers, Bucky Fuller and Ludwig Wittgenstein, get to share top billing as "transcendentalists" which, in this case, means both place a high value on intuition, but also on self-discipline. You get the most out of your inner genius if you train your reflexes, or allow them to be trained, like an athlete, as that-of-God within (or call her Athena) may ask for leaps, as well as bounds.

Having this world class library of books by and about both of these guys certainly works to my advantage. But then the trouble with books is when do we have the time to read them? Mostly we need them assigned, or want to have them read for upcoming discussions. Having some common currency, some concepts in common, is what culture is all about, popular culture but also high culture if we care to make the distinction.

As I was explaining to readers on Sean's list, in my case it helps to have Alex to report back to. He has really done his homework pretty well, is someone I have no trouble looking up to when it comes to sharing views, yet he's currently too invested in various self disciplines to have the time to just sit around reading philosophy books, appealing as that may be. I don't have oodles of time either, but as the books are right here in the Blue House, it's a lot easier for me than it is for him.

More specifically, both philosophers emphasize that understanding the parts involves having a sense of the whole, and there's a changing sense of the wholeness that has profoundly existential dimensions. One may speak of a waxing and waning that colors one's whole world, making it more or less nauseating, or enchanting, or what have you.

Also, both philosophers develop their meanings operationally, meaning through use in context within invented language games and namespaces, with an emphasis on non-linear readings anticipatory of today's "hypertext".

Both philosophers tended to number their paragraphs and write aphoristically, knowing their remarks made sense in many different orders, in what could be called networks. A sense of nodes and edges pervade the reading, ergo a sense of their topology, identified by Fuller with "systems" (as in "systematic thinking") with a tetrahedron of six edges and four nodes serving as his "minimum system".

Fuller developed intelligible meanings for "brain" and "mind", not wasting them as mere synonyms. He kept a dramatic tension going between them. The former might "disconnect" from the latter, resulting in what Otto Weininger might have called "a criminal state of mind in a dog-eat-dog world" (a despairing hell of nail biting terror, shall we say). Reconnecting with one's higher self, or, if connected, staying connected, was the heroic responsibility of a philosopher, or the routine responsibility of a cosmic janitor, depending on one's perspective.

In either case, a life of the mind was preferable, and Wittgenstein seriously agreed with this judgment. Salvation / liberation was sought through some eternal eye of the needle. Logic or grammar, rightly exercised, might help pinpoint it, but you would have to go through it on your own (an act of will, a doing more than a seeing). The doors to new perceptions keep opening. The act of eternally passing through them leads away from dead ends.

I've been inspired to get the Blue House added to some circuit of academic value to people, like a school of some kind. Calling it the Global U is rather vague, while in the meantime I've been dissing some of the better known name brands, being polemical. My Global Data Corporation, designed from the ground up to be Grunch-like, was similarly difficult to instantiate, though as a campus facility, I'd say the Blue House has done a fine job of it.

The only real company I sometimes work in is Unilever, in connection with the Pauling House Campus, and CBS, in my thoughts about television, along with Python.TV and some other stuff (including Disney). How does any of this jibe with Rad Math and Martian Math, ostensible products of said residential zone establishment? That would be the Oregon Curriculum Network and my "mechanized logic division" through work, and also through Saturday Academy (an occasional gig). Various Internet groups. Conferences. Nothing especially new. Same old same old.

Winter Adventure

2012-01-15T22:24:00.000-08:00

I traveled northward alone this time, an away team of one. My destination: a memorial service for Eve Talmadge, my dear relative, by way of an old haunt, a place to park, sleep, unwind.

Some of the chatter after the service revolved around Cantwell, near where Lee works in Alaska. There'd been some kind of propane buildup in the Chevron station and the place had blown. Investigators and insurance people would need to figure out what happened in order to help with the medical expenses of the injured. There's no concept of no fault medical coverage.

Evelyn's parents ran Mercer Island's first gas station along its first paved road, connecting a ferry on the Seattle side to a bridge on the Bellevue side. Hap, her dad, was killed in a car accident, as was my dad. She became a nurse and continued to nurture her talents for music and painting.

Evelyn raised her family in Ohio with her first husband, who became a professor at Kent State. Later in life, she met John Talmadge. She and John were very connected to the life and times of Bellingham, Washington, were this service took place.

Tara stayed behind with the three women and the dog, working on college essays.

Snow played a role in my adventures. I saw quite a few accidents, though none seemed really serious.

Thoughts About Meeting

2012-01-12T11:02:00.000-08:00

As a long time member of the Oversight Committee, I like to encourage Friends to see Meeting for Worship as the unique opportunity Friends offer, both to themselves and droppers in.

Some churches may give the impression of these masterful "life fixers" within the core, who will take new recruits under their wing, show them the ropes, and set them on a new path.

That's a nice projection, but with Friends it's really in meditation (as some might call it), in worship (also called "expectant waiting") that answers well up in a form unique to the individual, comprehensible yet private.

Don't expect it (the answers to your prayers) to come as direct advice from some "advanced Quakers" who are "clear" (that's more the Scientologist model maybe).

Seek wisdom from within the community, certainly, but don't imagine there's a fix-it-all core clique of Bodhisattvas -- or go ahead and imagine it (some projections are healthy), but then make sure you include yourself as "one of them", as inner circle, so you don't make a pest of yourself trying to "break in".

Some young folks just stopped by in a car and grabbed some of the free pile stuff Lindsey set out this morning. The girl was happy to get some shoes.

I'll be missing the memorial service for Ardelle Dennis tomorrow, as I'm planning to be on my way to another service for my Aunt Eve, daughter of my grandmother Esther's sister Elsie, sister to Bill, Howard, Bo and Ed. These are the Swedes on my dad's side of the family.

You won't find all Quakers using the word "meditation" for their practice, but there's enough of a bridge literature to provide that Asian-sounding spin in translations. That some local yokels would hit upon such a style in the tumultuous 1600s is all the more amazing, and that a branch would follow one Penn to a so-called New World (or New Atlantis if Baconian), had a big downstream effect on the future of the new nation later established (in 1776 by convention).

Ardelle and her family were contemporaneous with mine in the early days of Multnomah Meeting. Hazel Hemphill was among us. Sonya Pinney and Bob Smith remember those days.

Then our family moved to Rome where my dad had found work as an urban and regional planner for the fledgling North African state of Libya. He later worked as a planner for the Philippines, Egypt, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Lesotho, although sometimes more on the education planning side, a more specific focus. I didn't return to Portland until my late twenties.

Multnomah Friend David Lansky was working for Ecumenical Ministries at the time, and helped me get on board with the Center for Urban Education, where I started my career as a teacher of computer-related subjects, a career that continues to this day.

More Ethnography

2012-01-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

I've been diving into this Wittgenstein Reads Weininger tome, by Stern and Szabados, an anthology. Alex found it and graciously let me dig in. He's more into meditating these days, takes these things in chapters. I understand.

Movie Night at the Blue House (private party format) featured the season premier of Portlandia, and the great movie Being There with Peter Sellers.

Lindsey wasn't sure how to take the "pickle anything" joke, as she does take that attitude, felt targeted. Portlanders are generally cheered by this show though. Spoofs not bombs.

Everyone loved Being There. Jack Warden has aspects of Gene Hackman, as does MacLaine of Jane Fonda.

New Year's Day

2012-01-01T16:51:00.000-08:00

I've been channeling more of the day to day stuff to FaceBook of late. This may have to do with the thread I've been weaving on the Wittgenstein list, a thread I'm about to extend.

Alexia, Alexia's David, Tara and I met at Than Thao for Thai food at our favorite Thai-Vietnamese eatery. Fujin is our favorite Chinese and as neighbors we appreciate these families for the hard work that they do for us, day in and day out. The cuisine was excellent as usual, with two of the dishes customized per customer requests.

The home crew was cooking up a storm when I left, with Lindsey on her drum machine. There's been a bumper sticker in the neighborhood urging the rehumanization of music ("drum machines have no soul" it says), but I don't see it as either / or. My basement is suitable for drum machine rehearsals, a lot of which are done on headphone. Plus having a driving beat track already laid is what gives the keyboard track rails to run on, with the voice a more epiphenomenal track and last to be recorded.

I outlined a number of policy goals for the near future on PHYSLRNR, which may have a public archive, not sure. I joined that list on invitation of Bob Fuller. I tend to focus my energy there in bursts, mostly lurking. A "policy goal" is of generic significance in this namespace and might mean some ground rule about the house and grounds, or a planned scenario of wider scope. My involvement in encouraging more inter-mingling in the context of performing useful social services is hardly new. LAAP had a lot of that (that was our AFSC Latin America Asia-Pacific program, of which I was clerk for many years).

The various neighborhood households continue to weave a pattern with ours. I only found out recently that the Lotts were helping take care of the cat, which has been turned loose to roam freely. She's thrived so far, and has an entrance through the foundation to the music studio, still a base, though she's not really well trained enough for such an environment (somewhat feral and uncivilized -- this isn't Moon, who died some years ago).

I'm supposed to start filing financial aid papers for colleges soon. I was basically low ebb for two years, with the small business retired from much local contracting as I sought to honor bank obligations. Carol paid the 'rent' in exchange for living here part time, a very generous contribution. Walker donated the maxi taxi. We lived out of dumpsters, figuratively speaking (OK, sometimes figuratively -- lots gets wasted in America) and depended on Food Not Bombs to keep us afloat. Those days are not over, even though I'm now getting regular electronic deposits from Sebastopol (see online c.v. for more details).

The CSN work is voluntary for all of us, which is in the nature of start-ups, plus this is an open source / transparent endeavor and so follows a different emergence pattern.

On my radar are Bob Fuller (in recovery) and his family, and Suzanne (also friends with Alex) who lost her uncle. Our family lost Eve Lightfoot recently, the daughter of Elsie, my grandma Esther's sister and the mother of my cousins Alice and Mary. In the Meeting, we lost Simeon Hyde, a stalwart supporter and leader within our Multnomah Friends. We also remembered Bill Sheppard and George Hammond recently, wanderers and treasured persons among us.

At lunch today, I brought some pictures from our Parliament of World Religions trip in 1999 around this time of year. We celebrated New Year's in Maseru, Lesotho. Dawn did a workshop with the Dalai Lama in Durban. He later joined the conference to deliver a keynote. His Holiness also met with a bunch of us in the Cape Town parliament building, and was introduced by Deputy Defense Minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, a Friend and our host at the time.

I shared some good New Year's Eve time with another alum from the International School. Ms. Tomasi (as she was then known) was not in my class and had been in the Philippines much longer when I got there in 1971. She and I knew many people in common nonetheless. Thanks to FaceBook, we were able to make time in our lives to visit Back Stage at The Bagdad and catch up and compare notes. Expats from overseas school backgrounds should get together more. We help the world stay a little less crazy in my view (and each other), not unlike the Parliament of World Religions, yet even more eclectic.

Hanukkah / Xmas / Saternalia / Solstice

2011-12-26T16:22:00.001-08:00

:: december, 2011 ::

I'm serious about Saternalia, thinking of "that of God" (Quakerese) in Roman culture, from the vantage point of Mt. Tabor and the aqueducts leading into it. The architecture looks old English, but echoes still older.

Some District of Columbia wants us to cover them over, like with domes. Like Alaskans and Californians, Oregonians don't always follow orders from this non-state calling itself a "district". Cascadia has its own forms of nationalism / bioregionalism.

The Hanukkah party featured little hand crotcheted hats by Alexia's David. We discussed various medical conditions and treatments, affecting old and young among us (each a different case). Conversation roamed into comedy, that of Louis CK and others. We exchanged gifts and ate latkas.

Xmas itself was a low key affair featuring immersion of the household, especially Tara and I, into living room movie watching: Gattaca, Alice in Wonderland (Disney's newest), Primer (twice: once with director commentary), The Great Debaters, Rocket Science.

Glenn came by Xmas morning and shared the rest of the cinnamon french toast. He gave me a set of DIY books for home maintenance. Nothing about building a TV studio per se, but an overlapping skill set for sure.

Jen and Melody departed south and north respectively, to rendezvous with their families.

At intermission, I downloaded Stellarium to the laptop and projected the night sky to the south. Tara and I then stood on our south-facing porch and identified Rigel, Sirius, Betelgeuse, Procyon using short term memory.

For dinner, Tara and I adjourned to the very busy Fujin, one of the few restaurants serving, along with Mt. Tabor Cafe. Earlier on Christmas Day we took Sarah Angel to the reservoirs and surveyed the city from about half way up. We'd planned to hike to the top, like the Nallys had, but it started to rain.

Cousin Mary's visit before Xmas Eve was a highlight. She regaled us with stories at the Bagdad. She and I had Moroccan Coffees (alcoholic) while Tara got the crumble dessert (which all sampled). We discussed our wide ranging family and friends, Tara's college process.

Tara couldn't make the Solstice Party (nor the boat ride with Barry). Dawn used to host a big one, ever since our first taking up residence together on Rhine Street (not far from Aladdin Theater). We'd invite lots of Quakers. As I was mentioning around Burma Night, Dawn would have integrated well into our Food Not Bombs community. The gathering at Satya's was epic, though I didn't stay long.

Through all of this, I'm putting in my hours along the Python track, making sure students stay busy. They can work on ahead without me, but if I kick back for too long I just have that much more to catch up on. Staying up all hours is a theme around here though.

The Blue House is a lot like a submarine, with someone always awake. We don't "burn the midnight oil" so much though -- we only have the furnace on a few hours a week.

Jitterbug Party

2011-12-20T15:13:00.000-08:00

:: jitterbug party, 2011 ::

One can't but help feel one's cult or club member like status in a room full of people who speak the shop talk of Synergetics to some degree. The lineage is still somewhat obscure and esoteric.

There's a crystallographic flavor, which brings in the more classically trained chemists such as Steve Mastin.

We had some bona fide Silicon Foresters in our midst (at least two folks from Intel).

Our guest of honor was James Nystrom, a computer geek and professor, with lots of overlapping interests in physics and so on. John Driscoll picked up on a lot of the jargon from his Systems angle.

The event was orchestrated by Sam Lanahan, with Wardwell and myself assisting with the guest list. Having Trevor Blake, Glenn Stockton and Nick Consoletti in the maxi taxi was a privilege. Good seeing LaJean again, as well as meeting these new people.

Interesting to me was how the night before we'd been looking at a picture of a younger Alex, accepting the Nobel Prize on behalf of his mom, and now tonight John was boasting (in a self-humbling not too self-serious way) about delivering a talk on the physics of consciousness from that very same famous podium / stage. A nice segue between consecutive dinner parties, both of the highest caliber. The projected synergy is already kicking in it seems.

What I found gratifying is that a gent was applying differential and integral calculus to a cuboctahedron and coming up with some interesting properties, and was also playing cellular automaton games with the tetrahedron, random walking it, per a rule set, within the IVM.

He wants to tackle A & B modules maybe. He gets some of his graphics from Bob Gray.

The back story here is Sam and his 10-frequency flextegrity tetrahedron made their debut at the Rhode Island School of Design for the annual SNEC-organized Synergetics shindig, where he met this fellow Nystrom (Pearce was there too).

The fact that Dr. Nystrom talked Jitterbug and IVM and knew differential calculus made him the ideal resource to pair up with Mark Martin, who has been sweating the details of a Flextegrity computer model based in differential equations for springs.

Nystrom is one of those who takes seriously Fuller's pulsating vector field concepts, as articulated by the Jitterbug sending ripple effects through the IVM. There's a Negative Universe aspect.

Since he asked, whether we thought "IVM" or "octet-truss" would be best, I argued for IVM in the more theoretical context, as it makes a better dramatic foil for XYZ (also three letters). "Octet truss" refers to the more times-size realized versions, the less abstract. Bell's kites come to mind immediately, for many of us.

Saving the best for last in some ways: Nystrom mentioned using quadrays in one of his academic papers. I'd not heard of anyone doing that besides me in FoxPro Advisor, March 1999 (more an industry trade mag than an academic journal for sure). Wow. If there's a citation to track down here, I should do so.

Trevor and I played at the dinner table with BuckyBalls that he'd brought (the magnetic balls, so simple). Even though they're polarized, they'll come together in a tetrahedron.

Holiday shopping... must do some. But work has me pinned to the laptop. Boat ride with Barry coming up. Wish Tara could go but she'd probably be the only girl. Nirel has the same consideration. Sam suggested I invite Dondi to his event but I don't know her well enough, speaking of woman Wanderers I admire. Maybe Trish and her son will join us on the boat.

Lightning Talk

2011-12-17T23:00:00.000-08:00

:: holiday message ::

Great rant Charlie. You sound like one o' of them "Occupiers". Trying to reach out to the soldiers... Pretty bold guy. I bet Newt would tell ya to take a shower and get a job you little bum.

Eye Care

2011-12-11T19:41:00.000-08:00

The "I Care" campaign departs from the usual attack on a disease and simply states that every human being has a right to correctional lenses if indicated, which humanity has a moral obligation to provide. Of course the NFL will debate both sides of that resolution, but in the mean time, the "aff camp" (contending in the affirmative), with considerable resources, needn't sit on its duff. Lets get more of those eye exam buses fielded already, backed by ophthalmologists without borders.

This goes back to OPDX 2012 and the planning we were doing for our Ministry of Education. Camping gear / XRL was expected to become yet more ephemeral (more with less). Rather than have such a clunky dome in the A Camp, we might cover all of B Camp, or call it D Camp. This didn't have to be downtown. You may remember the planning meetings. A way to occupy the indoors. I went to Ikea.

I've been suggesting XOM get involved, as a part of the new Asian focus. Having a Russian Peace Corps (MirCorps) in the wings was the planning around Troutdale. These jets could be in Hillsboro as well, and meant for domestic / local service. I haven't even checked where Gulfstreams are allowed to land, if we're looking to repaint more of those.

When you get the exam, lenses and frames, an effort will be made to connect you in to medical records, if there's no record already. You will likely get the usual messages about how integrating your identity across systems is a job you might help with. Do not take only a passive interest in how your records get kept. Activists welcome. Designers, we need your assistance.

Speaking of which, the Oregon initiatives around open source record keeping in general might be a good place for "I Care" to start. As an off shore NGO, we're not worried about trying to jump through hoops to become some certified HMO / PPO covered entity. This isn't business as usual.

However, with the Chinese peacekeeper concept (like peacecorps), or the Russian MirCorps (like a geek corps), we're able to advertise some alternatives to high cost "all American" health care (the kind that leaves people out in the cold to die). [1]

Like the cruise ships (some of them), the criterion for service is not "ability to pay". We expect that access to money accounts is negligible in these monopoly games, with way more losers than winners. Doesn't mean they shouldn't have eye glasses though. We're just not that selfish, even if that's not true about you.

Of course realistically we might need more self serve, ways to administer one's own eye test. Our delegation to Managua found people scrounging through boxes, trying pairs on, using trial and error against an inventory of hand-me-downs.

