Open Buddha

In Memory of Leon Erlin

2012-04-24T23:30:00-07:00

My father-in-law, Leon Erlin, died last Thursday, April 19, 2012. He was 91 years old, a World War II veteran, and had survived a number of life threatening illnesses rather robustly over the last fifteen years or so.

My wife, Rebecca, and I went over to his and my mother-in-law, Louetta's, house this afternoon for a small family memorial service. Leon was cremated and I gather that Louetta just wanted something quiet with immediate family.

She spoke a bit about her 42 year long marriage to Leon and what he was like as a man. Others spoke at length about their experiences of Leon as a parent, an uncle, a cousin, and so forth in their lives over the last few decades. It was eye opening to hear about the kind of man he'd been in the eyes of these people. I've really only known my wife's perspective of her dad from my eleven years together with her and my own from knowing him during these last five and a half years. I never knew him well. He was quite old when we met and he was a taciturn man by nature, though I gather he grew less so over the years. He was a figure that I saw at family gatherings or the occasional visits to each other's homes.

Leon grew up as a Jewish kid during the Great Depression, often on his own. He enlisted in the Air Force as a patriotic American to fight Hitler (his own words). He managed to go to college with no support or resources, always managing to build on his own tenacity and willingness to work. He studied horticulture and had a great love of nature, spending much of his time over decades camping and hkining. He taught public school for many years and went back to school following his retirement to earn a second degree, this one in the Russian language. It would be hard for me to do true justice to the long life of this man.

At the memorial, we did some short readings to remember Leon as he was. Leon was a Jew, if a non-observant one, so we recited the Mourner's Kaddish together as a group. The Jewish members of the family doing the Hebrew and then all of us reciting in English.

In phonetic Hebrew, it is as follows:

Yit-ga-dal v'yit-ka-dash sh'mei ra-ba, b'al-ma di-v'ra chi-ru-tei, v'yam-lich mal-chu-tei b'chai-yei-chon uv'yo-mei-chon uv'chai-yei d'chol-beit Yis-ra-eil, ba-a-ga-la u-viz-man ka-riv, v'im'ru: A-mein.

Y'hei sh'mei ra-ba m'va-rach l'a-lam ul'al-mei al-ma-ya.

Yit-ba-rach v'yish-ta-bach, v'yit-pa-ar v'yit-ro-mam v'yit-na-sei, v'yit-ha-dar v'yit-a-leh v'yit-ha-lal, sh'mei d'ku-d'sha, b'rich hu, l'ei-la min kol bir-cha-ta v'shi-ra-ta, tush-b'cha-ta v'ne-che-ma-ta, da-a-mi-ran b'al-ma, v'im'ru: A-mein.

Y'hei sh'la-ma ra-ba min sh'ma-ya, v'cha-yim, a-lei-nu v'al kol-Yis-ra-eil, v'im'ru: A-mein.

O-seh sha-lom bim-ro-mav, hu ya-a-seh sha-lom a-lei-nu v'al kol-Yis-ra-eil, v'im'ru: A-mein.

This is English translation we used:

May God's name be exalted and hallowed throughout the world that He created, as is God's wish. May God's sovereignty soon be accepted, during our life and the life of all Israel. And let us say: Amen

May God's great name be praised through all time.

Glorified and celebrated, lauded and worshipped, exalted and honored, extolled and acclaimed may the Holy One be, praised beyond all song and psalm, beyond all tributes that mortals can utter. And let us say: Amen.

Let there be abundant peace from heaven, with life's goodness for us and for all Israel. And let us say: Amen.

May the One who brings peace to His universe bring peace to us and all Israel. And let us say: Amen.

Leon had studied Zen when he was younger and sat with Suzuki Roshi around 1962 for a while at Soko-ji, a Zen temple in a converted synagogue in San Francisco. He lost track of Suzuki later but was influenced by Zen in his life. Because of this, I was asked to read something to touch on this. Following the kaddish, I read part of Hsin Hsin Ming (信心銘) or "Faith in Mind," a poem attributed to the Third Patriarch of Zen and written around the year 600 C. E.

The section that I read was as follows:

In this world of Suchness
there is neither self nor other-than-self.
To come directly into harmony
with this reality just simply say
when doubt arises, "not two."
In this "not two" nothing is separate,
nothing is excluded
No matter when or where,
enlightenment means entering this truth.
And this truth is beyond extension
or diminuation in time or space;
in it a single thought is ten thousand years.
Emptiness here, emptiness there,
but the infinite universe
stands before your eyes.
Infinitely large and infinitely small;
no difference,
for definitions have vanished
and no boundaries are seen.
So too with being and non-being.
Don't waste time in doubts and arguments
that have nothing to do with this.
One thing, all things,
move among and intermingle without distinction.
To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection.
To live in this faith is the road to non-duality
because the non-dual is one with the trusting mind.
Words!
The Way is beyond language,
for in it there is
no yesterday
no tomorrow
no today.

Leon will be missed by his family and all of the people with whom he came into contact.

Review of Why I Am A Five Percenter

2012-04-07T21:40:00-07:00

I just finished reading Michael Muhammad Knight's new book, "Why I Am a Five Percenter." This is a follow-up to his previous, more academic, book on the Five Percenters, their history, culture, and beliefs centering on New York City that he wrote back in 2007.

Knight became well known a few years ago by the unique virtue of having accidentally created a movement in reality that he wrote about fictionally first. He is the author of "The Taqwacores," a novel about young, American punk Muslims. He depicts these Muslims being followers of a punk-rock movement of Islamic bands as they struggle to find their Islamic identity in an American context. This wholly fictitious vision was inspiring enough that a number of punk Islamic bands actually formed after the book was quietly distributed in samizdat editions, bringing the vision to reality, at least to some degree.

Knight has also written a number of other works, such as Blue Eyed Devil, about being a white American convert to Sunni Islam living in a post 9/11 era. That work is an excellent travelogue of road tripping from mosque to mosque across America. He has also written another of travelling to Mecca on Hajj and the people he met along the way.

