Oh man, carpal tunnel sucks. That along with lateral epicondylitis, is why I've gotten so little done. So, since I can't do useful stuff, I've been collecting linkspam...

• An interesting paper explaining why genetics and heritability are not the same thing (via the comments of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ horde );
• A fun post about an old book of household hints (because this is the sort of stuff so useful for would-be writers of (alternate) historical fiction;
• Another historical post via boing-boing, but what really got my attention were the other linkies to cool old documents at the bottom...oh my, what a treasure trove this site appears to be;

And, oh yeah, this fascinating article that explores the connection between the immune system and consciousness. —Summed up, your conscious perceptions have been scientifically documented to make physiological impacts...and vice versa.

Which basically suggests to me that, yes, physical problems—especially those that strongly affect whether I can work (especially artsy work) have a direct impact on mood.

Or put another way, not being able to work makes me depressed, and depression probably slows my recovery. What fun! I do sometimes feel, reading this articles, that there is some mindhack, just around the corner, that will let me figure out some better kluge than the one I do now...

Because of not being able to do much (just as an example, after testing the wrist by demo-ing 3—three!—beads yesterday, I woke up with pain, arghhh!!!) I watched my old edition of Pride&Prejudice. Then read up on it on wikipedia, not to mention Jane Austen herself...she died at a relatively young age, and going thru the wikipedia timeline, I noticed that towards the end of her life her household finances were precarious; and that she may have been suffering from a disease exacerbated by stress.

In other words, if her brothers hadn't lost a bunch of money, she might have lived longer, and written more books. (Also, people of that era, at least if they were part of Britain's gentry, didn't laugh, let alone do slapstick: emotions seemed to have been pretty constrained. This actually lines up with my knowledge of the books: if you think about it, Eliza's sly—and very understated—wit is pretty much as far as it goes, and even that is something of a rarity: only she and her father possess it. Jane, Darcy, Georgiana, and Bingley do not. Elinor and Maryanne don't, and Fanny actively despises wit.

Austen never received all that much fame and fortune for her books while she was alive, and reactions to Eliza's ‘pert’ manner resulted in less lively heroines in later books, which I thought a great pity. Oh, if only the author could have known what esteem Elizabeth Bennet's ‘lively manner’ would garner in the future!)

And what implications does this have for society? That, p'raps, the poor aren't poor because they're lazy; they're ‘lazy’ (depressed...?) because they're poor and in poor health! More and more, I think it vitally important that everyone have decent housing and nutritious food, and a reasonable way to make a living.

Anyway. I do have some flower pix. Cameras being set up for right-handed people means I can use ’em even when most other media are unavailable...so enjoy.

It's that time of year again, when the ubuntu folks roll out the new distro; which means the wizard upgraded the box I make these posts on; also thought I might like a new default browser, rekonq. Which is a kind and sweet thought, except I'm used to chrome, and what's more, all my bookmarks are on chrome, as well as my favorites, plus this cute little extension that allows me edit these pages using emacs.

—All that stuff: gone. And the wizard wonders why I hate change.

Among other things I was supposed to test were the various tools I use for making these webpages, and everything does appear to be working—bonus: lost all my ranty links, thus you're spared. Except this one for the three fen-created vulcan fonts which I remembered enough to find again. I originally stumbled across it via a clearinghouse for all sorts of fonts (which of course is buried in my chrome links, and that no doubt via some discussion on languagelog...) and I just think it is too cool. What the fen did was take set designers/artist renditions from the various movies/shows and then organize them into three quite different looking fonts that nevertheless do have a visual relationship to each other: formal, print and handwritten, more or less.

Pretty sweet! I love the formal calligraphic one, but then I'm all about spirals. Never let it be said I have no geek cred. Mebbe not a lot, but...some. Also, blue'n’purple flower pix labeled with scientific names, for the edification of f2tY's おとうさん/Otousan and yours truly.

Yesterday I didn't feel good, so I spent some time looking up quilting techniques. This is because the little bags I've been making are basically three-dimentional quilts, and my piecing sucks (fortunately the designs are pretty forgiving.) But I thought it might be useful to learn how to do it right, so I did a bit of research.

