Asking

1 Feb, 2012 in Uncategorized by

A few weeks ago I asked my wife, “How can I know if you’ll want toast with your breakfast? I never know whether to make it or not.” She replied, “When I wake up, I know whether I want toast. In fact, there’s usually a reason — but that would be a lot to explain. It’s nicest if you just ask me once I’m out of bed.” Wanting to be nicest, of course, I said “Okay!”

But a few days later, I was in front of the toaster and I couldn’t quite remember what she had said. (It was early in the morning, remember.) She gave me a simple rule for knowing whether she wants the toast, I thought to myself. What was it? After another sip of coffee, I smiled and remembered: There’s no rule! I have to ask her!

I wonder if God thinks it’s nicest when we ask Him what He wants, instead of standing at the counter and worrying whether we’ll get it right?

0 Comments
tagged ,

Remote Control Sailboat — Part 2, Hull Form

17 Sep, 2011 in Sailboat Project by

The stumper for a long time was the hull. It isn’t the only challenging part, but it is the first in line. It doesn’t have to be very hydrodynamic, but of course I want that. How will I make the hull symmetrically shaped? And how will I do that twice? (Remember, I want two boats.)

And what material will I use — Wood? If so, what form of wood? Fiberglass? Some resin compound, like auto-body filler? Vacuum-formed styrene?

One thing I can’t do: buy a couple of hulls. They aren’t for sale at any reasonable cost.

Diagram of hull lines

The hull lines, showing only what is needed for cuts on three axes

About the time I decided to stop focusing on my uncertainties and get started, my employer invested in a computer numerical controlled (CNC) machine for cutting Styrofoam™.

Hull carving Hull carving
These photos show an early attempt. I was still learning to plan cuts in three axes.
I still need to fully shape the block into a hull, but sanding Styrofoam is easy. With two identical blocks in hand, getting the lines good enough doesn’t seem impossible.

Oh, and because these blocks are based on a CAD file, I can up-size someday.

0 Comments
tagged

Letting the school bus roll

14 Sep, 2011 in Uncategorized by

Most mornings I drive my son to school. Leaving the school, I come to an intersection where buses are also heading elsewhere. Often one or two big yellow buses are waiting at the stop sign. I can drive past them; instead I usually stop my car, blocking my line of traffic, and wave at them to pull out.

  1. School bus drivers have a hard job. I’d like to do a favor by shortening their work day.
  2. A bus is using fuel at a faster rate than me and the car behind me. I’m saving the environment.
  3. The way traffic flows at that intersection, it’s possible a bus could be stranded 3-4 minutes.
  4. A late school bus can have lots of cascading effects that hinder many people.
  5. The way traffic flows at the next red light, me and the car behind me will almost certainly have to stop again. My choice now won’t affect us later.
  6. Sometimes the driver behind me gesticulates in frustration. I have satisfaction knowing it may still emotionally affect him during the next red light.
0 Comments
tagged

Remote Control Sailboat — Part 1, Intro

11 Sep, 2011 in Sailboat Project by
toy yacht

The "Endeavor II", identical to the one I had (except the small plastic bits that are green in this picture were white)

Five years ago I started planning a model sailboat.   It would be like the Star Yacht I received as a gift from my parents on my seventh birthday.  A decal on the deck bore the motto ‘Guaranteed to Sail’, and it sailed wonderfully.  My new boat would have radio remote control.

The first challenge was a lack of money.  I’d be happy with a ready-to-assemble boat, but those cost hundreds of dollars.  Besides, I want two boats.  Otherwise there’s no reason to say words like fleet and armada and regatta.  Especially regatta.  With two boats I can put on a race.

I will have to make them instead of buying them, which brings up another challenge:  lack of work space.  We don’t have a garage or a studio room, and the closest thing to a work bench is a weathered wooden picnic table in our back yard. Also, I own very little in the way of tools.

DaVinci-like Sketch

Early daVinci-like sketch

So five years ago, I mainly concentrated my efforts on daVinci-like sketches.

The challenges haven’t changed, but I feel ready now.  Join me in building a model sailboat for a cost of mere pennies.  At least until the remote control equipment is needed, I should be able to have fun building almost for free, thanks to a few lucky provisions:

  • My employer is a manufacturer with all sorts of tools and processes.  I can’t set up shop on the production floor, but I can ask for a few favors along the way.
  • For years I’ve been scavenging items that might be useful.

