Can Raspberry Pi Save Civilization?

Last night I bought a book because 2 nights ago, I bought a computer.

I'm a big spender. I know.

The computer is a little bit cheaper than the first one I bought in 1980 that ran CP/M and booted from floppy disks. It's called the Raspberry Pi and I laid less than $40 for it. I paid half that for the book.

Reading the foreword of the book made me worried. The author described the state of the kids he's seeing entering college nowadays and how they differ from the kids entering college a decade or two ago. He lamented the fact that kids nowadays don't know much about programming.

I'm not being a cranky old man when I sympathize with him, because I learned to use a slide rule and the micro-computer revolution happened after I'd safely graduated from college. But get off my lawn anyway.

Seems that in the last decade or so, kids interact with computers that nobody can program except Microsoft or SONY or whoever the manufacturer is. Look in your pocket right now and you may find a smart phone that has a lot more computing power than ever flew during the Apollo program. But have you ever tried to write a program on it? Of course not. It's a phone, not a computer. Same goes for your Kindle, your Nook, your iPad, or a half-dozen other computer-powered devices you commonly use.

These things are locked down and you don't have the desire to open the hood and fiddle with the stuff inside. And big corporations spend money and hire lawyers to discourage you from doing that, too.

Is this right or wrong? I won't say here, because the point I want to make here is that the sociological change this makes on our society is to regard technology as a black box. If a kid can fiddle with the things at the edges of that black box, s/he may think s/he is a programmer when there's an ocean of knowledge s/he's ignorant of.

The Raspberry Pi guys decided to change that and have brought out a cheap, open computer running free, open source software. There's nothing in the hardware or the software that someone can't get at and start messing with. Instead of coming in an enclosure with tamper-resistant screws and a warranty that's void if you open it up, the Raspberry Pi has no enclosure. It is just a circuit board you plug things into.

The cool thing is that for half the cost of a pair of Adidas sneakers, a kid can start experimenting with a real, live computer. When I was a kid all you could get for that kid of money was a dozen relays that's make clicking sounds. Lame.

When I got out of college a kid's parents could spend a lot more money for a computer that would play Pong. This Raspberry Pi has all the multimedia functions you'd find in an Arcade video game, and it'll stream HD movies or music from the Internet to your TV. And all the software that makes it work comes with source code. That means kids can learn to change it to do what THEY want it to.

Will they?

Most won't, but a few will. And those few will have a head start on becoming the next generation of technologists. I hope they will be enough.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

#29    Read your stuff aloud at least once

Sometimes a surplus of sibilants sneaks into sentences. Or an annoying alliteration afflicts your prose. The words you type have sounds to them that may not be apparent to you when you compose them. The process of speaking the words aloud gives you the chance to hear unfortunate combinations of sounds that can prove a distraction to your readers.
You are more familiar with your words than your readers are. You know both what you put onto paper, and also what you did not--the stuff you considered putting onto paper, but decided against. This can get into your way in a few ways.

For one thing, you can devise a sentence that is perfectly clear, albeit complicated. And thus the sentence goes on and on treading down one rabbit trail and up another. In your head, all the pauses are perfect and the delineation between clauses are clear. Trouble is that the sentence is too long and complicated to be grasped as a whole by someone who does not already know what the sentence intends to mean.

When you read such a sentence aloud, you'll find yourself stumbling over words. This is a clue. Or you'll find yourself out of breath before you're halfway through it. Or you'll botch the phrasing and pause someplace mid-clause. These are also clues. Simplify that sentence.

When you're writing your attention may wander or distractions may cause a word or punctuation to go missing. Likewise, your sense of grammatical correctness may nod off momentarily. Reading your prose aloud will bring these omissions to light.

Likewise, when you're editing your work, your eye may skip past typos. You are more familiar with your work than anyone in the world, and your eye can slide over niggling details. When reading aloud your tongue, which moves much more slowly, will trip over them.

There are text-to-speech programs out there. I've never tried using them to vet my prose, but I think it would be an interesting experiment. If anyone reading this has ever performed an experiment like this, please let me know whether it worked as well as reading it aloud yourself.

Rich People Can Be Stupid

One of the things about the local ArtPrize competition this year is that they open up the Grand Rapids Art Museum for free. It's a beautiful facility, but it gets too crowded during ArtPrize. Since I wanted to avoid the crowds, I went into the regular art museum's non-ArtPrize floors. What I saw was remarkable.

Remarkably bad.

It's my opinion that beauty inheres within the object. This is a minority opinion, because we see lots of cases where one person regards something as beautiful when another regards it as ugly. My reply to this is that tastes need to be cultivated. When I was a child I thought coffee tasted horrid, and Tabasco was painful. As I grew older, I acquired a more sophisticated palette. If beauty inheres within the object and tastes are subject to cultivation, then a wise individual will try to cultivate virtuous tastes and eschew vicious ones. That doesn't happen much in today's society.

