Sharing

I wanted to use vim to develop R code. I am on a Mac. R lets you specify an external editor (go from R->vim), but you need Applescript as glue to go the other way, vim->R, and execute code from vim in R. The Applescript below, saved in Applescript Editor, creates a script that can be run from the command line and will execute the first command line argument as a source file. It should be pretty easy to run any other program besides R that allows this kind of thing.

-- in shell "osascript RunR.scpt ~/path/script.r"
-- from vim: ":! osascript ~/bin/RunRb.scpt `pwd`/% "
-- in .vimrc: "cmap runr ! osascript ~/bin/RunRb.scpt `pwd`/% "

on run argv --for command line
	tell application "R"
		activate
		with timeout of 90000 seconds
			cmd "source(" & quoted form of POSIX path of item 1 of argv & ")" --R code
		end timeout
	end tell
end run

Mouthwash is now more expensive than vodka. So buy the latter and either gargle it straight or add a bunch of mint/extract and maybe a tablespoon of salt and another of licorice, or add anything out of your spice cabinet or a bunch of random herbal tea bags, and maybe water it down a little (just a little if at all), and you've got your own, proper, mouthwash.

These are Simon and Schuster's editorial guidelines for Star Trek novels. No time travel, no mixing casts, no plots that end up having been a dream, hallucination, no minor characters, etc, etc.

http://www.simonandschuster.biz/content/feature.cfm?feature_id=439&tab=24

Cool Numbers rates how cool a given (8 digit) number is. If a number gets below 12.5%, it is considered so remarkably uncool that that makes it cool. Here is the Hall of Fame:

http://coolnumbers.com/hof.html

http://coolnumbers.com

I decided to give a try creating deep zoom images as replacements for the powerpoint presentation that characterizes all lab meetings. The openzoom community is pretty solid and I made something pretty.

Here is what I got:

http://worldwideweb.unconventionallylonguniformresourcelocator.com/CoordinationGame09002.html

It wasn't the smoothest, but all the problems can be overcome, even if it isn't currently clear how I might do that. Here are the changes I would make:

• Improve the workflow (described below) to not take three hours. I'd presumably do this by learning to script the whole thing, and perhaps hack together sparse images, which ought to make a huge difference. This would also allow me to do super neat things like embed entire slides in the asterisk that usually refers to a footnote.
• Change the keyboard keys to pan by a whole screen width instead of the 5% that is programmed in. This would create the illusion of a powerpoint presentation
• Also come up with some keyboard navigation scheme to jump to different points of interest on the image, as is supported in a few examples I've seen (mostly the Microsoft implementations).

Here my notes: first openzoom presentation notes

I saw Dawkins the other night. A great showman for the greatest show on earth, with sharp attacks and well-honed one-liners. He was as divisive as I expected, and you don't have to be a cultural relativist to hold it against him. Best put by Ira: "His rhetorical technique is totally ineffective for anything but rallying the troops". I wish there was a more responsible figurehead for atheism.

Here is my main difference: I still have to be convinced that getting crowds sharply divided over false dichotomies is better than promoting evolution in a manner that doesn't unseat the many, many people who have managed to find room for it with their God.

Of course, maybe I am also posing false dichotomies. Maybe Dawkins is working towards a third outcome, one in which all religion has been made completely irrelevant, presumably by non-fascist means. Unfortunately this outcome is not only unrealistic, but desirable only to the atheists bent on making things worse, and on making even less room for "non-religious" to evoke a tolerance that has outgrown the greatest zealots on earth.

I just got a great email from my friend Ira Allen in response to this:

Hey Ira, I've been getting really preoccupied with literary approaches to scientific writing, and literary mechanisms of scientific writing, and literary scientists.  It is safe to assume that there is a large body of work on it, but I don't have any clue where to start or who to talk to.  Might you or Laura?
-seth

His leads:

Hi, Seth,

Well, at long last, I'm tendering what I owe on the debt below.  While I confess that this is, as one is perennially saying (an interesting rhetorical tic among academicians, that), not my field, I hope nonetheless that some of the following will be of use--and hope, too, of course, that this comes not so late as to serve only as pallbearer for the original interest.

All best,

Ira

@ IU's English dept: Jennifer Fleissner is really sharp and approachable and is doing a project right now on obsession and modernity, which dips into scientific discourses; apparently, Christopher Irmscher is interested in intersections between lit and science; and, from all reports, since-recently-prof-emeritus Lee Sterrenburg is quite fascinated by literary approaches to science.

Elsewhere @ IU, the only person who comes immediately to mind (besides Douglas Hofstadter, of course) is Amy Cook, in Theatre and Drama, looks at cognitive science and theatre, and specifically conceptual blending theory and performance of language in Shakespeare.

A few potentially worth-thinking-about-but-alongside-the-obvious-stuff-you're-no-doubt-already-considering primary texts might be the following: much by Carl Sagan (including perhaps the recently, posthumously published /Varieties of Scientific Experience/); novelist David Foster Wallace's nonfiction book on infinity (perhaps as compared with his gargantuan novel, /Infinite Jest/); Henry Adam's /The Education of Henry Adams/, especially the chapter on "The Dynamo and the Virgin"; Alfred North Whitehead's story-styled /Introduction to Mathematics/ (in contrast with his and Russell's co-authored /Principiia Mathematica/); and a fair bit of Freud's writing, which is often literary in style even in the midst of describing case studies (personally, I think a lot of psychoanalytic writing's rather literary--and the intersection between that and the discourse in neurobiology could be a good one to explore as regards style).  Though somewhat off-topic, for beautifully literary philosophical writing, check out Denise Riley's compact and really quite excellent /Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect/.

