The State of Purpose

I need a recommendation. For a time, I've wanted to learn-- to come to understand-- U.S. history. Now we all know that a story is as much a part of the teller as it is of the subject. That one has to consider the source. So, instead of my grade-school textbook on American history, I thought I could go and just pick up A People's History, that it would fill in all the details and explain causes and movements. But Zinn's work apparently assumes that one has already learned U.S. history from somewhere and that we just need to re-learn it. He skims past topics like the Boston Tea Party quickly, without explaining what brought the event about or its context.

So the recommendation, then, is for a solid, thorough explanation of really any piece of history. U.S. history might be a logical place to start for me, but really and piece or bit would do just fine, if it's lucid and engaging. My paternal grandfather really keyed me into this interest years ago, when he would send family letters (by U.S. mail) describing the books he'd read, often on historical subjects. I realized, through those letters, that history-- despite what my public schooling did to dry it out-- was actually a deep and rich bed, out of which current and daily events have grown.

This all serves as background, really, to the engagement that I want to make with my immediate and future world, in a few specific ways. In one part, it stems from living in the mid-west, where the highly political water-cooler talk isn't so easy that I can just affirm and abide. Yet, my lack of background impairs my faculty for informed response.

In an altogether different regard, I want to understand the business and financial worlds well enough to answer various questions I pose to myself while planning for the next thirty odd years:

Would I be happy pursuing a PhD and subsequently working in research, or would an MBA be a rewarding career move? Will I have enough savings to retire, or will there even be such a thing in 35 years? What connection do I hold with my maternal homestead?

Answers to such questions require fairly well-informed thought and a fair amount of research. But it's alright to take a few years to answer then and well worth the time investment. I enjoy this part of growing up; it's what we do.

So please, share with me your reading lists. Let me know who awakens your intellect and grounds your discourse. Write me back into our community, for the arid plains are beginning to make me parch.

In the stillness of exacting motion, a cessation of hiatus

Remiss, derelict, just generally absent from this space lately. I've missed you, dear reader. I think about you frequently. But it takes a certain set of chops to navigate these strange and complex changes. I feel as though i've lost my greatest audience. Readership has dropped a unit of late.

Now i fear the rains are bleeding my ink.

It certainly is late: late summer, late afternoon, late to return home. But a certain home drives my thoughts and actions fast. For since the last missive, we have pressed forward with our intentions. An offer, a negotiation, a counter, and now it is written. Our stamps are stumped and the parties arrived. Dear friend, a home has been found. We do silly dances and sleep lightly.

This is just a mention, a check-in after the respite. Tomorrow i leave for PDX for the week. My employer needs me to check a few things there, make sure everything is working as it should. Should be a blast, though also a distraction at the moment of action.

Sometimes you must move quickly just to stay in place. Sometimes there is naught to do but wait and rest a few bars on the bridge. Trust that things will resolve in time. I test, trust, and rattle the keys. And hope that i'm reading the right pages, for i've not run through this one ever before.

shutterbug

A few new photographs.

West Siiide

Finally got out of my bubble a bit. I'm back from a week on the west coast, based in Portland at my Brother's apartment-- a forgotten piece of rental property in southeast Portland (though soon to be rediscovered, as their water line needs immediate repair).

I'll pepper this post with ample pictures, but I've uploaded an album on facebook (where it's easy), so you should mosey over there and have a look, too.

I flew from Kansas City to Portland by way of Minneapolis the friday before last. The cheap flight had me up at 4 am, but that's actually when I woke. My alarm was set for five. Still, i kept nodding off on the plane. The whole Pacific Northwest was overcast for the first four days or so of my visit. I didn't get to see much on the flight out, except at one point where the clouds broke. It looked to be the Rockies below, but I had no real sense of geography, thirty-thousand feet up.

The warnings on flights to turn off all electronics are a bit bewildering. Surely airlines won't design a plane that could possibly crash if someone turns their cell phone on at some point. And my physics background tells me that it would be simple enough to shield all signals from the main cabin out. It occurred to me during this trip, though, that the precaution may be more about disallowing eavesdropping than about the safety of the aircraft. That is, a simple radio receiver might be able to pick up the pilots' communications with the airport. Incidentally, I did find my silly phone on at one point on the return flight. The power button must have gotten depressed while in my bag. I turned the phone off and we didn't crash.

Asheville, where I'm from, is semi-tropical rainforest. I like the rain and so it was sort of funny that Sprint's hiring manager used KC's high sunny-day count as a selling point. But I wanted to visit the north west US partly for this reason-- the famous mist and fog, that isn't exactly rain or humidity (at least not in the winter).

Portland, though, was uncharacteristically overcast until i got back from the bay area on wednesday, when things cleared up smashingly and my brother and I got some excellent views of the city by walking up Mount Tabor. But the drive to Seattle and the time while we visited Washington state was rather grey, so I don't have too many stunning pictures from the flight out or from Seattle. A highlight, though, was the red room in the Seattle library.

