Weeknote for 11/17/2019

Posted on November 19, 2019 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

I got the planning done and a tiny bit of work. I’ll need to do a big push this week to make sure I don’t fall behind my schedule.

Life maintenance

😐

I’m still working through my medical billing issues from the summer, so I’m making myself continue that this week, because I feel a need to resolve it all by the end of the year. It does feel like extra work, though, when I have enough to do already.

Fiction

😎

I finished Unutterable Horror, and I’m glad Joshi is so opinionated, because I need guidance through unfamiliar territories like this huge genre of literature. Not that I’m planning to become deeply familiar with it, because as much as I sometimes talk about horror media, I have definite limits on the types I can tolerate, and I have to be in the right mood to begin with, but the milder kinds of horror intrigue me as a source of creative ideas and of a sense of deep mystery. This book has reminded me that I’m not very interested in traditional horror tropes, like ghosts, vampires, and the occult, and instead what tends to draw me, other than cosmic horror, is random, Twilight-Zone weirdness happening in everyday life, the kind of stuff I imagined when I was young, and this type of story shows up in places like Kafka, Donald Wandrei (see “The Eye and the Finger”), and the “mundane horror” of Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, who was a frequent writer for The Twilight Zone. Now I’m looking back through the book highlight the authors, titles, and Joshi’s assessments so I’ll have stories to read, and then I’d like to find other opinionated reviewers who can help me keep up with new titles, and since this historical survey has been so helpful, I want to read others for science fiction, fantasy, and general literature.

Fringe

🙂

I apparently wasn’t done with October weirdness, because last week I was still in the mood for darker stories and ideas, and then came the impeachment hearings, which highlighted the conspiracy theories of both political parties and gave me the extra nudge to look into that world again. So I added a book to my reading queue that I bought a while back, The Truth Agenda by Andy Thomas, an overview of various conspiracy theories and other fringe research that tries both to present a reasonable case for them and to tie them into a cohesive view of the world and its history. I’m nearing the end of it, and I’ll give you my thoughts next week, but here’s a video of one of his talks that will give you an overview. Reading about conspiracy theories makes the political books on my backburner more relevant, so now I’m more likely to read them, but I’m going to put those on hold to get back to my original queue.

Spirituality

🙂

The next book in my queue is another strange one, Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney, and it’s actually relevant to The Truth Agenda because it covers similar kinds of esoteric spirituality. I originally added it to give me some context for understanding the book of alchemical art I bought, largely for decoration (Alchemy & Mysticism by Alexander Roob), but more generally I’m interested because I like exercising my mind with dramatically different ways of looking at the world, and in the context of this queue, it’s continuing a series on philosophies of life, arranged from more weird to less, some of which are reflected in weird and experimental literature.

Music

😐

The Advent Orchestra at church is coming up again, and even though I haven’t been practicing the horn all year to keep my lips in shape like I’d hoped, I’m on top of things just enough to give myself a couple more weeks of practice than previous years, if I don’t procrastinate, and this year I was also better about keeping my valves unstuck. So I’m picking out some free French horn exercise books from the International Music Score Library Project, and I’ll practice those till I get the orchestra music. I’m looking for exercises that work out my upper range, that aren’t rhythmically very fast or complicated (since that’s not really an issue in our Advent music), and that give me interesting melodies to play (as opposed to repetitive scales, arpeggios, or other patterns).

Posted in Christmas labels, Fiction, Fringe theories, Life maintenance, Music, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 4 Comments

Weeknote for 11/10/2019

Posted on November 10, 2019 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😉

As a bookmark for this project till I get back to it next year, I’ve posted a summary of the state of my research (a week late). To be honest though, I’ll most likely cheat and work on it in the meantime during other projects, because I’m kind of obsessed with this topic.

Christmas labels

😐

The update post for conceptual modeling took a lot more time than I expected, and I didn’t get around to any written planning for the Christmas labels, but I’ve been planning it in my head for weeks, so this week I’ll write things down and get started.

Fiction

🙂

I’m about three-fourths through Unutterable Horror, and it’s giving me quite a few authors to explore, such as Ambrose Bierce with his biting cynicism and Lord Dunsany with his invented mythology. I didn’t realize just how major of a figure Lovecraft is in the genre, at least according to Joshi, and I was a little disappointed to learn that the “King in Yellow” author Robert Chambers wrote so little that’s worth reading, but at least there’s more than I knew about. I should be able to finish Joshi’s book this week.

