Tuesday, December 31, 2013
perfect pattern
Monday, December 30, 2013
where to start
no fing way am i signing up for google+ as T fing S just to comment on a Blogger blog. Blazing Sun reads like a great cheap novel. u shud look 4 a book deal. write to my friend Alicia Erian. she's THE authority on this kind of literature.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
hyperblogging
If you tried to record everything you did every day on a blog, in satisfactory detail, your readers would think you were torturing them, but this is not because everything you did during the day is boring, it's because blogs (as they still exist) don't handle that kind of granularity well ... or at all, really. Let's say you had a time line that showed all the hours of your day, and in the hours were all sorts of notes, which displayed like little clouds, and then, if you were interested, you could zoom in on the clouds to study the notations in detail. This is another use for the app.
app map
If you imagine that each of the little boxes - all of the graphics, actually - represent functions, then the lines of code for the functions can be printed, miniaturized, in the boxes, or over the lines, etc., and then you would be able to zoom in and read and edit the code right in the map. This is just one of the app's capabilities.
Tandy Brands
Tandy is obviously really cheap today (25 cents). It should go up something like 40 times next year, and more. (If it doesn't, you'll just need to hang on. It'll get there.) Obviously you don't want to put a lot of money into something just on my say so, but if I'm right your $100 will turn into $4000. I looked at about fifty stocks today and Tandy stood out by itself among them.
a instachart
Agilent(A)
Here's a chart that updates whenever you load the page, so you can always see the latest.
The five day chart is here so you can check if the chart has updated.
a
Not surprisingly, the boss was not too impressed with A, though she did approve the purchase. Buying into rising prices like this is kind of a kick I'm on. Hope it doesn't kick me. Buying into low prices adds a big measure of safety, but forces you to do more waiting. I don't have it all figured out, I'm just, what's it called, disclosing.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Friday, December 6, 2013
Thursday, December 5, 2013
beginning
A series of posts begins with tech, and proceeds forward, or up, and you can see them in the archive for December, 2013. Before that, in December, a series of posts begins at the beginning, with more wonders, and proceeds forward, or up, until you reach tech. Readers can also start at the beginning, from the top, whatever the latest post is, just fine. This is just a heads up about where the blog is heading. It is to point your attention towards the archive, at the right of the page, and the 2013 and December archives, and the list of posts for that December.
snowstorm
Posting a link, in the post on Morgan Kaufmann, I encountered this page, which really points to a lot of important stuff, as well as perhaps containing important stuff itself, though I'm not sure what to do with it. The questions it raises are about how to manage my on line identity, in particular my identity as a blogger on Blogger, and also as an Amazon Associate. I want people to be able to connect with me, via the blog, in a very positive way, and some of these settings are doubtless a key to that.
Liz, if, now or another time, you have any thoughts about that for me, let me hear them. But I feel very hard to message. There's the comments on these posts, though I'm not entirely sure I'll see them - I'm anxious about it. E-mail is, if anything, more problematic still. It's essential to me in certain specific cases - and a great blessing - but, for instance, I don't have any idea, even, whether anyone is messaging me via GMail. It seems like I could go to Google+ easily from here, too, though I don't have any clear idea to what end. The questions do go on an on.
The problem with comments is ... well, there's a fundamental problem, which can only be corrected in the interface, which is that messages aren't delivered to my front door. Instead they are delivered to some obscure locations which are actually not entirely easy to find. I made reference to this in yesterday's post titled E mail. But why aren't all our messages being delivered to one easy to find location? It might seem, on the face of it, that it is because of some difficulty in sharing access, on the part of message senders and message deliverers, to our in boxes, but that actually isn't the problem at all. The problem is, something needs to be done to prevent our front doors from being buried in piles of new messages. We might be able to limit who can send us messages, to prevent this from happening, but that's complicated by our desire not to miss out. Really, the complete solution is being able to process our in boxes effectively. We need to pick up the mail, every day, and bring it inside, and start the process of Integrating it into our Data Warehouses. Everyone uses the same words to describe the beginning of this process: we call it sorting the mail.
It's distinctly possible that I am not enjoying the benefits of having my mail all delivered to one in box and being able to immediately begin the process of sorting it, in a highly controlled way, because of my lack of insight into available technology. I know my comprehension of existing technology - my Yahoo mail, my Google account, my Facebook - is extremely superficial. And I benefit from continuing to work with these interfaces, gradually acquiring a little more facility for them. But it could also be said that, if, even with my very limited facility for these things, I am not able to access fundamental processes, it suggests that there is still opportunity in these aspects of the state of the Web, opportunity for development work. I cannot be the only person struggling this way.