Rhetorically oriented approaches to science would include some of the following: Charles Bazerman's /Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science/; Leah Ceccarelli's /Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrodinger, and Wilson/; Jeanne Fahnestock's /Rhetorical Figures in Science/; and Alan Gross's /The Rhetoric of Science/.  Too, you might find it worth reading Aristotle's /Rhetoric/ and /Poetics/, especially book 1 of the /Rhetoric/, and/or something of Kenneth Burke's or Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrecht-Tyteca's: the essay "Terministic Screens," collected in /Language as Symbolic Action/, for the former, and /The New Rhetoric/ for the latter (they're especially concerned with the rhetoric of philosophy, which parallels in some ways the rhetoric of science--both of which inform 'literariness').

And a quick google-search turned up these two interesting tidbits: http://sci-lit-reading-group.blogspot.com/2009/04/cfp-correspondence-travel-writing-and.html and http://isotope.usu.edu/.

p.s. After all, it seems I'll only pay half the note today; I'll be in touch again soon(er) to follow up on our more recent conversation.  I hope the rest of your weekend is pleasant.

I just bought a subscription to Isotope. V. excited. Thanks Ira.

My bicycle got a love letter today

I was in bed, and tired and warm, both hands and shoulders under the covers. I fly was hovering over my face. After three poorly timed sucks, I got him on the fourth, but he got caught in my throat and I had to cough and spit him out across the room. He survived.

If you want to know/announce free food opportunities on the Indiana University campus, you can join huntergatherer-l@indiana.edu

or follow Hunter Gatherer (freefoodatIU) on twitter

Thanks to Jillian for the photo.

I'm building a bicycle wheel today*. I have to build one because the speciifc wheel i need is bizarre and impossible to buy or find. This is because I am refurbing Lydia's ancient Schwinn adult tricycle. The wheel is 24in, internal three speed. i tried to open and fix the hub. That was poor judgment. It is better to build a wheel around a working hub than to fix one of those insane mechanisms. Sheldon Brown is heroic. Lacing went way better than it should have. Still plenty of truing to do.

*Bicycle mechanics say 'build' where most people mean 'assemble'. I'll gladly carry the convention forward –– makes me sound cooler.

I just wanted to tell the world. A few weeks ago I repaired a piano. The coop inherited it (Thanks Matthew) and a bunch of people moved it through a hedge (Thanks Justin) and up 6 large stairs through a narrow hallway (Thanks Rob and everyone else).

It had four broken keys, and a little baggie with three broken hammers). The guy at the Music School's piano-tuning workshop, who lent us equipment for the move, also told me how to repair those three hammers. He even had a mock up of a key.

Behind your piano's panels, between the ivory-wrapped wood and the string, are 43 parts, levels, wedges, pulleys. Wood, felt, wire, string, spring and leather. Picture. So much to go wrong. He made it sound so easy. I spent the day, taking apart the piano and putting it back together again.

The way to mend a broken hammer is to get some thread, cover everything in glue, reattach the two pieces, and wrap the whole length of the hammer's fracture tightly, around and around, with the thread. Get the thread real goopy and let everything dry. The thread is tight enough that you don't need a clamp or anything and you reinstall the hammer with the thread glued on.

There are still a few stuck keys; that has to do with this tricky felt/wood, bouncy bit called the hammer butt. It also hasn't been tuned since 1973. Of course, before I can fix that I have to learn to hear the difference between major and minor.

This is the most impressive* work I've found in the field of robotics/AI since I learned about Hofstadter/Mitchel's Copycat.

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation

* where impressive is synonymous with scary

Google Calendar just correctly parsed the following quote into my calendar: "Organizational Informatics, every Thursday from 9:30-12:15 at LI001"

This may seem like a pretty small task, but machine language work is pretty bad at that stuff, and that is impressive.

I've got video up for every lecture from this year's Enfascination Lectures, formerly the Biannual Seth Frey Memorial Lecture Series. Here is the blurb:

Though we live in an awfully fascinating world, humans are not complex enough to fully appreciate the depth and richness connate to each and every passing moment. The Annual Enfascination Lectures provide an outlet for the transmission over minds of an enthusiastic appreciation for at least some small cross-section of those things that one observer alone could never absorb merely passively.

Each guest is invited to give a five minute talk on any subject. Only two restrictions: 1) The subject must be on something that you could get excited talking about and 2) The five minutes will be kept to. Bonus points for erudition and for researching your topic in advance. Those with no plans of speaking are welcome to merely bask in the glory.

Great quote in Russell's essay, On the Notion of Cause:

the subjective sense of freedom, sometimes alleged against determinism, has no bearing on the question whatever. The view that it has a bearing rests on the view that causes compel their effects...

What he is saying, in my words, is that causation is a human perceptual convenience, a pattern that is handy to percieve as true and safe to assume to continue to hold. However, to assume that there is causation is problematic. It is based on atleast two assumptions, that there are things and that there are events. These are also safe to assume at human scales, given human perceptual limits, but they fall apart at non-human scales, which is to say that 'things' and 'events' as models don't completely account for all of the behavior of their referents, merely enough to ensure the good functioning (survival) of most humans most of the time.

