Spring Breakers (movie review)

I've started on a plan to watch a lot of Harmony Korine films.  The Bagdad kicked it off with Spring Breakers, but Christine (a film maker) showed me Gummo first.

The film somewhat mocks the Spring Breaker as a type, a species, that never wants to break character.  Once in a swim suit, they stay in a swim suit, or partially out of them, as if clothes really had no protective value (and they don't, against bullets).

There's a Survival aspect in the way these girl survivors winnow down to the two we're warned are baddest at the beginning.  They're bad all right (as in "bad ass" thinks the Breaker), hard core.  One might segue to Thelma and Louise at the end, given no good may come of it.  They think as one unit, as Borg, or two Debbies from The Oblongs.

One might think of this as the R-rated sequel to that It's Friday music video.

Now watch the first four minutes of this Occupy film.

You've just learned a lot about how hedonism and consumerism help contain the tribes.  "What?  Contain?  They're out of control!".

The Breakers proselytize, but aren't missionaries, and they have no standing army or sprawling priesthood.  They do not rape and pillage or set fire to small villages in Southeast Asia.  Yes, the girls enjoy the fundraising aspect, which is both thrilling and extortionist.  Girls with guns get awfully cocky.

With "gangsta girls" in charge, you go up a rung from imperialist Patriarchy.  Many will frown at that contention and say good Christians are more benign than this orgiastic frenzied devil-worshiping mob.  No, these were the good Christians, look how they call their mothers.  It's the men who seem more corralled and inhibited (not subdued, not unduly oppressed), and I'm saying that's a step up.

Girls are better at "going wild" in some ways, less Fascist-Apollonian, more Athenian.

How much like Burning Man (Burners) or the Country Fair near Eugene (Cascadians), or Rainbow Gathering?

The desert is less forgiving than sunny Florida, and hippies mix in their studies more, versus swinging to both extremes.  Protective clothing is likewise far more necessary in the forest.

Those hippies and punks tend to geek out more (Tarot anyone?), are more DIY, plus maybe use a different mix of controlled substances.

None of these "live forevers" (like in Groundhog Day) seemed interested in learning scuba or marine science.  Their inability to get passed eternal frolicking marked them as still bambi-like in those bathing suits.  They'd get older, if not badder.

No review of this movie would be complete without some mention of the soundtrack and the "loading gun" swipe sound. What could so easily be an amateur's touch proves an effective suspense builder.  It also sounds something like a camera (lots of shutter action).  The camera itself is a weapon and or precision tool, a scalpel perhaps, for this skillful postmortem.

The editing style is also worthy of notice, with short repeat loops, a kind of "going over a few times" (like "scratch" in DJ world), mixed with flash backs to longer ago.  Events emerge in collages versus one strict chronology, a scrap book effect, jumbled-frenetic.  Blended memories.

Terry Talks

Some will think of TED talks, reading that title, and indeed ISEPP's Pauling House now has a videographer who produces for TED.  However Terry's run longer and the live audience still gets the immersive experience.  ISEPP's venues are less of a studio, though sound mixing and video recording are happening.

Terry's talk is of course cosmic in scope, but also perfect for Portland, a boom town these days.  We're rational optimists out here in Oregon, still surrounded by an undefeated spirit that feels at home here.

If this were football I'd say Terry is making an end run around the defending Scientists by separating out the disgruntled engineers, less appreciated, and making them an opposition.  There's deliberate tension in setting up the dialectic that way, with Fatalism fading to Defeatism owned by science, with Engineering still a throbbing heart of possibility.

As a consequence, religion is both shut out, and shut in.  But you've got a discourse, with heroes, and philosophy.  Terry flashed through a sequence of champions versus the dunce cap B Team.  Paul Erlich is definitely B Team, along with all the other waiting-to-say-I-told-you-so pundits believing we'd be dead by now, instead of at 9 billion.  Paul Romer, on the other hand, another big picture speculator, is A Team in Terry's playbook.

Terry scoffs at apocalyptic doomsayers more than most, and urges some of the loudest of such to retire from the podium, given their track record is so bad.

How he gets there, to his position of Engineer-Optimist, is more through Karl Popper and lets say Hegel.  He's happy to admit he's not the first one to truck out a dynamic Noosphere (not a term he used, something I picked up through Princeton) that has direction, towards some "good" (how that's defined is maybe less important than agreeing there's direction, an alchemy of fear and longing, not just value-neutral "trying stuff at random").

He doesn't much lean on Bucky Fuller or even American Transcendentalism back to Whitman.  He relies on Pragmatism instead, with lots of emphasis on John Dewey.

He'd just given this talk, or one like it, in China, and he freely admitted out at outset that his Engineer Ascendent memes maybe had a receptive audience there, not just because of recent great leaps forward, but because of a Marxian schooling in the background, wherein history plays out against a backdrop of a larger evolutionary tale, seamlessly the same thing, Nature a steering committee.  We could say Marx absorbed some key memes from Hegel, much as did Schopenhauer, and these memes resonate in Chinese thinking as well.

To get to this pinnacle minus Bucky or Wittgenstein is all the better for me.  I'm not going to be accused of just cribbing from Bristol, nor he from me.  We're coming from different foothills. Yet we both understand synergy and more-with-lessness.

How many man-hours does it take to produce one lumen's worth of power?  We effortlessly channel light, ergs, straining our spines relatively less per unit.  More like the PR around magic in the old days: as though you could wave something called "a remote" and choose "a channel" (or frequency) -- we know how to do that today, even from a young age.

Thanks to my board member valency, I was able to replace a cancellation and bring Trisha in for both the talk and the Heathman Dinner (a yummy slice of salmon with accoutrements).  She's a working mom, artist, hard worker, free spirit, just the right kind of Oregonian to appreciate Terry's upbeat hypertalk.  Glenn, Don, Steve and I joined her, closer to MHCC, from which she hails, for a reunion of sorts (not the first time at Pub 181), and a visit to her newest digs.

Suburbia and the Global U.  New circuit designs...

We stayed pretty late for old guys, but I had my morrow's trek to prepare for:  a long drive to Florence, Oregon by way of Big Bear Camp, and thence to a Girl Scout camp for our WQM gathering.

During the Q&A, both in the church and at the hotel, Terry was on his best diplomatic behavior.  He knows how much distrust there is for myopic, self-aggrandizing, environment-despoiling "engineers".

The proud / loud industrialist who leaves an eco-disaster behind, hiding behind a sham, self-justifying ideology, is a stereotype, and Terry is doing his best to dodge attempts to stick him with it.

He knows we've been awful.  He's not denying that humans are mistake prone.  Trial and error is not banished from his equations, just he thinks there's "cosmic genius" in the trying (noncomputable), or there's what the Quakers call "that of God" in each participant (some sense of the whole).

Portland AFSC Support Committee

Our conference call yesterday was a telephonic nightmare, though everyone was in a good humor about it, and we found workarounds on the fly.  The non-office group that started the Star Cafe conference call, including our clerk, patching in from Greater LA, could hear one another, but we in the office could not be heard on speaker, and if anyone picked up the receiver, the phone's speaker would die.

