“Not one dime! Not until Democrats pass healthcare.”

That is what DNC fundraisers who call our house are going to hear from now on.

The hacks and jackasses in Washington who took over the Democratic National Committee from Howard Dean have taken us right back to their old election-losing “centrist” techniques. Under Dean’s leadership, we witnessed the landslide election of Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate. All that advantage has been nearly frittered away.

Obama has spent the past year trying to engage Republicans in bipartisan governance. It’s been like a year of watching Charlie Brown trying to kick a football with Lucy’s “assistance.”

And when Massachusetts voters, one year after Obama’s landslide victory, re-fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat with a Republican? Surely something is very, very wrong. Let me just quote Howard Dean on what that something is:

If you want to win, you actually can’t sort of move to the middle and become a Republican. You’ve got to stand up and stand for the things that you got elected on and that the Democratic Party believes in and we haven’t seen that in the healthcare bill and I think that’s part of the problem.

The smartest thing Obama could do now, in my unhumble opinion, would be to beg Howard Dean to come back and run the DNC.

Update: Somebody on Daily Kos had a great suggestion about this issue: Make your own list of good progressive candidates. When you get particularly annoyed about something political, make that the occasion to send a donation to the next person on your own list.

Hello, 2010, you already look so appealing, even under a faint sugar frosting of newfallen snow. Farewell and very good riddance to the now-past noughties, from Bush’s Florida recount to the disasters his team left behind.

This picture is here to remind me of all the many things that are now better than they were when I was a little girl. The Merrimack River, once full of untreated sewage and factory waste, is now full of fish and dotted with boats in the summer. (Oh how Republicans complained about its cleanup!) I can find strawberries even in January, good ones, even! And I can drink black coffee any time I want to, because I’m a grown-up.

Let’s make our next decade a good one, thinking big picture thoughts and letting them guide us.

Let’s not end up looking back, ten years into the future, with head-shaking regrets. Let our 2020 vision be better than this one!

John Brockman and Katinka Matson were in Cambridge this weekend, throwing (as usual) an enjoyable party…

..at which none of my iPhone pictures came out, but I like this one of John, seen here with just a bit of Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, the author of the (soon to be published) Bursts.

There was quite a bit of talk about the Edge question for 2010 (which remains secret until it gets published there January 1.) I was also very intrigued by the ongoing DNA mysteries that Ting Wu explores in her Harvard Med School lab — and by the diverse places that Katinka Matson finds the flowers for her humongous photographs. I also learned that Frank Wilczek considers evolution a very roundabout way to deliver paltry amounts of information. I am looking forward to reading Connected by Nicolas Christakis and James Fowler, especially the chapter that begins with epidemic laughter. And if I had been sitting closer to Marvin Minsky or Benoit Mandelbrot, I might have learned something novel from them as well.

And then there was the Harvest’s sticky toffee pudding! Thanks once again, John Brockman and Katinka Matson.

I have seen the future and it is CERN.

The only reason our desks don’t all look like this right now is that you, yes you, haven’t yet realized how much you want this, and therefore computer and software manufacturers have not yet started to make it easy to get.

Brains are not computers and we have “evolved” our computers to supplement the places where we really need extra help — memory storage and processing, collaboration, number crunching, and visualizing stuff.

The trouble is that, because computer monitor square-footage has been very expensive in the past, we are used to short-changing ourselves on visualization. Instead of getting the full shiny benefit of all the ways our computer CAN help us think, plan, and imagine, we are resigned to the time-consuming hackage of layered or tiled windows cluttering up our lone monitor.

Old computers and old monitors are very cheap; it would be easy to maker-fy several onto the wall behind your desk for simultaneous and useful display.

But wouldn’t this create a problem, I hear you asking, with “continuous partial attention“?

Au contraire! — as the seasick Frenchman said, when asked if he wanted to eat. By keeping our very own plans and obsessions and interests on view, we would compete more successfully for our own brainspace against the binging and buzzing of multi-interruption.

What would you keep on your own five new computer screens? I am also mentally giving you a free sixth one, where you actually work on the stuff you do now.

Frank and I are in Bern on our way to CERN, as the LHC beams are finally online and being brought up to speed. The LHC beam got to Bern’s labs before we did.

But not much before we did — ATLAS recorded its first particle “splashes” on Nov. 20, not much more than a week ago.

The ATLAS group at Bern University focuses on data-acquisition and data-analysis. One of the many amazing things they showed us today is their giant realtime display of LHC information.