I feel very free seeing that the whole free will v.s. determinism thing rested on the faulty assumption that causes as I concieve them fully account for the actual events they describe. Before this, my inclination was to reject both determinism and free will as useful approximations of reality at human perceptual scales. Now I find that I don't have to do that anymore, instead I can reject all three!

For folks not used to these ideas, it can be difficult to accept that someone who holds them can see much meaning, joy, and fulfillment in life. Well, there is plenty more room for all that when you haven't packed all kinds of order and structure (and even intent and purpose) into a world much more complex than we can fully comprehend.

Happy Darwin Day! 200 years and 150 years for the man and the theory.

Thank God for Evolution.

The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) is coming to Bloomington. It is a contest built on a set of standards that enable students to design novel organisms for engineering purposes with minimal capital and training.

The most fascinating projects I have found are:

• E. Coli that generates peppermint smell when it is growing and banana smell when it stops
• Another organism that emits a red dye if it is in arsenic laced water; providing a cheap arsenic test.
• Photosensitive E.Coli; literal biofilm. In the attached flier, you see a print of the classic "Hello World". There can be no more overt demonstration of the intent to turn biology into engineering/programming.

These are organisms engineered by students! The callout next Thursday is to recruit a team to participate in iGEM2009. Bioengineering experience is not required. It was started at MIT and in four years has grown from 5 to 84 participating schools from around the world.

Meetings Tuesdays at 5:30

COB (Classroom Office Building) 118

And for your browsing pleasure:

• iGEM 2008 is the most recent contest:
  • http://2008.igem.org
• The Registry of Standard Biological Parts, in which a 'part' is a gene that has been modified to suit the easy-to-work-with BioBrick standard:
  • http://partsregistry.org
• OpenWetWare provides tech support:
  • http://openwetware.org

Best, -seth

After years of looking everywhere outside of Thailand for black sesame candy, in every big city I've live in, I finally found the exact same brand I was mad about in that very small village in northern Thailand. And it was in Bloomington Indiana of all places. This place sure fills my needs.

Also the grocery store (I think the owners are Korean) had hand-sanitizer at the check-out register, pointing out for the customer. I think it was some kind of public service. Anyone ever heard of that?

I really enjoyed James' 1903 Varieties of Religious Experience. It led me to wonder if any scientist since him has been so literary. By my use of the word, being literary is different than being a good writer. I'm not positive, but I think that part of being a literary writer is making non-scientist claims. These are not necessarily unscientific claims, or at least not claims that are non-scientist because they are unscientific. For example, in Varieties, James takes much evidence from literature; Whitman, Tolstoy, and in the process provides compelling reviews of much of this writing. Providing fiction as evidence is a great example of something non-scientist.

Alternatively, maybe I see him as so compellingly literary because he uses literature and uses it well.

So the question: Is James the last literary scientist? Is he the last one who could write in a literary manner (using either definition) without losing credibility as a scientist? By modern standards, does he lose credibility for having written that way? Have we defined his writing out of what a scientist can be?

I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out. But I'd be very eager to hear proposals for other literary scientists, particularly in the 20th or 21st centuries. It may be the bias of psychology education at the turn of the millennium, but I'm inclined to define 'scientist' narrowly enough to exclude the psychoanalysts.

First response:

"

Bertrand Russell, if you call him a scientist. I mean, mathematics...dotdotdot. Maybe that part's a stretch. But you can't fight the Swedish Academy on the "literary" bit, and the man writes the way other people breathe.

Oh. But better.

"

Also:

" ...But I would hardly say that he was the last literary scientist. There have been a goodly number, among them one of favorites Loren Eiseley whom I love for the sheer beauty and elegance of his style. I would begin with a little book of his entitled The Immense Journey. "

I made (assembled?) a 100mW laser and have made some cuts and burns with it. It is minimal, which means slow and small and it only cuts black,matte surfaces. I bought the laser module off the internet (and ultimately from hong kong) for $70. The 'making' end mainly involve scavenging a lens and contriving a power supply. The only really novel contribution, on my part, is the power supply. Insist and I'll get pictures. It has been a year since I went through all this, so apologies. I also got safety goggles. These have an OD (optical density) of 4 and, obviously, filter light at the correct wavelength (650 nm in this case). In the interest of safety I also always point it down, and never at anything reflective, especially not near metal or glass (which can send beams, still strong enough to cause damage, in effectively nonpredictable directions). Despite the word towards safety, the below-elaborated healthy attitude towards trial, error and more error may make some people feel uncomfortable. Well. I'm still here.

Here are the specs:

• Wavelength : 650nm RED
• Output power (mW) @ 25C : 100mW
• Operating Current (mA) : 185ma
• Operating Voltage : 3.0 - 5.0V DC
• Operation Mode : CW
• Modulation Mode: Analog or TTL > 10khz
• Beam Divergence > 0.4 mrad
• Output Power Stability < 1.0%

The important bits are the wavelength (match it to your goggles), power (minimum that burns is 80, I hear. I went for 100) and the operating voltage (3-5 volts).

Out of the box, it doesn't focus light enough to burn or cut anything. I taped a focusing lens on. (Folly! beg. of end.)

The power supply is due to much guidance and inspiration from my old roommate. At first I just cut off a stretch of USB cable from an old mouse and twisted the wires to the output of the laser, ignoring the third wire. (Which wire is the 'third' wire? Uhh, I just tried it). The USB standard supplies, uhh, I forget, well, I think 5 volts. Definitely somewhere between 3 and 5 vols. So with just that I was already rolling. But I wanted portability.

