And we have lost our way.

Our criminal system is broken.  Our only way of reacting to any infraction is to treat the person as if they are OBVIOUSLY A DANGEROUS TERRORIST.  Aaron Swartz was, by all accounts, about the opposite of that.  America has, sadly and dangerously, become a jailer state.  Proportionality is gone.

Our mental health is broken.  So many among us face depression, anxiety, and stress without the tools or support we need to cope.  Instead of treating this as a health problem (it’s probably about as common as getting a cold), we marginalize it, we criminalize it, we minimize it, we ignore it.

Our commons is dying.  I cannot know what made Aaron take his final, foolish action.  But we can all see what drove him in his life.  We have slowly strangled our commons by locking away the creative output that we have paid for with our taxes and donations and creation.  Slowly, painfully, we are recreating a commons from scratch, but while we receive with that hand, privatization and effectively infinite take from our other.

Now, we have lost Aaron.  The actions that resulted in his incarceration were somewhere between a juvenile prank and justifiable civil disobedience.  Yet it remains that he spent the past two years hounded by the government that I work for and vote for.  I suppose he is a martyr to these causes, but we needed him more as a prophet.

I and others like me feel his death so keenly in part because we aspire to be the misfit, the wunderkind, the maker that he was.

RIP, Aaron.

Yesterday we lost a chicken.  I went out to gather the eggs, none of the hens were out in the yard.  A bad sign.  When I poked my head into the coop, about half the chickens were cowering in a corner.  Also a bad sign, especially bad when the other half of the chickens are just plain missing.

I went around the back of the hen house; as I rounded the corner, a large raptor of some variety (can’t be sure if it was a hawk or an owl) flew away, and there I saw one of the Rhode Island Reds in a heap, missing some critical parts of her anatomy.  She was, sadly, well beyond any help, but happily,s well beyond any suffering.  Still no sign of any of the other missing chickens, and all the bad signs had just gone to worse.

I gathered the eggs and took them inside, and told Lina I was going to go look for the other chickens, or at least some sign of what had happened to them.  ”A chicken emergency,” I said.  I grabbed a shovel, and went back out back to stomp around in the trees, hoping against hope.  Alas, none of them were back in the trees.

As I was walking back to the house, I saw a little clump of white off to the side of the chicken yard, and I was pretty sure that was our one Silkie hen.  She’s a favorite of ours, for a couple reasons- one is, she is a funny looking little bird, with white poofy feathers and blue skin.  Another is, she’s mama to the one chick we hatched this year, who in turn was also missing, along with the chick’s other mama, who is a Buff Orpington.  The chick is a local mongrel of indeterminate breeding.

As I walked over to her, she didn’t move.  I reached down to see if I could figure out what had happened to her, and suddenly she gave a start and SQUAWKed at me something fierce, and ran straight through the fence back into the chicken yard, where the rest the missing birds had made themselves totally invisible among some corn stalks.  They were all within five or six feet of me, and I couldn’t see them.  They didn’t move until it was clear their cover was blown, at which point they hightailed it back to the henhouse.

Startled and relieved, but mostly relieved, I closed up the henhouse to count them, and I discovered the mongrel chick was still missing, which I mostly discovered by noticing how distressed the Buff Orpington and Silkie mamas were acting.  I opened up the chicken door again, and both those hens walked over to the fence and started clucking, at which point their little wayward chick came running back into the chicken yard.

All chickens now accounted for, I gave thanks that one was not more than one, and marveled at the chicken magic that let them hide from me in plain sight.

Fifty-eight people have bought In Transit on Amazon.  Forty-five more got it on the free promo day, and one person borrowed it using Amazon Prime.  Until June 21, the collection is exclusively available on Kindle, but the current plan is to make a little paper edition over the summer, and to record an audible edition as well.

A humbling reality is that other people are also writing, and I have been paying far too little attention.  Robert Pohl wrote a real book (not a 10,000 word collection of essays like mine), which is crazy fun:

http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Capitol-Hill-History-Behaving/dp/160949587X

Robert and I worked together, which is to say that he and Tim Krepp and I were all home with kids at the same time in the same place.  I have left Capitol Hill, but they are both still there, and both writing.

