eclectic-pencil at DOT blogspot DOT com

legato, then rubato

2012-01-23T15:32:00.000-08:00

re: Jan Zwicky

Two terms for music and metaphor: legato and rubato

see etymologies, both curious.

Graves and Valéry: the German economy in two pre-war's

2012-01-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That (pre-war economic jingoisms )and Paul Valéry in Regards sur le monde actuel on his visit with Henley, London, 1896, from 48 years later (The Review) : statistical mechanics/thermodynamics metaphor; hierarchy; Prussian ways and mores, economic warfare.

Economic warfare and Gus W. Weiss on the Farewell dossier ( l'affaire Farewell fiction) ; Fidel Castro on economic war (2007) ; the curious fate of Vetrov (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Mitterand in Ottawa)

The later London of Ford Maddox Ford

Heinrich Böll's Irish Journal and the Irish view of Germany and Germans

Ireland software bubble/real estate bubble in Cork ; Nabakov on time and the bubble (the philosophers, Pnin)

economics and real estate waves ; 1979/1980 collapsing sand heaps and catastrophe theory

Durs Grünbein poem : divorce hotel

Le Devoir philo · Nabokov note Card 68

Derek Walcott Venus

2012-01-15T08:52:00.000-08:00

This will be small-minded.

First, an aside.

I could not help but notice a strange parallel between Robert Graves in the trenches (1915?), the bombardments, (Goodbye to All That) and Elizabeth Smart's (1938?) kangaroos in a garden (on the subject of time).

Now, the unwelcome gristle.

Walcott "North and South" (1981) has Venus rising in an opening stanza that also carries both a full moon and a sunset.

Through the weeks, you might speak of Venus rising in the west (when first seen at sunset.) But the rising Venus of morning is the only rising Venus, whether, as he reminds us, she survives translation or not.

Poetic license ? Not with the planets.

More a question of knowing eastern and western, whether to your north or to your south.

Geddes has a photon flashing innumerable times among crystals in the snow. Can he escape knowing that a photon takes millions of years to translate from the solar core to the shell of the sun ? Was this his parallel? What is the poet to know of the local inferno ? The flipping magnetic poles ?

Robert Musil - William James

2012-01-13T07:07:00.000-08:00

re: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften

Might Robert Musil have had some idea of William James' intense relationship with his sister, Alice James?
Wm James d. 1910 ; marriage 1878

There should be a Musil note on pale-fire-cards.blogspot.com

Jan Zwicky, Wittgenstein and Form

2012-01-10T08:10:00.000-08:00

I was thinking that had PART ONE had the single line page headers and PART TWO had double-line page headers ... too obvious? A one unit and then a two unit length line as page headers? Golden ratio lengths? Imagine the unexplained subtle elegance of the book without the PART pages themselves being required as partitions.

§
What about a poem which opens with a left indent to

I wonder if it is the case that

[and then stanza(s),
finally ending with
a right indented ]

I think that it is so.

Imagine starting to see this as a recurring form in poetry magazines, anthologies.

A paradigm case of the ugly: a single quote from misguided Ernest Gellner Words and Things, 1st Ed. ?

Dal segno al coda would require us to use U+1D10B as the non-printing HTML UNICODE escape sequence &#1D10B;

The printer or the author was selective in the LW segno chosen?

It was not the segno

Repeat:

And then to the coda.

Zwicky, Wittgenstein, music

2012-01-10T07:14:00.000-08:00

IN 1992, would it not truly have been "fresh air" if, instead of the praise of Ronald de Sousa, the U of T Press had broken with good form and marketing and placed a dissenting view of the book on the back cover of the paperbound edition of Kan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy? On a tasteless dust jacket for an oh, so expensive hardcover destined for the shelves of libraries and so, discarded? And then from the stacks to storage?

Consider that not a single page is colour - in a book of so many reproductions. Not even the addition of colour to the bass clef. Or the alto clef of the Mozart.

The music extends only across Wittgenstein's taste. The melody of Ben Jonson's 1616 "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" cannot find a place in the narrow band from Bach to Bruckner's 7.

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner. Where is that Haydn piano sonata? The Weber clarinet?

Among post-Wittgensteinians, a question of good form? „Listen - can you hear it?“

Hopefully another edition would include links to fine interpretations of each selection included.

But is it assumed the reader can read music? Yet we could not have the Kant with the original German? This was Toronto Studies in Philosophy. They had published Fackenheim. Who are these readers of Wittgenstein who cannot read him in German?

It is as sad as those books of Haiku in translation with largely blank pages and not so much as a romanji version of the original. No special typesetting required (beyond a few diacritics.)

What explains the absence of Suzanne Langer? A failing of her editor? A misplaced set of note cards? A mis-labeled box of index cards? A single set of large file cards used on a plane while travelling back from an APA conference - and then misplaced?

Should this post be re-worked with an eye to form, to ensure balance, to allow thought to etch the mean plate of experience?

Wittgenstein — said to have interrupted a performance of a Schubert quartet ... a question of style. A shoebox of notes, perhaps not quite in order.

— § —

note: the 2003 Gaspereau Press volume has the author's name in a subtle red on the title page.
v. Rorschach colour shock; red-inked seals, kanji, on Japanese prints, 朱印

Zwicky, Woolf and metaphor

2012-01-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

It is curious to find so much Wittgenstein in Wisdom and Metaphor - but no Woolf.

Whatever you may think of Virginia Woolf choosing to name Miss Briscoe 'Lily', we do have (following the heavy-handed "virginal" for "Miss Brisk")

"as the night wore on, white lights parted the curtains"

which, in the 'white' for the 'dark', we have a metaphor perhaps stronger than the Haas bowl of dead bees.

Consider Lady Ki No Washika, "No". The Graeme Wilson translation is as follows:

It’s not because I’m now too old,
More wizened than you guess..

If I say no, it’s only
Because I fear that yes
Would bring me nothing, in the end,
But a fiercer loneliness.

as a counter-part to the Haas.

Woolf: "a serious stare from eyes of unparalleled depth"

What was the Woolf's view of that other painting, the one by Courbet?

わしか

Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor

2012-01-08T09:26:00.000-08:00

Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor does not cite Gaston Bachelard's closing observations on metaphor in his Psychoanalysis of Fire. For that matter, Bachelard is not mentioned in her Lyric Philosophy.

I hold no brief for Bachelard, but his Poetics of Space is cited by way of an epigram to one of her books of poetry ...

I think of these two large books as bound note cards otherwise well-suited to electronic editions in an annotation-friendly ebook viewer or reader.

Wikipedia's shiny-clean Austria

2012-01-06T16:11:00.000-08:00

I have added a discussion note to the de.wikipedia.org page for Bregenz, Austria.

Since 1559, Bregrenz had been excused from housing Jews by an Imperial ruling. A wealthy Pole built a chateau, but no Jews on the Bodensee?

But also no articles in de.wikipedia.org on any of the Nazis who administered the area known as Vorarlberg - of which Bregenz is Landeshauptstadt. Link 1. Link 2. No Franz Hofer. No article on a Hans Dietrich, Kreisleiter.

Kreisleiter Hans Dietrich did not merit the shortest page of documentation. Are there no historical documents. Is this actually Bulgaria and not Österreich?

But there are documents. And there was a lack of effort to pursue Nazi collaborators in Austria even in the course of official denazification.

The URL of my discussion comment will fail if it is deleted by an editor, so I have kept a copy.

This is a regular problem in wikipedia where articles on cities are cherry-picked by city staffers and "patriots for tourism".

The big problem is the content from wikipedia articles is pulled into "information" pages by various web sites. Think of it is "revisionism-by-neglect".

The article distinguishes between "sons and daughters" of the city and "Distinguished citizens" but does link to one Nazi and only one: Irmfried Eberl. Yet the English Wikipedia article on Austrian denazification indicates that some 40% of KZ staff were Austrian as was the Nazi leader and some his worst henchmen. Yet only one from Bregenz - too notorious to ignore. But then by 1928 he was in Innsbruck, so you see, Bregenz is not implicated. Almost squeaky-clean. Could almost be Swiss.

One Hofer is mentioned; but not this one. See: die Gauleitung von Tirol-Vorarlberg

There were no Roma or Sinti in Bregenz. But it was the region's capital ...

The answer: from 1938 to 1945 Austria ceased to exist and in that Anschluss period, no history was made. Nothing happended. At least not in Bregenz.

see: Aktion T4.

"Arisierung","Entjudung" der Wirtschaft im Gau Tirol-Vorarlberg happened in the district, but the capital city of Vorarlberg was not involved. The last Jew left they don't remember when and the one Nazi got drawn into all that way off over there in Innsbruck. Nothing but us Ehrenbürger here - and the Söhne und Töchter der Stadt and among those few who were
Personen, die in Bregenz gelebt oder gewirkt haben - any Nazis either weren't there or went back to Germany after the war (and as we said, they weren't really there - they may have been in the district ...)

siehe: Rolf Steininger, Sabine Pitscheider (Hg.), "Tirol und Vorarlberg in der NS-Zeit", StudienVerlag 2002, S 319-340

wordlist Object Icon

2012-01-03T08:06:00.000-08:00

The sourceforge.net wordlist page should be useful for anyone working in English on a lexicon with a text-oriented language such as Rebol 2, Red, Icon, UNICON, Converge or Object Icon.

I will be using a wordlist with Curl (the Curl web content language has a wrapper for zlib and has async loading so that a wordlist divided across zip files can be loaded astutely.)

Beguile Betray mandalot

2012-01-02T08:31:00.000-08:00

Robert Graves' "To Beguile And Betray" has the line

of jealous hankering for the mandalot

which must be commented upon somewhere ...

see: mandala, mandalotus weevil

Jan Zwicky Bachelard

2011-12-31T14:09:00.000-08:00

Jan Zwicky's Gaston Bachelard epigram* is from his Poetics of Space (La Poétique de l'espace 1957 ISBN 2-13-054444-4.)

The original, page 30, is this: [ scribd ]

Chacun devrait alors dire ses routes, ses carrefours, ses bancs. Chacun devrait dresser le cadastre de ses campagnes perdues.

Why 'then', "alors" ? Le chemin. Page 29:

Et quel bel objet dynamique qu'un sentier !

cp: his La formation de l'esprit scientifique: ... and the Pléiade volume by Jean Piaget, Logique et connaissance scientifique, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, 1967 with Hermann Weyl's Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science.

v. La flamme d'une chandelle

In our day,the Saskatchewan chemistry textbook opened with a qualitative task: describe a flame. Forty years later, work in catastrophes, chaos, attractors and fractals brings us to an account of the typical isolated flame, steady, flickering, steady.

See also: Bachelard preface to Jean Cavaillès Sur la logique et la théorie de la science
cf Georges Canguilhem,
La Connaissance de la vie
Idéologie et rationalité dans l'histoire des sciences de la vie: ...
Vie et mort de Jean Cavaillès
Études d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences
cf Michel Leiris' "Judith", J.H. Van den Berg

* Robinson's Crossing, 2004, Brick Books (Shibboleth: can you say CC? But as to that other inscription, what would Ivan Illich have made of her use of Canada Council funding for support of her books of poetry? Did Arne Naess avail himself of CC? Consistency, that anarchical hobgoblin. On the use of the internet to sustain poets in subsistence economies, see the earliest proposed use of M.I.T. Curl web pages as pay-per-page and the possible survival of the penny as the web fractional penny. millipenny ??)

The Bachelard in English as cited is:

Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows.

[ which continues with]
Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul ...

The uncredited translator was M. Jolas

Note Bachelard on Bergson M&M in Sec VIII on the Intro.

The epigram is followed in the text of Bachelard by a quotation from a poem of Jean Wahl

Art McKay's "Effulgent Image"

2011-12-29T08:09:00.000-08:00

Naomi Jackson Groves said of Art McKay's Effulgent Image that it

has the mesmeric magnificence of some far-off sun a billion years of age

Was it Comte who was certain we would never observe the surface of a star other than our sun?

From the CPU heatsinks problem, here is an idea for ensuring that the fuzzy star is at its best when viewed through a Newtonian telescope: a fan.

see: astronomical interferometer, interferometry, angular resolution, diffraction limit,Wm Herschel,aperture masking interferometry,speckle interferometry

Arthur Fortescue McKay's technique, quote:

[...] in 1997, Dr. David Howard described the painter’s technique as relatively simple. First, a layer of white latex paint was placed on masonite board. Then, using a scraper, McKay would create a rough geometric shape with a series of concentric lines or circles. Three dimensional texture was kept to a minimum [...]as any ridges of paint would be sanded or tapped down to maintain the two dimensionality of the geometric designs. The latex would be allowed to dry overnight before proceeding to the most important stage of paint application. (In many paintings a layer of another colour of enamel paint would be applied to create colour variation),” Howard notes. “The next day McKay would pour a layer of Northstar Stovepipe Enamel paint over the latex and then would scrape the surface again, very hard, from the centre outwards to the edge of the circle, square or rectangle being represented. The scouring of the surface reveals both the latex and residual enamel paint creating a materially flat image with extraordinary visual depth. (Howard, 2006)

Publishers Weekly PWxyz blog's most beautiful book of 2011

2011-12-29T07:15:00.000-08:00

The 2011 most beautiful book of the year from the PWxyz blog of Publishers Weekly is the Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire box set from Ginkgo Press.

http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/PWxyz/?p=7346

which set comes complete with faux long-hand note cards.

Mine is on order through my local bookseller, Westminster Books of Fredericton.

Note: a small ginkgo tree can be found growing in town on the east side of University Ave. not far from Charlotte Street near a weeping copper beech. Ginkgo are common in Memphis and were planted at one time near the entrance to the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Please find below an image of an Eocene fossil of Ginkgo biloba from MacAbee, B.C.

Note the cleft found in most Ginkgo leaves below:

[ images from Wikimedia Commons ]

Romeo Savoie

2011-12-28T12:47:00.000-08:00

I arrived at Ingrid Mueller'a Gallery in time to see the packing blanket about the Jean Rooney electric night over and along the Dublin Liffey.

For a while I sat filling note cards before Romeo Savoie's layered diptych, Fan IV. The the pair that form a companion diptych for me: two multi-media on paper, one with flowing black strands, almost a complex Kanji on a fond of rose and yellow with a grey-green, almost carrés, on a dull red, almost the pastel aurora of Fan IV, but there a palette knife left only edges of ochre — and next to it, the "action" of whites and white-grays, a red stippling on grey. Nearby, on a table, stood the small "untitled diptych" in a black frame two six-by-eight inch canvas panels, each dominated by white brush strikes, the inverse of Kanji, one over reds, one over a yellow stencilled beginning of an alphabet. The latter, a Kanji morphing from white to black through Möbius twining, twists from black to white.

The great Philip Iverson portrait of Elie Wiesel was not available in the gallery. I did not ask to see the carmine and emerald piece.

Fan IV may be dripping stove paint from what appears embossed gold but what is, on canvas, an overlaid piece, divided, occupied by arachnoid figures, mirror of a figure. (See: Mirrors of Gold.) The great blinded Zeiss Teleskop of the Sternwarte of Zürich has no gold mirror.

Fan IV may be dripping stove paint but a palette knife was at work, as was such a tool in Art McKay's Effulgent Image, also seen here.

Facebook blocks Blogger post from Blogspot and Google

2011-12-27T09:20:00.000-08:00

Facebook just refused to post a goo.gl short link to my previous post on Elizabeth Smart and Rilke.

Facebook rejected this Blogger address as SPAM whether posted as public or "friends".

Is this the beginning of an assault on blogspot.com by Facebook? An attack on Google?

Or a malicious "flag" raised by someone I stopped following recently?

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

2011-12-27T08:54:00.000-08:00

In a curious moment in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart echoes Rilke as
“ Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?”

The Rilke text has Schriee which gives cry out or scream — schriller Schrei would be shriek.

But here a curiosity: the Rilke echos schreibe or write which has curious twist in English where shrive, confess, is from the same verb but for the written assignment of a penance. And then there is the scrivener.

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen?

