Monthly Archives: April 2010

Saturday evening – Theodoros

Peacefule and productive day.. much of which we spent outside .. It’s starting to feel like summer. I htik it hit 60 today and everyone was out in shorts. We took advantage of the great weather to resurface Gabe’s skateboard ramp.. We’d built it last year from plans we’d found on the internet.. The suggestion was to surface it with urethane covered massonite.. that lasted about a month.. The plans hadn’t anticipated anything other than Southern Californian weather.   Our rain and snow just ate the stuff up despite it being covered by a tarp .. By this spring the stuff was cracked, bubbled and walling to shreds.  Something had to be done..

.. So I order4ed some sheet of Skatersblend from Renew Resources in Toronto. It’s a weatherproof plastic surface made from 100 % recycled plastic..
  

First order of business was to remove the old surface.. gabe numbered them in case we nedeed them as templates..

To our great fortune, Friend David showed up to help.. we’d ordered him some skatersbled as well.. since the ramp he made for son Austin was having the same weather problems as ours  . The lucky thing is that among many other talents, David  is an accomplished and well armed carpenter. He brought over this amazing deck screw driver that cut our work of moutning the plastic into a tenth of the time

He was even wounded in battle.. we patched him up and got the job done in a bout 4 hours..

Tomorrow we go and help David and Austin resurface their ramp.

This afternoon. Diane and I went to a Feldenkrais workshop for runners.. Turns out there was very little running involved.. but it was fun and interesting. It was out on by our friend Uve M.  I really recommend Uwe Mester for anyone who’s got problems with backs, knees, jaws etc..

The final task for the day was to drop a few of our storm windows.. It’s that time of the year that the house gets hot and stuffy by mid afternoon even though it’s still freezing in the mornign. Diane and I were talking about all the emotions around handling the storms.. when they go up, it means winter is coming.. we’re battening down the hatches for the coming cold.. the house gets close and queit with the extra layers of glass

in the spring the windows come down and we have breezes in the house, new sounds and smell from outside as we anticipate the coming of summer with its lazy days. heat and bugs

As with everything we handle.. there’s are always memory and emotions..

Which reminds me of my find for the week. Gabe brought home a worksheet on the ‘spiral of theodoros’ .. some cool old Greek dudes idea of a spiral where the magnitude of the radii segments are a progression of the square roots of the whole numbers..

Believe it or not.. I’ve never seen this.. though it’s in nature everywhere (think nautilus, ferns, etc )

There’s a spiral on Sam’s ceiling that follows that progression..   It’s like our life.. spiraling out from that one moment.. and now moving out into the world

OK.. gotta go hang out with kids.. more later..
nite all, nite sam
-me

Thursday night – what are freinds for ?

Ok.. so I’ve taken much heat for my spelling over tae last couple of years.. I have to confess that freinds and friends both look just as right to me without a spell checker.. and sometimes i don’t even get close enough for the spell checker to guess. I think that the touch of dyslexia that makes me a poor speller makes me better at scrabble  .. and for that I’m grateful   I was discussing this with freinds in Facebook .. particularly the ‘i-before-e-excpet-after-c’ rules.when my friend Brain pointed me at the following 

I Before E, if Taken with Caffeine

Poem ©1995 by Jef Raskin

“I before E

Except after C,

Unless pronounced A

As in ‘neighbor‘ or ‘weigh‘”

Education is forfeit for reinforcing such rules!

Sound a feisty reveille while eyeing the schools!
Neither will our heirs be agreeing to deceptions

Once seeing, herein, these sufficient exceptions:

We were seized by a feeling

For fleeing on the ceiling

To a leisurely meal

With Keith, Sheila, and Neil

We drank madeira, so foreign, in steins

Along with a surfeit of weird blueish wines
Being foolish, took codeine, ate ancient proteins
Therein guaranteeing these ogreish scenes

Wherein we’re canoeing to a new sovereign state

While deicing a kaleidoscope on a hot jadeite plate

And kneeing obeisance to an overseeing king

Our plebeian lips kissed his counterfeit ring.

Then we unveiled their sleight-of-hand trick
Deifying a heifer, with effect atheistic

And falling from the heights with a loud seismic crunch

We reignited the nonpareils we had heisted for lunch.

So I before E

Except after C

Unless pronounced A?

False decreeing, I say!

Now, I think i’m going to go to sleep for a spell 🙂
note all, note Sam
-me

Wednesday night – good hearted

Catching up from yesterdays pictures..  Fun and busy day.. Yesterday I had a routine cardiac workup that I do every five years or so..  I do these because my family doesn’t have the best track record here    I never met one grandfather.. and my other passed away  when I was young. I intend to stick around for a long time. so get myself checked out regularly.

