Category: General

Bravo channel is running an amazing documentary at this very moment, The Whole Warhol. It’s replaying later tonight so be sure to catch it if you can. This show has everything, but my favorite part is the tour through Warhol’s personal archives.

I’m especially a fan of Warhol’s earliest works when he still painted everything himself, his later mass-produced Pop works don’t interest me as much. I used to live down the street from the LA MOCA Temporary Contemporary museum, they had a nice collection of early Warhol paintings, one of my favorites is an odd painting of shoeprints with numbers on them, as in a diagram of a dance step. Warhol didn’t really return to this style of working until he collaborated with Basquiat, shortly before he died.

My all-time favorite Warhol image is a photograph my sister showed me in a Parsons School class catalog. It shows Warhol attending a drawing class at Parsons, there is a row of drawing tables with students working in the background. In the center, Andy with his black clothes and shock-white wig, is standing next to the model: a partially dissected cadaver, hanging by chains from a huge metal tripod.

When I used to live in Downtown Los Angeles, I used to walk a lot and I’d encounter random documents that blew around in the streets. I had a habit of picking up and reading almost anything, but I never found a document quite like this one.

One day my girlfriend Susie and I were walking from Traction Avenue in the Loft District towards Little Tokyo. I remember we were in a horrible mood of gloom and despair, some major disaster had struck. I can’t remember what the disaster was, but since we were starving artists it probably had something to do with money. We were walking in the blazing hot sun along a disused industrial street when I found a brochure stuck in the weeds. I picked it up and read it, and I couldn’t stop laughing. Susie thought I’d gone crazy, then I showed it to her, and she couldn’t stop laughing either.

It should be obvious I fixed up the site graphics. I decided to sit down and learn CSS so I could lay in some background patterns. I hope this design is visually pleasing, but I don’t know if it will look good on everyone’s monitor. If you have any comments then please click the comments link at the bottom of this messange and tell me your opinion. It would be really easy to change things, it’s fun. Oops, I just noticed, all my little horizontal lines don’t line up. I’ll have to RTFM a bit more.

For my next trick, I’m trying to set up an internal email link so you can send private comments internally. This will require sendmail, so I’m moving carefully and slowly. It would be really easy to set up a cgi script to run sendmail that would be a huge security hole for spammers.

I woke up this morning and discovered the server was asleep and unresponsive. I checked it out and discovered that a very strange thing happened.

I run heavily shielded spam-filtered mailboxes, every time my filter routines catch spam, a little pop up little monitor window appears. My mail is set to automatically download every 5 minutes. I get so much spam that the little popup window appears every 5 minutes, like clockwork. But apparently, for the first time, I did not receive a single spam message for a period of over 1 hour, so the popup did not pop up, and my CPU went to sleep. Oops.

My server stays on 24/7/365 chowing down the spam, it never goes to sleep. But there was a strange spam hiatus for a single hour, and my machine took a snooze. So I set it to never sleep and of course that will solve the problem. Funny that I never noticed it was a problem before. Apparently my machine has never experienced a spam siesta, it gets spam at least every 30 minutes, every day.

I finally got the Moveable Type stylesheets installed properly and now when I post to the blog, I get the full GUI where I was getting nothing. One thing I particularly notice about the default stylesheet is that it is a bit dim. The text is about 80% black against 10 or 20% grey backgrounds, it lowers the contrast sufficiently to make it a bit hard to read. The first thing I did in MT is fix the blog stylesheet to make the text 100% black so it would be easier to read. But alas it is not so easy to modify the internal operations stylesheet.

I’d like to make a few mods to the function of MT, I’d like it to automatically create new links that open in new windows. It’s an easy mod to make, if I could just figure out where to put it.

Paul McCartney has released an exhibit of his new vomitous paintings. Vanity Art exhibits like this do nothing for the world of art, nobody would go see these amateurish paintings except that McCartney says it’s a painting he made of Bowie puking.

