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big wide world – Page 19 – Words' End

Category: big wide world

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Internettings.

Well, I was going to write up a thorough account of the rest of the summit, but am a bit blogged out – if you’re interested, see what I wrote about it on the VHL blog. A large chunk of that is my previous post to this blog, so it’s not as long as it looks; on the other hand, I also link from the VHL post to the summit notes on TADA which are long but are also worth a read.

After the summit was over, I spent the weekend in rural VA not far from Charlottesville with a friend named Free who fully lives up to his name. It was lovely; there were three dogs, a horse and many children and friends, open-air fires at night and marshmallows and hot dogs roasted on long sticks. And I got to participate in prepping the foundation for a greenhouse. The air was quiet and clear, and the stars looked alien: I couldn’t make out any familiar constellations because most of the sky was taken up by tall tall trees, it was like peering up through a window to the multiverse.

Meanwhile, some intensely cool stuff is being documented on the net. For example, here’s a Quicktime movie of the Northern Southern lights from space and an .mpg movie of solar activity, both courtesy of NASA.

Also, omigod, a new Beowulf is coming out in 2007 or so, and Neil Gaiman has writing credits. !

Having missed the opening one-two-punch weekend of Serenity and Mirrormask, I’m very much looking forward to seeing both.

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Summit, evening the first.

I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia at the summit on digital tools for the humanities. It’s almost 10:30pm, I’ve got to catch a 7:30am bus to campus for breakfast and a day of intense work, and I’m jazzed to the point of spinning in the elevator.

The flights were fun, and even flying out of Providence at the ungodly hour of 6am was rewarded by one of those perfectly cloudless full-rainbow-spectrum sunrises. I read and read materials for the summit, and am happy to report that I completed the reading before getting to the hotel. The hotel gave me a warm chocolate-chip cookie upon check-in.

Today was a reception and dinner, followed by the usual greetings and a keynote by Brian Cantwell Smith, a computer scientist from U of Toronto. The man knows how to talk. He gesticlated wildly, looking at times as if he was about to leap towards us from behind the podium. He talked quickly and intensely, and yet managed to keep most of the audience.

Here are some points he brought up, rephrased by me; any brilliance is his, flat language would be mine. I haven’t entirely digested all of this, so present it mostly without commentary. Your thoughts, though, would be much appreciated.

Digital is a trendy word, he said, second only to like on college campuses.

Descartes was a smart guy. He separated the work, or process, of understanding the world from the world thereby understood.

Controversial revelation of this talk: computers don’t actually exist. There do exist many devices, but what are they?

Around the turn of the 20th century, we discovered that we could fuse meaning and mechanism. An example of this would be us. This idea eventually gave birth to computers.

Computers aren’t anything special, and computer scientists aren’t studying anything special. Or maybe anything in particular. This is liberating: instead of a restricted domain, they have a sort of monopoly on the universe.

We (computing humanists) shouldn’t be party to propagating the dualism between the ostensible “abstract” and the concrete. A server going down loses not the representation of mail, but actual mail.

Descartes said that we should have clear and distinct ideas. But this isn’t the way the world actually works.

Maybe the tools we build are digital at the level of the bits, but what matters about them is humanistic.

Computers are a historical moment (a long one, which started in the mid-1800s and is still going) in which we are getting past Descartes.

Matter is both a noun and a verb. Material comes from matter.

Computing is allowing us to get past the temporary, 300-year divorse between matter-noun and matter-verb.

Our commitment to what it means to be human shouldn’t be ideological (“if it’s human, it’s good”).

People can be special as in worthy of study and careful consideration, not special as in this is where inquiry stops because there’s nothing more to say.

…

That’s it for now. If you’re interested in one or more elements of this, comment and we’ll talk (in comments). I’m too tired to attempt an actual argument. Tomorrow is another day, with more photography and some serious hyperte… I mean, blogging.

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Good Monday morning, you lazy parental types.

While looking around Inside Higher Ed, I came across an old article about Princeton’s new policy of automatically granting a one-year leave from tenure track when a faculty member becomes a parent. I’d been delighted to read this back in August: one thing I don’t like at all about academe in the U.S. is the default assumption that people who make teaching and research their life’s work aren’t entitled to a life outside of the university.