I'm thinking /dreaming of a better service on average, such that we might have more pride our our species of hominid (however bloodthirsty). Why deny a person prescription lenses in a frame (a pair of spectacles)? Other healthcare may be more difficult to provide on such an industrial scale. Lets make a difference where we can, when we can, while we can.

Erudite Oregonians

2011-12-04T23:25:00.000-08:00

:: Go Cleveland Cannibals, and all you Oregonians ::

It was again my distinct privilege to chauffeur and judge at Clackamas High School not far off I-205, Sunnyside exit. Did I hear 46 schools were represented? That's mind-boggling if so. And that's what the event was, for its fearsome complexity and choreography.

Gonzo showed me right where he and Tara first met, in the hall in front of the Media Center, she the aspiring debater hoping to get a team going, and he the debate coach transferring to Cleveland High School, where she was. She made it to nationals, which Gonzo had always been curious about. He, she and his son Griffith went to Dallas this summer, joining other Oregonians and talent from all over the country. Tara is 36th in something or other (not to be dismissive, I'm obviously quite proud of her), in some national ranking system of the NFL (National Forensics League).

Anyway, back to yesterday: I'd judged here a year ago. This time I got to see lots of LD debates (Lincoln Douglas), the kind Tara specialized in during her high school years. I also judged poetry, impromptu speaking, prepared speeches. I came away proud of these young people. They're quite a diverse body and from all over the map (Tibet, India, Cambodia, Multnomah, Redmond... Guatemala). Such lovely people.

Yes, I took a lot of pictures in that one math classroom, B10, where we did some poetry. These were intense readings, lots of passion and thought. They needed a theme, readings from at least three sources to connect the dots, some remarks in between.

What also impressed me as we were gathering were the professional posters the sports teams were getting. Pretty impressive, to have posters like that. I snarfed up the girl teams especially, not knowing when my battery might die. I consider them more exotic, because it's not all that long ago that women didn't get the same privileges as men in sports. I was feeling proud their posters were so humbling, if that makes any sense.

Back to the events: Tara was quite appreciative and sportsmanlike (heh) regarding her various opponents. Those winning this time she may have won against before and vice versa. The best of the pack are like a club. This is definitely a variety of para- or pre-legal training, I'd say effective. Tara is not currently planning to make a study of law her focus (thinking more STEM), but that doesn't preclude her from getting a feel for the dynamics of Matt's world, for example (collegial, yet competitive, a willingness to fight hard for your client against people you know you'll likely have lunch with).

These meetups are excellent demonstrations of inter-generational collaboration. The adults really want to do their jobs well. They're all paying it forward, serving their world, putting their shoulder to the cause of civil process, working things out by the athletics of speech and expression, theater, not massacre and mayhem. Civilization was served, that seemed clear to everyone I thought.

The resolution for LDers this time: individuals are morally obligated to assist people in need. I could write a few reams on how that went down. Maybe I will. More of this on TV, with these same youth performing, oldsters too, would make sense to me. Too geeky? Hey, give us some channels to be as geeky as we wanna be.

Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life (movie review)

2011-11-29T13:11:00.000-08:00

Not to worry: just because I've seen one semi-hagiographic DVD made by some of her best friends, am I now suddenly some authority on Objectivism or what have you. This will not be a boring lecture decrying (or embracing) her metaphysics (if that's an appropriate word).

"Awww, what a sweetheart" was my more up front reaction, along with "so is this what the fuss was about?" I'd checked out The Fountainhead in like 8th grade, noticing its push-button value in adult faces. Like anyone that age (and younger) I wanted to be a part of the conversation, and this looked like a ticket. But then I lost the thread, and hey, who gets to live near a Movie Madness well stocked with well made documentaries? Certainly not me, until my middle years, when I had the good fortune to occupy a space in 97214 (actually, a few spaces).

What I guess people don't get, quite, is how the USSR of the day was a convenient backdrop against which to play out big labor disputes (many still ongoing). The reality of the Russian experience was going to take much longer to get through, given the Doppler Effect of human affairs and osmosis. Ayn was first wave messenger from a world deep in dire straits, a hell for so many. New York had its own Broadway version of Russia going, more romantic, more a projection. Rather than fault that, just accept it, and read Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era about the invention of China (while we're at it). So yeah, she was out of tempo with the drama so many were on about, but hey, she'd trained with the best, in Hollywood, and knew how to hold her own. Good for her. I admire her gumption, her complete commitment to her dreams.

But then I'm hopelessly lost in some other dimension, is the other shoe maybe. My meaning of "capitalism" for example: I play cities against cities, like we do in sports, talking about London and Hanoi as my "capitals". These days I'm severely dissing WDC and boosting Portland. That's me being a capitalist, using my head in a sensible way. Ayn Rand did the same, boosting New York, loving those skyscrapers. Hey, go for it girl.

We watched in my living room, Tara, Steve Holden and I all on our lap tops, doing our work. Tara found Phil Donahue amusing and I found myself explaining about the invention of the TV talk show and the pioneers of the genre, Oprah in the same lineage. Ninja David showed up on my porch during intermission asking to borrow my cell phone, sucking me back into my own Food Not Bombs soap opera (David "give me a hug..." fade out, cue laugh track, see ya next week).

The funniest part of the Ayn Rand story (at her expense, but she could laugh about it later): she's like totally gung ho to sail into New York Harbor past the Statue of Liberty, seeing the skyline, has dreamed for this day all her life, and she sleeps through it or something (I was glancing at my laptop when they said what the problem was). Never mind. She had her tears of joy later. So many of her dreams came true.

Speaking of which, the other irony or poetic twist if you prefer, was that this ardent atheist would have so many miraculous experiences, such as finding herself a handsome / dashing Roman soldier right off the set of King of Kings, with Cecil B. DeMille himself taking her under his wing. "You can't make this stuff up." Which leaves open to question, "so who does?" Ayn (I'm guessing): "you don't need a who (no agency)." God: "look ma, no hands!"

Office Studio

2011-11-28T09:40:00.000-08:00

Tara successfully burned an ISO of Ubuntu 8.04 and wiped her Gutsy Gibbon off the face of her hard drive. That gave her the confidence to try again with a more recent 32-bit LTS ISO from her workstation upstairs (overlooking the deck). She reported this morning that all was working, though the Flash plugin that started it all (not having one) still needed to go on.

Chairman Steve was over during the latter part of this. I called it an "install mitzvah" again, even though this wasn't specifically Python. We sat in the office but didn't use Wifi for much, as Tara was getting that 700 MB ISO. At Open Bastion, download times would be significantly shorter.

No update about Eve in awhile, I need to call Uncle Bill.

A lot of architects failed to anticipate that making video would be as critical as watching it, so that "media room" really should have been designed with cameras in mind. On the other hand, given how small the cameras, retro-fitting is hardly a problem if there's budget, and is what many have already done.

Given the gaping hole in my ceiling (beneath the deck) owing to previous architectural mistakes, upgrading the office would be my opportunity to show off home studio concepts.

People could interview here, or serve news. Granted: the basement is already sourcing some "guerrilla girl" pilots, but less primitivist aesthetics should also be within range, more blue screeny / weather forecasty (lots of global data streams to patch into, syndicated to home studios everywhere).

I'm taking a vacation from Synergeo until 2012, putting more thought into Koski's list instead. We're having some interesting threads, about tensegrity and so on.

Upcoming OPDX meetup (check Calagator for others):

PEACE BRIGADES INTERNATIONAL 30th ANNIVERSARY EVENT
Friday, December 2; 6:30 p.m.
Multnomah Friends Meeting House
4312 SE Stark Street

Business Cards

2011-11-27T11:40:00.000-08:00

TG 2011

2011-11-25T10:44:00.001-08:00

:: tg 2011 ::

Our plan to join the family up north was canceled this year, as we pulled together in spirit around Evelyn, my grandmother's niece. Mary and Alice, her two daughters, are with her.

Good friends took us in, Tara and I.

Lindsey would have joined us but she's still recovering from Occupy Portland, which took a lot out of her. We brought her back food, vegan, from her FNB friends and well wishers.

I'm grateful for this time with Tara and enjoyed the five documentaries we got to watch together, over cheeses, including a few hours on the Korean War, as it's called.

Lots of dogs joined us, a few cats. I left the car door open overnight, mistakenly, and Lindsey's cat made a night of it, in the passenger seat (or so I surmise, based on that's where I found her curled up in a ball, like a hibernating squirrel).

My best to Dawn's side of the family. I've been following Aunt Bettie's progress.

"Americans spend the most money the day after they profess gratitude for what they already have" said one of my friends. Interesting observation.

We're not boycotting or anything, just staying away from crowds. As I mentioned to Tara, I'm happy to share December 25 with the Christians but in no way do I consider it theirs exclusively. We enjoy the atmosphere that's created, why not.

I was glad someone said a prayer for native Americans at the day's feast. That's customary in our family as well, and amounts to far more than just lip service I like to think.

So good to see Elise, Les and Ruth, even if only for a couple hours. A good chance to swap stories.

Wanderers 2011.11.16

2011-11-16T10:00:00.000-08:00

Shomar died awhile back.

The Wanderers were not ceremonious about it. We mostly just meet for coffee, form friendships, and then do our work with the dead and dying "off camera" so to speak, not as official business of Wanderers itself.

David Tver, Glenn and I are yammering about directionality and coordinate axes. I trucked out the thesis that the common pairing of "positive" with "right" in Anglo mathematics, a constant drumming, a harping, had essentially destroyed the English language as a "force for good" in the world. Too biased. Glad to use American instead, or Fowler's Amerish maybe (pronounced "a-MER-ish" in his book). Of course that's a minority view. I tend to champion hopelessly underdoggy positions.

Don keeps projecting his picture of the black swan. I have a few of those too. Same one I'm pretty sure.

Nine of us here this morning. Our new guest, Bill Harris, is a retired general ophthalmic surgeon. After listening to us banter for 45 minutes, and watching us watch Jetman and a mechanical bird on Youtube, he raised the topic of the Occupy movement / revolution. The notion of "corporate personhood" was raised at some point. I held my tongue, no ethnic slurs against "voodoo economists" and their superstitions issued from my lips. "When in Rome..."

Bill is a "go to" guy when it comes to convening town halls, ignites, whatever GOSCON-like follow-ups we stage in the wake of OPDX / October 6. Small neighborhood gatherings are expected in some zip codes (not unlike Wanderers). We shall see.

More Twists

2011-11-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

The "petting zoo" as I call it, has filled with more animals that people like to hunt, feel are fair game. In a puritanical society, hunting down one's fellow man for sport is OK, as the latter may be stereotyped as possessed by demons and therefore of Satan's army.

Portlanders have inherited some of those "holy crusade" memes that made the Teutonic Knights the terror of Varmia in Copernicus's day (I've been reading Dava's latest). He was always being vexed by this gang of retard-bullies (as he probably saw them).

Caught up in the hunt will be lots of cuties still in there (talking OPDX campus), like dolphins and whales caught in the trawler's net, even some best-in-show kitties. Why be cruel to such innocents? America eats its young, spits out its old.

So the outrage might build, generating yet another backlash, and maybe a Thirty Years War or something suitably religious.

Saints, statues, more souvenirs... ain't European culture grand?

FNB pulled out yesterday (I took down the sign myself) because these are not ethnic vegans and our food was going to waste -- precisely the thing we're about countering (food waste). There's only so much we might do for the bloodthirsty.

The Anglo-Euros (mostly English speaking) never mounted an impressive show of their ability to provide social services, even though they have the technology. I didn't see eye exams happening, nor drug counseling, with attractive brochures about cool farm-like schools around the state, where ranchers have realized the bonanza to be had in helping street youth get a grip.

I've been storyboarding such schools for a high turnover student body of wannabe and actual diplomats, mixing it up, making networks that'd dampen the outward war impulse. The usual USIS / USIA kind of thing, back when the USA still had a State Department (since dissolved as far as I know -- or did I miss something?).

To that end, OPDX has been useful. I've seen more up close how a real estate bubble works. You could barely get a tent spot after the launch of the new zip code area (a proposal), whereas now they're all underwater, more like Stockton, CA. Sleeping bags come in faster than people can use 'em, so they get trashed after one night in the rain. It's a culture built on throwing away, as kids around the #OccupyIraq camps will be happy to attest (not much of an exit plan there either, or "endgame" as we say, except in some rarefied circles like in Obama's Wars).

Portland's future property values depend a lot on how the plan to put the parks to some serious uses, for civilian trainees working on their camping / disaster relief skills etc., get implemented on the ground. We've billed ourselves as high IQ, so don't want to go bezerkezoid in too embarrassing a fashion. How would we "put a bird on it" then?

Schools are under the same pressure as the parks (many tempting athletic fields, some in mixed use parks, like at Grant), given all the new gear and their need to develop GIS / GPS skills.

Currently, USA kids are getting leap frogged right and left, given the ineptness of their adult supervisors. Effective andragogy is almost unknown here -- only a few early adopters by the looks of things. Democracy is in a shambles. The Idiocracy (a mob psychology) reigns supreme (much like Beef Supreme in Idiocracy).

Basically, if your school has no electric ATVs, you're going to be in some serious competition with those that do. Put the key in your kuffka ("stuffka for your kuffka" is a kristmas kampaign).

More Democracy

2011-11-07T01:50:00.001-08:00

Visiting BizMo

2011-11-04T20:58:00.000-07:00

:: emergence by emergency ::

:: converging movements ::

:: spin doctor symbols ::

Endgame

2011-11-03T11:55:00.001-07:00

They keep calling for an "end game" around OP / OPDX, which I like, because it connects us to chess, a game vested in symbolism and symbolic logic. Keep Portland Cerebral, is a synonym for Weird.

So here it is: a City that Works needs to focus on public restrooms, keeping them safe, operable and open, even if that means paying guards / janitors / interns 24/7. My friend Teresina did duty like that in Tokyo, as a part of her Buddhist training. We have lots of Buddhists in Portland. 1 + 1 = 4.

This commitment to public health and safety might not make sense to some in the Business Alliance. Like AOI, like OPDX, we're talking about a mixed bag of ideologies, a "can of worms" as it's known in the business. However Metro and enlightened urban planners know that public restrooms, their state (status), provide a measure of a city's friendliness, to globe trotters following their Lonely Planet guidebooks, not just to "unemployables" (the "untouchables" of today's USA's central casting system, a leftover from English in some dimensions -- cite "unscannables" in Idiocracy).

The other "concession" won from the City was a commitment to more of those Town Halls, like we were promised in 2004 in connection with the Bucky play and president Obama's victory. Hopes were high back then. But then enlightened civic dialog failed to occur in large degree, because "we the people" were frightened of those "death panels", a social services bureaucracy that seemed out of control, and quite willing to plunge us back into Dickensian scenarios. I understand the Tea Party's chagrin.

Nevertheless, the Wanderers format, also Lightning Talks, Ignite Portland, OMSI Science Pubs etc., prove we're able to self-govern in such formats. We're not complete idiots at the end of the day, or at least not all of us are. We have gorgeous theaters, churches, other facilities, where chit chat may take place, and in more of an integrated space, in the sense of more voices being heard, and also acted upon. Different chiefs, different chefs, different channels. More diversity in other words. What cerebral centers are good at, Cape Town too (we have some back and forth traffic).

And here's the kicker: OPDX might wanna do this again next year and put even more pressure on those poor civic heads. We have less than a year to prepare. The kinds of artifact on display will have morphed a lot by then (better gear!), given all the new investment in civilian sector tech. More toyz (including more sensors), better communications, even broader participation. More democracy.

We need to fix those public restrooms so we can have more democracy. In the meantime, we appreciate what the unions are doing to supply those portable units. Labor is backing this effort, as we're talking about meaningful work, necessary infrastructure, not just digging and filling ditches in some parody USA. The New Deal was the real deal, thank you FDR.

But this may require some serious bulldozing, I don't know. All over Portland, we're beefing up the civic infrastructure. That's already happening, but don't call it a "stimulus". This is normal healthy tissue building.

Look at the Moscow subway system. Look at cities that really pour their hearts into making their streets safe. I could wander Rome at 2 AM as a tween, a tempting target. The Romans know city life better than many. Maybe it's even safer today.

The commitment to cycling and cyclers is outstanding here. For all the talk of "road rage" on both sides, I've also seen a great deal of politeness and civility, and not only from Trimet drivers. Average civilians in large SUVs will sometimes gladly surrender the right of way in an effort to be accommodating.

PDX is just that good at citizen diplomacy.

That's why our Village is more like the petting zoo at The Grotto. Just a lot of cute people, needing to use the bathroom from time to time. We pray for them, and we love them.

Fun Center / OPDX

2011-10-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

:: click for larger view ::

from the comments section of

Notes From the Occupation

48 hours inside Occupy Portland

· Articles · Cover Story · Notes From the Occupation

October 26th, 2011 AARON MESH | Cover Story

willamette week

Related comments:

A Poetic Comment
@ Ikea
@ Red Square
@ Fun Center

Halloween 2011 (1 of 3)

2011-10-27T19:26:00.000-07:00

:: halloween 2011 ::

This isn't actually the day of Halloween, October 31, but for us it's a season, and a favorite holiday. Tara got some time off school to come home and bake (part of our Blue House curriculum).

We took our bikes down to Peoples Coop, where I had a gigantic bag of lentils on order, keeping the memory of Teresina and Joe Havens alive, some really Together Friends that we knew.

Teresina was deeply into Buddhism, had cleaned public toilets in Tokyo as one of her services.

Joe started our Quaker Economics Study Circle, which blossomed, and in my case led to closer ties with the Henry George School.

We also procured pumpkins suitable for baking into pies and Tara has spent a good part of her day on that project, following The Joy of Cooking. She also went to the gym (no, not 24-Hour Fitness anymore, which we'd joined when it was still a Gold's in this town).

Lindsey was through for a pit stop. She's mostly roaring her engines (metaphorically -- she's against wasting peak oil) around Occupy Portland. Her picture is in this week's issue of Willamette Week as a part of a photo montage.

I bought her beers at Angelo's last night and pumped her for information. Her analysis tends to be influential on mine, though where spin doctoring goes, we do it differently, have our respective weaknesses and powers. She headed back into the fray just a few minutes ago.

She liked Notes from the Occupation in Willamette Week as it seemed an allusion to Notes from Underground, and Dostoevsky has been her theme recently, especially The Idiot, a role she alludes to in her own character in Privileged Dignity Village (she loved this picture, as I reviewed what I'd stashed so far).

:: EPCOT West / Annex ::

I need to return to Fred Meyer's, where we shop most frequently. The evaporated milk we were going to use in the pies is like a solid paste and a funny color. Kind of too old, too evaporated. No wait, it's condensed. I need to replenish our stocks.

I'm sharing storyboards of what an organized camp would look like, something the city might be proud of, in solidarity with camps elsewhere. We wouldn't go the steak and lobster tails route, like in Afghanistan, nor would we be so hazy on our mission, like in Iraq.