A closer reading might be:

For who, were I to cry out, would hear me from the ranks of the angels?

For who — as in So who — not For whom.

Do we cry out, if there is no one whose attention we might attract? Do we not then scream?

Did the author choose this variant with care? Her title is not "At" but rather "By" — attentive or arbitrary?

cf: Psalm 137 and its mistranslations.

kizuna as the "2011" kanji

2011-12-24T17:39:00.000-08:00

絆

きずな

Bond, tie

Compare: fetters ?
セツ or シツ ?

shackles = ashikase or 足枷

See: 愛 Ai suru. Note: indigo = Ai あい or 藍

Cf: amae 甘え as psychological dependence and reliance upon another or others: あまえ and the parent-child bond.

v: The Anatomy of Dependence by Takeo Doi, M.D.
v: The Japanese mind: understanding contemporary Japanese culture by Roger J. Davies, Osamu Ikeno

http://www.sociology.org/content/vol005.001/smith-nomi.html

To see the above, your browser must allow UNICODE utf-8 character encoding as a VIEW option.

Wiesel Versions

2011-12-24T08:08:00.000-08:00

There are two versions of Elie Wiesel's NIGHT: a Yiddish version (And the World kept quiet c. 1954) and the French La Nuit, 1958.

The liberation photo of Buchenwald creates a puzzle for the variant concerning the German girls and fiction.

Consider this: the witness, bearing witness under oath, is constrained. The American troops had a word in their speech which returned in every second sentence.

What events occurred in the Weimar, Thuringen area post-liberation - events which might be tied to the Yiddish original?

Was it not a fiction that the burghers of Wiemar were ignorant of the nature of the camp in the years 1937 to 1944 prior to the arrival of Wiesel?

It was a common-place of the eastern regions that the women and girls feared rape and murder at the hands of the invading Russian troops. Were they also starving in the Weimar region?

cf: facts and legend of Ilse Koch: what Wiesel heard of Ilse Koch after his arrival (her trial in Dachau was in 1947.) Did Wiesel know of the Weimar and Kassel Karl Otto Koch hearings for pre-1944 acts in Buchenwald by 1953?

Ondaatje, Debolt and ‘The Story’ in “Handwriting / poems”

2011-12-23T07:13:00.000-08:00

A few years ago Daisy Debolt told me that she would not be trying any lyrics from me as she was back working with Michael Ondaatje. So now, after her death, I went looking at what I had on my shelves and in stacks of paperbacks of recent work by Ondaatje.

I found myself reading ‘The Story’ from his “Handwriting”.

One problem of being a great writer is knowing when to rely on a good editor: this piece is surely jarring for anyone who has both close ties to philosophy of psychology and poetry and who has been present at the birth of children.

The poem begins with ‘a child’ but then falls into ‘Some are born screaming’.

I can attest that some are born furious, angry and, moments later, are loud. But I know the sound of screaming — the badly injured child, screaming. You forget neither. It is not what is heard at childbirth. Some ER nurses say they know the ‘ectopic’ scream of women at dire risk. Some are born as others hear the screams of a mother - or as others hear the scream of a father as efforts to resuscitate a mother cease. Some were carried by mothers who screamed and what was heard was nothing as compared to what was felt.

But matters are immediately worse: ‘some full of introspective wandering’.

I stumble, reading ‘wondering’ — from what we know of reading, I am not alone.

‘introspective’ is one of those words that has a casual meaning and a valued meaning and should be used with care — it is a foreign word at great distance from our ‘wander’. There is no need to read Husserl and Heidegger to know this.

Was he aware of just how flawed the piece is when he chose the title of the poem as prose? We ignore an initial flaw: this passage was not annotated as ‘i’ when the next is ‘ii’. (The publisher is Random House.) We ignore the flaws, wanting to get on with the story?

The notes say it is dedicated to persons (perhaps in Sri Lanka.) But the note is appended to the book (my edition has it page 77.)

I believe that as lines of a song, both phrases would not escape edits by a singer: so my question is whether they both passed muster for a poetry editor or editors?

Who is really concerned about the poems of a great novelist? A flawed poem is not so serious a matter as a flawed novel?

And we do sing flawed songs — some anthems take decades to find imperfect corrections.

One Tagore translator has said not to translate songs. Nor are all poems lyrics. But it is worth asking: how well would that sing?

Tarantino Kubrick

2011-12-22T07:09:00.000-08:00

For a few years I have refused to watch Reservoir Dogs. Perhaps to ensure that I would not do so on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, I saw it last night. What struck me was the connection to Kubrick's The Killing.

The one maps to the other not at all like quotation and not through obvious parallel ( I see now out on the web that QT is said to call RD "My Killing".)

But what is it - beneath, behind, at root - to be struck with such a relatedness across two films which are otherwise so very different? Is it the result of watching films as "types" - perhaps reinforced by serial television, by "westerns" ?

These links are not self-evident as "associations" - they seem to me to be based on my limited capacity to talk about film - itself a requirement for "intellectual" standing of any rank among avid conversationalists, let alone cinema mavens.

Perhaps it only strikes me so, given my struggle to recognize faces, and the embarrassment of familiar faces which prove to belong to complete strangers.

And then there is the resident of the Victoria, BC area, who has been my Doppelgänger these past 40 years — if brief exchanges with the few strangers who accost me first are to be accorded any credence. Have we aged in so similar a manner?

Mercury 11.07

2011-12-22T06:52:00.000-08:00

The Mercury logic-programming language — which provides Java, Erlang and C# compilations — is now available as 11.07 from http://www.mercury.csse.unimelb.edu.au/download/release.html

No binary downloads are available so *nix requires a GNU C build and Windows requires Cygwin or MSYS.

Both x86-32 and x86-64 are supported.

Daisy Debolt (1945-2011)

2011-12-21T15:16:00.000-08:00

Daisy Debolt has died. She passed away October 4, 2011 after a very brief illness.

We corresponded in recent years - she was a valuable source of encouragement.

One late summer evening in 1974 she gave a great performance in Regina, Saskatchewan at the old Folk Guild. Almost 40 years later it remains very memorable.

She is survived by a son, Jake.

I was enquiring of wikipedia why she was not on the list of Canadian musicians when I happened to go from her "pals" page to the home page. It was a shock and so saddening.

A poet's hubris?

2011-12-19T06:13:00.000-08:00

One volume of the Ben Belitt translations of Pablo Neruda includes not a single translation by another poet or by another poetry translator.

One of the translations is obviously flawed: a Chilean poem becomes a poem for all mechanized and schooled mankind. What is worse, the poet may have encouraged his translator in this cosmopolitan reading — but it is lacking in the original as given on the facing page, verso.

A better title: The Collected Translations of Neruda by poet Ben Belitt, 1970.

A book for me: a single volume with the best translations of Neruda from any European language (look how well Italian appears to translate to Danish - the concision - and Spanish?) with originals in Spanish RECTO and the selected translations VERSO (an e-book?) - not the usual arrangement (but consider how French bilingual dictionaries begin with the French lexicon, but those by the English or Germans begin with the target language - so the privilege would go to the poems, not the polyglot translations.)

A UN poetry week project: Tagore?

QR Codes for Fair Trade without exploitation?

2011-12-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

I looked at a retail holiday gift item today, but there was no way to determine that it was neither from a sweat shop nor a factory using child labour.

Had there been an FLO fair trade or related QR Code on the item, then I might have been able to make the purchase in good conscience. My choice was to continue on so as to try to buy local instead.

The original Curl platform would have charged a fraction of a penny per page: could we offer QR Code origin validation for a penny CDN/US/AU /GB/UK/IEP/EUR?

IE Updates

2011-12-16T07:35:00.000-08:00

Oddly, the Windows Update option for Microsoft XP as found in the IE8 Tools menu (Internet Explorer 8) does NOT go to an HTTPS site but instead to http://www.update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate even though just going to https://www.update.microsoft.com/ provides the XP user of IE an HTTPS site for updates!

Why does MS even keep that HTTP target on-line?

What would such a minor update to IE8 have cost the accidental collosus?

Header Image

2011-12-11T08:26:00.001-08:00

The blogger.com, i.e., blogspot.com simple template which we have been using has an option to add a background image and to have that image adjust its size to fit.

The result is not acceptable except for the mobile view.

But this one minor edit to the template HTML for the default CSS style gives a good result:

#header img {
  width: 100%;
  max-width:100%;
  margin-$startSide: auto;
  margin-$endSide: auto;
}

Select "Proceed" when warned about doing edits to the HTML.Be sure to preview the result before saving the template.

Confucian Analects of Confucious in Curl

2011-11-28T17:47:00.001-08:00

At phil.aule-browser.com/ancient/analects.html there is now a Curl-markup version of this text the understanding of which is crucial to assessing the political climate in China.

The above version includes Chinese Kanji for critical passages. Another version in Enlish only and with a Serif font can be found at phil.aule-browser.com/ancient/analects-en.html.

Both require the Curl RTE browser plugin from www.curl.com.

Both pages use the identical source SCURL file but each main Curl file provides a different definition of {c } which is a text format procedure whose expression wraps each piece of Chinese content. In one page it returns the content and for the other page it returns en empty {text } expression.

The table of contents in the left panel indexes the chapters of the 20 ‘books’.

Georg Misch

2011-11-18T13:27:00.001-08:00

There are now two versions of Georg Misch Geschichte der Autobiographie over at the aule-browser.com philosophy pages.

I have added a version with over 800+ footnotes partially restored at http://phil.aule-browser.com.
The footnotes are being handled by a script, so they are now sequential, but they also show the old fn number in the note itself.

The available text scan OCR is so poor and was ANSI and not Unicode, some many footnotes are yet to be restored. There are some places where italics and quote indentations would also be helpful.

I will work on dynamic user annotations later when time and new code permits.

The same web page links to a version with no footnotes which loads and processes faster.

The text sources are the same SCURL file, but the parent Curl files each their own definitions of {fn } and {footnote }.

Given the OCR issues, anyone noting text oddies is invited to drop me a line.

Kant Mind

2011-11-11T07:00:00.001-08:00

The term used by Kant in the first Kritik is Gemüte. While the English word 'mind' ties back to "gemynd" it has largely lost the immediate penumbra of memory and recollection (as in 'bring to mind') and has a aura of Latin "mens": the Greek had close links with memory.

The loss of the prefix in English means a real loss in translation.

Present-day English-speaking poets relying on Kemp-Smith are in serious neglect of the words of Kant: Vorstellung, Verstand, begreifen, Begriffe, Anschauung. No one would dream of so neglecting the word of Heidegger or Rilke.

Poets with a command of French can readily see English as a lost Germanic dialect: they need not learn to speak German, but they have no excuse for not reading the text which they cite in translation.

What did the angel say (as recorded in Hebrew) when he found himslef beind the door of Lot's house? I have a link to Luther's version at http://poets.aule-browser.com/.

Readily accessible on the web: Mit Gemüt meint Kant den gesamten (bewussten und unbewussten) Umfang ...

Penn Riots

2011-11-10T08:25:00.000-08:00

Milosz reports that the Polish universities were the hotbeds of antisemitiism.

Here at UNB, the Fredtown university is already truly "occupied" — by cars. Automobiles. Trucks. SUV's. Diesel buses. The food is shuffled in and out, from building to building, in large cargo trucks (unlike the tunnels of Laval University.)

They map the oceans while banking on Exxon and the "tar sands" of Exxon's North America.

How long since students last lined up to "thumb a ride"? (Regina campus, 1972-74, at College Avenue.)

And then there are the two visitors to North Africa, Oscar Wilde and André Gide — surely they paid those boys …

MIT Processing

2011-11-09T06:03:00.000-08:00

While I do prefer the MIT Curl web language, the MIT Processing language deserves attention.

If you try processing and the graphical element of the IDE windows are flawed, try increasing your screen resolution. I overcame my relutance when the nVidia driver update screen showed similar flaws ...

Just as there is Smalltalk in JavaScript (Jtalk is now Amber Smalltalk) so there is also processing.js

Dryer Kant

2011-11-08T05:38:00.000-08:00

The characterization of science in the opening of D.P. Dyer's Kant's Solution for Verification in Metaphysics (U. Toronto) is a vexation.

Sixty years after the death of Boltzmann, the battle for atomism at the turn of the century should have given pause.

At the time Dryer was writing, were not the Petroleum Engineers of America battling against plate tectonics just as they now battle against global warming (geology, geography and meteorology strike me as very much sciences close to Kant's own lectures and interests) ?

Today a massive revision of the Linnaen tree of species is underway - arguably as significant a revision in biology as that stirred by Darwin, the structure of DNA/RNA and the electron microscope (and many others that come to mind only with regard to biology which were fresh at the time he was writing.)

And then there is the role of important "thought experiments" in physics which do not fit easily into his brief portrait of the "success" of science (to use Dryer's term.)

The ability of suggestions by Murray Gell-Mann to keep String Theory in constant revision without yet succumbing has troubled at least one Harvard philosopher.

For one glimpse of the current state of philosophy in relation to science and metaphysics, see the CMU work on causality associated with Clark Glymour.

For progress in philosophy in the last century, see the work of Hilary Putnam and John Searle among others.

That philosophy remains beset with sophistry may be evident in the life's work of Habermas when see in relation to Hegel, Marx, Weber and then Searle.

Economics is no doubt the most difficult to assess, with psychology and sociology following close behind (as one might expect.)

Perhaps a present day figure of Kant's stature would being with the problems besetting economics as a science in the sense of organic chemistry or genome-based botany.

For credit to Habermas, see the opposition to GM botany and GM fisheries versus GM mosquitoes.

The Joy of Freud

2011-11-06T08:26:00.000-08:00

Freud may have been the sophist of the last century: as the winner of a Frankfurt Goethe prize (1930), his rhetoric merits attention in the original German.

One delight is the opening of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The term "Spannung" is interwoven with walking, running, falling. Today it may be hard to capture how this may have delighted some female readers in its day. The term, of course, covers both 'tension' and 'voltage'. The "Spann" is intimate to the exposed ankle.

Only a few decades ago, Canada's Eli Mandel was trumpeting the family triangle. Today I prefer Gruenbein's Im Zweieck, the two-cornered polygon which escaped Escher.

Albrecht Haushofer

2011-10-27T10:54:00.001-07:00

I have added a second poem from Albrecht Haushofer's posthumous Moabiter Sonette to poets.aule-browser.com

The poets Aule or site now has both Der Vater and Der Bruder.

His brother lived and is said to have found the poets corpse where he had been murdered outside the prison in the last days of the NSDAP terror regime. His father later committed suicide.

The poetry markup is in MIT Curl from www.curl.com and requires their safe and secure RTE (runtime engine) browser plugin.

Curl is a trademark of Sumisho Computer Corp, Tokyo.

Romain Gary

2011-10-27T09:02:00.000-07:00

A recent talk by a novelist at the English university of the bilingual province of New Brunswick was a talk premised on the audience being ignorant of the work of Romain Gary.

The talk began with an insult to those of the West who failed to grasp that "other Europe" of Milosz. We, the acquisitive, we in our striving for recognition, reward, we who have not read Hamlet (one supposes.) Or not understood Hamlet.

And surely none of us in the audience displaced, dispossessed, unemployed ...

The one Lithuanian in the audience had not heard of Romain Gary (!) let alone read Education or Cerfs. Some present may even have seen the film, "Madame Rosa", or heard of it.

In "La Parole" Ge. Gusdorf writes of how we must mistrust the speaker who is too aware of his audience - or perhaps too sure.

In fairness, the opening words which I heard concerned the trove of documents concerning partisans in the years 1944-1948 and the talk closed with an admission that our author had worked from secondary sources.

My initial reactions were posted on Facebook. At the close of the talk I mentioned The Painted Bird, but this seemed to pass unnoted. There is a parallel between the story of the re-submission and rejection of that manuscript and the view Gary took of himself in the hey-day of his Emile Ajar personna. The gap between 1944 and the 1987 Klaus Barbie trial is almost that which our writer invoked and that of Education and Cerfs.

But Gary was not simply a French novelist.

