May 1 PR

Memorial for Igal

:: remembering igal ::

Article at OPB site

Girl Rising (movie review)

My sympathies are with girls, not pit against boys, but with all genders having a shared co-investment in having their world be less cruel.

The film is nakedly propaganda and that's quite OK with me as I'm one of those USSA types who understands one must show one's hand sometimes, even hold it out for donations.  One must beg, even if one is The Grunch, i.e. Paul Allen, Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Intel, UNESCO and so many others.

"The Grunch" is insider vocabulary, cant, jargon, shoptalk, for the amorphous post-nationalistic Global U.  This film is the Global U recruiting girl students, seeking to perpetuate the lifestyle of a long on ramp of skills acquisition, wherein various fluencies are developed.  You need years to prep for your first adult life roles.  Marriage and children comes much later in this model.

You might want to see this in tandem with Waiting for Superman, another documentary that conveys statistics, and that points to trouble spots further along the pipeline.  Just getting to "school" isn't the end of the matter.  A lot of these girls seem to think of getting into school the way Christians imagine getting into heaven.  There's no "but then what".   Samsara would be another good one to see in close proximity, keying off the opening dancer in hypertoon fashion.

Were I to push back, it'd be about not giving up on adults, on the parents.  They need education too and to abandon them to their dead end jobs while putting all the pressure on sister Susie, is overly stressful, making girls take the brunt again.

Guardians need their little screens, the tents all need WiFi.  What's up with that UNESCO?  One lap top per adult?

Families learning together with the adults in the household (dads, moms) having some say?  Lets all watch Girl Rising as a neighborhood, without trekking to a "school building," or at least let us enjoy the benefits of a "flipped classroom".  Let parents continue to share in the job of teaching, as the dad does in buying his girl a coloring book.  Maybe he draws (and is a space case) too.

Because "school" does have a track record of unthinkingly persisting a hollow meme set.

A great lifestyle that just needs fine tuning gets eradicated, because the families are carved apart by a new Central Casting institution. A landlubber farmer in Ladakh is called "being poor", and the "fixes" may involve destroying a next generation's ability to carry on the family business (farming), because "school" is all about impractical uses of time, or imparting outmoded skills.

May we count on our schools to share the best ways of learning reading, writing, music and programming (accounting, tabulating), and how to work with an ecosystem (gardening, cooking, fishing, shopping)?  We have a real global shortage of such schools, including in the so-called "developed" world.

A lot of kids drop out everywhere the same reason:  they're too responsible to stay in school.  They're needed behind a cash register or sales counter.  School itself cannot afford to retain them.

The trick is to have the Global U compensate the tent cities more immediately.  If the tents are doing homework, passing tests, then the WiFi is considered to be "paying for itself".  Investors see what they were hoping for, not a doubling of their money (that's just inflation), but a rising in real assets, human resources (the army you've got), people launched in ways that create exciting (even to them) resumes.

If education is such a world-changing positive, then why delay all the gratification?  That's a questions I'm left asking, when I see the condition of our student body.  I blame a weak curriculum, artificially dumbed down.

The film has a lot of fine lines to walk.  The oppression of peoples is in the foreground and the analysis is how girls are treated is a "canary in a mineshaft" indicator.  Slavery in general, in any form, is an enemy.  Cloud Atlas seeps in.

The girls show spunk and are encouraged to do so.

They question authority, use reason, stand up for themselves, hold out for better.

Liberation poetry is proposed as an acceptable genre.  Secular leadership, indigenous values... ancestors are not completely shut out, and that's a positive.

There's no liberation theology per se (those films are left to others), but there's an academic global development culture that cares about numbers (statistics) and wants conditions to improve.  This culture is busy recruiting girls.  Here's a film made for that purpose.

If only the war of ideas could be waged in darkened theaters and on smaller more private screens, versus in the primitive monkey-brained Universe of blood and guts "theater" (drones, cruise missiles, cluster bombs, tanks...).

Clashing titans in the form of competing propaganda films (like this one) would be far more tolerable than making the point with terrorist / torturist implements -- a widely shared sentiment I realize.  Hence the Countdown to Zero campaign, which has lots of grown up girls behind it.

Speaking of which, the grown up girl who watched this with me at Fox Tower owns her own truck, owns land, and has training in film making.  She sells her photography all over town, in the form of greeting cards.  Dora Marsden was hoping for more such women.

Maureen had wanted me to see this film, a WILPF member.  I wondered if Dr. Tag had seen it.

Knocking on Doors

I was brainstorming with our Portland AFSC support committee about associations for "doors" recently.  The Door Project is one of those Mike McConnell like efforts to make a meme, condense a dharma.  Anyway "knocking on doors" is one of the themes, and that's the stage we're at now.  Sounds Biblical.

Mike McConnell was an AFSC regional director who died recently.  Quoting from email:

Michael became a passionate and creative leader in AFSC and with many partners for building our programs to challenge war and preparations for war, while lifting up alternatives. He was one of our chief thinkers and strategists for work on ending war and violent response to conflict, from developing the “Eyes Wide Open” campaign to our current F-35 campaign on military spending. He supported creative and effective programs dealing with healing justice, immigrant rights, peace, and economic justice across the region and the whole of AFSC, nurturing leadership qualities among staff and championing opportunities for young people to engage in AFSC work and gain knowledge, skills and  passion for peace with justice.    Michael’s legacy is deep and enduring.