The old phone system, potentially high end, fashionable at Victoria's Secret, had become unusable.  Discontinuities in management left old passwords inaccessible.  Factory resets?  The work fell to Mireaya.

These glitches, and those with the leased photocopier, have nothing to do with landlord relations.

Sharing the building with the IWW is a plus for a number of reasons.  On the whole, it's not a bad situation.  There's wheel chair access and East Burnside is a happening place.  The Catholic Archdiocese and AlbertinaKerr are both in the same neighborhood.

Our agenda was packed as usual.  Pedro and I talked earlier, about some of my correspondence.  I'd been endeavoring to connect Navajo and Wabanaki efforts, or at least raise awareness of parallel / convergent narratives.

Native peoples of North / Central / South America feel they have an automatic right to not have their movements (immigration status) controlled by immigrant populations from other continents.  They're not the immigrants in this picture -- they've been here much longer.  Some of this sentiment will be expressed in the upcoming May 1 festivities.

Links between Hanford and the bombing of Nagasaki in particular were discussed.  Apparently there's some new research available, in the form of an award-winning student project.

These are not official minutes by the way, and I'm not the recording clerk.  My role is to help mind the relationship between our Yearly Meeting (NPYM) and the AFSC.  This is distinct from the MMM - AFSC liaison role, which is linked to Multnomah Meeting's Peace and Social Concerns Committee, currently experiencing turnover as its clerk prepares for a Friends Peace Teams adventure.

The community service interns were generous in letting me photograph some of the squares for the Drone Quilt that's being coordinated at a more national level.  AFSC is just one of many participants in that project.

The Door Project is also benefiting from intern support.  Some Portland Public Schools have a community service requirement, more like scouting (our newest committee member, welcomed last night, is an Eagle Scout).

Speaking of PPS, Cleveland High parents are up in arms over the budget cuts.  As I put it in my written report to our committee:

Regarding the May Day theme of fighting back against oppressors who
are dismantling social services in order to feed their fevered dreams
of imperial domination, parents at Cleveland High School are up in
arms (see below)....

Those who preach austerity and cutting the budget while squandering on
military jobs (because it's easier and lazier to kill for what you
want than to negotiate a peace) have no business representing
themselves as "the USA", a nation that went bankrupt (morally as well
as financially) sometime in the mid-1980s according to Medal of
Freedom winner R. Buckminster Fuller.  Of course some hope for a
reawakening of her democratic principles.

Launch Sequence

...162, 92, 42, 12, 1.  That's a lowering frequency in to a nuclear sphere of 1, where the grammer of Synergetics may locate a point of inside-outing and a corresponding 1, 12, 42, 92, 162 expansion.  Bow tie Universe and all that.

The progression hooks to Coxeter in the recent biography, The King of Infinite Space.  This was a mathematical discovery Coxeter approved of, found merit in, and your mathematics might be only high school grade, and yet still you might prove it.

As I posted to Math Forum, in my posited Lucky Devils Academy (LDA), you have a slow, leisurely, relaxed approach to sequence and series generation.  You may introduce recursion in various ways.

Even fractals are color coded sequences, where those that converge are the black Mandelbrot points (example fractal), while those that diverge are colored according to their rate of divergence.  At Saturday Academy we took advantage of the University of Portland's excellent projector system and watched some Mandelbulb movies (another brand of fractal).

Sooner or later we get to Python, where we explore and implement math objects, including sequence and successive sum generators.  You're using Python for something it's good at.  My recent examples to Math Forum included Bernoulli Numbers and Gregory Coefficients (I'm not claiming to be the first to express those algorithms as generators plus I'd done Bernoulli Numbers before, though less elegantly).

1, 12, 42, 92, 162...

Of course I have an ulterior motive in sharing generators in that 1, 12, 42, 92, 162... describes a growing octet truss, a piece of scaffolding. The bars between the hubs describe tetrahedrons and octahedrons.

With a new model of 3rd powering, demonstrated with a tetrahedron, we get relative volumes of one and four.  Other whole number and incommensurable volumes click into place forming what Bucky will call the "concentric hierarchy".

As a grand central of connected concepts, it's hard to beat the density of relationships within this graphical / lexical matrix of shapes and sequences.   The Lucky Devils come away from this reading / viewing program more savvy about Python, the micro-architecture of the virus, and the geometric facts that will help with their STEM studies.

Wanderers 2013.4.17

Today's discussion veered into Intellectual Property.  I think Fuller's universal scholarship, paid for by the benefits accrued to us all by the leading innovators, has been sidelined by a gambling system that walls out most would-be participants.  Safe to say, I'm not a big fan of the current IP regimen and don't really care what the Supreme Court has to say on the matter.  Washington DC is a corrupt little town (OK, major city) that hasn't earned the right to dictate to anyone, about anything.  Actually, it has subsystems with integrity and that complicates matters.  I'm a fan of some offices.  But IP law is BS.  I have no problem with the fact that it's crumbling.

We also talked about the impending fluoridation of Portland's water supply.  This is one of the few municipalities not to add fluoride yet.  I'm against doing it, as the environmental impact of higher fluoride levels on salmon runs, such as this impact has been studied (not much), suggests that it's both significant and negative.  I'm tired of humans whining about their teeth, claiming they're too lazy to brush with fluoride and need their dose to be administered through the public water supply.   What lazy good-for-nothing jerks, to risk salmon runs out of inertia.  That sounds exactly like humans though, oblivious to the welfare of any but themselves, ugly stupid ape-like numbskulls that they be.

I didn't have the luxury in wallowing in my misanthropy though.  I was glued to my computer, actually plowing through my case load, or "slaying the queue" as I put it.  Lorri calls me a slayer (blush), which makes me feel buff, whereas I'm anything but, and with two pizza slices for lunch (no breakfast) the situation is unlikely to improve -- and a beer, C-Note by Lompoq Brewery.  We ate after Wanderers at Oasis, right across from the Bagdad, scene of many event in this blog, from OMSI science pubs to movies.

Then I went to Fresh Pot next to Powell's on Hawthorne and slew the queue for many more hours.  By late afternoon, I was ready to take a crowbar to my ceiling again, in the Buddha Room, and pull down more dry wall.  I'm trying to get that room back in shape as my office / studio.  Then I went upstairs and slaved away in Tara's room, turned upside down (figuratively) by my other daughter's crashing there for several weeks, with two pets no less.  That was a fairly smooth interlude actually.  She got launched in a new job, serving in one of these far flung answering services that lets people work from home, kind of like CareWheels was going to be, had that been allowed to take off (Canada said no, I thought stupidly).

I've been reading Wittgenstein's Poker, which so far is good on chronicling the deterioration of the Ludwig-Bertrand friendship.  Bertie did a lot to give Wittgenstein a leg up, but the latter grew disillusioned with "logic" as it was then conceived and pioneered in new directions.  In retrospect, I'm glad the protege outgrew the master, yet I'm quick to acknowledge Bertie's positive impact on me as a boy.  His books, in the parents' collection, helped galvanize my interest in that subject (philosophy).

