Set Design

I think it'd be way against code to trash the Blue House and replace it with a dome. You might think, as a Fullerite, that I'd be all for doing that, but as a matter of fact, I'm into preserving the historic character of the neighborhood and all this wood, as configured, is way more valuable than what it'd be in a recycling heap.

That being said, the Evaluation and Monitoring Room (aka the "control room") is going to acquire a new cover of some kind or another. Some guy plans to saw off the fence, which will make it easier to build the temporary deck atop the doomed flooring. Should a two-story movie set arise, budgeted by the film company? What about Duke's then? Our fates seem tied in some way. I've imagined a spiral staircase and metal framework, more like a fire station. LCDs and speakers, computers, screw onto poles, in a kind of minimalist system, perhaps a Home Depot product down the road, or Office Depot as the case may be.

No, I don't think a loan officer would be in the mood to underwrite such a thing, given Coffee Shops Network is already getting juice, or some business is, barely keeping the lights on (with heat intermittent in balmy Rainforest, Oregon (he says I'll need a "tiger loop")). Retrofitting "this old house" with energy monitoring devices just echoes that ever receding end-of-the-rainbow dream of a "smart house".

It's an open secret that Americans are mostly into "stupid houses" these days. The idea that each of your appliances could be held accountable: that's still considered Jetsons territory, even though the technology has been around since the 1970s at the latest. The central thesis of Idiocracy is borne out once again.

Portland Energy Strategies might be another candidate for upgrading, as well as the Pauling House. Product placement, lifestyle modeling... Californians like to showcase what's new. Oregonians have a more retro aesthetic to inject maybe, which viewers will find comforting. The "dream of the '90s" and all that, something to use as raw material anyway.

Of course this is all science fiction (aka investment banking). Any real control room involved in dispatching bizmos, say, would likely need more space. The idea of pro-actively doing useful things has its allure, versus simply "countering terrorism" or otherwise making this another "fighting the bad guys" game. CDC and FAO tend to have more mature players than those who think 24 Hours is worthwhile television. Counter-terrorism requires a steady supply of terrorists for job security. Making enemies is a full time job for many a family in WDC.

Open Source Photocopier

I rewatched Revolution OS last night, after a well attended FNB. Jay did a good job with those zucchini from the Blue House (prepared at St. David's). Melody gets the potatoes this afternoon, for Pink House prep.

This time I notated the time signatures where O'Reilly was mentioned or featured, as I was sharing this with OSTers, many of whom have probably seen it.

Combining the ethic of Make: and DIY, I'm envisioning a course built around an open source photocopier, meaning you may explore and experiment with it in any direction without hitting a brick wall of proprietary "eyes only" layers.

The microcode, circuit diagrams, drum architecture (if it has one), are all laid out and for free, with parts obtainable. Robotics has already taken this route, as has bioengineering. Sometimes we overlook the more mundane, yet printing machines of various description play a huge role in the workings of human societies.

How might your average city kid, male or female, of whatever "race(s)" and/or "creed(s)" avail him- or herself of said assets? Or average rural kid, or statistical outlier? There'd be these learning shops full of strategically placed products, much like is found on some university and corporate campuses today. People who already know the business get to be trainers.

I was thinking to see Inside Job this week (with Tag, Jody and/or Suzanne?), which is not about 911, but about all those people playing real estate games in airport hotel seminar rooms, being like the Werner Erhards of "get rich quick" Ponzi-like operations, all dressed up and corporate (a lot of this was post the dot com bust, another big let down for many canny investors).

When that all went away, as obviously it would, many dream bubbles burst, kind of like in Yugoslavia (more Ponzis gone wild), which became once again Balkanized. But I haven't seen the movie yet, so I'll save it for my review.

I also need to write to Nick (still in Eugene, where Rick and Cody went). Did Amber ever find her way back to Hannah's and John's?

I don't know if the University of Havana would be interested in the photocopier idea, on top of all the ice cream (another set of open source plans). Perhaps Japanese campuses already have closed source versions they'd be willing to declassify. Even if they're older models, you're building up the folk knowledge any service-oriented culture will need. Yes, of course I have my eye on the Pauling Campus, as usual.

Wanderers Retreat (spring equinox)

Yet again I missed an opportunity to see the next movie after The Cup by that cool Bhutanese director. I'm not despairing though, and used the time wisely to continue my visit with Rick and Cody, whom I hardly ever get to meet.

Their visit over St. Patrick's Day ("we're back") was well timed and appreciated. I'm glad they got to meet Alex.

I spent a lot of the day with David Feinstein, a rare privilege. He vectored one of his inner circle through Pauling House, a protege working in Tri-Cities, and chalking up another in the XX column, Trish having invited her friend from yesterday, and Jessica bringing her girl.

Mostly we who show up tend to XYs, with me sometimes offering up some archetypal Athena talk (feminist?) in somewhat the Francis Bacon tradition (via Nashville).

Tara has invited Reed over to see a movie. LW, free schooler, is practicing with R2. Having "qualed for nats" Tara is looking toward Dallas, then some other American states, including south of "the border" (bell sound), Friends a factor.

Trisha wanted me to explain "Quaker" and I did an account based in the 1600s, which is around when the East India Company began. I should have talked about branches in GIT, sometimes mergings, ala this O'Reilly book I've been reading.

Yes, these are somewhat random notes for building upon later (in Facebook?). More happens on retreats than meets the eye. Glad Rick and Cody could come by Pauling House last night, to meet some of the crew.

Lots happening on the discussion list as well, though a lot of it's dino talk (antediluvian). Tara and I made Hotcake House memories, also the site of tonight's victory dinner.

Speaking of privatized military firms (what the nats were about), I'm not noticing much civilian procedure whereby another front for warfare was entered, as a fait accompli. We saw the committing of inventory and personnel without much formal legislating or even policy debate. Talk about wagging the dog...

The premise: that some phenomenon in "the Arab world" is the monster, versus some more inter-generational breakdown (more a natural process than a beast to be contained), is resulting in some miscalculations.

Why not connect more dots, in Thailand, Burma, Greece? Big cities, small countries, brimming with hopes and dreams, want more democracy, why should that be a surprise? "Passing the torch" to a next generation is not always a smooth process. Perhaps with better media, it's getting smoother?