By 1953, no assassin came stalking Milosz. Or do the KGB records read otherwise? And then came '54, then '56, '67. Who are we supposing lived in the sunny light of ignorance? Children?

By 1980 there was no feigning ignorance of the role of Milovan Djilas.

By 1980 we had Nikolai Tolstoi's Victims of Yalta.

What is this requirement for historical documents and "distance". Reconciliation? Truth?

notes:

1945: Éducation européenne
1975 : La Vie devant soi (as Emile Ajar)
1980: Les Cerfs-volants

Apple iTunes desktop app

2011-10-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

If there is a worse desktop application for a better mobile device, I cannot imagine what it is.

The first oddity today was that suddenly my PC came up as "unauthorized". Then an entire album could not be found. I re-authorized the PC and was told that now 2 of a possible 5 computers were authorized for my account. What!?! I went to look at iTunes Preferences and decided to update address and phone number. But country was a separate entry ( we are now living in Canada.) Bad idea. All record of purchases went poof!

In an effort to wake up the iTunes "store", I went ahead and purchased yet another tune for 0.99$ - a nice guitar rendition of an old blues number by the late John Fahey. And there it stands: my one music purchase.

O Apple! Must I be driven to Amazon? Must I use an Android? What does the "i" in "iTunes" really mean? Indifferent? Inexplicable? Let me see ... a word starting with "i" meaning "doomed" ... "idiotic" ?

Unable to open TWAIN source

2011-10-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

The annoying Canon scanner error "Unable to open TWAIN source" is usally caused simply by the PATH environment variable not containing the appropriate value such as c:\windows\twain_32\SOME-SCANNER-DEVICE_NAME

I would create a new env var named scanner and give it that string value. You can then add %scanner%; to your path variable and be able to change scanners withot messing with the path variable.

If you need the fix take immediate effect without a reboot, open a cmd session on the directory of your scanner and lauch its EXE file from there.

Under Windows XP, a left-click for the PROPERTIES of My Computer will give you access to env var's via the Advanced tab.

eclectic-pencil.com: .htm for Mini Mobile and .html for aLL eLse Larger...

2011-08-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

eclectic-pencil.com: .htm for Mini Mobile and .html for aLL eLse Larger...: "2014 might not be too late to achieve this simple option: ht M for M obile web content htm L for L aptop and a LL other L ayout ..."

.htm for Mini Mobile and .html for aLL eLse Larger?

2011-08-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

2014 might not be too late to achieve this simple option:

htM for Mobile web content

htmL for Laptop and aLL other Layout

Luckily, we never had an "xhtml" file extention - and we were permitted both SHTM and SHTML for server-side includes.

The reason to consider HTM for mini displays is that it would not require typing by users to shorten or lengthen the extension if browsers would agree on a hot-key combination. A smart browser would check at any site offering an HTML whether there was an HTM if the last URL used was HTM by user choice and so offer the option visually to the user for the current site. It would be a simple browser configuration option for those devices, the format of which, was neither Large nor Mini.

Lately I have been using htm for 4.01 HTML and html for XHTML and also for HTML5. As the web moves to the latter, we should be able to set a meta value to flag that, say, this .html file has a sibling .htm file for constrained display and vice versa. And ditto for .shtm and .shtml and whatever might follow from 2014 until we achieve 20/20 hindsight.

MediaWiki geographic markup at Wikipedia

2011-07-25T17:03:00.000-07:00

I saw some useful geographic markup at wikipedia today.

The article for the town of Dawson Creek ends with graphic display of relevant links by direction.

Wikipedia is generated by MediaWiki, itself written in server-side PHP. You will not see the markup unless you run EDIT on the geo links section. What you will see then is:

{{Canadian City Geographic Location (8-way)
|Centre = Dawson Creek
|Northwest = [[Fort St. John, British Columbia|Fort St. John]]
|North = [[Taylor, British Columbia|Taylor]]
|Northeast = [[Fairview, Alberta (town)|Fairview]]
|East = [[Rycroft, Alberta|Rycroft]]
|Southeast = [[Hythe, Alberta|Hythe]]
|South = [[Pouce Coupe, British Columbia|Pouce Coupe]]
|Southwest = [[Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia|Tumbler Ridge]]
|West = [[Chetwynd, British Columbia|Chetwynd]]
|image_flag =
}}

Over at my Curl blog I'll place some Curl code that does the same on the client side of a browser. This will not require an 'extension' to Curl but will simply be a declarative use of an instance of a user class or of a user macro.

Really quite simple and useful for the towns accessible from the junction of highways which form Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway.

Skype and the Future (past and present)

2011-07-17T13:45:00.000-07:00

A very few years ago CIO's and CTO's were declaring that web applications were the future. Significant software projects were launched to convert best-of-breed programs from being desktop applications to being something presentable in a web browser - often at the expense of improved or new functionality.

Having spent a few years on such projects in niche financials for medical pricing and business risks, I have a question for top managers who drank the kool-aid: explain Skype.

Skype is not running in my web browser. It is a desktop application which happens to run over the internet. Had the FCC ruled otherwise, it could even have been ruled in the USA to be telecom software or have been barred from dialing POTS subscribers or cell phones.

It is not always very well-behaved. It does not update in the background. Smart is not a word that comes to mind. It is very popular and it is on handheld devices as an application.

Would you want it running in an HTML browser under HTML5?

Why? HTML pages are delivered over HTTP using TCP/IP. Text-chat, audio-chat and video-chat software may run using a protocol which is neutral as to whether TCP/IP is the protocol or UDP or other.

That Skype is a desktop application comes as no surprise to those who continue to use IRC.

Would we ask developers why Eclipse or Visual Studio have not been converted to run in a Web Browser?

At least no one is asking whether Skype is acceptable as an instance of a RESTful architecture.

Someone may want to argue that Skype is a variant of an RIA for some of its more annoying 'features' that come and go. Because the Skype client app's internet communication protocol is proprietary, a Gnu video chat is due: perhaps it will be RESTful and run in Firefox.

If Skype can be on your desktop, why is the only "browser" on your desktop running HTTP with HTML as the content markup? Perhaps a million browsers did not bloom, but at least two alternatives to HTML appeared.

What does strike me when looking at opensource web application server frameworks is that they are almost all tightly coupled to HTML. They are not likely going to survive communications services 3.0 (whatever that proves to be.)

The irony will be when the Chrome browser dissolves into applets running on an OS - applets for which HTML will be the exception rather than the rule for applets doing anything beyond lookup/display, err, 'browse'.

Chrome, Safari, WebKit and those cookie settings ...

2011-07-02T13:57:00.000-07:00

I changed a cookie setting to comply with a web page in Chrome. Nothing happened. Re-started Chrome, checked for my change, still the page protested. Hmmm. WebKit.

Stopped Chrome. Started Safari. Made that SAME change to the cookie setting. Stopped Safari.

Started Chrome and voilà! There's the change in effect.

Cloud Hype

2011-06-18T07:51:00.000-07:00

"Clouds" is a comedic play. Cloud hype is closer to hubris.

Remember "network PCs" ? Just as we were getting X-Windows to actuaries and LAN PC's to underwriters who had been confined to 3270 dumb terminals, an arrogant insurance CEO informed me that hard drives were already a thing of the past (and most were what, 20Mb with 2MB RAM on the PC's? We had just paid IBM big bucks for our first external RS6000 drive for our one AIX box. Meanwhile the CIO was betting on AS400. M/F Prolog-based expert systems for underwriters had just been replaced by procedural C + Sql just a fast PC Prolog implementations became available (they had nothing to do after their departmental LAN pension PC system for HR.) Windows 286 had recently been replaced by the extremely buggy 3.0 for 386 PC's with hope for a 3.1 version. To my utter amazement much departmental software was, er, uhmm, unlicensed. Especially the price-y APL for actuaries. WordPerfect was still the standard for PC text and the 99$ word processors were being crushed by illegal schemes ignored by anti-trust law enforcement. Smalltalk was being priced out of reach as competition collapsed in that niche.

Now, today: just as sold-state drives become a reality (and the Winchester drive from IBM Watson Labs was a big tech leap - or have we forgotten?) we are told that corp's will want to move to "dumb laptop" ChromeBook.

This is not like having an X-Server on a graphical workstation. Far from it.

And consider this: a really advanced programming language such as Oz is only now moving to being Distributed Oz.

Look at the hackers public "helping hand" site: the vast majority of programmers listed are really only competent in one procedural language: one of Java, C++ or C# (please don't start in on C# as multi-paradigm ...)

While Perl finally begins to take a bow, PCRE remains the standard while not a single text-processing language is in the TIOBE "top 20" PL's (no, Perl is not; SNOBOL was and REBOL, ICON, UNICON, Object Icon and Converge are just as LISP can be a TPL.) Perl is not a TPL - not any more than Crystal Reports could be called a TPL. Or Tcl's expect. Or grep.

While most programmers remain ignorant of advances in text parsing and constraint handling, the industry commentators would have us believe in the cloud. Nebulous shibboleth.

The cloud will not respond to the needs of forensic accountants (see the top-seller in the accounting niche for how many of the Big 4 ? )

The cloud will not respond to the need of health insurers to have smarter software and health providers to have smarter software (see the decade's repeat top-seller in that niche - so critical to controlling rising debt in USA and Canada.)

The cloud as a source of medical e-records will not reduce medical costs (await an unintended consequence in billing.)

The cloud is not the answer in logistics as so many diesel-burning haulers run dead-head on highways or back-and-forth in cities such as Vancouver, Canada (where the pollution drifts away and up into the higher Fraser valley) or that yellow-pancake-cloud hanging over the city of Toronto.

Just as we get multiple-CPU's we are to believe in the cloud (with USA and GB at not even in top-ten nations for internet connections.)

Common wisdom: the bottlenecks tended to be I/O and/or database accesses. The historically single biggest PC design flaw: I/O. The dominant database is SQL Oracle who now effectively own Java. Note the ties of C# to Microsoft, C to unix. IBM had to buy iLog even after the critical contributions of Watson labs to constraint programming (old Prolog is now viewed as a subset of a constraint logic programming strategy.)

The two critical languages never embraced by Microsoft: Prolog and Smalltalk. The Apple difference is that they dumbed-down a Smalltalk as Objective-C for programmers more comfy with C-syntax (Objective-C is the principal iPhone app language; when Apple stole from Nokia they stole from the company running Smalltalk in phones; Ericcson originally banned its own invention, Erlang. No kidding. C-only, please. Mercury now generates C or Erlang.)

Less common: the internet relies on HTTP with its connection restrictions. So the cloud will become the "private cloud" and then the "privately switched cloud" and the lessons of, say, 1989, can be re-learned in, say, 2019.

JavaScript is now being touted as the server-side solution. JS has a fine lineage back to Self and inlining ( aka Google V8), but a lot has happened in programming languages since the mid-80's. Without programmers able to work in multiple paradigms, abandoning the power of the client to run domain specific software is folly.

Those who will run such software: the high-end consultants and trouble-shooters. That trend will not help to bring down medical costs or prevent another Lehman Bros where a large part of the problem was the software used on the laptops of the E&Y auditors ( a trail that leads right back to the software run by the auditors at Enron.)

Is Drools on JBoss part of the answer ? IBM's acquired iLog and jLog ? Not likely. Too little, too dumbed down (not that for some tasks a "dumbed-down" language is not great, as Erlang has shown repeatedly.)

The critical software in audit is the worksheet component. If it resides in a procedural framework, suitable forensic options are unlikely to emerge. Cross ChromeBooks off the lsit for those EU auditors faced with Bulgarian government ministries, departments and agencies and those soon to be faced with Macedonia and Montenegro.

Maintainable software: server-side in the cloud at least one major bank and on major insurer have demonstrated that Smalltalk need not be visible (let the web UI be whatever) but we still lack a Smalltalk with fully integrated rules, logic and constraint handling. Traits in Smalltalk may achieve this.

Programming languages do matter: it is better to generate C code but have textual code which is maintainable, documented than to have C++ code that takes a few years to write and that is near impossible to evolve.

At the core of many of the leading "niche" software packages that prevent controlling medical costs are inadequate C libraries that programmers fear to touch. DLL's were intended to prevent this. Dot net will not help here as its dynamic languages fail to integrate rules and constraints in the manner in which they are integral to say, Oz.

Until a US congressional committee investigates the software used by auditors and risk managers, we will not be free to discuss was remains not in the cloud, but enveloped in a smoke-screen fog.

At least least outside the cloud, we can ask and be told what was running on those auditor laptops, which version, when last updated and with which customized features. Those are apps are software as desktop user applications. With replaceable SIMM drives, we could even ask for the read-only chip which was in use in that "laptop". Yes, there is an associated IT cost. But compare the costs of inadequate pricing control and audits in healthcare and in banking.

And the OS on the ChomeBook - welcome back to the past: a unix.

And the hope for getting around HTTP 1.1 limitationd in the Cloud: that other dinosaur, TCP/IP connections.

And this is without even mentioning the vulnerability of the G3 or G4 cloud in the case of any major international conflict, e.g., China blaming uncontrolled civil unrest on the West, in, say, 2019. Not to mention chaotic sunspot flare-up.

Remember, 1989 was touted as the "year of unix" when it was the year Microsoft undermined developers of ...

From IBM to Microsoft to Google, while the lesson of evolution is variation and alternatives. Java, C++ and C#: the majority of 'hackers' have less to offer than we might hope.

Curl Graphics: extensions packages

2011-06-17T07:35:00.000-07:00

There are beautiful page changing options to be seen in the early edition of COM.CURL.EXT over on SourceForge.

These are extensions to the Curl web-content language from www.curl.com and rival anything else available for dynamic business applications on web or desktop.

It is hard to imagine a business having to choose from among ONLY Adobe Air, Microsoft Silverlight and the various Googlisms when the Curl option is now so strong visually (it was always very strong as a framework and in terms of security.)

Other extensions which are not at all eye-candy include spreadsheet-like "worksheet" objects which should interest many of the large corporations already using Curl internally (a third-party package has long been available in Japan.)

Processing 1.5.1 for artists and others

2011-06-16T11:11:00.000-07:00

There is a new release of the Processing programming language from MIT. It is intended for artists and creative talents. For non-programming kids, MIT has scratch and Microsoft has kodu while Smalltalk has both e-toys (as found on OLPC) and the Croquet/Cobalt projects.

The revisions in 1.5.1 have some notable admissions.

Needless to say, Processing is not to be found on the top-20 TIOBE language index on which Lua has now appeared ( and on which Smalltalk-ish Objective-C is rising.)

But which language will rise as Android becomes dominant?

Private Cloud

2011-06-14T13:14:00.000-07:00

Microsoft is marketing the private cloud as the new corporate solution.

Think of it as cloud meals: you fired your kitchen staff to switch to salads from any caterer, appetizers from any caterer. Now Microsoft will not just cater to you, they will, uh, set back up that kitchen you dismantled - with catering called in as needed ...

Or are they marketing "dry water" at a time when aquaduct infrastructure is looking suspect ... will there soon be a new dry water tank up atop the IT shop? Remember the water-cooled M/F - was that water outa the cloud or the main? Did IBM bring out a dowser before that TOS/360 went behind the glass? A ribbon-cutting or a rain-dance?

The private cloud. Wasn't there a Joe Capp comics character with one of those? Ah, yes, Joe Btfsplk. Next someone will offer private vapourware. Very steam punk. Just don't let someone tell you that's fog - that's your shared cloud on the road ahead.

Squeak MVC

2011-06-09T17:17:00.000-07:00

At squeak.org the blurb for 4.2 says
and legacy MVC support
but the first test that I make gives a ScheduledControllers that is nil.
Both BitEditor and FormEditor appear unusable.
I looked in Monticello and the Universe browser but I see no relevant package to retrieve.
The package ToolBuilder-MVC retains this gem:

isActiveBuilder
"Answer whether I am the currently active builder"
"This is really a way of answering whether 'Smalltalk isMVC'"
ScheduledControllers ifNil:[^false].

So something is amiss. I am looking for a dependency framework - events, or Announcements or whatever in this image.

