Control Room

Looking Back

2012-01-21T21:16:00.000-08:00

Outcomes research was hitting a peak in the medical world in tandem with the career of my boss, David Lansky. He was director of CUE when I got together with Dawn. He got me working on FORTRAN on this HP mini-computer, and before long I was in the operating theaters at night, debugging my point of care Visual FoxPro suite, named CORIS (the cath lab counterpart was named CLAIR).

Perfursionists stayed alert and interested, filling in my grids, a professional way to fill the time by feeding researchers useful numbers. Nurses entered some data. Paper forms went around later, for doctors to fill out. A picture of the surgery was developed in the data, as research numbers.

The reputation of the hospital, for doing outcomes research, was kept at a high level. Interesting work. Mostly heart related.

Wanderers 2012.01.17

2012-01-17T19:15:00.000-08:00

Pursuant to the previous installment, I did leave a follow-up voicemail with Tre, as he seemed truly distressed up that tree, not just playacting. Just climbing that thing was a feat, of circus quality. Add the red and blue lights, crowds, and you get the expectation of entertainment. We've seen this in cartoons, with people shouting "jump" and so on.

I wore my chauffeur hat again today (not literally, I have no special hat for when driving), picking up an MVP at PDX.

You might think, if we were truly a spiritual community, of this network of colored houses, this board game of assets (safehouses and so on), that our personnel would be rotating through retreat centers, heading off to meditations, disappearing on vision quests.

Indeed, that's how it is, and has been, for a long time. Dawn was far more active in her practice than I was, by so many measures.

Just today for example, two meditators from another house came by, in route by bike to their meditation center (a yurt in this case, at some higher altitude). Melody is away on retreat as well.

Now I'm at the Pauling House for a talk on Computability, Turing Machines, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and all that. One of the seniors, a professor by training, is holding forth. He's got his super duper unlimited registers machine with just four instructions, for defining computability.

We should not forget the Quakers have a meditative inward practice, sometimes labeled "unprogrammed" to distinguish it from a scripted service, or ceremony, led by a minister, teacher, pastor or rabbi.

Unprogrammed Friends are free to attend programmed services of course, and many do. There's no necessary either/or relationship between programmed and unprogrammed (a lesson that may apply to computability also).

A senior member of a meeting may minister informally, in an authoritative ("weighty") manner, both inside and outside the Meeting for Worship context. Indeed, a Meeting has its ritualistic aspects for creating a privileged space, a fact Dawn was adamant about recognizing.

I've been publishing some of my philosophy of mathematics around the Koski toons, taking off from the flapping 4sys (Gene Fowler). The Wittgenstein list gets a front row seat, not surprisingly.

Meeting House Haps

2012-01-08T18:46:00.000-08:00

meetinghouse tree

Wilderness Way was having their regularly scheduled meeting when Tre showed up at the Stark Street meetinghouse, rapping on the window.

He asked if they knew Kirby, which they didn't, but then, when he climbed the tall tree outside and started ranting, they decided to call Lew Scholl, clerk of property management, their contact person for Friends. The neighbors just called the police.

I was on EmoKid (the bicycle) heading towards some union hall on Foster & SE 64th when I got the call from Oakland, CA. It was Lew. Did I know Tre Arrow? He was in our tree at the meetinghouse.

I revectored the bicycle and showed up there promptly (in about 10 minutes). Lew called back Wilderness Way and let them know to expect me.

The fire department had already responded and the police had blocked traffic on Stark St. The police had their lifting device, like for fixing phone poles but fancier, positioned high up. Someone was up there interviewing Tre.

I was asked not to contact him on my cell phone while this was going on. I called Lew back to let him know it was a pretty big production, and then Melody. Then my phone died (battery out) so I couldn't call anyone.

For the emergency teams, this was no big deal (that's what the sergeant said), but I thought it was a bigger ordeal than a cat stuck in a tree at least. The truck needed to hoist the interview booth required quite a bit of support logistics.

They said they wanted to ascertain if he was planning to jump or anything. He was not.

Rick Seifert, our clerk, showed up and talked to the police sergeant in charge. They were already in the process of dispersing. Dusk was swiftly turning to darkness. Rick later journaled about the event as well.

The Wilderness Way people understood Tre's ecological message and were willing to shout up their moral support.

Ranters gathered on each side of the sidewalk, starting a polarized debate familiar around Portland. They shouted about taxes versus the environment versus jobs, stuff like that. OPDX has somewhat changed the political climate and there's lots of passion for change.

Thanks to the Internet, bike swarms etc. were poised to offer more support and to send up gear were Tre planning to stay there a long time.

Lindsey caught the events on Livestream pretty much as they were happening, at least towards the end. Twitter and cell phones had spread the word and she just randomly happened to be tracking, had no foreknowledge of Tre's plans.

Channel 12 asked me off camera if we Quakers had foreknowledge of this action. I assured her we did not.

Rick really hoped John Munson would be reachable, and called Carl and Marge Abbott for his number from the clerk's office, but found out John's off serving in the Peace Corps someplace (that had been his plan all along). John and Tre have had communications in the past. I know John more from AFSC work.

Anyway, the police understood Tre was not really breaking any laws. He's a well known guy around here, an activist, in Wikipedia and everything. He does stuff like this.

I assured Tre the Quakers weren't looking at this as criminal trespass or anything, and there was no contemplation of seeing this as a criminal action (people are allowed to climb trees in Oregon). I think that's what he expected from me (kind of a no brainer), and said he'd be down shortly.

He came down in the darkness (with occasional flashes and TV lights) and made some eloquent remarks to the cameras. Channels 12, 6 and 8 each had small news teams. People crowded around and listened to his message.

He said we were raping the planet and needed to love Mother Earth. He wanted to know why more people weren't moved to defend her. He was quite coherent and everything. He's good at what he does.

:: tre addresses questioners ::

:: sharing on Facebook ::

More from Esozone

2012-01-01T20:45:00.000-08:00

Links mentioned:
BizMo Diaries: Explaining Esoterica
Control Room: Other News Blips
Grain of Sand: Esozone Talk
Control Room: More from Esozone

Base Tours

2011-12-20T11:18:00.000-08:00

As some of my readers know, I saw the Occupy camps as a recruiting opportunity.

Here in Portland, we specialize in disaster relief operations. The explanation for that is somewhat regional in that we live under the threat of impending doom, as a major earthquake is expected, if geology is any guide.

Another explanation is the pioneers who started coming here after the Lewis & Clark troupe were hardy campers and camping has never been far from the surface. That may be why Portland's was one of the largest Occupy demos, and one of the best organized.

The so-called Elk Club (the people who took the park and lived there in a demonstration community) is rightly proud of its little window in the sun. We decided to end the demo before the eviction notice. When the evictors arrived, the A Camp kitchen and medical tents were already gone, as was the Food Not Bombs tent in B Camp.

You've probably heard of "eco-tours" (already popular) where tourists travel with experts in various aspects of ecology. They visit both hopeful cleanup sites and disaster sites. Hanford is of course on the list (there's already an interpretive center) as is OMSI (for a taste of Portland's science mindedness).

There's a different kind of tour I'll call "human rights tours" where you have these international groups coming through looking at the USA's prison systems. Of special interest are the holding pens for so-called "illegal" immigrants (per Anglo-Euro jurisprudence) and what work is performed there. The USA is known around the world for its prison-centric militaristic culture and many want to see it first hand, in some cases just to see what they're up against.

Recent meetings with PBI and Amnesty International folks etc., me wearing an AFSC / NPYM hat, have given me some ideas for steering the new recruits. The workshops will dovetail with the weapons inspector programs, a grad school major expected to be popular in this region, as a part of environmental sciences. The disaster relief and cleanup industry is already targeting visitation sites, with assistance from whatever agencies.

By this means, I think expanding travel opportunities for campers is in the cards. It's not "seen one seen them all" by any means. A given Elk Club veteran might start with some local visitations and then loop through a few more distance locations before returning to a local theater or meeting hall to deliver a report. We expect hundreds of such reports, becoming thousands as more become involved. Where the IAEA fits in I'm not sure, given it seems to have been banned from operating in North America (we have queries to State about this).

When monitoring a site, you need to camp out nearby, using whatever gear and sensing equipment the university has provided. How supply lines are managed depends on the scene of course. You might just use the local Wal*Mart, and / or you might need off road vehicles, perhaps electric (less noise, less footprint) to navigate to the kitchen. Some camps will grow a lot of their own food, perhaps with assistance from various biodome models (designed for permaculture).

The medical tent might need special equipment for over-exposure to whatever toxins had been determined to exist in this environment. GIS / GPS servers will be aggregating this data.

Outfitting all the frack sites with sensors is already jobs aplenty for an FDR-scale CCC. Anyone who thinks there's a shortage of work opportunities should think again. Foreign aid agencies, as well as church networks, have their role. I should draw on more contacts in Vilnius for more church involvement.

Comic Interlude

2011-12-16T15:54:00.000-08:00

:: occupation of world's smallest park, Mill Ends Park in Portland, Oregon ::

Sam was pounding the table today, saying we weren't ephemeralizing fast enough.

We were at Laurelwood Brew Pub planning a next gala event, in part a homecoming for those who'd been at RISD this year, for the SNEC event (yeah, insider jargon, I'm full of it).

On the ephemeralization front, Occupy is in the lead, taking over the world's smallest municiple park today, according to the Guiness Book of World Records. Hi Cameron.

It'll be a failure of capitalism this Xmas if we don't already have the action figure kits, manger scene scale (like toy army guys), with little anarchists with tents, little riot cops with vans.

Junior can line up the cops around the camp while the anarchists amass. Depending on political leanings, the narrative may go differently.

Some will put the baby Jesus right inside a tent (Food Not Bombs tent?), complete with straw, cute animals, and a few defectors from the 1% (the three Magi).

Others will have their policemen smash those dirty commies with gusto, MacArthur style (President Hoover as King Herod?), while mom & dad beam proudly.

Koski has been replying to Zubek on Youtube, sharing the war on Poly, where grown children are still grumbly-grumpy about Bucky getting a molecule named after himself 'n stuff, when he really didn't invent anything new.

How can you put a refrigerator in a dome shaped home anyway?

Gimme a break right?

I bet they talk like this at Harvard all the time (snicker, superior Princeton sniff).

Me to David (typo fixed):

This stuff about the fridge:

You should remind folks that many of the architects working with
Fuller came up with more conventional rectilinear "stage prop"
interiors, that would protect privacy, but not have to be weatherized,
as the surrounding dome was doing that. More efficient, by simple
back of the napkin computations. More green. More sustainable.

In fact, Fuller's designs were quite smart and his cultist followers,
e.g Kirby Urner, think the ambient culture just didn't have the IQ.
"It's Planet of the Apes around here" is his usual off-the-kuffka
remark (cuffka.com).

The usual picture, duh:
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue22/buckminsterfuller.htm

http://www.mydigitallife.co.za/index.php?option=com_myblog&task=tag&category=buckyball&Itemid=29
(duh rectilinear as you like inside -- could be a city)

All this crap about the refrigerator is just teasing at recess, not
serious in any way. "Hey, your zipper's down!".

I'm something of a misanthropist when it comes to mean little children
that grew up to become mean little adults.

I've been yukking it up on the Wittgenstein list too.

:: koski contra zubek ::

POW Camps

2011-12-11T11:18:00.000-08:00

A re-gearing may occur when a camp changes status. The Business Plot camps in the Occupy Iraq and Occupy Afghanistan movement have a POW flavor about them. Those caught in these so-called "face saving maneuvers" have become the cosmetology kit for Washington, DC.

As pawns of the privatized security industrial complex, active duty conscripts are prisoners of war-making institutions such as NATO. They are kept in a kind of limbo, akin to refugee status, with a minimum of human rights. The North Americans have developed a prison-minded culture, so spreading this non-democracy to overseas bases is actually just a matter of following the same playbill.

I ranted on the power of prayer in our Quaker adult discussion group this morning, talking about the integrity of a moral vision. This was somewhat in response to the neuroscientific jargon which some Quakers have picked up, part of a meme virus I'd trace to a murky liberalism, by some twisted path.

I also shared about David Koski finally getting to screen cast his work in a way that lets him stay in the environment he's most productive in, a home office setting. That's how my prayers are being answered of late too: in the comfort of the indoors, even though it's the great outdoors that I scheme about (in terms of bringing more interesting work to our state).

Tara came in second overall in the LD category, in the debate tournament just concluded.

I've been sharing about these events on Facebook as well.

I do agree with George Lakoff that people seem easy to program, a two edged sword. The jingo-jihadists who want more war strut out "Republican Guard" as a meme, and the two-stroke thinkers (lawn mower brains) get all fired up, perhaps because "Republican" is "our word" (makes 'em mad just reading about someone else using it).

Stoking hatred for the Pakistanis hasn't been working fast enough either, although WDC's professional hate-mongers have been at it 24/7. As more of this transparent saber-rattling goes on, it becomes easier to isolate the meme viruses to their sources, often tycoon types with out-of-control egos and no use for "checks and balances" -- lots of senile geezers who use their bank accounts to inspire awe among the sycophantic politicos.

OPDX is "bad for business" in the sense of serving with the non-aligned against the self-aggrandizing uber-powers. The camps we're story boarding are not for prisoners so much as for those willing to freely express their conscience by acting on behalf of the Global U, providing food services, sanitation, shelter. How these camps contribute to the betterment of humanity's condition is relatively easy to see.

Kicked Back

2011-12-07T18:41:00.000-08:00

I'm in the Michael Jennings Chair of Computer Science, a welcome hand-me-down from a darling FNB couple. This chair was presented pre the Chairman's trip to Brazil, which so far sounds marvelous. They drug it up to the 3rd floor, not far from Hawthorne Theater. Holden chose wisely, among neighborhoods. Welcome to 97214.

I got to Wanderers too late to blog anything about the electric bicycle fashion in Portland. It's a lifestyle option some opt for. My electric ATV and electric snowmobile fantasies somewhat dovetail. Anyway, the speaker had departed well before I got there. Not complaining, as I was having a lovely time down the street, near Angelo's.

I'm back on the front lines of Math Reform again today, an old beat of mine by now, count me as one of the grays. Speaking of which, I was riffling through Powell's on Hawthorne and found an old copy of Everything is Under Control by Robert Anton Wilson. I bought it for under $13 in part for nostalgia value. Under GRUNCH there's my website teleport.com/~pdx4d/grunch.html

Thank you RAW. The then owner of Teleport married a member of our Quaker meeting (I was at the wedding) and I later bought the domain grunch.net to continue with that work.

Glenn has just arrived, with Amber, his daughter. We're saying good bye to Steve, who departs for Europe tomorrow. Alex Aris came by after, meeting me at the bus stop, bidding our Chairman adieu before he fell asleep.

AFSC Banter

2011-12-02T16:09:00.000-08:00

:: federated states ::

Per my squibs to Facebook, there's been much ferment in Quakerdom and old alliances are being supplanted with new ones. Twas ever thus. In the grand scheme of things, Philadelphia is still an important town, and Cherry Street still resonates with some authority. I'm not sure I can say the same for Washington, DC (WDC) however, which seems in steady decline as a world capital.

The new maps have come out, of the new AFSC regions, as devised for North American states commonly considered to be part of a single Federation. That means British Columbia is out, and Hawaii is in. Guam and the Marshall Islands, important foci in my AFSC work, do not seem to have much focus. East coasters especially are not known for their attentiveness to Pacific Rim details and affairs. We take all these maps with a grain of salt therefore. Philly, like WDC, has its characteristic thought patterns.

The timidity of Christians in general is a theme I'd like to take up. I think there's a desperate race to the bottom as each tries to "out meek" the other, in a bid to inherit the Earth. According to Apocalyptic renderings, "the meek shall inherit" meaning if you just keep your head down and do a modest amount of good, then you'll have your reward in Heaven, and perhaps even on Earth, God Willing (InshaAllah). Besides, who wants to be bossy? Just a comfortable "go along to get along" attitude is what most people call "liberalism" these days, and many Quakers would count themselves among them.

"Geek" rhymes with "meek". What if we beat 'em to it? "World domination" was our stated goal as well. Could the prophets have heard wrong, misplaced a syllable? Something for theologians to mull over perhaps.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have your "dangerous Quakers", but then a lot of those are far from Christian (Praise Bob), in terms of branding. These brands have not been well represented as there's a tendency to demonize, forgetting we're still talking about Friends of Christ.

Having a "Christ" outside of Christianity may seem a contradiction in terms, but then Friends are comfortably free of most doctrines and breezily point out that Christ himself was not a Christian, as if that settles the matter.

As an NPYM delegate, I'm supposed to help the AFSC keep up to date on what Friends are doing to fill the vacuum, now that Christianity has dropped the ball.

That's not my only responsibility of course. I represent different lineages. NPYM is an umbrella organization with many branches and sub-types represented. Unless you're intimate with the history, you're probably not aware of how many brands of Quaker there already are.

Revenge of the Gnurds

2011-11-29T15:09:00.000-08:00

Coming soon, to a theater near you.

Occupy!...

Then take a Victory Vacation.

Fire and Ice: Korean War (movie review)

2011-11-25T13:17:00.001-08:00

This two-DVD set was among the five documentaries we checked out from Movie Madness, for a small fee, due Saturday. We've already watched them all.

I'd been sparring with Cherlin, an OLPC guy, about North Korea in some thread and decided to back fill with some History Channel. Getting the North Korean point of view might take a Clint Eastwood (Korean version), but in any case I learned a lot about the American historians' point of view, colored as it was by the dizzying power of being a superpower, at least in its own head.

I'm tempted to say that Douglas MacArthur and Joe McCarthy were two of the worst things to ever happen to America, but then I temper my armchair viewpoint with the observation that both were products of their times and it's always within the power of the many to rein in the one, or should be, so blame the weak groupthink maybe?

Clearly those Main St. USAers weren't following too closely, as most are not today.

Who has the time?

Let Madison Avenue handle it (let advertisers pay for news, yeah good idea...).

The narrator relives the realization USAers kept having that they were not in charge of world events (such an alluring idea though). Blaming the OSS for "losing China" was as dumb as thinking Russia ("the invisible hand of Moscow") was pulling all the strings in China.

These simple mental models based on a smattering of loosely connected proper nouns just don't serve as reliable guides (don't constitute real thinking). People give in to ideas not because they're correct, but because they're easy to grasp, compact, even cute (the song of the sirens).

Would that intuition have a stronger hand eh?

By the end of the film (made around 1999), MacArthur has been reduced to a thespian. His final speech before Congress is squirmy / uncomfortable in its self-indulgent cliches, many of which he coined (so not cliches then, I realize).

Joe McCarthy was a terror, a bully, and Americans proved hardly able to corral this mad cow, because so infected themselves with their own "anti-communism". Was there any science in that rhetoric at all? Welcome to Planet of the Apes (1950s onward).

Sorry, I'm judging with hindsight and that always looks bad.

Good thing the American people started tuning out after awhile, rather than continuing to treat the Korean War as a spectator sport put on by generals in theater, like some kind of NFL.

That's just tasteless ugliness.

Watching humans blast their own infrastructure apart out of vengeful catharsis is just to watch the death throes of a pathetic species, another life form gone astray. One hopes to tune in later and find something worth watching.

Well made. Good footage. Tightly scripted. What a nightmare.

Speaking of Clint Eastwood, another documentary I got was a.k.a. Cassius Clay, a biography of Mohammed Ali that is rather deftly made given it's in the thick of things (in the midst of wars). It's a film that comes out boxing, dancing. Ali was smart to have this made at the peak of his career. Smart guy all around, a real dancer.

Esozone 2011

2011-11-19T17:03:00.000-08:00

:: esozone 2011 ::

My main intent was to catch @mathpunk Tom Henderson in the act, and that I did. We were first introduced by Keith Loftstrom at a Barcamp (#4 in PDX -- I'd been at the first).

I arrived just as he was taking the podium and stayed on through the Duke of Yuke, which I found relaxing.

Dinner with Alex had been a blast.

Now I'm back at the scene but all has gone quiet.

Steve Holden, the Chairman of a small global dictatorship, a virtual state, and myself, an unassuming Minister, would qualify as MVPs in many a diplomatic circle, but our presence here is unannounced. I did not file a resume or advertise as a speaker, as I had no idea when the trip to Silverton would be over.

We came back by Hwy 214 from Silverton, through Woodburn, connecting with I-5 to Wilsonville, stopping at Fry's. Tara had been interviewing for one of her choices of college (I joined at the end), then I united her with her champion debate team (the one she started as a sophomore).

I fondled the Brother MFC scanner / copier / color laser, going for about $500 -- on the high side compared to the others, but so like what I have now... I tore myself away with Holden's help with a recharger for AA/AAA batteries, some of each, and a palette of Red Bull (sugar free), which Tara drinks also (a Taurus family), stocking stuffers (for a vestigial Xmas).

During our stopover at Blue House, I found Food Not Bombs cooking up a storm for the GA at Colonel Summers. That might be a small one, like Holladay Park was (on my beat).

I know what it's like to show up with enough vegan chili for an army, to find only a few skate boarders with their boy and girl friends (which is fine -- plus sometimes we bring live performers, other entertainment, and blend in).

The temperature may get below water's freezing point tonight. FNB was serving at the same site last night as well, but then we're troopers, were doing the same thing a year ago, and years before, even without an Occupation.

Esozone is on the edge of China Town, or Old Town as we call it. I parked just inside the Chinese Gate so Steve, a citizen of the UK, could see how America is dealing with its problems. Mike D is a skilled worker. I know him from Duke's Landing, one of our hubs (though more of a storage depot in this chapter).

One of the dudes at R2D2 (Right To Dream Too) said "you can take my picture: I'm native American but I not one of those who believes your camera will take my soul". "Only two thirds of it" I bantered, as I snapped the shot. Smile. That was earlier today, while waiting for Tara.

Tom: the general uses everything, the artist makes do with nothing. A sense of self is a temporary matrix holding all together, both convergent / divergent. When narrowly focused, as in a trance, we may lose perspective on what our role may be, in the bigger picture.

Apparently the camera was not recording, so the performance has vanished into our brains and blogs as it were.

The audience was engaged and nurtured I thought.

Silverton was a hoot. I thought of contacting Gus but we were there for such a short time, hanging out at one of the main downtown watering holes (after dropping Tara at Silverton High). We enjoyed two appetizers, a couple drinks, and shoved off, back to Portland (a hub or "base") and Esozone.

Off to a food pod for some occufood next, probably the one at the base of Hawthorne, near Lucky Lab, where I am now, by way of Helium across the street.

Tweeting About Maths

2011-11-18T12:28:00.000-08:00

:: Ministry of Education banters with Republic of Math ::

Re: "Wittgenstein was a beery swine" (cited clip)

Virtual OPDX

2011-11-15T17:46:00.001-08:00

click for larger view

Per my intra Blue Tent memos, I think a mistake of some other occupants is to think the 1% controls with money.

There's money involved, but control is with spin, and the 1%, according to Bucky, are the ones most attuned to something he called "precession" (at which point we trail off, as apparently nobody knows what he meant by that -- the guy was just nuts right?).

On the Wittgenstein list, I make the point that our Jew of Linz had like superpowers in comparison to your average run of the mill Fortune 500 CEO capitalist, and yet he was an unemployed, houseless vet a lot of the time.

Who are these "giants"? "God only knows" right? Reminds me of our "great pirates" discussion on Internet Radio.

Phone Meeting Notes

2011-11-11T12:52:00.000-08:00

Thanks to David, I got clear on three things:

The volume 4 octa in which an icosa is inscribed, faces flush, is the same model Fuller employs to develop his S modules, 24 of which form as the difference between this octa and its icosa. These S mods have a volume close to that of the A, B & T: about 1.08x bigger. Ergo, octa 4 minus x > 1 = 3+ volume of the icosa (where x = 24 S).

The relation between the T & E is a buried gap in Synergetics 2, a 0.9994... that seems too much of a focus (over-amplified?). In 2011, we see E amplified by Phi**3 (volume-wise) giving E3, 120 of which make "super RT", embedded in which, as long face diagonals, is our "most important icosa" (the one from the Jitterbug) with edges 2R. On the T side, we see T amplified by 1.5 (volume-wise) giving K (1.5 T), 120 of which make the 7.5 volumed RT (interlaces with 6.0 volumed RD). The scale factor (volume-wise) to the E3 (E-mod * phi **3) is just 2nd-root(2) ** 3 (linearly: 2nd-root(2)).

The octa scaled up so as to contain the "most important icosa" also embeds a cubocta of edges 1/2 those of the octa. For comparison, the octa 4 (mentioned above) contains the cubocta of volume 2.5. The "most important icosa" is related to the cubocta of volume 20 by Jitterbug Transformation. Interesting factoid: the edge of the cubocta in scaled up octa is 1/10 the volume of the most important icosahedron, looking at PV = 2 (1 D), and icosa-volume = 18.51... with cubocta's edges 1.851... (same digits). That's weird, because we're talking about an edge vs. a volume.

