Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: what other subject is there this morning

[Robert Gehorsam]

Eric -

I’m a lurker on this group from the East Coast.  I think you have written an 
essential truth here.   Would you (or anyone else here) object to my sharing 
this (just a copy/paste of the content, no names) to another private group I 
participate in?  People  on it are really struggling to make sense of things 
this morning, and this might help ground them.

Thanks.

Robert


> On Nov 9, 2016, at 9:19 AM, Eric Smith  wrote:
> 
> Sorry Friam.  I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I foolishly 
> forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and partly chopped up.
> 
> This was what it looked like the firs time.
> 
> E
> 
> 
>> I think what this all is about is the power of resentment.  
>> 
>> I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that people look 
>> at her and see a face that they think believes itself better than them and 
>> that looks down on them.  For people who were already under the power of 
>> resentment, that sets it on fire and opens this thing that is weirdly 
>> borderline with hatred.  All the other stuff, news items or whatever, is 
>> just opportunistic window dressing that gets recruited after the fact as 
>> rationalization.  Nobody cares about emails.  If that hadn’t been available, 
>> it would have been something else.  What they care about is indulging in 
>> rage at being “disrespected”. 
>> 
>> I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the Dalai Lama, 
>> and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists who have been 
>> thinking about this systematicaly for nearly a thousand years, and I 
>> understand that they know things I don’t know.  But I also work with 
>> primatologists, of which anthropology is a sub-discipline.  The meanness of 
>> chimpanzees is probably retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that 
>> far below the surface in humans.  Whatever it is about social status, that 
>> gets wrapped up in the phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is big 
>> in us like it is big in them.  Humans on some occasions have other layers of 
>> culture that put some checks on it, but that superstructure is not all that 
>> robust.  I am not compelled by the Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I 
>> am nonetheless grateful) that this is about the loss of feeling needed.  It 
>> is much meaner and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling 
>> looked down on.  
>> 
>> But now we have trouble.  Americans seem to have a kind of negligent 
>> optimism that the mechanisms of democracy will still be there as a path to 
>> backtrack from mistakes they didn’t escape before.  But the keys to 
>> everything have just been given to a strange hodge-podge of people, to none 
>> of whose members are the mechanisms of democracy anything particularly 
>> desirable.  They are merely obstacles to their own small and predatory 
>> ambitions.  I don’t take for granted that there will be mechanisms of 
>> backtracking the next time a calendary cycle rolls around.
>> 
>> The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the bottom.  But 
>> mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter.  A few articles here and 
>> there seem to me to capture large chunks of this in a way that seems 
>> coherent and clarifying.
>> 
>> There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in the article 
>> from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”.  There is 
>> a systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions 
>> of democracy to capture spoils in a competition.  The method, for me, is 
>> best brought into clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and 
>> Goliath, about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill 
>> by implementing the full-court press on every play of every game.  Gladwell 
>> dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it employs conditioning as 
>> the thing that can be bought with discpline when there isn’t native talent.  
>> He comments, obliquely, that the teams of more skillful girls who were 
>> beaten in games were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press.  He 
>> doesn’t develop this, but I think it matters.  For the skilled girls, they 
>> were in a _game_.  The point of winning was to be a reward for being good at 
>> the play of the game.  Their upset was that suddenly there was no game any 
>> more, there was no skill, there was no aesthetic to be aspired to or served. 
>>  Winning became its own currency separate from whatever art the game had 
>> been meant to enable.  The story has both sides, and there is credit due 
>> both where Malcolm calls it and where he bypasses it.  But the analogy to me 
>> here is what happens when winning is separated from the game’s having a 
>> purpose in doing something else, which one might call “bigger”.  In 
>> basketball, the bigger thing was the cultivation of an art.  In politics, it 
>> is the preservation of a society.
>> 
>> We have 

Re: [FRIAM] Droid X vs. I Phone 4 on Verizon

[Robert Gehorsam]

I'm a lurker here, but happy to give my two cents:

I'm a Droid X user, more or less alone in a sea of iPhone 4s and the
occasional Blackberry.  Previously a BB Tour (world phone) user.

Neither the iPhone 4 nor the Droid X are world phones, and I'll avoid buying
a non-world phone again unless ‹ as is often the case ‹ Verizon only offers
mediocre world phones.

Other:

Form factor ­ Droid X is large and for some a little bulky.  I think this is
something you either accept/like or don't.  The weird camera bump on the
back is definitely an aesthetic faux pas for me, but I've come to like the
form overall and at this point the iPhone seems puny, especially for the
soft keyboard and the screen in general.

Battery ‹ not great, doesn't really last a full day even with an app killer
installed and regularly used.  I don't hear much better from iphone users.
That complaint aside, I'm probably going to go one step worse and upgrade to
the Bionic or its HTC equivalent this summer.  I wonder how long a battery
for a dual-core phone on an LTE network will last  4 hours?  4 minutes?

Screen ­ very nice.  Size advantage to Droid, web-browsing easy and good.
Accelerometer stuff is also good.  I'm a happy ipad and ipod touch user too,
and I'm not noticing a lot of difference.

UI ‹ I am starting to think I like the HTC UI better than the Droid, neither
are necessarily as tight as iOS.  I think the analogy might be a
better-than-Windows vs. OSX from a user perspective.  Of course, that
comparison is true on many levels.

UI speed ‹ Droid is zippy but occasionally the screen is unresponsive,
usually due to sync activity, but not always.  Never seen that on an iphone.
That said, it never freezes.

