Sunday, August 30, 2015

web futures

1)

WYSIWIG is the future of the Web.

You just dismissed that statement as obviously stupid.

2)

There is an infinity of space inside a computer.

Let me demonstrate:



image: Andrew Z. Colvin

The infinity of space inside a computer is the future of the Web.

3)

The Web of Semantics, the Web of Pages, and the Web of Games, these are the Web's present.

It is natural you do not see the future of the Web in its present. What exists is its present. Seeing the future is seeing things that don't exist.  That's sometimes called "seeing things."

4)

Ray tracing is the future of the Web. Luminosity, reflectivity, opacity, these are the future of the Web.

5)

XML is the future of the web.

You dismissed my statement as idiotic.

<house></house>

<property><house></house><garage></garage></property>

<city><property></property></city>

<planet><city></city></planet>

Saturday, August 29, 2015

some urbanistic themes

Building urban second levels - already fait acomplis - but not just converting them, inserting them, first in the laboratory of the imagination, walking skyways that connect at commercial nodes and gardens, and also little slow trains that trundle quietly above the wilderness along strings of pearls. To explain a little, transit causeways that are hedged about with habitat towers. Ride the train for a day, stay at the midway hotel or at one of the eight hostels, and finish your journey at your leisure. Let's talk about hospitality as part of the urban design curriculum. An elevated roadway, not extremely high, not extremely wide, meandering across a mesa top, attached at various points to habitat, with a turnout and lookout park and below, gardens and studios connected by a path to a "mind" garden, while their balconies are overlooking a little cayon land. Cities as a building, not because of density but because of interconnectedness. A kind of tendril and cloud architecture, clouds of structure and space more than blocks of them. Postengineering, the cybernetic model for structure and architecture. The thinking very big imperative. Never mind construction, let's design our hearts out, in super-vast ultra-granular detail, cheekily playing around on other people's property but always with ultimate respect. Let us immerse ourselves in abstractions, in the logic of CAD. An unprogrammed computer. Well, it's not unprogrammed. Someone inserted a BIOS. Probably if you turned it on it would invite you to type something. You can type something and save it somewhere and when you reboot it will run whatever you just typed and saved. There's a set of commands the BIOS understands. Where are those documents? But, that doesn't matter. What's important is the idea of a blank screen on which you can make things happen. Excavate a gallery in the basalt mesa top, a perfect rectangular void, one hundred feet on one side, fifty on the other, and twenty feet deep, with a staircase carved from the rock descending into it and the entrance to the caves emerging onto its floor. Deeper in the site - this gallery is up behind it - a light shaft and stair case connects to the junction of two branches, one of which comes out at the Ogiva, and the other underneath the Foundry. Around the junction are the caves, for storing cheeses, such as liquid ones that come in bottles and barrels, and are made of grapes, or barley, and ones that are made from vegetables or fish or other meats, and ones that are made from flour, and ones that are made from milk and honey. Another shaft now is being built, from the gallery, back towards the Canyon, emerging eventually just below the cliff tops, where there will be a balcony restaurant, and access to the stair tower that takes you to the river's terraces below. Shopping systems as an urban planning topic. Making sure everyone has what they need, and what they want, professionally delivered without any fuss. Subsidizing beer in kegs and growlers to encourage people to drink the good stuff, making sure there's an ample supply of tea and tea makers. Teaching and equipping the people to cook with wood. A complete stop to co-housing development, unless it's a lodge house. A not-pinched frugality that is just like extreme abundance, achieved through space and simplicity. The apartment as more like a little valley you live in. Water trickling in through a little fountain at the top. Your kitchen is a ledge, as if you're an alpinist, and there's no sewage, just graywater cascades through reed pools in hanging dishes, and you poop in the garden and pee in a bale of hay. Your apartment, the garden, a little realm unto itself, suspended in space among dozens and hundreds of others and I think that was in some way the vision. You can't prove this can't be done any more than I can that it can. Just for example, what is to be done with excavated material, when we dig in the earth for cellaring? It's improper to just haul it away. Many tons of earth and rock need to be moved into the superstructure. Rock towers, and, deep in the superstructure little quarries, where the people can dig for rock and earth for their gardens. Playing around with a body of unbuilt architecture. With the utmost respect, radically revising it. Intersecting the apse and a new form, torroidal, and introducing a new form, ha, the tower, as a kind of fiber. An architecture of interlocking panels that simply lock together. Building everything in a kind of enzyme matrix, not kidding, entirely like 3D printing, except there are people clambering around inside it with picks and hammers, making adjustments, reformulating, and a printed part can move through the medium, and be joined, and unjoined. Freely drawing. What is it with all this pre-planning and fiddling about?

Friday, August 21, 2015

Skype, but better. Better than the best.

Hey Gerdhar, would you put a little thing together for me. It's kind of a system test, very simple. It lives in my web hosting, or wherever else it needs to be, and it has its own email address, and when I send it an email with an image attachment, it adds that image to my image folders. And then they appear on my web page. Oh, who am I kidding? Anyway, I just simplified the rendering algorithm. Yea, but it's still at least a bit complicated. No, but it's not that bad. It stores

Oh, there is this: I mean, first, someone will visit the page, and our script will set up a screen for them with, oh, say, twenty images on it, all in a lines. The thing is, that'll display pretty much instantly because our script won't send a big image in that view, it'll send a little one. Then the script starts loading additional small images all around the ones we're looking at, and also some bigger images around the ones we're looking at, on I would say several layers, so zooming in means moving to a more magnified layer. Right at this moment I'm seeing something really great about the physics of this. Anyway, images load into a space around the screen, and we can scroll them by moving that space from side to side. I've done this, and it does work. All of this would properly be done client side, with a script that decides, possibly discussing it with the server, what image it needs next and how to position it in the scroll frames, and also what images to release from cache.

Note, to try to address some very simple details, I mean, trying to keep it simple, but to also address details a little, and also, simplifying the details to help with that, that dates and times are a very important part of this program's purpose, even though at this point they're hidden. We do need to extract them from image data. One wonders how reliable that is, though, so the time and date of the post should also be retained. Then a simple way to make that data visible would be a scrolling time and date readout that tells you when the last photo visible was taken, and maybe also the time and date of the first one.

That's all I would need to create a pretty dramatic slide show. I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable, though, not being able to 

slight correction

They do get things right. When I tap a certain link in the Blogger system, it takes me right where I want to go, even though it controls several locations and could easily not.

That's ... oh, it's Google.

The touch screen is Microsoft. Those are the guys I kind of like. I love Google, but I don't trust her. (And yet, she's reading everything I write. She's the first to read it. She's the one who asked me about it.)

I've been sitting here thinking things over for a good hour.

lament

This is getting me nowhere. They're laughing at me! That's what Art said would happen! He didn't have to say that! I'm not, in fact, wrong about anything. I have no illusions. I know it's just persecution, snarling at the outsider. And I am an outsider. I'm a space man. I refuse to accept the status quo.

Every blog should come with a donation button, already installed. It would appear as a gold disk, and when you click it, the blogger gets a little money.

Outputting the code for a page based on a set of instructions. The multiplication of pictures on the screen, into the hundreds and even thousands.

done

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Level 1

I'm picturing myself running a massive company pretty much via correspondence. I'm this mysterious CEO who nobody knows but who cranks out basically books of instructions for a crack team of programmers, marketing people, server operators, finance people, legal eagles, plus customers, reporters, supporters, and whoever. I've been reading about systems development as a management approach. It's fascinating because that's called Level 3, and I've been calling my project Level 1 for a couple of days now. In Level 3, the ongoing progress of the company does not depend on that one person running it. The whole team is engaged and empowered, and the whole team runs the company, which is good for everyone and in every way.

