Quick Loop (Infrastructure 101)

Our viewpoint from mid-Columbia was impressive, of sea lions, of ships.  Not that many ships actually.

On the Washington side we saw the grain elevator working, or heard it at least, with Golden Cecilie, brand new, appearing to have a full belly.

The car-carrying Delphinus Leader appeared to have delivered its load.

The container shipping terminal we went by, however, was eerily quiet amidst talk of labor disputes up and down the western coastline.

The Columbia takes ocean-going vessels as far as the outlet of the Willamette and a little higher.

What takes cargo on farther, or brings cargo from further inland, are barges, trucks, and trains.

The barges enjoy a series of locks, getting them past the big dams.  The train tracks go up both sides whereas the main east-to-west freeway along the gorge is I-84 (south edge), with I-5 north-to-south.

Containers are lifted directly off or onto ships from both trains and trucks, with barges doing more bulk items.

The rail lines do less work busing people (done by Amtrak) than freight, with airlines and private cars moving most the people, or Bolt Bus or whatever.

Freeways cater to private car traffic, shared with cargo-carrying semis (tractors with trailers, up to three).  The road and warehouse network brings goods closest to most cities.

Warehouses get used to repack different loads quite a bit.  A shipload of teddy bears from Asia gets divvied out to the different retail outlets, both big box and boutique, though some may stay with Amazon, a new kind of retail shopping.

A grain-carrying ocean-goer will park alongside an elevator and load up with grain that arriving by barge and by train.

Containers go by truck but aren't for grain usually.  Grain doesn't get shipped in containers, not in bulk quantities.  Special train cars, covered hoppers (not box cars) are best for transporting grain, and barges.  Trucks are fine for baked bread.

These sorts of infrastructure tours may not be practical as bus tours (we were on a boat) i.e. field tripping school children are not seen in droves apprehending their ecosystem / biosphere.  They need this information though, to understand their ecosystem.

With Google Earth and immersive video, these important aspects of a child's or adult's exoskeleton, the civilizational shell, may be explored and communicated.

Noticeable on the cargo ships were their bright orange escape pods, angled for rapidly shooting off and getting away from what might be a fire hazard.  The captain need not go down with the ship, as in storybooks.

The hazards of transport, the kinds of things that go wrong, are much on the minds of many who live here, as there's lots of talk of taking bigger health risks in terms of the volume and volatility of the cargo mix through the ports.

I've said little about air freight so far.

You might be surprised how many tons of commercial carpet have been flown from Atlanta to Tokyo!

Then we need to add the communications channels, which carry programs (e.g. via TCP / IP) and the power distribution networks, which channel electrical power, natural gas. Many networks to learn about.

Wanderers 2015.3.10

Our guests, Brian Haug and Eli Eichenauer, are crowd sourcing their businesses based on the new Crowd Funding law, encouraging Oregonians to invest in Oregon-based enterprises.

A small number of business were chosen to showcase the model.  Small enterprises scattered across the state have started up various green industries that care about profits, people, and environment as an integrated bottom line.

Oregon is around the fifteenth state to define a Crowd Funding game. 

You have limits on how much you can raise, both minimum and maximum.  The law passed in January 15.  Hatch, a community innovation lab, wrote Hatch Oregon, a web site implementing the game (picture Kickstarter).

Software engineering allows many games to be implemented, with variable risk levels, possible payouts.  On this one, you get money back, if the business thrives.  You've got something like stocks and bonds. 

The new law allows investors to take risks without engaging in public trading around IPOs in the usual, more exclusive way.  As long as people understand the rules, and the state approves, these experiments remain possible.  [ If the state does not approve, it's called a "numbers game" or something, and the FBI gets more annoyed (sometimes, depending on jurisdiction). ]

Hatch players need to be Oregonians.  Investors go shopping for businesses to invest in, through the web site.  Hatch is a nonprofit and does not take a cut. 

Some of the success story establishments pay rent if on site, so when the law works, Hatch looks good because its tenants look good.  Training, listing, launching -- a "purpose wheel" is in the making.

The business talking to us tonight Of Hops & Men, a Taproom-Barbershop, is not open for business yet, but will be shortly we hope, in 2016.  The shop will be OLCC licensed.  As a CSN guy brainstorming about a network of licensed coffee shops, my ears perked up.

An 18-block area near the Lloyd Center named Hassalo on Eighth (an eco-district development) is currently under construction.  This is property close to the Oregon Convention Center.  Offices are flooding in, bringing lots of new retail, hence OH&M.  The picture of Portland's NE quadrant in 2035 shows impressive growth projections, a busy skyline.

Brian, a former Navy diver, Peace Corps vet (I know him from Thirsters) is a 4th generation Portlander.  His Portland pedigree is impressive.  He can feed that in to the decor. 

He has a floor plan laid out. 

He hopes to work behind the bar, with the hair cutters paying him for their high profile positions. 

Hair cutters are like journeymen and bring their own equipment. 

Despite the name, women are quite welcome, the maleness being a branding theme not a deterrent to female customers.

If Brian gets his preferred location he'll be a stone's throw from the Max line.  He wants bicycle-related decor, but not overdone.  Digital Pour, like at Bailey's and Growler's, will show the beers.

 Hotel Eastlund is growing out of the old Red Lion.  A new Oregon Convention Center hotel should be here by 2017 maybe?  For Pycon round two?   

I'd like to see a Henry George based analysis of the Hassalo project.  Taxing land value, versus income, is how that game is played and its proponents claim they're able to "raise all boats" more successfully.
Eli is doing WebLively, Your Wellness Network, a website for clients to maintain a secure profile with medical information. 

Picture Facebook, but HIPAA compliant. 

Professionals (doctors, nurses, other health professionals) also store profiles, but publicly. 

Picture a dating service betwixt clients and professionals, but perhaps with a team, not just one on one.

My questions had to do with patients wanting to withhold information i.e. why does a massage therapist need to know anything about my bout with malaria six years ago (just making that up). 

Exactly: the client is able to set permissions for different specialists. 

OK then, I've been thinking about these issues for awhile, so the model feels familiar to me already.

Hatch Oregon is involved here as well of course, i.e. WebLively is another showcase business developing as a result of the new Crowd Funding law.

Alien Boy (movie review)

Jim Jim, who went by various names, was a work in progress.  He liked Mad Magazine and comic books, as I do, and was finding his way in the Portland punk rock scene, or trying to.