So what's the way for us to move forward, Liz? Comments are really beautiful, really intuitive from here, but so totally public. Perhaps we could discretely, carefully, use them to work out some better protocols. I suspect Google+ might be a valuable resource. There's also Facebook. The goal, at any rate, would be to develop a more controlled space for collaboration on questions like these that I feel I am raising a snowstorm of. The goal would be to collaboratively assemble collections of documents - the minutes of on line meetings - and then to disseminate some of those collections through selected channels onto the Web. The goal is to become fellows at MIT Media Lab, and other such places, all or largely through teleportation, that is, through media. The goal is to do this at our leisure, however we please. I have a lot of time and energy for this kind of work. I will continue to blog away, now that I feel I've made a start. What do you think of all this?
Liz, if, now or another time, you have any thoughts about that for me, let me hear them. But I feel very hard to message. There's the comments on these posts, though I'm not entirely sure I'll see them - I'm anxious about it. E-mail is, if anything, more problematic still. It's essential to me in certain specific cases - and a great blessing - but, for instance, I don't have any idea, even, whether anyone is messaging me via GMail. It seems like I could go to Google+ easily from here, too, though I don't have any clear idea to what end. The questions do go on an on.
The problem with comments is ... well, there's a fundamental problem, which can only be corrected in the interface, which is that messages aren't delivered to my front door. Instead they are delivered to some obscure locations which are actually not entirely easy to find. I made reference to this in yesterday's post titled E mail. But why aren't all our messages being delivered to one easy to find location? It might seem, on the face of it, that it is because of some difficulty in sharing access, on the part of message senders and message deliverers, to our in boxes, but that actually isn't the problem at all. The problem is, something needs to be done to prevent our front doors from being buried in piles of new messages. We might be able to limit who can send us messages, to prevent this from happening, but that's complicated by our desire not to miss out. Really, the complete solution is being able to process our in boxes effectively. We need to pick up the mail, every day, and bring it inside, and start the process of Integrating it into our Data Warehouses. Everyone uses the same words to describe the beginning of this process: we call it sorting the mail.
It's distinctly possible that I am not enjoying the benefits of having my mail all delivered to one in box and being able to immediately begin the process of sorting it, in a highly controlled way, because of my lack of insight into available technology. I know my comprehension of existing technology - my Yahoo mail, my Google account, my Facebook - is extremely superficial. And I benefit from continuing to work with these interfaces, gradually acquiring a little more facility for them. But it could also be said that, if, even with my very limited facility for these things, I am not able to access fundamental processes, it suggests that there is still opportunity in these aspects of the state of the Web, opportunity for development work. I cannot be the only person struggling this way.
So what's the way for us to move forward, Liz? Comments are really beautiful, really intuitive from here, but so totally public. Perhaps we could discretely, carefully, use them to work out some better protocols. I suspect Google+ might be a valuable resource. There's also Facebook. The goal, at any rate, would be to develop a more controlled space for collaboration on questions like these that I feel I am raising a snowstorm of. The goal would be to collaboratively assemble collections of documents - the minutes of on line meetings - and then to disseminate some of those collections through selected channels onto the Web. The goal is to become fellows at MIT Media Lab, and other such places, all or largely through teleportation, that is, through media. The goal is to do this at our leisure, however we please. I have a lot of time and energy for this kind of work. I will continue to blog away, now that I feel I've made a start. What do you think of all this?
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
The first page of the book is a long, long list of titles from the same publisher. I've just created a blog where I'm going to link to all those titles, or that's the plan. It's just a way to explore all the titles, although it's also a kind of store ...
"Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, an imprint of Elsevier, www.mkp.com"
"Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, an imprint of Elsevier, www.mkp.com"
Data Warehouse
I knew, even before anyone said anything, I was going to see you, Liz and Hannes, and I felt such joy, knowing that, and then, of course, there you were. And I knew I was going to see you more than once, and enjoy a lot of your wonderful, wonderful warmth and friendship, while I was there in New Hampshire. In fact, I was terrified, but I also knew this visit home was going to be an epic adventure, and oh how it was. My family is indescribably weird, but also perfectly amazing. I saw so much. So very much.
Arriving home, I was consumed with impatience to get on line, and make something of all that I saw - which I also worked to document, careful to keep that document somewhat spare and therefore, hopefully, to the point - to make of it, say, a document. But when I did start up the laptop, I had no idea what to do. I couldn't really do anything. I just had to think.
I needed a fluid way to transmit all these thoughts running through my mind, and all these images the experience had generated, and, of the various specific media, the obvious general medium being the Web, blogger remains, for me, the most fluid. It's definitely limited, especially because I understand it at such a superficial level, but its elegance gives it, for me, an effortless depth that's subtle but gives me the sensation of real possibilities.
Still, I needed to reactivate my account, something I hadn't done for a long time, because I was, for a long time, unsure how to use it, how to control it. Now that question was answered by circumstances, and I plunged in, once I got it set up, eagerly, and with a measure of confidence.