More concretely, Right to Dream Too (R2D2), close to the Chinese Gate, has a fence / flank made of doors along SW Burnside, in a zig-zag pattern.  This has become an art installation, with R2D2 seemingly air mailed from Burning Man.

Some here would likely gladly staff an eco-village prototype if they trusted the company, but few trust The Corporations holding "personhood" hostage.

You can sponsor these symbolic doors if you want to, a place to put your message, like a brick in a plaza, though less permanent, we understand.

If the "gentrification of camping" (living outdoors) could be taken a few steps further, we might have communities we're proud of, find aesthetically pleasing, and yet their camp-like nature is as unmistakable as their high tech may be overlooked, at least at first.

Occupy Portland was not that much of a scuzz bucket as some would have you believe.  On the other hand, it did become a magnet for monsters, molesters and other marvels, and lo the village was quasi defenseless, despite its security tent and squad.

The FNB tents held their ground and provided some alternatives to big tent fare.  We packed up on schedule, with other principals, preferring the big party notes of the previous night to a more serious confrontation with police, which is what awaited the lingerers and/or those who didn't catch our broadcast.

When I say "we" I don't claim to have been a denizen.  My Blue Tent (a wooden affair) was not that far away, and more capacious and comfortable.  I helped with supplies mainly, pulling SkyBlue (a trailer) behind EmoKid (a bicycle).

With all that straw spread around, and festive buzz in the moonlight, it was much like a petting zoo, like The Grotto in years passed.  Children were safe, at least initially.  Had this experiment been conducted in a proper setting, versus in the downtown of a major city, much would have gone differently, obviously.  More of a perimeter could have been preserved.

I've called for such villages through DemocracyLab, following the "company town" model but with DemocracyLab more of an infrastructure provider than landlord.  The kind of eVoting stuff Massimo writes, with some help from David -- that was a topic at our last meeting, just before Thirsters.  The Python Software Foundation uses this product.  Deb Bryant was on the alert for such open source offering given OSI's in-house needs.

I couldn't stick around for that particular Thirsters though, as I had my appointment with H&R Block to finish refiling, plus my preparer had a good letter regarding the 1099 mirror and IRS seeing double in 2011.

That was actually just the one income, with the partnership TIN being retired, DWA / 4D transferring to my personal SSN where they (it) continue(s) serving the public, albeit not in any especially high profile capacity.

I'm mostly a W2 guy these days, as the 2012 1040 makes obvious, with the back office the one getting the makeover (that's the $9000 reported expense, funds from business dealings for an office the biz pays for, enduring two years of leaking from water damage, taking about 10.6% of floorspace).

This Sunday is a memorial service for Igal Koshevoy. I'd been kind of taking him for granted as a pillar of our open source community, the paradigm geek. Geeks can suffer some hard times, I know that. We should learn to support each other more, not that we don't already, to an admirable degree even, but that still leaves room for improvement.

Igal gave some of the best talks ever, on exotic trains (BarCamp), and on virtual worlds (WhereCampPDX).

Speculations

The sudden fires lit to inflame fears of Koreans is helping us trace the veins again, like having some radioactive dye in the blood stream.  Various offices light up.

The National Forensics League (NFL) will be looking at Korea soon I bet.  There's a tendency to track headlines and see what the kids come up with, brilliant as some of them are, at winning arguments.  Politician parents, other relatives, sit in, fingers in the wind, gauging, looking for eigenvectors (strong winds) in the Matrix.

Imagine a town in which a large percentage of adults got by on skateboards.  Someplace flat, like in Florida.  Why should all those "trailer parks" (sorry:  "mobile homes estates") be limited to the 55 and old set (for which I will soon qualify)?  That joke about young people retiring in Portland is only sort of true.  A lot of us are telecommuting.  Yes, it looks like I'm just hanging out in a Starbucks (doing that now), but I'm working, actually winning my bread as they say.  Like a paid seal, or sea lion, eager for fish.  Welcome to Sea World.

Joke:  where should we put the Sea World in Iran / Iraq?  Answer:  How about Little Beirut?

More seriously:  allowing dolphin and whale diplomats access to more landlubbers is a priority.  A lot of factory ships haven't changed their ways in response to peer pressure and we'd like the landlubbers to understand when we take their twisted fantasies about shooting people and start seriously hindering the eco-terrorists of this world.  And by eco-terrorist I don't mean the green-minded hippies who camp in trees to protect them.  I mean those who would destroy the environment while paying the politicians to look the other way.

Steve is about to help kick off Write the Docs, Eric Holscher's creation.  He's likely to be one of our newest PSF members once this voting period is done.  We have like two weeks to ponder the ballot, familiarize ourselves with its content, before voting secretly using Massimo's software (David Mertz an adviser).

I've been commending Massimo of Web2Py fame for his most excellent eVote software, which PSF just used again, to rave reviews.  Not that we didn't have a tantrum or two.  The tent has gotten quite big and the geeks within are idealistic.  There's been lots of hype around Python and there's a sense of a Banana Republic wanting more respect on the world stage.  But all virtual states are back of the bus from a United Nations point of view.  Not everyone gets to play dress up and mean it, the way real diplomats get to do, with or without portfolio.  Massimo offered to write some additional voting software for OSI.  Whether Karl will take him up on it I don't know.