The Game naturally subdivides into its own three levels. It's a game. It has levels. I won't go into what the three levels are here. I'll say they make sense in all sorts of ways. They guide the user through a learning trajectory, that's both technical and theoretical, while providing an incremental basis for development. I'll also say that Level 1 (the first of the three levels, as well as the name of the project) looks like basic standard CMS, though I think it might not be. As I wrote earlier, I'm not an expert on CMS. I don't know what the products do, the advanced ones. I don't fully understand the ones I am using, like Blogger, and Facebook. The fact that I have no clue is evidence that I am correct. There are things that the industry isn't seeing because they're so simple and basic. Advanced CMS is targeted at advanced users, and the industry seems to think that makes sense. The novice user can't access them. The novice user won't access them, because of things like installation or even just creating accounts. By the way, Facebook and Blogger have very well defined account creation options, and Twitter does ... all the really great ones do. Even then, it could be better. And, beyond that, all of these that I just mentioned place very strict limits on the user. You can type in this box, and that's pretty much what you can do. The boxes all get stacked up this way, and that's pretty much that. It's extremely one dimensional, this approach, that is taking the Web by storm, has been, all the more today, probably because of its simplicity, but the primacy of that is an illusion. What I see is an entire untouched infinity of possibilities just infinitesimally behind (and before) this plane that we're all always looking at. Breaking out into that is almost a zero energy thing, just a shift in perspective.

Level 1 is standard enough stuff. That's not to say there isn't a whole huge list of challenging problems to tackle. Hiring a team of programmers and managers eager to launch into a massive, massive development program. I've read some about it. Everyone has to write a lot, and what they get is maximum fun, excellent pay, perks galore. Getting the ad component right is crucial from the getgo, and there's a lot to that, more than just anybody might think. I mean, the whole Google model revolves around analyzing customer data. The whole issue of user accounts and controls is also very, very important. We'll want to innovate in that arena. And there are also larger questions about what kind of growth we're facilitating in the community of users, sort of.

I love to write, and I'm also an eager reader. Let me hear from you.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

the trading book

Hmm. Hummm. Now I'm going to look for ...
alibaba ... Group ... BABA
looking at news, for news
for that article with the bad news
with the chart

looking at a chart,
a stock that I did buy
a little of
just the other day
After it jumped
buying the back side of the wave when it slumped down after
this was preceded by flat water
and now it ought to be flat water
again
i screwed it up
again
but then it isn't a bad ten year chart
this one that i stumbled on
glad i saw it
a giant wave and then
five years later
another kind of big wave
a group of three pretty waves
you wouldn't quite call them wavelets
or splashes, either
you would say they made you would say
some noise
for the tiny swimmer
in among them
so all of a sudden i'm analyzing cycles
that was five years between the two big waves
so, yea, we are getting into that area

and there was a spiky little firecracker just the other day

but it's a delicate situation
looks like it's still down, today

not good
not good
no news to be found
they make carrying cases
but this was years ago!

what triggered that spike?
i'm gonna start paying more attention to that question
when one of these stocks jumps
but
really
that's kind of a drag to do
i'm not sure i want to
i mean it can be fun
but its tiresome
paralyzed, too
no way to exit the trade gracefully
get out and see it go way up which
does happen sometimes
or try to make some more intelligent comments?
the pattern in the long term chart was too spindly
we want thick beefy waves
one lower than the other
with a clear flat spot at the end
at the lowest price
what about flags?
flags are not as reliable as these patterns
and they don't jump up as emphatically
or as durably

these patterns are the wakes of ships in the sea
we want to hitch ourselves to a ship with a strong churn of a wake not a little ripple

or one with the dynamic captain and handsome lines
maybe something like that

so what you want to do
because it's easy to find a bunch of stock that just jumped
like
you go to finviz and it lists them
right there
on the  home page
and it's end of day trading so
you look,
first at the long term chart for beefy waves
one lower than the other
i mean the second one lower than the other
and a distinctly flat bottom
at the end
at the lowest price
and then
an upward spike
or jump
clear above the bottom
clear above the previous day's high especially
and above the highs of the bottom
if maybe just
maybe
now we're going to look at the day's action
my guess is it jumped in the morning
and then did something
what did it do
after it jumped
bounced back down and then immediately back up again and down
and up and down a little and
up
a little?
or up and down sideways right below the top
that would at least be interesting
but what if it
so i've enjoyed not smoking pot your honor
i feel more normal, at least in that sense but
i'm tempted
i hate not having it
my mouth just takes over and i get it accidentally that way
and there's not actually anything wrong with it
as i was saying to the officer, officer, i'm busy. i'm going home to do house work and work on my
book.
so now i'm going back and forth for no reason
and it's not even like i want to
somebody else wants to make me what we're doing as a society is over parenting
why is it so stultifying?
because it's stultified
you can't think of anything better to do
i mean, i'm really careful not to get wild
not in a noisy way
i even try to avoid people so as not to bother them
i don't bother them and actually i don't get in trouble but it is all very weird
OK, let's say it gave back almost all the territory it gained today
did it do anything dramatic like a giant swirly pattern, closing low and flat
or an extremely straight squiggly line of actual trading that would have to mean something
or maybe it gapped up in the morning and then traded up and down above the gap
clearly up and down in the one minute chart
width a cluster of narrow bars at the end, maybe
could mean something
you could also check the chart first thing in the moring
and if it gaps up dramatically from the nearest clustered one minute bars
or of distinctly energetic waves then maybe you've found a keeper if you buy it
and it'll go up sharply all day, maybe way up, to incredible highs
trading actively all day
and then you can probably sell it the next day
looking for the signal
i mean it's possible it will make a pattern the second day, too
driving across town
being very careful to avoid any possible kind of incident
coasting for long stretches but then shifting the gears and giving her gas at times
skittering around corners turning sharply but at very low speeds
for fun
and to be always in complete control
finding my way, navigating traffic
picking the quietest route
cops everywhere
coasting slow but there's nobody behind me cause i shot out of there a little
flawlessly executing every turn and not waiting at any lights
coasting down the hill now in a little rush of wind
trundling towards the light which is now turning orange
not braking, just a little push on them when i turn in
then another couple making her shudder as i coast to a complete stop nose out a little
checking for traffic
that is quite the blind intersection with nobody around at all and right turn on red
after who knows how long a light the correct thing is to go
in the desert
navigating the hot crisp pavement
running the a/c pro dius
watching and waiting for breakouts
from linear patterns
gaps up
but if it
...
gaps up
checking first thing in the morning for them
then watching

washing, after all, a whole raft of dishes
using up the old dish water and starting a new
hanging on and saying this is normal, right
this is normal
gathering even more from different corners
of the kitchen and finally taking out a hard
frozen hot dog should have done it hours ago
helpless helpless in the kitchen and yet i usually
get dinner done something like on time checking
the clock and ok, on schedule because i'm also
writing, that's true

