Geeking Out

Tara and I are out doing homework with our Ubuntu laptops.

On my plate: grab Eclipse (downloading now, from the Rochester Institute of Technology) and install the Python plug-in; poke around more at Hackety Hack (somewhat esoteric); monitor the Math Forum for additions to a recent thread; compose something interesting for math-thinking-l?

We should be home in time for the CBS Evening News.

Quiet Time

I'm in my "tie-dyed freak with dark glasses" disguise, sipping Nilgiri Blue in a local coffee joint, my daughter close by doing some high schoolers' homework.

Although I'm working pretty hard today on several projects, this is also a day for pensive reflection, meditation, and thanksgiving.

I say thanksgiving because although this is a dark day on the public calendar, most flags at half mast, it was also the day of my marriage to Dawn Wicca under the care of Multnomah Monthly Meeting, in the Rhododendron Garden's wedding meadow, on a blustery but not rainy day in 1993, a happy occasion for many nearest and dearest.

Mom flew back to Philadelphia today, for AFSC meetings and such.

I had lunch with Chuck and Mary Bolton, old family friends. Their romantically situated Columbia Gorge cabin, since sold, was a favorite hideaway for our family as well.

Teaching GnuMath

Wing 101, Akbar font, VPython
click for larger view

Links: Integrated Studies; Teacher's Notes; followup on Math Forum.

Small Talk

We celebrated Tara's first day of high school by dining out at one of the excellent Mongolian grills in Greater Portland, but only after catching all of Alaska governor Palin's speech from the RNC podium, having caught big portions of the DNC show earlier. She's taking journalism this year, plus American history is interesting these days, who can deny it?

As a planner of an upcoming conference, I'm slated to join in a site check this weekend, even though this is a familiar venue, on the way to Mt. Hood. I'm playing with the idea of heading on over the mountain, but the fantasy is too vague to call "a plan" at this point. I often entertain such mirage-like possibilities, and sure enough, some of them become reality (isn't that special -- as in special case).

I was talking to a small business owner this morning, about what's good and bad about Portland. You find a lot of young people flocking here, in search of opportunity, but sometimes psychologically unprepared for how dark it gets, how much rain. I know Dawn was that way, coming in summer, from Florida, running smack into that wall of a winter.

Some swear by full spectrum lighting (check Ikea?), others take flight for sunnier climes, some grin and bear it, and some of us actually enjoy it (no kidding). Anyway, she's working hard to make it work, feels weary a lot, is supporting a child. I like her fun crew though, they generate a warm atmosphere.

Derek is swinging by, just having a chat. We're blabbing about slack, as in cutting oneself some, something we're good at in the Church of Bob (Subgenius).

Hamlet 2 (movie review)

click for larger view?

I came to Fox Tower with my own fantasy of working under cover in some Eastern European capital, posing as some fat cat in training for some "old guy Olympics," my hot personal trainer and I getting in on faux credentials or whatever, meanwhile gathering intelligence for HQS back home.

Hamlet 2 took me out of my world and dropped me in some Arizona high school snackatorium, with lots of trauma and drama, including an ACLU princess, hammy actors, and a great drill sergeant type principal, the kind who threatens you with a pickup truck if you get obscene like he does, but in the wrong way.

New York City signs its name on the end, reminding us that big city culture is still pretty powerful, even out here in the Wild West (not called Empire State for no reason). The principal forgave his father, so powerful was the final performance (involving a time machine, shades of Idiocracy).

I noticed the salutes to Dead Poets Society (logical as a double feature) and Robin Williams in particular.

Lookin' Good

Homecoming 2 of 5

I missed my International School reunion in Manila this year, have yet to see the new campus in person, looks magnificent.

The above 2nd segment of a 5-part video briefly looks at my era of attendance (1970s).

I recommend the first segment especially for its contrast between newer and older -- lots of history.

Homecoming 1 of 5

Wanderers 2008.8.27

All but two of us have laptops this morning, eight around the table. This was my first group check-in since starting a Wanderers PbWiki, leading me to make some administrative changes.

I hadn't realized my Writers were all being notified of one another's changes, the default, leading to lots of new emails. That's a setting each Writer has some control over, but only after logging in with a unique password.

We talked quite a bit about experiments with lasers, both for transmitting power and for cooling, with Jim Buxton reading aloud from some technical article. The topic of buffalo herds also figured prominently, their effects on topography, also migrating tarantulas, Glenn corroborating some of Ron Baithwaite's scary campfire tales.

We also continued our discussion of my Ouija board model vs. simple minded conspiracy theories, with Jon having us imagine a giant planchette governed by huge numbers of people.

Affordable Utopias

What's always too expensive is trying to get everyone on the same page as to what a Utopia is, like my bias is to not like the word itself ("utopia" sounds too infantile, too namby-pamby, having been disparaged for so long, though in opposition to "oblivion" acquired some new kick).