James ended up getting hospitalized for mental illness and was on a long slow road to recovery, with an address in downtown Portland (finally) when his life took a nose dive.  He'd gone off his meds and was needing more help than anyone had to give, given a network of friends is not always a real safety net.  He was passed being able to take care of his personal hygiene -- but had the potential to bounce back, under care, all talking heads agree.

At the bottom of his luck, though still with an apartment, a police officer and a social worker came to his door, knocking repeatedly.  He asked if a police officer were present (a chief terror), then he bolted, unpursued.

Later, when urinating (when you have to go you have to go), different police accosted him.  Terrified of police encounters ever since getting beat up in Utah, he bolted again but these officers were not the nice kind and beat him badly, then used a taser, in front of many witnesses having lunch outside.

The police knew they had broken him, likely killed him, so the game after that was to make it look good.  Spin control started early, with allegations about cocaine on his person, as if that would explain their excessive force actions.  But the crowd wasn't buying.  Having witnessed a murder, the lunch eaters were upset (the waiter included), and thirsty for justice.  Police need to show more self control in a civilized town.

J. wasn't quite dead yet though.  The paramedics showed up and offered to take him to the hospital, but the cops, having broken his ribs in 26 places, were not eager to tell the medics they were the likely cause of death on the record, so the agreement was to waive the patient's medical treatment and remove him to the county jail where the cops could control the narrative.

What followed was caught on tape on the prison cameras:  the police carrying a terribly wounded man around, not knowing what to do with him, and refusing him treatment, until he died in their care.

The public continued to thirst for justice for many years.

Immediate family eventually got a settlement of over a million dollars, as the city needed to stick with the union and not let anyone get fired for brutality.  Losing a civil suit was the best they could do.  After all, the whole point of a police department is to be brutal, like a military.  People understand what they're paying for:  the state's thugs (good guys) versus the bad guys.  Thugs are supposed to be badass.  So the cops who committed the homicide were never charged, which is why we shouldn't call it homicide.  The court said not guilty.  Soldiers don't murder people either.  English is funny that way, very law-abiding.

The Mayors keep apologizing though (first Potter, then Adams), and the City keeps needing to settle on other cases of abuse.

Clearly the training is at fault, a finding made early.  Tackling a fleeing 147 pound man from behind because he was urinating on public or private property is actually not what the training suggests is appropriate.

However a lot of this "training" is more hearsay than anything actual cops have been exposed to.  Portland cannot afford top-level training for its people, although even if only in self protection, the union should insist.

Leaving people vulnerable because of inadequate professional skills is the great disservice.

My thanks to Multnomah Meeting's Peace and Social Concerns Committee (PSCC) for bringing this video to my attention.  I'll wave the DVD around at tonight's APC meeting (AFSC volunteers + staff) before returning it to Movie Madness nearby.

Back @ Beaches

:: PDX ::

I'm back at Beaches in chauffeur mode, seeing Steve Holden off to the UK.  Rather recently, I was saying good bye to Lindsey, as she took off for Nepal.  We had some farewell beers, and food, in this same establishment, at the D, E gate end of the concourse.

We started up another Google Group today, for NPYM record-keepers.  Friends ("Quakers") are into record-keeping.  In order to cohere as a self-governing business, a Business Meeting needs (A) organizational memory and (B) structure.

I've been making airplane reservations, hotel reservations, rental car reservations.  Everything is so convenient and there's no need to pick up a phone to ask some busy person to take real time out of their day.  The phone was too intrusive.  Asynch is the way to go.  Friends learned that early.  We put silence between our communications, as a matter of course.

Even though the airport FlyPDX domain was not about to let me download Anaconda, Steve had a way of getting it over to me (memory stick), so I took the opportunity to blow away Python 3.2 in favor of Anaconda's 3.4.  That leaves me to face the music in PyCharm, which I expect will be easily reconfigurable.

Followup: turns out I hadn't really blown away 3.2 so PyCharm was unaffected.

@ Beaches

Song of The Sea (movie review)

This Irish / Celtic tale, beautifully rendered I thought, was in that same ballpark as my wife's Turning the Wheel and its storytelling.  She went to Ireland with Elizabeth and Gayle to visit those kinds of places, imaginary yet real (Ireland is a real place but the proper noun is not a constant, as one might say Eire, as one might say Nippon for Japan).

The dad is sad, having lost his wife in childbirth, and she's got some problems probably stemming from lack of oxygen at birth.  She's gifted though, and warms the arts of the frozen, which is are fate in Narnia as well, whenever the Ice Queen holds sway.  This world has an old witch too.  The echoes of Spirited Away were maybe not just in my head.

The big dog is adorable.  The family dynamics are a great hook.  I saw Step Brothers recently, a gift from Lindsey, a comedy with Will Farrell and John C. Reilly, of whom I became a fan through Check It Out, and am in the mood to look at all that kid stuff again, not that it ever goes away or anything.  I've always loved cartoons. 

I wouldn't call this a comedy though, more an action adventure or, lets get real:  a fairytale.

A Tale of Two Logos

:: mosaic @ PSU ::

Way back in the 1990s, when the Internet, and the graphical web especially, were novelties, I was encouraged to discover the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) was already using the IVM (Bell's Kite) for a logo, something on which Fuller had briefly (in geological terms) held a patent.

I started leveraging this fact, only to find out later the NCTM legal team advised taking more control of the logo and rebranding as something more slippery:  an infinity symbol, more mysterious, more alluring (or whatever cosmetic concerns).  Bucky's name:  sliced out of the picture.

Fast forward to yesterday and I learn the IMU (International Mathematical Union) has a new logo.  These are top mathematicians, not just high school teachers, and they overtly mention Bucky Fuller in their video about how their logo was conceived.

Now that shows the difference in caliber, between bona fide mathematicians, not afraid to acknowledge their influences, and lawyers, afraid of losing control but not really having any in the first place.

Despicable Me (movie review)

Like the Madagascar series, with which this series has much in common, the characters are still evolving and branching out, with movies of their own.  Madagascar spawned the Penguins thereof, and the two Despicable Me films, which I saw out of order, have set the stage for Minions, not out yet as of this posting.

A similar plot element pops up frequently in movies these days, given our fear about "franken-food", GMOs etc.  The baddies are into genetic modification or transmogrification or monsterfication (monsterization) -- but then is that really a new activity?  No.  The evil genius has always been into making monsters, only reality has changed.

