Rowan « Kenny Smith | Omnes hic sumus discere.

Rowan

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24
Sep 26

When you wake up and go to sleep in different places

No one was in the cat tunnel this morning, or at least this cat tunnel. But I liked the light and the colors and now you can appreciate them, too.

We have two cat tunnels because we have two very jealous sibling cats. If we didn’t have to walk around on the floor of the house we’d probably have a lot more cat tunnels. They’re cheap and the cats like them, but I think if you buy them in bulk you get a call from your bank or credit card about suspicious purposes.

“Who needs to purchase 45 cat tunnels on a Wednesday, sir?”

Some questions need to be asked, but some questions shouldn’t be answered.

In class today I refreshed our memories about the difference between performing and exhibiting identities. This seemed important based on the eager, yet quizzical expressions I received when I asked the day’s question: why would social media companies try to convince users that we are performing, rather than exhibiting, identity. This all gets to our previous readings, of which we have so far had four in this class. It is a bit philosophical, but not without some important distinctions.

It also allowed us to talk about the sort of data we generate. I made two nice slides on this and one of them I’ll use several times in the coming weeks, I am sure. We discussed user generated data, metadata, where it all goes, the databases it lives in, and the algorithms that grow from it. Students love to mention the algorithms, and this class goes probably a bit deeper than they thought possible or necessary. It is not enough to say “the algo” because there is ordering, interfacing, filtering, and all sorts of curation (biased and otherwise) to get to. Today is the day when I put up a slide about how bias in programming works against some users — usually marginalized or minority users, of course. And I introduced the whole room to the classic expression: GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out, a programming term that is even more applicable today than it was when an IBM guy coined it in the 1950s.

Next week we’ll talk about surveillance. Who knows what they’ll all think after that.

We left campus at a reasonable time and the sun was already doing this before we got home.

It’s pretty. It’s beautiful. I hate it.

I’m going to retire as a sunbird, moving from place to place that maximizes the daylight. A better plan may come along before I get to that age, but I haven’t thought of a better one yet.

Here’s a scene from the airport. I’m not sure that’s meant to invoke confidence at an airport. It is a helicopter either on fire, going down, or in too-close proximity to another aircraft. Also the guy in the EVA suit. What are we saying with this art?

And then here, in Nashville, is a bit more art. It’s evocative of the Tennessee flag.

That flag has been around since 1905, with the stars representing the three regions of Tennessee — legally and geographically unique — east, middle, and west. It’s a simple, clean look. Some people see some similarities to Confederate symbols. That’s probably more likely than not in Tennessee. I haven’t spent a lot of time looking into that, either way, it inspires some other nice art around there.

Anyway, I’ve flown to Nashville to go to north Alabama for a long weekend. Spending a little family time. More from there … that is, here … tomorrow.

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23
Sep 26

Woefully behind, branding

I have been given a memo making me aware that I am behind … the phrase the memo used was “woefully behind” in the site’s most popular weekly feature. I’m not sure which cat wrote it, I’m not even sure which one knows the word “woefully” but whoever did it, they are correct.

I am contractually obligated to share photos of them every week — until next month when they take over the site — but they haven’t been on the front page of the blog in almost three weeks. Woefully behind, indeed.

This might explain some of the early wake up calls, and the claws, that have come my way in the last few days. I’m sure they’ve just been waiting for me to figure out causation.

Maybe he’ll get it today, one cat says at 6 a.m. every day.

Well I figured it out. Let me sleep.

Phoebe is, I think, about to perform a magic trick. Keep your eye on my paw.

We got some takeout recently and that came in a bag and they don’t even care about the food, but they both enjoy the bag. We cut the handles for safety and this bag lived in the kitchen for a few days until, having taken turns, they both had their fill.

Here’s Poseidon, impatiently waiting for his turn in the paper bag. I don’t claim to be the best photographer in the world, but I think you can fairly well hear his huff and sigh in this particular still image.

Poe is also fascinated by the ice dispenser. He sometimes will chase a cube for a while, though the big thrill these days is watching me toss one into the sink. He’ll follow my hand, the underhand flick, the cube arcing through the air, the clang-a-lang-crash of ice meeting steel, and then he’ll leap onto the counter and stare down into the sink. I’m not sure what about that is satisfying, but it’s a better deal than leaving one on the floor, forgetting about it, and then walking into a small puddle later.

Anyway, here he is checking one out up close.

So, as you can see, the kittehs are doing fine, even if they are a bit miffed at my uploading negligence.

Tonight, I grew immediately wearing of thinking that I have a night class. This should be a later afternoon, early evening class, but the shortening days, the soon-to-change-clocks … this is a night class. I’m not sure if anyone really feels up for that just now, but we work where we are asked.

So my organizational communication in sport class today endured my discussing this evening about branding. We talked about some core concepts and watched videos.

It’s just a bunch of this.

Though no one reacted to that spot at all. People always have some sort of reaction to that piece. I will wonder about this for weeks.

So I knew I was in trouble when I got to the cutesy stuff.

