Small Streams

Canoeing on the Allegheny

We started out at the Kinzua Dam. The canoe is facing up river towards Cornplanter's Kingdom. Right after we were dropped off, Thomas saw the little toads along the bank, and couldn't help picking one up.

My compatriots making their way down the river. The portion of the Allegheny River we paddled, from the dam to approximately two miles north of Tidioute, is lined with hemlocks, oaks, cherries and silver maples.

A peaceful little inlet near Warren.

Quote of the Week

Hendrik Hertzberg's "Talk of the Town" piece has a gem which requires a little bit of lead up, but here goes . . .

In The Damn Yankees, the Devil helps the Washington Senators win the pennant.

The Senators' successors after thirty years, the Nationals, are up for sale.

One of the possible buyers is George Soros

Republicans and conservatives say some harsh things about Soros: Bill O' Reilly, "as far left as you can get without moving to Havana," Dennis Hastert has insinuated that some of Soros' fortune could be drug money and Jeff Gannon's GOP.USA, has called him "a prolocutor in the congregation of Moloch" and "Hungarian-born descendant of Shylock."

Get ready, here's the quote . . .

"Given the plot of "Damn Yankees," you might think that a prolcutor in the congregation of Moloch would be just what the Nats' front office needs."

Posted by mastr at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)

Destructive Creation

I'm busy killing/resurrecting notes I made on "Blog Pilgrim." Here's an old one from 2003, that seems apt since I'm about to go canoeing this weekend:

Went canoeing this weekend. One of the great opportunities in canoeing is the opportunity to pare down to just the necessities. You don't want to feel like you're denying yourself. On the other hand, you don't want to take a lot of junk that you don't need. It makes the canoe heavy and you just might lose it down the river, anyway. The trick then is to think just how much you need. You can't really plan to be satisfied, but you can at least hope that at some point you say to yourself, "this is all I really need." Hemingway wrote about it so well in describing the onion sandwich in "Big Two Hearted River." One of my favorite descriptions in Mark Twain's Roughing It is the following:

And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard-boiled eggs while our spiritual natures reveled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe -- ham and eggs, and scenery, a "downgrade," a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart -- these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for.

The Yin and Yang of Computing

I'm reading A Different Universe by Robert B. Laughlin, a book about how organizational principles define our physical world. Even though Laughlin writes very clearly and succintly and avoids jargon, I can't understand much of it. But I get the basic concept that relying only on fundamentals, experiment and observation, Newtonian laws, and so on, we might misunderstand how the world works. This all has to do with that sexy concept of emergence. Laughlin seems to have a tight grasp on this; and perhaps as the book washes over me, I'll gain some of his comprehension.

When I read the chapter on computing, however, the books concepts did come to life.

The joke about gender bias in computer skills thus has at its core the more important observation that we owe the existence, reliability, and utility of computers to principles of organization—including economic ones. That women have an easier time understanding the supremacy of organizations than men is not news, for this was known to the ancients and recorded in numerous places, notably in the I Ching. According to Taoist philosophy, the universe is impelled forward by the conflict of two opposing principles, yin and yang, that constantly produce and supplant each other. Yang represents maleness, the sun, heat, light, dominance, and so forth. Yin represents femaleness, the moon, material forms, cold, submission, and so forth. . . . One might say that we are presently in an age of yin, and even though computers were brought into existence by yang [a bunch of nerds figuring out how to make transistors work], they have reached their full potential only under the dominance of yin [the rest of us trying to make spreadsheets, invitations, photologs, etc.].

So even though I'm beating myself up trying to understand the workings of javascript and the underpinnings of of what I'm trying to accomplish, I should perhaps just let my yin side take over.

I Have Seen the Future . . .

and it ends with an ellipsis.

Actually, here's an .mp3 created by educator/musician Jeff Ritter, professor of communications at LaRoche College, examining the future. I'm not sure if the .mp3 is .xml or iTunes ready, but you can punch the link and give a listen to an appropriate inaugural interview with Carnegie Mellon's dean of computer science. Some very good stuff on the near and far future of computing from a man who is obviously making the future happen.

Dean Randal Bryant is like a good editor, he's got a firm grasp of the obvious. He recognizes the interplay of technology, sociology, and behavior. But he doesn't reflect on the effects of consumerism and the military-industrial complex. He was particularly near-sighted when talking about America's fear of robots versus Japan's, and says their sci-fi literature is much more positive about robotics than America's.

Bryant says that the Japanese have made many more advances in using robots for assisted living, while Americans have lagged because of our general public's negative attitude toward robots. Intentionally or unintentionally, he ignored the fact that during the '80s Carnegie Mellon's robotics department made a conscious decision to pursue military contracts at the expense of assisted-living oriented robotics.