The Academy Awards helps keep the wheels turning, as does the awarding of Nobel Prizes. David Feinstein's comments reminded me again of the importance of merit in meritocracies, often signified with bits of resume and credential. I'll have more thoughts about that another time.

For all these mixings of worlds, I'm hoping to mix them more.

Stewart Brand at Reed College

:: Stewart Brand at Reed College ::

Glenn and I got there way early, as I was having paranoid fantasies of lines around the block and not being able to get in to the Kaul Auditorium. Stewart Brand, co-founder of Co-Evolution Quarterly, Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL, Clock of the Long Now, with tons of other street cred, is like a superstar in my little fish pond. I was expecting most of Portland to be there.

As it was, the auditorium was comfortably capacious for the many Reed students and faculty, with a smattering of Wanderers. Don joined us closer to opening time. Those who got there early got to see this Youtube (or one very like it) which Stewart clearly found hilarious and ingenious because of the guy's inventing an English-sounding "language" (I'd just come from a Wittgenstein study group session where we discussed the "private language argument", so this seemed peculiarly apropos).

Stewart is a big picture thinker, taking a uniquely individual angle on stuff. He thinks cyber-government needs to charge the externalities of coal burning back to the coal burners (that'd be most of us), so we'll have to pay a lot more for the privilege. Cheap coal is both trashing the climate in ways that might kill us (the Venus Syndrome) while keeping competing solutions at bay.

He's finding wind power to be something of a boondoggle and favors civilian nuclear plants, including the kind that eats the nuclear weapons captured from those antediluvian criminal syndicates who still think about using them. The smaller plant designs, well under a gigawatt, would bring the power sources closer to the villages or townships.

He's pro solar, but doesn't like the idea of bulldozing thousands of acres for these vast arrays of panels. Wind farms are likewise land hungry.

Will there be fusion in our future? He's an older gray guy, so is quite aware of how long we've been hearing that hype, but he doesn't mind contributing, including by providing the voice-over for a rather elaborate cartoon about the latest ignition scheme.

On the whole, his slides and videos were top notch.

Stewart has a lot of respect and admiration for humans slogging in slums, building cities at a higher rate than ever in history. He's not dismayed by poverty, but encouraged by trends. We just need to keep harvesting that energy, without triggering a Venus Effect (ala Lovelock) and enjoy a bright future.

Energy includes biomass of course, and he's pro genetic engineering. As an open source hacker type, he takes the Freeman Dyson view that monopolistic control of biotechnology by corporations is already a thing of the past. Monsanto could go belly up tomorrow for all he cares, yet bio-engineering of new food stuffs, some with medicinal properties, is here to stay. Which doesn't mean that all applications to date have been well managed or sustainable.

Listen to those closest to the technology in question, such as farmers and foresters, he counsels -- a way of making friends and allies. He'd been a logger in Oregon in a past chapter, as well as a rock music show producer. "Loggers love the woods" he intoned. He has the sensibilities of a politician, although he's happy to pick arguments with libertarians or anyone who thinks civil servants are to blame for the world's ills.

The central question of our age, he said, is whether democracies can self-organize to the extent needed to get their ecological house more in order. The global climate conundrum is going to remain a scary source of inconvenient truths.

He likes that new variety of vitamin A rich rice (hitherto a missing ingredient), and sees anti-GMO sentimentalists as unwittingly condemning more children to blindness, as a result of the delays they'd imposed on the roll out of this genetically engineered product.

During the Q&A, many questioners took different points of view. Stewart was always happy to refer back to his sources and reading list, so we could delve more deeply and appreciate where he was coming from.

Stewart reminded me of Duane Ray, one of the Wanderers in attendance. Duane asked me if I was pro or con nuke plants and I gave a somewhat count-intuitive, counter-cultural response, practicing counter-intelligence on Americans to comical effect (Duane laughed).

The faculty member making the introduction (biology and environmental sciences department) mentioned Stewart's intelligence community connections, plus we'd heard talk of the CIA at the PPUG after-party from some guy in police work, relaying some CTO views. Stewart didn't seem at all worried about those Persian nuke plants, which currently borrow their fuel from a Russian fuel bank (library). He mentioned Valarie Plame of Countdown to Zero fame.

Stewart also thinks there's a right way to do fish farming (as well as a wrong way) and humans should let more of the wild stay wild, far less interfered with. Why eat any wild fish at all? Grow your wood crops and leave natural forests alone too. Bring back beavers. Introduce more diversity. This is his vision of how humans should live: as catalysts for nature's abundance and propensity for innovation. Accomplishing this goal requires keeping global temperature in check -- his highest priority.

Reed's campus is quite beautiful. People who get to live there must feel ultra-privileged. I don't know if its environmental sciences department has a "weapons inspector" major or course (something I've been pushing for OSU), but there is a nuclear reactor on campus.

Greetings from Philly

[a post to Synergeo, hyperlinks added ]

We're talking about Math for Mystics (book) on mathfuture. No one has mentioned Bucky, which is fortunate, as he did not consider himself a mystic (see Synergetics Dictionary). On the other hand, he was a transcendentalist, at least in my book. This doesn't constitute a belief in the "supernatural" however. Sure, he considered telepathy a reality, based on experience, but thought it would therefore become a topic for science. You find "non mystic" physics writers expressing similar thoughts, about the reality of a zeitgeist, noosphere, or shared mind (morphogenetic fields etc.). These topics should be filed as "speculative" to be sure, but it's not necessary to get all occultish about them. Fuller was not another Aleister Crowley.

I'm currently attending a meeting of the AFSC corporation, a Quaker action arm, somewhat Machiavellian in that it's all about forming alliances and networks with non-Quakers. That's what one has to do if in a small and esoteric sect (more a privilege than a burden).

I haven't met up with any SNEC people yet, but have some plans to do that tomorrow. Then the next day I fly back to Portland.

Also on mathfuture, I'm continuing to share my ideas for the emerging digital mathematics track, a multi-year conversation. In my case, I was influenced by the rise of object-oriented executable math notations (so-called "computer languages"). The idea of giving more concrete expression to "math objects" (such as rational numbers, vectors, polyhedra...) and defining their powers operationally, in terms of scripted algorithms, seemed like a "no brainer" to me. Subsequently, I encountered the resistance of the functional programming crowd, some of which are strongly opposed to "imperative" and/or "stateful" grammars.