In Kernel-Objects package the Object class has a class variable DependentsFields.

In Kernel-Model package Model has an instance var named dependents.

But I see no tests for MVC.

There had been a Tweak package and a code.google.com project to revive MVC in Squeak. Perhaps more interesting is Announcements in Pharo and the coming changes to Model-View-Presenter in Dolphin Smalltalk.

Abstractions are needed. MVC could be complex and Morphic seems best for direct manipulation rather than for traditional GUI applications. I like the admissions made at Dolphin for their candor - and I like working in Dolphin when all that I need is a Windows app or tool over at http://apps.logiquewerks.com/ST

note: the method >>isMVC is not available.

BUT. There is an answer. You need to start a new project which is an MVC project.

And now you are in as old a Smalltalk as you can imagine: an ST-80. Oh vey. This is not offering an MVC option. This is a collapsible Model-A in the cargo space of your auto-plane.

This is not Smalltalk the programming environment, but Smalltalk the split-environment for a house divided among partisans, some laboring under a tax of 90%, some under a flat-10%.

Converge 1.2

2011-06-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

A new version of the "alpha" stage or phase of the Converge programming language is available: version 1.2 at convergepl.org from Laurie Tratt.

Converge is a pythonic version of Icon (or UNICON or ObjectIcon) if you will - which is curious as Python generators probably come from Ralph Griswold and others' Icon programming language. It is prototype-based with goal-directed evaluation and generators.

Converge shares with its predecessors more than generators: it is something of a logic language almost in the way that Erlang is almost an LP. Converge uses success/failure instead of true/false and unlike the processes of Erlang, uses co-routines which can be reset.

These Icon-ic languages could be called string-oriented (and ObjectIcon is also UNICODE compliant) and descend from the efforts to replace SNOBOL4 - itself perhaps the first unintended "free" language for processing text as string data.

Converge provides an alternative to macros in the form of compile-time meta-programming. As with macros in other languages, a substitution occurs, but these CTMP substitutions are specific to this language (relying on the AST) but are called with an explicit splicing notation (in this regard I prefer Curl from www.curl.com) - they are documented with both the binary downloads and in the GIT codebase. Note: the substitutions occur before the VM has generated instructions.

In the years since the GOTO of SNOBOL was rejected by academics, layers of goto have crept into the mainstream languages first as exception handling jumps and then as aspects or as labeled break statements.

An ICON language continues to be used by one large USA agency (if one can infer from budget disclosures.)

At this time there are two mature ICON variants: Icon 9.5 and Unicon 11.7 (both freeware.)

My own preference at the moment is ObjectIcon 2.4 but if you like prototype-based over class-based then you may want to stay close to the Converge project - I know I will.

Complicity of Celan in the Palestinian plight?

2011-05-30T08:17:00.000-07:00

The post at Barbaric Document on Paul Celan's complicity in Middle East injustice somehow offends.

Is the author unaware of the little pogrom in Poland after the war's end? That some 300,000 hid their identities and remain hidden?

That in the DP camps the western nations were complicit in the Zionist effort to redirect refugees to Palestine?

Where were they to go? Back home to Marburg? Evict the new tenants?

Where were they to go? Alexandria?

Stalin's little Jewish republic in the far east of the USSR?

Where were Polish Jews to go? Rumanian Jews (not yet "Romanian") ? Hide behind non-Jewish names, cover names which may never been their own?

Why was the state of Montana not their destination? Or Paraguay? Or Stalingrad?

Where is Galicia now? Where was the Swabian Jew to call home?

Some tried: Frank never reached his destination in Marburg. G. Husserl tried for some justice in Kiel.

And Sussana Ginzburg - a Ukranian Jew or a Polish Jew? Oh, I see, dead. Nationality irrelevant if the corpse was not found. And have I not mis-spelled her surname?

I have no answer: the borders of Europe were not about to dissolve; the Americans and Canadians did not want Jews. At least not ordinary Jews. Let alone Polish Jews. Ukrainian Jews. "Rumanian? [turns to his uniformed colleague] Rumanian - is that more like Serbian or more like Czech?"

Never underestimate the ignorance of an immigration bureaucrat.

Of course, by the 1950's the high north of Arctic Canada was in need of "inhabitants" to justify a "border" between Russians and Americans ... "Any of your Jews good at spearing walrus?" [Canada paid compensation to those victims but refused to apologize.]
They lured in aboriginals from the south - into canvas tents in the highest arctic with no moose - yes, walrus as moose.

And who all was complicit? Would a show trial or two help to clarify which artists are to be banned from the first union and relegated to the second or third artists' unions? Do we campaign to snatch back the Nobel Prize of Symborska?

Note: neither of my paternal great-grandfather nor my maternal grandfather seem to have set much store by the border known at the 49th parallel. My maternal great-grandfather may have ignored it and his father ended defending it while his maternal grandfather ignored it (while fearing the Sioux and preying on the Blackfoot ...)

When will I be invited back to claim my block of land or rock in the Orkney Islands? In the Jura. In Ireland. In Blackpool. Among the Swampy Cree of the rivers flowing into the western shore of whatever we will rename Hudson's Bay.

When will the Navajo south of Grants, NM, acknowledge me as a cousin and fit to share the water that I might view the pristine night sky above the ancient fields of lava of El Malpais?

And yet I share some of this - after learning of the deception Paul Ricoeur and his sometime colleague, Mircea Eliade.

René Char

2011-05-29T16:58:00.000-07:00

The work of René Char is missing from the NB public library system.

Why should this matter? Well, there are bilingual editions available (quality varies) and perhaps he is important for Acadiens given their Quebec neighbours: consider what he says in Feuillets d'Hypnos about the French staff officer who laments the language spoken by Char's courageous maquisards.

He is not a Parisian poet so much as a poet of Provence. Yes, I know, Aix is a favourite destination of the Quebec intellectual. But all the same ...

Two nights ago I went to meet an Anglo-Irish poet at Alden Nowlan House at unb.ca. One table in the Windsor Castle bar was speaking French during the hockey game. A woman stepped out onto the deck and said "Look, I can speak French, too" and began making noises. It could have been a Russian imitating a Pole or a Ukrainian.

I keep hearing this kind of offensive drivel and noise-making here and there around this officially bilingual town - and in this, Canada's only bilingual province. And when will I hear an Acadienne imitate an NB anglo here in "Arcadia"? Will it be among Australian graduate students at UNB? I think not.

Is the answer to require Canadian schools to teach that Norman French forms a large part of our English vocabulary - and that the largest part of that came from Latin Rome? That the French were Franks? ( Is Germanic ancestry still the dominant ethnic origin of "English" Canadians? Does it remain so for "whites" in the USA?) Or are we to concede to ethnic loathing?

Should foreign students be required to take at least one course on Canadian history to obtain a graduate degree from one of our universities? Is UNB finding and funding graduate candidates from "la Francophonie" as much as from the Commonwealth?

As to the absence of Char: I have noted elsewhere how deficient the New Directions bilingual edition of Char is - but better that than nothing.

And here in Fredericton, where is the monument or plaque to commemorate the burning of those Acadian homes on these fashionable streets? (Shades of another quiet university town filled with tourists in summer: Marburg in Lahntal.) The Marburg of the students Eliot and Pasternak.

Ximena Gautier Greve

2011-05-14T18:37:00.000-07:00

I found these four calaméo links for e-books by Chilean poet Ximena Gautier Greve:

Réquiem por Chile
Chile mon amour
La Rama Quebrada o Pasión del Destierro
Unidas por la Sangre - Antología poética ilustrada

All can be read on-line as paginated books using Flash in your web browser.

[from a suggestion by Nela Rio and Joe Blades, May 14, 2011 Fredericton NB "Word in the World" poetry reading]

Sony PlayStation netWork hacKing eXplained

2011-04-28T14:30:00.000-07:00

SONY now says that PlayStation user credit card info was encrypted (at some level) - but they continue to suggest that the relevant tables may have been accessed.

The personal data table, which is a separate data set, was not encrypted, but was, of course, behind a very sophisticated security system that was breached in a malicious attack.

Very sophisticated indeed.

SONY has posted this FAQ. It includes this paternalistic gem:

For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email, telephone, and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive information

Mind you, SONY did not take much care with that user personal information. "We will not give out your information." We will not do much to protect it, either.

SONY PlayStation network user credit card info hacked

2011-04-27T06:04:00.000-07:00

The SONY admission that a hacker may have accessed all user info short of credit card 4-digit CSC's should lead to a class-action lawsuit in the USA.

Users should have had the option to use their hardware as the basis for a public-private key encryption of personal information.

The main reason not to do so is greed: SONY required access to pursue fraud and non-payment. Let SONY now balance this against their present plight.

In all likelihood Oracle relational databases were used by SONY. Storing strings in relational tables is easy for the developer and a joy for the hacker. But what functionality could have required relational tables for the personal information of users? Well, it may have made things easier, faster and cheaper for the SONY info tech folks. Manager gets bonus but users get ...

Sadly, the focus now is likely to be on network security. And a Master appointed to advise a judge would likely come from the world in which Oracle DB tables are the norm for any and all data.

Access to data should have been on a process basis and no hacker should have been able to fork such a process: only such a process should have been able to convert that data into readable and usable information.

So ... had SONY used Erlang, would their customers be in this sad situation today? And that is only one option from their asset stables.

Users will have a different view: regardless, of the technology in play, they should have been notified pronto. Forget KISS, CRUD and ACID. The term of the day is PRONTO.

With any luck, the hacker was in for cred and not credit cards. But SONY is a giant and this should be a sobering moment for corp IT that is public-facing. And for users? Well, caveat emptor. And then get a lawyer with a proven record in class actions.

Western Digital WD MyBook Premium HID 1394 Firewire external drive problems

2011-04-18T06:34:00.000-07:00

When we relocated, I parted with a number of old office DVD's. I have owned a few external Western Digital harddrives and it seems that the DVD for my current MyBook went the way of "all the things".

Since that time my UPS failed after repeated brown-outs here up the Saint John River near the hydropower station. One victim recently was the WD MyBook.

Like most corporations, I remain on Windows XP. One of the drawbacks of XP is its ability to handle Firewire. Then there is the firmware in the WD enclosure.

The problem was simple: XP refused to recognize the drive, and if it did , it would give a code 10 error for "device cannot start". It would usually take over an hour to get the drive up. A cold reboot in safe mode and then a cold shutdown followed by a normal restart would sometimes result in my being able - after several attempts - to get the device to spinup.

On one occasion, using the hardware device manager to enable and then again disable 1394 networking resulted in the happy result. On other occasions, an uninstall and reinstall. Sometimes the Windows driver would suffice, sometimes the WD driver and sometimes the device would be an anonymous disk drive and reported as a HID device with a problem.

But there is hope. The WD spindown utility seems to work ( I can now even let XP go into SLEEP mode and the drive spins up as we awaken.)

Here is what has been working (lately.) I restart and then launch the Process Explorer ( from Microsoft's web "Power Toys" after ensuring that I have a clean shutdown and restart of XP (one cold cycle through Safe mode + Networking and one warm cycle as a normal user doing the cycle start/logon/restart. ) If XP will not shutdown cleanly, all bets are off. Here goes:

1) kill the explorer process with Process Explorer
2) start explorer from within PE
3) use Process Explorer to kill itself (we don't want PE as the parent of explorer)
4) restart Process Explorer from Windows Explorer desktop
5) attach the drive
6) start the spindown utility ( it may report only a generic drive, but no matter.)

Thereafter, spindown the drive before sleep or powerdown or as you like.

You may try letting XP do the spindown, but painful experience has taught me to do it explicitly. My suspicions lie with the "Button Light" firmware which puts itself up as a 1394 HID device, but that's just my gut feel when the icing is there but the cake is missing ...

Now, for my own sanity, the drive is set for quick removal, not delayed-write, but just in case, I run a little Rebol script at low priority - that script writes to the drive every 9.5 minutes. It is started in a cmd shell and then PE is used to kill that shell. I then set the Rebol process to be full screen ( I have a few uses for Rebol during the day and am less likely to close this one's window inadvertantly.) The downside is that I have to remember to kill it when I do want the device to spindown. Unwanted spindown is such a headache with these WD drives and the spindown utility lacks the WD "Button" utility's command line option to adjust the interval. But the latter is just too annoying and useless ...

I should add two items: with device manager I have disabled the annoying WD button as an HID device and with msconfig I have blocked it from being in the XP startup.

It is possible to have the correct drive noticed and it is possible to run with the default Microsoft XP SP3 disk driver but I am doing best just now with the WD driver – and a new external drive (not WD) is on the way via UPS. But this is Fredericton, NB, so that will be another story ....

IE blogger

2011-04-14T08:12:00.000-07:00

Internet Explorer was going berserk on this blog! This was not the case for Google Chrome or Firefox.

Why?

Too many links in the Tag Cloud widget!

I restricted the tags that can appear in the widget and IE behaves.

JNode OS

2011-04-12T12:27:00.000-07:00

Over at sourceforge.net there is activity on the JNode Java OS. Although the files to download are unchanged since 2009, commits continued through March 2011.

Seaside Tutorial and Lulu eBook

2011-04-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

I don't recall posting a link to this tutorial for Seaside for Smalltalk.

There is also a Lulu book.

There are many thinks going on in Smalltalk these days (Cog VM, Roar VM, Pharo, revival of instantiations.com) but Seaside, like SOUL, is one of the best indications of the strength of Smalltalk as compared to Java, Ruby or Python.

I noted with annoyance that there is almost no mention of Smalltalk in the VM article on en.wikipedia.org — the reader would think it all began in Java!

Free Makichan Tex Viewer for Windows

2011-04-02T09:38:00.000-07:00

The free WIndows Tex Viewer from Makichan - their "Scientific Viewer" - amused me today. Here is a screenshot:

Note the jagged mossy-green around the white background of the text. That lovely green is my Windows preference for a default background in any window where the code does not set the background.

In some other Tex documents it became just nasty.

For many weeks this was also the case at www.qtask.com - one CSS setting missing. Oh vey.

Remember when C programming for Windows began with the bare Frame? Now we have both alpha-settings and this sort of silliness.

Where does user acceptance testing go wrong in these cases? The testers don't know Windows?

conduit.com

2011-03-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

What to make of the claims of conduit.com ?

Here are three links:

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/conduit

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/13/conduit-network/

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-engagement/conduit-network-boosts-browserbased-apps-in-a-big-way-008062.php

Simple TclOO and static class variables

2011-03-29T11:31:00.000-07:00

The discussion of class-side slots for TclOO is instructive in light of Carl Sassenrath's blog on defining "simple" in Rebol and in-the-large. But in the real world things are not so simple.

The TclOO architect offers his snippet from the view of the code internals of his framework.

Tcl 8.6 is in a slow beta while Rebol3 remains alpha - and in fairness TclOO was already a library for 8.5

A Curl (as in www.curl.com) architect in Boston once gave me his take on Tcl ... but again, in fairness, not having access to the internals of how mixins are implemented in Curl ...

The simple view: use traits where they are useful in maintaining separation. Much harder: to get a project to adopt traits effectively (e.g., non-HTML output for Smalltalk Seaside or Scala Lift.) Perhaps not possible: getting traits into ObjectIcon.

Anecdote: the Avro Arrow had a compontentized "open-bay" in its belly - long before the ISS universal docking spec.

Question: is re-motoring aircraft types always "simple" ? DC-8? And new wings for C5 Galaxy? Will the Shuttle engines be re-used?

Question: Should the Canadarm2 have been coded in Erlang or Oz instead of Ada? Erlang would offer X, Oz X, Y and Z. But for Ada there are tools and staff.

What is the "simple" approach to handling text in the age of Unicode? My test candidate: Octavio Paz' "Blanco" as the intended "dynamic text".

Apache Wicket

2011-03-28T06:09:00.000-07:00

Igor Vaynberg has an Apache Wicket Cookbook over at packtpub.com

A bit price-y for an epub in that genre.

Wicket has some virtues: it was not near impossible to convert to non-HTML/non-XML web content markup (unlike Scala Lift which is, well, ahem.)

