Illustration Friday - crash

We (Sqrl and I) are on a trip -- traveling/moving cross-country from California to Pennsylvania. While sitting in the back of the truck before bedtime, this came to me for the subject "crash".

beauty in the desert

boy oh boy... we sure do love Quartzite, Arizona! Such a little town, so much desert beauty. Behold the lovely pictures...

Today we leave

We depart for our cross-country trip/move. It has been a nice visit -- lots of family time. It's kind of scary to actually be leaving. We are so loaded down with stuff that everything looks and feels saggy -- the back of the car is nearly scraping the ground.


As you can see in the photo, the tow-bar thing didn't work out (a disaster actaully). We are using a U-Haul tow-dolly. Everything is ready. Just a bit on the heavy side. Damn it's hard to move!

On a nice creativity note... while we were here, Zuri and I made some metal sculpture with our dad's MIG welder.

in LA

Well, we're in LA. I'm finally getting over being terrible sick. The big family circus has been fun, and in a few days we hit the road for our "real" road trip.

Before we left Arcata (p.s. you should check out our "Last Day" collage ), I printed up a bunch of small posters from the PedestrianPropagandaProject which I plan to paste up around as we travel. I must admit that I am a little nervous about pasting them up 'cause someone might steal my designs -- many people have said they want a T-shirt when I am ready to make them (I guess those are pre-orders). But their easy appeal makes me worry a bit about just putting them out there in the public. Today I am going to spend a little time researching copyright (as well as CreativeCommons) issues to inform myself about what I can do to protect myself.

last night in Arcata

so much anxiety, so much disorientation, so much fucking stuff packed tightly into our car...

I don't really exist. I feel numb. I don't comprehend our situation.

-- tomorrow we leave

tow-bar for the car

I installed the tow-bar on Cassy (our '93 Toyota Corolla) so that she can be pulled by the truck.

Sqrl said she looked like "ghetto Cassy" without her bumper

Here is the bracket itself

And here's the complete rig

beach day

We went to the beach today. Patrick's Point -- North of Trinidad. It was a crisp, cool, sunny day. We found a lot of good driftwood. I found a ton of cool rocks. Since we leave in about a week, this is possibly one of our last trips to the beach here in Humboldt.

strangeness amongst the driftwood


and sea anemone friends

LED lights in the truck

I finished my LED re-wire in the truck. I removed the old cab light (incandecent) and installed my own six-LED array.

Then there's the light in the back, since we sleep back there.



... and the push-button switch that turns it on


All LEDs are 5 mm, 30 deg, 3.3 volt, 20 mA. The front light (with 6 bulbs in two serial legs) uses 480 mW, while the rear light (with 12 bulbs in four serial legs) uses 960 mW. Since a 12-volt car battery can deliver 1200 watt-hours, the big light (12 bulb) could be run for about 1200 hours before draining the battery.

new pieces

been doing a bunch lately... here's two


This one's my favorite -- "NO fencing" -- just silly... I like it




This one is Sqrl's least favorite. She said "I don't like that one. It's..."
"raunchy?" I said
"yeah, raunchy."

thank you FreewayBlogger

via VideoStumble, I learned about a person called FreewayBlogger. He demonstrates how to use freeways (highways) as a place for effective public communication. This really inspired me to get back into the Pedestrian Propaganda Project (PPP).

Something like a year ago, I went around my school campus (Humboldt State University), and posted signs. They were very small (about 3x4 inches), were printed on re-used paper, and were glued up with starch-paste (in keeping with our beliefs in sustainability). I put them in spaces that would recieve a lot of traffic, and yet would not draw a lot of attention. It was my first run at the propaganda thing, and I only had four different pieces in the PPP. Well lately I have been designing more PPP pieces (thanks to my new daily creativity contract with myself) and the time is approaching to go out into the world again.

See, we are moving in two weeks to Philadelphia. And though Arcata has been a wonderful little place to live, I feel very removed from the "real world". I have been thinking on how to make use of the PPP as best as possible. I considered actually making metal (enameled) signs just like the city uses. But I really prefer the frugal approach -- hence my previous run of little paper posters. Then I come accross the FreewayBlogger, and that really gets me back into my own mode and reminds me how effective the "good old fashioned" methods are. I think that I even want to try some freeway-blogging myself. But I am going to at least get back into my posters. This is all quite exciting.

Syntropy / Entropy

Just finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By in America.

Boy, we sure do use eachother. We take advantage of eachother. We hide and pretend not to see the truth.

Why?

Let's start with life. What is it to be alive? To be alive is to have the ability to capitalize a resource. Put more technically, a lifeform is a system capable of enacting syntropy between itself and its parent system.

The human condition is complicated. There are both entropic and syntropic forces at work simultaneously (though this is true about the physical universe as wee, so it's not very odd). You can interperet the current trend of increasing enequallity as an entropic force -- our social fabric unraveling into the spreading black plague of low-wage labor. But it must also be realized that the syntropic force of greed is at work creating that hierarchy through economic organisms that gather resources for their growth.

