Closing Keynote: USDLA

The closing keynote by Burck Smith focused on mega-trends for the future.

Non-accredited institutions are muscling in to the same teaching space occupied by accredited institutions.

Accreditation has been a kind of monopoly allowing those on the inside to keep their tuitions high.

With the falling cost of course delivery thanks to distance education, profits have been fattening for the accredited, but at high cost to students.

In the next chapter, the competition from the players outside the accredited sphere are likely to make deeper inroads into diploma space, offering certificates instead.

USDLA Keynote

Why Open Education Matters from Blink Tower on Vimeo.

Hal Plotkin, with experience in the Obama administration, is now with Creative Commons.  His abbreviated history of the copyleft movement (skipping the GNU / GPL chapter) led to this punch line:  in some scenarios, dropping proprietary content in favor of equally high qualtiy open content saves enough money to assure students get a properly equipped personal workspace to get on-line.

That's a lesson learned in the software industry a generation ago.  Perhaps the Linux / GNU chapter got skipped given Microsoft's interests in this area?  Free software and free curriculum content (free in the sense of liberated) certainly have a lot in common.

A focus of Hal's keynote was CC-by within TAACCCT, a US Department of Labor program.  We got to watch a fun little video (above) and learn about some success stories.

Translating into computerese, he's into gamification of learning e.g flight simulators for everything (chemistry etc.).  "Nobody can cheat on a flight simulator".

The geek world memes of "Ignite" (as in Ignite Portland, or Ignite.gov) and "open licenses" appear to have permeated this education world.  Several of the talks have the word "ignite" in them.

I'm here with some of my co-workers from O'Reilly School of Technology, nothing to do with the auto parts company, everything to do with publishing e.g. Safari On-line.

We got some statistics that only 7% of the world's humans have post secondary school education, but that's measured in terms of having academic degrees.

If you're like my friend Lindsey in Nepal, deeply involved in the study of Newar Buddhism, you might not have a PhD in that, yet still be highly educated.

Education and academic schoolwork are overlapping non-synonymous concepts in my book.  That might be heresy in this group, not sure (I'm a newbie).  The pro open source ignite flavored memes we're getting here are quite familiar to me however.

OSCON will be in Austin TX next year.  Portland and Austin have a lot in common.  They're both into staying weird.

The first talk I attended after the keynote was about "the four stages of SAMR" meaning Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition, an approach to giving new technology a foot in the door into course delivery.  Share PDFs with Dropbox, use a Learning Management System (e.g. Blackboard) for grading.  Basic stuff.

We're hearing a plug for Microsoft Office Mix + Powerpoint + Notepad, adding to my sense that F/OSS (free and open source software) is not a primary focus here.  "All students use Evernote or OneNote for all notes" (Powerpoint slide) -- that's Augmentation, after Substitution lets them use any app for notes.

OneNote is free as in beer at least, if not open source.  I'll first need to upgrade my OS to use it though.

Back in St. Louis

I woke up to telecommunications in Campaign Illinois, after seeing Johnny Rawls Blues Band at Iron Post, in Urbana, to learn of the devastation in Nepal, a 7.8 earthquake.

Lindsey is in the middle of the chaos.  She had taken disaster training seriously in Portland, little knowing she would confront disaster in Kathmandu Valley, in the shadow of the Himalayas.

My Altima Nissan (actually Alamo's) served me well on this trip, a jump into the future from my 1997 maxi taxi, a Maxima.   Push button start, rear view camera, comfortable and strong.  Quite and expensive piece of equipment, and I was relieved to get it back in mint condition, though with 700 plus additional miles to its credit.

I've updated some of the people who know Lindsey, and of her whereabouts, that's she's still alive.  Many were not so lucky.

Spherical Trig

I've been brainstorming with my peers on math-teach about how to make spherical trig more accessible, starting with a set of tools and not staring at a lot of cryptic scripting language right off the bat.  On a sphere, the Pythagorean Theorem has a different form.

Imagine a curriculum that used a code such as:  sTem; STem; steM... to highlight which of the four domains (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) gets the most emphasis in a given Lesson Plan. Multiple letters might be highlighted.  Superimposed (stacked), the Lessons reinforce one another and build up a multi-layered surface (spherical) or system (global matrix).

