Here’s a Holiday Blessing from Lojo Russo:

To:
To friends who share my laughter and tears
To family with whom I’ve shared all of my years
To loved ones with us and loved ones passed
To those whose grievances cannot last
To all of you who’ve touched my soul
To each of you who makes me whole
I thank you all and wish you Peace
Happy New Year & Merry Solstice!

From:
~Lojo

Thank, Loj — I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Pleiades Colony
2008
Digital image [Full size]

My latest creation in the Wallpaper series: a pen* sketch mashed up with a photograph.

See also Pleiades Temple.

“A wealthy institutional matrix has coalesced — integrating elite university faculties, museums, the arts press and foundations — single-mindedly directed toward the creation of a cultural monumentality to support the sale of the city to overseas investors and affluent immigrants.”
- Mike Davis

City of Quartz is a fascinating book, combining deep research with sparkling prose: the author’s love for the subject matter shines through on every page.

Here’s a passage that I find particularly interesting:

As Los Angeles — propelled by financial, real-estate and military booms — has rushed forward to Manhattanize its skylines (increasingly with offshore capital), it has attempted to Manhattanize its cultural superstructure as well. The largest land developers and bankers have coordinated a major cultural offensive, whose impact has been redoubled, after decades of mere talk, by a sudden torrent of arts capital, including the incredible $3 billion Getty endowment, the largest in history. As a result, a wealthy institutional matrix has coalesced — integrating elite university faculties, museums, the arts press and foundations — single-mindedly directed toward the creation of a cultural monumentality to support the sale of the city to overseas investors and affluent immigrants. In this sense, the cultural history of the 1980s recapitulated the real-estate/arts nexus of early twentieth-century boosterism, although this time around with a promotional budget so large that it could afford to buy the international celebrity architects, painters, and designers — Meier, Graves, Hockney, and so on — capable of giving the cultural prestige and a happy ‘Pop’ veneer to the emergence of the ‘world city’.

- Mike Davis, City of Quartz

City of Quartz @ Wikipedia

City of Quartz @ Amazon.com

Bacon Madness

My latest graphic mashup: Archie McPhee meets Rand Holmes.

Tip o’ the hat to EB for the Archie McPhee link.

Computer programming is a difficulty subject to teach: some students get it, some students don’t.

Researchers at the University of Middlesex have developed techniques for predicting which students will get it.

The predictor for a good programmer? Comfort with meaninglessness.

The initial study suggests that success in the first stage of an introductory programming course is predictable, by noting consistency in use of the mental models which students apply to a basic programming problem even before they have had any contact with programming notation.

The study started with the hypothesis that “we are able to identify small number of groups to represent novice programmers by looking at their problem solving methods and techniques.” We were looking for any sub-populations which are likely to achieve success. Our intention was to observe the mental models that students used when thinking about assignment instructions and short sequences of assignments and we hoped to be able to find out what those models are. We administered a test at the very beginning of their course before the students had begun to be taught about assignment and sequence, and then a second time to the same subjects after the topic had been taught. We correlated the results of these two administrations with each other and we found three groups: consistent using a single mental model (44%), inconsistent using several mental models (39%) and blank not answering (8%), and an apparent correlation between the consistent group and students who successfully passed the test.

The result demonstrated that the success in the first stage of an introductory programming course may be predictable, by examining the way that students approach to a basic programming problem even before they have had any contact with programming notation.

- Saeed Dehnadi @ Middlesex University: Link.

Via Clay Shirky @ Boing Boing:

Interestingly, this correlation is unrelated to correctness — being consistently wrong in your mental model of how a computer works is better than being inconsistently right, because if you are consistently wrong, you only have to learn one thing to start being consistently right.

Dehnadi and Bornat’s thesis is that the single biggest predictor of likely aptitude for programming is a deep comfort with meaninglessness.

- Clay Shirky @ Boing Boing:
Link.

To my thinking, a programmer is like a novelist. A programmer creates a complex mental world, populated by characters who act out the plot. If the characters are poorly drawn, if the plot doesn’t make sense, a novel fails to sell, or sells poorly. If a computer program is poorly drawn, or doesn’t make sense, the program fails to run, or runs poorly.

“The school lunch program is a disposal scheme for surplus agricultural commodities. When they have too much meat, when they have too much cheese, they send it to the schools, and they dispose it through our kids’ digestive systems.”