Plus Nature herself fights mono-culture i.e. we taunt ourselves with images of a zombie-like Borg with good reason, as "mindless robot" is a synonym for "maladapted" (we didn't get to be here this long by being that stupid).

"Getting everyone to agree" is neither a prerequisite, nor even a desirable feature, when planning Utopian resort ranches, call centers, training centers, tribal casinos or whatever.

So what I was explaining over a Guinness on Hawthorne yesterday, to a good friend and neighbor, was how I wanted to at least make the "props" be affordable, like some universal studios for wannabe "my way or the highway" types, who'd find one another on the Internet, say, and then pool resources to do some trial and error.

My goal: low barrier to entry. I'd also want to keep a tight focus on recycling, i.e. a Fly's Eye Dome disassembles into Y-shaped parts (Ed Applewhite's favorite picture in Bucky Works he told me) some to be reused maybe.

Props engineers needn't be super judgmental as to what lifestyles get tried with their wares, just as the brand on some camera doesn't rub off on the pictures taken with it, or vice versa, except in terms of picture quality (which matters).

Of course engineers have their own lives, their own families to take care of, must exercise personal discretion in that regard. But your generic catalog inventory, from Ikea or whatever, needn't come with a long list of moralizing "thou shalt nots" except of course from a safety point of view i.e. the consequences of getting it wrong may be low performance, or even disastrous failure.

Instructions with warnings or advisories of this type are not "fascist" just realistic. "Tend to your bridges or they could fail", "if you don't anchor your tent it could blow away in the wind" -- that kind of thing. Lots of holy writ has this flavor and with reason: experienced humans wanted to assist others from repeating their mistakes. That's a respectable motive for recording one's enjoinders, even when the intended audience has long moved on to other lifestyles.

Those with a "good eye" for community will create successful, sustainable communities, complete with permaculture, fun cartoons (like Suzan Pitt's are pretty wild), and solutions to the perennial challenges, as have many successful civilizations of the past.

Some will sell chocolate, others DVDs, some will tap into a power grid, others will be off-grid autonomous. Some will mix only some genders, some will disallow dolphins & whales (yes, that sounds dystopian, but maybe it's more a logistics issue, and besides, I don't have to live there, have choices about where I go).

And let's be clear up front: when a community disbands or disperses, that may well be by design and intention, i.e. seeing those helicopters come by and lift stuff away like that doesn't mean there were personality tensions, management problems or anything like that.

Or it may. Depends on the scenario. Not always my business to know. Yours either.

Somewhere in the literature, Bucky talked about wanting his domes to set a neutral pitch, like a holodeck (a Star Trek thing) before the show starts. It's not the job of the artifacts to dictate what goes on in them, only to clear a space in which lifestyles might unfold, making raw environmental factors less of a drag (like it's hard to perform Hamlet 2 in a blizzard I'd hazard).

Crazy Horse Play

Machine World meets Narnia?

A Summer Project

Our special thanks to Elizabeth Braithwaite

Weird Stories

[ internal memo to Wanderers, republished to blog (we're thinking of doing a Wiki) ]

I got to Wanderers late this morning, just in time to advise Barbara about an inexpensive yet good quality wifi-equipped laptop she might need in Panama, where she's headed this evening until December, wishing her a safe and fun journey.

We didn't talk too much about the Wiki idea, more about DrFrankenstein (not TheMonster). GlobalWarming could be another WikiName -- anyway you get my drift, and there's a thing you can do with square brackets [ ] -- like more punctuation -- if you want to avoid the CamelCase look.

Then I dashed downtown for this meeting at the Armory, a way cool theater these days, which went down to get room, up being out of the question in an historic landmark, although they did add a new roof (had to). Ed Schlossberg an inspiration at some level (not sure which). Check my Flickr Photostream for some pictures.

I rejoined Wanderers in their lunch setting, just as money was being collected. The idea of a "one man Bucky play" got people thinking of this manikin near Mt. St. Helens with a projected face. David suggested getting around "actor guild" restrictions (why Johnny Stallings can't play) by having his voice come from inhumanly scaled sources (too big or too small to be pigeon-holed as "actors"). We also brainstormed about finding people who genuinely believed they were Bucky, or were at least channeling (hence "not acting, so not an actor"). Such union busters we are (Fuller himself was a card carrying member of the machinists' union).

Then it was on to [ another meeting ] where I perused A compendium of certain engineering principles pertainent to Brazil's control of impending acceleration in its industrialization by R. Buckminster Fuller, Chief, Mechanical Engineer Section, Industrial Engineering Division, August 13, 1943 (so this was an anniversary of sorts).