Okay Lift: they have no excuse for the XML-lockstep as they have something like Traits available in the Scala language. Type of output should be orthogonal to HTTP forwarding, redirecting and the rest. But Lift has a project leader first, and a framework second. Scala itself has more promise.

Mercury programming

2011-03-27T19:35:00.000-07:00

There is a new blog to follow on the Mercury logic programming project: http://adventuresinmercury.blogspot.com/

It has a specific focus and is sure welcome.

LivelyKernel Safari

2011-03-16T08:47:00.000-07:00

The latest LivelyKernel is failing in Win XP in the latest Safari. Hmmm.

Pharo Smalltalk 1.2RC2

2011-03-14T15:57:00.000-07:00

Over at pharo-project.org the next release of Pharo is almost ready.

I had some issues today trying to load a MetaCello configuration of O2 - the traits-compatible version of OmniBrowser - perhaps the build already has the latest O2 ?

I did manage to load Aida/Web into the Pharo image (a separate Aida image is also available as part of the continuous build process).

This comes after a few days of freeing my PC from an attack which appears to have come through having Java enabled in default IE (although the attack began in a new Google Chrome while I was in that browser.) AVG, Ad-Aware and SpyBot were of no more help than Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool. The real target appears to have been Firefox - but because I don't use it, that tampering was easier to detect in explorer alone. A few bogus DLL's and many hidden files later I appear to have survived. One casualty was my recent Google bookmarks. Browser Helper Objects. Yeah, right.

Rather than rant, this much was funny: Ad-Aware made some suggestions but also had a high-lighted "read more" which I clicked on in their application window - but it did not open a dialog - it opened IE with add-on's running! Gee, thanks, folks ....

AI Hype, or, To MIT and Beyond!

2011-02-28T05:54:00.000-08:00

Here in Fredericton, NB, hype about IT is part of the city plan. It reverberates in the local campus, is amplified in the media, and so it goes. Fuzzy neural net agents. Evolving fuzzy neural net agents.

But seriously, what about M.I.T. ? Engineering practical robots is still not enough. The new claims seem to reflect a change in plan - late in life. I say that because some of the staunchest advocates may now realize that they will not live to see mechanical minds.

The strategy now covers both integration of systems and strange admissions. While there is no good reason to believe that evolution of smart organisms such as ants, bees, cuttlefish and octopus result from anything like integrating Java modules with Python modules except at the level of rhetorical tropes, the funding flows.

Consider M.I.T. itself. If it is true that MIT abandoned LISP for JAVA as the programming language of choice - not multi-paradigm Oz or proven engineering languages such as FORTRAN, ADA or SMALLTALK .... not R or APL ... but betting on what future?

Here is a symptom: programming for artists at MIT. At the institution with MediaLab, LOGO, CLU in its hstory, we get processing.org and the Java-bound Processing language.

What was a language for artists? Quite possibly ICON or UNICON - both are languages not wedded to TRUE-FALSE logic but success and failure - what works and does not work. Both are not hard-core AI languages: back-tracking behavior in ICON is as restricted as it is in Erlang.

Currently, an "artist" would download a 60+ MB zip of Processing replete with a complete Java JDK environent. I recently installed Processing 1.2.1 only to be confronted with egregious bugs. Their bug list is impressive.

What is worse, Processing, the language, was never needed: MIT had already produced Curl, the language (www.curl.com).

Now we see an effort by James Resig to salvage Processing in JavaScript. Not in Self or Self/Avocado or even Io, but in processingjs at processingjs.org.

The fate of Processing in JavaScript will be that the one innovative idea in Processing will be lost.

Why are we not teaching artists a Smalltalk such as Pharo or introducing them to a project such as Cobalt?

Now this iis just computing for artists, not computing for business and he military. Fact: the two robotc arms of the ISS are programmed in ADA. But artists working on simulations for ISS training would start in what ... AcionScript?

As for innovation, the legendary internet is plagued by two truly bad ideas: Perl and PHP. HTML5 does not resolve that. Apple may have abandoned Java, but they are using a Smalltalk-cum-C++ in Objective-C which show no sign of evolving. Will the Steve Jobs replacement embrace Scala.

Consider Scala. Scala tries to take a lesson from business and from OOP: embrace VM's and Traits. But Traits some from Self, one of those languages ignored at MIT. Traits emerged because some dicta of programming gurus were wrong and cannot be solved by AOP.

So what impedes the evolution of smart languages? Tenure? Take the most recent release of Squeak Smalltalk as 4.2 The Squeak folks embrace the idea that when a program starts it can be begin by consuming a script which can modify most any aspect of both the environment of the program and the program itself. Any of us who worked in demanding IT industry projects can tell you that this is a compliance and governance non-starter. What leaves the project leads - the academics - so out of touch that Squeak could 'evolve' in a way which imperils its survival in any real world niche?

Now to weave back to the hype at M.I.T. One of the most important AI innovations of the 70's was not embraced at MIT. The French company was absorbed by a large French corporation. The gist of those ideas lives on in AI in Europe and in 1.4 Distributed Oz of the oz-mozart project. In the first decade of the new millenium, major projects at large US corporations showed no glimmer of those ideas. the result is dumb software tackling medical pricing in hospitals and dumb software tackling risk management in banks, insurers, governments ... and MIT?

After years of pursuing internal representations (a notion long debunked by mere philosophers and linguists) MIT AI has embraced 'leaving much of the information out there in the environment". This idea of "invariants in the ecology" was championed decades ago by JJ Gibson. It was old hat by 1964 in the work of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. MIT AI is slowly embracing "embodied intelligent behavior" - again old hat in the work of M M-P from his critique of the psychology of his day and his lessons from the early days of the neurology of brain traumas and military amputations.

Much of what passes for the "programme" of AI at MIT is just rhetoric and most often relies on a variety of fallacies. When in 1960 an infallible pope declared as dogma that Mary had been taken up physically into heaven as both body and soul, the faithful did not ask for clarification as to whether she had first died at the end of her days. The dogma trades on words. The terms of the trade at MIT are 'agent',' 'action', 'learn', 'adjust', 'adapt', 'integrate', 'system'.

The promise of neural net began with the mollusc slug. What reason would a skeptic have to believe that such a project will evolve to build something on the order of a cuttlefish or octopus. Just take the one example of the obsession with duplicating the hominid hand. It ha taken years for someone to think outside of that box the 'gripper' as inflatable/deflatable bean-bag. A mollusc might have evolved one of those (and might yet do so if the seas survive us.) But. What reason to think that such a cephalopod would resemble anything like the proposed MIT AI strategy?

Take IBM's Watson strategy. Not a robot and not "intlelligent" (expect no witticisms, sarcasm, tantrums, devious resistance, passive aggression ... ) - but needing to show an AI result, IBM abandons the one big strategy for a more evolutionary notion of let all try and go with the most promising in any one round. Unlike warfare on the shifting battlefield along long battle lines, Jeopardy is polite repetition.

Dolphins evolved something akin to language and even a cross-species lingua franca. Cuttlefish have, in their skin, evolved something like a mental image, which we, their homunculi-by-proxy, witness and which often confounds their dolphin predator - perhaps on occasion evoking delphine amazement, delphine amusement, a delphine tingle that travels down the spine. No robot wil tingle all over when it realizes that THAT piece of 'coral' ain't no coral nor will it feel the grit of its teeth on cuttlebone. No robot appears to have any prospect of evolving to tolerate the ammoniac taste of the giant squid as has the sperm whale. Integrating taste sensors with vision sensors is not what occurred there. Adopting common messaging protocols across progamming libraries of procedural languages is not what occurred there.

I can think of no way except embarrassment to move someone past the doctrine of the physical assumption. Perhaps seriously thinking of Yeshua the healer helps the believer move one step towards atheism. The AI faiths are much harder nuts to crack: a "physical assumption to heaven" is "adjusting action to environment" - which just sounds so sensible. Just as heaven was once above. Just as necrosis was once a mystery. The bodies of the pure do not rot. The robot "solves the problem". Language will not make it so. The kingdom does not come in this lifetime.

Object Icon

2011-02-25T10:10:00.000-08:00

Object Icon 2.5 is now available at code.google.com as source code.

An internet search will reveal that the choice of name for this Icon language variant may be regettable.

Ralph Griswold had wanted to keep the name of the language intact, i.e., which precluded "Icon2".

'ICONUO' might have captured ICON+Objects+UNICODE but misses the key role of succeed/fail/retry logic and the role of co-expressions in Icon.

'ICOEXP' (pronounced Eye-Ko-eX-Pea ) appears an option for internet search.

The single word 'ObjectIcon' appears to be precluded legally already. In addition, a Google search must quote, as in
"Object Icon" programming language
in order to obtain a result.

BBC's Vatican: less than Global Minds

2011-02-23T02:14:00.000-08:00

The BBC's Duncan Kennedy had this report as journalism from Rome under the rubric Europe News:

"If the Big Bang was the start of everything, what came before it?"
That is one of the questions being posed by a new website being set up by the Vatican and Italy's scientific community. After centuries of mistrust between religion and science, the intention is to give the public a greater understanding of both sides. The website, which will be available in Italian and English, has information on everything from astronomy to theology, from space missions to philosophy and art. ...

It was my good fortune to hear his drivel about philosophical questions and cosmology. Kennedy is unaware that there is a field of philosophy of physics and philosophy of science and philosophy of religion. But, ah, yes, the web site is for the "public", which Kennedy also serves.

Only he serves cold porridge.

Kennedy appears ignorant that in my own lifetime Hoyle and Gamow's beginning of astro-biology was such an offence to the harmless Lutherans of Sweden that a Nobel was out of the question. And nothing as changed for atheists in Catholic countries.

Suppose Kennedy had asked what parallel existed between String Theory and the doctrine of the Trinity or between dark matter and the Physical Ascension of Mary? We have a clear idea of what might cause String Theory to topple - but will the Vatican revisit the triumph of the mystery of the Triune-God over the heresies of the "philosophical" early Christians? We know what may alter the calculation of the amount of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way, but did the feces and urine of Mary also physically ascend to heaven? The parasites in her intestines? The dogma of Pope Pius in 1960 came at a time when even the relation between nuclear membrane and cellular membrane in the somatic cell was not yet well understood. But what could cause that pious dogma to be revised? Is there an equivalent discussion to that in 1960 of the endoplasmic reticulum? How does bad theology cease to be dogma in the one true Church?

What counts as "philosophical" for the paid BBC reporter is what counts as "sophomoric" elsewhere.

Kennedy's priest mentions Einstein, but not Weyl. Hermann Weyl had philosophic concerns that did not lead him to the Christian soul or the Christian God of his native northern Germany. What could have brought Weyl, Gamow or Hoyle home to the One True Church? Not that BBC broadcast or this BBC web posting.

Science does not have all the answers - but it can defend a few assertions, such as the importance of condoms. Social and medical science can make a strong case against the celibacy of priests. Ethics can make a strong case for female priests.

The core issue for me is whether a non-reductionist, non-materialist atheist such as myself could ever by evidence and argument alone convince a believer in the soul that evolved embodied mind is a biological-social-linguistic fact and that individual minds end with their respective biological lives. End of story. A Weyl, perhaps. A Pope Pius, no. And among the philosophers courting the Vatican: Charles Taylor, no; Alasdair MacIntyre, well, time is running out there.

Note: The Vatican has been active in observational astronomy for many years - which is why facts are important (but only if your theory is not a dogma.) In mathematical physics, Georges Lemaître was both a priest and the author of the Big Bang. But he was also an artillery officer in WWI - something which Bertrand Russell was not. I take more issue with the use of heavy field artillery as morally unjustifiable in any infantry conflict between France and Germany ( as much so as aerial bombardment, machine guns and poison gas ) than with his being ordained as a priest and continuing in that confession. Note that after that war, conscientious objectors in pious Canada lost their right to vote - they might as easily have lost the right to study at universities. With argument, vote was restored, mustard gas banned. But the dogma of the Trinity stands untouched in Italy (see the fate of Bernard Bolzano, centuries after Bruno.) COBE may have backed Georges Lemaître over Fred Hoyle, but the facts and theory did nothing to legitimate the views of either - not the Jesuits' God and not Hoyle's "a bit of God ... operating in all of us".

Squeak Smalltalk 4.2

2011-02-18T16:59:00.000-08:00

Squeak Smalltalk 4.2 is now available at http://squeak.org as a single bundle "app".

I find the more conventional IDE to be to my liking - a click on a menubar selection opens a window. On my Windows box this gave a much more conventional feel which, for better or worse, is now the common desktop look and likely an aid both to productivity and to ease of adoption.

This version is designed to be compatible with the coming "Cog" VM so additional performance improvements can be expected soon.

The main alternative 'squeak' is now http://pharo-project.org where Traits from Self have been brought into Smalltalk as an alternative to AOP and Mixins. The awaited Pharo 1.2 is expected soon.

Both Squeak and Pharo are compatible with the Seaside 3.0 web application framework.

Faber and Faber poetry page layouts

2011-02-17T05:39:00.000-08:00

For all his faults and flaws, Seamus Heaney, "Opened Ground", 1998, did not deserve the orphans and widows of his publisher.

Time and again a stanza is broken only to end on a partial page.

The publishers do not know that when a page will be a few lines short, either to increase the spacing between stanzas or to suppress the page number (if it is at the foot) or replace that number with a simple arrow or to place a discrete arrow in the right margin or ...

Anything of that sort must be better than these fractured verses.

Perhaps it could be offered as what one gains by purchasing the hard-covers edition (electronic publishing from smart markup rather than mere SGML should not have a problem in providing for that luxury.)

Cannot they not see that this manner of lazy page layout is as flawed as perverting the order of stanzas?

Not as bad, of course, as U Cal Press placing the titles of at least one poem on every page with no bracket style to indicate "here it ends" or "here it begins" - as though the page is not before the reader. Poetry is not fiction in paragraphs; poems are not pages of fiction.

And yet so much careful attention to wrappers, dust covers, jackets, ...

The Faber and Faber does also mis-number the preceding roman numeral pages in adding an extra blank page (appreciated by me for my notes) in doing the gathering for the bookbinding. Page -I and page 0 may be quite fitting for the funereal in Heaney.

Blue Brain, BBC and Global Minds: gullibility and hyperbole.

2011-02-10T04:22:00.000-08:00

In both GB and Europe the high-blown claims for what we may learn from computer neo-cortex simulators continue to be propagated by the web entertainment journalists at BBC. Here is a quote from web BBC:

The scientists say the project could lead, for example, to new ideas on how psychiatric disorders develop - illnesses such as autism, schizophrenia, and depression.

Here are my last few tweets at this point:

rshifflet G. Robert Shiplett
Brain simulator advocates do not propose to explain why some people ignore principled objections to their research proposals or faith or

rshifflet G. Robert Shiplett
Why not claim that your neo-cortex simulator may explain _________ (here you fill in the blank with any apparent dichotomy in behaviour.)

rshifflet G. Robert Shiplett
computer brain simulator builders claim that all they need is more money; theorists of AOP, stateful Traits, co-routines needed more time...

rshifflet G. Robert Shiplett
computer neo-cortex simulators suggest may explain schizophrenia - but why not explain 'tendency to exaggerate' or 'obsessed with computer'?

But before I stop mocking hyperbole in CS at unb.ca let me ask this: why is neither project working with the Vienna Freud society? If fuzzy neural nets are to learn to "emulate mind" from Freudian fanatics, why would not at least one of these projects have done the same?

What if both tried? One could use ego | id | super-ego and one could use eros | thanatos. Both could ignore cathexis, catharsis, resistance, introjection, repression ....

We could have a race to explain why most victims of bi-polar disorders are not cured by meditation alone or why schizophrenia [ here take your pick: strikes more at 19 than 13 or is so seldom violent paranoid or has SEEMED to have no single neural correlates.]

And by all means, do send more money. Those who are busy squaring the circle or building perpetual motion machines are also sometimes starved for cash. Perhaps if they were using millions of parts or drawing millions of lines they would get the attention of BBC "Tech".