:: opdx 11-10-11 ::

Adult Discussion

2011-11-06T11:02:00.001-08:00

Our Multnomah Meeting Adult Discussion section (meets 8:30 AM), was all about Occupy Portland and Occupy Together. This was not at my instigation in any way and I had no foreknowledge of the topic, though I can't say it surprised me. The white board note taker listed all of our names as we went around, although one of us (not me) declined to be identified.

Many views were expressed, including the idea that outward violence would inevitably be necessary to make some kind of point. "Mayhem = catharsis" is how I'd characterize this school of thought. One strikes fear in the opposition by seeming "out of control" -- I was thinking of Dick Nixon, who relished the "mad dog" aspect (mask) when dealing with his imagined foes.

Others spoke to the "inward weapons" in play and how the stupid stuff might be less necessary. John Wish cited a Harvard study saying that violence levels were trending down. He also explained about the city tax structure when we got around to discussing the public restroom issue, which I raised.

Lew, a water and sanitation engineer, and a member of our Nicaragua Delegation, joined myself and a few others for some follow-up discussion in the Social Hall, where other Occupiers, some new to our group, were mingling as well.

When it came my turn to talk, I mostly regaled them with stories of Smedley Butler, the Fighting Quaker, and his outreach to the Hooverville in DC. "Moron MacArthur" stormed the place, ensuring FDR's victory in the polls. Could it happen again?

Would a commitment to public infrastructure, not only latrines, but warming spaces, be considered a "victory"? The commitment to regather next year, and perhaps many years thereafter, to showcase the new village-level democracies springing up around the world, out of refugee camps in many cases, prisons and military bases in others, seems to have plenty of inertia behind it.

OPDX itself has reached a point where a phased, planned shut down, with a plan to reboot next year, would be welcomed by several of the institutions involved, not least the social service agencies who treat drug addiction. They haven't shown up around the perimeter in their community service vehicles (for the most part), to do screening and intake, but they have infiltrated and well know what's going on, and aren't shy about informing.

Getting the public restrooms rebuilt, and made sturdier, for OPDX Twenty Twelve, would be part of this plan going forward. In terms of perimeter vehicles, we've mostly had voyeur TV vans serving the passivist spectator flag wavy NFL/NRA stations. The TV vans have not been exotic, just the usual networks we all recognize, except on rare occasions.

The elements for a phased shutdown are already in place, as a part of the built-in DNA. Humans have an inherent sense of community, an ability to internalize. OPDX is not a full protein, when it comes to Village life. There's no mortuary, no place to bury the dead, for example. In future versions of this microcosm, transplanted elsewhere, we'll have those features, much as the larger bases (and universities, like St. John's) have them today.

Many within OPDX are happy to work with the Portland Police on a drag net operation to purge the camp of meth dealers. The social service agencies have the same safety concerns as the public at large, which is the 99% after all.

But then will healthcare become more available, to these people in need?

The Americans may need to outsource such care-taking to subcultures with more compassion, such as doctors without borders and so on.

USAers aren't especially well known for being able to deal with their social ills; getting kids to sign up for a military adventure is one of their biggest social programs, when it comes to government handouts, and that's not necessarily a drug free career either (on the contrary). JFK (a commander in chief) was on lots of drugs.

The devil is in the details.

Big pharma, in making money (profits) the standard, is cheating (cutting corners), thereby cheapening the quality of its proposed solutions.

:: OPDX 2011 / GA Nov 6 ::

On the Beat

2011-11-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

:: brooklyn basement ::

I was pleased to join Glenn around lunch time on his birthday, to chow down at Hopworks and then survey the Brooklyn Basement once again, a project he and Barry have been working on.

I zipped downtown on my bike last night, in case the new trainee showed up, and he did.

I had the classic experience of getting a stranger to tell me his pet paranoia, what we're supposed to expect at Occupy Portland. But later I grew suspicious (more paranoid) thinking this rant was too well rehearsed (what with that baby in his arms and everything), maybe an act?

What's Crazy Mary again? Or was this Monty Python in a parallel universe?

Anyway, he said the chemtrails were really a UN plot to replace the ozone which the 1% had destroyed (yet another coverup). That's the thumbnail version (I'm leaving out the Surgeon General part). When the misses showed up, he said she knew even more of the details, and oh, could I spare a trailer for when the meltdown comes (any day now).

That night, a trailer, SkyBlue, went missing. Or was it later? Sherlock Holmes is on the case.

So while Will took SkyBlue for a test drive behind his bike (he brought her back -- not a suspect; he was cooking today with the others), I yakked with David Koski on my cell about what appears to be a new discovery:

that the "two phi down" version of the rhombic triacontahedron of volume 7.5, which interweaves with the rhombic dodecahedron of volume 6, added to the octahedron-inscribed cuboctahedron of volume 2.5, gives that icosahedron (also inscribed in the volume 4 octahedron) used to introduce the S modules.

I was getting all this while roaming around Occupy Portland, and helping Will with the trailer hitch. Pretty good multi-tasking I thought. Then I biked home, filed my FNB memo, mentioning some that I'd met there (a light night; there's no organized serving from the FNB booth on Thursdays).

Carol is in Philly tonight. Good to hear from Uncle Bill. Looking ahead to Thanksgiving.

Halloween 2011 (3 of 3)

2011-11-01T10:23:00.001-07:00

:: halloween 2011 ::

A high point of Halloween the-day-itself was getting to tour the basement apartment Glenn and Barry have been working on for so many weeks. Barry is really good with dry wall and does measurements to 1/16th of an inch. There's no texturing to speak of, as there's nothing to cover up. This is craftsmanship beyond what you would get from most contractors, was Glenn's assessment, and as a craftsman himself, he's in a position to know.

Earlier, Glenn and I took Sarah-the-dog to Laurelhurst park. I forgot to take a baggie again, like that time walking with Officer Bader.

Fortunately, a McDonald's cup lay nearby, thoughtlessly dropped by a shopper-consumer (I don't call them "capitalists" usually). Sarah went again at the park, where a nice lady had bags to give out, and a male version of Sarah into sniff testing (that's dogs for ya).

The Laurelhurst Park lake has been remodeled to positive effect. You can see the bottom even. I wouldn't call it "stimulus money" as it's just a day in the life of a city that works, to do maintenance and upkeep.

Wow, some of the Halloween displays are really professional this year, like direct from Hollywood or something.

Sara (Cera) and Satya stopped by, enroute to practice, just as I was shutting off the porch light, now that we were drained of candy (Kit-Kats mostly). We had a dry not-windy night, couldn't ask for much better.

People had a good time. Satya likes the carving part, noted the 3rd eye in our latest work.

I did office work through some of the candy part, which isn't entirely asocial, as there's Skype and the cool people I'm on with for work. Tim Curry and Jim Carrey have more in common than I'd realized.

Sara had trailered my lentil dish to OPDX, our to-the-second intersection occurring in the middle of 28th, as the crew departed the community kitchen for the FNB booth in South Park (downtown ToonTown).

Tara and I consider Halloween probably our main holiday of the year. This was a good one. She got children, boys, bike rides, movies, pie, cooking, family time with me and grandma Carol (Bagdad celebration). Sara got to meet her for the first time, albeit in a hurried way in the night, bike lights flashing.

Synergeo has been a lot about lentils, and now this "dymaxion tesseract", which is really no more than another teaching toy. The Russian Dolls motif is becoming important, for David Koski too.

The meetup with Trevor the night before had been an eye-opener once again. Tom Ellard eh? The brilliant artist-musician. One the of links I shared on Skype was this hilarious one, which Tom might take down at any time, wherein two Protestants pray for the soul of this middle American. You can tell they're American by the shape of their heads.

:: reminds me of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts ::

Looking Forward

2011-10-29T10:51:00.001-07:00

Poetic Comment

2011-10-27T17:15:00.001-07:00

:: click for larger view ::

from the comments section of

Notes From the Occupation

48 hours inside Occupy Portland

· Articles · Cover Story · Notes From the Occupation

October 26th, 2011 AARON MESH | Cover Story

willamette week

Related comments:

@ Fun Center / OPDX
@ Ikea
@ Red Square
@ Fun Center

Another Brainstorm

2011-10-24T23:08:00.000-07:00

October has been Brainstorm month at The Bagdad. Thanks to Wardwell for reminding me. I've enjoyed the three I attended, tonight's being the last.

The neuroscientist Larry Sherman and historical fiction author Jean Auel, wondered how the new magic of electronics might be rewiring our relationships.

The question was apropos, as I'd just gotten voicemail from Occupy Portland that a geodesic dome had appeared. I looked around through the Livestream channel later but couldn't spot it (not surprising).

I'd also texted one of the chiefs how Bill Nye the Science Guy was one of my heroes and then, a few slides later, there he was, projected large, next to a picture of Carl Sagan, and a musician who was not introduced. Larry had picked these guys as major influences.

Clearly, electronics were penetrating my theater experience in a big way. Plato's Cave is far from impermeable.

Mia Birk drew the most questions as she was the authority on re-engineering cities to make them bike friendly. She knew Portland really well and was happy to go street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood.

She understood a lot about ethnic boundaries, which are also namespace boundaries. Not everyone knows or cares what "bike lane" means, or all this other lingo (like "sustainable"), which cogniscenti treat as "the given" already. More physical separation between modes, between cars and bikes, is the harder step in a lot of cases.

Making car trips relatively more expensive: that won't be the cyclists doing that. We'll be those cyclists, running from higher pump prices.

I already hardly drive. Ward Cunningham made a lot of sense last week when he advised not choosing parameters you can't control, like "miles per gallon" (you get what you get). How about "fill-ups per month". What if you only fill up once every two months? That'd be different eh?

I actually had a question on this one: Trimet had been recently unveiling its new open source multi-modal trip planner and weren't trip planners a big part of making a city give up its secrets, in terms of showing off its routes? Kind of a nerf ball question I suppose.

Mia agreed, and somewhat made fun of how all these major players were heading off in various directions rather than sharing data and techniques.

Solving the problem might actually be more satisfying than showing the competition how incompetent it was. Always trying to beat an enemy is probably what CroMagnon excelled at, and why there're not Neanderthals left to tell the tale -- unless they linger genetically (memetically too? -- did they have music? play the flute? a hot topic).

Like Mia, the neuroscientist and author were clearly brilliant, each pulling miraculous performances out of a hat, routinely. They seemed like insanely great stage magicians in that way, though I'm not intimately familiar with the work of either.

Fixing degenerative nerve tissue disorders seems like a really valuable goal, yet this guy spends a lot of time not in the lab but out begging for funding, knowing his schools are pretty low on the totem pole in some namespaces.

Those seeking the next breakthroughs need to get in line behind those just wanting to break things or keep things broken eh?

I bought Mia's book, signed both by herself and co-author "Metal Cowboy".

A Domestic Future

2011-10-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

Not lost on many people is the homey domey flavor of Rainbow Gathering tech, with lots of web-like fiber stretched overhead to provide a kind of utility network. One could imagine optical fiber stretching to the Camp X theater (unit J, 34" LCD dome), where we're showing some serious movies (a kind of officers' club).

The bases I've studied have had their R&R side, especially the one near Baguio which I understand is closed. Jim Flory would've been born nearby, in some prison camp, son of missionary parents. We were a technology family in the Philippines, exporting urban and regional planning from some of the best schools, plus with service in Portland on the resume, manifestly one of the better planned towns, Tripoli too.

The OPDX campus may have hit a glass ceiling in terms of what the PNW has to provide. No dialysis unit in the Medic Tent for example. These people are in pretty good physical shape on average. The refugee camps we're looking at have more heavy duty requirements, but that's precisely why implementing rotation, starting with media personnel doing coverage, makes some sense. Maybe Lara Logan will come down, and treat this as an occupation by some aliens (the thinking seems "not from around here" some days -- maybe that's the Python).

Patrick and I were brainstorming at Angelo's, and realized having interviewers encounter more embedded professors and retired military brass might be a good thing. CDI should have a tent, and project Dr. Strangelove. Given my footprint in FNB, I've already leveraged an AFSC presence.

We should get Glenn Baker out here on a documentary, get some overview on Occupations more generally (including the one in Iraq, supposedly ending if not turning more Rainbow).

I'm sure we have vets in some tents already, judging from the signs. Smedley Butler would likely join us (I say "us" without needing to bunk there -- I've got my delegates getting fed, and so stick to my beat, including Colonel Summers park when I'm able).

:: at work, oct 21, colonel summers park ::

We had this classic scene at Angelo's, where like this guy and his more restrained buddy accosted me, loudly but not in too ugly a manner, over something to do with drink (a topic in bars). Was this the beginning of some altercation? He had a Food Not Bombs T-shirt on. I had the FNB trailer right outside, as my next stop was the OPDX campus (its new home). What a coincidence. He was proud of that heritage, a kind of Hell's Angels for him maybe? We parted friends.

Toward a History of Domes

2011-10-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

You'd think Global U doctoral candidates would be fanning out across the land to chronicle the early history of geodesic dome building, as this was the architectural breakthrough for which the 1900s will be remembered in large degree.

A lot of the early pioneers are still alive and willing to talk.

Dick Lehr was only just caught on tape before he died. Other key players, such as with Synergetics Inc., TC Howard chief among them, may not have been taped yet, I don't know.

David Koski and I have been looking into it. Duncan Stuart is another one. Don Richter of course. Jim Fitzgibbon, Jonathan Smith, Jeremy Martin... Thanks to John Braley for some of this scholarship. Edward Popko has been providing some puzzle pieces as well.

However, in so many ways the Global U is broken and we get to live with the symptoms of that.

Getting a working curriculum is a top priority and philanthropy will have a lot to do with revivifying various moribund circuits, many of them "between the ears" in popular consciousness.

Or call it "connecting the dots".

Workaday World

2011-10-17T09:21:00.001-07:00

Long time readers know I champion GST, pulled down from its dusty shelf, a little used abbreviation ("general systems theory"), as competition for Econ.

Econ deserves competition, by its own reasoning, yet college catalogs don't make room for such a discipline. They used to be smarter in colleges, at least relatively. Why those high tuitions again? A question for your Philosophy departments (ethics included).

Anyway, GST is heisting this word "work" (also used by Economists) to bring it closer to the Physics department meaning of "expending energy", or just "energy" (some work is potential, held back by a dam). There's no such thing as "not working", even in sleep.

"Unemployment" is with reference to an entirely different "cult concept": that of "the job". A "job" sounds like something out of the Bible (Book of Job). All the connotations of slavery, of servitude, of travail, get vested in "job". And yet we want them, desperately. This looks like a job for the Psych department. Calling Erich Fromm.

At least everyone is working though (so relax), employed in a job or not. Non-humans are working too, sometimes very hard (lots of power out, takes nutrients). Work is not about money necessarily, although it may well be about making long term investments. "Wealth is livingry" said Fuller, using a word his "peers" (snicker) refused to adopt, in contrast to "killingry" (their nest egg in many cases -- "peers" who think of "Barfie Doll" [tm] Richard Perle as a role model).

Hey, is it true Mercy Corps is sending recruiters around PDV? Anthropologists maybe. Or was it Medical Teams International? There's already overlap in staffing I'd think, twixt some of these old time volunteers and the Portland-based disaster relief industry (bigger here than Seattle's).

If I were head of UNESCO or UNHCR, I'd be studying Occupation logistics with an eye towards cross-fertilization. These are peacekeeper occupations, unlike #OccupyAfghanistan or #OccupyIraq, more Business Plot endeavors (the business-run Occupations get to use violence as much as they like, is one of the differences, even in contravention of international law).

The vets in #OccupyPortland have a lot of influence on others of recruiting age. Getting to camp out, learn skills, get trained, manage infrastructure, supply food, sanitation, telecomm, education services, fly around the world doing good: would you rather do this in the spirit of #OccupyPortland or #OccupyIraq?

I can see where lots of troops would be willing to jump ship, maybe bringing the Navy with them, as one of the more honorable services. The mercenaries might get left behind. #Glitterbomb Blackwater (yeah, I know, a new LLC these days, shares sold by wimpy Wall Street no doubt).

I couldn't find Time or Newsweek at Freddie's either.

Thoughts of Dad

2011-10-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

This is the anniversary of my parents' terrible car accident on the highway from Maseru to Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State, in the year 2000.

Jack was a fantastic dad, showed me the world, and a way of living in it. I'm not a clone or even a close copy, but some of the character traits I like best about myself I attribute to his example and parenting. Our whole family was impressed with this man, and were very sorry to lose him so suddenly that day.

We are grateful mom survived the accident and thrived in future chapters.

We thank the rescue medics and health care providers of Bloemfontein for their professionalism.

The engineering community building the dam in Maseru, the diplomatic community, Quakers, friends of the family, all provided support as Julie and I helped with Carol's recovery.

Intuition and Science

2011-10-12T12:40:00.000-07:00

The blend of an OMSI Science Pub at the Bagdad with an ISEPP lecture by Dr. Lisa Randall at the Schnitzer was quite "kick ass" I must say.

The three at OMSI were / are Oregon-based innovators: an ocean wave energy specialist, a graphic artist and war zone journalist, and an intuitive genius cook. Dr. Randall is a particle physicist teaching at Harvard.

Their stories were each fascinating (marquee below) and gave a sense of how following one's passion can be soooo the right thing to do (not talking about "crimes of").

This OMSI Pub was a co-production with Portland Monthly magazine, which provided the interviewer (a pretty good one). And of course McMenamins is involved.

Dr. Randall of Harvard was likewise spectacular. She was calm and respectful, yet happy to live up to her role of "smartest person in the room".

At the dinner after, I had two questions, a more popular one and a more philosophical one. I ran them by Tara and we agreed they were both interesting.

I led with the crowd pleaser: so what would really happen were an individual to walk through the 27 kilometer tunnel during a time of peak energy operation? What would be the biological phenomena we might expect? To Lisa's credit, she forthrightly admitted to holes in her knowledge, with zero defensiveness, and was immediately inquisitive herself. Here was a mind cut out for science: pure curiosity and a willingness to continually confront one's own ignorance, as an opportunity. Certainly her chosen field, high energy particle physics, is fraught with uncertainty and speculation, and also suspense, as the new machine (LHC) is more precise and more powerful than ever before.

My other question would have been a run through of my "particle physics as grammar" analogy, the one I ran by Dr. Robert Laughlin, just to get her comments. She'd been talking about this question of Agency, whether something external could perturb events without itself being a subject of scientific scrutiny (God would have to get in line under the microscope, just like everyone else). However, I'm more thinking of "agency within" with a more Ouija Board like synergy. No one feels in control because no one is: everybody is.

I didn't get to ask it though. Dr. Randall was timing her Q&A for the intervals between courses, so she could get some rest right after dinner, not stay late. When she got up a second time and saw my hand go up again, she said "you already asked one; who else has a question who hasn't asked one before." That was fair (I was more just being an ice breaker if needed) and I stopped putting up my hand after that, concentrating on the excellent wine and her witty responses to others' probing queries.

Back to OMSI Science Pub: it was great to meet Nirel's friend Patrick, who had been trying to deliver something to the Occupy Portland crowd when he was waylayed by some species of bigot-thug. He got into a fight, had this shiner. Dondi and Don were also present (we're all Wanderers).

I again saw Nate the videographer at the ISEPP lecture (we seem to be following one another around), Trish the teacher and gardener, Jessica (with her boy), Flextegrity Sam, Rick the engineer, Jon the musician, Jim the eclipse chaser, Lynne the artist, math guy Steve, Glenn with beads, David the applied mathematician, Joe the psychiatrist, Pat the realtor and Rhonda with Airstream and many others (this was the first of the 2011-2012 Pauling Memorial Lectures, so a kind of reunion in some ways).

Tara did a good job at the special table inside the Schnitzer, for people who had filled out the Portland Energy Strategies survey questionnaire, for a promise of free tickets. ISEPP made good on that promise, with Tara exchanging printed vouchers for tickets. Dr. Randall sat behind us (this was before showtime) being pleasant with people and signing copies of her new book.

Teacher / engineer: Annette von Jouanne – Electrical Engineer and Professor at Oregon State University, Pioneer in wave energy technology

Journalist / artist: Joe Sacco – Journalist & Cartoonist, Author of Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, and Footnotes in Gaza

Restaurateur / cook: Naomi Pomeroy – Owner of Beast, Award-wining chef

At WhereCampPDX

2011-10-08T16:45:00.000-07:00

:: wherecamppdx ::

This geography focused unconference has been made all the more real by the fact that Metro is missing a valued coworker, Mark Bosworth. He went missing in Riddle, Oregon when volunteering for Cycle Oregon. He's a cancer survivor, about my age (a gray). Lance Armstrong is paying attention, per Twitter.

Given a building full of geographers, mapmakers and so on, you would expect them to be thinking of how to support search and rescue, or finding missing persons. How could our tools play a stronger role?

Zooming back, making the story become more generic, it's not always a given that someone missing wants to be found. Finding people is a chief function of police, and paranoia runs high around tools for "keeping track".

The Wall Street Journal was recently talking up the FBI's ability to track cell phones, whether in use or not. TV is packed with fictionalized superpowers that only adds to people's confusion about what's real (quite deliberately in some cases -- it's a lot less expensive to have people believe they're being spied on than to actually do the work, which may be impractical in many cases).

In the case of missing persons, with worried / anxious friends and family in the background, there's a lot of pressure to make "finding" easier, but that pushes against other scenarios wherein people are evading detection for one reason or another. Perhaps they're being stalked, spied on, followed in some way?

Privacy, in the sense of going off the grid, being hard if not impossible to find, is a valued freedom many strive to defend. The antithesis of a free country is one wherein you cannot hide, are under continuous surveillance. On the other hand, some people relish a voyeur's access, why they called it Keyhole (KH) originally.

I mostly didn't say much in the session on this topic, until the end, when I pointed to my cuffka and suggested these could be pre-equipped with sensors and handed out to volunteers during those kinds of search and rescue operations when you want to leave a clear trace of who went where.

A core frustration here at Metro is not having any place to aggregate data about all the searches that have happened to date. Handing out devices, and collecting them later for downloading data and recharging small batteries, would take the emphasis off of personal phones.

Cuffkas might also be worn by hikers, other people wanting their positions to show up on an LCD somewhere.

Igal gave a great talk on virtual realities and their associated geographies, pulling from a wide range of anime, manga and computer games. Some were light hearted and fun, like the replica of Venice on Mars, with girl gondola guides. Others were dark and twisted (more gothic and/or demented), with themes of madness and the more surreal side of life (some'd say "bizarre", others "weird").

The audience, for the most part highly media savvy, was quite responsive to this talk and quick to throw out other examples of virtual worlds (Narnia for example). "All realities are virtual" used to be my sig, back when I was posting from pdx4d@teleport.com.

One of the realities was based on an old German town, down to rather small details. Another reality involved French fighter jets. This was geography gone wild (geography on steroids).

During one of the breaks, I showed Igal the faux socialist realist memes I've been weaving into my Pythonic Andragogy, complete with Tractor Art. Given he reads Cyrillic, we slowed down and zoomed in on some of my slides. I gave him the whole presentation in under three minutes, including the Cult of Athena slide at the end.

Good practice for my next lightning talk opportunity.

At Ikea

2011-10-06T20:08:00.000-07:00

A lot of ruckus was raised today, at Occupy Portland. Per my earlier chat with Melody, I'd be spending the evening in a slightly ironic setting: out by PDX (the airport), shopping with my daughter at Ikea.

The experience is apropos however, as I was discussing with Tara over coffee and other sundries: is it Swedish efficiency and smooth civilian operations that we're fighting, or just corrupt, overly weaponized, lazy / cowardly capitalism, as practiced by the wimps on Wall Street? A rhetorical question, obviously, as I'm defending Ikea to some degree, also Costco.

What's obscene about the business practices that run rampant in the US, a weakly governed territory held together with a rather weak glue, is the ugly lifestyles it engenders, the ostentatiousness that's synonymous with poor taste and a lack of standards.

The squandering of fuel oil in pursuit of pseudo-dreams and fantasies, as nurtured by screenwriters for TV, is especially symptomatic. The people have been reduced to wretchedness, in logistical support of such ugliness, and they're tired of it.

If the global idiocracy can think of nothing better to do than engage in war for sport and profit, then sure, the job is to topple such a fragile house of cards. That'd be the patriotic, not to mention intelligent thing to do.

Not that the October Occupation is over at the time of this writing. When I left, FNB was taking up a position to offer sustenance and morale, even as riot cops were amassing in the side streets.

There's always a chance the cops might spaz out and start firing tear gas etc., even though Portlanders are generally pretty good at handling themselves these days and the organizers are fierce about keeping this a sober if festive event with a minimal footprint in terms of damage to infrastructure. No pooping elephants or horses. The Rose Festival (which permits sidewalk camping) makes a bigger mess, with its Fun Center.

I'll check in with them later, after closing time.