When I read his initial work on the Five Percenters, "The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip-Hop and the Gods of New York," I was gladdened to see the level of sensitivity to the history of this movement that he paid. Knight seemed very sympathetic to their attempts to grapple with their beliefs, the role of these beliefs in their lives as Black Americans, and their relationship to the Nation of Islam. It turns out that, actually, he became more than just sympathetic, though it developed mostly in the years following his encounters that enabled him to right his first book.

For those that don't know, the Five Percenters, who sometimes refer to themselves as the Nation of Gods and Earths, are a Black American spiritual movement (I won't call them a "religion" because I don't think they'd want that) that has historical roots in the Nation of Islam, the American Black Muslim organization that so many know because of the fame of Malcolm X. In 1963, Clarence 13X of the Nation of Islam (NOI) had a personal revelation concerning himself, reality, and the nature of the lessons that he had learned from the NOI. He declared himself to be "Allah" and began to preach to folks he met in New York City during the following years. The primary group who took up his teachings were Black gang kids who had some affinity to the ideals put forth by the Nation of Islam without necessarily being affiliated formally with it. When Clarence 13X (whom I will call "Allah" henceforth) called himself "Allah," he was not identifying himself with the Allah of Islam as popularily understood. His conception of "Allah" was as the "best knower" with the understanding of the true nature of things and it was not an exclusive position. He regarded this knowledge and realization as the rightful inheritance of the Black man, who had been deceived, even by the NOI, as to his own nature. Allah spoke against the very idea of a monotheistic God, a "mystery god" to use the parlance of the NOI, the unknowable spook of mythology that people assign their beliefs to and use to justify their actions. In his conception, we (though more specifically Black men as he taught) are all gods, if we know the truth. These gods are not supernatural beings but people who have realized their godliness as whole beings. Allah preached a message of self-reliance, education, knowledge, and wisdom based on the 120 lessons (known as the "Supreme Wisdom Lessons") that were the basis of the Nation of Islam's teachings but given his own understanding of them. These Supreme Wisdom lessons are in the form of dialogues between Wallace Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammed, who founded the Nation of Islam and who regarded Farad as Allah. Allah took these lessons and added a spiritual mathematics, called the "Supreme Mathematics," which interelated the meanings of words and numbers, along with a "Supreme Alphabet." This is a form of what my occultist friends know as gematria where words have numerical equivalents and numbers have word meanings, so one can interchange back and forth between them, allowing one to assign meaning to numbers encountered, to combine them to form other meanings or numbers, and to use them as the basis of investigation. The term "Five Percenter" is a reference to a teaching originating in the lessons that 85% of the world lives in ignorance of the nature of themselves and the world, 10% know these truths but use them to dominate others, and 5% know the truth and are righteous, acting to lead the way for others. Allah's followers are thus in the five percent while the other religious leaders of the world, who preach of illusory or incorporeal gods, are of the 10%.

I'm not going to do justice to the depth of the Five Percenter teachings here and I mean no offense to the places where (quite likely) my summary and understanding may be wrong. This is just a little history and context in which to understand the book.

Allah was assassinated in 1969 by unknown parties but his followers continued to work with his teachings, converting others to their truth, and building upon them. Unlike many groups in these sorts of circumstances, they did not insitutionalize themselves, staying rather a loosely grouped set of related individuals, teaching and learning from each other based around the Allah School in Mecca, a building given to the school by the New York City government during the 1960s as the basis for Allah's work educating the community. They retain this building to this day and this was one of the places which Knight met Five Percenters and got to know their teaching while working on his earlier book, especially during their annual gatherings there.

What I found especially interesting about this book is how much aspects of it mirrored my own sense of religion and spirituality, along with the desire to come to grips with these, as concepts and lived realities, while living in our world today. Knight is a convert to Islam. He grew up a white kid in upstate New York surrounded by people who hated blacks, based on his comments. On seeing the movie of Malcolm X's life and being exposed to rap music (Public Enemy, specifically), he converted to Islam. The Islam that he converted to was Sunni, which is the most common form of Islam and what we, in the West, are really thinking of when Islam is mentioned to us. This is the form of Islam prevalent all over the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, with the exception of Iran and parts of Iraq, which are largely Shiite. Knight learned Arabic, went to school in Pakistan, and freely admits could have easily wound up as John Walker Lindh, taking up arms as a Jihadist in Afghanistan. He was talked out of doing so by a teacher in his school (who thought he was smart and could do more good by writing) but Knight's experience mirrors that of a certain segment of converts. On returning to the United States, I got a strong sense that he had a lot of difficulty in figuring out the line between traditional Islam, as presented to him in the Middle East, being a Euro-American convert, and living in a pluralistic world exposed to all sorts of philosophies, ways of thinking, and ways of interacting with the world. Knight is clearly a smart guy and is quite consciously aware of the situation that he found himself in. When you read "The Taqwacores" and works like "Blue Eyed Devil," you can see he's struggling with identity and how does one live as a Muslim without simply aping what has been handed to him or pretending he's living in pre-modern times. For myself, as an Euro-American convert Buddhist (by way of more than 15 years of Neopaganism), his struggles speak to me as well. I have to walk the line of what really is Buddhism, questioning the traditional teachings, deciding which teachings, when dealing with a 2,600 year old tradition, are applicable or important in my experience today without just being a dilettante who skims the surface. For both of us, we're the inheritors of traditions that come from outside the cultures in which we are raised, which puts us at a distance from the teachings. This is both useful, in evaluating things abstractly, but also leaves us at a remove from people who grow up in a tradition.

