Dropped at Drexel

The following content failed to make it to the web archives.  I'm unsure if Joe got my reply, but I think so, given I got his to me.  This exchange was with respect to something that was published, one of my many renderings of a so-called "paradox".

Joe Niederberger via mathforum.org
Sep 20 (5 days ago)
to math-teach

>We have an algorithm for omni-triangulating a sphere with more and more triangles. Even if we toss out the paradox at the end, here's some educational meat, some substance (to go over this topic).
Can you provide a link to a picture of this?
Thanks
Joe N

kirby urner kirby.urner@gmail.com
Sep 21 (4 days ago)
to math-teach

Sure, these geodesic spheres on the left show the number of triangles increasing as a function of "frequency" (the number of intervals along each edge.

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=7785e11168c0d14532be00fef843f041
Here's some free software for the school children:
http://www.antiprism.com/programs/geodesic.html

Earthlings (movie review)

I include this partly in contrast to Samsara (below).

Whereas Samsara is beautifully filmed and provides no commentary, Earthlings is about the slaughter of non-humans by humans in ways we would consider cruel and inhumane (including in so-called "kosher" facilities).  The narrator provides a point of view.

The film looks at animals as pets, sources of food and clothing, entertainment, scientific knowledge.

Earthlings feeds a sense of misanthropy (hatred of humans).

Mark Twain:  of all of God's creatures, Man is the most detestable.  Yes, that's obvious.  Many angels think so too.

Misanthropy is probably too simplistic a response though.

In a reincarnation system, we might suppose humans return as the animals they kill.  That would be called "poetic justice" by many.  However, the sum total is just a lot of meaningless suffering, however it goes down.

Hatred of existence itself is another meditation one might practice, perhaps as a stage along some path.  Life is an ongoing holocaust, 24/7/365.  Are you part of the problem (adding to the net total suffering) or part of the solution (decreasing to the net total suffering)?

If you suffer a lot yourself, that doesn't necessarily help matters, but perhaps you can't help it.  We're just little humans and Universe is really big.  Victimhood seems a natural condition and humans have often cast themselves in this way, against a greater cosmic backdrop.

LCDs in schools of philosophy might be more likely to screen such content than religious schools, although in some cultures that distinction is not made.

Samsara (movie review)

Samsara is the right title for this film and it is worthy of its ancestors, Baraka being the immediate parent.

In some ways a guided meditation, a mood inducer, but without direct preaching.  One might say "a God's eye view", but a God with a penchant for close-ups.

Some viewers will see the movie being more judgmental than others will.

The factories and places of worship were willing to share their interiors.

This is not a trivial hand-held tourist camera, one gets permission and talks to those whom one wishes to film.

The direct stares into the camera do not bespeak shame, regardless of surroundings or occupation.

We move from temples, to cities, to factories, to supermarkets, to a prison, to a casket store, to a funeral.  We look at the desert, a lush waterfall, glaciers.

We stare back at our own image, as viewers, at our life and our death.

I could see the very temples depicted showing this very film on their newly installed hi-def LCDs.

The film has several themes.

One them is the exquisite precision of nature, its repetitiveness.  Humans fit right in, and synchronize precisely, so much a part of the mechanism.

Are we but mechanical dolls in a vast machine?  The movie hints at this question but then metaphors fail as nature has no real counterpart.

The Buddha's gaze frames Samsara in some ways, his eyes etched with red to show not ferocity so much as compassion, though these are not unrelated.

I'd been hungering for views of Mecca, I later told Melody and Kelly who was visiting, fresh from working gate crew at Burning Man.  I'd watched a few Youtubes.  This movie really fed me, with clear moving images.

In general, I was grateful for all the updates.  I used to get around more, but now I mostly stay in Portland.  Seeing these views of Planet Earth, carefully crafted, state of the art, is a privilege.  Glenn's Easy Like Water was a joy in that way too.

Humans have been at this game for quite a long time and seem eminetely capable and adaptable.

I'm all for more movies in this genre.  I've always circled them as "required viewing" (in the sense of a syllabus, course material) for General Systems Theory savvy.

You get a better more realistic handle on our institutions when you get to meditate in this way, with mood and music.