This document is a lot about interviews with American engineers who'd been helping the Russians around the first three 5-year planning cycles, the Russians still considered a friendly ally in this picture. In the footnotes, Fuller notes how Brits and Germans tended to get political, Russians encouraging them to join in the fun, with Germans more into proselytizing for their National Socialism ideology, whereas the American engineers tended to be gruffly dismissive of politics, almost angrily apolitical, which you might think (paraphrasing Bucky) would lead to their dismissal, so disrespectful it seemed, but the Russians actually liked these stubborn china shop bulls, even agreeing to secret service protection in one case, to help reduce friction.

Also looking at Gargle & Snarky, Bil Baird's puppet troupe on Westinghouse Broadcasting, teaching Adventures in Number + Space post Sputnik (New York Times Mar 6 1958, pg. 28). [ Bucky apparently contributed a puppet to this effort -- ed ].

Home to watch Katie and Lara explain about Georgia and the Russians, including a chat with the Georgian president even, Condi also on the record.

A New Kind of Charter

There's a vague allusion to "a new kind of science" here, plus a little irony, as in my view "all public schools are charter schools" the difference being only the kind of charter or state mandate, which of course has a lot to do with when a given school was launched, and how much cruft has since accumulated.

This new drawing board design is for a new type of public school that specializes in hosting exchange students from other parts of the country and world, meaning there's a host family piece, and also a transfer of credits piece.

Under the old system in Portland, a host family inside the Franklin district cannot host an exchange student going to Grant or Cleveland, plus the schools take very few from out of district to begin with, plus they have no obligation to offer credentials, even to an incoming senior putting in a year's worth, however worthy the work. So many wasted opportunities.

The new charters will have that international school flavor already familiar to expats, and probably a cozy relationship with various State Department bureaus, as this will be a natural recruiting ground for future diplomats, once the appropriate sponsorships (aka scholarships) have been lined up (case by case).

The goal is to serve a large number of locally based students (probably at least 50% of the students will be from Portland) plus there's the assumption of many similar academies around the globe, meaning these same PDX-based students will have easier access to opportunities in remote places, likewise in an exchange student capacity.

Odds & Ends

Plans for an upcoming gathering of Willamette Quarterly Friends are coming together, with a lively lineup of talk show hosts. We might get more history of Beanites worked in, depending on interest level.

I'd told the barista I'd buy some of the art in this coffee shop if netting a windfall, wanting a witness, told Trevor too, exactly which one.

I may not have time to post much on August 6th itself, given plans to wolf sushi, but check out these pix of contemporary Hiroshima, emailed by an old buckynaut.


Also, I'm pleased the blogosphere is keeping the Britney Spears meme alive in a science-minded context. She's right up there with Madonna as a cultural icon, blocking public high schooler access to either warranting criminal charges one would hope.

On the calendar: a casino we know will be hosting an open house with all the slots free (no money down, just testing new equipment): a family-friendly event we're hoping to attend.

Exchange Student

Our household just got assessed for an exchange student, and although I displayed some jerkiness, I think we're still on the books as potentials. She'd be going to Cleveland, like Tara, but a senior, from China. We shall see.

Anna Roys has been showing a lot of determination in the face of adversity, in trying to perform her duties within the TECC service area, TECC being her proposed school, mentioned in my Chicago talk briefly.

As a homeschooling mom, she has the right stuff to make it happen, but it takes more than one principal to make a play. Gotta have thespians, co-stars, including in those nebulous realms.

I've been sniping amidst Quakers regarding this "overpopulation" meme some still bandy about somewhat unthinkingly, betraying their schooling in Neo-Malthusianism, popular in 1960s text books, in parallel with Marxism in Eastern Bloc countries.

Given our reputation for scholarship, these reflexes are subject to extinction over time, per Darwinian genetic algorithms, i.e. we're not built to stay stupid, have practices against that. It's not that overpopulation can't be a problem, with any species, it's the level of malign neglect people use it to justify, as if wasting lives were a solution to anything.

As a Wanderer, I'm into protecting the good name of both of these gents (Darwin's too) which means not letting their necessarily time-bound snapshot views get blamed for the cruft of the ages, much as Nietzsche gets blamed for Nazi propaganda (he had nothing to do with that).

That pleasant naturalist and journal keeper who visited the Galapagos had nothing to do with any War Against the Weak either.

But I digress.

This isn't a plan to implement immediately, as Tara's room is undergoing remodeling and Carol's office is in business 24/7, like mine down the hall. No spare digs at the moment, plus we might need to travel more before school starts again.

Mining Cartoons

These cartoons from the late 1950s provide anthropologists with a goldmine.

In the first one, you've got the beatnik wild man stereotype, the temptations of an evil weed. Our krew fits right in, cartoon figures that they be.

In the second one, you have Dishonest John, the tricky dick operator, slick oil man, or "cloaky Victorian" as Willow (a TV witch) might put it, with more allusions to counter-culture beatnikery, in turn affiliated with "modern art" ala cubism, plus "unintelligible" amplified music.

