PPUG 2014.9.24 / Ongoing Threads

We're learning about how to use Django + Postgres to handle unstructured / schemaless data.  Clearly Postgres is an SQL engine, so this talk was about a kind of hybrid.  The searchable JSON field type is key, with binary JSON coming in version 9.4.  JSON is the de facto standard for web APIs.

I was in a somewhat grumpy mood on the bus, as I knew we'd be having pizza, courtesy of Energy Builders, our job-seeking sponsor of the evening, along with Urban Airship.  The Division bus 4 was running a bit behind schedule, not unusual during rush hour.  Contributing to my grumpiness was my ongoing thread with GS Chandy on math-teach.  The discussion is moderated and sometimes I'll spend a lot of time on a post only to see it vanish into oblivion, or at least not make it to the official archives.

With django-pgjson added, you can query JSON fields, impose orders and filters and so forth.  Basically you're doing the kind of thing SQL does but within JSON fields inside Postgres.  Don't imagine Postgres is necessarily slower than Mongo.  This seems like a cutting edge talk.

From my posting to GSC:

National governments generally use schools to instill nationalism, a form of patriotism.  This may mean familiarizing students with the roles and institutions available to them in civic government, or perhaps it means exerting peer pressure to enlist in a military service, provided that's a voluntary choice to begin with.  

In this model, schools are seen as extensions of recruiting offices by the military services.  That's another reason a Quaker family might homeschool in a given zip code:  the programming at the local public school comes across as too militaristic (e.g. mandatory ROTC for boys).

Lets start with a list of roles and then start looking at workflows.  

Roles + Workflows is how to analyze a Quaker meeting as well (where "Role" might be "on a committee" i.e. other objects need to be defined to give roles their sense -- but lets keep thinking in terms of theater and scripts).

"Role playing games" tend to be popular among young people yet how much time do we spend on the mathematics of "game theory" (closely related or perhaps a part of GST, as you know).

Also:

As you may know, in our geographic region, school has been used as a tool of cultural genocide in that native populations were forced to surrender their young to boarding schools / indoctrination centers the purpose of which was to expunge the region of local cultures and replace them with a uniform Anglo-Euro veneer. These boarding schools no longer exist as such, but their after-effects are still part of everyday experience in our region.

One purpose of these indoctrination camps or prisons was to make the "nuclear family" the only acceptable norm and to recast family relationships according to the "white man" model. The imposition of alien marriage customs was part and parcel of this genocidal program, as memorialized at the cultural museum on the Warm Springs reservation.

 A nation such as India will go into a region such as Ladakh and apply western concepts of "living standards" e.g. cash income per annum, to determine the indigenous lifestyle "poor" as in "under-developed". We're talking about a lifestyle that has evolved over millennia that includes a lot of hard manual labor, but then many adults with privileges and freedoms actively choose manual labor as a voluntary activity, so that in itself is not a sign of "poverty".

What are the criteria of "poverty" anyway? I'd say malnourishment is a sign of poverty and by that criterion the US population, in suffering from increasing obesity rates, is becoming increasingly impoverished over time. It's not really about money as in some economies that commodity is not so much needed. And yet the "dollars per annum per household" measure is still often quite mindlessly applied, as if money were the measure of all things.

 Some in my circle have been to Ladakh and we have actively discussed and been to events about whether "schooling" and "westernization" in general is helping improve living standards there, or whether it is actually having an overall negative impact in disrupting a 1000s-of-years old lifestyle by penning children into the "Free and Compulsory" new schools that India sees fit to provide.

Here's a blog post with Youtube on the topic.

I managed to get plenty of pizza and am glad to have salvaged at least some of my prose. We talked some about the ShellShock exploit / vulnerability.  This was during our "ask the audience" session wherein people poll the audience.  Who's using Python 3.x?  Who's using Flask?

Bombs Away

WDC is doing what it does best again:  bombing.  There's always a cloak of "coalition members" (e.g. CNN) to keep our socio-paths in DC from seeming too Unabomberish, but I think that's a transparent rain coat at this point (apologies to Mark Allyn).  We know the Pentagon to be a bastion of mental illness and there's not much anyone can do about it, other than "sit back and eat pizza" (as I used to put it, back when bombing Belgrade was the cruise missile fiesta du jour, under Clinton).

However we should also move further west in our analysis, closer to The Heartland as it's called e.g. Ohio and Michigan, where you have many immigrants from the Middle East with strong views and extended families.  Atrocities by self-proclaimed ISIS members (or branded as such by media) trigger demonstrations in Detroit, which in turn make "bombs away" an acceptable policy, a cathartic revenge killing, characteristic of Christians who haven't turned the other cheek since the crucifixion.  Why should they?  No one else does, except maybe Buddhists sometimes.

The phenomenon of immigrants with an ax to grind is a standard pattern.  Organized crime was about to capitalize in Havana when Castro spearheaded a revolution, and Florida has ever since supported ostracizing Cuba, a policy the rest of the world pretty much ignores.  Many Syrians in the US have their own axes to grind e.g. with the Assad regime.  Their lobbyists become a source of white papers, just as refugees from Saddam's government were milked for justifications for invading Iraq.  The war profiteers are eager to test the F-whatevers of course (F-22s in this case).

Around AFSC there's this fixed view that the military is for those too mentally incapacitated to survive in a civilian ecosystem.  The gangland-mercenary lifestyle becomes an end in itself and killing sprees get you merit badges on your resume and/or colorful threads on your uniform / costume.  There's an esprit de corps, a camaraderie, that develops around bombing, both suicidally and otherwise.  Terrorism begets fraternalism, with token women as brothers.  ISIS and the Pentagon have much in common in that way:  both provide career opportunities for fratricidal morons.

Of course not everyone in the military is a rank idiot.  Starting wars is easy whereas getting them to wind down takes expertise and diplomacy.  The idiots all say war becomes necessary when diplomacy fails, but then outward war is by definition a failure, so it's eventually back to diplomacy again, this time perhaps more in earnest by people ready to try living as a civilians again, perhaps desperate to do so having tasted the no-win dead end that is war.  So we'll recruit a military person from time to time, as a war-stopper.  Quakers attract a cohort of ex-military in every generation who believe as Smedley Butler did:  that war is a racket.

Quick Insert

Before racing down to People's Climate March, I was thinking to review El Topo (Jodorowsky directing, and acting), however I'm under some time pressure.  September 21 is one of those circle your calendar type days.

I'm also cramming on Category Theory for notation buffs, though I might stay on the humanities side and say "analogy" or "metaphor" in place of "functor" given similarities in meaning.

Talked to Chandler at meeting, wanna figure out which "island in the Willamette" he was yakking about.

Mt. Tabor is looking good.

For further viewing:
Type Theory Foundations
Category Theory by Tom LaGatta

Anthology Books

:: Third Eye from porch of Anthology Books ::

Glenn and I enjoyed Stan'wiches today.  From our point of view it's El Dobre, the Polish place, but that name might have confused the public.  Either way, the food has been excellent and we loved the meatloaf pizza this afternoon.

We were watching them repaint Headlandia, which I gather Nomad Crossing owns, along with Vapelandia down the street.  Third Eye is adjacent and is somewhat the grandaddy on the block.  Linus Pauling House:  directly across.

I imagined the Pauling House fascia boards in a Bhutanese style.  The Newar temple, where Lindsey trained, is around the corner.

The economy is shifting gears here given hemp is making a comeback, industrially, for fabric, as well as the medicinal brands.

Adjacent to Linus Pauling House:  Anthology Books.  Quite a collection.  I bought a first person narrative about adventures in the Himalayas, for $6.

Glenn and I went in and talked with Gary.  We're all looking forward to the Equinox coming up, which we'll celebrate on Friday the 19th, a little early.

DjangoCon Talk

I'm in a talk being presented by a team from National Geographic.  Justin Quick, Ben Fonarov and Farhan Syed are the speakers.