Those dolls can sure dance, in all they do.  Talk about intricate choreography. 

Zenith (movie review)

This is an atmosphere film reflective of the times.  The theme of the film is how an authoritative voice seems controlling, especially when it comes from some hidden source, such that the true powers of the speaker remain concealed.  The vision of a murky "they" is formed yet to speak of "them" is to invite the view that one is paranoid -- a plot by "them" to make them think I'm crazy.  And so on.  That's the ballpark anyway.

The protagonist is gradually assembling a puzzle, in which his father figures as a similar lonely crusader.  The assemblage takes the form of videotapes.

This film revels in the cliches that film itself has richly textured.  Abandoned urban vistas.  The list of names, some already dead.  Obsession with one's own story, filming oneself.  The transformation of the dad, from priest to haunted unabomber-like figure, a lone hero against the machine, is striking, and as the "Making Of" feature makes clear (DVD version) was filmed in reverse, i.e. the dad gets more clean cut as we go back in time.  Shades of Memento.

I think a Wittgenstein reader might get something from this film as it turns reciting the dictionary meanings of thought-provoking words into a subversive activity (shades of Fahrenheit 451).  The mainstream is barely shown, as we're confined to an underworld, but what we're given to understand is the majority is in a state of perpetual oblivion, a kind of state-crafted happiness, imposed by the success of medical science.

This was the semi-somnambulistic state we've been promised.  The fact that these words barely survive as recited definitions reminds us to think about meaning through use.  Use 'em or lose 'em.

Zenith is reminiscent of Zion in The Matrix in some ways, less a place than a direction, but in this case sinister rather than a last refuge.  To ask about Zenith is merely to mark oneself as another ranting 2012er, another prophet, medically treatable, in an age when speaking in tongues seems about the best anyone can muster.  The rest is pure banality.

Under the torpor and sex are the sordid secrets and sadnesses, the sins, the broken taboos, for which we no longer have the words, a sin in itself.  The saints are not dragon slayers.  They're paupers and mentally ill who still speak truth in their innocence.  The down and outers have a special ability to see Satan, always a peripheral figure, beyond idols and avatars.  As I was saying, the currency is cliches, but exquisitely wrought and therefore able to forge lightning bolts in the unconscious.

The director is eloquent in the "Making of":  his purpose is to contribute the kind of movie we can all read into, such that when we discuss it later, over pizza, we don't just have pat and shallow opinions.  He wants to wake us from our Matrix a little, in the spirit of film-making (and theater) as a vehicle for heightening self awareness, expanding consciousness.  Exploring the unconscious with steadicams:  a way to go.  Shades of Chernobyl.

A Natural Disaster

I enjoyed yakking with David Koski the whole way from PDX concourse to Max, to 75, to my neighborhood.  We're used to talking about rhombic triacontahedra and stuff, probably to the amusement of some fellow Max travelers.  We talked about namespaces and how Coxeter.Q and Koski.Q needn't be the same object, as any Python programmer could tell you.

Alas, my levity balloon, say T modules (pointy wedges, 120 of them tiling a sphere-like shape of 30 faces), was just on the cusp of a high Entropy state, and E modules (E for Entropy, though in Synergetics for Einstein) were in the wings.  Hard drive crash!  The HP Pavilion's.  I thought it might be mainly software corruption but a BIOS test indicates it's a hardware issue, Failure, can't read, status 7 (whatever that means).  KTU3 is no more, for all intents and purposes.

Yes, I backed up a lot of pictures, but using Adobe Elements, and will I ever find that again to restore?  Evacuating the household, moving 90% of the stuff to the school (what school?), would help us prep this place for an overdue remodel / overhaul.  The neighborhood deserves to see its properties maintained.  So where'd I get the fat salary all of a sudden?  There's those "inquiring minds" again.  However I think these fantasies are mostly just an attempt to escape the loss.

What does occur to me though is some cults (we could call them) might specialize in a kind of transparency, in that students and faculty would be expected to scan in, otherwise upload, all kinds of personal data, such that on-line identities (real ones) became a basis for weaving stories, incorporating a gradually increasing radius, to make the scope of world history feel inclusive.