Instead rich guys of dubious taste hire art experts. These art experts proceed to curate art collections and to acquire pieces that will enhance the reputation of the collection. It's all a matter of reputation and unlike the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes, there's no little boy to point out the ridiculous.

Thus I went through the collection at the Grand Rapids Art Museum marveling at the pieces that had been donated by this rich guy or that rich guy. "You paid good money for that?" I thought. "Stupid."

That's the subversive threat of ArtPrize. People can see a hundred times more art in a few weeks than they'd otherwise see in years. Anyone can enter anything and quite frankly, a lot of stuff is put out that should be tacked to the refrigerator. Yet, there's a lot of beauty on display and the public is more inclined to vote for beauty than for ugliness.

Once you get an eyeful of ArtPrize entries, you can look at the high art in the museum and I for one have found it woefully lacking. The experts are caught in a groupthink where they only listen to similarly credentialed experts. And because they're experts, rich guys take them seriously.

And that's how Rich People Can Be Stupid.

Show and Tell Is The Game I Play

 #27 Show, don’t tell. Depict sensa to the reader and let him/her interpret it.

The advice "Show, don't tell" is one of the first things you'll hear when you start talking to folks about writing. OK, let's unpack what that means.

Reality presents itself to human observers through the five senses. Each of those senses work a little differently with each individual. My eyesight is better than my wife's and it's not as good as it was when I was a kid. And I can hear better from one ear than another. Sensa are the sum total of everything that comes to the observer through the five senses.

After sensa are presented to the observer the mind interprets it. Interpretation is where we decide what sensa means, and where we contextualize and link sensa to every other concept in the mind. Interpretation does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs in the sum total of the observer's experiences. The woodsman who's spent decades in the forest stalking game will interpret bent blades of grass and disturbed soil. He'll interpret these things differently than a city-dweller who might be completely oblivious to the significance of the same sensa.

We continuously encounter more sensa than will ever fit on the printed page. The job of the writer includes figuring out all the sensa in a scene and deciding which of them s/he can record in prose. When I write anything, I have in mind a point of view character. If that POV character is a city slicker, s/he will be oblivious to bent blades of grass or disturbed soil. Conversely, a woodsman will notice such things.

I think that the POV character can provide a little interpretation for the reader, but not much. The woodsman can read the signs and tell the reader they are fresh bear tracks. Of course, if the reader is an expert woodsman, he may not appreciate being told the obvious. Your reader's expertise will determine what's obvious and what's not. If you interpret the obvious parts of a scene for the reader it can be like pre-chewing someone else's food. Unappetizing.

You have to trust your readers to take the prose you put before them and come to understand what's going on.

#28 Show, don’t tell. Witness, do not preach.

I am a Christian, and an Evangelical to boot. Part of my religious background includes an emphasis on communicating the content of my faith. Evangelicals are encouraged to witness to non-believers. Sadly, this does not happen very often. Instead, a lot of my zealous coreligionists preach too much. And this is a mistake.

When you witness in a court of law, you describe what you've actually experienced. If that experience is of a religious nature, your interlocutor may deny your sermon more easily than your experience.

The same goes for your writing.

When you write about some element of your story--a girl for instance--you can say she's beautiful, or intelligent. But these are summary statements. It's better to describe the shape of her face, her eyes, lips, complexion...all of the things your POV character would sense that contribute to an impression of beauty. Likewise, an intelligent girl will use bigger words, solve mathematical problems, or do other things smart folk do.


You may have some deep insight into the way the world works. There are certain facts that brought you to this insight. Trot them out in the sequence that will lead your reader to the same conclusion.

But you can't be heavy-handed about it or you'll come off as propaganda.

Only Commies like propaganda.

How To Risk Amish Wrath

There's one sure thing about religion and that is that whatever you believe someone else believes to the contrary. Even if you say reason is reasonable use to reason about deity in an interfaith dialog, someone else may respond by setting fires and killing people.

This presents the writer with a problem of avoiding the giving of offense when s/he writes about religion. I'm happy to state that no Amish Fatwa has been issued pursuant to blogging about the Strategic Amish Reserve. My head rests easily on my pillow knowing that no Amish fanatic with a name like Yoder or Miller will try to behead me.

One strategy for avoiding offense is to refer to deity in the only vaguest, non-sectarian terms. This is what US media did in the early 1960s and this offended my mother whose religion was neither vague nor non-sectarian.

Another strategy is to avoid any religious motif whatsoever. This is the easiest approach and it's  worked well to a large extent. However, it has limitations.