A core "math object" (where the concept really takes off) is of course the "polyhedron". People ask where polyhedrons occur in the real world, but if you're thinking generally, then the answer is "everywhere". Any kind of container at all, from beer can, to planet, to human body, is a polyhedron in some sense. You have an inside and outside, spinnability, translatability, scalability... a rich set of ideas explored in detail in Synergetics.

Once we agree that polyhedrons make sense as paradigm "math objects", the question remains as to whether Fuller's treatment is relevant and important. My position is clear: of course it's relevant and, in fact, not mentioning this treatment in any way has gone a long way to draining the more traditional curricula of their credibility and viability. In failing to incorporate even the gist of the "concentric hierarchy", we've discovered math teaching subcultures to be mired in straitjacketing reflex-conditioning. This belies many claims of operating "logically" and/or "intelligently" (rationally). I see corruption and a lack of integrity. That's an opinion, clearly, and the countering view seems to be that Fuller's treatment lacks integrity for one reason or another. For the most part, the guardians of the status quo feel no obligation to be explicit in their defense of said status quo, as they don't see polyhedra as making a come back under any guise, let alone as avatars of some "world game" nonsense.

Those who do tend to verbalize their defense, including many who may be "pro polyhedron", tend to recite the mantra the "Fuller was a mystic" (taking me back to my opening paragraph). Somehow, teaching about the 1/24, 1/8, 1, 2.5 3, 4, 5, 6, 18.51 20 volume progression is associated with Tarot, astrology etc.

Wittgenstein (movie review)

I finally got to see this, after complaining to Alex Aris that no movie had been made of the guy's life.

"There is one" he informed me, relaying details, and a generally positive review (good leading actor).

"It's more like a play" he cautioned.

As it turns out, I was on my way to Movie Madness (on my bicycle), which specializes in hard to find videos, and there it was, a dvd filed by director Derek Jarman.

Having Ludwig's skeptical students (including Maynard and Bertie) sitting on deck chairs, like poolside, was a funny touch.

He keeps exiting stuffy Cambridge, stage left, disgusted by mediocrity and the dialed back "polite company". He goes looking for craggy cliffs more like a Fortress of Solitude, and finds them in Norway, later Ireland.

Is Wittgenstein our superman then, ready to stare down the internal self-believing solipsist?

What's harder: "egocide" (per Fuller) or "killing God" (per Heller on Nietzsche)? A question for another day perhaps.

I respected the script for working hard to communicate something of what he teaches, beyond doing a biography.

Beautiful Mind? Sort of. The scene in the Soviet Union was interesting. The play casts somewhat scary and/or disapproving women.

I liked how it starts with a young boy character and never really gives that up, ending with like a bed time story.

There, I'm reminded of A Cosmic Fairy Tale by Fuller, his Tetrascroll (a collaboration).

He goes to Russia to be a manual laborer but fails to meet the requirements.

Keynes is as important as Russell to the plot.

Then there's some guy he befriends, like a protege maybe, whom he's trying to liberate from the fly bottle (to escape academic philosophy and get a real job). He's considered a corrupting influence by academic recruiters, obviously.

Like what about the protege's parents who gave up everything to give him this opportunity? Parents hate Wittgenstein lets remember, because he was so mean to that little girl, scared her witless.

All in all, I'm reminded quite a bit of Logicomix about Bertrand Russell, in which Wittgenstein also features.

"Compare and contrast the war scenes (before he was taken prisoner) in each fictional account" could be a writing assignment.

The movie alludes to some of the scholarship: same history teacher as Hitler, with Cambridge a spies nest.

Regarding these latter rumors, you've gotta remember that McCarthyism had it's British incarnation (with "commie symps" everywhere, riddling fascist fandoms).

The comedy is understated, although Wittgenstein's thinking to kill himself because people were flipping him off with "a V sign", driving him to self doubt, is beyond hilarious (laughter too high frequency to make any noise). Thinking of Adam Bellow for some reason (yeah, son of Saul and fellow alum).

He's definitely cast within the "tormented saint" archetype (suffering from an excess of virtue), again not unlike the treatment of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (we empathize with these projected "crazies", our certified shamans).

If there's a strong word for this Wittgenstein guy, it's "abrupt" (as in "I'm moving to Ireland" or "our friendship is over") but also -- and this is what the young boy establishes -- "flamboyant" and "theatrical".

To just say "moody" is really too "broody" -- he's got an ET friend after all, and a beautiful mind.

Maybe the funniest line is at the end, delivered with Steven Wright like dead pan:

"I wanted to write a philosophy book that was nothing but jokes." Pause. "So why didn't you?" "(sigh) I didn't have a sense of humor."

Badaboom. Applause.

I told Alex I found it somehow ironic when people kept "questioning the obvious" in this film (thereby sounding philosophical) and yet the truly obvious ("this studio") is barely mentioned.

A die-hard truth-teller might want to point that out: that for all this talk of "language picturing facts in reality" these were actors in a Made for TV world (or language), with Wittgenstein himself nowhere directly depicted.

Is he not even present between the lines? OK, maybe there is some "rhinoceros in the room", but there's still no "pointing" in this direction.

"Read more Hegel? That would drive me mad" -- another throwaway from Mr. Loony Tunes himself, in response to yet another Nurse Ratchet type, who didn't like his bringing up Trotsky for some unfathomable reason.

I still can't get over the Martian (almost like a Yellow Submarine character, foreshadowing a more psychedelic future perhaps, where they / we breathe a different air?).

This jolly green ET is a private language court jester, an imaginary friend, a projected homunculus imagined since boyhood, a font of wisdom & nonsense (like an oracle) tapping into a more cosmic, more secret, sense of self.

Make: Mathematics

:: OST annual meeting ::

I'm in a presentation by Scott Gray, O'Reilly School of Technology (OST), regarding his ground-breaking Make: Mathematics program.

The conceptual model is a cube with paired opposite faces representing Tools, Content and Learning Management. Opposite Tools is Making, opposite Content is Learning, and opposite Learning Management is Feedback.