The impetus for Knight to write "Why I Am a Five Percenter" was his realization after he wrote "The Five Percenters" that their influence on his life wasn't going away. He found himself drawn again and again to the Supreme Wisdom lessons and the teachings he had learned while studying them. He points out that this is one of the dangers of studying a group and getting in their heads in order to know them. They get in your head as well. Much of the book is Knight explaining Five Percenter teachings, contrasting them with traditional Sunni teachings, and then going over how he balances between them or how he can related to the Five Percenter teachings while still identifying as a Sunni Muslim. How can you both submit to Allah (God), as a Muslim inherently does, while embracing the teachings of Allah (the man), who speaks out against mystery gods? How do you relate to teachings which say that the "Asiatic Black Man" is God and white men are the devil while you are a blue eyed white man? What role, if any, does a white convert have amongst the Five Percenters? Knight was given the name "Azrael Wisdom" (meaning "Azrael #2" in the Supreme Mathematics). This was done by Allah's one and only original white follower, who was named "Azrael" by Allah, and who is still alive today. As Azrael found, there was a role for a white man within the Five Percenters but he is also a historical anomaly. Knight discusses quite a bit how he grappled with the lessons, meant for an audience of Black men, and how to interpret them to be meaningful to himself. In doing all of this, he found both a relationship to these teachings but also the community that has developed around them and Allah's teachings over the last 40 years, that added meaning to his relationship to traditional Islamic teachings. Knight clearly sees himself as both a Fiver Percenter, in some capacity, but also still a traditional Muslim. He goes over the teaching of a number of Sufi masters in past centuries, showing that it is possible to find idea quite similar to those of the Fiver Percenters in these Sufis' teachings. He also points out that most Five Percenters would scratch their heads and probably think these miss the point. They don't struggle with how to submit to Allah (God) while identifying to themselves as gods (but with no real connotations of magic, deity, or the supernatural in their idea of what a "god" is). They see themselves as gods and it is up to them to fix their own lives and the world. No one is going to help them without them helping themselves first. Knight stands in an in-between place as he straddles both the traditional Islamic world and a very American religion.

In many ways, reading about the Fiver Percenters brought me back to my own experiences as a Neopagan for many years. Many of the ideas that Knight relates in this book (and his previous one) would be at home with certain elements of the Neopagan and occultist world. Most Neopagans are overly theistic, which wouldn't go very far with the Five Percenters, but there is an undercurrent in both Neopaganism and occultism of atheism, which reinterprets teachings, the gods, magic, etc. are forms of philosophy and psychology. Where the Five Percenters grow out of a matrix of black experience, especially the black experience of inner cities in the 1960s and the Nation of Islam before that, most Neopagan thought grows out of the experience of white and Jewish Americans living in urban environments but trying to find religious meaning in beliefs relating to sacredness, the world, and their own personal divinity. While there are significant differences in thought, I think there are a lot of commonalities and both of these very different milieus are struggling with spirituality, empowerment, and myth in the late twentieth century (and now the twenty first century) society.

The book is valuable in watching Knight engage in his balancing act, showing how and why he is a Five Percenter but also how he relates to his otherness, as both a Sunni Muslim and a white American, in this identication. He thinks long and hard (so long and hard that he felt compelled to write a book on the topic) and I feel that watching his thinking caused me to look at my own experience of religion and to see that many of the things with which I have struggled are not terribly unique. I expect that other people would probably find this struggle and Knight's insights valuable as well.

DARPA, Hackerspaces, and Schools

2012-04-06T17:00:28-07:00

A little levity for your memes

There is a bit of a controversy brewing right now that, in many ways, may be a tempest in a teapot, but also points to larger divisions in the hacking/making community.

First a little background

In January, O'Reilly Media, which owns Make magazine and operates Maker Faire, issued a press release around receiving funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This press release said, in part,

O'Reilly Media's Make division, in partnership with Otherlab, has received an award from The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in support of its Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) program. The team will help advance DARPA's MENTOR program, an initiative aimed at introducing new design tools and collaborative practices of making to high school students.

Makerspace [...] will integrate online tools for design and collaboration with low-cost options for physical workspaces where students may access educational support to gain practical hands-on experience with new technologies and innovative processes to design and build projects.

The MENTOR effort is part of the DARPA's Adaptive Vehicle Make program portfolio and is aimed at engaging high school students in a series of collaborative distributed manufacturing and design experiments. The overarching objective of MENTOR is to develop and motivate a next generation cadre of system designers and manufacturing innovators by exposing them to the principles of foundry-style digital manufacturing through modern prize-based design challenges.

The MENTOR contract award provides the initial year of funding for what is expected to be a four-year program. Throughout the program, O'Reilly Media and Otherlab will work to develop both a physical and digital workspace for collaborative design and manufacturing in high schools. Students will have access to sophisticated new tools for digital pattern making that allow them to create complex 3D objects using a variety of manufacturing methods, including low-cost manual or machine techniques. By making the dependency on specialized equipment optional, a broader range of schools may participate in the program, adding these tools later if needed. These tools also embody advanced methods for completing distributed design and manufacturing.

Make magazine also published a blog post on this as well.

As it turns out, the public details of MENTOR are available on fbo.gov. There, it is noted that MENTOR is part of a larger program, "Adaptive Vehicle Make," which has the following objectives:

to dramatically compress development times for complex defense systems such as military air and ground vehicles
to shift the product value chain for such systems toward high-value-added design activities
to democratize the innovation process.

You'll see the third goal cited a lot in discussions of MENTOR but not much mention of the first.

This led to a number of blog posts, somewhat criticical of Make's involvement with DARPA:

Storify, 3 BIG questions (and lots of smaller ones) about DARPA & Make
Library Cult, Make, DARPA and the line in the sand, #1
Library Cult, Make, DARPA and the line in the sand, #2

The first of the above includes some rather choice tweets from Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media and more interesting ones, involving the editors of the Boing Boing blog can be seen here and here as well, which may explain why Boing Boing hasn't covered this issue.

On April 2, Mitch Altman, one of the founders of the Noisebridge hackerspace and someone who often acted as a bit of an ambassador from the hackerspace movement, told everyone, via twitter, facebook, and some hackerspace email lists, that he would no longer be associated with Make Faire. He said:

It's official. I'm greatly saddened I won't be helping at US Maker Faires after they applied for and accepted a DARPA grant.

