Sitting in the quiet calm of my brother and sister-in-law's guest room, this feels like a good space to process the last two intense days in Vancouver, intensely beautiful, intensely ugly, and intensely sad.
I guess I regret not bringing a camera along, since I would've enjoyed highlighting these reflections with a few photos. But, since I didn't, I'll put extra care into describing the experience vividly and accurately.
The benefit of not bringing the camera, is that now I get to let my memory have final say on what's worth saving rather than whether or not I happened to take a picture of something.
So what stands out...
Delight, connectedness with my past (my family visited Vancouver in 1986 for the World Expo, aka Expo '86), formative experience, and the soberness of
The ride up Chancellor Blvd. and Broadway's West Coast retail, boardsport shops and designer sunglasses
Light wispy tree canopy, cement, moss-aged road
view of mountains, riding up the hill with a tea in one hand, young girl practicing skateboarding, forest trails,
anthropology, the big penis. oh what would Jon Hines say if he were here....
tour
tour highlights
potlatch
woman with face vagina and round, red circle lips
Bill Reid's raven on the old gun turret, an aboriginal creation story that incorporates and reclaims the Canadian military battlements
totem poles "outside"
enjoying nature, reading in the grass, the feeling of clean earth, mountains
meeting Eve, remembering what attracted me to her. seeing some beautiful things in her and Dave's life, and wondering if I also sensed something Dave wishes was different, or whether it was my imagination.
terrible collision
mangled bicycle, pool of half-dried blood on the road, a large pool. crushed helmet
I asked the police officer, how did this happen? He said, "A bike and a truck got together."
it took a minute or two to process, then I began to cry as I lifted my bike onto the rack on the bus, hoping this wave of tears would stop by the time I entered the bus to pay my fare
Sign seen from the bus: "Ours to preserve with hand and with heart" -Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR)
Needless to say, the cyclist fatality put a damper, a big damper, on the rest of the morning. It made me start questioning
it made me remember the value of life
solar powered trash compactor?
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Three feet away from Alan Kay
It was a little surprising to find an invite in my inbox a month ago to a "special David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture". It was addressed to Comp Sci alumni and included lunch with the speaker, Dr. Alan Kay. As this sounded like a unique and interesting opportunity, I RSVP'd despite the fact that I'm not a CS alumnus and was only enrolled in CS for two academic terms.
Sometimes casual decisions lead to some pretty amazing experiences. I didn't realize it at the time, but after hanging off Dr. Kay's armchair for over an hour, I began to understand that I was listening to one incredibly remarkable man. His ideas are among the most astonishing, while also being perfectly reasonable, that I have heard in a long time, on both philosophical and practical levels.
At 2pm the same day, we (that is, me and handful of CSers who met at lunch) also got to hear Eric Veach, who was one member of a small team of 'software architects' at Google describe some of the behind-the-scenes workings of Google Maps. Veach was both the top of his class and the top student in the university when he graduated from CS in 1997. Here are my notes from the afternoon, as well as additional ones from Kay's convocation address the next day. I couldn't get enough of this guy!
-----------
Many of our themes co-evolved with the inventions of networked personal computers, graphical user interfaces and dynamic object-oriented programming. -http://www.vpri.org/
Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2000 - PIXAR!!! website
------------
Chuck Thacker - invented tablet PC Xerox PARC
www.vpri.org
a research centre for augmenting human intellect
intellectual amplifier - 192 kilobytes which you can interpret to mean 1 Mhz, supported 20 users, UCLA, Butler Lampton operating system
Bob Taylor, UC R Linchider, Lang Roberts, Wes Clark, Paul Baron, Len Kleinrock, Bob Kahn, VMT Corp
1969 the intergalactic network, unlimited desktops, "Wat For" "ppl who were supposed to be thinking were believing. (I asked myself) do I love this because I understand it or because it's a good idea" coping is what humans were made for.
Math and Science give you an escape function from the current (now) [paradigm].
SAP 350 lines of code 17,500 books, "never met anyone in business who can deal with 350 M things unless they were dollars"
I think you should be more explicit here in step two - and then a miracle occurred "but it's the miracles which are important
------------
language, market, ?, ? - the four idols
normal is a construct
"no one likes the child who says the emperor has no clothes"
the problem with computer science in the university is that it has become incremental...new paradigms are hard to ...get funding for. got funding for something that had almost no chance of success from some woman who had seen 294 similar uncreative proposals and was upset and frustrated with them, so funded theirs. then he found matching funding...this was Xerox PARC-scale funding
when I walked up he was talking about The Bible and how people (cultures) use different parts of it depending on what problems they're facing... people don't read it.. not uniform how they're ...