By comparing notes, life stories, researching backgrounds, genealogical records etc., we could piece together a customized view of the past / present, hinging greatly upon just exactly who showed up to attend.  One could call this "place based education" and some do, though I may be taking it further, making it more like another kind of "reality TV" in some cases.

All this dovetails with the "school server / school spirit" meme (every schools needs a rack space for filing recordings and contributions), which in turn is close to what seniors might like for themselves.  Engineers don't want to "retire", they want to putter on their own projects for a change, and preferably in an environment that encourages and rewards both innovation and collaboration.

Students will be encouraged to bring show and tell stuff and share their lives.  They may choose to donate much of that stuff as rummage after awhile, but unlike the "classic cult" the stress is not on leaving one's previous life behind, but on using it as a springboard for getting to know the world in a new way, in cahoots with peers.  It's like a detective story, where you keep yourself in the plot, are not the "know it all" observer with magical powers to narrate omnisciently (usually an inauthentic voice, used by historians a lot, and spoofed in Idiocracy).

Getting serious rack space with RAID and Hadoop-like failover etc. makes more sense when you're not just a solo individual trying to "do it all".  The idea of a "nursing home" needs to be replaced for engineers, with something more kibbutzy, and which includes rack space (not meant in the Spanish Inquisition sense, talking about shared storage).  People who always put off organizing their memories until old age will get to mix with younger folk doing the same thing (organizing their memories, putting in order the facts of experience).  A school's organizational memory need not be entirely public, but on the other hand a school is by definition that which draws on shared experience to produce original value-adding programming (i.e. curriculum, intelligence).

More Assembling

I learned from Google Plus that Tom Higgins is playing with Raspberry Pis now as well.  What curriculum writing has been done around these gizmos?  All the ingredients for STEM would appear to be present.

Meetinghouse Event

Melody told me about this event, some presentation about the Zapatistas.  What's up in Chiapas, Mexico?  I was curious, so I wandered over, hopping the 75 for a few blocks to save time.

The replacement camera (Nikon Coolpix S8300) had just arrived so I dropped by Freddy's for an SD card (none included).  Kingston 16 GB SDs were on sale for only $13 or something.

As it turns out, it was fortunate for the event leaders that I showed up, as their A/V solution wasn't working out.  The projector stayed blurry no matter how close or far from the screen so reading the menus was impossible, plus they hadn't brought any speakers.  

The Meeting rents out space but tends to not rent A/V equipment, however since I was there, I could access the meeting's projector and speakers and wheel them out.  After some futzing, we got everything working.

Portland has its own relationship with Chiapas and the Zapatistas.  Our presenters, not native Spanish speakers (many Zapatistas aren't either), had been eyewitnesses fairly recently (though not with PBI).

The indigenous people of Chiapas are trying to develop their locale independently of the central government and that's hard for many nationalists to stomach.  The fact that Zapatistas want to run their own school system is hard for the control freaks to accept.

The Zapatistas are routinely bullied, their crops burned, their assets stolen, by rival political parties (read "rival gangs").  The expectation is the new Mexican president, a PRI member, will turn a blind eye to the PRI's persecution of the Zapatista minority.  Other parties also engage in systematic harassment and terrorization against this unwanted (by them) upstart party.

Thanks to video campaigns, knowledge of this kind of harassment and displacement (ethnic cleansing etc.) is widely publicized.  New Yorkers know about it too.

The conversation then turned to the Drug Wars, which rage more in the north of Mexico, not in Chiapas.  One of the Mexican nationals in our group made a speech about how USAers only needed to educate their children to not want drugs, and all would be well.  

The impact of ending Prohibition was not discussed, although that's the direction many states in the North American Federation have been taking, slowly but surely.  Another Mexican national pointed out that we had strayed from the core topic, as the war on the Zapatistas was distinct, politically and sociologically, from the Drug Wars (aka Prohibition).

The primary group leader was in a hurry to catch a plane.  She went through a few more slides, after showing two videos and going over the history.  She put the meetinghouse doors on self locking, and returned the key to the mailbox (standard procedure).  I helped with cleanup, and locked the projector away, but then left the other group leader in charge.