A 9 volt battery supplies, as advertised, 9 volts. If you take the bottom off many such batteries (not all) you will clearly see 6 AAA batteries folded up but attached in series (where a single AAA battery supplies 9/6=1.5 volts). In these batteries, you can use two twisty ties and electrical tape to rewire a 9 volt battery to supply 4.5 volts. Just change the 6 in series to two parallel series of three. This supplied me 4.5 volts, and it worked fine. Of course, the batteries that aren't made of 6 AAA batteries are instead filled with battery acid, the consistency of clay. I don't know how to keep from making that mistake again. But the stuff isn't too nasty, I just felt bad disposing of it.

Details. So, I got a nine-volt battery made of 6 AAA units in series. I took off the bottom, so the contacts were exposed. With the 9V on its side, you will see three columns of two AA batteries. I snipped the little strip of foil that connects the two batteries in the middle column. Than I grabbed a twisty tie and took a little bit of the plastic/paper off of each end to give the 'wire' two ends. Take off just enough to connect the AAA's contact with one of the 9 volt contacts on the other end, and no more. If you take off more than that, and the metal of the twisty touchs the 9V casing, you will complete a circuit with the battery's case and it will start to get warm, then hot. That provides a handy indication that you are doing something wrong and should try again. Well; it provides a handy indication that you are doing something wrong.

Connect one end of the twisty tie to one of the newly snipped AAA ends. Solder 'em if you've got 'em, but I just sort of winged it, wrapping the snipped foil around the twisty with pliers. Take the other end and attach it to either the positive or the negative contact of the 9-volt's business end. Which? Well the internal AAAs aren't very well labeled, since they were never meant to see light, so just wing it. Attach the AAA to whichever 9V contact doesn't make the battery hot. With the other twisty, attach the other AAA butt to the other 9V contact.

If my attempts at description haven't made it obvious, I don't know much about electronics; only enough to get into trouble.

Afterwards, e-tape the ass-end of the 9V casing shut and tape the twisties firm to the 9V casing and you have a 4.5 volt power supply for the laser. To attach it, you can just twist the wires around each 9V contact. But to be classy, since 9 volt batteries connect very nicely to each other (WHY?), I dismantled a second 9V battery for just the contacts (a.k.a business end), and attached the laser's wires to it to create a plug for the 4.5V power supply. Then lots more tape. Plugging the battery into the the laser's new plug makes it shine. Glory be.

So, what could be more foolish than playing with very dangerous lights and opening batteries with pocket knives? Burning yourself a tattoo. I cut a spiral, in Jan or Feb '08. Believe it or not, all this effort was towards the goal of providing myself a compelling means to promote personal mindfulness. I wanted something small, personal, and homemade but visible enough close up to encourage me to not get stuck in my head. Since then, I have also come to appreciate the (superficially?) oxy/moronic ring to high-tech-Buddhist-laser-tattoos. In the end, it didn't entirely work. I was hoping the effort and pain and visual salience would provide strong enough holds to attach real personal meaning. It turns out that to give the burn the meaning I intended, takes continuous time and attention. No shortcuts to mindfulness, and I am still in the process of giving the burn meaning.

On the subject of attention, I deferred posting this project because I didn't want much. Bragging about your neat things is awfully contrary to cultivating self awareness. On the other hand, many reasons conspired to provide compelling reasons to publish.

• value of sharing ideas on the internet
• preventing exclusion-via-patent (am I helping to do that by publishing this?)
• the initial failure of the mindfulness-promoting aspect of the design
• and the potential to inspire others to create.

It took about 2 months to mostly heal and about 6 months before it wasn't slightly more red than the surrounding skin. After a year (now) it had healed almost completely, so I tried it again last week (Folly!). I'm applying some natural compounds described elsewhere in this blog (the walnut ink) to both stain the new burn and compromise the ability of my body to heal itself. I'll share if that works. I saw some internet-meme-inspired burns on MAKE a few months later (April?) and a tattoo artist using a laser to cut leather furniture (he was close. But damn, it had to have crossed his mind to do humans. I think he is just keeping it on the DL.). All those cuts are much more geometrical, having been made with computer-controlled lasers. For the most part, you can only get access to these with very close connections to well-funded shops in well-funded universities .

Well, I hope this is valuable to someone. Please don't irreparably damage yourself in any unintended manner.

(Update Beg. of March: yeah, pretty faint. It won't the next butterfly tattoo anytime soon.)

COMMENTS

1) BATTERIES -- If you'd like to avoid the mess of battery surgery, you can grab a three-battery AAA holder here: http://tinyurl.com/de5x68 or at Radio Shack (or wire two together in parallel if you need the amp-hours). You can also use electrical tape to make a nice bundle of as many as you like (in multiples of three, with the appropriate number positive-up and positive-down, then solder bell wire across the ends to create the series-parallel battery pack you want. When you wear down the pack, you have to do it again, so it's better to buy the holders. If you want the 9v connectors, you can buy those as well, wired or solderable. If you want both the 9v connectors and form factor, then what you're doing is the way to go. If you don't need portability you can also buy a Radio Shack 4.5 VDC power supply here: http://tinyurl.com/d5ek6k.