Many more comments have been posted since I last read the article, and I boggle. Some of the people who choose to be “child-free” actually dare to imply that having children makes for lazy academics. That having children means you aren’t dedicated to education and research. I’d like to see them be responsible for a baby and hold down an exhausting full-time job at the same time, for just a month or so. I wonder if they’d change their mind then.

And spare me the “we have too many people on this planet” argument. Fertility is well below replacement rate (2.1 is said to keep a population stable) in a large portion of the world, including most of Europe and North America. The places with particularly high fertility rate (Niger tops the CIA World Factbook chart, with 7.55 children born per woman on the average) also have a huge infant mortality rate.

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a burning in the soul.

It’s getting cooler in Providence, where we returned from a three-week road trip this past Friday. The ostensible reason for the journey out west was Burning Man; a couple of family visits all over the country (Saint Louis and somewhere near Grass Valley, California) and a visit to friends in Santa Rosa were in order as well, so renting a car made sense. It turned out to be convenient and fun; Ethan and I both enjoyed our second road trip as a couple, counting the honeymoon a few months ago.

Burning Man was… well, most of all it was satisfying. Even though I didn’t get to see nearly as much of the city as I’d wanted, nor participate in as many events: all of the good intentions of starting each day with yoga somewhere on the playa kind of went to hell. But being part of Foodlab, a camp that made a hot sunset meal for about 130 people every day for the week, was solidly rewarding as a community-building exercise.

At least, it was rewarding until the end, when only 8 or so of the 37 people in the camp ended up breaking it down, a long and often tedious and unpleasant process rife with snarky comments from exhausted burners feeling a bit bitter at having been left all alone to deal with the final mess. Still, given the kind of camp we were (much trash to truck out, many supplies to account for), we only left about 4 hours later than intended. It could’ve been worse, and I’m glad we stayed and thankful for the work and ultimate mutual support of the breakdown crew.

It’s been a little unsettling to get anonymous and not-so-anonymous snide comments about what went wrong in Foodlab this year. My impression remains that Foodlab had a good year, and this is corroborated by the glowing thanks we’ve received from several people who ate with us but weren’t privy to the inner workings. *shrugs* I just hope that discussion of what to do better next time doesn’t occlude the warmth and laughter we gathered and fed every evening.

When we weren’t busy at Foodlab or hanging out with friends, Ethan and I carved out a few times to be together. The first of those was on Thursday, as we attended our friends Bucky and Emily’s colorful wedding at the clockworks. The afternoon was filled with gorgeous clothes, scorching sun and not one but four ice cream cakes, rock-hard from the flash freezing and being stored in dry ice! Talk about a treat, in the desert.

We puttered about the city a couple of times, returning to the Center Camp Café on Tuesday to revisit the morningtime conversations and coffee that kept us in thrall of each other at the 2003 Burning Man, where we met. On Sunday, we went to the temple burn together, intending to make a late night of it; but a convoluted set of events left us looking for my bike in a nascent dust storm, in which I ended up losing Ethan and never finding the bike. A couple of solid hours of wandering the playa left me exhausted and so covered in pale-brown alkali dust that my campmates didn’t recognize me when I walked into camp looking for my husband who of course wasn’t there. We finally reunited, fell into a deep sleep and broke down the camp the following morning. An anticlimactic ending to our burn, perhaps, but an adventure that now provokes more smiles than rue.

And so, after all the busy-ness and bonding time with Ethan, after the freedom of merely existing in Black Rock City, I kind of felt that I hadn’t emotionally connected with anyone new, not deeply or satisfyingly. There’d been a few meaningful conversations, a couple of great first meetings, one entire night spent talking with some campmates, but in all of that was this insidious distance. By the end of the week my haptic interface was twitching all through my muscles – I hadn’t had prolonged tactile contact with anyone besides Ethan in many days, and in an intensely emotionally open environment at that. This made for an unsettled and thoughtful state, which wasn’t unpleasant but was a bit isolating, [because it|and] took up many thought cycles.

So it was surprising and very cool to find myself having revelatory conversations with N., a longtime friend of Ethan’s from back in Colorado, who has been studying Tibetan Buddhism for several years now and was on his way to New York. I haven’t processed all of what we talked about yet, but the introspectiveness triggered by Burning Man and the desire to once again hermit myself and do a few things well this coming year were kindled by the talks, which took place at all hours (we did the trip straight through, with two stops for sleep and a few more for rest and breakfast and what not).