Within the Fuller School, we tend to regard beatniks as prototypical in their fight against "squares". That's because Bucky used to hang out in Greenwich Village with Noguchi & Co., getting loud in bars, until he decided to "dress like a banker" and/or "storekeeper" (so people would take him more seriously -- fashion matters, they say). Plus he was into triangles, not squares, and tetrahedra, not "qyoobs" so heavily.

My thanks to Alan on Synergeo for his scholarship.

FOSS on Radio

I tuned to KOPB 91.5 FM on the living room stereo for this one, booking the 9-10 AM time slot (it's a family room I share).

The level of fluency was very impressive all around, with only a few balkings at buzz words, like when that one caller was exulting about his "Python hooks to Apache".

The "green architecture" caller might want to check into Google's Sketchup, one of those "secret sauce" free applications, in a mix with other free open source software (FOSS) ingredients.

Much of the focus was on our rapidly morphing demographics, the changing collective face of geekdom. We're not losing core committers necessarily, but it's in the very nature of this business to encourage broad participation, to leverage those invaluable "network effects".

Sometimes it's just a matter of networking with other talented individuals with a shared agenda, and mastering existing tools.

Other times, you might get support from a proprietary vendor looking for ways to give back, not by donating the whole kit and caboodle necessarily, but by slicing off a piece of cake -- often the same one taken in-house for enhancements.

As one of the interviewees well explained, businesses will freely enhance tools, even in ways that help competitors, if this doesn't erode other strategic advantages they may have. For example, Intel isn't in the operating system business, so supporting Linux is a way to stay focused on making chips, not wasting energy on investments peripheral to its own core area of expertise.

Open Source Databases

I'm listening to an illustrious panel of database experts, many of them with much experience in proprietary realms (Oracle, Sun... Autodesk).

History: Ingres and Sybase inherited from "open source" BSD research (not called that back then). Sybase later sold its code to Microsoft. The point: databases had open source beginnings. IBM's code, in contrast, was always closed source and never went anywhere or progressed more slowly as a consequence.

The free and open exchange of ideas, and code, is what spurs innovation (it's dangerous to not avail of this in many cases, if expecting to stay competitive). Open source folks were fastest in adopting open GIS-related standards.

CouchDB is more focused on the commodification of server farms and hearkens back to node-based architectures (I'm thinking of Mumps). Web services like EC2 have become a platform for open source databases. SimpleDB is Amazon's solution for running atop its S3 web service.

The newer generation is making better use of pre-existing standards (e.g. http), not investing in one-of-a-kind inhouse protocols. There's more than just lip service in favor of interoperability these days. The USA's DoD is moving towards open source, increasing demand.

Autodesk guy: the future is where big data stores come over the web and mix with local stuff. Semi-structured data, semi-structured searches... these are cutting edge areas.

Sun guy: "All open source databases suck at blobs" (large binary files -- like entire DVDs). He also worries MapReduce is "anti-green" in terms of rack space required, kilowatts per hour and so on. Maybe the optimization literature isn't getting applied, in favor of mere brute force solutions? Other experts in the audience weren't so sure (apples & oranges?).

What's the difference between a filesystem, database, and version control system anyway? Databases are on top of a filesystem, more CPU intensive. Versioning systems tend to not use relational databases, but why? Subversion uses SQLlite. The database might be for metadata...

I asked about user friendly front ends, like Microsoft Access, which write the SQL for you, based on drag and drop, filling in forms and so on. There's nothing quite like that in the open source world, and that's a frustration for people wanting to start small medical databases on desktops, and incubate them without bothering the IT department.

Panelists mostly agreed that these front ends are hard to develop and in short supply. In the old days, SQL itself was envisioned as the user-friendly front end, but it's not taught except in a few majors, such as finance. Steve reminded me that OpenOffice has some tools along these lines -- we did some testing over the break, just for kicks.

Speaking of front ends, my next session for today was Stupid Django Tricks (except they didn't seem stupid). Django is one of the Python flagships for writing web applications, also a space served by Ruby, PHP, Perl... Erlang.

Then Steve, Duncan and I went to American Cowgirls, close to the convention center, to kill time before Emma Jane Hogbin's talk on how to get more women involved in FOSS. Duncan and I compared notes on Arabic, a beautifully logical language, while I joked with Steve about a credentialing system based on tattoos (use your own imagination).

Moblin 2.0

This presentation by Dirk Hohndel from Intel is about a class of new devices now ready for the mass market. We have lots of proprietary ways of doing the software, but to drive innovation and participation, a truly open source approach is the best way to go.

Mark's notion of designing for plugins, making platforms very open (like Mozilla FireFox) is apropos of this discussion.

Moblin 2 (Fedora... Gnome) will be an open stack, i.e. no lock in -- too bad no build platform ready yet (four weeks?). The hope is the community will take ownership and move this project forward, per R0ml's "exceptional software" platform (see below).