Worship team

😎

Last Sunday my team was scheduled to play, and we were without a pianist, so after the rehearsal Saturday morning I volunteered. I immediately wondered if I’d made a mistake, because I feel like the bar has risen since I was a regular pianist, but after some practice I felt calmer. It ended up going well, and somehow the set felt special, mostly hymns like “Nothing but the Blood,” a little different from our usual selections, so I felt privileged to be on piano.

I was also happy to step aside for the offertory, which was “The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power” sung by our worship leader in gospel style, because I knew I wouldn’t have it ready in time, and then to see that she was able to ask her friend to accompany her, which worked much better, and it was clear that our African-American friends in the congregation loved it.

Christmas list

😛

Note to family: I’ve updated my wish list.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Holidays, Weeknotes, Worship performing | 1 Comment

Conceptual modeling Sep-Oct 2019 summary

Posted on November 8, 2019 by Andy

September and October 2019 were occupied with my project to develop an approach to conceptual modeling. This post is a rough summary of the state of my research from this sprint.

Purpose

Part of my evolving approach to modeling is to match the situation being studied to one or more conceptual frameworks. My initial goal for this sprint was to determine the framework implied in Munzner’s account of data visualization. But my mind insisted on exploration mode, so I ended up looking into other topics as well, some more directly related to visualization and others less.

Findings

Project scope

  • To make sure I had my overall project properly delineated, I had two questions:
    • What topics counted as modeling? For example, should I include creative thinking and problem solving, since those are involved in the modeling process?
    • What academic and professional fields should I use as sources? I want to draw insights from a wide range, but I don’t want to spend time on fields that don’t focus on disciplined modeling.
  • On the topics question, I concluded the ones I questioned had some overlap with modeling, but I shouldn’t make a complete study of them as part of this project, because substantial amounts of the subject matter wouldn’t be relevant.
  • On the source fields question, I decided to focus on the fields in this sprint and later expand in two directions.
    • For creating frameworks, the natural fields would be math, computer science, and systems theory.
    • For learning process, the fields are probably business, social science research, problem solving, intelligence analysis, visual intelligence, intuition research, and the scientific method.
    • I also made a big list of all the fields that felt relevant to give me a somewhat organized future reference for this question.

Data visualization

Munzner, Tamara. Visualization Analysis and Design. A.K. Peters Visualization Series. Boca Raton: CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015.

  • I’ve read about 30% of the material from various parts of the book, but I think it’s enough to get the gist. Most of the book seems to be about working out the details of the “how” question (see below).
  • Munzner’s goal is to define a set of criteria for designing and evaluating visualizations.
  • She divides her approach into three areas: what kind of data is being visualized, why it needs to be visualized, and how it should be visualized.
  • What
    • My take is that all the dataset types are based on tables (or maybe networks or dictionaries): discrete items and attributes, though some datasets ultimately represent continuous data.
    • There are kinds of information this framework would be a stretch for, such as narratives.
    • The data types understandably focus on spatial data.
  • Why
    • What to look for in the data partly depends on the tasks.
    • What to look for is described by math, mainly statistical methods, graph theory, and geometry.
  • How
    • The book is good for expanding my visual repertoire in an ordered way. For example:
      • Visualizations can contain composite glyph objects. Thus, diagrams don’t have to be simple.
      • Visualizations are made up of marks (visual objects with various numbers of spatial dimensions) and channels (the marks’ visual attributes, which have traits that make them suitable for encoding particular kinds of data attributes).
    • Certain visuals do have semantic meaning (the expressiveness principle), such as lines on a graph indicating trends (so you wouldn’t want to connect unrelated points with a line).
    • “Eyes beat memory” is a key insight even beyond her application of it to animation. I think a major reason visualizations are so helpful for thinking is that they unburden the viewer’s memory by keeping certain information in view.

Model-driven software engineering

Brambilla, Marco, Jordi Cabot, and Manuel Wimmer. Model-Driven Software Engineering in Practice. Second edition. Synthesis Lectures on Software Engineering 4. San Rafael, Calif.: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2017.

