Sara Winge really is awesome

Quinn Norton writes about O'Reilly's Sara Winge.

There are a lot of people at O'Reilly who do incredible things, but Sara is very high on the short list of coolest people at O'Reilly.

Censorship and control is annoying.

I sent the following item to 'class list' for my son's class. The 'class list' is a cc of everyone's emails.

--
"California and the Bay Area is currently experiencing an outbreak of Whooping Cough. So far five babies in California, all under four months, have died from it.

Immunity, even for vaccinated kids, and those who have had Whooping Cough before, wears off with time. For vaccinated kids immunity is pretty much worn off by high school, perhaps before, and we have a large reservoir of unvaccinated and under vaccinated people in our school community.

The tDap/dTap vaccine against Diptheria, Pertussis (Whooping Couch), and Tetanus
and is licensed for use in adolescents ages 10 to 19."
--

It seemed pretty benign to me. But the teacher promptly admonished me. "Please don't use the class email list unless clearing it with me first. "

Sorry, but you don't get to control speech. You especially don't get to control speech involving actual threats to our children created by the nutcase anti-vaccination crazies in the community.

This is the teacher who told me on another instance, 'what did you expect sending your child to an anti-technology school.'

I talked with the principal today, who refused to answer the question if the school was 'anti-technology.' But did say that the school has no policy on vaccinations.

70% of the kindergarten has 'vaccination waivers' - which is a pretty clear statement that the school certainly does have a 'policy' on vaccinations, that the policy is to accept the creation of a dangerous cesspit of infection and put our children in the middle of it.

D-RATS Gigapans

I just got to go to Arizona for two days of Gigapanning Volcanos and Lava flows for this years 'D-RATS' tests.

This is NASA's 'Desert Research and Technology Studies' tests. See the wikipedia article on them.

My gigapans of the test are all tagged 'd-rats-2010' - but so are some other gigapans, so do a search for the d-rats-2010 tag sorted by date.

Brian Monteleone, a Post Doc from ASU, drove up and we spent Sunday night planning our assault, and Monday and Tuesday gigapanning.

The first day was the windiest Brian has ever experienced while doing field work. My netbook was pulled out of my hands by the wind _twice_ (once is an accident, twice just carelessness?)

Chile a long time ago

Today is Feburary 4th, 2010. I have some dates seared into my memory. And other dates which turn out to be a little less 'seared.'

I sort of think that Feb 4th, 1980, was the date I arrived in Chile for my year's exchange with AFS. But now I am a little fuzzy on the exact date.

Memory and all. Sort of funny. But it was pretty close to Feb 4th, so 30 years ago - about.

Ten years ago I had this thought that it would be interesting to transcribe my hand written journals, on the 20th anniversary. Maybe even do it day by day - transcribe a day each day. Relive the year over a year.

But goodness, that seems, well, discursive? Distracting? Painful?

But in any event, thirty years ago I was an exchange student. And suddenly it is now.

Oakland Farmer's market says 'eat less salad'

The Oakland Farmer's Market has banned plastic bags. I wrote a comment on the Oakland Local site about this article.

But comments on other people's sites are, well, on other people's sites. And this seems important somehow.

The key is that in Europe people mostly bring their own bags. But if you don't bring your bag you can just buy a bag for about 40 cents. No moralizing. No fuss. Simple, and (and I know this is a bad word in the progressive community, but it is true) this is a 'market based response' to the issue.

OTOH, the Oakland farmer's market has decided that ideological purity means that you can not buy salad greens which are guaranteed for seven days in a plastic bag. Rather, you have to decide to eat your more fragile produce earlier in the week, and eat your robust vegetables later.

WTF? For want of a 1 cent plastic bag the Oakland Farmer's market is literally saying 'eat less salad.' You can't eat salad every day if you shop at our market because we have decided that one particular bit of the modern economy, the one penny plastic bag for salad greens, is morally evil and must be banned.

Here is the comment I posted.

--

I am personally disgusted by our practice of throwing out bags, and general lack of reuse, but I am a little confused here.

As near as I can read, the headline on this article should be "Oakland Farmer's Market says 'eat less salad greens'"

At least in the case of salad greens I think this article is specifically saying that a bag which costs 1 cent allows people to keep salad greens fresh so that they can be consumed over the whole week before coming back to the market to get more. And that the fact that this bag is made of plastic means you should just not eat salad during the later part of the week.

The alternatives to having fresh salad greens which are offered are, well, none. You can eat your salad greens early in the week before they spoil and eat root vegatables or something for the rest of the week.

I think this is a major 'WTF' on the part of the market. At least in the limited case of the salad greens the market is now banning (no, this is not a 'policy' it is a ban -please don't newspeak this!) the current best state of the art way of delivering salad greens to people because of a specific ideological crusade against plastic.

I just spent five weeks in Vienna and Berlin. Almost everybody there brings there own bags, but if you don't there is a nice stack of bags at the register.

They are nice bags. A bit nicer than our use-once stupid bags, and a step below our (and their) reuse many times heavy duty bags.

And the clever hack which is part of why most people bring their own bags is that they moved the store bags from the right side to the left side of the cash register.

If you want a bag you pay Euro 0.25 for it. About 40 cents plus or minus.

And with that simple move people have the incentive to bring their own bags, and the store makes money if you need a bag, and you have a gentle reminder that reusing bags is a good idea plus it will save you a real amount of money.

And there is no moral watchdog banning your actions. There is noone who is shaming you if you forget your bag.