This caused a bit of a flurry of conversation over the last few days, such as the typical Slashdot trollfest, finally leading to an official statement from Dale Dougherty, the publisher of Make magazine and the man in charge of Maker Faire.

Who cares?

With all of this, you may very well be asking, "So what? Why do I care?" I can't really tell you why you would care but I can tell you why I care. As I call out above, DARPA's MENTOR program is part of the Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) program. That program's first objective is "to dramatically compress development times for complex defense systems such as military air and ground vehicles." What this means is that the AVM program is, first and foremost, a military program. It is about the development of military vehicles. Now, MENTOR's specific goal "is to develop and motivate a next generation cadre of system designers and manufacturing innovators..." What this effectively means is that MENTOR is an educational program to develop designers and innovators (including, one surmises, engineers). This is all well and good. We can use more engineers in America. The problem is that this is meant to further the AVM program for the development of military vehicles. DARPA is interested in putting money into educational programs in order to guarantee itself a supply of the right kind of people to make military equipment or to develop new equipment.

This leaves me in a moral quandry. On the one hand, we have money that is being targeted to education, specifically science and engineering education. This is where Make is coming in with its role in the program to do this work in high schools. As they say in their press release:

"Makerspace [...] will integrate online tools for design and collaboration with low-cost options for physical workspaces where students may access educational support to gain practical hands-on experience with new technologies and innovative processes to design and build projects."

On the other hand, we have school programs being funded through the Department of Defense, of which DARPA is a member, rather than the Department of Education. As a parent of a 16 year old girl, I understand the need for science and engineering education. I helped start a hackerspace in part because I saw this very need, not just for myself, but for others in my community. I believe in "practical hands-on experience with new technologies and innovative processes to design and build projects." That's what we're all about at Ace Monster Toys. The problem is that I really don't want the military involved, no matter how indirectly, in the education of my child or that of other children. Money is a form of influence, even if done indirectly, and I feel a lot of aprehension at the idea of the Department of Defense having an ongoing channel of influence into the science and engineering programs at schools. We have a society with a strong and traditional separation between civilian life (including education) and the military and some very good reasons for this separation (look to history in certain regions).

Outside of this specific MENTOR program, there is also ongoing efforts by DARPA and willing hackerspaces to fund various effforts. Just this week, I received the news that the Hackerspaces Global Space Program had received DARPA funding (more docs are here and here with their mailing list archive here).

All of this together feels to me as if it serves as an opportunity to legitimize military involvement in our education institutions and also as a means for the possible co-opting of the hackerspace movement by the military. Hackerspaces have formed as a ground up phenomena, first starting in Europe and then spreading to America during the last few years (Mitch Altman played a key role in this effort, I should point out). No governmental entity or program created these workshops and educational spaces. We did it ourselves as a DIY movement. I fear the influence of government money (which is often called "free money" by folks) on our independence. There is also the issue that many of us, as individuals, have been supportive of anti-establishment movements like Occupy and one wonders how government backing would affect the kinds of activities and speech groups or people are willing to support.

At the end of the day, though, I'd like to see educational departments fund education, not military departments. While I understand the argument that it is our tax dollars and we should take education funding where we can get it, I do not believe that there is any such thing as "free money." Money, or funding, always has implicit or explicit strings attached. There is a reason that people are giving it out, after all, and attached agendas. This doesn't make DARPA or even Make bad actors in any sense but it does mean that we should think long and hard about these issues, especially when it comes to the funding of the education of children or the potentially changing effects on the organizations and movement that we have worked so hard to build.

I would use this as a call for more transparency and dialogue on DARPA and its grants to various organizations and individuals. Let's get everyone talking, not simply flaming one another and drawing lines in the sand. I've had several brief e-mail exchanges with Dale Dougherty about this and I've found him to be a perfectly rational and well intentioned individual. I think there is room for all of us to have differences of opinion but I also think that there should be an open discussion, if not debate, on all of the issues around this and the reasons why this is acting as a lightning rod for many of us.

Open Sangha Progress

2012-04-03T11:00:00-07:00

The once a month meetings of the Bay Area Open Sangha continue to occur every month. We have had a little bit of an off and on again start since the weekend meditation retreat this last November, missing a month in March because of changed in scheduling.

As of this last month, there is an all day open sit on the first Sunday of every month. In this, we normally have six sessions of 40 minutes of sitting and 15 minutes of walking meditation. Other than that, there is a little discussion during lunchtime usually and then a little more discussion after the last session. The schedule looks like this:

9:00 AM: Participants arrive.
9:20: First session or sitting meditation (40 minutes).
10:00: First session of walking meditation (15 minutes).
10:15 – 11:10: Second meditation session.
11:10 – 12:05: Third meditation session.
12:05 – 1:00 PM: Lunch and informal discussions.
1:00 – 1:55: Fourth meditation session.
1:55 – 2:50: Fifth meditation session.
2:50 – 3:45: Sixth meditation session.
3:45 – 5:15(ish): Discussion period for participants.

Most people have found the sits either by knowing me personally, from the Saturday Night Sangha group that meets nearby, or from the meetup group. In regards to meetup, I've found that in both Open Sangha and for Ace Monster Toys, it has had a phenomenal impact on getting the word out to folks. Almost all of the recent new people find Open Sangha through meetup (and over half of the new people coming to AMT).

I've debated having a more regular sitting group, such as meeting for a couple of hours once a week but it isn't clear whether it would fulfill a need or even be successful. As Michael, one of the regulars, stated, there is already a group for every night of the week and I might be better off just going to someone else's sangha to sit. I've actively been thinking of going to Empty Gate now that I no longer work in Mountain View on Wednesday nights, which is their biggest weekday night when their guiding teacher does his talks.

That said, if I knew that I could get at least four or five people to attend, I'd probably arrange for a weekly sitting group where we could sit for two sessions and maybe chat and have tea afterwards.

