Small Streams

Give Me a Sign

It's up there. Just waiting for people to see it. The artists reception is tonight at 7 p.m. at Pittsburgh Filmmakers' Melwood Gallery.

Thanks to early supporters like Christine Brill, Pat Clark, Traci Jackson, Rich Engel, Matt Hannigan and the folks from the Sprout Fund, Al Kovacik, Bob Batz, and photography pros with hard-to-spell names like Larry Rippel, Dan Buczynski, and Craig Biertempfel.

I'm sorry if I didn't get to mention you by name, especially sorry if I didn't get a chance to invite everyone who's been a part of this project. Goodness knows I've missed a couple. But the opening has been mentioned in the Post-Gazette and the Tribune Review. So maybe you know about it anyway. So please come.

Regards to the St. Lawrence Friday Night Duckpin League, especially Thorn Hill (win without me guys).

I'm Really a Blogger

I't's kind of official now that I went to Blogfest, I've committed a certain amount of my life to blogging. I met with a bunch of bloggers in meatspace, in this case Finnegan's Wake, on the North Side. Very interesting group, pretty much 50/50 male/female, not very racially diverse, 25-45, mostly professional, although some might be semi-employed like myself.

Unfortunately I was busy setting up Pittsburgh Signs stuff at Filmmakers and Liz was at a raku firing, so I couldn't stay long.

Meeting the Pittsburgh bloggers was a bit like the last scene in the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy comes back to reality: "I was in this magical land, and you were there, and you were there, and you were a scarecrow looking for a brain."

Of course, all of us were Dorothy. And maybe our sojourns to the Land of Blogs is just a fantasy, like Trekkiness, and Civil War reenactment, and rotisserie league baseball, and the Rotary.

Something tells me, though, that our avocations aren't without purpose. Or perhaps it kind of leans toward a zen-like purposeless purpose. Toqueville never imagined a Trekkie, but he anticipated them coming. And so I believe the phrase "pointless fascination" is an oxymoron. And maybe even a parallel could be drawn between such blogfests and, say, 1970s Homebrew User Group meetings.

Might viral-patterned social links laden with metadata change the world?

Naw, couldn't happen . . .

Thanks to Inner Bitch, Grabass, Creating Text(iles), My Brilliant Mistakes, and everyone else who made Blogfest a great event.

God Bless You, Mr. Derrida Everyone

During the weekdays, I drive Liz to work, which gives us time to talk in the morning. This morning Liz was talking about people she knew and their outward displays of sexual orientation, whether they seemed straight or gay, what made them seem straight or gay or somewhere in between. To paraphrase, it seemed to her, as it probably does to many people these days, that the labels sometimes don't do justice to people, maybe not even describing people's sexuality as being along a continuum can provide us with sufficient understanding.

If we think about how gender status and gender expression manifests itself: secondary sexual characteristics, the sound of one's voice, and one's gestures, it becomes clear that each time you try to categorize something or develop hard, fast rules for defining gender, you come up short. One can see this in how gay subcultures in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Village People, and The Simpsons turned the idea of macho on its head.

She says that what brought the thoughts to mind was this article in the New York Times about the late Jacques Derrida. The author, Mark C. Taylor, writes about how Derrida expressed how language can exclude, and eventually become a force for oppression, and that his seemingly arcane lessons are ones we should be learning.

During the last decade of his life, Mr. Derrida became preoccupied with religion and it is in this area that his contribution might well be most significant for our time. He understood that religion is impossible without uncertainty. Whether conceived of as Yahweh, as the father of Jesus Christ, or as Allah, God can never be fully known or adequately represented by imperfect human beings.

And yet, we live in an age when major conflicts are shaped by people who claim to know, for certain, that God is on their side. Mr. Derrida reminded us that religion does not always give clear meaning, purpose and certainty by providing secure foundations. To the contrary, the great religious traditions are profoundly disturbing because they all call certainty and security into question. Belief not tempered by doubt poses a mortal danger.