The acronym STEM is perhaps peculiar to English and need not be taken too seriously.  The pun on STEAM, with A = Anthropology, seems to be one of STEM's chief values as a marketing device.  We get another bridge to the Humanities through Anthro / Animal, thereby unifying the Liberal Arts in true Trivium / Quadrivium fashion.

In Synergetics, the spherical triangle is emphatically a face of a tetrahedron with edges to the planetary center.  Saying "planet" for "system" has a somewhat Little Prince flavor.  But then we already use the word World for a namespace, as in Python World, or Python Planet (both references to the computer language, but of course Monty Python resonates as well).

My travels took me through Salt Lake City recently and I found myself reading about Pink Floyd, the pink flamingo that escaped from the zoo and lived in the wild with the other birds for a number of years.  Brine shrimp are plentiful in those lakes (a patchwork of shallow mini-lakes), though I'm not sure if that's what flamingos actually eat.  Tourists would spot Pink Floyd from time to time, but he or she drifted off and was last seen in Idaho.

Among the tools a student might use:  Google Maps and/or Google Earth for finding locations and getting their lat / long coordinates.  These might be fed to a Web resource (URL) that spits back XYZ coordinates, taking Planet Earth to be centered as some origin.  Straight line distances through the Earth's crust would correspond to chords, whereas on the surface we have geodesics or great circles.  Going from lat / long to XYZ to spherical coordinates helps us translate between data sets.

Generations

They say a generation is twenty years.  Twenty years ago I went to the Fuller Centennial in San Diego and wrote this three part series.  I'm tonight reading a partially overlapping account.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were boomers, somewhat post beatnik which was Jack Kerouac's generation.  The two met in New York as a part of that bus trip, Leary's group the next stop.  Sometimes a Great Notion (Kesey's next novel after Cuckoo's Nest) was being released.

Pegging the time.  I was in elementary school, starting in Portland, winding up in Rome.

My generation was / is late boomer, pre Generation X.  When our group had families, those were called Yuppies (young professionals) a play on Hippies.  Various neighborhoods gentrified or whatever.  Jersey City sure took off, since my day in the early 1980s, as a high school teacher walking to work along Kennedy Boulevard.

I took my daughter to New York and Long Island City that time, to meet with Kenneth Snelson and to take in a ceremony honoring the friendship between Fuller and Isamu Noguchi, a sculptor.  Shoji Sadao was another in that crew, a workshop / studio, across from where the Noguchi Museum is today.

My mom is aiming to be in New York City by tomorrow, for only for a brief stay.  She'll be back through on her return.  I'm meanwhile soon to set out for the mid-west on company business.  My daughter is now twenty, a next generation.

The Princeton P-rade is worth catching, if you get a chance.  The classes parade in order, though with a 25th year group in front (I think is how it goes -- I was there for that one).  You see time go by really quickly, a review.  The alums get younger and younger, turning into underclassmen at the end.  I'm not sure what other universities do that.  Pretty interesting.

The "march through time" metaphor (is it a metaphor? -- seems pretty literal) is pretty cliche.  Or is it the march of time?  Whatever.  "Time is the only dimension" was one of the tropes I remember from Synergetics.  But then time and size go together.  One needs room to rattle around.

Given I was in Rome during the tumultuous 1960s, I had a somewhat different take on things than my three-years-older wife.  She had stayed in North America, mostly in the southeast, joining the Portland scene before I did.

My return to Portland, in 1985 (as I've pegged it, I hope correctly) was after my parents left Bangladesh but then moved to Bhutan, where dad continued his career as a planner / designer, now of education systems, later in Lesotho.  When my wife was hired as the bookkeeper for Center for Urban Education, I was away in Bhutan.  On a next trip, she and Alexia joined me.

Anyway, if you're curious about my autobio I've got more on file.  Check it out.

Trite Math

Держись!

According to the Bridges trolls, i.e. the kick-and-punch reviewers who come out from under the bridge when someone proposes to cross it, the relationship VE:Icosa :: S:E is of no conceivable import, cultural, artistic or otherwise.  So be it.  Lets call it Trite Math (Koski's coin).

VE is a remote vocabulary word in the Synergetics namespace, pioneered by the ever-lonely Bucky Fuller.  VE stands for Vector Equilibrium.

Rational ancient Greek speakers know it as the "cuboctahedron" although that suggests a solid shape, not the skeletal version with doubled radials, eight hinge-bonded unit-volume tetrahedrons, per Concentric Hierarchy lore.