The lefthand side of the monitor (most of it not visible in this photo) shows many aspects of the LHC beam status. One young experimenter is here pointing to information about the most recent “event” recorded by ATLAS, from three different viewpoints. This was a cosmic ray event, which was superceded by a second cosmic ray event during the few minutes we stood looking at the monitor. (The beam status was “off” so collision events were not on view.)

The black rectangle with many particle tracks is a lovely revolving three-dimensional image of very the first beam “event” recorded by ATLAS. Wow.

I am definitely going to follow CERN on Twitter for more.

The limerick is a fine old mathematical chestnut, most likely created by a real practitioner who invoked Gausswhen trying to tie his cravat and thought of Klein bottles when he heard the milkman’s cart rumble by. With blessings upon Stu’s head, I am not that old.

I hope all my readers will show their support for YouTube’s new adult content by favoriting Stu’s video early and often.

NH swimmers at sunset. I don’t remember now if this photo showed people headed down to the lake or about to come back up to sit on the porch. But maybe that’s part of what this photo really means.

Dave Winer, in the course of a blogpost called “Narrate your work.,” says:

Over the years I’ve seen ideas that show up over and over in various different forms, and when we discover one, we give it a name. Examples. Jay Rosen came up with Atomization. Doc Searls said Markets Are Conversations. David Weinberger has so many — including Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Transparency is the New Objectivity. Clay Shirky says Here Comes Everybody. Jay and I together came up with Rebooting The News. Some of mine are Sources Go Direct, River of News, We Make Shitty Software, Checkbox News, People Come Back to Places that Send Them Away, Ask Not What the Internet Can Do For You, The Platform with No Platform Vendor, It’s Even Worse Than It Appears.

I agree with Dave’s “Narrate your work,” and would just add to that — make time also to narrate your life, at least for yourself and maybe for a very few others.

Were these faintly-seen swimmers heading back up to the porch? Or down into the lake? What matters more is that I managed to photograph one lucid moment of pure summer pleasure. That memory will now be mine for the rest of my life.

Fortunately, this nitwit forgot to change the sigline, which points to this blog.

From: Betsy Devine
Date: July 28, 2009 5:54:43 AM EDT
Subject: Hello

Hello,

How are you doing? Hope all is well with you and your family, I am sorry I didn’t inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar/conference.

I need a favor from you as soon as you receive this email, I misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money, and other valuable things were kept. Can you urgently assist me with a soft loan of $2,600 US Dollars to sort-out my hotel bills and get myself back home. You are the only one I can trust with this, please can this be between us? You have my word; I will refund you as soon as I return.

I will appreciate whatever you can afford, I’ll pay you back as soon as I return I promise, Let me know if you can assist, to enable me send you the details to use in sending the money through western union.

Thanks,

Betsy

http://BetsyDevine.com/blog “Making trouble today for a better tomorrow.” ———————————————————–

How very complex are the surfaces that confront us, walking through real life. And yet how much simpler they seem if considered as a succession of layers, each layer with its own time stamp and simple description.

Consider this Krakow wall’s layers as a series of event reports in some kind of blog. Translating its RSS feed into English, a few entries follow:

Description: Surface layer of city grime

pubDate: multiple/ongoing

Description:Graffiti incident, Antoni & Malgorzata

pubDate: 1987

Description: Broken fragments of stucco re-expose brick wall

pubDate: 1974

Description: Deterioration of paint starts to re-expose stucco

pubDate: 1943

Description: Painted stucco layer on top of brick wall

pubDate: 1934

I’m thinking back on my own life as a series of layers — heartfelt events whose legacy remains even when others succeed them. What would your life’s RSS feed say about you?

There is something magical about musicians in concert spaces before they perform. Years of aspiration and perfecting skill, weeks of practice with friends (and perhaps enemies) — in just moments now, one more wonderful chance for their public fruition.

Last night’s concert featured two works by Mieczysław Karłowicz, a string serenade and a violin concerto, followed by Beethoven’s Pastorale symphony (#6).

I had never heard Karlowicz’s music performed before and am glad I discovered it–not least because we share a December 11 birthday. Krakow’s St Catherine Church is a wonderfully high-arched space for listening to music augmented by the occasional twittering of its few sparrows.

This huge Gothic church sits in Krakow’s former Jewish district Kazimierz, brutally emptied by Nazis, now serving up platefuls of carp and earfuls of klezmer nightly in restaurants like Ariel and Klezmer Hois.

Vladimir Nabokov said of “articulate art,” but could also have said of music or science or any fine human endeavor, that it is a “melancholy and very local palliative.” There is something melancholy about musicians after a concert, even one that ends with a standing ovation, as last night’s performance by Capella Cracoviensis deservedly did.