Eric Schmidt via John Battelle.
Expertise will transition in our lifetime from learned information to learning information— this is a big shift.
Babies
So it turns out you can’t really grow a “crop” of peas in a single pot, but you can grow snacks. I’ve been dutifully planting into this pot at three week intervals, indulging my little gardening urges. My reward appears to be four to six peas at a time.
I’d been pollinating the sugar pea blossoms with a fluffy paintbrush, but I don’t think the plant sex is necessary. When I was tickling each flower in just the right place, the pods would end up nursing a single, swollen pea among 5 or 6 shrivelled unpeas. Since the vines have gotten denser I’ve been missing a lot of the flowers, and their pods look less Knocked Up and more like regular sugar peas.
Either I was not a very good lover or virtue makes peas strong.
The big news around my fake garden, though, is the monstrous bud the euphorbia is making. I don’t know how long it has been growing this; I spotted it about a week ago. It’s about the size of a golf ball— hilariously out of proportion to the rest of the plant.
The bud is shaped like a bird head, like it’s about to start talking. It’s covered in peach fuzz. I am excited just to have such a ridiculous bud hanging around. I wonder how long this will go on before it pops.
Rebecca thinks euphorbias are related to pointsettias, and that I might soon be the proud guardian of a pointy red flower. She also maintains that when cacti flower, they flower for weeks at a time. She’s a bit of a garden enabler.
Bride of the Unicorn necklace
I’m not sure whether all green and white jewellery would look bridal, or whether it has to involve tiny pearls and botanical clusters. This necklace ended up with an overpowering resemblance to a wreath of ivy and grapes. It is a hairband for a unicorn, or better yet a wedding bower for fairies. I can’t wear this. I am not bethrothed to a pegasus, and I feel it would give the wrong impression.
I started to get misgivings before I even finished making it— same method as yesterday’s necklace— but I was determined to keep up my stash-into-treasure momentum. I gave Bride of the Unicorn a couple of weeks and tried it with different outfits, but no dice.
I figure if I can find a big unicorn pendant to hang off one side of this, I might be able to bring it back from the edge of whimsy, back into territory controlled by the Empire of Irony. (Just thinking about the necklace is apparently enough to shift me into the conventions of epic fantasy. Thus begins the Age of The Reluctant Bride and her Pearly Necklace!)
Fair tax and other aphrodisiacs
Grist has a great little article about economic responsibility, the neglected cousin of social and environmental responsibilities.
Much more than most progressive or activist websites, Grist seems to make an effort to come up with a simple vision of priorities, and start pushing the vocabulary to go with it. I appreciate their thoroughness, and skill. In this piece, the writers suggest we need to refocus on gigantic environmental issues like global warming, and we can’t do that without more sustainable economics.
Incidentally, how did economists get to be such rock stars on the internet? It started before Freakonomics, maybe to do with social software engineering and online community theory? It’s Clay Shirky’s fault maybe? I have no basis for this hunch.
In any case, the latest bit of Grist that puts a twinkle in my eye:
Economic issues have long been the poor cousins within the corporate-responsibility debate. For many years, they were considered to be synonymous with financial issues, and widely assumed to be well managed. But as concerns like fair trade, fair pricing, and fair wages have increasingly made headlines, it has become clear that economic issues are surprisingly ill-understood by most corporations, and an underrepresented dimension of the corporate-responsibility agenda.
And getting into the meaty words and definitions:
Let’s just toy with one of these dimensions: economic equity. This addresses the reasonably transparent — and certainly strategic — management of the creation and distribution of wealth. It includes issues like fair trade; fair wages (is it reasonable for 50 cents of the price of a $100 sneaker to go to production workers, and $18 to the retail labor selling them?); fair pricing (is it reasonable for the world’s poorest to pay from two to 20 times as much as the richest for their food, water, energy, and drugs?); and — the new humdinger — fair tax (is it responsible for business to see corporate taxes purely as a cost to be avoided, rather than part of their “social contract” with society?).
‘Fair tax’ would be a hot response to any mention of ‘“tax relief”:http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/simple_framing,’ which is a phrase that I notice has started popping up in Canada now that we’ve got a conservative federal government. (“Hot response?” Hot? This is what I’m talking about. Since when do economic buzz words have sex appeal?)
Space Race: a necklace
I’ve been getting the feeling that turning my entire crafting stash into finished objects is not really going to be about emptying my stash closet. Plunging into the bead portion of my inventory is making this even more clear: this endeavour is about generating masses and masses of treasure.