Abbie Grotke, whom I work with, released an ebook of her classic:

http://www.missabigail.com/book/

I call it a classic because she’s been working with the material since 1998, which is almost forever in electronic publishing.

A dozen family members are writing, and doing so with more persistence and success than I have thus far.  Books, theses, blogs, songs, movie scripts, and comic books are springing into being.

The writer I admire most is my sister-in-law, whose horror novel Audrey’s Door is both incredibly well written and incredibly good horror.  I revisit the story in my mind whenever I see ants, which is basically every day on the farm.  *shiver*

Uncle Dave is writing songs and music and prose on the road.  I saw an advance copy of JT’s comic, and holy shit.  Oliver is blogging, and he is a serious smarty.  I would be remiss if I failed to mention that my lovely and talented editor not only edits for me, but also blogs a bit.

I am working on another collection of essays, a bit different from the first.  If all goes well, they will be ready by summer.  This time around I think I may skip the Amazon three month exclusive to get everything out to the Nook, iPad, and other readers more quickly.

Thank you to those who are writing, those who are publishing, those who are reading.  It is a wonderful little ecology, even on the fringes where I am sitting now.

Finished my first batch of knotweed dye, dyed a cotton shirt.  Doesn’t look great, thought not bat for a first attempt I guess:

Made my first commit to @eikeon’s hu repository, also not great, but also not bad for a first attempt, I guess.

Thought more about how to keep better track of things we’re making, came up with the idea of keeping a “log” on the “web” and maybe calling it a “web log” or just a “blog” for short.  I think this last idea may be the one that makes me millions.

Children seem to have this innate sense of the sweet spot between practicality and abstraction which is well suited to mathematical thinking.

Given the Roman number II, the integer 2, the real number 2.0, the word pair, children seem to understand the relationship between them.  Children seem to know how two chairs and two people are the same.  In the bath last night, my two-year-old asked for one of her “guys” and when I gave it to her she pointed at the other one and said “two guys.”  Then she pointed at herself and said, “I’m two!”

What is the sameness between those two guys and the two years she’s lived and the two fingers she holds up proudly each time she uses that word?  Where does that sameness break down?

If I give her three sticks and she counts them, she counts to three.  If I break one of the sticks in half, she understands I haven’t added or subtracted any substance from her stick pile, but she also understands that predicates are needed when we talk about the four sticks we now have: two whole sticks and two half sticks.  If I ask “how many sticks are there?” she could answer a bunch of different ways: 4, 3, 2, or some other answer I haven’t thought of.  In order to settle on the same answer, we have to have a conversation about what we mean by “stick” – just a whole stick?  any part of a stick?  the number of sticks before one was divided?

Mathematical logic in children seems to be something that develops early and is surprisingly capable without too much intervention.  Wonder what it is that we do to change that?

Indefinite pronouns got me thinking about concurrency patterns a bit more:

• any
• all
• some
• none
• one
• few
• fewer
• many
• more
• neither
• most
• such

That’s not all of them, but it’s a good start.  Indefinite pronouns, roughly speaking, are what allows us in English to signify operations on a list somewhat less… definitely… than otherwise.

These are the parallel equivalents of the Boolean operators we all know and love.  And, or, not, so, xor, nand, nor, etc.  Of course many of the Boolean operators operate most naturally on a list of two items, and the indefinite operators work well on lists of indeterminate length (in some cases, literally indeterminate, in that they could work on a list that hasn’t been counted at all).

Now, the difficulty here is that with software, indefinite logic requires us to do a bit more bookkeeping than straight Boolean logic.  For instance, when I do something like “a and b” with Boolean logic, I just evaluate a.  If a returns true, I evaluate b.  If b returns true, the whole statement is true.  Everything can be done sequentially, and programmers know to rely on the short-circuiting nature of the operation.

