Wanderers 2011.9.27

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

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

:: 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.