------------
"Funded at the Xerox PARC level -- may not succeed but is likely to come up with some interesting stuff." Xerox PARC Smalltalk laid the foundation of windows ~200,000 lines of code is 10 books, 1/10,000th this would be Moores "Law" of Software
Ad Hoc organizations are messy. Math is clean. "do not touch any of the wires". Mine can run with 10% of ourselves disconnected
Ad Hoc | Science and Math
disorder order
No centre networks ARPAnet, Ethernet, Internet
No OS internet all the way down
No programming languages
No applications
No mainframes
-------
What do children do? -one laptop per child Teach kids variables -Brilliant
one kind of object, completely polymorphic
by learning one kind of abstraction you can deabstract...? Maxwell had to think statistically, Bonnie his wife, the original screenwriter of Tron. Gary Starkweather, John McCarthy's version of Maxwell's equation. APL, a toy language, David Reid's thesis Butler system designer simula - simulus calculus, semaphore (exactly the wrong way to do it.)
in the west, we like nouns and hate verbs. in the East, they like verbs and hate nouns. so to them a rock is a thing in process, and to us it's just a thing.
> 1 Million nodes and still be self-balancing - really amazed at the work of these early creators of the internet. TCPIP only a few heuristics added. Computer can simulate our own ideas, not just old media...printing press, it was 100 years before ppl realized what it was "before it realized what it was..." anachronistic.
No gears, no centres. ARPA/PARC Outlook everything is kind of like the internet. 100 trillion cells in body., 60 billion pants "the way you scale" any particular cell not critical (cancer cell?) Mathematicians will go through any amount of work to avoid doing work - kind of work won't do scunt work. one of the better Master's degrees his mother is a math'cian M for Marshal McLuhan..."widgets, apps, real? classes "dynamic mathematics". Google - type in lonely kernel (in so far best version of Javascript) Dan Engles computing has committed the great sin of trying to be smarter than the past, rather than building on it. "amplifying us rather than imitating old media" fold up into their natural entropy http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html
Ivan's 70th birthday, sorted ppl by whether they understood significance of what he did. something for humans didn't worry about what's wrong with TX2 or what's wrong with computers, Engelbert 75 papers very profound. computing is one of the great art forms of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Sometimes casual decisions lead to some pretty amazing experiences. I didn't realize it at the time, but after hanging off Dr. Kay's armchair for over an hour, I began to understand that I was listening to one incredibly remarkable man. His ideas are among the most astonishing, while also being perfectly reasonable, that I have heard in a long time, on both philosophical and practical levels.
At 2pm the same day, we (that is, me and handful of CSers who met at lunch) also got to hear Eric Veach, who was one member of a small team of 'software architects' at Google describe some of the behind-the-scenes workings of Google Maps. Veach was both the top of his class and the top student in the university when he graduated from CS in 1997. Here are my notes from the afternoon, as well as additional ones from Kay's convocation address the next day. I couldn't get enough of this guy!
-----------
Many of our themes co-evolved with the inventions of networked personal computers, graphical user interfaces and dynamic object-oriented programming. -http://www.vpri.org/
Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2000 - PIXAR!!! website
------------
Chuck Thacker - invented tablet PC Xerox PARC
www.vpri.org
a research centre for augmenting human intellect
intellectual amplifier - 192 kilobytes which you can interpret to mean 1 Mhz, supported 20 users, UCLA, Butler Lampton operating system
Bob Taylor, UC R Linchider, Lang Roberts, Wes Clark, Paul Baron, Len Kleinrock, Bob Kahn, VMT Corp
1969 the intergalactic network, unlimited desktops, "Wat For" "ppl who were supposed to be thinking were believing. (I asked myself) do I love this because I understand it or because it's a good idea" coping is what humans were made for.
Math and Science give you an escape function from the current (now) [paradigm].
SAP 350 lines of code 17,500 books, "never met anyone in business who can deal with 350 M things unless they were dollars"
I think you should be more explicit here in step two - and then a miracle occurred "but it's the miracles which are important
------------
language, market, ?, ? - the four idols
normal is a construct
"no one likes the child who says the emperor has no clothes"
the problem with computer science in the university is that it has become incremental...new paradigms are hard to ...get funding for. got funding for something that had almost no chance of success from some woman who had seen 294 similar uncreative proposals and was upset and frustrated with them, so funded theirs. then he found matching funding...this was Xerox PARC-scale funding
when I walked up he was talking about The Bible and how people (cultures) use different parts of it depending on what problems they're facing... people don't read it.. not uniform how they're ...