Kudos to the Portland AFSC for the Drones Project (maybe not the official name) involving LEP High students.  Making allusions to "a quilt" is a nice touch.

A flatland Florida village with skateboards a primary means of getting around, why not?  I'm not saying hit has to be Manatee County, though I do favor the enviro-sensors and maybe drones planned to help protect said creatures (manatees keep getting hit by stupid boats).  Hunters who stray off season our out of zone are going to see their actions monitored as well.  We can't afford to let humans play fast and loose with the rules as much, whether hunting or fishing.  Snow Crash an inspiration.

Wanderers 2013.4.3

:: mt. hood community college ::

We're sitting around comparing theories of anthropology.  Lots of us here, lots to think about.  David Tver is saying the liberated Jews in the Passover story were not technically "slaves" in the way we might use the word.

My point exactly:  the word "slave", kind of like "race", dumbs us down when used uncritically.

We're a typical room of verbally endowed hominids, post Babel, not all on the same floor, let alone page.

DC is like this too:  nonsense meetings, people getting a word in, no narrative congeals (nor need one, in this case).

What is / was / will be a "slave"?

I learned only recently that Plato was apparently a slave of some kind -- I just checked that out, more a temporary prisoner of a goofy potentate who saw a chance for some booty (he accepted a ransom).

Buzz is talking about Plutocrats.

Cal Tech gets a fair amount of rep with us, given Feynman and Pauling, and also OSU, thanks to the archives, but Mt. Hood Community College (MHCC) should get more credit.  The overlap in staff and faculty has had a precessional effect.  The other night, a few of us visited the campus planetarium for a teach in on galaxies, an event open to the public.  Got a tour of the lab / offices.  Impressive I thought.

The Thai restaurant, Vi Thai in Gresham, Wood Village exit, up the hill a ways, was excellent.  Just saying "Thai restaurant" into the Android (Steve fakes an American accent) got the robot voice telling us where to go.  Electronics have made it easy.  "Where's my car?" doesn't work yet though, when you get lost in a shopping center (or community college).

I quizzed Bob Mcgown on the difference between graphite and graphene.  Was the latter another allotrope of carbon, like buckyballs and diamond?  This got us talking about the trail of evidence Harold Kroto followed to a Nobel Prize with Richard Smalley and Robert Curl.  On the spur of the moment, we surfed up his web site and emailed a greeting (with a snapshot, so like a postcard).  I'd met Harold a long time ago, at the First International Conference on Buckminsterfullerene, in Santa Barbara (by Pergamon Press), where I represented both BFI and ISEPP (I was BFI's first volunteer webmaster).

So many eating options along Hawthorne means less business for any one of them, maybe (unless total foot traffic increases, or the willingness to eat out).  Such traffic patterns were on Becky's mind when last we stopped in.

Swirl is not competition for Fujin, but it was for Ben & Jerry's in her analysis, yogurt being trendy, and would the new owner of the ice cream shop there keep making things stay interesting?  Free cone day is coming right up, we saw that on the sign after, drawn in by the singers out front.

Speaking of Unilever, I heard the theory lately that PonPonPon has an overabundance of Unilever products represented, some kind of conspiracy?  Count me a skeptic so far.  I've gone over it and don't recognize any ice cream containers.

Last night, in private studio, we went over some South Park and related productions:  history of white people in America, of Mormons, and a famous musical number.  The public threads (journalism, blogs etc.) seemed to do less to educate about Mormonism than I thought they would, given Romney's candidacy.

Opinion

I don't think the Roman Catholic church should strive to be other than a patriarchy.  That's what it is and changing the rules too drastically would change the character of the practice to such a degree as to render it a different animal.

I have no problem with patriarchies persisting, any more than I have a problem, in principle, with a religion that reserves its core positions for females only (however defined -- XX a clear place to start, but not necessarily where all do).  Nor must all religions use gender-based criteria -- but those that do should be permitted to do so.

The premise here is your freedom to choose:  religions are brands.  You also have the freedom to create new ones, and some will be better than any so far InshaAllah.

For warm up last night, we goofed off watching Maru  (まるです) the clever cat.  I closed out the show with Code Guardian by Mark Spitoni and company, a kind of tribute to a genre of war movie and popular with my Saturday Academy classes.

We talked about Hawaii a lot.  Pat is moving there to be with her mother.  This is her last Wanderers meeting in awhile.  She'll be at the next ISEPP lecture (like TED talks, but longer).

Email from Python Software Foundation:

You have voted and your vote has been registered. Thank you!  Here is your ballot....A copy is also attached.

Please keep it to verify the integrity of the election.

We have secret ballot elections for new fellows, board of directors etc., even though we also claim to be a dictatorship when we feel like it.  Guido has thumbs up thumbs down on PEPs, plus he's free to take the language in new directions.  We got a taste of his leadership during his Pycon keynote this March.  I also enjoyed Raymond Hettinger's keynote and have offered to summarize it for our school.

Soviet Propaganda (remix)

Wanderers 2012.3.20

Peter Miller, newly back from a brief excursion to Myanmar (Burma), graciously agreed to come address our little group, recapping some of what he'd covered with Thirsters in last week's debriefing.

