Sunday, April 24, 2011

More Bizmotica

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.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

From the Chronofile

[ link ]

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Meetup in Woodstock

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.

Friday, April 01, 2011

Ecumenical Ministries

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.