roasted tomato on polenta @ 12:59 pm

The leadership training program I'm in is all about practicing listening and sharing. One thing that means is that I have a lot of time built in to my schedule over the next few months for talking to people on the phone. So if you're one of those people who means to keep in touch but you never quite get around to it, or otherwise think "Hey, I should talk to Kevin more often," leave a comment here. Make sure I have your phone number. And I'll give you a call sometime.

Comments screened by default so your phone numbers are not publicly revealed.

lentil nut loaf @ 04:18 pm

Here are some quotable bits from No More Throw-Away People, the book by "the Time Bank guy" Edgar S. Cahn:

On what work is rewarded by the market:

If we accept the market definition of work, there are a few minor omissions worth noting. Work does not include: raising children, taking care of one's elder parents, keeping one's family functioning, being a good neighbor, or being a good citizen. So work includes everything -- except family, community and democracy. Some of us think those are rather important.

On assigning high value to scarce things:

[Money] can never adequately value certain activities until they become truly scarce: caring, learning, imparting values, sharing, neighboring, socializing, helping others.

On social aspects as economic externalities:

Healthy families, neighborhoods, communities, and civic society are the social equivalent of clean air and clean water.

fudgemallow bars @ 04:38 am

Oh, geez, this is why you people do caffeine, isn't it.

Not this lying-awake-in-bed-for-hours. No, that's one of the reasons why I generally avoid the stuff. But the quality and clarity of thought, as opposed to the mumble-mumble-don't-ask-me-to-think I spend much of my days in.

So, one of the things this leads me to think about is why I'm so resistant to adopt caffeine and some of the other socially acceptable psycholubricants. It's certainly not because I think I'm perfect as I am, thankyouverymuch. I'm all too willing to believe that my mindbody needs some outside support. If you tell me I need to stand on my head, or spend energy running in circles, or ingest a few extra grams of some amino acid, all in order to perform a little "better" in some respect, I'll eagerly accept that idea. And a hack that allows real-time monitoring (and perhaps regulation) of my biochemistry or endocrine system is at the top of my Christmas list.

Really, I think what stops me is my fear of addiction, of not being able to manage it. I mean, I know what a poor job I do of managing my electronic-stimulus addition, and a chemical addiction seems like an invitation to disaster. And there's my perfectionist belief that anything that has this sort of decreasingly-effective negative feedback loop, where you need higher and higher levels of stimulus over time to achieve the same result, must not be the right answer for shifting what I would like to be a baseline state.

Although, some of what I know of biochemistry says that's the way all stimulus works, so I'm not entirely sure on what grounds I'm holding out hope for some other model.

Shifting subjects slightly, it's often true that my thoughts are freest when I'm heading off to sleep. Part of it is that the fact that I'm going to sleep means that I'm freed from the consequence of my thoughts. I have really good reasons for not getting up and following through with them. It's the middle of the night, I can't call them at this hour, now that I'm in bed I should get some sleep instead, etc. It's also one of the few times that I'm both a) unplugged and b) not preoccupied (dominated) with the feeling that I'm supposed to be doing something else.

But, speaking of heading off to sleep, I've finished my drink now. The ginger may not be exactly calming but it should at least help with that uncomfortable too-much-candy-before-bed feeling. And I really would like to get some sleep tonight.

A word I learned from reddit this evening: anhedonia.

Tuxedos chocolate sandwich cookies @ 03:59 am

The questions I come up with at 4 am in the middle of a heat wave:

If you take an average of the temperatures of each point on the surface of the Earth, to what extent does it fluctuate? (Over human timescales, not geologic ones.) Does it tend to balance out, i.e. if it's hot here, is there typically cold in other places to smooth it out? I mean, on a day-to-day basis, does heat mostly move around the planet, or is it more about atmospheric conditions that change how much heat is absorbed, reflected, or radiated from the planet?

I guess now that I think about it, it's probably the latter.

Man, of all the things I could write about, what you get is entirely ignorant ramblings about the weather. Well, there you go. Stay cool out there.

And while I'm being profound, here's another tip: Despite the implications piped over the store's public address system, these Safeway brand junk food cookies are not as tasty as the Paul Newman brand junk food cookies of similar appearance. I can probably assume they're equally bad for me, though.

little big cookie shake @ 11:06 pm

I've been spending a lot of my attention on alternative currencies lately, driven by an interest in the Portland Timebank community and partners. I've been in some discussions lately about different directions the timebank might develop in, and some of these conversations have succeeded in challenging enough of my assumptions about economies that I've concluded I have no idea how it works right now.¹

I've been holding off asking this question, because it feels like a sort of novice "rtfm n00b" question, but I haven't read the manual yet and at this point it's worth writing down just to get out of my head. And after talking it over with stereotype441 at dinner the other night, I think I can articulate it well enough to do so.

A time bank is a type of "mutual credit" currency. If I'm selling you a bike tune-up service, when I tune up your bike a credit is debited from your account and added to my account. All the accounts in the system sum to zero, and nobody has to worry about who is issuing the currency and if they're issuing too much of it or what have you. (Or so the story goes.)

A natural consequence of this is that there will always be accounts with a negative balance. That's fine, a negative balance in this system is expressed as a "commitment" to provide that value in the future. But if I keep using the rules I understand from participating in the $USD economy, things don't make much sense.