I think I'll probably want to check out this book on paper piecing. It does seem a bit counterintuitive to be stitching fabric to paper, or discarding half your triangles just so everything comes out ‘perfect’ (because you actually have to cut one to two thread widths, in much the way woodworkers must account for the width of sawblades—talk about precision!—to get properly sized pieces).

I mean, I thought the point of quilting was to use up scraps! (To be sure there are freestyle methods that do.) Anyway, speaking of using up odds and ends, I have a feeling today's bead probably had a fair bit of that as part of its design history.

So while I sat, zoned in front of the computer, waiting for aspirin to kick in, I stumbled across this post on women programmers in Open Source:

Work with scraps. I get anxious over wasting food or cloth or paper, so when I cook or sew or write stand-up comedy or poetry, I feel more comfortable working with scraps, with leftovers. When I am scribbling ideas for stand-up bits, I prefer to use textfiles that already have miscellaneous jottings in them, or little half-full notebooks, or odd-shaped scratch paper. No doubt my preference for pre-ruined materials reflects my perfectionism and anxiety over worth. I can be creative more easily if the materials were just going to go to waste anyway. I think the trick to addressing this mindset, in the long run, includes habits of deemphasizing and subtlety, tricking oneself into not making a big production out of any given attempt. I’m not good at that. But in the short term: scraps.

Substitute [fanfiction] for [comedy/poetry] and there you have my working methods in a nutshell. My best friend has no trouble using new materials, but has a difficulty spending time. I've always presumed that collage, mixed media, ephemera and the like came pretty much out of current culture's manufacturing capacity...how much of it is also from other people like the writer and myself, using “pre-ruined” (I love that phrase) materials as a mind-hack to free ourselves from Jay Smooth's little haters?

(Oddly enough, today's featured item is not made from scraps.) Happy May Day, everyone:)

Sorry about the lack of posting. Turns out when I'm bizzy bizzy bizzy making the art, I haven't got much time to post about it (as it is, this is something I dragged out of the queue...)

But I did think this quote was interesting, when I spotted it last week:

We got a fair amount of flak from students last time around who were frustrated when labs didn’t work like a recipe from a cookbook — yet that’s how science usually proceeds, with lots of tinkering and frustration and repetition.

I have vivid memories of labs not going well when I was in school. It took me a long time to internalize the importance of the journey, rather than merely copying/reproducing results. (Also, I got terribly dehydrated, and then sleepy and frustrated—for obvious reasons, they don't really want you consuming stuff in biology (let alone chemistry) labs. One of my profs suggested taking breaks during our 4-hour labs. I looked at him, owl-eyed. You could do that?)

But the real reason is that, frankly, art's much the same way, which is kind of the point of today's post, which documents a partial development of a new cane. (That is, there's isn't a fabulous recipe for the most gorgeous floral cane evah, merely me flailing around.) And I think, sometimes, that people get frustrated by all the fiddling around they have to do to get a design to look good. Hello, that's kind of the point, people!

In fact, I suspect it applies to nearly any human endeavor. f2tE has gotten into a new sport (to the point of packing on nearly 20 lbs of muscle in the last couple of months) and pointed to me to these Jillian Michaels ‘shred’ videos. The latest one is probably just about perfect—only 20 minutes long, not too many complicated moves, maximum workout—the culmination of years, I suspect, of experimentation on her part. I realized this when I watched a much older one. Too complicated, too easy to damage knees, ironically not as challenging as the streamlined version. Even her delivery had improved, in such a way that both drew the viewer in while better explaining why she (yes, this vid was addressed to women) should persist.

So. For all you wishing to know how I bumble my way through floral cane design, have at it.

So, today being a caturday, here's a fun comparison of a big black cat and little black cat which I happened to particularly appreciate for the slow motion photography of them jumping. There've also been these videos explaining how cats right themselves as they fall, with comments about their lack of collarbones giving them extra flexibility. So I dug out my Goldfinger*, and lo and behold, as far as I could tell, most if not all mammals traveling about on all-fours lack clavicles. (Bats have them; and birds’ wishbone is a fused version).