So it is then our responsibility to work syntropically in the social sector to strengthen social organizationa (or organizations that work toward social equality), and to work to unravel systems of concentrated wealth which will allow for wealth entropy.

Inertia = resource lag

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20060428

I am listening to a Science Friday podcast about quantum computing. The guest says that when particles collide they flip bits. Molecular vibration is a storm of calculations. And entropy is a spreading out of calculatory pressure.

That means that matter can be thought of as a dense cloud of calculation objects.

In moving something through space, you are only moving the outer layer of particles (calc. obj.). It is then those particles that push on their neighbors, who push on their neighbors, etc. Think of a 50-gallon trashbag filled with gelatin floating in space. If you pushed ever-so-gently, you could cause the bag of gelatin to drift slowly away. But if you pushed very quickly, your hand would drive the plastic into the mass of gelatin leaving a deep dent, and not causing as much motion as you expected. The inertia of the whole mass was greater than its cohesion.

To relate to the quantum computing thing... by pushing on one side, you cause calculations to be carried out through the entire cloud. So, does this mean that inertia is an expression of the processing power consumed by the entire cloud as it responds to a change in velocity?

--
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Are you an invariant representation?

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20060414

Who am I? Am I my brain? Am I my spirit?

The brain is an information organ. It passes information "up" and "down" a hierarchy which is defined in our cerebral cortex. Patterns are recognized, decisions are made, and new patterns are learned in hierarchical levels above the current one. Lets call these pattern objects for now. Then at each level of the hierarchy, there are collections of pattern objects. It is the job of a pattern object in the current level to choose from the collection of pattern objects from the level below.

At the top level there are patterns which Jeff Hawkins refers to as invariant representations (as opposed to "auto-associative memory"). These are top-level pattern objects. At the top level, these objects have the advantage of input that has been refined as it was passed up the hierarchy.

What then is our sense of consciousness? If at each level there are only collections of pattern objects, then our "self" is either, as Jeff says, just the hum of the top-level hierarchy, or our "self" is like a single pattern object in a non-physical level one more up the hierarchy. In the first case, we can use our sense of consciousness to understand how a particular hierarchical level experiences the level below it. In the second case, it would be understanding how a particular pattern object (a cortical column) experiences the level below it.

My hunch is that the "we" that is "self" is a little of both. There are times we are "listening" to the various "voices" which guide our thoughts. But we are also able to asert a single, "self", an "I", that can take control and make top-level decisions that override all. ... or do we?

Is there an "I" which floats above ready to pass judgement? When we make a decision, is it the action of a "supreme judge" (a meta-parent) or is it simply the loudest voice (siblings) drowning out the others?

This is nearly a theological question, or at least a spiritual one. If our self is meerly the collection of siblings duking it out for the podium, then the existance of a "higher power" seems unlikely. If our self is (at least occasionally) the result of a meta-parent, then our self is like a pattern object (child) of a non-physical level above us.

Wealth Entropy

Choosing not to support the largest company is a choice to support wealth entropy (which furthers socio-economic equality).

---
this came out of a response I had to an email sent to me by my friend Courtney Geetter about waging a "gas war" against Exxon/Mobil.

Are you seeking any help?

Last Thursday (20060406), I became aware of the connection between specialization, hierarchy, and the disconnect between individuals (people).

In Political Science class, there was a class discussion about a recent on-campus rape. The teacher, Dan Faulk, removed himself from the discussion to see how the class would handle directing a discussion on their own. Overall, a very successful experiment. As Dan later said, the class conducted a repectul, productive, democratec, and gender balanced discussion about a potentially volitile topic.

Many things were discussed. I said that I felt that this "problem" of "what to do" was mostly one of disconnect between people. You see, one of the methods discussed was a small community's (tribal?) ability to ostracize the individual that commited the crime. This led me to my line of thought about seperation. I brought up that we in this current age, in the large, complex, disconnected system we live in -- we cannot use the method of direct ostracization that is available to the small tribe. We don't even know what's going on in the apartemnt next door.

After class, Dan Faulk and I talked about hierarchy and specialization and I realized that they go hand in hand. You cannot have a hierarchy without specialization -- duh!

And specialization is a beautiful, double-edged blade. Specialization is good for the overall system as an organism -- it allows the organism to function well as a whole. But specialization implies a hierarchy. By nature of their design, specialized units cannot be free of dependencies. To be a specialized unit menas to be dependent and to be depended upon. To be specialized means to exist within a hierarchy.