We could experiment with hexayurts, take and send "away teams" through Ft. Lewis. There's no law against civilians getting to use some of the same toys the military does, for humanitarian purposes. We could also showcase more bizmos and vegan food carts running on biodiesel provided by Asian restaurateurs and fellow travelers.

This is not about shutting down the OPDX campus so much as about providing a more planned and thought-out response to Portland's most desperately needy. Released prisoners, returning vets, other homeless, are flocking to OPDX seeking relief from the bully club and involuntary treatment wards.

There's an opportunity here to let a thousand dots of light show us a kinder, gentler America, what used to be the presidential rhetoric when I was between Lindsey's age (36) and Tara's (17).

We remember what happened with Rajneesh Puram, when they tried to address social ills in a more remote setting. Keeping OPDX from being spun in that direction by the press is not going to be easy, even though there's no Bhagwan.

The movement has a cultic flavor, thanks to various branding choices. Not saying that's bad. The pumpkin I carved was that Vendetta guy, as suits the season. I put that upside-down A, our Victory sign, on the back.

Tara found Lisa Randall on The Daily Show. We watched from her Holdenweb laptop in the kitchen. Patrick should be over soon, for nog 'n rum, yar! I was Facebooking Daily Show earlier tonight, sharing some links to that Bank of America story.

:: Ma Sheela, from The Oregonian ::

Psychiatry Today

2011-10-25T19:08:00.000-07:00

Joe Arnold is here, packed house again, giving us a talk on psychotropic medications. He's a practicing psychiatrist and a Wanderer. He has shared about this topic with us before, but thinking evolves, goes deeper, pulls in more and more of a world view. Philosophers know this from personal experience.

Cranks, Quarks and Dorks: that's not the title of the book he's sharing, more a paraphrase. He's wrestling with the authoritarian aspects of the Apollonian paradigm or archetype.

Heavy duty STEM theories are hard going sometimes, especially if you're not fluent in their cryptic equations (code languages for generalizations). It's a "back to basics" discussion, a kind of recap of physics. Nirel just walked in, with her girlfriend Max, and Barry. Wow, what a huge turnout.

I'm wondering about group psyches, mobs, currents that clearly transcend individuals. You might call them meme viruses, but that maybe reads too much into an analogy. "PR campaigns" won't cover it either. Some churches call it the zeitgeist (Holy Spirit). Television, the hottest and most volatile of the several media, is of critical importance in both spreading and quashing these movements.

Rationality is important to a psychiatrist, as it's critical to most diagnoses in that field that patients be suffering from a shortage of same.

That's an oversimplification of course. Some conditions, in need of treatment, result from a perhaps over-abundance of rationality. Thinking too clearly may be a recipe for existential alienation.

Octavia Butler novels come to mind. Her talented and gifted bore the brunt.

Paranoia was sweeping OPDX tonight and Lindsey was too busy trying to get fire lanes open, than do much more than telegraph her thinking. She was calling for help.

I went to my desk and sketched a draft of what I was getting, somewhat like a cartoonist. Like check out this one, shared again on Facebook recently, in honor of mom's visit to the Nevada Test Site.

Actually, Joe is far more suspicious and skeptical of science writers these days, so his investigation into the nature of rationality is more directed against his peers, other commentators on psychiatry.

The view I will share, when we go around the table, is that Psychiatry as a discipline should no way retain its monopoly, going forward, over the control of psychotropic substances.

I've taken some lessons from the "Voodoo House" on this (a silly term, invented by Willamette Week), but my thinking goes way back, and stems from interviewing many sources.

Mature cultures have other ways to manage psychotropics aside from as "cures" for "mental illnesses". Using the "illness" model so exclusively puts pathologies and their treatments in the drivers' seat, a situation we can ill afford.

The churches have a lot to do with this state of affairs, in not wanting to take on their deeper heritage. It'd take another Nietzsche to really get to the bottom of all this.

In the meantime, we continue to live under the yoke of Prohibition.

My other question for psychiatry is to what extent is there a literature of "social ills (pathologies)" and their cures. The standard model seems to isolate the "illness" to the single individual which may not be the appropriate unit of analysis in all cases.

We've all heard of "family therapy", but mob psychologies spread to far beyond a family. Does psychiatry allow itself to look at the spread of pathological ideologies (the "military-industrial complex" for example).

The focus on "the brain" may be somewhat unhealthy (too restrictive) if that causes these good doctors to avoid thinking about the importance of television, other media.

The spread of Freudianism (or Jungianism or whatever) should be studied as if it were the propagation of a mass delusion, a way of performing a kind of "group psychoanalysis" within that profession. The confinement of "mental illness" to a neuroscience discussion is blocking a lot of progress on other fronts. George Lakoff tries to bust out of that straitjacket, but he's a creature of his discipline, some might say a prisoner.

HomeSpun

2011-10-24T23:53:00.000-07:00

photo and sculpture by Dan Suttin

photo by Dan Suttin

photo of Dan Suttin and models

by Tyler C. Cleveland/The Ranger

World Food Day

2011-10-23T22:16:00.001-07:00

October Look

2011-10-22T00:11:00.000-07:00

(click for larger view)

Zen koan: remember your face before Facebook was born.

OPDX / PDV

2011-10-19T22:56:00.000-07:00

:: esoterica ::

(click for larger view)

These camp sites are not especially hospitable, despite extraordinary measures to keep them ship shape. #OccupyIraq is no better in many ways. Sleep is difficult.

Some claim #OccupyPortland (OPDX) is frequented by Nike executives, posing as homeless. That's not really it though. Some families there, with kids, are truly homeless and are just looking for mercy, have a hard time sleeping in freeway dividers, especially with children.

If you're in social services, you're thinking "intake" i.e. there's some triage going, a sorting out, and a long menu of next stops, including some camps, but better established and set up to impart skills, give campers a new angle on life. More like BarCamps. But where? Are they secret? In Russia? The gulag professoriate should have them planned by now (or is "the future" not their business or cup of tea?).

Speaking of BarCamps with their unconference format, I got a worried email from Eve, perhaps following me on Twitter. I was bringing up those Broadway Metroplex theaters again, thinking about the spontaneous film festival we could be having, geared to an audience primed to think and talk anyway (that's about all that goes on in PDV, with sleep hard to come by). Eve also has designs on those theaters.

I was thinking of that Town Hall we held at Portland Center Stage. Theater and Town Hall go together and here's a vacant multiplex theater. Of course we would need sponsors. That would be the interesting part. Who would sponsor and who might feel like not participating because of those sponsors? That's a question for campers more generally.

Also, part of my pattern is to check out abandoned theater halls, like The Stanley, and to propose to repurpose them for curriculum use. I'm really into having movies be on the syllabus, just like books, and sometimes it's worth having a bigger screen with a serious sound system, the shared experience of others in the same space. You have a different kind of consciousness in a movie hall or meetinghouse. That's why Quakers come together, because the sum of the parts is less than the whole.

:: movie night @ opdx ::

Maybe the theaters were closed to install high def digital projectors. Livingroom Theaters, down the street, is doing a thriving business. Laughing Horse has plenty of relevant videos, like Punishment Park, that we could be screening (or maybe something less disturbing). PSU could be giving lectures, about the History we should be learning. Bring your students. Have them interview and learn from real homeless for a change, maybe sign up for career training through a booth, for duty in a Reboot City.

We may end up inventing a host of new brands as a result of the Occupation. The troops seem to be rotating, but so slowly, into more interesting lines of work. At this point, a few more arm band colors might do the trick. Give me tiger stripes and send me in a loop, recruiting others. It's an animist badge. But anyway, we don't need these to stay effective.

I've long advocated fleets of bizmos geared for inter-encampment touring, a way of cross-fertilizing the various cultures. The various bases were in on some of these circuits. Depolarize in North America and the campus will become friendlier in other Occupation zones as well -- that's the theory anyway. Or re-polarize on different axes. Doesn't happen overnight of course.

Checking In

2011-10-13T23:54:00.000-07:00

I walked through our "Privileged Dignity Village" (PDV) tonight, newly aware of Ibrahim's camp, a few blocks a way, on a steeper climb (Portland Tribune gives that story a whirl).

That name (PDV) is from a sign I photographed. Better than "Hooverville", another name for an encampment, associated with this same park (at least now that these dots are connected).

I was on my way to see Ides of March at Fox Tower though I didn't know it at the time. I follow leadings sometimes, part of my training as a Quaker, with Ray Simon another influence. I helped take care of Ray's and Bonnie's baby girl in those early days in Jersey City, after I'd quit my job with the Dominicans, following leadings.

Ides of March is set against the backdrop of US presidential politics, highly fictionalized. This culture lives in fiction, and finds that works pretty well, as long as the toilets keep flushing (a Morlock responsibility). The upcoming movie Anonymous looked interesting.

Occupant Village is spic and span with like a village square or circle, with booths and boutiques (not saying for money). The kitchen is well organized and bustling. It's like a Brouwer (Dutch painter) except minus the drunken revelry. These folks are staying sober, have some serious organizing to do. Their living standards appear to be improving, as people notice the rewards of collaboration.

Zooming back, we see vast Hoovervilles all around Planet Earth. Would that similar youthful enthusiasm gain some access to inventory. The student body could use some gear, some of it brand name. Stewart Brand conveyed some of the excitement of these swift development scenarios. Shouldn't university coursework involve learning logistics? These campers crave opportunities to learn and share skills.

The community downtown feels a little different in terms of footprint as there's a sense of a propertied owner class behind it. A lot of these campers have homes, though probably in places with less sense of a campus community. They're getting "sangha" to sound Buddhist about it. This is how they'd like those property taxes spent, to keep their festive encampment a showcase of future lifestyles, and not necessarily distopian ones (many high cultures have used tents).

I doubt North Face executives are unhappy seeing their products in use (tents mostly). I wore my Andy & Bax army surplus jacket. Officer Urner (no yellow-fendered bike this time), strolling through The Village, seeking an idiot perhaps.

I took TriMet both ways.

Oh, and lets not forget the rare appearance at Carl's Jr., thinking strongly of Idiocracy. Regarding that film, it's not a literal genetic theory, I hope you weren't stupidly believing that (grin).

Life in the Material World (movie review)

2011-10-08T10:48:00.001-07:00

Catching up on the life and times of George Harrison was an eye opener. The guy had a lot of eloquent, well spoken friends who came forward to testify about his life, as a dad, husband, brother, boyfriend and Beatle.

I had never realized the extent to which George was involved with the Monty Python troupe. I'd seen Ringo Starr in The Magic Christian, under the tutelege of Peter Sellers. Some of the Python gang make appearances in that film. But I'd forgotten how The Beatles were seeing so much of themselves in the irreverent, satirical Monty Python movies. George bankrolled Life of Brian to the tune of $4 million, after EMI dropped it like the hot potato it was (right up there with Jesus Christ Superstar in terms of inspiring righteous outrage).

This movie is cram packed with footage you'll likely see nowhere else, unless this becomes the new source for clips on YouTube. The movie takes us back to the very earliest years of The Beatles and rolls forward. George's friendship with Ravi Shankar is pivotal, in terms of its effects on his music and subsequent career. His friendship with Eric Clapton was likewise transformative. He loved his friends, clearly, women and men from many walks of life (race car driving included).

I found the stories captivating, as did the others in our audience. The film received a warm applause, both at intermission and at the end. Many of the on-camera remarks got a hearty laugh as well. George knew some funny people, was pretty funny himself when in the mood to be. He also channeled quite a bit of fury, one could sense.

On the Road

2011-10-03T22:22:00.000-07:00

... with David Koski (as Charles Kuralt).

Wanderers 2011.9.27

2011-09-28T19:52:00.000-07:00

Attendance was really high last night; Duane Ray is a popular speaker and his topic, String Theory, was of generic interest to our demographic, a diverse group of the science minded.

Usually I've heard Duane expressing dismay about the beliefs he's presenting, but tonight he was sharing about the world view he respects. He was humble when it came to assessing his own level as an initiate. Those who maybe thought themselves of higher degree made some challenging criticisms of some of the slides. One or two of the errors were outright typos.

I had nothing much to say and sat on the back stairs, close to Dondi, who was taking in the whole talk with rapt attention. She also brought us wine and chocolate. Angels do exist. Anyway, I say hats off, interesting performance, share it more, by all means, keep getting feedback.

Neutralinos eh? Those sound good in pasta salad, plus I like dark meat better so dark matter might be tasty in small amounts. Just tossing word salad with ya.

This was very much ISEPP country (lots of techno-pomposity), so I was all the more surprised when Brian Sharp suddenly appeared from nowhere, looking hail and hardy. Don, likewise impressed, was quickly on his feet as our master of ceremonies, putting the spotlight on one of our tribal elders, a voice of conscience if not consilience, on the Wanderers discussion list.

Duane covered the Standard Model of gravity, electro-weak and gluonic realms, explaining the taxonomy of whatsons again, a dizzying zoology of permuting quanta. Thanks to having my own brains in the Synergetics blender for so long, it's a little hard for me to disentangle this talk from the A and B modules, a neighboring namespace using many of the same terms, but with semi-remote meanings (just how remote is a topic on Synergeo).

That was a lot to cover before sliding into strings themselves (the subjects of the theory).

What's intriguing about this uni- or multi-verse picture is it's no less miraculous than some of the more religiously inspired, just hangs together better, at least sometimes. There's enough consistency to give a sense of syntropy, of sense being added more than leaking away.

That being said, it was interesting how long we went on, during Q&A, really not seeming to know what we were really talking about. Everyone had some ideas. To me, this sounded like a room flooded with metaphysics, but that's just because of how my ear is trained. I have ears for philosophy and tend to filter other subjects with that bias in mind. Many complain this makes my blogs hard to read. Too many non sequiturs sometimes.

:: brian sharp ::

Retreat News

2011-09-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

We had an abundance of mathematicians amongst us this afternoon, at our Wanderers retreat. The topics overlapped in combinatorics, judging and scoring, also sizing. Nirel's Cuffkas need to come in optimum sizes for male and female wrists.

David has been working with men's pant sizes for some years now and has amassed a database of over 8000 measurements. True, this table contains more than its share of non-average sizes, and thereby hangs a tale.

Don was eligible for a special fishing license (free) given his age and over fifty years in Oregon. On almost the first day on his own with his new gear at Gary's dock, he managed to snag a twenty pound Chinook. Nirel is cooking up a big slab as I write this.

I woke up at 4:30 AM this morning remembering I'd left my bicycle, with the Food Not Bombs trailer, unlocked behind the Pauling House. I made myself roll out of bed and go retrieve the rig, which was fortunately still where I'd left it.

Carol and Tara both came to our potluck last night. I wrote something for the Wanderers list which I'll repost to Synergeo.

Philosophy of language:

Freshwater News, September 2011, Vol 29, No. 9, Oregon & SW Washington's boating news monthly, traces an interesting line in the water in: Old Boats, Homeless People: Poverty and Lawlessness on the Waterfront (pg. 18).

Some of these boat-dwellers, paying rent for moorage, living aboard yachts, don't consider themselves homeless. Their home is their boat. What gives the newspaper the right to judge who is homeless, might be a question in some letter to the editor. What would the Wittgensteinians say, about what it means to be homeless. Was Wittgenstein ever homeless?

My Character

2011-09-06T16:37:00.000-07:00

:: pyladies T ::

My own role in this "Russian novel" (some science fiction) is somewhat interesting, at least to me. I'm in a large suite in a Hilton with Associate Producer on my nametag.

But then there's this Guys and Dolls aspect, especially before I lost the Quaker aka "Chicago crime boss" hat, where I'm on the phone to these street molls and soup kitchens, some kinda Soprano (finally caught me an episode or two at Patrick's).

Meanwhile, mom fights against weapons in space (more power to her, to us, the human beings).

My street busking Global U student (lots of skills) got some water dumped on her from a 2nd floor window (slam!). The crowd below had been semi-appreciative (evening party goers). She was deliberately practicing some of the time, pioneering "professional practice" as a form of street entertainment (it's hypnotic for some, crazy-making for others).

The computations are somewhat intensive. I have a set of equations ("Duke's Equations") I truck out in our followup "board meetings" (yes, I like to pace). She might carry an umbrella next time.

School is about to start. Tara is still decompressing. The meeting gets its first official briefing on 9-11.

Djangocon is off and running. I sat in on the end of a tutorial and was reminded of how security conscious Django is. You need to follow its model to have these features work.

I'm not so much the intended audience for these tutorials though, as I tend to focus on teaching more these days, with lots of thoughts about animation.

The videography around Djangocon is interesting to me. We have both a taping crew and a still photographer. The magician, Aaron Smith, was really good.

Wanderers 2011.8.18

2011-08-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

We talked about Linus Pauling a lot, most appropriately.

Nate had seen the OPB documentary, so was up to speed on this being the boarding house towards the start of his biography.

After his dad died, his mom had to make ends meet, while the gifted son explored chemistry in the basement.

Nirel slipped in and out of the Portland Matrix in a flash, another world traveler.

Chairman Steve took the head of the table.

I've been chirping on a citizens' band (public listserv), letting my peers know about the disposition of the FnB trailers. Even if you're far away on a trip, it's fun to get these blips sometimes.

Barry and Glenn quizzed me on re-roofing plans. I'm nowhere close to having blueprints, that's for sure. But then I'm not the architect.

The looming trip has my attention.

We also chatted about Bram Pitoyo and Amber Case, as Nate had just come from listening to Sheldon talk about "netness" some more.

Good having Michael Hagmeier join us again.

Today's STEM Lesson

2011-08-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

Related filing: Topic: Computers in Schools... (Math Forum @ Drexel)

PUG 97214 (Launch Event)

2011-08-14T08:39:00.001-07:00

I showed up at Lyrik babbling about Brazil (Keiko is from there) and toting totems, the PSF snake and a borrowed Moose slipper, for working on another pro-Perl photo op. YAWTDI or something like that.

Pythonia (Python Nation) and the Programmers' Republic of Perl are friendly neighbors. When looking at the camel from the right angle, you can see Guido's house in the background.

from GIS in Action 2009

Keiko told me about a more touching Brazilian movie than the one below, involving singing duos that roam the countryside, often brothers or sisters... reminding me that Lindsey was off busking somewhere, solo yet safe. One of our troupe. David had SkyBlue.

The occasion was a first meetup of the Hawthorne District Python Users Group. HD PUG might work, or perhaps we'll embrace the whole zip code: 97214 PUG. Steve had been talking about starting one, now that he has enough chairs. We haven't come up with a schedule yet.

Last week we attended the big Portland Python User Group at Urban Airship.

Our beginning was auspicious in that we had a successful install-mitzvah with Steve serving as rabbi. I munched on a sandwich and Skyped with our CSN CTO, also a good Wanderer buddy. Another attender joined us from London, also by Skype.

Flextegrity LLC was a sponsor for this event.

Elite Squad (movie review)

2011-08-10T00:35:00.000-07:00

I lost my way in this melodrama more than a few times.

The overall plot was clear: Brazil was trying to live up to some ideal of itself, vis-a-vis the Pope in particular.

Perhaps it's only in English that BOPE and Pope sound so similar.

