moon traveller herald

In honor of our trip to New York … I am running a picture of…. Racine. Es Kewpies! File under blast from the past. My son and I are going to be in NYC and we're hoping to see John Ruetz and the OneTwoManyBand at Cornelia St. Brusha and Paul DeMark told me about this band. I am psyched. Will AIM high. With mustard and pickles. Note: Kewpies used to be hunkered down under a public parking garage when I was a kid. Who would have known it was so breathtakingly streamlined? One wonders if Zippie ever went here. Kewpee: A buddha-like doll baby committed to Food for the folks. It's next to what was Reihls there. Thrifty Sandy used to be in the garage too. Smell of mustard on hamburger still brings back the time...Dave and [Bob H., John C?] ditched me and Jim. Ran into Norman of Soulville with his family there too much later on.

David Brooks is one of the heavier denizens of the New York Times op-ed pages. And PBS convention coverage. And so forth. Very middle of the road; rightish, but not so that his veins bug out. He wrote an interesting piece on ‘when world’s collide’ On Friday, July 07, 2006, or thereabouts. Page One’s Missing Characters takes him back to his young career and the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago. “The golden age of Chicago journalism was just then coming to an end” he writes by way of exposition. [If this was still the golden age of the Internet I could link to it and you could see for yourself, but, alas, and, alack, the op-ed page is now premium content.] Different classes met. The reporters spanned all class, and had to misplaced sense of the noble poor. They probably worried about declining circ and agate dollars, but they didn’t blog in response. The Billy Goad scene described resonates for me because it is something of a world I’ve seen glimpses of …. Ben Hecht, who he mentions, after ...

We worry about the machines taking over, therefore we are. But the flying machines of cyborgdom that plummet down the cliff still out pace the Roombas - and Orek and Hoover are not shaking at the thought of the Roomba. Those who have read the accounts of the Dartmouth Conference, and who credit it as a starting point for a new look at machines, generally know too that it finally lead to dissolution. In 1956, Marvin Minksy, Claude Shannon, John McCarthy and others gathered at the Ivy League school and started the long formal trek to Artificial Intelligence [AI], although machine intelligent may be the better term. Kubrik’s movie 2001, much more than is posthumous film, AI, gave artificial life to some heady machine notions, but after Cambridge’s AI Alley [a home for several commercial ventures aimed at harnessing young AI] went sour, the AI egg had a great fall. Fuzzy logic and Neural Nets did not carry the baton much further. The intelligence of a three-year-old human is still an elus...

In the morning we’d drive down Main Street. From 3 Mile Drive to Point Blank. Dr Shroud in his Vette would pass us – the smallest semblance of a wave - and we would thereafter tail him. Dr Ai Moloch Shroud in his blue corvette motoring down to the laboratory. Where they tested and researched. Within Shroud chemical tower complex the test tubes were vast. Inside, Shroud orchestrated a flow of chemical elements. Gorf [Shroud Jr] sent away for the Dr Shroud patch symbol from Elliptictine ersatz drink. Gorf saw array of glass tubing; imagined it as the palace of wisdom. I’m a Man played on the car speakers.

Inside framework design with author Krzysztof Cwalina : "A look inside Microsoft's thinking on framework design comes now via Framework Design Guidelines by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams. It can benefit any developer. "

Jr. Shroud heard the signals through the Zenith. To look into the box from its vented backside was to peer upon mystic vaccuum tubes, amber and gold like the mead in Beowulf's den of old.

Vacation Day 1, 2006 -- At home quite near the great lake, the signals came through the night -- masked in the murk - dark secrete sparks would speak as I sat out back and watched. While cicadas in the trees radioed their cryptic presumptions; while sleeping monarchs with their intentions prayed to the great up yonder. Back in the day signals were electronic, electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic –but not yet a memory web for a robot insect army. I heard feedback. And echo. On many nights the Zenith like a fireside. I would star through the holes in the radio’s backside. I saw feedback, wondering at tubes -- the glass vacuum tubes, were golden with hot filament lights radiant. The Midnight Special would come in from Chicago …

"This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe." -Jimmy Carter, on Voyager Record, circa 1978-

Was in the symphony one day – many rainy years ago -- and Beethoven’s message was just crystalline to me. Me, Shroud Jr. Like a telegraph message through the foam of time – Beethoven heard the birds, the guns, he was losing his hearing. He was writing it down. Sending it out. Shroud Jr. was pickin up on it. On April day in 2000, in Boston, they again put the needle in the groove, the cannon of orchestra salvoed, and the pensioners, Brahmin and punters heard the master voice. He said ‘I was alive on the Earth and here is what it was like.’ Beethoven world’s is somewhat like Mars to us now. Or we are Mars, I don’t know. The message I was heard was as if from space, or, I thought, this would be a worthile message to send spaceward in case the planet needs to be reconstructed from a few small existent artifacts. Like sea monkeys from sponge grindings. Carl Sagan set up some of these notions with his Voyager record . Mozart’s brain Listening has attuned Shroud the Latter. For years, drive t...