That library, in fact, is possibly the greatest I have ever visited, built inside a transplendent Koolhaus building. Maybe it's a reflection of a discussion my brother and I had. I've always thought we should have itemized taxes, so you could go down the list and check off military, education, but leave out The War on Drugs and prisons (or whatever). Zack pointed out, though, that this would probably result in a great divide: the libraries and schools of the coasts and the militia of the central states.

So, arrived Friday. Saturday we drove up to Seattle and walked around the downtown (library, Pike Public Market, several blocks in search of a dog park Zack remembered, and drove through Capitol Hill). Sunday we drove out to Astoria so I could for the first time in my life see the Pacific. Drove past the Goonies house, but I didn't particularly notice it. That evening, back in Portland, we went to a local bar and met up with my brother's friends. Monday I flew (at a leisurely hour) to Oakland, CA to spend a day and a half visiting san francisco and a friend of mine from Pinewoods. While there, a friend from high school found me on facebook, so I got to see a good friend I hadn't seen in eleven years.

Tuesday I took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) into frisco proper and walked around town all day. I got off at the 24th St Bart stop, walked up Bernal Hill Park, as recommened by my friend's roommate, for spectastic views of the entire area in all directions. Then up Valencia through Mission (which has many murals),

taking 16th street west to Castro. After lunch at Blue, I walked up Market and took Fillmore to Haight, walking Haight several blocks west to Ashbury (where I checked my email and found my friend from high-school had added me). Despite my feets' complaints, they carried me on into the Golden Gate park past the de Young Museum (about a third the length of the park). On the north edge I caught the 29 bus up into the Presidio and got off to walk down to Baker Beach. Here is where I actually touched the Pacific for the first time. Also watched cargo ships coming into the bay (did not see any hit the Golden Gate). After a bit, walked back up the bluffs to the bay side of the Golden Gate Bridge, where i caught the 80 (Golden Gate Transit, express bus) back to the Civic Center BART stop and headed back out to Oakland. I considered taking the ferry across the bay, but it was already 5 or 6 pm and my feet. Oh, my feet.

The next morning i flew back to Portland, nearly missing the flight (the BART stopped in it's tracks a few times on the way there) and forfeiting my pocket knife in order to carry on a bag i was going to check. That was Wednesday. Thanksgiving day, my brother and I got our constitutional walking up Mount Tabor, which has a few good views of downtown Portland and one of Mount Hood. That evening, we joined Zack's friends for thanksgiving dinner, complete with turkey, two kinds of stuffing (one with pepperoni, I believe), two cranberry sauces, biscuits, gravy, beans, corn casserole, and wines. I supposed there were desserts, too, but I was well satiated by that point.

That's the rough outline of the trip. My brother and I had lots to talk over and covered probably a small percent of it. I could easily spend a month out west and not get bored, but one makes do. I loved every moment of it (except possibly the bits going through security in the airports) and am ready to pack up and head out there for goods. Below is a bit of the view that Bernal Hill affords.

Families of Generally Acyclic Directed Graphs in Three Dimensions

Most family trees are planar, representing time or generations along the vertical axis and siblings and spouses both across the horizontal. For a while now, I've been working with the idea of separating the spousal and sibling relationships into two dimensions and building family trees in three. This lends well to large and extended families.

Originally I had imagined building these trees from the sort of dowels and styrofoam primitives you can get at hobby stores. But I knew the things wouldn't support themselves. It might still be possible with threaded metal rods-- something stronger and more rigid. Such a beast might even make a nice mobile.

Since the concept is already patented (in a distressingly convoluted presentation), there's no issue sharing with you the sketches that I've made (pay no attention to the symbolic modifiers). The image above shows a mock-up that I made using a fairly simple modelling program. Currently I'm researching more robust programs that can handle heredity and inheritance (of the model's physical traits) better. But i'm pretty happy with what is shown here already.

West Side

How do I plan a trip along a specific route? Google maps should accept such things as "Portland, OR to san francisco, CA via Route 101". If i'm going to drive down the west coast for the first time in my life, i want to take the coastal highway.

What GM does feature, though, is the ability to drag waypoints into a route. With a few strategic alterations, I can get exactly what I wanted, without knowing the details about connecting roads and such.

synesthesia

slowly have i realized that i am blessed with a perceptual experience with interesting symptoms and no side effects. several years ago i noticed that, while i watched basketball through a window, my mind was creating noises to accompany the bouncing of the ball that i saw. at some point, i learned the word for this. i think it was when one of my sister's described how numbers have color, for her.

What i learned today is that the word synesthesia describes the class of conditions, of which my visual-aural and my sister's number-color experiences are distinct types. My favorite encyclopedia describes the latter as "Grapheme-color synesthesia" but doesn't have such a fancy name for my variant. That encyclopedia has interesting links at the end.

The bouncing ball will test whether you have my variant. I experience it a lot while using computers, because there are often visual events with no sound, either in the user interface or in banner-ads on web pages. Another instance is watching the turn-signal of the car in front of me at a stop light.

It's a pretty neat condition. And since it "runs strongly in families", i'm curious to know whether my other relatives have variants. feel free to post a comment or email me (even if you're not a relative...). Maybe at the next family reunion, we can have a volleyball match between the dyslexics and the synesthetes.