So how do we illuminate who we are? How do we define ourselves and others? As a writer, someone who explores this idea of character, I deal with this question. In writing class I was told about and read about Flaubert asking his student Maupassant to characterize a cab driver. Maupassant wrote a description of a hunched man in a cap smoking a gauloise. Flaubert returned it to him saying that to understand the cab driver's character Maupassant must write about everything but those characteristics. This wonderful anecdote has perhaps not made a miraculous change in my writing, but I'm sure it's changed my life.

Lately I've been in the habit in the morning of going around silently blessing people, just as an odd exercize. "Bless you, Mr. Young Man in a pickup. Bless you, Ms. Older Woman with a black umbrella." I noticed when I did this I saw -- or should I say imagined -- some more of a person's character than I otherwise would have. I can imagine that each of these people have weaknesses, perhaps they're overweight, or slovenly, or they look impatient, or they're overly fastidious; but each time I imagine that these people have great strengths that get them out of the house, or to the market, or to their kid's soccer practice.

I, of course, am the one most affected by blessing of others. It gives me a general good feeling, and maybe it might lead me to write better characterizations, or maybe I might get to know some interesting people.

I must confess I only have a weak knowledge of Derrida, tried to read Glas, saw him speak once and hardly understood a word he said – and yes he was saying it in English. But I do think he was on the side of the angels and somehow after the confusion I sometimes reach a clarity I otherwise wouldn't have.

Finding a Good Parking Place

The Allegheny Institute came out with a study that says the Pittsburgh Parking Authority discourages people from parking downtown; and PittsburghJack's Place posted an interesting entry on parking in Downtown Pittsburgh.

For the entry, I commented that most private lots charge twice as much as public lots. If the Parking Authority didn't exist commuters and shoppers would be even more discouraged from parking downtown.

Jonathon Potts replied, "that if people don't park Downtown in the private lots, then prices will fall."

PittsburghJack concurred and said that one of the reasons for the high parking rates is the high parking tax.

O.K. Let's get rid of the Parking Authority, reduce the tax, and let the market decide.

My guess, and it's only a guess, is that what you will have is higher downtown parking costs, or less people parking, or less tax revenues, and more people shopping elsewhere, and more traffic, and longer driving times, and bigger parking lots dumping more runoff on the near suburbs, and more vacant buildings downtown.

If that means a victory for the free market so be it. But I'm guessing the external costs -- and this is some kind of mad accounting that environmentalists and planners come up with because no one in particular sees these "costs" -- is that you'll have developers buying up greenfields, asking for tax breaks and tiff money and highway subsidies and sewer subsidies and no one in particular giving a damn what happens in flood sodden towns like Carnegie and Sharpsburg.

As long as we're prepared for acres of new asphalt, and a disrupted market place, and a slightly tarnished gem of a downtown looking more like downtown Youngstown, let 'er rip. We can get rid of the Pittsburgh Parking Authority, and revel in the triumph of theory as we drive our shiny, metal boxes around and around and around.

My fulminations aside, I think we are all saying, "let's cast a cold eye on all our alternatives."

Look at What's Going On

Why can't we fight the war on terror from an armchair? Might the energy Americans spend expressing their opinions on the war on terror be better channeled in other directions: learning Arabic, finding an Afghan pen pal, writing letters to Muslim clerics asking for a fatwa against Osama bin Laden, and my favorite, becoming border observers.

Bear with me on this, because there is a Big Brother aspect to this, but with present technologies we can monitor potential terrorist activity in our armchairs. Satellite images are detailed enough that if someone had a casual interest in, say, movements along the Afghan/Pakistan border, and were given a few rules-of-thumb for spotting terrorist activity, they might be able to find something.

Yes, we'd be encouraging a certain amount of snooping, and people in Tora Bora should have the same rights to privacy that we do. But consider this an open kind of snooping. What I imagine is a group of people much like WWII air raid and coastal wardens, searching the sky and horizon for possible threats. Maybe just like air raid and coastal wardens, the positions are just a palliative, and this function is already served by the act of war-blogging.