Philosophy of Science

Yesterday was a philosophical day, in terms of ethics / aesthetics (some say "esthetics").  "How much shall I eat?" was one of the queries.  Quakerism bases itself on "queries" and "knowing experimentally":  probably a reason Quakers tend to not run away from STEM.

Two philosophy parties were in the Friday night picture.  I went to both.  I ate at both.  Then I went back to the first one and had a (very thin) slice of cake.  I should call them "dinner parties" to be more accurate.  The second was in the Heathman and followed a philosophy of science lecture by John Dupre.

Now today, Saturday, I'm with Dupre again.  We're in the Pauling House listening to Terry bounce around in his namespace, influenced by John Dewey.  If we look at this as the philosophy that steers his choice of lecturers, then I'd consider it elucidating.  We're hearing what makes Terry tick.

I brought two books in my briefcase I don't expect to get to share, except asynchronously, such as here.  Both books were edited by Robert G. Fuller, the physics professor.  He died not long ago.  One book is about Robert Karplus, his mentor, the other about Aung San Suu Kyi, his student from that time he taught in Rangoon, at British Methodist Academy.  He continued to track her trajectory ever since.

We learned more about that region of the world from Peter recently, the other Princeton grad at Elliot's talk (besides me) who therefore knew about Blair Hall and Blair Arch.

Terry casts two archetypes named the Scientist and Engineer, which he contrasts.  In theater or psychology, we could set this up in two minutes as a premise for some melodrama, yet to be unveiled.  That's the suspense:  will there be a plot, after the preamble?  Stay tuned.  In Bucky's namespace the plot is eternal regenerativity, how to keep it all going.

Earlier today I showed Christine, a photographer, the Kenneth Snelson book.  I was wanting to share the 360 degree photographs, but she went through all of it, including his Portrait of the Atom with its curious electrons, sometimes rendered with quirky effects.

Complementarity, experimentally demonstrable, is another of Terry's plot elements.  He says local vs. nonlocal, particle vs. wave, are similar to left and right handed.  We have a minimum of two paradigms, says Terry, and they're not reducible to one another.

At the first party, I received a gift from the scholar who's birthday we were celebrating:  Wittgenstein's Poker.  That's a book I've long been meaning to read.  I will post about it more on Sean's list.

Terry's philo is a lot like Erhard's but presented differently.  He gets to where there's no determining "the meaning" and that's freeing for him more than angst-producing.  Meaninglessness is not heavy but an invitation to create meaningfulness.

Terry's attack on the Scientist archetype coming from the Engineer's angle is in danger of being a straw man argument.  To have straw men, one may need straw worlds.  It's the world of one static truth, a machine, that's made of straw here.  Terry advocates pluralism.  One still needs theories and models though.  To say there's no ultimate final ideal car is not an argument against having cars or developing new ones.

Pycon 2013

:: from Portland to Pycon ::

I dipped into basket case status getting here, having sent the Razr M through the wash (insured, a $99 deductible / slap).  On top of that, I miscalculated the Max time and stood in the wrong line at Alaska.

If I'd gone to a kiosk (no line) and paid for one bag, then I could have jumped to the front in pre-paid bag.  Not knowing that, or figuring it out, I queued behind the languid folks for Hawaii, getting my hit of adrenaline (clock ticking).

Do I live longer for these steroidal moments, brought on by attacks of stupidity?  We shall see.

What to do with the extra time?  Beaches.  Happy Hour.  Just snacks, beers.

The day before I ate a lot, both literally and metaphorically, in a busy engaging day.  Sam is cutting ties with Flextegrity, setting it more adrift, so Trevor and I descended, like vultures.  Sam was liberally sharing, letting go of a certain bicycle parked for three years.

We visited his storage unit.

The exercise felt Food Not Bombs like, rescuing soon-to-be compost.  Apropos of that, Adam phoned mid-exercise, needing the meetinghouse key for FNB work.

Speaking of storage units, Trevor showed Sam and I to a secret location (cinematic) where he's stashed more tons of Fuller-related material, with many thanks to Joe Moore.

Some of Dawn's closest friends and I walked the labyrinth at Unity, joining in her memory.  Alexia is house sitting in a neighboring state.

Then came a meetup and catching up with an FNB friend, followed by Wanderers.

The next day was my flight on Alaska.  Getting some last minute Alpo for Sarah contributed to my lateness.

The consequences of missing my plane were not that great in this case.  Having WiFi at PDX let me keep working pretty much the whole time.

Holden had flown down the day before.  I found him with Brian Curtin, Jack Diederich, other luminaries, having beers in the lobby.

We hobnobbed for awhile.  Brian has been working with our Code of Conduct, applicable at Pycons.  Did the Ukraine PyCon of 2012 really attract 4K attenders?  Some of us were skeptical.

The talk on abolishing the traditional 9-12 high school structure, didn't make the cut unfortunately.  My lightning talk did make the cut:  Python for Adults.  Maria Litvin is here, has participated on one of the panels.  This was our first Education Summit.

Lots of interesting people.  I finally got to meet Michel Paul (picture below), with whom I've been conversing on edu-sig for quite awhile.

Our keynote speaker was Walter Bender, founder of SugarLabs, which produces free software for the One Laptop per Child program's flagship computer, the XO.  Walter knows Ed Cherlin obviously.

Henrique was here with at least seven others from Brazil (Steve thinks more like fifteen, which he's happy about, his trip to Brazil a career capper as PSF chairman in some ways -- Van is doing that job now).

Python is gathering momentum in South America, as evidenced by the increasing number of Pycons.  Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela all have active Python users.

Wanderers 2013.3.6

Don invited me to turn my AFSC adventure into a formal talk.  I took awhile to respond, and Micheal Sunanda, not often around, had signaled his willingness as well, so we split the platform.  He actually left the building during most of my talk, whereas I puttered in the kitchenette, making coffee, during a lot of his, also dove into emails.

What I emailed was my exultant sense for having Elizabeth Furse join us for the AFSC part of the meeting.  She's worked with AFSC, which I hadn't known, out of Seattle, and for sure knows Arthur Dye, a former director there.  Elizabeth had visited Wanderers recently, thanks also to Don, and impressed everyone with her command of US / NavAm relationships (I use "NavAm" as an abbreviation for Native American, with plenty of resonance left over to mean an airline ala PanAm, connecting airstrips within NavAm bases and/or connected sovereignties -- been doin' it for years).

Eddy and I had just been to the corporation meeting (annual), both in the same capacity:  as NPYM representatives.  Yes, we have a lot of acronyms going.  I've blogged about some of these before:  WQM, FUM, EFI, FGC, GWYF, QUNO... FCNL.