the rules of trading

you are responsible for creating a brokerage account
But I was going to write about my experience with Scottrade, who I selected, years and years and years ago, because they seemed big and capable. They sounded respected. And yet, they were an alternative player, and slightly nerdy, just enough so, just right. Five hundred dollars opens an account and now you've got on line trading although back then I called orders in. Losing money, or even not sure what was happening at all, but not all that much, after all, to trade, I had to put money on deposit, but then losing big, in another account, to the point where I had no money. But the gods provided, i thought they would, they really did, have, despite my doing nothing, even the wrong things, except some right things, righteous things, just a little, just enough, pushing it out another day, again. Losing and losing and losing for years and years and years and years, compulsive, driven, not quitting, not thinking about quitting.
Still, in there, more recently, the occasional success, like two stocks gaining 500% in one year. Are you saying that's a coincidence? I mean, I definitely picked them, and what are the chances I would randomly pick a stock that will go up five times in one year. And another going up ten times in one month, which I was actually sure it would, but then not selling it, and it's all the way back down again a few months later. Waiting, because I kind of trust it. I even didn't sell it deliberately. I'm actually glad I didn't!
But I want to refine my technique. I really must. It's ridiculous. No, I think I've actually got it. Wait for a morning gap up and buy near the gap high. I'm putting off folding the boiled linens, is what I'm doing. I'm indulging myself and being wild. I'm starting in on the delicious beer and I've held off a long time and I'm refreshed and I stayed out in the heat though I ran the a/c non-stop to save wear on the motor good. Either pour on the gas if only for a moment or press it not at all or just a little is the way. Roshi even said that. I got it from the Samurai. Lift high when striking and apply English, or French. Buying close to the gap high, when there's a morning gap, meaning, what, you have to think about this, meaning at the gap high, the first bar after the gap, unless, maybe, that's a very long bar? Then buying close to the gap low? What if after the first bar that is long it makes a second bar that is short? What are long and short they're relative to the size of the gap. What if it's a tiny gap and then late in the day prices return to near the low of the first bar but stay above the gap? Listen, if it gaps up a ton, maybe it's done, that's possible, but what's a ton? You check that relative to the larger nearby pattern. How big was the previous actual wave - not if it started high but you have to see the top and the front of it? Did it jump just a small part of that distance and just above the little waves that made a flat spot of some kind, clearly distinguishable? Does it seem like just a frilly decoration on the end of a long tendril of low prices? You may have found a winner because the next day it can go all the way up, all the way to the big highs more or less, and that could be a real winner. Or it could gap up a little, again, but when you sell is when it gaps up a lot, a lot bigger than these little gaps that started the thing, or really it's not gapping up, any longer, it's spiking. It might gap up a little, but then it'll climb all day. At the end of the day it'll stand up proudly, the daily bar, far larger than the initial motion, and then it's probably time to sell - I mean, there is an exception - but a lot of the time it'll be perfect. So the thing is, with this kind of trade, you could buy fifty dollars worth and actually make money. Heck, you could put in twenty dollars and make money. Now you can trade twenty five times even if you loose every time. This is the ultimate rule of trading.
I have had an idea.
5:24, and still, on schedule.

Another.

And a big gap up out of nowhere, in the first thing of the morning, you could buy it right then, with a short one minute bar, or coming down towards the bottom of a longer one minute bar. What if it gaps up just a little in the morning? Wait until the end of the day to buy it? That could be an idea. What if it climbed steadily all day then, but not too much? Then you could be happy.

Checking the day's movers. CLTX is up almost 300%. Why not take a look. Fantastic sideways pattern for weeks previously. Canyon bottom. Crisp. Elemental. Zooming in on the three month chart, searching for it over at MarketWatch, and yes, there it is. !. The gapping day, and, the next day, the big rally.

What did it do during the gapping day, though. You can see it opened high, then went lower, then finished in the middle. It went up and down in waves during the day. And then, the next day, the big big bar. Closing at the extreme top, too. This is going up again tomorrow. It'll be an even bigger bar, but not bigger percentagewise,,,,,,,,the real opportunity was yesterday, after a near 50% gain already.



AMaZoN flashed The Patern at 50 in 2007 and at 100 in 2009 and at 200 in 2012 and at 350 in 2013 and again early this year and then at 400 a little later this year and at 525 just the other day. I just looked at a whole bunch of example in the charts - I looked at all of them - on the Finviz home page, and a lot of them didn't produce giant rallies the next day, but very few of them went or have gone down really at all and quite a few produced some kind of rally anyway and pretty much all of those are going sideways and looking at the very least promising. The Pattern seems to predict not only short term fireworks, often enough, but long term excelence, as well. Picked a few to highlight on the charts blog. Lots of attractive pre-Signal patterns. Hopefully I'll be more thorough with my watchlist building going forward.

Someone amazingly high level looked at this blog recently. I wonder if they found it interesting. And there's also a little chart showing the number of visits over the last few days, and if it was a stock, I would be very interested. I would predict a jump in readership.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

games

I can't get anyone, period, to talk to me about business. They pick me for an idiot, and the fact is, they're right. But I think I'm right, too. Maybe if I could publish.

Computing looks so advanced, and so complete, but I think it's in a complete muddle. In the near future - this is what I predict - we'll think what we were doing with computers today was pretty silly. We'll also be glad we got past it, and can finally have some real fun.

In a word, CAD and virtual reality are the future of computing - they're really what computing is, but that's a long story. Today, at any rate, they are regarded as the periphery, outliers. Real computing is about e-mails, files, apps. CAD is for professionals only, and virtual reality is for gamers.

Let's call it games. The pros can keep their CAD. I don't want it. But the games we play, in the future, won't be today's frenetic fantasies, they'll be mellow deliciousness, and quite serious - seriously fun.

You will enter a world, even a universe, through your screen. It will be your world, your universe, and there you will play to your heart's content.

You will play, there, in blissful solitude. When you want to, you will invite friends. You will invite them to your party palace, or planet, or star, or galaxy, and when you want to be alone, you will go into the hills, to your hidden temple, and be ... that.

You will have all the tools you could want, saws and drills, and endless benches, in giant studios, supplied with stacks of fine timber, steel bar and plate, great heaps of clay, wax and coal for casting, fine paper and cloth, and on and on.

And now, to begin.

There is the problem of the interface. It has one solution: xml. The fact that this isn't universally recognized is evidence that computing, today, is in a muddle. It isn't that there's anything wrong with the computers. They are improbably perfect. The problem lies with the software. But I won't go further into that here.

Then there's the problem of rendering. You will experience your universe as images on screens. I, by the way, could care less about immersion. Computing is a medium. If it were necessary that a medium be indistinguishable from the rest of existence, then books and art would never have been invented. Well, I'm old fashioned. But you will experience your universe that way, as image on screens. These images will be constructed from a model. That's the xml.

In case you haven't noticed, I'm talking about very spacious models. If you want to explore galaxies, and not just a few of them - deepest space - in your model, you will be free to do so. If you want to explore stars, and the planets that orbit them, you will be free to do so. If you want whole continents, and the seas between them, to build out, all for yourself, they will be yours. If you want forests full of trees and wildflowers to wander in, wander. Very spacious models.

No limit on the spaciousness of your universe is imposed by the hardware, even today. There is no limit, even today, even on the amount of detail, or its precision. The problem resides with the software, and the unanswered difficulty is that of rendering ... infinity.

There is a mathematical formula that solves this problem, but first we must discuss more precisely what the problem is. The model contains information about countless objects that comprise our universes. We view these objects on our screens. They are rendered there. Extremely compact statements about the objects in our universes are exploded into arrays of pixels by the rendering algorithm. In the model, objects are so small they almost occupy no space, like magic, but when rendered, they become vastnesses of data. Therein lies the problem.

Viewed from a particular place, a very few objects are big enough to see, or, to put it another way, we are looking at them. The vast majority are out of sight. (But, not out of mind. That is the beauty of games, as contrasted with the inscrutability of lists, though, of course, lists are beautiful. But we can easily find our way to any location in a universe, and we can remember, if we've visited before, or even only if it has been described to us, what is there, what was there. This is the way the human mind is constructed, not so that we don't need to visit places again, but so that we can.) This is what the renderer must do, before it shows us its images: it must decide, or know, what is in the picture, out of all that is in the model, and what is not. It only renders what is in the picture, and it does not render what is not in the picture, and thus, it is not, any longer, limited, rather, it is infinite.