Taking a break in the action to note I listened to Recordially Yours Ray Smith’s radio show tonight, and the old Swing Buzzard was featuring some kind of comparison of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw [one with Gene Krupa on drums, the other with Buddie Rich]. Not easy comparison, because the material they duplicated was somewhat sparse. But Ray found that Goodman and Shaw both cut a number by Raymond Scott:Powerhouse. Raymond Scott is best known for Looney Toons stuff. Which is great. Great it was as well to hear these clarinet giants’ cuts on Scott. On Raymond http://raymondscott.com/MENsndf.html

Or Dharmapada Joy Blues By Jack Vaughan [After TVMama] Let me tell you - Live .. in joy; people, Love - in a world of hate Let me tell you – Live.. in joy; people, Love - in a world of hate Don’t worry bout tomorrow. Tomorrow may be too late. The wars bring hate – who can say who really wins? War brings hate – who can say who really wins? You may sort it out in Valhalla, but in Nirvana your wheels will spin. Don’t walk with a fool – his road is dark and blue Don’t walk with a fool – the road will be too blue The moon walks through the stars – it casts a better light for you. For five years – my TV on the blink For five long years – my TV on the blink Now it-s back on - exploding - and I struggle when I think I was in my bed sleeping - boys what a dream! I was in my bed sleeping - boys what a dream! Had the TV Dharma blues – all about exploding screens. Let’s live in joy – let’s love in a world of hate Let’s live in health – love, and work for change Cant wait until tomorrow – tomorro...

Notable Blogs: Smalltalk meets Vista and .NET : "A recent addition to the list of notable blogs is Peter Fisks VistaSmalltalk blog. He is exploring ways in which the Smalltalk can work with .NET using the Windows Presentation Foundation. " Smalltalk is one of the most influential languages of all time, and, although Java somewhat blew it away, its advocates still are innovating.

WikiPedia En says the term "anonymizer" is often used to signify any internet based anonymization tool, even though it is a trademark of Anonymizer Inc. An anonymizer tool is one that makes you anonymous - unknown. It was a new term to me…and I pictured a type of perfume dispenser that obscured your identity. Thought an ‘enterprise-class’ anonymizer could make you Real Unknown. Every blog writer should have one. Eternity, Manifesto; why not Anonymizer? Kinda looks like Snoopy in this rendering. My mind has been kidnapped by Charles Schultz's poltergeist.

I wrote a piece on Butler Lampson recently. The article I ran discussed software development processes. Just didn’t seem to have room to fit in his comments about artificial intelligence. Here is what you might call an outtake from the cutting room floor. Lampson: “The reason philosophy is always in a mess is the same way AI is a mess. Anything that becomes successful gets spun off. For example, machine vision. [AI] will continue to have successes and continue to have a mess.” Lampson then mentioned intelligence amplification and Doug Engelbart [who was a former colleague] but I really couldn’t pick up his drift. Then he turned attention to Google and The Big Scan. People worry about the book scanning, and if humans are turning into cyborgs, he indicated, or that human centered cyborgs are arising [Think: “I was a teenage quant!”], but “We are already cyborgs,” he said “You haven’t been able to function in world without add-ons for quite some time,” he said. Course, the Wooden Ship Peo...

The Application Development Media Group had an outing to commemorate K's departure for Barcelona and it was the Milky Way Lounge in J.P. and they had bowling [candlepin] and pizza and karoke. I did Hard to Handle by Otis Redding. A boast song. Think I did You Dont Miss Your Water once in Madison..but never did Otis live before. He was like one of my music gods since I first saw him in the movie Monterey Pop. Crushed when he died in Madison plane crash. Got to his memorial their by the lake. Hard to Handle is hard to sing! Here is to you Big O!