2) EXCLUSION BY PATENT -- I discussed this with a patent attorney at work after designing, building and shipping to a supplier a gaging system for measuring a tricky common mechanical feature on certain electronic assemblies. I worried about buying my gage design back from the supplier if they filed. The attorney's comment was this: that to be patentable, the object must be 'not in common use for the intended purpose,' and that publication of the idea _may_ tend to indicate that. He also said our company only patented marketable items, and wouldn't search and file if we don't intend to manufacture and sell gages, which we don't.

David. 63.163.14.186 08:57, 29 March 2009 (EDT)

In the toolbar on the left you may see 'Breathe' below notes. It is an RSS feed that just reminds you to take a deep breathe every now and then. I do it whenever it pops up on top of my Gmail ticker. Just a friendly reminder.

I started a map of all the fruit trees that grow in Bloomington, IN, color-coded by the season they can found to grow in.

• Green is Spring
• Blue is Summer
• Red is Fall and
• Light Blue is Winter.

It is editable by anyone, just add the map to Your Maps (if you have a google account, if you don't just get one) and click edit and add flags where you know trees to be.

The map left my hands within a month of mapping and is finding contributions from people I don't know that I'll ever know. Awful satisfying.

Here is the Bloomington Urban Harvest Map

And here is a related map, of community services in Bloomington

I've been experimenting with fast an easy methods for making quills and ink with natural materials v. likely in your ecosystem. Here is what I know. I'll start with the simplest possible functional account and provide little elaborations, it is an 80/20 thing, the first part gets you 70% of the way, and additional tweaks take you closer to perfection.

The ink:

• where
  • In California, oak galls grow everywhere (on oak trees), but particularly in the central valley and places further from air pollution. They look like this. You'll inevitably stuble on some if you ever walk on anything that calls itself a trail.
  • Throughout the Midwest, pick walnut fruit of any variety, pick them whole anywhere from yound to fully rotted and completely gross. Only contraindication to rot is you might see grub crawling if you handle them much. They look like this.
  • Anywhere else, I don't know, hell, you can use coffee. Take the minimal instructions for a pen below and even coffee will work, espresso/turkish are best (darkest/most concentrated). It is actually really pretty.
• To make more ink than you need take as few as two galls/nuts, soak them for a week in a mason jar or something. You don't even have to slice or cute them. The amount of water you use is the amount of ink you will have, and you don't need as much as you will inevitably make. If you use oak galls, throw in an old nail, pin or anything made of iron, other wise it won't work.
• pour it into somethin you want to use as a ink well. That is the 70% ink, it sounds in-credibly easy, as in not believable, but that is real ink, that real people used to use. And it is beautiful, both start brown, the oak turns grey over the first two or three months.

Next Steps

• With just two weeks of soak and no boiling it will be on the light side. They next step, if you want to get way 20% closer to real ink, is to make it darker, soak for more than 2 weeks or boil it down. It might seem like wicked stuff, but you can use kitchen pots without worry, they will clean up fine.
• As for touching up, for that last 10% to real ink, you can do the following:
  • When pouring into an ink well, pour it through an old sock or tshirt to strain out the plant parts, You can use a cheese cloth, if you don't mind it being permanently stained and a little less food-grade than it was when you started.
  • My oak gall ink has molded over before. To fix/prevent that pour in just the smallest dab of rubbing alcohol or any booze over 40 proof (stronger the better). It turns out that the scribes did that too. I think the walnut ink is nasty enough to keep infection out, I hear it is a natural insecticide.
  • You can cut or grind up the galls/fruits, more surface area technically means stronger ink sooner, but really it is a small difference.

Quill

Bamboo grows everywhere, lots of landscaping uses it. Just bike around your neighborhood and snip snip the thinnest shoots that are still hoolow inside. The very thinnest shoots won't be hollow, and I don't think branch-shoots are hollow. So as thin as you can get. no less than 5" but start too long, less than a foot, like 8", you can always cut it down.

Inevitably, the prcoess of cutting a quill is something to do with ink and paper, it is iterative and you will learn more by doing it than reading about it, so here is the minimal %70 quill:

• Get a sharp knife and cut the bamboo stem to a point. That is enough, it will work as a pen. I didn't even tell you how steep to cut it. You will figue out soon enough that too much in either direction is either pointless (in both senses) or too fragile for writing.

• The next %10: Cut a slit down the middle. Makes the ink draw better. You might cut the slit before sharpening the point on either side of it. The thinner the point the thinner the line.
• Next %10: you can cut a resovoir, either a nick on the back, or dig a hole out, or even hollow out more of the pith in the hollow center so the ink goes higher up.

This quill works better than any other type i've experimented with. You'll find it slower than a bic pen. If you are writing a letter you find:

• You can only draw down strokes, this will change your handwriting, but you can indulge and make it classy. My handwriting is like that of a different person when I write with quills.
• You will dip the pen every line or so.
• You will sharpen the nib every 4 pages or so. It isn't bad.

Next next steps

I have learned to make paper yet, but once I've done that, I'll be able to send entirely naturally locally made letters: paper, envelope, ink, quill; all but the stamp. Let me know if any of this works for you. As you can see, all you have to do for ink is pick and soak. All you have to do for pen is pick and cut. How did we ever make this kind of knowledge abstruse and arcane?