This is not, in any way, an insoluble problem. It is quite soluble. In fact, I feel certain it has already been done. But it is regarded as something highly esoteric, as I said, peripheral. Or perhaps it has not been done, but only because of that, and not, in any sense, because it is exceptionally difficult to do. (Admittedly, it is a little beyond me, myself, at the moment.)

Even in the vastnesses of SecondLife, for example, I always feel the pressure of amorphous limits, on me. This may not be entirely because of the rendering algorithm, but I think it is because of that, partly. I think it is because that algorithm imposes some kind of distant limit, and I can feel it. And I recently read that in MineCraft, if you wander far enough, the physics start to break down ...

Let us not be under any illusion: this game will be free. You will need your hardware - your terminal, your devices - and your Internet. That is all. There will be no up-front price of admission ... if you have the devices. But, have no fear, our company will introduce an abundance of delightful advertizing into your universe, and we will prosper greatly from it.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

actuality

I actually am writing about CAD algorithms and wysywig editing environments.

letters

I would like to build a CAD that is free, and completely capable, and very easy to understand.

I would also like to build email that is actual letters, on paper, folded, and inserted into envelopes, of various types, and addressed, and stamped, with flaps, that close, and even seals ... that appear in actual mail boxes, in bundles, and if there are too many they are delivered to door steps, and in personal mail rooms they could be sorted, and in a pleasant drawing room they could be opened and read. Hold this under the light. I can't quite make it out.


Why not really do it? Your photos are spread out along the walls of an immensely long gallery. It is so long it curves with the surface of the earth and yet it is high up on an openwork superstructure, shaped like perfectly square cells, so that, as regards the wilderness, it is nothing but a shadow.


SecondLife isn't big enough, that's what it comes down to. And it isn't easy enough to understand. I would like to partner with them to bring my infinite, free, completely rational CAD together with theirs, and their avatars, including LindenDollars, and SecondLife itself. You have to think all sorts of thoughts to succeed in business. That's what Donld Trump just said.


Another thing I would like to create is a furnace filter that is even easier to clean and longer lasting than the finest product on the market. It's a kit that includes that, the Flanders NaturalAire filter, some fittings, and a completely natural easy to maintain supplemental filter. The Flanders filter is the most ecological and aesthetic filter made, it is completely suitable for decades long use, and it is structurally superb for use as a filter base. This is important because it's an ecological alternative and perfectly lovely and there are millions of potential customers.


Finally I would like to market environmental sensors, scales, and flow meters, that are shaped like coins or paper weights, and tubes, or wrap around power cords, and send periodic measurements to tablets and phones, where they are represented as charts.

check again

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=size+of+paris

Saturday, August 15, 2015

connections

Mr. Sanghi, My wife and I have gotten into the habit of attending the annual shareholder meeting. We live in Tempe, so it's easy, and it's fun. We make a day of it. We've now been to three of them. I'm a great enthusiast for investing, but my wife is the genius who picked Microchip. I'm more of a stumbler and bumbler. Still, I've been reading my Benjamin Graham, and I felt new excitement at today's meeting, perhaps because I understand the numbers a bit better. It appears you have paid a dividend for twenty years running, which is something I've been looking for in a company. Really, what an accomplishment.

Well, I aspire to be in business, and I'm focused on software, which is not exactly your line, but, obviously, is related to it. And then there's the simple fact that you very much are in business, and understand that. As for myself, I really am "just a dreamer," though one person called me a thinker, which I really appreciated, and, for what it's worth, I do write ... and also read. I'm an oddball, and even even a nut, but I'm actually a serious person. Still, I've discussed some of my ideas with a few people who are in business, or who teach it, and they have all come down on the "nut" side, or sad sack, that kind of thing. Well, and the fact is, I'm not much of a programmer, although I have worked through some problems in programming, but the thing is, even the great programmers, Mark Zuckerberg, I'm thinking of, haven't done it all themselves. Or Steve Wozniak. These people made it with help and guidance from business people.

I have, well, really, a passionate respect for business, as, what, an art, a craft, a method of operation? For the building of companies, by which I mean products, infrastructure, work forces, customer bases, and then, as my friend, who called me a thinker, puts it (with a measure of skepticism), "stocks and shares". That's to try to sell you on my mind set. Indeed I would like to be an executive. True, I probably need to take a more responsible attitude. I've been reading about personality types, and the author speaks of a person with his head in the clouds. I suppose that's me.

But, I persist in thinking and writing. I'd like to interest you in one of my ideas.

Already this evening I wrote a poetic but, actually, I think, not unuseful essay, and one that is not as much a rant as what I sometimes come out with, though it is a bit of a rant. It is also not extremely specific, which I think might be a useful quality. That is the previous post on this blog. By the way, we lingered a little, and were among the last to leave, and as we made our way out, someone said "have a great weekend", so I was already a little aglow, and then there you were, greeting us. Thank you. I always go to these meeting thinking about how to have a conversation, though it's out of the question, given, well, myself, but, at any rate, we got to say hello. At any rate, I couldn't sleep, and thoughts about how to say more about my plan, or my idea, were going through my head, so I'm up, blogging.

In the garden, in the middle of the night.

My premise is that CAD, as it's currently constituted, doesn't cut it, and I'm trying to explain why I feel that way. Obviously, it's a kind of miracle, CAD, as it's currently constituted. I say the same thing about computing, generally. Actually, you know, I'm a mad chartist - I don't especially recommend it, but I'm still, let's face it, a believer - and what I see in this whole phenomenon is a giant wave, a huge breakout. By "this phenomenon" I mean computing, computers, languages, software, and now the Internet, and the Web. Well, I suspect the general perception is that this wave has largely run its course, or, at any rate, already reached its apex, but what I think is it's just the beginning. I see it as a signal, a buy signal, the base of the wave. And this, which is just what I see in the shape of the wave, as it were, would, or could, or might, confirm what I'm thinking about the Web, generally - the Web being, in a sense, the surface, that part of the wave with which the most people interact most actively - is that, as fantastic as it is, it's in a muddle. It's also in a subtle correction. It's regrouping. It's trying to figure out what to do next. If I'm right, I might be able to make a contribution to that.

What is the nature of this muddle? That's what I'm trying to articulate. It's a disconnect. I keep encountering this thought. It's a disconnect between what the Web fundamentally is, and, maybe, implementation. It's a disconnect between what computing fundamentally is and implementation.

So, then, what do I say computing fundamentally is? It's a medium. It's something akin to, say, pen and ink and paper. That trinity clearly is a powerful thing. Why? It's just three kinds of muck. We have to understand that they are suited to a purpose, to understand them. And that purpose can be expressed in a single word: representation.

Here, then, is how the disconnect comes into existence. The fundamental nature of what these things are, muck, with a purpose, is so simple, so prosaic, that it's easy to think it's inconsequential. We get caught up in all the variations on it, all the applications of it, and we start to think they are what's fundamental. Then we loose our way.

CAD. That's Computer Aided Something. Design, is what you mostly hear, but sometimes we encounter a variation. I'm saying it's Computer Aided Depiction. I'm saying that's what computing is. I'm saying that's what the Web is. I'm saying that's what these things fundamentally are.