So now... thinking about all this, I'm riding home on my bike... when I ride past this lady catching her balance on the back of a truck. I turn around to see if she's alright. She asks if I can help her walk home -- "just around the corner". I say sure and as she takes off her backpack, I hear heavy bottles clank together, and... then I smell the friggin distillery. Well, I start walking and thinking "what am I doing? How am I gonna get out of this? I'm being an 'enabler'!" And then she starts stumbling out into the treet! I call her back over the the sidewalk and ger her to sit down on the curb. She says how come ya always have to go for the booze? I say it's 'cause life hurts. She says yea, but how come... and she holds up her hand and "drinks" out of her thumb-bottle-neck. And I say it's cause life hurts too much and you need to run away -- you need to bury the pain and alcohol makes the pain go away... for a little while at least.

Just then, a cop pulls up.
She says to me "oh shit! uh... what's your name?"
"Andrew"
"okay... uh, Andrew you're my friend and you are just walking me home and you are gonna take me home now okay?"
"... no, I can't do that. I can't lie for you"
"but please! come on, please!"
"no. You have to deal with this. You have to deal with the cop and I can't lie for you."

After the expected cop/drunk skit, I became aware that life was just putting me through a situation to make me understad the true scope of the disconnect problem.
You see before he arrested her, cuffed her, and took her away -- while he was still doing his cop-lecture shtick -- something he said really stuck with me.

He said to her "are you seeking any help yet?"

Notice the disconnect. In the theoretical small tribe -- the person with a problem like alcoholism would not have to "seek help" because the tight-knit (and largely parrallel) community would be the help. But in our large, complex, disconnected system, we say

"are you seeking any help?"

saying "marijuana" makes me uncomfortabe

I don't like thinking of how others will percieve me when reading the below poem. I makes me uncomfortable, and I think "I should take it down... I shouldn't post that...". But then another voice (and aparently a stronger voice) comes up and says "if you think you shouldn't post it because people will judge you for it, then that's exactly the reason you have to post it"

I think that's accurate -- it's poetry, not... i dunno, something else.

the poet's lost within me

here I am again
    so very high today
but to finish with my schoolwork
    I can see no other way
for marijuana gives me focus
    allowing me to tredge
through mounds and mounds of homework
    till I can see the edge
and, the poet's lost within me
    in a cloud of smoke today
but I'm getting high again
    for I see no other way

Jason told me the best thing...

I gave Jason Galuten a book of my poetry for Christmas. The other day, he and I were using Google Chat (through Gmail)... here's the transcript

Jason: so anyway... your poetry has become popular around here
me: ??
Jason: I have had people over my house on different occasions...
and they end up taking turns reading poetry and laughing and smiling and other things
In fact, I hadn't even read any of it until someone picked it up off of my shelf and began reading stuff aloud
i like ode to a speed bump
there are many other favorites
just las week we had a bonfire at my cabin and people were passing around your book
very nice
me: ... that's.. well the best thing I've heard in quite a while.
Jason: yeah, man... you're stuff is really good... people who don't know you are getting a lot of joy out of it
me: That was my only wish -- truly
Jason: right on
well... you should distribute them more ...
hmm... nah...
just write more..
for me and my friends

Sent at 3:28 pm on Monday

WTO says...

The richest fifth have 80% of the world’s income and the poorest fifth have 1%; this gap has doubled between 1960 and 2000. (United Nations Human Development Report, 1999)

Berlioz spam I got today...

I got a wierd spam I got today...

How to make your orgasms last longer...

and Berlioz.

... am I missing something?


Here's the spam.
=========
Zheldybin, had hauled Nikanor Ivanovich out of bed, told him of Berlioz's death and followed him to flat No. 50. There they had sealed the deceased's papers and personal effects. Neither Grunya the maid, who lived out, nor the imprudent Stepan Bogdanovich were in the flat at the time. The police informed Nikanor Ivanovich that they would call later to collect Berlioz's manuscripts for sorting and examination and that his accommodation, consisting of three rooms (the jeweller's study, drawing-room and dining-room) would revert to the tenants' association for disposal. His effects were to be kept under seal until the legatees' claims were proved by the court. The news of Berlioz's death spread through the building with supernatural speed and from seven o'clock on Thursday morning Bosoi started to get telephone calls. After that people began calling in person with written pleas of their urgent need of vacant housing space. Within the space of two hours Nikanor Ivanovich had collected thirty-two such statements. They contained entreaties, threats, intrigue, denunciations, promises to redecorate the flat, remarks about overcrowding and the ourjrlrjrk r k r n rjr pufsl sus hss soonsjsms j himk mqlhmtlsl o l pmt lt momq mrjq lgjkj tj kjrjp f o jqjljm hhmolmmk mom lmqmkm j ks m omh j gjnjt f sjmjpj q j qg s g i gpfstku ltjug ug tfttr m tutj tq thtfpitstf us okrirlr f rrrnr ot nrt r m rprkrgn frr susr rm ogorn m ounlop ooo oosnfqporo go r omoihtlhlsl t qftlt lt mui uqts u pusr uumuruiupunqquk u n uk muhohkithp hjhn irhlgf ili uihis iomniji m i j sdjksdfsdfsdlgkj sdflkjsdf lksdjfsdfsdf