Category: telling

For Derrick: “The source of the exhilaration is the explosion of perception.”

So I am reading MIT’s first year computer science textbook from the early 80s and the foreword is by Alan Perlis, the first recipient of the Turing Award. It is full of the kind of thing I am thinking about when I wonder if computer programmers have always had a quasi-poetic streak.

Every computer program is a model, hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process. These processes, arising from human experience and thought, are huge in number, intricate in detail, and at any time only partially understood. They are modeled to our permanent satisfaction rarely by our computer programs. Thus even though our programs are carefullly handcrafted discrete collections of symbols, mosaics of interlocking functions, they continually evolve: we change them as our perception of the model deepens, enlarges, generalizes until the model ultimately attains a metastable place within still another model with which we struggle. The source of the exhilaration associated with computer programming is the continual unfolding within the mind and on the computer of mechanisms expressed as programs and the explosion of perception they generate. If art interprets our dreams, the computer executes them in the guise of programs!

— Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Relationships all the way down

I really like Bharat’s thoughtful post about talking to his morning bus driver about climate change.

So, as someone who thinks climate change is a serious issue, is it not my responsibility to jump into this debate? Here’s an otherwise stand-up guy who appears to be very misinformed and misled on basic climate change facts, good opportunity to change minds, right?

I am not so sure.

He points to research showing that “more science” doesn’t cure climate skepticism, and proposes that the hard work of building trust is more effective than sharing the best facts. B, I’m so curious to hear how that goes on your bus rides.

This relates to a theme I have been pondering in many areas, which is that change doesn’t happen when we have the best arguments; change happens when we build positive relationships. Simple idea, endlessly challenging.

Here is someone talking about the pointlessness of having logical debates about queer rights in faith communities and other religious issues.

Every poll and every wise observer points out that gay-affirming folks have not been winning on account of superior arguments, whether arguments from the Bible or theology or science. They aren’t winning on account of their superior debating skills. They’re winning by being present and visible in faith communities: by coming out in ways that clergy and congregations can’t ignore. Gay people are winning because straight people who love and respect them are coming out right along with them.

The classic instance is the faithful older church woman—a devoted and beloved member of the community—who, at just the right moment in a congregational meeting, stands up and says, “Well, friends, I guess we can argue about all of this until the cows come home. All I know is that ________, my ________, is as dear a child of God as I will ever hope to be.” She then goes on to tell the story of she found out about ________, how they stayed close, and how her heart was changed. Bingo. Are we ready for the vote?

And if you squint, I think this example is related too. Here is someone observing that designers are dismissive about the time they put into building relationships with their clients.

While they see client meetings are important, many designers don’t see them as integral to the craft and discipline of interaction design. For them, the “real work” of interaction design is the work of creation… So, despite the unavoidable necessity of communicating with clients, designers don’t seem to talk much about hand waving as a part of interaction design as a profession.

However, with more than 100 hours of project work analyzed through video and audio, I’d say that successful hand waving looks more and more like an important and hard-won accomplishment.

I think relationship work gets dismissed in a lot of areas, while ideas and intellectual work get called “real”. When people talk about unpaid work, it is often focussed on the massive unpaid caregiving labour that women and girls do. I wonder what it would mean to also account for the dismissed relationship-building work that supports other work?

For Jessica: Sexy Ladies Let Me Talk To You

Sexy Ladies Let Me Talk To You by Justin Timberlake

  • In the course of spending some quality time with myself over my 32nd birthday, I found myself cleaning the bath and having a 5pm dance party.
  • Jessica Yarish if you named a Justin Timberlake song you would name it this, I think?
  • I am trying to post gifts for people over here instead of on Facebook.

For Perseid season.

Joanna Newsom – Emily

Anyhow – I sat by your side, by the water
You taught me the names of the stars overhead that I wrote down in my ledger
Though all I knew of the rote universe were those pleiades loosed in december
I promised you I’d set them to verse so I’d always remember

That the meteorite is a source of the light
And the meteor’s just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite’s just what causes the light
And the meteor’s how it’s perceived
And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee

Anonymous robot lover, misread quotes, sometimes we see what we want to see.


Rivest spent much of his time at Stanford’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence lab, helping with a fairly quixotic project involving an autonomous robot rover. The idea was to get the electronic beast to roam the parking lot with no human intervention, a typical overly optimistic task for AI workers in the 1960s.

Oh, rover. Rover. I see.