  • Martin Fowler identifies three modes of use for the software modeling language UML: sketch, blueprint, and programming language.
    • Sketch uses UML as an informal thinking tool and lets the code diverge from the diagrams over time.
    • Blueprint uses the diagrams as a set of requirements for the code.
    • Programming language treats the diagrams themselves as executable code.
    • Brambilla et al focus on the blueprint and programming language modes. That is, MDSE models are oriented toward executable software, even if they’re not directly executable. In contrast, the sketch mode belongs to a category that Brambilla et al call model-based engineering (as opposed to model-driven), and it’s outside the scope of their book.
  • Major players that Brambilla et al cover:
    • The Object Management Group (OMG) with the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and related languages (together known as Model-Driven Architecture, or MDA).
    • The Eclipse Foundation with the Eclipse Modeling Framework.
  • MDSE models are very formal and abstract and often very detailed.
  • MDSE’s technology gets organized into layers of abstraction: models that describe systems and metamodels that describe modeling languages. OMG’s MDA framework is comprised of four of these layers.
  • Modeling languages have syntaxes. The concrete syntax represents a model. The abstract syntax represents the metamodel.
  • Syntaxes can be graphical or textual.
  • Models are manipulated via transformations, which produce other models or code.
  • OMG has a specification for representing RDF technologies.

Graphic facilitation

Agerbeck, Brandy. The Idea Shapers: The Power of Putting Your Thinking into Your Own Hands. [s.l.] Loosetooth.com Library, 2016.

Margulies, Nancy, and Christine Valenza. Visual Thinking: Tools for Mapping Your Ideas. Norwalk, CT: Crown House Pub. Co, 2005.

Sibbet, David. Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes & Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

  • I’ve read all of Sibbet, about 40% of Agerbeck, and 30% of Margulies and Valenza.
  • Agerbeck identifies four uses for drawing:
    • Representing. Traditional art fits here.
    • Thinking. This fits the uses of sketchnoting that The Idea Shapers covers. Generally speaking, the sketch mode of software modeling also fits here.
    • Communicating. Slide presentations fit here. Parts of software modeling also fit here: blueprint mode (communicating to programmers) and programming language mode (communicating to the computer).
    • Facilitating. Graphic facilitation fits here.
  • Graphic facilitation contributes insights on the process of modeling.
  • Graphic recordings mostly function as reminders, whether during a session or after it.
  • Visualization aids thinking.
  • A visual process can greatly engage a team.
  • Drawing by hand has its own meaning, so it shouldn’t necessarily be replaced by computer graphics.
  • Graphic facilitators pay attention to visual structure in addition to depicting concepts, making use of templates for the large- and small-scale structure of their drawings.
  • Certain structures enable a flexible, exploratory process more than others.
  • Abstract diagrams are like the skeleton of the model, and pictorial ones are like the flesh. For example, the border of any depicted object (a cloud, a building, an animal) can function as a containing line, and in addition to grouping and isolating content, the object will evoke meanings related to its subject matter.
  • Drawings can range from literal to metaphorical.
  • Building a visual vocabulary (like mental clip art) lets you draw fast.

Semantics

Saeed, John I. Semantics. Fourth edition. Introducing Linguistics 2. Chichester, West Sussex [England] ; Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016.

  • My goal was to learn how semantics researchers analyze words and sentences to get an idea of the fundamental concepts they recognize. These concepts could be used to build frameworks.
  • Some of these approaches compete to be full explanations of meaning, but I think they all offer tools for understanding aspects of meaning.
  • A survey of the book’s pointers to semantic primitives:
    • Word meaning:
      • Lexical relations, including lexical field, homonymy, polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, member-collection, and portion-mass.
      • Core vocabulary and universal semantic primes.
    • Sentence relations and truth: Logic brings a lot of concepts with it that would inform a fundamental conceptual framework, such as entailment, contradiction, presupposition, and tautology.
    • Sentence situations: Situation type (static, dynamic), tense, aspect (completed, ongoing), modality (level of certainty, level of permission), mood (e.g., indicative, subjunctive), and evidentiality (attitude toward information source).
    • Sentence participants:
      • Thematic roles: agent, patient, theme, experiencer, beneficiary, instrument, location, goal, source, stimulus.
      • Voice: active, passive, middle. As with the other categories, these voices bring other concepts along, such as the concepts of scene, figure, and ground and animacy hierarchies.
      • Classifiers and noun classes: These morphological constructs encode categories like shape, possession, and gender.
    • Meaning components: Semantic components, with accounts by several researchers:
      • Katz on semantic markers and distinguishers.
      • Talmy on motion verbs.
      • Jackendoff on conceptual semantics.
      • Pustejovsky’s extended conceptual semantics.
    • Speech as action: Types of speech acts.
    • Cognitive semantics: Image schemas (e.g., container, path, force), metonymy relations.
  • Concepts related to models and modeling:
    • Context and inference: Deixis, discourse, background knowledge, mutual knowledge, information structure, conversational implicature, lexical pragmatics.
    • Formal semantics: More concepts from logic, specifically predicate logic, which formal semantics translates English into. This type of analysis is explicit about modeling. Montague’s approach is actually called model-theoretical semantics. Similar approaches are situation semantics and discourse representation theory. Formal semantics covers both sentence and word meaning.
    • Cognitive semantics: Radial categories, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, mental spaces, Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar.