At Red Square

2011-10-04T12:20:00.000-07:00

I wiped out on the bike again last night, coming down the driveway too fast and putting all my weight on the front fork, leaning forward, accelerating (slowing down real quick). First Person Physics.

I suspect a feedback loop at work (a vicious circle) wherein the bending wheel caused the brakes to further seize, resulting in more forceful velocity change than ever.

The event was highly reminiscent of the "parking episode", wherein my front wheel dipped into the sidewalk tree's square of dirt right as I was braking. I turned that wheel into a tortured ovoid. Last night, I repeated the feat.

Safe to say, given the higher inertias, I went over the handle bars and landed on my back, first time out in my new paramilitary black field jacket from Andy & Bax (matches the black helmet). Officer Urner strikes [the pavement] again.

Two weeks ago, it was train tracks.

The bike shop on Belmont knows me by name. Red Square, a coffee shop, is across the street. I'm wearing my "Kremlin Kuffka" (with Nirel Foundation branding), a kind of homage to Shepard Fairey. This morning, I registered for the WhereCampPDX @ Metro.

:: cuffka.com ::

An Asynchronous Summit

2011-09-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

These postings to the Wittgenstein forum have many points of interest in this Halloween season. [1][2]

Likewise this thread at the Math Forum.

Equinox Retreat

2011-09-16T20:25:00.000-07:00

I've been dovetailing worlds today, the opposite of worlds in collision. Smoothly meshing gears.

I finally joined the #pdxpython channel on Freenode, long overdue. I'm using Chatzilla.

I introduced myself (to people who know me from PPUG already) and my agenda: to get back into the IRC groove in anticipation of #pdxfnb drawing some traffic.

Maria Droujkova of Math Future popped up on Gchat and kindly checked my "business cards" for spelling (she found a problem with the punctuation).

Then, at the cook site, St. David of Wales, I took some of the fresh vegan soup and added it to containers for bringing to the Linus Pauling House by bike trailer.

FNB meets Pauling House.

Chapter Change

2011-09-09T00:12:00.001-07:00

I explained to Satya this morning that I thought Lindsey really did her homework getting to know Friends, myself included, and that proved a strong basis for anchoring Thursday's kitchen for a year's worth of fresh vegan Food Not Bombs meals.

I'm not ready to promote anyone else to her position, as trusted key holder, from within the ranks at this time. Now that Organics to You has moved to N. Williams, we thought this would be the right time to drop our weekly gig.

We both remain interested in the logistics of increasing participation in these kinds of intelligent operations. Neither of us plans to come off as over-zealous however. As a street musician these days, she's in no position to preach. I'm more a back office boob myself, am no Alex Jones with a bullhorn.

This disconnecting of our Multnomah Friends kitchen doesn't mean OTY can't continue to help feeding the hungry in southeast, as both OTY and the northeast chapter have made abundantly clear. Indeed, several of our regulars hail from northerly zip codes and could replace Lindsey as haulers (she was thinking of Jay in particular).

She enjoys hauling herself, leaving the meetinghouse today with an humongous train of trailers, after visiting OTY and bidding them adieu for the time being.

In this next chapter, we may find ourselves performing new roles.

Even the meetinghouse, a kind of learning center, will remain on-line in some ways. We continue with our various social concerns and campaigns (testimonies).

#pdxfnb on freenode

Friendly Discussion

2011-09-04T14:00:00.001-07:00

I joined Multnomah Adults' Discussion (MAD) for an engaging reading this morning. Gary has scraped some ostensibly "satanic" stuff off the Internet, about six pages, which we passed around, taking turns reading.

In this version, the angelic host is merely exercising the privileges of selfhood against a jealous Demiurge that would keep them servile. Some of their number get involved in human relationships, starting with Eve. They basically encourage the study of STEM subjects against the know-nothing boot lickers who wait upon the Demiurge, a jealous jerk.

We had some insightful discussion, treating our text as science fiction. Indeed, Gary said much of it had been written as recently as 1991. One of our discussants and been raised in a Satanic cult. She advised us that the taxonomy among Satanists was ramified (not unlike among Xtians) and this text we were reading had little if anything in common with the protocols she'd been reared on.

I spoke with John Wish afterward who extolled Gary for his intelligence, and quality walking sticks (Gary has a Lord of the Rings air about him, would probably thrive in New Zealand).

Meeting for Worship was a lot about community. Our delegation from Jubilee House had returned. I used some of the time to study a book entitled Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia by Edward Baltzell. He was writing in the turbulent 1960s, comparing it to the 1600s in some dimensions. Quakers as proto-hippies?

Eve Menger was present today. We know each other from Wanderers as well, lots of history. I mentioned having just come across her father's story again, in "some esoteric philosophy I've been reading". I was talking about this book Alex found at Powell's and is letting me read: Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language by Russell Nieli.

These latest two SUNY Press books have felt more alive and contemporary to Alex and myself, we think because Wittgenstein is finally getting more recognition as a shaman (to sound ethnographic about it). Kimberly, in The Jew of Linz called him a magician. Of course these are not academic categories and such terms are easily confused with metaphysician. Perhaps "alchemist" is better.

In any case, the many references to George Fox and Quakers, by Nieli, a Princeton quasi-contemporary (we had some of the same teachers) is helping me shrink my world. That may sound like a bad thing ("shrink") but in the vernacular I'm using, it's more like "more with less".

Message Traffic (rad math)

2011-09-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

From:	Kirby Urner
To:	pdxfnb
Date:	Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 2:21 PM
Subject:	Re: SE chapter: starting Thurs Sept 1 prep

Our new cook, just finding work, was glad to get Corrina's bike,
pulled Satya's trailer to the park.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/6104537430/in/photostream

( bike in basement, plus lock, with David's replacement knives --
unopened boxes)

He was eager for updates on our SE comic strip (silly sit com, PG-13)
as he'd been away for days.

Lindsey announced her no-gossip-about-others policy while proceeding
to gossip about herself at great liberty.

I was glad Satya came by and reminded me about adding vinegar and/or
lemon to lentils.

We must have had over 200 red peppers to play with. Expect to see
some today (they're in prime condition -- thanks OTY).

I have this dynamite recipe I'm hoping to use for FnB one day, but
don't mind sharing ahead of time:

http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2008/07/together-friends.html

The molasses would be too sweet for some of our associates, and the
onion verboten.

However it does have sour ingredients. Thumbs up. Not my invention
(not taking credit).

I might just make it a side dish instead of an entre.

We were semi-silently marking one year of service where Multnomah
Friends are concerned.

http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2011/09/quaker-doings.html

I saw David's new flyer, verbose / micro-print, took it off to my
perch (where I sometimes go when on duty).

Again, we all have active imaginations so if you have a different idea
of PR, shake your booty.

I've got my daughter Tara, recently returned from Managua, advising me
on aesthetic possibilities (and/or traps to avoid).

Kirby

- Hide quoted text -

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:16 PM, kirby urner wrote:
> Opening 3:30 today. Heading over...
>
> See ya'll.
>
> http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2011/09/quaker-doings.html
>
> Kirby
>

Wardrobe

2011-08-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

I was yakking with Steve at Horse Brass about how Quakers (Friends) have traditionally gotten along with military personnel.

The rank and file wanted to draft George Fox as a commanding officer of some kind, or at least that's the rumor (scholars welcome to chime in -- on Facebook maybe?). Annis Bleeke (FWCC General Secretary, Ret.) confirmed the elements of this story during social hour just today (I was showing off my new bike helmet, looks kind of German or Darth Vadery).

In my own case, this heritage has translated into wardrobe concerns. I've been eyeing abandoned US military bases and military surplus stores, as campus and prop inventory respectively, when writing my "girl scout math" curriculum (some boyz allowed), a kind of interactive theater.

We just visited Portland's top military surplus store yesterday, to stock up. One of our household is heading out of the country (no, not for Pycon / Cuba). She's in Houston right now.

Steve suggested "extra-military" rather than "para-military" would be more the label I'd wish for -- less controversial. I'm easy with either, as a Friend.

Brand names such as Fox and Coyote have already been deployed.

Doing Hard

2011-08-18T22:26:00.000-07:00

"Doing hard" is in contrast to "doing easy", taking me back to that funny movie from Laughing Horse Books and Video, based on a short story by William Burroughs.

I've asked David to come sit next to me in my office so we could surf the net and shop for the knives and case I managed to lose for him off the back of my bicycle. I want him to come out ahead.

We had way too much food, got started late, were lugging a piano (toy Casio), didn't get much help. Thanks to Betsey Kenworthy for taking the compost. She was there for the Nicaragua delegation meeting.

Here's what I posted to the Riseup pdxfnb list:

Alas, one of my worst FnB days ever.

I found David's chef knives (velcro roll) left behind at the
meetinghouse and stupidly put them on my bike rack, not well secured.

They didn't make it to the park.

I am committed to replacing every last one of them.

If anyone sees a nifty knife set appearing on Craig's List -- I'll buy
it back, oyster knives and all, no questions asked.

Dropped somewhere between 43rd and Stark and SE Taylor and 34th....

Also, I think starting our OTY pickup at 3 pm, when food prep starts
at 3:30 is just nuts.

We used to do our pickup at like 11:30 am.

Toting a battery powered piano slows things down, need extra time for that too.

Glad Elise came buy to give me a hug. Tre was kind to me at the park.

David is taking it well too, though clearly upset and disappointed.
I'm really sorry guy.

Kirby

Google Drones

2011-08-12T20:33:00.001-07:00

These came up in a meeting at Bagdad today -- like the cars but higher, and sent to remote areas a lot of the time. Just for surveillance of course, not psycho dark ages stuff from some Dr. Evil horror show.

True, not everyone likes the idea of being on HDTV. Low flying, over criminal stockpiles... what do we choose to call "against humanity" then?

Does "prohibition" mean "no nukes"? A lot of schools think that way, yes. Verification remains a part of the picture, especially over a region as large as North America.

Board Games

2011-08-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

:: multnomah meeting ::

Jay and I were chatting at the park about a possible Food Not Bombs board game: a map of some city, different kinds of pieces. Yes, it could be a computer game, like Sims -- it should still have a map though, lots of 'em.

Blue House is of a specific type, a subclass of "FnB machine" (thinking in terms of programming now, object-oriented). We're not specialized to store or refrigerate more than average, whereas some network households may focus on storing and sorting, more like our warehouse suppliers.

Given warehouses are already in the business of storing, I'm always looking for ways for the households to not absorb any more waste than necessary. A "just in time" supply chain means perishables are picked up and used in a timely manner with little need for long term preservation. The focus is on throughput not stockpiling or hoarding. Each kitchen has its FnB stores (shared and/or partitioned). These kitchens may be institutional (e.g. St. David of Wales) or based in a private residence (e.g. Pink House).

Blue House has produced some specialty krauts, other pro-biotics, but our kitchen is not pressed into service in the prep window, some three hours before a park serving. We're an asynchronous supplier of specialty items. Some of our bike rovers are likewise well connected to specific kitchens or stores who appreciate FnB as a valuable community service (which it is).

Our 1950s vinyl kitchen with stainless steel counter tops looks made-for-TV, and I could see doing some shooting here for the training films and promos, but when it comes to food prep our role is to serve as a gateway to one of the institutional kitchens: the one at the Quaker meetinghouse, formerly an Electro-measurements (ESI) property and before that one of Jantzen's knitting factories. The Friends have done extensive remodeling and expansion over the last 50 years or so.

We might call those "supply houses" and a bike with trailer might be routed to go by one or two enroute to a church or meetinghouse. Or a bike with trailer might dash over to a warehouse supplier.

Most warehouses dealing in produce have a walk-in refrigeration unit with a palette or more of produce slated for composting, yet still with some fresh, healthful items for which no one has a use -- until the waste mitigation system is installed (here's a bike with trailer), at which point many vectors point away from that palette to various kitchens and distribution sites.

The idea of a control room taking feed from GPS devices, with helmet mounted web cams and ear buds ("that looks like a good box of avocados, how about grab it?") feeds the next generation science fiction version. This goes with the fleets of biodiesel powered trucks running on Asian restaurant cooking oil, bringing CSA goods in, taking compost and combustibles out.

Connecting my past work with trucking and routing (optimizing delivery schedules) to FnB is part of the larger scale waste mitigation effort. When resources are tight and need to be shared, with some solutions more optimal than others, far more serviceable, there's momentum to develop the simulations and get into anticipatory design mode.

Blue House is close to community kitchens and provides overnight parking for some of the bike trailer fleet (SkyBlue chiefly). We also do low level carryover, some refrigeration. My inventory in the staging area currently consists of squash, zucchini, cucumber, tomatoes, some fruits, carrots. These were retrieved from the park yesterday and will be picked up by the Tuesday crew later today.

My goal has been to render the model with sufficient transparency to support transferability and scalability (scaling down as well as up). I put a lot of emphasis on the learning opportunities the free school provides for those wanting to master cooking for large groups using a somewhat "just in time" approach.

Thinking Claymation

2011-08-06T22:28:00.000-07:00

I was chauffeuring the chairman around, showing him Produce Row. Hawthorne and Morrison bridges were both mostly shut, so I was surmising Bridge Pedal was happening tomorrow morning.

Having just checked the web site, I see I was wrong. I'm glad I'm wrong because getting to our event would be difficult with that many bridges closed.

We went to Office Depot so Steve could better equip his Portland office. Earlier, at Angelo's with Steve and Patrick, I thought I'd texted Patrick's cell number to Melody (with permission) but later my phone showed no trace of such an outgoing message (Melody later: confirmed receipt). This phone also tries to sell me stuff, which I consider rude.

Another day in purgatory I guess, punishment for sins I'm still committing most likely.

Bridge Pedal has Catholic connections so yakking about it, and sin, in the same post might actually be apropos.

At Steve's with Glenn I was saying how I was now Will Vinton's friend on Facebook. He's the founder of a famous claymation studio here in Portland. From his picture he reminds me of Jesse Ventura and G. Gordon Liddy.

I was leaning against the wall on the floor, doing some chuckling, taking a break from my queue at the carnival (geek fest, feast, nutritious meal).

Portland as ToonTown, is what I was again connecting through to at Math Forum, under "shovel ready". Steve has Python.TV registered, so why not? We'll need a lot of workshops perhaps, but then so did the WPA (perhaps we'd be able to bring more Python to the UN?).

Tomorrow I hope to see more of the thread with GS about population pressures in a world game context.

FNB on FB

2011-08-02T18:38:00.000-07:00

Click for larger views...

Perl World

2011-07-28T18:49:00.001-07:00

:: from July 3-5, 2011 ::

Jeff Zucker is here, my old friend and associate from CUE days (that was Center for Urban Education). We sat around the table in the foyer of the ballroom, catching up.

I'm walking the talk of the totem toter, diving deep into Perl culture coming from snake charming (a related brand of geekery). The totem spent the whole convention at the Perl Foundation booth, nuzzling with the camel. An inflatable globe also got into the act, perhaps signifying world domination (yet again, yawn).

Apropos of this theme, Trish hosted a Perl versus Python debate on the convention TV station, if we might call it that. Is Netflix a TV company or an Internet company?

We've been talking about Python.tv, the domain name.

The debate was most friendly. Steve thanked Perl culture for helping to get this O'Reilly circus off the ground in the first place. OSCON is an outgrowth of the Perl conference. In coming to State of the Onion, I'm in some sense at the core. I may not stay for lightning talks though.

Staff is over on Hawthorne welcoming a new mentor. I'm eager to meet him too. My schedule took me back to 97214 for Food Not Bombs duty, adjutant to officer Walker (Blue House has offices).

Once David showed up, I was sure she had enough help, so bowed out, having helped with those coconuts, washing and sterilizing serving utensils, sharing some Quaker lore with our kitchen mates.

Earlier, at the Expo, after yet another excellent Google lunch, Scott sidled up to me yakking about Simple Gifts, as frequently cited by Copland in that famous symphony of his.

He's interested in the Quaker angle as well.

Trish was emceeing the televised debate with Chairman Steve and Peter. They took turns counting from 10 to 1, showing slides, going through their respective languages' best features, each somewhat teasing the other, a good-natured rivalry.

"Learn both" was Trish's advice, as a PHP coder.

You can see me on the video towards the middle, during the crowd shot: a hunchy gray big guy with the green PSF snake, which I was in the process of transporting back to its hovel on the Max and bus, given the booth fest was to end. At the booth fest: lots more talk with Computers for Kids (hand-me-downs, not spanking new OLPC stuff), and DemocracyLab. Open source TV production.

State of the Onion: mixed with lightning talks this year. I'm learning a lot listening to all this. I should go look for a bus soon.

At the Carnival

2011-07-26T22:04:00.000-07:00

I think O'Reilly was working boldly with "symbolization" here, to use a term I learned from Trevor's ethnography on the Technocracy movement.

From 6 pm to 8 pm, one of the capacious Oregon Convention Center exhibit halls was turned into a memefest centered on the carnival theme: cotton candy, corn dogs, nachos, popcorn, caramel apples, what amounted to rides, games, photo booth... pinball machines.

Everything free to conference attenders and in unlimited amounts... for two hours.

I left around 7:33, having saluted my new Brazilian friends from last night.

Why this carnival imagery was deep, in a form of life sense (just "lifestyle" sounds too shallow), is the etymology of the word "geek".

The original geeks were in carnivals, down on their luck, and willing to engage in self-demeaning activities in front of gawkers, such as biting the heads off live chickens.

None of that went down here. We've come a long way. This was a wholesome event, even with a few true children. The rest of us faked it pretty well.

I dorked around a bit myself, made the bell ring with the hammer a few times, played Star Wars pinball, and floundered through the inflated obstacle course, falling off the cliff in the middle and taking the "death door" out the side (I wasn't the only one to perish in that way, though some managed to climb back out -- I even witnessed a rescue, of one woman by another, in true girl scout fashion). I rode a "monster tricycle" a few laps.

This morning was all business.

I rolled through my queue on the laptop, working the day job, teaching school for this same O'Reilly company. I'm on a superpass this year because I helped with some of the tracks, stressing medical research data (harvesting from medical records, sharing), and of course Python.

My usual themes.

During the first lunch yesterday, I had a long talk with a medical data person, with offices around the world. At today's lunch I just listened.

One of my neighbors from across the street is here too.

Today's talks: the OSCON Data track is in a state of mulling things over. The Internet has thrust us into a state where swift evolution of data storage tools is a fact of life.

Open code is better code, and some of these tools just wouldn't hack it as proprietary offerings. They need to get worked on.

If you're a LinkedIn or Netflix, you don't want to wait for some vendor to fix bugs and make enhancements. You hire your own talent and get to work, on whatever it is.

Netflix is building out atop Amazon, about to fire up in South America, with other services to follow. They're happy enough with this solution to be willing to give up "Roman Riding", meaning one leg on each horse as they dash around the ring. Their own data center is the other horse.

How wonderful to be able to configure a ring of Cassandra machines in Japan with the touch of a button.

Netflix makes deals in Hollywood and then actually sources the streaming formats and DVDs from master originals. They're involved in the actual digitization process. Their GUI front ends serve off Java Tomcat.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, is more into in-house solutions, not renting in the cloud. They use lots of Harry Potter sounding open source tools, plus Kafka, which they may be willing to take public soon.

In-house development with the perspective of working on "products" is an advantageous mindset, as more general, sharable solutions also tend to be more robust, have a longer half-life.

If you just do vertical market silo stuff, you become unintelligible to yourself more quickly. I could hear a kind of anti-pattern against private language, shades of Wittgenstein.

The State of New York sent some people. Like in the other states, the political machinery is old and creaky and also not particularly accessible to ordinary people.

You might think it would be easy to look up the laws and monitor new ones as they wended their way through committee. You would be wrong, at least until recently. New York had been charging a hefty subscription to anyone wanting access to real time information. This has been changing, thanks to a small crew of geeks and a more aroused public.

I settled in to the HTML5 / CSS3 track again for the afternoon (up until carnival time), continuing to grade student work and monitor threads.

On the bus and Max to and from, I managed to finish How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser. More on that some other time.

This One's For You

2011-07-14T07:45:00.001-07:00

:: annual session, npym 2011 ::

We turned off on Hwy 512 just north of McChord AFB and the joint facility with Ft. Lewis. Check Google maps, satellite view if interested. A big Bud billboard supports the troops. That's a Euro company used to provide advertising encouraging a certain image of "American". Euros are always making up stuff about the USA. They like the idea of a "martian police" (a dick brain neocon concept).

I caught the org reps meeting, as an NPYM guy (AFSC Corporation), mom too, on the Board. I pointed out towards the end of the meeting that since Quakers scarcely do titles, these signs of role serve as badges or c.v. credentials when addressing non-Q 3rd parties, not just our internal agencies (FCNL, FWCC, WF, FLGBTQC, QUNO and blah blah alphabet soup).

Speaking of Quaker entities, a topic on our plate this Session is shall NPYM affiliate overtly with the Friends General Conference (FGC). My table at dinner was focused on this. Tom Head, on the committee to make a recommendation, finds the demographic argument compelling. NPYM isn't about to turn on a dime and change its character, so if consolidation is the name of the game, then FGC is whom NPYM should hang out with. EFI and FUM would have no truck with us.

Chris on the other hand, daughter of a Quaker minister in Whittier, thought NPYM was more a beacon on its own and should not sacrifice its unique heritage in some effort to blend with the Quaker hoi polloi. Her meeting had broken away from FUM but still kept an orbit, and NPYM too has its special path, less squeamish in some ways.

I told Gayle afterward I didn't think NPYM was giving up its identity either way, and that FGC too would be changed, should the affiliation occur.

I also suggested these relationships were not mutually exclusive and NPYM was in no way monogamous (think of the "sister cities" program). Given we look "East" (i.e. towards the Far East, as in Asia), we should be looking to affiliate with some of those regional groups as well.

NPYM could jump in with some Quaker branches in Japan. Look at the University Meetinghouse in Seattle. Clearly Zen is an influence, and Buddhism more generally.

Of course Quakers, especially of the unprogrammed variety, are quite esoteric and you won't find many of them anywhere, not even in Philadelphia. Getting permission to settle in Pennsylvania was a breakthrough. The western USA states let us keep to our own rule book pretty closely as well. We're able to freely build on historic friendships with pre-Columbians for example, such as the Stillaguamish. Ft. Lewis is close to Steilacoom.

The Friend in Residence talk was about a Quaker meaning for "clear". I could imagine doing some creative videography and twisting this into a meeting for wannabe scientologists, spreading clearness around the world and, even more to the point, getting clear themselves. Just a passing thought.

There was also this Kierkegaardian theme: to will the good is to will one thing. What might you really put your heart into, out of conflicting motives? Maybe nothing? Expectant waiting is the Quaker form of meditation, a kind of not knowing. Satori (Eureka!) is not an uncommon result.

Quakers have a knack for remembering about sangha (community) even while emphasizing the individual's mystical powers to connect directly to some source of "right action upgrades" (cloud services). That explains all this talk about "corporate worship" which has the sound of some zombie worship capitalistic idolatry and/or superstition.

The Friend in Residence quoted extensively from Margaret Fell and John Woolman, two of the anchoring bodhisattvas in our Friendly tradition.

Given our closeness to the airport at McChord, we get to see some interesting mechanical fauna in the flight path, at about the same height as over DK's place in Minneapolis, though not nearly as frequently.

I brought the PSF totem in a bag with some speakers, mentioned doing this on Diversity. Tara might use those speakers. She's playing several responsible roles during this Session, from JF recording clerk to presenter regarding their recent "away team" delegation (no, not to Cuba).

That was a part of my remarks at the end of the org reps meeting: I mentioned my PSF affiliation, pointing to the decal on my uniform. I also tried to get clearer on former President Hoover's trajectory. Some NPYMers are holding puzzle pieces about him.

As I was mentioning to Eddy and Marty, now that we've escaped the gravitational vortex of establishment Christianity, we should do more to dabble in its forms, using retrospective allusion as well as pioneering new forms. Why not have some Synods, like the Lutherans do. We could dress up more, invent some costumes. I've been looking at fashion anyway, in connection with those Tarzania courses (advanced STEM). "How about Quaker tattoos?" I was saying, before our paths forked (not mandatory of course).

Scattered Recollections

2011-06-30T22:47:00.000-07:00

Early meeting with a new (to me) engineer, lots of stellar ideas. Much talk of the Tesla pump. Better sand blaster, better paint mixer. Economies will shelve a good invention, because more money is made with more breakable solutions. People coast on fragility quite a lot.

More news from the Gulf, where only now are some events from Katrina starting to wend their way through the courts. It all takes too long. Resistance to electronics?

Effective education allows people to synchronize more successfully, moving events ahead more smoothly. What might have taken lifetimes only takes a few years. The karma doesn't spread and fester as much, if justice is swift, or at least that's a Tantric theory (anyone wanna back me up on that?).