I just was transported a little back in my own history. I am currently very focused on CAD. That's not entirely a new thing for me, or even new at all for me. For years I've been talking about building a new CAD. But I did regard it as a bit of a crazy dream, and for a number of years I've focused more on the Web. What's the distinction? It's almost embarrassingly simple. CAD is three dimensional. The Web is two dimensional. Really, there is no distinction. I don't think that's as prosaic a thought as it might seem to be. But I don't think it would benefit me to elaborate. I'll just present it as a proposition: CAD and the Web are the same thing. If we separate them, if we argue that they are not the same thing, we create a disconnect. We separate what is fundamental into assorted things that are not fundamental. If we do that, we start to create a muddle.


This is what I was thinking about, that was preventing me from sleeping. I was seeing some sort of core, with the qualities of a realm, all sorts of complexity and wonder in it, and around it were a complex of lance like rays, crystalline, a realm in themselves, pointing in towards it. Those rays were tools that we use to manipulate the core. But the tools, as presently constituted, are problematic, because they are not completely connected to the core. They are imperfectly connected to what the core is.

I was thinking rather grandiose thoughts about how this is not to belittle the developers of CAD, or of the Web, about how I would not even be thinking about these things if it weren't for them, and for what they have produced, and about how it's just luck that I am this crazy brain seeing, at this moment, how these things do connect ... how to connect them ... how they got disconnected. If I actually am so lucky, maybe I can connect them up. And about how my preference would be to build a company out of that, but that, if that doesn't happen, maybe by writing about it, I'll get them connected anyway, that I'll make a contribution to that. But that I'd rather accomplish the former thing.

And my previous post describes, or, in a sense, mentions - because it's that kind of essay - how I want to approach that. It hints, poetically, at what I think CAD should be, which is something everyone, absolutely everyone, uses. And uses in the fullest sense. What I hinted at is that I want to build - you could almost say this is first and foremost - a free CAD. That's on the model of Google's products. (One of which, by the way, not incidentally, I'm using to compose these essays.) This is not the Free Software Movement Model. I respect that model - I won't go into that - but I also regard it as a grand farce. I'm supposed to be liberated by those people's efforts, but, here's the thing: I can't understand the first thing about their code. So what good does it do me? On the other hand, Google's stuff is beautiful, and I can use it; that's "even me", a complete incompetent. Nor is this the Professional Products model, products which I can neither understand, nor afford. This is the Ad Supported Model. And I just LOVE advertising. I love seeing it. I feel like it's a gift. I feel like it's a gracious invitation. I feel like I barely deserve it, so I feel like it's hugely generous. And I feel like it's so clever, because I actually do spend money, and even on advertised products, here and there. Even me. Oh, how I love advertising. Yes! I want to be in advertising. 'Nuf said.

Well, but this is something fundamental, too. It points to one of the disconnects. CAD is not, as it is often thought of, mainly for professionals. Well, that's according to my analysis, but I say it's the core of what computing is, and it's for everybody, and I say that is the core of what computing is, and an aspect of it: it's for everybody.

But now, I am going to go off in a strange direction, and talk about mathematics. How is that for everybody? How on Earth is that for everybody. Well, hopefully I can explain. Actually, I think my previous essay, which is much more brief, though a bit more of a rant, manages to make that point, quite effectively. But I'll try to belabor it more here.

What is CAD at its core? What is computing, at its core? You have, to begin with, your computer. That's your processors, and your memory. With these tools, you are going to undertake the core purpose, representation.

You are going to manage these tools using a set of peripherals, some of which are input devices, and some of which are output devices. Some of them combine the two general functions, but the two functions still apply. At any rate, primary among these are the keyboard and the screen. Now you have, in your memory, a file, which is, in its initial state, empty. It's just a location in memory, and a realm of memory which extends from that location, and which is available for inclusion in the file. Using your keyboard, you send information to the processor, and the processor includes that information in the file. And then the processor represents the file for you, on the screen, so you can monitor what you've done. And the file is becoming a string of Bits. And the processor could represent those bits for you, on the screen: 100100110. But that wouldn't mean much to you. However, the processor can represent those bits for you as composite symbols: <object name="earth" type="planet" radius="3959miles;source:google;timerequiredtogetnumber:.1seconds"><city name="paris" location="48.8567° N, 2.3508° E" size="40.7 mi²" represent_as="greenyellow disk"></city></planet>.

So, the processor implements algorithms, which are stored in program files, or in tokens in memory, I guess, to convert your keystrokes into bits, in the file for your model, and then to interpret that file into that string of characters, on the screen, for you to inspect. We're working towards something more. Admittedly it gets more complicated, but there's a point I'm trying to make about that which is that complicated and incomprehensible are not the same thing. Somehow, in that file, we're going to describe the orbit of the Moon around the earth. It's my understanding the Moon doesn't spin on an axis. Apparently there's a point on the moon's surface that always faces the Earth. Once we've defined the Moon and its orbit, relative to the Earth, we'll put a camera into the model. <camera><receptor shape="square" size="500pixels" left="100pixels" top="100pixels" /><location>the point on the Earth's Moon's surface that faces the Earth</location><focal_lenght>500 pixels</focal_length><pointed_at>the center of the Earth</pointed_at></camera>.

Now we will see, on screen, an image of the Earth, maybe a white sphere, floating in black space, and maybe we'll see a greenyellow disk on the surface representing Paris. That depends on the time, because our rendering algorithm will figure out where the Moon is relative to longitude and latitude on Earth at that moment ...

So, I asked, in my other essay, "Is this really a better CAD interface?" And here's where I can talk about the idea of disconnects in a more specific way. Because the way everybody is thinking about CAD, the file, where the objects in the model are described, is something quite incidental. It happens to be necessary, but it's kind of a nuisance, and we want to insulate the user from it as much as possible. I don't think that's the right approach. Listen, the image of the model produced on the screen by the rendering algorithm is a manifestation of the model, but the actual model is the file, and the esoteric code in it. We can pretend we're trying to let the user directly manipulate the rendering, but it's just a pretense. Any change needs to be applied to the code in the file. Then the code in the file gets re-rendered to change the rendering. I wrote in the other essay about how we get fooled by what looks obvious. The rendering looks like a model, so we think it's the model. The code in the file doesn't look like a model, so we think it isn't the model. But the code is the model, and the rendering isn't. If we get those things confused, we get in a muddle. We end up with all sorts of limitations and problems. And those problems look insoluble. We think "well, if people aren't smart enough to use the software, that's their problem." We think the problem is how smart the user is, or isn't. And we figure the user isn't smart, or rather that the non-user isn't smart, and thus that that person can't read the code in the file ... which actually isn't true at all. I mean, here's another thing: it's true that only the grittiest coder can find the particular line in a huge mass of code that does a particular thing, but that's actually not because most people are dumb, it's because the software that allows you to read the code is an afterthought. And, sure, there's software for that purpose, but it's technical, and intimidating. I don't think that's because the problem is fundamentally technical and intimidating, I think it's because we, the providers, think it is, or even that it should be. We've made a decision, deliberately or not, to present it that way.

The camera, by the way, is part of the model. It's a construct of points and point relationships, a surface, onto which the pixels it represents are mapped. Lines through their centers intersect other surfaces in the model, and the pixels derive their colors from the nature of those surfaces, and the nature of those intersections.

There are many such issues to discuss. It clearly makes no sense to wade in further, here, but perhaps I have illustrated my point, the one about disconnection, and reconnection. I wonder.


Friday, August 14, 2015

model

If you have a computer that you can use, you can create a model of anything. That's the future of CAD, and it's also the future of computing.

You means anyone. You don't, any longer, have to be weirdly smart to figure this out.