Gru is an interesting character, compared by some to Boris of Boris & Natasha from Rocky & Bullwinkle days.  He's extremely flamboyant in ways completely inconsistent with the usual idea of a "spy":  someone living "under cover".  He has many good qualities.  A lot of the best humor, though, comes through his minions.

Quaker Terminology

:: attenders ::

For the most part I think we use "slate" the way most people do as in "list of candidates" but we carry it over to mean "approved cast" as well.

When you get a playbill with a list of players in a show:  that's a slate, the way we use the word.

The other meaning is:  "not yet approved" as when when Nominating goes to Business Meeting with a "slate for approval" (the more mainstream usage).

So we could say "unapproved and approved slates" and be plain (clear) in our meaning.

As NPYM's technology clerk, I've been looking at npym_slate (a web page) to see if we've filled any holes still showing as empty, or if we're showing any ad hoc committees that have since been laid down.

Clint has been making changes.  This is an "approved slate" we're talking about, just sometimes the web-displayed version lags what clerks carry around in their heads.

Domestic Affairs

Perhaps as a consequence of the smartphone still having Alzheimer's, overloaded with Aviate, I managed to spend four TriMet e-tickets getting from A to B, which pissed me off, and I thumbed my irritation in the direction of the app makers.  To their credit, they refunded my Visa, and to mine, I'm still using eTickets, being a credit to my religion (one in favor of appropriate tech, including these handy GIS / navigation devices).

Speaking of Alzheimer's, did you see where Putin might have Asperger's all of a sudden?  That's not catching, like Ebola, so he's had it all along and only his nurses knew.  The martial arts training was all a way of diverting our attention from his stare or whatever open source signals are telling the Pentagon goat staring types what's really happening in Putin's brain (as opposed to his soul, which Bush checked out and briefed the Pentagon about already, presumably).

CBS is the one with the story.  I'm yukking it up on Facebook about it, but with empathy for those who suffer from this syndrome, which nowhere in the Constitution is listed as a disqualifying characteristic for a USA president.  I've always seen Ollie North as autistic, yet he'd have been at least as strong as Romney dontcha think?

Back to my kitchen:  dish washer has run amuk, leaking into the basement.

Thirsters last night:  kudos to Mrs. Beebe (PhD) for her presentation on stellar Filipina women who've not only tended our ailing (e.g. in the Holy Land) but have run banks, software companies, done everything men consider worthy.  But was leaving the Philippines a prerequisite for success?  One may always wonder, but one life is the one set of cards, and we don't get to play "as if" all that easily as when fantasizing about lives we didn't have.

I was glad to see (in her slides) more of the history in condensed form since my departure from those islands, after many formative years, in the 1970s, to attend a four year university (Princeton).  I was back briefly right before Cory Aquino's rise to power, but not since.  I still buy San Miguel sometimes, just for the mood and the memories (not that I was a huge beer drinker in high school, just we liked to hang out and enjoy one anothers' company -- what a lot of school is about, or should be, if you're lucky).

Superbowl 2015

Yes, I'm partaking of the national secular religion today, Superbowl Sunday.  I'll link to some previous blog posts, as proof I've been around the block at least once in this cult.

I've got the pre-game on screen and feel properly endowed with comestibles and imbibables, namely cheetohs (flamey), Dr. Pepper (diet), and Torpedo IPA from Sierra Nevada.  Plus local sports bars are but blocks away.

Dr. Charles Bolton just called, the sociology professor.  I think he understands my willingness to partake in a social ritual, even though distant from football (US style).  I think back to the Mayans and the importance of ball games in this hemisphere.

US football may inherit from rugby but I think the seriousness with with civilization takes spectator sports is not confined to the North Atlantic Anglos or anything so restrictive.  Athletic events abound wherever anthropologists are willing to seek them.

Yes, I care about memes (memetics) and therefore advertising and so on, and may have something later to say about that.

So far my only story is about Patriots deflating their balls or something.  I'll no doubt be doing more homework on that, given how easy a search engine makes researching such stories.  Time was, one needed to dig in the library or find gold mines in books full of such juicy stories.

Omni-triangulating is easier now.  One to two pounds under.  Lots of other coverage out there, not saying it all ends with one story.

For those not from around here, US football, unlike soccer football, features goals high off the ground and no goalie per se.  You're allowed not only to touch the ball but to hug it like a teddy bear and make it your best friend ever.  Kicking it is allowed but in special circumstances only.  Hitting it with your head, which is supposed to be in a helmet, can only be a mistake.

Bookmark: one of yesterday's, to the Math Forum (familiar themes, pg. 119).

Hah, I liked that Katie Couric with Brian Gumble flashback commercial, for BMW's new electric model.  The Kickstart commercial was pretty rad.  Bud did another Clydesdale and puppy scenario, fun.  M&M gag was good.  Invisible woman: funny (with Matt Damon).

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.

Birdman (movie review)

I got to Columbia River Brewery (CRB) early and checked in via Swarm, leaving a record in my Facebook profile.

Hollywood Theater, a nonprofit with a loyal membership, including friends of mine, was doing a brisk business this day after Christmas, 2014.  Matt and I were there to see Birdman.  I saw Wild on Christmas Day, also showing here, but I saw it at Lloyd Center.

We both admired Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice and I saw a lot of continuity in the character.  A raving psychotic who should be supervised, or at least not be given openable windows, is allowed to pursue a dubious career in theater, at least in his paranoid / locked-up own mind.

His daughter does her best with this guy but is showing a lot of birdman tendencies herself.  Both achieve some notoriety, with her registers being more cyber-spatial (Cyberia-focused); she's following Twitter and all that.  Having seen Wild the day before, this young one's character reminded me of Cheryl's.

Matt and I had mostly critical things to say about the movie, but really we were talking about the whole melodramatic / theatrical culture.

I'm not exactly a quietist, as a Quaker, but on the quietist-to-ranter spectrum, I'm more a quietist than this theatrical bunch, prone to expletives, like the Nixonian White House.  I'm certainly known to rant sometimes, giving vent to invective.

But then, to be fair, this cast needed to survive on Broadway and pump it up incredibly, every night, for eager audiences, any one of which might contain a powerful media critic of enormous influence.  That's a lot of stress.  Show business drives people nuts, and likewise attracts nuts to its swirling core (cite The Zero Theorem -- nutty and fun).