Ethan and I dropped N. off on Friday morning and headed to Providence, physically tired but agian deep in conversation. Somewhat unexpectedly, we turned to topics that ended up solidifying and concretizing our relationship, even more so than it had been already – a sort of culmination of the two years during which we’ve come to know each other and see a future together.

So the unsettled feeling that I had previously been baffled by, the one that felt like loneliness in the midst of a full life happily building a family, probably wasn’t loneliness after all. It now feels like a restlessness, a desire to move forward and again to deepen my relationship to my love and to my world. Suddenly we’ve seen the path we both want to take in developing our selves together. If the past two years are any indication, the next few will be distilled eye-opening joy.

Tomorrow I go to work. Can’t wait, actually. There’s a lot to do, and I finally feel rested enough to do it well. Welcome home.

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reflections on nature

Victoria, BC, 5pm on Wednesday June 15th

(that’s yesterday)

I am jet lagged all to hell. First we went two (one?) hours back, from Denmark to Iceland. Then we (I) realized that it just wasn’t going to get dark in Reykjavik at all; it’s close to summer solstice, and we were after all in the land of the midnight sun.

Then we flew from Iceland back five hours to Boston, from whence to Providence by bus in the evening. One full day and two nights at home, and off to Seattle – another three hours back.

So, all in all, nine time zones broken up over several days. My body has stopped trying to figure out what time it is and sort of floats through time and space, alternating between running on fumes, perking right up at random intervals, and threatening to shut down completely with distressing frequency.

In the course of all these travels, nature has been gloriously varied.

Denmark is lush and green, punctuated by vast fields of blinding yellow rape plants, purple and pink and white flowers by random bodies of water, and sky-high sky. Sometimes it’s grey, other times pale blue and whispy white, but it’s always high up above you. Denmark has space and rolling shallow hills and wide wide bike lanes, as wide as for cars! It rained more than I would’ve liked, but such is spring in that part of the world.

Iceland is… like nothing I’ve ever seen. Its volcanic soil clumps up softly. Get out of Reykjavik, and all you see is this clumpy fuzzy rug and a few long narrow highways. Misty geyser steam in the distance, and mountains, volcanoes. SUVs everywhere, but they’re actually useful there, necessary even. Reykjavik is a mish-mash of funky architectural styles, some older, some with a decidedly modern aesthetic, none of them simple copies of mainland-European styles. Public art in the form of swoopy steel statues, as well as courageous men (on horseback or not), proudly green with bronze oxidation.

Boston, oof. Coming back to Boston was like getting into a steam bath against your will and clothed, and not being allowed to come back out. Muggy, oppressive. We spent half an hour or so waiting for the bus underneath a raised road, concrete all around us, beyond it grey pillows of sky so close you almost think you can touch them. Thank the technology gods for air conditioning at home and at work!

Seattle greeted us with mild-mannered evening sun, and for the rest of the evening proceeded to live up to its perpetual “60s, partly cloudy, chance of rain” weather forcast. This morning the sun didn’t wake and show his face until I was on the ferry to

Victoria, which is surprisingly like Denmark in its lush greenness. But it’s also sunny and mild, gorgeous in its pacific-northwest way. The bay where our ferry arrived turned out to be located near beautiful museum buildings and downtown. Lovely walk into town, a bit of shopping, some free wireless net time at the coffee shop where I had lunch but not coffee (see jet lag above), uneventful bus ride to the UVic campus, which is hyoooge and has many,

many

bunnies. ALL OVER. *dies of cute*

(The morning session is about to start. Hooray! I always get so… giddy at ACH/ALLC conferences. Skipped almost all the way to the room.)

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Best. honeymoon. evar.

It’s 2am in Bergen, Norway. It didn’t really get all the way dark until about midnight.

I meant to blog more extensively while visiting Jill and her mum, since net access from your own laptop is a beautiful thing. But somehow I got sucked into catching up on all my net-reading instead, and… there’s just so much.