Quoting from the Thirsters list, John Dougherty reporting:

Peter returned from Myanmar on Tuesday, March 12^th and presented fresh views of the social and health services sector there.  He was invited as a representative of The Population Council by the Myanmar Ministry of Health.  Peter said that the health system in Myanmar was functional but survived on minimal resources that have increased in recent months, but that the government and health providers are committed to increasing the quality of health services.  USAID was invited to [the] country about 6 months ago.  Social indicators are strong:  95% of girls and boys attend school, fertility rates are about 2.0 (replacement level), and infant mortality in the first year of life has fallen by more than 1/3^rd in the past 20 years to below 50 per thousand live births (the rate in Thailand is 16) [ Source ]

Peter was humble about his understanding and did not try to sound like a know-it-all, always refreshing.  Our group peppered him with questions.

I was especially interested in commercial billboards and whether cigarette companies were aggressively declaring war on the health infrastructure.  Peter did not feel bombarded by cig ads, though ads were in evidence.  Korean youth culture seems to have captured the imagination of many Burmese, with an image of a softer, gentler society with many technological advantages.

We were interested in the sex trade, drug trade, refugee camps, religious strife, non-Burmese cultures, and several other topics.  We talked about museums holding stolen artifacts, sometimes preserving them, and about the Doctrine of Discovery and papal infallibility.

I came away again thinking that "globalization" is not strictly a "westernization" phenomenon as Asia has absorbed and continued with western memes, many coming full circle as Europe used to look eastward for its culture (still does).  Asian cultures have their own momenta.

Burma reminded Peter a lot of Sri Lanka some years ago, in part for the piety of its Buddhist population.  Tourists come from around Asia to these temples, not so much to take pictures of one another as to pray, to worship.  I talked about Alan Potkin and his scholarly wife.

Peter has had an interesting career.  We talked at length about his work with rural Pakistani women, especially with TBAs i.e. Traditional Birth Attendant (midwives and such).  He felt their curriculum had made quite a big difference owing to several factors, as evidenced by lowered mortality rates.  He brought a healthy skepticism to any statistics though, as a seasoned demographer.

One does what one can, with hazy measures.

He felt oxytocin had been misunderstood by many TBAs, as they administered it during birth instead of afterwards.

Back to Burma, Peter gave us an abbreviated history, stretching back into the misty past.  The current narrative, for several decades, has focused on a military regime versus a popular movement focused on the daughter of a national hero, and Nobel Prize winner in her own right, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Whereas he wasn't actively countering this story, he was complementing and supplementing, as a lot of what's happening goes undetected if the story is focused too narrowly.

Don was interested in talking about the US flag as deriving from the East India Tea Company flag, something Bucky Fuller talked about as well (see Critical Path, St. Martin's Press, 1981).

I ducked out towards the end to run an errand, returning later to take the above picture. Five of us adjourned to Cup and Saucer after the talk. 

More Geek Anthropology

We have a PhD student in the social sciences sharing some perspectives.  Jackie Kazil runs WDC PyLadies with Katie Cunningham.

She looks at roles, systems of governance, workflow, ways of addressing public issues. Distributed governance.

Tribe, Chiefdom, State, Empire... an "ordinal typology of political systems".  So far, I'm not impressed with these list maker social scientists.  What happened to Companies (are they chiefdoms)?  Crews (ala pirate crews)?

She thinks we're a State more than a Tribe.  Sure, I'd go with Nation too (already a lightning talk topic).  The PSF logo would be our flag (no special currency though). She doesn't know about Holden's "Mighty Python Empire" apparently.

Our lunch table featured Pythonistas from Oregon (Eric and I), Brazil (Henrique), Italy, England... we talked about meat eating habits, Brazilian especially.  All you can eat Brazilian restaurants.  The guy from England hosts meat.io and lives in a Portuguese-speaking neighborhood in London.  Lots of meat lovers.  Nicolas Cage jokes were also a topic, and animated GIFs ala Tumblr.

I went around collecting T-shirts and chatting with cute booth folks (many genders) at Hulu, Plone Foundation, Spotify etc. (this was before lunch).  Good catching up with Andy McKay.  He's with Mozilla now, supporting the App Store for the new Firefox phone (an HTML5 platform, its own OS).

Yes, I gave my lightning talk in the huge plenary room.  Not all the thousands were there yet, but the audience was substantial.  I got some good laughs.

The genome analyzer people were here again, Counsyl.  They must use a lot of Python.  Their operations is very automated, with FedExed blood samples coming in.  You need a doctor's perscription for this test as the results are medically actionable i.e. you may need to make some decisions.

Futurism Again

My dad subscribed to The Futurist and thought like one.  Fifty year plans were his bread and butter.  He helped get systems going, for the longer haul.  Naturally, some of that rubbed off, these being memes, not so much genes (or jeans).

What I've found is I sometimes pray / predict / prophecy some future development, but then not recognize when it actually happens.  There's a lag as I adjust to the vision being just alien enough to be not seem purely a product of my own imagination (not a criticism).  Youtube, for example:  I used to write sundry strange things about The Videogrammatron, short clips, a database, hyperlinks between them.  All that happened, not using my nomenclature and so almost escaping my notice at first, as my prayers already answered.

