Aku Aku

Dance Weekend

I need another weekend to recover!

We went to a great fetish-wear party Friday night (in honor of it being Folsom Street Fair weekend). Saturday was the Love Parade, and Sunday of course was Folsom Street Fair.

Much dancing was involved. We danced in the Mission. We danced down Market Street like a victorious army (ironically melding with the anti-war protest going on at the same place, same time). We danced in Civic Center. We danced in City Hall (w00t! VIP passes!). We danced on Folsom. We danced in leather, we danced in fur. Late Sunday night, we danced at the hippest new restaurant in America, San Francisco's Supper Club, a restaurant/club so decadent one patron asked where the vomitorium might be.

I took photos on Saturday, but the latest Flickr iPhoto Plugin keeps crashing, so I'll have to upload those late and add a link. Oh, I just discovered that there's a photo of Mie and I at the Supper Club site from the pre-opening party in May.

The weather turned out to be perfect, giving me hope that October won't be as unseasonably chilly as September has been. Yay, San Francisco.

Unfortunately all the festivities destroyed any chance of getting around to responding to the dozens of nice responses we've been getting since sending out our 'we got married' announcement last week. Hopefully I can start on that tomorrow.

Meet my wife

Last night Mie and I returned home from 10 days in the desert. We descended into the Bay Area tired, dusty and married. We got married Wednesday night at Burning Man, where we met three years ago. I'm not positive, but I think Wednesday night of BM 2002 might have been our first evening out together too. Some things to note:

• We've decided to make "Wednesday night of Burning Man" our anniversary, instead of August 31st.
• Since I'm not attached to my last name (I was adopted into the Coleman name and no longer have any relationship with my adoptive father) and I always thought it was unfair for women to have to change their names upon marriage and not men, Mie and I have decided to both change our names. We've chosen her mother's maiden name, Yaginuma, as that name was going to disappear one day since her uncle is the last male of that line and has no heirs. Yaginuma means "willow tree pond" in Japanese.
• We're planning on doing wedding band tattoos instead of rings. We still need to come up with a design though. It'll be the first tattoo for each of us.
• I had been working on an fancy proposal scheme that fell through at the last minute due to missed deadlines and a held up wire transfer to china (long story, more details to come). In the end I was unable to propose to Mie at Burning Man as planned, so she took me completely by surprise by proposing to me. I'm still going to finish the thing I was working on. More details on that will be forthcoming.
• I love my wife!

So may I present Mr. and Mrs. Yaginuma:

in/finite games

Although I didn't really want to leave Indochina, and felt an especially strong sense of stationary inertia in the village of Pai in Thailand, it is nice to be back in the stimulating environment of San Francisco. A few days after I got back I attended another Long Now seminar, entitled "Religious War in Light of the Infinite Game" delivered by James P. Carse. Carse is a retired NYU professor who taught history and literature of religion (is this different than 'religious literature' I wonder?). He wrote a popular book Finite and Infinite Games which describes a finite game as one where the participants' intend to win and an infinite game as one where the goal is to keep the game going. He offers War as the ultimate example of a finite game and Religion as the ultimate example of an infinite game. It was an enjoyable lecture, despite my nigh-psychedelic state of jet lag. He told some charming anecdotes from his personal life and gave brief overviews of his ideas including relevant bits from Hegel and Nietsche. I'm not sure I agree with his assertion that the popular religions of today are the longest running infinite games. It seems to me that life itself, in terms of biological molecular entities (complex adaptive learning machines) playing in an ecological arena, is the longest running infinite game. Update: I weaseled out of actually typing in my notes from the lecture, but someone else wasn't as lazy so if you want to read more about Infinite Games check here.

lumps and splits

Dave Weinberger's Sunday session at FOO Camp was an introduction to his book in progress with a working title of Lumps and Splits (working subtitle is Messiness as a Virtue). It was an example of what I consider to be the most prevalent track at this conference: categorization/tags/pivot points/ontologies. Here's my notes from the session:

- Lumps and Splits [Messiness as a Virtue], Dave Weinberger
  - [way cool email address deleted]
  - How we draw lines defines culture (romans didnt have dff word for baby/adolescent)
  - book is about changes in how we classify
  - typical
    step 1 arrange items (books)
    step 2 make index (card catalog)
  - new
    step 3 - the owners of the info no longer control the organization of the info
      - no penalty for having multiple tags
      - job of librarian changes from coming up with useful taxonomy to building as much meta
        data as possible into object so users can catalog as has meaning to them
  - chapters
    - lumps and splits, why isn't everything miscellaneous?
    - dewey decimal system, why is it so racist? (less digits for christianity than "other")
      - Classifications are tools, not mirrors of reality
      - Steven Pinker (is 64 more even than 4? people say yes)
      - worst classification system: the colon system (facted classification)
    - better to have a wrong system than waste time fixing it
    - bar codes and rfids as transitional elements between real world and digital
      - value of implicit meta data
      - history of spaces between worlds and history of capitalization
    - trees (branching trees)
      (google kicked yahoo's ass but there are places for trees 
      - (game of 20 questions, 20 hops gets you anywhere))
    - farce of knowledge, attempts to make universal taxonomies
      - Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge
      - perhaps history of SGML will go here
      - how do you knit disparate ontologies together
      - del.icio.us tag choice as popularity contest
  - historical controversy of the introduction of alphabetization as an affront to God's Plan
  - object model of OWL as differnt sort of obj model than that of a programming language
  - people cluster around prototypes (name a bird, unlikely to name an ostrich)
    - dow jones had a boolean search engine which failed because it was too exact, what worked
      better was a fuzzier search that lets the human skim more results
  - scientific name for blue whale means "winged little mouse" ...all that matters is it has a name

