Worthy Projects

Two worthy projects came to my attention at Multnomah Meeting today.

Ann Hyde gave me a copy of When a Peace Tree Blooms, a telling the story from the Japanese side, of being atom bombed.  Yet good relations are restored with the perpetrators, a representative of whom brings a gift of seeds that grow into beautiful and fruitful trees with healing powers.

I'll pass this book to Carol and the Disarmament Day (August 6) Committee.  More libraries and gift stores than ours might be interested in this slender tome, the story by Hideko Tamura Snider, and illustrations by Mari Kishi.

All profits will be donated to charities supporting the children of Fukushima. ISBN: 978-0-9894858-0-7.

Even as Ann was sharing about this project, Lew Scholl was setting up the projector for our invited speaker, Dana Iglesias, MD MPH.

This young yet already experienced family practice doctor has done stints in Haiti, Peru and Nigeria, as well as in the US in some hardship areas.  Her parents hail from Panama.  She grew up in New York and started her medical training in North Carolina.

After testing the waters and searching her soul, Dana feels ready to commit fully to the Egbe Hospital Revitalization Project.  Her participation is being organized by SIM.  She needs to fund her own way, about $50K a year which covers travel.  The positive multiplier effects have huge potential.

Dana is especially focused on mothers giving birth and pediatric care, though she practices the full gamut of cradle-to-grave medicine.  She is skilled at several kinds of surgery, such as delivery by C-section.  However she feels she makes an even bigger long term difference when able to help influence public health through improved infrastructure and education.

As of this writing, she was just getting started on her website.

I adjourned to a Peace and Social Concerns Committee after Dana's presentation, in my capacity as AFSC Liaison.  We'd had our meeting of the Area Program Committee since the last meeting and I was to report back.

Didactic Visualizations / Animations

I'm glad I caught the Tomi Ungerer bio, Far Out is not Far Out Enough.  Like me, he's a pioneer in the edgy cartoons area and sees andragogy as distinct from, yet inter-mixed with, pedagogy.  We have ratings for a reason.

What caught people off guard is he was spanning G (General Audience) to MA (Mature Audience) with the same aesthetic, unifying the levels in some sense.

Was that interference in childhood innocence?  The Puritans thought so.

My agenda is a little different:  to impart technical content but to not eschew the animated form, even the demented or unrated.

Take these excellent lectures by Sapolsky at Standford for example, and imagine the animated reveries that could go with them, ala this movie on Chomsky, or these well-known RSA lectures.

Or I think of the more Bakshi / MAD style in the Morton Downy documentary.

Having a "movie track" for a lecture adds value.   Using animations is not "dumbing it down" even where higher and lower math, and quantum physics is concerned.

In our coffee shops, I don't necessarily want to monopolize the audio track, though an ear buds "airplane seat" setup might be used.  You get the reveries disconnected from the anchoring lectures and maybe spliced together by enthusiasts.

That's OK, as our coffee shop is more trafficking in a "meme soup" than in any particular subject or discipline.  We're providing ambiance, an atmosphere conducive to study and / or daydreaming, but we're not necessarily directly competing with the Apollonian Academy.   We're complementary.

Happy 2014: for your coffeeshop LCD....

TAILOR-MADE (Tokimonsta remix) Daedelus with Milosh from Victor Acevedo on Vimeo.

October Club Feature

A Quick State of the Union

This blog evolves rather slowly compared to the several others I write for.  Hello, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for this non-existent yet nascent network of coffee shops, emblematic of Philosophy (French influence) and of intellect more generally.  Portland, Oregon is a great place to experience the culture, but so is Rome, Italy.

I'm not clamoring to be a Church although that's probably the easiest way to get an easement in some of the controlled substances acts, but this is not about rushing communities to accept new standards.  If you want to experiment, try a cruise ship or charter maybe, but make sure your captain and crew don't drink the kool-aid, whatever that may be, i.e. there's a line between those experiencing the show, and those putting on the show (staff and guests, thespians and audience, newscasters and news viewers).

I mention controlled substances (like alcohol and tobacco) because the next think you imagine I'll talk about is gambling.  They go together right?  But then your Church basement was typically smoke filled, i.e. consenting adults are allowed to make wagers in some game of chance like context.  It's the shape of that wagering that states like to control.  Can you bet on dogs?  Off track?  I barely know what that means.  You had people "running numbers" in all the old cop shows.  What were they doing exactly.  Ask an anthropologist.

But yes, I'm going to mention games of change and skill both, arcade game style and other, wired up to donate to charities.  Yes you can do this from home.  Generous people right now are playing games to give money.  My late wife assiduously played a few each day.  Small amounts were presumably being made, to feed the hungry, to save the wolves, that kind of thing.

The business plan here is the product sellers, the brands behind the counter, are using games to help build brand loyalty and brand recognition.  The whiskey company maybe doesn't own the rights to the game inside, but the company logo is still a game element, product placement one could say.  Companies aren't bound to stay literal.  If an elephant is your mascot, why not go with that?

Patrons may pony up their own funds, but a lot of turns at play are sponsored.  Getting that Voodoo Donut includes a spin or two of the wheel, or maybe something more involved.  The point is you're engaged in an heroic episode at the same time the sponsor is pledging your winning to charity.  That's actually a potent mix.  Doing well to do good.  People enjoy that kind of challenge, with or without a Coffee Shop setting.

You could say the point is to give ordinary people a sense of what it's like to be a philanthropist and give generously, changing the course of human events thereby.  We can't all expect to steer at the same level in the same way, but a game with the point of giving, and requiring at least virtual heroics, is potentially quite exciting.  One could say giving to charity is addictive in this new form, but if that's the case, I can think of worse forms of addiction.  Lets have this form of addiction (unable to stop charitably giving) be a new problem, one we'd like to have.

Street Intersection: The Game

This is one of my favorite computer game genres, where you confront a city intersection and have to model muddling through in some way.

If you're a policeman, do you have the right to confiscate the property of the houseless person 30 feet from City Hall in the margin of a sidewalk, with no visible shelter?

As an old man, will your time run out before the street car lurches on without you, or will you run fast enough on your current dosage?

Is there a drinking fountain?  Unusual, but maybe we're in Portland (look up:  Benson Bubblers).  Is there fluoride in that water?  From where exactly?  So much to study (it's an ecosystem after all).

Was the intersection badly designed?

Sometimes it's just culture.

In Portland, more cyclists "felt safe" in this new green area, whereas the cars would not see them and turn right anyway, hitting them.

This was a spike in statistics after a new painting scheme was applied at, you guessed it, street intersections.

May Day Festivities

:: May 1st / PDX ::

Fun in the sun. A day for showing spring fashions.