More Adventures with TinkerBell

I like "TinkerBell" (the name of my bicycle) because it's in CamelCase, an allusion to the Republic of Perl, and by extension an homage to that sturdy if intractable beast of the Arabian experience. Add some discreet oasis cell towers, iPods and podcasting, and that lifestyle ain't so bad they tell me. Plus there's always the local airport, when it's time to get away from it all and see New York or whatever. A two way street.

I rode her (Tink) to Wanderers @ Linus Pauling House this morning, to join the free form discussion about reforming this and that (the PP in ISEPP). We just throw out policies, left and right, and then shoot 'em in a barrel, seeing which might survive.

I had some otherworldly suggestions, like I always do (mostly involving computers), and then wheeled in TinkerBell for a consult. We (as in "the hive mind collective") got her working well enough to get me downtown at least, where I accessed the Extended Services Building @ PSU to sign my contract (retroactively, for work already in the can).

Also at Wanderers, on request from Jon Bunce the musician, I did a Lightning Talk on gnu math, and dot notation in particular. How we think about numbers now, like of 1,2 and 3 as instances of a single class, say the Integer class, with operations like + and * being methods of that class.

I start out with a Dog class though, with just a constructor (__init__) and a self-representer (__repr__). I mostly write legal Python, abetting with diagrams. Had it been projected from my laptop, I could have executed the code.

In about three minutes and as many pieces of butcher paper, I'd inducted our small assembly into some deep mysteries of hackerdom. I'd exposed the way we think (in OO -- not everyone uses this same model).

These Wanderers (in this case all older adults) lapped it right up, i.e. got it immediately, and felt ready to play (Jim Buxton seemed especially ready). Music and software engineering go hand-in-hand I'd hazard. Both involve looping, interpreting, clock cycles and so on.

In my work queue:

• I'm about ready to rewrite my embedded SQL programs to use SQLEXEC for pass through [later note from work site: I'm working on this now].
  
• Plus I keep getting North Korea on my plate, probably because I reviewed Team America, World Police awhile back, which spoofs Kim a lot (pun). Plus there's a lot of stuff in the news about some stupid rocket.
  
• Closer to home, we're doing a major kitchen cleaning, with outside professional help. I helped supply the ice chests.
  
• Plus I need to deal with those 02 tanks in a minute (the Apria truck is about to swing buy).

I recall Dan was in North Korea recently, Tom Head reporting. Something about cats. A mystery. And how do the Moonies fit in? I am so out of date apparently. Is this why we call it a Church of the Subgenius? Fuller called it the Doppler Effect (534.00) -- a lot about lagging or slack, a source of relativity in our respective narrative accounts.

You can't be up on everything at once. No Instant Universe. That's one of the teachings in Synergetics. Sometimes we learn it first in Arizona. Oregon may be ahead in the race to reform math education, but our cartoon-making savvy lags that of many major studios, including in Japan.