You'll have an ancient estuary go bad with a leak at 18 feet only, with just one contractor on tap to clean up. Why hurry? The pay is for time. Let the ecosystem die then, if it's profitable to let it. That's our reflex-conditioned society in a nutshell: programmed to externalize.

The problem with engineering today: they can't seem to design an economy that makes any sense. Rewards are for what everyone agrees are idiotic results. We so often pay ourselves, reward ourselves, to stay incompetent. A sorry truth.

Real solutions would threaten the status quo, and that's what people protect, because what's known feels somewhat secure, even if it's clearly sub-optimal (to put it mildly).

FNB went smoothly today, just Blue House on duty this evening. LW is working on a new song. Many of our party have headed to Rainbow Gathering. I sliced mushrooms, cut up kale, spinach, lettuce, onions, garlic... plenty of work for two people.

The meeting with Anna went well. We wound up at Common Ground just before closing, Steve Holden joining us. That was last night.

Just now: over to Holden's for a G&T. Reported on the shuffling in DC-based positions. I reaffirmed my sense that edu-sig is an important list in Python World.

Tara watched Contact again. Don has re-anchored closer to Blues Festival, as it's that time of year.

Source Code (movie review)

2011-06-26T22:31:00.000-07:00

Comparisons with Groundhog Day are inevitable. The movie is about a brave hero who takes impressive action over and over. He develops a complete mastery over his scenario. 12 Monkeys also comes to mind.

There seem to be a lot of loose ends, but the movie isn't about solving mysteries so much as evoking them. Humans respond to their situations. The camera gives us an up close study.

The quasi omniscience of the ghostly camera gets played with in this film. The point of view goes back through a grate. When we look in the big reflecting ball, there's no evidence of an onlooker. As an audience, we're the uber-voyeurs.

That's how films usually work, but this one is somewhat playfully and self consciously about the viewpoint. We hop among minds and realities.

Philosophers should use these expensive special-effects-laden works to anchor some of their discussions. One gets more out of a story like this than from some "brain in a vat" story with no plot.

Why be so snobby? Discussion is enhanced by having these shared reference points.

Wittgenstein loved films, found them a cleansing shower after too much of his day job.

Open Source Law

2011-06-23T09:54:00.001-07:00

I'm attending OS Bridge 2011. We just heard Portland's mayor, Sam Adams, give his keynote, which was about Portland's commitment to funding startups.

We have a few of those, according to the buzz. At least one is a part of the beltway economy, meaning it traffics in federal government contracts for data collation and intelligent visualizations.

Of course McMinnville has also been a part of such networks, going back through aviation more than computing.

Law is Code and We're Here to Open Source It was a good talk, by the Oregon Laws people. Making the law accessible is where the private sector is doing value added.

I asked if any legislature were using version control. Everyone laughed, already knowing lawyers are too stuck in the mud to be doing that yet.

Sketchy Ethnography

2011-06-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

:: exploring the Twin Cities of Minneapolis / St. Paul ::

City planning was a big part of the conversation while I was here, with some mention of my dad and our family's concern with Libya's future, some 50 years ago minus a few. The plans dad did were for about 50 years forward, so even if they were followed (as some say they were), they'd be about at their horizon limit by now. Other planners would have had to be doing some homework in the meantime.

Minneapolis has light rail to the airport, like PDX. It also goes to Mall of America, which I had no reason to visit on this trip. My trips were by gasoline powered vehicle, small convertible and van. We did some walking to the Museum of Imperial Russian Art, just off the nearby exit from I-35 W. That was an engrossing exhibit, about the marching towards populism known as Socialist Realism, a type of art Stalin favored, and that has since turned to self parody and self reflection, via Shepard Fairey and others (Dead Kennedys parodied Nazism, fast forward to South Park), verging on psychedelic in some schools of art.

I'm somewhat the emissary from Portland on Pirate Party business one might say, helping to organize some campaigns. David is thinking of taking on the 59ers, those who apply Miller's Rules to get the 59 stellates of the icosahedron, a classic topic by now, right up there with uniform polyhedra. The rules might come across as somewhat capricious to some, as they admit some rather goofy monsters into the mix. Couldn't we pare down? Koski's critique of the Archimedean honeycomb duals seemed to get at least steelpillow's attention (using an Internet alias -- some of you know who I mean). The Pirate Party courts Esozone, Subgenius etc. and so these geometrical esoterica are a natural fit. Speaking of which, we watched John Brawley's new video of his Icosahedron in a Grotto (Portland has a Grotto too).

What does a smart diplomat do in such circumstances? If you're a real pro, you go to a neighborhood block party in Tangletown (its doors you admire). Then you join Omar Ansari's Surly Brewery in its festivities, now that the law has been changed, permitting destination factory towns, more like Disneyland but with more alcohol. Oregon has these already and does a great job with them (witness Edgefield). And you tour a neighborhood hard hit by the tornado three weeks ago. There's an urban legend that hotter urban CBDs and surroundings repel tornadoes. Comforting, but no deterrent to the one that put down here recently, ripping through a swatch of residences.

Characteristically, there was no overt government presence, as emergency services to residents are increasingly verboten in Private America, as evidenced by Orlando's banning citizens sharing free food in public parks with hungry neighbors. Any such "short circuiting" of the money economy is regarded as "underground" even though it's the background from which the monied emerged.

The Pirate Party questions privatization, starting with Ludwig Wittgenstein's "theories", which Dr. Cornish calls a "no ownership" metaphysics. That might sound Communistic to some (more like a not-for-sale military), and indeed there's a sense in which Grunch of Giants (a party favorite) was more subversive than anything dreamed of since Karl Marx (says so right on the back). This is not a party that seeks majority status however. Perhaps thanks to Quaker influence, it stays deliberately tiny and elitist, and fields few candidates.

So yes, the weather is rather dramatic compared to Portland's. The tornado was severe, the lightning and thunder storms are higher powered. The heat spikes and the cold spikes are both more exaggerated. The roads take a real pounding in the winter, meaning many more potholes and wear and tear on motor vehicles. They gave up using DEQ-style emissions testing to keep the rolling stock on the newer side (more efficient) because falling-apart older cars simply fall apart under the stress of cold winters and all the sand and salt in the streets. The Elm trees have been dying. Perhaps Ginko, an older species, will do better in the Early Plasticene (or is it Late already?).

The Back Office

2011-06-11T18:56:00.001-07:00

Control Rooms

2011-06-04T00:46:00.001-07:00

In the early days of GST, I would write about the personal workspace (PWS), envisioned as a place for "value adding". I also called it an edit/recombine studio, which sounds like it might have something to do with DNA, but I was thinking more of audio and video editing. One takes in snippets, contributes one's own, then splices them together in new and interesting ways. Presto: value added.

The PWS sounds somewhat individualistic. In an endeavor to extend the "knowledge worker" economy, I was drawn to the Star Trek namespace for "away team". Post WW2, North American couples would wander in romantic, war-devastated Europe, as war-torn peoples desperately endeavored to heal. They would take slides using Kodak products and come home to show friends and family. My grandparents were of this generation. One could call it "intelligence gathering" but one didn't. One called it "tourism" (in some ways a prelude to "adventurism").

When I look at my leaky roof office, an amateurish add-on by previous owners, to a house originally placed here around 1905, I think of something more comic book, like with a bat pole for sliding down, and a spiral staircase. LCDs grip metal poles and may be swiveled and angled. Something like that. I'm previewing a Garden of Eden "smart house" of that Other Tomorrow, where people enjoy appreciably better living standards (I've dubbed it Columbia, and pitched it for television).

I was spieling with my edu-sig buddies today, outlining my use of Tractors in place of Turtles, hence Tractor Art. Rather than fight the socialist realism that suggests itself, ala Shepard Fairey, I say embrace it. Tractors rule. The etymology is interesting: to drag, which is obviously to plow, is to work (tractatus), to pull against friction. Gaining traction, as we say. Turtles have it a little easier, if sea turtles, though on land they're quite ungainly. Few of nature's creatures have managed amphibious lifestyles as well as humans with their aqualungs (scuba gear).

Where there's a tractor (worker) you've got to have a field (working environment). The Farm class defines little more than a 2-way array made of ASCII. We might speak of "ascii waves of grain" while conjuring a kind of minimalist xkcd meets Norman Rockwell kind of vista. The socialist realists, their cartoon avatar tractors, are sometimes of the CropCircle type (a subclass). These will plow a Mandelbrot Set left to their own devices. I've already logged that in some detail.

Tonight we looked at the Eddy Crouch / Carol Urner idea of an Area Program Committee for the Region (AFSC jabber). Pending a green light from staff, this looks likely to happen, somewhat imitating the Colorado model.

Focusing on August 6 as an annual Disarmament Day, which might extend to forswearing use of a forked tongue or some other such psychological weapon, if not into carrying guns or knives around town (some do so by permit, and besides knives have generic utility), would be one possible option, as a kind of test drive. The Regional Director helped organize the meeting and staff were present, as the Executive Committee was just starting to convene, meaning MVPs were in town. Was this more like Philadelphia, or just Portland being weird?

Christian Scientists built The Mapparium, the better to play World Game. But we all have Google Earth now. Actually, many of us do not, and libraries are under-served, but enough have used it to know what it feels like to access global data at medium bandwidth. Some of the in-out-around landscapes have a Salvador Dali flavor, with freeways drooping over cliffs, not properly filled in. Gifted engineers like Lew go in and add like the Multnomah Meetinghouse.

A "smart house" was supposed to be highly energy aware and had all kinds of self diagnostic electronics. This dream for the future was postponed for so long that people resigned themselves to "stupid houses" for the indefinite future. We now live in Stupid House World (SHW). We have little sense when it comes to energy. Our need for teacher education is dire.

Speaking of teacher education, Glenn is back to his studies of Megalithic Era cosmologies. The importance of Orion's Belt and the World Tree is evident across many times and cultures. The span of the solstices around the equator, the lunar and solar cycles, the snakes that would try to eat the sun (eclipses)... these mnemonics were all there and tightly organized. They knew of the ~26K year precessional cycle, about 1 degree every 72 years. These people weren't dummies. Idiocracy R Us.

Earth's Doom

2011-06-02T22:03:00.000-07:00

:: final night ::

by Fsgregs

Cowardly Capitalism

2011-05-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

Cowardly Capitalism (CC) is the type that's risk averse and can't accept the idea of going head to head with non-profits or other governments when it comes to providing world livingry services, such as rental cars, jet rides, hotel accommodations, education and health services.

A military is allowed to have these services, but only in exchange for agreeing to carry out immoral acts, much as the children are expected to do overseas.

Brave Capitalism (BC), on the other hand, is not threatened by the idea of a government running its own airline or rental car company, hotel chain, hospital chain. Just another kid on the block. Governments manage according to different ideologies than most businesses. Some won't do well with trains, others will be stellar.

The ridiculous myth you get from the whiners is that it's all or nothing. They talk about "nationalizing the oil" or "nationalizing the banks", as if a government couldn't have just some banks and not others, or just one of the major oil company brands, a rental car company. The USG didn't need to take over Avis or Hertz, to have its own niche.

Switching military over to civilian circuits, like when NASA went more Mouse in Orlando, is a great way to leverage existing skills and assets. The USG already operates a lot of guest housing near airports. We could have more meetings on bases, "we" being civilians without obvious rank, not trying to crowd that seniority system or pretend to certain kinds of training. We're special in other ways.

I was ranting about this when Dave called from Minneapolis. We have this rivalry going, about which city is more on the forefront in ways we treasure, such as bicycle friendliness. I think our drivers could be more courteous, but so could our cyclists. When I come to an intersection along Springwater Corridor, the drivers often stop right away, eager to prove they're on board with these urbane values. I was on said Corridor just recently in fact, even though EmoKid (the bicycle) is losing about a pound a minute from her front tire.

TinkerBell was stolen you may recall. We have crime in Portland. Our family car, Robin, was swiped as well, from the Lloyd Center Theaters parking lot, while I was seeing the movie Troy. After that, we got Razz, another Subaru wagon. Razz met her end in the high desert, no one hurt, still drivable. She was totaled, at which point I found another car in the neighborhood rotting in a driveway, the owner having come to Portland with an expressed goal of weaning herself from motor-vehicle dependence. I was just trying to do a reverse lookup on her license plate when I again encountered Cowardly Capitalism.

This is publicly collected information, made available from government sources, but rather than allow you the people to access it directly, you get to be told that the data is there, but you need to subscribe for X dollars to some private data service, a dot com, in order to reach this dot gov data. It feels slimy and gross. What filthy little businesses want to charge me to access my data about my own car, or other cars that share the road.

If you pilot big metal at high speed on public roads, don't expect to stay anonymous as a matter of personal rights. You're not anonymous behind that plate or license. Anyone can pony up the $40. But they shouldn't have to. If this were really a Land of the Brave, we'd be defended against such smarmy commercial practices. Cowardly Capitalists are aided and abetted by those "on the inside" who are cowardly in the same way. They join government precisely to undermine and defang it, a kind of mole.

Lets allow the government to have a rental car agency. The bookkeeping will be transparent. It'll be a profit center, helping pay for the hospitals. Lots of summer jobs. Some electric options. Discounts if you have a valid USG passport (retro nationalism has its perks, citizenship still matters in some ways).

Once some of the other government companies are in play, we'll have more attractive career segues for ranking personnel. Some may just keep doing what they're doing, in perhaps repainted university facilities, transit centers or whatever.

Rango (movie review)

2011-05-18T09:30:00.000-07:00

Long time readers of my blogs, people who know me in other ways, know I'm a fan of cartoons (animation). I'm sometimes that only gray haired guy, the loner, amidst families crawling with kids, at your local neighborhood theater.

Yesterday, my birthday (53), that cartoon was Rango and I went with my daughter (16.9). We were 10 minutes late, so that voids my right to give a rating or score according to the Association of Movie Reviewing Bloggers. Here's someone else's review, giving more of the storyline (my reviews are generally for people who've seen the movie).

ILM knows how to do fire, water and earth (dirt, desert). The alchemy of Clint Eastwood style spaghetti westerns plays in full force here, right down to the religious fervor of the beleaguered. Many films get the nod. A thousand Wild West movies crowd into one.

The time is now though. The characters are playing out this retro "we can't be gunslingers anymore" narrative while Las Vegas is already fully developed. It's the 21st century we get to forget. For an hour, we're at home with our ancestor creatures -- most of them movie stereotypes...

Which stereotypes cartoons have an uncanny ability to reinforce, or even create from scratch, given the effectiveness of animators in their presentation of ethnography, part real, part fiction.

Only the human imagination itself is as powerful.

Rango is richly textured. If you haven't seen it, see it for the scenery and music if nothing else, though I'm not myself complaining about the characters and their appreciation for the value of potable water.

Earthy Day

2011-04-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

:: earth day in pdx, 2011 ::

I got a call from 12th and Stark, where we mostly think of the abandoned school, which I'm thinking our Ministry could take over (might just leave it as is, like a war monument). I met up with the architect.

I wandered about running my camera, juxtaposing the dome and the tepee in that classic retro way. So Portlandia. Good use of tension, with those tetrahedrons pulling. FNB had a booth, I found out later.

Matt returned my call. Maybe next weekend, we'll have that beer.

I'd just been paying my respects to one James Jameson in a philosophy thread and who should happen to be there, along our later route, but the man himself. Even Lindsey hadn't known he was back in town, and they're FB friends (LW and I are not, though we were once and might someday be again).

Mostly I'm just some expat American, roaming among my people, somewhat on the quiet side. I don't play the guitar or sing much. Glad to enjoy a bright sunny day, even with the allergies kicking in, and then the fire after dark (though it never really gets dark in the city, thanks to "light pollution").

Today, it's Easter.

Unknown (movie review)

2011-04-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed seeing Liam Neeson again, having taken a liking to the guy in Kinsey.

When he and that taxi driver were laughing in the bedroom about the noise through the wall, I was thinking their private joke was he'd worked on that movie.

Anyway, twas good to escape through The Bagdad by immersing myself in someone else's problems for a change, and to vicariously tour Berlin again, a former Cold War capital.

As I was imbibing beer, I had to find a strategic moment to empty out. The car chase was a good time for that, as action thrillers almost always have them.

Interesting to see who is the target in this movie: someone wanting to benefit mankind in a believable way, by making something valuable be free and open source.

Gifts of "intellectual property" are accepted as subversive by the worldly audience for whom this film was intended. That tells you something right there: the myth of Prometheus is still alive and well.

The plot seems tight within the conventions of Hollywood screenwriting, though people keep leaving the scene of a crime (after smashing up a whole city, or maybe just one bridge, one doesn't usually just walk away and get lost).

The ringleader complains about the brief case at the airport being a loose end, but I'd say there were loose ends all over the place (pretty sloppy). For people trying to stay "under cover", they sure seem to make a dramatic spectacle of themselves.

Roller Coaster at Reed

2011-04-09T14:08:00.000-07:00

:: harmonic convergence ::

I've been enjoying the roller coaster ride at Reed College (metaphoric). I'd misread the program calendar so had given up on seeing "Juliet Alpha" do a PowerPoint based on his most excellent anthropology blog. Glenn and I just got back to 97214 from Eliot 103, where he spoke. I was happily surprised that I still had this chance.

Alpha's daughter went to Reed. His real name is John Allison, and he was here to warn present generations of what was coming: more of the same, in the sense of COIN type programs openly directed at those who might cut off its funding, the security-minded sponsors of modern warfare.

John's chief beef was that the Afghani people he'd lived with as an anthropologist some decades before (his contemporaries then and now) were being targeted for mayhem and his only role was to provide window dressing, like a flower at a funeral parlor.

"Winning hearts and minds" among the empire's victims is no longer considered either realistic or essential. The main thing is to please the bread and circuses crowd, and to scare it with images of domestic monsters they might need defending against.

The US Army has played this role of pleaser protector for a long time and every generation gets to play out its version of the narrative, taking up roles in the drama, though in Glenn's case he did COIN training with the Navy before serving as a cryptographer in theater then joining the cast at Antioch and becoming a "granola hippie" (the real deal, raising a family off the grid).

The Reed kids in the room, thoroughly embedded and "sewn in" as John put it, were using words like "narrative" and "trope", knowing it's science fiction they'll be living (of one kind or another), have lived to this point.

Elaine suggested it comes viscerally, not just through the imagination, to act on principle and conscience and to raise one's level of consciousness. The discourse sounded political but might just as well have been Buddhist -- not that Elaine had any kind words for what she called "new age racism" (neo-liberalism) nor had she ever felt especially worshipful towards the Clintons.

Initially, Juliet Alpha (John Allison) had had hopes of making a difference from the inside (as well as earning a hefty pay check), as if imperial reflexes stretching back to Roman times and before might be effectively countered by some academic alchemy. Quite the contrary, universities are in his view mostly outposts of this same culture, hell bent on conquest. Complicity is the name of the game, especially when Iron Mountain pays the bills.

"Kinetic warfare" (outward violence) continues unabridged but shoppers at Trader Joe's will be lenient and forgiving and not protest the wars too much, because this is now a kinder / gentler America; an anthropologist with a human face, is supposed to keep shopping secure. Hence the HTT program, which costs many schools and hospitals -- yet contains elements of both.

Elaine Brown was the invited speaker the night before, and she did a wonderful job explaining her position on the 13th Amendment, which bans involuntary servitude (slavery) within the USA jurisdiction. The slavers get around this ban with euphemisms, as slavery is alive and well. Even where prison time is being served as punishment, free labor is expected on top of that, in an economy which feels entitled to such services.

Yet the currently unincarcerated seem complacent and quasi okay with this new state of the planet, or world order if you prefer. Reed College is comfortable and how would making speeches in Pioneer Courthouse Square make any difference? I was reminded of my time at Princeton, where ending apartheid in South Africa was a number one ambition. We needed to shine for each other, as a next generation lighting the way. We were our own primary audience.

Like John, Elaine is somewhat at a loss for answers. She knows there's a zeitgeist, and it works in mysterious ways. It's not that her generation was genetically more heroic, just that the meme wars have taken us into some new spaces.

History does not repeat.

Maybe the young will have some heroes, and not just obsess about Charlie Sheen or whatever is going on in the moment (Michael Jackson was not mentioned).

Prior to Elaine's speech: COINTELPRO 101 (the movie). This is being shown in high schools and middle schools, where the typical reaction is a sense of betrayal i.e. why is my adult community not daring to give me more of the real story?

Welcome to vast wastelands of ignorance kid. It's not like everyone has time to ponder weighty matters of Empire and its sorrows.

I forgot to mention that Elaine Brown had been a leader of the Black Panther movement.

John had served in the military in Korea, prior to getting that PhD in anthropology and working with the Afghanis. Then he got recruited by British Aerospace and Engineering though CLI for this HTT job, as an embedded anthropologist who would be one of the "good guys".

Times are hard in the US and the only jobs are military and intelligence, which overlap in the prison (so-called justice) system and the media. There's a sense of Sparta meets Athens, and the movie Avatar.

Elaine's adopted son is the 13 year old Little B, tried as an adult and serving a life sentence for a murder he didn't commit against a person he didn't know. Kip Kinkel, on the other hand, loaded up and shot a lot of people, but was given kid glove treatment by comparison. This is how the mother of Little B would tend to see it. The packed Reed auditorium appeared to empathize and gave Elaine two standing ovations. She also quoted Buckminster Fuller appreciatively, which I took as a signal.

Wanderers Gone Wild

2011-04-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

:: Wanderers at Large ::

I'm way behind on my blogging of Wanderers events. Bunce is writing the Lorentz contraction formula on the white board, having brought this 5D model (his namespace), milled on a 3D printer in urethane (or something, Steve is amazed by its density, stone-like, closer to marble). Yes, these things exist. Could be used as a vase. Answers Buzz's question (by the coat rack): what's a universe where all black holes go to the same place? Sculpture was about $500 for a one-off. No patents need apply.

Steve did his QM For Kids as a two parter and I only made it to the 2nd part. Lots of notation, with simple 2D vector models, easy to get kids up to speed. Except we need to not use this word "kid" to scare off the needy adults. As soon as they came up with NCLB, I knew we needed NALB. Bunce wishes Tver could have been here, as this has been a math topic between them.

The "cosmic zero" in this model has no physical location, though it's modeled by the center of this thing. John took his drawings to a wood place first, but they were thinking two parts glued together. Sherpa Design came through with this 3D printed neolith. Now we're talking Lie Groups,... "six trumpets". Sounds apocalyptic... or like a fun cartoon.

The other not-here-today Steve's punch line is he gets to these well-known experiments that confirm QM models, ala Bell's Theorem, over some of these other statistical models. Mentions of "Bell's Theorem" ring a bell for me, a resonance in the blogosphere.

We're discussing Bill's prognosis. He's back with us today. Steve Mastin is conducting the interview.

Set Design

2011-03-26T19:14:00.000-07:00

I think it'd be way against code to trash the Blue House and replace it with a dome. You might think, as a Fullerite, that I'd be all for doing that, but as a matter of fact, I'm into preserving the historic character of the neighborhood and all this wood, as configured, is way more valuable than what it'd be in a recycling heap.

That being said, the Evaluation and Monitoring Room (aka the "control room") is going to acquire a new cover of some kind or another. Some guy plans to saw off the fence, which will make it easier to build the temporary deck atop the doomed flooring. Should a two-story movie set arise, budgeted by the film company? What about Duke's then? Our fates seem tied in some way. I've imagined a spiral staircase and metal framework, more like a fire station. LCDs and speakers, computers, screw onto poles, in a kind of minimalist system, perhaps a Home Depot product down the road, or Office Depot as the case may be.

No, I don't think a loan officer would be in the mood to underwrite such a thing, given Coffee Shops Network is already getting juice, or some business is, barely keeping the lights on (with heat intermittent in balmy Rainforest, Oregon (he says I'll need a "tiger loop")). Retrofitting "this old house" with energy monitoring devices just echoes that ever receding end-of-the-rainbow dream of a "smart house".

It's an open secret that Americans are mostly into "stupid houses" these days. The idea that each of your appliances could be held accountable: that's still considered Jetsons territory, even though the technology has been around since the 1970s at the latest. The central thesis of Idiocracy is borne out once again.

Portland Energy Strategies might be another candidate for upgrading, as well as the Pauling House. Product placement, lifestyle modeling... Californians like to showcase what's new. Oregonians have a more retro aesthetic to inject maybe, which viewers will find comforting. The "dream of the '90s" and all that, something to use as raw material anyway.

Of course this is all science fiction (aka investment banking). Any real control room involved in dispatching bizmos, say, would likely need more space. The idea of pro-actively doing useful things has its allure, versus simply "countering terrorism" or otherwise making this another "fighting the bad guys" game. CDC and FAO tend to have more mature players than those who think 24 Hours is worthwhile television. Counter-terrorism requires a steady supply of terrorists for job security. Making enemies is a full time job for many a family in WDC.

Open Source Photocopier

2011-03-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

I rewatched Revolution OS last night, after a well attended FNB. Jay did a good job with those zucchini from the Blue House (prepared at St. David's). Melody gets the potatoes this afternoon, for Pink House prep.