I'd say there's an element of parody here, in having all the rich and privileged sitting around talking about Foucault.

I'm more in the Nobby lineage in supposing ethnicities have a right to their medications, but when the heritage is so thin, much of their power is lost anyway. Some drugs just exaggerate predispositions. In war, you might want uppers and speed.

We live in a world without doctors, statistically speaking (translate "doctors" however you will).

The film is pointing out that the ethics and motivations are just too twisted to make much sense.

As an audience, we're invited to study the pain and suffering, dramatized for our benefit and education.

I got this from Movie Madness because our Brazilian friends at OSCON were saying this film seemed to capture a lot of the culture as they experienced it. I'd seen a couple others with Brazil their setting.

BizMotica

2011-07-30T18:11:00.000-07:00

:: hb2u lw ::

One of our staffers left her computer / bag aboard the Max from the airport (Red Line). Honest Oregonians disturbed it not, and it joined a gated community facility, a forlorn kind of Toy Story place where many lonely toys are not found. This bag was though: I retrieved it in the "escape pod" Lindsey used to eject from the State of Georgia (her birthday today, having a small dinner party, Melody our cook).

My route was from the marina adjacent PDX down Columbia Blvd to Lombard, into St. John's, over to Hwy. 30 past Sauvie Island to Cornelius Pass, up into Jenkins/158th area, near the Costco. Same way back. Quite a good drive. The Nissan Maxima, performed well. Lots of building going on. Intel expanding etc. Yet lots of rolling countryside, lots of farms.

We saw them all off at the Max again this morning, bound for divergent destinations. Staff is spread out. Sebastopol was like a northern border with Russia in the early days, with Hispanic mission based culture coming up from the south. The Bay Area was a center of contention. Fun history to know, if you think of that Russian Imperial Museum in Minneapolis, housed in a mission-style building. What does it all mean?

I shared some some history too, learned from Les (CIO) about those bad ass Haida, and the Hudson Bay Company's response: to import lots of Hawaiian muscle to keep pushing a lucrative fur trade.

Those Euros couldn't get enough furs, having already managed their property unsustainably. The Doctrine of Discovery allowed for title transfer into church holdings, of vast tracts of valuable land. Much of this was protected by a lay populace of faithful, willing to champion their ethnicity in a kind of zero sum game.

Anyway, Hawaiian names decorate the coastal areas, Camano Island for example.

Dignity Village was on the itinerary again, this time from the marina, not the airport. I refer to it as "Epcot West", America's best futuristic thinking on display.

Later, I played some Idiocracy again, while picking up the living room, dusting and so forth. I even changed where I hung some of the pictures. OSCON has clearly changed my mind in some ways. That's what circuses do sometimes: they expand one's idea of what's possible, by showing one freaks and geeks of various types, in a fun house of crazy-making mirrors.

click for author's photostream

OSCON 2011 Continues

2011-07-27T10:57:00.000-07:00

No bizmos at OSCON this year. Maybe someday we'll get one into the exhibit hall, a small version, but an open source one (open hardware, not just software).

The keynotes today were somewhat ironic, with Microsoft seeing the cloud as another "commercial software" environment, with Windows Azure the latest back end.

The announcement that it supports PHP, other open source, was perhaps underwhelming, somewhat like announcing a car with an "ignition key" as a feature.

The next public splash came from Nebula, with the CEO whipping up enthusiasm for and industry-supported convergence of OpenStack and OpenCompute. The goal: generic cloud services built with open hardware and software at the core. Was it a coincidence that Al Gore appeared in the promo, and a forklift was used as a prop to wheel out a rack?

F151 was a deep silo discussion of CONNECT and Aurion, presented by the Alembic Foundation. CONNECT is a project to facilitate the exchange of medical information (HIE). Hey, the guy said "default" -- that's the first time I've heard anyone mention the WDC-based soap opera going on these days. It's buzz word city in here. Not clear to me Lower48 are where it's happening these days, where electronic medical data is concerned. Too bureaucratized, even though we're talking big money. Count me a skeptic.

Chairman Steve gave awarded the Frank Willison award to Georg Brandl. I brought Naga, the PSF Snake, on the Max. After the keynotes she went straight to the DemocracyLab booth, remembering Deb Bryant (she's on Mark's board). The Perl Foundation was immediately adjacent, so she next jumped over there and gave a ride to the camel. Chairman Steve has a debate later with one of the Perl avatars. Both write curriculum for O'Reilly School of Technology, so it's somewhat a punch and judy show. We're all family here.

The talk on NORC's study, done for the US Congress, on open source EHR systems used in safety-net health-care clinics (so-called) was illuminating. The clinics tend to get more deeply into using their systems as a function of both needing and wanting to customize them.

R0ml took up the topic of internationalizing source code, one of my pets. He conceded at the beginning, somewhat sarcastically, that "everyone should learn English", satirizing the predominant Anglo imperialism (paradigm). He used Portuguese as an example of another source code language for Python. I already know from chatting with my Brazilian friends that top-level names, minus keywords, built-ins and standard library, are already in Portuguese in many a Python program.

I introduced R0ml to Henrique in the Expo Hall later. I also went back to the Perl booth where Michael of Food Not Bombs was hanging out. Mention of FnB brought up an interesting opportunity to compare notes, as the Perl guys were from Orlando.

Rainbow Gathering (musings)

2011-07-19T01:41:00.000-07:00

:: bioneering project by jim murosako ::

I didn't go to this Gathering, but many FnBers did, and I'm pumping them for information. Satya's group walked the whole way there. The aftermath, involving cleanup, is a kind of Part 2. I got reports about the trash, the detritus, from that many people camped in the forest for that long. The reports make it sound a lot like the Gathering of Western Young Friends but on a much larger scale.

Expanding FnB as a way of training cooks, improving coordination and logistics, using food about to go to waste anyway, seems like a good idea. I'm surprised how below the radar it stays, given so many chapters.

I wonder about this Quaker network of safe houses or whatever it is. LW and my friend, another chef, are thinking about scoping out more of Yamhill county. I sent an email ahead, to one of the property owners. There's no substitute for reality. Dreams without substance accrue no inertia.

I was thinking back to my research into Unicode and OLPC today. Sinhalese and Tamil were on my screen at CubeSpace, seems a long time ago by now. I alluded to that chapter in my recent post to edu-sig. The entire thread is interesting I think, relates to diversity (I have related threads going on both Diversity and PSF-members).

Should Global U students travel more? Many of the more conscious and aware types, such as those in my current household, think a lot about peak oil. We mostly walk, bike, take the bus, though I gladly do chauffeur duty (company car) for the 82 year old.

Adding more electronics and doing more virtual meetups still seems like a realistic way to go. But again, there's no substitute for reality. Sometimes one really needs to go to a place, to broaden one's perspective.

We should probably run these conveyor belts faster, get more turnover going. But that takes software. I've imagined CSN as a supportive business, but one can't live on coffee shop fare, if that means your standard airport concourse coffee shop (which CSN shops are not -- some may require membership).

One needs to have substantive protein. Lyrik does a lot of its own baking. Jody may have known about Calibri's operation but I was too new to CSA (community supported agriculture) to grok the background story.

The idea of a disaster relief corps is already well established with AFSC. Of course the vast majority aren't Friends, but you may still find a lot of your own plans and dreams mirrored, just in a different namespace. Happens all the time.

Should we take applications? Who else wants to join our Global U project? Metaphorically, it's what we're already involved in (Global U = Spaceship Earth), but on the ground you have all kinds of resource and personnel allocation strategies. LW used to read resumes a lot, back in Savannah. She might help select her own replacement for when the time comes to change the scenery (scene), not saying I'm bound here either (turnover is a fact of life).

Alex, newly a US citizen, said photography and cinematography were discouraged at the Gathering, so I may not find as much on Flickr as I'd hoped. Burning Man, in contrast, is well covered by photography.

As I was mentioning tonight, if the goal is community, then your designers need to know right away if you're accommodating the very young (newborns) and the elderly. There's a tendency among the young to think in terms of their generation as the anchor. However, many of these communities would likely happen more quickly if the seniors saw them as a solution as well. Segregation by age has its consequences.

Lots of anthropology branches off from these rather scattered remarks.

Checking In

2011-07-15T19:22:00.000-07:00

Once again from your business crew, some Bizmotica...

Quakers convene for business yearly, in what's called Annual Session, to have these plenary sessions. There's an esoteric inner faction among Friends that's saying plenary, rhyming with canary, which of course is the wrong emphasis. Fabik and Scholl went at it, first Lew with the Droid, then Dave with the iPhone, to find other rhymers, such as Harry.

Good segue: in some Xtian sects, that Harry Potter stuff is too distracting or "of the devil" or whatever, to be permitted a core focus of any official religious event. Not so at Annual Session this year. Joe Snyder took a posse of some 39 ticket holders to opening night of Part 2 of the latest, with the whole group watching Part 1 in the lounge at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU), where we stayed (wandering gypsies that we be).

Another highlight for me was watching that satirical look at the emerging Facebook culture through the eyes of South Park Studios. We watched on his iPhone. Google+ has just launched, around the time of this writing, so throwing people into circles (e.g. "to the lions") has become a big part of the buzz.

The PSF snake, Ms. Naga, was a stowaway with the 3.1 computer speakers (with woofer). She's the stuffed totem we cart around as another "cult symbol" (hacker speak) in Python World. In the comix, she's a good natured, adventuresome type.

During Quaker Fair, when organizations paraded their stuff, like so many stationary floats, the anti cruelty to animals guy discovered he'd forgotten the power cable for his speakers. I was sitting right there, doing my day job teaching Python over wifi, and quickly volunteered that I had some back in the room. Timothy Travis returned me by golf cart, forthwith.

Of course Naga came along in the bag and curled up at the exhibit, where the movie kept playing. I got the soundtrack over and over as I continued my grading, hearing about the terrible things humans do to other animals. This was a good position for a Quaker animist to take, and another score for FnB style cooking.

The two booths I spent most of my time at during this Fair: AFSC and Western Friend. Susan was showing some poster art reminiscent of Shepard Fairey's, prompting a quick visit to the Obey Giant website. Hyzy, WF editor in chief, was like Lucy in her booth in Peanuts. Thinking of Linus, I remembered my security blanket (blue).

I've also been reading and writing about Wittgensteinian philo, chatting with Nick, DK, wondering about my peeps, so spread out and around.

Diversity / Python Nation

2011-07-13T00:45:00.001-07:00

Excerpt from one of my posts from earlier today (I added some hyperlinks for the blogged edition):

A lot of people go by "hurt feelings" as their guide and naturally aim for
a world, by whatever means necessary, wherein their feelings are
better protected. A kind of truce is trucked out: "I promise to not
hurt your feelings if you promise not to hurt mine". Those who apparently
continue to hurt others feelings are in abrogation of this truce and are
worthy of punishment to make them stop.

There's an imperiousness to this however, in that you will look for
and expect people to automatically change their behavior when
they see you're offended. The missionary shows up and is offended
that people are not covered up, not modest, in the way God ordains.
Will there be consequences if the locals refuse to modify their
dress codes? What if they continue to school their young in how
to use various weapons? Does it hurt your feelings that they won't
accept the new edicts (e.g. the so-called "Bremer Edicts" in Iraq --
which hardly anyone remembers anymore).

What offends people *a lot* is when they are not *obeyed*. They
may feel deeply hurt, quivering lip and everything, because the
servant says "no, I must take care of my sick child".

The flip side of "you must not hurt my feelings" is "you must obey
my will, within reason" (but who defines "reason"?).

So, yeah, I'm very suspicious of ethnicities that use "hurt feelings"
as a guide. Americans do this a lot, but they inherit so much from
those Anglo-Euros when it comes to an imperial mindset. Not a
good guide for the future. Behind those "hurt feelings" is a
hypocritical willingness to use force. They whine they're not
getting enough health care, but are in no hurry to stop manufacturing
drones and cruise missiles, and using those on others, because
that means jobs jobs jobs. I wonder how we might use Python to
further reduce the influence of such people.

A Senior's Musings

2011-07-07T22:00:00.000-07:00

:: bioneering project by jim murosako ::

I heard from Nick this morning. Looks like he'll be getting that apartment in Hillsboro. He's been in Eugene.

Today was the Blue House's turn at bat with FNB, as usual. People were trickling back from the Rainbow Gathering. I got my first reports.

The phrase "check your privilege" was a theme today. I did some cross-fertilizing, in typical Wanderers fashion. Mandelbrot:

“Science would be ruined if it were to withdraw entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are wanderers-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.”

After the call from Nick, I did my 14 mile loop on EmoKid, the refurbished bike, successor to TinkerBell.

I'm officially a senior now, after last night. The guy at Burgerville gave me a Senior Coffee. I drank three cups, a kind of baptism.

As I was mentioning to Lindsey, in recounting this story in the meetinghouse kitchen, I take "senior" in that schoolish sense also, in the sense of "senior privilege". I get lots of power and control in this chapter. Other connotations might be held at bay for a bit, while I manage these institutions.

Could I be CMO from Coffee Shops Network, and still be CTO for a government agency at the same time? It's a theoretical question, but as the former offers an open source business plan to funnel money to worthy causes, it's already doing more than many government agencies, not to mention NGOs (a self serving suggestion).

So in my own mind at least, the answer is yes. One should have a minimum of two work identities. We want more than one job, for their synergetic potential.

I was amused by Glenn's stories of the BBC helping to shed more light on this Scientology business. That was never my camp, though I've done some ethnography. At least one of their security chiefs has defected, and that makes it easier to expose some of the inner workings.

Office Reflections

2011-06-26T19:15:00.000-07:00

I'm not too happy about Qwest changing its name to CenturyLinks, a big faux pas in my book. Anything "century" is too stale, unless grandfathered in. Purposely reverting to such retro signage is just a pale retreat, an attempt at a new wrapping. Anyway, not my problem.

I followed up on that PSF traffic regarding Python / Iran. The for-credit "truckology" degree (not its real name) could be cause enough for a convergence, with GeoDjango a theme (like at OS Bridge).

Holden and I discussed the new Hess album on Facebook, our having met at GOSCON last year.

Planning to see Source Code this evening.

I have a "commit bit" for the Wittgenstein feed. Hope Alex, Satya and company are doing well on their walk. Lots of turnover at FNB. LW enjoying Dostoevsky. Did the 14 mile loop, like in the old days with SB and friends.

Simulating A School

2011-06-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

I was back to my "school for diplomats in the high desert" topic again, in a recent meeting at the chairman's (some of the chairs were recently re-glued by Patrick). Could we apply Henry George principles?

Henry George, an economist, proposed to keep government from being too greedy, by freeing people to add value to land through their own efforts, without having to pay tribute on the value added except in a most general way, relating to the appreciating value of the underlying shared infrastructure and ecosystem context. "Improvements" wouldn't be penalized as a land tax is more about neighborhood value. It's a way of "raising all boats" by boosting land values while allowing more of the rewards of innovation to flow back to the innovators.

Economists are always interested in "bootstrapping" because development is a result of cybernetic feedback that spirals one way or the other, or has both convergent (concentrating) and divergent (dissipating) tendencies. A few domes in the desert, or near a stream bed, perhaps in an airspace zoned for air taxi service, do not by themselves constitute a school. However, with a few product placements and signers on, sponsor decals, co-venturer insignia, one does have a basis for appreciating land values.

We already know some of the purposes of such a school, based on the Countdown to Zero literature, Gasland, and other classics. Environmental monitoring, through the use of sensors, is in the public interest, as is the geographic display of the collected data. It's not just a convenience, but a government responsibility to the people, the lack of which global data only goes towards delegitimizing those claiming to inherit high office. If a citizen cannot dial up current data about Bull Run, the Portland metro area watershed, then do we really have a government? The data collection centers will have a public service mission that's clear and obvious enough to attract the kind of volunteers we would most like to get: idealistic and self motivated. "Idealistic" does not mean "pie in the sky" so much as willing to project a personal narrative against the backdrop of "the greater good".

Beyond eco-monitoring and "away team" forays, the students are learning how to be mannerly in an ever-shifting global economy, one which brings ethnicities together in new ways.

Those tracking these blogs know that we've created our Blue House as an urban based prototype of one of these schools, adopting a Free School model and providing economic support to self motivated individuals. The "time capsule" houses much of the syllabus. The back office is where sponsors put their mark. Whether outreach to the movie industry succeeds sooner rather than later remains an open question. Japanese anime companies have been courted. Portland is on the map, diplomacy-wise. Our track record has been established.

Father's Day

2011-06-19T19:25:00.000-07:00

I was grateful to be reunited with my daughter today, meeting Gonzo's party at carousel 4. I also had Sir Steve in my company, his JetBlue having landed but a few minutes earlier. We all fit in the Kirby taxi no problem.

Steve showed me some pix from Djangocon / Amsterdam.

Out to celebrate more.

Shanty Town USA

2011-06-10T10:31:00.000-07:00

You have a lot of Americans pressuring to start the same sprawling shanty towns we find in many urban areas. The city sidewalk and public thoroughfare is, not for the first time, the front line in a battle between public and private. The right to camp on public lands, if curtailed, is on some level a blow to sovereignty, especially as more citizens take to the camp grounds.

Stewart Brand was upbeat about all this youthful energy, the vast encampments spreading around great urban concentrations. This might free up a lot more area for pure wilderness, a zoning he favors.

His objections to solar /wind farms are mainly against the plow happy practices of tractor fanatics and their bulldozing cousins. If flowers (sun tracking solar collectors) destroyed property the way those dozers do, we'd have run out of wilderness in no time.

Nature seems to concentrate its stupidest memes in humans for some reason (guinea pigging?). Nature for Dummies is our constant reading, always going over the same lessons, again and again and again. Tsk, I'm sounding not philanthropic again.

Back to those tent city PeopleTowns: here in North America, it might be more senior-boomers, vets, mixed with young families just starting out, already foreclosed upon in our shark infested waters.

America's people are among the least defended against some brands of predator, the military conveniently looking the other way if it's an "intelligence" problem.

The military's ranks and budget actually swell when civilians are driven from their precarious paycheck-to-paycheck perches. Humans get herded into I, Robot prisons and militias, once out of other options.

The schools have yet to catch up, making Food Services struggle without the benefit of much systems analysis or real time control room monitoring.

The Ivory Tower is still hellbent on obliging with killingry science it seems, pandering to an Iron Mountain Economy while neglecting so many critically important student services, providing shelters for example, versus blowing them up.

We can't have strong ethics if we're busy selling out to the Forces of Darkness now can we? Lord of the Rings revisited.

I've wondered if the aerospace sector, with lots of bright people, would be stepping up to the plate the way Bucky planned. Weren't we expecting some experimental prototype community of tomorrow?

Then I realized I still like trains a lot, and maybe the global university extension campus should stretch across rail lines, for PhD programs in history, languages, signals, physics, geology -- you name it.

Not just PhD programs, but future Doctors of Philosophy especially stand to benefit from working on a railroad at some point in their lives. Could be Russian Studies. I'm not saying I'm confidant USAers are capable of self-organizing this creatively -- or they already would have by now, right?