I joined Patrick and Steve at The Bagdad, staying on until Happy Hour.

Tomorrow I have an AFSC meeting and will mention attending this event.  Melody was aware of it thanks to her AFSC connections I'm pretty sure.  She used to work with AFSC more concertedly back in Austin.

Study Hall

Even in Windows XP I was able to get VPython working on Python 3.2 in a virtualenv, editing through PyCharm.  Then I pip installed redis just to prove I could do it, having spent much of the morning reading up on that.  Looks like interprocess JSON with persistence.  I didn't understand about messaging as my client seemed to block on listening, so how was that gonna help?  WinXP has both server and client, though not recommended for production use.

A blooming buzzing garden of such tools and toys, running in ensemble, with simple demo code, pared down, for teaching purposes, is what Free Geek might help staff, if not host.  OSDL?  There needs to be something more contemporary than a museum, although there's no rule against museums being contemporary, so maybe that's not right.  Portland Knowledge Lab was how I used to refer to it, copying London's (where I'd given a presentation on my way to a meeting), but I let that go out of focus when the Active Space experiment ended, in disillusionment with Metro Wifi.

My audience or client base, updating from CUE days, are still those do-gooder nonprofits and idealists.  But we're not in Kansas anymore, using WordPerfect + dBase (my "good old days").  Today, it's more about mod_wsgi (still) and Tornado and noSQL.  The clay, the source, is all out there.  "Use the source Luke" is the new commandment.  But are we getting anywhere?  Is STEM gaining in traction?

Redis has you talking through a port, I gather through sockets.  Surely those aren't HTTP requests.  No, it has its own protocol.  Like JSON in that respect.  The guarantee is transactions are atomic, as this is one thread (each redis instance).  You could probably sell seats with this thing, and not promise the same one to any more than one.

Before that, I was boning up on gevent + gunicorn, a hot new way to serve processes.  I couldn't tell if I'd use Celery in addition to or in lieu of, but I get the idea:  lots of event loops running in user space, context switching there, rather than kernel space (the mod_wsgi solution).  I watched a talk on Blip.TV comparing that dynamic duo with more traditional solutions.  Where high availability is concerned, gevent + gunicorn is looking pretty good, a plus for Python.

I've got DjangoCon on my radar.  Should I duplicate this WinXP configuration on Lion?  Yes, that would seem prudent.  The PyCharm product is something I might get an academic discount on, once we've completed a work process, but for now I'm just using on free 30 day trial.  Will it use Akbar font if I like, is a next question.  I'll get back to y'all when I figure that out.

Design Science 2.0

Yes, that's a somewhat tongue in cheek allusion to Tim O'Reilly's invention, Web 2.0.  Actually he was just captioning an important plot twist (AJAX), thereby catalyzing it (by naming it).

Might DS2 be up for designing new religions?  The question is rhetorical, per Triumph of the Moon, in the Wicca is one of several "designer religions" of recent vintage. Or call it "social engineering", or call it Disney World (another example).

YouTubes of Mecca are interesting, even for people that go there.

Lots of Iranian kids are feeling drawn to their older-than-Islam heritage.  No different here, w/r to Xtianity.  The best religions are still ahead of us?  I don't think it's necessary to defend that claim.  There've been some good ones.

To add more religions is not to destroy existing ones, or if they're that fragile... there's always room for another tribe.  I was discussing these matters over cider, beer and cigars this evening, contemplating choices.

I mentioned appreciating a positive spin on "witches" as well as "wizards" and keeping the links with geekery, tools use, health sciences, technology.  Witches were / are STEM teachers, role models for girl and boy scouts both (one needs models across genders).

I don't know if putting a lot of attention on geometry makes it sacred, but from Synergetics I'd inherit its relevance to a grammar (in Wittgenstein's sense of a logic or language game).  The U = MP idea still looks pretty usable.  "Metaphysical" in the sense of what's not "physical" in the sense of wiggling needles.

But then polygraphs consist of wiggling needles, lets remember.  Neuroscience is building its inventory of instruments.  Lying or tainted truth takes its physical toll sometimes.  We pay a physical price for trafficking in misinformation, as propagators of meme viruses.  On the other hand, nature has many ways to divert attention.  She's a master of disguises.  Masks.