I have finally set up the meetup entries for the monthly sit as a reoccurring event so I should be able to avoid the issue of people not having a lot of forewarning of which weekend we're meeting. Attendance has varied between as many as ten people and as few as three. I am hoping to grow this to something like twelve regular attendees but it is really up to people being already interested in sitting all day. Frankly, if you do not already have an interest in practice, the above schedule of six sessions is both going to be daunting and not seem very exciting. Since meditation sessions are not "exciting" in a traditional sense of providing distraction, this is fine but probably not terribly good marketing.

I am also looking to find a co-facilitator who will share some of the load so when I go out of town or just cannot make a monthly event, there will be someone to keep time and arrange for things to continue.

The Attack of an Open Request

2012-03-07T21:28:00-08:00

Apparently, asking for people to support an open community and to keep divisive speech seen to attack community members off of Planet Mozilla is seen by at least one of the Planet Mozilla peers as an "attack." See his comment here.

I can only shake my head at this and wonder how people just don't get it.

One person calls for enshrining in law the traditional second class position of members of the LGBT community in society on the basis of his personal beliefs. A second calls for an open community. Does the peer call the first person's post an attack? No. But apparently responding to it with yesterday's post by me does constitute an attack. How's that work?

I certainly never to expect to be chastised for my position and have a peer suggest I take yesterday's post down for standing up for people.

What I said yesterday included the following:

One thing that I cannot abide is prejudicial actions within that community which go against its basic ethos of inclusiveness and betterment for the good of all.

and

I encourage all Mozillians to donate to one of the many public organizations supporting equal rights for the LGBT community. This is the best way to send a message in support of inclusiveness and an open Mozilla community.

I'm not going to apologize for wanting an inclusive Mozilla that treats my queer brothers and sisters (and they are all of our brothers and sisters, as well as wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, even sons and daughters) as welcome members and co-creators in what we're trying to accomplish. We are a community based on openness and the betterment of society. Isn't that what we're here for? Not simply to participate in making cool Internet software?

Supporting an open Mozilla

2012-03-06T16:00:00-08:00

I'm a proud Mozillian. I've worked at the Mozilla Corporation since June of 2007. I came there after working at Microsoft for nine years and was tired of working in a closed system that seemed to be designed for the good of a few people only. Working with my coworkers and the larger Mozilla Community composed of everyone interested in Mozilla (not just Firefox) and contributing to it has been a great boon to me over the last few years. It was a breath of fresh air.

One thing that I cannot abide is prejudicial actions within that community which go against its basic ethos of inclusiveness and betterment for the good of all. Today, a fellow community member decided to send a post to Planet Mozilla, the public face of the community through its blogs, that was prejudicial against the queer community.

As with quite a few others, I was outraged at this but, as the individual has said, it is his blog and he can say what he wants on it. He has his bully pulpit but, as it turns out, so do I.

I decided to respond today with this post but, more importantly, I also gave a donation to Equality California in the name of my fellow community member. Why Equality California? Well, I live here and we're actively fighting a battle on the very issue, gay marriage, that was at the root of the person's post. EC is very heavily engaged in this fight. As EC says on their site:

Equality California (EQCA) is the largest statewide lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights advocacy organization in California. Over the past 13 years, Equality California has strategically moved California from a state with extremely limited legal protections for LGBT individuals to a state with some of the most comprehensive civil rights protections in the nation. Equality California has partnered with legislators and advocates to successfully sponsor more than 80 pieces of pro-equality legislation. EQCA continues to advance equality through legislative advocacy, electoral work, public education and community empowerment.

Another option, for UK community members, is Stonewall.

I encourage all Mozillians to donate to one of the many public organizations supporting equal rights for the LGBT community. This is the best way to send a message in support of inclusiveness and an open Mozilla community.

Ace Monster Toys Book Scanner is Complete

2012-03-04T11:39:28-08:00

The Ace Monster Toys Book Scanner

A year ago, Ace Monster Toys member Myles and I did a bunch of work on a DIY Book Scanner based on a variation of Daniel Reetz's design to make it more lasercutting friendly (see this). We took beta kits of the these to the 2011 Maker Faire and generated a fair amount of interest.

This last fall, Daniel went to the Open Hardware Summit and unveiled a much improved book scanner design. A few weeks after that, he gave us a set of mostly complete parts for the wood framework before moving away. Just a few weeks ago, he announced the near final revision of these.

The parts that Daniel gave us kind of languished a bit in preference to other projects but AMT has been very interested in Daniel's call for a book scanner in every hackerspace. Recently, a new member, Ben, had a pressing need to scan a rare book before returning it so we got a fire lit under us to finally finish the build. As a result of this, Ace Monster Toys now has a fully functioning book scanner in its space. It isn't the final revision design but it works and works well, using the new bicycle brake design for triggering the cameras, thus bypassing the need for hacked firmware as long as you can lock focus on the cameras after setting it for your books.

In the process of doing this work, Mike from AMT, who owns a shopbot, figured out how to do the routing on the current design and we expect to be able to produce more frames from 4'x 8' sheets of plywood on demand. I'm going to get a couple routed out to do a build of this design.

Visitors to AMT can now non-destructively scan books that they own, provided they bring some windex (for cleaning the glass as it gets dusty quickly) and some elbow grease. The next step is to build a light enclosure (pun intended) around it to keep out the horrible UV lights in the space. Think of it as a small black tent for our modest scanner.

I want to thank Daniel for all of the work that he's done on book scanners over the last few years, as well as Ben and Mike for doing work at AMT on the builds.

I've put a photoset of the AMT book scanner up on flickr as well.

Little Brother on Stage

2012-01-31T21:30:01-08:00

I went with friends on Sunday night to see the Custom Made Theater Company's adaptation of Cory Doctorow's young adult novel, Little Brother. As most of my friends know, I am a fan of Doctorow's work in general, finding him to be both an excellent writer but also someone speaking on things that I care greatly about as someone who works at Mozilla on open source and keeping the web as open as possible. I am also a particular fan of this book, having given a copy to my own daughter (who is now 15) to read because I think it addresses a lot of important issues in our current times. When I found out that a stage version of the play was being done and done locally, I was excited and determined to see it.

