Rolandt

It can be really hard to find time to learn a new language or new paradigm. How can you find the time you need? In this episode, I share 5 tips for setting yourself for success when you’re learning functional programming.

Transcript

Eric Normand: Where can you find time to learn functional programming? By the end of this episode, you will have five tips to pull a learning system/learning environment together to set yourself up for success.

My name is Eric Normand. I help people thrive with functional programming.

The reason this is important is I talk to a lot of people who want to switch their careers from maybe they’ve been doing object-oriented programming and they want to get into functional programming.

The thing is, the older they are, the further into their careers they are, the harder it becomes. They’ve got more responsibilities. They’re older. They have kids. They have a family. They are used to a higher salary. They don’t have as much time. They don’t have as much flexibility for switching.

Now, I’ve talked countless to people who have made the switch but it’s harder. It’s definitely harder. It’s important because you got to start now. It’s not going to get easier. No matter how old you are, it’s not going to get easier.

If you’re just starting out and you’re just learning programming, maybe it is too early to specialize into functional programming. Just program. That’s enough. But if you’re already a programmer and you like what you see in functional programming, the longer you wait, the harder it’s going to be.

I have five tips for how to get this set up so that you can find some time. I want to give an analogy. When people talk about starting a running habit, they want to start running, the advice is always about making it easy.

Do all the setup beforehand. You say, “I want to start running tomorrow morning.” Well, they say get everything set up tonight. Get your shoes out. Put them by the door. Get your running gear. Get it ready. Set it up so that it’s easy to put on.

If you are going to drink some water beforehand, get a bottle and fill it up with the water so that it’s ready. Set a time when you’re going to leave. OK, I’m going to leave at six o’clock before breakfast. How long are you going to run?

Make all the decisions before because, especially when you starting a new habit, you’re going to have a lot of inertia. That is the same thing that you need to set up for learning functional programming.

I was lucky. I started learning functional programming…it took a lot of time. That is clear, for everyone it takes time. It’s a big field. There’s a lot to learn. I was lucky because I was still in school when I started.

I had plenty of time. I could do my school assignments in it. I asked my professors if it was OK. They said yes. I could choose my electives around it. It was something that I lucked out in because I found that I liked it then, early enough.

Now that I have two kids and a wife, there’s just a lot of life stuff. I got a house. I don’t think there is time [laughs] to learn a new skill like that. I totally sympathize even though there is. There is time. It’s just about making it happen.

Here I’ve got five tips for getting yourself set up. The same kind of things like putting your shoes by the door the night before. It’s the same kind of stuff.

The first thing is pick a language or technology. You don’t want to say, “OK, I got time now to learn. What am I going to learn?” You don’t want that to be the question. You want that to already be set up.

The first thing you’re going to have to decide is what language are you going to use. Are you going to use a functional language that’s very focused on functional programming? We’re talking Haskell, Clojure, Scala, Elixir, Elm, whatever it happens to be.

You could choose one that’s super functional. Just jump right into the functional side. You could also choose a different approach. Say if you are a Java programmer, you’re going to focus on a small step, which is Java 8 Lambdas.

Or, if you’re a JavaScript programmer, you can say, “I’m going to do functional-style JavaScript.” Because JavaScript is a very paradigm-agnostic language. It has first-class functions too. People have found a lot of success doing functional programming in JavaScript.

Either choice, it’s up to you. I think if you’ve been hesitating, it might be better to start with a smaller leap like the Java to Java 8 Lambdas, or the JavaScript to functional-style JavaScript could be a better choice.

Just a little bit more about that. I went to a meditation retreat. It was a Buddhist meditation. The teacher was talking about how you don’t have to believe all of the metaphysics of Buddhism. You don’t have to believe in reincarnation. You don’t have to believe in any of the Buddhist dogma. What’s important is you meditate. It should be practical now.

You should start to see benefits from meditation starting very quickly. You shouldn’t continue if you aren’t actually seeing benefits. Then he says, “Well, you got to give it two or three weeks. You can’t just do it one time.” His point was that Buddhist meditation is a very practical thing. You don’t have to make a big leap of faith for it to have benefits. It’s not a faith-based system.

That really struck a chord with me, especially since I think the same about functional programming. It should be practical from the beginning. Every technique you learn should be applicable in a non-functional language or in a non-functional context. You don’t have to make a big leap of faith.

You don’t have to say, “Oh, it’s Haskell or nothing,” or “I believe that Clojure is the best possible language.” You don’t have to do that. You could learn just one concept from functional programming, and that should make your programming better. Then, of course, there’s more. You might want to learn the second one, then the third one. Those should all help all of your programming.

It’s OK if you just stay in Java and learn how to do Java 8 streams. It’s OK if you just learn how to do something in JavaScript like higher-order functions, something like that. It’s just perfectly fine. I would applaud you if you did that. That was number one.

Number two is to get your system set up. Get your computer installed with whatever language or technology you need. Get your IDE set up. Make sure you can open a file. Get Clojure installed, and make sure the REPL works.

Whatever it is, get set up so that when you do have a moment, when you have some time that you’ve dedicated to learning, you don’t have to start installing and stuff and feel like, “Oh, this is just a waste time.”

You want to get that done ahead of time. Those are the kinds of things that you can do in the spaces between things like, “Oh. Let me look up the commands for installing Haskell.” Then you just have them open in a tab. Then at some point you’re like, “Hey, I have some time. Let me type those things in. OK. I had an error. I’ll search for it, but I don’t really have time to solve it now.”

You can do these things gradually. The worst would be is if you cleared your schedule. You got a babysitter for the kids. You went to a coffee shop, and you bought a really expensive coffee and a big slice of cake. You’re sitting down. You’re all ready. You’re like, “Oh, now I’m just going through error messages and stuff.” You don’t want to get there. You want to spend that time elsewhere.

You want to spend the time from, “Oh, I had 10 minutes after work when I was just futzing around trying to get the Haskell installed. It wasn’t stressful because I just put it aside when it stopped working. I’ll come back to it,” whatever.

Anyway, get yourself set up so you don’t have to do that in your dedicated focus time. It’s not worth learning [laughs] how to set this thing up. It’s not a huge, great skill to have. It’s not worth that dedicated focus time.

Number three. Pick a small project. Something small, tiny. Even getting Fibonacci written, I would not say that’s too small. If that’s a challenge for you, that’s perfect. It could be something like get a Web server running in Clojure. I can boot it up, I can hit a Hello World page, and then I can take it down.

That could be, for you, a nice size project. When I say a nice size project, it’s something that you think you could do in three hours. I believe that it should be something you could do in another language. That’s nice because it means you’re not trying to learn too much.

If you’ve never done Web programming before, it might be too much to start Web programming in a new language. You’re learning two things at the same time and you can’t tell is this part of Clojure or is this part of the Web?

Another thing is just to help with motivation, it could be something you were going to do anyway. Like, “Oh, I was going to write this script in Python, and I kind of already know how to do it. Why don’t I try writing it in Elixir instead?” Something like that where you’re motivated to do it. You already have the need for it. You’re going to do it anyway. Why not do it in this new language?