These are hardly new planks for a religious platform., but then we'd expect plenty of continuity.  Eternal / perennial philosophy is what it is, with an institutional framework.  I've been thinking in terms of coffee shops and didactic game playing, a casino for channeling surplus while building both brand and cause loyalty.

Faster Forward

I've continued to agitate, per usual, on behalf of STEM, contra the over-specializers.  I think feedback loops groom singularities and I'm one of them, but so are a lot of people.

Calling me a "spin doctor" is quite accurate though.  The term usually has derogatory connotations, so I'm not being boastful that much, except to acknowledge I'm pretty good at it.  I had good teachers.

The "Happy Camper Brigade" (HCB) as I call it took off for Patrick's place, thence to the coast.  They phoned HQS for an update about the detour.  They'll be going out of range.  I just texted a reminder to turn off cell phone power or the battery will drain.  I know Melody has a charger but they won't always be in a place to use that.

Have a great trip Alex, if I don't see you again before you go.

I tried to get another basement involved as back up, which we'd use today, given Lindsey is out of town.  We'll see if that works, where food storage is concerned.  In the meantime, I'm sure we can handle it (don't pass that back, if you read this in my blog).

Does thinking in nationalistic terms destroy an analysis to the point of unreadability?  Not usually.  You can still read the things, just they're not very smart.  Accounting for nationalism, on the other hand, is something else, and should always be done, if relevant.

I'm reviewing a lot of history these days, and not just through print media by a long shot.  Tara is in final count down.  Betsey from our Meeting will be visiting her in October.

Fast Forward

"Accelerating acceleration" seems to be the name of the game, shades of Alvin Toffler.  One's own life is its own succession of "future shocks".

I'm working with Saturday Academy again, to bring some of the latest technology into classrooms for young teens.  Mostly people don't provide that as a service.  I'm talking about Python 2.7 with Visual Python.  The computer lab is at a local university.

Tonight Tara and I hopped a bus to see for ourselves what this vigil around City Hall is all about.  A corner of the park where Occupy was based last October serves as a compact little picnic area.  Many of those present are homeless.  Cities do not always tolerate gatherings of this kind.

This particular initiative has been going on for awhile.  I've been reading up on the twists and turns in Willamette Week and Mercury.  Negotiating the status of R2D2 (Right To Dream Too), a long-running occupation of a privately owned property -- with owner permission -- has been a part of it.

Monday night I hauled food to Colonel Summers from St. David of Wales, and then headed over to Barley Mill to catch up on reading.  Then I returned to the park to chat with some of the people I know there, such as the Jennings, Melody and others.

There's too much going on to capture all the details, either for myself or these blogs.  I'm sure it's no different for others.  Lots just flows through the nets.

Tara and I took the 14 back towards the neighborhood though she alighted early to catch some comedy at Helium across from Lucky Lab.

I went on to Pauling House where Bob McGown was holding forth, but decided I needed to work instead so wandered over to Powell's Books on Hawthorne and jacked in.

Hours later, I'm still working, though I've shifted the venue.

I did find some time to post to the Wittgenstein list, thinking about thoughts some more.

:: franz hall ::

The Hunger Games (movie review)

Not unlike Cabin in the Woods in that the enslavers, the urban elite, has untold technologies it seems to only share with its "tributes" from the districts, the rural feeder zones.  No wonder the King (Donald Sutherland) seems nervous.  This would have to be a tense situation, especially for the 1%, anytime a strong underdog comes along.

They have maglev, amazing powers to control the environment, so why are the district people starving?  Somebody has to do the dirty work and oppression is the only way?  Mining (in District 12) looks as bad as ever.

OK, I admit it:  I was standing in line for food when the movie got started -- a little early by my calculations, plus this clueless couple got in front of me, not seeing the line behind.  Anyway, maybe it's all explained at the beginning.  Don't spoil it for me.  I'll see it again.

Last of OSCON

I've been puzzling in the rear view mirror, ever since, like reading my new Go language programming book at American Dream Pizza today.

