I am … unhindered by talent

Café Scientifique wasn’t the only excellent event on the schedule last night. As part of the 2005 Banned Book Week our fine library hosted a reading last night from various banned books. WeatherGirl, Sub-Evil Boy, and I hoofed it over there ASAP after Café Scientifique wrapped up and enjoyed a pleasantly subversive end to a busy evening.

We missed the first 10 minutes or so, coming on a nice (if overly long) reading from The lion, the witch, and the wardrobe. There were then readings from a whole host of sources which had been banned at one point or another, including some Shel Silverstein poetry, Gone with the wind, Joyce’s Ulysses, and a short bit from Harry Potter and the goblet of fire that was chosen, introduced, and read quite nicely by Sub-Evil himself.

A definite highlight, though, was a wonderful poem Dave shared entitled “Scab sandwich”. His father apparently composed this gem and penned it in a friend’s school science book back in the day, and when it was discovered at the end of the year when they returned their books, the teacher was sufficiently grossed out that he had that copy of the book removed from circulation. Unfortunately I can’t quote the poem from memory, but we’ll try to get Dave to pass it along. For now, suffice it to say that Sub-Evil thought it was truly hilarious…

Growing up in Texas, me and book banning go way back. Like the time my school district ordered several dozen perfectly good, brand spanking new dictionaries destroyed. These had been sent by publishers as evaluation copies but were discovered to have “bad words” in them. The review commitee apparently didn’t notice that they were in fact the same “bad words” that filled the dictionaries that were currently in use in our schools. Craziness of a high order. And then there was the time that in a fit of proto-blogging back in the days of Usenet I went off on a long rant on this subject that (through no efforts of my own) later ended up on rec.funny and can still be found on their archives. Ain’t life strange?

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As almost immediately reported in Pharyngula, the Café Scientifique concept had it’s Morris debut last night at Common Cup Coffee Shop. It was an excellent evening, and big congrats to all those that helped pull it together!

The turnout was indeed wonderfully strong. It was even a bit overwhelming for that space, but far better to have a small space packed than a big space that looks empty with the same number of people. The audience was, however, pretty university heavy, and most of that from the Division of Science and Math as well. There were exceptions, of course, but they tended to prove the rule rather than weaken it. I suspect this is at some level “the way it will be”, but it would be cool if this grew to include a broader audience.

Our speaker, Keith Brugger, did a nice job with a big subject (how we measure past global climate change), and did an excellent job of setting the stage for future Cafés. Being first is not easy, and I think he got us off to an fine start.

I’m not the best judge of how much sense “Jane and Joe Public” made of it all. Sub-Evil Boy followed much of it, and asked a question at the end that made Keith really happy, but he did find it a bit long and academic for his tastes. It will be interesting to see what WeatherGirl says about it all.

Having now seen one I have a much better sense of what the game is about and could probably make a much more focussed suggestion on a possible topic for a talk. Two things currently come to mind. First would be a talk on (modern) cryptography and how that relates to things like secure on-line communications (encryption and digital signatures) and (if I was feeling ambitious) digital voting. The second is a talk on the challenges and problems with correctness in large software systems, trying to give a sense of why engineering a major piece of software is both similar to but distinctly different from engineering a large “physical” project like a bridge or an airplane. This latter one might be nice to do with someone from physics like Len Keeler where we could do some demonstrations of things like the principle of continuous change in physical systems and constrast that to the tendency of digital systems to be wildly discontinuous. It looks like their schedule for the year is largely worked out, though, so I think I have plenty of time to think about it and get feedback on ideas.

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WeatherGirl’s once again caught up with me and for another nine months we’ll be the same age (in years) :-).

I made her a “Make tea not war” shirt for her birthday that’s looking pretty cool, but more on that later.

Best birthday wishes for a wonderful woman!

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Just caught Autechre’s remix “Adverse Camber” on the 24 July 2005 Brainwashed podcast (yeah, I’m a lot of behind) and it’s really cool. This is based on Tortoise’s song “Ten-Day Interval” from their album TNT. It’s long and atmospheric, but rhythmically really interesting and not dull or repetitious. It would be interesting to hear the original. I like the funky little noises at the end; they sound vaguely like processed recordings of something like a pencil bouncing on piano strings.

And, no, I’m not talking like a pirate today like I should (too much like work, and I’ve got enough of that lying around), but PeeZed is, and WeatherGirl just about laughed herself silly late last night reading the pirate version of Dawkins’ recent brief explanation of evolution.

Some root themselves into th’ soil and tilt green solar panels toward th’ sun, ye scurvey dog!

Indeed!

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A few weeks ago I babbled incoherently about the film Shultze gets the blues and, as promised, we invited my FYS students over to the house to eatch the film with us. So last Sunday five students came to the house to watch the film. The short version? WeatherGirl and I quite liked the film, but Sub-Evil Boy and some of the students found it a little slow for their tastes.