Josh Costello did the adaption from Cory's book and directed the play as well. We actually had a Q&A after the show so he spoke about it a bit. While he was in contact with Cory, both for the obvious legal reasons and wanting to keep him in the loop with what was done to his baby, Josh did the adaptation on his own without any real outside input, from what he said. The play is done with a cast of three actors, primarily playing Marcus, Ange, and Darryl. (Technically, this isn't true in that Cory Censoprano who plays Darryl actually has very little stage time as Darryl but he does start and end there.) While Daniel Petzold always plays Marcus, both Cory and Marissa Keltie (who plays Ange) rotate through all of the other characters encountered in the course of the story. For example, when Marcus is confronting his parents, a sweater and a shawl are added, along with a change in intonation or accent, in order to convey that it isn't Darryl and Ange (if that isn't completely obvious). The conceit of the play, really, is that Marcus, Ange, and Darryl are telling the story of what happened to them after the fact in the storefront they've set up in the Mission following the incidents being related. Josh discussed afterwards that having the actors play the other characters so transparently (as opposed to really pretending that you couldn't tell it was the same person) involves the audience as kind of co-conspirators in their doing so. I do agree that it was effective.

Another thing that worked well in the production was their use of video. The story of Little Brother is one that heavily involves technology. How to show this in a small stage play is an obvious challenge. One thing that was done was to have video intermixed at various points, especially when the characters are working online or texting, but to have it reversed so that the projected video showed them typing or texting (but no details) while the actors, right in front of us, explained what they were doing or acted it out. When Marcus does his press conference in Clockwork Plunder, a clockwork driven online pirate MMORG, pirate hats, plastic cutlasses, and, I believe, an eye patch or two were donned as the avatars in game acted out the conference (to some hilarity).

Overall, all of this worked out well. Obviously, I'm a fan of the original book so I'm predisposed to like the play but a bad adaption or approach to the story, which had to be condensed mightily to fit into two hours, could easily have ruined it. Using only three actors could have worked out very badly as well. I found that it flowed and was true enough to the essential story that I was satisfied. One of my companions did complain that his favorite line by Marcus from the book was left out (which was "I had a boner that could cut glass") but even he was happy overall.

One of the things that makes the story continue to work well, which the cast and script writer/director acknowledged in various ways, is that even though it was written in 2008 to deal with issues of the post-9/11 world, Little Brother is very much of the current times in which we find ourselves. We've had the Arab Spring and the ongoing attempts in Syria and even Iran where people are using technology as a lever as they try to overthrow tyranny. We have our own Occupy movement (especially here in Oakland, where I live), which is very much trying to change the discourse in our nation and to raise awareness. This has lead to protests in the streets, here in America, and subsequent crackdowns. Against this sort of backdrop, I found that my emotional response to Little Brother was much stronger than it might otherwise have been. The idea that we need to stand up for ourselves, no matter how otherwise powerless we might be, and "take it back" is something I think that many of us understand much more immediately than we did in 2008 as the economic crash leading to our "Great Recession" began and everything that has happened to lead to the current very vocal dissatisfaction with business as usual. I wanted to post a quote a quote from Little Brother that covers the sentiment exactly:

"It's our goddamned city! It's our goddamned country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! *Take it back!"

"TAKE IT BACK!" we roared. She jammed down hard on her guitar. We roared the note back and then it got really really LOUD.

Of course, in the story, this is followed by the kind of beatdown of the crowd by the authorities with pepper spray and clubs that would make the Oakland Police Department grin like proud parents.

I think that the play is definitely worth seeing and I see it has been extended two weeks through the end of February. You can get tickets at goldstar. You should go!

Changes and 2011 Review

2012-01-01T13:45:00-08:00

It is now January 1^st, 2012 so I suppose it is time for year end (beginning?) review and announcements.

For the most part, this has not been a year of changes. I've been at Mozilla for four and a half years, working with the seminary for the past few years (first as a student and now as an instructor), been in the same house, married to the same wonderful woman, and running the same hackerspace.

This year I turned 40, which is considered to be entering mid-life by some. It really doesn't feel much different than 30 except I'm, perhaps, wiser or at least more aware of what an idiot I can be. I think that is all we can really hope for with "maturity" anyway. I do find it true that our conception of ourselves seems to freeze sometime between 25 and 30. It isn't that we aren't constantly changing as people still (nothing is constant except change, after all) but the shorthand we use to view ourselves is still that person we thought we were when we were that age. It could be different with others but, based on talking to people and what people have written in books and whatnot about themselves, I think this is a common feature. So, I'm old enough to know better, not that old still, but have to remind myself I'm not quite that loud-mouth I was when I got divorced in my late 20's.

This is where I will announce, beyond Twitter and Facebook, that my work is changing. I've been doing Quality Assurance ("Software Testing") since 1996 with the exception of a six month stint with a generic "Project Manager" title right before I left Microsoft in 2006. For most of the last four and a half years, I've run the QA side of security updates for Mozilla Firefox. This has meant triaging incoming bugs with devs and others, verifying fixes, and generally making sure the updates don't destroy your computer or the usability of Firefox. Right now, I'm officially in transition to leave QA and to join Mozilla's Security Team as a program manager. My duties at this point appear to likely focus on communications with various parties, such as bug reporters, looking at incoming issues, and helping out other Security Team members on wrangling projects. This is a pretty natural transition given that I've been working with much of the team for years and I'm likely reporting to one of my triaging partners. Obviously, lifewise, this is a big change as I'll be leaving QA after 15 years for a new career shift into program and project management. Given the intersection of my work at Mozilla and helping found and run a hackerspace, this feels very "right" to me and organic as an evolution of what I'm doing and the space in which I wish to work.