All of which would frankly not matter, except I wrote this kitty-cat novel in which one character admires another's clavicles. However, they're bipedal, so I'm gonna assume they acquired collarbones in much the way humans (or other apes?) did. (One presumes since my fantastical kitties also maintain their flexible spines that they probably have even more back pain than we do, there being a tradeoff between rigidity/strength and flexibility/susceptibility to strains.)

*Interestingly enough, the wikipedia article on cats claims they do possess a clavicle—it's just not attached to the breastbone (sternum), but just sort of is buried in their musculature. (It also claimed the flexible feline spine results from extra vertebrae.) What I found particularly intriguing is that this bone does not appear in Goldfinger's drawings—tch, tch, tch. Now, in the (much cheaper) Thompson (writing in 1895) he notes cats do have clavicles, and they have a visual impact on the animal's appearance (though he shows them only indirectly, with musculature. This book is also much better for information on feathers, with actual counts, not to mention nicely documented fur directional patterns, which doesn't appear in Goldfinger at all.) —According to Wikipedia, animals needing to rotate their forelimbs retain this feature. Cats climb, ergo, they need collarbones. (Cheetahs, btw, evidently don't have them—and can't climb.) You can see this for yourself, in housecats’ charming propensity for folding their forepaws in a crossed position in front of their bodies.

Dogs can't do this.

Also, neighborhood cats wander through my garden, helping to protect it from the numerous rodents that enjoy munching on it. So, yay cats. And flowers.

Ok, so all the (somewhat) upbeat stuff I've been collecting—a really cool (and organic) image of adobe houses, with the same sort-of-square beauty of fields on rolling land; a really nice drawstring bag tut (that nevertheless doesn't help me cuz I can't figure out how to make it small enough) —Guess I'll just have to (horrors!) shell $8 for the pattern to learn.

Also, while trolling the bbc site for more news on Boston, I stumbled upon this interesting article/podcast about the political protest origins of flameco, which are being revived as flameco flashmobs in banks. —Turns out, the pretty, sanitized flameco (that I didn't much care for) was originally the music of the marginalized Roma living in the Andalusian region, and their songs (in the original, undiluted form) have more than a passing similarity in feeling to my beloved delta blues.

Plus, I really like the idea of joyous, local (and creative!) protest in the form of dance.

And something weird's going on with Patheos, so I checked out Fred's old haunts to see if there was any info...there wasn't, but I followed the link to a couple of interesting looking vegan cookbooks which frankly is probably as far as I'll get with either, cuz I'm kinda lazy (and fooded out, for the moment—I gots beads to make!) but I absolutely agree, these earrings are adorable —Really, I never ceased to be amazed with all the cool stuff you can do with fimo, and I find miniature fruit tart beads far more interesting than as accents for dollhouses. Lovely canes, there.

There's just so many interesting byways on the internet...

Oh, yeah, the page. Sewn wire-edged ribbon bags.

Via boingboing, a blog post and accompanying video. I think the author was trying to predictive, but I found the lecture, in particular, profoundly depressing: he decided to recast a famous jazz album in video-game chiptune format. Unlike sampling, which is nearly financially impossible in today's climate, this was technically a cover; you pay a reasonable fee, and you're good to go. His little kickstarter was successful, and his labor of love (I mean, Miles Davis as a video chiptune? I'm not a jazz purist, so I rather like the idea, but it's not the sort of thing you could ever imagine MegaCorporateRecordLabel coming up with) was successful enough that it covered its costs—possibly with a bit extra.

But wait! He hired a designer to render the album's cover image in 8bit format. This would be a parodic (or artistic) interpretation? Nope—he was sued for copyright infringement, and, though the lawyers told him he had a solid case, it would take...oh, about 16 years, probably to grind through the courts. That doesn't sound like much, but do recall just recently Aaron Scwartz committed suicide over a similar disagreement. Though copyright violations are probably second only to speeding violations, a ticket will just ruin your day, says Baio; but a copyright infringement, at up to 175K per infringement, can ruin your entire life.