FOO Camp 2004

Hot on the heels of our return from Burning Man, Mie and I find ourselves at O'Reilly HQ north of San Francisco for the now annual FOO Camp (Geeking Man). The great conversations started early this year as I gave a couple of friends, Anselm "Andy" Hook and Jason Harlan, a ride up from San Francisco. Anselm has been working on Thingster, a location-enabled personal content publisher and global search engine. He's also using the thingster code base as the back end for a book recommendation service called books we like. Friday morning before we left I mentioned to him that I have never entered my books into one of these systems like books.burri.to (now defunct) or mediachest.com because I'm too lazy to type in all my ISBN numbers and my cue cat is fritzing. I told him that I ought to be able to take a digital photograph of my bookshelf and submit it to a service that analyzes the image to indentify the books. The software would need to separate each individual book and then use either OCR or a similarity index to previously identified books to generate the appropriate book title. It could probably even identify the publisher edition. Anselm mentioned my idea to lemonodor and within minutes the lisp master had whipped up a demo app that could extract just the spine of a book from a photo of his desk. Unfortunately his code is owned by his employer, but it's an encouraging proof of concept. Jason "everything I own is in two bags" Harlan has been living a nomadic hacker lifestyle, travelling through Eastern Europe and elsewhere along the thematic lines of locative and art technologies. He says he's met at least 150 interesting artists and technologists in the past year or so, and that by having so little possessions and anchorage it has forced him to become very skilled at networking in order to meet such needs as places to stay, work, things to do, etc. As a perennial introvert his life seems to me to be a bit like learning to swim by jumping into the deep end of the pool, but I find myself wanting to follow his lead as I'm sure it will pay off major dividends for him, personally and professionally. The Saturday sessions are about to start, so I'll post this and be off. I'll try to post some session summaries later.

Callin' out around the world

Callin' out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat? Summer's here and the time is right for dancin' in the street. Dancin' in Chicago (dancin' in the street) Down in New Orleans (dancin' in the street) In New York City

Barlow, who has already turned Burning Man into a guilty pleasure, further twists my sense of moral obligation with his plan for peacful protest at the Republican National Convention that combines a sense of puckish frivolity with my long-held attraction to guerilla theater as a tool to foist upon my more decorous fellow citizens a (sur?)real exploration of the territories beyond cultural boundaries: BarlowFriendz: Dancing in the Streets: Revolution with a Smile

So, to that end, I propose the following: I want to organize a cadre of 20 to 50 of us. I want to dress us in suits and other plain pedestrian attire and salt us among the sidewalk multitudes in Republican-rich zones. At a predetermined moment, one of us will produce a boom-box and crank it up with something danceable. Suddenly, about a third of the people on the sidewalk, miscellaneously distributed in the general throng, will start dancing like crazy and continue to do so for for about a minute. Then we will stop, melt back into the pedestrian flow, and go to another location to erupt there.

I'm even thinking this might be a reason to leave Black Rock City for a day or two to fly to NYC and participate.

24 Hour Blogathon

Starting at 5AM Saturday morning, and continuing for 24 hours until 5AM Sunday morning, Mie was participating in a blogathon for charity. Participation required posting to her blog every thirty minutes, a task she accomplished by uploading images/video and handwritten text via her cell phone as usual. We stayed up through the night, so we're both pretty beat today. It was 47 posts in all, covering three restaurants, a couple of nightclubs, one cafe, a six/seven car wreck, a sexy new outfit, two movies (one in a theater, one at home), some sleepyheaded grogginess, lots of motorcycle riding, and repeat appearances of a couple of cats (surprise!). A day in the life of Mie Kennedy: Kokochi: 2004 blogathon Archives.

shipyard dorkbot

Last nights Dorkbot was held at The Shipyard. The typical theme of "People Doing Strange Things With Electricity" was replaced by "People Doing Strange Things With Fire". Photos and videos here: Shipyard Dorkbot 2004.

Long Now Seminar mp3/ogg

Wow, I just found that all of the Long Now seminars have been recorded and the audio is available here: SALT - Seminars About Long-term Thinking. I was wholly bummed to have missed some of these, now I am wholly unbummed! The talks include speakers Brian Eno, George Dyson, David Rumsey and Laurie Anderson. Bruce Sterling's talk "Your Future As a Black Hole" just got added!

2004 power tool drag races

Attended the Power Tool Drag Races today. Took about 120 pics and a few videos, here they are: 2004 Power Tool Drag Races (Saturday).