This time I notated the time signatures where O'Reilly was mentioned or featured, as I was sharing this with OSTers, many of whom have probably seen it.

Combining the ethic of Make: and DIY, I'm envisioning a course built around an open source photocopier, meaning you may explore and experiment with it in any direction without hitting a brick wall of proprietary "eyes only" layers.

The microcode, circuit diagrams, drum architecture (if it has one), are all laid out and for free, with parts obtainable. Robotics has already taken this route, as has bioengineering. Sometimes we overlook the more mundane, yet printing machines of various description play a huge role in the workings of human societies.

How might your average city kid, male or female, of whatever "race(s)" and/or "creed(s)" avail him- or herself of said assets? Or average rural kid, or statistical outlier? There'd be these learning shops full of strategically placed products, much like is found on some university and corporate campuses today. People who already know the business get to be trainers.

I was thinking to see Inside Job this week (with Tag, Jody and/or Suzanne?), which is not about 911, but about all those people playing real estate games in airport hotel seminar rooms, being like the Werner Erhards of "get rich quick" Ponzi-like operations, all dressed up and corporate (a lot of this was post the dot com bust, another big let down for many canny investors).

When that all went away, as obviously it would, many dream bubbles burst, kind of like in Yugoslavia (more Ponzis gone wild), which became once again Balkanized. But I haven't seen the movie yet, so I'll save it for my review.

I also need to write to Nick (still in Eugene, where Rick and Cody went). Did Amber ever find her way back to Hannah's and John's?

I don't know if the University of Havana would be interested in the photocopier idea, on top of all the ice cream (another set of open source plans). Perhaps Japanese campuses already have closed source versions they'd be willing to declassify. Even if they're older models, you're building up the folk knowledge any service-oriented culture will need. Yes, of course I have my eye on the Pauling Campus, as usual.

Wanderers Retreat (spring equinox)

2011-03-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

Yet again I missed an opportunity to see the next movie after The Cup by that cool Bhutanese director. I'm not despairing though, and used the time wisely to continue my visit with Rick and Cody, whom I hardly ever get to meet.

Their visit over St. Patrick's Day ("we're back") was well timed and appreciated. I'm glad they got to meet Alex.

I spent a lot of the day with David Feinstein, a rare privilege. He vectored one of his inner circle through Pauling House, a protege working in Tri-Cities, and chalking up another in the XX column, Trish having invited her friend from yesterday, and Jessica bringing her girl.

Mostly we who show up tend to XYs, with me sometimes offering up some archetypal Athena talk (feminist?) in somewhat the Francis Bacon tradition (via Nashville).

Tara has invited Reed over to see a movie. LW, free schooler, is practicing with R2. Having "qualed for nats" Tara is looking toward Dallas, then some other American states, including south of "the border" (bell sound), Friends a factor.

Trisha wanted me to explain "Quaker" and I did an account based in the 1600s, which is around when the East India Company began. I should have talked about branches in GIT, sometimes mergings, ala this O'Reilly book I've been reading.

Yes, these are somewhat random notes for building upon later (in Facebook?). More happens on retreats than meets the eye. Glad Rick and Cody could come by Pauling House last night, to meet some of the crew.

Lots happening on the discussion list as well, though a lot of it's dino talk (antediluvian). Tara and I made Hotcake House memories, also the site of tonight's victory dinner.

Speaking of privatized military firms (what the nats were about), I'm not noticing much civilian procedure whereby another front for warfare was entered, as a fait accompli. We saw the committing of inventory and personnel without much formal legislating or even policy debate. Talk about wagging the dog...

The premise: that some phenomenon in "the Arab world" is the monster, versus some more inter-generational breakdown (more a natural process than a beast to be contained), is resulting in some miscalculations.

Why not connect more dots, in Thailand, Burma, Greece? Big cities, small countries, brimming with hopes and dreams, want more democracy, why should that be a surprise? "Passing the torch" to a next generation is not always a smooth process. Perhaps with better media, it's getting smoother?

The Academy Awards helps keep the wheels turning, as does the awarding of Nobel Prizes. David Feinstein's comments reminded me again of the importance of merit in meritocracies, often signified with bits of resume and credential. I'll have more thoughts about that another time.

For all these mixings of worlds, I'm hoping to mix them more.

Stewart Brand at Reed College

2011-03-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

:: Stewart Brand at Reed College ::

Glenn and I got there way early, as I was having paranoid fantasies of lines around the block and not being able to get in to the Kaul Auditorium. Stewart Brand, co-founder of Co-Evolution Quarterly, Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL, Clock of the Long Now, with tons of other street cred, is like a superstar in my little fish pond. I was expecting most of Portland to be there.

As it was, the auditorium was comfortably capacious for the many Reed students and faculty, with a smattering of Wanderers. Don joined us closer to opening time. Those who got there early got to see this Youtube (or one very like it) which Stewart clearly found hilarious and ingenious because of the guy's inventing an English-sounding "language" (I'd just come from a Wittgenstein study group session where we discussed the "private language argument", so this seemed peculiarly apropos).

Stewart is a big picture thinker, taking a uniquely individual angle on stuff. He thinks cyber-government needs to charge the externalities of coal burning back to the coal burners (that'd be most of us), so we'll have to pay a lot more for the privilege. Cheap coal is both trashing the climate in ways that might kill us (the Venus Syndrome) while keeping competing solutions at bay.

He's finding wind power to be something of a boondoggle and favors civilian nuclear plants, including the kind that eats the nuclear weapons captured from those antediluvian criminal syndicates who still think about using them. The smaller plant designs, well under a gigawatt, would bring the power sources closer to the villages or townships.

He's pro solar, but doesn't like the idea of bulldozing thousands of acres for these vast arrays of panels. Wind farms are likewise land hungry.

Will there be fusion in our future? He's an older gray guy, so is quite aware of how long we've been hearing that hype, but he doesn't mind contributing, including by providing the voice-over for a rather elaborate cartoon about the latest ignition scheme.

On the whole, his slides and videos were top notch.

Stewart has a lot of respect and admiration for humans slogging in slums, building cities at a higher rate than ever in history. He's not dismayed by poverty, but encouraged by trends. We just need to keep harvesting that energy, without triggering a Venus Effect (ala Lovelock) and enjoy a bright future.

Energy includes biomass of course, and he's pro genetic engineering. As an open source hacker type, he takes the Freeman Dyson view that monopolistic control of biotechnology by corporations is already a thing of the past. Monsanto could go belly up tomorrow for all he cares, yet bio-engineering of new food stuffs, some with medicinal properties, is here to stay. Which doesn't mean that all applications to date have been well managed or sustainable.

Listen to those closest to the technology in question, such as farmers and foresters, he counsels -- a way of making friends and allies. He'd been a logger in Oregon in a past chapter, as well as a rock music show producer. "Loggers love the woods" he intoned. He has the sensibilities of a politician, although he's happy to pick arguments with libertarians or anyone who thinks civil servants are to blame for the world's ills.

The central question of our age, he said, is whether democracies can self-organize to the extent needed to get their ecological house more in order. The global climate conundrum is going to remain a scary source of inconvenient truths.

He likes that new variety of vitamin A rich rice (hitherto a missing ingredient), and sees anti-GMO sentimentalists as unwittingly condemning more children to blindness, as a result of the delays they'd imposed on the roll out of this genetically engineered product.

During the Q&A, many questioners took different points of view. Stewart was always happy to refer back to his sources and reading list, so we could delve more deeply and appreciate where he was coming from.

Stewart reminded me of Duane Ray, one of the Wanderers in attendance. Duane asked me if I was pro or con nuke plants and I gave a somewhat count-intuitive, counter-cultural response, practicing counter-intelligence on Americans to comical effect (Duane laughed).

The faculty member making the introduction (biology and environmental sciences department) mentioned Stewart's intelligence community connections, plus we'd heard talk of the CIA at the PPUG after-party from some guy in police work, relaying some CTO views. Stewart didn't seem at all worried about those Persian nuke plants, which currently borrow their fuel from a Russian fuel bank (library). He mentioned Valarie Plame of Countdown to Zero fame.

Stewart also thinks there's a right way to do fish farming (as well as a wrong way) and humans should let more of the wild stay wild, far less interfered with. Why eat any wild fish at all? Grow your wood crops and leave natural forests alone too. Bring back beavers. Introduce more diversity. This is his vision of how humans should live: as catalysts for nature's abundance and propensity for innovation. Accomplishing this goal requires keeping global temperature in check -- his highest priority.

Reed's campus is quite beautiful. People who get to live there must feel ultra-privileged. I don't know if its environmental sciences department has a "weapons inspector" major or course (something I've been pushing for OSU), but there is a nuclear reactor on campus.

Greetings from Philly

2011-03-05T11:46:00.000-08:00

[a post to Synergeo, hyperlinks added ]

We're talking about Math for Mystics (book) on mathfuture. No one has mentioned Bucky, which is fortunate, as he did not consider himself a mystic (see Synergetics Dictionary). On the other hand, he was a transcendentalist, at least in my book. This doesn't constitute a belief in the "supernatural" however. Sure, he considered telepathy a reality, based on experience, but thought it would therefore become a topic for science. You find "non mystic" physics writers expressing similar thoughts, about the reality of a zeitgeist, noosphere, or shared mind (morphogenetic fields etc.). These topics should be filed as "speculative" to be sure, but it's not necessary to get all occultish about them. Fuller was not another Aleister Crowley.

I'm currently attending a meeting of the AFSC corporation, a Quaker action arm, somewhat Machiavellian in that it's all about forming alliances and networks with non-Quakers. That's what one has to do if in a small and esoteric sect (more a privilege than a burden).

I haven't met up with any SNEC people yet, but have some plans to do that tomorrow. Then the next day I fly back to Portland.

Also on mathfuture, I'm continuing to share my ideas for the emerging digital mathematics track, a multi-year conversation. In my case, I was influenced by the rise of object-oriented executable math notations (so-called "computer languages"). The idea of giving more concrete expression to "math objects" (such as rational numbers, vectors, polyhedra...) and defining their powers operationally, in terms of scripted algorithms, seemed like a "no brainer" to me. Subsequently, I encountered the resistance of the functional programming crowd, some of which are strongly opposed to "imperative" and/or "stateful" grammars.

A core "math object" (where the concept really takes off) is of course the "polyhedron". People ask where polyhedrons occur in the real world, but if you're thinking generally, then the answer is "everywhere". Any kind of container at all, from beer can, to planet, to human body, is a polyhedron in some sense. You have an inside and outside, spinnability, translatability, scalability... a rich set of ideas explored in detail in Synergetics.

Once we agree that polyhedrons make sense as paradigm "math objects", the question remains as to whether Fuller's treatment is relevant and important. My position is clear: of course it's relevant and, in fact, not mentioning this treatment in any way has gone a long way to draining the more traditional curricula of their credibility and viability. In failing to incorporate even the gist of the "concentric hierarchy", we've discovered math teaching subcultures to be mired in straitjacketing reflex-conditioning. This belies many claims of operating "logically" and/or "intelligently" (rationally). I see corruption and a lack of integrity. That's an opinion, clearly, and the countering view seems to be that Fuller's treatment lacks integrity for one reason or another. For the most part, the guardians of the status quo feel no obligation to be explicit in their defense of said status quo, as they don't see polyhedra as making a come back under any guise, let alone as avatars of some "world game" nonsense.

Those who do tend to verbalize their defense, including many who may be "pro polyhedron", tend to recite the mantra the "Fuller was a mystic" (taking me back to my opening paragraph). Somehow, teaching about the 1/24, 1/8, 1, 2.5 3, 4, 5, 6, 18.51 20 volume progression is associated with Tarot, astrology etc.

Wittgenstein (movie review)

2011-03-03T01:02:00.000-08:00

I finally got to see this, after complaining to Alex Aris that no movie had been made of the guy's life.

"There is one" he informed me, relaying details, and a generally positive review (good leading actor).

"It's more like a play" he cautioned.

As it turns out, I was on my way to Movie Madness (on my bicycle), which specializes in hard to find videos, and there it was, a dvd filed by director Derek Jarman.

Having Ludwig's skeptical students (including Maynard and Bertie) sitting on deck chairs, like poolside, was a funny touch.

He keeps exiting stuffy Cambridge, stage left, disgusted by mediocrity and the dialed back "polite company". He goes looking for craggy cliffs more like a Fortress of Solitude, and finds them in Norway, later Ireland.

Is Wittgenstein our superman then, ready to stare down the internal self-believing solipsist?

What's harder: "egocide" (per Fuller) or "killing God" (per Heller on Nietzsche)? A question for another day perhaps.

I respected the script for working hard to communicate something of what he teaches, beyond doing a biography.

Beautiful Mind? Sort of. The scene in the Soviet Union was interesting. The play casts somewhat scary and/or disapproving women.

I liked how it starts with a young boy character and never really gives that up, ending with like a bed time story.

There, I'm reminded of A Cosmic Fairy Tale by Fuller, his Tetrascroll (a collaboration).

He goes to Russia to be a manual laborer but fails to meet the requirements.

Keynes is as important as Russell to the plot.

Then there's some guy he befriends, like a protege maybe, whom he's trying to liberate from the fly bottle (to escape academic philosophy and get a real job). He's considered a corrupting influence by academic recruiters, obviously.

Like what about the protege's parents who gave up everything to give him this opportunity? Parents hate Wittgenstein lets remember, because he was so mean to that little girl, scared her witless.

All in all, I'm reminded quite a bit of Logicomix about Bertrand Russell, in which Wittgenstein also features.

"Compare and contrast the war scenes (before he was taken prisoner) in each fictional account" could be a writing assignment.

The movie alludes to some of the scholarship: same history teacher as Hitler, with Cambridge a spies nest.

Regarding these latter rumors, you've gotta remember that McCarthyism had it's British incarnation (with "commie symps" everywhere, riddling fascist fandoms).

The comedy is understated, although Wittgenstein's thinking to kill himself because people were flipping him off with "a V sign", driving him to self doubt, is beyond hilarious (laughter too high frequency to make any noise). Thinking of Adam Bellow for some reason (yeah, son of Saul and fellow alum).

He's definitely cast within the "tormented saint" archetype (suffering from an excess of virtue), again not unlike the treatment of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (we empathize with these projected "crazies", our certified shamans).

If there's a strong word for this Wittgenstein guy, it's "abrupt" (as in "I'm moving to Ireland" or "our friendship is over") but also -- and this is what the young boy establishes -- "flamboyant" and "theatrical".

To just say "moody" is really too "broody" -- he's got an ET friend after all, and a beautiful mind.

Maybe the funniest line is at the end, delivered with Steven Wright like dead pan:

"I wanted to write a philosophy book that was nothing but jokes." Pause. "So why didn't you?" "(sigh) I didn't have a sense of humor."

Badaboom. Applause.

I told Alex I found it somehow ironic when people kept "questioning the obvious" in this film (thereby sounding philosophical) and yet the truly obvious ("this studio") is barely mentioned.

A die-hard truth-teller might want to point that out: that for all this talk of "language picturing facts in reality" these were actors in a Made for TV world (or language), with Wittgenstein himself nowhere directly depicted.

Is he not even present between the lines? OK, maybe there is some "rhinoceros in the room", but there's still no "pointing" in this direction.

"Read more Hegel? That would drive me mad" -- another throwaway from Mr. Loony Tunes himself, in response to yet another Nurse Ratchet type, who didn't like his bringing up Trotsky for some unfathomable reason.

I still can't get over the Martian (almost like a Yellow Submarine character, foreshadowing a more psychedelic future perhaps, where they / we breathe a different air?).

This jolly green ET is a private language court jester, an imaginary friend, a projected homunculus imagined since boyhood, a font of wisdom & nonsense (like an oracle) tapping into a more cosmic, more secret, sense of self.

Make: Mathematics

2011-02-23T16:36:00.000-08:00

:: OST annual meeting ::

I'm in a presentation by Scott Gray, O'Reilly School of Technology (OST), regarding his ground-breaking Make: Mathematics program.

The conceptual model is a cube with paired opposite faces representing Tools, Content and Learning Management. Opposite Tools is Making, opposite Content is Learning, and opposite Learning Management is Feedback.

In a past era, a "maker cube" was actually an apprenticeship, a hands-on, integrated approach to learning a trade, with mentoring. Assembly line education broke up this model to manage the exponential growth curves. With the advent of electronic communications, Scott thinks we're ready to restore the apprenticeship model in some areas.

Scott has an interesting story. He was born into a coal mining subculture in Appalachia. He was struggling academically in a mediocre school, until he encountered a college math teacher who helped him flip on the lights. He suddenly discovered his inner brilliance and went on to become a luminary in the distance education world, having grappled with many a STEM curriculum.

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity drove his curiosity in several dimensions.

The story behind OST has a lot to do with the University of Illinois in Champagne / Urbana. I'm still putting the puzzle pieces together in my own mind, as I get to meet the key people. Several have flown here for the annual meeting.

The late Jerry Uhl was the early pioneer in this picture and his curriculum writing is still a backbone of the Make: Math curriculum. I'd been tracking him through the Math Forum and knew of his stature. Many of the people at this meeting knew him personally, were among his closest friends and co-workers.

Make: Mathematics is designed to be sharable for a fee. The product allows professors to customize their own course content and syndicate it over the web, using Scott's team's cloud service. Wolfram has licensed Mathematica to run on their back end.

Students get to interact with a web page that's a lot like a Mathematica Notebook, implemented in HTML and JavaScript (Bruce has been coding the back end). UI enrollees get to actively author content in a personal sandbox, while switching between native Mathematica syntax and typeset views, provided by the server as images.

Hilbert has built in workflow that allows students to hand in work-in-progress to a teacher (e.g. Bruce), who then gets to make comments and hand it back. Color coded text areas distinguish between student and mentor comments. The team sought our feedback on the color scheme.

This is not simple-minded low end learning management system (LMS). Students have access to free form cells accepting Mathematica code. They can change code on the fly, look at 2D and 3D graphics with a slider that changes the viewpoint -- all in a web page (AJAX by Joel).

The mathfuture group should have some interest in this technology. "Learn Math by Making Math" (OST's motto) is a lot like "Make Math Your Own" (Maria's tag line).

Wanderers 2011.02.15

2011-02-15T18:56:00.000-08:00

Mark Frischmuth is giving us an update on developments around DemocracyLab. Brandon, also present, is a code warrior for the project. Expect more news soon.

Steve Holden is new in Portland. He has been helpful since hopping off the airplane. He solved the rear car door not unlocking problem (child proof feature, duh). The drains are flowing more smoothly than they have in months.

Steve is reassuring us that his peregrinations, frequent moves over the years, have not kept him from developing a sense of community. He doesn't think electronics are able to replace community however. We're a completely packed house tonight. Barbara, Patrick, Lew, Dick, David, Bill, Jon... Trish.

What is the open source philosophy? Its goal is to develop common resources and infrastructure which you're free to tweak, mess with. Costs may be driven down by sharing in the development of these assets.

Steve didn't want to make this a long talk. He gave us some biographical information, tried to locate himself on the geopolitical spectrum, made some thoughtful remarks, and then threw it open to discussion.

The discussion got into patents and copyrights, whether academic work is open source, what benefits one might get from contributing to open source projects. A lot of the people around the table have experience and connections in the open source ecosystem, so this was a fairly sophisticated discussion. We mentioned Apache a lot. I sat quietly, typing this blog post.

Exhibit:

/*
 * --------------------------------------------------------
 * "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
 * Adam Ziolkowski and Leon Handreke 
 * wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you can do 
 * whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you
 * think this stuff is worth it, you can buy us a beer in return.
 * --------------------------------------------------------
 */

Terry Talks

2011-02-12T10:47:00.000-08:00

Terry Bristol is sequestered with some of his friends, and visiting guest speaker Nancy Cartwright, to go through some of his philosophy of science banter. Terry Talks are not TED Talks, though we do have a camera going (the same tiny Canon that Glenn Stockton controlled when Nancy Cartwright lectured at the Schnitzer).

He's working on a book, somewhat like Mindwalk (Capra brothers) and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig) in that it weaves biography, real world characters (Stephen Hawking especially) into a kind of reverie on the history of "western" thinking (scare quotes because east met west quite awhile ago by now).

Terry has been fortunate to hang out with quite a few big name contemporaries, the guests he brings to Portland, Seattle, San Jose and other places (Portland is the hub of this activity, but does not define the outer boundary of his show). He also considers himself a serious philosopher in his own right. Given these two ingredients, it's not far-fetched to expect the kind of book that brings Terry's reverie into the foreground, against a backdrop of stellar figures.

I was quickly introduced to the assembly, by Terry, as a big wheel in the Bucky Fuller subdomain, and as a student of Rorty's at Princeton. The latter tagging was for Dr. Cartwright's benefit. The credential (studied with Rorty) got me a lot of cred with Dr. Haack when she was here, because she'd sparred with the guy, in print and in person.

Pragmatism is much on the table here, through Dewey, and Karl Popper especially. Wittgenstein is at "the far end of the fire poker" here, kept at arm's length for the purposes of this discussion. Bucky Fuller's thinking will only appear here, in my blogs (on-line journals).

Fuller's philosophy is somewhat unique in the "western" tradition in that it subtracts away any static all-encompassing "thing" that is "the universe". We experience Universe (Fuller assigns it a proper place name (532.18)) yet it's eternally aconceptual, a context for our systems, our partially overlapping time tunnels (scenarios) without being point-to-able as some "elephant" or "thing".

Terry's philosophy is somewhat similar in that he's skeptical that "a theory of everything" is a necessary goal of the sciences. He's content to let our systems stay special case. That may be the more pragmatic stance, I agree. When empirical theories become intrinsically intolerant of counter-cultures and complementary "insanity" they've likely reached the rigor mortis stage of some "empire", an endgame.

Anthropologically speaking, perhaps the urge for a totalistic TOE is the urge to build a Tower of Babel, with human cogitation at the apex. What seems to happen at the apex is thermodynamic noise, or is that pure signal? Systems tend to dissolve, in any case. Humanly contrived systems have a finite half-life, tend to meltdown at "the top" (another meaning of "trickle down").

Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript could be another puzzle piece here?

Terry's style is to speak quickly in a colloquial style. He says the word "thing" with high frequency, and might end a sentence with "da da da" (similar to "yada yada"), the sense being he's been over this turf so many times, it's somewhat a waste of time to say it again. If one hasn't bounced around in this namespace, it may sound like noise. Having been to several Terry Talks over the years, I feel on familiar ground.

On the pragmatic front, a service guy from Montag keeps coming back to fix our furnace. He has theories as to why it's not coming on. A rational tree structure diagrams the possibilities. The art of furnace maintenance may be subtle sometimes. Lets hope our experienced repair guy doesn't snap under pressure.

Nancy had an interesting necklace worth commenting upon. A large puzzle piece around her neck. I felt we'd won something important while geo-caching, couldn't say what exactly. A cosmic fish perhaps.

Nancy Ankorn was also present, meaning both XXs were named Nancy. The rest were XYs of high mental caliber and engaged in contradictory exchange. Both Nancys are quite up to co-managing in this guyish world in my judgement. Good seeing Bruce Adams, Mark Martin.

PPUG 2011.02.08

2011-02-09T11:59:00.000-08:00

Twas my distinct pleasure to introduce the chairman, Steve Holden, to a packed house at Urban Airship, PPUG's new meeting venue. Adam Lowry was acting in the role of host, with Eric Holscher, another UA MVP, delivering the majority of the evening's content with a truly excellent presentation (more below).

Steve is temporarily my house guest, like Lindsey but shorter term. He's already found a property to value in 97214, making his new business (The Open Bastion) bi-coastal. His other zip code is 11105.

Other news: upcoming conferences: OSCON, Pycon, OS Bridge. Talk proposals for this last one are still being accepted.

Dan Colish gave a talk on the ABC module, containing Abstract Base Classes. The name of this module may be construed as homage or at least a pun. Guido greatly appreciates his intellectual progenitors at CWI, as I learned at the EuroPython in Gothenberg. Python-the-language inherits from an older language named ABC.

Readthedocs is a free and open source community service, implemented in Django. The project got started during a 48 hour dash (dart?), a longer version of the sprint. As a lightning talk is to a thunder talk, so is a sprint to a dash ("thunder talk" is not commonly so-defined as of this posting).

Eric was a veritable font of information about what's cool and hard at work in web services: Gunicorn, Nginx, Solr, Celery, Haystack and of course Sphinx, around which this django project is built.

Readthedocs can host your materials through a docs prefix in your existing registered domains, while also providing subdomain access within their rtfd namespace. It supports themes, including an in-house theme that gives you a consistent user experience (ux). "Use a designer" counseled Eric, sharing important insights he'd gleaned.

I spent much of the pre-meeting chatting with Luke, following up on our conversation about computing in academia. Back then, I'd been pondering PSU's situation (Banner etc.), before diving head first into trucking for a spell.