That's twenty-four radial versus twenty-four circumferential vectors in Bucky's accounting system and vocabulary, hence the name "vector equilibrium" (twenty-four of each).

The shape is barely stable however, only fleetingly itself.  It Jitterbugs into an Icosahedron of equal edge lengths, the Icosa in the ratio above.  In so doing, the volume decreases from 20 (the eight tetrahedrons are volume one, six half octahedrons volume two, so 8 + 6*2 = 20) to about 18.512... (more digits).

S & E are both slivers, splinters.

The topologically minimum container in ordinary space and ordinary language, is the tetrahedron.  You don't have a volumetric "cage" with less than six edges, if constrained to constructing with sticks.  Fuller accounts volume using aggregates of these slivers, which he names:  A, B, T, E and S.

You can look them up. They have plane nets and everything. A, B and T all have the same volume (1/24).  E outweighs T by a tad, has the same shape.  S is for Skew.

So VE:Icosa :: S:E is a volume thing.  David Koski has been playing with these blocks and making lots of discoveries.  Low hanging fruit (i.e. trite fruit) is plentiful in this 4D domain.

Lets do it in Python:

e3 is simply Evol shrunk by 1/phi i.e. all edges are .618... of what they were, with volume decreasing as 3rd power of that amount.  Edges:Area:Volume grow and shrink in a 1, 2, 3 powering relationship when a shape changes size (duh).

I agree this is all pretty easy and accessible, which in some circles is a mark of inferiority, of triteness.

[ The fact that floating point numbers have noise digits on the end owing to base conversions etc. may be off-putting to "real numbers" fans. ]

Cliché Math we could call it. Cut and Paste Math.

Speaking of which, the source code for studying the above modules is available here on edu-sig.

The source to render the above graphic is also available, but you'll need the free / open source POV-Ray ray tracing engine to get the final result.

Rejected, too-trite and/or incomprehensible papers:
Bridging XYZ and IVM Volumetric Accounting Systems with the Square Root of 9/8 by Kirby Urner
Revisiting R.B. Fuller's S & E Modules by David Koski

POV: A Game of Fetch

POV = Point of View.  In this case, provided by a DJI Phantom Vision+ 2.

Starring Seuss the dog, Les piloting, Elise and Kirby as backup ball throwers.

:: the quad-copter ::

Wanderers 2015.4.7

:: paying myself $30 plus postage ::

Barry is talking about needed reforms in the capital games tax, talking about day trading, after the capital gains period, eating your losses etc. etc..  He's a retired banker, but those around the table aren't that as financially savvy necessarily.

I think a state should expect commitment of time and energy in lieu of taxes or as a type of taxes.  You get a job with the government where presumably there's value added as a result of your performance.

Barry doesn't like the corporate personhood movement, also known as Voodoo Economics whereby inanimate objects (corpses, corporations) gain personhood (souls).  It's a kind of legal fiction, or science fiction that's serious enough to govern role playing in some subcultures.

A government could run hotels, rental car depots, a bunch of tourist related stuff.  It does so now, in the guise of its military, but what about civilian bases, more like Disneyland than Mordor?  There's no shortage of stuff for people to do, as committing some percent of their aliveness to serving the greater good.

The so-called 1% would stereotypically want to exempt itself from government service as they're wanting to party in penthouses and not maintain mountain trails.  Not everyone is equally able.  One could have a monetary way of playing the taxes game, but also this other way, like joining the military but the civilian correlate.

At one point I was suggesting Girl Scouts as the model, with abandoned bases in the Philippines as my backdrop.  I'd been to Clark AB pre Pinatubo so knew how a base might double as a civilian campus, or be converted into one, more like a university, less like a prison.  War is unfreedom to the max.

Christine is asking questions, as Barry continues talking about stocks and IPOs.  Insiders can't sell their shares right away.

When people give to charity they get credit sometimes.  Their profile is updated.  However the government takes the glory for how taxes are spent.  Were individual role playing the currency, bleeping over the importance of individuals would be harder.  People complain USAers are "too individualistic".  Maybe that really is not the problem.

You want to be a star, a celebrity, and how do your taxes help you achieve that?  Does the government give you fifteen minutes of fame?  Are you able to make movies?  In some cases yes, taxes get used for that.  But how many filmmakers get to serve the greater good as their way of pulling their weight?  Don't we waste talent by not letting them?