The basic story is that Schultze, a retired miner and “classic” German polka accordion player, discovers a snippet of zydeco on the radio and becomes enamored with cajun/zydeco music and culture. He starts to play this little zydeco riff he’s worked out, but the locals really don’t understand what he’s doing and respond quite negatively. Somewhat independently, his local music club decides to send him as their representative to a German heritage festival in their sister city of New Braunfels, Texas. After hanging around the festival for a bit, however, he bails on it and embarks on this strange boat journey down to the Gulf of Mexico and through the bayous of east Texas and Louisiana.

From what I’d read, I had expected it to be a slow, gentle film, and it certainly was. It was, however, much quieter and less focussed on a traditional narrative than I’d expected. It was really more a portrait of Schultze and his German community, told in quiet shots where very little actually happened (because very little was actually happening in their lives).

For a film “about music”, it is in fact largely silent, filled with almost soundless shots of Schultze in his living room, or riding his bike across the flat plains around his village (which was so like Morris!), or coasting along the bayous in his blue boat. On the one hand this was mildly annoying (I wanted to hear more of the cool music!), but on the other hand it was remarkably moving and effective, and made the music we did hear all the more powerful.

The visuals were also quite “silent” in the sense that the camera almost never moved. They would set up a shot and hold it for quite a while (often minutes), and people would wander in and out of the shot without the camera making any effort to track them or even acknowledge their motion. The shots themselves, though, were typically beautiful and often achingly so. And as Sub-Evil Boy correctly pointed out, the lack of motion made the shots where they did use things like pans stand out that much more.

Given that Schultze only says a handful of words in the entire film, it’s quite amazing how powerfully his character is conveyed, and how strongly I felt about and for him at the end. In many ways, the film was much more like a poem than a novel, using a few carefully chosen words and images to build an deeply resonant world.

One thing that several of us commented on was that the boat trip makes no sense from a logistical standpoint. We have no idea where or how he acquires his boat, and a look at the map of Texas makes it clear that boating from New Braunfels to southern Louisiana would be a pretty tricky business (especially with his very limited command of English and no evidence of maps). So you just have to set those details aside, treating it as something more impressionist than representational.

In the end, I found it a very powerful film and am really glad that we stumbled across it. It was beautiful on many levels, and spoke in wonderful ways to issues of diversity and complexity both within a single person and their life, and within and among communities.

There is a soundtrack for sale on Normal Records, which looks like a neat collection of German and creole music. I suspect, though, that it doesn’t have the silence that is so dominate in the film itself. For that, I think I’ll go listen to something like Peter Cusack’s Baikal ice, Lauren Weinger’s Silos, or Chris Cutler’s Twice around the earth. The little accordion piece they play when you visit the film web site, though, is quite beautiful and worth hearing several times over.

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In a comment on a previous post, DesertDonkey asked my opinion on the feasibility of a wiki for the development of an internal knowledge base. I started my reply as a comment, but it grew beyond all sensible proportions and I decided that it really needed to be a post of it’s own. It’s pretty long, so I’ve put the bulk below the fold.

The short answer? Yes, a wiki can be an excellent choice for building an on-line knowledge base. There are, however, some pitfalls that you’d want to be aware of going in. The enthusiastic may also find my “Why wiki?” write-up from a few years ago helpful.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Well, sort of… :-)

The day started with WeatherGirl and I having a very productive strategy meeting with Arne and Athena to work on the design of a MARQS pamphlet in support of November’s school levy vote. While we were deep in planning, who should come into Common Cup but Loudon Wainwright! He apparently came in last night, and spent the day wandering around town and campus on his own, including lunch at our little coffee shop.

Many (most?) artists and speakers that come to UMM tend to hole up in their hotel rooms and spend almost no time in town among us plebs, so it was particularly cool that Loudon was so comfortable cruising around town. We talked about going over and saying “Hi”, but I’m frankly a total wimp about talking to famous people like that. In the end he left before we did, saving me the trouble of having to think about it.

After that exciting time WeatherGirl and I went over to the PRCA Gallery to take photos of art. As a fund raiser for the Center, we’re working on a calendar of photographs of the work of PRCA artists. I already had quite a few relevant shots from outside the Center, but needed to spend some time in the Center of some of the cool stuff on display (and sale) there. We stayed a couple of hours and I took some 150 shots. I think we’ve got a pretty good set of shots to work with, and will hopefully have the calendar design and permissions sorted out in a few weeks.

This fine day was then capped off by an excellent concert by our lunch guest. Loudon played a fine 90 minute set as the opening act of this year’s Performing Arts Series, mixing crazy fun stuff with his great family songs and political commentary. Edson Auditorium wasn’t full, but it was close (400 people?) and the audience was very enthusiastic and supportive, and he got a nice standing ovation at the end.