We adjourned to Bailey's Taproom (see slides) where much chatter occurred. Jolly Michelle ran a tight meeting as usual, getting most of us to wear name tags (me included: Kirby Urner it said).

Fond greetings to all of you. Yes, I said Chipy was cooler, in terms of e-lists, but that was more just to galvanize (goose, elicit) more self improvement activities.

HNY 4708

2011-02-04T21:15:00.000-08:00

Got Tara off to her debate meet, a road trip, student organized, parent supervised. I burned through much of the day in cyberspace, plane spotting or whatever I do, pretending I'm a Howard Rheingold or Amber Case (both cyber-anthropologists).

I was in a thread on mathfuture with Alexander Bogomolny, webmaster for Cut the Knot, a useful source over the years. I've linked to it from Bizmo Diaries.

Then I shot down to FNB on my Captain Amerika bike or maybe she's Bat Woman. She was happy to be closer to her love interest, the FNB trailer, retrieved from another Ville.

Walker played the Casio and sang as we gradually dispersed, with some soon heading north to monastic facilities and/or the San Juans.

Tara texted from the debate site. Emails with mom, regarding AFSC business, with Stallings re Consoletti.

Holden inbound.

I've been reading up on White Metal Rabbit lore per some Chinese mnemonics. I'm not sure any one culture has a monopoly on "memory palaces" though I could see where advances in spatial data management techniques would excite cross-cultural GUI development in mind's eye virtual modeling (a glass bead game (meme game)).

Humans learn from their peers pretty quickly.

Make your teachings worth propagating.

Happy New Year.

Wanderers 2011.2.1

2011-02-02T23:04:00.000-08:00

Don's cell call reminded me of this interesting opportunity, to hear more stories from Asia from a woman recently returned. I took my leave of Food Not Bombs in the shelter, making sure I'd be seeing Cera again, before she disappears into some monastery or wherever she goes.

I peddled my bicycle through the darkness and winter cold, grateful for the flashing LED headlamp I'd finally won budget for (funds are tight in America, with Nick an hour on the bus each way to dialysis, barely able to walk, and with spinal difficulties). We've eliminated oil heat from the list of necessities. DSL is the priority.

Funds are very tight in Cambodia as well, forcing parents over the border into Thailand, perhaps to never see their children again. The child abandonment rate is very high, in part because of a recent holocaust and a missing generation. The need for orphanages is great, reminding me of Romania in some ways.

I learned a lot from Ms. Goldmann's presentation. She's a vivacious, intelligent and I expect effective fundraiser for her worthy projects. If only the Coffee Shops Network were further along, with its NGO-friendly games.

Ethical tourism is the new buzz word (right up their with eco-tourism), heard around Burma as well. Come with the intent to spend wisely, to have your visit help sponsor your causes.

Discretionary travel is a way to walk one's talk, on the model of a pilgrimage, an inward journey involving self reflection and meditations about purpose.

The flip side of traveling ethically is to encourage beneficiaries to not discriminate so blatantly against foreigners (in Cambodia, all foreigners are blanket "French").

For example, the current Cambodian airline (co-operated by Vietnam Airlines) actually advertises lower prices "for Cambodians only", meaning foreign nationals will automatically need to pay more.

This double standard makes humanitarian projects like Ms. Goldmann's unworkable, as NGOs depend on stretching dollars as far as they'd go as if a local were spending them. Having to pay "tourist prices" makes such undertakings unaffordable.

The orphanage in question is just outside of Batdambang, Cambodia's second largest city. Some speculate international tourism may route through a revitalized airport there, given the airport nearest Ankor Watt is too near, and the relics are starting to crumble thanks to jet engine vibrations just a mile away.

Ms. Goldmann has gone back and forth quite a few times and had many adventures to recount. Motorbikes are dangerous. Dustin's severe foot injury reminded me of Nirel's experience in India.

Our gathered Wanderers were much impressed and encouraged by Ms. Goldmann's kind and brave nature, as well as her extreme youth (she's 18). I was reminded of Jody (an orphan with experience working with orphanages), of my daughter, and of the goddess Tara herself, a compassionate archetype.

Speaking of Buddhism, even though the Cambodians are cash-poor, they know how to build epic-sized temples. Finding some kind of rapprochement between "the French" and their western education, and indigenous scholarship, would probably be of significant benefit to both sides. Californians revere Buddhist teachers and study Zen for college credit. Why pit east and west against one another, in dimensions where the most synergy might occur?

The orphanage itself is non-sectarian. Ms. Goldmann is Jewish and Dustin, her business partner, soon to become a Cambodian, does not plan his life around some belief in a deity. I think of my Jewish friend Alan Potkin as well, another respectful admirer of Asian cultures who has no interest in recruiting people away from Buddhist patterns of thought.

Buddhism is variously categorized as poly and/or non-theist, depending on which branch of scholarship one is following. A doctrine of rebirth somewhat obfuscates the line between mortal and immortal, meaning Bodhisattvas or saints might also be considered embodiments of eternal archetypes, more like in the Jungian model.

Enneacontahedron Again

2011-01-28T09:53:00.000-08:00

Finding omni-symmetrical polyhedrons with volumes close to the sphere's volume, while having the same radius in some important direction, has been a preoccupation of some geometers, David Koski among them.

Sir David works in tetravolumes, a little known standard, wherein the unit sphere is rt2(2)*pi in volume. That's (4/3)*pi*r**2 times S3, the Synergetics Constant. Either way, the ratios come out the same, so even in XYZ you will find the enneacontahedron comes within a fraction of a percent of a sphere's volume, hugging it even more closely than the rhombic triacontahedrons you may have encountered in this neighborhood: the 5 and the 5+.

Below is a rendering developed in POV-Ray using the export feature from vZome. I've jiggered with the camera and added a textured sphere inside, still growing to become tangent to the enneacontahedron's narrow diamonds, embedded in our rhombic triacontahedron's.

Waiting for "Superman" (movie review)

2011-01-23T16:28:00.001-08:00

The movie offers a somewhat ahistoric view in that it paints a picture of some idyllic time, when it all just worked, but now it's all broken.

The supposed idyllic time was no doubt after the Civil War, but maybe before the Cold War, or during said war if your family was then living the suburban American dream and unaffected by the world's hellish conditions (a minority even then).

There was no mention of the fact that a really giant educator, the military service, slurps up a lot of people, and has been doing so for a long while. The prisons get talked about, but not the military.

Other voices in the film (besides the director's) do point out that the despoliation has been occurring for a long time, somewhat contradicting the "idyllic past" hypothesis.

So lets just say the movie tells more than one story, at least if you read between the lines.

The analysis accepts a rather rigidly nationalistic framework, with the USA pitted against these other nations in a kind of metaphysical Olympics (USA losing).

I won't deny the "metaphysical" part, but is nationalism much more than a crutch for a lame and insufficiently responsible rationality? What did Albert Einstein think about nationalism, and what percentage of high schoolers have studied that question in the last year, anywhere in the world? I'm sure we don't know, but probably not very many (OMSI-goers an exception).

In sum, this movie is itself the product of a somewhat impoverished all-American curriculum. The movie-makers have no time for much history (nothing about "busing" or the civil rights movement, desegregation, successive waves of immigration, church and state tensions). They're effective teachers (deserve merit pay) but that doesn't make up for the rather shallow analysis.

The animations work (or what does Tufte think? -- too much chart junk? I saw spatial volumes substituting for surfaces when showing percents, a recipe for making statistics misleading) but with that kind of bandwidth, we could be covering a lot more ground. Let's put even some good college teachers to shame by really covering a ton of data in the allotted time. Don't dumb it down for us.

If you have Bill Gates on your show again, maybe have him do something more technical, less political? Maybe he could teach us the next Windows, or explain SQL? Lets actually educate about math and computer science, not just talk about whether we like it or are good at it.

Like, at what speed does one actually break the sound barrier and when was this done? There's lots of room on the screen to show facts and speedometers (control panels). Why not flood the screen with data, like they do during football games (with scores of other games, recent headlines, a company logo dance, a belly dance...). Let's play with the theory that big screen communications could convey a lot more, now that we have the ability to easily rewind them. This is what happened to writing, once literacy became widespread.

I found it interesting to come to this film having just seen Helen's work, which looks at the same issues from a more zoomed out perspective. Is this "education" we plan to be offering all that big a help? Were we teaching anything about how to grow vegetables? So what if you know calculus? Sure, you might need to know it but are they telling you why? No computer programming in your high school? Reasoning? Where's the debate?

In much of the world, kids get herded off to classrooms, where a culling process begins and a few get skimmed off by The Empire. The rest are dumped on the streets with no prospects, ready to be recruited into liberation fronts. Their farmlands have been taken, their community fragmented. Why should this be called "school". If you're not building networks and friendships for life, as well as relevant skills, maybe it doesn't get that label?

When Quakers wanted to distinguish their houses of worship from the other churches, they decided to use "meetinghouse" as their designation. A church was but a "steeple house" and, as such, was not up to Quaker standards. I'm seeing a similar need today, to distinguish, to disambiguate.

People these days say "eco-village" a lot. Perhaps a real school is at minimum an eco-village. City-as-campus. Maybe these buildings called "schools" are just another kind of learning center, one of many. Should we Quakers open some new learning centers around town, and leave "going to school" to the less innovative? Let's check what the tribes are thinking.

The guardians in this movie are committed to providing a decent life for their kids, however it's clear that this cannot be done near or in the home, and that adults who have not specialized as classroom teachers are not a source of "schooling" and will not be offering many life-relevant skills beyond idle play and/or nagging to do one's homework. "On which side of the Periodic Table do we find metals?" Your average parent is not expected to know, and yet your average 8th grader is.

If there's something between you and that body of knowledge, it must either be your own lack of will, or the fact that some system is withholding your rightful heritage. In this case, I'd agree with the film makers: it's your heritage that's being withheld, by those likewise deprived, but then when has the public curriculum been overwhelmingly generous? It's not new to hold back. Not everyone needs to know the King's business, after all.

I mean look, if we were really serious about pumping more and better information into the culture, wouldn't we be doing that by now? Perhaps some of us are. We have televisions and DVD players galore, not to mention Youtube, which many "schools" block.

Sure, we could be investigating our problems way more seriously than we do, and have working solutions to many more of them. Like we could've had voting machines in the schools for some years, and been polling students frequently on many issues, lots of stats. We could have used this technology to explore how voting works, how votes get tallied fairly even when the ballots are secret. What's private and what's public?

But lets face it: at the end of a long day commuting and pushing products nobody really wants or needs, it's more fun and relaxing to kick back and pop open a can and watch something quasi-mindless. I'm not against R&R, but lets talk about how to talk ourselves out of crummy work habits. Guardians need quality time with their kids doing shared community service. When does that happen?

Note to historians: Americans had simply run out of any ability to imagine the future, other than to try to inhabit some TV world they'd had beamed at them as the wars raged in Asia. If Star Trek and The Jetsons were unobtainable, maybe we could relive something already in the can, say The Waltons or even All in the Family. "Someday, we might even break the sound barrier and wake up in the 21st Century (give us another generation or two)". Welcome to the rubber room, still open for business and packed with people in transition.

We went to this movie at Laurelhurst Theater on Burnside directly from Quaker meeting. This was one of the two days a week when minors are permitted (the marquee didn't let on there was a 1:10 PM showing, as this was only true on weekends -- the Web was my source). Tara and I had Chinese food afterward and discussed our views. Her latest debate tournament at PSU didn't result in any awards, but she felt good about her role as a mentor to the relative newcomers to the sport. Other Quakers went home to watch football, as today was an important game, especially for Bears fans.

At meeting, I talked about AVP and whether violent video games were an alternative to violence. In some curricula I think they are, most definitely. Carl and I also discussed the merits of NPYM affiliating with FGC. He's neutral on the topic. Doing so would have its costs, but they're probably bearable.

I'll be avoiding Quaker Quest (a program hatched in the UK) as I'm finding it too alien to my own Friendly faith 'n practice. No biggie, forking happens.

I also met up with Lew, our property management clerk. He'd recently finishing using Google apps such as Sketchup to get the Multnomah Friends meetinghouse in 3D on Google Earth, as a public service (our clerk positions are unpaid). Now this guy is educated.

click for larger view

The title Waiting for "Superman" has somewhat the same cadence as Bowling for Columbine, but the films come from different angles. Would a KIPP show Michael Moore films to its students? How about SuperSize Me? Would it teach Verboten Math? If you're a student or teacher in one of those, maybe drop me a note, as I'm curious. Journalists? Any news?

FNB: 2010.1.13

2011-01-14T12:22:00.000-08:00

Food Not Bombs has been in a sharing relationship with the Religious Society of Friends here in Portland since about September of 2010. The relationship goes back a little further than that if you count our participation as a Quaker household (per directories) minus any use of the commons on Stark in a non-rental community-serving set of arrangements.

Basement storage of bulk supplies is permitted. Deep frying is not (fortunately FNB tends to go with light steaming, as we did yesterday). Friends pay for heat, electricity and water use for a three hour period each week. FNB also borrows salt and pepper on occasion though with plans to replenish (I could get some next time I visit Costco).

I used to be dogmatic about some official FNB trailer not getting separated from Simon's cookware, but that was mostly invented bureaucracy on my part. The stalwarts are ingenious at coming up with trailers, including making their own. Simon, a stalwart, with history as a software developer, is pulling a new rig fashioned from a ladder. Aaron's trailer, like Noah's in Davis, is able to haul an ass of compost, maybe several (an "ass" is a unit of measure in our household).

Yesterday (Jan 13), I wasn't sure I'd be getting assistance (I'd done the job solo the previous week). Lindsey volunteered to assist, though she considers herself mostly a hauler (despite her vegan cooking skills). Upon arrival, however, I was greeted by two veteran cooks already in the kitchen. Sarabell used to work in a Quaker elementary school in Philadelphia. Noah seemed to know his way around a kitchen. We showed up with the produce Lindsey had hauled earlier that day.

Thanks to the surfeit of cooking talent, Lindsey allowed herself to sing her show tunes using the social hall piano, though always mindful that her TV-14+ lyrics might be offensive to some Quakers working in the building. She has a more PG-rated lineup when playing in houses of worship, such as during that benefit for Sisters of the Road.

At the park, it felt a bit like a Zen convention, as Satya and friends were on their way to some esoteric sitting and presentation regarding some newly translated works. I thought about going, but then Brent very kindly offered to share wood he'd salvaged from a free pile in Washington (a clear cut). Their native practice in that state, probably in Oregon as well, is to douse all this burnable fuel, including fresh hemlock, in diesel, and set it ablaze. Air pollution from such waste had already driven Brent from his habitat at another time (the fire smolders for days). He fights back by salvaging what he can and redistributing it to suburbanites who maybe don't appreciate the value of real firewood, or the level of waste their own lifestyles encourage.

Brent came to the house with his maul and ax and split some seriously big segments right there on the patio, by the light of a partial moon (plus some electric light, which Quakers are not against using). I now have that essential ingredient I'd been missing: lots of kindling, as well as more burnable woods than what we'd inherited when buying the house: a garage full of something rock hard, which Brent also took a crack at, successfully in many cases.

While all this chopping was going on, Lindsey reappeared with the trailer and responded to Brent's request for broken inner tubes he might use around his ax handle (as a veteran of Bike Farm, she stocks such supplies). Then she was off to her coven and I to my office, where my night job begins late. I went through a few billable hours of course material before shoving the dog over and crashing. Other household members are away. Nick, who sometimes stays in the room where I crashed, is still undergoing lots of tests. I plan to go visit him using the green elevators.

Noah didn't join us at the park as he wanted to be a part of this town meeting, called by the mayor, asking citizens whether Portland should rejoin a certain "counter-terrorism task force".

The reason Portland is thinking about rejoining is because of mentally ill people and their nightmares, many of which have an impact on collective living standards. People have been staging protests and vigils against terror. It's hard to find anyone who's pro-terror in this neck of the woods. Many of 'em just wanna use "shock and awe" to eliminate terrorism, using torture if necessary.

Of course the Quakers are in the minority on this issue, in wanting torture banned in all its forms (including slow death by starvation). The collaboration with Food Not Bombs is a part of our Ending Hunger campaign, the way I look at it.

Speaking of which, the head of Food Not Bombs was interviewed on the radio in a program broadcast by KBOO this morning. I missed hearing it but apparently FNB is disturbing to neighbors in some zip codes and they end up calling the police.

Here in Portland, neighbors often show up to share food and catch up on the buzz. We discuss all kinds of esoteric topics, as we hail from many walks of life. Many of us are wanderers, and enjoy comparing notes. For example, Fallon, who made the little Youtube about our operation, is these days biking around Mexico, doing her damnedest to pick up on more Spanish (or Mexican -- English:American :: Spanish:Mexican, sort of, when it comes to vernaculars).

Concave / Convex

2011-01-12T21:11:00.000-08:00

Epiphany 2011

2011-01-06T11:52:00.001-08:00

The way I was taught, the Kings didn't show up on Xmas day, plus they weren't really Kings, more like Wizards or Magi, as in "magicians" (they knew to "read stars" and such). Of course in geological time, we don't reckon that December 25 is much more than a close-to-solstice holiday, like Saturnalia, but the fact of an interval (or memory address offset) makes sense, like the Kings wouldn't intrude right on his birthday (that'd be rude).

I've been reading the 2nd edition of Aung San Suu Kyi, Fearless Voice of Burma. I enjoy seeing mention of some of the same people I've shared a room with, such as Bishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama, also friends of each other. Bob autographed one for the elder son whom I hope to meet with someday. This was another Bhutan family (of subgeniuses?), living in Thimphu around a decade before ours did.

Congratulations to Steve Holden, who isn't thinking about his business (Holden Web), now that he's just meeting his first grandson. Some of us met at his behest at Kell's recently, to brainstorm about where the "open source" idea might be going. Portlanders are supposed to have ideas about that sort of thing, at least by reputation.

On the way to Kell's from the "taxi" I walked along with a frac gas guy going back to Arkansas (random chance meeting), where permitting isn't as controlled. Hard to frac for gas around here.

We've continued to apply "spit and polish" (as they say) to our crystal ball for geometrical concepts, a kind of test pattern for high def and stereo TV. I've posted some of the latest blueprints to the CSN "wall" (as people say in FB).

Our household is likewise scholarly (not unlike some of those I've been reading about). A "wave of Zen" seems to have swept the place, although it's still a bit rustic and maybe too dense.

2011: Day One

2011-01-01T20:18:00.000-08:00

by dk

Ken Brown kicked it off by sharing from his mobile that 2011 is both prime and the sum of 11 consecutive primes. He doesn't give this as a reason for Mayan Y2K, which some predict for 12/21 for reasons I've forgotten.

Apocalypse Pretty Soon was interesting reading. Woolsey shows up as maybe talking about UFOs at one point. You could see how word would get out if that happened, grays talking about grays.

Ed Cherlin was praising Quakers for being closers in gray power suits, in a thread on mathfuture. I look more like Jack Abramoff when I wear my "power hat" (the one by Paul Kaufman).

Did some cleaning, checked in with family, did some equipment inspection (Kelly Kettles are pretty cool), telecommuted to work some. I was privileged to learn from one of the Python teachers about this Calculus video.

Dr. Z is continuing to represent the academic consensus. The Global U seems to be churning a lot, as "the Bucky stuff" continues to go viral on some LCDs. We call that an "upgrade" but others prefer to teach their usual business without competition. I should check that MIT webcam again.

Trevor reports that the Kabul Dome is now in Alaska. That sounds symbolic.

More on Islamic banking, micro-lending and Quakers on mathfuture, ala RSoWR and all that.

Anthony Manusos, Kathy's predecessor at Friends Bulletin (now Western Friend) was known to observe Ramadan on occasion and to write knowledgeably about Quaker-Islam relations.

ibid

From Day to Day

2010-12-27T19:14:00.000-08:00

Just off the cell with Dr. Nick, having contacted Verizon to roll back the terms (a rep had talked me into a lower text messages bracket but that had backfired).

I cataloged a list of science fiction storyboards I'm working on, some closer to reality than others. This was to Brian with copies to our Wanderers group, which meets on that Linus Pauling Campus I sometimes write about:

EPCOT West; safety corridor for academic degree program "truckology" students twixt Istanbul and Kabul / Stans; Pycon / Tehran; Pycon / Havana (post Gitmo); Martian Math cartoons (Japan / PDX); "weapons inspector" as a major at University of Colorado and New Mexico Tech, Python courses and lightning talks, GOSCON, "girl scout math" at abandoned military bases in the Philippines (lots of Martian Math influence); SeaWorld / Iraq (going on many years by now -- relevant that Keiko is an honorary Wanderer); Countdown to Zero, the computer game / simulation (Valerie Plame Wilson and Scott Ritter sought for board of advisors).

Science fiction? Maybe, although some of these are pretty dang real (Martian Math is on Wikieducator and was field tested at Reed College this summer; GOSCON = government + open source, was a blast this year, I was at the table with PSF chairman Steve Holden, Rami Kassab of Portland, and some Barcampers from where Keith and I last met up).

Martian Math:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/sets/72157622961425831/

GOSCON:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/sets/72157625315757940/

So is that review or preview or what? We all have our preferred futures, and science fiction is a way to express them. The Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, part of the Experience the Music Project (EMP), focuses on this theme quite a bit, or did when I went through.

After making supper for Tara and I (toasted cheese sandwiches with pickles), it was time for Food Not Bombs. I took the bike Lindsey tricked out for me, versus the FNB hauler with the tall pedestal.

What a crowd tonight! Simon, Aaron, Cera... David. Lots of people I couldn't name.

I told David about the college major of "weapons inspector" I was writing about, a story set in the near future when we have a lot of weapons to inspect (kind of a joke). I think he could see why I'd be recruiting for this career among those standing for Food Not Bombs. I also explained the difference between a maze and a labyrinth.

Satya was just arriving as I departed, ships in the night, quick greetings on passing bicycles.

Virtual Ornaments

2010-12-24T16:22:00.000-08:00

by david koski

by swdharmraj

Storyboarding Engineers

2010-12-22T23:58:00.001-08:00

We've enjoyed some passionate discussions on the Wanderers board, between actual meetings in the board room around the long table. Those of us most active on-line may not be the ones who show up at the meetings and vice versa.

The solstice party was fantastic. Gus played some vintage radio from funnier times.

I've been going over with Keith some of the IAEA stuff I've been looking at in connection with these schools for diplomats. These are like OMSI camps in some circumstances, complete with caring for horses (more important than riding them -- it's more about them in their welfare, not you in the movies pretending you're a cowboy).

The cosmopolitan spin is about all getting along, even after we go back to our respective "bubble villages" in whatever grid sectors we monitor. Maybe EMO should have a role. Ecotrust definitely. GIS/GPS is a big part of IAEA "geocaching" (sometimes with assistance from FBI people).

Although you may be picturing boarding schools for mostly young people, it's not always that way. Picture a few thousand Camp Davids (maybe not easy, if you've never been there), and take the average.

The reciprocity in training and verification techniques makes IAEA duty not unlike TSA duty, and indeed, there's overlap, and I'm not just talking about 12 Monkeys type stuff. You might have a week's rotation in Colorado followed by a short stint in South Asia (many more states). All have their respective challenges. Multi-tasking is less wearying (at least to some -- others like to stay focussed on the one situation).

I've had to change my grading philosophy based on feedback from my boss. Given the kinds of jobs I envision, I was being a stickler for details, but at this early stage keeping high morale is more important. Many people lack the self confidence to jump in to this business.

Here are some excerpts from my correspondence with Keith, archived to our group:

What I write about are "bubble villages" that look something like
those DEW line encampments, or subsequent models. The people
living there tend to have strong backgrounds in STEM. They might
be bioneers like John Todd, or developers of the Garden of Eden
dome concept, like J. Baldwin.

The latter wrote Bucky Works, an interesting book that has served
as a basis for a lot of my screenwriting and science fiction planning
for over a decade.

...

Back to my original point, I see a lot of serious and immediate
concerns about the health of the biosphere and ecosystem being
corralled by this feckless discourse called "global climate change".

Like, I'm fine with trying to figure out of the global temperature
is going up or down and whether the sea level is being affected.
We need to monitor everything and have plenty of open data for
people to analyze.

But I think it's mind-numbing to imagine that "global warming"
is the only signature we need to look for, if the goal is to avert
catastrophe and provide for the well being of future generations,
of non-humans and humans alike.

Yes to a focus on global climate change (one of many).

No to any monopolistic hijacking of that debate by people
who think "climate" does not include the presence or absence
of nuclear weapons.

Their presence is warping everything about how humans behave
and that's affecting the climate. Getting rid of them is what
serious engineering is all about (unless maybe you live in
the Lower48 where it's more like Planet of the Apes these
days, monkey see monkey do etc.).