I knew, Liz, that you and I would have a chance to talk about computing, even though being determined that I would do that risked imposing, but then I have learned, through blundering efforts, a little about how to approach it, and then, too, I knew, and know, how open you are to it, to allowing it to be a topic of conversation. That shows, for one thing, how truly expert you are. You just live computing, and it's because, and also the reason why, you are such a true artist. It's wonderful. Plus, you're just such an open person. You and Hannes are rare experts in the art of living.
I even knew, Liz, you would choose some very advanced book on computing for me, something I would never find on my own, and give it to me, but when, as I knew you would, you did that, the book you chose for me exceeded all my expectations. The flight home gave me a chance to read the first two or three chapters, and I just felt transported. It was so aligned with being immersed that way in these wonderful machines, the air transport system, to which, in fact, the authors were insistently making reference. And I was thrilled, because the data warehouse, their descriptions of it, so perfectly describes what I'm working on. That's a huge conceit, to think that I'm operating on that level, but I do feel I am, in a way.
The book, operating as it does on such a high level, as you said, and also your comments, about not being able to do it on my own, which I eventually interpreted as meaning the same thing, about working at a higher level, in a programmatic sense, gave me, in my thinking, the idea of approaching it all at a greater level of abstraction. I feel it has proved effective. I'm aching for you to read the posts here, from yesterday - Wednesday, my first day back home - and this morning. I so hope you will agree that those posts do describe data warehousing. I was truly close to even giving it that name, without having heard the term, and this is for years. I'm fascinated by the idea of warehouses, like the shelves in an Amazon distribution center, and like so many other ethereal facilities, and I thought a lot about my goals as including an exploration of modeling physical warehouses in virtual reality. Still, I had not quite put the two things together into Data Warehousing. But then again, I feel I am onto something in the idea that physical warehousing and data warehousing are not, in effect, two separate disciplines. I feel, in effect, that that idea, the idea that that perspective may prove fruitful, that it is ultimately fundamental, is my own invention, though I won't be surprised if others actually are making the same connection - outside of my knowledge of goings on. After all, here is a whole world, the world of Corporate IT, which, until these last few days, only peripherally entered my awareness, and now I'm suddenly immersed in it, in a way, because these authors so embody that. (The German quality of this writing amuses me no end. I have strayed into not just any IT department, but a German one. I truly am a long admirer of the German engineering process. It's quite crazed, but, in an interesting way, esoteric, and produces marvelous results.)
I was, you see, confronted with the problem of how to send you an e-mail. Oh how wonderful. It simply would not do to put all the tumult of thoughts and recollections I wanted to disperse to you and others in an e-mail. Nor were my custom pages, never mind all their dynamism, up to the task. The stars aligned dramatically around Blogger. This is where I can offer you my material, and also share it, including these documentary notes about my work, with these other people who are so important in my life, Mom and Dad, who don't get to see much of this, and Martha, similarly, where she can take it or leave it, because I'm not entirely certain how she will, except that she is endlessly patient with me, and then my friends, and also people I respect out there, who I hope I may interest some day. And there's no pressure, in Blogger, because the posts will accrue, there's that hope. But I so fervently hope you will take a look at this material, and give me some more of your perspective about it all.
Arriving home, I was consumed with impatience to get on line, and make something of all that I saw - which I also worked to document, careful to keep that document somewhat spare and therefore, hopefully, to the point - to make of it, say, a document. But when I did start up the laptop, I had no idea what to do. I couldn't really do anything. I just had to think.
I needed a fluid way to transmit all these thoughts running through my mind, and all these images the experience had generated, and, of the various specific media, the obvious general medium being the Web, blogger remains, for me, the most fluid. It's definitely limited, especially because I understand it at such a superficial level, but its elegance gives it, for me, an effortless depth that's subtle but gives me the sensation of real possibilities.
Still, I needed to reactivate my account, something I hadn't done for a long time, because I was, for a long time, unsure how to use it, how to control it. Now that question was answered by circumstances, and I plunged in, once I got it set up, eagerly, and with a measure of confidence.
I knew, Liz, that you and I would have a chance to talk about computing, even though being determined that I would do that risked imposing, but then I have learned, through blundering efforts, a little about how to approach it, and then, too, I knew, and know, how open you are to it, to allowing it to be a topic of conversation. That shows, for one thing, how truly expert you are. You just live computing, and it's because, and also the reason why, you are such a true artist. It's wonderful. Plus, you're just such an open person. You and Hannes are rare experts in the art of living.
I even knew, Liz, you would choose some very advanced book on computing for me, something I would never find on my own, and give it to me, but when, as I knew you would, you did that, the book you chose for me exceeded all my expectations. The flight home gave me a chance to read the first two or three chapters, and I just felt transported. It was so aligned with being immersed that way in these wonderful machines, the air transport system, to which, in fact, the authors were insistently making reference. And I was thrilled, because the data warehouse, their descriptions of it, so perfectly describes what I'm working on. That's a huge conceit, to think that I'm operating on that level, but I do feel I am, in a way.