In a past era, a "maker cube" was actually an apprenticeship, a hands-on, integrated approach to learning a trade, with mentoring. Assembly line education broke up this model to manage the exponential growth curves. With the advent of electronic communications, Scott thinks we're ready to restore the apprenticeship model in some areas.

Scott has an interesting story. He was born into a coal mining subculture in Appalachia. He was struggling academically in a mediocre school, until he encountered a college math teacher who helped him flip on the lights. He suddenly discovered his inner brilliance and went on to become a luminary in the distance education world, having grappled with many a STEM curriculum.

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity drove his curiosity in several dimensions.

The story behind OST has a lot to do with the University of Illinois in Champagne / Urbana. I'm still putting the puzzle pieces together in my own mind, as I get to meet the key people. Several have flown here for the annual meeting.

The late Jerry Uhl was the early pioneer in this picture and his curriculum writing is still a backbone of the Make: Math curriculum. I'd been tracking him through the Math Forum and knew of his stature. Many of the people at this meeting knew him personally, were among his closest friends and co-workers.

Make: Mathematics is designed to be sharable for a fee. The product allows professors to customize their own course content and syndicate it over the web, using Scott's team's cloud service. Wolfram has licensed Mathematica to run on their back end.

Students get to interact with a web page that's a lot like a Mathematica Notebook, implemented in HTML and JavaScript (Bruce has been coding the back end). UI enrollees get to actively author content in a personal sandbox, while switching between native Mathematica syntax and typeset views, provided by the server as images.

Hilbert has built in workflow that allows students to hand in work-in-progress to a teacher (e.g. Bruce), who then gets to make comments and hand it back. Color coded text areas distinguish between student and mentor comments. The team sought our feedback on the color scheme.

This is not simple-minded low end learning management system (LMS). Students have access to free form cells accepting Mathematica code. They can change code on the fly, look at 2D and 3D graphics with a slider that changes the viewpoint -- all in a web page (AJAX by Joel).

The mathfuture group should have some interest in this technology. "Learn Math by Making Math" (OST's motto) is a lot like "Make Math Your Own" (Maria's tag line).

Wanderers 2011.02.15

Mark Frischmuth is giving us an update on developments around DemocracyLab. Brandon, also present, is a code warrior for the project. Expect more news soon.

Steve Holden is new in Portland. He has been helpful since hopping off the airplane. He solved the rear car door not unlocking problem (child proof feature, duh). The drains are flowing more smoothly than they have in months.

Steve is reassuring us that his peregrinations, frequent moves over the years, have not kept him from developing a sense of community. He doesn't think electronics are able to replace community however. We're a completely packed house tonight. Barbara, Patrick, Lew, Dick, David, Bill, Jon... Trish.

What is the open source philosophy? Its goal is to develop common resources and infrastructure which you're free to tweak, mess with. Costs may be driven down by sharing in the development of these assets.

Steve didn't want to make this a long talk. He gave us some biographical information, tried to locate himself on the geopolitical spectrum, made some thoughtful remarks, and then threw it open to discussion.

The discussion got into patents and copyrights, whether academic work is open source, what benefits one might get from contributing to open source projects. A lot of the people around the table have experience and connections in the open source ecosystem, so this was a fairly sophisticated discussion. We mentioned Apache a lot. I sat quietly, typing this blog post.

Exhibit:

/*
 * --------------------------------------------------------
 * "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
 * Adam Ziolkowski and Leon Handreke 
 * wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you can do 
 * whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you
 * think this stuff is worth it, you can buy us a beer in return.
 * --------------------------------------------------------
 */

Terry Talks

Terry Bristol is sequestered with some of his friends, and visiting guest speaker Nancy Cartwright, to go through some of his philosophy of science banter. Terry Talks are not TED Talks, though we do have a camera going (the same tiny Canon that Glenn Stockton controlled when Nancy Cartwright lectured at the Schnitzer).

He's working on a book, somewhat like Mindwalk (Capra brothers) and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig) in that it weaves biography, real world characters (Stephen Hawking especially) into a kind of reverie on the history of "western" thinking (scare quotes because east met west quite awhile ago by now).

Terry has been fortunate to hang out with quite a few big name contemporaries, the guests he brings to Portland, Seattle, San Jose and other places (Portland is the hub of this activity, but does not define the outer boundary of his show). He also considers himself a serious philosopher in his own right. Given these two ingredients, it's not far-fetched to expect the kind of book that brings Terry's reverie into the foreground, against a backdrop of stellar figures.

I was quickly introduced to the assembly, by Terry, as a big wheel in the Bucky Fuller subdomain, and as a student of Rorty's at Princeton. The latter tagging was for Dr. Cartwright's benefit. The credential (studied with Rorty) got me a lot of cred with Dr. Haack when she was here, because she'd sparred with the guy, in print and in person.

Pragmatism is much on the table here, through Dewey, and Karl Popper especially. Wittgenstein is at "the far end of the fire poker" here, kept at arm's length for the purposes of this discussion. Bucky Fuller's thinking will only appear here, in my blogs (on-line journals).

Fuller's philosophy is somewhat unique in the "western" tradition in that it subtracts away any static all-encompassing "thing" that is "the universe". We experience Universe (Fuller assigns it a proper place name (532.18)) yet it's eternally aconceptual, a context for our systems, our partially overlapping time tunnels (scenarios) without being point-to-able as some "elephant" or "thing".

Terry's philosophy is somewhat similar in that he's skeptical that "a theory of everything" is a necessary goal of the sciences. He's content to let our systems stay special case. That may be the more pragmatic stance, I agree. When empirical theories become intrinsically intolerant of counter-cultures and complementary "insanity" they've likely reached the rigor mortis stage of some "empire", an endgame.

Anthropologically speaking, perhaps the urge for a totalistic TOE is the urge to build a Tower of Babel, with human cogitation at the apex. What seems to happen at the apex is thermodynamic noise, or is that pure signal? Systems tend to dissolve, in any case. Humanly contrived systems have a finite half-life, tend to meltdown at "the top" (another meaning of "trickle down").

Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript could be another puzzle piece here?