Another plus is my teenage son is interested in the project, which means I won’t have to master the remote control technology on my own.  Also I’ll have the delightful motivation of spending time with him.

My next post will be about the hull.

0 Comments
tagged

The End of Outlining

7 May, 2011 in Knowledge Manager by

In Fifth Grade I was taught to “outline.” The key to outlining, we learned, was contained in one simple rule:

If you make a sub-heading “A”,
you MUST also make at least one other sub-heading “B”.

We grade-school minions spent a fair amount of time in mental agony trying to come up with the “B” that would complement our fully-realized “A”.

Outlining was a precursor to all kinds of organized thinking and endeavor. (For example, my readiness to use of stub entries and scaffolding when developing code owes a distant debt to outlining.)

However back in grade, school outlining was promoted for one virtue: enforcing linear thought. This was never said out loud — that would have damaged the underlying presumption, which is that ideas are intrinsically friendly to being strung up in long chains. But what somebody knew is that if you can put a multitude of things into a line, that offers a way to keep your head straight.

Then, my millennium changed.

  • Science learned the brain doesn’t naturally operate in linear steps.
  • World anthropology showed a large body of cultures (we call them “non-Western”) doesn’t bother with outlining.
  • Programming embraced “object orientation”.
  • Everyone decided the world is more complicated than the fifth-grade teacher had ever been prepared to acknowledge.

And, oh yes —

  • The computer arrived. The computer offers other tools for helping one keep track of complicated sets.

All this joined counsel with my eclectic mind, which always had the awkward habit of sometimes rejecting linear thinking out-of-hand.

Image of neurons in network formation

Neurons as a network


So now, at those times when it seems counter-productive and frustrating, I reach for a mind map. Or if the computer’s running, I just open up TiddlyWiki.

0 Comments
tagged ,

In which Billy Collins deprecates despair

27 Jan, 2011 in Literature by

Despair

by Billy Collins

So much gloom and doubt in our poetry -
flowers wilting on the table,
the self regarding itself in a watery mirror.
Dead leaves cover the ground,
the wind moans in the chimney,
and the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.
I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
would make of all this,
these shadows and empty cupboards?
Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrators of experience,
Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained,
and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces,
Ye-Hah.
———
This poem is published in Ballistics.

0 Comments
tagged

In which a rival poet is humiliated

25 Jan, 2011 in Literature by

The Rival Poet

by Billy Collins

The column of your book titles,
always introducing your last one,
looms over me like Roman architecture.
———
It is longer than the name
of an Italian countess, longer
than this poem will probably be.
———
Etched on the head of a pin,
my own production would leave room for
The Lord’s Prayer and many dancing angels.
No matter.
———
In my revenge daydream I am the one
poised on the marble staircase
high above the crowded ballroom.
A retainer in livery announces me
and the Contessa Maria Teresa Isabella
Veronica Multalire Eleganza de Bella Ferrari.
———
You are the one below
fidgeting in your rented tux
with some local Cindy hanging all over you.
———

Structure

The poem’s overall structure is a chiasmus (see explanation at bottom).

        The Rival
            Me (the Speaker), inferior
            Me, fully self-inflated
        The Rival, fully belittled

The Rival’s work is a column, a Roman architecture. The Me, the speaker, doesn’t have a column, but rather a pin.

Now come the second half, where the speaker takes over the marble staircase, the focus of all that Roman architecture. The Rival has no architecture at all.

        the Rival's collection "looms over me"
            "longer than the name of an Italian countess"
            "Contessa Maria Teresa Isabella Veronica Multalire ..."
        local Cindy "hanging all over" him

In the revenge daydream, the last nine lines, the Speaker’s part is brocaded with prestige (just try translating the name of the Contessa). The ratio of syllables to words is more than 2 to 1. The Rival’s part is an impoverished 1.5 to 1.

Meaning

The title asserts: We are adversaries.   For Him and Me there is no acceptable mutual standing, no human middle.  My insecurity makes it impossible. I’m consumed by my perception that He is superior and I am crap.  I have to cope somehow, so I build an elaborate daydream.  The rival’s humiliation will have to be huge, if it is to compensate for my inferiority.

My personal shame drives the whole episode. My self-beatification is dysfunctional, and also destructive –  I have dwarfed myself and my capacities.

What a portrait Billy Collins has given us.  What a give-away of the demented, selfish self.  What a piece of art — B. Collins festooning himself in this jester’s get-up, so we can laugh and wonder why we are the way we are.  What a gift.