But why the claim to explain schizophrenia? Why not atheism? Paedophilia? Witches?

What would really matter is to explain why most schizophrenics are not violent paranoiacs. Or not obsessed with building computer traffic simulators for crowds approaching the Roman Coliseum or wondering why "arena' would be used to name a building in which ice hockey is played - or being amused by really bad puns.

Yes, explain inveterate punning - it causes more annoyance to more people than schizophrenia. Believe me. Or I'll hold my breath until my brain turns blue. Unless you pay up ... Explain the willingness to take bribes, to turn a blind eye, and if nothing else, propose to explain the need to mock, to mock cruelly, to perseverate, to perdure in follies, to exaggerate, to fib.

signature, catchword and fuzzy neural networks: the hypebole of emulating mind

2011-02-08T06:45:00.000-08:00

There is a fracture in en.wikipedia.org which might give pause in any enthusiasm about the coming singularity or the use of AI by emergency management planners

While reading a rebound hardcover Fulke Greville on Philip Sidney I was struck by the word on an orphan line at the end of each page: that word matched the first word on the next verso or the next recto page.

This typographic practice in page layout is related to the task of gathering in bookbinding. It's only role as an aid to the reader is that it may have helped ensure that pagination of the book is correct.

The term 'gathering' has no link in the bookbinding article and the term 'catchword' is missing from the relevant articles.

The article on 'catchword' has no relevant "See Also" or other helpful link for a webcrawl.

Now what if I deliberately refrain from correcting this oversight? The current hyperbole concerning melding the social web with the data web might be tamed by more enthusiasts reading Cornelius Ryan's "A Bridge Too Far" with an eye to presuppositions [not following an order and Van Zwangen's 15th at the Schelde; Montgomery's innovation, chance, bad luck, logistics, failure, intention, compliance, risk, emergency management, command,collaboration,messaging,trust,folly,enthusiasm,slaughter.]

Then there is the idea that science is more fundamentally theory of error and measure than else [ but with a strategy for peers to expose liars, lies and frauds as much as falsehoods and fallacies.]

What measure shall we apply to this 'fracture' in wikipedia, this missing branch, failure to connect, and the attendant misinformation such as the quote selected for use in the 'catchword' article? Unintended misinformation recalled as explanation. Hmmm ...

Trivia: how to detect in Google Books the last book published in which catchwords were employed by the printer and bookbinder? Error? Metric? Estimate?

Inspired by hyperbole concerning fuzzy neural nets and 'holistic' computational 'ecosystems' in pseudo-computer science at unb.ca [ or, from simple glaucoma to wartime responses to unforeseeable emergencies as documented by Ryan for the Arnhem glider airborne debacle risk, the unexpected Ardennes counter-attack and the 2010-2011 "Jeopardy" inclusive or multi-paradigm strategy of IBM's "Watson".]

Communication. Logistics. Innovation. Improvisation. False belief. Risk. Evidential value. Connections.

Ivor Winters: the canon and Fulke Greville

Note: the canons of page layout

Innovation: the IBM "Jeopardy" meta-program strategy for "Watson" versus Watson Research and Winchester drives and Bell Labs "escape of COBOL" versus microwave background radiation. C.P. Snow on innovation in bi-plane tail slide and bombing civilians up to and including Wuerzburg [Würzburg].

Of interest: signature and foliation in differential geometry; confer: jet bundles and the space-time metric; Hermann Weyl

ObjectIcon, branching, success, failure, design strategies, text analysis, neglected options, co-routines, green threads. The cable ferry on the Rhine. Antwerp. Self and Strongtalk stranded or suppressed at Sun. Actor and Io.

Google Blogspot blogger labels or tagging limit: 200 characters and 20 tags. Gloss. Annotation. Pull quote. See more text. Detail. Map.

Compare this 'fracture' to noticing a distracting river on a text web page upon changing the magnification or 'zoom'.

Cisco hyperbole and other foolishness

2011-02-03T10:10:00.000-08:00

A recent web ad by Cisco asserts that robot interfaces are part of "pure research".

A Cisco vice-president in a long-running ad on MSNBC claims that the next generation will be able to see whatever they want, wherever they want. Will that generation be living on another planet? Apparently you don't need to know much history to predict the future.

Then there is the CNN headline to report that new planets have been found "in the Milky Way". Did they really think that we are spotting star wobbles in another galaxy? In the Andromeda Galaxy? The Whirlpool Galaxy?

You might as well report that more species of salt-water fish have been found - and that they live in the ocean. Or that more craters have been found on the moon - and that they are on the surface. Or that you don't need to know much to be licensed as a journalist under the law proposed in Quebec ...

Subverting a popular uprising: the role of goon squads in Bucharest [the miners]

2011-02-03T06:23:00.000-08:00

The Bucharest Lesson: bus in the goons [miners, in that case] and have a "revolution" in which the ruling apparatus remains unchanged and a farce of representative democracy.

That lesson was not lost on the Egyptian masters of the goon squad system.

And invoke respect for the father [the Prime Minister, Ahmed Shafiq, handling a journalist "scrum" today in Cairo (src: Nile TV interpreter).]

We need a new term for "police riot": a "goon riot".

June 15. 1990, The New York Times.

Ernst & Young audit at Leymann Brothers: software and GRC

2011-01-30T10:49:00.000-08:00

The BBC article on Davos 2011 lays a great deal of emphasis on Leymann Brothers failing.

But an earlier article on Ernst & Young is more to the point: but it still misses a critical point.

It is not just that there are so few global audit firms, it is also that more than one ( 1 of 4, 2 of 4, 3 of 4) use the same software vendor for audit.

This is not the same as all using Microsoft Excel. Spreadsheets as such are not designed for risk management and reporting. As with Enron, Leymann Brothers was a GRC failure: Governance, Risk and Compliance. It was not just fraud.

The problem begins all too often with what it takes to become a partner in one of the Big Four. An audit partner. These firms spit out a great many articling students, auditors and managers before one of them becomes a partner. This is not like a criminal law firm where a barrister is seem and heard in court as part of the record.

It has been said of justice in modern Bulgaria that it is often hard to tell who is acting as prosecutor, who as judge and who as defense - based on their actions. There is much more hope for justice in Bulgaria than for an end to problems in the global accounting firms.

Software can play a role here just as it can play a role in "following the money" in the more pedestrian variety of wrong-doing. But the audit software in use now is more "handy" than it is "smart". But what expert will review the design, maintenance and evolution of that software?

If Airbus and Boeing were using the same software for autopilots - and only equipped with one such system - an international aviation body would intervene. But this is audit. And we are dealing with some high flyers and egregious behavior.

Health care costs and financial risk management

2011-01-27T13:12:00.000-08:00

Once again MedAssets has claimed the KLAS #1 spot ( they acquired the company that held the spot.)

MedAssets likes to claim that they have "Cutting-Edge" solutions - by which they mean that you can use some of their modules in a web browser.

But what they cannot tell you is that any of the algorithms being used have a single patent or are the result of the work of a single PhD in Computer Science or related field. Nor can they point to a single peer-reviewed publication of a scientific nature.

This lies at the core of the high cost of health care: the medical field is the most backward in computing, more backward than insurance companies or university administration or the global audit firms.

There is a parallel in the 2008 financial crisis: the utter inadequacy of the risk managment software for both auditors, insurers and bankers - and that is a story which is not going to be told. Part of it can be investigated by looking at the lack of patents held by the the "leading" software vendor in that area, the lack of PhD's in their employ, and their practices of stifling competition through what I have termed "predatory partnerships".

Both fields have top software vendors acquired by large companies - but those "innovators" in software were accountants in both cases - and with an appalling lack of engineering staff.

Fundamentally, accountants do not understand computing as an applied science or as a branch of electrical engineering. They just don't get it. Important revolutions in computing were totally ignored by both niche leaders. Software is sold by "financial" folk to other "financial" folk.

Just try to imagine that the airlines were operating using aircraft developed without regard for wind tunnel results, air foil science and without those "leading vendors" hiring PhD's. Warfare prevented this: the early passenger aircraft are linked closely to air warfare and military engineering. That is not the case with software for either healthcare or financials with almost the sole exception of derivatives. Just check the hiring - read the open position descriptions as they appear advertised on the web.

The lessons learned in software at NASA have not been passed on to either the audit firms, the banks, the insurance companies or the healthcare providers.

In what is perhaps the most egregious folly, both major hospital systems and major health insurers use the self-same software. Oh - but it can now be used from a web browser, so it is "cutting edge". It is the patient's wallet that is slit open by the "bleeding edge".

To get just one clue, look at the Minnesota fiasco. Then look at the Leymann Brothers audit firm (could we let another global audit firm fail?) Ask one question: were they using the same audit software vendor as the failed Enron auditor? Ahem.

MN Google search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22HealthMatch%22+SSi+Albion+ACS+Minnesota

Win the Future: a flawed centrist speech, a flawed global vision

2011-01-27T04:45:00.000-08:00

Obama's second SOTU is being praised - but that same day a question was posed to the chair of his committee of economic advisors (CSPAN-3.)

One might ask whether the displaced Bushmen need jobs. After all, the diamond miners will have jobs. Did those Bushmen "lose" their jobs in being forcibly relocated? Should so many retirees in USA and Canada be in such low-paying jobs?

Consider Kenya and its coffee co-operatives. Is the aim to make Kenya number one? Is the objective "full employent in Kenya"? (The day after SOTU-2 Obama was in WI preaching "being number one" as the space-age challenge.

Per capita, America is the number one energy consumer. But we are told that the answer is more energy.

Consider DC current for our many devices. One innovation failure is that our homes are not cabled for low voltage DC. As a result, we heat our homes with transformers. Every cell phone sold, is another transformer.

In the race to #1 there is not always a clear winner. But suppose that Google does have the best, most innovative, search engine strategy. Suppose that Facebook does have the best social networking strategy (neither is obvious from the standpoint of innovation.) The question of the business model of each is simple: advertising.

When Obama remarked that corporate profits are up, he did not remark that this is consistent with low-paid low-benefit unsafe manufacturing jobs being in the throd world. It is. They are.

The US two-year tech colleges for IT are not teaching the innovations. A remarkably high percentage of their "grads" get jobs. Experienced older IT workers who have a proven track record as innovators are unemployed - a high percentage not mentioned by the sputnik-innovator-advocates.

Bill Gates was not an innovator. Period. He told egregious lies to Ricoh and IBM. Is that innovating?

Many American IT corp's have a history of suppressing innovation: Sun may have been one of the worst. Obama did not mention IBM, a true innovator of long-standing. He did not mention M.I.T. There is more to Boston that bio-tech.

The money government spends on education will be largely mis-spent except from the point of view of the re-election of Obama. But after his second-term, he is sure to turn his attention to the global.

A democratic and innovative China as #1 might ensure the long term stability and prosperity of America - that might be a win-win game. We do not know.

Germany as #1 in Europe is no more tha answer for Europe than is France as #1 - or a crime-ridden and corrupt Russia.

The USA should be be focussed on being the winner. That is too short-sighted. That is not a long-term vision.

If US life-expectancy remained lower than Norway or Sweden but world-wide life-expectancy for those over age 40 improved, would the US be the loser?

Recent science suggests that the perceived "own" group may limit the charity and altruism of most of us. Consider what a President Palin would mean in a North America with melted Arctic sea ice and a weak Canadian claim to the high arctic. Just ask yourself what the Teddy Roosevelt response would be if control of the high arctic were viewed as required to be #1 or to "win the future". But neither Canada nor Mexico nor Cuba found mention in SOTU #2.

Aside: will that 2 years of college get bright, illegal Latinos out of the low-paying jobs - such as teaching? Will the investment in IT mean another lost investment in a replacement system for the IRS?

The software skills needed for scheduling high-speed trains are not taught in most IT training colleges. Nor for scheduling buses. Nor for scheduling speeches. The number of IT grads from 4-year programs who can answer a simple question about costraints in programming is in the single digits. It is a fallacy is that innovation comes with the PhD. The words "post-doc" were not in the speech.

The neglect of electronic medical records in reducing the cost of healthcare was not mentioned. The dismal state of the software provided by the leading American innovator in healthcare pricing software is simply unknown to the public although the company was purchased by a publicly traded corporation. This is the software used by the most hospitals - and the same software used by the biggest health insurers. It was designed by an accountant. Innovative accounting has never been the answer.

The crisis in the accounting firm for Leyman Brothers passed without mention: the software used to track risk at that audit firm is on a codebase that I have had the misfortune to learn. Another failure in software innovation - by an accountant (in this case, an auditor.) The failed head of audit at Enron - a client - is now the head of audit at which great Chicago insurer? He remains their software client.

The two software suites dominating both those markets are from recognized "innovative" firms and yet neither shows any sign of having absorbed a major applied science innovation in CS more recent than 1973 in 2005 and 2009, respectively. The winners, each #1 in their niche, are part of the problem as they cater to industries notorious for not addressing their IT problems - and placing the cost on their customers premiums, industry-wide. Only an international board of inquiry of IT innovation experts reviewing actual code could demonstrate the extent of this infrastructure "challenge".

Universities are 10 to 15 years behind the innovators. Healthcare and insurance and banking (regardless of the derivatives-hype) are how mnay years behind the US universities?

Facile gab about innovation investments is not itself innovative or insightful. It is politically expedient.

Cisco advertises on the web that robotics bio-interfaces is "pure research". Advisors to the White House confound science and techniques in the same breath. No amount of such foolishness is well-advised. But a serious conversation in a public forum about IT failures and deficiencies is both over-due and unlikely. The relevant codebases are not open to public audit or confidential review.

That three of the more innovative programming languages are only recently UNICODE compatible, that RDF is only now coming to Drupal - these two simple facts will be unknown to the hip President with the BlackBerry and able to talk about String Theory and Game Theory.

The elephants in the room, low levels of personal savings and the Mortage Interest Deduction were not mentioned. That those with no savings could buy a house for no money down and use the deduction to get a better deal than renting is a fact and a fact that howls to be addressed. It has no voice.

Demagogue Issa

2011-01-25T12:28:00.000-08:00

Here is a bit on Darrell Issa who may consult and may confer in the name of oversight and reform. As slippery as an eel on Jan 25 in his first day as chairman. Now to go after the most corrupt White House ever.

Or is that the most confused due to Republican Senators' holds on White House appointments?

Huffington Post

2011-01-22T17:00:00.000-08:00

The arrival of Howard Fineman may have been an uptick for huffingtonpost.com but it still ranks below Fox News which almost has a Science link on its home page.

There is a Science page for HP but you have to look for it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/science

Here's a sample from today's page:

We have a problem. We can't go back to old-time religion in familiar ways, and we can't go on bowing down before the scientific method. What is a person to do?

What I suggest is the NYT Science pages as a place to hang a link.

Remember: "we can't go on bowing down before the scientific method." Oh, that would be which of Mill's idols?

I am working on a model of a browser for science feeds with some concept mapping and some annotation features as an alternative to what remains my best tool: OneNote.

If you have a package better than OneNote 2003 or 2007 or 2010, I would love to hear about it.

doppelgänger island

2011-01-17T09:18:00.000-08:00

So I'm swapping mistaken identity incidents with our Claire when it occurs to me that my doppelgänger in Victoria may have sometimes called in sick when I was not working a day-shift. On those days I was often downtown at a cafe, a bookstore, the library or walking the shoreline of the strait or bicycling to U Vic. On any day on which he called in sick, a fellow government employee might have seen him gadding about.

Transpose to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

"Excuse me, but isn't that James MacPherson from the Receivables Section?"

"Jinks MacPherson? Looks like him to me ... Now why would you be asking? - or would I be poking my nose where it don't belong?"

Animal Plant

2011-01-16T18:28:00.001-08:00

The Green Sea Slug that is part plant! My thanks to Sarah Beth and Brady for this tip!

Microsoft WebMatrix

2011-01-16T17:57:00.000-08:00

Although an install of Microsoft WebMatrix is free, it is not at all clear to me why I would want to install it for personal use. Do I want to use SQL Server ? I have Joomla, MySQL5, SQLite3, Moodle and WordPress now at my hosted site - which is running on shared linux - what advantage accrues to me by moving to Windows at my host? What could induce me to make that move?