There’s a nice little assignment tied to this lecture, which everyone approached with gusto. Since they’re all broken into groups and running fantasy football teams, we’re doing a lot of assignments through that context. Tonight they had to break down all of the starters on their teams using the various criteria we discussed in class. I was pleased to see they were interested in that.

This class has more exercises like that, but I think I need to dream up a few more, too. Can I come up with something for roughly every other week? Do you have ideas you can share?

I’d ask the cats, but I’m afraid about the memo I’d receive in reply.

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22
Sep 26

I will not talk about aura, I will not talk about aura, I will not —

This is week four. I am a professional. I should have my Tuesday morning routine down by now. I do not. Almost made us late. There was just a curious moment where I had time to do the things required of the gargantuan task “finish getting ready.” And, then, suddenly, there was not time. So I drove to campus a bit faster than normal. I’ve slowed down a lot in the car in recent years. There usually aren’t that many things to rush to, but when your carpooler needs to get to work, and when you’re carpooling with your spouse, and you’re the one on the verge of making everyone late, you re-discover the accelerator.

And that is what I did. Fortunately, I am from a place where people think the road signs are the speed limits, a place with no police on the highways, and everyone operating under the mistaken impression that their morning commute was a tryout for the nearby speedway. It has been said that you have to a certain kind of mean to drive in my hometown, and that’s probably true, and I learned the lesson well.

We got there on time. I let her out at the door, so she could run to class. I went to park.

That story ends there. Nothing remarkable happened in the parking deck. I walked into the building and held my office hours. No one stopped by, which meant that I had the opportunity to do a bit of grading and study my notes for class.

Today we talked about a Bernie Hogan paper, which dives into the sociologist Erving Goffman and his dramaturgy, and also the fantastic paper, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by the German philosopher and media critic Walter Benjamin. This is the eighth section of this class I’ve taught, and so I’ve read this paper a few times. And every time there’s something new to discover. This time, this weekend, might be the first time when I didn’t find a new thing to wonder at. And so I was excited to take this paper into class and talk about it today. We had fun.

Back to the statue, Contact. I’ve been walking by this this semester, and every time I see it I think that these are actual people. I’ve been wondering, since the second time I was fooled, when I wouldn’t be fooled. And since then I’ve been taking photos of it. If you click that link you can see a post I made specifically about it, with details on the artist, and a wide shot from all four angles. Over the next several weeks we’re going to zoom in a bit. First, the hands.

It was this hand that I saw first, because I was walking toward it, but it seemed absurdly misshapen. It still does. The fingers are too long, too big, the knuckles somehow disproportionate.

Perhaps it is the finger placement. Her other hand, a bit of wear aside, seems to work much better for the size of the figure. There are three things to notice here. The watch tells us a time. I saw that after I noticed the details in the back of the hand. It’s a dye-coating over a bronze statue, but in that you can see the bone structure, and maybe even the work of the veins in her hand. Also, she’s wearing a wedding band.

Let’s look at the man’s hands. First, he’s also wearing a watch. Can’t see the time. Can’t move the sleeve. (I tried. I tried because there’s magic in art, and I believe you have to find out all of the places where the magic exists, and make sure you aren’t overlooking any of it besides.) You would assume his time piece should show the same time as hers. If it doesn’t the commentary is entirely different. Looking at both watches carefully, there should be hands of his watch visible, based on what time she is showing. There are not. Is his watch slow? Are they from different times? Out of time?

He is also wearing a wedding band.

Are they married to one another? Will we ever find out? We’ll continue exploring, but we will not.

Next week, we’ll take a closer look at these two characters’ faces. As you might expect, there’s a lot to consider there.

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21
Sep 26

Autumn showed up

The equinox came … or did it arrive? … or did we catch up to it? Or it will. We mark the equinox tomorrow. But the autumnal weather pushed its way in this weekend. Rain came with it. Everything was gray, except when it rained, except when it was sunny. Weather forecasts are spotty now, thanks to unnecessary budget cuts to NOAA and NWS. This won’t be a real problem until it is. But fear not! When it is, we’ve also cut FEMA to the bone. We are a very smart society.

Anyway, the weather was a bit of everything this weekend. We even had some blowing rain and some sideways rain. At least the drought monitor program, and if that data is still working as expected, we are now officially out of our drought. I haven’t mentioned it here since the beginning of the month, but our maps changed about two weeks ago. Take longer showers, kiddies! The aquifer is full!

Or so I assume.

Friday I went to campus to take part in a Professional Learning Community. We are encouraged to take part i some of these. There is a wide variety presumably there is something for everyone. You could see it as a chore, but, really, you’re being paid to learn things. This semester I am in a food, agriculture, and forestry PLC. I like food. I have a degree in agriculture. I studied forestry for two-plus years. I figured it’d be a good program for me. Friday was its first meeting, and Friday we went to the campus farm.

Our guide told us about the work she and her colleagues and a bunch of students are doing. They’re just getting started, but it is already interesting, and already breaking out of the humble beginnings category, just in year two.