Michael Pollan spoke recently with Bill Moyers about food, health, and agricultural policies in the United States:

Food is the shadow issue over all those other issues. And so, you know, you’re only going to get so far with healthcare costs unless you look at the diet. Let’s look at the school lunch program. This is where we’re feeding a big part of our population. We are essentially feeding them fast food and teaching them how to eat it quickly. Well, let’s look at school lunch. If we could spend a dollar or more per day per child and work on the nutritional quality of that food. And let’s require that a certain percentage of that school lunch fund in every school district has to be spent within 100 miles to revive local agriculture, to create more jobs on farms, to, you know, rural redevelopment. You will achieve a great many goals through doing that. You will have a healthier population of kids who will perform better in the afternoon after that lunch. You will have, you know, the shot in the arm to local economies through helping local agriculture. And you will, you know, teach this generation habits that will last a lifetime about eating.

… The school lunch program probably has to get out of agriculture. Let’s move it over to education. Lunch should be, lunch should be educational. Right now the school lunch program is a disposal scheme for surplus agricultural commodities. When they have too much meat, when they have too much cheese, they send it to the schools, and they dispose it through our kids’ digestive systems. Let’s look at it in a different way. This should be about improving the health of our children. So maybe it belongs in Health and Human Services. Maybe it belongs in Education …. Get the Department of Agriculture’s hands off of it.

- Michael Pollan, interview with Bill Moyers @ PBS: Link.

See also:

michaelpollan.com

Michael Pollan @ Wikipedia

Dave Polaschek recently posted some interesting thoughts about social networking sites:

Not that I’m entirely anti-social, but other than flickr, which has kept me much more interested in photography than I otherwise might be, I tend not to go to any of those sites unless someone has sent me an invitation that I need to respond to. It’s not that I don’t like people, it’s just that I’d generally rather see ’em in person than read things from them on some third-party website with lots of blinky crap.

But even that isn’t my real complaint with these sites. My real complaint (and I have a vague memory of having written about this before) is that these sites don’t support the nuance that happens in real life friendships. There are some people who I consider close friends, and they match up pretty well with what some of these sites have to offer. And then there are others, like a few of my high-school classmates, that while I wouldn’t mind gabbing with them for an hour or two over a few beers, I don’t want to share my entire life with them, and I suspect they don’t want to know that much about me. An hour or two every five or ten years is plenty for both of us.

I’m reminded of the saying: “A friend will help you move. A real friend will help you move a body.” But try to express those different levels of “friendship” on one of the sites out there. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I haven’t seen any site that’s done even a half-assed job of it. In most cases, if someone asks to be my friend, I go ahead and say sure, because if I don’t, they’re going to wonder what they did to piss me off. But then how do you flag your closest friends differently? Then again, based on the popularity of the sites out there, maybe most people don’t care about the nuance (or think about which friends they’d call on if they did have to move a body).

I don’t know. I don’t have any big answers here, just questions that wandered through my mind this morning.

- Dave Polaschek: Link.

“I read this so you don’t have to. It’s all part of the service.”

Neal Stephenson — one of my favorite writers — recently spoke with AV Club about his new novel, Anathem:

AVC: Why base a book in part on topics that you yourself aren’t passionately interested in reading about?

NS: I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics. Later I learned that some eminent 20th-century thinkers, including Bertrand Russell and Kurt Gödel, had been interested in Leibniz’s work, and that Leibniz had been adopted as a sort of patron saint by some of the people working on Loop Quantum Gravity. When I finished the Baroque Cycle, I still felt as though this was a loose end. In part, Anathem is an attempt to tie up that loose end. To do this, I had to read Kant and Husserl and some other stuff that Kurt Gödel apparently thought of as light reading.

AVC: Has this happened before with any of your books, where you had to fight your way through source material on some specific topic to get what you wanted for the book?

NS: All the time. I read this so you don’t have to. It’s all part of the service.

- @ AV Club: Link.

Tip o’ the hat to JS.

“Colonel Matumo … believes, as most Mai Mai do, that he has special powers connected to water that make him all but invincible. During the war these fighters would wear drain plugs dangling from their bulging biceps as amulets of their potency. “

The New York Times reports on rebel warlords running tin mines in Congo:

Under the terms of the peace agreement that ended the war, the militia was absorbed into the national army and became the 85th Brigade. The fighters were supposed to be sent for military training and then deployed around the country to dilute the influence of regional militias.

But the 85th refused to disband. Its commander, Colonel Matumo, is known as a ruthless warrior with a keen eye for business who believes, as most Mai Mai do, that he has special powers connected to water that make him all but invincible. During the war these fighters would wear drain plugs dangling from their bulging biceps as amulets of their potency. These days the brigade’s members have mostly abandoned this practice in favor of the more practical army greens.

They violently enforce a system of illegal taxation of every worker, merchant and mineral trader who comes to the mine.

- Lydia Polgreen @ New York Times: Link.

Phaeton 9
2008
Digital image [Full size]

My latest creation in the Wallpaper series, based on a pen* sketch.

See also Phaeton @ Wikipedia.

Contact Me

• Phone: 612-929-3520
• Email: karl@karljones.com