I want to emphasize the size really matters. You want to find something that you can achieve. If you only have two hours to do something, don’t make a big project and then feel frustrated like, “I didn’t get anywhere,” or “I only got 10 percent of the way done but nothing to show for it.”

You want it to be small. Start in small steps. You can build a huge application one step at a time. You want to know, “OK, I got something done. I learned a little thing.” That’s good. You don’t have a lot of time. You want to achieve something.

Now, the thing is though, that small project can be part of a big project. If you say my first step is to get Clojure running, and then shut it down, you want to have another step in reserve. After I get the Web server running, I want to have it serving files from the local file system. Once I have that, now I want to get it so I’m using a CSS framework on my pages.

Little steps but have some in reserve so that if it turns out that you are really fast, and you get the Web server running really quickly, you’re not going to waste the rest of the time. You already have stuff ready.

Number four. Set up your environment. We, people that is, are very good at learning. That’s what we do. We tend to also have this ability to…If something is out of sight, it’s out of mind. Setting up an environment for learning is something you can do to help improve your learning.

Something you could do that’s pretty easy is order some books on the topic, the task, or order some Haskell books. Have those Haskell books ready, available, sitting where you put your books that if you’re bored, you leaf through. If you want to go all out, you could find a chapter that you want to read and leave it open so that when you’re passing by, you see it.

Other things you could do — get some cheat sheets ready, print out some tutorials. Have them ready. They don’t have to be spread out on your desk but have them in the environment so that if you need them, you can just pull them down. These are all things to do to set up your environment.

Think about when someone wants to learn a foreign language. The best thing to do is to go to the country where they speak that language. You start interacting with people. It’s everywhere. You’re now breathing that, and so your mind is just going to pick it up.

We learn a lot just by having the stuff happening around us. Your mind starts to realize “Man, if I need to buy something, I need to learn how to understand numbers in the language, so I better start picking that up.”

It learns things that you haven’t consciously realized you learned. You haven’t taught it. Just having stuff in your environment.

Think about what you would do in your house if you wanted to learn a foreign language. You might start labeling everything in that language. You get some Post-its and you say, “This is coffee, and in Spanish it’s café.” You put a little sign that says café on it. Little things like that. All those things stimulate you, help you learn. Get yourself set up like that.

Get some things to put on the wall that’s the Haskell syntax. Just have it there. I’m not saying distract yourself. Those little things, every now and then when you glance at it, you’ll pick up a little thing. You’ll get used to the syntax, even if it’s just that.

You might not pick up any particular thing that you can do, but it’s starting to look familiar now. Before, it looked kind of weird. That’s set up your environment.

Number five, commit to some time. I would say at least a week out. I’ll talk about why in a second. Commit to some time. Say, “OK, on Saturday, from one o’clock to 4:00, one to three hours, I’m going to work on this small piece of my project.” Really commit. That means make sure that you’ve got focus time. No one’s going to interrupt you. Turn off your phones. Those kinds of things.

Just get it all so that you can concentrate. Pick a project that you can do in that time that you can achieve, so that you can have some sense of accomplishment in it. That’s a win. If you get that done, no matter what else you get done, that’s good enough for that amount of time.

It’s really important that you have something you can focus on. When you’re learning, you learn better when you are fully engaged and focused on it. You want to get it so that you can get good at it. Get good at something in that small amount of time.

The reason to set a far future — I guess that’s more like near future, one week out — is because it’s a trick that I like to do. Once I’ve committed to it, I’m like, “Oh, yeah. I’m going to get it so I can move a circle around on the screen in this three-hour block. That’s good enough.” Then during the week I’m looking forward to it.

I’ll have a little bit of time here and there where I can do a Google search. “How do I move a circle on the screen in this language? Maybe there’s a tutorial.” I can just use these little pockets of three minutes here that I’m on my phone or in the supermarket waiting in line. “Oh, there is a tutorial. Let me save it. I’ll print it out when I get home.”

I can set up all those things to maximize my success at that time. It’s all about making it easy. That’s really what it is. Make it easy so that you can maximize the time that you have to focus on it.

To recap, I’ll talk about the five things. One, pick a language. Two, get set up. Three, pick a small project. Four, set up your environment. Five, commit to the time.

Do yourselves a favor. Look for ways to make it easy. Even one little thing could get you to learn one more bit. What actions can you take today to get yourself set up for success?

Please do me a favor. If you like this material, please subscribe or share it with your friends. If you subscribe, there’s more like this coming down the pipe and you’ll be notified of it. Sharing with your friends. If you liked it, you might know someone who’ll like it, too.

I also like to get into email discussions. If you’ve got questions like things you want answered about functional programming, about learning functional programming, please email me. Eric@lispcast.com.

Also, you can get into discussions on Twitter. Ask me questions on Twitter. I’m @ericnormand with a D. Also, on LinkedIn. I will answer your questions there. Just search for Eric Normand, and you’ll find me.

I’ll see you next time. Bye.

The post Where to find time to learn functional programming? appeared first on LispCast.

I set out on a sunny afternoon to Fruitvale BART. The station itself is aboveground, elevated, and kind of beautiful. It has glassed in sides that angle outward on either side of the tracks (there are 2 platforms) And a partial roof that comes out from the sides to shelter the platform, which have another angled …. thing… I can’t describe this, argh! Each platform has one side completely glassed in, and then the on side closer to the train there’s a little angled bit that comes down over the platform, with little bart-train-window shaped windows in it, so that from one platform while there is a train in the station, you look up, and those little windows make it look like a WHOLE OTHER TRAIN is floating in the sky above the real train! And, the entire glass part of the platform shelter looks kind of like a giant glass BART car! Is it just in my imagination or has anyone else noticed this amazingness?

On the ground floor I did have a look at a wall of tiles painted mostly by local schoolchildren.

Then I headed out to the plaza just outside the station entrance. Wow it’s so nice! There are little stands (veggies, fruit, caramel corn/lemonade, fancy shea butter soap, textiles, mostly guatemalan woven stuff) and then a nice plaza with a fountain, lots of seating, lots of places to get delicious food, pastries, ice cream. The library is also right there though the entrance is around the corner. I was hanging out outside eating my delicious cornmeal fried fish & chips (perfect) and just going, OK, why is it so damn nice here?! A family went by with some very excited little kids jumping up and down and i realized as t hey approached why the kids were excited – the dad had a bunny in a little soft hutch carrier. Another guy walked by a while later from the other direction with an african grey parrot in an ornate white iron cage on a handtruck. The parrot was upside down, squawking, and clearly having a blast. (For a while I owned an african grey and so I know what they are like!) People in the burger joint talked with me. Some random other lady conversed with me about hair in the nicest way. Another lady and I had a laugh about the bunny. So i was thinking OK this is also how 24th and Mission could be and even is sometimes but it always has more of an edge. But… but it **could**. Anyway, it also was refreshingly not full of young bankers looking bewildered as they eat a dusty bagel in front of a bored security guard (Montgomery station…. that plaza with the fake checkers behind the mechanics monument…. I’m looking at you).