I suddenly have three necklaces to my name, and the stash has not gotten visibly smaller. It doesn’t take many beads to make a necklace, at least in the context of my 15 pound supply. Either I need to make a lot of necklaces, or I need to reconsider my decision not to make another beaded curtain.
This is copycat jewellery
The first necklace to come out of my stash is my attempt at copying something that caught my eye at the Starving Artist Bazaar. The original was fluorescent red and blue, which triggered my spider senses from afar.
I haven’t attempted to make jewellery since I was about 8 years old, so I’m still getting my inspiration really directly and obviously. I like to think of this in the spirit of sketching from masterpieces.
I’m excited to figure out how to make more things up out of my head, though. All those neck bones and cords to work with!
Basic ingredients and method
I used two units of stash:
- a bag of about 50 pointy, purple, glass beads
- a collection of 5 aqua blue, glass beads
Then I went and ruined it by buying more crafting supplies!
- a length of black cord (used half)
- a spool of silver wire, which has definitely settled into stash status
- a set of clasps
It took about an hour to make this, mostly spent figuring out how jewelry works.
I settled on twisting the wire around a pencil to make a long spiral and threading beads onto that. Then I threaded the black cord into the spiral (easy), and pulled the wire at both ends to tighten it against the cord. I poked some of the beads around and made an extra loop to create that bump of blue, then clamped on the clasps.
I judge this a success
I’ve been wearing this a lot. The colours and the blue orbs remind me of retro visions of space. Space Race: a Necklace!
Weird weekend
Yesterday I spoke on a panel discussing the film Petals, which follows a photographer who creates a collection of vulva portraits. In one of the scenes, a woman who has studied some kind of native southwestern or Mexican sexual tradition is naming different vulva shapes. Deer woman, buffalo woman, dancing woman. OK.
Towards the end of the scene her explanation gets away from her a little and she starts just stringing animal names together, at which point Galen and I both cracked up despite ourselves, and despite having the film’s producer sitting with us. “Sometimes you’ll see a woman who is half deer, half sheep, and that’s called a fox, and…” Stop, stop!
During the post-film discussion, a woman in the audience asked about the vulva names and where she could learn more about deer woman and company. It suddenly sounded a lot like the fabled 100 Inuit words for snow. The panel didn’t go there at all, but I wondered what I would do with 100 words for genitals, how that would help me communicate or think. (Howard Rheingold’s They Have A Word For It is a great book on this theme.) I’m not sure I want to get into categorizing body shapes and types. What it really made me want to know was 100 words for feeling weird, because I was deferring a lot of weirdness at that moment on the panel.
When I showed up for the screening, the film festival director didn’t recognize me when I said hi, even though we’ve met several times and my name was in the program. He still didn’t know who I was when he invited the panel to come up front, and instead of covering with any grace he just sort of squinted at me with his mouth open. The producer I was sitting with piped up with my name, so it sort of worked out. Then the panel turned out to be unmoderated, no one got introduced, and the director wrapped up the discussion by walking in front of the stage and shouting “Is that about it?” like a reluctant teacher interrupting a boring student presentation. Whoa.
So I’m looking for a word, English or otherwise, to explain the general sentiment that “This would embarrass a lesser woman, and I’m sure glad that I know better than to let this ruin my weekend. Where are my usual friends and when can I hug them?”
I’m also in search of a word to express my reaction to a photo shoot I organized on Saturday where somebody invited about 30 extra models (quadrupling the total population of the shoot), and other various things. We went to a barbecue and the address was abandoned? Galen was moved more than once, this weekend, to declare, “At least we still have our dignity.”
What is the word for this kind of weekend, and what language has catalogued silly angst in this level of detail?
New knitting motivation
I’ve figured out which dress to wear with this fuzzy red thing I’m working on.
Once I’m done with dressing like a jellyfish, I can start dressing like my website. Oh, red and blue.
Red and blue… and checked
I had forgotten about this skirt. I think it’s the first item that got me excited about red and blue as the One Colour Scheme To Rule Them All.
Urban duck parenting
Just in case the crows and cherry blossoms didn’t make you think I was a sappy hippie, here is a portrait of two neighbourhood mallards that seem to nest in inappropriate urban locations every year, and raise their ducklings on apartment lawns.
Last spring I saw a business woman in a power suit and sneakers trying to get a fuzzy puddle of ducklings to stop following her down the sidewalk. Who will be their victim this year? And does the football shape of a duck make you want to tuck it under your arm too, or is that only me?
Paging any unicorns in the area…
My favourite local microclimate effect is the pink snow globe that will sometimes develop on single blocks, where one street’s cherry blossoms are just ripe enough and the wind just strong enough to make it snow cherry petals.