Ironically, what Elizabeth had to teach me today was that Quakers were perhaps at the forefront of that "kill the Indian to save the man" movement that was so counter to NavAm interests.  A major portion of Friday night at Friends Center was about this genocidal campaign.  We reviewed slides of the concentration camp boarding schools where the young natives were coralled brainwashed, forced into thinking like Anglo-Euros, much to their detriment in terms of continuing the family lineage and traditions.  These cultures continue to feel decimated and healing is going to take awhile.  Yet perhaps a corner has been turned, that's the good news.

So I see the need to dig more deeply, into Quaker works in this area.  Having work camps together still is an important tool of diplomacy from a Quaker viewpoint.  My parents were camp leaders as late as the 1970s, wherein Palestinians, Israelis, and a smattering of cosmopolitans from American University of Beirut, all hunkered down to build a swimming pool in solid rock.  This was before the general erosion of an older intelligence that kept a relative peace in many areas where conditions have since deteriorated.  This was in Ramallah, not far from Jerusalem.

These camps were entirely voluntary however.  In the WWII chapter, they were less so, as conscientious objectors were assigned to them willy nilly.  I know it sounds like I'm rambling but we're intersecting Doug Strain's scenario, and his associations with AFSC are quite significant, his associations with Linus Pauling at Cal Tech even more so.

Prison State

During the breakout session at the AFSC meeting, people dispersed to various rooms to learn about programs.  I went to the presentation on some of the prison work that goes on.

The US has an immature understanding of humans and likes to make everything a morality play with goodies and baddies.  A lot of this thinking was inherited from England, a likewise under-developed civilization of mediocre collective IQ.  Organized religion has a lot to do with it.

The US incarcerates a huge number of people, a growing profit center for many public and private organizations.

Prisoners = free or almost free labor, and compared to the boredom of doing nothing much, many prisoners would prefer to be doing something skillful.  Making furniture is a chief activity.  The government itself thrives on slave labor in this way.

Calling it "slave labor" is of course loaded.  The double standards involved warrant the term, some would say.

Identifying products suitable for boycott because made by prison labor was not a strategy suggested by staff.  Prisoners often prefer work to idleness and would be disappointed to lose their manufacturing jobs.  Not that they necessarily would, as the USG and state governments are a reliable customer.

Chinese consumers should educate themselves on what products for sale in China might be made by US prisoners.  Whether to boycott or not is an individual choice.

I think school children, if sitting in desks made by prisoners, should be made aware of that fact.  The study of prisons and prison systems is a great 8th grade topic.  At Overseas School of Rome, we had Sociology as a subject in middle school.  Fred Craden was my teacher.  I don't think most US based schools offer sociology am I right?

Our staff presenters were from New York and Michigan respectively.

Zero Dark Thirty (movie review)

I thought I might miss this one but JS at the Meeting said it was good and not all that biased in his view.  Not sure what to make of that, my curiosity piqued, I made time after a Hilton lunch at ApacheConNA, where Alexia and Christine and I joined up with director Holden.  Christine had her own truck and took Alexia onward, while I ducked into the Regal in Fox Tower.

Katherine Bigelow has already made a name for herself in the war movies department, with Hurt Locker.

Everyone gets what they want to some level.  Letting the solo agent make the positive identification of UBL was a good touch.  Did she have much choice in that being who he was at this point?  The big plane seems a little hollow at the end, when the whole point of her career until now has been to reach this point, so now what?  Make a movie about it?

Pakistan is properly alert to having some airspace invaded.  Choppers always have problems so don't call me a spoiler.  It's not like the U2.  Remember the President Carter thing with the helicopters?  The movie makes some literate allusions into the lore,  Charlie Wilson's War isn't far in the background.

Had UBL actually died years before, this would have been the better story then too, and there would not have been much to cross-check its authenticity.  This movie is far from claiming to be an historical rendering of events.

That followup movie would talk more about who got what out of the deal.  The CIA is portrayed as having been made to look bad after 911, when it falsely claimed WMDs were being stockpiled (remember that dog and pony show at the UN?  They watch that in grad school now and learn that NATO intelligence was clearly inferior, jealous of UNSCOM and Scott Ritter).

So now it was all up to this Lindsey Moran type to not be so wrong this time.  She needed her loyal fans.  The (movie) director counts on at least some being won over.  She's the UBL hunter, straight from high school.  Not necessarily a gun nut either.

Speaking of the director, the actor, Gandolfini (Tony Soprano), looked not unlike Panetta as CIA director I thought, if maybe rounder.  The NSA had a role too, as a skeptic and reality check.  We were back to the embassies and Fortress America (I remember those under-car mirrors).  Not too hard to understand.  The US president was close at hand, was the feeling (as thoughtful, analytical).  The narrative looks for its boosters within White House circles.

Maya is not totally unsympathetic (more would say the exact opposite) in that she does net better treatment for the first torture victim, who starts getting some decent treatment eventually, though not Hilton quality certainly.  Being truly amicable goes a long way.  Not that we see much of that in this film.  USAers are an unfriendly bunch for the most part, as cast, eager to detain you or at least snatch your cell phone at gun point (not shown).

Although persistent, Maya is not expected to have paranormal abilities (Casey was known to look for ESP on one's resume), there's no remote viewing except what comes in from satellites, nor does she need to speak or read other languages.  She has to go through translators and her collection of torture CDs would need to be dubbed.  She's an attainable role model maybe.  There's no assumption she's expected to bed-bounce her way to the top either.  She's more like a good Muslim in that way.

The birthday cake plot element again seemed to echo back to Iran and Ollie North during Reagan's term.  They (he and McFarlane) were hoping to butter up some arms trader in that storyline.  Or was it Ayatollah Khomeini himself they were hoping to charm?  I'm Googling old articles as I think back to those days.  There's a sense of betrayal.  Iran is a still a "bad guy" in Washington's simple "friend or foe" neural logic (simpler than Drosophila's probably).

I should see that other new spy movie about that op (rescuing hostages), which I remember learning about closer to the time in early public accounts.

Anyway, the movie hopes we're at least friendly enough to buy some of these images of who and what Americans are supposed to be.  There's this hunt for UBL.  Now it's over.  They shoot a lot of parents coldly, telling the children it's OK.  The Pakistanis aren't so sure this is acceptable.  They're told to stay back.

US military helicopters have become a cliche and/or trope, thanks to Vietnam War movies.  This film takes the challenge of the chopper sound to heart and explores "stealth chopper".  Can a helicopter be made quieter than a dog barking?  The soundtrack poses that as a kind of physics question, testing our willingness to suspend disbelief (another variable, a wild card).

I know many of the events mentioned were real enough.  Nancy Irving herself told me what it was like at Friends House, after that bus explosion in London.

Tony Soprano is perceptive, noticing the ISI is close to UBL's secret hangout. There's a negotiated flavor to this settlement.  Something for everyone.  Washington DC continues to play some imperial headquarters full of bossy types.  The film suggests spunky women (who know when to cuss correctly) have a bright future at Langley, token blacks too, and OK to be Muslim (Wolf a nice touch).