The book, operating as it does on such a high level, as you said, and also your comments, about not being able to do it on my own, which I eventually interpreted as meaning the same thing, about working at a higher level, in a programmatic sense, gave me, in my thinking, the idea of approaching it all at a greater level of abstraction. I feel it has proved effective. I'm aching for you to read the posts here, from yesterday - Wednesday, my first day back home - and this morning. I so hope you will agree that those posts do describe data warehousing. I was truly close to even giving it that name, without having heard the term, and this is for years. I'm fascinated by the idea of warehouses, like the shelves in an Amazon distribution center, and like so many other ethereal facilities, and I thought a lot about my goals as including an exploration of modeling physical warehouses in virtual reality. Still, I had not quite put the two things together into Data Warehousing. But then again, I feel I am onto something in the idea that physical warehousing and data warehousing are not, in effect, two separate disciplines. I feel, in effect, that that idea, the idea that that perspective may prove fruitful, that it is ultimately fundamental, is my own invention, though I won't be surprised if others actually are making the same connection - outside of my knowledge of goings on. After all, here is a whole world, the world of Corporate IT, which, until these last few days, only peripherally entered my awareness, and now I'm suddenly immersed in it, in a way, because these authors so embody that. (The German quality of this writing amuses me no end. I have strayed into not just any IT department, but a German one. I truly am a long admirer of the German engineering process. It's quite crazed, but, in an interesting way, esoteric, and produces marvelous results.)
I was, you see, confronted with the problem of how to send you an e-mail. Oh how wonderful. It simply would not do to put all the tumult of thoughts and recollections I wanted to disperse to you and others in an e-mail. Nor were my custom pages, never mind all their dynamism, up to the task. The stars aligned dramatically around Blogger. This is where I can offer you my material, and also share it, including these documentary notes about my work, with these other people who are so important in my life, Mom and Dad, who don't get to see much of this, and Martha, similarly, where she can take it or leave it, because I'm not entirely certain how she will, except that she is endlessly patient with me, and then my friends, and also people I respect out there, who I hope I may interest some day. And there's no pressure, in Blogger, because the posts will accrue, there's that hope. But I so fervently hope you will take a look at this material, and give me some more of your perspective about it all.
MiUniverse
There's a simply vast amount of information, implicitly, in this elementary diagram, and I'm convinced you can access any specific part of it in seconds, just by motoring in, with your little space ship, towards the graphic. For instance, you can motor in towards the history of the universe, and towards the 1970 line, and before long you can find a specific day, and all the content you made note of on that day. This blog is about programming the digital shuttle and its built in universe, which is called My Universe.
abundance
In the material world, it is very difficult to create the kind of abundance I have just described. Our material world is stretched very very full. It is therefore under tension, and that makes it very difficult to shape. We are constantly pushing against its limits.
But there is another world which is always no distance away from everything in the material world, connected to it by magical wardrobes, if you are familiar with the tale of Narnia, the world of information. The world of language and imagery, and the new world of bits and bytes, contains empty space, pure possibility, at a new level of infinity. Here, on the Internet, we can actually create outrageous things like:
A very very long, very beautiful hall, like Versaille.
Picture this: you load your home page, and it's like starting up a little space ship. The windshield springs to life, and you can see, before you, space. The blackness of space, with stars in it, except it's actually whiteness, and, suspended in this whiteness are some words, in big giant letters: 100 billion years of time.
But there is another world which is always no distance away from everything in the material world, connected to it by magical wardrobes, if you are familiar with the tale of Narnia, the world of information. The world of language and imagery, and the new world of bits and bytes, contains empty space, pure possibility, at a new level of infinity. Here, on the Internet, we can actually create outrageous things like:
A very very long, very beautiful hall, like Versaille.
Picture this: you load your home page, and it's like starting up a little space ship. The windshield springs to life, and you can see, before you, space. The blackness of space, with stars in it, except it's actually whiteness, and, suspended in this whiteness are some words, in big giant letters: 100 billion years of time.
E mail
Just thinking about e-mail. I say that because, well, distilling the content of that vision, of a space, populated with luminescent orbs, representing the future, and the possibilities the future offers me, which could be called my future - not what will happen, but what I can imagine, happening - into posts, the hyperspace, web 2.0 phenomenon - is definitely hard.
Just thinking about e-mail. And an extension of e-mail, comments on blogs, a problem I'm very actively aware of as I now launch into this new blog. I want to receive comments, but, in another, more temporal sense, I don't, because managing them is, well, beyond me. And if I don't manage them well, they become a problem. They could be a boon, but, from my present vantage, they'll be a problem. I'm searching for solutions. My mind has already, over a period of years, incessantly generated imaginary solutions. I can point to the orbs that focus on that set of problems. One is labeled e-mail, and it can flash other names - messaging or - i find i need to search for it - say, networking. Another is a little more difficult to name. I'm pretty sure there are people who do manage messaging effectively. Maybe I'm equivocating, there, because I know there are such people, and I'm reluctant to admit that my struggles with e-mail and comments are a result of my lack of wit, and initiative, and not attributable to limitations of available technology. So maybe I'll call that orb, that task, because that's what I first called the orbs, call it "managing e-mail effectively with existing technology.