Norway has great seafood. Bergen is mountainous and half-hidden in rolling fog, it’s as though they’re living in a cloud. I’ve never been so bruised in my life (biking + sleeping on hard ground afterwards, for days on end), and am loving it. Having a bed to sleep in for the past two nights has been an insane luxury. Jill’s daughter Aurora is the sweetest kid since my nephew. Denmark seems Very Hilly when you’re lugging a heavy trailer behind your bicycle, but is actually Rather Flat. Fjords are gorgeous and unexpectedly (for us and for the locals) windy just when you dedicate an entire day to biking around one. The Danish campsite network is impressive and convenient, but morning pastries overshadow all of that by a mile. Camp stove was superfluous, since most campsites have kitchens. We’ve only actually cooked once, but ate out (including Copenhagen) for about five meals out of more than a week, covering the rest with energy bars and remarkably satisfying supermarket food. Snails and slugs abound and are cute; spiders are not cute but luckily don’t abound either. Cows prance and frolic, I kid you not. The last campsite we stayed at had goats that talked to you, and not one but three of those huge inflatable bouncy trampoline-like pillows that you can flop and bounce on (and we did). Ferries rock, and – Molly and David, I feel like a traitor – Clif Shot energy packets are much tastier than Gu. Or perhaps it’s the texture.

I can feel myself getting stronger. Some biking-relevant muscle groups have gained a surprising amount of definition already.

It’s like a dream. Still a bit surreal, although we’ve been traveling for ten days now. To have and to hold such a brilliant mind and generous, patient, kind heart is a privilege, and isn’t lost on me. We’ve spent more time than I’d expected in companionable silence. At first this felt odd, since usually we can’t stop conversing, but it feels good, so to hell with the usual.

Tomorrow, ferry back to Denmark and ten more days of traveling. Net access from the campsites is spotty, and when it is available, it’s on the camp’s computer, not a wireless connection. (But it blows my mind that it exists in such boonies at all!) I’m internalizing much more than I’m able… well, willing to write. It’s too much effort to write. I’m retreating into my own head again, thoughts of family and humanity and my place in the world whirling like tiny mosquitoes all around me. How do you write about all of this when increasingly your MO is to live fully, day by day?

You don’t, is how. Especially not at 2:30am. Definitely time for sleep. I’ll leave you with a post I wrote on the plane over, many days ago.

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Wed 18 May 11:01 Copenhagen time

I haven’t blogged much about personal life in a while, mostly due to time constraints. So much to do before honeymoon! I’m happy to say that, for the most part, the sudden rush of work in the last few weeks resulted in some happy developments. Now I just have to remember to pitch VHL’s new toys to some lists, and hopefully gather some interest.

Today is my mom’s 65th birthday. For her, it’s still yesterday: she’s in Hawaii with a friend. Happy birthday, mom! We’re thinking of you.

I’m writing this on a plane from Reykjavik to Copenhagen. We left home at 4:30pm yesterday, and at 4 I was still doing the dishes. A bit of a rushed feeling persisted, but I noticed an undercurrent of that state whee you just can’t be bothered to do things any quicker, you know? It all worked out, in any case. Taxi to Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence, on to a bus to Boston’s Logan airport, timed so that we would arrive three hours before our flight left. We figured, we had two heavy and very carefully packed suitcases with bicycles in them. If TSA wanted to check that stuff by hand, there might’ve been trouble: they’re notorious for, well, repacking things in such a way that they get damaged. In an attempt to avoid this, we even taped love letters to TSA agents to the inside of the bike cases, explaining that if they break, our honeymoon will be VERY VERY SAD.

I don’t think they checked us, unless it was behind the scenes. The entire check-in process for Icelandair took about 10 minutes, including standing in line (of which there was none). Perhaps there’s more havoc when it comes closer to a flight, but it was just… so… pleasant. I don’t think there’s an elevated terrorist alert in the northern countries.

And so we left! Zooommm, off on a 9:40pm airplane. Dinner was bad food, but I didn’t care, as I spent most of that flight asleep. Now, post-nap and Reykjavik airport Earl Grey tea ($4.50 a cup) and airline coffee (surprisingly full-bodied and tasty!), I’m wide awake and bouncy. In a couple of hours we’ll be in Copenhagen.

What we saw of Iceland on the descent, and then on take-off, was pretty amazing. Pretty snow-covered mountains, steaming geysers, water so blue. We’ll be there for about a day and a half on the way back, staying in an actual hotel – the only hotel reservation we’ve made the entire trip.