I returned to ApacheCon in time for the whiskey social.  A lot of the guests are from other time zones and some are furiously working on their talks.  I empathize.  We later joined Ashley at Rock Bottom.  Both her parents were or are in the military.  Mom is a medic.

Evolving Minerals

Dr. Robert Hazen is a huge mineral enthusiast, enjoying a Renaissance of interest in the discipline.  What mineralogists have recently discovered is the panoply or canvas of minerals one finds goes through a progression, or "evolution" if you will, with the implied sub-meaning of "complexification" (greater variety, more permutations).

Early rock from the congealing of the solar system, such as that meteorite that recently blasted out windows in Russia (a big topic of our conversation), won't have many minerals in it and half of what it does have is only present in relatively nano amounts.

You need complex chemical reactions to catalyze a bigger vocabulary, processes like vulcanism and of course the appearance of water.  Those things only happen later, on bigger planets (is the current thinking), if at all.

Planet Earth, at age 4.5 billion or so, may actually be peaking around now, in terms of its mineral variety, as the Sun continues to warm.  The breathable future is measured in millions, not billions of years.  That may be the standard life cycle then, for planets in our class.

Hazen was very sure that humans' contribution to CO2 is like nothing the world has ever seen and is orders of magnitude higher than any second greatest cause of net change.  We're pushing fast and hard into unknown territory and he wonders if that's a good idea, though as a scientist he finds it fascinating.

Hazen wonders if "evolution" might gain more traction as an acceptable topic, in the anti-science USA, if transposed to this scale of minerals.  There didn't used to be clays.  Evidence is pretty strong that, without bacteria, you don't get specific crystals.  Humans are not the first biological form to play a role in planetary alchemy.  That used to be considered a newfangled idea.

He was also pretty definite about the story of the Moon.  Though he had nothing affirming to say about Velikovsky (someone asked at the dinner) he does of course accept that worlds collide.  Earth was not long congealed before this second mass collided with her at an angle and hit the reset button big time.

Venus may have undergone something similar as evidenced by her "reverse spin" (did she reel in a moon?) -- it's hard to know much about Venus.  Earth's spin nudges our Moon away from us, day by day.

Anyway, besides deterministic processes, you have these stochastic random events, and these will make a huge difference in any given scenario.

In Hazen's mind, it's pretty clear that "life" (however defined) is happening in trillions of cases.  His version of Universe is very richly permuted with life forms.  Maybe that's why he seemed so enthusiastic about science.  He also has a mineral named after him.  He was up front about the political nature of nomenclature committees.  Some of us were already used to that from tracking Pluto's demotion from planethood.  As new information comes in, old mental categories need to be fine tuned.

"Were buckyballs part of the early crystalline makeup of the universe?  Maybe not because buckyballs aren't crystals right?"  That was my question, plus another about whether anthropogenic mineral is an oxymoron.  Yes, a buckyball is not a mineral but a lattice of them would be.  Early Universe had graphite.  Astral buckyballs have already been seen and indeed their spectral signature is what led Kroto to approach Rice University in the first place (this is me thinking out loud now).

Regarding my other question, right, it's not a mineral if made in the lab, that's just part of the concept.  That being said, humans have created conditions that have allowed new crystals to spontaneously form.  Coal tailings, debris from mines, have been the only known locations for some types of crystal growth pattern.

We had many young students in the audience and the audience was very encouraging of their coming up with questions, which many did, coming to the microphone.  The balcony was filled with sponsored tickets.  The Mentor Graphics banner was prominent.

I did some outside work with other Wanderers.  The Heathman dinner was spectacular.  I asked about the Hamaker-Weaver thesis (glacial dust, re-mineralizing the Earth).  Some elements of that were part of Hazen's model, as the carbon cycle is one of his research foci.

Carbon subduction is of major interest.  As the Earth cools, it can afford to suck more of its own carbon to lower levels apparently.  He and his wife had just visited Biosphere 2 in Arizona where he had been struck by the scale of some of the experiments, though he thought they might be leaving out some important variables.  Live and learn.  I bought his book, The Story of Earth.

Report from Afghanistan

 :: meeting room, Peace House ::

Some of the wiser elders of Portland (Oregon) gathered at Peace House tonight to go over their thinking about hearings in Washington DC regarding intelligence matters.  Our speaker:  a native born Afghan expat with over forty years experience in North American academia, going back and forth to Kabul.  He has US citizenship yet speaks fluent Pashto and Dari, as well as English, reads and writes in 'em too.

The New York Times article of February 5, Drone Strikes' Risks to Get Rare Moment in the Public Eye, was passed around for those who'd not seen it.  This was a well-read group, professional activists, well traveled, Portland cognoscenti.  The NYT article focuses on Mr. Brennan's advocacy of weaponized drones, versus drones for surveillance only, such as the WWF uses against animal poachers in East Africa (and elsewhere).

Afghani police themselves wonder why they can't make the arrest on the ground, versus letting aliens shoot at fellow citizens from the sky by remote control.  Drones seem pretty cool until they start shooting, at which point you have to wonder what happened to habeas corpus and innocent until proved guilty, the UN Declaration of Human Rights and so on.  Why are the poor and under-priviledged always getting the ax?  Aren't those pulling the trigger on their "flying shooters" (weaponized UAVs) equally chargeable as criminals?

Nah, war is always about double standards and total unfairness.  War is about flipping off those who yearn for the rule of law.  Mayhem rules.  We had some Vietvets with us, reminding us how true that is.  Given permission and encouragement, humans have what it takes to slice each other to bits and then some.  Drugs help.

War is by definition a kind of gangland violence and a US president wanting war powers is someone working hard to suspend the Constitution.  We all learned about Rome in school.  The patricians (Republicans) were frustrated by the constraints placed on them by the Plebes (Democrats) and decided enough was enough.  They went fascist, staged a coup and branded a new position of Emperor, commander in chief in a perpetual war of expansion.  "Fasces" is Latin for "bundle of rods" and is what you see emblazoned in US House of Representatives iconography.

They tried the same thing against FDR, but Smedley "Fighting Quaker" Butler blew the whistle (see Business Plot in Wikipedia).

Rome is never far beneath the surface, and at times like these, one wonders why they don't just wear togas in Congress.  I guess the suits make 'em look more Anglo and they're still aping the Brits after all this time.

I asked our speaker about how to tell the story as a Drug War.  We'd heard about oil, copper, gold... Afghanis are rightly proud of their resources.  They see the size of those bases, the US embassy, like Roman outposts, and don't believe for a minute that they're about to be vacated.  This "pulling out" in 2014 sounds like another chapter in hoodwinking the American people, while continuing to run a giant jobs-welfare program on the backs of the occupied.

The military / mercenary business is a jobs program, we all know that.  Dollars pump directly though these pipelines, as desirable as opium or cocaine, directly to warlords and government officials.  It's called "corruption" but it's also called doing what one can while one can, for one's extended family.