Terry's style is to speak quickly in a colloquial style. He says the word "thing" with high frequency, and might end a sentence with "da da da" (similar to "yada yada"), the sense being he's been over this turf so many times, it's somewhat a waste of time to say it again. If one hasn't bounced around in this namespace, it may sound like noise. Having been to several Terry Talks over the years, I feel on familiar ground.

On the pragmatic front, a service guy from Montag keeps coming back to fix our furnace. He has theories as to why it's not coming on. A rational tree structure diagrams the possibilities. The art of furnace maintenance may be subtle sometimes. Lets hope our experienced repair guy doesn't snap under pressure.

Nancy had an interesting necklace worth commenting upon. A large puzzle piece around her neck. I felt we'd won something important while geo-caching, couldn't say what exactly. A cosmic fish perhaps.

Nancy Ankorn was also present, meaning both XXs were named Nancy. The rest were XYs of high mental caliber and engaged in contradictory exchange. Both Nancys are quite up to co-managing in this guyish world in my judgement. Good seeing Bruce Adams, Mark Martin.

PPUG 2011.02.08

Twas my distinct pleasure to introduce the chairman, Steve Holden, to a packed house at Urban Airship, PPUG's new meeting venue. Adam Lowry was acting in the role of host, with Eric Holscher, another UA MVP, delivering the majority of the evening's content with a truly excellent presentation (more below).

Steve is temporarily my house guest, like Lindsey but shorter term. He's already found a property to value in 97214, making his new business (The Open Bastion) bi-coastal. His other zip code is 11105.

Other news: upcoming conferences: OSCON, Pycon, OS Bridge. Talk proposals for this last one are still being accepted.

Dan Colish gave a talk on the ABC module, containing Abstract Base Classes. The name of this module may be construed as homage or at least a pun. Guido greatly appreciates his intellectual progenitors at CWI, as I learned at the EuroPython in Gothenberg. Python-the-language inherits from an older language named ABC.

Readthedocs is a free and open source community service, implemented in Django. The project got started during a 48 hour dash (dart?), a longer version of the sprint. As a lightning talk is to a thunder talk, so is a sprint to a dash ("thunder talk" is not commonly so-defined as of this posting).

Eric was a veritable font of information about what's cool and hard at work in web services: Gunicorn, Nginx, Solr, Celery, Haystack and of course Sphinx, around which this django project is built.

Readthedocs can host your materials through a docs prefix in your existing registered domains, while also providing subdomain access within their rtfd namespace. It supports themes, including an in-house theme that gives you a consistent user experience (ux). "Use a designer" counseled Eric, sharing important insights he'd gleaned.

I spent much of the pre-meeting chatting with Luke, following up on our conversation about computing in academia. Back then, I'd been pondering PSU's situation (Banner etc.), before diving head first into trucking for a spell.

We adjourned to Bailey's Taproom (see slides) where much chatter occurred. Jolly Michelle ran a tight meeting as usual, getting most of us to wear name tags (me included: Kirby Urner it said).

Fond greetings to all of you. Yes, I said Chipy was cooler, in terms of e-lists, but that was more just to galvanize (goose, elicit) more self improvement activities.

HNY 4708

Got Tara off to her debate meet, a road trip, student organized, parent supervised. I burned through much of the day in cyberspace, plane spotting or whatever I do, pretending I'm a Howard Rheingold or Amber Case (both cyber-anthropologists).

I was in a thread on mathfuture with Alexander Bogomolny, webmaster for Cut the Knot, a useful source over the years. I've linked to it from Bizmo Diaries.

Then I shot down to FNB on my Captain Amerika bike or maybe she's Bat Woman. She was happy to be closer to her love interest, the FNB trailer, retrieved from another Ville.

Walker played the Casio and sang as we gradually dispersed, with some soon heading north to monastic facilities and/or the San Juans.

Tara texted from the debate site. Emails with mom, regarding AFSC business, with Stallings re Consoletti.

Holden inbound.

I've been reading up on White Metal Rabbit lore per some Chinese mnemonics. I'm not sure any one culture has a monopoly on "memory palaces" though I could see where advances in spatial data management techniques would excite cross-cultural GUI development in mind's eye virtual modeling (a glass bead game (meme game)).

Humans learn from their peers pretty quickly.

Make your teachings worth propagating.

Happy New Year.

Wanderers 2011.2.1

Don's cell call reminded me of this interesting opportunity, to hear more stories from Asia from a woman recently returned. I took my leave of Food Not Bombs in the shelter, making sure I'd be seeing Cera again, before she disappears into some monastery or wherever she goes.

I peddled my bicycle through the darkness and winter cold, grateful for the flashing LED headlamp I'd finally won budget for (funds are tight in America, with Nick an hour on the bus each way to dialysis, barely able to walk, and with spinal difficulties). We've eliminated oil heat from the list of necessities. DSL is the priority.

Funds are very tight in Cambodia as well, forcing parents over the border into Thailand, perhaps to never see their children again. The child abandonment rate is very high, in part because of a recent holocaust and a missing generation. The need for orphanages is great, reminding me of Romania in some ways.

I learned a lot from Ms. Goldmann's presentation. She's a vivacious, intelligent and I expect effective fundraiser for her worthy projects. If only the Coffee Shops Network were further along, with its NGO-friendly games.

Ethical tourism is the new buzz word (right up their with eco-tourism), heard around Burma as well. Come with the intent to spend wisely, to have your visit help sponsor your causes.

Discretionary travel is a way to walk one's talk, on the model of a pilgrimage, an inward journey involving self reflection and meditations about purpose.

The flip side of traveling ethically is to encourage beneficiaries to not discriminate so blatantly against foreigners (in Cambodia, all foreigners are blanket "French").

For example, the current Cambodian airline (co-operated by Vietnam Airlines) actually advertises lower prices "for Cambodians only", meaning foreign nationals will automatically need to pay more.

This double standard makes humanitarian projects like Ms. Goldmann's unworkable, as NGOs depend on stretching dollars as far as they'd go as if a local were spending them. Having to pay "tourist prices" makes such undertakings unaffordable.

The orphanage in question is just outside of Batdambang, Cambodia's second largest city. Some speculate international tourism may route through a revitalized airport there, given the airport nearest Ankor Watt is too near, and the relics are starting to crumble thanks to jet engine vibrations just a mile away.