On the other hand, if I say “all a, b” I kick off concurrent evaluations of both at the same time (even if under the covers the machinery that takes care of this runs sequentially, or optimizes to run the faster one first or the more likely to fail one earlier).  If b immediately returns false, I need some way to tell a to stop evaluating, which might save considerable time and effort.

The Go programming language has some nice primitives built in for both operations (e.g. kicking off parallel computations, and for communicating between the various sub-processes).  The “go” term indicates parallel execution, and the <- operator on a channel indicates communications back.

Of course with a thousand nested parallel calls, interspersed with plain old Boolean logic, there may be quite a bit of this going on, but it also may happen that most the calls get shut down before doing much.

The code might look something like this:

and(a, b, c, all(c, d, any(e, f, g)), some(h, i))

Here, the term and indicates sequential execution, the term all can be thought of as a parallel short-circuiting and, the any can be thought of as a parallel short-circuiting or, and the term some can be thought of as another variety of parallel or, which maybe doesn’t short-circuit as quickly.

I think programmers would grok this if it were presented in a reasonable fashion.

[one wee little edit: if you're reading this on the front page, read the version with comments, which are worth a couple posts by themselves]

When I started college, there were a series of peer counselling sessions, structured to gently introduce the (possibly sheltered) 17- and 18-year-olds to some of the more jarring differences between a (possibly sheltered) high school classroom, and life at college.  The session I remember most vividly was run by what is now called the Queer Students and Allies (QSA).

It was next door too our suite, in the RA’s living room, and twelve or fifteen of us sat around in a circle on the floor with a couple older students leading a discussion group on a pretty wide range of topics.  Each of the topics seemed tailored to gently prod some of the more heteronormative ideals of the first-years.  Perhaps the most thought-provoking point in the discussion was when the peer counselors asked us to go around in a circle and say, “Hi I’m so-and-so, and I’m gay.”

I think the idea was to provide a safe environment where two things could happen: people who wanted to say it in the worst way could say so in a context that felt pretty safe (after all, everyone’s doing it…); and people who didn’t want to say it could see what it felt like anyway.  We duly went around the room, until one kid just wouldn’t say it.  Instead he said, “Hi, I’m David, and I’m not going to say that.”

He was the only one.

He was me.

I’ve thought about that day a lot of times since then.  That summer I went home and smugly told the story to a friend at church, reveling in my steadfastness and righteousness.  Like a Pharisee.

Hi, I’m David, and I’m gay.

I’m sorry I didn’t say it that day.  I’m sorry I subsequently bragged about it.  And I’m especially sorry to have made it harder to say for the people who really needed to.  I’m older now, and I suppose the stakes are lower: I’m not worried that some of the people reading this will only read that one sentence:

Hi, I’m David, and I’m gay.

After going around in a circle, the peer counselors asked, “What did that feel like?”  Almost twenty years later, I’m proud to say, I felt like an ass.  I felt like an ass when I didn’t say it, and I felt like an ass when I bragged about it, and I feel like an ass admitting that I thought it made me a good Christian.  So, in addition to saying

Hi I’m David and I’m gay.

I have one more thing to say: if you believe in God, and you’re gay, well, God loves your gay self, too.  And we’re not talking about a love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin kind of love, we’re talking about loving part and parcel.  And you know what, everyone (gay or straight or neither or both) who believes in God finds that last part hard to take sometimes, so just get over yourself.

Yeah, I said it, God loves you.  And I’m sorry it’s so controversial.

Emergence is a way to understand,
When hierarchy fails to lend a hand.
It’s not to the exclusion of the rest,
A complement’ry use of it is best.
A single data point cannot be used,
Emergence is when two or more are fused.
Imagine that a line’s emerged from points,
Imagine that an elbow comes from joints.
A forest can emerge from stands of trees,
A hive emerges from a swarm of bees.
Meter comes from syllabaries said,
With emphasis on tail or on head.
Rhyming also cannot be incurred,
Without the use of more than just one word.
Emergence is a way to help address,
That order can arise from such a mess,
That cosmos from the chaos can arise,
And this should not be such a great surprise.