The audience reminded me it was Ecuador that had taken recent steps to legalize its own pharmacological assets.  Washington DC likes to outlaw crops in other countries, shows up with flame-throwers, assuming it has jurisdiction where it has none.

The idea that after all this time the US was still in some kind of "stalemate" in Afghanistan seemed somewhat laughable to those present at this meeting.

We were admittedly not yes-men or yes-women regarding the president's policies.  This was not a room full of kiss-butts at the CIA, praise Allah, all bucking for job security and cushy retirement (the hearings are about making Brenner the new CIA chief, which Central Intelligence Agency is, since 911, only one of sixteen desktop icons in the lineup -- but still with higher public name recognition than most, with NSA a close second).

Like John le Carré, Dr. Wahab would have liked a police response to the crime of 911.  This was not a job for the military and the militarization of intelligence has resulted in a rotting and crumbling of that intelligence.

The USA of forty years ago was not as idiotic, to put it bluntly, was just starting down that slippery slope.  The leadership was perhaps better back then, for all the psychosis in high office (not a new phenomenon).  Even if Obama is semi-sane, he's still surrounded by drone-infatuated crazies and Gitmo apologists.  Back in the day, we had more people like Bob Textor and Roger Paget (and James Lambert while I'm naming names).

I think NATO was just jealous of all the respect the UN was getting, sending consultants around and trying to make the world (aka Planet Earth) a better place.  The US was like the evil queen in Snow White, going "mirror mirror..." and hearing "UN, UN" (not US).  This was hurtful, and the Jesse Helms crowd decided to pull the plug on the UN and go with NATO instead, which had a more liberal use-of-weapons policy (best to go with one's strengths, they were thinking).

NATO is now practicing "development at gun point", far less effective than the UN brand, and far more corrupt.   The military-minded also prefer NATO because they like to strut and puff in uniform, while sending emails to their secret admirers.

Wanderers 2013.2.6

 Steve Mastin delivered a detailed yet sweeping account of the history of diabetes, especially its diagnosis (e.g. Benedict Reagent, Clinistix, glycosylated hemoglobin HbA1c etc).

Type 1 diabetes is more of an autoimmune disease whereas Type 2 results from a combination of susceptibility (increasing in the population) and environmental factors, such as diet and obesity.

Steve has worked in the field, including with Japanese ministries post WW2, when the switch to new eating habits triggered a diabetes epidemic.

We went off on numerous tangents (per Wanderers) as Steve knew some of the players personally and wanted to give a sense of them, Richard T. Jones (OHSU) for example.

Attendance was high, including David Feinstein, Dick Pugh, Dave DiNucci, Michael Hagmeier and several others.

Cosmic Consciousness

:: a mashup of meetups ::

Dick Pugh graced Wanderers with his standard spiel, the one he takes on the road, with help from NASA.  He does a great job, as one of the world's leading experts on meteorites.  In more ways than one, it's a discrete science, a perfect niche, as there aren't really that many big ones you might own.  Only 6% are the iron type.  Most are rocks or hybrids.  Two days have gone by, and I didn't take notes.

The giant (or relatively large) hard thing breaks apart and leaves a field, usually.  It hits at an angle, leaving an oval pattern of stuff.  That's what the meteorite hunters look for, less for craters, which just don't happen that often.

The Earth's surface, being lush, or under water, masks some of its craterous features, plus its atmosphere really does burn up a lot of the smaller stuff.  Really big things that hit at cosmic speed are in a category of their own, and are Earth changing.  On the smaller side are the giant impact craters.

Our small group was very privileged to handle so many certified rocks of extraterrestrial origin, many of them as old as the solar system or older.  Many have pedigrees and history.  Most are discovered, a few have known impact times.

I encourage people to study meteorites and what they remind us about our solar system environment.  Seeking the "shooting star" as they're called is also a reason for getting outside at night under clear skies.  "No child left inside" is the Outdoor School slogan (something we have here in Portland).  Get off yer duff and go watch some space debris burn up in the biosphere.  Go alone or with dear ones.

Because a large mass will break apart, it can look just like a lot of windows of the same giant craft.  I recall when freeway goers including myself were treated to this illusion just south of Seattle one night, as if a great UFO had been sighted.  Cars pulled over, and a sight it was to behold.  The Seattle Times said later it was space junk breaking up, something Russian maybe.

Towards an Anthropology of Geekdom

Freshman year Princeton found me in the engineering library browsing standards, not really knowing why.  I'd fallen to Earth and now had a world class open stack library within walking distance.  Time to catch up on what's been going on.  I believe it would have been in the course of that reading that I would have first stumbled upon Unicode, along with ISO this and ISO that.  No W3 yet, back then.

In some ways social commentary by the pundits is uninteresting because it hasn't swallowed enough of the facts.  We have social engineers now (e.g. Facebook), much as you folks feared we would, and we actually do have a human languages friendly way of preserving diversity.

Some conservatives just assumed the engineering caste was so partial to Anglos that we would just get on with some conquest.  That's not how it turned out however.  Pirates took in engineering and now so many engineers talk like pirates, use profanity, or at least feel safe in doing so when they wish.  Sailors strut on land, full citizens, despite the landlubbers' having their traditional puppet authorities (Kings and Queens and such).  A more believable form of democracy seems close at hand some days.

I was just realizing I'd been tacitly waiting for universities to get wise and field any number of anthropologists, as that's what management needs (more insights), whether it knows it or not.  Books like Bucciarelli's were pioneering (How the Hippies Saved Physics also).  But the wave didn't come, and I realized what that means:  it's up to us to think more like anthropologists and not wait for the self-professed to get wise.

Learn from the anthropologists what you'll need and apply the skills as they develop.  Don't worry about your "credentials" to think in those terms.  You don't have to pay licensing fees for the thoughts you have, much as we've become amputees in other respects, thanks to "the law" and its rewarding of selfishness past the point of pathology.  The wages of sin.  The sorrows of empire.  Illiberal policies, when it comes to knowledge sharing, leads to a Tower of Babel syndrome pretty quickly.  Almost no one has enough puzzle pieces, even Gollum.

Conference badges are a space where it all comes together, as well as patient-facing medical monitor screens.  If they can't print or display the Chinese or Thai characters that make up your name in its native context, then to what extent have they bothered to master our shared technology?  How lazy, in a more negative sense, are they being?   For sure the competition will eschew advertising such incapacities.  The LCDs in the hotel room (or hospital room) will be in your favorite language (or choose the one you're learning).  Use the remote to change the view.

It's OK to judge at this point, to stop making allowances for yet another generation of journalist that can't write about Unicode intelligibly.  You needn't be a "technical writer" to tackle that subject.  The schools have had the time in principle, it sort of doesn't matter whether they lunged at the opportunity.  It's a computation:  oh, you could have and didn't, lots of time lost, so now we stop waiting.  We refine our level of expectation: "Ah so, it was too hard for them."

