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Writing

A collection of 11 issues

Wanderings along the way...

starting some daily journal entries - these will mainly not show up on the front page, but still saved and findable.  I want to pin and record more things.  Today, Vancouver, taking the long way around to the AAAI conference...glad i did.

Seen and heard on the way
   a woman walking on the rocky shore, i said hello, lovely shells.  She answered yes, and every rock is a painting, art is everywhere.  well put.

a 'people's castle' but the stairway blocked, it seems a fight with city council brews

later, two Bald Eagles and a nest that a local said they come to every year.  last year at eth denver i saw one, flying low over the river there.  



Wandered and walked about 5 miles, took a seabus and a rented bike, then finally the venue.  The views from the Vancouver Convention Centre are breathtaking.  Don't know when i used that word before, but it fits here. The conference itself wasn't bad either...

installed neogpt between sessions, so i could feel legit, and worked on a little wrapper to have it represent a did.  quite simple and hacky but its for a short workshop so, about right.  a good

2 min read

A Logical Conclusion...

this piece makes me happy every time i reread it.  it was born out of frustration with fintech bros

A Darwinian Argument

“You must die.” The woman spoke dispassionately, her face blank.

The jowly man chained at the ankle squinted across the room at her. His glasses had broken in the struggle, so were there subtle clues to read he might have missed them anyway. His face betrayed a racing chain of emotions, flickering from fear to contempt to calculation. Which of his enemies sent her?

continued...

1 min read

Untitled post

walking over a bridge in san jose, costa rica after talking to an Israeli ex-pat in the hostel and preparing for RightsCon tomorrow, i realized why i haven't been writing, at least one of the reasons

the work is not so much to pull a thread of sense out of my tangled thoughts - that is work, but its the good part

(oh wow as a side note wordpress has gotton so awful about interrupting while i'm trying to write, i may switch but all my things are here. moving this to a plain text editor)

the bad part, or the hard part, is framing thoughts for an audience, in particular an audience that in my opinion has actively harmful frameworks and assumptions embedded. its exhausting trying to think of how they are thinking, being bothered at it, and then trying to talk in a way that will be convincing or compelling. that is why i do not write more, i think. also where to do it and probably no one in particular wants to read it anyway! the part about voice and personableness might have not a little to do with it as well!

but back to the frameworks.

2 min read

Thinking in the Open

You write notes down first, then write them up.  So, this is writing down, threading out thoughts to sift through later.

Joy in work comes from meaning, and teammates - and most when colleagues share the meaning and core values, enough of the deep context, and share a level of professionalism and skill to make work fly. It is common enough to find shared professionalism or skill, harder to find the shared meaning, and a treasure when all come together. If in addition it pays something, well, it's a plus but it makes little difference to the moment, as long as bills are handled somewhere.

Transactional markets are never going to capture this. Nor do they try to - but why do economists find it legitimate to handwave away the real reasons many of us do work?

Money, according to Economics 101, is useful as "a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value, and a standard of deferred payment." And so it is. Economics, however, if measuring real change in the world - something equivalent to the concept of work or energy in physics - should not limit itself to those patterns measurable by scalar and

2 min read

Eyes Out

something I wrote in 2007 and just found now

Swoosh!  The thrilling sound of a near-miss filled Hal Bjordman's ears as he wrestled against the G-forces pinning him to his seat.  Nothing like a game of Supersonic Pursuit to get one's blood moving!  Not really dangerous, either, if everyone obeyed the rules.

Hal turned his small craft into a nosedive out of his opponent's likely flight path, angled into a cloud bank and reversed direction, nearly cutting his jets as he did so.  It was a daring move and succeeded in surprising his opponent and best friend, Skag Elmore.  Skag had done just what Hal thought, hovering  
over the cloudbank in wait.  Hal's craft emerged angled perfectly, straight towards Skag's and just below.  Less than a second later, the nose of Skag's ship was shot off, and Hal's friend was floating ignominously down in a large white puff of chute fabric.

Later in the bar, Hal crowed gleefully while buying drinks for the two of them.

"Pure skill, I tell you - and the luck that follows.  That turn in the clouds - you never even saw me coming!"

Skag smiled ruefully into Hal's infectious grin.  "You got me all

7 min read

Untitled post

I will post this.  Although it may ramble, be warned - this morning I have given myself permission to simply write, a sort of private-public diary, to try to tease one noodle out of the bowl, or to follow one twisted path of thoughts up to the root.

Reading Virginia Woolf helped, I think.  Though it also made me discontent again in the routine I have accepted, the one where most of my life and day goes into work for something that I don't fundamentally care deeply about, that is not core to me.  How did that happen - something to do with rent, bills, children I think.  Yet it also has a benefit, this discipline, I have learned valuable patterns from it.  The question is, can I find time to apply those patterns to what is core to me, before my mind becomes more fuzzy than it already is?

I have found, this past year, some threads that do feel deeply central, some possible solutions to the world that I want to try, that can be tried by a single person or a small group, that I believe can grow and live and combat some of the cancers that

3 min read

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