Who needs it? So, of course he settled. Which is just about what everyone does, and because of non-disclosure agreements, the public seldom hears about it. And, now those clever lawyers are figuring out how to auto-generate lawsuits—at $2–5k, a pop, they could be veritable cash cows.

Eventually, of course, this modern ‘Prohibition’ will be overturned; laws, like governments, ultimately only work with the consent of the governed. —But in the meantime, Big$ interests are stomping on the commons.

Baio started his talk by explaining that most—mebbe all—art is in effect a remix (something that became painfully obvious in the survey class for my art history minor). Certainly that's all I ever do. Making stuff is what people do—so often, folks claim they ‘can't make art’ or ‘don't have any talent’ —well, the world is bursting with talent, and it's taking pretty draconian measures to keep stomping it down.

Of which the latest is that fscking zombie law to slice and dice the internet to ribbons, Cispa. I'm so tired of fighting this, and the moneyed, powerful interests just keep bringing it back and back and back...

Larry Lessig has a new version of his corruption talk —it's snappier, I guess, but the message hasn't really changed, and all this sometimes makes me despair for humanity in general and the US in particular.

When are we gonna do things right?

On a slightly brighter note, here's a rare project that worked out easily, just as I intended—just right, in fact.

Ha, more eloquent voices than mine are starting to emerge: Bruce Schneier said everything I was attempting to express a couple of days ago, but much, much better; a participant in the marathon expressed much the same sentiments (via Pharyngula); and while the lefty blogs I read tended (because of the April 15 date) to homegrown anti-taxers, Crommie noted that suspicion inevitably (and in my view, very unjustly) gravitated to those others and wonder of wonders, even Ross Drouthat (who is not beloved at all in feminist circles) had something sensible to say —which is kind of reassuring: it's never a good thing when all those you identify with seem to universally have good ideas, and those you oppose have bad ones. Reality suggests that just about everyone has a good idea some time.

And, perhaps, however slowly, we're learning to deal with this sort of criminal; the good ideas are penetrating. —That gives me hope for my country.

Thus, to celebrate that hope, today we have more patriotic beads.

So today I have to give the library back Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style (v. 3.1) so I guess if'n I'm gonna rant about it, now's the time. I loved this book. I mean, it's beautifully designed (the author is a book designer and poet, both of which are generally very concerned about how type sits on a page, not to mention a typographer.) The lovely translucent laid paper (ye good gods, where does one see laid paper in a book anymore?) the charming sidenotes (I have a side note in one of my novels, nyah, nyah, nyah...also footnotes and endnotes, yay latex), not to mention the lovely examples of ligatures (I adore ligatures). If I had a (Western) man-sized hand, its narrow pages would fit comfortably within it; I presume that was the author's intention.

It is a book as beautiful physical object, without being a picture/coffee table book—subtle. I appreciate that.

Plus, you know, being a poet, the man actually knows how to write coherently.

And, I learned some more stuff about page density (printers like the text to be a smooth even value, without emergent patterns spoiling the beauty of their pages, and distracting the reader from the content) and layout scheme. I knew that ‘rivers’ were to be deprecated in text; also some basics about kerning and the like, picked up, of course, from Donald Knuth's books on TeX and Metaphont. I appreciated that Elements took my understanding to yet another level.

And there, Dear Reader, is where I got so very annoyed with Mr Bringhurst. LaTeX still dominates scientific publishing today. I've mentioned, more than once, that the wizard had to hand in his math homework in ink—and since writing is such a chore for him, we typeset it. In TeX. —The equations were beautiful, and much better looking than the textbook. So far as I know, if you want to typeset mathematics, TeX (or more commonly LaTeX) is still the gold standard.

So here's Mr Bringhurst, blithering on about a font called Beowulf (pp. 189–190):

The computer is, on the face of it, an ideal device for reviving the old luxury of random variations at the threshold of perception (quite a dfferent thing from chaos). But conventional typesetting software and hardware focuses instead on the unsustainable ideal of absolute control...There have been several recent attempts to introduce a layer of random variation, but all have had to work against the grain of technological development.

An early example was...Beowulf. In its first experimental version (1990), this face relied on the output device to create truly random perturbations from a single set of letterforms...evolving hardware and software quickly passed it by, [but] it remains an important landmark in the effort to teach computers what typography really entails.