This poem is published in Sailing Alone Around the Room and earlier in The Apple that Astonished Paris.

A note about Chiasmus

This literary term identifies the simple sequence:  A shifts to B, then B returns to A.  This can happen on any scale, from sentence to narrative.   Many quotations are memorable for chiasmus:

Flowers are lovely, love is flowerlike. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I am Sam.  Sam I am. — Dr. Seuss

I doubt everyone would recognize this pattern in Billy Collins’ Despair; but if you take empty cupboards and the sun blazing in the trees as a central point, you may agree that a chiasmus is loosely established.

Chiasmus is essential for understanding Semitic writing, which includes all classic literature from the Jewish and Arab cultures. Some translated Bible stories and poems won’t fully make sense without an awareness of this. Parallelism is similarly important, but chiasmus on the narrative scale is especially easy for the English reader to miss.

It is very strange to me that an Internet search on chiasmus will not return much information; but it doesn’t, so remember: you read it here.

0 Comments
tagged ,

Flow charts of nonsense

21 Jan, 2011 in Knowledge Manager by

But are flow charts for merely serious thinking?

Of course not! Allow me demonstrate.  This lets you select the right web font:

Humorous flow chart about selecting a font

At last you will navigate the Great Font Plethora! Go ahead, click for the full view!

Thanks Ben Gilles

This chart lets us enter the mind of the Street Fighter:

humorous flow chart about game street fighter

Winning moves! Or move, I mean.

This chart lets us avoid current tasks in a disciplined, savvy manner:

humorous flow chart about procrastinating

This is surely worth a few minutes of my precious time.

A lot of charting fun is available on Google. Just search on chart health care bill!

Of course many charts, like this one, deliberately present the new health care system as complicated and fearsome. Apparently that isn’t difficult; one does notice the shortage of charts that try to present the opposing view.

Flow chart illustrating the health care bill

...

Ouch. Let’s go back to the basics …
Flow chart about flow charting

I feel all tautistic all of a sudden

0 Comments
tagged ,

Master and Commander, Book 1

2 Jan, 2011 in Literature by

The first book is the best of the Maturin-Aubrey series. But that requires one to assess the books individually; a shabby approach, and inadequate, for the later heights could not be achieved in a single book. As one reader observed about a culminating episode:

I think you could make a case that the effect of that single sequence, relying as it does on 1,000 cumulative insights/relationships/details spread throughout the previous novels, is one of the great literary moments in English literature.
(David Wilmington in Facebook, Sept 2, 2010))

I agree with the high commendation; also that the brilliance belongs to the oeuvre rather than the single volume. In that light, it’s natural that the first book should excel above the others. It is sublimely clever; but this is Patrick O’Brian, and I must merely say natural in order to save on superlatives.

Chapter One introduces three men. We are given a glimpse of each, in the privacy of early morning, and in each glimpse the name of Lord is spoken in vain or earnest:

‘Christ,’ said Jack, as the shattering din of the carpenter’s hammer prised him from his hold on sleep. He clung to the soft darkness as hard as he could, burying his face in the pillow … But there was no sleeping; the echoing crash of the hammer right next to his ear made certain of that. They were in his sleeping cabin, of course. Jets of pain shot through Jack’s head as he lay there. ‘ ‘Vast that bloody hammering.’ he called and almost against his shoulder came the shocked reply, ‘Aye-aye, sir,’ and the tip-toe pattering away.

[Stephen Maturin] opened his eyes and stared about very stupidly: a moment before he had been so solidly, so warmly and happily in Ireland, with a girl’s hand under his arm, that his waking mind could not take in the world he saw … He had been exceedingly attached, and she was so bound up with that time … He had been quite unprepared for this particular blow, striking under every conceivable kind of armour, and for some minutes he could hardly bear the pain, but sat there blinking in the sun. ‘Christ,’ he said at last. ‘Another day.’ With that his face grew more composed.

‘Christe,’ hummed James Dillon under his breath, shaving the red-gold bristles off his face in what light could make its way through the scuttle of the Burford’s number twelve gunport. ‘Christe eleison. Kyrie …’ This was less piety in James Dillon than a way of hoping he should not cut himself; for like so many Papists he was somewhat given to blasphemy. The difficult of the planes under his nose silenced him, however, and when his upper lip was clean he could not hit the note again.