While I was there a nearby high school must have been on lunch hour because the plaza was cheerfully full of teenagers. Can I just say also I ended up chatting with all sorts of people. A friendly public space. I went shopping for a bit and came back to have ice cream (coconut + mamey) from the shop inside Fruitvale Public Market. I hope that the plaza outside the Richmond station can someday be this pleasant – it has the potential to be.

The library was a nice place to work – I found a quiet corner with rocking chair and free wifi by the window overlooking where the trains pull in. And, after work I looked at the local history and Native American history section, found a book on my list to read too (The Ohlone of Central California: People at the Edge of the World, by Betty Morrow). It was short so I had a quick read through and took notes for my game project. The social justice section was strong in this library as you would expect. There was a nice shelf of cheap books for sale by the elevator up top, then below at the entrance a shelf of equally nice free books and a lot of bulletin boards.

Another little plaza to the.. west? is connected and has mosaic circles in the ground and on a large bench (a sun/moon face) and a beautiful mosaic archway.

Anyway as I wandered around kind of randomly I decided I love this neighborhood. I’ll be back to hang out!

From the southbound platform I looked for the Oscar Grant mural but could only see a half of a face sketched onto a wall across the street. That may not have been it? The station was under construction so I may have just not been able to see the mural. I remember his horrible murder like it was yesterday and did NOT realize that was TEN YEARS AGO. Y’all.

Index to all posts describing my BART station visits

In the BART elevator at Embarcadero station the guy in there with me got confused when we stopped at the MUNI level. “It’s MUNI” I said helpfully. “You probably want the one higher up to get to the street.”

“Oh! Yeah! Right! You know it’s partly the old age and partly that I’m really, really high a lot of the time!” He looked out at the MUNI platform, pleased with life.

I chortled appreciatively.

“It’s funny how everything really far back is so clear. Everything now, I forget! But 59 years back is clear as day! I’m old, but I’m also a stoner!” he said.

“Yeah it really does start to all become one thing, as I get older I really feel like it’s time travel and time is all in one big moment that all exists at once!”

He side eyed me.

“I’m not even high! Ahahaha, I just talk like that! When it seems like people are open to it.”

We then agreed memory is time travel. The elevator is very slow, so there’s plenty of time to chat. I did not mention the TARDIS. We emerged from the elevator doors as boldly as if we were all the Doctors and Companions.

My February talk to the Boston Linux and Unix (BLU) group about my home control system - a work in progress.

Wired’s Gadget Lab recently invited me to be on their Podcast to discuss Should This Exist, and the recent article by Olivia Solon about IBM using Flickr Creative Commons licensed photos to train their facial recognition AI–NOT something anyone would have anticipated when those photos were licensed in the early 2000s.

China is rejecting our trash. I was surprised to learn that since China started rejecting our trash, more and more is being put into our landfill here in the U.S. It’s astonishing that shipping trash to China is (was!) more economical than recycling it here.

Claude Parent was an architect who conceived of “the function of the oblique” working on buildings that did not hew to the horizontal, but had slanted floors, and were more like landscapes–imagine lying on a hill, or settling into a pond–than typical interiors. This made people active, rather than passive, in his buildings.  Parent worked with artists and theorists such as Yves Tanguy and Paul Virilio, and there are photos of him in conversation with people using slanted platforms instead of furniture. Like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, Parent’s Manifesto is made up of disruptive maneuvers to free yourself from conventional thinking:

Twelve Subversive Acts to Dodge the System
1. Open the Imaginary
2. Operate in Illusion
3. Dislodge the Immobile
4. Think Continuity
5. Surf on the Surface
6. Live in Obliqueness
7. Destabilize
8. Use the Fall
9. Fracture
10. Practice Inversion
11. Orchestrate Conflict
12. Limit Without Closing

---

Architecture Principe Paul Virilio, Claude Parent. Just the names of the chapters intrigue: The Oblique Function. Potentialism. Bunker Archaeology. Power and Imagination. It was an era of manifestos, ideology and brutalism.

 

“Democracy is like love. It only works if everyone has a voice.” - | Carol Gilligan

Siobhan Morris @siomo
Doing my annual search for my childless, single person tax credit #budget2019 pic.twitter.com/vGIBvAG5bt

Boing Boing @BoingBoing
"Ayn Rand is a Dick" - excerpt from a new book by Mike Monteiro boingboing.net/2019/03/20/ayn… pic.twitter.com/05pkMeXwU3

❄️⛷❄️Sean Galbraith❄️⛷❄️ @PlannerSean
I’m obliged to mention that it usually snows here in April at least once.

According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, customisation and personalisation are defined as follows:

• customize: verb [ T ] uk usually customise UK — to make or change something according to the buyer’s or user’s needs
• personalize: verb [ T ] uk usually personalise UK —​ to make something suitable for the needs of a particular person. If you personalize an object, you change it or add to it so that it is obvious that it belongs to or comes from you.

In this post, I’m going to take a more extreme position, contrasting them as:

• customisation: the changes a vendor or service provider makes;
• personalisation: the changes a user makes.

Note that a user may play a role in customisation. For example, when buying a car, or computer, a buyer might customise it during purchase using a configurator that lets them select various options: the customisation is done by the vendor, albeit under the control of the buyer. They may then personalise it when they receive it by putting stickers all over it.

One of the things I’ve been pondering in the context of how we deliver software to students is the extent to which we offer them customised and personalisable environments.

In the second half of the post Fragment — Some Rambling Thoughts on Computing Environments in Education I decompose computing environments into three components (PLC): a physical component (servers); a logical component (computing environment: operating system, installed packages, etc); and a cultural component (personal preference text editors, workflows, etc.).

When we provide students with a virtual machine, we provide them with a customised environment at the course (module) level. Each student gets the same logical virtual machine.

The behaviour of the machine in a logical sense will be the same for each student. But students have different computers, with different resource profiles (different processor speeds, or memory, for example).

So their experience of running the logical machine on their personal computer will be a personalised one.

As personalisation (under my sense of the term) it is outside our control.

If we offer students access to the logical machine running on our servers, we customise the physical layer in terms of compute resource, but students will still experience a personalised experience based on the speed and latency of their network connection.

At this point, I suggest that we can control what students receive in terms of the logical component (customisation), and we can suggest minimum resource requirements to try to ensure a minimum acceptable experience, if not parity of experience, in terms of the physical component.

But there is then a tension about the extent to which we tell students how they can personalise their physical component. If we are shipping a VM, should we tell students with powerful computers how to increase the memory size, or number of cores, used by the virtual machine? The change would be a personalisation implemented at the logical layer (changing default settings) that exploits personalisation at the lower physical layer. Or would that be unfair to students with low specced machines who cannot make changes at the logical layer that other students might be able to make at the logical layer?

If it takes the student with the lowest specced machine an hour to run a particularly expensive computation, should every student have to take an hour? Or should we tell students who are in a position to run the computation on their higher specced machine how to change the logical layer to let them run the activity in 5 minutes?

At the cultural layer, I would contend that we should be encouraging students to explore personalisation.