It's not that the interface is going to become weirdly smart. Fact is, today's interface is weirdly dumb. Oh well, that's not really important. If I try to explain that, it gets complicated. Listen, today's interface tries to help you, even though you're dumb. But dumb can't be helped. But, in actual fact, you aren't dumb. Today's interface is dumb because it's designed for dumb people. People aren't dumb, so designing an interface for dumb people is dumb, and it results in a dumb interface.

CAD is math. Computer Aided. And computers compute, and computation is math.

Another dumb assumption behind today's CAD is the assumption that what you want to model - CAD is modeling - is very specific, and quite or very limited. Limited. What is that? It's meaningless. It's dumb. Why is CAD designed around a limited, dumb concept? Well, people are dumb. They're easily bamboozled. I'm not saying it's the fault of malicious tricksters. People bamboozle themselves. They just get bamboozled. Nobody did it, it just happened. Here's why today's CAD is limited: it's natural to want to model something big. For instance, you might want to model a huge palace, even several of them. No problem. But you're going to use a computer to do that, and the computer you are going to use is quite small. You can fold it up and put it in you brief case. It's just weird that you can use something so small to model something as big as a huge palace. Today's CAD will let you do it, but it's a weird thing for you to want to do, to model something huge using something small, so today's CAD, which isn't used to the idea, will only let you do it if you absolutely insist. You have to be really smart, to do that, to absolutely insist.

In case you think I'm just making that up, here's a variation on the theme: In all probability you will want to model things that are fairly complicated, even very complicated. Well, it's just not right, is it, that modeling something very complicated would be very simple, and very easy? Modeling something very complicated should be very complicated to do, and difficult to do. Well, CAD could make it very easy and simple to model something very complicated, but that wouldn't be right, so we make the interface very difficult. Then only very, very smart people can use it. This restores order to the universe. Now, as it properly should be, it's very difficult to model complicated things, and only very, very smart people can do it.

The mathematics of CAD is completely limitless. Basically, in CAD, you've got your model, which is a data construct, a file, a string of symbols, in fact, a string of Bits, though they are usually grouped to form letters and numbers and punctuations marks and mathematical operators. How big can the CAD model be? One Googol miles. There, I just described the size of something, and it's incredibly large. It's trillions of times the size of our visible universe. And I did it with three short words.

Do you see where I'm going with this? A CAD model is basically a list of descriptions of thing, and those descriptions are basically pretty compact. There are sort of limits on the size of a CAD model. If you describe a large enough number of things, the model will become as large as your hard drive. That's the kind of limit there is on the size of a CAD model. It's really not a limit on the size of what you can describe, it's a limit on the number of details you can include. According to my calculations, you could describe one billion objects the size of the smallest things in the universe, each precisely positioned in a space the size of the universe, in a one Terabyte file. Lots of detail, and lots of space, and a pretty moderate amount of data.

Where I'm going with this is, first, that, to say that CAD is not as limited as we think. And the other place I'm going with it is to say that CAD is not as complicated as we think. In CAD, we describe objects, using a kind of language - sort of a mathematical kind of language, which might make it sound complicated, but let's investigate a little.

You would begin a model by describing a point. It's standard practice to describe a point by listing its x, y, and z coordinates. This is usually done using a kind of shorthand, but we could do it using more conventional language. Your CAD file, which is a bit like a novel, could begin as follows: The x coordinate of the first point is eight thousand miles. The y coordinate is zero miles. The z coordinate is one thousand miles. If you're good at puzzles, you might be able to guess what I'm describing. Note that each coordinate consists of a number and a unit of measure. But, you know that.

There is, of course, a great deal more to say. Is this really a better way to approach CAD? Do we really need a better way to approach CAD? Does every one really need CAD? Isn't it really, actually, only something professionals need? What is everyone going to do with it? What am I going to do with your donations?

I'll answer the last of those questions. I'm going to offer a ten thousand dollar prize to whoever submits to me a meaningful business plan. A meaningful business plan is a document - it's in writing, maybe with pictures - that describes certain things. What kind of team will be required? How will that team be compensated? Who will assemble the team? What kind of hardware will be required? What will it cost, per month, to maintain it? People will have accounts. They'll log on and build their models. Advertising will appear on their screens. Who will put together the advertizing? How will this be capitalized? Who will handle the capitalization of it? How will the activities of the business translate into shareholder value?

This can also be abstracted one level. How does a business plan like that get put together? Who does that kind of work? What kind of stories can be told about that kind of undertaking, about people who have done that already, and how they did it?

http://www.microchip.com/

Thursday, August 13, 2015

section 1

Here's my aphorism - I made it up myself: The things to do take the Web to the next level are so obvious nobody can see them ... except me.

Here's another, and maybe another: The problem with the Web today is not finding something ... something to read, something on your topic ... it's finding the next thing.

If you are on a topic, which is actually a kind of metaphor - I'll try to explain - I assure you you do not want to read just one article. When you finish the one your reading, you want go straight to reading the next one. (You may not realize this, but it's definitely true.)

The Web kind of gets this. It suspects it. It has an uncomfortable feeling about it. It's sort of trying. But it doesn't realize how COMPLETELY ESSENTIAL this is ... and it's ... afraid. For these reasons, it's not actually doing it. It's sort of kind of doing it, but not quite, and not quite is, well, not really.

Here's the thing about topics: they are not necessarily very specific. I'll give you an example. I recently connected with a very liberal rag called The Washington Spectator. It's quite high level, meaning, there's a lot of (a large number of) actual articles. Now, at the home page, it's the usual thing, assorted headlines. It's basically the essence of disorder. But if you click one of the tabs at the top, you get, first, a menu, which is actually not a bad thing, and then if you click one of the menu items - a topic - you do get a reasonably long list of headlines. That's sort of exciting. At the same time, it's completely faulty. Well, it's not that a list of headlines is a bad thing, what's bad is ... where it goes from there ... or where it doesn't go from there.

Where it goes is, if you click a headline, you get an article.

To get the next article, you have to go back to the list of headlines.

And that is a terrible thing.

But it's not terrible for the obvious reasons. One of those has to do with the essential folly of Web design today, but to figure that out, you have to go through several levels of more petty folly, the first of which is this: that list of headlines is divided up into some unknown number of pages. What if, by some miracle, you were deep in that list of pages, and the obvious thing happened, and when you went back to the list of headlines, you ended up back on the first page. You're basically sunk. Now it's true you are probably smart enough to use the back button and get back to the page of headlines, from the list of pages of headline, you were on. But the question isn't whether you're smart or not, it's "do you have nerves of steel, and when are they going to crack." Even nerves of steel will crack.

Let me put it this way: the browser back button is not the solution to this problem.

Here's what the solution to this problem looks like: STOP DIVIDING LISTS OF HEADLINES INTO PAGES. JUST GIVE US THE WHOLE LIST.

But, clever people that you are, you will see that this will cause problems with people's browsers.

So I will tell you what: THAT IS NOT A PROBLEM WITH THE BROWSER, AND IT IS NOT A PROBLEM WITH THE COMPUTER, IT'S A PROBLEM WITH THE PROGRAMMERS. THEY CAN'T SEE THE OBVIOUS PROBLEM. IF THEY COULD, THEY WOULD SOLVE IT.

NOW IT'S TRUE THAT THE OBVIOUS PROBLEM LOOKS A BIT TRICKY. IT'S DEFINITELY EASIER TO "SOLVE" IT BY DIVIDING THE PAGE - a very, very long page - INTO SMALLER PAGES. Next page. Next page. Aaaaaaaaaargh.

Try to think. I know there are pages that sort of do this: as you scroll down, more items load. I can see it's quite difficult to make this work properly. I can see that because, mostly, they don't. WE HAVE GOT TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM. THIS IS NOT AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM.