But suppose that I have volunteered to set up a web site for a non-profit group. If I know enough to know what they need and that a hosted site will suffice, how is it that I would still need WebMatrix to accomplish the tasks involved?

Here is what they say:
Start from open source web applications, built-in web templates or just start writing code yourself

So, if in their words, I can just start writing code, why would I use WebMatrix? Is Silverlight now open-source? What they appear to be plugging is Visual Studio in the 2010 Express version and whatever we are supposed to call MS "Expression" [ possibly Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Web Professional ] They have one word right: "web" as in near invisible trap woven so as not to be noticed.

Is this how HTML5 will somehow appear to mean Microsoft HTML5 ?

"Dog Whistles" and Palin's crafted message: the simple code

2011-01-14T09:39:00.000-08:00

I disagree with Matt Lewis of Politics Daily.

Her evangelical listeners are very attuned to what she said about the "sentiment" of the "beautiful Catholic Mass" as she was raised a Roman Catholic and they are very aware of her choice of evangelical church. the bigotry it preaches as virtue in terms of the demonic, the Antichrist, its anti-science and its lack of ecumenical "sentiment".

And I would say that Pawlenty's handling of Jon Stewart indicates that he will be the candidate for the Republicans in 2012 ( I lived in MN during his tenure, although I was often working on Smalltalk software elsewhere in the USA.)

Shiplett Facebook: handguns in America

2011-01-14T09:12:00.000-08:00

I posted this at my Facebook page:

"I linked to the coalition to stop gun violence as myself a victim, December 21, 1995, Memphis, TN (Shelby County) - at which time I learned of the neurosurgery practices in Memphis from Dr. Patel (now Boston?) and his lovely spouse (from Cairo, IL) and the gunshot victims of Memphis and area. I was the third victim of violence that quarter (!) on that Smalltalk team at Fedex hub."

I was only taken down by two handguns to my head, stripped of my coat, sweater, watch, cash and wallet and then, in the dark under a staircase, in a gated-community into which deputy sheriffs feared to enter alone in a vehicle, only hundreds of yards from the Germantown border - forced to beg for my life. It was a routine event for Shelby County in the no-man's land between white Germantown and dysfunctional Memphis. I was lucky. Only the younger boy wore a mask. Saying to a black, female manager at Fedex that my attackers were black teenagers resulted in my contract being terminated by Fedex. But when the V-P was pistol-whipped, Fedex moved that project out closer to Germantown. The sole black members of the Germantown Episcopal church of St George were the family members of a black female executive at Fedex: a lawyer residing in Germantown.

That is not the Memphis of the tours for BB King and Elvis Presley fans - and in fairness, Cleveland north of Case Western and Cleveland Clinic is much worse and seems much more hopeless.

This is Jory Aebly's account of his ordeal: he, too, was ordered onto his knees at gunpoint, but not under a staircase, in the dark. When the taller one put a round in the chamber when they first confronted me on the walk up to my door, I had seen a blue spark as he but a round into the chamber of his nickel-plated semi-automatic pistol. I still feel the barrel against my temple as they told me to beg for my life. They had looked in my coat pocket and found money which I had forgotten was there - and they sounded very mad that if they had not taken the coat, they would not have had that money.

It was a rare below-zero night in Memphis: when they were gone and I called for help (my keys were in that coat) neighbours called out to tell me to shutup. An immigrant from Pakistan, a doctor, came to my aid. The County Sheriff's people left me to shiver, no one offered a coat or a blanket. Later that night I followed their trail across the lawn and recovered the scarf which had fallen from my coat. This, the detective, had not bothered to do. One of them could have dropped his own wallet getting into their car, and the detective would have been none the wiser. When likely garage door muggers were arrested, no detective called me to try to identify the one without the mask, no one had me look at mugshots. Welcome to Memphis. You are in Shelby County, the land of John Grisham and the Hollywood movies and desperate poverty, just mile north of northern Mississippi and its endemic poverty. Police corruption. Mayoral corruption. Enduring racism. Senator Ford. The part of the country where few walk and no one walks or jogs at night. Where police ask you what you are doing in a neighbourhood based on the colour of your skin ( I did not believe this until I took a wrong turn leaning downtown after the last concert ever at Frank Hall - the officer told me to lock my doors and only to stop at red lights as if at a stop sign until back on Poplar. It had taken only one wrong turn, just as Charles and I would later make one wrong turn leaving a Chinese seafood restaurant near downtown Cleveland.

And for the morbidly curious, not, I did not have to change my underwear. I slept on the doctor's couch. I changed apartments the next day. And the next time I called about prowlers, the deputy waited for backup before driving onto the grounds of our fenced community. Once I did see community action in that modern Memphis townhome community: a lady had seen a snake and the deputy was out in the dark with his gun drawn, other men emerged with baseball bats, others with golf clubs. She was not told to shut up because people were trying to sleep. People fear snakes. Violence - that they are in denial about.

Crime in Cleveland, OH: Plain Dealer
Crime in Memphis, TN: memphiscrime
Has Memphis changed? ScoreCard
Minneapolis crime: http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/police/crime-statistics/codefor/

I now live in a very safe Canadian city, Fredericton, NB, where people of both sexes walk and jog at night. It is not problem-free, but it is relatively free of handguns. Organized crime may be involved in their typical industries on the models of Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo and Boston, but are not obvious, that is, not visible in their favoured hang-outs. Notable in Memphis: residential arson by those with insurance policies which had a temporary housing clause, but not utterly unlike restaurant arson elsewhere in Canada. The most visible criminals are meth vendors at King's Place and its bus stop; electronic locks can be seen on some refurbished homes near the downtown. The local hazard is falling ice from eaves, not muggings (except late Saturday night after bars close.)

W.S. Merwin and a poem for the year to come

2011-01-13T06:05:00.000-08:00

As an atheist with a concern for poetry I was glad to hear the Tucson evening end with a poem by W.S. Merwin. But I did not like the choice of poem.

To my surprise, I find this morning that I had left a bookmark for that poem in my copy of "Present Company" (from that lovely bookstore at Venice Beach.)

The problem was in the reading. Perhaps just anyone can read from the Old Testament, but the President of U AZ, Tucson could not read that poem.

Given that a real native opened the ceremony, why not invite a real poet to read the closing poem? A poet who reads aloud.

When I read my own work aloud, I try to start by reading first from work which I admire, work which someone in the audience may know and appreciate, work which someone may later turn to even if they do not turn to my own.

It is not an ecumenical evening if the priest does not read from what the Buddha is believed to have said, if the rabbi cannot find some wise words in a letter from Saul ofTarsus, if the evangelical pastor cannot find some words in some address by a pope of the church they so demonize. This I believe.

Guns Drawn, the Proud Americans

2011-01-12T13:05:00.000-08:00

BBC says that Rep Trent Franks says what was needed last Saturday in Tucson was at least one more gun.

Where was Gabe Zimmerman's gun? Why was it not drawn and cocked with a round in the chamber? He was her interface to the gun-toting public!

Why not an actual posse, masked, dressed in black? A 50-cal on the roof of the Hummer?

Then there is Rush Limbaugh. The real leader of the non-majority "majority of Americans". Make a case for decency? One notable evangelist in that area has abandoned his efforts. But liberty and free speech is only on home soil - what about travel as a deterrent to hate speech?

Great Britain has banned Kansas lawyer Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Phelps dynasty (even with her 11 children, Phelps is no Mia Farrow) so perhaps we can hope for a British travel ban on Glenn Beck for starters ... New Zealand? Australia? Forget Canada - they will "want to follow America's lead" ... and not that of Britain. It's all about the climate, you see ... political or otherwise. When Canadians look east, they can see those low, dark clouds rolling in on their right - make that, 'the far right' - or is it now 'the hard right' ...

Oh, I forgot - a White House expert in the Budget Office thinks that foreign travel is an indicator of possibly treasonous dispositions, inclinations ... or was it mood? Emotion? Maybe just a feeling ... oh, right, grumpiness. Wasn't Morrow a little grumpy? Yes, but he didn't work handling official secrets, such as America'a really, really big diplomatic secret that the US Ambassador in Tripoli thinks that the leader of Libya might be slightly unbalanced ...

Cables you say? I thought we had gone beyond cable!?! Stop using the telegraph! The enemy has a book on Morse code! But who leaked it ?!? Lynch the commie fag!

Huckabee's Confidant Execution of Whom?

2011-01-12T12:34:00.000-08:00

Here is a link on likely US-presidential candidate Huckabee speaking with confidence about execution as the only just remedy for the leaking of embarrassing cables: HP.

Don't forget that he is also a good Christian minister and the young man in question could easily be from a colleague's congregation. Like his pappy, Huckabee lays down the law. Now will that be by hanging or firing squad? And in time of crisis? Keep a list and Round'em Up! (worked in Canada in 1970.)

Here is a report on another bit of Huckabee: a joke?

Canada's Tom Flanagan now regrets his call to assassinate Julian Assange, or so he says. But he would have settled for "disappeared". Does he know which side of the southern continent Chile is on and which side Argentina is on? But this is not the Canada of Diefenbaker and Pearson: this is Steven Harper's Canada.

Who else called for the murder of the Australian citizen? What if General Motors had wanted to "disappear" Ralph Nader back when he was a "job-killer"? ( A Canadian hero worked with Nader, by the way ... Ken Dryden.)

What if Three Mile Island or Love Canal had been designated a "State Secret"? Would we be calling for the execution of NYT journalists, editors? Hells-bells, everyone knows the Washington Post is a hotbed of treason! Elitist treason! What America needs is a Cultural Revolution! Put those elitists to work in the cotton fields of Arkansas!

And then there is the real threat to the American way of life: atheists. Homosexual atheists. Socialist homosexual atheists. Lesbian atheistic socialists. Arm the militias! America is in imminent peril! Round up the Japs and Chinks! And most of those Polacks at Catholics like that Mafiosi, "Jack" Kennedy - who was actually born in Ireland, you know ...

And Huckabee? This Baptist minister from Hope, Arkansas came in behind McCain and Romney in 2008. Everyone thinks of him as a likable guy. Folksy charm. A real populist. Not one of the elite.

Yet Americans like to see an elite serve as the captains of aircraft carriers, as their NASA astronauts. In those cases, Americans are less likely to advocate for plain fools.

( Of course, in Canada in 1970 there were bombs, kidnappings, killings, organized domestic terrorists - and the ability to suspend civil liberties ... )

Now about organized crime in Niagara, N.Y., maybe we could just sit down an talk to those misguided entrepreneurs, right Mike? There's nothing Un-American about it - they're just responding to a commercial threat from the Canadian tourist industry. Hell, those Falls probably should have belonged to Uncle Sam in the first place ... now what would Kit Carson have done?

Sarah Palin and the rhetoric of Evil

2011-01-12T10:36:00.000-08:00

"a single evil man"

This follows a key statement: she agreed with the "sentiment" expressed at the "beautiful Catholic Mass". Her evangelical followers hear the message about the "innocent" just as they hear "sentiment" and "beautiful" in relation to a Catholic mass.

It is not that she contrives to speak in code: she has spoken to the public in these terms for so long that it is likely now her natural bent.

But take a moment to remember that other shattered life: a young man in the grip of delusions, having fallen prey to a mental illness. He was not yet a man in any of the fullest sense of that term, as his family well knew.

Let me give you evil men: those who conspire with others to commit murder for private gain and to maintain personal power. Step-fathers who rape and then murder their step-daughters yet show no sign of psychosis themselves. Ex-husbands who plot the kidnapping and murder of their former wives.

The assassin was not a single evil man: he was a member of a community with inadequate mental health services and extremely lax gun laws.

America is not exceptional in its political life: it stands with England, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland ...

Some truly evil demagogues have also had speech writers who knew how to turn a phrase.

If you are not acquainted with the doctrine of evil of her chosen evangelical church with its brand of biblical literalism, now would not be a bad time to learn who this particular demagogue is. Become acquainted with their views on Catholics, Jews and mental illness. Then listen to a great Polish-American Rabbi from Milwaukee who is also a renowned psychiatrist. It is a way to gauge the distance between a leader and a demagogue, an imperfect mind and a defective mind.

Canadian poetry

2011-01-12T10:12:00.000-08:00

I have added new site index page which puts in one place both some Google book previews and some of the home pages of Canadian poetry organizations and other useful sites.

Honda technology and the Leap of Faith

2011-01-12T08:02:00.000-08:00

Honda's robotic technology ad which you may of seen running on the internet uses an expression not usually associated with applied science: "leap of faith".

Now what did Kierkegaard think of the "omnibus" on the streets of Copenhagen?

Perhaps the Honda robots can be used as ushers in mega-churches to pass the collection plates and count the cash after the faithful hear the benediction that they go forth to consume and to prosper.

Robots and the "salto mortale" may be next in the rhetoric of the unrehearsed company cheerleader catching our ear with some favoured association.

Perhaps Toyota can talk about their beliefs next ...

"Leap of Faith" ... not even marketing is based on that notion.

Blood Libel and Palin

2011-01-12T07:31:00.000-08:00

Whoever gave that demagogue the advice to use or to retain that term in a prepared address to her followers? That is not just a way of speaking; that is not just a rhetorical trope. Was she libeled? Was she even defamed?

From the mouth or ghost-writer of Glenn Beck, all right. An adversive right-wing nutter will mouth such things. But from a political leader who inspires an entire political movement in a western representative democracy?

There are fools and then there are fools who just don't get it. The term leaves her one step from the Westboro Baptists - so at least she spoke with respect the the mass held for victims and mourners, even if that respect is not to be found in the teachings of her own evangelical church in Alaska. But neither was it to be found in Obama's chosen church in Chicago. The murdered federal judge was a Catholic who came there from mass, the congresswoman is a Jew. The demagogue has never disavowed the teachings on Catholics and Jews of her chosen church and pastor in her Alaskan home town. Or did she hear this term used by her father, her husband Todd, an advisor or some fellow extremist?

Would she but return to sports journalism where she could try to learn relevant facts and rules.

Is Palin aware of the "blood libel" which induced a pogrom in post-WW II Poland shortly after the end of the war even after the holocaust? Is she aware that the perpetrators were Catholics - naive believers in the "one true faith" in which she was raised by her parents and which she has disavowed?

Could she really believe that a paranoid schizophrenic, aged 22, with no previous violence or convictions, is an "evil man" ? Is mental illness the work of the devil as taught in her chosen Biblical-literalist faith? Does she really believe that pogroms were not a social and cultural and religious phenomenon?

Does she believe that even as a sports reporter, she was not reporting on a football game or basketball game that was a social phenomenon with a social and economic history and which plays an agonistic function in the workings of America as a nation? That places her libertarian views far beyond those of Glenn Beck in the extremist dimension.

note: her facebook stats today:

@SarahPalinUSA

914Tweets

110Following

371,361Followers

12,344Listed

Here's CBS editor-in-chief of CBSNews.com, Daniel Farber on Palin's "presidential" moment.

BBC Glock

2011-01-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

"But surely - and forgive me for being blindingly obvious here - the elephant in the room is the astonishing ease with which a 22-year-old man whose behaviour had caused alarm in his community college, had question marks over his mental stability and who lingered in the darker recesses of the web, was allowed to walk into a shop and buy a gun. And not just any old gun. But a Glock semi-automatic, a weapon designed arguably only for hunting humans.

On some issues, like alcohol consumption and drugs, America is - on the whole - strictly suspicious of the individual's ability to be behave sensibly. But when it comes to lethal weapons, this country is astonishingly permissive and trusting. We are told over and over again that it's the person that kills, not the gun. In the case of Jared Lee Loughner and his semi-automatic Glock, that is clearly nonsense.

In Arizona, the political debate has been particularly heated. But this is also a state where students and teachers are allowed to carry concealed weapons to class. Ironically, this is a freedom which Representative Gabrielle Gifford favoured. The inflamed passions of American politics are unpleasant. But the ability of some deeply troubled individuals to purchase lethal weapons must surely cause alarm. However this aspect of the tragedy has been little debated since the weekend, which to many outside America is frankly baffling."