Of course it's not either / or (trains versus planes) and "working on a railroad" easily becomes a metaphor for any dirty job involving a component of physical labor.

Young bodies are especially in need of exercise, aren't designed to just sit around in cube farms, rotting away around water coolers, eating too much meat, depending on air conditioning. School is a travesty if it grooms only Eloi, channeling Morlock tendencies into either pointless athletics or outright predating on other humans (so-called blood sports, "Roman circuses").

You can see some TV stations wanting to move more in that direction, encouraging wars, inflaming both sides to boost ratings, with the producer-militants seeming to encounter little resistance from democracy's last bastions (this gives them encouragement).

Hey, I'm starting to sound like Micheal Sunanda, my hippy co-interviewee in Internet Radioland, on one of those Coast to Coast type twisted alien shows, like those underground comics.

So why is Planet Earth still such a nasty place, why so much misery? The pat answers of the past don't ring so true anymore. The sermons have gone hollow in so many churches (at least Subgenius rants still have some punch).

The poignancy is still there, but its nature has changed, the surrounding storytelling.

It's getting harder to think in terms of pure physical insufficiency anymore (the "too many people" cop out) ever since the Renaissance in Italy, and especially since the 1970s with its Apollo Program and so forth. Humans have the ability to ferry themselves to the moon using small well-insulated capsules. Amazing.

I'm meeting about "EPCOT West" tonight, among other projects (Earthala etc.). You could think of it as a book club for retired science fiction writers if that sounded comforting. Other Tomorrows Network? See you next Esozone maybe?

Hatless in Portland

2011-06-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

I took some time out today, to label recent photographs, to hunt for my hat. I've misplaced it again, perhaps this time for good. Said hat hogged the limelight in my autobiographical post to the Wittgenstein list.

Trisha (at Wanderers this morning) was off to help load a donkey into a pickup truck and that got us all talking and Googling.

What's a mule anyway? Jim Buxton had more experience with donkeys. The dad is always the donkey it seems. If the mule is fertile, it's because she might get pregnant. Guy mules have no track record of fathering.

Mules bond well with horses, especially mother figures. Many attractive features.

A non-sterile male mule with a horse father and donkey mother would likely be too oxymoronic to call a mule. It'd deserve its own label.

Donkeys usually are a help around the farm, especially when it comes to looking after other animals. However, one donkey Glenn knew was credited with teaching the horses in its care to step over cow guards. It showed them over and over until they got it. The horses and donkey would take off and go exploring, much to the consternation of their human proprietor.

FNB Gossip

2011-05-26T18:01:00.000-07:00

Walker's switch to raw vegan leads her less into chiefing the cheffing show, which she and I have been casting, and pulling off weekly since September, sometimes one or another of us taking the full load (Lindsey more than I, given my trips to Philly and Sonoma County).

My version has FNB scaling, changing branding if disowned, yet always respectful of its "parent" organization, even while incarnating as its weirder spawn ("Make Portland Weirder").

We publish DIY ("how to") cooking shows, showing few-for-many styles, not just nuclear family me-for-myself or me-for-hubby-n-kids. Other shows do that, with which we don't compete. Crew cooking in a well equipped kitchen and serving by bicycle in public structures. We're looking at public schools maybe taking this on, bringing back the day when bike riding was a for credit learning experience, as important (another part of) drivers' ed.

I was using funny accents today and talking about ToonTown, as I'm wont to do. "Every day is cartoon day" I intoned, in a Quaker meetinghouse, sounding like some weighty Friend in a Disney cartoon, some Subgenius. Lindsey's energy adds to the lunacy of it all, as do others in this roly-poly cast.

We're talking about shutting down the Thursday program as is and reconfiguring. Too early to see the shape of what's to come.

HB2Me

2011-05-17T13:44:00.001-07:00

Yes, another "coming of age" date on the calendar, a prime number this year. Carol, my mother, now age 82, took me to lunch at The Bagdad. I had a Dungeon Burger, curry chic pea soup, and two Workingman's Reds. Mom had turkey sandwich, same soup, and coffee with cream.

She had plenty of stories from the Philippines, of lowlanders coming into a "zip code area" and forging documents, making a kind of "mockumentary" wherein ancestral lands could be sold to USA imperial corporations, like Dole, for nominal prices. When westerners mean "land reform" that's often it: set up a game wherein we make the rules, so we can buy you out for cheap (as in swindle). Easterners would fall for that, time and again. Or do we call them "easterners" any more.

I haven't had time to read The Mercury yet but the cover story title makes no sense. How could indoor digital put Indie Theaters out of business? A lot of them use the same technology. It's about distribution, not what kind of light bulb you're using. If the coffee shops have first dibs on the work of this or that studio, by longstanding agreement, then you'll expect a loyal base, interested in that studio's latest releases. Home theaters will catch it later, unless in the loop in some way (there's no rule against staff house parties). Wineries have a similar economy: some taste it before others. Film culture has always been osmosis-based.

re Prohibition

Per the BBC

2011-05-08T18:33:00.000-07:00

some comments (apologies for typos)

Lesson Planning

2011-05-02T22:41:00.001-07:00

Some programmers new to Python do not understand how a two dimensional array might be implemented simply as nested lists. The "outer list" forms your rows and the members of that list, themselves lists, define the columns. I used to go back and forth with Bernie Gunn on that one, the 70+ year old geochemist who flew his own plane in New Zealand, had cut his teeth on Pascal.

Whereas years of grade-school drill in this biases, such as to put (0,0) either in the middle or lower right, the way printers and typewriters work, by typing against an advancing scroll, suggests the first row will end up at the top of the page. Ding, carriage return. Old typewriter noises. So (0,0) tends to mean "upper left) and (1,0) is one row down, far left margin if you read left to right, possibly far right margin if you read right to left.

The Tractor is similar enough to a Turtle to be imported as such, but the field it plows is simply a two-dimensional array with a simple ASCII representation. Mentally, students are starting to think in terms of a GUI canvas, but in terms of working the server, we're keeping the processes fairly lightweight. The REPL buffer stays reasonable unless students create vast fields (of soybeans), like in Brazil.

More Bizmotica

2011-04-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

A BizMo, some may remember, is a "business mobile", and that has various connotations, one of which is you're making some kind of positive contribution to an economy in that "not yet retired" sense. "Still performing a service" -- that's the connotation of "in business" or "working" today, though "going to school" is acknowledged as a kind of work, hence work / study (i.e. the "GU scenario" -- GU = "global university").

Wanderer NA and I checked out Movie Madness (she'd never been there) where I exchanged Fantastic Planet (animation) and Hitler's Last 10 Days (Alec Guinness), for another of Alec's, Horses Mouth. You might call these homework assignments. Right next to MM is a BizMo Food Court, with each bizmo a restaurant, with shared outdoor seating. Willamette Week just did a cover story on these businesses, which are not really a new idea, and which have sprung up all over town, in food courts everywhere. NA and I both had the chicken horseradish sandwich at EuroTrash.

Food caravan bizmos come in various shapes and sizes, many still on the drawing board. Were we to serve the schools with these festivals on wheels, we could add the planetarium truck and some of the other education mobiles (lots of STEM and/or STEAM), tipping the scales in favor of study. The military recruiters would want to join our circus, along with various gangland front ends, as humans tend to polarize into warring bands in some regions, which pass on their traditions. We could have a traveling anthropology bus with some exhibits about that, as if it were news to anyone.

Rather than emphasize the competitive aspect so much, I tend to think of bizmos in fleets, with control room dispatchers responding to request maps. You tend to go where you're wanted and invited. Like I felt welcomed in those venues last night, as another guest of a family. I hadn't expected to find James. The Earth Day festival had its food booth aspects as well, and a carnival atmosphere. The fair and circus come into play as motifs anytime you caravan these things, which conjures gypsies. There's the romance of the road, the idea of sometimes sharing a journey. However it's not like I'm inventing this life style in science fiction: we already have the RVs and their RV parks. Dave Ulmer has been tooling around with his version. NA is on his mailing list and has been getting those pictures.

From the Chronofile

2011-04-13T20:44:00.001-07:00

[ link ]

Meetup in Woodstock

2011-04-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

Mom reminded me on the phone that she and Jack had visited the remnants of a Georgist colony in Louisiana. Most had gone to Costa Rica a generation before. Quakers mostly: not eager to play out their lives against the backdrop of Machine World in El Norte. My sister Julie joined the Costa Rican branch off community as a school teacher.

My review of Inside Job had attracted some attention, but we didn't talk about that film. Tom Gihring, already a good friend of the Boltons (whom I'll lunch with today), was one of the gang. He seemed comfortable with Georgist lingo. I consider myself more of a novice.

Indeed, my purpose in being there was more to recruit another school of Economics to Systems Science. PSU is like that last university in El Norte to offer a degree in it. Melanie Mitchell is on the faculty. Students from around the world come here to learn this stuff, but there's talk of being swallowed by another department. From my side, Systems is doing some swallowing of its own, the better to compete with Economics, while seeking defectors willing to jump ship.

Plans to phase in energy management simulations (micro and macro), as a part of the curriculum, link here. I'm not sure if Stanford is into being this practical. California is taking the lead in other respects. I was expressing admiration about that at Wanderers today, saying Reed College could learn a thing or two from the competition (not that I'm with Reed College, any more than with PSU -- just close with some alums, current and ex faculty, a few students).

The Systems / GST camp is staking turf in the "smart house / smart grid" namespace, prying it loose from Economics, at least of the fuddy dud sort. Software engineers will have more of a future with CEOs who studied Systems over some withering branch of Econ out of Chicago or whatever.

Ecumenical Ministries

2011-04-01T19:27:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling like the chief clerk of EMO these days, not that they have such a position. That's Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, my old boss, and sponsor of Bishop Tutu's visit.

Today, I was in somewhat Methodist circles, explaining to Bob (Fuller) that I'd met Alex through this esoteric Buddhist cult called FNB, which of course is a stretch. It's a national organization.

Our lunch as at the Cuban place on 28th and Glisan, a first for all three of us. Mom left voice mail from her airplane seat: off to WDC again. We'd all been to Burma (me just for a couple days as I recall, on home leave), two of us to Bhutan. I wore a sharks & dolphins T-shirt under a free pile Nike jacket, which become too hot as the weather brightened and warmed.

After lunch I dropped a trailer with cooking gear w/ Jay @ SDW (Episcopalian) before visiting the Daime House (which WW had unceremoniously dubbed the Voodoo House, in a rather parochial snub piece).

Lets be fair though, I really was learning about some esoteric Buddhist stuff in the park, like from a computerist guitarist who'd been sharing the other night (and not someone ordained).

This was an important API, this part of "the matrix" (rDzogs-chen).

That's when I wrote to Quakers (Los Amigos):

That's one reason I think an FNB binder might be cool: we get such exotic people coming through all the time.

I enjoy the ecumenical opportunities that this work fosters.

Learned more about Newar Buddhism and Palden Lhamo today, at the serving.

I borrowed Forest of Visions: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Spirituality, and the Santo Daime Tradition, by Alex Polari De Alverga (translated from Portuguese by Rosana Workman). I think I'll take it by Lyrik for conversational value.

Speaking of which, I had a meetup with Jody, the former owner. I named Fine Grind Productions after her coffee shop, now Lyrik.

I've also borrowed Complexity: A Guided Tour, by Melanie Mitchell. Melanie is teaching at PSU this semester. She harkens back to SFI (Santa Fe Institute) and is part of the dynamical systems clique, along with her mentors, Douglas Hofstadter, and Stu Kauffman, the latter one of our ISEPP lecturers.

More Comedy

2011-03-30T13:49:00.000-07:00

Current household faves, when taking a break from being serious.

Earlier favorites.

The Magic Christian (movie review)

2011-03-27T10:52:00.000-07:00

I tried grabbing a screen shot of Yul Brynner in drag. Easier said than done with bitmaps.

I'd not been aware of this interesting spoof, starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr. Early (1969) foreshadowing of Bruno, especially in the boxing ring scene.

The film is about the all-corrupting power of money, and the thin veneer of polity (polite company) over fear and longing, with all kinds of cracks and fissures manifest.

But is also a who's who of sorts, an allusion to the ship of fools that is The Magic Christian (an opulent cruise ship). Raquel Welch, of Bedazzled, makes an appearance. The future Monty Python cast is picking up the baton of British comedy. Then there's Ringo himself, with a sound track by Paul.

Sellers is preternaturally good at affecting lots of inane mannerisms and accents. American accents (and attitudes) get spoofed as well. Ringo Starr is the privileged son who gets the view from back stage as it were, with a front row seat on Vice Street goings on (board meetings etc.).

When the practical jokes are as benign as these, having lots of money starts to look like fun. Too bad so many jokers are more like The Joker than like our Being There guy.

Citizen Diplomats

2011-03-24T14:33:00.001-07:00

Tara and I met with Betsey today, in Vancouver, Washington (McMenamins). On the agenda: a delegation to Nicaragua.

Later we found out that the SE side Passport Office is not where Google says it is. The guy behind the desk assured us they'd contacted everyone they could think of about the misinformation. Welcome to government, where record keeping is hard to keep up with, even if working at the speed of light.

Good to catch up with Betsey, one of Tara's "Quaker aunts".

Welcome to Portland, Colin.

I'm finally getting back in the saddle with FNB and the Multnomah Friends Meetinghouse.

SPD (sponsored)

2011-03-17T14:01:00.000-07:00

The above is what my friend Andrew Frank has been into, as a dedicated worker for the Infinia company. He swooped in from Kennewick that time, to show me innovations in pedagogy. He'd always been talented.

This week: the Sonnenfeld family came through, minus Candy and Teddy, but we included Candy vicariously (she'd grown up in Portland some) by going to the Crab Bowl (in name only, but a dear place nonetheless). Ergo, I didn't get to the well-attended Quantum Mechanics lecture at ISEPP, starring Julian and George, other friends (hello Allen Taylor... Jon Bunce). Dinner at the Portland Fish House was a better use of my time.

Today: SPD (St. Patrick's Day) is also when Dawn left our company, though not in spirit. I've been invited to a Labyrinth ceremony this evening. Tara is in debate camp (nat quals), while Alexia celebrates her eldest daughter relationship. My mom phoned me, to yak about death and taxes. She's using her Google phone, which she likes a lot.

Rick got to meet Alex. The Wittgenstein Study Group lives on. Before that: OMSI. We all road the simulator, which appears to substitute acceleration with motion, but can't really do the roller coaster willies the way a real roller coaster would. But then it's only $5.

Speaking of which, I'm reviewing the ways in which Bangladeshis are called "poor" in this excellent video by my good friend Glenn Baker. In light of The Economics of Happiness, I'd suggest that be revised. Bhutanese have a high living standard, because they're free and under the thumb of nary a superpower. Superpowers are sorrowful, cuz they suck. Mad Magazine never wuz one.

LW is off to FNB. Marian Rhys phoned to say she'd be there. I have no idea about Jezebel. When the Sonnenfelds were around, I made sure to play up the Google Earth reality of some of these structures, such as the Pauling House and Lew's rendition of the Stark Street meetinghouse.

I notice Trump is on the bandwagon of sickos already in questioning the president's credibility and veracity on the matter of his own place of birth. President Obama has done a fine job in my book: no kooky generals bombing Iran already, like ran amok in Iraq. LAWCAP's "spaz attacks" were /are killing our planet (hence the straitjacketing, continued auditing).

PPUG 2011.3.8

2011-03-10T13:40:00.000-08:00

I got good and winded running to the bus for this one, almost door-to-door. I'd forgotten where the door was though, which added time.

I barely had time to swig a beer and grab a piece of Fat Tuesday pastry at Urban Airship before the charming Michelle hassled me to grab a nametag.

My name was spelled backwards (ala Leonardo), leading one geek to joke about his mirror iPod app (for when you need to fix your lipstick or whatever).

The main talks were by Lindsey Smith regarding feedparser, "Shmichael" about PEPs 380 & 3152, Adam Lowry about some ingenious thread tracker he'd written, and Eric Holscher on a way he could track server activity with this nifty graphic web stuff he'd put together. These were definitely "makers", creative bar none.

Will I have time to propose an OS Bridge talk this year? I don't yet have the video clips I'm looking for. We're in a holding pattern, waiting for the dominant paradigm to admit it could use some stabilizing influences.

We went to Bailey's for the after-party again. As usual, I talked with the gmpy guy from Mentor Graphics, plus someone else who wanted to talk about OpenEMR, other open source medical records initiatives.

Remember: open source doesn't mean open data. You can have all the source code published and in the clear, and still be as tight as Fort Knox in what you do with it.

Some of us are going to Pycon this weekend. Not me though, gotta work and stop traveling for awhile. I'll miss the whiskey BOF. Jason Kirtland had some cool glasses made. One is depicted below.

War as Sport

2011-03-05T07:21:00.000-08:00

Our corporation meeting continues... Treasurer's report in progress. Friends really appreciate JimFletcher.

I've been reading some of the literature around Friends Center, reminding myself that many enjoy participating in outward wars, find meaning in it, and would feel lost without these kinds of challenges. War is addictive and many depend on it for their livelihoods, not just soldiers.

Friends engage in somewhat parallel activities in extolling the "Lamb's War" as something positive. This is an inward war, a jihad, waged with psychological instruments. Many enjoy this work and take sustenance from it.

Legitimizing large scale violence is a core function of many states and religions. The business of making war depends on inspiring ideologies, cheer leading, drumming up passions. The star "athletes" in this sport become anxious when no war seems to be looming. How will the next generation learn the ropes? The cigarette industry has a similar ongoing challenge: recruiting new smokers.

Fortunately for the violence-prone, the human condition remains dire, with resources distributed highly inequitably and injustice the norm. Betting on the war machine seems like a secure investment and many pensions depend on its thriving (or used to -- some have escaped the vortex to morally higher ground).

LAWCAP long ago figured out how to institutionalize weapons production across many congressional districts (CDs). Since WW2, the actual needs of professional militarists has taken a back seat to the economic needs of the war machine. Outward war is an economic necessity for this creature, regardless of consequences.

The proliferation of nuclear WMDs of little strategic or tactical value is symptomatic of this form of mental illness (the so-called "military industrial complex").

Yeah, these are somewhat cliche thoughts for a Quaker to be having, I admit. Decrying the "war machine" is an ancient literature by this time. If people really thought a better lifestyle were possible without it, that'd shift the balance perhaps, but such "utopianism" is routinely dismissed by the outward warmongers. Those with the "most toys" are given to believe that their living standards would plummet were there to be something called "world peace", a nasty and undesirable outcome by many accounts.

To really move beyond "outward war" (which'd require more effectively countering sociopathic behavior around the world), we'd need to go with something more like general systems theory (ala Kenneth Boulding) over traditional economics. We'd need to take a more Project Renaissance approach, wherein longing would trump fear.

