OSCON 2011

The trend towards gamification of UIs, in cars and elsewhere, is a theme of one of the keynotes this morning. Other talks, on infrastructure, on community building, and on DIY science, have helped focus some of my conversations.

Although I'm carrying a "We're Hiring"badge, I'm not here as CSN CMO.

I'm toting the totem around, PSF snake. Chairman Steve suggested we park her at the Perl Foundation booth and that's where she is right now I'm surmising.

My other OSCON-related posts are in my other blogs.

Does the Nebula concept have relevance to CSN growth plans? I was at their big party last night, but that wasn't a place for business conversations. Why not just a pentagonal dodecahedron for edges, instead of something more complicated? What would we see upon turning it?

On the topic of 3D (spatial) logos, I think it's the responsibility of the designers to define its look from all angles, using CAD or other tool, prior to release. CSN LCDs will feature their share of dancing logos, coats of arms, other heraldry, both 2D and 3D.

Or, as some might say, 5D (tetrahedron4 + time1).

We believe in Diversity around here. Lots of comparing notes with people from Brazil.

Learning from Friends

I participated in the fundraising event at the Multnomah Friends Meeting, not as CSN CMO, though we did use the company laptop and car, but as a proud dad.

My daughter is a member of this delegation, headed for Central America. We were raising funds to sponsor the group.

In a relaxed CSN setting one might dial up reports from the field from a large database of well crafted presentations. Yes, some of these might be on Youtube, such as the CDCA one we showed this evening.

CSN might have its more exclusive stashes as well, some local to a specific shop. Why? Because some causes mean the most to local players, or because the opportunities are restricted to specific friends, an inner circle.

I was mainly gleaning ideas. Serving refreshments, other goodies, from the sponsored locale, is one way to go. While we're talking about coffee, why not show the whole process up the line? CSN is into transparency.

Some people come to our shops just to browse those popular infrastructure videos, watch the web cams. Remember penny alley? We're not embarrassed to offer peeps.

Does you city have cams on the landfill, at the treatment plants, cleanup sites? One response to more surveillance of the public is to make the feed more available to said public.

Rather than some "us" spying on some "them", it's just ourselves, watching ourselves. Watch those webcams at the Oregon Zoo.

Followup: I was on projector crew for the Friends again today, this time for Tara and Luci presenting on their trip Jamaica (not as tourists). The circumstances were ad hoc and Tara jerked out the projector chord without using the cooling fan. Being a startup is difficult. Larry took me to StarBucks and showed me his "iBad". The flying app is especially impressive, takes some of the fear out of it (less likely to get lost maybe?). He left me here, working for CSN.

Instead of "delegation" I might say "away team", aware of the Star Trek associations. The Friends Meeting is like the mother ship, and these people slip off, to distant lands and climes, and return, reporting. Tara and Luci did a wonderful job, were top notch reporters. We salute Jamaica and its avid application to sports and health care. The world could use more principled athletes and physicians of many casts and sheens.

I had a quick meeting with the CHR on Hawthorne Bridge, staying friendly. CSN is no tiny tune when you're up close to the trumpets. I was on my way to see Stallman.

Screen Testing...

by Jennifer Reeves with music by Raymond Scott and Tommy Dorset


by John Driscoll starring Amber Muir

Q & A

Q: If the goal is to raise funds for worthy causes, what's to stop a shop from making a game be super easy, such that you'd have to work at it to lose. Wouldn't this maximize funding?

A: Remember the model: you're in competition for company profits, and if your heroics are insufficient to save the day, then wish your peers better luck. The company cannot afford to just funnel any amount to worthy causes so "game difficulty" is how to apply the brakes and really make the games instructive.

On the other hand, there may be times when just taking a survey, answering a questionnaire, is sufficient to have the proceeds go to such and such an agency, perhaps with matching funds. It's possible to have a game time out when various goals are reached. No one said they needed to be open ended.

Q: I don't get why I'd want to play in a coffee shop, especially one that serves adult drinks, when I could play the same games at home, and spend less on beverages.

A: you're free to stay home. Some find the conviviality of a shop appealing and are looking to others for tips. What's the hot new charity to be connected with? Remember that people compete with their profiles, with "cooler than you" a motivation (friendly rivalries, looking good on the runway of life... showing off).

Also, depending on your zip code, your CSN affiliate may have access to ingredients you can't easily get as an individual (ayahuasca for example). Again, you might want to seek guidance, check LCDs for workshops and meetups.

More QM in Portlandia

I met with the CFO today, starting from an old geocaching site, the "man pointing", top of Mt. Tabor. She's been bouncing around, will continue to do so. I appreciate the Alaska connection, which our CHR shares, in a different way. I'm glad she's found family.

I hope I get to AK at some point. That Hubble guy had gone there, to some edge of the Universe kind of place (it's all "an edge" when you're a cosmographer like that).

Some bristle when I, a founder of DENSA (by my own accounts), start yakking about IQ. Am I being sarcastic? With regard to CSN, there's a kind of IQ test going on, with some getting in on the ground floor as we speak. Or call it the Doppler Effect.