They inject you with radiactive Thalium (or technitium). an dstick you on a treadmill…

Then they use this wicked cool gamma ray camera to capture a 3D movie of your heart . From that they can tell if all your parts are working as they should.. and all your plumbing is good.

I got a clean bill of health .! . which is why I ate 6 french fries for lunch today.. 🙂

The process with the radioactive Thallium is a little different from the Technitum process I experienced before.  (There’s a nationwide shortage of technitium because 2 of the 6 reactors worldwide that make it are out of order.)  With Thallium, they have to take two different scans with the camera.. so.. in the middle of the day I was free to go. .   I had a full day of meetings but they were all on the phone. so I drove out to Montpelier to try and get a replacement title for the car we’re donating.. It was a beautiful day for a drive..

After some amount of paper chase, I walked out with the new title.. I needed to get it to Good News Garage yesterday..   There was one catch before I dropped off the title, I needed Diane’s signature…  well, as fate would have it, Diane was shopping in williston as I headed back from Montpelier .. We met in the parking lot of the grocery stor and had a sushi picnic and signed the title papers.. what a nice break from my day.

From there I went and did my final scan, then went to Good News Garage to drop off the key and title.

So.. that was my day.. nothing more to report.. and it’s almost 1.. so off to bed..

Oh wait.. I want to share one of the best SamStone pictures we’ve ever received. My friends Jeff and Michelle got stuck in Africa because of the Iceland volcano, they took advantage of that to go to visit Giza in Egypt.. They sent em this picture today..  I love it !

OK.. Nite everyone.. nite Sam !
-me

Tuesday night – Focus

A couple of weeks back I was interviewed for Focus Magazine one of Germany’s largest news magazine. (5.5M readers, I’m told) I was part of an article that was speculating about technology in 2030. I have no idea how they foudn there way to me.. but it was fun doing the interview The article came out today.. and it’s pretty interesting.. I’m not sure why they picked the excerpts they did from our conversation.. but the article is kind of cool.. Best yet, I’m quoted in the same article as one of my heroes , Leah Beuchley from the MIT media lab. She pioneered a bunch of the wearable computing stuff I like.  I even own soem of her ‘washable computer circuits’

Here’s the images from the magazine..


Here’s a rough summary  translation that the interviewer sent me..

Germany, Focus Magazine, 16/2010, 19.4.2010, 2030: How we will live tomorrow 2nd part: Invisible Technology (7 page article)

Summary:
In the year 2030 we will be surrounded by intelligent everyday objects, which communicate among themselves. The Technology itsself becomes invisible. …

John Cohn photograph: “At your service: IBM scientist John Cohn sees us talking to smart machines in the future – mind control, altough technologically feasible – will not be accepted by mankind.”

Computer as we know them today – experts agree on that – will play only a minor role. Instead, the things around us will become intelligent. … Technology will then appear in the form of computing capacity not as a device. Just like we receive power from a power plug without the need to buy a power generator. At the same time we have to get used to continuous, inaudible whispering. All those smart devices will communicate with themselves and merge to the internet of things.  The human user will then only choose the desired service. Leah Buechley at MIT’s Media Lab describes a scenario where the smart tapestry wirelessly communicates with  the computer or the handy. Such smart tapestry could help to remote monitor elderly people.

Mainly by speech we will communicate with technology in 2030 – that’s what John Cohn sees it. As a senior scientist at IBM, he looks into the future. “Even with everyday objects we will be able to communicate via speech. This could be the toaster, the fridge or the car. You will never have to deal with dumb things again,” he says. However, this raises also new problems: “Is it acceptable to yell at our mobile phone?”.
Similar topics are also being researched at T-Gallery, the future lab of Telekom.  How do we interact with smart things? Is it ok to use the informal “Du” or do peope prefer the formal “Sie” when they interact with technology? Among the technologies researched one approach is a advanced smartphone as the central point of interaction with our smart environment. Philipp McKinney, Chief technologist at HP prognosts how such a multi-talent could look like. …

Instead to improve the human being, Japanese researchers work ambitiously on an alternative – the roboter. Tomotaka Takahashi believes that in 20 years we will have roboter helping us at home. …

There is no common opinion among experts, when and if at all we will eventually reach truly “artificial intelligence”.
IBM scientist John Cohn estimates that between 2020 and 2025, computer chips will process as fast as the human brain – and in 2030, chips will most likely reach the complexity of the human brain.
“Does some kind of consciousness develop through complexity and programming? This question is open,” explains Rüdiger Spies from market research and analyst firm IDC. “If the answer is only a little bit of yes, then the next level of evolution will be much faster and happening between robots and supercomputers.”


Again.. not sure how they found me.. but glad I got to contribute..

Hmm.. not much more to report today.. Diane and I went to Gabes Lacrosse practive and ran with the dogs in the woods. It was a perfect spring evening.. cool and clear…

that’s about it for the day.. more tomorrow..
nite all, nite sam !
-me