(There follows an image of the letter ‘e’ at three levels of randomization.)

Hello, The TeXbook—whose actual title is Computers & Typesetting /A—came out in ’84. The METAFONT book (Computers & Typesetting/C) in ’86. TeX itself was written in the late 70s; chapter 21 of the Metafont book discusses randomness, for example. Knuth discusses a number of ways to shape fonts, indeed that's the whole point of Metafont, to set up parameters to design whole font families at once (because scaling them up and down doesn't actually look that good.) —But there is no mention of Knuth anywhere in Bringhurst's book, despite the fact that Knuth created a language specifically to typeset beautiful (mathematics) books.

Though I've fiddled with calligraphy for years, and was vaguely aware of fonts and book design as an art (to the point of collecting font catalogs), it was Knuth's books that really ignited my interest. Knuth was the reason I bothered to check this book out of the library. If I had a million dollars to fund an Open Source project, it would be to write a more intuitive, artist-friendly front end for Metafont (or, perhaps, an interface between Metafont and a vector program like Inkscape) —cuz it would be so cool to design typefaces that way! And then we could have really cool, properly designed ones...

But Knuth doesn't even get a passing reference. I know, cuz I checked the index, the list of font designers, the Further Reading (i.e. bibliography), the List of Type Designers, and Foundaries (Knuth is famous for his ‘Computer Modern Roman’ family). Three times. Or more. Cuz I just couldn't believe he wouldn't get mentioned.

Nope.

Bringhurst mentions mathematics typesetting on several occasions (as well issues coming out of typesetting various non-Roman alphabets and particularly all the special diacritics that, say, Vietnamese require). He notes his own book uses word spacing, letter spacing and glyph spacing (TeX doesn't, so far as I know, do that, probably because it's so old: there probably wasn't the computation al power/memory back then)...but, I was given to understand, that, until Adobe and others swiped it, TeX's hyphenation protocols were the best. Since Elements is now on version 3.1, I can't believe that no-one amongst its legions of fans hasn't pointed out the omission. So it's gotta be deliberate.

Why? It seems a sad flaw in an otherwise fabulous manual.

Ok, rant over. Have a stars'n’stripey bag.

Well, crap.

It's not just the people killed or maimed, though they are first, most obvious, and cruelly hurt victims; it's everybody.

My usual response to most sports ranges from irritation to outright contempt; but I always rather liked the Boston marathon—mebbe because regular people compete in these things, and there's not much besides acclaim to come out of winning (or at least, that was my perception.)

Several of the news sources I've read have emphasized two things: don't jump to conclusions as to the perps (wise) and, best case scenario, security theatre will increase.

Even those who only suffer relatively “minor” injuries could easily be years recovering: it's been three years since I suffered a broken collarbone and cracked incisor, and though I've probably recovered as much as I'm going to, I'm not the same. And that was an accident, without malicious intent.

But, awful as the immediate aftermath is, I can't help thinking about longer term consequences.

I hated the changes after 9/11. They did little to increase our safety, while giving a corrupt administration a longed-for excuse to wage a heinous (and incompetent) war, for which our nation's hands are still bloody. I would like to think that cooler heads will prevail this time around; and maybe they will —ironically enough, I was reading a fascinating interview with Rebecca Solnit in which she argued—I think correctly—that most people are essentially good-hearted (but that the very wealthy tended to be fearful during the sorts of calamities, political or otherwise, that pull ordinary folks together, because they're afraid—of losing the status quo, I think, as much as anything else).

So perhaps we're finally realizing that giving up our civil liberties is a kind of death of a thousand cuts, a slow draining of cultural lifeblood: gradual, but still profoundly discouraging for all that.

But, hey. It was warm today. Spring is coming. Robins are harbingers of hope, too.

Hideho, I've been pretty busy last week, attempting to prep for my guild's meeting. I managed to fail utterly to clear all the sewing crap off the dining room table, not to mention screw up the bead exchange, and the only reason the kitchen floor wasn't filthy (and I do mean filthy, as in not mopped in months) was because the wizard took pity and did it for me.