But just for a minute imagine that the CIA does not have enough analysts to review and digest all the satellite information they receive each day. And what if not only you had satellite wardens searching for information, but sharing information. For instance on how drugs and arms and money crosses borders and what a terrorist encampment looks like (although I think that terrorist encampments look like homes more than Al Qaeda training facilities).

I haven't found much on the subject. Much of it is dated.

An article on using satellite technology to hunt for Osama bin Laden

A pre-Iraq war article on using satellite images in journalism. This article also mentions the governments role in limiting satellite imagery use.

An ABC news article on Waziristan where Osama bin Laden is thought to be hiding.

Here's a rather lame photo that accompanies the article:

Blog Pilgrim

I used to write about different subjects in Blog Pilgrim, mostly things on simplicity and number and prayer and how I relate to my computer. The blog software was called blosxom a relatively simple program written by Rael Dornfest in Perl. I don't really have the time or will to keep up two personal blogs, but I do want to continue to write about the same subjects. I might also occasionally recycle something from that site. Combining the two should work -- because, after all, it's all about me.

Anyway, after drinking caffeinated coffee last night I woke around three a.m. and began to try to induce sleep by visualizing numbers. The sheep I counted, though, were unruly. I began trying to think of a million, and ways to think of a million.

I first tried to think of a row of ten, which I must admit is a bit of a fiction, since I believe the largest row of units the untrained mind can visualize is between five and seven. But for the sake of moving things along I thought ten would do. Then I thought of ten rows of ten. Take them blocks of a hundred and put them in a ten by ten plane and then stack the plane ten high and you've got yourself 100,000.

Put together ten of these blocks and you've got yourself a million.

By this time, of course, I was far from sleep.

What if you used a different set. How about twenty. Twenty cubed. Twenty cubed cubed. Or how about two. A fairly simple generational pattern which models our own biology. I have two parents, they each had two parents, and my four grandparents each had two parents. I had 2 to the third great grandparents and they had two to the third great grandparents, and so on. Each one hundred years I could go back three generations, and so I imagine I had about 64 direct ancestors living in the beginning of the 18th century, 512 in the beginning of the 17th century, and so on. (Of course, as Alex Shoumatoff, puts it succinctly in his book The Mountain of Names, there's only so long you can do this without assuming there has to be some kind of intermarriage.)

Meditating on generational patterns got me to think of web patterns but even allowing for bad links and dead ends, the possibilities of interconnection are intriguing. If you want to play around with some visualizations visit TouchGraph's Google Browser, where you can learn about what links to what. What you can't see in the graph is how the website connections ultimately mean people connections. As far as I can tell, each of the nodes look the same. My node looks like Yahoo!s' node which looks like the New York Times' node, and so on.

I'm sure as time goes on Jupiter Media and the Pew Internet people will come up with some impressive graphics for understanding the web. In the meantime I'm going to continue to try to contemplate numbers. And maybe I'll find some good examples on the web. Here are a few links I've collected so far.

A PBS teacher resource on math.

The Megapenny Project.

A visual topography model that makes me think of how numbers can look like shapes.

And an article by my friend Peter Hart on how numbers can make you think about the place where you live.

Everything You Might Need to Know

Matthew Spong took the time to scan and publish the Household Cyclopedia, a late 19th c. reference for Victorian DIY-ers. The information is very much in keeping with the extension movement of its day, with information on gardening, metallurgy, medicine, photography, pyrotechny, etc.

I'm checking out the engraving information and as soon as I get some nitric acid, will be well on my way.

I wish that there were some kind of updated encylopedia for everyday use and creations. Maybe with not so many caustic chemicals involved and an understanding of more modern tools. But after a hundred-twenty or so years, this book stands as some sort of model for understanding how things work.

Where the Action Is

I always wondered if being a Republican had an aphrodisiac affect on women. Here's a story in the Post-Gazette that makes me think it's true. Young Republicans gathered for the first debate at Finnigan's Wake to compare notes and do what young people do when gathered together.

"You guys are for Bush?" asked party coordinator Salena Zito as she approached the clique of young men holding beers. "That's awesome!"

I imagine it would be nice to impress women by my choice of candidate, but since I'm married it's probably just as well I'm a Democrat.