BBC's Matt Frei

There is, however, reason to think that "heated" does not correctly characterize the rhetoric of Gabrielle Gifford's Republican opponent in 2010. And he was only one example among many from Florida, Nevada and elsewhere.

The landed gentry who launched the American experiment did not have the kind of divine foresight attributed to them by those now worshipping at the altar of the Constitution - not in that flawed document and not in its Second Amendment.

Wikipedia's Beck

2011-01-10T16:23:00.000-08:00

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Beck QUOTE:
"
Political views

Beck has described himself as a conservative with libertarian leanings.[72] Among his core values Beck lists personal responsibility, private charity, the right to life, freedom of religion, limited government, and family as the cornerstone of society.[73] Beck also believes in low national debt, and has said "A conservative believes that debt creates unhealthy relationships. Everyone, from the government on down, should live within their means and strive for financial independence."[74] Beck supports individual gun ownership rights and is against gun control legislation.[75]

Beck believes that there is a lack of evidence that human activity is the main cause of global warming.[76] He also says there is a legitimate case that global warming has, at least in part, been caused by mankind, and has tried to do his part by buying a home with a "green" design.[77] He also views the American Clean Energy and Security Act as a form of wealth redistribution, and has promoted a petition rejecting the Kyoto Protocol.[78]

Countering progressivism
"What’s the difference between a communist or socialist and a progressive? Revolution or evolution? One requires a gun and the other eats away slowly."
— Glenn Beck, keynote address at the February 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference[79][80]

Glenn Beck's progressive "Tree of Revolution" chalk board, from the September 18, 2009, episode of his television show. The "roots" of the tree (from L to R) are made up Che Guevara, Woodrow Wilson, and Saul Alinsky, while the "trunk" is the Students for a Democratic Society and Cloward–Piven strategy. Comprising the "money leaves" of the tree (from L to R) are Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Wade Rathke, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Dale Rathke, President Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, Valerie Jarrett, Apollo Alliance, Van Jones, Leo Gerard, Carl Pope, Ruben Aronin, and Jeff Jones.[81]

During his 2010 keynote speech to Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Beck wrote the word "progressivism" on a chalkboard and declared, "This is the disease. This is the disease in America", adding "progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution!"[79][80] According to Beck, the progressive ideas of men such as John Dewey, Herbert Croly, and Walter Lippmann, influenced the Presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson; eventually becoming the foundation for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.[79] Beck believes that such progressivism infects both main political parties and threatens to "destroy America as it was originally conceived."[79] In Beck’s book Common Sense, he argues that "progressivism has less to do with the parties and more to do with individuals who seek to redefine, reshape, and rebuild America into a country where individual liberties and personal property mean nothing if they conflict with the plans and goals of the State."[79]

A collection of progressives whom Beck has referred to as "Crime Inc", comprise what Beck contends is a clandestine conspiracy to take over and transform America.[82][83][84] Some of these individuals include Cass Sunstein, Van Jones, Andy Stern, John Podesta, Wade Rathke, Joel Rogers and Francis Fox Piven.[82][85] Other figures tied to Beck's "Crime Inc" accusation include Al Gore, Franklin Raines,[86] Maurice Strong, George Soros,[87] John Holdren and President Barack Obama.[83] According to Beck, these individuals already have or are surreptitiously working in unison with an array of organizations and corporations such as Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae, ACORN, Apollo Alliance, Tides Center, Chicago Climate Exchange, Generation Investment Management, Enterprise Community Partners, Petrobras, Center for American Progress, and the SEIU; to fulfill their progressive agenda.[83][87] In his quest to root out these "progressives", Beck has compared himself to Israeli Nazi hunters, vowing on his radio show that "to the day I die I am going to be a progressive-hunter. I’m going to find these people that have done this to our country and expose them. I don’t care if they’re in nursing homes."[20]

Historian Sean Wilentz has denounced Beck's progressive-themed conspiracy theories and "gross historical inaccuracies", countering that Beck is merely echoing the decades-old "right-wing extremism" of the John Birch Society.[88] According to Wilentz, Beck's "version of history" places him in a long line of figures who have challenged mainstream political historians and presented an inaccurate opposing view as the truth, stating:

Glenn Beck is trying to give viewers a version of American history that is supposedly hidden. Supposedly, all we historians — left, right and center — have been doing for the past 100 years is to keep true American history from you. And that true American history is what Glenn Beck is teaching. It's a version of history that is beyond skewed. But of course, that's what Beck expects us to say. He lives in a kind of Alice in Wonderland world, where if people who actually know the history say what he's teaching is junk, he says, 'That's because you're trying to hide the truth.'[88]

Conservative David Frum, the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, has also spoken of Beck's propensity for negationism, remarking that "Beck offers a story about the American past for people who are feeling right now very angry and alienated. It is different enough from the usual story in that he makes them feel like they’ve got access to secret knowledge."[20]

Ideological influences

Political and historical

"The old American mind-set that Richard Hofstadter famously called the paranoid style – the sense that Masons or the railroads or the Pope or the guys in black helicopters are in league to destroy the country – is aflame again, fanned from both right and left ... No one has a better feeling for this mood, and no one exploits it as well, as Beck. He is the hottest thing in the political-rant racket, left or right."

— David Von Drehle, Time Magazine[28]

An author with ideological influence on Beck is W. Cleon Skousen [emphasis added] (1913–2006), a prolific conservative political writer, American Constitutionalist and faith-based political theorist.[89][90] As an anti-communist supporter of the John Birch Society,[91] and limited-government activist,[92] Skousen, who was Mormon, wrote on a wide range of subjects: the Six-Day War, Mormon eschatology, New World Order conspiracies, even parenting.[92] Skousen believed that American political, social, and economic elites were working with Communists to foist a world government on the United States.[79] Beck praised Skousen's "words of wisdom" as "divinely inspired", referencing Skousen's The Naked Communist[93] and especially The 5,000 Year Leap (originally published in 1981),[92] which Beck said in 2007 had "changed his life".[92] According to Skousen's nephew, Mark Skousen, Leap reflects Skousen's "passion for the United States Constitution", which he "felt was inspired by God and the reason behind America’s success as a nation."[94] The book is touted by Beck as "required reading" to understand the current American political landscape and become a "September twelfth person".[92] Beck authored a foreword for the 2008 edition of Leap and Beck's on-air recommendations in 2009 propelled the book to number one in the government category on Amazon for several months.[92] In 2010, Matthew Continetti of the conservative Weekly Standard criticized Beck's conspiratorial bent, terming him "a Skousenite."[79] Additionally, Alexander Zaitchik, author of the 2010 critical book Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, which features an entire chapter on "The Ghost of Cleon Skousen",[95] refers to Skousen as "Beck's favorite author and biggest influence", while noting that he authored four of the ten books on Beck's 9-12 Project required-reading list.[96]

In his discussion of Beck and Skousen, Continetti also stated that one of Skousen's works "draws on Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope (1966), which argues that the history of the 20th century is the product of secret societies in conflict",[79] noting that in Beck's novel The Overton Window, which Beck describes as "faction" (fiction based on fact), one of his characters states "Carroll Quigley laid open the plan in Tragedy and Hope, the only hope to avoid the tragedy of war was to bind together the economies of the world to foster global stability and peace."[79]

Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz postulates that alongside Skousen, Robert W. Welch, Jr., founder of the John Birch Society, is a key ideological foundation of Beck's worldview.[97] According to Wilentz:

The popularity of Beck’s broadcasts, has brought neo-Birchite ideas to an audience beyond any that Welch or Skousen might have dreamed of ... He (Beck) attacks all the familiar bogeymen: the Federal Reserve System (which he asserts is a private conglomerate, unaccountable to the public); the Council on Foreign Relations (born of a "progressive idea" to manipulate the media in order to "let the masses know what should be done"); and a historical procession of evildoers, including Skousen’s old target Colonel House and Welch’s old target Woodrow Wilson. His sources on these matters, quite apart from Skousen’s books, can be unreliable. (For example) on September 22nd, 2010, amid a diatribe about House, Beck cited a passage from Secrets of the Federal Reserve, by Eustace Mullins. The book, commissioned in 1948 by Ezra Pound, is a startlingly anti-Semitic fantasy of how a Jewish-led conspiracy of all-powerful bankers established the Federal Reserve in service of their plot to dominate the world.[97]

Other books that Beck regularly cites on his programs are Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s A Patriot's History of the United States, and Burt Folsom Jr.’s New Deal or Raw Deal.[79] Beck has also urged his listeners to read The Coming Insurrection, a book by a French Marxist group[79] discussing what they see as the imminent collapse of capitalist culture.[98]

In addition, on June 4, 2010, Beck endorsed Elizabeth Dilling's 1936 work The Red Network: A Who's Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots, remarking "this is a book, The Red Network, this came in from 1936. People — (Joseph) McCarthy was absolutely right ... This is, who were the communists in America."[99] Beck was criticized however by an array of people, including Menachem Z. Rosensaft and Joe Conason, who noted that Dilling was a proud anti-semite and Nazi sympathizer.[100][101][102]
"
END QUOTE

My favourite article in WP is that on the Gray Jay - but this one, like many others which I would prefer not to have to read, brings many elements and references into one accessible page. [And yes, my mixed American and Canadian spelling is deliberate.]

Glenn Beck

2011-01-10T16:14:00.000-08:00

'We cannot as a nation survive much longer. We must take a page from our own history at the Alamo and “draw a line in the sand.” We must decide who we are, what we are capable of and look to the heavens to chart our course. Do we return to the ideas of the past or do we continue West to the yet unrealized and unfulfilled promises laid out in our Founding ideals? We must choose as individuals and then put those choices into action."
http://www.glennbeck.com/2011/01/04/glenn-beck-fundamental-transformation/

"We cannot as a nation survive much longer." By "we" he means the USA. Not Sudan. Not Pakistan.

But he is not an extremist masquerading as a news commentator. The people of Vermont and Minnesota, debating questions of taxation, entitlement and services, can draw what lesson from the Alamo? Why not draw our lesson from the first time Kit Carson conquered California (oops, where is that Declaration of War?)

If we continue "west", do we not arrive in Beijing or North Korea?

" the yet unrealized and unfulfilled promises laid out in our Founding ideals" - this could mean anything - but it does sound as though there is cause for getting down that antique musket, some flints and dry powder ...

But this is not some nut case pandering to the worst in people through network radio and network television. He's just an entertainer. By the way, GB has it that the 2011 Arizona assassin "chose" to be a paranoid schizophrenic. That will comes as news to a great many Americans struggling with a 19-to-21 year-old child diagnosed with schizophrenia and the few with grown children stricken with a paranoid variant of what is a disease with a genetic component.

I grant that Rachel Maddow can be tendentious - but Glenn Beck is not mouthing extremist rhetoric. The nation is in peril: we must act! He's only being reasonable. Now let's check those gold futures ...

poems poesis

2011-01-10T09:38:00.000-08:00

Started an new entry point or "aule" to poems.aule-browser.com at poems-poesis.blogspot.com

Not all of the poems will be presented in the Curl web content language: some will be in minimalist HTML formatted as, e.g.,

a line

a line

a line

and other minor efforts to leave poetry readable when being annotated or edited.

Simulating Fools

2011-01-09T10:43:00.000-08:00

Where is GigaText when we need them?! We need to simulate that as well! A happy people do not blog about technology failures; rather, they laud and sing hymns to technology break-throughs! Pierced with the arrows of technical insight!

Simulate everything - especially the sound of millions down the drain ...

And don't forget those happiness metrics and social networking tag indices ... and simulating the interest world-wide in which individuals are being simulated tracking the world simulator's versimilitude ...

Let's start be simulating Iowa. No, to get that right we first need to simulate the United States - let's start there. And to be ready for the IPO, let's start by simulating 2014 first and then work back to 2011 if our web hits justify the expense ...

In fairness, this as deen on BBC Technology page and not the sci/env page where some sanity is present (so CNN has no such rubric.)

Favourite science web quote of the past week: the last super-nova in the Milky Way occurred 600 years ago.

Runner-up: man who submits data anomaly credited with discovering 4 gas giant exo-planets without a telescope (and which amateur telescope might he otherwise have used?) Discovery attribution peer-evaluated by ....

Let me see ... kid discovers body (says there is a new lumpy area in the woods and Dad digs it up but stops at first sight of what could be part of a skull) ; forensics team identifies body as that of X - so kid discovered X without use of what? Their gas injection spectroscopy machine? Their DNA gel sheets? Dental xrays? Tweezers?

In the running: Vultures as spies; spy agency sharks in the Red Sea.

Mental Health and violent acts in America

2011-01-09T06:58:00.000-08:00

This is the US mental health link mentioned in connection with the shootings in Tucson: NMHA.

The proposed DSM-5 manual for mental health professionals is found in wikipedia here. Note the change from the DSM-IV Roman numeral to arabic numeral 5 in the acronym.

A Slate article reports the six dimensions for DSM-V diagnoses as negative emotionality, introversion, antagonism, disinhibition, compulsivity, and schizotypy. Intent to do harm to a public figure not of ones personal acquaintance was not statistically useful in their current approach - let alone murderous intent without cause. The model of 'disinhibition', 'antagonism' and 'compulsivity' is not consistent with 'intent', planning and 'action' in any obvious way because the view is fundamentally one of learning, behavior and physiology. Even foolish and simplistic political notions have no obvious place in this psychiatric approach in which language and cognition are secondary to behavior patterns and neurotransmitters. Anti-social behavior becomes a set of high numbers on some 5 or 6 of these dimensions.

But someone in the White House thinks that these diagnoses can be used to root out possible whistle-blowing traitors who are more interested in others (foreigners) than the American State - and that official's delusions we would call what on our own dimensions for the stupidity of fools with official titles and official bulletins? Talk about 'family secrets' ... and the US government seems to have so many on so many levels. Maybe if unnamed US Senators were not blocking so many appointments, a few of these nutters would be reigned in and better heads prevail.

Quote:
"

Do you use psychiatrist and sociologist to measure:
Relative happiness as a means to gauge trustworthiness?
Despondence and grumpiness as a means to gauge waning trustworthiness

"

Question: sociology and individual loyalty assessment - let's look for that science for 'identifying whistle-blowers before they leak'. Perhaps in some old speeches of a Senator Joe?

Note it is not about 'how' or 'should' but 'do'. "Do you ask your employees if they discuss wrong-headed policies in which we persist despite no good science or results?"

BBC link.

Zweite Elegie

2011-01-08T07:13:00.000-08:00

I added the second of the Duino Elegies at aule-browser.

This page is also in minimalist HTML so that the source can be copied with ease to create a new page.

The minimal markup has been made as unobtrusive as possible: the BR elements are aligned to the right so that even as raw HTML the page is readable for uses such as adding translation snippets and other annotations.

Joel Hauserman photographer

2011-01-08T05:29:00.000-08:00

Cleveland photographer Joel Hauserman declined to share a photograph of his via the internet.

He has a point - I had not provided him with a secure eyes-only/no-copy/no-forward viewer as an alternative to email or browser.

The photograph is from a series, itself a work in progress.

[also to be continued ...]

Duineser Elegien / Duino Elegies / poetry markup

2011-01-07T08:43:00.000-08:00

Over at aule-browser I have placed a page with the first elegy from Duino Elegies.

The German text is in a minimal HTML layout so that you can create you own web page with notes.

The layout is not as useful or minimal as I can offer in Curl, but it seems useful.

notes: die findigen Tiere [...] in der gedeuteten Welt perhaps as in the Adamic naming of the animals of the field ( the passage is followed by the Baum; cp opening of the first of the Sonnets to Orpheus.)

Alternative markup:

stanza[1] line[-3] words["noch"] style["spaced-letters"]

but this placed in a separate 'markup-style' file included by the poem viewer/internet resource browser and NOT in the cleanly formatted text.

Inline markup dates from paper publishing, slow computers and conventional programming languages.