I accidentally called Japan today instead of the local coffee shop. Skype makes all kinds of things possible. Try dialing the same number to every country and see what you get. I got variations on 'the number you have dialed is incorrect' in 4 different languages, and one busy signal. I think a little research is in order, the random dialing might not have potential to get enough hits. But regardless, look how globalization reduces transaction costs so that we can colonize the world with every cultural malady ever invented.

I meet many people who stopped paying attention in Math, anywhere between 4th and 12th grade and, years later, got their interest piqued again. This happened to me too, and I know the feeling that it is too late. And I know that it isn't, particularly with the resources of the web. I'm posting an email I wrote to a friend. It is a post-calculus curriculum. If you made it as far as 11th grade before fading out, you can start here. You'll pick up the trig again as a result of getting back in, sort of piecemeal, the rest you can get guided through in the courses. This is more of a roadmap through MIT's OCW. OCW is the complete coursework of every MIT course that is or has been taught. A great effort to make knowledge haveable. Everything is there: HW, tests, lectures, slides, readings (or books to buy) and answers to all the HW and tests. If you haven't made it as far as calc but want a roadmap through everything up to it, let me know and I'll put something together.

Here is the letter:

"

Lucky you, OCW not only has a complete linear algebra class, but it has full video lectures AND it is taught by the amazing Gilbert Strang. He is the Mr. Roger's of Linear algebra. I took Numerical Methods with him at MIT and he started the course off talking about his 4 favorite matrices. When I was taking linear algebra at Berkeley, having never even heard of the guy, friends were watching these lectures to help them understand what was going on in the local class which was taught entirely differently.

Watching the lectures will be nice enough, but to really benefit from

this stuff, you should do the HW

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.htm

Here are all the math class, with all the All Class on the left sidebar.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/index.htm

It is lucky that you learned, back in the day, 'everything up to'

calculus, because there isn't really a one stop shop for full pre-calculus courses. MIT assumes precalc and all that trig. Though you have likely forgotten your trig and a bunch of your algebra, it won't be prohibitive to pick up again, and you can ask me to clarify steps, and the internet Does have all the bits and pieces scattered about. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ is a great resource. Wolfram is an important egomaniac who has done some cool stuff.

Given a foundation just up to calc, I prescribe the following

four-unit plan to Catching You Up. The goal is to give you the fairly conventional ladder up to taking courses with proofs. That is when you really start seeing the beauty of mathematics, and when equations stop having numbers in them. The first three units form a sort of bottle neck, with intertwined prereqs, after that, you can branch off in all kinds of directions: more applied or more abstract or more fun. If you want to skip straight to courses with proofs, you can do that, just let me know and I'll revise this to take out all the courses that use numbers in their equations, though you should give this a try. If you want a Unit 0, just to get you psyched and ease you in, take 18.781 Theory of Numbers . Number Theory was my favorite math.

Unit 1

18.01 Single Variable Calculus (or 18.013) 18.06 Linear Algebra

Unit 2

18.02 Multivariable Calculus 18.03 Differential Equations

Unit 3

18.05 Introduction to Probability and Statistics 18.100A Analysis I

Unit 4

pretty much whatever you'd like. Everything below is in math, but from here you can learn Real Physics and Engineering of all kinds. Physics tends to start as three courses: Classical Mechanics, E&M (electricity and magnetism) and then Quantum (which MIT teaches concurrently with statistical mechanics, which is excellent). None of these requires all of the above prereqs, but just the process of doing them all is great preparation for all of these, and, importantly, all of the above are considered a minimal foundation (though I haven't taken analysis and have never had a proper DE (Diff Eq)(differential equations) course. Recommendations: 18.781 Theory of Numbers (Great!!) 18.04 Complex Variables with Applications 18.100B Analysis I 18.152 Introduction to Partial Differential Equations 18.353J Nonlinear Dynamics I: Chaos 18.901 Introduction to Topology 18.950 Differential Geometry "

So, taking the T in Boston, mostly up and down Cambridge, I've been in the habit of entering the car that will end up being closest to where the exit will be at my destination station. I've observed that the best car is usually the last car. So a simple rule of thumb to shave a valuable 15 seconds off your commute is "Ride the last car on the subway."

When I am trying to explain how it is an okay thing for a person to be attracted to very specific things, I tend to say that 'You can't control what you like'. But when I remember Epictetus' Enchiridion, I repeat the mantra, that how you feel is the only thing you control. I still have to figure out how I really feel and come up with a model that reconciles these two beliefs.

Brief notes on much of the work presented at this bi-year's lecture series:

• Properties of numbers in base 10
• Proof that irrational number to irrational power can be rational
• Q&A Re: Tax and inheritance
• Arctic String Figures
• How to sharpen a chisel
• Some cultural differences between Japan and the US
• Brief history of the Jim Henson Company
• Insider Trading
• Film of Peter Greenaway
• An incident of interest in the structure of thought
• Tones in Mandarin
• Infinite Plus One
• DIY Backpacking
• The Yeti
• Food preservation technique
• 3d modeling and thought
• Rangolis, Kolum
• The Hollow Earth

I've had an image of an old man, who takes small shuffling steps, who is mild and invisible, orchestrating his own dischordant death in broad daylight. He shuffles down a relatively quiet city street of his home, through a busy tight apartment building, down its claustrophobic halls to the roof. The movers he hired earlier that day, under the pretense to his neighbors of finally moving to the country farm to prance in the fields, have a pulley all set up to get his threadbare furniture down through his luxuriant bay window. His piano is hanging outside the building from the pulley assembled and braced on the roof. Slowly, with arthritic hands the geriatric suicidal saboteur connects a release lever to five stories of stiff twine.