Speaking of the hackerspace, Ace Monster Toys continues to do well. We're up to about 30 paying members (+/-2) with a few more coming to events and meetings that are not members. We're in the process of finishing our federal nonprofit paperwork in the next few weeks (we're a California nonprofit right now). We had tables at the main Maker Faire and the local East Bay Mini Maker Faire this year and got a lot of attention at these. We were on the Make Live Hackerspace Roadshow with a video we made giving a tour of the space. The goals for this year are to have more regular workshops and classes for the public and to generally grow the membership.

Within the Buddhist side of things, I've been fairly busy. The Five Mountain Buddhist Seminary went through a name change within the last two months, becoming the Prajna Institute for Buddhist Studies, to help differentiate ourselves as a non-denominational Mahayana Buddhist seminary from our Five Mountain Zen lineage. We continue to pull in a few new students on a regular basis and we're examining how to increase our offerings and improve what we already have. I continue to teach a few classes every quarter, working with something like eight students on average.

My primary Buddhist teacher and the head of the institute, Rev. Jiun Foster, received Inga (Inka) this last week, recognizing his accomplishments and realization as a Zen teacher. As part of this, his Dharma name was changed to "Myo Gak" (or "Myogak") by his teacher, Rev. Paul Yuanzhi Lynch. Not directly related to this but associated with ongoing developments in our Zen work, I've received a new Dharma name as well, which is "Ji Gong" (Jigong), written in Chinese as "智空," and meaning "Wisdom of Emptiness" (or is it "Empty of Wisdom" as the joke goes). This is because I've been appointed Dogam or Vice-Abbot of Great Cloud Zen Society, of which more details will eventually be forthcoming. This is based off of Rev. Myogak's work in Cincinnati over the last five or so years and will be an evolution of our continuing Zen work.

I've also begun to hold open Buddhist retreats in the Bay Area under the moniker of "Open Sangha." I held a two day retreat in November and have begun scheduling monthly one day retreats starting this month. As I say on the site, "The Bay Area Open Sangha exists to allow people to practice and study the Buddhadharma, the teachings of the Buddha, without concern for sectarianism or the historical lines between traditions of Buddhism." The retreats are a place for people to practice meditation, usually sitting and walking forms, without being tied to a specific school or tradition of practice. I realized that there are already quite a few Zen, Vipassana, and other groups in the Bay Area (and elsewhere) but few that allow Buddhists of all traditions of practice to come together. I feel that this is a useful space in which to work as I really question the value of too much sectarianism within Buddhism, though I do agree with the value of learning a coherent tradition of practice.

On a personal front at home, my wife, Rebecca, and I continue to do well. We've both embarked on a variety of fitness focused routines during the last year (and some). Part of reaching 40, as a fellow priest pointed out, is realizing that you can wake up in the morning having hurt yourself in bed without doing more than sleeping. Working a rather sedentary job (technology) combined with sedentary habits like reading, writing, and meditation, it is easy to just begin (continue?) to physically fall apart. I seem to have made a successful transition in the last year and a half to being a bit of a jock. I work out with a trainer once a week, do at least two cardio routines every week, and lift weights four or more days a week. Basically, I now work out almost every day compared to never working out or getting any exercise as recently as two or three years ago. A year ago, my trainer, who is a competition Olympic style weightlifter, taught my how to lift weights, which is something I'd never learned as a young geek who avoided the jocks at the gym. My garage is now filled with multiple lifting racks, two olympic barbells, and about 500 pounds of free weights (plus some dumbbells and a range of kettlebells up to 53 pounds). It is amazing the amount of difference working our daily has made in my energy levels and my outlook on life. I feel strange now if I don't work out on a given day for at least an hour and feel a sense of accomplishment in my gradually increasing ability to bench press, deadlift, or otherwise lift heavy things. On the other hand, I've hurt myself pretty well a couple of times being ambitious but, given my age and habits, I really do need to work to be healthy.

Additionally, in October I had LASIK surgery on my eyes, which Rebecca had done about four years ago. While it took a month to fully heal (and aspects of it are still healing and adjusting), it has been a life changer. Having worn glasses since I was twelve, it is hard to impart how incredible it is to have at least 20/20 vision and to be free to run around without glasses. To any of my glasses wearing friends, I cannot recommend the procedure highly enough if you qualify. It is easily the best money I've spent in years for the most return. As it turns out, I'm only a couple of years away from needing reading glasses, which this doesn't help, but in all other respects, I have perfect vision now. (I also had new portraiture work done by a photographer friend, to commemorate having no glases anymore and thus changing my appearance.)

In summary (for the "too long, didn't read" crowd), I have a new job at Mozilla, am still running a hackerspace, and have a new ordained name. I'm also running retreats open to anyone in the Bay Area, teaching in a Buddhist seminary, and lifting a lot of heavy things often. I must say that turning 40 has been a lot better, a lot more even, than turning 30 was by any estimation. This last year has been good overall and I hope that this coming year is even better.

Hakim Bey on TAZ Origins

2011-12-28T14:45:00-08:00

I just read a recent interview with Hakim Bey today, In Conversation with Hakim Bey done by Hans Ulrich Obrist from e-flux.

As many of my friends know, I ran one of the longest running Hakim Bey sites for many years on hermetic.com before I gave the site away to a new curator. Back in my undergrad days in the early 1990's, I was the person that (with permission) reformatted Bey's T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism for posting on Usenet, the old discussion forum sort of area on the early Internet. I have been very influenced by his thought at various points in my life, even as I moved beyond my earlier enthusiasms (and despite the personal controversies around Hakim Bey).

I noticed in the interview that Obrist asked Bey about the origins of T.A.Z. and I thought it worth quoting. It was interesting to read (as was the whole interview).