Field interactions

  • Software models tend to be more detailed and consistent than models in business and other social and creative fields, so software and other STEM modeling can contribute rigor.
  • Fields outside of STEM can contribute insights into the process of modeling. Software modeling discussions tend to skip straight to the model’s features and representation.
  • The needs of software models overlap with the needs of other fields, but software models also have features that aren’t well suited to others or aren’t relevant to them, so the modeling languages would need to be adapted. I’m looking for a database like OWL more than a behavioral system like the MOF seems to be. The behavioral aspects I’ve seen of MOF would come into play if I were making a modeling IDE.

Issues

  • Separating the MDSE abstraction layers is a challenge.
  • What features does a modeling language need, as opposed to other formal languages, such as specifications meant for validation, grammars for parsing, or mathematical notation?
  • It’s hard to know what layout I’ll need when I start a sketchnote.

Future directions

  • Create a simple tool that ties together various existing modeling tools so I can learn by experiment.
    • Attempto
    • Protege
    • EMF
    • NLTK
    • Logic programming
  • Express informal diagrams in formal terms.
  • Practice sketchnoting.
  • Catalog basic attributes.
  • Express existing questions from my method in formal terms.
  • Compare my questions to those from graphic facilitation.
  • Create instructional documents on these formal languages.
  • Expand to educational comics and technical illustration.
  • Expand to knowledge representation.
  • Create visual representations for sentence semantics.
  • Map out the semantic approaches in detail.
  • Try various textual notations for modeling, such as Human-Usable Textual Notation, KM3, and Emfatic.
  • Finish cataloging data visualization information.
  • Experiment with creating a new basic textual notation and modeling tool, if it seems helpful.
  • Begin relearning math.
  • Learn relevant areas of basic computer science.
Posted in Conceptual modeling, Project updates | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 11/3/2019

Posted on November 4, 2019 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😐

I got most of my update post written, but it’s not quite ready, so I’ll take a day or two more on it.

I didn’t finish reading The Idea Shapers either, but I’ll just continue it till I’m done, however long that takes.

Christmas labels

🙂

This week begins the Thinkulum project month of November, and like last year the project will be making my secret Christmas labels for my presents to my family. So I’ll update you on my progress, but I’ll wait till after Christmas to tell you about the content. This week will mostly be for planning and gathering resources.

Philosophy

🤔

I listened to Thomas Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race, an argument for anti-natalism, the idea that it’s wrong for humans to reproduce. His argument isn’t that humans are bad for the earth but rather that consciousness is bad for humans–that when you remove all the psychological defenses, suffering makes life not worth living, so the kindest act toward future generations would be to limit our reproduction so the human race gently goes extinct.

At times I sympathize with this viewpoint, but overall I don’t share its assumptions or Ligotti’s pessimistic frame of mind, and ultimately I think, if we’re not being theological about it, humanity should keep living if only to see whether the key to utopia lies around the next bend.

Fiction

🙂

I researched Ligotti a little and found out he’d written an unproduced X-Files episode (here’s a working link to the script). Some of the themes from Conspiracy show through, and since The X-Files is technically still going, I wouldn’t mind seeing the episode in video or comic form someday.

Now I’m back to Joshi’s history of supernatural horror, Unutterable Horror, which last week explained to me the greatness of Poe, so I’ll have to give him another try, though in recent years I’ve been able to appreciate his style in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Raven” (which I found less horrifying and more heartbreaking).