Corporation Meeting

2011-03-04T08:11:00.000-08:00

:: AFSC Corporation Meeting ::

Quakers have this business-oriented vocabulary stretching back to the early days. They (we) actually have "Meeting for Worship for Business" which to skeptical ears could sound like we worship the almighty dollar or some cash cow (golden calf).

Are Quakers the moneychangers in the temple? At one time maybe. I had a recent thread with Ed Cherlin about all that, on mathfuture of all places.

So I'm at the annual meeting of "the corporation" i.e. the American Friends Service Committee. I'm at Friends Center, affectionately known as "the Quaker Vatican". My role is "Yearly Meeting Appointee". North Pacific Yearly Meeting being the region I'm representing, along with my peers.

Hugh Thomforde is here, whom I haven't seen since around 1970 in Rome. We used to go to his family home for Quaker meeting on Sundays. Great family! His dad worked for FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization).

Hugh, these days based in Arkansas, is savvy about fish farming, other things aquatic. Based on his experiences in the Philippines, he helped establish a pearl farming industry in the Cook Islands, working for USAID. That project had Cold War origins and at first encountered much skepticism as the "nuclei" needed to start pearls sounded too much like the "nuclei" associated with nearby nuclear testing by organized criminal syndicates (highly unpopular with the locals). We might call this a "name collision".

My mom (Carol Urner) is here too, flying in from Whittier, and Tom Head.

The clerk is using a Tibetan "singing bowl" to anchor her introductory talk. She's about to introduce our new General Secretary, Shan Cretin.

My work with AFSC in Portland was youth-focused. I helped launch a new chapter, as volunteer clerk, after my internship as contributing editor of Asian-Pacific Issues News, apprenticing under Paulette Wittwer.

AFSC has been influential on my thinking in that it tends to focus on various media campaigns which often go against the grain of contemporary popular opinion.

Quakers, especially our branch (so-called "unprogrammed"), are pretty tiny and esoteric. Getting anything done requires making strategic alliances, sometimes with unexpected collaborators. Somewhat in jest (and to raise eyebrows), I've been known to refer to the AFSC as "the Quakers' Machiavellian agency". If you know your history, that's somewhat apropos.

One focus of AFSC these days is the exploitation of workers, modern forms of slavery. We probably need to give up the popular conceit that slavery has been "abolished" (according to whom?). Many businesses are slave drivers and participate in human trafficking. Exploitation of the undocumented (so-called "illegals") is another way a broken and decrepit nation-state system has been corrupted to feed the rapacious maw of unethical moneymakers.

Remembering a Person

2011-02-12T03:23:00.000-08:00

Jim Person was the son of my grandma Esther's older brother, August.

Esther was my father Jack Urner's mother (Carl was his father). Margie was my grandmother on my mother Carol's side of the family, Tom Reilley her father.

Bill Lightfoot, Howard, Bo, Eddy and Eve, were grandma Esther's sister Elsie's kids. August was one of Esther, Elsie and Alice's brothers, along with Robert, Dick, Dud and Ernie (all Persons), and all Swedish settlers on Mercer Island.

Augie was an impressive human being by many accounts, a top Rotarian in his early 30s before he succumbed to pneumonia, and a radio man (repairs and operations) much in demand from Astoria to Portland. His widowed wife married Walt Tornblad and her young son Jim thereby gained his younger half brother Paul. They moved to Cherry Grove.

This was a memorial for the young son Jim, by now an old guy. His wife Martha Jane Person had died in May of 2009.

I was learning a lot of these details for the first time. I took some pictures of the literature available to the public. I wish I'd taken one of the preacher, a friendly giant and community servant.

Jim died peacefully in a way some of my relatives envy and seek to emulate.

Bill Hancock's dad was from nearby Glencoe (we were in Cornelius for the service). His wife Barbara is Harold's daughter, Harold (Dud). Harold Persons sisters were my grandma Esther, Elsie and Alice.

Elsie had many children, among them Bill Lightfoot, who picked me up at the house in his Aztec and drove me there and back. We adjourned to Back Stage for a beer afterwards.

Another Space Case

2011-02-09T21:29:00.000-08:00

Although I mess around with the professor archetype (senex etc.), I'm averse to falling into that trap of "absent minded". Averse or no, the laptop is probably in a good place, but I won't be sure until tomorrow, so movie night didn't happen. Long story.

Hey, I've been thinking about how to translate "samsara", am aiming to consult with Satya on this. This has probably been thought of, but I'm thinking "sorrow" as in "river of sorrow". But then, for me, there are connotations, like with Krishnamurti saying as much. Hi Nick and Quinn.

In rough translations, there might be some attempt to link samsara to Hades or even hell as an afterlife, but that's to miss it's one's life today. This is also our world of joys (nirvana).

We'd have these philosophical discussions while in the Kia sometimes, Urners, Dawn Wicca, Tara, our tribe. Julie had been to Grahamstown as well. We took the scenic route back to Cape Town.

One could also call it one's "time tunnel" which has the look and feel of a "world line" (but with thickness). The "partially overlapping scenarios" idea was a remark about shared grammar, one might say, whether one uses this remote (esoteric) vocabulary or some other.

We had Thai food, per plan. Only then did I discover I'd probably set her down, movie still in the drive. I'm back to "absent minded" and how it haunts me. Part of the human condition I realize. Something about P.D. Ouspensky. Hi Gary.

Academia should have no problem with "dharma talks" as a genre, whether these be about genomics, neuro-science, other hybrid subjects (as if we were somehow done with alchemy).

Lining up polyhedrons and "the elements" may seem like a strange thing to do, yet we should acknowledge that this was done. Tracing the history of a meme game doesn't require making it one's own, though one may, on occasion. I covered some of this during Martian Math, using the free Web to omni-triangulate.

I'm drifting in and out of a Python theme. It's become a kind of calligraphy for me, simple, spare programs for STEM teachers. I'm seeing our bridge again, twixt natural numbers, partial sums, partial sums of those sums.

Hey, at PPUG last night I was yakking with the gmpy guy again (picking up from work by Alex Martelli). He said arbitrary precision complex numbers are on the way. It's not like they've not been implemented in other libraries. Bringing them into Python is what he's working on doing.

My movie-goers were kind and empathized with my loss, did not begrudge me the missing movie. The disk is Bob Smith's though. Fingers crossed I get it back.

Thinking about relatives and friends in different chapters, moving round the karmic wheel. Jim Person recently passed away. The aging process is inevitable. The impulse to plan for a better world remains though, an indication that we're drawn forward, not just impelled from behind (fear vs. longing: pursued vs. drawn towards).

Tell the Truth and Run (movie review)

2011-02-06T23:09:00.000-08:00

My thanks to Marian Rhys and Bob Smith of Multnomah Friends for bringing this enlightening documentary to my attention.

I served as projectionist at the meetinghouse tonight, sharing it with a tiny elite, including Sonya Pinney and Harriet Holling, our elder stalwarts and a source of memories going way back. Their kids were my contemporaries (hello to Sonya's Eric, Lael, Heather and to Harriet's Alice and Linda).

The movie: Tell the Truth and Run, a biography of George Seldes (1996).

His brother, Gilbert, was the well-connected arts and letters guy, friend of Picasso and James Joyce, who took over The Dial from Bucky's great aunt Margaret (with a few owners and editors in between). These brothers had grown up in a Jewish intentional community known as The Alliance, losing their mother early to TB, and strongly influenced by their dad's engagement with world affairs and uncompromising intellect.

George was on the right side of history in so many ways. When this documentary was made, people had the benefit of more hindsight and were happy enough to pile on honors and accolades. He lived to be 104.

In the actual battle for a freer press, he was the quintessential "muckraker" in the most positive sense, taking on the unholy alliance between advertisers, publishers, and what news that's fit to print (nothing that might hurt owner/sponsor profits, if at all possible).

He challenged journalists to live up to their own ethics (if they had any).

What were his radical positions that branded him a muckraker?

He refused to suck up to El Duce (Mussolini) when so many were doing just that, on both sides of the Atlantic. He was in Rome at the time, as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, and he was eventually evicted, and might have been dragged off the train to Paris and killed had it not been for some British officers giving him cover in a hastily arranged ploy.

After WW1 he went behind enemy lines and learned the average Germans were not the despicable people ("huns") he had helped dehumanize as a war correspondent. War itself was the enemy. General Pershing would not let him publish about the horrors of war. War correspondents enlisted in the Army were there to build morale, not question the dominant paradigm.

He well understood that the Spanish Civil War was a dress rehearsal for Fascism versus democracies.

He reported accurately on the approach of WW2, seeing the militarization of youngsters as the unmistakable harbinger of what was to come. He already knew the fascist psychology pretty intimately and recognized its features in his homeland as well as overseas.

After WW2 he fought big tobacco companies and their huge propaganda machine. Americans were (and are) easy targets for addictive drug pushers and their spurious health claims ("more doctors smoke Camels"), plus consumers wanted to believe their American dream, not explore its dark side or wake up in some "matrix".

Lets remember that readers / viewers are often complicit, in insisting the media reinforce their world views. It's not just the moneyed who shape media campaigns. There's an unspoken social contract whereby the moneyed end up paying for what the "me tooers" ardently hope might be a sustainable model of reality. Given sufficient commitment and education, this might prove a more viable model down the road.

George made a career of fighting corruption, conflicts of interest, hypocrisy, and made a lot of enemies in the process.

After quitting the Chicago Tribune (too much corruption), he and his wife retreated to Vermont and set up their own four page weekly called In Fact, which developed quite a following. It reported on stories no one else would touch (such as the links between cigarette smoking and lung cancer). FAIR was in some ways a successor.

By the time we get to the McCarthy Period, he's one of those vilified as a Red, along with Albert Einstein, Aaron Copeland, Edward Murrow and other "subversives". Stoking public fears against dissenters, using the "Commie" memeplex, was a convenient, if cowardly, ploy. People were afraid to subscribe to In Fact lest their names show up on some FBI watch list, and the journal went out of business in 1950.

George Seldes was in many ways a meta-journalist in that he discussed the business of journalism and the editorial process. Many of his readers were themselves professional journalists.

Having seen how newspapers sell themselves from this angle, it's harder to rush to their defense in this age of the Internet. What if If Fact had been an on-line publication? We've gotten to the point where money is less a factor than having facts that cross-check. This is potentially good news for democracies.

States in Flux

2011-01-29T13:54:00.001-08:00

Grunch of Giants (by Bucky) is in part about a contrivance known as "the corporation", an on-paper invention in legal fiction that defends the shareholders against losses beyond their original investments. If the ship goes down, only your share goes with it, not your entire estate.

Nation states, on the other hand, were deemed less "flash in the pan" (less here today, gone tomorrow) so securing debt against them might be a better proposition in the long term. Many a bank specializes in loans to sovereign nations.

As of the 1980s, the flim-flam was becoming more obvious, as the press for financial mechanisms to sustain a weapons buildup was pushed forward. Dragging Uncle Sam under was a part of the plan. He was the addict, war was the drug.

Fast forward to 2011, and we find the English schoolboy reality of "nation states" still failing to fit the facts on the ground. High ideals continue to wrap themselves in the claptrap of statehood however, whether these states be virtual or even fictional. Theme parks abound, Burma's among them, a sacred space.

Egypt's is a great civilization, as is Israel's, yet they permeate the globe by this time. Localizing to shrines, sacred sites, tourist attractions, continues to make sense. Carving the world into some jigsaw puzzle, ever changing, makes ever less sense.

An ethnicity needs airstrips and dots on the map (campus footprints) but vast contiguous tracts, in the shape of nations? We share a commons, that much is obvious. Resource managers have important responsibilities.

Count me a skeptic where schoolboy politics is concerned. Too much emphasis on "boy scout math" had gotten us into this pickle. Our Promised Land is not as much a "house divided" as the nationalists presume. Our New Atlantis is nothing other than the Global U itself, our Novus Ordo Seclorum.

Ecosystems pay no heed to political districting.

I'm all for zip codes however, as a way to deliver and assess demographics. I respect Bhutan's Dzongkhags, and Switzerland's cantons. We still need organs for local administration, systems for delivering mail and/or goods.

bizmotica, good bye party

HNY (Rabbit)

2011-01-26T15:09:00.001-08:00

They're looking into Nick's case pretty deeply at the hospital. He's receiving the same standard of care they'd give to anyone with his medical condition. Lots of friends coming by.

It's almost Chinese New Year and the hospital is decorated accordingly.

Snakes Alive!

2011-01-24T08:56:00.001-08:00

Next Frame

2011-01-09T19:01:00.000-08:00

Nick appears better. We chatted about a wide range of topics today. He didn't see why Internet access should even be an issue in this day and age. Why do we settle for the problems we nurse along, specialize in not solving? I'd been whining about my failing laptop, which shut down during social hour at the meetinghouse today. I need to try rescuing some pictures at least. I'll grab everything I can get.

We're convening a first board meeting, in recent memory (I'm fairly new to this gig), to brainstorm more about the future of ISEPP. I was exulting this evening about how Terry had managed to pull off the most stellar and illustrious lecture series in the history of the planet to date. Jet airplanes were only recently invented after all, and a lecture series isn't quite the same thing as a circus, though such analogies are inevitable. Stephan J. Gould, Jane Goodall, Stephan Hawking, Carl Sagan, Sir Roger Penrose, Susan Haack... James Burke.

Yes, the OMSI pubs are way cool, as are the TED Talks. We'd wanted to do more with streaming video. The right people never came out of the woodwork I guess. We do have an inventory of some interesting tapes.

Tara secured top awards, best speaker, top debater, at the Pacific University meetup this weekend (an overbooked two day event that ended up going seven rounds).

I slogged through multi-hour Quaker business meetings in the meantime, made endurable by the people in them. I'm of course proud of Tara, as are the Friends. I was bragging to mom on the cell today (as well as listing my woes).

Portland has done some really stellar service, and our achievements should be more celebrated. I'm not sure the new sitcom is helping (I've yet to see it). Of course I've been indulging in such boosterism for years.

Perhaps I'm fighting a deeply ingrained inferiority complex? Having lived in many cities around the world, I think Portland deserves to capitalize on its successes, yet one of the memes is we're too lazy to amount to much.

Synergeo is just a Punch 'n Judy show these days. Why try to keep it serious when there's no hope of doing so. Yet there's content to work in. I'm being the dedicated scholar, scrounging up those passages from Synergetics like I always do, trying to prove to the world that our agenda wasn't all that off target. Listen to Portland for a change? Not that we're all into esoterica to that degree. My brand of geekery is one of many on tap.

I'd think a supranational looking for positive PR would be salivating for a slice of Portland pie. I've already stuffed these blogs with enough science fiction to put my preferred future on the map. Others have their own storyboards, which they're free to be up front about.

Return to ICU

2011-01-07T22:38:00.000-08:00

I got a cell call from Gideon this morning that Dr. Consoletti was truly ill, and going by train to Portland. My instructions were to get him to the ER right away, and that I did. He's getting good quality professional care from Providence, one of the best hospitals around.

Quinn, a Chinese medicine teacher, was on the phone with the ER doc (Dr. Goldstein), and later met with him in person. No one was in disagreement. The question to Nick was whether he was willing to fight for his life with them. He's greatly in need of some sleep, but ICU is more about keeping people conscious, at least under these conditions. I'm not a medical doctor and spent much of the time eying the computer equipment, judging their aesthetics. Pretty functional. Getting more compact.

Nick has been hitch hiking for longer than most people in this galaxy. He's been given rides by Carlos Santana, Gregory Bateson, Jerry Garcia, even Krishnamurti. He worked with Ervin Laszlo's Club of Budapest as in intern with The Union "without walls" Institute and attended Schumacher College in England (David Bohm was supposed to be teaching that semester, but his health was failing -- Nick did his thesis on "Bohmian Dialog" which emerged from meetings between David Bohm and Kirshnamurti). He's wandered Europe as a busker, playing the dulcimer and other instruments. He's a scholar and a gentleman and well known to friends of Bucky Fuller.

Quinn likened him to Forrest Gump as we talked later at American Dream Pizza. I went back to say g'night. Quinn will visit first thing in the morning, me later.

Tara, away at a debate tournament, made finals (she usually does, as one of Oregon's finest debaters, objectively speaking).

I've been working on a design pattern I call Combing Medusa's Hair that I could use some more help with. Medusa is a reference to an old asynchronous listener, a precursor of Twisted (these are Python language resources). The hair-like threads represent many spawned processes. This is for COM objects inside a working model truck dispatcher, mostly implemented in VFP.

I'll have more to include about Nick and his adventures as events unfold. I ask you to hold him in the light. It's touch and go for the guy.

I've notified several key Wanderers (Nick is one, if anyone is) and left voice mail for Gideon with an update. I need to contact Johnny Stallings. Quinn is also spreading the word.

Nick has enriched my life with many lasting and nurturing relationships.

Looking Back on 2010

2010-12-31T20:33:00.001-08:00

Wanderers 2010.12.29

2010-12-29T09:22:00.000-08:00

I came to the Linus Pauling Center all hot to trot about this new "weapons inspector" major. The feedback I've been getting ranges from "too narrow" to "too broad", as one would inspect in such academic discussions. The idea of hosting facilities in the Philippines is sparking interest among Japanese sources. Could a consortium of universities look at Okinawa too? MIT?

Glenn and Steve are hold forth on their gemology studies. Glenn is a hard worker and makes stuff. His turquoise may take about three hours to buff. Now they're talking about welding. Jeff and Bill have done this with electronics a lot. Jon Bunce is here as well, the musician. He's the coffee beans keeper, one of the few official roles we've designed into this institution (Wanderers).

We've had a suggestion from "off camera" (from someone not here, using the Internet) to watch a particular TED talk, dunno if we'll get to it. Glenn is back with some welded jewelry, other finery. We're moved to a discussion of taboos, inter-breeding, and hemophilia within the British royal family (Queen Victoria a carrier).

I'm more in the "too narrow" camp (re weapons inspector PhD). The environmental sciences department is seeing the need for sensors, lots of IP numbers, DNS coverage of hydrofracture sites, hundreds of thousands of "bubble villages" (the cleanup crews). Radio-toxins such as crews grapple with at Hanford need not be the sole focus of a given Global U student. Deploying sensors, taking readings, designing visualizations, is simply GIS in action and applies equally to theme park planning (like a roller coaster theme park, Six Flags near LA for example, a First Person Physics project, open to physics majors). When you transfer to the bubbles around Subic Bay, you may or may not have Johnston Atoll on your "to visit" list (maybe you just came from there?). Routing through the Manas Transit Center? You may or may not be in field dress.

What am I reading these days? Lots of stuff, but this one hardcover in particular is worth yakking about. I passed it around the table. The first chapter is about a group not unlike Heaven's Gate in some ways, of Hale-Bopp fame. "They got the wrong Applewhite" quipped Ed on the phone, me at Russ & Deb's for the PNW Synergetics Confab (with other confabs since). Here's the book: Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America by Alex Heard (W.W. Norton Company, 1999). The Unarians weren't into abducting themselves in quite that way.