One of the best talks was this enthusiastic woman, Kirsten Jones, with a clear mission:  to make our use of the web APIs less frustrating.  And she did that very simply, by showing us the best software for snooping on web traffic and getting those request and response objects clearly mapped, complete with headers, parameters, whatever came or went.

That genre of software proves its value over and over in her experience and she gave a really clear exposition about that, to an appreciative room.

In reverie, I was taken back to West Precinct, Jerritt Collord presiding, starting our class in Open Source for Saturday Academy, courtesy of Hillsboro Police Department, geared for youngsters in their region.  He had them thinking about packet sniffers immediately.

Even though Officer George Heuston, former FBI and white knight in good standing, was present and monitoring, he allowed Jerritt to proceed.   This was public information.  Geeks, and geeks in training, have a need to know -- especially if it's the web traffic through your own machine, not even talking about sniffing wifi.

The final keynote was amazing as well, all about fear and longing, motivation, "mind hacking".  A skillful speaker that guy, head and shoulders above so many.  I was enthralled, even though I felt I knew the ideas already.

Slides are an art form and I don't think that biomimicry guy made the right call, in opting out of sharing pictures in that Bagdad setting.  The standup comics get away with not doing that, but is that what we were there for then?

The military has adopted the lightning talk standard, per anthropological reports.  I can see why.  With slides, and five minutes, you can say a lot.  But then blog posts let you read at your own pace and have more hypertext -- it's more pull than push.

Need to know?  Keep clicking.

OSCON 2012 Day One

I couldn't see squeezing past those people with Naga in a bag (Python mascot) and my satchel, so separated from Steve and moved to the side of the auditorium.  This was the opening event in some ways, tutorials over, Camp OSCON behind us.

Tim O'Reilly's keynote had a simple message:  Open Source could do more to tell the story of how it's powering the ecosystem.

Like solar energy, it's often under-accounted (under-valued) because the sun drying clothes or growing food is unmetered.  Those little pie charts showing solar energy as a tiny fraction of the economy's input are talking about metered solar panel income.

That's not the same thing as wealth or value.  Most economists don't grok "cosmic accounting" very well, no secret there.  Economics has been pretty weak in the STEM department.

Take Comcast for example.  Who is making billions from whom?  Customers are paying to view content they themselves provide in many cases.  Comcast gets access to all kinds of free content from the Internet, an open bastion of a kind.  How much of this revenue is attributable to "open source"?  It's a question to look at, a story to tell.

Hewlett-Packard (a presence here), other companies (Microsoft), both thrive in and contribute to, this shared ecosystem.

A first principle, says Tim:  reap less than you sew, create more value than you capture.  Feed the commons, don't operate as a net deficit to your community.  Seems like common sense to me.

I'm in another Go talk this morning, more about the history and management within the community than the syntax, which was a focus of the tutorial yesterday.

I may not get much time to develop either my Go language or Blender skills, but they're both a source of inspiration anyway, in terms of what they're contributing and how they show off what humans working together may accomplish.

The education track was dealing in some interesting heuristics, however they happened to map rather closely to the status quo.  There's a brand of positive futurism that envisions a new standard or protocol, but if you admit hybrids (diversity, multiplicity), then we're back to "what's so" -- meaning it boils down to whether we all want to march to the same drummer.  We do not.  Nor do we want all others to do so, bottom line.

Like "metadata" tends to just mean what we carry around "in our heads" i.e. the persona as filter is better (because real thinking is finely tuned) than any robotized search algorithm.  I think we all know that by now.  Hyperlinks are "metadata" in the sense that human beings find the most relevant links, even if machines are in on the act, aid and abet the experience in various ways.

FERPA, ancestor of HIPAA in some dimensions, seems like a goofy law.  Students aren't bound by it, and may blab about so-and-so being a presence on campus.  Indeed, free speech rights conflict with the right to privacy sometimes.  My secrets need not be your secrets.

Democracies, for one, should be more into promising transparency and sharing data than clamping down on the free flow of info.  If you want your affiliation with an institution to remain classified, consider joining a private academy or LLC that makes secrecy a part of its culture, among other students / employees as well.