Django is a part of their website ecosystem.  Their talk is based on their Django module activitysteams on Github, the open source repository.

An Activity Stream is like a series of comments, likes, or game actions on a target.

A semantics like "You favorited a photo" pertains, with an "actor / verb / target" grammar.

What's exciting to me is the Neo4j graph database being used by the Horizon service.

Horizon is their Node.js web socket service that takes snippets (like "likes") and stores them using Neo4j.

I've been thinking of a Quaker meeting management API based on activity streams, not realizing what wheels might not need reinventing.

"Make [actor] [position] vis-a-vis [committee] for [term]" would be the kind of semantics we need.  Example:  "Make Joe Shmoe clerk of Oversight for three years starting June, 2015."

Also:  "Show [actor] and [actor] are married under the care of [meeting] as of [date]." As I've pointed out on math-teach, said marriage might or might not be recognized by the state in which the meeting is situated (Quakers define marriage their own way, independently of their surroundings sometimes).

The team made the good point that browsers prefer interactivity to read-only web pages.  Given how I generally have comments turned off in these blogs, I'm going against the grain on that score.  These are on-line journals more than conventional blogs.

However, it's fairly easy to post a link to a blog post and frame it for comments elsewhere, such as on Facebook.

Carol on the Columbia

Quaker Village in a Box

Just add water... (smiley).

I'm mixing DemocracyLab memes with The Village (movie review) and coming up with this high tech "reality show" (reality, but shared in media) that comes with a software ecosystem and operating manuals, plus lots of DIY instructions for setting things up.

The community may not be autonomous or self sustaining in the larger sense, as we're all "solar surfers", but might still be somewhat remote and a place to restart in some ways, for some folks.

Yes, there's a bit of WestWorld in this vision (with Yul Brynner).

Edge of Tomorrow (movie review)

The plot here leverages the experience of every player of first person shooters:  you get so far into it, and then you die.  Reset, and again.  You play until you make it through, or give up (similar to our pedagogy at OST, in lieu of "grades").

Given there's no alternative "outside world" beyond the game (The Matrix is complete, a reality prison), Tom (named "Cage" with good reason) has his Ground Hog Day cut out for him.

Seeing Cruise and Murray and their co-stars (Emily Blunt as Rita, and Andie MacDowall also as Rita) as a double feature would be fun, as one gets two different worlds reflective of the kinds of acting each guy does.

Murry is quirky and whimsical whereas Cruise is darkly War of the Worlds and action oriented, highly kinetic.

Yet the similarities stand out too:  how to authenticate as a time traveler.  Blunt's Rita has "been there" and so has an added advantage vis-a-vis her looper partner.

Having Cruise go from shy and retreating to full on aggressive, with that same sense of partnership displayed by Peter Quill towards Gamora (Guardians of the Galaxy), was a fun twist.

A needed ingredient is that sense of destiny aka fate that goes with heroism, a strong sense of making a big difference.  Once Cage develops confidence and survivability, along with his sense of destiny, he develops his heroic qualities within the loop, an eternal return.

The "mimics" which Cage and Rita get to fight have plenty of demonic power.  As a first person shooter, this game is definitely challenging.  Live, Die, Repeat is the other name they came up with for it.

Finding Vivian Maier (movie review)

One might imagine I felt drawn to Vivian as I share her obsession with "street photography" as they call it, though I more call it "National Geographic photography" when thinking about it to myself.

The controversy about her accent seems easily resolved:  you could call it "affected" as she went to France only later to discover her ancestral roots.  Adopting those roots and owning them was wise on many levels, including in the practical sense that upper middle class people still sucker to this day for that "European nanny" jazz (though these days the Philippines is the new Europe).  It pays to have a French accent when you're in the nanny business, and she had to learn hers late in life.

She had that kind of spy-like fly-on-the-wall existence that life behind a camera somewhat foments.  You get that distance, that "observer" mentality (to quote the est Training).  One is recording for posterity, spying as if for ETs, but really for the future, and it was just hugely fortuitous that John Maloof would acquire her property at auction to start, and do the requisite archeology.  He reminds people how fun it is to discover others, and that's just as viable a creative outlet as making a big show of oneself.  Reminds me of Trevor.

Indeed, he's being somewhat Vivianesque in playing the self effacing documentary maker.  People treat him with the respect of someone who's done some homework.  Vivian too, did a lot of homework, and came across as respect-worthy.  Her employers would have sensed that in wanting her to have parenting responsibilities vis-a-vis their own children.

Yes, developing film was messy, chemical, and a pain.  If you're a deeply private individual, as Vivian was, then piling up your negatives in good condition and putting them all in a time capsule, with some strategic letters, is not a bad strategy.   High risk, but at least doable.

Remember Bucky Fuller and his "chronofile":  to self document in that way added a dimension to his experiment "Guinea Pig B".

Vivian achieved her own kind of nirvana in morphing herself into one of the greatest street photographers in the age before we could just upload into the cloud.  Now I think she so resonates with people like me, the common garden variety camera buff, because we share the same fascination with street photography, and the technology to make it relatively painless.

Of course it helps that the pictures she took were really excellent.

As Linus Pauling said (paraphrase):  the secret to taking some really good pictures is to take a lot of them (as he said of "ideas").

This is a well-made documentary about an intriguing subject:  Mary Poppins meets Bridges of Madison County (OK, that's a stretch -- she doesn't meet anyone, but she does remind of Clint Eastwood).

Someone told me ahead of time she was "plain" and/or "homely" and if maybe that was why she had such a lonely life, the poor dear.  On the contrary, Vivian was photogenic and displayed a level of toughness that goes with the territory, if "street photography" is your game.

As for her supposed mental illness (yes, lots of paranoia, imagine today with Cyberia) and draconian child rearing techniques, lets remember this was spoiled upper middle class America and she was hired as a French nanny.

The role of the nanny was to be "bad cop" sometimes, giving parents a more "good cop" role, sparing them the need to use the rod (nanny was rod queen).

So sure, the little darlings had some PTSD under Mary Poppins, but who wouldn't under such a Scary Mary?  I'm sure Vivian could be intimidating when she needed to be but she didn't water board, lets be clear.  Hers was the wing of the OSS (or whatever spy service) that didn't torture, but maybe did stay out in the cold quite a bit.

Graph Databases

Ever since Pernilla Lind's talk at OSCON, the idea of graph databases has been rolling around in my brain.  A kind of NoSQL.  That's the place to fit in.

I don't mind accepting the pejorative connotations of "spaghetti monster" (play up the Italian food angle) or the links to the spoof deity that said monster comes with, in the Atheists' religion (some denominations).

That's all a plus in my box.

Neurons, like the Wild World Web (WWW), get messy, like Ms. Frizzle taught.  That's STEM.  So yeah, a graph database might be a terrible tangle, a Gordian Knot.

The beauty of it though, may be seen in its application to Quakerism and its processes.  Nominating puts forward names in a slate, which gets approved by Business Meeting, thereby filling all these positions.

Who served as what when, create a time slice, produce a resume:  these things a graph database will do, and reliably, if you feed it true information.

GIGO, right?

Just keep track of who on what clearness committee recommended X for membership to Oversight, and you'll have your reports at the end of the day.  Bring a smile to your clerking team's helpers, especially if your meeting has grown complicated and involuted over the years.

Minutes are just log files detailing the transactions that have gone on.

But of course the applications of such graphing engines are far broader than Quaker committee work or household diagramming, business analysis and so on.  The list goes on and on.

Dymaxion House

My plan is to visit some coffee shop with Wifi and my copy of Cosmic Fishing, to re-read whatever Ed Applewhite recounts about the Witchita, Kansas operation.

Then I'll flip through Bucky Works by J. Baldwin, which Ed liked a lot.

Trevor of Synchronofile has the most comprehensive Fuller archive within a thousand mile radius, so I'll likely be consulting him too, just to remind myself about some of the subplots.