He shuffles back down the cramped stairwell to the sidewalk, one step at a time, carefully using the railings and his cane near the false step on the third floor. He steps out into the sun, the same one that illuminates the dust floating in his ancient apartment. He shuffles to a spot under his window, three stories down. Tulips grow there during the spring, dandelions sublet during the summer. He turns around, with the street on his left, people brushing by on the sidewalk. A few feet away he is passed faster by cars with anonymous drivers. He waits patiently for the side walk, pretending to be senile. The sidewalk takes 90 minutes to clear. He takes as deep a breath as he can manage, puts on as big a smile as he can manage. He tries to think of people to say goodbye to as he realizes that he is about to say hello to every ancient face that came to mind. And then he pulls the rope.

I thought that old man would be me. But Yelena proposed 'overdose of knowledge' as the cause of my death and now this dream must fade as I paint a new portrait of the end.

So there is this rule of thumb in biology, that ontology recapitulates phylogeny. A developing embryo seems to (roughly) follow a miniature course of evolution, resembling in form its genetic ancestors as it grows into an adult of whatever species. It is an observation, not a law, and one that I've wondered about.

I just found a new instance of it in a pedagogical question. Take a highly developed and complex part of physics. So parts are very intuitive, some features are very subtle and counter intuitive. Now try to teach it.

The question is, do you teach it the way it is, or the way it developed? Should a student follow an abridged guided version of history or take the knowledge, complete and self consistent as it is, and pick up where current knowledge leaves off? The problem with the first is that there are many things that are not true, which nevertheless account for everything a student knows at a certain point and make sense. Later such stepping stones turn out to be false (incomplete is a better word), and get nuanced by something more complicated.

The latter is inadequate because understanding is not the uploading of information to a brain, nor a list of facts. Understanding a subject means knowing what is primary, what is subtle, what is important and tricky and obvious and given, and what comes from what. And the history of a field is going to go through this same process. That said, we don't teach phlogiston or other well developed, long discredited and largely forgotten attempts at comprehending the world. Does individual learning recapitulate the development of scientific understanding?

Obviously, the answer isn't going to be one or the other. What happens is a dense mix of both. The question is interesting because it brings up more:

• Why do we see individuals retracing the history of a field in their own development?
• What steps get repeated and which skipped?
• What is the difference between a community learning something unknown and an individual learning something known?

It was this last one that gave me the most intriguing idea: Compared to the environment I am in now, my distant ancestor organisms developed in a much different environment than the one I developed in.

In the language of pedagogy, The process I will go through is different than the process my academic forefather will go through because what is already known is different. Presumably, the mistakes and discoveries that get repeated in my learning are the more important ones out of all mistakes and discoveries that were made for the end result I'm approaching.

The idea of end result is tricky tying this back to the biological inspiration. Thats about as far as I am pondering all this.

I went to the Boston Skillshare and shared how to make a few toiletries:

Q-tip

Everyone thinks this is sketchy, but I love it. It is such a simple example of how we have left even the simplest human traditions to a culture in which participation is something you purchase. This proceeds to the point where it doesn't even occur to us that these things not only can be made in ten seconds, but were made by everyone until maybe 40 years ago. Intructions copied from myself

"

My ears were all clogged up with wax, to the point of itchiness. My pinky is too big, so I tried to steal a q-tip from my roommates without their noticing, but they didn't have any. Ear candles are a little overboard, so I tried a toothpick but that is scary, poking around in your ear with a toothpick.

How can I make it less scary? I took the toothpick, dug around for a cotton ball, and rolled the toothpick against the fluff of the cotton. It turns that that this was nothing less than reinventing the qtip, the exact qtip!

It worked? Of course it worked, that is what a qtip is, they are so inconscpicuous, and so complete; they are so There, that I never thought of them as something that can be *made*. Not so mystical. No patented qtip technology. Why did I never know that? How did that knowledge get lost to humanity? Well, I guess that with both ends cushioned, noone heard this presumably timeless knowledge drop and slip through the cracks of time.

Making them gives you a steady hand and an intuition for fluff, you are basically spinning thread, but only a few inches of particularly fluffy thread. And I broke off the sharpest bit o' tip from the carefully machined splinter that served me, (otherwise its still just a tiny bit scary).

In Your Ear!

"

Handkerchiefs and Dispenser

Handerkerchiefs are easy. Go to the thrift store and buy threadbare tshirts. linen is best, cotton second. Avoid stretchy, sheer, thick or dense fabrics. Choose pretty ones. Cut the t-shirts to hell. There you are. Next is to figure out how to get thin, careful hems. Handkerchiefs are a practical habit to keep up if you have a whole bunch. Shirts, underwear and pants are not a limiting factor in my laundering, but socks are, so I keep more socks than anything else. Similarly, you should keep lots of kerchiefs, because you don't want a really snotty one, because the best thing about kerchiefs is offering them to others, unless they refuse to take it on grounds of its snottiness.

So, having a whole bunch, where do you keep them? How about in a tissue box? Fold them the same way Kleenex fold and you've got a dispenser, even with the magical 'the next one peeps out when you take the first' action! How? It is too easy, just fold them ove each other so one hanky pulls the next partway out with it. The length of the description betrays the simplicity, but only because descriptions of physical operations are cumbersome in words.