I must confess that crime stories are a guilty pleasure. Or stories that revolve around prior bad acts and their consequences. The detective story is in one sense a puzzle story where the reader is to ascertain whodunnit or how to prove whodunnit, but in another sense the detective story is a depiction of a cosmic imbalance of justice that requires the detective's sleuthing to restore to balance.

Humans do bad things to each other and life goes on (except for murder victims). The badness of a bad act depends upon the malice of the perpetrator, the act itself, and the pain of the victim. And bad acts range from mere annoyance to soul-destroying injuries. There is a lot of this going on in the world and there are a lot of interesting stories that can be built around bad acts. Not all of these stories need to be about mass murderers.

I recently saw a movie that hinged upon an inciting incident of rude words spoken to and then coffee being thrown on a girl. A boy (one of the regulars at the coffee shop where she works) comes to her aid and he treats her kindly. As the story progresses a mystery begins to emerge as to why he's doing all the kind things.

The girl had been bullied as a schoolchild. He had joined in and now he is doing these things to atone for his prior bad acts. The climax of the story occurs when the boy discloses this. The girl is furious and despite his sincere apology and the penance he has paid her. The story then turns on her reluctance to forgive him. Her resistance to forgive is justified. Few injuries hurt as much as those inflicted in childhood by classmates.

None of the this rises above the level of misdemeanor, but the girl's pain is real and her grievances are real in the story. The story works better because the hurts are small enough to be personalized. The reader can more easily identify.

Forgiving the boy is the key to the girl's future happiness. At this point, a Christian propaganda movie would start hitting the audience over the head with the Savior's parable of the two debtors. Happily, that is not necessary, because the way the story works out is just one person offering his apologies and one person accepting them.

That's what any society needs and that's what each person needs to know.

In another movie--a black comedy--the girl marries an abusive, violent man and she causes a hunting accident. And then she marries another man who turns out to be a heroin addict and she overdoses him. And then she marries another who is a wife-beater and she buries him alive. And this goes on and on through six different husbands... the last of which is a poisoner who's trying to kill her. In each case, the viewer can appreciate her motivation and may even think her actions justified.

Anyone who's survived the honeymoon can understand the temptation to do in one's spouse. This made the movie work. I kept watching mainly to find out the next spouse's flaw and the next spouse's cause of death. It was interesting to watch the girl change as the weight of her crimes grew heavier and heavier. After she's faked her own suicide on the eve of her seventh marriage she appears to be literally bloodthirsty.

And then in the last scene they pulled the rug out from under me.

Murder is not one of those things where you can apologize and people say OK. The person who might accept your apology is DEAD. Society takes a dim view on murder. The weight of guilt--not subjective guilt, but objective guilt--associated with murder is more than a human can bear. How can you end a movie about a serial murderess that the viewer sympathizes with and give it a satisfactory ending?

I was shocked when I learned that her 7th husband is the second person of the Christian Trinity. If you're not familiar with Catholic nuns, you won't know they "marry" Christ. And when Priyanka Chopra says she'll drink his blood, she refers to the Catholic notion of transubstantiation wherein wine becomes Christ's blood, and bread becomes Christ's flesh. (It only seemed that I used "literally" incorrectly.) As a nun she'll do more good for society than rotting in prison. And nobody gets off "scott-free" because her sins are paid for by Christ on the cross.

Nobody in their right mind would ever confuse this movie with a Christian tract. Yet it shows in a very sly, perhaps unintentional, manner the essence of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness.

That's the best way to put religion into a story.

Don't preach. Just show how parts of the religion work.

A Taxonomy of ArtPrize Venues

If you don't know what ArtPrize is, you're not from Grand Rapids, MI or you've been in a cave for a few years. You can read the details here. Last year I blogged about ArtPrize for the first time. I noted patterns in the ArtPrize entrants and presented A Taxonomy of ArtPrize Entries.

This year I noticed my prior taxonomy held up so well that I couldn't think of anything useful to add to it. I think you may someday see a rise of ArtPrize Hacks, but that's another story.

Instead, I noticed something about venues and how they differ. Some venues are absolutely amazing and others are less so.

Crowded and Possibly Overrated

There are venues at ArtPrize that are just a pain to deal with. My first impression of ArtPrize this year was the guard at the Fredrick Meijer Gardens telling me that photography was not permitted. OK, I won't vote for anyone at this venue. Besides, there wasn't one entry that I would have voted for, too. Pity.

I also made the mistake of going through the Grand Rapids Art Museum on the Saturday afternoon of ArtPrize. Big mistake. It had two monumental pencil sketches that looked cool, but not so cool that I want to brave the crowds for them. And besides, didn't we do monumental pencil sketches in earlier years?