Now, I want to return to the thing about topics. For example, at The Washington Spectator, well, here, I'll show you:


Politics, economics, and so on. Those are very broad topics. Each one of those menu items gets you a huge multi-page list of headlines ... articles about all sorts of different things.

If a topic is something very specific, these aren't topics at all. But I did say that topics aren't necessarily specific. The question is, is that meaningful?

What does that question mean?

You are thinking it means something obvious. No! The real problems are not obvious. Not to you. You are looking at the details, and not seeing the big picture. I ask you, what is the big picture.

The big picture is scholarship.

But you look at that word, scholarship, and what do you see? The details. That's not the big picture. You see scholars. They are scurrying around the campus, like bespectacled rats, hunched over their screens in the newsroom, in their rumpled but stylish shirts and pants, swarming Washington, sticking their cameras into the faces of politicians and bureaucrats, asking, I'll grant you, well worded and intelligent questions, going out to lovely lunches - and that's a very good thing. They're smart and personable, unlike myself. I am a real scholar, a surly nobody who thinks he's brilliant and knows it all ... except he can't get the information, because it's caught in an endlessly tangled Web!

A Web of Lists of Links, of "Next" and "Previous" pages organized around supposed Topics and Sub Topics. WHAT IS THE BIG PICTURE? WHAT, ACTUALLY, DOES A SCHOLAR DO? A SCHOLAR READS

AND READS AND READS AND READS AND READS AND READS

A SCHOLAR DOES NOT REQUIRE HIS MATERIAL TO BE PREDIGESTED, PRESORTED, PRE ANYTHING.  WHEN I, A SCHOLAR, A PROLETARIAN, A HOI POLOI, AM DONE WITH ARTICLE ONE, I'M READY FOR ARTICLE TWO, AND THEN ARTICLE THREE, AND THEN ARTICLE FOUR ... I'LL KEEP GOING UNTIL I REACH ARTICLE 75, AND ARTICLE 750.

I TOLD YOU, YOU ARE NOT SEEING THE BIG PICTURE. A LIST OF HEADLINES, DIVIDED UP INTO PAGES, OR MORE PROPERLY NOT DIVIDED UP INTO PAGES, IS OF NO USE TO ME. IT'S NOT OF USE, IT'S A NUISANCE. I MEAN, YES, AT ANOTHER TIME, FOR REASONS I DON'T NEED TO GET INTO, IT'S A NECESSITY, BUT UNTIL YOU GIVE ME SOMETHING OF REAL VALUE, IT'S JUST INANITY. THAT'S WHAT I SAID: AN ENDLESS LIST OF HEADLINES LOOKS LIKE THE SOLUTION, BUT THE ACTUAL SOLUTION IS, AN ENDLESS SCROLL OF ARTICLES.

And yes, we have revolved back to an era where we read from scrolls. It's just a wonderful thing.

AND YES, WE CAN DO THIS.

THIS CONCLUDES SECTION 1. 

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

movies

This one's a tough go, but interesting.

Now I've been launched into endless inanity!

Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979)

aw, friends ... to the death

 

Fearless Dragons (2014)

on minute in my comment is, good god!

urbanism rap urbanism rap

I want a new city. It's not that the one I've got is a piece of crap. I like the new, and so do you.


Architects. I think I'll throw up now.


It's not your work. It is your their work. It's your hauteur.


Oh well, better listen. Listen to what. A giant muddle. Not about a new city at all. But I'll listen.


Urbanization is not being done, it's just happening.


So it's all about the financial center?


It's not that it sucks. I want to go. But really ... that is all?


Is this clever thing, commodification of urban differences, the answer? Is that the answer? I want to go. It is a sweet answer. But is it the answer?


What are you telling us? You architects, in your nice jackets? You with your elevated european chins? All in English, lucky for me.


How much does it cost to build a tower? That's what I want to know, but I don't imagine you will answer or reply. I am just hoi poloi, after all.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

meditation

East on 101, Marlborough, Peterborough, Wilton, Milford, then Hudson and the Merrimack. Merrimack? North along the Merrimack, East Merrimack, and then Manchester. I'm too far east.

West from Manchester along Mast Road, Goffstown, 149 ... and I've found it.

meditation

The surface area of the earth it 500 trillion square meters.

I want to do a web site where anyone can view a contour model of any part of the surface of the earth.

Contour models are created by stacking layers of board cut to the shapes of contour lines. My web site would do this virtually.

It's hopeless.

I went to the national map - just trying to think what to do - zoomed in on New Hampshire - the place occupies my mind, to some extent - is to some extent a comfort to think of - zoomed in more, looking for a particular spot ... couldn't find it ...

... Because I'm working on my back, my head on a pillow made from rolled up bedding, the laptop propped on my chest and crossed leg, the touch pad gets jostled, so I have it turned off. To zoom, then, I try pinching on the touch screen, and discover something interesting, that that doesn't zoom the map, it zooms the page. To zoom the map you double click on a point, or click on the zoom tool, and then you get a different map, a different resolution, a different level of detail, but by pinching on the touch screen I get the same map, enlarge or reduced.

Now I have a very close in map that shows the town of Keene, with roads, and their names, and streams and brooks, and their names, and the streets of the town, and the houses. But where is Keene? I think the place I'm looking for is to the east. Route 10 heads north and east, and route 101 heads east. I could explore along them and see what I find.

All of a sudden the weather's almost surly. A big blow, low clouds, thunder, a few rain drops, the power out. No internet, can't find my atlas.




Monday, August 10, 2015

future

My idea is to build very tall towers of very, very large apartments. Redefining the apartment. It isn't any longer an interior space, it's an exterior space, a platform in space ... essentially a ranch, a farm ... build many proximate towers and abundantly connect them at every elevation ... one is habitation, homes, farms, ranches ... the next is public space, gathering places, shopping, schools, government ... the city not as an assemblage of discrete towers but as a matrix in space ... the tower not as a spire of enclosed space but as a support for a matrix of outdoor space ... units of indoor space - houses, and then complexes of apartments, offices, halls for performance and the like, shopping streets, these are features in the environment, not the environment itself. Residents will not, as in today's tall cities, go down to the street every day ... they will explore more horizontally from their elevated homes across elevated neighborhoods and districts.

A new relationship to nature, to wilderness, no longer seeking to move into it, so much, as to view it from above, living on catwalks, bridges, bridge cities, that meander across the landscape, which flows beneath them, undisturbed. And also, creating not only habitat, but nature, too, in our architecture: gardens, streams, even wilderness.

Treating existing cities as a feature of the primordial earth. Building above them, just as we build above the wilderness, leaving it and them undisturbed.

Thinking about the home, in our planning, whether in these imagined places, or in the city of today, whether that is the urban core or suburbia, exurbia, or something in between, thinking of it as something more or other than a place for our solitary moments, thinking of it as a place for living, a place for industry, this in our planning, so that the home can become something other than what it has tended to be.

The idea that what our architecture is originates in planning. It sounds obvious, but I believe it is unconventional, even radical. I see planners trying so hard to respond to perceived imperatives, to accommodate them. We should accommodate them, but we can also imagine anything, and should do that. Imagining something completely other. It is problematic if we imagine, with it, the destruction of what is, the rejection of what is, but if we at once embrace what already exists, revere it, care for it, then maybe we can imagine and even create freely.