I'm not sure when in 2011 that it was done but I do find it interesting that nowhere in the discussion below does the Occupy Movement come up. Given its natural tendency to do so, I suspect that this interview was done early in the year before it became much of a well known phenomena, especially since Bey is in the Hudson Valley in New York. I'm kind of curious as to what he would say about it.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I also wanted to ask you about the origins of T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, which is a book that changed the way I approached exhibitions when I began working as a curator. Growing up with this idea that the exhibition has a master plan and the curator is the one who does a checklist, reading T.A.Z. for the first time in the early ‘90s really triggered a whole set of exhibitions for us, like Life/Live, Cities on the Move, and Laboratorium. Most of my exhibitions in the ‘90s, and then also Utopia Station in the 2000s, relinquished the curatorial master plan in favor of being temporary autonomous zones in which we would basically invite collectives and artists to curate shows within the show. So for me it was a toolbox for curating, and I always wondered how you came to write that book, how its genesis came about?

Hakim Bey: Well, the real genesis was my connection to the communal movement in America, my experiences in the 1960s in places like Timothy Leary’s commune in Millbrook. And of course the main criticism of this activity is that it didn’t last. But these things tend to be very ephemeral—if a secular commune lasts in America for ten years, it’s a miracle. Usually only the religious ones last longer than a generation—and usually at the expense of becoming quite authoritarian, and probably dismal and boring as well. I’ve noticed that the exciting ones tend to disappear, and as I began to further study this phenomenon, I found that they tend to disappear in a year or a year and a half. In the ‘60s we had a lot of communes that lasted for a year and half, two, three years. I think the only one that survived was The Farm, and that’s due to a number of things that made it very different, such as the fact that it had what I would say was a rather authoritarian leader, Steve Gaskin. What a brilliant guy. I think the place held together because he was willing to be its leader. A lot of the other communes fell apart because they were so anarchistic that they had no leaders, and so nobody washed the dishes. The movement was still going on in the 1980s. I had friends who were deeply involved in intentional communities, and I myself got involved. And everybody in the ‘80s was giving a good deal of thought to the whole idea of what intentional community could mean and how it could improve your life to be in one, or if it even could at all. That was the question. I think it unquestionably does. People have great fun for at least a year or a year and a half, and then when the problems start, that’s usually when it breaks up. After thinking about that for a while, it occurred to me that, well, it’s not such a great tragedy that these things don’t last. You shouldn’t condemn the experience of the people at Brook Farm, for example, just because it only lasted a few years. Those people had an incredibly deep experience that changed their lives. They had fun while they were there. They had a more intense existence, with everything geared up to a higher charge. All you have to do is read a little Emerson and a little Thoreau, see what the people who visited Brook Farm had to say about it. It was buzzing with energy and good vibrations.

HUO: Emerson said, “Nothing great has ever been achieved without enthusiasm.”

HB: Exactly. So it occurred to me that you could make a virtue of the temporary nature of these things. If these organizations fall apart after eighteen months or so, well, let’s just plan on it. Let’s have these communities and say that they’re only going to last for a short while. And as soon as the intensity fades, then it’s over. It’s finished. We wrap it up, go somewhere else, do something new. But I also have to admit that by the 1980s, waiting for the revolution for thirty years had gotten a little tiresome. When I was really young and full of enthusiasm in the 1960s, we really, actually, sincerely believed that a major transformation was imminent. And as it turned out, we were all naïve, perhaps like those Christian fundamentalists who are so certain that the end of the world is imminent. I don’t know. It could have been a form of millenarian insanity, but we believed in it in any case. The older we got, the more this receded into history, at least for me. And for others it became a futile, youthful dream they had to give up. But I’m still working for that transformation, though I’m no longer convinced it’s around the corner, or that it’s going to happen in my lifetime. So as I began wondering how we could have a taste of revolutionary life without the revolution, since it was apparently not going to happen, this new Temporary Autonomous Zone seemed the only possible answer to that. There was no single moment of genesis really, but a whole series of light-saturated moments throughout American history—including the 1960s, which I had lived through myself—that all culminated in that theoretical work.

HUO*: So if one considers Temporary Autonomous Zones as these pockets of anarchy, do you find any now, in the twenty-first century? Where are they? Can they be expanded? And what forms do they take?

HB: Well, I’ve always said that I didn’t invent the TAZ. I just noticed that it existed. It’s always existed. For some reason, most people have to believe that what they’re doing is going to last forever in order to find the enthusiasm to do anything at all. The only thing that changed was thinking of the temporary itself as a possible good, instead of an obstacle. A good dinner party is a Temporary Autonomous Zone. Nobody tells you what to do at a good dinner party. Nobody gives orders. Nobody collects taxes. It’s an experience of giving and being given to, of filling the body and emptying the mind, having good conversation and good wine and so forth. This is already a TAZ, but you have to conceptualize it that way for it to be that way. It’s simply a matter of consciousness. But once you find that consciousness, the forms of organization begin to open up. You begin to see all the different forms of organization that this could take. It could be anything from a picnic by the riverside to a community that lasts for two years. Where is it actually happening? Well, I have to say that the current moment at the end of this decade is, to me, one of the low energy points of history. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I feel that it’s actually hard to find a good TAZ now. And it’s more important than ever to do so. One reason being that communism is no longer. We now live in the world of the triumph of capital. And in this world, it would seem that the TAZ is, perhaps, the last possible revolutionary form. I hope that’s not true, but it may be. Either way, the idea is certainly more important now than it was around 1989 when I dreamed the idea up in the first place.conversation and good wine and so forth. This is already a TAZ, but you have to conceptualize it that way for it to be that way. It’s simply a matter of consciousness. But once you find that consciousness, the forms of organization begin to open up. You begin to see all the different forms of organization that this could take. It could be anything from a picnic by the riverside to a community that lasts for two years. Where is it actually happening? Well, I have to say that the current moment at the end of this decade is, to me, one of the low energy points of history. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I feel that it’s actually hard to find a good TAZ now. And it’s more important than ever to do so. One reason being that communism is no longer. We now live in the world of the triumph of capital. And in this world, it would seem that the TAZ is, perhaps, the last possible revolutionary form. I hope that’s not true, but it may be. Either way, the idea is certainly more important now than it was around 1989 when I dreamed the idea up in the first place.