Another case in point:  I used to visualize that "virtual companies" that would conjure floorspace using the cloud.  Certain floors would be occupied, as a team suddenly appeared, conducted business, and moved on, like gypsies.  But now, sitting in this Hyatt in Santa Clara, taken over by the Python geeks of the world, as a paid, booked in advance venue, I realize that's how it already is:  floor space materializes even as people jet in. Convergence / divergence.  That's what's going on here.  And that's the conference biz, people meeting about anything and everything.

True, I was thinking more small teams traveling in packs, but we have those too.  People come here as members of a tribe, a company, a nation, a virtual nation.  Henrique said I could quote him, about how it's "more and more awesome" every year, in terms of how many familiars from around the planet one gets to greet and catch up with.

The Oregonian wrote me up twice, Carlin the journalist both times maybe.  The second time I was predicting hypertext kiosks in hospitals.  This was before people knew what hypertext was.  The first time I was shown holding a postcard next to my head, of Fuller's global data projection.  That was in the Metro section only I'm pretty sure.

Selected Favorites

Big Picture

I devoted some time at the AFSC meeting to catch up on some pieces of the Wikileaks story.  Truthout had the translated interview from a Norwegian source, while The Guardian had something like a transcript of Bradley Manning's testimony.

Earlier, after lunch, we met the assistant director of the Western Region (the director is in Spain) to go over some programs.  Many of the region's executive committee were present as well.  Cruel and inhumane practices by the prisons (e.g. solitary confinement), for-profit prisons, and immigration reform topped the agenda.

Per the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, the practice of simply "declaring" lands to be "US" by "annexation" and/or by "buying" such lands (Manhattan, Louisiana Purchase) has created a sense of entitlement over all of North America, by those ethnic groups most benefiting from these narratives.

The seasonal migration of peoples, a pattern for millennia, was interrupted by the imposition of "states" and/or "territories" as institutional jurisdictions.  Cultural genocide ensued.  The US Army was a leading exponent of this land grab during the so-called Indian Wars.  A bounty was placed on "red skins" (hides, scalps).  Extermination was encouraged.

The UK-based idea of "countries" (the districts of its empire), inheriting from the idea of "sovereignties" (a civilizational pattern) helped solidify a sense of "ours" among those inheriting this namespace or ideology (a brand of science fiction).

Fences went up everywhere, as in Europe.  The land was carved into "properties".

A sense of "manifest destiny" continues to inform various ethnic groups, many of whom see the entire globe (and beyond) as theirs to rule and administer.  As controllers of "documents" they brand fellow humans "undocumented" and forcibly incarcerate and deport them.  Religion is often used as a justification.  According to many belief systems, someone called "the Lord" (a kind of superman landlord) has authorized / ordained that those faithful to Him should lord it over (have "dominion" over) others.

The labor intensive nature of colonizing North, Central and South America by the Euros fed the infamous slave trade.  Various doctrines were advanced to justify this practice among those who professed faithfulness to their Lord.  Some were unconvinced by these doctrines however and ideological schisms appeared.  This led to the US Civil War which continues to have repercussions.

Considering Diversity

The term "diversity" has become code within various subcultures.  Many related memes help form the complex, chief among them being "race", an inherited corrupt idea still entrenched among Anglophones especially.  North Americans are historically obsessed with "race", a kind of religion for them.

However "diversity" may also refer to "gender" as in the Python world I frequent.  The outreach efforts of the PSF have had everything to do with attracting more women to Pycons, nothing much to do with racial categories.  My focus on Diversity (an e-list) has been recruiting non-Anglophones, given the Unicode capabilities of Python source code.

"Diversity" may also refer to age.   "Sexual orientation" is a related meme.

When the American Friends Service Committee talks about diversity, they tend not to collect birth dates.  Corporation members and board members tend to be "grays".  More, they want to know about my "race", and I'm not supposed to say "Asian" as that's not how racists would identify me.  My Swedish heritage etc. gets in the way and I admittedly haven't learned enough Kanji.

The AFSC Nominating Committee is delivering a report emphasizing that ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation are indeed on the radar.

Looking out over a sea of white-faced (pale-faced) people and complaining of "no diversity" is of course a kind of selective blindness (could be called bigotry), a variety of "all Xs look the same" (and therefore are).

Even genetically, you'll have lots of diversity among whites, blacks, yellows, reds etc.  However, it's "ethnicity" that introduces more metaphysical forms of diversity.  Ideology makes a difference.

A book called The End of Racism by Dinesh D'Souza is an interesting contribution to this literature.

I'd say the membership is maybe disproportionately academic.  Lots of teachers / professors and retired teachers / professors.  That's an ethnicity (subculture).  Maybe we should add a check box for that, when measuring our characteristic mix?

I do find it a quaint practice among Anglophones that speaking of "colored people" is considered a somewhat racist practice whereas speaking of "people of color" is a more accepted idiom.  English is a bit of train wreck eh?

More open source geeks involved in AFSC work might be nice.  The central office has standardized on Microsoft Sharepoint for its internals. The ideology of sharing source code around the world, as a form of activism, is not well established in this organization.