And isn't it true we are living in a world of new technologies, with new capabilities? The technology of imagination, the mind, remains unchanged. The technology of representation is almost like a whole new thing, although it seems, in some ways, like we don't realize it. But my hypothesis is that out of complete representation, implementation will spontaneously emerge. And technology for building ... it is as if there exists, now, a new realm of the possible, that is only waiting for us to seize it.

terms


Sunday, August 9, 2015

future

http://search.lycos.com/web/?q=Future+Cities+Laboratory+-+Singapore+ETH&keyvol=009098a7a07f54b50a91

There is widely accepted concern that the suburb, as an urban form, is problematic, for a number of reasons. Then what is proposed as an alternative to it is - we don't want to be too esoteric - another conventional phenomenon - an environment of towers. Some of them are residential, and some are clerical. To some limited extent they can be commercial - some retail, perhaps some warehousing or wholesaling.

This is what evolves. Any other notions, regarding what the urban environment could be, are necessarily radical.

The environment of towers has some advantages over suburbia. There is some benefit vis a vis energy consumption. This is rather dry, but perhaps important. Of more interest in a human sense, as well as in an ecological and aesthetic sense, more people can live, and perhaps even work, on the same horizontal tract of land. And if human interaction, or even simply presence - activity - correlates to liveliness, then there is the possible benefit of that effect.

too complicated

My idea is to build very tall towers of very, very large apartments. Redefining the apartment. It isn't any longer an interior space, it's an exterior space, a platform in space ... essentially a ranch, a farm ... build many proximate towers and abundantly connect them at every elevation ... one is habitation, homes, farms, ranches ... the next is public space, gathering places, shopping, schools, government ... the city not as an assemblage of discrete towers but as a matrix in space ... the tower not as a spire of enclosed space but as a support for a matrix of outdoor space ... units of indoor space - houses, and then complexes of apartments, offices, halls for performance and the like, shopping streets, these are features in the environment, not the environment itself. Residents will not, as in today's tall cities, go down to the street every day ... they will explore more horizontally from their elevated homes across elevated neighborhoods and districts.

A new relationship to nature, to wilderness, no longer seeking to move into it, so much, as to view it from above, living on catwalks, bridges, bridge cities, that meander across the landscape, which flows beneath them, undisturbed. And also, creating not only habitat, but nature, too, in our architecture: gardens, streams, even wilderness.

Treating existing cities as a feature of the primordial earth. Building above them, just as we build above the wilderness, leaving it and them undisturbed.

Thinking about the home, in our planning, whether in these imagined places, or in the city of today, whether that is the urban core or suburbia, exurbia, or something in between, thinking of it as something more or other than a place for our solitary moments, thinking of it as a place for living, a place for industry, this in our planning, so that the home can become something other than what it has tended to be.

The idea that what our architecture is originates in planning. It sounds obvious, but I believe it is unconventional, even radical. I see planners trying so hard to respond to perceived imperatives, to accommodate them. We should accommodate them, but we can also imagine anything, and should do that. Imagining something completely other. It is problematic if we imagine, with it, the destruction of what is, the rejection of what is, but if we at once embrace what already exists, revere it, care for it, then maybe we can imagine and even create freely.

And isn't it true we are living in a world of new technologies, with new capabilities? The technology of imagination, the mind, remains unchanged. The technology of representation is almost like a whole new thing, although it seems, in some ways, like we don't realize it. But my hypothesis is that out of complete representation, implementation will spontaneously emerge. And technology for building ... it is as if there exists, now, a new realm of the possible, that is only waiting for us to seize it.

Saturday, August 8, 2015

strategy

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/john-kasich-debate-gay-marriage-gop-strategy
why is there evil in the world? (how can we make lemonade out of these lemons)
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/sad-sac-kids-table-debate-blogging
concluding a (blessedly concise) bunch of nothing, 5:38 PM: Foxbot host asks candidates how they will combat the epidemic of loaferism among Americans.
http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/07/transportation-infrastructure-scott-walker-highways-000153

taylor camp

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/taylor-camp-hippies-kauai_55b090b5e4b08f57d5d3b0d5?

http://www.moo.com/us/

W10

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aka.ms/windowslifecycle

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Friday, August 7, 2015

any pattern

I'm setting up a blog called any pattern.

I'm using Blogger to track stocks. It's a weird thing, but it's the easiest way I know to maintain a web page (with a lot of stuff on it)(and with new stuff added all the time).

Incredibly, I can publish charts by going to Finviz.com. It's not the most comprehensive source, but still, I can choose from a very wide selection of charts. I can publish a static chart - it always shows the same pattern that the stock made at some point in time - or a dynamic chart that shows the latest chart for the stock when the page is loaded.

I can publish the two together, so that post will show the pattern I was interested in at a moment in time, and whatever has happened since that moment in time.

The first post will be an alphabetical index of symbols, so, if I'm looking at an interesting pattern but I'm not sure if I've already posted about it, I can look that up. (The posts won't be in alphabetical order, so it'll be hard to check if there's a post for a given symbol.)

I can "label" the posts - simply down patterns, canyon bottom patterns, high surf patterns, hook patterns, wedge patterns, early patterns, extending patterns, bought, sold, and so on.

One stock to a post, then, after that, a static chart and a dynamic chart. Simple as that.

filters

Begin with a filter of the green mat type.

Add four buttons at the corners.

A piece of soft loosely woven but sturdy fabric the same size as the filter base.

Button holes on the four corners.

The fabric filter buttons onto the filter base.

Remove it and wash it once a week.

63

I'm trying to index every article that has been published on every web page so that you can read them all.

No I'm not. It's just too hard to do.

Yes I am. I just need the right technology.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

mice

I sure love my touch screen(s), but I think mouse functions could be better. Some issues: it can be difficult and even impossible to select a small link or to press a small button, and then there this, basically: when using a conventional mouse, hovering over a link or button produces its own effects, and that is at best imperfectly reproduced.

I also think some of the functionality I have in mind would improve on the functionality of conventional mice and mouse like devices.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

62

OK, To Do

Order soap

Give some money to Bernie

Themes

The Work At Home Economy

A Renewed Emphasis on On Line Video

trommel

It's my dream, too, own a very good composter. This is a little awkward, but I want to live in a world in which everyone composts their poops, and pee. Now, the standard composting toilet is a nasty thing that barely works. It's wrong in concept. The proper way to compost pee is to absorb it with grass and leaves, simple as that. And the proper way to compost poop is to blend it with grass and leaves, in a pile. It will then dry and there will not be any issues with odor or a mess, or harmful bacteria, either. Once it's dry, it can be composted at a controlled level of moisture, and the result will soon be a clean loam.

Regardless of whether I'm going to attempt this or not, I want a good composter, which is basically a trommel: a rotary screen. In other words, it's a cylinder made of screen mesh. You fill it with the material to be composted, establish the right level of moisture, and rotate it on a daily basis, and the finished compost sifts out into a bin beneath the trommel.

Trommels are nothing new. They're used in mining ... and in industrial scale composting ... but I haven't seen them advertised for home composting. Strange.

60

In defense of Magic, I actually feel a little closer to having my own trash burner. Now this will not be a steel drum wafting of smelly smoke. The whole load in the stove will burn in one quick fire that will barely have an aroma at all, and what aroma it will have will mostly be sweet. Then the fire will be out, and everything will be burned to ashes.

The ashes should be handled properly, too. Ideally they should be scattered in the wilderness. I mean it. But there are more intricate options which I'll address later.

Anyway, writing the last post got my mind shifted just a little bit forward, and I looked at web sites for materials. One hundred dollars worth of ordinary brick would probably be enough to build a workable stove ... but building it is probably beyond me. I shifted my thoughts to the possibility of having something made out of steel, and called up a page of steel fabricators in town. I might actually be on my way to securing my stove.