That’s right, no hotel reservations at all in Denmark. We have all the camping gear we need, including over a dozen different spices for cooking: is anyone really surprised? Didn’t think so). The the suitcases in which our bikes are packed turn into trailers (have I mentioned how much Bike Friday rocks? Because they do), and Denmark is flat. It also boasts fifteen or so national bike routes, and a large number of regional ones. Some farmers will let you stay on their land for stupidly low prices. Plus, there are reasonably-equipped camping sites all over. From what we saw, most come with things like showers and electricity, I’m happy to pay a bit more to recharge the laptop. Reportedly, some sites even have wireless access: a geek’s wet dream vacation.

We have… what is it, 24? 28? rechargeable batteries. And the charger, and a laptop, and a digital camera, and Very Bright LED lights for our bikes, and an iPod and an iTrip, and two sets of cheapo radio headphones so that we can listen to the iPod broadcast. [Note at time of posting: this failed to work. Ah well.] And probably other stuff I’m forgetting. (There’ll be photos on flickr, that’s for sure. Watch that space.)

Yeah. Low-tech this trip ain’t. And while we’re on the subject of tech: about a week ago I bought a new battery for my PowerBook, as the old one was dying slowly but surely. Power saving technology sure has come a long way: on the dimmest monitor setting (before it goes totally blank), with the battery settings optimized, we should get something like 5 hours of text editing. Probably less for movie watching and photo handling, but damn. Hoo-ray.

Tomorrow I go to visit Espen Aarseth and his department. Should be fun! [It was! We nattered about the state of humanities computing, games research in Denmark, working and living in Europe, and weather. Which was beautiful.] At the end of the month we’ll take a ferry from Hanstholm, in the northwest of Denmark, to Bergen, Norway and visit with Jill for a while. That, I know, will be awesome. Other than that, we have no set plans, except for a vague itinerary that hits most of the places we would theoretically like to see. But first we have to get used to biking with trailers and panniers full of Stuff. It’s a good thing Denmark is flat.

I’m glad to be out of USA&tm; for a while. There has been a subtle but insidious change in the air over the past several years; the political strife both national and international is taking its toll on the daily lives of everyone around us. Perhaps this has always been the case, and I’m just more sensitive to it now because I’m deeply distressed about the direction the U.S. has taken under Bush Junior. Right now, though, it feels as though with every passing minute I’m shedding another layer of weight I didn’t quite know I was carrying. And it’s not just the feeling you get when you go on vacation after a busy time at work. My soul is more at peace; I feel as though we’re flying toward sanity.

—

Life will take over in quite a hectic and unceremonious manner pretty much the minute we get back. And yet, I feel like this intense traveling experience is about all I can take right now, so I watch the storm of activity rage all around me but keep it at arm’s length, the eye of the storm suspended somewhere in the middle of my ribcage.

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Question for the digirati and other geeks

I’ve never done any 3D modelling, and would like to play with it. Is there a cheap or free program for OS X that is quickly learned? My time is stretched thin right now, so I’d rather stay away from Photoshop-like complexity. My requirements are easy, really: I’d like to manually create a bunch of nodes (doesn’t matter what they look like as long as I can name them), define connections between them, and then see a 3D representation of the resulting structure. Preferably, a representation that I can turn about and see from different angles.

Later on, I’m gonna want something that will take an XML-encoded text, process it according to the rules I give it, and spew out a 3D representation of that text. But that’s sort of a pipe dream; for now, I’m more interested in a very basic DYI. Does such a beast exist?

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dreams vs reality

I dreamed about an ex-lover, a friend to whom I’m about to write email (only partly because of the dream). He’s been, to a greater or lesser extent, in my dreams for something like a week now. I’ve no idea why. All I know is that I awake happy and slightly nostalgic, that I miss him and want him and Ethan to meet.

I told Ethan about this yesterday morning. His eyes reflected the shine in my own. He smiled, the corners of his eyes creasing; he wants to meet J. too. This is important – in some ways, this is it, it’s why I treasure him so. He gets what it means to love, nurtures the depth of feelings I carry for him and for others.

I wake, and before writing email I read blogs. My legs underneath the blanket freeze as I follow links from a post. A sixteen-year-old girl is accused of being terrorist threat and imprisoned – imprisoned! – for being a teenager. For not getting along with her parents, for wanting to get married at 16, for a misunderstanding in the family that involved the police because they trust in the system, a decision which cost their daughter her freedom after the police involved the FBI.

The girl’s Muslim. As the source of my links wrote, “this is the Patriot Act in action. This is religious persecution. This is your America.”

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