Reading Crypto, by Steven Levy, a history of public cryptography. Halfway thrilling, even though I know approximately how it ends. I’m trying to fill in the gaps, see if I can finally learn the pieces in a way I will remember. “Rivest” gave me an itch about the math for PGP, but I had to look up the name. RSA. Rivest is the R in RSA encryption.

Surprising inspirational aspect of the Chernobyl “Zone Of Alienation”


There has been an ongoing scientific debate about the extent that flora and fauna of the zone were affected by the radioactive contamination that followed the accident. No scientifically documented cases of mutant deformity in animals of the zone were reported other than partial albinism in swallows and insect mutations. There have been individual eyewitness reports of other animal mutations but no comprehensive statistical analysis has been completed to date. The cloud of heavily polluted dust left the Red Forest (Rudyi Lis)—a strand of highly-irradiated pine wood near the plant which was subsequently bulldozed.

There have been reports that wildlife has flourished due to significant reduction of human impact. For this reason, the zone is considered by some as a classic example of an involuntary park. Populations of traditional Polesian animals (like wolves, wild boar and Roe Deer), red deer, moose, and beaver have multiplied enormously and begun expanding outside the zone. The area also houses herds of European wisent and Przewalski’s Horses released there after the accident. Even extremely rare lynx have appeared, and there are reports of tracks from brown bears, an animal not seen in the area for several centuries. Special game warden units are organized to protect and control them.

— Wikipedia

i need a new username.

This has been sitting as a draft since Jan 2009! This week I ran into more real life friends on Flickr and Twitter and it brought this all up again. Ugh, leftover old username. I think I’d been working around this problem by avoiding places where I had a username at all. Maybe that is the right solution anyway, to just use my real name everywhere. But, as drafted two years ago, something about having no nicknames makes me sad. And something about being renamed seems timely right now.

i’ve been “ookpik” online since 1997, when i took the name from a kids’ poem that i liked. it’s an inuit word for owl. it’s also the name of a kind of furry owl doll made for tourists. i thought that was ok for a long time, but now i think it’s too much appropriation and colonial weirdness. so i need a new username.

i’m posting about it here to ask for help. i have a common first name, a last name i don’t like, and no nicknames. ookpik was unusual enough as a name, and i’ve usually been early enough to register on sites i use, that i have no backup names at all.

something about having no nicknames make me sad.

So. Ideas?

A book I once stayed up all night reading.


“Hello?” she answers, and I pause. I hate her for the fact that I know she’ll hang up, but I hate her more because there is a chance she won’t.

“When I pluck my eyebrows, I’m becoming more of a woman.” I say, “When you stop plucking yours, you become less of a woman. When I fuck a man, or his boyfriend,” I say, “and my chest is shaved, and my eyebrows are plucked, and his expensive underwear is pulled aside so that his cock springs free into my mouth, what do you have? Is gender really just tits?”

“Who is this?” the woman says.

“And women who develop breast cancer, who have their tits cut off, who wear the same breast form fakes as I do when I’m all dressed up, are they less than women?” She hangs up and my anger is confused because I don’t know what I believe anymore myself. If that’s what gender is, just an illusion, then why don’t I fuck women?

— Lockpick Pornography by Joey Comeau

I remember that being the question that made me decide to keep reading.

Ghost slaves


If the energy provided by the fossil fuel to support the average inhabitant of the US had to be produced by human power, we would each have 120 slaves.

— cit. Weston Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, 2000, p.4.

I forget where I found the phrase “ghost slaves” to describe this idea, but it helped me get my head around some more radical criticisms of agriculture and civilization.

Ooh, a mini-sequel to “A Massive Swelling: Celebrity As A Grotesque, Crippling Disease”


In the lack of a dialogue about political economy and its effects on individual psyches, capitalist nations instead indulge the delusion that these things are unrelated. We are tacitly encouraged, as a society, not to see corruption as the product of elitism and power— not class-related, in other words— but accidental every time, a result of the personal weakness of the powerful individual, who we are encouraged to view as an aberration— mentally ill, an addict— an exception to the rule, rather than the norm.

The super-rich are so over-engorged, so coddled, so disgusted with themselves, they are turning into demons, because they have lost all touch with reality and all faith in the boundaries of a sane world. And when tyrants and stars, nation-states and classes believe they are Nietzschean übermenschen, beyond good and evil, there is, quite frequently, a body count.

— Cintra Wilson on The toxic seeds of John Galliano’s fall (via Constant Siege)