We decided to hit Laurelwood Pub, adjacent Rheinlander, which used to occupy the CRB location nearer the theater, only to find it was packed to the gills.  We checked the pub I often go to after Hollywood, but that was packed too (not a work or school night).  CRB was comfortably busy with just cleared booths.  I got War Elephant Double IPA and a sandwich, Matthew a salad.

Birdman is over the top intentionally I'm sure and with enough psychoanalysis we could get something spinning around the secret psychic powers (shades of Stalker).  I'm going to leave that to other critics.

Test Piloting a QR-code

with special thanks to David Chandler, Leslie Hickcox, and to Portland Mennonites

Hobbit Economics

"everything is awesome!" (so much gold!)

So King Thorin has a serious headache with all that gold, inherited from the nasty dragon.  If he just lets it out the door then pretty soon it won't be that scarce.  We saw how the villagers treated it, but how long would that last?  It would have to be meted out, and you would need to be an Einstein, or Milton Friedman, to figure out the velocity of money issues.  How fast would be the military build-up?  Would inflation lead to food riots, with wheel barrows of gold barely buying a zucchini?

What are orc children like?  Did we see a hatchery in a back episode?  Do Mr. & Mrs. Orc ever party, and do they form nuclear families at all?  They don't appear to have much use for money in other words, or the finer things in life.  That's probably why Smaug's Mountain has to be "strategic" in some battle ground, as a bunch of gold is not attractive enough.

Indeed, what can gold buy you?  The Elves have what they need so remain aloof.  No HDTV, no iPhones... there's precious little money can buy back then, and one gets tired of mere jewelry and gold bricks used for street pavement.  So what?  What's so "wealthy" about streets paved with gold when you get right down to it?  Slippery, impractical.  Back to Thorin's nightmare.

One can almost read Gandalf's lips there at the end when he says Bilbo is a terrible liar.  We all know he's got the ring and Gandalf understands the Shire is the best place for it as the saga continues, with Mordor on its military build-up, post face-off with the elvyn chyk (tail tuck time).  We know that in the audience as well, that Gandalf is just biding his time, plus the book readers among us even better understand how the ring is increasing Bilbo's willingness to lie, never mind how bald facedly i.e. badly.

The first of the three Hobbit films got me claustrophobic and I'm reminded by last night's Solstice banter that the book is that way too.  Now that I've seen the Snowden documentary, I can't help but make the pun "snowed in" and draw the parallel of getting stuck in some hotel room in Hong Kong for N hours.  Lets just start on some adventure already!  People should let up on Assange.  In general, lets be a lot less Mordor-like, less Orc-like, if we really think the Hobbits won or deserved to.

Where's the Fair? (movie review)

Where's the Fair? asks why the USA no longer seems to care about the World's Fair or Expo concept, having withdrawn from the international body that plans them while producing only lackluster pavilions and then only when goaded by foreign governments to step up to the plate.

Talking heads propose various theories as to why the State and/or Commerce Department have dropped the ball, while the Freedom of Information Act begets a lot of heavily redacted documents.  No one seems to know for sure.

The film spends very little time on the Montreal dome of 1967, Buckminster Fuller's contribution, and mentions Kabul and Khrushchev not at all.  Minus the Bucky thread, perhaps too much of the narrative unravels?

Washington does not want to get trapped into doing another dome probably, while winning hearts and minds is an undertaking that city despairs of doing anymore, having alienated just about everyone. 

The confidence to spin truly hopeful visions of the future is not in the USIA's repertoire anymore, as there's no longer a USIA.

I learned quite a bit from this film.  I had no idea Spokane, Washington had hosted a World's Fair in the 1970s, or maybe I'd known that once and forgot.   Archival clips from some of the events were exciting.

Perhaps the USA is just too diverse to be represented by some out of touch State Department in any case.  Cascadia could have its own pavilion someday maybe?  GM did, in Shanghai in 2010, with its Chinese partner company.

Milan 2015 will be the site of the next Expo.  The documentary suggests the USA will not have a pavilion but from the perspective of December 2014, we do expect one.

:: rendering:  usa pavilion 2015 ::

Followup proposal:
A possible food candidate for the American Food Pavilion

Wisdom @ Work

Penguins of Madagascar (movie review)

Strange as it may sound if you're not used to thinking of movies in a curriculum context, ala film school, this cartoon deserves doing some homework first.

The Madagascar franchise is already well evolved, and this narrative follows an off shoot:  the special ops team of penguins, so endearing in the earlier episodes.

Ideas come quickly at high bandwidth, fighting boredom all the way (I was never bored); ideas about physics, about relationships, and about human (or octopus) motivations.

The villain feels royally dissed that all the zoo patrons coo over penguins and not him.  His revenge:  "monsterize" penguins.  The giant ray gun, a staple of villain cartoons, is playing the usual role.

Another special ops team appears on the scene, somewhat modeling the so-called "special relationship" between the US and UK.

The US broke off from the UK at a high management level, as well as in the rank and file, and the two cultures still have a lot of the same attitudes toward what "special ops" looks like (ala James Bond, though I didn't catch that many direct references to this Ian Flemming character).

Seeing Penguins of Madagascar and Big Hero 6 both on the same day, with a few hours in between (enough time to visit Yard House for dinner, bus home, come back with the car), made for some interesting thinking.

John Malkovich plays a great villain, bravo.

Note closing credits:  they get it right with the hexagons as connoting high tech.

By 2014 we have successfully migrated from the right angled XYZ look to the more futuristic / organic IVM look, when it comes to connoting high technology.  Graphene is where it's at.

When buying two 3D movie tickets at once (the 2nd for Big Hero 6 at 9:50 PM) for like $29, I mentioned something about breaking the bank.  The ticket lady said she didn't mean to be rude but if I were age 60 or greater I could claim a discount.

Although I have the requisite white hair, I wasn't sure if she'd card me so demurred: "I couldn't prove it" I said, "but I'll be 60 soon though, and then I can watch all the cartoons I want!".  The guy behind me thought that was funny.  Me too.

Men Were Too Slow

Given ongoing ops in Bangalore to raise living standards for children by sharing a more intelligent STEM curriculum (OLPC an influence), I'm seeing a next campaign shaping up.

You may remember my Kite campaign, a connecting of dots that included Alexander Graham Bell's kites.  This campaign will be similar in that many dots will connect, and many light bulbs will go on.

Before that it was "Aristotle was right, remember the Mite", homage to space-filling tetrahedrons (Sommerville a champion).