More OSCON Keynotes

R0ml Lefkowitz poked fun at the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF), and Rational Unified Process, the this, the that. Fun phrases and namespaces.

eXtreme programming's Kent Beck gives us six phases, ending in death.

Ethos:

• running code speaks
• peer review
• release early release often
• given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow
• community matters
• fail fast
• always make new mistakes

Quintillian: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio (Lefkowitz is a fabulous rhetoritician). I call it the Be Do Have projects completion cycle (Urner, GST).

Exceptional Software Methodology:

How gracefully software handles exceptions is what makes it exceptional.

Keep Quintillian's model, but start the circle in a new place:

• Commit / Update (memoria)
• Run / Use (Pronuntiatio)
• Bug Reporting (Inventio)
• Triage (Dispositio)
• Integration (Elocutio)

Note we start by "releasing the crap" (whatever you've got, version it, then run / use, collect bugs etc.).

No requirements: because there is no "development" only "maintenance."

Don't lock it up front with "requirements", just let users complain when it doesn't do what they want it to do.

The talk was somewhat tongue in cheek, lots of laughter. Go R0ml.

[ Later: here's Duncan's review ]

damian's impression of r0ml
(click to read talk balloon?)

Damian Conway did not disappoint. His themes interwove, lots of build up, then a really crazy riff on Dirac / Feynman and positronic variables (type pv in his Perl implementation, swimming upstream against the flow of control (going "back" in time)) -- not forgetting Rod Logic (easy links to Gattegno). His send ups of R0ml, Mark, Larry Wall, were both hysterical and highly appreciative. Wittgenstein and nanotubes (the rods) were also prominent.

I'm enjoying the new O'Reilly master of ceremonies this year Allison Randal, an accomplished geek. Nathan Torkington's shoes are big ones to fill (figuratively speaking). Edd Dumbill is co-chair.

OSCON Season

Just to follow up on yesterday's Puttering, I've invested in a new 600W power supply for KTU3 so I might interimly avail of the new KTU4 guts, to wit the ATI Radeon 4850. No rush though, shipping ground.

Back Stage has this great mural, where Patrick, Steve and I had our beers yesterday.

I picked up with Steve Holden and Duncan McGreggor where we left off, retrieving them from the coffee shop inside the Ecomotion electric car dealership on Sandy, where both were connected to wifi. I showed off "my" fleet of eATVs, like the ones we'll need for our call center ecovillage.

We sampled our local Indian buffet (Indian as in India, where Duncan had studied with some with Tibetan trainers that time), Glenn Stockton joining us, with a review of the Shuttleworth meetup @ Mission Theater last night.

So what's up with the CBS News podcasts @ Apple iTunes these days?

Puttering

I'm back in the saddle (new office chair, from Office Depot), reconnecting with my Portland matrix after a few days in Corvallis.

Nick is heading the other way, having tended to the flora and fauna in our absence. I took him to Fry's in Wilsonville so he could check out the latest in tiny laptops, maybe for a next Europe trip, and so I could begin acquiring parts for KTU4, a next office monster (plus I bought a Cosair flash drive, 4 GB, for just $23).

Today's big investment: a Diamond branded version of ATI's Radeon 4850, 512MB etc., sold at a discount, plus rebate (about $150 all told). My bookkeeping and other projects will be happier with more throughput.

Why not just use the PCIe slot in KTU3 you may ask? Well believe me I thought of that, but this lower end HP Pavilion a1630n has only a 300 Watt power supply with no PCI power connector. So for now I'm sticking with Nvidia GEForce 6150 LE, the mobo chipset, running at 85 hertz. Should I get a PCI power adapter and try the new ATI anyway? A new power supply might be a better idea.

The annual open source circus is in town (OSCON) meaning people to see, parties to join.

:: Anna and Inanna (cool hat) ::

Later: I had a good time showing Steve Holden around Hawthorne, including the Linus Pauling House, where I introduced him to Patrick Barton. Steve and I then joined Andy Baxter (with Google Australia), Duncan McGreggor (divmod) and the Martelli family (Anna, Alex and Inanna) for excellent food at the Montage Bistro, 301 SE Morrison. Good call Alex!

Don and Glenn went to hear Mark Shuttleworth's talk; I'm looking forward to their reports, plan on catching his keynote tomorrow evening.

More Explorations...

NPYM Friends have been generous with their scholarship, helping me develop my story a little more.

Jane, formerly a Unitarian, was familiar with the Transylvanian origins of that sect, a near neighbor of our own Friendly universalist blends.

Eugene suggested researching NeoPlatonist Friends, Isaac Pennington and Anne Conway in particular. This helps with my Synergetics thread (a transcendentalist work).

excerpt re Bucky, NYT, April 5, 1963, pg. 33

On the dystopian -- utopian spectrum, where do Quakers position themselves I wonder, both individually and corporately? That's a query to keep looking at, as there's a sense of wavering, adjusting, within each scenario.