Photography

😎

My Halloween evening was partly spent trying to get frostbite while capturing the scenery winter left us in its hurry to arrive.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

This year we get #autumn and #winter at the same time. https://www.thinkulum.net/blog/2019/11/04/weeknote-for-11-3-2019/

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

Movies

😎

I wanted to do something spooky for Halloween, but not too spooky, so I watched a movie I’ve had in mind for a while, The Endless by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. It’s a thoughtful ontological mystery that starts normal and gets really weird while exploring the characters’ widely varying strategies for dealing with their situation. I didn’t know much going in, but it ended up being a great match for what I’ve been looking for, which I guess you could call light cosmic horror, though now that I’ve been spoiled by the bleak, real cosmic horror of Ligotti, part of me was disappointed by the movie’s uplifting aspects. In any case, I’m intrigued by this filmmaker duo, and I’ll definitely be watching more of their stuff.

Music

🙂

Now that October is over, I’ve put away my Halloween ambience videos, and my attention has turned to my playlist of autumn ambiences. I felt they could use some background music, but being a new fan of fall, I didn’t know what kind of music the season called for, so I let the good denizens of Spotify tell me. I found this instrumental autumn playlist that seems to be a good fit for the ambience videos–folksy and relaxed.

Christmas

😛

This is a preemptive reply to my family that I’m working on my Christmas list this week.

Posted in Christmas labels, Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Holidays, Movies, Music, Philosophy, Photography, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 10/27/2019

Posted on October 28, 2019 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😐

I spent most of the week looking into model-driven software engineering, and it felt like a confusing mess, but I expect that’s just a matter of time and careful study, though I’ll probably need to put it off till at least January.

Graphic facilitation seems like a very promising area for my modeling method, but I’m always in danger of researching without producing anything, so I made myself start sketchnoting with the sermon at church on Sunday, and it both highlighted how helpful sketchnote is for memory and reminded me of the problems I have drawing and diagramming, so the practice is serving its purpose.

This is the last week for the October project month, so I’ll spend it wrapping up, which will take the form of writing an update post to summarize the state of my research, since this (double) sprint ended up being very exploratory and I didn’t get far enough for a regular wiki article. I also want to finish reading The Idea Shapers, since that’ll be the most helpful resource for my sketchnoting.

Life maintenance

🙄

Last week I had the fun of dropping a bill of sale for my old car in the mail to the state, then realizing I gave them the wrong apartment number, and dropping a corrected one in the mailbox to be sent with the first one.

Then early Saturday morning I drove to the DMV to return my license plates and get a refund on my unused registration sticker, and after seeing the 50-person line out the door even 15 minutes after opening, I did some research and found that I was supposed to mail in my refund request anyway, so that saved me a couple of hours and also gave me an early start on my day.

My life maintenance catch-up continues this week.

Fiction

😎

I finished Experimental Film by Gemma Files, who I hadn’t heard of before I found the ebook in a Kindle sale, but now I’ll definitely look into her other work. It’s a mystery and a ghost story but also something more mythic, and she raises a number of interesting ideas, so I’m glad I have the ebook to revisit.

After that I started on the very long Unutterable Horror, in which literature scholar S. T. Joshi surveys the history of supernatural horror and tries to understand what makes the genre work. I’ve gotten through the first few chapters, covering the genre’s precursors and the period of gothic fiction, which reinforced my plans to reread Frankenstein and gave me a few other novels to consider.

Philosophy

🤔

So I can get through my current book queue without dragging too much gloom into November, this week I’m interrupting Joshi to listen to horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s book of pessimistic philosophy, Conspiracy Against the Human Race.

Soundscapes

😎

Enjoy this playlist I made of relaxing autumn ambiences, where you can sit on your porch sipping tea, crunch the fallen leaves while walking through breezy woods, sit by the fire with your cat, or write by candlelight while listening to the rain against the window.

Something I’ve noticed about YouTube ambiences is that they range in complexity from a simple, constant background noise, such as rain or wind, to almost a full-fledged (though mostly wordless) roleplay, which I tend to prefer, so that’s mostly what shows up into my playlists.