The gist of the new campaign:

Men had thirty years to appreciate Synergetics and a few of them did, but mostly the Bucky stuff, being about livingry and not killingry, is about "girlie man" stuff i.e. is "for girls" i.e. "patriarchy [sic] is too dumb to get it" (as in:  too lazy, too slow -- a non-virtuous kind of dumb).

This taps into pent up fury against patronizing men, plus helps counter the Barbie Syndrome.  Works well in India, but other places too.

More on Facebook.  Stay tuned. Wicca an influence as well.

Good Bye Party

I'm at a low key good bye party for Steve Holden, who comes and goes from Portland quite a lot, but with this departure having a penultimate flavor.  We look forward to having him back in 2015.

Steve lent some serious technology to the Blue House:  a color printer, now in the Buddha Room, and an Apple computer, to which I added an HDMI monitor and USB keyboard.  Lindsey uses this setup, freeing my Samsung tablet for use as my reader.  I bought Dataclysm this evening.

I'm chauffeuring Steve to PDX tomorrow morning.

Progress...

After watching a few motivational Youtubes about Neo4j, which I'd been playing with using the default Movies tutorial, py2neo just started working as advertised.

What I'm still not clear on is where this data persists, and will Tom Hanks come floating to the surface, some castaway, perhaps lost in our Quaker terminal?

The "4j" should be seen as meaning "for Java" i.e. Neo4j targets the JVM, as do Scala and Clojure.  No matter:  the C-family of Pythons have an API to the engine, just as they have the standard DB API for talking to SQL engines.

Neo4j, in being an open source graph database, is "not SQL" or "~SQL" per the graphic below, aimed at elucidating Model, View, Controller architecture in the form of a web application.

Mockingjay Part 1 (movie review)

My daughter warned me as I entered one of Plato's many caves (The Bagdad) -- having just bought her his Republic, a new translation -- that this would not be a happy world, beer and pizza notwithstanding, nor one tied off with a bow (being a Part One).

Katniss, Tara noted (having seen it earlier), had broken through to a next meta-level of The Hunger Games when manipulating cat behavior in a bomb shelter (cave), suddenly seeing her own role (as Katniss) with new eyes (bingo, enlightenment strikes).

I'm somewhat in awe of this whole series which snuck up on me.  The pieces it fits together are pieces we've seen before, but the arrangement seems deftly done and that impresses me.  More to think about.  The Wag the Dog aspect is especially intriguing i.e. the PR dimension.

I've been writing about PR a lot on the Math Forum, sometimes in complement with a disillusioned "mad man" from Bangalore, soured on sloganeering from having pushed too many products he did not personally approve of.

Onion Pie

Steve Holden is a pretty good chef and blogs have traditionally kept recipes.  I only have one so far, for a lentil dish.  Here's another:

Take six pounds of onions, and chop off tips, skin outer layer, halve, then slice with cross-section laying flat.

Add to large sauce pan with stick of butter and steam over medium heat until cooked down and flavorful, about 25 minutes.  Preheat oven to 425F.

Add to onions:  four slices (rashers) of sliced bacon, sauteed; pint of sour cream; two heaping tablespoons flour; salt; pepper, four eggs lightly whipped to blend yokes.

Fill pie shells and bake for about 45 minutes to an hour, until golden brown.

Extra filling may go in portion-sized bowls.

NYPM IT Comm Business

I was cracking some jokes with the IT Committee about our retro, largely spreadsheet-based record keeping practices within NPYM.

We're not universally using such scatter-brained tech, as M3 uses Quickbooks, which is at least database based, what you need where monetary transactions are happening.  Keeping track of money on spreadsheets is not especially professional, though they're great for "what if" planning and doodling.

Imagine a futuristic NPYM wherein the Secretary, wanting a list of current M&O clerks throughout the region, simply runs a reporting routine that polls the MM servers behind the scenes.  These Meetings of Record, the Monthly Business Meetings, are where the real action is and their servers are on-line 24/7.

NPYM is just about gathering together a few summary reports and providing Directory Services, in addition to producing Annual Session, our roaming conference, like a circus.

In reality though, in 2014, we use only a few SQL engines, let alone NoSQL engines, for member tracking and there's no uniform API allowing the central office to send HTTP requests to any of them, for a list of current members.  They're not on-line in the first place.

Meetings do not host CMFs and/or depend on FGC Cloud Services, even though NPYM is technically not within FGC.  Friends tend to use Facebook instead, which I'm not saying is terrible, but the data then goes to Facebook, not to our offices.

I've set a target of 2016 for having at least two Monthly Meetings able to demonstrate an ability to let households maintain their own records on-line.  Our NPYM Directory would then practice polling them in answer to NPYM Secretary queries.  Worth a try anyway.

Back to Teasing

We've got this character named Israeli Knight, seriously.  I call him IK for short (see below).

You can dig through math-teach yourself if interested, an acquired taste for sure.

Anyway, he's a racist of the classic sort, and Biblical to boot, so I asked him this question, as a way of spiraling back to a favorite video:

Say IK I've been wanting your take on this short operetta about a black King and a white woman who decide to collaborate on an oasis development project, thereby attracting attention from the natives. Do you think it's a good idea to form inter racial business partnerships of this kind?

Ongoing repartee: [1][2][3]

CitizenFour (movie review)

Big slow-moving bureaucracies that can't do their own thinking are easy targets for the faster thinkers, human individuals, brains with integrity, geeks or what have you.

The NSA is easy to crack and spy on, its mostly military-minded leaders none too bright and none too keen on protecting the Constitution, which they most likely know little to nothing about.

Google is easy to spy on as well, as is Verizon.  These companies have little to no ability to protect against serious investigative reporters, let alone geeks.

The table-turning of Wikileaks etc. is obvious:  the real intelligence community owns the unimaginative bureaucrats, the laughing stock victims of professional spying.

No, I'm not saying Snowden was a criminal, guilty of espionage.  Like Manning, he's a bright kid who wants to uphold and defend democracy.  He thinks for himself.  Unlike most generals.

So what do we learn from "spying" on the NSA: that most of its people are average Americans e.g. they get along to go along and aren't particularly principled.  So what else is new?   The technology is new.

I remember researching "PGP guy" (Zimmermann) versus Bobby Inman (then head of NSA).  Should ordinary citizens have a military-grade skill set?  The opportunity, the freedom to have that, is what counts.

Organized government, like organized religion, says no.  Who asked them though, right?

Anyway, PGP plays a role in this movie, as does encryption as a general theme.