If we are running a course that involves an element of programming using a particular set of programming libraries, we can provide students with a logical environment containing all the required libraries. But should we also control the programming editor environment, particularly if the student is a seasoned developer, perhaps in another language, with a pre-existing workflow and a highly tuned, personalised editing environment?

In our TM351 Data Management and Analysis course, we deliver material to students using a virtual machine and Jupyter notebooks. To complete the course assessment, we require students to develop some code and present a data investigation in a notebook. For seasoned developers, the notebook environment is not necessarily the best environment in which to develop code, so when one student who lived in a Microsoft VS Code editor at work wanted to develop code in that personalised environment using our customised logical environment, that seemed fine to me.

Reflecting on this, it seems to me that at the cultural level we can make recommendations about what tools to use and manage our delivery of the experience in terms of: this is how to do this academic thing we are teaching in this cultural environment (a particular editor, for example) but if you want to personalise the cultural environment, that is fine (and perhaps more than that: it is right and proper…).

To riff on TM351 again, the Jupyter notebook environment we provide is customised (preconfigured) at the logical level with preinstalled extensions and customised at the cultural layer with certain of the extensions pre-enabled (a spell checker is enabled, for example, and a WYSIWYG markdown editor). But students are also free to personalise the notebook environment at the cultural level by enabling their own selection of preinstalled notebook extensions. They can also go further, and personalise the logical component by installing additional extensions that can facilitate personalisation at the cultural level, with the caveat that we only guarantee that things work using the logical component we provided students with.

PS I originally started pondering customisation vs personalisation as a rant against “personalisation” in education. I’d argue that it is actually “customisation” and an example of the institution imposing different customised offerings at the individual student level.

Mary Jo Foley:

Users who want to use WVD to access Windows 10 and Windows 7 desktops and apps won't be charged an additional fee for that purpose, as long as they are existing Microsoft 365 F1, E3, E5, Windows 10 Enterprise E3 or E5 and/or are a Windows VDA customer. Those who are existing Windows Server users, there will be no additional cost, as long as they're using existing Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and the appropriate client-access licenses.

During the public preview, desktops and apps can be deployed in virtual machines in any Azure region, but the data and management of these apps will reside in the U.S. That means data transfer to the U.S. may happen during the test period. Once WVD is publicly available, data and management for WVD will be available in all Azure regions, starting at general availability.

Microsoft is committing to make WVD generally available in the second half of 2019.

WVD users will get free extended support for three years (until January 2023) with no additional charge.

More >

The Washington Post: Trump could be left off some states’ ballots in 2020 if these bills become law.

“In refusing to release his tax returns, President Trump bucked decades of tradition and set off a Democrat hunt to obtain them. Now several statehouses are looking at making their release a condition of the 2020 presidential election: Show us your tax returns, or you can’t be on the ballot.

Eighteen states have considered legislation this year that would require presidential and vice presidential candidates to post their tax returns to appear on the ballot during a primary or general election, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

Proponents of the bills, such as the one passed by the Washington state Senate this week, say they are aimed at increasing transparency and returning to the “norm” of candidates releasing their financial records. But Democratic lawmakers behind the some of the legislation have admitted they are also very much about Trump, which raises legal and political questions about how far states can — or should — go in regulating who appears on their ballot, especially in a hyperpartisan climate.”

Link via MetaFilter.

The Art of the Personal Project is a crucial element to let potential buyers see how you think creatively on your own.  I am drawn to personal projects that have an interesting vision or that show something I have never seen before.  In this thread, I’ll include a link to each personal project with the artist statement so you can see more of the project. Please note: This thread is not affiliated with any company; I’m just featuring projects that I find.  Please DO NOT send me your work.  I do not take submissions.

Today’s featured artist:  Cade Martin

Blues Men:

While I love everything about the collaboration that comes with a commercial shoot, when it comes to my personal work, I find I am drawn to the one-on-one with real, every-day people.  You can’t make any of it up or direct it – how they carry themselves or have decided to dress for the day is better than where my imagination could take it. I always go out of my way to make the subjects look their best, to present them in the truest, most sincere way- exploring the architecture of their faces, the texture of their clothes and so on.

I worked on this post-production with one of my go-tos, Sugar Digital, and that familiar relationship is great for both understanding my process and pushing me to experiment. My original intention going into this Blues project was to produce these as black and white portraits, but the more we played, the more I gravitated towards a bit of warm color that brings a little more life, as well as further defining the magnetic architecture of their faces.

To see more of this project, click here.

Cade Martin is now being represented by Heather Elder

APE contributor Suzanne Sease currently works as a consultant for photographers and illustrators around the world. She has been involved in the photography and illustration industry since the mid 80s.  After establishing the art buying department at The Martin Agency, then working for Kaplan-Thaler, Capital One, Best Buy and numerous smaller agencies and companies, she decided to be a consultant in 1999. She has a new Twitter feed with helpful marketing information because she believes that marketing should be driven by brand and not by specialty.  Follow her at @SuzanneSease.  Instagram

 

The post The Art of the Personal Project: Cade Martin appeared first on A Photo Editor.

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Do you know this person? Might it be you?

Over the years I’ve found some of the best business partners by posting on this site. The overall audience for Searchblog has waxed and waned, but I’m deeply appreciative that there’s a core group of you who still watch this feed to see whatever it is I happen to be thinking about.

You may have noticed I’ve not been posting as much as I normally do, and there’s a reason for that. Back when I wrote about moving to New York, I promised to keep you updated on what I’m working on now that I’ve settled in. While I continue my work at Columbia and my engagement with NewCo (more on that soon), one my projects has become central, a new company I’m working on with several New York-based journalists and entrepreneurs. We’re keeping the focus of the company under wraps for now, but we’ve started hiring, and I’m looking for a business side partner who can handle any number of key functions as we build the company. I’m posting the role below. As the weeks progress, there’ll be any number of other roles we’ll be looking for, across technology, partnership/sales, and more. So stay tuned for that. But for now, I’m looking for what I’m calling Lead, Business Affairs. If you or someone you know is interested, please reach out. I’m jbat at battellemedia dot com. I look forward to hearing from you.

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The Business Affairs Lead will be one of the earliest founding team members of a hybrid media/technology company, responsible for crucial business functions throughout early launch. The qualified candidate can competently tackle nearly any business task related to starting a company, and has familiarity with media business models, in particular digital video, subscription, advertising, and social media. The Business Affairs lead will manage the company’s accounting, finance, contract, reporting, development and other key functions. As the company grows, any number of opportunities to either specialize, take one or more P&Ls, or grow into any number of senior functions will emerge. The company has already secured seed financing from a well known NY-based venture firm.

The company is in pre-launch and not promoting itself. The founding partners each have more than three decades of deep experience in media, technology, and venture finance. Qualified candidates will be briefed in detail. This is a full time position starting immediately, in New York, with market compensation and early equity.

Qualifications

At least five to ten years experience.

Ability to manage a budget/accounting.

Demonstrated comfort and experience handling contracts and interference.

Strong communication skills and attention to detail. Confidence, humility, passion.