Authoring dystopian science fiction (like 1984, like Clockwork Orange, like Brazil) doesn't mean you're committed to bad dreams coming true. On the contrary, we may use these dark and twisted fantasies to sort through pressing puzzles of the day i.e. this may be time in the simulator well spent, in many cases.

Jim gave me some pointers over a game of ping pong. He was born in an internment camp run by Japanese, in Baguio, a favorite getaway for my family in later years, when based in Metro Manila (Magallenes Village, Makati).

A few Friends and I enjoyed flipping through the art books I brought along, including The Bobliographon (ISBN 1560259396), and Obey: Supply & Demand, The Art of Shepard Fairey (ISBN 1584232447), some other gems.

Together Friends

I've elected to join the Convergent Friends discussion, ongoing these days within the blogosphere, with what I'll call my "Together Friends" -- a trope or literary figment, usable in spoofs.

Together Friends, somewhat hypothetical and/or fictional (or shall we say incredible), really do have their act together, and make the rest of us feel like bozos in contrast.

We tell stories and jokes about Together Friends with the aim of spurring ourselves towards higher levels of performance in our faith and practice as Quakers.

For example, one might say "Together Friends already have an online database of thousands of outstanding vegetarian recipes suitable for feeding large groups; just put in the number to be served, and get a list of ingredients."

That sounds way more together than most Friends I'm aware of, but is maybe "convergent" in the sense of holding out an ideal we might agree upon as worthy.

Or, if we disagree on a projected practice, then we have something to chat about, another way of exploring our differences, our relative biases.

Together Friends know geodesic math and how to use it. Do we agree? If not, then why don't we?

Speaking of vegetarian recipes, here's a family favorite from the late Teresina Havens, a Together Friend, which scales to mass quantities.

WRDL: Bizmo Diaries

click here for the applet

Bead Show

Some Quaker PR

Background Reading:
Quaker Politics
Homeward Bound
Adult Education

More Wild West Biz

A twosome in a bizmo might logically rotate as pilot and co, but when you have bigger teams, roles further differentiate, into navigator, camera crew and so on. Sometimes the bizmo mixes in with other vehicles i.e. the caravan isn't one-to-one with circus positions and/or the talent occupies dual roles (even more in some castings).

Given the Native American connotations, we like the word "chief" a lot, so CEO, CFO, CTO and CSO (chief security officer) make a lot of sense, even for non publicly traded companies.

When Quakers aggregate in their Monthly Meetings, they're expected to map to legal state boilerplates for non-profit religious corporations, meaning one needs to name officers, with the bylaws being essentially the F&P (Faith & Practice) i.e. Quakers' way of doing business, which is all about doing business, per the Meeting for Business, or M4B (another form of M4W).

By the same token, we're happy with the word "deputy" as it has that old timer Wild West ring to it, kinda Don Knotts in flavor (kinda comic).

You'll find many companies with a Deputy CEO if you Google, with the acronym DCEO sometimes used.

Some picture server is down @ Google today (~ 11:45 am PDT), messing up these blogs. I joined a group discussion about it, OK fixed.

A Pseudonymizer

Since I was through Centralia today, I got to thinking of last year's BarCamp (alpha version) twixt medical and geek participants (very prototypical, no press releases).

When working for a local clinic through Free Geek, our very security conscious staff wanted to obey HIPAA to the letter, meaning no confidential patient info should leak off premises.

On the other hand, we needed realistic test data with which to develop our application (an upgrade of SQL Clinic, migrating it to more object-oriented Perl, Naked Ape the lead contractor).

Likewise, doctors need to swap case histories in vast numbers, but without compromising patient anonymity.

Enter the pseudonymizer: a program able to synthesize fake identities on a massive scale, in order to give thousands of cases legitimate cover within microseconds.

The case info remains intact, as statisticians need to know actual age, sex, body weight, risk factors and so on. But if someone left a laptop on the train, with all this valuable outcomes research info, it'd be untraceable to real individuals.

I've looked through some literature and see modest use of this term "pseudonymizer" for roughly similar purposes, although not with reference to HIPAA in particular.

Dumbing It Down

There's really no attempt in these articles to discuss Synergetics in any way, the invention behind the inventions. And yet it contains such simple breakthroughs: a way to think more coherently about gyroscopes, a way to organize polyhedra in a memorable manner, lots of cool graphics.

But given the colleges and universities have this anti-Bucky boycott going, it's not surprising that journalists haven't the time or wherewithal to ponder deeper questions, such as why aren't we sharing any of this information on television?

Headline: ancient Greeks made some wrong turns, Euclideans especially, getting all rectilineal in their analysis, whereas nature is more into triangles, so now we've got some serious "bugs" in our "western civ programming" that make us awkwardly incompetent. Will we fix them in time? Will we give our kids a clue?