Fold all kerchiefs to the width of the box and lay the first lengthwise. Lay the second in a line with the first, overlapping half way. Fold the uncovered part of the first hanky over the overlapping half of the second. Now you have a free half of the second and a small stack of the first over the second over the first. Take you third, put it halfway on the stack and fold the free end of the second over it. Continue until you have a stack.

Stuff the stack into an old tissue box, or even an upsidedown yogurt container with the bottom cut out. It works, its great.

Toothbrush

Use a stick that you chew on. I use licorice stick from the Harvest market. In Vedic tradition it is neem, in Islam it is siwak. You can get the latter at Arab grocery stores. They are naturally antiseptic, its been tested. As a rule of thumb, any plant with bitter roots should provide branches or roots suitable from brushing with. Like Olive? neat! You can also dip the tip in baking soda if you want.

Razor

You could buy a straight razor, i think you can get them for as little as 25$. I just made a simple disposable one using cheaper but higher quality blades. Go to a store that sells old fashioned safety razor blades, I used Boston's Levitt and Pierce. Then, seriously, I thumbtacked it to a stick that I cut at an angle. And it works. I could still touch it up more, to give the cleanest shave of all, and I post it if I do, but in the meantime, that will do you. Instead of 10 bucks for five blades (2 bucks a piece) it is 2 bucks for 10 blades (.25 cents a piece).

I tried hardware store razor blades, and, atleast the ones we are all familiar with, are not sharp enough. There may be some suped-up kinds with tricky alloys that do the job, if so, they are a better choice than the safety razor blades, which are more expensive than hardware stores blades and very thin and flexible (which is bad).

A Common View

The Great Artists have endured time because they are beautiful, because of their strength and universal appeal. Very little art or music made in recent years will endure in the same way, because it is less beautiful.

The Point:

As individuals and small groups gain a larger share in determining a generation's canon of beautiful things, fads will become more common in society because only large institutions have the inertia (and resistance to change) to carry one generations's canon into the future.

The Angle:

I was at dinner with some fascinating people* and Howie the composer was a big fan of emphasizing experiential universals (and therefore universal reactions to music (and therefore an argument for universal beauty, or at least universal communication through music)). By universal I only mean human, but all humans, builtin sense of beauty. His opinions seemed to be mostly a reaction to the excessive relativism of the last century. I lean more towards relativism, but I was listening.

One assumption he was making was that The Greats have lasted because they are beautiful, because of their strength and universal appeal. He expressed doubt that any art or music made in recent years will weather the centuries that the late great composers have. I agree, but …

A confound occurred to me, one worth investigating (if investigable). Institutions carry ideas and traditions through generations. Their size influences their resistance to change and their ability to carry art through human time. There is no arguing that this will be a factor (in addition to Beauty) that carries art forward through generations and lends a sense of universality and concensus to such cultural artifacts. By this mechanism 'lost artists', are artists that got dropped by institutions and rediscovered only by research. Presumably such artist's work didn't 'speaks' to its birth culture and didn't get in the canon.

This culture is seeing an interesting trend due in large part to technology. Large institutions get larger and Small ones get smaller and more numerous (Analogously, designers have noticed that Photoshop has made good design better and bad design worse). Since any institution, large and small, can only carry a finite (and small) number of cultural artifacts forward as canonical, the number of cultural artifacts carried forward by large institutions will be small relative to the number of artifacts carried forward by small institutions and the total number of artifacts. I will put my focus on the role of small institutions in carrying work forward.

Individuals are more empowered than ever before. Small institutions are gaining an larger stake/share in selecting the contents of collective conciousness. But small institutions don't last. They have limited power to carry cultural artifacts through the vast stretches of time necessary to lend such work an air of universal appeal.

Fads are works that don't stay relevant beyond a generation. Perhaps (and is there even a circumstantial way to test this?) as people get more empowered and large traditional institutions contribute a smaller share of those artifacts which a culture finds relevant, fads will become more the norm. This will happen because of how ideas get passed on through time, not because today's culture isn't producing sufficient beauty or sufficiently universal beauty.

An interesting implication is that we can't use the ephemerality of fads as evidence of their lack of 'substance'. I don't think Howie will like that, but an important caveat in any talk of culture is that no cause is THE cause, and I am only putting this forward as a factor in the mess of factors that makes society into the complicated beast that society is.

Testability

There is evidence in support of this already (though falsifiability is what we are after). I wonder if there is any way to test the aforementioned hypothesis. A Model?

*notes to self

• Howie = Howard Frazin (composers in red sneakers) and Anna = Anna Willieme. Mother has no pictures of Anna's dream book. Strange; Internet should not have failed.
• Much restraint to not use the word 'meme', which is still too arcane for non-obnoxious use in discourse. Atleast for me.

Boston:

• I just found an amazing one On Mass Ave, between Central and Harvard Sqs. [1] Impressive, thick, tall, serious, and I've biked by it every day for two years without noticing it.
• Sighting by Abe Lateiner: ""I found an awesome tree. Check it out. It doesn't appear that awesome from the satellite, but I passed it last night and it is the bomb diggity. It's near my new place. I propose that when it gets a little warmer, you come over one evening for tree climbing followed by a picnic in the park which is right next to it.
• Sighting by Dana Malas: "I have to take you to this park by the green monster"

This is the beginning of my work at this unreasonably long address

Maybe someone will make the trek to read it one day.

-seth