This film could be shown in high schools to:

(a) inspire patriotism and respect for geeks and
(b) motivate more learning of maths, crypto in particular.

I saw it with Carol and Melody at Living Room Theater #6 in downtown Portland, a couple blocks from the main Powell's.

Martian Math

 
1 x 1 = 1

2 x 2 = 4

 
3 x 3 = 9

3 x 2 = 6

Wanderers 2014.11.4

David Chandler was our speaker tonight.  He's made a name for himself in 911 circles by proving, fairly persuasively, that WTC-7 fell "at the speed of gravity" meaning "controlled" demolitions were happening, in addition to crashing airplanes (no airplane hit "WTF-7").

NIST in its final report agrees WTC-7 was in free fall for over two seconds.  The North and South Towers had their own pathologies.

The Twin Towers were certainly alluring as a symbol of cogitation, including to me, in nearby Jersey City for some years, a high school math teacher.  I was taken up with the plight of Tibet and seeing office towers as a place for "virtual nations", like corporations, to base themselves.

My fantasies tended toward offices of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas in respective towers, maybe goofy but I thought poetic, given the imposing nature of the towers.  This was before the family relocated its HQS to Bhutan.

Were one to dig up my crudely hand-drawn comic books of the day, the Twin Towers in silhouette would show up on various pages, and one might imagine I had nefarious designs.  The designs were benign however.

I'd ride the PATH train from Jersey City to WTC quite often, Manhattan's Penn Station even more often.  I had other designs as well, our family (dad in particular) having "planning" on its resume:  for a high definition Dymaxion Map billboard on the back of Loew's Theater (near my house); a rail spur to Newark Airport (like Portland's MAX to PDX); an IMAX in The Stanley.

:: big dreams for JCNJ ::

When 911 actually happened, Dawn and I, in Portland, Oregon, were expecting a wedding anniversary, which it was, but not one of the normal kind obviously.

As a matter of logic, one cannot conclude from evidence of an intentional demolition that hitting the button on the buildings was long planned for that day, even if there was such a button.  How many more would be saved versus burned alive?  So many were leaping to their deaths, would that be going on for several days then?

Would helicopters and long ladders have made it all better?  Viewers would have felt moody and blue watching all that dying day after day, not that they weren't moody and blue already.

The "mercy killing" theory is the antithesis of the "part of the same assault" theory.

In between is the "needed to do it there and then for insurance reasons" theory.  Only the "coordinated assault" scenario really requires pre-planning.  Other scenarios require quick judgement calls one may question in hindsight... and a button.

Depending on the theory, different groups get to push the button.  Bin Laden pushed it?  Yeah right. Not enough is made of Bin Laden being the construction company.

The idea a building of that size would need to come down someday, so would be pre-wired for self destruction -- seems like a good idea at least.  Nothing lasts forever.  I'm not sure you'd need to sneak around adding explosives later.  Paul Laffoley's story suggests otherwise.

New World Order

Whereas the financial press may date the end of the US as we know it to the 1980s, when terminal bankruptcy was trumpeted as a sign of bogus immortality, the layperson on the ground is more likely to date the desovereignization process to the breakdown of borders in the Middle East.

As of 2014, no one really knows where the borders are among the former nations of Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Iraq and so on.  Political maps survive, showing snap shots of various people's belief systems, however the credibility of such was draining away from the 1940s onward.

Ironically, a chief catalyst in the breakdown of the nation-state system was the Pentagon's "strategy" of bombing whomsoever it pleased in the No Man's Land around Afghanistan-Pakistan.  The cruise missile and later drone attacks were corrosive of the whole sovereignty concept and softened up that framework for eventual garbage collection.

Of course Romans did not really know Rome as an Empire had "fallen" on any given day.  Those narratives get invented later and only hold water through repetition and agreement, as stories are much more than necklaces of facts strung together.  The infrastructure of passports, customs, import / export taxes and so on remains, especially in areas where borders are enforced.

The end of the nation-state system happened first on paper in the back office, where those in the know were holding high cards or at least knew what a "high card" was.  Then "border rot" propagated by Pentagon policies, helped the world's "average joes" come to terms with the fragility of the entire nation-state framework.  Life would go on amidst the rubble of once proudly recognizable jurisdictions.

Gothic (movie review)

In this obscure Ken Russell film, a bunch of over-privileged white people with servants to wait on them and nothing important to do, drive each other crazy in various ways, only to return to "normal" when the sun reappears.  Lord Byron and company, but no Ada.  I'm hoping for more movies about Ada.

Hash Tag M3

Probably #M3 won't catch on, certainly not right away.

Even our Clerk of Communications is not into Twitter and he's at least a standard deviation ahead of his peers when it comes to navigating around in Cyberia.

I expect #MMM will be far more popular, once more of us start using Twitter.

As NPYM Technology Clerk, I should role model how we do things in Twitter-ville.

:: in my twitter profile ::

:: going out to subscribers ::

Fall Fashion

I've been working on this look for awhile.  This is a different hat, a present from Glenn.  My Paul Kaufman original has gone missing again, maybe will show up on eBay someday.

Libby, Montana (movie review)

This almost-two-hour documentary does a marvelous job showing the story from Libby's angle, where the workers gradually put two and two together and realize this deadly asbestos they've been hearing about is actually the stuff they've been mining but branding as vermiculite or something else cute.  The stuff is everywhere because for awhile no one thought lung science could possibly matter in the rock business.  Kind of like H-bombs can't be bad for ya.  Or smoking.  Live and learn.

Anyway, what's missing are the board room meetings at W.R. Grace where the limited liability nature of the corporation kicks in.  That's what keeps little old ladies from losing their life's savings because some venture goes bad and all the sailors lose their lives at sea.  You may not get that box of chocolates, $100 wasted, but if you do, each bonbon will be individually worth $100, the proceeds all yours to keep or divvy among friends per your temperament.

That was the promise to English nobility:  risk ten sheep, reap a fortune, or at worst, lose the ten sheep.  No one comes banging on your door for twenty sheep.  There's a cap on your liability equal to the amount ventured.  That's what Inc. means.

W. R. Grace needed to reallocate resources to selectively bankrupt the Libby subsidiary, then block EPA from locking up lucrative contracts, in case a clean up ever was approved.  Meanwhile people were dying but there's no real cure for asbestosis anyway so that was already a write-off.

These were more good soldiers of capitalism, risking their lives for their labor in their capitalist sea, and reaping the rewards:  early death from complications associated with one's job.  Grace management died on the line as well, this wasn't just union men.  Whole families got it.  Asbestos is no joke.