Too hot potato maybe, not topics the news editors are prepared to tackle, given the pressure of deadlines. Anyway who has the authority to question the ancient Greeks and two thousand years of follow-on flat earth thinking? There's a lot of inertia here, and if you start thinking more like Bucky did, they'll likely brand you a failure won't they? Safer to just toe the party line and be a dweeb, a square. Or was Bucky wildly successful, compared to most of us?

Focusing more on the octet truss, less on the dome, and making the connection to Alexander Graham Bell, another great American, might add some missing depth to this story. More focus on Applewhite as the Synergetics collaborator might also add some useful spin, but this requires mentioning Synergetics in the first place, which so far these editor-censors are loathe to allow, perhaps under pressure from antediluvian math teachers.

Business License

I'm faxing my IRS 1065 and Schedule K to the License & Tax Division just now, explaining how come I got 100% of the partnership's income in 2007: my partner, Dawn Wicca, for whom the business is named, died on March 17 of last year, of invasive breast cancer.

A partnership is like a goldmine or ranch, or in professional circles, sometimes doctors and lawyers create them, in order to pool business expenses while deriving some percentage, usually as a function of what a partner brings in. Dawn and I would each invoice our clients from DWA / 4D, pay business expenses, then take "owner draws" -- reported as income on an IRS 1040.

Some individuals join more than one partnership and so receive multiple Schedule Ks at the end of the year, plus one might jump on and off payrolls, netting W2s as employees of this or that temp agency, school or whatever. I've netted W2 income separate from the partnership most years. DWA itself has no employees, only owners.

Law firms often keep the name of a deceased senior partner, although Dawn Wicca & Associates isn't a law firm, is more an engineering and design firm, interpreting that broadly so as to include curriculum writing.

Chronofile

I should be heading to Trader Joe's now, before closing, but just wanted to register my enthusiasm for the emerging ToonTown economy. Go Portland!

Family News

We lost a valued nonhuman member of our extended family this morning, Rosie, Alexia's cat (a sphynx), who died of heart failure.

Dad's side of the family is on track for another July 4 reunion, our branch planning on hovering in the area. See some of you there.

Summer Retreat 2008

Michael Hagmeier played his didgeridoo during our outdoor gathering on Friday night, with David restraining a curious 180 pound Shomar, an English Mastiff.

Trisha talked about a 102 year old woman she visits, way sharper than the average adult and completely engaged with her world.

Matt came by to finish enrolling Michael, Anna and I in the St. Andrew Clinic fund raising walk, which took place the next morning. Great seeing Tim and his dad, learning Tim won 2nd prize in his category at this year's ISEF in Atlanta.

We spent some time geeking out on the "birthday paradox" on Saturday.

In Python, you can compare fact(N) / ((N**n) * fact(N-n)), the probability of no birthdays in common among n students over N days (N = 365), with e**((-0.5) * (n**2) / N), an approximate expression for which David had a more intuitive derivation. Like for 24 kids, the first expression gives about 0.462, whereas the second gives about 0.454.

Tara got me hooked on Mad World, a sad song Mr. Avison used to good effect in his good bye movie to graduating Winterhaven students (Tara appreciative). I've also been rereading Kirsten Backstrom's autobiographical essay in God the Trickster, thinking about other courageous people I've known.

Saturday evening: an animated discussion of corporate personhood, how to effectively counter institutional inventions run amuck. Part of my own strategy was to develop a counter-cultural supranational and propagate it as a meme in literary circles. I called it the Global Data Corporation. Don went to visit Doug Strain.

:: shomar ::

Wanderers 2008.6.18

:: The Ancient One by Lynne Taylor ::

Lots of talk about TV studios this morning, after I succeeded in hijacking the meeting just long enough for a lightning talk on anthropology, used the tiny Apple speakers on the mantle to boost my iPod, circulated some printed lyric sheets.

Duane has some talks lined up in other venues, as do I. Jim's got a Canada trip queued, to see family. Jon and I talked about the ethnography around robots while making coffee in the kitchen. Traffic lights are called "robots" in South Africa.

Terry and I talked server. He's agreed to be the whois technical contact for wwwanderers.org, so I'm going to work on making that change today (done!), one of many tasks on my task bar. Appending a diagram...

I just learned about Katie's YouTube channel from someone who knows I'm a fan.

:: wwwanderers.org: current + speculative ::

Train Story

This is one of Amtrak's newest, just leaving Union Station. The sleek design says "built for speed".

However, high speed rail is the stuff of science fiction in these parts, as are bedroom communities served by commuter rail. Amtrak operates a bus fleet on I-5. A lot of the track is older than this typewriter (photo taken with permission at Powell's Technical).

Portland's new Pearl District is still up and coming. We ate at Whole Foods today, after shopping for books, dropping Nick at Union Station (background). Nick was taking an Amtrak bus to Eugene. That's Razz (my car) in the foreground.