Industrious, self-motivator with demonstrated ability to take initiative, make firm decisions, manage projects, in a fast-paced environment.

Excellent people skills and ability to develop and maintain productive business partnerships. Startup/media experience a major plus.

Curiosity and willingness to tackle matters outside their area of expertise.

Again, I’m jbat at battellemedia dot com. Thanks for reading!

Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, Blake McShane, Nature, Mar 21, 2019

I am definitely of the same sentiment as these authors, especially when it comes to the 'proofs' of non-hypotheses (like: there's no such thing as learning styles) to which we have been subjected over the years. Here's what the authors say: "We’re frankly sick of seeing such nonsensical ‘proofs of the null’ and claims of non-association in presentations, research articles, reviews and instructional materials." Underlying this is a reaction against the idea of a statistical 'proof' of an all-or-nothing statement. "Inferences should be scientific, and that goes far beyond the merely statistical...  eradicating categorization will help to halt overconfident claims, unwarranted declarations of ‘no difference’ and absurd statements about ‘replication failure’ when the results from the original and replication studies are highly compatible."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Laura Ritchie, Mar 21, 2019

You start either with an audience to speak to, or something to say. From there, you either tailor your message to your audience, or (better) you find an audience for what you have to say. Most of this video interview is focused on the latter, and people teaching students how to connect online will find this video, and the post its attached to, to be quite a useful resource. Having watched the video, I now see how I could maybe have been more useful, for example, by referring to something i wrote ages ago, How to be Heard. I will say, though, that Jonathan Worth has provided the right advice.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Mike Isaac, New York Times, Mar 21, 2019

It's a bit funny to be posting a reference to this article in an email newsletter that has been publishing for almost two decades, but there you have it: "My new social network is an email newsletter," writes Mike Isaac. "Every week or so, I blast it out to a few thousand people who have signed up to read my musings." This is part of the trend away from sharing on public platforms, he writes. " Now, more of us are moving toward private modes of sharing: a Slack group instead of a tweet; an encrypted Signal message instead of a status update." Of course that might be because most newsletters (including mine) are redirected into oblivion by platform-based (and ad-supported) algorithms.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

There’s more evidence about the importance of creating walkable communities in a new study that was reported in The British Medical Journal. While cities strive to have goals such as bus stops within a ten minute walk of every residence, research undertaken by Dr. Bo Xi, at Shandong University’s School of Public Health illustrates that walking to the stop may actually be extending transit passengers’ lives.

Inverse.com writes that  researchers found that walking, dancing or even gardening for “10 minutes to an hour per week was associated with an 18-percent lower risk of death compared to people who did nothing.”

It is no surprise that people who did even more gentle exercise like walking half an hour a day or 150 minutes a week as a minimum had a 34 percent lower death risk. And there was good news for seniors aging in place in their communities~strokes and heart attack risk fell  by 12 percent with moderate exercise.

Sampling data came from the annual National Health Interview Surveys in the United States. Looking at figures for the years from 1997 to 2008, the amount of activity of over 80,000 people was estimated, and then linked to registered death data up to the end of 2011. The researchers used figures collected through the surveys between 1997 and 2008 to estimate the activity levels of 88,140 people aged 40 to 85, and linked that data with registered deaths  until the end of 2011.

Here is one more reason to reboot communities to have walkable shops and services to keep residents healthy and connected.

 

Jede Straße, jeder Gehweg, ja jede Radumdrehung erzeugt in einem Tesla-Fahrzeug eine Vielzahl an Informationen, die Auskunft sowohl über den Fahrer als auch das Auto geben. Vielen ist dabei nicht bewusst, dass Tesla kein herkömmliches [...]

The Mayor of the  City of Toronto  is now talking about  instituting 30 kilometer per hour speed limits in the city.  I have written about the road carnage that is happening in Toronto where 46 pedestrians and cyclists were killed on city streets in 2018. That number increased by ten percent from 2017. Imagine~almost four people a month dying walking or cycling in the City of Toronto. The quickest way to alleviate this carnage is to slow vehicular speeds and enforce them~being crashed into by a vehicle at 50 km/h a pedestrian has a 10 percent chance of survival. Survival odds increase to 90 percent if a pedestrian is crashed into at 30 km/h.

In Oliver Moore’s article in the National Post, fingers have been pointing at Toronto Mayor John Tory who has been very conservative about addressing this road carnage. The City also instituted Vision Zero, a road safety program that should be focused on eliminating all traffic related deaths and serious injuries according to its creed. But no, in the City of Toronto they decided to only try to achieve a percentage lowering of deaths, not the complete elimination of carnage, and received much bad press about that.

The Toronto Mayor has become more proactive now looking at reducing speed limits on roads and adding more red-light cameras. He is even working on provincial acceptance of speed enforcement cameras. There is no surprise that data is showing that speeding is the culture on Toronto roads, with 20 percent of drivers travelling 10 kilometers or more over posted speeds, with some motorists driving five times faster than the limit.

With the unfortunate moniker of “Vision Zero 2.0” the mayor  has stated  “We simply have to do a better job of catching and penalizing those drivers who clearly disregard pedestrian safety and endanger others.”

Toronto, especially in Scarborough has long wide super blocks of street network that facilitates vehicular speeding and impede pedestrians from making easy crossings. As Ward Vanlaar with the Traffic Injury Research Foundation in Ottawa observed road safety used to be thought of as a transportation issue, with deaths perceived as the price to pay for “mobility”. It has been the shift towards a public health approach and the alarm raised by reports like the B.C.’s Medical Health Officer’s Report “Where the Rubber Meets the Road” that have shown that vehicular crashes are a major cause of death. And those deaths are preventable by changing road design, controlling speed, and influencing driver behaviour.

Monica Campbell, a spokesperson for Toronto Public Health, said traffic safety falls within the realm of her department.“If you invest in safer roads, safer streets, better infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians – does that reduce the burden on the healthcare system? Absolutely it does.”

Images: thestar.com, GlobalNews.ca

Getting back into that bava blog groove, and oh it feels so good! I blogged my weekly watch at Reclaim Video a few weeks ago, so this is more catch-up. Once I get settled a bit I’ll pick this up again, but better to have blogged from behind then to never have blogged at all! Words of wisdom, Jimmy, words. of. wisdom.

Reclaim Video’s not so digital signageSo once I got back from Lansing (more about that trip to come) I locked in for a solid week of Reclaim Video clerkmanship. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. To be clear, we currently have two clerks working at Reclaim Video who actually do the work, so I’m more like the eccentric old man shuffling around with random outbursts about this movie is awesome or this one sucks, etc. I’m not sure how the rest of the Reclaim crew feels (and I may not want to know), but I might be even less productive than usual when I’m on-site at Reclaim’s headquarters. I blame the fast approaching senility. 

But in the end productivity is little more than a neoliberal myth used to extract value out of my virtual labor. So, what would any self-respecting person do to resist? That’s right, go to the movies! And what did we watch, you ask, well, let’s go to the tale of the tapes….