What some anthropologists might study is the geek use of the term "laziness".  The usage pattern goes with the grain of many a Chinese philosophy.  The management caste is well aware of how easy it is to fall into a hero mode that's unsustainable and self-overwhelming.  You start accelerating, go into "fixit mode" whereas a big picture generalist will allow that some individuals need to hang back and keep to some level of overview, much as some soap opera or melodrama becomes interesting.  Quakers have their overseers (rotating positions) for this purpose, not just their clerk.

In software, you have the tools to automate drudgery and push the work onto machines.  It's an overwhelming amount of work happening at superhuman speeds, so even a hint of it coming the other way, starting to make you the big "doer" has the whiff of incipient tragedy.  The geek knows that and insists on writing a script to do the work.  "If I end up doing all these things manually, my day will rapidly become hellish" is the familiar diagnosis.  Treatment is indicated.  The prognosis is good if the geek is given the liberty to pursue "laziness" as an end in itself.  Enter the Church of the Subgenius and Bob's gift of "slack".

The role of profanity is starkly clear in Titanic, the movie.  I'm not sure this aspect of the film was accurately captured in the various dubbings, as some movie-going ethnicities may not accept cussing in public.  The Titanic itself has upper and lower deck subcultures.  When the ship starts to sink, the lower deck people have no priority for life boats.  In the near future of this world, a more globalized engineering caste is controlling the search vessel and indulging in lower deck like banter.  One interpretation is the future was less mindful of class.  In a related meme, the King and Queen are invited to eat "hot dogs" with Bill Murray, playing FDR.  The findings of science have been accepted.

The idea that "the blood itself" contained distinguishing chemistry had mostly vanished from medical science.  We were all software running hardware running software.  The concept of "race" was following "class" into intellectual morbidity.  That doesn't mean we had stopped believing in selective breeding or genetic material.  Distinguishing chemistry exists, like finger prints.  Distinguishing memes also make their circuits.  Peers continue to recognize one another by gesture and secret handshake.  The many protocols would only continue to proliferate.  The idea of "no class" and "no race" is in becoming so very very many, Venn diagrams gone wild.  Everyone is different, that's for sure (even twins).

Done It Again

Background: 
Esoterica
Numbers

Counting Down...

In saying that nuke weapons are a tool of the few to enslave the many, I am not suggesting that many if any of "the few" are still alive.

The ecosystem of nuclear weapons, armed, targeted, set to go off, is the ticking time bomb bequeathed to us by psychotic ancestors, clinically just through the Depression and newly high off the exhilaration of physics breakthroughs.

Human subject experiments continued both in and out of the internment, detention, and concentration camps, as well as on Pacific islands.  Children inherit.  Radio-toxins last a long time.

Building public consciousness around radiation dangers is a slow process as it's best grounded in comprehension rather than blind fear.  I'm not sure where Common Core is going with those physics standards, but we're hearing there's a distressing lack of CERN type stuff, i.e. the dance of particles.

This would correspond to the low Polyhedron Quotient (PQ) in the prototype Standard Maths.

Neither standard (math or physics) takes many impressive steps in the direction of STEM integration.  Rather, we're seeing more of the usual.

Continuing to link the topic of radio-isotopes to both diet and medicine, the ecosystem, is vital.

Tracing the fallout from Fukushima is an everyday STEM exercise.  We tie the dinner table to the ecosystem to the particles involved, right down to the quarks.  We do this early. We do this often.  No "standards" will get in our way.

Wreck It Ralph (movie review)

This Disney / Pixar animation was perfect for my head space at the time.  On Synergeo, we were looking at Geoscopes (what Bucky called them), basically globes, or orbs, upon which whole Earth data may be projected, but also mind maps, networks of a more alien kind, or call them Worlds, or Namespaces as the case may be.  Planet Pauling would be the world according to Pauling, including the molecular aspects of diet he cared about (he knew it was all one ecosystem, inside and out).

Anyway, to the film:  each Namespace / Planet (ala Little Prince) is a computer game or arcade game like at Avalon. When the humans go away, the game characters (the avatars, the coded puppets) continue to have identities, politics, motivations, needs.  This is Disney's World, after all, and the premise of Toy Story etc., going back, way back.

Each game has not only it's "rules" (boring back of the box stuff) but its aesthetics.  There's the girly pink world of sweets, like the pink aisle at the toy store.  There's the more urban world of tenants, tightly packed, caught between forces of decay and destruction, and miracle repair people, who make it so they don't need to move out.

Ralph is the principle of decay (he actively wrecks stuff), the need to demolish and destroy, because things get tired, worn out.  But the characters in the story are blind to the fact that he's as much a principle as they are, and without him, there'd be no game.  Internally, he experiences this blindness as lack of appreciation, as loneliness, motivations just about any audience member can appreciate at some level.

So Ralph decides to not return to his game from Game Central, as he's supposed to, and to hop into another game, in search of a sign of his right to appreciation and respect.

Once we've engaged that premise, that "game hopping" is possible, the script tastefully exploits that.  We don't collide every game with every other.  There's no NFL football, though we do have a "team play" type game, nor do we have much in the way of martial arts, though those types of games are recognized.

Indeed, the Grand Central scenes do a good job of recognizing the genres, but then we settle on just three of them: Aliens (Sigourney Weaver country), Wreck It Ralph's home planet (Fixit world), and Pink Aisle girl-sugary (a raceway).

How fun, because Female gets these two contrasting sources.  It's like a three body problem in Newtonian gravity and the texture goes fractal.  Disney is anything but unsophisticated.  He stays safely hetero in his attractions, but you know he'd as easily not, were it not for an audience he'd like to hold onto.

The nutty King is a character we've met before in Disney films.  The plot has its intricacies, good exercise for new-to-the-movies viewers (and/or new-to-life-itself).

This isn't to say the film has lost all uniformity of look and feel.  Even across Game Worlds, it keeps a steady cosmology, with human world (the players) included.  Games themselves live and die, and a sign saying Out of Order, seen backwards from within the console, is a known Kiss of Death.  Some game figures are already unemployed.

The film plays (just a little) on the longings and nostalgia of older kids in the audience, i.e. adults with their kids, as the Pong era type characters may no longer have a home.  Someday we'll find Kirby under a bridge, no longer employed by Nintendo (he's 20 this year).  Who will take him in?

The Sigourney Weaver as Ripley type character develops a thing for the Fixit guy and vice versa (happily -- so often these things are one way).  Wreck It Ralph is kind of shreky, and there's a sweet Beauty and the Beast aspect to his story (she might be under age).

Again, this is all Disney's world in the final analysis and the script tells a wholesome tale.  Arcade games tend to be less scary or demented compared to the ones you can buy for your home e.g. the ones by Valve.

Sim Farm

Tara grew up playing Sims instead of with dolls, though we did have a doll house.  Sims were more fun.  They sometimes wouldn't do things if too tired.  They had wills of their own, a bit.

So does Farm Simulator 2013 take you into the world of GMOs much?

I like the point that wheat with DNA from insects, mice or fish isn't technically "wheat" any more, hence the name "GMO" (genetically modified organism).