Trains We Might Like to See

Mycology Festival

I'm super-uninformed about the fungal inhabitants of Planet Earth, in terms of their names and ecosystem niches.  That doesn't mean I don't find them fascinating.  Given Christine is a professional photographer of same, i.e. makes a part of her living selling beautiful pictures of these guys, I was happy to use that as an excuse to pay a visit to Miller Hall, a part of the World Forestry complex near to the Oregon Zoo (shares a parking lot).

Indeed, parking can be a problem in that lot, so if you're a tourist or smart Portlander, consider parking below in Goose Hollow or nearby and visit Goose Hollow Inn for some fine local fare (I had Country Boy IPA).  Then hop the Max for one stop and study the quirky yet excellent timeline made from a core sample drilled as a prelude to carving this deep tunnel Max station into hard rock.  The elevators will take you hundreds of feet, to the surface.

Patrick, a co-worker, was on an independent health hike from Asylum District to the zoo.  I used my Max ticket to revisit Goose Hollow Inn to meet him for some Sunday Headless Chickens (Bloody Marys).  We rejoined the Mycology Festival and I sampled yet more of the exquisite shroom-based miso the Culinary Institute was serving.

The Pacific Northwest is haven to a large number of fungal species, so no wonder you have a legion of shroom-heads out here.  The festival was well attended.  Hugely knowledgeable experts were on hand, to identify specimens and give advice to hunters and collectors.  Again, I'm quite on the fringe of this subculture, but I appreciate the well-organized event.  The white square worked fine when swiping my card.  Encouraging.

Reminiscing About Conferencing / Software

:: Steve Holden, GOSCON 10 ::

Speaking of Quakers, a long term low priority topic (in the sense of non-urgent), is do we want to open source any of our PHP + MySQL LAMP stack stuff through NPYM (where these are most used).  I'm suggesting moving slowly, in light of how specialized and esoteric our needs in the first place.  An adequate needs assessment has not been done.  Open sourcing is not the first step but a much later step in a longer process, as I have been underlining in committee / subcommittee threads.

I was NPYM Registrar at least one year, passing the baton to Dave Fabik as I recall.  That was in my FoxPro chapter, a language since discontinued, though still popular in Prague they tell me.  Actually the USA is full of FoxPro adherents and I don't mock it in any way.  Serious applications that do heavy lifting were my bread and butter, from camp registration to food banking to hospital data collection work (in tandem with other products -- the camp stuff was in dBase not VFP (they're all called xBase in the lingo)).

Anyway, that was before watching over Steve's shoulder in the Open Bastion chapter, which saw several conferences produced, only some of which I got to be at and observe first hand.  GOSCON was maybe my favorite because so esoteric.  I don't think I'll ever see one quite like that again.  That's where I first ran into Rami Kassab.  Then the DjangoCons were good, ApacheCon... nothing less than top notch, though I'm not a judge of speaker quality, not being a web framework geek (FoxPro was thick client LAN-based, pre-TCP/IP even).

I'm a somewhat peripheral player given IT Committee has a rather narrow mandate at the moment and grand schemes to use Github for anything are far from front burner.  That's fine with me.  I'm more here to grease the wheels for conversation among the principal players than to press for any new agenda.  The wheels were already turning when I got here.  I'm just adding some lubricant and telling campfire stories from my software developer past (now I teach a language, a little different, yet related).

:: from xkcd ::

Threshing Session

:: meeting room, Stark Street facility ::

Yes, I'm blogging from the meeting room right now, but like a TV reporter in front of the camera before the event begins.  The Quakers are mostly down at Social Hour, schmoozing, which is what I'd usually be doing, but the hubbub was distracting.

I'm also listening to SomaFM (Drone Zone), probably sucking off Meeting Wifi.  Lew et al have done a good job reconfiguring the building to take advantage of what bandwidth we have.  The laptop is likewise "live", which is why at least the first couple paragraphs were real time.

I'll probably want to put this away soon, when more people show up (only three in here besides me, listening to Lucinda).  In geek world, like at Google, it's OK to keep using a laptop when a speaker is speaking, as remarked upon soon into it by Andrew Bacevich, a progressive Catholic (or so he seems to me).

Now there's no one here but me, when I snapped the above picture.

Quakers are not like Mormons or Masons in having "members only" rooms or rituals.  We have rooms and rituals, inner sanctums, retreats, but non-members are allowed to infiltrate by design, as a way of keeping a check on member honesty.  Quakers noticed from studying history (lived experience writ large) that a "members only" club design leads to abusive relationships, institutionally speaking.  Chuck Fager goes into this at some depth in an adjacent blog posted video.

What are we threshing about?  Depends whom you ask but the Bulletin distilled it down to a little box, so I should grab a screen shot of that:

The prospect of losing the PSC committee is exercising (worrisome, anxiety-producing) for many Friends as it looks like a disembowelment, a suicidal act.  The right to have such a Committee was won through bitter struggle so to just give away the store looks a tad cuckoo to put it nicely.

But that's just one angle, probably more prevalent among oldsters like me.  The younger hipsters see a way forward where we all turn to one guy or gal for guidance, or treat as a catalyst or whatever.  I'm hoping to pick up on what the new lingo might be, in the aftermath of such a radical surgery.

My guess is Friends will back away from the precipice and signal a willingness to resume their duties as Quakers (a self identified Friend has one choice: to walk the talk or appear hypocritical).

However, that we've even been to this brink says a lot about us and the State of our Society.

Our upcoming State of Society Report will need to draw from whatever Megge and Rick put together (they're to write some report).  I'll be sending some analysis to Philadelphia, plus blogging here obviously.

I think I'll move to the library now, and take some more pictures.

Marty has a laptop open, so I feel OK for me to do that also.  Good to see Carl, sitting in front of me.  He's clerk of Nominating, which is sourcing this proposal to shelve Peace and Social Concerns.

"Friends do not avoid issues which are difficult and controversial, or complex, or require learning information of an esoteric nature, and threshing sessions help the community get up to speed in advance of going back to executive mode."  That's a paraphrase.  Hmm... I don't see Josh.  I thought he might have a view on all this.

Megge is opening the discussion on whether we agree that the topic is "how best might Multnomah Meeting address Peace and Concerns issues?"

We're back to the water / welling / bubbling metaphor which has been popular in meeting lately, one of our thematic memes.  Catholics go through these.  Seems the topic wording is more vague than what was put in the newsletter.