Speaking of Applewhite, I think he would have been gratified to see this depiction of Fuller's E-module, with follow-up mention of David Koski's Youtubes on Facebook:

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More Counting Down

As in "countdown to zero" that is, a meme brought to you by the abolitionists, versus nuclear weapons that is (the anti-slavery battle is ongoing as well and they're related).

This year we again enjoyed fine weather, perfect shade, and a relaxed summer park atmosphere, with members of the public towards the back performing acrobatics quietly, in much the same way Joe Snyder does with kids' program during talent night at Annual Session (which I mostly missed this year, OSCON a priority -- still got some IT committee prep work done though).

A fun wrinkle was this mom & pop "radio station" showing up with what appeared to be equipment for making interviews.  I didn't see them make any, but one of their colleagues posed during Congressman Blumenaur's speech, with a black on yellow sign calling for Barack Obama's impeachment.  Carol later remembered Bonnie Tinker's fascination with the prospect of impeachment vis-a-vis George Bush.  My take both times is the same:  USAers are still PTSD from the Nixon Era and now see impeachment (a kind of scapegoating) as a solution for everything.

The highlight of course were the en Taiko Drummers, teens and tweens, led by taller girls but all obviously enjoying themselves and the audience feedback.  Mom took the opportunity to leaflet the front row during their 2nd performance, a stunt reminding these theater mode duffsters that it was theirs to stay active, get involved, not just to expect entertainment.  Or at least that's my spin.  She really didn't block anyone's view and she had relevant information.

Veterans for Peace is always high profile at this event.  The Native Americans were less foreground this year.  These things come and go.  I was wandering off site to savor local context and widen my perspective, and stumbled into a photo exhibit regarding some event called Vortex in 1970, which according to the proprietor was like a state sponsored Woodstock aimed at keeping a surly hippie generation out of trouble for the summer, by organizing some "lets get naked and pretend we're Indians" event.  That puzzle piece fit with my recent airplane reading.

Carol reminisced in the car about some of the early versions of this annual event, now pushing fifty years.  Fellowship of Reconciliation used to be involved but FOR must see Portland as "over it" by now, pretty much reconciled by now.  Mercy Corps is just across the street but not an active sponsor.  I was off in a Chinese second floor restaurant having a Tsingtao and watching Chinese TV for a part of it.  Like I said, I was taking in surrounding Portland (Old Town), adding nuance and new angles to an event I've attended for almost fifty years (but with a huge gap from like from age six to fifty).

Carol was given full credit for helping start this ceremony / memorial by Polo, a community / city leader, some years back.  She knows a lot of these people and had a walker full of stuff to compare notes about.  She's looking forward to another workshop today in fact, on the military's misappropriation of drone technology.

OK, time to stop blogging and head out to an AFSC-related meetup (AFSC is an old time co-sponsor of this event, right from its inception). The Portland office has relinquished its hold on its historic digs on E Burnside, though the outdoor sign is still there.

Where to go next, that's fully ADA compliant?  Old houses like that one usually don't even begin to qualify.  E Burnside has a ramp, with some turning radius in the restroom but I don't have the exact figures.  I'm suggesting we camp out, at least on billboards:  picture an AFSC tent overlooking a grand canyon (doesn't have to be the famous one):  "Really Out There, and Lovin' It!" could be the slogan (would McDonalds sue?).

The idea is like we're into scouting and stuff.  Like the old days in some ways, when AFSC ran work camps for COs.  The idea of a recruiting tent right in R2DToo itself has some appeal.  AFSC has a long history of working with stateless / houseless / refugee populations.

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Pilgrimmage

Islamic cultures have appreciated the geodesic sphere and dome from the start.

The shape is geometric and the mathematics pristine.  No wonder that the Globe restaurant in Riyahd, atop Al Faisaliah Tower, is considered one of the architectural marvels of the Middle East.  Sir Norman Foster, who also developed a fourth Dymaxion Car, was the designer behind it.

Here in North America, the domed mosque in Perrysburg, Ohio, near Toledo, has long been on my list of "see in person if you can" places, and yesterday I found myself only eighteen minutes away (per Google Maps) having pulled off I-75 for some excellent sushi with a co-worker.

Tara and I took the country back roads in the rental Mazda 2, guided by GPS.  Although the building was locked, a kind gentleman allowed me inside for a brief self-guided tour.

This dome was designed by Temcor, Don Richter's company, Don having been a student a Buckminster Fuller's at Black Mountain College, a contemporary of Kenneth Snelson.

Replacing a Broken Camera

I'm thinking of the hardships endured by the Five Broken Cameras documentary filmmaker and his friends, compared with my relatively easy life.  So I had a scratch on my Nikon Coolpix.  That's hardly a super serious problem is it?

Yes, it was messing with every picture and for a guy like me, who uploads by the thousand, that seemed like a big deal.

But that's the kind of problem people shouldn't have to complain about.  Right?  Lets get real here and make fun of ourselves and our "first world problems" (his last problem looked legit), if we happen to be lucky enough to be in danger of spoiling.

The new camera is another small digital point and shoot, a FujiFilm XQ1 with lots of cool features, though less of a zoom than the Nikon Coolpix S9300.

Built into this little jobber, not an accessory, is an ability to share pictures with my Android smartphone, meaning it's even easier to upload from the field, without a computer as an intermediary and over the Verizon network.

Another first world problem is I'd left my brief case with another Wifi device at the boat moorage yesterday and had to go by the marina enroute from the airport (where I dropped off an OSCON attendee) to Forest Grove, where I was to (and did) retrieve Carol (my mom) from Pacific University.  I shared an outdoor lunch with the annual gathering of North Pacific Yearly Meeting.

Old Germantown Road made for a good Meeting for Worship for Driving (MfWfD).  I'll be doing quite a bit of driving over the next few days, if call goes according to plan.

Good seeing Tom Whittaker, Tom Head, Nancy Irving, Sarah Michener, Clint Weimeister and Gayle Matson.

Oh right, and I also replaced my Skullcandy headphones with more of the same brand, purchased at Fred Meyer for about $10 on sale (no microphone on this model).  Maybe the old ones had been through the wash or something, but one ear had gone flaky.  Nothing lasts forever.

OSCON XVI: Wrap Up

If you've not been to an OSCON, you might find it surprising how many talks are of a "psychological" nature, meaning about inter-personal skills, not in the sense of compensating for not having them, but in the sense of being a community manager or developer evangelist for a global company that depends on Agile / OSS for strategic advantage.  Neo4j is such a company, and their developer evangelist did a dynamite job outlining exactly what the job is, using graph theory.

Older companies may not appreciate what a "community manager" even is, as that sounds like some touchy-feely PR job, some icing on the cake associated with lobbying and schmoozing with members of congress.  There's some of that "special interest" or "lobbyist" flavor, for sure, but you're more serving a team of expensive race horses, your developers, your sled dogs, who are pulling this chariot towards fame and glory, or just plain old towards helping people, making life less of a drag.  Graph databases are doing that for people and Neo4j is a serious player.

Another talk was on Dealing with Disrespect, by a seasoned community manager with Ubuntu on his resume, one of the premier users of, and of course developers of, free and open source software.  He sketched a sorting system of three buckets:  agreeable, disagreeable and unacceptable communications, and techniques for dealing with the disagreeable most especially, as that's where attention to context matters.  Get beyond just content and tone.  The basic posture is empathy.  As an empathetic attender to communications, you're less likely to just go off in the face of provocation.

What I found refreshing and agreed with in this talk is we're not attempting to criminalize offending content, such as satire ala South Park or whatever.  Offensive content, like toxic acids, has its place on the chemistry shelf, as an ingredient.  The public spaces are free to protect themselves from too much "push content" but if you wanna watch HBO, that's your business.  Content providers are not always trying to reach that "agreeable to everyone" market, or only are some of the time.  That's all my spin on the presenter's remarks, what I took away as validation, given my content is sometimes offensive.  It's not like I didn't put that skull and crossed bones on the bottle (smile).