The rules I have, in my old "money is an asset I have" mindset, go something like this:

• As a consumer (buyer), I want to acquire as many goods and services as I can with the resources that are available to me. I will probably never reach a state where my appetite for all goods and services is sated. I will stop only when I run out money.
• As a producer (seller), I want to do as much business as possible. Maybe because I love what I do, probably because it's profitable and I want to increase the size of my pile of money, but as long as a customer's money is good so that doing business doesn't incur a loss for me, I'll do business with them.

But when I run with those rules in an economy where the buyer doesn't stop when he hits $0, I get a situation where the buyer never stops buying and the seller never stops selling. Any exchange-for-currency is available at any time, which leads me to wonder why anyone's bothering to do any accounting at all.

So, clearly, I've talked myself into a ridiculous state here. What are the components I've left out that make this accounting structure useful?

Like I said, I expect the answer is RTFM. My reading list currently contains No More Throw-Away People (Cahn), Economics in One Lesson (Hazlitt), The Creature from Jekyll Island (Griffin), The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (Greco), and Making Money (Pratchett).² Suggestions for additions or prioritization are quite welcome.

Footnotes:

1. Having no idea about it works is not a bad result of those conversations. Which is to say, it is a much better state than having an equivalent amount of knowledge but being under the impression that I do know how it works.
2. Okay, the Pratchett book is just for fun, but the fantastically titled The Creature from Jekyll Island is entirely serious.

ginger cheesecake @ 01:11 am

A really geeky thing I am writing down for reference:

Oh, and on the subject of geeky things in Ubuntu Jaunty: I clicked on the display properties applet in my panel, it said something about not working with my driver but it would launch the vendor's (NVidia's) tool instead, and there, under GPU 0/DFP-1, there is a selector for "GPU Scaling Method," that makes it so fullscreen apps written for the 4:3 aspect ratio don't get stretched out on my 16:10 monitor. Neat! I've been looking for a toggle for that for a while now.

carrot soup @ 07:34 pm

I've just read the first chapter of Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming our Schools. It's written by the Change Leadership Group at Harvard.

One of the things that stood out for me in this chapter is where they're making the case for not "reform" in education but "reinvention."

America's system of public education, especially at the secondary level, was deliberately designed as a sorting machine. The industrial economy of the twentieth century needed only a very small number of college-educated citizens. It wasn't until the 1950s that half our students received a high school diploma. [...] Throughout the twentieth century, students who dropped out of high school were able to seek and hold good, stable jobs that paid a middle-class wage.

[...] In fact, we have never educated all, or even most, students to the standard of "college-ready." It is not as if educators were doing this in earlier decades and then forgot how. The system has not "failed." It was designed perfectly to produce the results it needed, and attained.

There's some historical context that I didn't have. Pretty much the only history I've looked at in my recent advocacy for public education is that around the time of my own experience in the '90s, which we talk about primarily as "school funding in Oregon has been cut every year since then." But I haven't really had a conversation with anybody about the design of the current system, or the expectations that were in place at the time.

So the author's contention is that the currently prevailing attitude is something along the lines of: we take the current system, add some accountability measures in the form of reading and math tests or what have you, make the numbers go up, and then the young people of our nation will once again have the skills necessary to thrive in today's global economy. But they say that this is not a winning strategy, that schools are by and large operating in an obsolete system. They make an analogy with the typewriter. Reform a typewriter, and you get the electric typewriter. They're calling for not a reformed typewriter, but the personal computer.

I'm not quite sure how long I'll stick with this book, as its intended audience is quite clearly those who are currently in a position of leadership with the staff of a school or school district, but it also seems like good reading for the "what I want to be when I grow up" category. On that note, the author biographies say that one of the authors lives in Portland. One who isn't a superintendent or director or fellow at Harvard. That sounds like someone I want to talk to about what I want to be when I grow up. I'll try to contact her through the CLG, but because Portland is small, I ask: Can you introduce me to Harriette Thurber Rasmussen?

grilled cheese and tomato soup @ 12:48 am

Uh, which of you, or which three of you, were just looking for the web service that does this?

I have _____
category [ Skill or service / Item / Space or resource ]
asking ______
(you can set an asking price or a preferred barter item)
[ ] This is only available to my trusted neighbors

Examples:

• Skills and services, like: Salsa dancing lessons, carpentry, accounting
• Spaces and resources, like: board room, backyard patio, lawn garden
• Items, like: books, tools, paint, seeds

That's the inventory sharing interface at Bright Neighbor.

toast and more toast @ 03:41 pm

Okay, I must be getting old, because I need to ask you to explain an online communication thing to me: What is the deal with the Facebook wall? Why do people try to start conversations there instead of sending me a message? Wall posts are not threaded and the audience doesn't seem to match and I don't get it.

I guess I sort of understand the wall as a space for "happy birthday" and "hey come to the show tonight", as there are some messages that you actually want to make in a public forum, but ... okay I'm just going to stop talking now and let you tell me how this works.

Almond butter and berry jelly @ 01:59 pm

Here's one thing I don't really get about keeping dogs as housepets: They don't read, write, knit, talk on the phone, or play World of Warcraft. What does a dog in a single-dog household do all day? A cat goes where it pleases, but here in the city a dog can't really go out on its own.

She was pretty upset at first when everyone she knew left her here, but she calmed down after a little while. Now she just seems more bored than anything else. She lies here, with the occasional heavy sigh, looking at the door, sometimes drifting off to daydream. Then a car door slams or the mailman comes and she wakes up and whines a little more...

The only thing she seems really happy about is the prospect of going out, but we're not going to be able to go on walks all day.