Ms. Goldmann has gone back and forth quite a few times and had many adventures to recount. Motorbikes are dangerous. Dustin's severe foot injury reminded me of Nirel's experience in India.

Our gathered Wanderers were much impressed and encouraged by Ms. Goldmann's kind and brave nature, as well as her extreme youth (she's 18). I was reminded of Jody (an orphan with experience working with orphanages), of my daughter, and of the goddess Tara herself, a compassionate archetype.

Speaking of Buddhism, even though the Cambodians are cash-poor, they know how to build epic-sized temples. Finding some kind of rapprochement between "the French" and their western education, and indigenous scholarship, would probably be of significant benefit to both sides. Californians revere Buddhist teachers and study Zen for college credit. Why pit east and west against one another, in dimensions where the most synergy might occur?

The orphanage itself is non-sectarian. Ms. Goldmann is Jewish and Dustin, her business partner, soon to become a Cambodian, does not plan his life around some belief in a deity. I think of my Jewish friend Alan Potkin as well, another respectful admirer of Asian cultures who has no interest in recruiting people away from Buddhist patterns of thought.

Buddhism is variously categorized as poly and/or non-theist, depending on which branch of scholarship one is following. A doctrine of rebirth somewhat obfuscates the line between mortal and immortal, meaning Bodhisattvas or saints might also be considered embodiments of eternal archetypes, more like in the Jungian model.

Enneacontahedron Again

Finding omni-symmetrical polyhedrons with volumes close to the sphere's volume, while having the same radius in some important direction, has been a preoccupation of some geometers, David Koski among them.

Sir David works in tetravolumes, a little known standard, wherein the unit sphere is rt2(2)*pi in volume. That's (4/3)*pi*r**2 times S3, the Synergetics Constant. Either way, the ratios come out the same, so even in XYZ you will find the enneacontahedron comes within a fraction of a percent of a sphere's volume, hugging it even more closely than the rhombic triacontahedrons you may have encountered in this neighborhood: the 5 and the 5+.

Below is a rendering developed in POV-Ray using the export feature from vZome. I've jiggered with the camera and added a textured sphere inside, still growing to become tangent to the enneacontahedron's narrow diamonds, embedded in our rhombic triacontahedron's.

Waiting for "Superman" (movie review)

The movie offers a somewhat ahistoric view in that it paints a picture of some idyllic time, when it all just worked, but now it's all broken.

The supposed idyllic time was no doubt after the Civil War, but maybe before the Cold War, or during said war if your family was then living the suburban American dream and unaffected by the world's hellish conditions (a minority even then).

There was no mention of the fact that a really giant educator, the military service, slurps up a lot of people, and has been doing so for a long while. The prisons get talked about, but not the military.

Other voices in the film (besides the director's) do point out that the despoliation has been occurring for a long time, somewhat contradicting the "idyllic past" hypothesis.

So lets just say the movie tells more than one story, at least if you read between the lines.

The analysis accepts a rather rigidly nationalistic framework, with the USA pitted against these other nations in a kind of metaphysical Olympics (USA losing).

I won't deny the "metaphysical" part, but is nationalism much more than a crutch for a lame and insufficiently responsible rationality? What did Albert Einstein think about nationalism, and what percentage of high schoolers have studied that question in the last year, anywhere in the world? I'm sure we don't know, but probably not very many (OMSI-goers an exception).

In sum, this movie is itself the product of a somewhat impoverished all-American curriculum. The movie-makers have no time for much history (nothing about "busing" or the civil rights movement, desegregation, successive waves of immigration, church and state tensions). They're effective teachers (deserve merit pay) but that doesn't make up for the rather shallow analysis.

The animations work (or what does Tufte think? -- too much chart junk? I saw spatial volumes substituting for surfaces when showing percents, a recipe for making statistics misleading) but with that kind of bandwidth, we could be covering a lot more ground. Let's put even some good college teachers to shame by really covering a ton of data in the allotted time. Don't dumb it down for us.

If you have Bill Gates on your show again, maybe have him do something more technical, less political? Maybe he could teach us the next Windows, or explain SQL? Lets actually educate about math and computer science, not just talk about whether we like it or are good at it.

Like, at what speed does one actually break the sound barrier and when was this done? There's lots of room on the screen to show facts and speedometers (control panels). Why not flood the screen with data, like they do during football games (with scores of other games, recent headlines, a company logo dance, a belly dance...). Let's play with the theory that big screen communications could convey a lot more, now that we have the ability to easily rewind them. This is what happened to writing, once literacy became widespread.

I found it interesting to come to this film having just seen Helen's work, which looks at the same issues from a more zoomed out perspective. Is this "education" we plan to be offering all that big a help? Were we teaching anything about how to grow vegetables? So what if you know calculus? Sure, you might need to know it but are they telling you why? No computer programming in your high school? Reasoning? Where's the debate?

In much of the world, kids get herded off to classrooms, where a culling process begins and a few get skimmed off by The Empire. The rest are dumped on the streets with no prospects, ready to be recruited into liberation fronts. Their farmlands have been taken, their community fragmented. Why should this be called "school". If you're not building networks and friendships for life, as well as relevant skills, maybe it doesn't get that label?

When Quakers wanted to distinguish their houses of worship from the other churches, they decided to use "meetinghouse" as their designation. A church was but a "steeple house" and, as such, was not up to Quaker standards. I'm seeing a similar need today, to distinguish, to disambiguate.

People these days say "eco-village" a lot. Perhaps a real school is at minimum an eco-village. City-as-campus. Maybe these buildings called "schools" are just another kind of learning center, one of many. Should we Quakers open some new learning centers around town, and leave "going to school" to the less innovative? Let's check what the tribes are thinking.

The guardians in this movie are committed to providing a decent life for their kids, however it's clear that this cannot be done near or in the home, and that adults who have not specialized as classroom teachers are not a source of "schooling" and will not be offering many life-relevant skills beyond idle play and/or nagging to do one's homework. "On which side of the Periodic Table do we find metals?" Your average parent is not expected to know, and yet your average 8th grader is.