I stayed at my workstation Thursday morning (atypically a last day, as the usual format is Monday-Friday, not Sunday-Thursday -- next year back to normal), getting back in the groove.  This was not vacation time for me.  On the contrary, it was double duty.  True for all in the mentor pool who manned the booth (Kelly, Patrick...).  Our main booth guy is not a coder by training but is fairly able to converse in Portuguese, Russian and maybe some other stuff.  Given i18n was a theme for us, he was just what we needed from central casting.  I sat around looking silvery gray and professorial, in my blue blazer (no elbow patches).  I brought Naga (@psf_snake) in her special carry-on and draped her over the OST counter on Wednesday.  I'm talking about the Python mascot in past OSCONs (she'd flirt with the Perl camel), this year mute on Twitter as I'm no longer her puppet master behind the scenes.

OSCON XVI

I've got a different angle on OSCON this year, from behind a booth counter some of the time, also in front of a TV camera in booth 818.  OST is booth 717.  We're well integrated into the O'Reilly ecosystem, with the mother ship booth to our west at the Expo Hall Center.

Our program opened with a series of videos encouraging OSCON attendees to strive towards being "full stack engineers".  What that means is awareness of one's place in an ecosystem.  Know about how you and your skills fit in to an environment.  Basic sense making, but in geek parlance.

Bluehost and HP are especially visible as one comes in the door.  Both gave keynotes this morning, Bluehost in tandem with Raymond Henderson of Grassroots.org, a latter-day CUE (where I used to work; Center for Urban Education) in the sense that it helps non-profits leverage free and open technologies (CUE was at its peak prior to Open Source going gangbusters, around the time of the IBM PC).  IBM was here in force this year as well, with Softlayer.

Grassroots.org will get you some reliable hosting for your footprint in Cyberia, as long as you meet specific criteria.  Your ability to do quality bookkeeping is relevant.

The keynotes were somewhat psychological with the theme being inclusivity, the flip side (as in, same thing as) diversity.  What about children?  What about introverts?  Say what?  The talk on "coming out as an introvert" by Wendy Chisholm was quite ingenious in taking the term "coming out" -- usually associated with gender -- in a different yet related direction.

Wendy, an Accessibility expert, had found a way to pace herself that didn't go against the grain so much, in terms of her need to be alone with her thoughts and process in tranquility.  Someone with a daily meditation practice would sorely miss it for the same reason.  In allowing for her own needs, her stamina had greatly improved.  She encouraged conference attenders to attend to their own inner rhythms and maybe cutting back on stimulation as a way of engaging more fully.

We also heard from the younger generation, from a precocious programmer with parents up to providing guidance, and a community smart enough to appreciate his talents.  These factors:  access to the tools, guidance and encouragement, had led Shadaj Laddad to achieve maturity as a coder, with adult-level skills.  That he had done so much work in Scala was something the audience could appreciate.  Did I see Python code with a decorator aimed at adding trail call recursion of some kind?  That turns out to be a deep topic in the literature I was unaware of.

I took the nap lady's words to heart.  Not right away, as I had booth responsibilities and time on camera with Patrick and Steve, but later.

Will Marshall of Planet Labs rounded out the inwardly focused talks, plus HP on OpenStack, by sharing about his plans to open global data to user via some API. He already has a lot of satellites out there.

Carol Smith from Google, another Diamond sponsor, along with Citrix and HP, recapped ten years of Summer of Code.  Much has been accomplished.  The "design science revolution" (Fuller's coin) lives on.

Scala Tutorial at OSCON

My notes from Get Started Developing with Scala by Jason Swartz and Kelsey Gilmore-Innis.

This is my day for JVM languages i.e. languages that compile to the Java Virtual Machine.  Clojure and Scala both fit that bill and have other features in common as well:  immutable data, functional programming, first class functions.

I opted for this tutorial based on a lunch conversation at one of the i18n tables and showed up with nothing working or even installed.  One of the minders got me up and running, getting stuff off a memory stick.

Turns out my version of Java was too old on the OST Mac Air.  I'm grabbing jdk-7u65-macosx-x64.dmg.  That worked.

Now I have a little web servlet going, controlled by the tutorial code.

Starting SBT for OSCON Scala tutorial
mackurner:scala-tutorial kurner$ ./sbt.sh 
Starting SBT for OSCON Scala tutorial
[info] Loading project definition from /Users/kurner/Documents/scala-tutorial/project
[info] Set current project to Scala Tutorial (in build file:/Users/kurner/Documents/scala-tutorial/)
> console
[info] Generating /Users/kurner/Documents/scala-tutorial/target/scala-2.10/resource_managed/main/rebel.xml.
[info] Starting scala interpreter...
[info] 
Welcome to Scala version 2.10.4 (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM, Java 1.7.0_65).
Type in expressions to have them evaluated.
Type :help for more information.

scala> "Hello, Scala"
res0: String = Hello, Scala 
scala> var started_programming: Map[String,Int] = Map("Kirby" -> 24, "Odd" -> 25)
started_programming: Map[String,Int] = Map(Kirby -> 24, Odd -> 25)

The language is not entirely unlike Java, statically typed, object oriented, but is more spare, more "expression-oriented" according to our presenter.  Someone who knows Java might move to Scala next.

Like Python and Clojure, Scala has a REPL (shown above).

I'm sitting next to a man named Odd Are. I like that.

For those who know Python:

>>> list(filter(lambda i: i < 3, [1, 2, 3]))

is the same as

scala> List(1, 2, 3).filter(i => i < 3)

or even

scala> List(1,2,3).filter(_ < 3).

Both Python and Scala feature top-level functions, meaning you're free and encouraged to pass them as arguments on occasion.  The methods map, reduce and filter give you a basis for functional programming.

Our presenters recommend easing into Scala by using it to write tests for Java code.

Recommended followup tutorial:  The Neophytes Guide to Scala.

OSCON 2014 Tutorials (Day 1)

My notes from: The Simplicity of Clojure presented by Clinton Dreisbach and Bridget Hillyer.

Collections in Clojure:  Vectors, Lists, Maps, Sets.

Vectors are heterogeneous, as are all the collections, so like Python's lists. Also 0-based.

(nth [3 6 9] 1) ;=> 6.

A List is a unit of execution in that the first element is the function. Above: [3 6 9] is the Vector whereas (nth ...) is a List.

Collections are also immutable, like Python's tuples, so (conj (list 1 2) 3) ;=> (3 1 2).

Maps are similar to Python dicts.  Why are they associative again?  Sets (#) are like Python sets: no duplicates

:keywords have a magical property of serving as functions. (:a {:a 1}) ;=> 1.

A :keyword is a symbol that evaluates to itself.

Function names (symbols) are common to all the collections wherever that makes sense.  This has to do with their all being Sequences (not just Collections).  The laziness of the Sequence should evoke Pythonic ideas of lazy iteration, as well as the general notion of sequence.

Strings are not sequences but get coerced into same in using sequence functions:

(first "this is it") ;=> \t

...where \t is the character type.

Python's special names enforce a kind of uniformity across types.  We get to the syntax level with __getitem__ and __getattr__ i.e. obj[x] and obj.x are things we define within the obj type.

First exercise (I'm in a tutorial):

(list "Professor Plum" "Mrs. Peacock" "Mr. Green" "Mrs. White" "Colonel Mustered" "Miss scarlet")

(nth (list "Professor Plum" "Mrs. Peacock" "Mr. Green" "Mrs. White" "Colonel Mustered" "Miss scarlet") 3) ;=> "Mrs. White"

They had us download LightTable to follow along.  Here are the slides.  LightTable works with Python as well!

I met up with Tatia and Ed Leafe at the break.  Ed shares my FoxPro lineage.  Tatia is fresh off the plane from Brazil.  She's a Pythonista, like Ed and myself, fluent in both English and Portuguese.  We compared notes on Ruby (another OO language like Python) and clojure (functional, more LISP-like).