Someday I'll blog about why Rich People Are Stupid. But that's for another day.

Unserious

I walked into Brann's on Leonard and looked around. There was some kid's project where he'd glued Tootsie Roll Pop labels to a bit of poster board in a pleasing pattern. That's nice. "Anything else here?" I asked the manager. "No."

A lot of downtown watering holes have a few items they put up and I'm glad they do, but I wish some of them would take it more seriously. It irritated me when venues weren't open when everyone else was, or had closed early.

It's really nice when a venue has arrows directing people to the art. If they do a good job of making non-customers like me feel comfortable and welcome, I'll be more likely to come back as a customer the next time I'm hungry or thirsty.

Last year Coit Elementary school had this marvelous 3-story high painting that I mentioned. Sadly, Coit Elementary has only two entrants.

Confused

If you're an "art expert" you'll say the old museum, Site:Lab is a great venue. OK. It's confusing, because it's hard to know where the detritus of the old museum ends and where the art begins. The site is across the street from a big church with a lot of art in it, too. By some odd coincidence there was an entry that from a distance appeared to be a church bulletin board.

Diamonds In The Rough
There are several churches that host a number of entries like City View and Monroe Community. They are pleasant spaces and have a surprising mix of good pieces, message pieces and refrigerator art. These venues generally lie beyond walking distance from downtown.

The best exemplar of this type of venue is Baker Tent Rental. The best part of Baker Tent is their "didn't get into ArtPrize" reception this Saturday that showcases artists who didn't make the ArtPrize cut. They plan to serve snacks to starving artists!

Lemons Into Lemonade
The recession has caused some large commercial office spaces to remain unrented and unfinished. One such is High Five. They've taken a huge open space on the fifth floor of an office building and filled it with art. They have benches set up in front of art that are made of boards resting on cinder blocks. They have large windows that allow people to see some of the huge installations in adjacent parking garage stairwells. Finally, they have a wonderful dynamic light sculpture using LEDs suspended from CAT5 Ethernet cables. The best part of this installation are the recliners that let me put up my weary feet. Good show guys.

In addition to having tough economic times High Five has a tough location. It's hard to find and easy to miss. So, they put up helpful signs leading to the elevator in the parking garage and hired a pleasant girl to welcome & direct visitors.

By all means get downtown and see ArtPrize.

What just happened? That just happened

#26     Alternate slow scenes and fast scenes.

A few years back the second Indiana Jones movie came out. He's in China and he gets shot at and he takes poison and he gets the antidote and he escapes on a plane and the plane is about to crash and he jumps out and he slides down the mountainside and and and...

I'm exhausted.

The story's first act had a relentless pace. In the words of my favorite Bluegrass band, "That just happened!" Because the first act was a dervish of spinning action the audience could not process what was transpiring.

Given the choice between two stories I'll take the one with too much action over the one with not-enough action. But this needs balance, too. Something has to happen in a story, or I'm going to toss it against the wall. I don't care if he is William Faulkner, he'd better do something in the story or I'm tossing it and it'll take an act of congress to get me to look at anything else by that author.

So, the writer must navigate between the Scylla of nonstop action and the Charybdis of inaction. In a fast-moving scene, there's no opportunity to explain the meaning of what is happening. In a slow-moving scene, nothing much is happening. So, it makes sense for the writer to alternate fast and slow scenes to introduce cool happenings and then to explain them.

If you are prone to wax rhapsodic with beautiful words, do so in your slow scenes between fast ones. The slow scenes let you woo the reader with chocolate and flowers, candlelight and soft music. Then use fast scenes to consummate the relationship with the reader. Then enjoy a cigarette and an afterglow in each others arms.

Too much of one and you bore the reader. Too much of the other and you wear her out. And she'll probably complain of a headache next time you want to sell her a story.

I've got to be careful here, because I don't want to give the impression that I think slow scenes are boring. They may not be exciting, but they can be incredibly interesting. If your story introduces some really wild ideas, slow scenes are where you want to play those cards. If your story includes the secret of life, the universe, and everything, let the reader savor it in a slow scene. (And I suppose that if you want to HIDE a little bit of foreshadowing, add it to some of the dust thrown up in a fast scene.)
 
When you see a guy exult when he shoots the charging water buffalo and then catch a bullet in his brain, the reasons for his intense happiness and the reasons for his wife's murderous act are much more interesting than the gunplay. Likewise, when you see the waiters tie butcher knives to a chair and pretend it's a bull fight, the anticipation of "this won't end well" is as satisfying as the actual unfolding of manslaughter.

Slow scenes and fast scenes are two sides of a coin. The slow scenes should establish the context of what happens and afterwards explain what happens, and the fast scenes is where something happens.