Or are things heating up in 97214, birthplace of the Silicon Forest? I told her about our live in exchange student ("torture taxi" refugee) and the new work / study program I've embarked on.

Wanderers was interesting tonight. Steve, for some time a ward of the state, is back to his quantum mechanics (QM) teaching, trying to make it accessible to high schoolers.

Just using bra ket notation gets him some kudos with our Silicon Forest crowd, though we had our registered skeptics, as usual.

I gave him Rhett's number to follow up on some of those Bell Theorem interpretations. Maybe it could be a comic book? We'd need characters, and not just the usual suspects.

Earlier, I'd checked into Wired (Conde-Naste) to read up on that anthrax scare, which claimed some real lives (not "just a cartoon"). Advances in bioinformatics resulted, as people learned more about sequencing that lethal bacterium.

The Russians get blamed for stockpiling in Siberia, though they could always take the "just making vaccine" defense like the Americans do. Nasty toxins like that have a Matrix feel about them, their handlers a lot like those men in black.

I'd also picked Mental Floss from the rack, but a meeting with the CSO kept me moving.

Now, I need to attend to my queue. This may be one of those up-all-night working times. It happens. The service industry. Red Eye flights.

Good hearing from Sam, Dawn's bro, while I was walking by Portland Energy Strategies (Patrick was joining us for the QM talk).

Movie Making

The movie Nirel has been working on, to be shot in Europe, would likely feature this starlette.

The script is only loosely based on Nirel's adventures. What's more important, they've hit it off. "She is a single mom, dancer, martial artist and skates" writes our CTO.

I'll save names for later.

I proposed myself as a cameo (maybe many), always wanting to be an extra somehow.

Storyboarding LCDs

The above figure, by David Koski, developed in a Java application called vZome by Scott Vorthmann, shows several polyhedrons (polyhedra) sharing vertexes (vertices).

They are color coded for discernability.

The yellow lines, for example, form the diamond faceted rhombic dodecahedron of special interest to Kepler.

The green lines form an octahedron, the red lines a rhombic triancontahedron (30 rhombic faces).

Their volume ratios are as follows:

• Red rhombic triancontahedron : solid cyan cube :: 7.5 : 3.
• Yellow rhombic dodecahedron : same cube :: 6 : 3.
• Green Octahedron: 4.

These ratios are not in lowest terms and the last "ratio" implies 4 : 1, with 1 being our unit of volume, a tetrahedron of edges 1 CCP ball diameter (the tetrahedron is defined by four inter-tangent balls of equal radius).

These computations relate the above shapes and ratios to an additional set of polyhedrons, three having the same shape as the red one above, but with different relative volumes: 5, 5.00+, and 21.21+.

To have a rhombic triacontahedron (RT) of volume 5, you need to shrink the 7.5 RT's volume by 2/3 and therefore all its linear measures by the 3rd root of 2/3.

The resulting RT's radius is very close to 1 (0.999+), assuming the diameter of any CCP sphere to be 2.

The shaded blue line labeled "mind the gap" is about the tiny difference between the T-modules RT and the E-modules RT, each "module" being 1/120th of its respective rhombic triacontahedron.

:: click for larger view ::

Jitterbug Perfume is an allusion to the book by that title, by Tom Robbins, but also to Fuller's operational adaptation of that word, a dance style, to the twisting-contracting motion whereby a skeletal cuboctahedron might be formed into an icosahedron using six additional equi-lengthed edges.

That icosahedron, combined with its intersecting dual, the pentagonal dodecahedron, its "wife", "give birth" to yet another rhombic triacontahedron, phi bigger than the E-moduled rhombic triacontahedron, or phi to the 3rd power bigger by volume (phi being the golden mean or golden ratio, pronounced "fee" by some, "fie" by me).

Again in terms of our unit tetrahedron of 4 CCP spheres, this larger (or "super") rhombic triacontahedron has a volume of 15 times the second root of 2.

The E-mod rhombic triancontahedron "phi down" from the super one, has a radius (body center to face center) identical to that of the CCP spheres.

To summarize:

Four rhombic triacontahedrons have been discussed, with volumes 5, 5+, 7.5, and "over 21".

The 5 and 5+ are very close to the same volume ("mind the gap") and are each exploded into 120 tetrahedral modules, the Ts and the Es respectively (E for Einstein or maybe "explodes", T for triacontahedron).

The T-module RT has a close relationship with the red one up top, the 7.5. The T-modules have volume 1/24, identical to that of the A & B modules, which build the other shapes (besides the red one) in the top picture.

The E-module RT has a close affinity for the "jitterbug" RT, the one that embeds the 18.51+ volumed icosahedron, with edges equal to the diameter of the unit-tetrahedron-defining CCP spheres.

CCP = closest cubic packing, the same as the IVM or "isotropic vector matrix" when comparing scaffolding or skeletons. Architects may say "octet truss" for the same space frame, studied intensively by Alexander Graham Bell before Fuller got a patent for it.