------------
"Funded at the Xerox PARC level -- may not succeed but is likely to come up with some interesting stuff." Xerox PARC Smalltalk laid the foundation of windows ~200,000 lines of code is 10 books, 1/10,000th this would be Moores "Law" of Software
Ad Hoc organizations are messy. Math is clean. "do not touch any of the wires". Mine can run with 10% of ourselves disconnected
Ad Hoc | Science and Math
disorder order
No centre networks ARPAnet, Ethernet, Internet
No OS internet all the way down
No programming languages
No applications
No mainframes
-------
What do children do? -one laptop per child Teach kids variables -Brilliant
one kind of object, completely polymorphic
by learning one kind of abstraction you can deabstract...? Maxwell had to think statistically, Bonnie his wife, the original screenwriter of Tron. Gary Starkweather, John McCarthy's version of Maxwell's equation. APL, a toy language, David Reid's thesis Butler system designer simula - simulus calculus, semaphore (exactly the wrong way to do it.)
in the west, we like nouns and hate verbs. in the East, they like verbs and hate nouns. so to them a rock is a thing in process, and to us it's just a thing.
> 1 Million nodes and still be self-balancing - really amazed at the work of these early creators of the internet. TCPIP only a few heuristics added. Computer can simulate our own ideas, not just old media...printing press, it was 100 years before ppl realized what it was "before it realized what it was..." anachronistic.
No gears, no centres. ARPA/PARC Outlook everything is kind of like the internet. 100 trillion cells in body., 60 billion pants "the way you scale" any particular cell not critical (cancer cell?) Mathematicians will go through any amount of work to avoid doing work - kind of work won't do scunt work. one of the better Master's degrees his mother is a math'cian M for Marshal McLuhan..."widgets, apps, real? classes "dynamic mathematics". Google - type in lonely kernel (in so far best version of Javascript) Dan Engles computing has committed the great sin of trying to be smarter than the past, rather than building on it. "amplifying us rather than imitating old media" fold up into their natural entropy http://www.smalltalk.org
Ivan's 70th birthday, sorted ppl by whether they understood significance of what he did. something for humans didn't worry about what's wrong with TX2 or what's wrong with computers, Engelbert 75 papers very profound. computing is one of the great art forms of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Friday, June 13, 2008
A Book Review
I've been pondering lately what kinds of media offer the best form of expression for different sorts of ideas. A lyricist told me a few weeks ago that he reserves his most controversial/challenging ideas for his art because they're received better when expressed abstractly, rather than simply stated outright. So I don't know whether a blog is the best place to post a book review. I guess some people write short blogs, with a handful of concisely expressed personal reflections. However, as someone who likes to mix media, I think I'll risk it and write a review here for Drive, A Road Trip Through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile.
Drive, by Tim Falconer, is a very readable, topical book -- particularly as the car, and our dependence on it, are under so much scrutiny in the age of climate crisis. The book has a lot to offer for anyone who is either casually or professionally interested in transportation history and culture.
Drive starts out strong, with a local focus on Toronto, and is jam-packed with meaty stats on the growth of motorization of Southern Ontario, as well as successful social movements that stemmed this growth, saving Toronto's unique neighbourhoods. Drive is accurately described as a road trip, since Falconer offers a narrative account of his journey through America in his 1991 Nissan Maxima. He makes planned and unplanned stops along the way, such as a surreal visit to the GM Power Center, where Cadillac and Corvette engines are made, as well as Detroit, Indianapolis, and other U.S. "conurbations" that have been shaped by the automobile. Woven throughout the narrative are Falconer's own reflections, along with insightful commentary and factual knowledge. Falconer uses pop culture references to good effect, retelling scenes or summarizing episodes from South Park and The Simpsons to add humour and context to his observations. The book loses speed a little towards the middle, while Falconer tries to squeeze unnecessary detail into the sections on car clubs, and personal visits. However, this is partially redeemed by the personal and participatory flavour it lends to the book. The author is careful to give space and credit to all those who insist on joining him along the way to share their story, or to simply show off their car. Four stars.
Drive, by Tim Falconer, is a very readable, topical book -- particularly as the car, and our dependence on it, are under so much scrutiny in the age of climate crisis. The book has a lot to offer for anyone who is either casually or professionally interested in transportation history and culture. Drive starts out strong, with a local focus on Toronto, and is jam-packed with meaty stats on the growth of motorization of Southern Ontario, as well as successful social movements that stemmed this growth, saving Toronto's unique neighbourhoods. Drive is accurately described as a road trip, since Falconer offers a narrative account of his journey through America in his 1991 Nissan Maxima. He makes planned and unplanned stops along the way, such as a surreal visit to the GM Power Center, where Cadillac and Corvette engines are made, as well as Detroit, Indianapolis, and other U.S. "conurbations" that have been shaped by the automobile. Woven throughout the narrative are Falconer's own reflections, along with insightful commentary and factual knowledge. Falconer uses pop culture references to good effect, retelling scenes or summarizing episodes from South Park and The Simpsons to add humour and context to his observations. The book loses speed a little towards the middle, while Falconer tries to squeeze unnecessary detail into the sections on car clubs, and personal visits. However, this is partially redeemed by the personal and participatory flavour it lends to the book. The author is careful to give space and credit to all those who insist on joining him along the way to share their story, or to simply show off their car. Four stars.
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