That leads to another observation, which I noticed last year too with the winter ambiences, that the roleplay ambiences feel intriguingly surreal to me, as if they take place in another, somewhat ghostly world, where people rarely speak, they may be invisible, events tend to loop, and light and motion work differently, judging by the simple animation and collage appearance of the scenes. Given how much sound and environment affect me, the surreal world of the videos adds a subtle, surreal color to my general mood, which, being me, I welcome.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Life maintenance, Philosophy, Soundscapes, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 10/20/2019

Posted on October 23, 2019 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😎

I finished Model-Driven Software Engineering in Practice, and it was clear that MDSE will give a lot of definition to my modeling approach, though it also turned out to be relevant to my current, non-modeling work, since my ebook work involves transforming XML from one format into another, and MDSE involves transforming models into other models or into code. I’ll have a little delay on any actual software modeling, though I’ll probably dabble immediately anyway, but sometime early next year I’ll reintroduce myself to Eclipse and try out the Eclipse Modeling Framework, which might mean I’ll finally have to learn Java.

Some graphic facilitation books I ordered came in the mail, so I bought some related ebooks on my list and paused other reading to start on my new collection: Visual Meetings by David Sibbet, Visual Thinking by Nancy Margulies and Christine Valenza, The Idea Shapers by Brandy Agerbeck, and Presto Sketching by Ben Crothers. Visual Meetings is on Kindle, so I listened to that for a general introduction to graphic facilitation, though it’s mainly written for non-graphic-facilitator business people who run meetings. The next two books go into more detail about certain aspects of the practice–symbolism for Visual Thinking and diagram types for Idea Shapers–and they’re print books, so reading through them will take longer. Presto Sketching is another angle on the subject from someone in the tech industry, and I’ll listen to it after I get through my spooky October books.

I’m still working on Munzner, and I got some of my thoughts typed out. I probably won’t get through as much of the book as I’d planned by the end of the month, but I don’t think that’s a real problem.

Fiction

🙂

Now that I’ve finished Visual Meetings, I’m back to Gemma Files’ Experimental Film. I’ll finish that this week.

After that will be another long book of literary criticism, S. T. Joshi’s Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction.

Soundscapes

😎

Last winter I found out that a reliable way to set my mood is to listen to soundscapes, which on YouTube are called ambiences, and they work especially well when I pair them with the right music, so to make my October more eerie, I’ve been listening to some Halloween soundscapes. One of them spun out into its own little project, where I made a long playlist of ghostly music you might hear while spending the night in a haunted mansion (minor key piano, organ, harpsichord, and solo singing; piano rags, calliope, and music box). If you would like a spooky backdrop to your day, play this YouTube playlist of ambiences (arranged in order of increasing scariness, starting with five that are barely even supernatural) while playing this Spotify playlist on shuffle, and put the music on a low volume so it sounds like it’s coming from some other room in the house. I kinda want to learn how to make these ambience videos.

Later I’ll have a non-spooky autumn ambience playlist for you. I used to not like fall, because (1) I didn’t like warm colors, and (2) in Dallas, where I grew up, fall is boring and brown, but the history of my tastes is that they slowly expand over time, sometimes by circuitous connections, and a few years ago it seems the attention I paid to Surrealism while deciding on my old apartments decorating theme opened me up to the redder side of the spectrum and various aesthetics that tend to use it. I also tend to slowly absorb other people’s tastes, and this year it was apparently the right time for me to catch my Twitter feed’s (weird) enthusiasm for fall, because in striking contrast with every other year, when I walk out my door and see this, I feel strangely cozy despite the air’s mild chill.

Childhood mysteries

😎

Last week Fisher-Price solved several childhood mysteries for me, starting with the question of why I think of particular letters (and I think, by extension, words) as having particular colors, which led to a Google image search for my suspected answer–a rainbow-colored alphabet magnet set of unknown origin that we had when I was a kid–which led me to this article that confirmed my suspicions, let me know I wasn’t the only one, and identified Fisher-Price as the culprit.

Jumping off of that revelation, I investigated another long-time mystery, the identity of the Treasure Island recording I constantly listened to, now with the hypothesis that it too was a Fisher-Price product, and what did I find but a Treasure Island tape by this very company! While (fruitlessly) searching for an audio sample to tell me if this was the one, I found this bootleg recording that let me identify another of their tapes I had, George Washington from their Spellbinder Tapes series.

Childhood mysteries can run, but they can’t hide–forever, anyway.