As if it isn’t enough to regularly find sidewalks blanketed in pink flowers, or legitimate drifts of blossoms in the gutters, sometimes we can walk around in air full of swirly pink flakes that smell like cherries. But only for one block.
Something about Victoria’s proximity to the ocean or our particular collection of hills results in very pronounced weather differences between neighbourhoods or across streets. It’s pretty normal to get simultaneous hail and bright sunshine over different parts of your own yard, even.
Consequently we have cherry trees in bloom in different parts of the city from January through almost to June, one pink block here and one there, as each climate pocket hits peak cherry breeding conditions.
Walking past a single fragrant cherry tree is enough to cheer up most people for a few minutes (especially by moonlight!). I’ve had such a prolonged, steady dose now, after four months of spring, that I’m almost ready to cry sometimes when I walk around the neighbourhood and pass through a block-sized cloud of cherry perfume. I’m saturated.
It’s absurd that this tree blossom marathon is even possible, and we’ve got several weeks to go before the Victoria spring season is over. The chestnut trees have barely started, and I just saw my first lilac yesterday. I might as well be on happy drugs.
I went out for coffee with my friend The Hawk today (a real person, not my spirit animal), and the weather was making it clear that this city was built over a coastal rainforest: windy, rainy, gray. I was grumbling a bit on the way home, in the ritualistic way we complain about weather here, and then I turned a corner and there was a snow globe on Southgate Street.
It was raining flowers harder than it was raining water, and the flip side of the rainy climate was suddenly dominant. We get this surreal rainforest light sometimes, where it’s quite bright, but shadowless because of the cloud filter, and it turns kind of green from reflecting off so many plants. The light makes everything look like it is glowing.
It made me feel a little better about the fact that a couple of generations back, somebody paved over the local cedar groves. At least they put up a ridiculous, Dr. Seussian city, where today, for one block, even the vertical surfaces were getting plastered with airborne flowers. On one side of the street, anyway.
I was just about to formulate some mental joke about how unicorns or winged foxes (maybe a talking spirit bear?) could appear at that moment without surprising me, when a few crows started collecting sprigs of cherry blossoms, presumably for their nests. Close enough! I can’t even process little black birds growing up in a pink nest. It’s sensory overload.
My mum has this old, ceramic mixing bowl that is robin’s egg blue, and when I visit her I just want to put things in the bowl and look at them. Yellow cornmeal, white or brown eggs, red lentils, black olives, buttons, a toad, chocolate milk, anything, as long as it goes in the blue bowl. Today was like that; I wanted to look at these crows poking around in a glowing pink and green lawn forever!
Activist patterns
I posted this in a discussion about The Grim Meathook Future over on Warren Ellis’ new Die Puny Humans site.
I find all this talk of leaders and critical masses and movements fascinating. To my mind, everything keeps getting more fractured and more complicated and we can’t put it back in a nice tidy box. Simple, reductionist, comprehensible viewpoints only lasted until we built machines that could handle thousands of variables at once. Now look how many things actually have thousands of variables at work. Practically every news story boils down to “it had more consequences than we thought.”
I don’t think any kind of movement will gel. These problems are bigger than human minds can handle, at least the way we’re used to thinking. When, before now, have average peasants fancied they might figure out how to alter the course of every society on earth in this level of detail? I think progress will be about learning to deal with complexity, and not just the parts with catchy names like “emergence” or “the long tail.” Parts like “a land war in Asia” or “we’re all getting cancer.”
Lots of fields have formal techniques for dealing with complexity. “Scale later” in software, etc. I’d be really curious to collect similar patterns from activists or politicians.
Then I immediately thought of a bunch of possible patterns and places to find them. I’m going to post them here, before I go see to what degree my comment has been eviscerated by other puny humans. I can’t believe I said “practically every…” on the internet. Bring on the nitpickers!
These are mostly about compassion.
- The Fog of War documentary about Robert MacNamara by Errol Morris talks a lot about understanding your enemy and understanding that war is very complicated
- Cory Doctorow says, “If your popular revolution demands that we give up on popular entertainment it won’t be very popular.” I think that’s a big part of the problem facing environmentalism these days.
- The Ethical Slut gave me a lot of ideas about getting what I want without imposing on other people, and about finding ways to collaborate.
- Fernando Flores gave me ideas about using trust as a tool for change, and as a good partner for criticism. I wish his books weren’t so ’80s.
- I’d really like to hear Heather Corrina’s ideas about patterns for activists, because she spends so much time and energy on activism.
- Lots of people talk about 80/20 rules, but I like Umbra Fisk’s explanation best.