State funded institutions should be looking at their student populations as closer to public servants.  Public schools are about preparing people for life in a democracy, and a democracy of necessity provides lots of transparency, as well as some secrecy i.e. no one says you can't encrypt or otherwise protect access to your files -- and feel free to opt out of on-line campus directories and/or other records the school server may ask you about.

Better to offer courses on identity management and countering stalkers by exposing them, than to promise some high degree of anonymity and absence from public records of all kinds.  That's to promise the impossible and to set up unrealistic expectations among students.

That being said, if you want anonymity, I recommend distance education academies.  Other students don't see you unless you choose to attend events where you come out of the closet, as it were, as a peer or alum.  Your affiliation is a lot easier to keep secret when you're never seen in the parking lot.

Two Cameras

Two videographers capture the same performance in 2009, a Burning Man related event in Portland, Oregon.

I was videographer #2 with the trippy wandering camera.

Videographer #1 took an unwavering shot and got better sound.

Viewing suggestion:  roughly synch and play both at once, while muting the sound on #2 using the Youtube speaker control (then unmute #2 if you want to continue a little longer).
 

:: video 1 ::

:: video 2 ::

The performer, Lindsey Walker, had recently moved from Savannah, Georgia. She came in a Nissan with her own PA system (Bose), a keyboard, and a cat.

However, for this performance she made use of the house sound system.

What you're hearing though, is hand held camera pickup, hardly studio quality.

I treasure this song all the more now that she doesn't play it anymore, or at least not in this form.

Lindsey still performs in and around Portland, sometimes as a street musician.

You will see her (briefly) in the movie Occupation Nation by Portland's B-Media Collective.

From The Open Bastion

The Open Bastion's CEO is back in PDX, just in time for OSCON.  In his luggage, the brand new and newly branded Raspberry Pi.

A first order of business today, his first back, was to hook up the full size projector via HDMI cable, attach keyboard and mouse the the USB jacks, and hit On.

The Linux bootstrapping process percolated across the console to login, thence to startx, thence to the RaspberryPi desktop, this one with two versions of Python in IDLE, Scratch, a few games.  It's a minimal world, what some might call "structured", and ideal for kids.

OK, there might have been a bit more fumbling about.  For one, we needed a nonwireless USB keyboard, and for that I needed to walk a short distance to a second floor of a supplier.

The model I chose, for about $13, has extra large letters on the keys, which makes it look both kid and old people friendly at the same time.

It's a US keyboard layout of course, whereas this device is from the UK.  Need a double-quotes?  Try Shift-2.  Wild.

Nor have we gotten audio out at the time of this writing, choosing Force HDMI but maybe not having the right settings on the peripheral, a work in progress.

Of course I was looking for photo ops, as Raspberry Pi is still quite a new item.

Here are some pictures (click through to Photostream):

:: raspberry pi ::

:: a tiny device ::

:: back in rose city ::

:: projected desktop ::

Avatar Suits

 :: STEM teachers meet :: 

:: The Platonic Realm ::

:: STEM Text ::

More Movies @ McMenamins

McMenamins has been showing Cabin in the Woods, and more recently Chernobyl Diaries, both horror films, and both featuring bizmos.  So you'd think I'd post this in BizMo Diaries, but then they both featured Control Rooms as well.  You could say they were linked other tomorrows in that sense, via their control rooms.

In the meantime, Glenn provided a happier backdrop, talking about the wild creatures of Chernobyl (ala Keith Lofstrom and Stewart Brand), and of the light comedy Accepted.

Cabin in the Woods has Joss Whedon all over it, going back to the Buffy sequence with the boyfriend from some subterranean government.  Shades of Lost.  They've got a hexafence, takes out an eagle.  There's a hell mouth.  What's missing is the Catholic Church.  They're all engineers down there, minding the store.  They're actually the collective mind of the viewer as in Woody Allen's control room in the movie about sex.  That's today's control room in so many ways.  Of course Sigourney Weaver would be part of it.

Chernobyl Diaries starts out with Blair Witch jerkiness, prompting fears the movie will be all bouncing camera, but then she settles in under more confidant direction and I could relax and enjoy the ride more.  I'd had a long day and was still on duty, more like in Indianapolis, which was also a barrel of monkeys.