We bought a copy of Here come the choppers, and Sub-Evil Boy got in line to have it signed. Sub-Evil really enjoyed chatting with Loudon, and I think that Loudon got a kick out of having a really cool young fan. Sub-Evil told him that he’d wanted to request “Unhappy anniversary” (a pretty unusual request from an 11 year old), but he was pretty pumped that Loudon finished up his encore with “Hard day on the planet”.

All in all, an excellent Saturday!

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Mike A. just brought to my attention the fact that the U of M has set up an all-U IM server using the Jabber protocol. Their reason for this move?

Jabber is an open, XML-based instant messaging (IM) technology. By hosting our own Jabber servers, the University can provide safer and more flexible instant messaging for its users.

The ability to host IM traffic on University servers allows us to protect our users against sophisticated virus and worm attacks, such as the ones that spread over AIM in Spring 2005.

All this seems quite sensible, and I really like Jabber (my Spring, 2004, Software Design class wrote Jabber based chat clients), but I’m not real convinced that this is going to fly. So far they’ve done pretty much nothing to inform the university community that they’ve done this, and I’m totally not sure that they’ll be able to convince the students, who have IM contacts all over the universe (most of which use either AIM or MSN), to switch over and use this. I wish them luck, but I’m not putting money down.

And what is up with the U’s continued schizo attitude towards Open Source tools? Last year they adopted Oracle’s on-line calendar system (internally called UMCal) without even considering an open source alternative. And they continue to promote the use of WebCT despite the existence of several plausible open source alternatives (some of which the U is even helping support, at least on paper).

Yet, when they wanted to set up an IM server, they go with the open source Jabber option. Hmmm… Why is that? Maybe because there were no good proprietary options?!? Arghhhh…

And while I’m ranting, I’ll express my concern about what I perceive to be a growing trend both within the larger U and here at UMM to build this type of closed, inwarding looking solution (”We support IM, but you can only talk to U of M people.”) in response to real and perceived security issues. A vibrant, successful university is almost certainly an outward looking institution, aware of and part of conversations and activities that span the entire globe. This move to closed, internal communications networks is inherently inconsistent with the mission and goals of the institution.

PeeZed manages to handle the many security issues surrounding his highly successful (and wonderfully “controversial”) blog all on his lonesome while still inviting and encouraging the participation of a large and active community. You’d think that the massive resources of the U could do better than running around locking all the doors.

Maybe I should ask them to disallow phone calls to my office from off campus. Then I wouldn’t have to talk to those pesky colleagues, alums, employers seeking a reference for a student, and that woman who wanted to interview me two weeks ago about a security clearance for a recent graduate.

Think of all the blogging I could do … uh … work I could get done without all those tedious interruptions…

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I’ve been re-reading Robert Palmer’s excellent Deep blues as one of the texts for my FYS course on American roots music and just came across (again) one of my favorite lines from the book:

I thought, oh, man, this cat is just jivin’, he ain’t goin’ to Chicago. I thought goin’ to Chicago was like goin’ out of the world.

This is Muddy Waters talking about his reaction to Robert Nighthawk’s suggestion that Muddy come with him to Chicago in the 30’s and record together.

It’s interesting how much things have changed, as today most Americans wouldn’t find the idea of travelling 600 miles nearly so daunting. (Of course the huge improvements in roads and cars has a lot to do with this.) But things haven’t completely changed. I’m often amazed by how many of our students have never been to Canada when you could darn near throw a rock to it from here. And while 30-40% of our students do some sort of international experience while they’re here, others are pretty freaked out by the idea of travelling to another country. One recent grad caught all sorts of grief from his grandmother because he had the audacity to spend a summer in SoCal on a research internship at USC, and then go to Oregon for grad school. Weird.

My family has a long history of international travel and tends towards being study abroad junkies. My grandfather spent a year studying in Switzerland in the 1920’s, which included a sojourn with some buddies to North Africa wandering the Sahara in an Opel. My mom spent a summer in Vienna in the early 1950’s (while the Allies were still sharing it with the Soviets!) as one of the first Americans to go abroad with the AFS.

WeatherGirl’s family, on the other hand, had to work up to it a bit. Her paternal grandparents grew up literally next door to each other in Manchester (UK), and when they moved to a different part of the city 12 miles away the neighborhood had a going away party! Then her dad got all radical and married a woman from the south of England. Then she got all radical and married me and moved to the U.S.

We figure Sub-Evil Boy has to marry a martian to keep up the trend.

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Just heard Al Duvall’s “In the Shack” on Brainwashed Radio, and that was a crazy fun bit of banjo weirdness. Must learn more…

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