I don't think we have any tribal members as AFSC corporation members (speaking of "Indians" as ignorant Anglophones called them).  That's ironic given Quaker history.  USA maps that don't color code the "reservations" (also "military bases") are withholding some important information.  When it comes to data overlays, ala ESRI, I favor displaying this layer more frequently.  Show us the prisons too.  Elizabeth Furse would be of help to us I'm sure.

"Changing the narrative" is the title of one of the slides we're watching (I'm in the corporation meeting as I write).  That sounds like CIA talk.  Should we recruit more spooks / ex-spooks?  Valerie Plame maybe?  A lot of exCIA people have taken strong positions many Quakers could agree with.  Stansfield Turner?  If the goal is diversity...  Of course Friends tend to demonize the CIA as a proponent of outward violence; all the more reason for more outreach then.

Wanderers 2013.2.27

I showed up late, driving from Apachecon, where I much enjoyed the reception.

The Technology Association of Oregon delivered a message of welcome to open source people in general.  The Apache community is somewhat esoteric within the movement, and has built itself around http, httpd, https and related services.

You could link Apache through CERN in that way, to the W3.  Citrix (of Cloudstack) was a big sponsor.  Some readers may remember HP's high profile around OpenStack from OSCON.  The cloud is a place to be these days, whereas in older cartoons it was a sometimes satirical view of Heaven (Harps Inc.).

Doug McCarty had the rare privilege of serving as astronomer in residence at a very remote lodge in Namibia, where the darkness factor is 10+ (there's actually a scale known to astronomers).  Astrophysical phenomena are astoundingly clear, if your vision is 20-20 or better (as corrected).  They have a great eyepiece waiting.

The feel of the place is also amazing.

Whereas this particular lodge has a high luxury quotient, more like a cruise ship in adventure travel circuits, you may pay a lot less renting a camper-on-wheels (motorized) and buzzing about a bit.  However in a certified dark patch, such as near this lodge, you'd not be welcome with high beam headlights, or any lights.

People living there use red or focus them tightly.

Doug had a nice slice of nickel-iron meteor from the region, one of the bigger impact zones.  The Negev desert makes meteors easier to see.

Ecotourism was again the theme, reminding me of Lynne's talk.  She was there with two dogs.

Dick Pugh gets a lot of credit for promoting Namibia as a STEM stop, a place to earn credit towards your career in the field, as a mineralogist or perhaps craftsman like Glenn, a Wanderers co-host.

Our venue was packed, people sitting on up the stairs.  Great to have a large cast now and then.  I started proposing anti-talks when we wanted to thin it out.  "My weekend exploring I-205" maybe?

I've got a full work week going.  For me, Apachecon means listening head down with my face immersed in light from a laptop computer, the Mac Air.  At geek conferences, that's completely OK i.e. it's not considered rude to stare at your screen while a technical talk gets delivered.  We multi-task.  We're geeks.

So what I'm really doing is teaching Python.

But then I also transport items around (such as the director himself and his accoutrements), given Open Bastion is based at the Hilton.

Good seeing Patrick there, and Nancy, a conference producer with her crew, used to working with Holden Web.

Naked Lunch (movie review)

Steve was actually a friend of a friend of William Burroughs, the friend being Ian Sommerville.  Neither of us had ever seen it, and Christine, a Wanderer knew it was good, that we would like it, and volunteered to scrounge it up.

I'm quite glad to have seen this, in part because of the big dot connect with eXistenZ by the same director.  All that icky gooey bug stuff actually went somewhere.  Archy (friend of Mehitabel) move over.

Watching in 2013, the typewriter itself has become exotic.  The scene of the "typing bar" (or coffee shop) is an eerie anticipatory sketch of today's coffee shop in Portland.

I'm not a big Burroughs reader.  I think back to The Discipline of Doing Easy, which is obscure.  So what here is parody, and what is gentle fun?  I get the movie version, without yet reading the book.

Speaking of fun, my thanks to John Driscoll for having me by Systems Science today, as a guest speaker.  I have this fun roller coaster of a slide show that, while not Burroughs-like maybe, is still literary and somewhat fluent.  A mix of Python and MAD Magazine.

Note to self:  introduce OSCON peer reviewers to David Feinstein's work with ISEF.  Some additional layers of display to help us plan the tracks... we were lunching at Thai Baan near PSU, after we joined SysSci students for beers.

That was too much fun for a Friday I'm afraid.  Saturday will be on the clock again.  Nice to set when I work, if not the total hours.

Surgery on the Blue House

:: demolition ::

 :: new beams in 2013 ::

Bacteria Ain't Dumb

Dr. James Shapiro regaled us with stories tonight, of the picture biology has painted in the last 40 years, which, to read press accounts, has yet to be unveiled.  These aren't secrets though, just technical results that require some added vocabulary.  We were outside of the standard 4000 words or whatever English speakers tend to get by on.

The short of it is:  cells don't just change (morph) because hit by random cosmic rays, with natural selection then weeding out the losers.  There's no time to be that stupid and cells are not.  They form alliances, as symbiants, as parasites, as lethal adversaries or whatever, and they exchange DNA / RNA.  They seem to share information.