- Women, Passion and Celibacy is really angry and ranty, but it had a lot of good ideas about doing without things, in this case sexual relationships. The author compared celibacy to vegetarianism, which actually blew my mind. I like to compare both those things to atheism, and reduced consumerism.
I’m finding underwear really inspiring today
Chris has to get a short haircut for an acting role. We had a little chat, over lemonade, about haircuts and vanity and self-esteem and so on.
We both sounded a little disappointed that identity could get so tied up in haircuts; it seems like a confident person should be able to transcend something as trivial as a haircut, and yet here we are worrying about our ‘dos.
Possible ways to weasle out of this:
- call it style, or personal expression
- point out that hair has a big impact on faces, and faces are a primal staging ground for identity
- turnabout is fair play: sure it’s trivial, so who cares if I care about my hair?
But yeah, weaseling about vanity is hard to do effectively. Once you start pointing out all the things that humans do out of vanity, it gets to be a bit of a sandpit, caving in on you whenever you try to build a way out. If I were still my 16-year-old self, I’d be willing to spin you a reductionist path to the conclusion that everything is vain. Doing nice things for other people? Oh, I guess you just want them to like you so you’re manipulating them with kindness.
Later this evening I realized that I have a similar relationship with underwear as I do to haircuts. I hate wearing boring or ugly underwear, and I sometimes like an outfit better just because I have, e.g., ruffly-backed hipsters underneath. My panty salad contains many colourful frills. This is silly, and yet… I get a lot out of fancy panties.
I’m not in the mood to tie this into the power of costumes, or ornament as communication, or a confession of my own vanity, or any of those angles, but I will happily point out that admiring these overpriced panties is inspiring a lot of jellyfish couture in my head.
This model (meaning the garment) is the most like a jellyfish, with folds and sheer ruffles. It could use some streamers.
These are giving me ideas about new places to add gathers to garments.
This is only conceptually like a jellyfish, and I admit I had already considered gathers in this location…
I’m not sure lace is necessarily jellyfish-esque (too structured, too vertebrate?), but this particular lace arrangement does evoke a muff peeking out, so it gets points from me.
Lies, all lies
The biggest lie of all is right in the title, of course.
I’m going to lobby Galen to include the bit about “Fancy breads, fillings and spreads…” in a Panty Boy song. So poetic, and rich with innuendo. Fillings and spreads is my new code name for pornography.
They are obviously trying to kill me
I don’t know if you can process the solid block of horror in that last photo, but be sure to note that any mentions of vegetables are actually referring to condensed soup. (See also:)
(Yes, that’s a cake.)
One true thing, so you don’t die
I would follow that little arrow pretty much anywhere, so it’s good that it’s playing for the one tasty sandwich I can get behind.
I can’t keep these sort of objects in the house— I end up thinking too hard about how kitsch is gross even if it contains rad typography— but I send them to my friends.
Haircut tip
If you get a haircut and you kind of hate it, and you find yourself being a dink to everybody, phoning up your friends and saying things like, “wanna come see my shitty new haircut?”… there is a way to save yourself. I tried styling it a lot, I tried leaving it alone, I tried waiting, I tried whining, I tried optimism, I tried resignation, and what finally worked was taking a lot of grouchy photos of myself until I managed to take one that looked cute.
My new haircut: a rollercoaster
Now I like it. I can’t decide if I feel silly or not, for spending 24 hours figuring out how to like my new hair.
The usual time lapse
Erik drew on a poster… a couple of days ago. I lost almost a whole day yesterday, over a haircut. Oof.
If it must be yellow and purple, could it at least be a warthog?
Animals we’ve come up with so far that would not be obnoxious if mass-produced and distributed around town for charity, as opposed to stylized orcas and spirit bears:
- wild boars
- squid
- hammerhead sharks
- goats
- ducks, if gigantic
Watching people sketch
We ran into Erik and Leni at the show last night and shared their table. I got distracted, watching Erik draw on the back of a poster he ripped down from the bar window. He’s fast, and starts right in on the details without blocking anything in. I took a dark picture of the poster after he taped it up backwards on the window again, but I forgot to look at it from outside when we left.
After that, and spending a lot of time scribbling on our bar table as a group, I was excited to see a little ““watch people sketch online”:http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/12/watch_and_rate_peopl.html” game posted on BoingBoing this morning. But it turns out to not be that interesting. Maybe it has to do with texture? Maybe I only like watching people I know.
Galen is still considering starting some kind of one-thing-every-day blog. Maybe he should post a little video of himself drawing a picture. Like that landscape painter with the happy little trees, but not educational. Spectator art!
How are we going to get all these bears back in?