We're immersed in dinosaur imagery here, literally. Craigmore Creations operates in many of the chambers throughout this Center, turning out quality graphic novels about science, mostly set in the geological (prehistorical) past. Although human observers may be present, which gets a plot line going, you need some pseudo-science to get them there (a time machine perhaps, like in Idiocracy). Per Dr. Fuller (recent meeting), Karplus invented Mr. O, a little observer character with one palm painted (to define left-right orientation), the Observer (or "first person") of any physical vista.

Bill found us this amazing video stream, very fractal. Sharing links is part of the "groupthink" (usually a "bad word", right up there with "hive mind"). For example, David Tver has a text sample in image format, in a language as yet unrecognized, discovered in a Genizah in Cairo. Pat was off to see her friend Kitty, age 98.

Jeff is showing me Pivotal Tracker, which we can use for our storyboard planning (he's already using it at work). I could invite faculty from New Mexico Tech to join me here vs. using Facebook or one of those. Bill: what's atan2? (used in the "3D Mandelbrot" he's studying). We found it on Wikipedia.

Mir

2010-12-25T09:01:00.000-08:00

Rock On Portland

2010-12-18T14:52:00.000-08:00

Typos fixed, links added.

--- In Synergeo "coyote_starship" wrote:

> Another meme that makes the rounds is that "conspiracies are bad" i.e.
> you'd never want to throw a surprise party, or be in league with some
> friends and work to steer the company in a positive direction. No,
> those'd be collegial networks among peers, whereas a "conspiracy" is
> by definition nefarious. This FBI guy doesn't seem to have much
> immunity to the "conspiracies are bad" meme.
>

This is where I'd go back to the memeplex I was hammering on with an influential McLuhanite (newmedia) with Church of Bob connections. Synergetics Dictionary -> M -> Marshall McLuhan gives us a scene wherein Marshall shows up on Bucky's radar going "I've read your books, and I want to join your conspiracy". Said in a cheerful, affable style no doubt, with a tinge of mischief.

The word "conspiracy", meaning "to breathe with", also has that "piracy" meme embedded (there it is, right in the spelling -- aren't memes fun? not unlike numerology, a sub-branch of memetics). Pirates conspire. Or Pyrates.

Now here in Portland, we like Pirates, think they're cool, might dress and talk like pirates on some days. So we might like conspiracies too then? Let's say we do.

A radical bookstore like Laughing Horse is where people are likely to know a lot about the various conspiracy theories ("911 inside job" is a bevy of theories, not just one). They're like librarians, or at least the more experienced ones are. More like Giles or the female equivalent in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Portland as a city is quite well read, with some enormous famous bookstores (Powell's especially, but others too) and a really excellent library system (the on-line stuff works). So it stands to reason that Portland, even without a Library of Congress, is able to serve as a decent intelligence gathering headquarters.

Our analysts are nothing to sneeze at.

Kirby

Santa's Elves (movie preview)

2010-12-17T17:04:00.000-08:00

This one is about North Americans gleefully making bombs, designing new kinds of horrors, with many of them professing some kind of twisted "religulosity" to justify their livelihoods.

Disturbing. Reminders of Why We Fight.

Keeping most of it a cartoon is a cute touch, as an offset to the grim realities.

I can see where the Elves wouldn't want to tarnish their good image (Lord of the Rings was too kind), and their morale is Santa's concern.

Will it come out in 3D?

Hanukkah 2010

2010-12-12T14:10:00.000-08:00

We're getting closer to Judaism in making Hanukkah our December event after Thanksgiving.

We used to throw a big Solstice Party.

Dawn didn't proclaim herself Christian, though she was cleared as a Quaker, was a member of the Religious Society of Friends through Multnomah Meeting.

We enjoy schmoozing with those doing the tree thing in their living rooms, even if we don't do one ourselves. More ornaments should be polyhedrons. A virtual tree would do (on the LCD). The scene would keep changing. A reverie.

I'm somewhat predatory, though appropriately diplomatic when it comes to nuts, eggnog, other winter cheer. I got a ride in a Cadillac today, to the supermarket. Our kitchen was somewhat bare again. Last night I tried boiling vegetables, including some greens and marinated tofu. Not half bad. But I do like a box of Coca Krispies now and then, and lots of coffee.

The hanukkah gifts were generous. Soaps and chocolate, socks, stuff we really do use.

I grabbed an Advent Calendar out of the garage awhile back, a wooden one that Dawn hoped we'd use -- she was raised Catholic and recognized the power of rituals. I set it atop the upright piano, a gift from the Braithwaite family years ago.

This time of year, I tend to truck out my "Fourth King" myth, but I haven't thought of anything new to add. Maybe others will take it on (they weren't Christians either, those kings -- no one was back then).

Speaking of Christmas, Sam Lanahan his been like Santa Claus lately, mailing out his beautiful book to a long list of people (Dave Koski was pleased to find his, under a pile of snow on his doorstep, in the midst of a blizzard).

Sam is also giving away free samples of the prototype materials. Customers need only pay shipping.

FNB was also distributing some hanukkah "geld" (chocolate money) thanks to Satya. He offered the bag to me but we agreed it was for younger children than mine.

Office Work

2010-12-10T18:55:00.001-08:00

As I was complaining to Patrick:

Today I'm regretting not taking you up on some summer time offer to pour trailer park slop on my upper deck, which needs a new sealant. I just went up and relaid the tarp, in the faint hope that'll help. The ceiling in my office, in the meantime, is cracking along seams (latex paint layer). The electrical tape solution was ugly and pointless (the glue melts when damp). This surgical tape solution, porous to let the blood through, might be just the ticket for now...

The bookkeeper's computer is rebooting at will. I took it outside for a dusting, but there may be deeper damage. It reboots even from within BIOS. Maybe a hard disk transplant into another skeleton computer would solve the problem. I'd have to dig one up somewhere. That's also the network printer controller...

My equipment is out of date, as is my domicile more generally (1905). In some experimental prototype community of tomorrow, a leading buckaneer wouldn't be some Wall-e in a junkyard, all intelligent life on vacation (Orlando?).

I'm glad mom is doing OK in average 70 degree weather (Whittier). Tara was gung ho to hit the debate circuit again this weekend, but her team (and coach) need their rest.

I'd gladly upgrade the Blue House to meet Global U codes (and help define them), but that'd require some planning and organization, both of which are in short supply in this day and age, at least where radical math teaching is concerned.

Walker took off after dark for a remote tool shop on the outskirts of town. Why do everything nocturnally? My senses reel.

The Dead Mathematicians Society (DMS) has been suggesting I give a talk. I just submitted a proposal.

My attempt to do multi-threaded COM was successful, but the code is quite "mickey mouse" as my scuba instructor Gill Gilleland was wont to say -- exMarine, professional recovery diver.

Mark Hammond himself dropped by on comp.lang.python on response to my query, wow.

I made some baby steps forward with OST as well.

Writing to Nirel:

As individuals we're brilliant. As teams working together, you'd think we could do more. Anyway, that's how it seems tonight -- thinking about teams.

Choosing a Flavor

2010-12-08T23:10:00.001-08:00

The next generation of forms handling is XForms, another W3 standard.

I've been experimenting with ODK Build, which allows one to build phone-ready forms for the Android.

The "ice cream factory in Havana" might be one of the simulations, keying off Senator Leahy's remarks about getting a Ben & Jerry's in Cuba, in a manner consistent with zoning and city ordinances.

Facebook Excerpts

2010-12-07T18:24:00.001-08:00

Olive Branch

2010-11-29T13:22:00.000-08:00

featured artist: Mario Marín

I held out an olive branch to the functional programmers today. They've been registering their distaste for what some have called the "object oriented paradigm" (OOP), saying it's not really a "paradigm".

That might be true. Or if it is a paradigm, it's a very old one, embedded in natural language. Animals have behaviors signified by verbs. Animals, signified by nouns, inherit characteristics (adjectives, properties) from their ancestors. What's new about that? Nothing.

What's proved a lasting innovation was the notation, and that notation is "dot notation" (DN).

So instead of writing "object oriented notation" in place of "object oriented paradigm", I merely substitute "dot notation", with the caveat that some OO languages don't actually use it (which is fine, diversity rocks).

Conversations about Bizmos

2010-11-26T22:04:00.000-08:00

Friends and relatives know I've had this idea for a long time, of roving vehicles that aren't just recreational, get work done.

We already have lots of utility vehicles on the road, including some that provide health care.

This trip north have provided some more opportunities to discuss the idea. I just filed another brain dump to Synergeo on the topic.

I've got a lot of interesting science fiction going, way better than most IMO, in the sense of realizable. So much dilly-dallying goes on. Where's the beef?

Yakking with Patrick

2010-11-22T10:06:00.000-08:00

Sir Patrick was by yesterday evening, one of our resident geniuses (97214: the zip code of geniuses in the city that works).

Dr. Nick came in later, and we screened A Necessary Ruin against the classroom wall (same arrangement I'm using to teach Python).

We also talked about girl scout math, which LW is pioneering -- a kind of bridge between Supermarket Math and Neolithic Math per my Heuristics for Teachers. One needs to shop wisely, meaning a lot of homework goes into the BE phase (GST). One simulates, plays "what if" in one's head. Then you jump out of a helicopter or whatever (perhaps as a rescuer, perhaps as an occupier, perhaps as a company shill... many language games might apply).

I also shared this little cartoon that's good for learning Wittgenstein's philosophy. I used it in my last Python class as well, given the nominalist (name -> object) model it well illustrates, antithetical to pragmatic operationalism but in an edifying way.

Given Barton's connections to Hollywood, I'm always left thinking about documentaries when he leaves. There's a lot of retarded slowness in getting those S3 cartoons imported. We're coming up on another NFL that'll just show off how "left behind" is the Lower 48, or so I'm anticipating. The USA is now the basket case of the world, refusing to upgrade, putting future shock off onto everyone else. That's a theme of Idiocracy and deserves to be played up.

Blaming King Obama for not waving his magic wand fast enough might give rise to a Harry Potter for president movement. Lets watch for tell tale signs of that happening. Without proper civics training in the schools, USAers fall back on monarchy and the claptrap of the Ivory Tower and its royal societies. We're back to courtly models, socialites buzzing around a throne. The socialism of the celebrity class, bejeweled and tawdry, is just more Lord of the Flies.

I'm no Anglophobe ala LaRouche, but then I'm not into kowtowing to Hogwarts when it comes to ethics, faith and practice. That's one school among many. We've got better witches, and more "right stuff" free software, a better meme pool overall.

Walking with Nick

2010-11-18T15:46:00.000-08:00

I joined Dr. Consoletti for a saunter to 17th and Hawthorne, site of the Barley Mill (a Grateful Dead capital) where we dined on tater tots, coffee and beer. This was a chance to catch up, reminisce, compare notes. Nick knows a lot, has been around the town a few times. I value his information, much of which is in the category of "news" i.e. I knew nothing about it. I'm far from omniscient, lets make that clear.

Now I'm back at the meetinghouse, juggling logistics. It's a crazy wet day and I forgot my bike lock again (Lindsey brought it). My flashlight is underpowered. I'm not appropriately equipped. Call out the National Guard right? When the absent minded professor decides he does wanna be president (thinking of Albert again), stand back everyone, maybe lend an umbrella.

I went back to my yak of the morning, which is that (a) an aphoristic style ala both Nietzsche and Norman O. Brown is apropos and (b) it's more up to self-professed humanities experts to grapple with Synergetics. Leaving it to physicists and mathematicians is quite the opposite of stepping up to the plate. You've got your philosophy of mathematics if you need to blend into the woodwork on occasion. Wittgenstein's stuff is almost custom made, for talking about cubing versus not-cubing, where 3rd powering is concerned.

That's something to look at between your readings of Emerson and Thoreau, maybe Logicomix. Don't push it off on those "engineers" you need to vilify. This is common heritage, a contribution to the vernacular, obtuse as it may seem.

We talked about Bonnie DeVarco, at Bioneers (way overpriced for depressing times, Nick thought), in the early days of BFI's founding. We share a number of names in common. You could call that a "namespace" if so inclined.

Yes, I heard about the Medal of Freedom. Sounds like there's more of a story there than most people know to tell. How might we encourage future curriculum writers to delve more deeply?

We also talked about the Coffee Shops Network, a way to get faster geometry to the public without needing a visa from the gulag. Sit sipping your espresso, and see some of those memes you might have encountered in prose. Maybe you've been a loyal reader of these blogs? If so, you'll probably know it when you see it.

I'm drenched and there's no one here (here's Justin). I should get to work, washing those pots and pans.

Visiting Speaker

2010-11-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

Kathy Bergen has a long history working in that area of the planet commonly associated with stories in the Bible, Koran, Torah. She's been with AFSC and now helps out with other Quaker assets in the region. The prophetic or "book" religions, as some call them, each have many denominations or branches, all of which want floorspace in this intensively trafficked region. Lots of tourists coming through, along with pilgrims, airline pilots, people with hidden agendas, as well as open ones.

We learned about Ramallah and the water situation. There's running water only a few days a week. Makes me wonder what Philadelphia Inquirer was crowing about, saying that city was doing well, but then I didn't see the article (just heard it reported on). The nearby gated community suburbs are like these Neocon flats, where people live more like squanderous Portlanders in their opulent palaces (water 24/7), shopping at New Seasons and driving around in their Priuses, feeling proud to be so green.

Not that I'm against running water 24/7 mind you. I'd like that for Ramallah too, but do engineers have the competence? Getting "smart grids" to actually be smart, requires intelligent consumers, not mindless ones. Software can't do everything.

Waste and inefficiency is a problem all over. Introducing some realistic simulations as games one might enjoy playing, is a time-tested way to develop skills.

They say religion has something to do with all this, but I'm not sure what exactly (so many conflicting stories). Those "book people" never made a whole lot of sense to me, even though I'm one of 'em. Been there done that etc.

Jesus was definitely a great Bodhisattva, I think many Asians would agree. Let's see how much "Peace on Earth" rhetoric we get this time through Santa's tunnel, how much "Good Will to all Men" that's not hollow. Or has Christianity finally gone belly up? Maybe Quakers got out just in time? Jesus was Jewish, a great rabbi.

When I was in Ramallah in the 1970s, you could still be an Arabic-speaking local with family going way back, and get permission to use dynamite from the authorities. There's lots of rock in that area and building just about anything requires blasting and pneumatic drills. The attitude was relatively laid back. By most measures, the world IQ has been plummeting since the 1970s, at least in some subcultures.

The distopian hell hole this region has become for so many does not reflect well on the programming, a point Bishop Tutu was making at the University of Portland the other day. It's hard to be proudly a Christian, and besides, there are many preachings against vanity. Wasn't it Sir Francis Bacon who wrote: "life is a tale told by an idiot?" Idiocracy R Us right? They oughta do more on South Park.

Kathy showed lots of interesting slides and the event was well attended, at least by oldsters such as myself. Younger people tend to read more manga (comics) and are maybe not as infatuated with this part of the world, hard to say.

Geographic literacy is down across the board. You'd think with Google Earth and all... but then many schools aren't using that, because it's new, and schools don't do "new" -- too busy letting adults relive their childhoods, which keeps them kinda retro.

They say the second half of life is all about nostalgia for the first half. The future is something we back into inadvertently, as we make other plans.

Some schools are maybe not as like that, teach more "listening to Abba" (however translated), i.e. "attending to Spirit" (as some Quakers say). One might hope.

Carnival Bizmos

2010-11-06T06:56:00.000-07:00

More petro-fueled truck-based than van-based, but we're open minded around here. My thanks to Ovo for referring me to PinkTentacle.

GOSCON 2010

2010-11-04T22:39:00.000-07:00

:: GOSCON @ The Nines (PDX) ::

Accounting for Time

2010-11-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

I'm lurking on the ChiPy list, the Python group based in Chicago. They're talking about producing boss-friendly reports that account for time spent, hour by hour, or even more fine grained.

In trying to jump start a more literate mathematics, more informed by philosophy, I've been flitting about, conversing with characters. Asynchronous meetings. Who else is doing it, and does it need to be done?

What is mathematical literacy?
What about the C.P. Snow chasm?
How do words mean?
Girl Scout Math

Hey, wonderful I'm able to write so much, which also entails reading. There's a sense of urgency though, which may be unfortunate given how back burner is Urner. I keep hoping for Project Renaissance to take off, or something similar.

I recommended Obama's Wars to Steve, suggesting clues to decode, such as WTF, some stuff about torture. He's off to new adventures, following a busy schedule. I hope to hold the fort for Holden Web's new Portland office.

Hillary came by today just as Lindsey was sorting her bike trailer full of organic vegetables, doing Get Out the Vote. I gave her my secret ballot to deposit on my behalf. Good timing.

I voted with Native Americans on the casino issue (no). I'd still like to see those new kinds of games though, where you build an on-line portfolio reflecting your commitments and values. The USG could develop and test some open source prototypes to seed the market, in collaboration with various non-governmental entities.

I wrote more about simulation and recruiting games on Halloween. Go fish?

Your friend in the Silicon Forest.

BarCamp 4

2010-10-24T16:33:00.000-07:00

:: barcamp 4 @ eliot center ::

I woke up with the sense of gentle tendrils pulling me downtown. I'd need to go on my bicycle, in the rain, to keep it a pure experience. I blundered about the house, scarcely believing I was going to an event I'd only just tuned in the night before. What better time though? Better than staying home and being sick.

The registrars and Eliot Center management were most gracious in allowing me to wheel the bicycle into an unused classroom. I'd forgotten my keys at the house, so couldn't lock it to a post. Bicycles do get stolen around here.

Not everyone is interested in stratifying by age, drawing attention to the obvious demographic pyramid, with a broad base of young geeks in their 20s and 30s, with a dwindling number towards the peak. Ward Cunningham wanted to explicitly address the span of generations and have us interact cross-generationally. We were "young" if we considered HTML a first language, "old" if we'd ever programmed an Apple 2e.

A lot of us were a lot older than that. When we got a show of hands as to who'd ever used punch cards, not only did several go up (including mine), but a gent in the corner actually produced one, passed it around for show & tell purposes. For the most part, Ward got us to sit facing one another in two groups, the so-called old and the so-called young. Some oldsters preferred to mingle with the more youthful however, but no one really cared.

Keith Lofstram's ServerSky talk has progressed since I first tuned it in at Wanderers (at the Pauling House). He imagines relieving Earthian power grids from needing to fuel data centers, by moving this capability into orbit. His brand of science fiction features solar panels thinner than paper and steerable by light pressure alone. He's pretty "out there" and BarCamp is the perfect place for such speculation. Just working through some numbers on power demands, energy sources, in big picture terms, is plenty edifying. The basic thermodynamics of the solar system come across as more intelligible if cast in terms of a long term story wherein humanity plays a role.

On my lunch break I headed over to the library and read some collected essays by Richard Stallman. If there's an elder statesman for Geek Nation, he'd be the guy. Without free software and a willingness to question the ethics of those who make helping one's neighbor illegal, we would have no assets to boast of.