Comments and e-mail are the same thing, right? They're little messages. I'm tackling the orb labeled advancing messaging technology, referred to by some similar name just now, here, first. It's the one that will easily be labeled wishful thinking, and tackling it first, or at all, could be labeled "impracticality," labeling me "impractical". I could be labeled "dismiss" for tackling it, or what I say about it could be labeled dismiss, it could be dismissed, as being madness. But I'm going ahead.
Imagine a large bin full of messages, that has just been delivered to me. I need to do something with it. I think it would be a good idea to put it on a table.
Let's rapidly expand this image. Maybe I'm trying to describe the process and experience of e-mail, and more generally of being on line, as an assortment of gestures. First, I want to know I'm getting all my messages. If, by design, the system places all my messages in a big bin by my front door, I'll know. All I have to do is go to my front door - a very easy place to find - and check the bin for messages. But it's very important that I immediately do something with the latest batch of messages. That's where the table comes in. It should be a large table, and I'll immediately start to lay the messages out across the table. Maybe I'll create some piles. The biggest one might be junk. I don't want to throw it away, at all, I just want to put it in an unobtrusive location, but one I can easily find again. And, I forgot something. Call me peculiar, but I'm really interested in what my messages looked like, piled in the bin, when I first got them. I want to create a record of that. Although, here's a difference between physical mail and on line messaging: in physical mail, unopened messages are rich with visual information. In e-mail, there is no provision for this. Yes, the about line is displayed, and looking at your in box is like watching some kind of festival, a parade, but there's a level of information, of informativeness, about its contents, that the day's physical mail provides, which the e-mail in box, or comment moderation system, does not provide.
Now, the problem of correcting that can be approached from one of two directions. E mail is linear, and has two nodes, the node where a message enters the system, and the node where it exits the system. Call them sender and recipient. As an aside, inspect either of these nodes more closely, and you find they are both complex functions. But for now the question is, how can we attach more meaning to the subject line of an e-mail? And in a way the obvious answer is to do it at the sender end. But, I wonder. Sometimes the obvious solution is not the ideal one. Attaching, or, as it may be called, developing, extra meaningfulness can be done at the receiver end, and that provides an opportunity for customization of the message appearance on behalf of the primer user of received mail. But let us not ever forget history. It is very important that what the sender sent, in all its specificity, be preserved. I do like to experiment with archiving mail, and if I was making a record of messages received, I would create an image for each message, with several image in it. One image, I just remembered, shows what the bin the message came in looked like. Another shows what the message looked like as it was unpacked from the bin. It lay among other messages, and the messages that had already been unpacked from the bin are arrayed across the table, in this image, so you can see the message was only visible after half the bin had been unpacked, unpacked, that is, from the bin, an put in several piles on the table. And then we can see the motion we used to put this message in one of the pile, or maybe on its own spot on the table.
So, if we are unpacking an e-mail in box, each message, as it arrived, to our awareness, looked like a long string of textual notation, on a single line. And all the messages together were stacked in a long block of these lines. But here's another question that isn't being answered in our receiver interface to e-mail: how many messages were in the bin, when we checked it at 9 in the morning that day in November of this year? In fact, how many are in the bin right now? It's difficult to say. There's something we need to define, which is "what's in the bin." What's in the bin is new messages, ones that we haven't ever looked at before. And now we're going to unpack those messages, and begin the process of integrating them into Our Data Archive. But first we are going to make a note of what the bin looked like, as we began this session of message management.
Let's ramp up to another level of metaphorical abstraction. Actually, first let's do some more abstracted theory. Then we'll do the metaphor. Virtual reality, the world of information, information technology, the Internet, are all a form of abundance. This is not an abstraction, it is very real, but it is an abstraction, in that it is still being developed, and is even nascent. What is Reality? What is The Real? What does it mean that something is real, is a reality? There is a kind of deep abstraction out of which things can emerge. In the digital universe, this is an endless matrix of neutral nodes. They can be either positive or negative, and they can change from one state to another. Each node's location in the matrix is absolutely fixed. Some nodes may be neither positive nor negative: of indeterminate state. Maybe.