If there's something between you and that body of knowledge, it must either be your own lack of will, or the fact that some system is withholding your rightful heritage. In this case, I'd agree with the film makers: it's your heritage that's being withheld, by those likewise deprived, but then when has the public curriculum been overwhelmingly generous? It's not new to hold back. Not everyone needs to know the King's business, after all.

I mean look, if we were really serious about pumping more and better information into the culture, wouldn't we be doing that by now? Perhaps some of us are. We have televisions and DVD players galore, not to mention Youtube, which many "schools" block.

Sure, we could be investigating our problems way more seriously than we do, and have working solutions to many more of them. Like we could've had voting machines in the schools for some years, and been polling students frequently on many issues, lots of stats. We could have used this technology to explore how voting works, how votes get tallied fairly even when the ballots are secret. What's private and what's public?

But lets face it: at the end of a long day commuting and pushing products nobody really wants or needs, it's more fun and relaxing to kick back and pop open a can and watch something quasi-mindless. I'm not against R&R, but lets talk about how to talk ourselves out of crummy work habits. Guardians need quality time with their kids doing shared community service. When does that happen?

Note to historians: Americans had simply run out of any ability to imagine the future, other than to try to inhabit some TV world they'd had beamed at them as the wars raged in Asia. If Star Trek and The Jetsons were unobtainable, maybe we could relive something already in the can, say The Waltons or even All in the Family. "Someday, we might even break the sound barrier and wake up in the 21st Century (give us another generation or two)". Welcome to the rubber room, still open for business and packed with people in transition.

We went to this movie at Laurelhurst Theater on Burnside directly from Quaker meeting. This was one of the two days a week when minors are permitted (the marquee didn't let on there was a 1:10 PM showing, as this was only true on weekends -- the Web was my source). Tara and I had Chinese food afterward and discussed our views. Her latest debate tournament at PSU didn't result in any awards, but she felt good about her role as a mentor to the relative newcomers to the sport. Other Quakers went home to watch football, as today was an important game, especially for Bears fans.

At meeting, I talked about AVP and whether violent video games were an alternative to violence. In some curricula I think they are, most definitely. Carl and I also discussed the merits of NPYM affiliating with FGC. He's neutral on the topic. Doing so would have its costs, but they're probably bearable.

I'll be avoiding Quaker Quest (a program hatched in the UK) as I'm finding it too alien to my own Friendly faith 'n practice. No biggie, forking happens.

I also met up with Lew, our property management clerk. He'd recently finishing using Google apps such as Sketchup to get the Multnomah Friends meetinghouse in 3D on Google Earth, as a public service (our clerk positions are unpaid). Now this guy is educated.

click for larger view

The title Waiting for "Superman" has somewhat the same cadence as Bowling for Columbine, but the films come from different angles. Would a KIPP show Michael Moore films to its students? How about SuperSize Me? Would it teach Verboten Math? If you're a student or teacher in one of those, maybe drop me a note, as I'm curious. Journalists? Any news?

FNB: 2010.1.13

Food Not Bombs has been in a sharing relationship with the Religious Society of Friends here in Portland since about September of 2010. The relationship goes back a little further than that if you count our participation as a Quaker household (per directories) minus any use of the commons on Stark in a non-rental community-serving set of arrangements.

Basement storage of bulk supplies is permitted. Deep frying is not (fortunately FNB tends to go with light steaming, as we did yesterday). Friends pay for heat, electricity and water use for a three hour period each week. FNB also borrows salt and pepper on occasion though with plans to replenish (I could get some next time I visit Costco).

I used to be dogmatic about some official FNB trailer not getting separated from Simon's cookware, but that was mostly invented bureaucracy on my part. The stalwarts are ingenious at coming up with trailers, including making their own. Simon, a stalwart, with history as a software developer, is pulling a new rig fashioned from a ladder. Aaron's trailer, like Noah's in Davis, is able to haul an ass of compost, maybe several (an "ass" is a unit of measure in our household).

Yesterday (Jan 13), I wasn't sure I'd be getting assistance (I'd done the job solo the previous week). Lindsey volunteered to assist, though she considers herself mostly a hauler (despite her vegan cooking skills). Upon arrival, however, I was greeted by two veteran cooks already in the kitchen. Sarabell used to work in a Quaker elementary school in Philadelphia. Noah seemed to know his way around a kitchen. We showed up with the produce Lindsey had hauled earlier that day.

Thanks to the surfeit of cooking talent, Lindsey allowed herself to sing her show tunes using the social hall piano, though always mindful that her TV-14+ lyrics might be offensive to some Quakers working in the building. She has a more PG-rated lineup when playing in houses of worship, such as during that benefit for Sisters of the Road.

At the park, it felt a bit like a Zen convention, as Satya and friends were on their way to some esoteric sitting and presentation regarding some newly translated works. I thought about going, but then Brent very kindly offered to share wood he'd salvaged from a free pile in Washington (a clear cut). Their native practice in that state, probably in Oregon as well, is to douse all this burnable fuel, including fresh hemlock, in diesel, and set it ablaze. Air pollution from such waste had already driven Brent from his habitat at another time (the fire smolders for days). He fights back by salvaging what he can and redistributing it to suburbanites who maybe don't appreciate the value of real firewood, or the level of waste their own lifestyles encourage.

Brent came to the house with his maul and ax and split some seriously big segments right there on the patio, by the light of a partial moon (plus some electric light, which Quakers are not against using). I now have that essential ingredient I'd been missing: lots of kindling, as well as more burnable woods than what we'd inherited when buying the house: a garage full of something rock hard, which Brent also took a crack at, successfully in many cases.

While all this chopping was going on, Lindsey reappeared with the trailer and responded to Brent's request for broken inner tubes he might use around his ax handle (as a veteran of Bike Farm, she stocks such supplies). Then she was off to her coven and I to my office, where my night job begins late. I went through a few billable hours of course material before shoving the dog over and crashing. Other household members are away. Nick, who sometimes stays in the room where I crashed, is still undergoing lots of tests. I plan to go visit him using the green elevators.

Noah didn't join us at the park as he wanted to be a part of this town meeting, called by the mayor, asking citizens whether Portland should rejoin a certain "counter-terrorism task force".

