Of Two Minds – What Collapsed the Middle Class?
— Read on www.oftwominds.com/blogfeb21/collapsed-middle-class2-21.html

A succinct summary.

Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation

(from Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Ministry for the Future”, 2021

Google Cardboard is still open source, but Google is done with the project.
— Read on arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/googles-vr-dreams-are-dead-google-cardboard-is-no-longer-for-sale/

My friend Douglas and my son Ian both noted how Google has a tendency to drop things before they’re complete systems. Oh well. Sayonara, google cardboard.

Overview of the Power Fx language
— Read on docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/power-fx/overview

Years ago, I thought about a language I’d like to build for music based on some ideas I’d had using HMSL’s “Action Table”.  Things in the language would be collections of properties, nothing more, and the values of any of the properties might depend on other properties.  Properties might include things like “density”, or “scariness”, or “lightness”.  Some properties might be objective things like “current time”, “last MIDI note played”, “number of people in the room”.  A piece would be a network of bundles of properties.

It occurs to me that this is a bit like the mental model of a patchable synthesizer: various circuits are entities with collections of properties, properties are patched into other properties, the whole thing is “live” all the time.  This is the pd/Max idea without the GUI elements.

Power FX (weird name) is a declarative, interpreted language that implements this idea.  They have incorporated the standard GUI widgets, database and other business-useful entities.  I wonder how hard it would be to add things that operate on physical musical entities, like MIDI, OSC, …

Today I had a phone screen with a Microsoft manager who works on the HoloLens. A fun looking project, and I find that I wish I’d thought to tell him about my former life as a maker of musical instruments and pieces, since it seems so in line with what they’re making. And told him of work with Brickell and Cagent, and how Microsoft had bought the latter twenty years ago. Strange. I find I quite want this job. And I’m a little impressed with myself over some of the things I’ve built. And maybe I want to build some more. That’d be a relief.

So, I’m a little confused. I’m applying for citizenship, and as part of that process I will have to answer 10 questions that may include ones about the US system of government. I have duly studied, and to the question “what is the function of the Supreme Court”, one of the accepted answers is “to determine whether or not an action is constitutional”.

We are in the process of impeaching the last president, and this constitutionality question has come up: can you impeach a President who is no longer in office? However, it appears that this question was not decided by the Supreme Court, but by a simple vote in the Senate.

I’m confused. Is the Senate not itself conforming to the Constitution in this case? What am I supposed to tell he examiner?

“A person is only whole when their heart is broken”

from the Zohar, the classic medieval work of Jewish mysticism, via Dr. Susannah Heschel

Attacking the U.S. Capitol is not an act of patriotism. Obviously.
— Read on www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/worst-revolution-ever/617623/

Wow. A clear-eyed look at the “insurrectionists” everyone’s been wringing their hands over for a week.

This year I edited another book, worked on fascinating projects at Fluxx, and learned many learnings. I’m co-hosting an event on 14th December, and you’re welcome to join me: Fluxx Talks: How…
— Read on medium.com/fluxx-studio-notes/52-things-i-learned-in-2020-6a380692dbb8

These are interesting things. Fluxx sounds like an interesting place.

Nice turn of phrase. Captures where I’m at.