Camera ‹ never really use it.  Doesn't seem that great even at 8MB.  UI is a
little clunkier than iphone.

Soft keyboard ‹ I prefer the Droid.  In part that's because you can rotate
to landscape mode and have larger keys.

Call quality ‹ very nice.  My guess is comparable to iphone on Verizon.
Never had a drop.  I also use Skype on it often.

Apps ‹ in a year I think it will be impossible to distinguish between the
range of selection between Android and Apple.  However, it's also true that
there is less curation that goes on in the Android market, so quality and
discoverability are still an issue.  Again, I think it will diminish.

Music -- ain't no iTunes on the Droid.

Exchange integration.  Pretty seamless.  Five minutes to set up.  Neither
compares to blackberry, though Enterprise Activation on the bb can take more
than a few cups of coffee to get done.

When I first got the Droid (because my colleagues use them) I thought I'd
made a mistake.  Then I lost my Blackberry and had to rely on the Droid.
Once I changed the case (get the clear plastic one not the rubberized one)
honestly, my whole attitude changed.  I much prefer the size of the phone to
the iphone and while the rest of my gear is Apple, at this point, I am going
to stick to Android (be it Droid or HTC).

Honestly, I wouldn't be either right now.  I'd check out the HTC Thunderbolt
which is an LTE phone, or wait for the Bionic and invest in whoever their
battery supplier is :)

Hope this helps.  

Robert






From:  George Duncan gtdun...@gmail.com
Reply-To:  The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
friam@redfish.com
Date:  Wed, 18 May 2011 11:35:22 -0600
To:  The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Friam@redfish.com
Subject:  [FRIAM] Droid X vs. I Phone 4 on Verizon

Your thoughts on relative merits? Any experience?
Thanks, Duncan 
George Duncan
georgeduncanart.com http://georgeduncanart.com/
(505) 983-6895  
Represented by ViVO Contemporary
725 Canyon Road
Santa Fe, NM 87501
 
Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
Soren Kierkegaard

 FRIAM Applied
Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's
College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works

[Robert Gehorsam]

Hi, I get to claim both lurkership and newbie-ship here, and have enjoyed this 
thread.

This is an interesting idea, Pamela, that literature has endured, more than 
non-fiction.  It feels intuitively true as we look back on various canon(s).  
It does all sorts of 

I come from the opposite direction; for years I read nothing but fiction 
(plenty of science fiction, and I still have a special jonesing for urban 
fantasy), though I spent time in the 80's as an editor of general trade books 
on science and computing.  But recently, just the past few years, I have read 
more and more non-fiction, most recently and belatedly, Collapse, by Jared 
Diamond, which is a masterpiece in its own right.  Great literature clearly 
endures from both its universality and beauty, but I also wonder how long the 
novel will endure as a form.

Which leads me to note that few people have brought poetry to the fore here.  
When you talk about the pleasures that come from being sensitive to a form's 
techniques, there's nothing like poetry, maybe because of the intensity that 
must be brought to bear on each word.  As an undergrad, I wrote a lengthy paper 
on an early and somewhat traditional Yeats poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus.  
It was entirely a formal and linguistic analysis, and I believed then, as now, 
that not one aspect of language -- syntax, semantics, form, phonology, you name 
it -- escaped Yeats' attention as he composed, all serving his specific 
purpose.  He was the master.  Alas, I lost the paper in one move or another.

But here's the poem, and as a bonus, for everyone who loves Ray Bradbury, 
you'll probably see the connection --

I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,   
And cut and peeled a hazel wand, 
And hooked a berry to a thread;  
And when white moths were on the wing,   5
And moth-like stars were flickering out, 
I dropped the berry in a stream  
And caught a little silver trout.
  
When I had laid it on the floor  
I went to blow the fire a-flame,  10
But something rustled on the floor,  
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl  
With apple blossom in her hair   
Who called me by my name and ran  15
And faded through the brightening air.   
  
Though I am old with wandering   
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,  
And kiss her lips and take her hands; 20
And walk among long dappled grass,   
And pluck till time and times are done,  
The silver apples of the moon,   
The golden apples of the sun.


Robert Gehorsam
CEO
Image-Metrics


On Oct 9, 2010, at 4:27 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:

 When I hear someone say I never read fiction, I'm a little saddened. It 
 comes to my ears like I never look at art. When one starts getting all 
 hairy-chested about the greater value of non-fiction over make-believe, 
 please be reminded of the books you pull off your shelf to make room for new 
 ones. They're often of the genre of  The Coming Crisis of 1981. Valuable in 
 its way in 1979, but not so much later. Literature lasts, which is why so 
 many of our choices here have been oldies.
 
 Why do we read fiction? Any number of reasons, but one major reason is to 
 help us see--often, see anew. So one of the things that separates literature 
 from a pleasant afternoon's escape (of *course* I read thrillers too; I like 
 pleasant afternoons of escape) is that literature does make you see anew. It 
 does all sorts of other things too, if you're sensitive to its techniques. 
 
 One of the best ways of teaching yourself about those techniques is James 
 Wood's How Fiction Works. Wood is a staff writer on the New Yorker, and a 
 passionate reader. He's not going to teach you how to write a novel, but 
 he'll certainly teach you how to read one better. He's deliciously 
 opinionated, but makes his arguments lucidly and persuasively. It's a small 
 book, and I often toss it in my backpack for the subway, open it at random, 
 and start to think as I read it.
 
 Pamela
 
 
 How quickly weeks glide away in such a city as New York, especially when you 
 reckon among your friends some of the most agreeable people in either 
 hemisphere.
   Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans
 
 
 
 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org