In a local scope, function let takes a Vector to give its bindings.  defn contracts def and fn.

Thanks to prefix notation, the hyphen is fine in variable names (symbols), no confusion with the minus symbol.

Polymorphism:  how?  If you don't have objects.  multi-methods maybe.  Helps to know some Java maybe as defrecord relates to Java's classes and interfaces.  "Make a Piece protocol" to model chess pieces, say with possible-moves and can-move? as methods.  OO thinking involves dispatching.

Functional reactive programming:  Javelin treats your data like a spreadsheet.  Check core.matrix for an example of professional clojure code.  What's ClojureScript?  Read more at Hoplon.io.

For further reading:  Clojure for the Brave and True.

Wanderers 2014-7-9

This blog post is somewhat out of chronological order in that I've already blogged about a subsequent Wanderers meetup I attended (my practice is to cover only what I witness myself), but then some presentations may take longer to think on.

Anyway, Milt Markewitz treated us to some Kabbalistic esoterica last Wednesday, which he has done before, providing a neuro-scientific context:  ancient languages, in providing alternative mnemonic networks (semantic networks) may pop us out of our reveries and provide a fresh view.  When scanning invisible landscapes for better ways forward, seeing with new eyes as it were (per the concept of "aspect shift" in Wittgenstein) may sometimes prove our salvation.

Milt's chosen specimen ancient language was Hebrew.  Around the Blue House the I Ching tends to perform a similar service in providing doors to a collective unconscious in the Jungian and/or Nietzschean sense.

For some reason I associate Jewish mysticism with my Quaker animism, meaning the non-human aspect.  Treating non-humans with respect, as Wanderers among us, worthy of their own records and chronologies, cemeteries, is one of my themes.

We lost two of our non-human community shortly after this talk, a beloved dog named Blueberry and a cat of unknown name (but appreciated) -- which may be why this theme is so close to the surface.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (movie review)

I've been an avid Apes (Planet of the) since the first one, with Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall. I've even been known to read the books.

This newest addition to the franchise is excellent in that it continues to give the apes real personalities, no less than it gives them to humans.  The camera / observer is perhaps an angel from another planet in the sense of its sympathies going both ways.

The movie might be construed as pacifist in its message, even while the inevitability of war is its subject.  Fear and jealousy drive both sides and the lesser characters, the non-heroic, are the first to succumb.  They spread the seeds of war to others, including through treachery.  An old pattern.  The analogy of the physical virus with the mental one is crystal clear.

The facial expressions of anger, giving vent to the inner demon, stir in both human and ape alike, a first symptom of the infection.  I'm thinking of Tich Nhat Hanh and his challenge to followers to foreswear anger.  One might imagine this movie on his syllabus.

The choreography and computer graphics (visual effects) are spectacular.

Flavors of 12 Monkeys, Jurassic Park, Cabin in the Woods and several others, which isn't to say anything pejorative, on the contrary.

That the movie was brave enough to use subtitles is a big point in its favor.  The movie takes itself seriously enough to make real soul searching possible.  There's not much gratuitous levity.  The situation is dire.

Exploring Cultural Heritage

:: all you need is cash ::

As a teacher of the Python computer language, I consider it my professional responsibility to fill in a lot of the gaps in my knowledge regarding Monty Python, for whom the language was named.  I found out watching the five hour bio of George Harrison, Life in the Material World, that he'd been instrumental in getting Life of Brian out there, after movie executives flinched at the South Parky content.

Speaking of South Park, that's another edgy cartoon I've been remiss in watching enough.  I watched the two part episode where Tom Cruise and other celebrities, tired of being made fun of, attempt to capture whatever mojo they can from a certain religious leader whose picture must not be shown in cartoon form.  For a brief shining moment, the scheme appears to work, and Tom is happily immune from spoofing.

Anyway, I hadn't seen the full mockumentary, All You Need is Cash, until last night.  I completed viewing it, with another Rutles fan, after taking the bus home from the Blues Festival and Don's boat (in the water again, after months of dry dock repairs).  George Harrison himself plays a role in this movie (can you find him?).

More Andragogy

I've been "watching" the World Cup, sometimes actually watching, on HDTV at a sports bar, e.g. Jolly Roger, while waiting to help on a move of some archive, but other times only hearing, being at the wrong angle to view, but hearing the cheering, the sounds of an engaged audience.  Such was the case at Horse Brass, where we sat around the corner from the TV (HD).

I've been advising my students to kick back and watch it though.  You'd think I'm self serving, just trying to have less work, but my view is programming requires some neural rewiring, or whatever model you like of "mental work", and that happens during sleep and off moments, not just when you're focused and concentrating.  Those two moments go together, a dialectic:  fierce concentration, followed by relaxed inattention, while you let the rest of your brain catch up, so to speak.

Bucky Fuller used Doppler Effect to mean something different:  the fact that we're not all on the same page all of the time, nor need we be nor should we be.  We roam around (wander) and find others on the same page, but not everyone, and sometimes only our own selves.  It's that "non-simultaneous only partially overlapping" stuff he talked about incessantly.  We get it in different orders, "it" being the thing we assemble from the puzzle pieces, per the constructivist view.

I'm calling this More Andragogy because it's pedagogy, familiar, but recapped for adults.  You might be a child reading this, but your peer readers are likely older, given the demographic for writings of this type.  I'm not thinking to be exclusionary and welcome child readers.  Fairy tales are for adults as well, as the muppet-masters manifest.  Inter-generational banter, message traffic, is the stuff of civilization, torch-passing and all that.

Today was a jumble.  We'd had a rule change at work awhile back, a consequence of growing towards new archetypes, as an academy, such that students were frantic to have finished X by today, a deadline.  Carol, mom, needed some professional attention and with help from Carl's Jr. and nearby Oregon Clinic (closed), I was able to snarf the WiFi I needed to keep up with said frantic students, enjoying a milkshake at the same time.  Carol's X-rays revealed nothing serious and we have follow-up care planned and covered.  The system worked for us today.  And yet: today was a jumble.

I hear the back gate swinging open as my door to the back deck (upstairs) is open, Sarah-the-dog taking in the night air, meaning Lindsey must be returning, our extended house guest from Savannah, GA.  She was introduced to me by Patrick, fellow mentor, with whom I just had a beer (not the first time).  We're a neighborly bunch, in our partially overlapping scenarios, experiencing the Doppler Effect by weaving through one another's lives in Scenario Universe as Bucky called it ("it").

Notes from Business Meeting

:: this little light of mine ::

Joanne and family showed up as a worship group, This Little Light of Mine, with a prepared statement regarding Nominating's proposal to replace the Peace and Social Concerns Committee with a single individual, the PSC Coordinator.

Business Meeting was not in unity regarding this proposal.

Although the Peace and Social Concerns committee has in fact fizzled, its clerk, Debbie Averill is still up for making announcements and talked about our annual $75 contribution to the Hiroshima / Nagasaki Commemorative Ceremony (August 6th), which my mother helped start back in the 1960s.

Joanne proposed we have a threshing session, with PSC alums, e.g former clerks invited, to seek a way forward.

In her prepared statement, she mused on the theme of how far we might depart from Faith and Practice and still get away with the "Quaker" labeling on the box.  Truth in advertising is an issue, relating to our Integrity testimony.

Any mention of PSC on the Nominating slate might as well be stricken, said Debbie, as it's not realistic to show one, now that a threshing session is planned, and given the two on the slate (currently listed through 2016), besides herself, have not been coming to PSC meetings for some time, plus more recently we've stopped having any PSC meetings at all.

I moved that the AFSC Liaison position also be temporarily removed from the slate, given the job description mentions reporting to the defacto defunct Peace and Social Concerns.  My name was listed as "pending" anyway, and is slated to run through 2015.