Over on math-teach, the topic is bandwidth again. We watched the RSA Animation about how adults are drugging their kids to keep them focused on too-boring-for-words presentations. I'm hoping the Ignite format helps address the boredom issue, and that we can give students better self-management skills where "brain meds" are concerned.

On Synergeo, Rybo is learning to say "meds" instead of "medications". In my book, that's a positive. Yes, idle banter, but among feuding factions, so an improvement in our internal affairs (buckaneer world).

New on the Job

2010-12-16T15:38:00.000-08:00

This feels like that first day for Centers Network, getting balled out by a lower chief for forgetting the golf pencils. Checker cab full of bankers boxes, straight from supplies. Then to seminar setup. Sometimes in the snow. "Damn, forgot the damn pencils" forgetting to censor my own train of thought. I had some between-jobs soap opera guys on my team as well, I'll call them fans. They booed when Ron gave me a dressing down, stayed in my corner.

The training today was well crafted. I followed along on screen.

On other fronts, I was putting out fires.

But the main situation in my control room is mundane: a leaky roof. Pictures will be forthcoming but I must say I'm grateful for the break in the weather. Patrick turned me on to some goop that appears to be just the ticket. His sample had hardened to onyx chewing gum, which is kind of the end state I'm aiming for, but the new stuff, going on, is more like thick cake frosting. I went to town with this stuff. Like slag from some oil refinery, like where David was pulling night shift.

At least the math teaching forums are being peaceful. I sense a broadening consensus about where to go next. People are getting used to their iStuff and are ready for more outdoorsy experiences. Hiking and geocaching, camping and maintaining trails, look like a better bet than just lying on the couch all day with a diet coke shooting at pixels in high def. Your thumbs get strong, hand-eye improves, but you're still not getting much exercise or team player skills (not counting your on-line buddies).

It's not like they won't have video games at the school, twenty miles walking in. You'll have other stops along the way too, complete with wifi and interesting activities. This isn't about wasting a lot of your time, but on the other hand what are the skills? Sometimes watching and waiting is one of them.

Wanderers 2010.12.15

2010-12-15T09:48:00.000-08:00

Ohman, Dec 19, 2004

We're having one of those open sessions dominated by comparing notes on computer matters, quite boring to some. The "Microsoft treadmill" is a theme, which is not really a good name for it. Any number of companies require fees to keep their software functional.

Bookkeeping companies want you to download new tax tables. Of course the government should have made such software available for free ages ago, as compliance with the government's own laws is what's at issue. It's an executive branch function to interpret the will of Congress into running code. However, DC doesn't have the imagination for real government, is just coasting on past fame and glory. Or maybe I'm just unaware of the cube farms already working on this challenge? Where's the beef?

Speaking of which, the Blue House would be happy to prototype the energy simulation games, contemplated for use in the schools. These give both a household view and more zoomed out views, comparable to first, second and third person. Monitor your resource consumption as an individual, team or household, or grid sector on the globe. With this equipment in place, we could also look at those gorgeous new bookkeeping front ends the government is thinking about, complete with a Wild West motif for those wishing, lots of history tucked away as easter eggs. Even people who "hate money" will love playing these wonders of contemporary engineering.

Even if DC is planning to pass on all these opportunities to keep the USA alive, other cities might share the responsibility more. Hollywood has done plenty to inject life into various myths, such as Iron Man, Batman, Superman and all of those. People use these as matrices for internal guidance sometimes (internalize role models). Introjecting comic book characters is phase one in becoming a geek, escaping the larval nerd incarnation. A kind of morphing (transformation) occurs.

The same thing happens at more zoomed out levels. USA OS gets a new shape, new feathers. HQS are more distributed.

Congressman Wu put his finger on it when comparing it to a geodesic sphere, not a pyramid hierarchy. Should we change the dollar bill, and put the eye in the middle?

I shared my view that the rest of the world is hopping onto the free bandwagon where "metaphysical assets" are concerned. Most cities don't torment their kids with negative propaganda about the "free Web" being a bad thing. That's more retro thinking from the 1900s, still spewing, still polluting the 21st century. We wave good bye in the rear view mirror.

Speaking of "girl scout math", Trish showed us a website where she'd gotten the template for a free antenna that enhanced her laptop's wifi reception considerably. This led to many additional forking conversations, regarding access to bandwidth. Jim would like something other than dial-up where he lives, but not at exorbitant cost.

suggesting Uncle Sam supply "liberty apps"

Onward FNB

2010-12-14T13:40:00.001-08:00

Here's what I posted to the board this afternoon. Run of the mill stuff really. Lightly edited:

[pdxfnb] Re: week of Dec 12 (Tues / Thurs )

From: kirby urner
To: pdxfnb
Subject: [pdxfnb] Re: week of Dec 12
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 12:41:55 -0800

Greetings FNBers --

The trailer is in the usual location. Chefs should be

thinking about acorn squash and kale as major

ingredients. Also have pomegranates, other fruits

and root vegetables.

Food prep on Thursdays at the Quaker Meeting house

has been happening since the beginning of September,

except on Thanksgiving when we made other arrangements.**

I'll be there at the usual time (sorry, was late last time)

to open up, return the soup ladle, and look for some left

behind plastic. I'll wash the pots and await the chefs.

If you're volunteering for Tuesday, you know where to

go for the trailer (blue house on Harrison) and OTY

ingredients. Greetings from OTY.

LW still gearing up to check possible CSA site in Yamhill.

I filled in as hauler per prior plan. Fond greetings to all.

Kirby

** Here's a write-up with slides from back when we started:

http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2010/09/fnb-food-prep.html

Postmortem FNB

2010-12-10T10:19:00.000-08:00

By "postmortem" I mean "going meta w/r to the last chapter" as FNB will continue on its merry way. I'm still hosting the trailer, planning a next pickup.

There's a trade off between excess and waste. One brings an abundance of food to the market so as not to run out, and paying customers come to get what they need. After closing, you have the problem of what to do with unsold produce. Trading with your neighbors is not always feasible as you may all have an excess of the same thing.

Enter these various alternative recycling systems, engineered by geeks, drawing from the gleaner tradition. Yes, the material has already been picked over by paying customers, or in some cases selected and delivered. That doesn't make it all substandard though. Excess may mean "more of the same" i.e. there's no detectable step down in quality.

A geek cook or chef is someone to value. If there's a doable menu with lots of essential nutrients, both hygienic and flavorful in a rustic vegan kind of way, then your chefs will come up with it. There's not always much lead time. Here's what we have, start the meter running. You may have seen similar talent shows on The Food Channel.

Fruit that's too ripe for further storage might be perfect for a pie. Not being an expert chef, I'll spare you a long list of examples. Whitney brought cinnamon yesterday, and that made a real and positive difference to the fresh squash Aaron cooked. We also had scads of mushrooms. I proposed we make that a soup, to which beets, potatoes and some other stuff was added. As part of the janitorial staff, I'm allowed to make proposals.

What many would have to do with their excess is drive it back to its rural origins for composting, as the city waste collection system isn't open to excessive dumping. A farmer's market can't just abandon a pile of wasting produce and expect to be invited back week after week. So it's an expense to the farmers to haul a lot of it back. Earning the good will of the townsfolk by feeding one of its recycling architectures, makes a lot of sense.

In my own case, I model the "radical house terminus". I know you're probably thinking "radical" means something "bad" politically, but as a math teacher let me assure you it simply means "root", as does "terminus" in some lexicons, as in "tapping point". We provide time and energy to the recycling grid, which means accepting some compost and doing our own gardening and food provisioning. We contribute to the kitty.

On the other hand, we don't want FNB to become a composting service for surrounding neighborhoods, or, if we do, we'll need to work with the city on a truly intelligent plan for that. Maybe bulk storage and delivery around town on CSA routes, using lots of bamboo bike trailers, a job for academic credit in some programs, becomes fashionable, if not in Portland then maybe in Brooklyn.

However if neighbors start lugging bags of compost they can't use to the FNB fooding events ("fooding" is a colloquialism in Bhutan), expecting free haul away service, then "termini" such as mine would be quickly overwhelmed.

Now Lindsey is a composting genius and when she takes up residence on a property, it's "with intent to farm" -- and that means compost. She'll get off her bike to check out a compost pile, strike up conversations, build her whole social network around the art and science of composting. This isn't me though, and when Lindsey leads a girl scout math training in Oregon's hinterlands, I'm immediately over my head with this composting business, unable to route and organize effectively. I go under, as neighbors use my terminus for a landfill (we haven't gotten to that yet, thanks to city codes).

So that gives a sense of the workflow. If Portland wanted, it could probably scale up these types of operation and pretty soon be teaching gourmet ethnic cooking to legions of young people, taking advantage of healthful local produce, some bought and some vectored through experimental math curricula like FNB and girl scout math.

In a TV literate culture, you'd expect to build public acceptance and understanding through sharing video and audio (so-called "reality television"), and indeed we're well along in that process. FNB chapters have been feeding media to public repositories from all over the world, each providing a local spin. Our chapter was recently the subject of a PSU student study.

When Lindsey came to town from her engineering company background, the bicycle equations were front and center, all about joules and calories, and skills, intelligence. The bamboo bike trailer phenomenon was getting going, thanks to a civil engineer we later met at a FNB event. Aaron's metal version is like eight feet long and easily took everything from the meetinghouse yesterday (including a soup server I need to return, along with Aaron's plastic ware).

However, we're well aware at the Blue House that this is a lot about trucking as well. Food conveyed to the warehouses, on a big enough scale to stock supermarkets, does not happen without trucks. Fortunately, our insights into that world are growing, owing to geek activities in transportation engineering. The same routing games played with bicycles are played with trucks on another scale.

Portland has been working on being bicycle friendly, so the idea of "feed me" cafeterias staffed by people in training, with a lot of bicycles going and coming, is not going to overwhelm the infrastructure right away. The lanes have been painted and are intended for use in all weather conditions (except ice and snow for most cyclists -- for most motorists too, in these parts).

An electrified fleet might be coming, if not here then in a sister city, but it's still a different mix on the road, more vulnerable and fragile.

Oregonians make fun of themselves for not knowing how to drive in the snow, but they do know how to accommodate bicyclers hauling trailers or just hauling ass. That might be a university geek you know, does Ruby on Rails. Or maybe she's a nun of some variety (we have those too), cross-enrolled on several campuses around town. These aren't people you wanna hit with your gas guzzler. Foreign exchange students (many from Africa). Ambassadors' kids. Lets keep Portland tourist-friendly.

Cave Paintings

2010-12-05T00:17:00.000-08:00

Speaking of debates, today is Civil War day in Oregon and the clerk of our Quaker meeting, himself an accomplished journalist, has been wondering about the appropriateness of this metaphor. Doesn't this nomenclature tend to trivialize, while at the same time lending an air of innocence and fun to something intrinsically awful? Oregon's so-called Civil War is this annual football game between two of its major universities, the University of Oregon (Beavers) and Oregon State (Ducks).

The debate has to do with language and imagery. Some Quakers oppose violent language whereas others think the imagination, including science fiction, the Bible, comics, film, television, are appropriate media for channeling demented, disturbing and violent memes. Art absorbs these transmissions, not to amplify them in the physical world, but to render them less likely to erupt in mob behavior. If we're not violent on paper, we'll be violent for real, because of the real voltage pressures beneath the surface, the teleological vulcanism of the zeitgeist itself.

As is obvious from my rhetoric, I place myself in this second camp, likely because I started reading Freud in 8th grade. I was schooled in the view that an id or unconscious needs some approved way to express itself, and that a strong superego is less repressive than a fragile one. Tapping into the deeper recesses of the mind requires encounters with the archetypes. Fairy tales are full of violence. However, if the violence remains within the metaphysical vista, then those fairy tales have done their job. Those who insist on a completely sanitized psyche, all sweetness and light, are actually feeding the maw, serving as shills for the underworld, by adding to the imbalance.

Judging from its imagery, Tantric Buddhism would seem more well rounded than a lot of the more sugar coated stuff.

My many postings on Alternatives to Violence (AVP) therefore have a somewhat dark aspect. I link them to my Jungian Society talks. When watching football (or playing chess), I might sometimes imagine the horrors of war. Or I'll play videogames with violent content -- not because I wish for more violence in the world, but because I think potentially horrific content needs to be wisely channeled.

This analysis goes for debate world as well, the world of diplomacy. The contestants often invoke images of all the death and destruction that will likely result, if their opponents' views are more widely adopted. Disptopian outcomes are unfurled on screen, in movies such as Punishment Park, or Clockwork Orange.

There's a tendency to exaggerate, to engage in hyperbole, to invest in caricature. Again, these are ways to express stresses and tensions that are even more dangerous and likely to get out of hand if not allowed to express themselves. One needs to spy on the id ("id" for "idiot"?), get a sense of its thinking, if wanting any semblance of a rational, well-crafted civilization. This is difficult work, and requires spelunking deeply into oneself.

That's supposedly something Quakers are good at, or so some would contend.

The Ducks won this year.

Countdown to Zero (the game)

2010-12-02T08:32:00.000-08:00

playground dome, Hillsdale, Oregon

As I was remarking to my fellow think tankers, you do not copyright titles, so we are really talking about a whole genre of game, with many internal axes or criteria, such as "how much math?".

The idea of a game based on a movie is not in any way new, of course, so I'm not loudly tooting my horn about this non-innovation. As a role playing game, you probably have a choice, each with a wardrobe (imagine dressing your Sim). You might be an FBI agent on a sting operation, somewhere in Colorado, with control panels to IAEA, Interpol and CIA. Your wardrobe includes snow shoes (optional accessory).

For those who didn't catch the movie, Countdown to Zero is a sobering policy film, a documentary, in which several powers that be, across the political spectrum, line up behind this policy of criminalizing and eliminating all nuclear weapons. Actually, the criminalization phase might be more of a medicalization phase where we chalk up WMDs to PTSD and treat the "military industrial complex" like any psychological complex in need of treatment. That's for game designers to decide.

Another axis is realism. To what degree is this set in the future, when presumably sensors are better, and infra-red webcams more affordable? More to the point: what actual datasets are publicly available giving known sources of weapons grade fissile materials? Where are the dumping grounds? The testing zones? Much of this information is already available to the eco-tourism industry, which is bringing people through Hanford, WA and to Nevada. Visits to retired missile silos make for great photo-ops and new uploads to Flickr.

When it comes to realism, you'll want to work with colleges and universities with a focus in environmental sciences. Serious schools take such studies seriously, if declaring an interest and attracting students on that basis.

The math does not have to be inordinately difficult. The concept of "half life" is fairly easy to get across, and students will better understand why producing all these toxins was considered criminal behavior. Many of the cleanup jobs are themselves life threatening and require special wardrobes and access to sensors. The role playing done through the game is actually preparation for real life for some stellar players -- another reason to take the math seriously.

Related reading:

Storyboard / Simulation

Background viewing?

Hurt Locker (movie review)

2010-11-26T08:20:00.000-08:00

Les pointed out, as we settled in for this war movie, in a snowy horse farm, that it was directed by a woman. That did seem relevant, as we entered the surreal world of occupied Iraq.

The guys are in pause mode when it comes to developing civilian life skills. They've forked off into a hellish world they do not question. The language games revolve around rank, giving and following orders, demonstrating competencies with one's equipment, one's tools.

When the protagonist, Sergeant First Class William James, tries to re-integrate into his civilian persona, he feels he has no skills. Chopping carrots and pushing a cart through the supermarket only add to his sense of alienation.

Feeling like a fish out of water, not especially respected or understood, only separates him from his art, his work, which is disarming bombs. He needs to go back to the theater, to where he understands his rank and role in a social network.

In not questioning this man-made reality, simply taking it as a given, the film duplicates the atmosphere of a computer game, such as Half Life. Concrete wastelands full of wind-blown trash, any of which might be explosive, turns this into a first person Quake or Doom.

The film alludes to this, by showing the hero playing such a game. The army recruits with such games as well. The implied message is that life imitates art, and the Middle East has become a stage for acting out teenage fantasies of destruction and death.

The message of the film is rather clear I thought: war is a drug, and may become highly addictive. Finding some place in the world to live out one's destiny as a soldier becomes an existential requirement. Survival of the persona trumps survival of the body. Better to die for one's art than for no reason at all.

One of our Wanderers has a son who did that job of bomb decommissioning. Takes courage, and lots of it. The guy is somewhere outside the theater of war these days, though is still working with explosives.

Les and I talked about whether the XY chromosome was buggy. In a world where war is unnecessary, does the "male species" lack relevance? Many seem to think so, and respond by making sure war remains necessary.

Hurt Locker would work well as a double feature with Jarhead, as both are overtly philosophical.

More Global Data

2010-11-17T10:28:00.000-08:00

Made in Sweden

Gasland (movie review)

2010-11-14T23:57:00.000-08:00

John Fox is worried about what it might mean to allow hydrofracturing in his water table. Would toxins get into the ground water and destroy his habitat? Hydrofracturing is a process of injecting a brew of chemicals deep into the earth to release natural gases.

A complicated and unknown geology may offer little protection against seepage. Wells get contaminated and the the tap water catches fire. Streams go bad. Toxins trickle in (or flood in as the case may be). Animals (including humans) get sick and die.

John makes a pilgrimage across country, starting and ending in Pennsylvania, aiming to discover what's been going on. Colorado, Texas, Wyoming, Utah... Louisiana.

Are the denizens of the Lower48 still hell bent on destroying their own environment. Yes, apparently they are. Environmental protections put in place by a previous generation have been rolled back, as unfavorable to industry.

The largest unfiltered water supply in the world in upstate New York is the next target. People worry about "terrorists" poisoning their water supply. Ironic.

Lots of people enjoy natural gas though. Big city folk use it to cook with, heat their buildings with, power their "clean energy" buses with. Gotta have it.

What's happening to the countryside is a lot like what's happening to the Niger Delta or any region where rampant energy extraction occurs without much rhyme or reason. The locals are no match for the conquerors, who bully them into subjugation. There's little government to speak of, and no real national guard (in the literal sense, of guarding the people).

One might imagine ways to actually plan and develop energy resources in harmony with the ecosystem, intelligent designs. Such planning is hardly evident in the Lower48 though.

Any real science is short circuited as politicians try to create "jobs jobs jobs" (opportunities to "earn a living") regardless of the consequences.

Quick Note

2010-11-11T00:39:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed getting some training to serve as a judge of debate teams, and of other speech events. This was at Cleveland High School. As Nancy pointed out, it's a big poor public school with limited resources.

The state doesn't provide much funding for debate as a sport, even though this is such an obvious long term investment in cultivating democratic institutions. Government is half-assed and lazy, is Tara's view.

I'd been at Glenn's when she reminded me this was the 10th. Somehow, I'd always pictured this training happening on a Saturday, so was somewhat discombobulated.

Glenn and I had been discussing my global exchange student fantasies, which he tended to regard as too expensive. Why would taxpayers fund all that travel, over more local exchanges?

I took my general systems theory view that it's not taxpayers we're crediting, but the sun itself. Yes, human labor is mixed in... (more in my science fiction linked below).

The example debate, shortened for show, to give the new judges some exposure, was kind of interesting. The national forensics league had picked the "mosque at ground zero" meme for Public Forum (pofo) and was taken aback by all the backlash. For the first time, a resolution was retracted and replaced with: resolved: public forum resolutions should not be about sensitive religious topics.

Tara and I discussed it later. She sees debate as her sacred sanctuary, free from much of the crazy nonsense that infects the wider world. Keep silly religious topics out of bounds, and the sport will stay more enjoyable. My view was the debate format is pretty wimpy if not robust enough to handle run of the mill controversies, religious or otherwise. Wearing my judge's cap, she probably won. Keep the sport from getting too ugly by picking resolutions wisely.

On that particular issue, my view is religious installations, including temples, synagogues, mosques etc., maybe smallish ones, should be a feature in many an "office" building. Zoning should be for mixed use, including residential in more cases, so we have less mindless commuting. Why not work, sleep and worship in the same skyscraper?

I scribbled some more science fiction before I went to be, trying to be a good capitalist (means "using one's head"). I was also sparring with Brawley some more (he's a vet -- another topic), on whether it's a lost cause to try overcoming cubism. I think the Martian Math approach is being productive, as it lets me speak of Earthlings from a more external perspective (ETPV). I've been doing this on mathfuture as well.

Made for TV

2010-11-04T16:10:00.000-07:00

So it's a week later at the meetinghouse (see below) and I'm learning a lot more about workflow design, even though that's already on my resume in places.

The idea of a "made for TV" Food Not Bombs maybe sounds cruel and heartless (too LA, too Hollywood), but in an era when we're counting down to zero, the ~bombs part has broad agreement and appeal, such that sponsors might want their brands front and center (or miss the boat).

I might see applying Centers Network skills and/or Western Young Friend skills, but then these are somewhat generic and emergent already. And I'm not seriously thinking this has to be a Hollywood show, unless you mean Portland's local neighborhood by that name. This is community participation TV of the kind we were always promised. Doesn't mean we can't filter excerpts to the bigger networks like ABC. Now if we only had real optical fiber, that let small outlets share the infrastructure -- not what the monopolists are intending.

In the meantime, there's a lot of local awareness of the criminal syndicates building more bombs, buying their pet politicians, while neglecting infrastructure for children and old people. To the extent there's any DEW system anymore, there'd be some real push back from the Pentagon. I still think an open alliance with Cuba would be cool (bridge through CDI?), a noble alliance versus that nefarious international human rights violator known as Gitmo.

Given recent progress within the Global U, I could see where the real dollars would go with us, and not with the phonies.

However, I digress. Back to workflow: what if the sponsoring donors send too much food to the cooking plaza, where the kids are lining up to learn and showcase their cooking skills? True, the cooking happens daily, with bike trailers, electric conveyances, delivering servings all over town (yeah, like Meals on Wheels).

On a small scale, what this looks like is too much produce piling up. For example, Lindsey (a star student) has a superman complex (very Nietzsche): she enjoys lugging huge amounts of produce up hills with a bike trailer, distributing it to free porches, sharing it with friends (she built the "tractor bike" herself). Sure, we could use more heroes like her (the more the merrier), but I can see where a plethora of committed horsepower might overwhelm some of the cooking facilities or, more likely, their composting facilities (not every church is so well equipped -- nor every meetinghouse either for that matter).

One solution is to cultivate more urban gardens, like in Brooklyn.

There's a lot of useful work implied in this picture. In Global U terms, one may not get a cash advantage for participating, but consider the sponsor credits. Free time in a bike co-op or gym, movie tickets (serious-minded documentaries most likely), even access to conferences, concerts, travel. I'd advocate sending Lindsey to Havana if we could get that ice cream factory thing going.

Plus like one of the crew was saying tonight (a former Brooklyn resident): hanging out with F~B gives free access to coveted apprenticeships learning to cook healthy vegan and/or vegetarian meals for lots of people. That's valuable skills building. Our Gathering of Western Young Friends, using the kitchen facilities at Camp Myrtlewood, is likewise a training zone.

These kinds of rewards, more career related, count as income in anyone's book. All it takes is some organization and a willingness to pitch in.

How wonderful to have Quakers at the forefront. Logistics R Us.

Will Code for America step up to the plate? We hear a lot about that initiative. What open source fund accounting software is out there. Coffee Shops Network wants to know.

Meetinghouse Again

2010-10-28T15:25:00.000-07:00

Food Not Bombs came off brilliantly last week. However, this week we're decimated by illness, though with a crew of under ten, that might not be the best word choice. I'm still fighting a bronchial condition, with abdominal pain from so much coughing (more at night). I'll steer clear of the food prep except for sterile procedures. Lindsey is just as under the weather with different symptoms, so is wisely out of the picture.

Satya and Cera came by the Blue House the other evening and spoke at length about Bhutan with my mom. I made a cameo appearance after Pauling House, saying the plane was early, so I had to move quickly. I was in and out the door in about 30 seconds. The MVP in question is the chairman of Python Software foundation, in town for GOSCON.

Speaking of GOSCON, the Ignite.gov event was the first ever Ignite for the government (.gov). O'Reilly is OK with the meme transfer, i.e. the spread of the brand from non-governmental services (NGOs etc.). The Ignite format allows for 20 autopaced slides at 15 seconds per, or is it 15 slides at 20 seconds per -- seems that should be up to the presenter?

In any case, the talks were excellent. I sat with two of the same folks I'd shared a table with at Barcamp 4, along with Rami Kassab (a presenter) and someone else from his company. Steve and I were both wearing Holden Web badges. Most the tables were occupied but were by no means packed. Small intimate conferences are a rarity in some circles, especially with so much going on between the developer community and government.

What did I come away with from these talks? Government is today seeing itself as a provisioner of data sets. That's something governments often do well: amassing data, statistics, large pools of information.

Making the presentation layer attractive, or thinking of ways to combine data sets to tell a story, is not something government should have to worry about. The developer community, the app builders, have those skills.

By providing a level playing field of data set libraries, the government fulfills its side of the social contract. Different players will come along and mine that data, sometimes for private gain, sometimes for public service, often as a combination of both (serving the public garners good will and customer loyalty to the brand).