Tim and I watched Killing Zoe together, which was directed by Roger Avery who worked with Tarantino on Pulp Fiction that same year,1994, so it was kind o a moment for him. I do love the opening taxi ride through Paris, but the film seemed pretty dated 25 years later. I realized watching this one that Eric Stoltz can’t real carry a lead role all that well, and  Jean Hughes-Anglade gives Al Pacino’s ridiculously over-acted performance in Scent of a Woman a run for its money in this one—-ooooh rah! Nonetheless, the laserdisc was in prime condition and Julie Delpy did what she could—I always find her convincing—but the prostitute with a heart of gold working her way through school is already such a cliche role it can be a hard role escape its gravitational pull of predictability.

Fort Apache, the Bronx on Selectavision, there is something so 80s about that formula I can’t even express it. It’s kinda like Mikey from the Life cereal commercials dying of an exploded stomach while chasing pop rocks with Coca Cola. Anyway, this is movie belongs to what Frederic Jameson described as gang war films visualizing  the ‘near future’ through the lens of internal civil war.* He includes other late 70s and early 80s films like The Warriors (1979) and Escape Form New York (1981) with Fort Apache, and the idea of near future urban civil war movies would make an interesting film festival. In fact, you could also in Neil Smith’s ideas around the revanchist city to see how the myths of the “new urban frontier” also inspired a wide range of films during the 70s and 80s from Death Wish to Crocodile Dundee.  And the whole vision of The Bronx as the inner city frontier from which civilization has fled is almost the essence of Fort Apache, the Bronx, it is literally re-positioning the frontier in NYC, and invoking a more contemporary vision of conquest through gentrification. I mean the film opens up with Pam Grier executing two of NYC’s finest at point blank , which is an odd, retrograde hat tip to her thriving career just a few years earlier as an ass-kicking action star. The scene later in the movie where she cuts a john with a razor blade hidden in her mouth was akin to the Alien popping out of John Hurt’s stomach for me. She steals the film in her bit scenes, and while I am a fan of Paul Newman, this is not his finest hour. He tries his damnedest, but the film’s heavy-handed approach is far too tedious for him to transcend. That said, the shots of NYC in the early 80s is stunning, and the documentation of the South Bronx during a moment when hip hop and rap are emerging from this urban “frontier” make for an interesting counterpoint to the general longing for law and order through colonization. Anyway, that was a longwinded way of saying I went to grad school once….next!

I pulled out John Coltrane: the Coltrane Legacy to get a sense of the laserdisc sound quality, which was one of the real revolutions of  this medium. The laserdisc was an early taste of the CD revolution that would explode in the 90s, and this Pioneer laserdisc was part of the stash of nearly 2000 we bought in January from Fat Kat Records. The audio was awesome, but even better was the music. I know next to nothing about Jazz, but I had heard A Love Supreme by Coltrane and was moved. So, I put this on, and his rendition of “My Favorite Things” was magic. But I know little about Jazz, so I can’t really speak to the music, but what gripped me about this documentary was that it had a series of recorded sessions peppered with interviews, and Elvin Jones, the drummer of the Coltrane quartet, were wild. He spoke of Coltrane as if he were truly an emissary of god, and there was this sense of awe and adoration he exuded about Coltrane that made him almost Christ-like. Come to find out there is a church in San Francisco dedicated to Coltrane called the St. John Coltrane Church—what else is there to say?

Possibly the most forgettable of the movies I watched was The Andromeda Strain (1971). I was surprised given it was directed by Robert Wise, but it was perhaps overly faithful to the novel and left for a ridiculously slow and boring paced film. I had not seen it previously, so was expecting more, but the opening was like an overly long  Twilight Zone episode without a twist. It was definitely a letdown, but I can report the laserdisc is in fine shape, and played beautifully, at least the parts I watched.

Ranking right up there on the turkey scale with Andromeda Strain was Parents (1989)—though less to my surprise. The best thing about this movie is the VHS box, and the tape was in pretty poor shape, which effected the experience. Nonetheless, as much as I enjoy Randy Quaid sometimes, this was predictable and boring. Suburban patina hiding a cannibalistic urge that is fairly pointless. I wasn’t even that taken with the period elements, which are usually an easy win. I subjected Reclaim Video clerk Xander to this one given it was my first time, but I’m afraid I may have wasted his time. The VHS tape was interesting because it was recorded on SLP, the lowest possible quality setting. It’s almost like it was a transfer, and you could tell because there was significantly less tape that on other VHS movies we have. How bad the picture and sound quality was may have been the most remarkable part of the experience, and a reminder that VHS by and large was not a pretty format when compared to laserdisc. 

I also watched Rosemary’s Baby (1968)on Selectavision, which was pretty impressive quality wise. The film is one I have seen many times, but I have never seen it videodisc format, and it was well preserved and the quality was easily as good, if not better, than VHS. I love the Selectavision just cause it is so wild, and here is a video of me demonstrating how you insert a videodisc into the Selectavision player:

I also had a bit of fun playing Morricone Youth’s Mad Max album in concert with the VHS tape scene of arguably the best opening to any movie. I don’t think I had the right son, but it works all the same. Morricone Youth pretty much rules, and I am trying to secure Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik (1968) on VHS or Laserdisc so I can play Morricone Youth’s take on that soundtrack to the film. Stay tuned!

I also went on a bit of a mini Corey Haim marathon, even if unexpectedly. I remain a huge fan of Stephen King novel adaptations from the 1980s. In fact, the list is impressive when you thing about it: The Shining, Dead Zone, Christine, Salem’s Lot, Firestarter, Cat’s Eye, Creepshow, and the list goes on. Silver Bullet (1985) is probably a lesser known film, but it was a favorite for me back in the day. I loved the whole idea of some crazy uncle (Garey Busey) giving his disabled nephew a souped-up wheelchair called Silver Bullet for fighting a werewolf who turns out to be the local chaplain. Good stuff, and I was pretty impressed with Corey Haim, I did not remember him in this one, but he was convincing, and I enjoyed it on re-watch.

But probably the most powerful film experience for me on a personal level was First Born (1984), Corey Haim’s very first film, although he played the younger brother to protagonist Christopher Collet of Manhattan Project (1986) and Sleepaway Camp (1984) fame. The film has an insane cast featuring Terri Gar, Peter Weller, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Robert Downey Jr., to name a few highlights.

But beyond that, the film centers around separated, but soon to be divorced parents (as so many 80s films do), and the effects on the kids. In particular, when the absent dad is gone how mom (Teri Gar) takes in a freeloading drug dealer (Peter Weller), and the effects on the kids. The sense of tension and deep seated horror of a split family is real, and the way in which the brothers try and cope struck me. What’s more, it was all filmed in new Jersey, so they are playing lacrosse (which as a Long Islander was a regional signifier) and the brothers would fight over who stole whose batteries for their hand help video game or walkman—talk about 80s! I don’t know, this film just struck me on a level that is hard to define, it is far from a great film cinematically, but one of those artifacts of time that say some much about moment. In many ways the opposite of timeless, but almost as important as a result. If I ever catch up on my blogging I’ll write more about this one cause it hit a nerve.