We went through some of the history.  Barbara McCormick's research is key.  Cells have lots of feedback loops and respond to stresses by moving DNA around.  Those sequences are not read-only, but read-write, and there's lots being encoded based on what's happening or what gets in.  Since Lynn Margulis we've started to get it:  once independent life forms have swallowed one another.  Today's mitochondria and chloroplasts where at one time bacteria in the wild.

The microbiology also seems to show that once X swallows Y, a redivision of labor occurs, with X taking on perhaps more of Y's responsibilities.  The eukaryotes have their own special ways of doing things etc.

If you think of cells as both cognisant and sentient, you'll have access to more of the English grammar needed to map the circuitry a little.  Fear of anthropomorphism is misplaced.  It's an intelligent mapping of an articulated part of language to something complex.  Letting British novelists describe intra-cellular relations using the the tropes and conventions of their trade might actually make for better cell biology, when it comes to conveying the nuances within our gray matter.  Make it more of an opera, and you'll get it.  It's Machiavellian all the way down.

It's when cells get starved that they really go crazy.  Being unsuccessful, or "insulted" as Terry put it during the Heathman dinner afterwards, is a primary stimulus.  As they said in est at the graduation, it's being losers that reactivates us, as humans (vs. the angels).  That's when we / they innovate, duplicating whole sequences (making backups) so as to be able to perform tricks of the trade on a copy.  How does it all work in real time?  We don't know that yet.  Lots more science is needed.

The problem with a lot of scientists, biologists etc. is they're victims of the die-out of "vitalism" versus "mechanism" in the great debates of the recent past.  The vitalists didn't have modern microbiology to draw from, to state their case.  The feedback mechanisms were hypothesized in a crude manner, the human imagination applying a rude sketch to nature's true face.  Now, a century and a half later, with more of that face revealed, the vitalist metaphors are more appealing, and what is language above metaphor, analogy?  Nature is alive, we know that, or do we wish Machine World as our only description.  It's more a decision about language than about Nature, as she is what she is.

My role at the church was outside security at first, a role I'm well used to playing.  In this case all that meant was directing ticket holders to one door, ticket buyers to another.  I had help.  I was wearing a thermal shirt under my coat and tie.  I had a large coffee from McDonald's (cardboard with plastic lid).  Certainly it was my privilege to welcome guests, not in any way an onerous duty.

Dr. Shapiro was right to pitch his talk where he did, as a science lecture that didn't try to dumb it down too much.  He knew he might have some real peers scattered in the audience, eager to suck down what they could.  His talk was high bandwidth in that the slides said a lot too, to those more versed in reading that kind of diagram.  Yet he was able to hold the attention of those just starting to get their feet wet.

It's not that we want to be superstitious about cells.  It's more that we want to not "misunderestimate them" (he cited George Bush for that one).  When challenged, bacteria respond like "knowing machines" that have had millions or billions or years to learn their tricks.  They're like transformers.  They don't just wait for mesons from heaven to throw the right switches in the face of adversity.  They're a lot smarter (more optimized for exaptation) than that.  As human beings with science, that gives a sense of where / how we might innovate, but also tells us more about what we're up against.

Dr. Shapiro said he'd given only two pieces of advice to the medical community:  wash your hands between each visit, and don't give them antibiotics unless it's really to save a life.  The latter advice is not just altruism.  Antibiotics wipe out a lot of friendly bacteria and if there's any surgery in this picture (say within six months), you'd have been way better off with your allies intact.  You kill part of yourself in other words (not unlike chemo then, in some ways).

The Q&A was all over the map, about cancer, about autism, about any given professional community's resistance to new ideas (memes -- microbiology in language).  Steve Holden and I slipped out just before the last question (he'd been ushering too) and headed over to the Heathman.  A very talented female vocalist was on the piano, with accompaniment, in the downstairs gathering.  We convened at the mezzanine level, per usual.  The wine and fish were excellent, as we've come to expect from this world class hotel.  I was grateful to have this privilege and gratified to see all this updating of world views happening.  Portlanders are staying in the loop at least.

My question during the Q&A after dinner was to cite the Pfizer guy's talk and ask if he felt walled out or otherwise denied access to what big pharma might be finding, behind closed doors.  The Pfizer guy was saying research was stagnating because playing it close to the vest, hoping to cash in big time with a few puzzle pieces, was not working out.  Researchers needed to put their cards on the table, for the good of everyone.  The liberal arts view.

Dr. Shapiro replied that he'd some time ago made the decision he couldn't afford that kind of profit-oriented seclusion for himself.  He felt the open source community (openly published science) was producing a flood of new findings, while being secretive was just shooting oneself in the foot.  As a geek, I could appreciate that analysis.

I used the "maxi taxi" for this one, finding less expensive parking than last lecture.  The crisp cold night air was welcome.  Mostly I'd been holed up indoors all day.

Tosca (opera review)

I had mistakenly assumed that, with a name like Puccini, the guy would know Rome like the back of his hand, maybe own his own Pinocchio factory (like Giapetto) and sell puppets at Piazza Navona at Christmas time.  Nope, turns out he went to Rome precisely to research the script, get the landmarks right.  Apparently the old libretto had Angelitto or whatever his name was swimming across the Tiber river to seek sanctuary in St. Peter's.  But as we all know, these two institutions (Castel Sant Angelo and St. Peters) share the same bank of that river.  The original author was fine with taking dramatic liberties, but Puccini wanted more realism than that.  The opera was going through a phase:  "verisimo" they called it, or verisimilitude.  The music was becoming more like a soundtrack.