I have never understood what O’Brian is saying about blasphemy among Papists, and it’s curious that he uses that prejudicial term while we are visiting Dillon’s mind. But this bit of narrative is an epigram; it foreshadows the man’s fate. When we close the last page of Master and Commander, we will understand Dillon’s red hair, his hopes and perils, his inability to hit the note again, his dim lighting, and his private intonation of the doxology.

6 Comments
tagged

Looking for the TiddlyWiki community

24 Dec, 2010 in Knowledge Manager by

I’ve spent my recent hours trying to discover the Internet residence of the TiddlyWiki community. It’s exhausting. They’re like an on-line version of some elusive band of trans-European vagabonds.

We know, we TiddlyWiki people, that we’re ready to shift a whole world’s approach to knowledge management, and this is unbearably exciting. We are individually empowered through TiddlyWiki — which is natural or to be expected, given the course of computer development. But it may also be unprecedented in its degree; so perhaps that becomes a new test of the web’s capacity to draw together distant individuals.

Sure, that’s grandiose. I’m just trying to account for the mysterious lack of a central clearing-house for news and information. This forces me to think big things, like Maybe Doug Engelbart is still too far ahead of us, even after all this time.

The search for this hypothetical headquarters is not only frustrating. It’s a slow-going and thrilling process, because it entails visiting site after site of stupendous TiddlyWiki endeavors and applications and plug-ins. Some of the sites are enormous. So my imagination is getting crammed full of new genius, and my little collection of plug-ins is growing.

Endless plug-ins … and not much instruction on how to use any of them. Users declare their interest for documentation, but in reality the need is not so critical. The plug-ins work well and it’s not too hard to figure out what they’re for and how to put them to work. You do end up learning some JavaScript, however.

That’s the crux, however, of a cultural and marketing challenge. TiddlyWiki can help the user with no programming knowledge. I guess it’s correct to call it a content-management system — like WordPress, but incredibly easy in comparison. Yet WordPress offers a user interface that beautifully hides all the HTML and coding until you’d like to take a look; whereas in TiddlyWiki, to apply text formatting you must learn some mark-down brackets. They are fantastically simple, but there it is: you’ve typed some code. Then as you recognize the available power, you want some plug-ins; and if you’re not careful, pretty soon you’re flailing around with those funny curly brackets near the p on your keyboard.

Documentation could make a big difference on that. I’m not sure how, except to say I’ve written code (some weird code, I’m sure) when, unknown to me, a plug-in was ready to go. It would have been a lot easier with a clear and comprehensive list of plug-ins.

By now you’re wondering how this TiddlyWiki society can be so obtuse, not to have the documentation written and the headquarters well identified. Actually, they work hard at it. I think they’re overwhelmed — not at the same level as Yours Truly The Newbie, but on a different scale that comes from viewing this wonderland of functionality from a high elevation. There are several ambitious efforts to draw together all TiddlyWiki resources. But as of 2010, the landscape seems to feature several neighboring Towers of Babel; and while fortunately they speak the same language, that language is growing beyond workable lexical proportions. In particular, they’ve created TiddlySpace, which lets all members interconnect their wiki creations. This has a recursive quality, and unfortunately I always feel very confused when I go there. It’s like being in a Hall of Mirrors. After a while I can’t remember whose brain I’m in, or where I started or wanted to go.

Yes, imagine a Hall of Mirrors that fills the Tower of Babel, or several such Towers. The Lord has not come down to visit the site(s), and heaven is just a few floors away.

But wait, you are thinking — Facebook Groups to the rescue! While Facebook (or even LinkedIn) has connected the fan-base for many an enterprise, for TiddlyWiki this hasn’t happened. The group pages exist, but they collect about one post per month. This too is a reflection of the larger-than-lexicon immensity of TiddlyWiki. You look at a typical boxy message-board and think: That’s useless. Why post something here? It’s like using a View-Master® to observe a full-on double rainbow.

But don’t let my puzzlement over all this keep you from checking out TiddlyWiki! I can’t recommend a safari in TiddlySpace, but I can direct you to my own posts. And while they won’t answer your questions once you’re underway, I can assure you the many Mirrors of Babel will … even if you actually end up getting your information via the humble Google Group, and even if that’s embarrassing to the luminaries of TiddlyWiki who know there ought to be a better way … a TiddlyWiki way …

A closing note: they are very kind and patient, those luminaries. They’re on a happy mission. And in 2011, I expect the Hall of Mirrors will become a laser beacon with an high-altitude mounting. Here’s to a great New Year!

4 Comments
tagged ,
Pages (3): 1 2 3 Next »