I am missing a few films I watched, but saving them for update 3 because I will catch my groove here soon and make this far more regular, but for now it’s just another brick in the bava wall!

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*This is taken from a footnote in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, and you can read it here.

,

My love affair with Priority Pass began in 2017, on the day I had the worst food poisoning of my life.

I was set to fly halfway around the world, from Muscat, Oman, to San Francisco. But after eating what must have been a bad order of shawarma, I was feeling horrible and stuck at the airport, and basically I just wanted to die.

And then I saw the gates of heaven.

My mother had a best friend who became my godfather and his name was Saul. He was tall and rangy and spoke gently, but had a laugh I could hear from the lawn outside our second-floor apartment, which embarrassed me at the time, but now I laugh around the same decibel level. Uncle Saul was a natural fan, a lover of things and people, and something he loved a lot was music theater, along with its culture and accoutrements. He hung Erté prints in his carpeted apartment and kept a framed Barbra Streisand poster in his office at the City of Toronto’s social services division. He loved Fosse, the 1999 revue, so much that he planned to name the dog he was in the process of adopting after the famous choreographer.

When I was a kid, Uncle Saul took me to musicals — the ’90s blockbuster revivals I really wanted to see, like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Phantom of the Opera. By 2000, the year I started high school, I had drifted away from such interests and cared mostly about impressing my new, alternative friends. I was majoring in music theater — I’d wanted to go to an art school and was better at singing than drawing — but the only “musical” I was interested in was The Wall.

On October 22 of that year, a Sunday, I got a phone call from my mother, who had gone to meet Saul and another friend, my Aunt Janet, for a movie. I could tell by the airlessness in her voice that something bad had happened. When Saul hadn’t answered his door, the building superintendent had let Janet into the unit. They found him on his bed; he had died in his sleep of a heart attack. He was just over 50.

That night at Saul’s apartment, with his body in the next room; during his memorial service at the 519 on Church Street; placing stones on his gravesite in Montreal, I was very sad. But it wasn’t the kind of grueling, physical grief I supposed I should have felt, and that I’d feel sometimes over matters as trivial as the end of a short-lived fling. Nearly two decades later, the way I feel is bereaved. I feel his absence from my life acutely, unpredictably, ritualistically. I think often about the kind of friendship we’d have if we’d gotten to know each other as adults.

I sense how much of him is in me, from my tastes to my disposition to my sense of home. Anyone’s childhood is a scatterplot of impressions, of people and places that aren’t what they were, or what they seemed to be, but Uncle Saul is the throughline among my happiest and most familiar memories, and whatever he represents is what I most identify with, what I feel I most belong to.

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In 2015 I moved from Toronto to New York, where I got a job in an office above Times Square, overlooking all those theaters and lighted signs on which Toronto’s theaters and signs had been modeled. Times Square had long diffused into representations of itself which I’d followed, it seemed, to the site of their origin. I wanted to merge the past with the present — the vague, powerful impressions with the vague, overwhelming scene I pushed through to make it on time to meetings, and to study what was finally real to me.

A few weeks ago, meaning to watch Velvet Buzzsaw on Netflix, I got bored and queued up a YouTube upload of Sunday in the Park with George, a 1984 musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. If you have even a passing interest in musical theater, you know that Stephen Sondheim is considered the greatest living God of the form, but those who don’t care about musical theater don’t often feel like they should. For years I’d thought musicals were all about banishing negativity and reducing feelings to orchestra hits, but what I didn’t know was that Sondheim and people like him (for instance, Bob Fosse) had mastered a technology whose sole purpose was to give pleasure, and rewired it for complex emotions and social dynamics.

Sunday in the Park with George is based on the life and work of pointillist painter Georges Seurat, in particular “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” the 7-foot-by-10 painting that hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. Like the painting, composed of thousands of multicolored dots that form an image of everyday people at leisure, the show is made up of seemingly disparate dabs of narrative that cohere as if by magic into an overwhelming whole. The first act follows Seurat as he struggles to complete his painting. His mistress and model, Dot, is pregnant with his child, but feeling neglected; she leaves him and moves to the United States with their baby, Marie. The second act features Seurat’s great-grandson, a contemporary artist who creates light structures called Chromolumes and is struggling similarly with art and relationships. His grandmother, Marie, insists that Seurat is his ancestor; he doesn’t quite believe her, but he travels anyway to La Grande Jatte — unrecognizable except for a single tree featured in Act I — where he encounters the ghost of Dot, his great-grandmother.

The musical’s origin story is one of synchronicity, or “kismet,” to use Sondheim’s word. In 1982 he had seen a play of Lapine’s by happenstance, and was “stunned” by its sophistication, “so much so that I determined to meet with him and raise the possibility of collaborating with him on a musical,” he wrote in the second volume of his annotated lyric collection, Look, I Made a Hat. “I did nothing about it.” A few months later, a producer got in touch to ask if he’d be willing to meet with a young playwright — James Lapine — who’d hoped to collaborate with him.

Lapine had wanted to adapt Nathanael West’s novel A Cool Million, which, by chance, was one of the few novels Sondheim had read and enjoyed over the past few decades. The project didn’t pan out, but the pair got to discussing what might work instead. When Lapine asked what sort of musical Sondheim wanted to write, he replied simply, “themes and variations,” and showed him for example a French magazine that had devoted an issue to different visual riffs on the Mona Lisa. They started talking about French paintings, and Lapine mentioned Seurat. “We discussed the curious fact that of all the 50-some-odd people in the painting, not one of them is looking at one another,” Sondheim wrote. The painter was the missing element: the person who had placed them all neatly on the same canvas, despite the messiness and inscrutability of their real lives and dynamics. “The challenge? Bring order to the whole,” George says, at the start and end of the show. “Through design, composition, tension, balance, light, and harmony.”

If anything about Sunday feels dated (besides the Chromolumes) it’s the supremacy of one vision over the people conducted within it. But, doing away with the genius myth, you could read the pointillist theme, and its variations, as a metaphor for contemporary social arrangements, or George himself as a stand-in for any one person attempting to make sense of themselves at the intersection of people, ideas, and images they encounter at the terminus of their own screens. A sensibility can cohere a worldview more vividly than an institution, for worse and for better. “Stan culture”; the cyclical interest in astrology and its archetypes; the commodification of co-presence, as in podcasting and vlogging — all speak to the timeless fact that it’s easier to make sense of a world in flux, atomized by a million emergencies and bids on one’s attention, through the unifying lens of another person.

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In The Secret Life of the American Musical, Broadway producer and artistic director Jack Viertel writes that people often cry at the end of Sunday’s first act, when the characters depicted in Seurat’s painting join together to sing: People strolling through the trees/Of a small suburban park/On an island in the river/On an ordinary Sunday. “No one has died, nothing momentous has happened,” he writes, “but art has somehow given stature to an everyday moment… the whole first act has been preparing an unsuspecting audience for this moment, and it’s overpowering.”

I did not cry at that moment, but I did cry about 30 minutes into the second act, when George’s grandmother, Marie, sings “Children and Art,” a much quieter, more subdued song addressed to both her grandson and her mother, Dot, who never got to meet each other, and who don’t even know in any material sense they’re related. You would have liked him, she sings. You would have liked her.