I've been putting on my Teilhard de Chardin goggles from time to time and looking at history with that benefit of hindsight.  Sure, the explosion in logic made little sense at the turn of the last century.  What were they thinking?  Their rationality hardly improved and politics stayed as dumb as ever, so what was that all about?  Looking back, the computer languages were being born.  Lineages were getting started.  Turing fed into Von Neumann with channels back to player pianos and other hole-punch controlled devices.  Ada, Hopper...  It all makes so much sense in retrospect.  Like evolution creating the eye.

Likewise one can see the stage as prototypical of the "big screen" we'd be getting later (Plato's Cave version 3), which is still pushing the envelope at 48 frames per second of little Hobbits running around in IMAX 3D.  That's what we're up to by the time of this writing.

Back in Puccini's day, we didn't have film yet, but we had something very like IMAX 3D, namely The Opera.  And the singing took (still takes) real athletic capability.  Not just anyone could belt it out like that without slipping.  In any case, artists had what amounts to a big screen, and they had a sound track to think about.  So there were lots of things to try, lots of niches to carve out.  Theater evolved in parallel.  Then we had "musicals" (not opera, but operatic).

Looking back, Puccini was an early film director and verisimo was a move to ground more in the nitty gritty of the time, any time.  Yes, a genre, but an anticipatory one.

They say Puccini went to great lengths to get to tone of St. Peter's bell right.

Yes, it's been a long time.  When I was young and thin and more like a fish, clambering around on that Trevi Fountain guy with my friends (we didn't steal the coins tourists were throwing, and we were tolerated as colorful youth, boys at play never mind we might be expats) I used to get "dragged to the opera" quite often by my culture-loving parents.  I was getting some of the best of the best back then, but didn't really realize it.  Now I'm back, as a gray.  I blended right in too, though I also saw quite a few kids, along for the ride with mom or more likely grandmom or dad.

What I need to sort out is the back story.  What was the Vatican doing vis-a-vis Napoleon and why was the escapee being pursued?  What was the painter's view of Napolean's wins or losses?  And what was Scarpia the secret police chief of again?  Of what exactly?  Was that the Vatican's secret police or what?  I'll have to do some more homework eventually, fit those puzzle pieces together.  After Super Bowl:  OK, Wikipedia clears it all up, complicated story, all the worse because Napoli (Naples), ruling Rome at the time of the play (set in 1800) is not named for Napoleon (Neo Polis = New City).  Speaking of which, good to hear Civitavechia mentioned.  That was Etruscan you know.

And that was my Superbowl Sunday folks.  Doesn't sound like I'll be doing any comments on the commercials, per previous years (I sometimes scan them for geometry).  I did write about the cuboctahedron on Math Future though.

Oh well.  Opera is cool too, not just kicking (and throwing) some ball around.

I hear the power went out in the stadium.  That's pretty interesting.  Tell us more.

The Big Lebowski (movie review)

Lindsey was telling Jay I reminded her of "the dude" (Lebowski's moniker in this film).  I'd never seen this, and my curiosity was again piqued, as it crops up as a cultural reference.

Lindsey likes to re-watch her favorites over and over, so it took little encouragement to have her fetch her copy up from her basement lair.

I like Jeff Bridges.  Altered States was another one where-after some of my friends compared him to me. No wait, that was William Hurt.  Thanks Don.

I'm currently rereading The History of Underground Comics.  Jeff's character reminds me of a comic character.  His life is a comic book, a storyboard, if painful at times.

The usual rules of physics have been suspended in some ways.  People bowl a lot more strikes.  Or maybe it's the metaphysics that are different, or maybe it's just the 1990s.

The bowling alley takes me back to White & Nerdy (Weird Al).

Next we saw The Onion Movie, which Lindsey had grabbed off a free pile.

Like comedy night at The Bagdad, the latter is inconsistent / experimental, toying with ideas we have limited agreement about (special interest, for focus groups).

"Behind the scenes, Onion News's corporate owner, Global Tetrahedron, seeks synergy by promoting its other products within Norm's news broadcast."

Monty Python territory in some ways, though many comics explore here, variously / philosophically.

Jay was by because he needed to borrow my bicycle for awhile.  His was stolen.  We picked him up on our way from St. John's.

Jay is a key player in our current Food Not Bombs configuration, which is in the process of reconfiguring.  Like Melody, he has lived in Austin.  Focus:  architecture, anti-waste.

The Sessions (movie review)

This film recalls Kinsey in taking an anthropological view.

The casting is almost too perfect, to where it becomes a cartoon, and in that sense a divine comedy.  The Catholic priest is top of the line, if not over the top, in that regard.

The film is structured as one long confession, but ultimately not a confession of guilt.

This husband of the therapist has an interesting role.  You'd probably need to be a philosopher to have that be your wife's day job.  We only see him blowing up once, and even then it's fairly low key melodrama, and she gets to read the letter anyway.

He's in the church with the rest of 'em, cleans up well.

I like that they have her making tapes, reflecting into her 1980s cassettes.  It's not set in the present.  That's something of a relief.  He lived to be about my age.