Good Shepherd (movie review)

This very stylish piece plays it straight with our man Agent Buttercup, a shy guy, both ostensibly and for real, who turns his back on every one of his angels in exchange for some vaguely lewd Castle of Whispers (plus a haunting piano).

I was reminded of both eXistenZ and A Beautiful Mind (imagine oscillating between the two in some random sequence).

Other spins in this literature make it so much less of a guy thing. I contribute to this genre in part because of inbreeding: my Princeton's 2D (Class of 1980) was more coven-like than anything bonesmen (more of a Yale thing). But hey, this movie isn't about me, so I should just save it for my blogs, right?

De Niro both directs the film and plays Wild Bill Donovan, titular founder of the OSS, which later transmogrified post Truman, as we all know, to become the beloved Cold Warrior agency, since then eclipsed by this weird constellation of like sixteen little agencies around some D'ni in Uru (or whatever (I don't pretend to follow too closely)):

The Americans don't make out very well in this film. Agent Buttercup & Co. basically botch every operation they get close to, like the Russians are simply better at it and so? All water under the bridge by now; cold warriors having their fun in the sun.

I kept thinking of the Matt Damon character as a Sim, like you don't want too many of these guys in your reality (idiocrats, "pompous and faggy" (allusion)). Damon gets points for doing him so effectively (another "quiet American" you just want to scream at, tell him to get off the phone and get a life (like, you're married to Angelina for crying out loud)).

Chance of Rain

One of the most light hearted autobiographies I ever encountered was at a nearby coffee shop with this name. I don't know if it still has that bookish look any more (a passing phase), plus I know it no longer shows those Governor Schwarzenegger movies. Anyway, Salvador Dali's. Check it out sometime.

Wanderers: Barry is describing pre-WWII banking situations, leaving some guy to sleep it off in the vault.

I came in late, giving a heads up about another four-legged Wanderer candidate that might join us briefly. It's my practice to include non-humans in our gatherings.

We shall see. We also discussed fund accounting, vs. the more usual for-profit kind (DWA's specialty, and TBC's, is/was the former type of bookkeeping, used by many a 501(c)(3)).

We then broke out into some full blown kabbalah type conversation, lots of Hebrew letters (more unicode fun), thanks to Milt and his invited guest Ken. The Mayan and Wiccan calendars also received significant attention from the other end of the table. Portland is just like that.

I name dropped Stan Tenen but otherwise didn't have much to offer in this department. I've never read much Suarez, given all that time squandered on Synergetics (plus R&R).

The dog was beautiful. My sincere thanks to her handlers for sharing her with us.

Unicode

from the OLPC Wiki

I was out stumping for Unicode again today, welcoming its centrality in the newer Pythons (3.x generation).

The XOs come with various swap-in keyboards, such as the one depicted above.

Consider the hexadecimal U+0436 for example, the lowercase letter Zhe (ж), 8th letter in the Russian alphabet: Python source code is now able to include that.

Showcasing Python's new internationalization features might be a theme at Vilnius again next year.

Americana

Wanderers 2007.11.21

The agenda for this meeting remained volatile right up through the opening, oscillating somewhere between "open" and "programmed."

The Tiller video (Stanford emeritus, one of the Bleep guys) was somewhat Wanderers like, but the audience was more polite and deferential than is our wont, so after about 45 minutes we paused the DVD and went ape for a few.

Then I had to bow out (taking my Dell laptop which had been playing the DVD -- fortunately we still had Bill's), owing to this being that Thanksgiving Season again, and I have a great deal to be thankful for, even amidst sorrow, plus a lot of logistics to handle.

Yesterday I thought Glenn was appropriately skeptical of this cymatic "face" as they call it, which might actually be one of those grays, and cousin to the one on Mars.

This political ad by Mike Huckabee and his friend Chuck Norris is hilarious.

Thank you Trevor, for turning me on to the Ulam Spiral.

As I was saying, I have much gratitude to express, many lucky stars to thank.

Home Appliance Story

Les & Elise tackled my dishwasher problem with gusto. The thing had become anemic, only the bottom rack usable, and the heating element was looking pretty fried.

The Yellow Pages guy had failed to find the real problem, had charged me $70 anyway, whereas Les quickly got to the heart of the matter: the chopper blade had come off the circular pump intake mesh, leaving it to clog with grime, which explained the low water pressure. The plastic mounting post was irreparable.

