island94.org

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

At present we’re snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there’s no rational format for an understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts—thin art—because there’s very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

The following precedes the former, but if I put it in order the people who care about technology will stop reading when they hit romance (you know who you are!) and vice versa (same!) and the people who can grok both won’t care either way (yeah!):

In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature’s order which was as yet unknown. Now it’s time to further an understanding of nature’s order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s consciousness are a part of nature’s order too. The central part.

…

The time for a real unification of art and technology is really long overdue.

So go make something lovely (that’s for the people who can grok both; the rest of you are grousing).

Visiting Western Massachussetts this weekend—Angelina sang at Tanglewood—we visited the Norman Rockwell Museum. It was beautiful in the Berkshires and while I can’t speak to the comprehensiveness of the collection, it was just what I wanted. Norman Rockwell is one of my favorite americana motifs to wallow in.

At the museum’s center was the Four Freedoms paintings. The feeling I had from reading that speech in high school—and the Port Huron Statement in college—is one of my most comforting whenever I get bogged in the cynicism of politics: that the current state of affairs (whatever they may be) is not for lack of dreams.

When looking at the paintings, I had to remind myself of the false appeal I hear to better times. As I learned from the museum, much of what I consider fantasy was that—the policy during the Great Depression was to avoid grim reality—or the lack of color among faces—the policy of the Saturday Evening Post was to only show african-americans if they were performing a service job.

As a tool, the drawings make a powerful message for equality and pluralism: Isn’t this wonderful? Shouldn’t have this idyllic life. This shouldn’t be an America reserved for just one race or class. Which brings up what all this harkens too—and ironically in this context, I am least moved by the I have a dream part—is that these paintings are the promissory notes of which all should be able to cash.

Borderland download

• Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith release

In my Boston University Institute for Nonprofit Management and Leadership program, we always get up to the edge of talking about the interplay between resource development and need, but then it always seems to drift away. So this is my contribution: if you swing too far towards either (ignoring the other), you’re toast.

And for the record, available resources and community need are external to your organization. Also, my art is lousy. And if you find this interesting, you should read my previous post on Community Engagement.

I’ve recently been collecting examples of whale art. My interest mostly lies around their monotonous use in hipster art; and they’re kind’ve cute. I put up on Flickr a gallery of whale archetypes.

Left-to-right and top-to-bottom, the whales are named: Billy, Gus, Tina, Sal, Sanjay, Perth, Jill, Buddy, and Ann. Some of them may be familiar to you.

Update: this functionality can now be achieved with the iTweak_upload module . Thanks to Damon for the tip!

I made a custom override for Drupal 6.x’s Upload.module’s attachments table that is displayed at the bottom of a node when you create file attachments. That table is, in my opinion, one of the ugliest common and default presentations in Drupal core. Below is an example of the before and after:

To use it, unzip and drop the included folder into your active theme’s directory (e.g. /sites/default/all/garland), it should take effect without any other modifications—though you may have to reset the theme cache (goto admin/build/themes and click save without making any other changes).

Click Here to Download (shiny_upload.zip)

Also, I don’t know what the name is for these types of theme overrides: it’s not a module, and it’s not a whole theme. I posted this to a Drupal Group that, I think, calls them “Themer Packs“.

The icon code is based on the CCK filefield module—but the current 6.0 version is kind’ve clunky and I wanted to port it to the core Upload module. The namespace is “shiny_upload”.

Also, as an aside, the reason island94.org doesn’t currently have this enabled is because it’s still running on Drupal 5.x branch

Thought I should (tardily) follow up considering my Nonprofit Technology Sandwich was featured on LOLnptech.org

Today I was helping a work-study student down the hall from my office on a film studies essay. Her assignment was to analyze what critics had to say on Woody Allen, specifically whether his films were comedies or dramas.

She had only read one of three critics (Carney) but it was interesting to map out with her what her finished assignment would look like; she was (as was typical of my undergraduate experience) unsure of what the final product would look like, other than a page count (12-15). I gave her my best idea I could of what I would expect:

Coming up with a thesis, even as simple as “Many critics disagree as to whether Woody Allen’s films are comedic or dramatic.”

The Believer buy

Then deconstruct and explain those elements in a logical fashion:

1. Who is Woody Allen, what are his films and why do we care enough to write 12-15 pages on what other people think of him.
2. Who are the said critics, what are their backgrounds and how may that affect their opinions (which we still aren’t sure we care about)?
3. What defines a comedy or drama? Can they agree on that?(nope)
4. What are they using to apply these definitions to? (the scenes). Describe and deconstruct.
5. Restate what is now obvious (the thesis)
6. Conclude with why all this is important? —this was my response to her confusion with the teacher asking for a personal reflection

I thought it was interesting how that one critic strongly seems to use fantasy (I only scanned the first few pages) to define a comedy. And that Woody Allen is masterful at creating squirmy, deep situations, and ending them prematurely before any sort of conclusion can be made (the non-dramatic part).

The hard drive on my two-month-old MacBook up and kicked the bucket and the whole darn thing is at the shop. So this week’s comic is done with a borrowed Sharpie and some watercolor paints I found on trash-day.

7-10 days they say. 7-10 days…

While in New York a few weekends ago I visited the Solar Powered Arts Festival at the encouragement of a local techy and all around good guy Jacob. He and the ever smiling Diana met me at Stuyvesant Cove Park on Sunday afternoon, both of them having used pedal power to get up there from Brooklyn; I took the metro.

There was a lot of really cool artisans and builders out. From the friendly woman who paints bicycle portraits to the kooky guy setting alight aluminum and lye (the combination creates hydrogen gas) and giving away plans for sterling engines. A stage was powered entirely by solar panels where local musicians were jamming. Also, the Children’s Zoo had a couple of snakes and monarch butterflies out for people to touch and their keepers, of course, who you couldn’t.

I had a good time photographing the two “structures” the organizers had built: the first built out of cardboard tubing, the other a pile of tires. The tubing was a mish mash of concrete-piling-forms connected together with “a couple thousand bolts”; this from the guy further reinforcing it further with nails pounded in by the side of his wrench “to fill time”. It was throwing some crazy shadows. The tires were just a bunch of tires piled up with plants in them; it was a nice juxtaposition of green and black.