Life maintenance

😐

With taking a break from stress after my intense summer and getting wrapped up in data visualization and graphic facilitation, I’ve let some practical matters pile up, and the pile must be on my back because it’s weighing down my mood a bit. This week I’ll clear some of that out.

Posted in Childhood mysteries, Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Life maintenance, Soundscapes, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 10/13/2019

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

🙂

I got through some Munzner reading and decided to pause and analyze what I’d seen so far, and I came up with some ideas that I haven’t recorded, but then I got sidetracked by other issues–the questions of (1) what activities count as modeling and (2) which additional academic and professional fields I should draw from for modeling insights. I decided to come to some kind of resolution on those before returning to my infographic study.

Along related lines, my spooky audiobook listening this month has been interrupted by Model-Driven Software Engineering in Practice by Marco Brambilla, Jordi Cabot, and Manuel Wimmer. I’d known about it for a while without really understanding what it was about, but after one of the authors wrote a blog post that basically expressed what I’m trying to do with this project, I decided I needed to jump in and induct myself into the MDSE community by reading the book, and hopefully I can find ways to participate.

Futurism

🤔

The futurism group met for one of our free-form discussions, and at my end of the table we talked about the articles one of our members had posted in the event comments, which centered around dataism (Wikipedia on dataism; is tech evolution inevitable?); climate change (a new warning and new messaging from scientists); and the shift from democracy to dictatorship (the effectiveness of Trump’s brazenness; the benefits and drawbacks of Fox News for Trump). In our discussion he brought up the good question of what we’d do with all the extra heat from fusion power if we’re trying to reduce global warming, so I might look into that.

Experimental literature

🙂

I finished the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, kind of a slog for me toward the end but still interesting and worthwhile. My eventual goal is to take a bunch of notes on it so my links list can become an annotated bibliography that will give people reasons to read the works. In the meantime I appreciate just having a better sense of the overall subject.

Fiction

🙂

For my creepy October stories, I started with Evil Eye by Madhuri Shekar, a short one I picked up on Audible a while back. It’s performed as a drama in the form of phone conversations between an Indian woman in America and her overseas parents, centered around her dating life (or lack of it). Things start out normal and then slowly spiral into the darkness. I didn’t know what to expect, but it was immediately engaging, enjoyable, and somehow relatable, even though it was largely outside my experience, and it kept me listening.

After that I started Experimental Film by Gemma Files, which will apparently be supernatural horror once I’m far enough, but I got temporarily sidetracked by the MDSE book. Experimental Film is a little lecturey so far and harder to get into than Evil Eye, but it’s fun to have something like a bonus chapter to RCEL, and I was pleased to find that a discussion of the avant garde felt familiar to me rather than alien.

Movies

🙂

Sunday I saw the movie Ad Astra with Tim, and despite the questionable science of the plot, the setting felt plausible and fed the part of me that wants to see us colonize the solar system. It even fit in some realistic-feeling action scenarios. But the point of the story was the main character’s personal journey, and the film handled it thoughtfully.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Experimental literature, Fiction, Futurism, Movies, Politics, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 10/6/2019

Posted on October 8, 2019 by Andy

Work

🙂

I’m out from under my piles of work for real, so now I have my evenings back. Will this translate to more progress on my stuff? Time will tell.

Conceptual modeling

🙂

This week starts the spoooky project month of October, and for this project I’m continuing my study of Visualization Analysis and Design by Tamara Munzner, which is appropriate because I still have a scary amount of it left to read. I also need to avoid getting lost in the details and focus on my main question for this study: In a modeling project, how can I match the object under study to a visual scheme, based on the conceptual frameworks implied in these schemes? On the side I’m looking into the more pictorial kinds of information graphics Munzner’s book doesn’t seem to cover, and the main search terms I’ve come across so far are graphic facilitation, technical illustration, and educational comics.

Experimental literature

🙂

I made a schedule for listening to the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (RCEL), and I should be able to finish it this week. After skimming through a lot of the essays earlier in the year, it’s interesting to see what they’re like when I hear the whole content. Some of them are more confusing than I’d hoped, such as the one on Tel Quel–and when I add summaries of the essays to my experimental literature list, I might start with those–but others are more thought provoking and relevant to me than I expected, like the one on postcolonial literature.

