I am … unhindered by talent

Morris is lucky to have a wonderful art deco movie theatre from the 1940’s that is still a single screen first run theatre. It went up for sale this summer, and there were concerns that we might lose our cinema. Happily, a group came together on fairly short notice (essentially over the weekend) that was able to make a successful offer on the theatre.

As one might guess from the photo, the theatre could use some rennovation, and some creative changes to the business model wouldn’t hurt either. Still, I was extremely impressed by the group’s enthusiasm for saving the theatre, and the creative energy at the meetings over the weekend.

People asked WeatherGirl to be on the Board of Directors for the theatre, but the fact that we’re leaving the country for a year in three weeks kind of killed that :-). We’re probably going to be setting up a web site for them, so I ran out and took a bunch of photos of the theatre, including this.

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Sub-Evil Boy and I spent a few hours in the Twin Cities on our way to Wisconsin a few weeks ago. Several hours were spent at the very cool Pompeii exhibit at the Minnesota Science Museum (no pictures, sorry). We also had a short visit to the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory in St. Paul, which we’d never been to before.The animal enclosures tended towards the old and sad, but the conservatory was quite beautiful.

The gorillas at Como were particularly sad. Classic old school enclosures, with fairly little space and even less to do. They looked bored and depressed, and it was hardly surprising. And I’m not just trying to take cheap shots at the zoo, here. I’m sure their funding is nothing to get excited about, and as a city zoo in a park with essentially no admission fee, they operate under some pretty challenging constraints. Still, it all makes for a zoo that’s preserving DNA, but not much else.

I was really torn this and the B&W version of this. The discussion on Flickr about that (and about zoos in general) has been quite interesting.

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I’m writing some (Ruby) scripts to help my sister (a biologist) process and analyze some of her field data, and I keep running into spreadsheet programs that are too damn smart for our own good. She, like many/most non-programmer types, uses spreadsheet programs to organize and rearrange her data. Problem is that Excel keeps deciding knows better than we do what kind of data we have, and how it should be formatted. I can’t tell you how much time we’ve lost because it decides to rewrite dates and times in ways that break my script, not to mention inserting wacko header info, changing the line break characters, and deciding that animal tag labels are numbers in scientific notation. And, sadly, OpenOffice tends to play similar games, although the details are different.

With sufficient effort we can no doubt beat Excel and its friends into doing what we want, but I’m tired of this and would much rather have a tool that doesn’t fight us all the time. Does anyone out there know of a spreadsheet like program that’s more of a text editor and less like a word processor? I’d preferably like something simple, open source, and easy to use so I can sell it to my sister and (perhaps more importantly) she can sell it to her co-workers/co-authors as an alternative to a highly entrenched status quo. I’d like it to by default treat cell contents as basic text, and not race around interpreting and reinterpreting the data.

Anyone know of such a thing? Please? Whimper?

Also, sorry for the silence around here. In three weeks we move to the UK for a year and there’s rather a crap load of stuff that needs to be done. Doesn’t help that some bored stupid punk wanna-be hackers (no, really, I’m not pissed) have hacked our Computer Science lab at the U for the second time in a month. Damn, but that stuff ticks me off. Not like I could be getting any real work done instead of chasing these script kiddies around.

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Wow, this is one hell of a zinger. He is, as they say, angry as hell and not going to take it any more. The particular catalyst is the commuting of Scooter Libby’s sentence, which Olbermann considers

the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the pre-arranged lottery all rolled into one—and it stinks.

The connections he draws to Nixon, and especially the firing of Cox, are potentially quite powerful. I have no sense, however, of how well they will resonate with the undecided middle, which is where the battle clearly lies.

I love the ending, and the idea that even Our Fearless Leader might manage “that iota of patriotism”:

We of this time—and our leaders in Congress, of both parties—must now live up to those standards which echo through our history: Pressure, negotiate, impeach—get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our Democracy, away from its helm.

For you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed, on August 9th, 1974.

Resign.

And give us someone—anyone—about whom all of us might yet be able to quote John Wayne, and say, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.�

The full text of his remarks are on the MSNBC web site. Thanks to my wonderful (and righteously angry) mother for the tip.

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Thursday I’m guesting in Paula and Chris’s Summer Scholars class (Talking About a Revolution: Dissent and Freedom of Expression in Today’s World). I’m being brought in as a “tech head” to talk about how technology plays into these questions, so I’m going to jot down a few thoughts.

First, dissent (or at least effective dissent) fundamentally requires communication. If people wish to change things, they presumably have to convey their dissent in order to make a difference, raising awareness, explaining the issues, and recruiting support. Second, the mechanics of and opportunities for communication have and continue to be defined by technology, and the rapid changes in technologies certainly affect communication, and consequently dissent.

Consider, for example, McCarthy and Murrow a la Good night and good luck. McCarthy used the technology of Congress (and I use technology extremely broadly here) to create his bully pulpit and communicate his ideas. Murrow, in turn, used his access to the still young technology of television to communicate his alternative view. Similarly, the Dixie Chicks can use the technology of music recording, radio, and public performance to object to Bush’s policies, but at the same time large media conglomerates like Cumulus Media can ban the Dixie Chicks’ music from their 300+ radio stations, potentially limiting the impact of that dissent.

So to understand the impact of technology on dissent, we have to think about how they affect our communications. Key, though, is to think about who a technology allows to be a speaker, and who is forced to be a listener. Who does the technology empower, and who loses opportunities? Jerry Mander, for example, encourages us to

Make distinctions between technologies that primarily serve the individual or the small community (for example, solar energy) and those that operate on a scale of community control (for example, nuclear energy).

So, are the internet and the web the great savior of free speech (and dissent), or shall just another controlling arm of corporate and government interests?

Discuss.

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Last year we lost two of our three elms to Dutch Elm Disease, and a few weeks ago we came home to find a large orange ‘X’ spray painted on the final elm.

This morning at a little before 8am we were awoken by the army the city had sent to deal our diseased tree, and a neighbor’s across the street.

This is the stump shortly after our tree was felled. A tree that had stood for around a century, shaded us and protected us from the harsh north winds of winter, is now chunks of wood and piles of leaves headed out for disposal.

WeatherGirl took some neat shots of the stumps of the other two trees last year, one of which will be on display Friday as part of the Horizontal Grandeur exhibition here in town.

Sub-Evil and I had a great time in Wisconsin, and it’s nice to be home again (even with this morning’s tree cutting racket).

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