This brought to mind one of my favorite books, Edgewise, an oral biography of the writer and actress Cookie Mueller. Mueller was a mainstay of downtown Manhattan in the 1980s, and her personal history runs through the freak circuit of late-century America, through the towns and enclaves whose scenes would feed into modern queer and DIY culture. “She herself was an entire scene,” writes author Chloé Griffin. She died in 1989 at age 40, of AIDS-related illness, amid an era of incalculable loss and incalculable grief.

Griffin is not, by her admission, a journalist, or even a biographer per se; she just connected with Mueller’s writing and felt pulled toward the community of her people, which, in the end, she belonged to. Mueller’s loved ones — particularly Sharon Niesp, her close friend and former partner, and Max, her son — trusted her, and the document she produced works something like Seurat’s painting: a portrait of Mueller made from impressions of those who loved her, which cohere into a great, projected likeness.

The book ends with some impressions of Razilee, Mueller’s young granddaughter, who friends of the family call little Cooks. “She has the same curiosities and she holds herself physically like Cookie would,” Niesp says. “It’s really amazing… she’s a sweet girl and Cookie would have really loved her. They would have had fun together, and every grandmother says that — there’s a part of her in there — but it’s even more pronounced if they’re dead. You see the DNA coming through, and the person isn’t there to confirm it, or you don’t reflect off the grandmother anymore so you reflect off something spiritual.”

There is nothing miraculous about it, if you don’t like to think in those terms — genes are tangible, cosmic synchronicity is not — but it really is a matter of how you like to think. Affinity across a great distance of time and space is both profound and totally mundane. Personal affinities, today, sort themselves in ways comparable to an algorithmic feed, not necessarily determined at all by temporal or spatial proximity. It’s normal to relate more to people who are nowhere near you geographically than those you see every day, and social platforms materialize a connection that once seemed arcane.

People can seem to reincarnate in new variations, at different points in family lines, but these “themes and variations” occur, of course, among unrelated people. “I don’t know what part of us falls in love with the voice in another person’s stories, or why I felt something hinge in a mute, broken off part of myself when I read Cookie’s words,” Griffin writes. I don’t know why, upon hearing the singer Laura Nyro for the first time, I felt constituted as a person in a way I never had before. She presented a whole vocabulary for an emotional worldview I shared, and she inhabited womanhood in an extravagant, painful, ecstatic way that I finally recognized myself in. Something in her work implied a whole mode of being that felt like a lineage of sorts, like a secret society, communicated through symbols I hadn’t known I understood. Laura died of ovarian cancer at 49; her partner, Maria Desiderio died of it two years later, and so did her sole biographer, Michele Kort.

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My mother still misses Saul a lot, and in times of discord, we can reliably make peace by reminiscing about him. He has been gone longer than I knew him, and my memories are not so dependable. There is no way to reconcile how I interpret our relationship now with how I perceived it at the time, and no way to know which perception is more accurate; I can’t separate the ways I want and need to remember him from the facts. Every relationship, near or far, involves a certain amount of myth-making. At a certain point it doesn’t matter what’s fact and what isn’t; to belong to something is an opt-in.

Usually my mother is quick and sharp to correct me when she thinks I’ve misremembered or embellished upon something that happened to both of us, but not when it involves Saul. My mother and I — and those friends of hers I grew up with, though we may no longer be in touch — remember him the way fans remember an icon: the quality of the memory is less its accuracy than how it speaks to the soul of who he was, because he was more than what he did or didn’t do.

When you are young, at least when I was young, I thought the adult world was static, and that growing up meant growing into it. I thought of my elders in terms of a pantheon of fixed personalities in constant relation to each other; I didn’t know grownups grew up, or consider the possibility that once our adulthoods converged we might have very little in common — that what had held us all together was a moment in time. I didn’t understand the paradox of being alone in one’s perception of other people, while being the sum of their influence. What we all still have in common is missing Saul.

mkalus shared this story from imincorrigible on Twitter.

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A new official image of Apple’s near mythical AirPower inductive charging mat has made its way online.

Michael Bateman, an iPhone in Canada reader, discovered the official render while digging through the source code of Apple’s Australian website. Bateman found a reference to a figure class named “image-wireless-airpower,” which lead him to the image seen below.

Notably, the image shows AirPower directly charging only two devices: an iPhone and an AirPods wireless case. When Apple’s Phil Schiller first teased AirPower at the company’s September 2017 iPhone X launch keynote, he said the accessory was capable of charging three device simultaneously. Of course, it’s likely best not to read too much into an image.

Some, granted circumstantial, evidence suggests Apple may finally announce an official launch date for the AirPower soon.

Most notably, the company announced three separate products updates on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. Going into Thursday morning, it appeared there was a chance Apple could announce a launch date for AirPower on either Thursday or Friday.

Source: Twitter (@michael8bateman) Via: iPhone in Canada

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Google Chrome for Android is letting users navigate back to previously opened pages and forward by swiping on the screen.

There’s a Chrome flag — a hidden enabled developer setting that lets developers A/B test new features — that lets users perform these actions.

According to Android Police, the flag is called “Overscroll history navigation” on Chrome Canary and Chrome Dev and “Enable Gesture Navigation” with Chrome Beta and the live version of Chrome.

When the feature is enabled, Chrome triggers the action when the user intentionally swipes more on the right or left side of the display.

What’s interesting is how the feature works with Huawei’s Mate 20 series. When you turn on gesture navigation on those devices, they require the user to swipe the right of the screen to go back.

Chrome’s functionality may not work with the phones as Huawei’s native gesture control could kick the user out of the app instead of simply going back to the previous page.

iOS Chrome users are already able to swipe left and right in Google’s browser to navigate.

Source: Android Police

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The Apple Watch Series 4’s ECG heart monitoring feature could finally be making its way to Canada.

While the wearable’s ECG functionality has been available in the U.S. for several months now, Apple Watch Series 4 users in Canada haven’t able to access the feature yet. In fact, switching an Apple’s Watch’s region doesn’t enable access to the feature given that it’s locked to the area the wearable was first bought.

Health Canada has repeatedly stated that Apple has yet to file an application for the agency to certify the Series 4’s ECG functionality, though it appears things have started to move in a positive direction.

Health Canada’s official Twitter account recently responded to a question about the Series 4’s ECG feature finally releasing in Canada.

Apple has communicated that they are working to bring the Apple Watch heart features to Canada soon. However, to date, Health Canada has not received an application.

— GovCanHealth (@GovCanHealth) March 20, 2019

This tweet is an indication that Apple and Health Canada are at least taking part in discussions. That said, an official application hasn’t been submitted to the regulatory body yet. As such, it’s unclear when Apple will release ECG in Canada.

Apple’s ECG feature is activated by placing your finger on the side of the Digital Crown for 30 seconds, revealing whether your heart rhythm indicates signs of atrial fibrillation or a standard heartbeat.

Source: Twitter (@GovCanHealth) Via: iPhone in Canada 

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