The bizmos are quite similar in both films and serve as conveyances into Other Tomorrows.  I've been thinking a lot about my high desert schools.  The planetarium (you need one even there) looks a lot like those golf balls in the UK countryside, big ones, so as you round the corner, perhaps in a van, but maybe on foot, you see like colonizers from another somewhat higher civilization.  They're living up to our heritage, more a maritime set?  We're not near the ocean necessarily.  Bhutan was like this (Druk-yul as they call it), minus the golf balls (back then).

Both bizmos met a similar fate, and neither proved a secure shell against danger.

What I found myself thinking, is when you have intelligent young people like this, at their peak in abilities in many dimensions, why not have some serious work in store, rather than all idle vacation.  Hard work actually builds skills.  Not that these troops didn't end up working hard -- much too hard, almost in compensation.  We resent they get a vacation I suppose, when all we could afford was a movie ticket.

Anyway, a "business mobile" is deliberately not portrayed as a "recreational vehicle" (RV).  That doesn't mean the work can't be fun, but this is expensive equipment and lots of communities have some serious needs that need documenting.  The teams get to swap around a lot.  This was also a topic with Glenn -- like time shares in Orlando but really nomadic sometimes: few possessions, yet institutionally wealthy.

Speaking of work, I was hitting the queues more than usual for a weekend, having an unusually occupied work week.  We got a lot done, turned a lot of corners.

Cabin... suggests it's helping us turn over a new leaf in that the horror film formula is not unconsciously / religiously followed: the Scooby Doo guy gets away with it. His smoke actually helps in the fight against Satan -- game changing.  He and the virgin somewhat turn tables on the eager voyeurs (deep out of site) as we don't see them ritually punished any more than we are at the end of the day.  The creatures of the deep become restless.

Wanderers 2012.6.19

Lew was focused on finding the right technology for the meetinghouse.  Our acoustics are actually quite good now, with music events quite doable on the 2nd floor.  We're mostly interested in keeping it quiet for our neighbors, not because the room can't handle music.  However Lew's challenge is the spoken voice, occasional singing.  He's looking at array microphones and their ability to direction-find a sound source.  Not a dumb idea.

I'd CC'd Lew earlier today, when SDW sent a memo on the kitchen.  FNB kitchen use is more my focus than Pauling House scheduling, where I'm nominally a listowner on the shared calendar (a Yahoo! gadget).  That was a solution from another era.  In SDW's case, it's the new baker we're seeking to accommodate.  Luckily, FNB doesn't do meat or lard.  We're not about to fill the atmosphere with grease.  A gluten-free baker has nothing to fear, and indeed it's a synergetic combo.

Anyway, I CC'd Lew because I was sharing about meetinghouse history.  We have some overlap with St. David, in terms of current and former members.  Chatting about our presence on Google Earth, thanks to Lew, is something of an ice breaker, when working with these other neighborhood religious groups.

The link between the Pauling House and the Meetinghouse is Doug Strain's company, ESI.  The corporate booklet gives 1958 as a date, whereas other sources say ESI vacated the building in 1956.  But remember:  the fire at the place on Macadam.  ESI moved out, then lost the new place in a fire.  Did they need to move back, temporarily?  I'm not privy to corporate archives, but the meeting archivist (Dr. Carl Abbott) might have some of those records.

More discussion of UAVs.

Cameras producing pictures that let you change the focus after the fact were another topic.

As a courtesy to one of the tenants, involved in alcohol counseling, we no longer bring alcohol to our meetings.  We've been criticized in the past for allowing it, but then wine is a social drink in this region, with OMSI lectures taking advantage of the McMenamins license to run a full bar.  We were like a Spaghetti Factory or Red Robbin in allowing minors, but with like a TED talk going on (no, not pole dancing -- that would have been down the street).  Private party rules applied, with no selling to the public either expected or implied.

We're getting ready for the Summer Retreat.  That time of year again.

I had lunch at Laughing Planet on Belmont.  Yesterday:  Toney Bento.

Touring Earlham College

:: starting with parent / prospectives tour... ::