RCEL and the alchemy art book I also bought have put me in the mood for various surreal and philosophical topics, such as existentialism and esotericism, so now I have my reading list for the next couple of months, which you can see in that Goodreads link. Some of my choices are also fitting for Halloween, and if I’m diligent about listening, I can fit all the spooky ones into October.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Experimental literature, Weeknotes, Work | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 9/29/2019

Posted on September 29, 2019 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

🙂

On my infographic design project, I made decent progress on my Munzner reading, and I’ll continue that this week. I chose this book because it’s very organized and very broad, but I’m finding there are pictorial types of graphics I care about that it doesn’t cover, so I’ll need to supplement with resources on technical drawing and instructional diagrams. Also relevant are insights from graphic design and comic design, but I’ll have to put off some of that until later project months.

I finished Semantics by John Saeed, and it gave me a good sense of the range of topics and theories in the field and where I want to focus my attention for my various purposes. Pretty much the whole field ends up being relevant to me, because it’s closely related to both conceptual modeling and AI, and a key message I took away was that each camp within the field offers valuable tools, even if you don’t accept their approach as a complete explanation of meaning. If I were going to settle in one of these camps, at this point it’d be cognitive semantics, because for a while I’ve thought of meaning as being grounded in bodily perception and action and as being pervaded by analogy.

Experimental literature

🙂

I’ve decided to dip back into this topic from earlier in the year. I’ve learned my source for it, the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, has an ebook version, so that’s what I’m listening to now. It’ll be a while till I dedicate a month to updating my link list, but I may add a topic here and there if I feel like a break from my official projects. For now my goal is to hear the whole book so I’ll have a better sense of the context of each author and work.

Video

🙂

Sunday Jeremy and I finally went to see Spider-Man: Far from Home, which was actually an extended cut. I wasn’t expecting such a political theme, though I think it was subtle unless you’ve been paying attention to political commentary, at least on the left, but I found it very timely, very relevant to my epistemological interests, and even a little distressing. Also distressing was the uncertainty over the future of the Spider-Man movies, since Sony (in charge of Spider-Man) and Disney (in charge of Marvel Studios) had a contract dispute that meant Spider-Man was being pulled out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I saw an entertaining discussion of some creative ideas for bringing him back into the series, but later in the week it turned out no narrative cleverness will be needed, because Sony and Disney resolved things so he could stay in the MCU for a few more movies.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Experimental literature, Movies, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote 9/22/2019

Posted on September 26, 2019 by Andy

Work

🙄

I thought I was over my work hump, but I was mistaken, and the piles of ebooks are continuing for a few more weeks. I have ideas for making them more manageable in the future, partly by reworking my ebook production procedure and partly by reworking certain features of our ebook production tools. But I can’t really do that till I’m out from under these piles, so I’ll have to be patient. The workload does interfere a bit with my projects, but maybe I can use it as an opportunity to tighten up my time management.

Conceptual modeling

🙂 (for the Munzner book)

I listened to some Gestalt psychology articles, but they were only marginally helpful for my current project on infographic design, so I didn’t feel too bad that I didn’t get around to taking notes. I’ve moved on to the main event, working through large parts of Tamara Munzner’s Visualization Analysis and Design. Since work has been taking up project time and I haven’t been managing my time well anyway, I’m going to give myself another month on this project, because this one is important and I don’t want to wait several more months to have truly usable results.

Futurism

🙂

I found Dale Carrico, a critic of some of the futurists I follow, which makes me happy, because I learn a lot from watching opposing ideas clash. Here’s an index of his blog posts on ideas and figures in the “superlative futurology” camp. It’ll take me a while to get through all that, especially since he writes in such a dense, academic style, but if you want a peek at his views in a more conversational style, here’s a video of his interview on radio show The Zero Hour.

Music

😎

I’ve been looking for a new music genre to listen to, and I’ve landed on a mix of lo-fi chillhop and synthwave/chillwave. Lo-fi is very popular right now, especially this video, and here’s an interesting article on its history and future. Here’s a chillwave playlist on YouTube I’ve been listening to, and here’s another one on Spotify. Driving with chillwave makes me want to add colored lights to the inside of my car so I can feel like I’m living in the retrofuture (seriously!), and I might install something like these AUXITO LED strips (demo video), if it’s legal in Illinois, though really I’d want a setup that gives me multiple colors at once.

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