Interstate Message Traffic

A common misperception even among Hawthorne District aka Asylum District cognoscenti, is that the "one flew over the cuckoo's nest" prototype, outsourced by Salem, is the seminary at the top of the street, a ways up Mt. Tabor.

Not so.  The old hospital campus no longer exits but think "food carts near Jolly Roger" on 12th to get closer.  Think Washington High School (where Pauling went), already retired from public school service in my day, and used by artists.

Anyway, I finally met a guy from there, the seminary, just here for two weeks to finish up some doctorate of divinity studies.  He's based in Texas and his family gets antsy when he travels.  I understand.  If the family might go too... I was thinking of Brazil with my daughters...  Not everyone enjoys having their cage rattled the way traveling does do.

He was already very experienced as a world traveler, doing childrens relief work.  We agreed that Austin is like a bridge city between Portland and the rest of Texas.  Everyone seems to think that.  Topology is weird.

New on Twitter: @npym_it

:: @npym_it twitter account launches ::

The first tweet is a link to the job description i.e. how the IT Committee serves NPYM Meetings and Annual Session. This is a new committee as of October, 2014.

I'm the Technology Clerk with Alberta Hill the Facilitation Clerk (when we have meetings, she clerks them).

We mostly work with development teams and interested parties on things like (a) registering and organizing for Annual Session (b) Directory Services.  We may also poll member meetings (e.g. invite them to participate in surveys) and consult with them regarding appropriate technologies for conducting their business.

Inching Closer

We may be getting closer to that Guantanamo "theme park" memorializing the USA's descent as a sovereign power under the globalizing influence of Pentagon-style capitalism aka "cowardly capitalism" based on "cost plus" defense contracts.

The mercenary industry became a boom sector, organized around the Goon Belt (WDC).  Neocons ruled.  America suffered a huge loss in respect as the rest of the world watched aghast at its wild antics.

Lots of giant corporations were never fans of the Neocons however and getting funding for such a theme park need not be a huge problem, especially if it's established as a non-profit.

The Cubans should not have to worry about coughing up the dough.  They weren't the cause of the problem and needn't pay the tab for the cleanup, which will take decades.

The Imitation Machine (movie review)

I recommend coming at this as a theater play with historical content, not as some "docu-drama" or historical re-enactment.  That way you needn't worry about "manga-fication" (cartoonification), the process whereby subtle tensions become much more in your face and melodramatic, anything but subtle.  Like with Wittgenstein and that fire poker.  He almost killed Popper right?

Like in real life a Rumsfeld might dictate some acerbic memo, a "snowflake" in Pentagon-speak, asserting his primacy in the chain of command over Condi.  In the "manga-fied" movie version, he gives her a punch across the jaw and she responds by dancing with nun-chucks on the ceiling, in slow motion, in a leather rain coat.

Taking a real example from the movie: I doubt a fist fight broke out over withholding strategic life-saving information after Enigma was cracked, or that the Really Stupid General was really so stupid as to take a crowbar to a Turing Machine named "Christopher" and almost lose the whole war single handedly for His Majesty.

I was glad to see the Soviets getting sympathetic treatment from MI-6, as Churchill was indeed worth bypassing; you can tell I'm not a huge fan, Human Smoke reader that I be.

I wasn't privy to any of this salacious storytelling or gossip around Alan i.e. Bletchley Park was no Hogwarts for me.  They didn't celebrate that history yet.  I grew up in the Cold War when such things were still secret.

Public key photography would have to wait for the power of GCHQ to wane against New Zealand's (long story, PGP-related).  I started to catch up thanks to Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

Great acting, by all the Turings!

For a minute there I thought Scarlett Johansson (aka "Lucy") had come back in time in her "know everything chair" to help Alan with his puzzle.  But no, Keira Knightly is actually a different person, duh.

NPYM IT Comm: Tracking Issues

We don't have a JIRA instance or others issues tracker, though it's on the drawing boards to get one as a service, so I'm noting some tasks here.

(a)  Outreach & Visitation is following a number of Friends, whom we might call "isolated" except "Isolated Friend" is a term reserved to a type of member.  Friends (RSoF) as implemented within NPYM has a membership aspect baked in.  But this new column is independent of membership and could be coded as FollowedBy with OVS as a property of that relationship.  Except that's graph database talk.  These days, we're in SQL.

(b)  continue engaging #M3 re gender attributes we might want to add.  The current schema appears stripped of any gender or ethnicity information.  That may be intentional, or M3 may, at the corporate level, suffer from an attention deficit, a common phenomenon among corporate persons.  M3 is a flagship Monthly Meeting (MM) albeit not the only one in our region.  Its choosing to drop gender, and our regional schema following suit, should get some notice as a landmark decision, versus happening almost as a sleight of hand when no one is looking.

I've got the ball rolling on both (a) and (b) by the end of 2014, but see many steps will be needed before either issue is closed.