After lunch, I sat in on a discussion of Haiku, a reincarnation of BeOS. Is it going anywhere. Having diverse operating systems represents a well spring of ideas and feeds those hungry to do original, ground-breaking work.

The workshop on Brain Meds was interesting, mostly a litany of warnings to just stay away from most modern "crazy meds", especially the anti-psychotics. However, the discussion was nuanced and delved into related medical topics such as sexual dysfunctions, insurance, generic versus brand name. The two girls leading the talk had medical diagnoses that were covered by insurance. One researches and writes for a blog on this very topic.

Free beer followed, courtesy of Widmer.

Did you know that generics can be plus or minus 20% the dosage of a name brand and that's OK with the FDA? The advice was to stick with a known manufacturer, once you found a right dosage, or you could be in for a nasty surprise when switched by insurance to a supposed equivalent.

I was glad to see geeks taking responsibility for sharing about such personal matters in a frank, no nonsense style. Most television and politicians are relatively gutless. There might have been some extra nervousness in the room as a result of taking on these topics, however Portland BarCamps are nothing if not experimental and cutting edge.

Igal's Train Porn was one of the most interesting. I'd been fascinated by trains as a kid. Dad and I had an HO scale train set when I was still in the single digits. I'd also had the good fortune to ride many a funicular and even a few cog railways in Europe. North America has fewer of these. I'd never seen that wild 1950s way people got to Timberline Lodge before the newer highway was built. A bus suspended from tension lines and using its on-board power to "fly" over the snow, ascending 2100 feet in 10 minutes.

Speaking of the Pauling House (where Wanderers meet), my science fiction about bringing it into the Unilever fold have so far proved unsuccessful, were never on Terry's radar to begin with I don't think. Besides, what would an Anglo-Dutch conglomerate want with such an asset? The company is already holding other property just a few blocks away, so why be redundant?

Which reminds me... one of the young geeks had a "Silicon Forest" tag on his BarCamp badge. He spoke knowledgeably of the history, shared the lore. He knew quite a bit about Doug Strain, but hadn't connected him to Linus Pauling. I filled in some of those details for him.

I also met another rad math teacher type, Tom Henderson, espousing Punk Mathematics. Perhaps we'll collaborate as time goes by (as the world turns). InshaAllah.

Art of Note

2010-10-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

from Chapter 5, Flextegrity on-line

Genki Sudo - World Order のパフォーマンスユニット - 須藤元気

From my meeting with Ovo

Listening to Women

2010-10-17T19:55:00.000-07:00

Women do seem to have the role of suggesting the wiser course, with more thought for the future.

Sure, that's a generalization. I'm thinking of Belau (bet you weren't) and the Compact of Free Association. The women hoped the men would stand by their Nuclear Free Zone position (this was a small tropical island nation, expressing defiance and a fond hope for a nuclear free world).

Through several plebiscites, the men did, before they caved. Or at least that's one way of telling it. Roll the tape forward and Valerie Plame Wilson becomes the new voice of sanity, urging the men to reduce their nuclear arsenals to zero.

Not that much has changed, beyond the names and the places...

In that spirit, of listening to the women for a change, I was privileged to join my mother and a large crowd of well wishers to celebrate the life of Pat Hollingsworth. She'd stayed the course, fighting for women's rights and the abolition of nuclear weapons.

I was pleased that her family encouraged us to toast her memory with Jack Daniels. The Quaker Meeting had suggested alcohol would be inappropriate (not my policy) but we had too many people for that venue anyway. Hoffman Hall is much bigger.

Pat was a superb pottery maker (among other talents) and her estate was giving away numerous pieces. Mom selected a handsome mug.

Yvonne brought her dog and sang songs, taught us a game ("conkers") from her childhood. Another man made a stirring speech, about not giving up.

Afterwards, we visited the Wall of Fame, part of the Portland State University campus, whereon my mother's name is carved in stone next to Mary Bolton's, with Pat's just inches away.

The Womens International League for Peace and Freedom memorialized many of its star players here, although Barbara Drageaux chose to stay off the list for some reason.

When I got home, I learned of the death of Benoît Mandelbrot. I'd opened for him once, giving a talk on fractals on short notice. Cool dude.

Peace Garden (continued)

2010-10-13T21:43:00.000-07:00

Click here for Part One.

Vote!

2010-10-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

20/20 Hindsight (movie review)

2010-10-10T16:05:00.001-07:00

We're watching a movie, 20/20 Hindsight: Censorship on the Frontline, an interview with a whistle blower, Richard Grove, who tried to go to Frontline etc. with this story about a software application, owned by Legato and then EMC, that contained a "back door," a way to defraud investors and circumvent the strictures of Oxley-Sarbanes.

The irony was the software in question was advertised as supporting Oxley-Sarbanes, the anti-corruption legislation. The software actually provided circumventions of the laws it claimed to support. Just delete the jar file: millions of emails go away.

The whistle blower brought his case to court. Everything he asserted was proved, according to Grove, but the judge ruled that the statute of limitations had run out.

I was reminded of the Doctrine of Discovery and its "statute of limitations" defense. If there were a problem with this "law" it should've been raised years ago. Likewise the idea of "corporate personhood" can't be overturned this late in the game (say the courts), as it wasn't overturned when it should have been, years ago.

Capitalizing on ignorance, using fear to manipulate, is not a new phenomenon of course.

Rhetoric and persuasive speech, even if full of fallacies, is the way to control behavior.

Getting paid to speak persuasively, using intimidation where needed, tends to short circuit the intellect, says Grove. Emotional content, feelings of insecurity, is the basis for making a sale, especially of gold and silver.

Putting your intellect back in the driver seat is an antidote to fear. The media might have been that intellect, but that hasn't been happening.

Grove is a fan of Tarpley, is hardly a cheerleader for the Obama or Bush teams. His project these days is to help people in thinking for themselves. He's gone back to the trivium / quadrivium for heuristics, in contrast to "outcomes based" education, which he regards as promoting subservience and dependence. He's also a 911 "inside jobber" (believes in a conspiracy to recycle the real estate).

The interview and Grove's subsequent career reminded me of this quote:

Never before in all history have the inequities and the momentums of unthinking money-power been more glaringly evident to so vastly large a number of now literate, competent, and constructively thinking all-around-the-world humans. There’s a soon-to-occur critical-mass moment when the intuition of the responsibly inspired majority of humanity, in contradistinction to the angered Luddites and avenging Robin Hoods, faced with comprehensive functional discontinuity of nationally contained techno-economic systems, will call for and accomplish a world-around reorientation of our planetary affairs.

R. Buckminster Fuller
“Can’t Fool Cosmic Computer”
Grunch of Giants (St. Martin’s Press, 1983), pg. 89

Oh Superman...

2010-10-07T16:25:00.000-07:00

So at 52, I'm not at the pinnacle of my athletic career. To live in the world of my dreams, I'll likely need to be reborn, perhaps as some Tarzania type (a female Tarzan). A traditional Jungian projection (anima... anime).

Fantasies aside, I picked up that Food Not Bombs box the wrong way, in that walk-in refrigerator, and sprained my lower back pretty good. At "college night" last night at Cleveland High, I hobbled around like I needed a cain, looking somewhat pathetic (because I didn't have one).

Before that misadventure, I'd tackled some plumbing upstairs in the 105 year old Blue House, placing a bucket beneath a sink full of corrosive toxins before unscrewing the curved piece of pipe ("the trap"). The pipe piece went plunk into the overflowing bucket and splashed some of the toxins in my eye. Coulda been worse, a lot worse. Why wasn't I wearing my glasses? Events conspire sometimes...

A lotta civilians would like a kind of boot camp experience, a way to get in shape, learn some skills, without other grownups being super mean and sending them off to kill or be killed. They'd like to be part of a solution in some way, welcomed as world game players. Movie stars work hard for such treatment, and such roles. In my Project Earthala communities, we have a lot of "off your duff" stuff to do, if you have a young body needing to stay trim, or an older one, likewise predisposed.

Wanna work on a railroad, even literally?

You may do so, for academic credit, while learning history and general systems. Might be in Russia someplace.

But you're not here as a prisoner.

The work / study people flit about. You'll meet some of them again... and again.

Our discussion this morning (while cleaning) was about so many office buildings zoned to where you can't legally sleep in them. The night time janitorial service doesn't want to be stumbling upon snoozing personnel. No, you'll need to drive 50 miles to get to a bed from your cube farm, or ride some bullet train. Those are the zoning rules.

Gazillions of people slosh in and out, because home is not suitable for working and work is not suitable for taking time off work.

Work is a place that you "go", as in "go go go" (all that fossil fuel, sluicing down the drain -- welcome to Planet of the Apes).

Anyway, the fantasy was of small firms, wandering bands, troupes, with banners (logos, coats of arms -- such as I just returned to Djangocon sponsors), coming into a city and setting up shop, perhaps only for six months. They have live-and-work style offices, more like lofts, more like studios.

Perhaps the job is to teach urban farming techniques, help set up another plantagon, get the software tuned, train some friends, get some training, share some music... and move on, to another city with floorspace.

You don't buy a cube farm in a sky tower and a hotel room by the airport.

Or maybe you work in a home, outfitted as a workplace.

The Blue House is all futuristic by then, lots of monitors (including on-board energy use), lots of two-way communicating, routing, both in real time and asynchronously (like today).

New toons are getting made, XRL (a kind of livingry) is being field tested. We're a management hub, like CUE used to be for "refugee resettlement" in some other war against terrorism, another chapter in fighting fear.

Should this be Reality TV? The Pauling House people talk a lot about streaming.

Given I'm embedded in this old school urban grid, I'm only somewhat able to walk my own Global U talk. I've done my best to conflate the commute, to have my studio and sleeping quarters be ship shape, not spread all across town. The torture taxi stays in the driveway a lot.

In doing Food Not Bombs today, I rode a bicycle to the Quaker meetinghouse, towing a trailer full of sustenance. Marian Rhys is here, helping Cera (Sara) and some new kids in town, part of a cross-continent cycling team.

Their plan is to ride both ways, to start back by looping south (as far as New Mexico? -- I haven't asked 'em).

Working in the kitchen, pealing potatoes, washing pots and pans, is somewhat close to my Ecovillage fantasy.

Sure, Lockheed-Martin has failed us, Boeing has let us down. EPCOT was a disappointment (sad for Disney). The "best toys" are uncool. The engineers built us a railroad we don't want or need (remember MX missiles?), at great expense in shared living standards. Welcome to our self-inflicted slums then, a sad memorial to Bombs Not Food. I hope our progeny have compassion and forgive us our many tresspasses against them.

This unpleasant reality doesn't keep us from dreaming some American dream however. The power of nightmares is only finite after all.

We may be a conquered people, slaves to an alien ideology, a kind of "complex" (as the Jungians say), but one day we may again breath free, having tossed off the sorrowful yoke of empire.

More Philosophy of Education

2010-09-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

More banter with RH (from math-teach) -- typos fixed:

> "And the reason is....?"
>
> In my opinion, arithmetic is essentially the literacy equivalent

> to reading. It has a functional use in everyone's life, like reading.
>

The ability to read is not just one skill. What if graphs are involved, statistics? The science you might want to tune in, to follow debates about genetically modified foods, requires some mathematical background perhaps.

It's not just what math Obama might need. You also want your Supreme Court and Congress to have a fairly strong grasp of the technical issues.

> Beyond arithmetic, the skills begin to become "nice to have"

> rather than "must have". I generally share the same

> thought with the others that subjects like algebra exercise

> and develop one's reasoning skills, even if there will be

> no practical use later. But this isn't a must have, it is

> a nice to have, unless you have decided that you will

> be an engineer or some other math related career

> and then for you personally, it is a must have.
>

You've generally been dismissive of "math appreciation" as not the real deal, just like "physics for philosphers" can't really amount to a hill of beans in your book.

Calendars and navigation, architecture, surveying, map making... each one of these topics comes with skills you might learn, surrounded by stories of other civilizations. To fully understand history, one
needs to be able to follow the math and science (e.g. the role of cryptography in ww2).

If we dont' consider "math appreciation" as part of mathematics proper, then we should at least allow it to surface under the heading of literature.

Dr. Susan Haack, a contemporary philosopher, is quite explicit about this: in her view, a distopian society we do not want to have, consists of docile non-scientists who can't follow the debates and
leave all the decision-making to the supposedly most qualified, the credentialed experts.

You want informed voters.

You also want people not easily manipulated or hoodwinked.

I say "you" in a general sense, realizing that informed and intelligent voters is maybe *not* what some people want. They'd rather have a lot of docile broom pushers who just smile and nod when told what to do by the ruling class digerati.

> What would be the "nice to have" element of reading?

> Or maybe I should say literature? I would propose that

> creative writing is a "nice to have" but not a "must have".

> Reading and basic writing would be "must haves" in my opinion.
>

Any educated high schooler should be able to read and write about how the Internet works, yes or no?

Any educated high schooler should have read a lot of civics, know about the history of the world, including recent history.

E.g. books by Edwin Black are appropriate for an American History class, or at least lengthy excerpts, along with related documentaries.

There's a difference between knowing how to read, recognizing the words, and being literate, being given the time, encouragement, guidance and freedom to read widely in many subjects.

Does a society afford people that freedom, people of all ages?

Or does it simply give them rudimentary reading skills and then push them out the door after 6th grade, handing them a mop if they don't prove sufficiently compliant or worthy in the minds of corporate eugenicists?

More Dreams in the 'Hood

2010-09-16T20:24:00.000-07:00

Global Matrix Studios enjoyed some guests this morning, through an international school connection.

I wasn't especially talkative, more in the role of chauffeur, even though Jerome was doing the driving (he's good at cards I discovered, over coffee later).

I've been sketching a fantasy double deck office, converting the leaky deck above 4dsys (a router station) into a monitoring room, perhaps with a spiral staircase between them. It'd have to be part of some video stream and/or movie production, to make it worth the expense. Maybe Patrick has the connections.

The reality is I need to buy some more plastic from the hardware store.

Then came a quick haircut (someone new) and Food Not Bombs at the meetinghouse (and more wifi). Andy Cross came by and we went over some of what I'd learned at Djangocon (recently completed). I introduced him to the cooks. They bantered in Spanish.

I stayed late to clean up, again having the building to myself. Then the directory people showed up, intending to make phone calls, hearthkeeper among them (I hope I passed muster).

I packed up and returned to the Blue House (so-called -- there's also a Pink House).

Through the wifi, I was tracking the Python community's Diversity list, noting the link to an article by a Seattelite about bioinformatics, about including more of that topic at the high school level. This jibes with my curriculum writing as well.

That could be a focus of Pycon / Tehran I should think, as health care is ramping up in that youthful economy, with many future doctors, nurses, technicians. A Pycon / Chicago focusing on trucking might make sense, although here I'm thinking ESRI might want to get involved, as trucking has everything to do with GIS/GPS.

I was also in touch with Mosaic regarding the Business Intelligence position at PSU, which would relate to our work with Ktraks etc.

My thanks to Dr. Tag for dropping in for a family dinner last night, followed by a quick visit with 97214 geniuses (not at Pauling House this time). I had the PSF python (Naga) along (stuffed animal totem), plus two Django ponies.

I play the role of geek in this 'hood (namespace) and am somewhat expected to do geeky things of this nature. Fortunately, I'm not entirely alone in this regard, meaning I get to clown around with my peers when I'm lucky.

Glenn joined us at the new Chinese place on the corner of 39th and Hawthorne, in the Mason Building (Hawthorne Theater) across from Fred Meyer.

The tour included a look at Flextegrity models, though we didn't get to snap icosahedra together. This was not an actual workshop, more just a tour.

Inception (movie review)

2010-09-14T00:17:00.000-07:00

The movie was about dreams and projections, keying off The Matrix theme.

My movie-going companion slept through most of it and was adamant that Hollywood's self-indulgence was precisely what was wrong with this once great culture. How could we bear to be insulted in this way? And at what opportunity cost? Why lavish such attention on fictional fantasies (waking dreams)?

I suppose I'm more in the mood for more serious-minded documentaries, especially about the recent past. More about the U2? Elections in Iraq?

We haven't had many Iraqi talking heads speaking their minds lately on any topic, other than the odd defector or refugee in past chapters, with sound bites used to galvanize and mobilize around somebody's war plans.

Lots of dead zones in the news, deliberate graveyards. Lets go back and talk about what was missed.

Also, getting more tetrahedra going, and not just on MTV, has been a priority in 97214, the zip code of geniuses.

I'd dispatch an away team tonight if I thought it'd improve the quality of our TV programming.

Anyway, back to the movie, of which this is supposedly a review, I enjoyed some of the special effects, especially at the cityscape level. My dad was a city planner and I was taught to appreciate cities for their character.

In the dream world of film, ideas get planted, that much is certainly true. Memes spread. Sometimes one needs to counter 'em.

I was back to the DoubleTree neighborhood, just two blocks away from the venue for Djangocon, reminiscing already.

This initiative to prototype various brands and types of voting machine (electronic and mechanical) in high school settings, complete with tabulating back ends, along with lessons about security flaws, scams, the sordid history of voting, sounds like it'll result in some dynamite civics.

Talking about dirty tricks, or just plain tricks, is not verboten, at least not among young adults needing to figure out what they're getting into with this democracy business. Lots more documentaries then. Stay tuned.

DjangoCon Day Three

2010-09-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

The panel this morning was entirely on the topic of integrating NoSQL into Django. The term NoSQL seems to be one of those "universally despised but we'll say it anyway" kind of memes.

Given how our ponies are snuggly-friendly with relational database technology, there's a sense of outreach as well as girding for a possible future, in which NoSQL takes off a lot more than it has. Buzz words in this namespace today include: HBase, MongoDB, Riak, Voldemort, Neo4J, Cassandra, Hypertable, HyperGraphDB, Memcached, Tokyo Cabinet, Redis, CouchDB.

Alex Gaynor, soon to turn 20, spent a Google summer of code wrestling with the task of fitting Django's ORM API to a MongoDB back end. Some on the panel questioned the advisability of fitting a schemaless database into such a schema-based framework, but then Django is somewhat characterized by this API. What else would it mean, to add support for a NoSQL back end, if not keeping the API streamlined and powerful.

It's not a given that every back end key-value or document store is a good fit. In the case of MongoDB, there's enough of a one-to-one mapping to make the bridge or database adapter. Google's BigTable is likewise "close enough" to a SQL engine (though it isn't one) to support a somewhat Django-like API within it's Appengine framework.

One has other ways of using such NoSQL utilities as redis inside Django. Django is just Python after all, so if its a matter of simply importing another module and using it, you may do so directly, through whatever API Python natively provides. Use this alongside ORM connections to SQL engines. It's not either or (like, use the zodb module why not?). How is redis different from just using a memory cache like memecache? The API does a lot more.

On the whole, the panel was reassuring the PostgreSQL would always be enough of an "out of the box" solution to throw at so many of life's many challenges. Don't let the "rip tide of lies" (i.e. all the empty hype) around NoSQL pull you off balance. The Django community is experimenting, outside of core-dev.