Some from the art side struck up a side conversation on Zombie Jesus, another circulating comic meme.  Warning:  not everyone has a sense of humor where Jesus is concerned.  More of a Gnostic thing maybe?

Interstellar (movie review)

I caught this at Laurelhurst, packed house, smaller screen, bright and sharp picture though, I don't require Real3D to stay happy (except outside when driving I find it convenient).

I'd been skeptical about this film given the hype and my low opinion of public opinion a lot of the time, call me a snob or elitist.  However I've come to respect the film for what it tackles:  the way in which love seems to transcend even death, or call it gravity.

The memes are straight from the dust bowl cornfields of America mixed with NASA space program ethos, a volatile combination with many stark contrasts.  Planet Earth is on the wane and there's a sense of needing to bootstrap somehow.  Why are humans always on the brink?  Or maybe that's what prehistory was about:  not being right up against it with End of the World just around the corner.

Science fiction is expected to have worm holes and higher dimensions.  That tradition was established at the end of the 1800s, when novelesque plots were developed to take advantage of 4D, the new kid on the block.  The tesseract or hypercube, made its brilliant debut, with no upper limit on dimension number.  Worm holes could be everywhere.  Our confinement to the solar system, a frustration for plot developers, was solved.

As I've harped on in these blogs, the tesseract is not a time machine except in scifi.  That these would be jumbled together on the chalkboard is part of the tradition, but formal math does not permit it.  The polytope mathematics of the nD crowd, led by Coxeter, is not the 4D mathematics of Einstein, nor the 4D philosophy of Fuller, to which this film comes very close (no obvious tetrahedrons though).

In classic humanities liberal arts, the dead speak to us in our libraries, through our books, across time, across space.  Yes, it's kinda spooky, and poltergeists (at least tales of) lurk in those pages.  Young girls are especially drawn to certain passages, specific phenomena.  Their dads use science to discourage this tendency but then end up on the other side of it, wanting to speak after deadline.  The hero's frustration is palpable.  He has machine Marines for cold comfort.

The relativity touch was really well acted I thought, complete with aging at different rates.  Maybe I'll see this movie again, in Real3D even.  A car pulled out in front of me on Stark on the way home and I was glad to have the right break-hitting reflexes and enough traction even in wet weather.  The film is long, starting with previews at 8:45 and not letting out until close to midnight.  Not complaining; it kept me in my seat.

ReThink911 @ HGP

I learned from Dr. DiNucci that David Fura would be presenting on 911 at Friendly House, addressing Greater Humanists of Portland.  Given local Quakers have been recently joined by David Chandler, scheduled to speak at the meetinghouse on April 12, as a part of our Peace and Social Concerns program, my scoping out this talk seemed apropos.  Fura cites Chandler in his slides and plays the video of David, identified as with AAPT, asking the NIST guy a question.

The National Geographic and Popular Mechanics efforts at debunking get tackled in Fura's talk.  If thermite is not useful in demolition, as NGS alleges in its own attempt at debunking the Truthers, then how does one explain the patents for using it that way?  I forget what the Popular Mechanics thing was about, however these debates are all on-line so feel free to tune in.  A lot of people are participating in these discussions, not just the Humanists and Quakers.

The ReThink911 agenda is all about casting doubt on the official NIST reports, especially around WTC7, the building that (even officially) went into free fall, officially because of fires weakening its structural members, but unofficially and off the record thanks to preset charges i.e. because of controlled demolition.

If NIST is right -- but it won't release its computer model -- then it has discovered a new way for skyscrapers to fail due to carbon-based fires never before contemplated and never before or since seen.  The Truthers remain highly skeptical of the NIST theory, wherein the numbers keep changing.  Both sides appear to use science to support their claims.

My question, as a matter of logic, is how one gets from the apparent fact of "controlled" demolition to the "uncontrolled" events of 911.  Buildings of that size and stature should be designed with demolition in mind right from the start, as Paul Laffoley asserts was the case with these 1970s monsters (which I admired), losing money and ready to be replaced by the 21st century.  With what we don't know.  Laffoley's own design, conceived after 911, was for a Gaudi-like building, part memorial, more conceptual art than a blueprint at that stage.

Could these buildings have been scheduled to come down anyway, just not as a result of terrorism?  Was someone "pushing the button" a part of the terrorist plot all along?