The reason Portland is thinking about rejoining is because of mentally ill people and their nightmares, many of which have an impact on collective living standards. People have been staging protests and vigils against terror. It's hard to find anyone who's pro-terror in this neck of the woods. Many of 'em just wanna use "shock and awe" to eliminate terrorism, using torture if necessary.

Of course the Quakers are in the minority on this issue, in wanting torture banned in all its forms (including slow death by starvation). The collaboration with Food Not Bombs is a part of our Ending Hunger campaign, the way I look at it.

Speaking of which, the head of Food Not Bombs was interviewed on the radio in a program broadcast by KBOO this morning. I missed hearing it but apparently FNB is disturbing to neighbors in some zip codes and they end up calling the police.

Here in Portland, neighbors often show up to share food and catch up on the buzz. We discuss all kinds of esoteric topics, as we hail from many walks of life. Many of us are wanderers, and enjoy comparing notes. For example, Fallon, who made the little Youtube about our operation, is these days biking around Mexico, doing her damnedest to pick up on more Spanish (or Mexican -- English:American :: Spanish:Mexican, sort of, when it comes to vernaculars).

Concave / Convex

Epiphany 2011

The way I was taught, the Kings didn't show up on Xmas day, plus they weren't really Kings, more like Wizards or Magi, as in "magicians" (they knew to "read stars" and such). Of course in geological time, we don't reckon that December 25 is much more than a close-to-solstice holiday, like Saturnalia, but the fact of an interval (or memory address offset) makes sense, like the Kings wouldn't intrude right on his birthday (that'd be rude).

I've been reading the 2nd edition of Aung San Suu Kyi, Fearless Voice of Burma. I enjoy seeing mention of some of the same people I've shared a room with, such as Bishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama, also friends of each other. Bob autographed one for the elder son whom I hope to meet with someday. This was another Bhutan family (of subgeniuses?), living in Thimphu around a decade before ours did.

Congratulations to Steve Holden, who isn't thinking about his business (Holden Web), now that he's just meeting his first grandson. Some of us met at his behest at Kell's recently, to brainstorm about where the "open source" idea might be going. Portlanders are supposed to have ideas about that sort of thing, at least by reputation.

On the way to Kell's from the "taxi" I walked along with a frac gas guy going back to Arkansas (random chance meeting), where permitting isn't as controlled. Hard to frac for gas around here.

We've continued to apply "spit and polish" (as they say) to our crystal ball for geometrical concepts, a kind of test pattern for high def and stereo TV. I've posted some of the latest blueprints to the CSN "wall" (as people say in FB).

Our household is likewise scholarly (not unlike some of those I've been reading about). A "wave of Zen" seems to have swept the place, although it's still a bit rustic and maybe too dense.

2011: Day One

by dk

Ken Brown kicked it off by sharing from his mobile that 2011 is both prime and the sum of 11 consecutive primes. He doesn't give this as a reason for Mayan Y2K, which some predict for 12/21 for reasons I've forgotten.

Apocalypse Pretty Soon was interesting reading. Woolsey shows up as maybe talking about UFOs at one point. You could see how word would get out if that happened, grays talking about grays.

Ed Cherlin was praising Quakers for being closers in gray power suits, in a thread on mathfuture. I look more like Jack Abramoff when I wear my "power hat" (the one by Paul Kaufman).

Did some cleaning, checked in with family, did some equipment inspection (Kelly Kettles are pretty cool), telecommuted to work some. I was privileged to learn from one of the Python teachers about this Calculus video.

Dr. Z is continuing to represent the academic consensus. The Global U seems to be churning a lot, as "the Bucky stuff" continues to go viral on some LCDs. We call that an "upgrade" but others prefer to teach their usual business without competition. I should check that MIT webcam again.

Trevor reports that the Kabul Dome is now in Alaska. That sounds symbolic.

More on Islamic banking, micro-lending and Quakers on mathfuture, ala RSoWR and all that.

Anthony Manusos, Kathy's predecessor at Friends Bulletin (now Western Friend) was known to observe Ramadan on occasion and to write knowledgeably about Quaker-Islam relations.

ibid

From Day to Day

Just off the cell with Dr. Nick, having contacted Verizon to roll back the terms (a rep had talked me into a lower text messages bracket but that had backfired).

I cataloged a list of science fiction storyboards I'm working on, some closer to reality than others. This was to Brian with copies to our Wanderers group, which meets on that Linus Pauling Campus I sometimes write about:

EPCOT West; safety corridor for academic degree program "truckology" students twixt Istanbul and Kabul / Stans; Pycon / Tehran; Pycon / Havana (post Gitmo); Martian Math cartoons (Japan / PDX); "weapons inspector" as a major at University of Colorado and New Mexico Tech, Python courses and lightning talks, GOSCON, "girl scout math" at abandoned military bases in the Philippines (lots of Martian Math influence); SeaWorld / Iraq (going on many years by now -- relevant that Keiko is an honorary Wanderer); Countdown to Zero, the computer game / simulation (Valerie Plame Wilson and Scott Ritter sought for board of advisors).

Science fiction? Maybe, although some of these are pretty dang real (Martian Math is on Wikieducator and was field tested at Reed College this summer; GOSCON = government + open source, was a blast this year, I was at the table with PSF chairman Steve Holden, Rami Kassab of Portland, and some Barcampers from where Keith and I last met up).

Martian Math:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/sets/72157622961425831/

GOSCON:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/sets/72157625315757940/

So is that review or preview or what? We all have our preferred futures, and science fiction is a way to express them. The Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, part of the Experience the Music Project (EMP), focuses on this theme quite a bit, or did when I went through.

After making supper for Tara and I (toasted cheese sandwiches with pickles), it was time for Food Not Bombs. I took the bike Lindsey tricked out for me, versus the FNB hauler with the tall pedestal.

What a crowd tonight! Simon, Aaron, Cera... David. Lots of people I couldn't name.

I told David about the college major of "weapons inspector" I was writing about, a story set in the near future when we have a lot of weapons to inspect (kind of a joke). I think he could see why I'd be recruiting for this career among those standing for Food Not Bombs. I also explained the difference between a maze and a labyrinth.

Satya was just arriving as I departed, ships in the night, quick greetings on passing bicycles.

Virtual Ornaments

by david koski

by swdharmraj