Judging the painting strictly on its aesthetic merits, this is painting below the quality of even student work. Broad use of unmixed, uncontrolled colors have turned the painting into smears of ugly brown. Art teachers sometimes refer to this as “puke brown” and it is the sign of a poor painter with no control of color mixing. The huge red tongue reminds me of a sarcastic remark by one of my painting professors, “if you can’t make it good, make it big. And if you can’t make it big, make it red.”

McCartney is high up on my hate list, right in the #2 slot behind Bill Gates. Sir Paul is another hypocritical hippie, the counterculture revolutionary who ended up owning the music rights to almost everything in the world, even the tune “Happy Birthday.” The RIAA and the DMCA are the tools Sir Paul uses to stay filthy rich.

I’ve had a microwave oven longer than anyone, my family lived near Amana, Iowa and was in the test market for the first 25 Amana RadarRange ovens. There was no cookbook, we got xeroxed cooking tips to put in a 3-ring notebook. As the experiment progressed, they put out urgent warnings like not to use china with gold edges, or they would explode. Actually, that warning came from us, we had some Lenox china with gold edges and we blew up a couple of plates before we figured it out. Then we warned Amana who put out the warning to the other test market users. We also got warnings about cooking eggs in the microwave, but there are also techniques to cook them properly, if not well. I think the most ridiculous thing we ever did in the experiment was when my Mom cooked a large Thanksgiving turkey in the microwave. It did work OK, but was more trouble than it was worth, and the oven worked better anyway. Oh well.

About the worst thing I ever did in a microwave is I misread the label on some frozen fried chicken, it was 6 pieces, it said 6 minutes so I mistakenly thought it was supposed to cook for 36 minutes. I thought that was a rather long time to cook. After about 25 minutes, smoke came pouring out of the microwave. There is no way to describe what was on the plate, other than to say it’s sort of what you’d get if you shot a high-energy weapon at a chicken: a smoking unrecognizable heap of burning flesh and bones.

This image from The Cosmic Background Imager may be the closest we can get to visualizing the beginning of the universe. This is the fine structure of an explosion the size of the universe, as it begins to change from a state of raw featureless high-energy plasma into lumpy areas of matter and space. This is the transitional state between everything being all one thing, into everything being a bunch of little things.

I don’t usually read over someone’s shoulder, but on a cross country flight a few months ago, I couldn’t help myself. The fellow next to me was reading the Wall Street Journal, there was an article about how Powerpoint and its bullet point system was affecting corporate communications. Business analysts agreed that Powerpoint was only good for presenting simple ideas in a linear fashion, people tended to dumb down their ideas to fit the Powerpoint format. The article asserted that Scott McNealy hated this effect so much that he banished Powerpoint from all Sun corporate offices. Having written a few complex multimedia presentations with fancy branching, I had to completely agree with the article. Powerpoint is a straightjacket for the mind, the structures determine how and what you can say. I never really understood this until I worked at a huge corporation that lived and breathed in Powerpoint. People spent their whole days emailing each other about what to put in their Powerpoint presentations. I asked one of their managers to make a simple decision about what color to make their website logo, she went in her office and came back in about an hour with about 5 pages of Powerpoint color printouts of color combinations, they held a quick meeting and everyone voted on them. Powerpoint presentations are an embodiment of a formal managerial hierarchy.
Even the structure of the typical outline is a eurocentric idea, it is basically unheard of in some Asian cultures. I work with exchange students from Japan, the hardest thing they have to learn is how to write papers in English. It’s hard for them because they have no idea of how to make an outline. HTML does a pretty good job at outlines, I’ll do a representative example of an outline for a story.