In the material world, it's a matrix of something like particles of light, and state is a function of orbits, or relative motion. But the effect is the same: matrix neutrality, out of which emerges That Which is Real: That Which Exists: Things. Now, things, as a class, have their own peculiar characteristics. These are the characteristics of the class "things." First among them is: surfaces. Things exist because they have surfaces. Edges. Defined limits. Inside this surface is the thing, and outside of the surface is the thing's environment. Surfaces have this characteristic, of defining what is within them and what is outside of them. A surface is really a volume. All surfaces are closed loops - in n dimensions - or else, infinite. Also, it is true of all things, all volumes, that they are made of some number of smaller things. Usually this is quite evident, though there are cases in which it is less easy to see. In those latter cases, if we study the thing closely enough, we will find that it is made of component things, but we need to study them very closely to distinguish the component things. When we perceive things of this sort, what we perceive is an empty thing. Emptiness is full of potential, but perceptually, temporally, it is empty.
Then there are things whose components we can easily perceive. These could be called full, or actively real. But I'm in a bit of a muddle. What defines a thing is that it is defined. It might be an empty thing, but, if we can clearly see - perceive - that it is a thing, it is a thing. Whether it is full or empty defines, to some degree or another, how we can interact with the thing. The thing itself is defined by some kind of variation in the density of the underlying matrix. And what is important about empty and full, about the fact that things are made of things, that things are collections of things, is that collections of things are things. For example, our unpacked mail is now a number of things, scattered across the table. We are accustomed, for some reason, to thinking that the things spread out across the table is an incidental thing, and what it really is is each thing, and that its meaning is found when we inspect one or another of those things more closely, but if we back up, and look at the table from further away, the whole complex - the table, the bin, the messages on the table - becomes a thing. And it has immense meaning as a thing in itself. It's really something very evocative, this composite of a table, and a basket, and some piles of letters.
This is abundance, to have a table, and be able to spread out the day's messages across it. We are beginning to define abundance, here, so that we can reproduce it in an abundant new world of fundamental matrix, the digital world. It is abundance to have a room, with a table in it, soft and beautiful floors of wood or marble, beautiful walls aglow with almost edible texture, tall windows admitting light and views, muted sounds from the world around us. In another room, we have many shelves, and, for now, we will just say they are for storing our messages.
Just thinking about e-mail. And an extension of e-mail, comments on blogs, a problem I'm very actively aware of as I now launch into this new blog. I want to receive comments, but, in another, more temporal sense, I don't, because managing them is, well, beyond me. And if I don't manage them well, they become a problem. They could be a boon, but, from my present vantage, they'll be a problem. I'm searching for solutions. My mind has already, over a period of years, incessantly generated imaginary solutions. I can point to the orbs that focus on that set of problems. One is labeled e-mail, and it can flash other names - messaging or - i find i need to search for it - say, networking. Another is a little more difficult to name. I'm pretty sure there are people who do manage messaging effectively. Maybe I'm equivocating, there, because I know there are such people, and I'm reluctant to admit that my struggles with e-mail and comments are a result of my lack of wit, and initiative, and not attributable to limitations of available technology. So maybe I'll call that orb, that task, because that's what I first called the orbs, call it "managing e-mail effectively with existing technology.
Comments and e-mail are the same thing, right? They're little messages. I'm tackling the orb labeled advancing messaging technology, referred to by some similar name just now, here, first. It's the one that will easily be labeled wishful thinking, and tackling it first, or at all, could be labeled "impracticality," labeling me "impractical". I could be labeled "dismiss" for tackling it, or what I say about it could be labeled dismiss, it could be dismissed, as being madness. But I'm going ahead.
Imagine a large bin full of messages, that has just been delivered to me. I need to do something with it. I think it would be a good idea to put it on a table.
Let's rapidly expand this image. Maybe I'm trying to describe the process and experience of e-mail, and more generally of being on line, as an assortment of gestures. First, I want to know I'm getting all my messages. If, by design, the system places all my messages in a big bin by my front door, I'll know. All I have to do is go to my front door - a very easy place to find - and check the bin for messages. But it's very important that I immediately do something with the latest batch of messages. That's where the table comes in. It should be a large table, and I'll immediately start to lay the messages out across the table. Maybe I'll create some piles. The biggest one might be junk. I don't want to throw it away, at all, I just want to put it in an unobtrusive location, but one I can easily find again. And, I forgot something. Call me peculiar, but I'm really interested in what my messages looked like, piled in the bin, when I first got them. I want to create a record of that. Although, here's a difference between physical mail and on line messaging: in physical mail, unopened messages are rich with visual information. In e-mail, there is no provision for this. Yes, the about line is displayed, and looking at your in box is like watching some kind of festival, a parade, but there's a level of information, of informativeness, about its contents, that the day's physical mail provides, which the e-mail in box, or comment moderation system, does not provide.