This is not a land grant school, but here we are, on a small regenerative farm, where scientific work is taking place, where they are helping support students and the community with fresh produce, restore land, and also make a few bucks for a good cause. The president of the university grows some peppers out there, he and some students work the land. The peppers get turned into a hot sauce. It’s sold, with proceeds going to an emergency student fund. The president is very proud, and this is a cool running project. Also, the hottest hot sauce is so hot the catering services aren’t allowed to provide it on campus.

There’s also a nice little birch stand out there.

Birch bark is incredible versatile. You can create bowls (makeshift or otherwise) for food and water storage. People have used it to make roofs, canoes, cordage, body armor. You can actually eat the inner bark — some indigenous tribes saw it as famine food — and may have medicinal properties.

But there’s a researcher here who is doing some science beyond what are understood as those practical, historical uses. Presently there are experiments underway studying the adhesive qualities of the stuff.

I wonder how you get a project like that underway. How many hoops that research team had to jump through, if they got pushback, or if had to work the phones and forms a lot. I bet I’d get turned down if I suggested something comparable.

The conversation at the farm inspired an idea and by the time I got back home I had a semester-long thumbnail sketched out. I waited a few hours to send it on, just so it didn’t seem immediately hasty. It doesn’t have to do with those trees, but we’ll see if it becomes anything more than an email. Could be fun.

Let’s check on a few of the things growing at home. I’m still not sure if this a flower or a weed. The definition simply has to do with intention, and I don’t know if we want this there or not. But it looks nice. Also the bees like it.

The rose bushes are still going strong. These things are resilient, prolific, and persistent.

We have two giant hydrangeas, and this one has had a great year. Also, the rains didn’t knock it over this summer. Hopefully it’ll give us a few more weeks before the beautiful decay begins. Again, the bees are pleased.

Inside, Saturday, I caught the diminishing sun at just the right time. Usually there’s a cat on this landing, but they both missed out here.

Sunday it rained. And then it rained some more. And it kept raining. And while it rained, I admired the still-budding flowers. And I actually stopped to smell the roses.

And, friends, there’s something to that expression. They smelled lovely. If you get the chance, you should do that.

I make this joke that we should keep this weather until March. It’d be nice for a lot of reasons, especially the flora.

But, ya know, if it warms back up a bit after this cold front moves through, that’d be nice, too.

At the risk of putting a busy week behind, and after a productive afternoon trying to stay on top of everything, I enjoyed a little bike ride today. The highs only got to the mid-70s, and then I messed around and almost missed my window. The temps had started to slip just a bit. It felt cooler outside than inside, but you don’t notice such things when you finally get the heart rate up.

Before I got out of the neighborhood, I noticed the first real signs of fall.

The whole of it was a gray ride, through the neighboring neighborhood, into town, around the lake, back through one of the busy intersections, past the new purposeless developments and into the countryside. When I got precisely halfway into the ride, almost exactly so, the occasional sprinkle became a mist, which evolved into a rain.

I was riding into it. But I had a big right turn and I figured I had a 50-33 shot of riding my way out of the rain. What I got, when I turned right, was a full on rain shower. And I rode in that for the last 12 miles. And in the last seven miles it was just rain and headwinds.

It wasn’t a fast ride, but it was the right ride to start autumn. Let’s have a great one!

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17
Sep 26

The statue, ‘Contact’

I’ve mentioned this and, if you’ve been reading along, you’ve seen some or all of these photos. But it seemed important to put them all in one place.

To teach one of my classes I must leave my building, turn right, walk to the end of the block, turn left and do another block. There, you run into this statue. And now I know it is coming, but it still catches me off guard somehow. So I’ve been taking these photographs, because it seems interesting enough. Next week we’ll start looking more closely at some of the details, but here we have the same work from four different sides.

This installation is called “Contact.” The artist is Seward Johnson. He was born in 1930, lived all over by the time he was old enough to go to school. He knew Georgia O’Keeffe. Served in the Navy during Korea. Did some sailing of his own, of a sort, taking a 2,000 mile canoe trip from western Alberta to the upper edge of the Northwest Territories on the Arctic Ocean.

He worked for Johnson & Johnson, which was the family business. He was also fired from the family business.

There’s a great anecdote about the man that makes him perfect for a college campus. In search of a career to support his young family he took a sculpture class. He left the class because the instructor talked theory.

He would learn his craft in other ways, and eventually he found metal work, which was what really clicked. Now he’s this world renowned artist with a huge body of work of large and life-sized sculptures.

Somewhere along the way he decided to find a way to help other sculptors, and in 1974 he opened the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture. This place works with artists on retaining control over their artwork and opening doors to learning previously mysterious production techniques, becoming a place where the art and technology advanced because of it. Artists from all over the world have been a part of the Johnson Atelier.

This is a trompe-l’œil painted bronze statue. That’s French for “deceive the eye,” Wikipedia tells me. The paint used here is a heavy-duty coating that is also used by the aeronautic and automotive industries. Seems to be holding up pretty well, compared to earlier photos. The blues aren’t quite as dark, perhaps, but that only adds heft to whatever story you’re about to imagine here.

Johnson died in 2020. There are several of his other statues around town and I’ll have to explore them all, but, first, we’ll take closer looks at this one, starting next week.