OTOH, the Oakland Farmer's markets believe that shaming people and banning the best technology for the specific task of getting salad greens home and preserved is reasonable.

Again, WTF?

I'm going to post this comment on my blog http://testingrange.blogspot.com and I welcome comment there or here. Maybe I am missing something important. But it just seems that telling people that a 1 cent bag which will let them eat salad all week is wrong is stupid of the market. And that dictating policy with bans which hurt both consumers and producers is simply stupid.

Paleogeographers, Neogeographers, Psychogeographers, taggers and Storytellers

I have been thinking and working with maps and location and GPS units for a long time now. I coined a phrase, Quantitative Psychogeography, which has not yet caught on, co-wrote two books, _Mapping Hacks_ and _Google Maps Hacks_, preached to the choir and to the unconverted, and I have been tracking and geolocating many of my travels and photos and gigapans for years.

And I have been frustrated. And I finally realized why: I just want story telling and life logging tools. Paleo and Neo geographers have created amazing tools. I've been part of some of that energy. And it is great fun, and it is powerful, and it matters.

The engineer in me likes these tools. I like PostGIS, I like GDAL, I like Google Maps and My Maps and I am even making my grudging peace with KML. But none of these tools really hits the story teller in me. They don't hit the artist, the life logger.

And none of them is appropriate for managing a 'personal geo-repository.'

For a long time I just collected the data, and either whined, or offered constructive criticism, when the subject came up. And I gave hope that tomorrow's software would be able to make sense of yesterday's data. But then in Vienna I decided that I could no longer deal with a fundamentally broken model of managing waypoints.

Too much, all of it in fact, depended on my remembering wayoint names - key words - and too little of the work was being done where it should be done - by the computer.

I say it was a decision, but there was jet lag and anxiety to blame as well. There was waking up at 3 in the morning and not being able to sleep again, worrying that I was not doing enough here to justify the trip. To justify the trust placed in me by my boss, and by my self, the trust that I would do something great.

So I figured out my waypoint repository challenge. At least well enough for now. See 'Annotating Waypoints, partially solved' And as you read that remember that I am trying for a system which can operate comletely offline, on a minimal computer, with minimal software dependencies, and maximum flexibility. And I don't care if there is a bit of command line involved if that preserves flexibility and if it so importantly doesn't hide anything from me.

Storing points in GPX format, and importing them from the GPS with GPS Babel seems the best option. I can imort them into Google Earth (or better, convert them to KML using GPS Babel, and then import the KML into Google Earth) for viewing, but basica annotation and management seems to need to be kept in a text file format, and in a text file format which won't suddenly be magically and terribly reformated in a way that causes me to lose timestamp information for the individual points (and yes, KML, I continue to be confused about how you manage time, and why those choices were made :-(

I feel like I am refining my keyboard shortcuts for using a TRS100 laptop computer. I know KML is how everything is done, but damnit, KML and Google Earth hide more of my story than they reveal.

OTOH, Google Won, right? Everybody loves Google Earth, I love big junks of it, but I don't trust it to not just accidentally cause me to lose that which I find most important.

Annotating Waypoints, partially solved

I have been fretting about the problem of annotating way points for a decade. The general issue is that I wander around a place,and I mark points of personal interest. And later I don't know why I marked a place 'Pieta' or 'aslice.'

I have a long rant about this, but the main problem seems to be that the 'artistic' side of my brain knew that the system I had didn't work, but was not able to articulate that back to the 'engineer' side to let me just solve it.

The trick is to have a repository of points which you trust, and then to merge in new points, and to add annotations to those points.

I made a small script with GPSBabel. It handles most cases. Patches and suggestions welcome.
The key is a 'repository' of waypoints, in a GPX file, and then I merge that file with the GPS using the GPSBabel filter duplicates command.

#!/usr/bin/sh
# save the current 'repository' of waypoints in version control.
sudo svn commit -m "automatic commit before merging new waypoints from GPS" netbook_annotated.gpx
# Merge master file with the GPS.  deduplicate
sudo gpsbabel  -i gpx -f netbook_annotated.gpx -i garmin -f usb: \
-x duplicate,shortname,location  -o gpx  -F netbook_annotated.gpx
sudo chown rich:rich netbook_annotated.gpx
echo now edit netbook_annotated.gpx and write it back to the GPS
sudo vi netbook_annotated.gpx
echo temporarilly not writing back to GPS.
#sudo gpsbabel -i gpx -f netbook_annotated.gpx -o garmin -F usb:

Here is a sample waypoint in GPX Format

 201.039795
 Operapassage
 27-DEC-09 6:58:05PM Where the u2 karlsplatz line comes out
 27-DEC-09 6:58:05PM
 Flag, Blue

The key for my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx is that the cmt field does get written back to the GPS by GPSBabel, but if it is too long it will be abbreviates.

I have some waypoints where I seem to have done something wrong in editing the name field, and GPS babel attempts to shorten the name and thus generates new waypoints. I am working on that.

Also, I should take the date out of the desc field and reformat it in a proper GPX time field.

But for right now I am able to comfortably sit at the Ubahn station with a train which won't arrive for 4 minutes, connect my GPS to the netbook, import the waypoints, add annotations to them, and usually even pull my most recent track log in and look at them both in Google Earth.

In four minutes while waiting for a subway.

The next big challenge: how do I annotate track logs in a reasonable fashion? How do I mark the spot where we turned wrong and ran into a new adventure?