Now, the problem of correcting that can be approached from one of two directions. E mail is linear, and has two nodes, the node where a message enters the system, and the node where it exits the system. Call them sender and recipient. As an aside, inspect either of these nodes more closely, and you find they are both complex functions. But for now the question is, how can we attach more meaning to the subject line of an e-mail? And in a way the obvious answer is to do it at the sender end. But, I wonder. Sometimes the obvious solution is not the ideal one. Attaching, or, as it may be called, developing, extra meaningfulness can be done at the receiver end, and that provides an opportunity for customization of the message appearance on behalf of the primer user of received mail. But let us not ever forget history. It is very important that what the sender sent, in all its specificity, be preserved. I do like to experiment with archiving mail, and if I was making a record of messages received, I would create an image for each message, with several image in it. One image, I just remembered, shows what the bin the message came in looked like. Another shows what the message looked like as it was unpacked from the bin. It lay among other messages, and the messages that had already been unpacked from the bin are arrayed across the table, in this image, so you can see the message was only visible after half the bin had been unpacked, unpacked, that is, from the bin, an put in several piles on the table. And then we can see the motion we used to put this message in one of the pile, or maybe on its own spot on the table.
So, if we are unpacking an e-mail in box, each message, as it arrived, to our awareness, looked like a long string of textual notation, on a single line. And all the messages together were stacked in a long block of these lines. But here's another question that isn't being answered in our receiver interface to e-mail: how many messages were in the bin, when we checked it at 9 in the morning that day in November of this year? In fact, how many are in the bin right now? It's difficult to say. There's something we need to define, which is "what's in the bin." What's in the bin is new messages, ones that we haven't ever looked at before. And now we're going to unpack those messages, and begin the process of integrating them into Our Data Archive. But first we are going to make a note of what the bin looked like, as we began this session of message management.
Let's ramp up to another level of metaphorical abstraction. Actually, first let's do some more abstracted theory. Then we'll do the metaphor. Virtual reality, the world of information, information technology, the Internet, are all a form of abundance. This is not an abstraction, it is very real, but it is an abstraction, in that it is still being developed, and is even nascent. What is Reality? What is The Real? What does it mean that something is real, is a reality? There is a kind of deep abstraction out of which things can emerge. In the digital universe, this is an endless matrix of neutral nodes. They can be either positive or negative, and they can change from one state to another. Each node's location in the matrix is absolutely fixed. Some nodes may be neither positive nor negative: of indeterminate state. Maybe.
In the material world, it's a matrix of something like particles of light, and state is a function of orbits, or relative motion. But the effect is the same: matrix neutrality, out of which emerges That Which is Real: That Which Exists: Things. Now, things, as a class, have their own peculiar characteristics. These are the characteristics of the class "things." First among them is: surfaces. Things exist because they have surfaces. Edges. Defined limits. Inside this surface is the thing, and outside of the surface is the thing's environment. Surfaces have this characteristic, of defining what is within them and what is outside of them. A surface is really a volume. All surfaces are closed loops - in n dimensions - or else, infinite. Also, it is true of all things, all volumes, that they are made of some number of smaller things. Usually this is quite evident, though there are cases in which it is less easy to see. In those latter cases, if we study the thing closely enough, we will find that it is made of component things, but we need to study them very closely to distinguish the component things. When we perceive things of this sort, what we perceive is an empty thing. Emptiness is full of potential, but perceptually, temporally, it is empty.
Then there are things whose components we can easily perceive. These could be called full, or actively real. But I'm in a bit of a muddle. What defines a thing is that it is defined. It might be an empty thing, but, if we can clearly see - perceive - that it is a thing, it is a thing. Whether it is full or empty defines, to some degree or another, how we can interact with the thing. The thing itself is defined by some kind of variation in the density of the underlying matrix. And what is important about empty and full, about the fact that things are made of things, that things are collections of things, is that collections of things are things. For example, our unpacked mail is now a number of things, scattered across the table. We are accustomed, for some reason, to thinking that the things spread out across the table is an incidental thing, and what it really is is each thing, and that its meaning is found when we inspect one or another of those things more closely, but if we back up, and look at the table from further away, the whole complex - the table, the bin, the messages on the table - becomes a thing. And it has immense meaning as a thing in itself. It's really something very evocative, this composite of a table, and a basket, and some piles of letters.
This is abundance, to have a table, and be able to spread out the day's messages across it. We are beginning to define abundance, here, so that we can reproduce it in an abundant new world of fundamental matrix, the digital world. It is abundance to have a room, with a table in it, soft and beautiful floors of wood or marble, beautiful walls aglow with almost edible texture, tall windows admitting light and views, muted sounds from the world around us. In another room, we have many shelves, and, for now, we will just say they are for storing our messages.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
tech
An array of tasks in the space of my imagination, ahead of me. Luminescent orbs. Exhaustion. Ill. Wondering if I'll even live, or, at any rate, why. Deep in a hole, trapped, with other hapless angels. Their commitment, their welcome. If I am to get through, it can only be by tackling these improbable callings.
The feeling I got is, we did a short hop from east to west, along the more northerly circle, then south and west, climbing for two hours and a half, over the wall, to the greater circle. We left it all in the hands of the navigators.