Microsoft's Lampson at Usenix: Write software that expects to fail! : "Earlier this summer, we sat in on a Usenix session at which Microsoft Research Distinguished Engineer Butler Lampson asked some pointed questions about which technologies have succeeded and which have failed. He identifies RDBs and virtual memory as successes, but marks RPCs and persistent objects as botched jobs. "

Gordon Thomas and I share a fascination with epics. I know a couple of years ago I made a point to watch - largely by tapping Gordon's collection - El Cid, and the Pride and the Passion, and a bunch of other things with big music, big views and Sophia Loren or Chalton Heston. But Gordon is more than just fascinated. He can write hundreds of words about this. Check out his Ben-Hur Epic on BrightLights Film. He zeros in on the author of Ben Hur, Lew Wallace, and Indiana cat. Lew Wallace appears to have been one of those great American eccentrics, a loner interested more in proselytizing than in cranking out mainstream product, but who knew his fat sermon would sprout such legs? The Ben-Hur films could be seen as archetype for the whole sword-and-sandal genre that survives in Hollywood to this day — the revenge-motivated story arc serving projects like Braveheart and Gladiator surely originated with Ben-Hur — yet, when it was published in 1880, Wallace’s novel nearly sank without a tr...

Steward Brand writes..in TechReview...Vernor Vinge dedicates his new novel, Rainbows End, "To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives -- Wikipedia, Google, eBay, and the others of their kind, now and in the future." The book is an imagining of how those technologies might develop over the next two decades. http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17085&ch=infotech

Henri Rousseau set the stage for surrealim. He groked on early popular mass culture. He was a naive abstractionist in presentation, and he took the material coming from the colonial france and turned it into dreams. For better, but usually for worse, Rousseau lived in a time when the byproducts of French colonialism, aided by new means of mass reproduction, seem to have provided the folks back home with some of their most popular, titillating forms of entertainment. Wild beasts, people and adventures were depicted in pulp novels, postcards, photographs and tabloid magazines like Le Petit Journal, whose color covers depict, pre-Barnum and pre-Hollywood, a dazzling stream of rampaging tigers, damsels in distress, bloodthirsty natives and embattled explorers and animal trainers. Real animals could be seen in the city’s zoo... writes NYT's R.Smith, as National Gallery show opens. This conflict of '1st' and third world of dream [with nobody on] was coming to a bad end. How would...

Filene’s department store in Boston is going out of business, absorbed by a series of conglomerates until it became redundant. The song with different tenor has been sung in Washington [Hechts], Chicago [Marshall Fields], Racine [Zahns] and beyond. The local department store has given way, just like the local grocery store, the local appliance store, or local shoe store. The tipping point was a long time ago. Several years ago Filenes became part of Federated stores. The Filenes stores that survive will become Macy’s stores. The central HQ on Washington St in Boston will close. The caravan moves on. Just as surely, small bits and pieces of the world we grew up in fade away. Commercial mergers and bankruptcies happen – but, in turn, small parts of the civic fabric are rent. Does the manager of a national chain take less interest in the doings of the Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau or the Civic Improvement Association than does the president of the local department store?...

In a study published in the journal Nature this week, researchers describe how two paralyzed patients with surgically implanted neural devices successfully controlled a computer and, in one case, a robotic arm -- using only their minds. This is science at the apex. This recalls Weiner at Mass General. And he must be smiling in the cybersphere. Some heavy stuff. Let's hope this is the dawning of the age of cyberkinetics. http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17163&ch=biotech or http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/content/index.jsp

Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett dies, and this causes pause. Interstellar Overdrive went hand in hand with Third Stone from the Sun, for me, as sonoural representation of the future, space travel, electronics. The Telegraph has a life story. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/07/12/db1201.xml&page=1

Sam Guckenheimer, software engineering and VSTS : "Sam Guckenheimers Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is not a book for developers or architects if what they want is something that cant be understood outside of their own discipline. Like the tools it describes, the book is about the team. "

Spysmasher was a serial I saw, one afternoon, spliced together to make a movie, not long after I’d seen the Batmen of Africa . I took notes. As it turns out, Spysmasher was one of the most notable un-noted serials, marked by its incredible movement. Acme of cliff hanging. i. Spysmasher -- in goggles -- caught. There hanging -- crucified-like – in a dungeon. He won’t talk. He is executed. He is still alive. The French Resistance colonel is happy to meet him in his coffin. A sea plane across the clouds. A steam locomotive is superimposed on a map of state-divided America. He meets the head of the SS asking for a match near Waterville Junction. After the fight, the Spysmasher is saved by his twin brother Allen, who wasn’t killed in a plane crash over France. The Corby Estate. Someone just came into the drive. Allen approaches in a a plane, goggles, leather skull hat. Spysmasher jumps out – parachutes. The two gangsters attack the head of Naval Intelligence. “Open the safe” “I’ll do noti...