The Clerk, turning Assistant Clerk after this meeting, denied my motion, saying she hadn't had time to fully study the AFSC Liaison job description.

Maybe AFSC and FCNL Liaisons and Peace and Social Concerns committee might be unlinked?

Perhaps that was the Clerk's thinking in wanting to keep my position alive while allowing the PSC committee to remain in abeyance.

Will the threshing session choose to go ahead with a Peace Coordinator, or "Peace Czar" as some call the position?

Other meetings, usually much smaller, have gutted themselves in this way and still go by the label "Quaker".

Even Multnomah itself, then smaller, flirted with having no PSC, back in the 1980s.  At least someone had been doing some homework.

I think the assumption most meetings and churches make is they're free to design a Liaison position however they like and AFSC is not really at liberty to have input. 

That may be accurate, although in our case the local AFSC office staff wanted their opinions known (they've been happy with me, as has been Debbie -- complaints to Nominating were from other corners and may have related to my eldering others in the meeting, in my capacity as former Overseer).

Even if a Friends Meeting is making the transition to Friends Church, as Multnomah has been doing, that needn't mean any interruption in liaising. 

Indeed, it's during times of radical surgery that these liaison relationships might be most needed and appreciated, as they bring a kind of legitimacy and continuity to the process.  The Quaker brand, valuable in and of itself, remains intact.

End of An Era

Probably quite a few Friends Churches don't have a Peace and Social Concerns Committee.  That's a holdover from the Liberal tradition, especially typified in Cascadia, where meetings in the Beanite lineage have populated the Willamette Valley, Olympia, Seattle, surrounding areas.

College Park Association in California was the common parent, a group disowned by Iowa Yearly Meeting back when a wave of evangelical fervor was gripping the mid-west, driving out the more rational (think Pol Pot -- anti-intellectual).

Our local Multnomah Monthly Meeting, once a Liberal Friends flagship, has raised a new flag of late.  There's still a rainbow decal on the door, and a sticker in favor of wind power over coal, but beyond that the place is rather non-descript, though it prominently affiliates itself with the Religious Society of Friends.

 The Faith & Practice, gathering dust by the library door, will tell the newcomer about Peace and Social Concerns, but you'd have to be listening closely during Social Hour to realize that committee was "on ice" or "imploded" or whatever is the jargon du jour.  Don't expect the documentation to actually inform you about the real API.

How naive could you be? (yes, I'm being sarcastic -- as a geek I tout up-to-date documentation as a virtue and I'm not proud of our demented documentation, so way out of date).

Hah hah, bait and switch!  You thought you were getting a Peace and Social Concerns committee (it's there in the manual), but you weren't, and chances are "the clique" felt no obligation to tell you, so in-grown has it become.

What does this mean in terms of joining FGC and having ongoing relationships with the alphabet soup of Quaker entities?

Probably the AFSC has taken the most notice, given the local office is supposed to have a seat on the defunct PSC.  How does one take one's chair at the table, when the table and chair have gone missing?  Kind of puts it in one's face, the whole question of "where do I fit in"?  Answer:  nowhere at the moment, but likely AFSC will find a place to reconnect, once the restructuring is over.

What restructuring?  Come to Business Meeting or stay tuned.  Nominating has become the most powerful committee in the meeting, one could argue the last vital one of the three major "Monthly Meeting organs":  Nominating, Peace and Social Concerns, and Oversight.

Nominating gets people into their roles; Oversight gives reality checks / feedback, informing Business Meetings (a form of worship) by collecting and sharing information; and Peace and Social Concerns presents the cutting edge of Quakers acting out their testimonies:  egalitarian ethics, a commitment to plain speech (if sometimes technical),  simplicity / elegance in design and presentation, integrity, non-violence (no need of outward weapons) -- all that good stuff.

Like what's the point of a Monthly Meeting if you're not actually a platform for putting Quakerism into practice, isn't that the whole point?

We lost a lot of our Oversight powers awhile back at Multnomah, when a new committee (CAC), undocumented, took its place regarding external affairs (vigilance, intelligence, whatever).  Secret alliances were forged with no Oversight input, which committee mostly rolled over and played dead, or was dead for real.  Another story.

And PSC is now gone, as I've been mentioning, so that leaves Nominating to try to jump start the new structure.

Kind of like Dr. Frankenstein in his lab, applying the voltage to his "project".  Lets see if "the project" sits up and starts passing the Turing Test.  Then:  will it have Quaker values?

Rat Story

Like most of my rainforest neighbors experience from time to time, we have live-in rodentia, some squirrels, some rats.  They frequent the attic and spaces between the lath and plaster and wooden exterior (I know, Cascadia quaint, with somewhat creaky floors but not nearly as squeaky as Pauling House).

In the attic, an infra-red motion sensor has been firing off pix by email via the Internet (it has access to my router).  A have-a-heart trap of feral cat / raccoon trapping size sits in my living room, a $10 purchase at a nearby estate sale (thanks for the tip neighbor!).  However, the real property damage, to shared stores (Food Not Bombs) and personal stuff (the dog's food bag) has come from a rat or rats not in the attic.  I have less of a heart in some areas.

Speaking of slaughtering innocent furry animals, I also buy mice at the pet store for $1.98 apiece and let them "go free" in a confined volume with a predatory hungry animal, which kills them quickly by suffocation / constriction.  If one believes in moving on, a next life, roll of the dice, should be better than that of a clueless mouse in the pet food business.  But how about being a snake, what's that like?  Philosophers wonder about such things, what it's like to be a bat for example (famous essay).

The rabid consumer in me is pissed off the local grocery has gone with an off brand knock off of the V trap that's always worked well, lets call it Z.  I kept the receipt somehow knowing this could be problem, and sure enough, one night cheese, the next night peanut butter, and both times this super smart rat got a meal without paying the ultimate price.  My respect for the rat has gone up a lot, while my respect for the Z has plummeted.  I'm going to try another store for a V, and if it works then return my two Zs with scientific evidence to back my claim that Vs are better.

Dry as Bones

Thinking about the Honduras Sisters, how I think of them, through Multnomah Friends for a visit not so long ago.  Interesting conversations about membership.  Hey, how 'bout the new Pope!  My Catholic friends have said some glowing things, some of them.  Boosts morale.

Speaking of Multnomah Friends, we're due for a new Nominating slate soon.  It's that time of year.  We do management by rotation, meaning we get to exercise our various talents in different roles.  I'm interested in PR (public relations) so it makes sense where I sit.  Front row seat and all that.

The Curse of the Gothic Symphony was video fare for the non-serious, by which I mean we needed something fun and engaging that would not punish us for dividing our attention.  In my case, I needed to work through Python work, submitted by earnest students of this computer language, named for Monty Python, friends of the Beatles and Peter Sellers.

Python's author is a Dutch guy though, not a Brit, however Python's adoption within the English-speaking world has been widespread.  The 33 keywords (as of this writing) are all English (in, for, is, if, else...) but that's it.  If you wanna have Russian characters, or Chinese, be my guest.

For my current courses, the ones I teach, at least business English is a requirement, somewhat a reflection of our school's tiny size and my not being anything close to polyglot.

I returned The Curse of the Gothic Symphony just now to Movie Madness, resisting the temptation to get Wagner and Me, in my queue for later then, when I have more bandwidth.  The Curse... could be viewed in a Systems / Project Management class, where you study workflows and methodologies like Agile (what I teach, Python being an "agile" dynamic typed language, vs. static).  One might find it on a college's "required viewing" syllabus.  Anthropology maybe.

Raging Against the King

Joe America has a simple model of reality.  The president is a King which is like a superhero, like Superman.  If things go wrong, they're convenient scapegoats, these Incredibles.

In her book EcoMind, Frances Moore Lappé circles our willingness to "build up" (project celebrities) then "tear down" (celebrate their fall from grace) as one of the energy traps that keeps us living more stupidly than need be.