Portland, Oregon has a fairly advance community accustomed to using data sets to create what are called civic apps. This might be iPhone and/or Droid apps. The data might be real time relevant i.e. when is the next bus set to arrive. That's a service anyone with a cell phone might avail of today (I was using it last night in fact, when talking the 14 back from downtown).

The data might be long term chronological and only changing slowly. We could say all of it is geographic at some level, defining geography rather broadly (biochemical processes within the body use energy in a time and place, so are geographic in that sense). Not surprisingly, many of those attending GOSCON have a GIS background.

I introduced Chairman Steve to Selena Dickelman, one of the chief organizers of this event. Amber Case was also present but too surrounded by discussants for me to want to break in. Later, at Kells, we met up with Deb Bryant of OSL, the lead protagonist in that Willamette Week article some weeks back. She and Nate were both primed to talk about public-private partnerships.

Nate had lots to say on the topic of EMRs (electronic medical records). Deb kindly consented to having her picture taken with the PSF totem (Naga, our mascot). Such as I've been around at the edges of GOSCON, I've been serving in the capacity of "snake wrangler", same as at Djangocon some weeks ago.

My request for a discount on school lunches was denied within just 24 hours. I probably shouldn't have reported gift income, nor does the form anywhere ask about expenses. That $500 a month for catastrophic coverage... when it comes to civic apps, I did not really see how this was a well designed one.

Lindsey's solar panel came today, for powering her battery charger and perhaps an XO-1 (experiments needed). How does one live lightly on the earth? She's very conscientious about recycling, including fabric and materials. Her boots, scavenged from a free pile, have lasted about a year with frequent patching. They're close to worn through.

Two of the cross-country bicycle guys from a few weeks back have showed up. Their buddy was hit on the road near Cocquille and had to be life flighted to Emanuel in urgent condition. They hitched back to Portland and are researching their options....

Here's Cera, gotta go.

Wanderers 2010.10.20

2010-10-20T17:40:00.000-07:00

President Obama is in town today, but it's still too early in the day to expect any new traffic patterns. Carol wanted to attend the meeting but has a full plate.

Our presenter this morning is Dr. Karl Widerquist, Visiting Associate Professor in Philosophy, from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar

This is a talk about academic political philosophers and some of the irresponsible factual claims they've made about "primitive peoples" without bothering to factor in much of the anthropological research.

A lot of their claims (e.g. "everyone is better off with private property" or "individuals appropriate; collectives interfere") tend to be no more than the superstitious projections of their day and age, a kind of post hoc justification for an ideology, minus many reality checks.

Philosophers tend to live deeply in Plato's Cave (a kind of movie theater for the mind's eye).

The myth, traceable to John Locke and contemporaries, starts with an untamed wilderness. Homesteaders and pioneers appear, thereby appropriating it (mixing labor with land).

Inheritance and trade among homesteaders develop, after which the State appears and begins imposing its will, rules, taxes etc. In a pristine state, private property precedes government -- or so goes the (unsubstantiated) theory.

Anthropologists typically classify societies into hunter-gatherer bands, autonomous villages (tribal societies), chiefdoms, early (archaic) states or civilizations.

The philosophers depict these as ancient patterns, with only states or civilizations remaining. However, one might see a campus as a semi-autonomous village (Cal Tech, Reed College). Urban areas have bands, camps or gangs. Proctor & Gamble and Unilever are chiefdoms, as is any company with a CEO, CFO, CIO, CMO etc. (C = chief).

The argument that these are archaic forms relates to what constitutes the "highest" authority, i.e. anarchic bands (with no head person giving commands) didn't have to report to a chief or be patrolled by a police. Colleges pay taxes, engage in commerce (town/gown relations).

In conventional accounts, the nation-state is nowadays considered the highest authority, with the above configurations turned into an evolutionary tale of how the state emerged, a kind of dialectical materialism.

In hunter-gatherer bands, large game is considered a common resource no matter who kills it. In an autonomous village, access to land is flexible and non-exclusionary, with households entitled to their own harvests. Every household does its own farming, including the village administrators.

Only in large chiefdoms, consisting of multiple villages, does one find people with the power to exclude others from resources. Chiefdoms introduce the idea of a chain of command with an owner at "the top".

With the evolution of states comes tyranny and slavery, kingdoms. This pattern emerges around the world. Land tends to be a gift from the central authority, perhaps in exchange for military conquest (land was deeded for deeds).

The modern concept of private property turns out to be a recent development, emerging in Europe rather late in the game (1500s). The idea of private property spreads through colonialism and through establishment by governments. The romantic libertarian notion that private property begins in the earliest primitive societies, the government coming later, is eminently debatable.

Private property as currently understood is through government. Centralized government does not represent the usurpation of pre-existing property rights in primitive societies, but is more the vehicle for the creation of private property rights as an institution, beginning with the rights of monarchs (chiefs).

Property ownership and real estate ownership are distinct concepts. Nomadic or herding societies may not stake ownership of ground by surveying and fencing (like ranchers and farmers), but will recognize ownership of wives, sheep and goats.

Chiefdoms seem a gateway to tyranny, almost universally. The Iroquois seem to be one notable exception.

The talk was not a lot about maritime trading and the subcultures aboard seagoing vessels (pirates etc.). How a given ship is organized is a variable, even where titles of captain, first mate, navigator might have conventional meanings.

During the Q&A, I brought up the Doctrine of Discovery again, which several religious traditions are threading about. There's a need to unravel some of the mysteries behind "property" and own up to a new form of calculus that doesn't bank on the supposedly inherent superiority of one people (religion, ideology) over another.

Jim Buxton brought a generous haul of chanterelle mushrooms again, a quasi-yearly even in October and a day I look forward to. He set them out in a box with bags for us to truck them away in. Given the theme of Karl's talk, I thought this most apropos and highly civilized. Jim Buxton is a great chief.

Back at the Blue House, I advocated donating a portion of my haul to Food Not Bombs tomorrow, perhaps as a garnish or ingredient (not as bulk produce). I'm not a chief chef though.

My vision is lots of Youtube cooking shows as F~B turns into a gourmet occassion, with restaurants, farmers markets and warehouses eager not only to donate ingredients, but their personnel, as what better way to market superior quality product than in these potlatch potlucks in the park.

I need to backpedal though, as if word got out about this underground gourmet "fooding", we'd be inundated with tourists wanting to take but not give. The same phenomenon is evident in the FOSS community, where "giving back" often only happens in exchange for generous self-helpings to the work of the ages.

Our mostly under-the-radar operations, through FOSS covens and Zen dens, keeps our sponsors visible among an inner circle of cognoscenti, earning good will, without the overhead of a lot of over-the-top hype, or push advertising (no Crazy Eddy commercials required -- though around here we think of Tom Peters).

The New Atlantis (movie review)

2010-10-17T08:39:00.000-07:00

This obscure DVD, a talking head documentary interspersed with theatrical re-enactments, is Volume One in the Secret Mysteries of America's Beginnings series. The material is not anything that oughta be kept secret, if the goal is to provide a deeper understanding of past and contemporary myth-making. The content is certainly PG enough to share in an American History or Literature class, is not even TV-14.

I agree with the premise of the filmmaker that the ideologies driving the colonization of the so-called New World, by the English in particular, included these so-called occult and/or esoteric brands, the Freemasons and Rosicrucians in particular.

The screenwriters don't want to come across as mindless shills for the Masons, and so frequently cut to disapproving voices tsk tsking about "witchcraft" and "the occult" (as if Christianity didn't have its share of occult teachings).

The disgraceful kidnapping and murder of one Captain Morgan, who supposedly divulged some Masonic secrets, is re-enacted such that one could understand why the ensuing backlash took its toll on membership.

Francis Bacon is the pivotal figure throughout the narrative, cast as the successor to John Dee, a core member of the Rosicrucian school.

Dee was at first a confidant of Queen Mary (daughter of Henry VIII), but he fell out of favor (for not being Catholic enough?) and was later confined, along with Mary's sister Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth 1) for whom he became a mentor as well.

Given the Pope had declared Queen Elizabeth and the Anglicans in contempt, a secret service formed around the new Queen as a protective body, headed up by Sir Francis Walsingham.

One could see where these secret societies would have a role countering the Roman Pope, and later the King of England during the American Revolution. The formation of underground (sometimes literally) secretive societies in the face of persecution and/or prying busy-bodies is an ancient design pattern.

The Boston Tea Party, a protest against the East India Company, was organized by such Masons as Paul Revere. This is perhaps ironic in light of today's "tea party" seemingly wishing to disavow any such "occult" and/or "outlaw pirate" affiliations.

The documentary, being of recent vintage, connects a lot of contemporary dots, including the National Treasure movies (deemed too literal and materialistic), Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, and several other lesser known scholarly works. The Masonic philosopher Manly P. Hall gets a lot of attention.

The script claims John Dee is the model for Marlowe's version of Faust, Rowling's Dumbledore in Harry Potter, and even Ian Flemming's "007" (Dee's occult signature). And yes, there's a whole chapter laying out the Baconite view that Francis Bacon, Dee's protege, was a principal ghost writer behind the Shakespeare plays, not the Stratford-based actor, who provided the cover story (Mark Twain was also a Baconite in this sense).

Speaking of Shake-speare, the story about "spear shakers" Athena and Apollo as core archetypes for Bacon and his cronies -- with a tilt towards Athena -- is perfect PR for Coffee Shops Network, likewise anchored and tilted.

Sir Francis Bacon comes across as passionate about alleviating misery and contributing to collective prosperity through invention in language. He sought to improve English, based on his experience of what the French were up to. As a curriculum writer, he was doing his best to have the inevitable colonization of the New World be a positive experience yielding lasting benefits, even a paradise on Earth if possible (hence the title: New Atlantis).

I was reminded of E.J. Applewhite's Paradise Mislaid, which title suggests we might have gone astray with respect to Bacon's metaphysical program. Applewhite lived a life of the mind and was an admirer of both Bucky Fuller (with whom he collaborated) and J. D. Bernal. Does today's curriculum promote such mental aliveness, or does idiocracy prevail? Utopia or oblivion?

What may annoy some science-minded viewers of this DVD is the murky blend of experimentalism and spiritualism shared not only by these historical figures, but by some of the contemporary talking heads. Perhaps John Dee felt he could contact angelic beings, but today you need to see a shrink if they catch you thinking like that.

I'm not saying I think this is a great documentary that somehow "reveals all" (whatever that might mean -- nothing probably). The analysis of the Woodstock era North American counter-culture of the 1960s is quite superficial.

Linking Britney Spears and Madonna to the occult seems more like naked piggy-backing on popular culture, in an age when the Masonic subculture has reached a low ebb -- which is not to deny an age-old link twixt celebrity / court culture and esoteric science fiction. Indeed, a core point of the movie is people like Ben Franklin would have little choice but to frequent the eating clubs of the spoiled witless (somewhat notorious for hanky panky, especially in the projections of the puritanical), when seeking sympathy for the USA's upcoming forking off (Declaration of Independence).

In remaining tightly focused on a very few secret societies, many other factors, such as slavery and the genocidal "manifest destiny" ideologies, are overlooked or simply absorbed as footnotes to an unquestioned Anglo imperialism (somewhat Reichian to begin with, as if Atlantis were some "superpower").

Watch more documentaries then, lots more. But at least weave some of these threads into your world model as well. Keep the secret societies on your radar, if you want your analyses to remain credible. Also keep in mind there's a fine line between "secret" and "accessible only with study and practice".

Too many people forget that "intellectual property" refers to the capabilities of those who know some craft, have some skills (like computer programmers). Scribbles on paper, a few diagrams, do not in themselves constitute the transmission of the relevant metaphysics.

In other words, don't forget to "know thyself" in your efforts to know the selves of others, and choose your friends wisely.

PPUG 2010.10.12

2010-10-12T19:38:00.000-07:00

Michelle Rowley is introducing "Thunderdome" -- Pythonistas are coming forward with lightning talks on various modules. At least the name sounds exciting. Abstract Syntax Trees... (ast).

Jim is here, one of my clients. I'm counting 30 men here with Michelle, whom I identified to Jim as our fearless leader.

ast is highly esoteric. It builds a syntax tree from Python expressions. We're looking at a module that parses PHP yet converts it to Python. Next we're learning about dis, also abstruse, from Chris McDonald. dis spits out the assembly language like byte codes for functions 'n stuff.

Earlier today I did some light exercise by climbing Mt. Tabor (that might sound like a big deal, but Mt. Tabor is a local park surrounding a dormant volcano, like a butte). The next exercise was somewhat heavier: I pulled the Food Not Bombs bike trailer from a pickup site

Adam Lowry is lecturing on the operator module, tying it back to dis.

The select module is "used for I/O multiplexing". Yikes.

Regarding our 30:1 male:female ratio, I invited a gender specialist to join me (she was at the Mercy Corps meeting), maybe give me a read just for fun.

One can't learn everything from just the one meeting of course. We could use more anthropologists and documentary movie makers in our midst (what I came to at Djangocon, surrounded by so many "pink ponies").

I'm having a lot of deja vu today, about a lot of things. We're also looking at __main__ and __builtin__.

We adjourned for beers at Bailey's, where I enjoyed Hopworks ESB quite a bit (was on the bus, so didn't mind the extra pint). I was honored the maintainer of python-gmpy was with us.

Casino Math

2010-10-08T22:53:00.000-07:00

Tom Siegfried, editor in chief of Science News, kicked off our the 2010-2011 Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture series last night, at Portland's central Broadway venue, the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, his name in lights.

Most of Tom's talk was a walk through the rise of statistics, from its inception in the world of gambling (hence my title). Cardano got the ball rolling, with Pascal and Fermat picking up the thread, then de Moivre and Adolphe Quetelet (a lesser known but one of Tom's favorite thinkers).

Quetelet was pioneering the notion of "human physics" i.e. predicting social trends and phenomena using statistical methods. Applications to molecular dynamics, stochastic analysis, was more a derivative of nascent sociological sciences than vice versa, a point often overlooked by those claiming the soft sciences are always trying to imitate the so-called hard sciences.

The arbitrary P=0.05 correlation threshold required to prove "statistical significance" has its own history, which was more spelled out in the printed program than in Tom's talk. Safe to say, a lot of studies misapply statistical reasoning, meaning drugs that shouldn't be out there are, and some that should be are not -- among other consequences. The process of aggregating studies to get a larger sample size and perhaps a more significant outcome is also regularly botched.

In general, people have a poor understanding of probability theory, which demands improbable events, flukes.

Then Tom went off the deep end in a culturally approved way, by discussing a "multi-verse" picture of branching universes. The discourse was especially interesting to those five-to-ten of us in the world who read Synergetics, as Boltzmann gets credit for "eternally regenerative Universe" ideas in Fuller's work, and here it was all about "Boltzmann brains" and their likelihood in alternative universes. I disagree that "infinite time" is an antidote to "never" i.e. I don't agree that what's "infinitely improbable" is somehow bound to occur given infinite time.

Ascribing meaning or sense to "infinitely improbable" occurrences is problematic to begin with i.e. how does one know if one is confronting such an outcome even if it does occur? If a monkey types a work by William Shakespeare (say Macbeth), why would we agree this was "random"? Perhaps the monkey was suddenly possessed by some well-versed ghost? Remote controlled by hidden grad student by means hitherto unsuspected? Who has authority to give the "true account" in this alternative world? In a multi-verse, anything would seem possible, including far-fetched explanations for incredible events. Sounds familiar doesn't it?

The entire exercise seems more like a safety valve, a licensed "letting off steam" in an otherwise pressurized system (alluding to Boltzmann again, and how his thinking is featured in Fuller's philo). Language needs to exercise its grammatical capabilities sometimes. Philosophy is a playground, largely unsupervised these days (so watch out for rusty nails, hidden pitfalls -- most your grownups are on vacation).

After the Heathman dinner of cod with eerily moving parts (some kind of garnish -- very eXistenZ), Tom answered some additional questions. He expressed a "Google is evil" point of view, i.e. here's a company dumping hard-won value added writings into the commons at no cost, undermining publishing as we know it.

No wonder science has become so much the sex slave of moneyed interests with axes to grind. There's almost no way to sustain oneself as an independent, self-respecting, objective private investigator anymore.

Science journalism is likewise under pressure to sensationalize, to hype murky findings, simply to stay in the game. The economics seem unsustainable, which makes the job difficult, sometimes discouraging.

I also entitled this journal entry "Casino Math" because of my Heuristics for Teachers on Wikieducator. Puritanical readers may have a problem with this nomenclature because of strictures against gambling, but it's true to the history of the field, as Tom's talk well illustrated. Universe has casino-like aspects regardless of what games people play, as one of the questioners pointed out, saying "Even if God does not play dice, He seems to have a serious gambling problem" (audience laughter).

I was happy Tara could join us for this event. We took the bus to and fro. She gamely ate the cod, if not the mushrooms, and shared many insightful and intelligent remarks about the talk and proceedings.

The next day, Terry phoned me at American Dream Pizza, where I was waiting (on chauffeur duty). He wanted me to accompany him in treating Tom to an intimate dinner with some PSU students interested in further discussion. Twas my distinct privilege.

We spent the evening at the McMenamins on the Park Blocks, quaffing beers, munching on snacks, and discussing the pros and cons of various philosophical positions, such as determinism versus macroscopic randomness.

Terry drove me home in his brand new Prius after leaving his distinguished guest at The Heathman.

Wanderers 2010.9.28

2010-10-02T09:14:00.001-07:00

Dr. Cari Coe of Lewis & Clark College regaled us with stories on Tuesday, regarding land use planning in Vietnam. One of the ministries is hoping to protect remaining forest lands using a national park system. Local residents have land claims stretching back through time, and the national park overlay creates two levels of story.

Is the central government being successful in conserving these resources?

Deforestation is a problem all over Asia (and the world) and forest management really needs to extend to beyond a few protected areas. Creating new forest lands (a kind of terraforming) was not among the topics discussed however. This was about preserving some old ones.

Cari's research was on behalf of the Vietnamese government and some banks, maybe the World Bank among them. She speaks fluent Vietnamese and had a woman traveling companion or "minder" (also a friend) to give more authority to her visitations.

They traveled by motorcycle all around one of the nature preserves, interviewing about 103 families in three provinces. Cari had been to Vietnam before and is a motor bike enthusiast with lots of hands-on savvy when it comes to their maintenance.

The study is somewhat inconclusive as to the long range impact of these plans, but that doesn't mean her findings were not valuable. On the contrary, a detailed snapshot emerged, as nothing replaces field work and actual feedback from the villages.

Writing policy in some centralized bureaucracy gives no clue as to whether these policies are being followed and, if so, how.

Her status as an obvious outsider, a North American, helped interviewees speak more freely, was her impression, since she had no obvious affiliation with up-close participants, party to whatever rivalries or tensions.

Rice paddies and forest lands are deeded to caretakers and beneficiaries on timed leases, according to the latest model.

After 20 years, a parcel of rice land reverts to the government and the lease will need to be renewed or renegotiated. If the land is being used according to plan, it's more likely to remain with the family that works it. These agreements are registered in little booklets.

One goal of the research was to find out which families had booklets, and how they got them if so. In theory, protected park lands should not be deeded out, but given local authorities made the arrangements, forcible land reform i.e. confiscating lands from those with historic ties to the park lands, was not really in the cards.

The system is more like a "land lending library" than a system of titles and deeds on a market, with inheritance (where zoning and land use policies may also apply). Forest lands are lent out for 50 year periods.

The slides included some GIS and I wish I'd asked more about how much GIS is getting used in the ministries. I've been posting about GIS to math and Python discussion lists, most recently regarding Singapore's use of GIS /GPS and its possible applications (along with GST) to long haul trucking along the old trade routes, from Istanbul to the Stans, via Tehran.

American Dream

2010-09-23T16:44:00.000-07:00

I'm at American Dream Pizza (not eating, plenty of food at home), chauffeuring my mother to and from the hospital. She's in relatively good shape, enjoying better eyesight as a result of cataract surgery.

Glenn wanted to share some of his most recent breakthroughs, extending his more-than-a-decade studies of what he calls his Global Matrix. Per Quaker thinking, it's given to each of us to distill a one-of-a-kind dharma or teaching that is that of God, the gift of a personal angle.

The upside is we have a precious and unique point of view. That's also the downside, as a "private language" is a kind of "black hole". The good news is also the bad news. There's still a lot of bandwidth though, for cross-fertilizing ideas -- what Wanderers is all about, so Glenn was definitely in the right place this morning.

Sam Lanahan joined us (a rare occurrence), along with the self-proclaimed mayor of Bonnie Slope (a privilege). The room was actually packed.

Let's see how I might map Glenn's thinking for Synergetics readers (yeah, right, pile the esoteric on top of the esoteric and see if that helps -- sometimes it does).

Picture two unit-radius spheres, just touching. Each is a "complex space" inside, meaning we have operational models for thinking about quaternions (Hamilton) and octonians (Graves, Cayley).

The symmetries inherent in complex number space (which he links to Lie Algebra) give us polyhedra, the figurative hallmarks of spinnability (+2) as well as concavity/convexity (x2).

The paired Platonics and their derivatives occur in both of these "kissing spheres" which have a "fixed point" singularity where they touch.

The Lorentz Attractor enters in (a butterfly with tilted wings) along with personal biographical data: some time studying languages, cracking codes for the NSA, followed by a lonesome Arizona vista, developing a system in solitude, with repeated visits to the Big City for reality checks (quantum logic courses at PSU, Cascade Systems Society, Wanderers). Or to the Santa Fe Institute, for a two hours session with Stuart Kaufman lo those many years ago.

I'd characterize Glenn's talk as a nutritious meme soup, a hefty stew. He's a craftsman and whereas homemade mnemonic structures may not be the norm in academia, that's no reason to clamp down. We've not had many centuries in which auto-didacts were in a position to share their art, when the content was most germane to the "upper classes" (so-called). Times have changed.

During the conversational period that followed I managed to get Sam's OK to show his book around. He and Buzz looked at the new eCommerce pages that make Flextegrity components available to the world. Bill Sheppard read aloud from Carl Sagan's book regarding the stellar and pivotal role played by the Paulings, in getting atomic bomb testing partially criminalized.

I thank Trish for patiently enduring a tour of my blogs, as I explained some of what my life has been like over the past year or so, with special emphasis on the poster art of one James Jameson.

Yesterday I formed some paragraphs for the Quakers attempting to set forth more of the Food Not Bombs philosophy. I'm hoping FNB helps me fine tune my rendering such that I accurately reflect the group's dharmas. I'll write more about that in BizMo Diaries sometime soon.

Speaking of FNB, my heartfelt thanks to Lindsey Walker for working on my bike at Bike Farm yesterday, hauling it in her trailer, along with boxes of food for a North Portland disbursement site. Aside from occasionally borrowing my daughter's, I've been cycle-less since Tinkerbell was stolen over a year ago.

Repairing Voting

2010-09-18T18:14:00.000-07:00

Today is Free Software Day and geeks in my lineage (open source) are expected to stand up for democratic rights, even in an electronic age. Especially in an electronic age. Here's from today's stash of writings (typos fixed):

Imagine something similar to vote by mail in Oregon. You don't
all have to vote on the same day, there's at least a week. You
need not take time off work. You'll have a way to vote online,
by entering your PIN. Email confirmation will come back to your
email box, showing how you voted and giving another number you
can use to find your vote. You needn't keep it a secret how you
voted -- be as public as you like (your choice).

Traveling overseas? No problemo. There's a way to vote from
your iPhone.

There's also a lot of votes taken throughout the year, polls. People
are in the habit of voting often if they want to. So they know
if their credentials are working, i.e. it's not a matter of being
surprised on "election day" (once a year? once every four years?).
On the contrary, a trusted voting infrastructure is used almost
daily, by at least some set of eligible persons (you might have
needed to register -- like now).

It's easy to imagine working solutions that are light years more
advanced than what we have today. People generally feel satisfied
with the systems and understand how they work. Access is quasi-
universal. Literacy rates are high, infant mortality is low, and
the debates on TV are intelligent and to the point.

People in this future look back on our ranting raving dark age of
crazy-making punditry, and fall to their knees in gratitude that
at least it's not 2010 or thereabouts, when everything was just
nuts! They weren't even teaching about Bucky hardly at all, when
so much depended on waking up to brighter prospects.

Hard to explain, how our ancestors could be so slow.

Something in the water? Lead poisoning?

That's what some speculate happened to the Romans. Brain rot
eroded their civilization from the inside out. Fast food?

I've written quite a bit about voting and voting technology in these blogs already.

You may ask why I haven't instituted tagging for your reading convenience, or turned on comments to this post.

Well, I come to the Web from a Quaker background and was just thinking of these as my journals, world-readable for sure, but not water coolers for people to gather around and chat with each other.

Lots of blogs out there serve that purpose (literally millions at the time of this writing), so I hope it's OK.