Elise, a mechanic in her own right (she fixes old Volvos etc.), managed to track down and secure this obscure assembly, along with a new heating element, just minutes before Saturday closing time at a nearby supply depot.

The heating element came with a replacement circuit board controller and a warning to only install both, suggesting to Les there'd been some shortcomings in the previous programming i.e. I probably wasn't the first to experience a heating element melt down.

My only role in all this was to dash to the hardware store for a Torx screwdriver kit, and to hold the flashlight.

During final reassembly, Les and I took a time out to express our patriotic fervor regarding our privileged position as civilians in a society with its act together enough to make such repair stories possible.

I attributed our success as a culture in part to our willingness to rant against ourselves, often in the context of hard core trainings, illustrating with a five second Full Metal Jacket impersonation crossed with some football coach.

Les agreed, then told the story of this top manager he knew, who lived across from a high school and finally got tired hearing coaches screaming at their male trainees about their being "women" in the sense of incompetent sissies. She went over there and really gave 'em a piece of her mind, again making a positive difference to our culture.

Later, while Ruth and Tara played upstairs, the three of us watched a show about the Galapagos on the National Geographic channel, which is where Les & Elise got married. The dishwasher is working great now.

Defending the USA

At least the Pope is doing his job, coming out swinging against nuclear weapons across the board.

Inferior brands of pseudo Christian take a more forked-tongue approach: put the screws on Iran while hypocritically reserving the right to stockpile, not just nukes, but WMDs of all kinds, to be used not just in self-defense, but in preemptive wars of choice that pander to mob hysteria fanned by self-interested corporate media invested in war profiteering.

These hollow-voiced pundits and newscasters are selling out their country by turning it into a ridiculous paper tiger, worthy only of mockery and disdain.

Fortunately, the USA still has a few patriotic defenders able to rise above being cynical, manipulative losers. One or two of them might even get to be president someday.

An Evening of Meetings

Our Python Meetup at PDX Cubespace was quite successful, owing in part to our sponsor, Kavi, who provided some first class salad and pizza. We took some of the excess za over to the PHP group, meeting elsewhere in the building, returning the favor from last time.

Our featured talks: ReportLab, simplifying development, Django, and myself on open source in medical research.

My main point was to distinguish an open source process, which inherits from the liberal arts ethic (tipping my hat to Robert Lefkowitz here), from its fruits, which might be shared tools or standards.

Engineers have a tendency to actually brand their stuff "open source" these days, whereas the medical community has other shoptalks.

To some extent, merging the expertise of our communities is an exercise in translation.

Jeff clued me about some recent announcements from Google about its intent to make on-line medical record keeping more of a reality, with Microsoft making similar plans. Thanks Jeff.

The beer part afterwards was fun though I didn't drink any, sticking to champagne with orange juice (not necessarily any less caloric I realize). I had some good basic conversations about SQL Alchemy, Postgres and so on.

It's not my style to try to sound all-knowing in when geeks talk turkey. On the contrary, I'm more like the guy who asks "what's a turkey?"

Immediately following, I buzzed over to Wanderers to catch the tail end of Greg's presentation, but it was over already. I enjoyed some informal banter with my cronies before turning in.

TechNation

Calling it "TechNation" (with or without a space) connects in esoterica to TechNate, a term of art in the Technocracy movement, about which most North Americans are clueless (hey, there's just no time to learn history -- though maybe this Hollywood writers' strike will open a window, by giving viewers more time to catch up on their nonfiction?).

Anyway, going back to the dot com boom and bust, I sometimes tell the story of how I was approached by some guy, early in the boom phase, suggesting I move to New York City and become the CEO for his startup. I looked pretty good on paper, plus had a web site pretty early, even some good press. I'd be like his trophy executive. Then, went the plan, once venture capital was secured and it was time to "go live," I'd be replaced with someone more savvy, no doubt one of my would-be recruiter's cronies, already waiting in the wings.

There might've been some real bucks in it for me, no question, but the prospect of leaving Portland was not appealing, plus when I got the guy's business plan in the mail, I could see through the jargon and buzzwords to another plain vanilla ISP, another Internet Service Provider. I just didn't like the hollowness of the hype, so said thanks but no thanks.

A disconnect I sense in the storytelling is most North Americans aren't up to date on this whole Open Source thing. Didn't Linux take a hit when the dot com bubble burst? Or if it didn't, don't we at least know that those scruffy hacker types, "dot commies" with pipe dreams of world domination, were forced to eat their own dog food, roll over and die?