Maybe the way around the labeling controversy is to say:  you don't have to say if it's GM, but you certainly can't call it wheat, or rice or whatever.  Not if it has genes from an alien species.

So make up new words and symbols if you have to (marketing will figure it out).  Primary ingredient:  organisms.  "I can't believe it's not wheat bread" might be a slogan.

So what was the followup on that 1999 case where Thai substance control detected transgenic wheat from the Pacific Northwest?

GM papaya saved the day in Hawaii, while making it safer to grow non-GMO breeds alongside.  The gene for the "coat" of the viral attacker is what's transplanted.

Is it that the protective viral coat's protein protects against itself?  Yes, in a sense.  This trick has been used with tobacco and potatoes too.

Speaking of legislation, I think the proposal from around here was to remove the base institutionally from Cuba (a change in jurisdiction) -- similar to proposals for Okinawa in other words, a re-zoning if you will.

Although transgenics get much of the attention, the rise in celiac disease could be due to other changes to the wheat genome brought about by selective breeding, to boost the gluten levels.  From Wikipedia:

Many who have found themselves newly intolerant of gluten or wheat in the 2000s have wondered if genetic alterations of wheat through selective breeding might be the cause. From 2002 to 2005 a variety called "Hard White Wheat" was introduced into the US market, with varieties that were developed in the late 90s through 2004. ^[50] It is unknown if the introduction of this wheat variety is at the root of the current explosion in gluten/wheat intolerance, but the timing suggests it is an area that scientists should explore.

The US has enough self discipline to eventually phase out colonial holdings, such as imperial bases in other nations, as geopolitics permits.  Either that or it's hardly self directed enough to be considered "a government".  No runaway empire gets a foothold through the Constitution.

Closing bases here doesn't mean others can't be opened there, with more intelligence in the design, and with a clearer sense of mission.  A president has powers to effect change in this manner.

The Cuban government opposes the presence of the naval base, claiming that the lease is invalid under international law as it was not a sovereign nation at the time. The United States argues this point is irrelevant because Cuba apparently ratified the lease post-revolution, and with full sovereignty, when it cashed one rent check in accordance with the disputed treaty.^[2]

The immaturity of this relationship is obvious. Is it a "Vegas vendetta" that keeps Congress paralyzed? Eating a cake while continuing to have it, in an uneaten state, sometimes looks like "pursuing happiness".

The US is looking like another sorrowful giant, so weighed down with the trappings of empire as to be rendered immobilized and unrealistic about its prospects in this hampered state.  Someone should write an I Ching for nations.

Wanderers 2013.1.1

Mentioning Glenn Baker had me thinking "semiotics" anyway, and then it came up on the physics teacher list.  Those kinds of segues happen often enough:  an obscure topic connects across adjacent scenes or threads.

Tonight we were looking at "synchronicity" courtesy of Glenn Stockton, who built up suspense around doing an I Ching reading.  If he established nothing else he established his respect for the I Ching, and he reminded us of is own impressive story, which many of us have heard at least parts of, but here recapped in the Pauling House, in the evening, with a largish group on New Year's Day.

Glenn has been throwing the I Ching ever since he learned about it in language school, where he was blitzing through Vietnamese.  The NSA combs through there (the Monterey place) and he ended up a decoder, though there are fancier names for it.

He'd been a small town Montana, St. Helen's and Page, Arizona kid before that, teaching himself the art of capturing small animals, and letting them go, other skills. He stood out among his peers for his high aptitude and for that he was bullied. I've yakked here about Glenn before.

Anyway, it's OK by him to have a 5000 year old "machine" driven by random tosses (as we'd call them) offer him generic advice about whatever.  The notes to this matrix of 8 x 8 slides are magnificently oracular and in the tone of an intimate adviser acquainted with the ways of this world.

Giving it a whirl adds a magical moment to one's day, a fact I think even Martin Gardner might have toasted, why not.  The synchronistic tapestry quivers at 90 degrees to the literal plane, we might say.  Plus as someone may have put it, you don't have to visit any creepy Tarot lady, if you're not in the mood, as it's self administered.

Not that I think having another reader or therapist or auditor or what have you is a terrible fate.  The I Ching may feel too anonymous and not give enough truly personalized advice.

In any case, having Glenn treat us to his escapades in self teaching usually don't fail to entertain and instruct.  He scoots through a lot of chew, to coin an idiom, and leaves one wondering if it really could be true, that it's all one big fat quantum logic machine whatever that means.

The story involved Portuguese Jesuits finding the thing (being introduced to it by their hosts) and some of them going off the deep end in trying to get to the bottom of it.  Such power it seemed to have, as holy hypertext with a randomized spinner.

The logical pattern itself was of interest, what with three rods, either broken (0) or not (1), giving trigrams, then combinations as hexagrams, with changing lines reaching towards a next state, as we're always tumbling, tumbling.

Leibniz was reportedly one of the first to get his hands on a copy (translated) and to marvel at some of the logic, which no doubt corresponded with his own in many respects.  In exactly what way the I Ching might have been influential on his subsequent thinking is one of those big unknowns we might see books about someday, or a Wikipedia page.

There's no reason we couldn't study this game board in math classes more, what say the blogosphere teachers?  Yay?  It's pretty harmless to read ancient wisdom, as deep or deeper than just reading Dear Abbey or the daily Horoscope, or watching General Hospital, plus that's not the whole point.

Part of the point of the exercise is to get into the logic, the groove, and to start thinking more like Glenn does, e.g  "two in and one out" (describing a logic gate, a boolean vertex, or maybe a transistor, a fork in the road, a decision point).

As Portlanders, we embrace our Asian heritage and have no problem scanning the I Ching any more than we should or would viewing a favorite cartoon.  It's not like we only have time for Santa Claus, as Bill Shepard might put it.

Nor am I putting down a reflective self discipline with a mental attitude of humility ("teach me oh wise one").  Neuroscience will come along soon telling us how healthy that is, as if we had to wait for the names of all the proteins involved to get on with the experience of learning (good news:  you needn't wait, but do keep to your studies, it's not either / or).

Speaking of "either / or", Glenn was really down on the Aristotelian "excluded middle", which he characterized as "an axiom" (one of four was it?).  This form of logic had done harm by injecting polarity and opposition where we needed something more like inversion, and an appreciation for complementarity, not "me or you".  That's a rough sketch of some of the content.  Glenn has his own way of getting his message through.

Good seeing Barbara.  Christine asked for more definitions.  One Wanderer copped to using the I Ching only once, but getting good advice for the time, perhaps even critical.

The presentation wrapped up in a series of passings-around of books and art.  Glenn had brought several titles in a box and was eager to let us know about them.  Some were quite new, such as Quadrivium, a recap of that old curriculum design.

Speaking of synchronicity, it was good seeing Nancy Ankorn today, my listening partner through a number of Jungian Society of Portland events.  She connects me into the theater world, that of musicals, which her daughter inhabits, in DC these days.  I think of Ray and Bonnie and their show biz predilections.  Life is a performing art.  Ain't it?