Here's looking 180 degrees at some of the new construction. That's the Fremont Bridge in the background, with the train tracks off to the right (behind the fence).

Here's the tail end of the handsome Amtrak train, leaving Union Station and heading north along the west side of the Willamette River, moving slowly. Our passenger trains usually run behind schedule, sometimes by many hours.

All photographs taken today with my trusty Olympus Stylus 720 SW.

OutTakes

Per my Accessorized Quaker motif, I sometimes go with a local costume, the better to share about our western heritage why not. I see others on YouTube pulling similar stunts. My hat is real beaver (like felt), with my name inscribed.

I mostly produce these self styled pilots for in-house use, as I know other groups have their own recognized authorities, don't need me to tell 'em what a Coupler is, a unit-volume space-filling shape of eight MITEs.

I put each MITE in an octant of XYZ, all corners touching at (0,0,0), just to get the ball rolling in an analytic spatial geometry context (important in design science).

Here was a more esoteric explanation of "bow tie universe" using a Dorji as a prop (works well in this role).

The Homeland Security T-shirt is a souvenir from New Mexico, goes well with the hat and/or sunglasses.

More Lore

Scholars in Summer

If your students are eager to keep up and stay in shape with new topics, suggest puzzles, like from Martin Gardner books, or Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

If looking for theme based studies, recursion is always a good one, links to fractals and phi. Puzzle: "my whole is to my longer as my longer is to my shorter, so what's my longer's length if my shorter's is one?" (provide a picture?).

But without getting so numeric, consider geek lore: GNU stands for GNU is Not Unix, so the G stands for GNU, a kind of "not joke". Likewise the Y in YAML stands for YAML, which Ain't Markup Language.

Speaking of markup languages, XML and XHTML remain hot, along with JavaScript and the DOM. I was just running these by some gnu math teachers today in fact, as more topics in ~M!.

Here's an idea: obtain Periodic Table data in YAML, either as open source or from scratch (and then share it?), or how about graph the bones of the body (which connects to which?).

The point of these projects is not to create unnecessary tedium or drudgery. Let students take a lot of time learning about the elements, about bones, including from first person experience in the great outdoors. Nature guides a big plus sometimes -- your student might become one?

Recommended chemistry readings: Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks, Isaac Asimov's stuff (a chemist and fabulous writer). Biology: Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas. Mathematics: surf the Web for stuff on phi, fractals and Fibonacci numbers. Visit Koski's Kiosk?

Make sure your students are well briefed on bookmarking, maybe suggest Delicious as an option? I've certainly gotten value from that service.

Note to students: avail of work freely shared, while showing respect to your peers. Give back. Cultivate generosity. Study potlatch economics? Start a new blog?

HB2U

Open House

Saturday Academy is moving up in the world, and these are their best digs yet, right across from Multnomah Country Library, a sixth headquarters in twenty five years. Willamette Week was the former occupant of these premises. Furniture came from OSDL's Beaverton office during the latter's recent consolidation.

I invited Tara along, thinking she might get in on some interesting conversation, and we were not disappointed. Gordon Hoffman, a Wanderer and adventurer, is our resident Indiana Jones. He regaled us with stories of climbing out of an active Costa Rican volcano, at night, and of a WWI German army hospital, recently discovered almost completely intact. He's headed to France soon, hot on the trail of a Medal of Honor winning uncle from that era, having spent the last couple years or so studying Chinese. I was glad Tara got to meet the guy.

My name appeared on the list of instructors with five years or less service. I'm a relative newcomer on the scene, glad of the opportunities this top flight academy provides, both to students, and to careerists such as myself, willing and able to share skills and experience.

An Immersion Experience

I forgot the Afghan place was closed Mondays so Jon and I ended up at the Indian buffet on Hawthorne for lunch, then adjourned for a brief workshop on Google's SketchUp, which I hadn't realized sports a Ruby API, lower level than VPython's, yet quite usable.

Dr. Jon Schull of the Rochester Institute of Technology has been exploring immersive projection technologies using off the shelf components, with an eye towards designing useful interfaces, not just new passive viewing modalities.

In joining Jon's touring of noteworthy sites, I got to visit with Immersive Media's CTO and check out their local office. Immersive fields those VW Bugs equipped with 360 x 300 degree movie cameras, which simulate looking out through eleven of twelve windows of a pentagonal dodecahedron (the twelfth window is reserved for the pedestal).

The views have their seams sewn together by software to give real time recordings of actual geographies. GPS gets synched with the frames, so you get a well defined world line (scenario, point of view) from hard drives filled in the field, currently at a rate of about a gigabyte per minute mas o meno.

The player (controller) typically gives the user the freedom to look around at will, viewing the surroundings as if from within a geoscope. Some models of player give more powers yet.

Then it was on to the Pearl and Powell's. Much in Portland had changed since Jon had attended Reed College in the 1970s.