Victoria has a history, and I think a proud history, of shitty public art. Until recently, the scope of debate could be summed up as a war between abstract sculptures that annoy old people and hockey fans, and a teeming horde of orcas.
Orca murals, orca mosaics, orca sidewalk chalk, maybe an eagle or a salmon painted somewhere for good measure, but most prominently, a whole army of mass-produced, fiberglass Orcas In The City sculptures, each decorated by a different local artist.
Orcas In The City were bland and oppressive (seriously— the organizers put ‘Arts’ in quotations in their goal statement), but no one was supposed to complain about them because they were only temporary and they were auctioned for charity. Think of the children.
I flipped the bird on one of the more overtly branded Orcas at least once, but I regret never having ruined a tourist’s Orca family portrait by humping an exposed tail flipper or something. I have a lingering vendetta about the Orcas, with apologies to The Children.
Enter Spirit Bears
Suddenly, this spring, a new menace. Sir Bartholomew is not alone, and he’s even less distinguishable from the other Spirit Bears In The City than was the typical Orca In The City. A spirit bear is a white grizzly bear, if you’re not familiar with Pacific Northwest variations on junior high unicorn-and-kitten fetishes, and the decoration jobs seem to have been rationed out exclusively to the artists who made their Orca contributions look the most like the inside of a Starbucks. It’s wall to wall funky neighbourhood scenes. I know I’m biased towards neon red and blue as the official colours of 2006, but I don’t think I’m alone in believing that yellow and purple should take a well-deserved break. Let yellow and purple recover from their hard work portraying free spirits and Italian snack foods.
Worst of all, the Spirit Bears have broken free of the tourist containment zone and have been popping up as far from the Inner Harbour as Island Blue printers. I yelled out loud when I spotted the specimen at Fort and Quadra.
What’s a concerned citizen to do? How are we going to get all these bears back in?
Toronto got saddled with Moose In The City, so apparently this ride doesn’t hit bottom until it has dipped deep into Canadiana cliché pap. This aggression must not stand! Besides writing to the organizers at the Lions Club and begging them to at least consider funny animals for future mass-blanding fundraisers (goats are a good standby), what is the fitting response?
Three different people have suggested blowing up the bears somehow, but I’m taken with this Knitta Please textile graffiti. I don’t have the time or the tendon health to knit any quantity of bear shrouds, but I think some sewn hoods secured with zip ties would do the trick. As much as the bears stimulate my gag reflex, I’m a non-destructive kind of person and I wouldn’t want to actually destroy someone’s art.
I favour a sign reading “Out of Order” as the finishing touch.
Belated photos
I have no writerly ethics on this website at all. Just a warning. I go back and edit old entries all the time. For instance, I just added a proper photo to the birth announcement for this cardigan.
Their children will be bisexual at least…
I should really stop before I get into trouble by using the degree to which a couple would ‘turn their kids gay’ as a measure of excellence, but I’m happy to see that Galen’s sister Zoe and her man Dan are well on their way to raising some lesbians. Lovely bracelet, Dan, especially for a beginner at crochet!
The A that makes me crazy
The strange capitalization puts a lot of emphasis on that capital letter A, and the A is backwards. It’s across a parking lot from a really nice, gigantic, properly-oriented capital A, so you’d think whoever put up that sign would know better. I’m open to the possibility that this was an intentional, very subtle message about the nature of coffee Art, but that makes me even less inclined to go inside.
My favourite w in all the land
I walk by this as often as possible, at St. Andrew’s Elementary School. Jauntiest little letter in town.
Almost the same
There are a lot of handpainted apartment doors in my neighbourhood. I should take better pictures of them.
Two Rs that almost match, two 4s that almost match. Repetition with variation might be the Christopher Alexander design thought that I remember most often. I’ve always been into collections of similar objects, and think the slight variations are the root of my fascination. Add them all together and you can see the spectral range of a Rockridge R, or of 1044’s 4s. They put each other in context. I’ve never thought of handwriting as a collection of similar-but-not-quite-the-same objects, but indeed it is.
I think you mean BEARtholamew
My desert island would probably be annoying
I’m with Mark Frauenfelder— a live ukelele weirdo beats the pants off any radio. Who watches that ad and wants to hang out with Mr. Grouchypants?
This reminds me of the Most Wanted/Unwanted Songs project, where researchers attempted to create the most agreeable and disagreeable songs in the history of the world. The disagreeable one was a 25-minute, bagpipe-Opera-rap with clip-clop noises and a chorus of children, and it was awesome. I’ll take that over a bland, romantic, R’n‘B duet any day. Marketing focus groups don’t see things that way, I guess.
I can’t stop watching the ukelele ad. The little white socks!