Some Friends are too upset by the prospect of killing off Peace and Social Concerns (OK, icing it for a couple years); they want to thresh about their shock and worry about losing it, and maybe to share about their PTSD from being on the committee in the past.  We have some PSC veterans here.

Veterans:  Joanne Luchini, Carol Urner, Jim Metcalf, Desiree Hellegers, Debbie Averill... so far everyone is speaking passionately about how a Peace and Social Concerns Committee is vital to Quakerism.  Jan Kjerne remembers a time thirty years ago when the committee members all wanted to act solo and never attend meetings.  That's probably the time this meeting seriously faltered before, in the 1980s.

Jim emphasized that such a committee is not about solving all the world's problems, but about supporting people doing serious work in the world as peace workers.  The committee provides advice and coaching and is a repository for the meeting's organizational memory.

Still an hour to go.

Carl, clerk of Nominating, finally addressed the question as to why we're even having this discussion, as so far no one has backed Nominating's proposal.  Mostly, it seemed to Nominating that Friends were not interested in serving on a reputedly "falling apart" committee.

The idea that people might come to Peace and Social Concerns meetings without going through an appointment process sounded like a good way to address this apparent reticence on the part of potential committee members to come forward with concerns and leadings.

"There's still a Peace and Social Concerns Committee" Carl claims.  That sounds a tad euphemistic to my ears.  He used the word "goofy".  Mom said "I don't think you're goofy Carl".  Carl:  "well, it may be that the proposal was."

Eddy is reviewing her career with the meeting, as several Friends have.  We have only about nine minutes left.  Glee is confused about how to separate her concerns into Oversight and/or Peace and Social Concerns.  She's relatively new to Friends.

I don't sense any interest in shelving the committee so far.  My guess is the Meeting will move to resume operations as usual, with this vital organ intact.  That doesn't settle the issue of AFSC Liaison though, as I will likely discuss in a future blog post.  For today, that's a tiny footnote.

The Zero Theorem (movie review)

Glenn and I agreed afterwards, at the nearby English-style pub, lights out shades pulled (a holdover from bombers over Britain days, unfriendly).  This Monty Python esque movie is a frolic in the collective consciousness of our day, with perfectly played stereotypes or masks (archetypes if you're Jungian).

The "ga-ga girl" from Management, top of her class, kept being a spelling teacher in my fantasies, and I knew why.  The son of Management was convincing, with the onset of hormones, already a smart cookie.  The supervisor of our anti-hero (or hero) is brilliant as well.  And so on.  Management does a great job.  Having so much set in a church, which burned down when none of the faithful monks (vow of silence) would yell "fire!" made this a comic Brazil like relief.

The job life there is so utterly crazy yet a lot like mine "crunching entities" (I crunch with "objects"), and instead of pneumatic tubes ala Brazil we have glowing test tubes of fluid as the storage medium du jour, with human hands still in the picture.  Storing data in fluids as gene sequences (packets) to be assembled later (they're numbered) isn't such a bad idea, and glowing is like labeling, so Gilliam's team may have nailed it.  Pizza will of course still be popular.  The realism level here is quite high, right down to the almost-contemporary advertising and product placement gags.

I won't go into the plot or share more of the jokes.  Check the official trailer for more details of that sort.

Glenn knows about the authentic English-style pub tables one may procure in Dundee, a nearby town in wine country, Willamette Valley.  I used to live about three blocks from here in Hollywood, for which the theater is named or vice versa, used to serve on the Neighborhood Committee in fact, with neighbors and realtors bellyaching about the supermarket moving out, and someone with a pet cougar.  I rented a basement space from a dear Quaker family with kids, watched 'em both grow to adulthood before I passed on (met my death on) _______ [intentionally left blank].

A Quaker Arc

Speaking of Carl Jung's Red Book, I will be suggesting in my Quakernomics talk tonight that branches of Gnosticism may have re-awakened within specific branches of Quakerism, but then I'm using a larger backdrop wherein Quakers, whatever their diverse makeup, had almost peaked around the time Philadelphia was Quakerdom's new capital (well before 1776 in other words).

So it's a bell-shaped curve rising up towards the "total capitalism" phase, when Quakers gave birth to the industrial revolution, and by extension the UK itself, with Friends then starting to experience diminishing power "until 1756, when they refused to vote a tax for war against the Shawnee and Delaware Indians".

Their refusal to fight the "Indians" was somewhat the final straw.  Then their refusal to support slavery was just beyond the pale.

Many a Quaker family fled westward in the build-up to the Civil War, finding themselves unwelcome guests, viewed as outright terrorists, or as disruptive at best, in the pro-slavery South.

However, in the UK, slavery was a less "in your face" phenomenon, and Quakers continued to climb the social ladder with their crowning achievement being this Iron Bridge which opened in 1781.

So let's use 1781 to mark the apogee of Quaker power in Universe so far, with a long sunset phase carrying us through the North American dark ages and near extinction within the derivative Pastoral forms.

I wrote a little program to draw timelines in ASCII, with a few examples:

timelines = {
"Oliver Cromwell":(1599,1658),
"George Fox":(1624,1691),
"Henry VIII":(1491,1547),
"Rene Descartes":(1596,1650),
"Margaret Fell":(1614,1702),
"Mary Dyer":(1611,1660),
"Queen Elizabeth":(1533,1603),
"Ben Franklin":(1706,1790)}

def make_line(person, start = 1490, end = 1800):
    line = (end - start) * ["."]
    born = person[1][0] - start
    died = person[1][1] - start
    line[born:died]= ["@"] * (died - born)
    return "{:>40} {}".format(person, "".join(line))

for person in timelines.items():
    print(make_line(person))

The British Empire peaks when Quakers have already started to wane, not surprisingly as imperialism is incompatible with egalitarianism.

The US empire -- more a flash in the pan by comparison -- takes place against the backdrop of the New World Order or whatever we wish to call the Future Unknown.

Historians and some economists may seize on Quakernomics as a useful meme. We shall see.

As I posted on Facebook recently:

Our Multnomah Meeting spawned a Quaker Economics Group under Joe Havens for awhile, huge interest and attendance, but no one thought to coin "Quakernomics" as anything special at least that I can recall. So hats off to these PR gurus and their new branch of economics. May they live long and prosper (Spock sign).

Red Book (not Mao's)

About Red Book
With Friends of Jung