Scapegoating our purported leaders is a major pass time and a hallmark of our irresponsibility.  In radical middle politics, we don't require super heroics to begin with, just a modicum of personal integrity -- even more than a modicum if one can afford it.

Out of the ruins, out from the wreckage
Can't make the same mistake this time
We are the children, the last generation
We are the ones they left behind

And I wonder when we are ever gonna change it
Living under the fear till nothing else remains

We don't need another hero
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond the thunderdome

Read more: Tina Turner - 

We Don't Need Another Hero Lyrics | MetroLyrics

Portland Water in the News

Properly disinfecting surface water sources kills E. Coli:

Systems using surface water, rather than ground water, are required to take extra steps to protect against bacterial contamination because surface water sources are more vulnerable to such contamination. At a minimum, all systems using surface waters must disinfect. Disinfection will kill E. coli O157:H7.  [source]

So should Portland blame its reservoirs or the lack of sufficient treatment?

Contractors are in place to disconnect our hundred year old system, not because it's broken, but because the EPA says we have to.

Do underground, versus surface sources, also contain E. Coli sometimes?  Yes.

Given E. Coli has nothing to do with why the EPA wants this system shut down, we at least have a litmus test:  any politician using the E. Coli scare to make points for closing is willfully clueless and a self identified lackey for the contractors / businesses standing to gain financially from the EPA's one-size-fits all ruling.

Godzilla (movie review)

I enjoyed this more than I expected, coming in as a skeptic.  Given my birthday was starting around showtime, the Happy Birthday Daddy theme resonated some, and I could appreciate the nuclear family vibe (pun intended).  Allusions to Aliens (egg sacs) and Lost (Monarch) seemed present.  The human familial matrix was mirrored by the creatures, with that intelligent eye reminiscent of whale movies.  We recognize a fellow sentient being in Godzilla and company.

This is a great film for control rooms, so let me underline that meme again in this Control Room blog.  You have them in nuclear stations, on aircraft carriers, wherever command and control is exercised, as well as monitoring (it's a feedback loop).

The film has a young audience in mind and wants to show them bravery, loyalty, discipline and other positives.  What a great lesson in infrastructure.  The importance of electricity is never more obvious than when it suddenly goes away and planes fall from the sky.  EMP is a real danger in our age and in 2012 the planet narrowly missed a solar flare that could have had similar consequences.  Nature is not conducting itself with human life and civilization its front burner priority, though as humans we should take responsibility for developing more backup systems and better shielding.

I'd flown from Reno the same day and had been meditating on the vast wealth humans have created for themselves, in terms of cities, roads, agriculture.  Godzilla likewise reminds us that we live in a fairly advanced global civilization.  The science fiction did not have to push very far, once the creatures themselves were admitted.  The opening credits waste no time in that they help contribute to the back story.  My conversion from skeptic to fan had a lot to do with enjoying the back story.

My thanks to the vast army of professionals who worked on this thing, a visual feast / extravaganza.  We're also celebrating the state of the art in special effects (VFX) in this movie.  Audiences come with high expectations and, speaking for myself, I was not disappointed.  Judging from audience response, I was not alone in feeling appreciative.  The Bagdad's new sound and digital projection system got a great workout.

Prior to show time I tucked into Patti Smith's new autobio at Fresh Pot across the street, a walk through from Powell's (Asylum District) so one may snag and read, and sometimes buy.  I didn't get which Robert she meant until I finally read the dust jacket, given I was in my usual non-linear mode.  Lots of interesting twists.  I missed her co-appearance with Ralph Nader at my 25th Reunion, but certainly raved about it anyway.  Yeah, I thought Horses was good, we all did.

Intellectual "Property"

 I enjoyed the story on quinoa in the recent Harper's, among other stories.  Bolivians are understandably reluctant to contribute to a corrupt system that allows patenting of things they may already know, such as how to create male-sterile varieties.  The author doesn't mention Open Source and the revolution in the software industry that has already occurred.  Pfizer has been talking Open Source.  The biologists need to learn from the engineers.

Speaking of Open Source, I'm in the beautiful Lake Tahoe area, on the California side of the lake, at all all-hands meeting of the O'Reilly School of Technology.  O'Reilly Media, parent company, is a champion of Open Source in the world, as the organizer of the annual Open Source Convention, OSCON.  I'm one of the OSCON proposals readers / rankers though not a program or track chair.  We're in a meeting about the overhaul of our codebase, currently in progress.  Angular.js and Node.js are among the technologies we're moving towards.

Sean is urging that we remain friendly towards our competition.  For example CodeSchool does a free course on using Chrome dev-tools.  Referring our students to that should not be a problem.  We're looking out for what's best for our students.  We're not under the illusion that we have some monopoly or corner on the market.  This is about taking on the Open Source mentality, says Sean, seeing ourselves as part of a larger ecosystem and emphasizing collaboration over mindless competition.

Dan is hoping to improve the student experience with the creation of cloud-based gateways closer to students with fatter pipes on the back end.  We use a lot of terminal servers and a chief complaint of our students is the slowness of this connection.  We have some workarounds that work sometimes, but in this world everything becomes available through the web site.  We shall see.

Our courseware is open, but not our homework assignments as we want students to get the benefits of working through these projects themselves, not find cut and paste solutions on-line.  Having some secrets is not inconsistent with the Open Source ethic, though it may be in conflict with the Free Software ethic.

Slopey Dopey

Hah hah, check out this new way of providing a reclining position angle: slope the seating surface down so the back can stay straight.  Why hasn't that been thought of?  So endlessly creative, these advertising geniuses.

Who'd "sit" on one of these anyway, and was that ever the point?

No, never the point.

Billboards, pretending to be chairs.  The "might have been benches" series, conceptual art.

Fighting for Treaty Rights

Similar in some ways to Five Broken Cameras: land grabby immigrants with some self-justifying mythology seize the assets of a less numerous, less well-defended people.

This is about fighting for treaty rights. The hypocrisy of prosecuting criminals while meanwhile getting away with breaking treaties is what gives Anglo-Euros their "forked tongue" reputation.

The AFSC provided a loan that helped towards making this film, which was repaid in full.

Empty Theatrics

Lots of laughter in Portland as the Water Bureau drains a bazillion gallons because somebody peed in the reservoir.

Is there any science behind it?

I was up there today and watched them hose out a swimming pool the size of a lake.  Ducks poop in that water too, but no headlines then.

I think the point is to:

(a) get some overtime pay, not a problem

and

(b) remind shallow non-thinkers why we need to take the best water in any municipality, fresh from Mount Hood, and turn it into the same underground / canned stuff everyone else has (piss poor).

People hear about Portland having better water and get jealous.

The EPA doesn't like that, makes other cities look bad, raises questions, so the better thing, they think, would be to just make Portland's "best water" reputation go away.

Draining the lake for no good reason is part of the campaign.

But are Portlanders buying it?  Clearly not.  It's a joke.

Taxes Filed

Thanks to Holden Web for the magnificent steak dinner, probably my most opulent in 2014.  Finding an excuse to celebrate was not hard:  Nikki at H&R Block got me through taxes for 2013, with me owed by The Feds, but owing Oregon.  I promptly paid by check, sending via USPO, and feel squared away with the IRS for awhile.

Flask Workshop in Portland

I spent much of the day geeking out with peers at what was billed as intermediate Python level, a dive into a 3rd party micro-web-framework named Flask.  We had the good fortune to be taught by the new O'Reilly author, Miguel Grinberg, software engineer and film maker.  He'll be presenting this tutorial at Pycon later this month in Montreal and was eager for a dry run or dress rehearsal one might call it.  That was great for us, with Idealist sponsoring with catered tamales, a very generous number.  Urban Airship provided facilities in this building used by our wind energy sector (windmills).