1. Introduction
   1. State the Main Thesis
2. Main Body
   1. Supporting Points
   2. Each point supports the following point
   3. Each point is a link in the chain of argument
   4. The chain of logic will lead inevitably to the Conclusion
3. Conclusion
   1. Restate Main Thesis as a conclusion

This structure makes absolutely no sense to the students from Japan that I’ve encountered. They were trained in a system called "kishotenketsu" that is an entirely different structure for stories. In this system, the supporting points loop around the main point without creating a linear argument. The points are intended to only obliquely reference the main point, it is up to the reader to infer how this relates to the main thesis. There is no firm conclusion, only an ambiguous ending that may point to several possible outcomes. Again, it is up to the reader to form their own conclusion. Perhaps the best example of kishotenketsu is the movie "Rashomon." The movie explains a crime from the point of view of 4 different people, each of them claim to have committed the crime. We see the crime repeated 4 times with subtle variations, in the end there is no clear indication of who really is the criminal, the viewer must decide.
The kishotenketsu structure is so predominant in the minds of Japanese students that it is really hard for them to come out and make a straightforward argument in a term paper. Japanese textual styles are quite indirect, they must lead but not push the reader towards the point. It takes a lot of effort for these students to learn new structures, but I always admonish them, that’s the whole point of learning foreign languages, so you can learn to think in new ways.
I sometimes show these students an old standard journalistic technique, "pyramid style." It’s much more practically oriented so they catch on to it immediately. The first paragraph of the story, the "lead," must have all the important facts, who what when where why how. The facts are presented in the order of importance, with no conclusion at all. This style is primarily intended for the convenience of editors, who can lop off a few paragraphs at the end and not lose anything important.
There are many other valid structures for stories and libraries of stories. The reason I’m describing these in detail is because I’m fed up with Radio ‘s outline-centric structure. It is amazing how much Dave can blather about how his awesome algorithms are changing the world, but it is clear that he’s oblivious to what he’s really doing. There are professional writers, editors, linguists, and librarians who have studied these ideas for decades, but Dave has no use for them, he’s too busy trying to change the web to reflect his own scattered thinking processes. There is an old hacker saying, "the Street finds its own uses for things." The "semantic web" will not be created by coders like Dave, it might happen with his tools, but certainly not in the way that he designed it to work. The world has moved on since Dave wrote his first outliner, but he has not.

I hate dentists, but I love my periodontist. I went in today for a checkup, and as usual, we chatted about biomechanics. I have problems with TMJ syndrome, if my bite isn’t perfectly aligned down to a few microns, I get horrible migraines. My periodontist also had TMJ problems, so he studied the treatments and is quite an expert in the subject. It’s kind of odd since he’s a periodontist, usually orthodontists do this kind of work. But I’m lucky to have him, he only works part time and teaches at the local dental college, which is considered the best in the US. I’m getting the best dental care in the world, and it’s even cheap enough that I can afford it.
But the main reason I love my periodontist is that he understands why I hate dentists. I ended up with him to repair the damage done to my bite by overly aggressive, clumsy work by a dentist that I refer to as "Dr. Hamfist." After hearing continual complaints about Dr. Hamfist’s rough treatment from other patients, my periodontist actually went over to his office and chewed him out! I guess dentists are so used to inflicting pain, they don’t realize when they’re causing needless pain from their own rough handling. It must be pretty unusual for a dentist to complain directly to another dentist, on behalf of the patients who are complaining about him. I asked him about his confrontation with Dr. Hamfist, he got really riled up and told me, "people like that give dentistry a bad name!"
So today I’m in the chair, the exam showed no particular problems, but I’d confessed to the hygienist that I had been slacking off and only brushing 4 or 5 times a week and flossing maybe 2 or 3 times a week. Then later on, as she’s starting to polish my teeth and I’m pinned there helpless with the pneumatic polisher in my mouth, she starts grilling me. "You know you’re lucky, don’t you? We have patients who could brush and floss 3 times a day and never have as good teeth and gums as you do. But you know your luck is going to run out!" To which I could only respond "aaah ah aahh ah." I like my dental hygienist too, she makes me laugh.