Now I'm watching mangas in a window next to another window, reading and writing. It's all about experience, about moving our perception across the variations of an infinitely confident world, with the help of heroes: the pilots and stewards, the artists and writers and animators, the web developers and cloud operators. I'm a little flicker on the edge of it all, the elite behemoth network of technologists.
The feeling I got is, we did a short hop from east to west, along the more northerly circle, then south and west, climbing for two hours and a half, over the wall, to the greater circle. We left it all in the hands of the navigators.
Now I'm watching mangas in a window next to another window, reading and writing. It's all about experience, about moving our perception across the variations of an infinitely confident world, with the help of heroes: the pilots and stewards, the artists and writers and animators, the web developers and cloud operators. I'm a little flicker on the edge of it all, the elite behemoth network of technologists.
community
So many of my friends are artists. It's beyond amazing. One of them picked out the photo of my dad's museum, in a second, from a batch of pictures. She noted it from Yellowstone, while I was posting from New Hampshire, on facebook, just to update my friends before leaving, Tuesday morning. She had just posted a photo of a bison.
no recovery
Back from yet another incredible adventure, and who would think it, but I'm not surprised, I wasn't surprised, not in the least. I found it wonderfully irksome, having to visit, to fly, to keep my mouth shut, not that I entirely did, but I also recognized it as a fantastic privilege, being invited, right into the sanctuary. The radiation, of ten hours in space, ferried along by United, packed into a series of luxurious tin cans with a hundred thousand other budget travelers, all their parts humming, the wings dipping in around the clouds and rain, in the night, baked all this experience into me, forever.
I was proud of how I just went back into my routine, so that Peapod was reassured, and the other cats gathered around me, and I was aching, and I filled the bath ceremonially, desperate for peace, lighting incense, though it was just futility. The nutty woman beside me had said, "I know I am not going to sleep tonight," and, "it's so good to be home," but I was determined, could think of nothing but getting to work in the morning, whatever that might bring, and eventually did sleep.
I was proud of how I just went back into my routine, so that Peapod was reassured, and the other cats gathered around me, and I was aching, and I filled the bath ceremonially, desperate for peace, lighting incense, though it was just futility. The nutty woman beside me had said, "I know I am not going to sleep tonight," and, "it's so good to be home," but I was determined, could think of nothing but getting to work in the morning, whatever that might bring, and eventually did sleep.
poring
I poured the water in, and it took a long time to fill, because it's one of those magic vessels, that's bigger on the inside than it is without, and eventually the water came up and formed a little bubbling pool, just as it ought, with mists over it, and lilies rooted in its softness. I poured the first cup. The spring gushed forth without any hesitation. Goodness.
the tea pot
The tea pot made it home safely under exquisitely dangerous circumstances. I took a chance on making myself sick, eating a Ceasar salad with lobster at Sam Adams Grill, looking down over the baggage claim at Manchester airport, another jetsetter, and then, missing a cue, I was among the last to board the little plane, and the pilot, behind me, said to another pilot, who wanted to take the jump seat, "we're so full. we're so heavy." Called the angels, and we soared up quietly. The nice lady next to me, who was sad I chose silence, got up from her window seat and clinked the lid, to her horror, but no harm was done. (The pot was wrapped in its plastic wrappings and in my shoulder bag under the seat in front of me, as much as possible positioned for safety.)
It's built like a bulldozer, this pot, a very graceful, exquisitely perfected one. Readers, as the artist pointed out, because he's the most humble person ever, it's heavy, and, in many pots, heavy is a flaw, but not in this one. Inside, outside, from every angle, it expresses itself, expresses its concern for humanity. Its weight is just pure strength, without a hint of absent-mindedness. The whole design presents us with a whirlwind of flourishes, each executed with utter authority, outrageous daring, given to us, and always with a shy apology. I noticed the profound iridescence, hidden inside, right at the bottom, so that when you do see it, it's a shock, amazement, joy, and the little flowers pressed into the inside of the lid, and that's when Hannes said I should take it. And so, here it is, and suddenly I want to have tea, very much, which will be so good for me.
It's built like a bulldozer, this pot, a very graceful, exquisitely perfected one. Readers, as the artist pointed out, because he's the most humble person ever, it's heavy, and, in many pots, heavy is a flaw, but not in this one. Inside, outside, from every angle, it expresses itself, expresses its concern for humanity. Its weight is just pure strength, without a hint of absent-mindedness. The whole design presents us with a whirlwind of flourishes, each executed with utter authority, outrageous daring, given to us, and always with a shy apology. I noticed the profound iridescence, hidden inside, right at the bottom, so that when you do see it, it's a shock, amazement, joy, and the little flowers pressed into the inside of the lid, and that's when Hannes said I should take it. And so, here it is, and suddenly I want to have tea, very much, which will be so good for me.
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