See, I was figuring no one would show up, like last meeting.

But alas, the sun came out, the day warmed, and we actually had a pretty decent turnout. No-one managed to get hit by popping glass, or kick over the numerous containers of dirty mandrel water, or drop precariously balanced plants on their toes, so I guess it wasn't a total failure of housekeeping skills—though I think that was more luck than anything else. (People still froze, of course, even though I turned up the heat. 980 cubic feet a minute of 45–50 degree air is still pretty chilly.)

Anyway. I demoed leaf (mustard, mosaic & 022) and a basic EDP/gold ruby–periwinkle/ink-blue striped floral cane and how to apply them. My flowers sucked, but fortunately, most people couldn't really see what I was doing, so it didn't matter. (Here is a very useful approach for demoing: even if you drop the glass on the floor, it doesn't really matter, as long as you can talk a good story while you do it—most people won't realize you're screwing up unless you're stupid enough to tell them:)

I've already discussed cane, florals and the like at length, so the post is actually gonna be a cute little trillium drawstring bag. But I promise some beady goodness tomorrow, or at the very least by the end of the week;)

Did you enjoy the day off from ranting?

Yeah, well, that's good, cuz I got a new crop: Crommie attempts to explain that no matter what Adria Richards did or didn't do about that dongle crack (during a presentation about sexism no less!) she was gonna lose; and it didn't take very long in his own comments for someone to pipe up, but she complained the wrong way. Exhibit A, comment No. 3.

(I'm so glad the wizard does perl. They're probably not any better than the python folks wrt sexism, but the fact that a trans woman (Audrey Tang) jump-started the lagging 6 dev with pugs can't have hurt. N.b.: this is a very rough approximation of perl history.)

And then, (via Feministe, I believe) we have yet another ...I hesitate to call it “fake” feminism, but definitely watered-down: for all those people who wonder why I fear and distrust facebook: the ultimate work time waster thrives on unceasing labor of its employees; the most successful woman in the company is attempting, evidently, to defang those nasty socialist/communist feminist critiques by pushing her own feminism-brand, in much the way facebook attempts to compete with apps that might decrease its market share. (Hmm, where have we seen that before...?)

Ironically enough, women are treated better at the Evil Empire (aka Redmond) than they are in the Open Source movement. Le sigh.

Nevertheless, facebook feminism, your (het, married, breeding) woman submerges her entirety in work. Life is work, and work, life. Now, I'm all about living an artistic life, a “present” life, if you will. But it is for my art—not some company's bottom line. And some days, I simply take off. (Yesterday, frex...)

No thank you.

All is not doom and gloom. You want to see some genuinely passionately made work, via Drawn check out this gorgeous old-fashioned lettered-and-advertising-style-arted (ok, not a word, I don't care) album cover. And if you want more sign-painting goodness, another vid of the guy working—made by the same videographer, so once again stellar cinematography. Do love the attention to detail, even if they're a little heavy on the drama (come on people, it's not that hard to slump an unadorned piece of sheet glass, though I admit a kiln malfunction on the round one with all the work on it would be majorly annoying). Otoh, all that dust...! Cold-working—grinding and sandblasting—are not for me. By the way, if you've ever wondered what the gold leaf I use in beads looks like, you can find out; though I use an old power supply (fan) drilled with lots of tiny holes in the top to hold my leaf in place, since the bristles of a brush would scorch while applying leaf to a hot bead!

And speaking of beads, today we have my student/peer's instructions for making bunny beads; along with some of my very own less than stellar examples.

Via Pharyngula's (non) anti-caturday post, this photo series of kitties— big kitties, if not quite full-grown—on a fence.

Or you can have spring giftwrap. Now that it's s'posed to snow.

Enjoy.

Ok, lessee if I can format this page correctly, this time...

While I was angsting over f2tE's furisode project, I stumbled across this howto for constructing one. I think the actual pattern info is covered in my books, but author intriguingly offers suggestions for purchasing used kimono: ichiro plus three others but unfortunately the urls are are an image, so must be typed in, not clicked.

Or, early crocuses.