When you feed an http request to a Flask framework, it routes to functions with URL bits available as arguments.  The functions usually prepare a response object that goes back to the client browser.  What happens in between (between the ears of the web service) is what we call the application, and Flask is merely a framework, like clay.  Miguel had shaped it into a password protected service that had login, cookies, database access, email, iconic "gravatars", the whole nine yards.  He really touched on a lot of deep features, not dumbing it down for us, yet keeping it moving.  The applause was sincere, and for Flask as well i.e. I think we appreciated its straightforward yet powerful design.

I'm not seeing web frameworks, even just those within the Python sphere, as being at each others' throats in some Wild Kingdom, narrated by some gringo, sponsored by whatever insurance company.  It's not a Darwinian circus.

We're talking more like models of airplane, with Django more heavy / commercial, geared stereotypically for newspaper sites (which covers many cases) and Flask more the ultralight, with many frameworks in between like web2py.

Jinja2 is a sophisticated templating engine.

The back end might be PostgreSQL with postGIS options enable.

So in calling Flask "ultra-light" I'm not suggesting it's under-powered (you sit it behind Apache probably), just simple enough to wrap a lot of power tools and get them working together in a manner that pleases at least some web developers.

You can even just use it locally on your own machine, why not?  Play on some, work on others.

By the way, lest events overtake me, allow me to put a stub link here (in my own blog), Wiki style, to a post I want to write about the most recent Thirsters gathering on East Broadway.  There's an idealist theme connecting them.

I was greatly encouraged to learn more about how anthropologists are conducting themselves these days, adding to my respect of that profession and its ethics.  We had some Reed faculty present, at least one, and Forest Service, not sure what other government agencies.

Our topic was relations with "first peoples" as we might call them, descendents of earlier waves of migrants, going back some 10K years.  There's no sense in which "the Indians were all wiped out" and live on only in museums and interpretive centers.  To think that way is to live in deep ignorance.  However, I do understand where someone living in present day (2014) Philadelphia might get that impression.

Divergent (movie review)

A charming and competent story of love and bravery in a delightfully apocalyptic Chicago, now more like a playground, a self parody, a gotham.

We're funneled into guilds based on aptitude but some of us can't be made to fit in.  Wandering beyond the perimeter appears not to be an option.  The sense of being penned in is palpable.

I'm already drawing a blank on the name of her guild, the Rowdies lets call 'em (boo hiss, I hear you), and they've got the place rigged with secret rope walks and other cool stuff.  Plus they're seriously into drugs.  One gets how Erudite might become power mad and get our heroes enslaved to do their dirty work against Abnegation.  Man, that rings a bell doesn't it.  Always war on the poor (because they're weak and helpless, and might be other nations so laws don't apply).  OK, that's infantile.

We didn't get to see much child rearing going on, like the heroes were all this semi-narrow age group.  I guess we saw some kids, did we?

Anyway, I think there is still room at front at The Bagdad for a platform based performance, of comedians or whatever, i.e. the new first run movie status doesn't physically block these other possibilities, I know nothing of license agreements.

I'd been looking for this Kate Winslet / Weird Al muppets video that must have been removed from YouTube, so her name was fresh in my mind.  She's the wicked witch of the west (not really).

You'd see why comprehensivists would appreciate this moving testament against "tracking" and "aptitude tests" (high stakes testing).  If Lego World was the mind of a younger lad with a control freak dad, this was the stressed out world of an over-tested adolescent geek wanting to hang with a tougher crowd.... was it Drapes?

Wheels Turning

 I've been surfing more web pages on the Ukraine, Crimea, Russia and such.  Wikipedia breaks the paradigm of "encyclopedia" by having such up-to-the-minute reviews, with revisions in progress, narratives in the making.  I've done my share of Wikipedia contributing / editing.  Stressful sometimes.

Multnomah Meeting seems to be gearing up to form a study group or something, but really most of our regional savvy is in Bridge City, with fluent Russian speakers, at least one.  I've been reflecting on my Lithuanian experience and thinking of Facebook pages to visit.

Nationalism in the sense of ethnicity, and nationalism in the sense of nation-states, have a very uneasy co-existence, with the former organic and natural, the latter forced and awkward.  Our maps are nation-free (liberated from those dictates) at least in some of our classrooms.

I'll check for Gorby's opinions shortly, when I have some time.  Haircut next.  Our "NATO professor" needs to look more clean cut.

Pi Day

Not wanting it to go by without mention even though blogging by cell from the airport is tedious.  I'm waiting for Tara to arrive and that's fun and interesting.  What about e Day?  I would it be an e Minute:  Feb 7, 1 hour 8th minute.  True, wrong base, but then so is 3.14.

School-to-Prison Pipeline

This pipeline has become a focus of the AFSC (ACLU too).

Private for-profit companies are contracting with so-called "states" to provide in-school security personnel who fulfill functions formerly performed by vice principals and guidance counselors.

Instead of going to the principal's office, you might be sent to a law enforcement agent.  A bed in a for-profit prison has your name on it in short order.

"Undocumented humans" are also funneled to detention centers managed by these same companies.

The neo-fascist "state" of Arizona is an example a political jurisdiction that has gutted itself and outsourced state functions to corporate entities.

The question of whether we still have a "USA" is up for grabs at this point in time.

Washington, DC, never a state, has declared wars against a number of peoples around the world without the consent of the governed.

Medal of Freedom winner Buckminster Fuller wrote "The USA we have known is now bankrupt and extinct." (Grunch of Giants, St. Martins Press, 1983).  Do they read that in American History class?

CS-enabled Algebra

We've enjoyed a rollicking debate on math-teach recently.  I reiterated a long-time position, that high school students deserved math credit for a discrete math sequence of topics we could provide, as an "excuse" to piggy-back the sharing of newer math notations used by various global subcultures, such as Intel and HP.

What do I mean by "newer math notations"? Simply: computer languages.

Many of them (by no means all) use "dot notation" a grammar of noun.verb() and noun.adjective (or call it property, or attribute).  The period or dot is important.  A.b means A has some feature named b, maybe its age or its level of enlightenment.

With dot notation, you've got behaviors responsive to arguments, and you've got persistent state, and no, that's not the only lingo out there, just one of 'em.  A CS-enabled algebra would be friendly to this ethnicity's lingo, among others (not exclusively).

I've suggested our economy in Cascadia, high technology intensive, could benefit from a school system that allowed for these alternative for-math-credit courses.  They'd be elective in the same sense trig and stats have been elective.  Yet three years of math credit is mandatory, in Oregon, for a high school diploma.  You have various ways of adding up to that.  The goal:  make discrete math courses count (some say "digital math" courses -- the labels are not that critical).

Cascadia, if you've not read Wikipedia, is the Pacific Northwest coastal area north and south of Seattle, some say all the way to the Bay Area, some draw a line at Arcata.  It's more a science fictional jurisdiction and one of the "nine nations of North America" popularized by urban legend and some key writers.  Northward, we could reach well into British Columbia, so-called.  These are thought experiments you may indulge in, as a way to review some geography if otherwise bored.  Good exercise. What other nations might you name?

This script was not my solo creation.  On the contrary, I was overlapping with high school computer science teachers anyway, joining the annual programming tournament at Willamette University through Free Geek.  When I presented at OS Bridge, the Software Association of Oregon was in the audience and it was from SAO that I learned of the concrete proposal to wedge in a discrete math course or sequence, geared for high schools.  Teachers from all over the state were encouraged to brainstorm about content of this for-math-credit offering.  We had a day long meeting in Sherwood, a neighborhood south of Portland out toward Wilsonville along I-5.

To sum up, I sometimes cast myself as an unregistered lobbyist, not often seen in Salem, yet definitely with an agenda.  My Oregon Curriculum Network has consistent / illustrative content.  Determining where I'm coming from is not that difficult, per the aforementioned math-teach thread.

If you want to join in the debate, I encourage finding regional colleagues, as the issues we raise tend to manifest in different ways by region.  Having solutions in one area does not automatically imply a translatable result.  There's no one-size-fits-all panacea.

Princeton Club of Oregon

:: global netnight on mentoring ::