If demolition were integral to the design, then the question becomes at what point in the timeline were charges added.  Might there have been a schedule driven by financial concerns unrelated to troop movements in the Middle East?

As expected, once off the official narrative, it's somewhat of an inkblot test as to whom we think is really responsible.  People who don't read a lot often think of Neocons and the CIA as the same bunch, whereas from other angles one sees open hostility, or at best rivalry between these two camps.  Just saying "bad guys did it" doesn't really get us anywhere.  The devil is in the details.

That the CIA is trying to use the Truther Movement to make Bin Laden look like a patsy is consistent with past cover up failures.  Iraq would be more like Cuba by this analogy, Oswald being cast as pro Castro and by extension a Soviet spy.  Hadn't Saddam plotted against Bush Sr.?

However analogies with the JFK chapter only go so far as in this case there's really no doubt about the jet airplanes hitting the two buildings, WTC1 and WTC2 (not WTC7) -- except amongst odd-ball extremophiles.  In Oswald's case, it's rather doubtful he ever fired that rifle, or killed Officer Tippit or any of that.  He was just following instructions, up to where he tried to escape his fate as the fall guy, by explaining his innocence to the police.  Jack Ruby had to silence him.

What do the ReThink911 people imagine would have happened if only the jets had hit?  What would have been the scenario, absent any controlled demolition?

The jets hitting was enough to get people jumping off buildings.  Hundreds if not thousands had died already.  Clearly these were nightmare situations, with firefighters bravely walking into them.  If the goal were to provoke a war with Iraq, per the Neocon agenda, wouldn't this terrorist act have been sufficient?  Why would anything potentially even more risky be required?  At least one of the Humanists asked about this during the Q&A.

With no demolition system in place, would the towers still be standing today in 2015, or would they by now have been demolished, WTC7 included?  After that day, they were totaled, unsalvageable no?  So we'd have demolished them by now at least, maybe even without the planes hitting.  The Twin Towers were close to worthless by 2000, were white elephants, according to many accounts.  As soon as we had finished rescuing all the people, they would have needed to be destroyed, no question.  Repair would have been infeasible.

However Fura thinks the WTC towers may have been too full of asbestos to make their demolition practical at any point.  This would point to a major design flaw as how does one replace buildings of that size once they've outlasted their lifespan?  How would one remove towers of that stature except by controlled demolition?  Or is the theory that anything that big has to last forever?

Do we suppose architects are off the hook in needing to think about a building's full life cycle, including its eventual destruction?  I expect the buildings would have needed to come down later, actually quite soon, WTC7 included.  In fact, once the Twin Towers where down, why keep WTC7 around even a day longer?  Everyone was out by the time it imploded.  Why not?  It was worthless by then.  Just more rubble to clean up at that point.  Civilians had cleared the area.

What I don't know is how many additional lives might have been saved had the firefighters been given more time with their hook and ladder trucks etc.  People were already jumping to their deaths.  The additional numbers that might have been saved is a difficult calculation once you factor in the number of firefighters who might have died as a result of heroism, trying to rescue people from the two towering infernos.  Lots to think about there.

Brunch on Hawthorne

We promised William an authentic Hawthorne brunch this first spring day, and Cup & Saucer did not disappoint.  Glenn talked about his "global matrix", a thread in these blogs.  I called it a "non-glaze over" namespace, as for Glenn at least, his particular decryption or encryption (however you want to look at it) keeps him fluent in many cutting edge areas.  He has low bus numbers though.

William is studying computer science and works full time doing the kind of work he trained for at OST and elsewhere.  When we first met, he was one of my students, still in Afghanistan.

Quick Loop (Infrastructure 101)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've said little about air freight so far.

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

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

Wanderers 2015.3.10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He has a floor plan laid out. 

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

Hair cutters are like journeymen and bring their own equipment. 

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

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

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

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

Picture Facebook, but HIPAA compliant. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alien Boy (movie review)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The public continued to thirst for justice for many years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back @ Beaches

:: PDX ::

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

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

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

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

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

@ Beaches

Song of The Sea (movie review)

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

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

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

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

A Tale of Two Logos

:: mosaic @ PSU ::

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

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

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

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

Despicable Me (movie review)

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

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

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

Quaker Terminology

:: attenders ::

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domestic Affairs

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

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

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

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

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

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