How many on Main Street know the story of SCO, which tried to eat Linux's lunch, yet ended up delisted? How many know that IBM is a major contributor to the Linux kernel, or that Microsoft now sports a lot of Open Source DNA? If you still think it's scruffy hackers vs. Microsoft, think again. Of course those pathetic loser patent trolls in Texas still plan to put up a fight. I can't say I'm much interested in their sorry fate.

The story I tell goes more like this: lawyers still held enough cards to make the first dot com boom a Wall Street phenomenon, all about making money the old fashioned way, with lots of smoke and mirrors. Round two still involves mirroring, focusing, but engineers now hold enough cards to keep the smoke levels way down. Transparency in business processes is now part of what Open Source means. Investors should like this, though it'll mean a shakeout process as those over-depending on smoke get a taste of the competition. The result: a more robust economy, and not just in North America, not by a long shot.

Science Friday

I thought Harold Salzman of the Urban Institute did some significant backpedaling today, conceding most points his rhetorical opponents were making.

Salzman's view: the education situation may be dire, concerning, but it's not apocalyptic. Kids today know a lot more about computers than did kids thirty years ago. Compared to where we were, we're not all that different, on average -- never mind where the rest of the world is going, that's not what this study was about. "If my son or daughter is as informed and aware as I was, when I was his or her age, then things can't really be that bad" seems to be the attitude here. A semi-static picture should be no cause for alarm.

Yes, the cream of the crop is still pretty creamy, and given the intellectual squalor in which we live, there's really not that much demand for even more engineers, not counting those in the destruction business, of which there's a severe shortage right now (hence Stop-Loss). Destructive engineering is still a bonanza source of family wage jobs, thanks to myopic policymakers. Cruise missiles R Us.

Those disillusioned would-be design scientists might be more in demand in some other, more futuristic civilization, some parallel universe, one in which World Game was actually mentioned out loud (gasp!). Indeed, lack of hope in the future was cited as a major reason for students getting turned off, abandoning their hopes and dreams i.e. all that homework to what end, given global warming and the impending economic downturn? Fear over longing, once again (an old story).

So what's this Urban Institute anyway? Mostly middle of the road liberal types, of the kind who lost the War on Poverty, got us mixed up in Vietnam?

I liked Intel's Craig R. Barrett's thinking better: if we don't shape up, USAers will get creamed in the global jobs market. I think that's correct, but in the backs of their minds, some so-called liberals still just knee-jerk assume we'll have to write off the less privileged as unsalvageable. They then sugar coat their thinly disguised Malthusianism in various bureaucratic policymaking voices, like FEMA does when talking about those post-Katrina toxic trailers: all blather, and no action, because the mindset between the ears is quite broken.

Let's talk about "mental poverty" for a change, and acknowledge it might come dressed up in a suit and carry a briefcase, with fancy degrees and all the rest of it. Losers come in all stripes, don't they?

More Commenting on News

From the CBS News website:

"The image that's been portrayed is, we sat around the campfire and said, 'Oh, boy, now we go get to torture people.' Well, we don't torture people. Let me say that again to you. We don't torture people. Okay?" Tenet says.

"Come on, George," Pelley says.

"We don't torture people," Tenet maintains.

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammad?" Pelley asks.

"We don't torture people," Tenet says.

"Water boarding?" Pelley asks.

"We do not – I don't talk about techniques," Tenet replies.

"It's torture," Pelley says.

"And we don't torture people. Now, listen to me. Now, listen to me. I want you to listen to me," Tenet says.

My comments on Quaker-P (Sun Nov 4 10:41:21 PST 2007):

So was that all a lot of hooey? Why should we believe as he believes, right?

Another gestalt: if you use torture, you're simply not part of the CIA in Tenet's view. Something of a tautology perhaps? Doesn't he have the right to a view though, as an exDCI and all?

At some level we're each a walking microcosm. How you tell history is really a window into your own personal psyche no? This was Kierkegaard's point in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript I think.

This idea of an Objective Voice that narrates history from some omniscient God's eye view is a literary conceit. One may pretend to such a voice, but is it ever authentic?

These "objective stories" are a manifestation of people herding together, seeking comfort in a shared telling -- more Will to Power at work, to take Nietzsche's slant.