Seeing Voices

From the source: Helen Keller speaking to a large crowd in Fukuoka, Japan in 1948. Keller is on the far right with Takeo Iwahashi and Polly Thomson beside her.

I wrote in a previous post about the summer of 2017, and what a beautiful and challenging experience it was. I might have added that just about every preconception I had about that long-anticipated summer was mistaken. What I'd thought would be hard proved easy, and vice versa. The high points I anticipated didn't fall flat, but were not the standouts I'd expected. The people I thought I'd show things mostly showed things to me instead. And, most startling, Dácil.

I knew about Dácil, of course. I'd met her, indeed, I'd been around for her birth and for the harrowing experiences that followed thereafter. I'd read about her development since then (and you can too). But really, I had no idea, or rather the ideas I did have were mostly misconceptions. Meeting her in person and the reading I've done since...well, I'm fascinated, and changed.

For those who didn't bounce out to the first hotlink, Dácil is an eight-year-old girl, daughter of dear friends, who is deaf and blind and in other ways developmentally different. Stunted in some ways, certainly, but turns out that's an overly simplistic summary and one that quite misses the point. I had assumed Dácil would be a burden to her and my family as we traveled up and down the state, visiting beaches and mountains alike impassable to someone who can barely walk. California is a land of stunning views; Dácil can only just perceive the difference between dark and light. She cannot ride a bicycle, she cannot be reassured that a long car ride will be worth it. As a parent who often bemoans the loss of freedom my two fully functional children impose, and who takes his opportunities to leave them behind now and then, well, to me the obvious thing for our visitors to have done was to leave Dácil at home.

I'm so glad they didn't, because Dácil, I suspect, appreciated what we had to share at least as much as any of our many other visitors. The sublime view of Mt. Tam from our local pool was invisible to her, but it was likewise ignored by every other child and most adults, where Dácil enjoyed the water at least as much as anyone else. I gave a boombox to both visiting families; Dácil, though almost entirely deaf, was the one who made most use of this gift, and who most appreciated my excellent electronica. Robbed of distance senses, Dácil, I believe, tasted California more vividly even than her pizza and ice cream loving sibling; certainly she lingered longer over her meals.

Dácil was a presence, mostly off in her own world, pursuing her own pleasures, but her enjoyment was shared by all and added a lot to an already special summer. A reminder for me: other isn't necessarily less.

I survived the summer of '17

That was a very full summer. Travel to Amsterdam, Munich, Montreal, Seattle, the Sierras, and the north country. Visitors from Amsterdam, Tenerife, and Seattle in return, and that much understates things. A lot of time at the beach and in the water (usually unrelated activities, not so this summer!). A great deal of camping, some of it while in our own home. And for that home, too, a fair share of changes, with a new performance stage built down below, repainting and projects up above, and many hours of planning, perhaps even preparing, for the rains to come. Challenging, stressful, wonderful, beautiful, a summer none of us will ever forget.  Some photos here.

Betcha all that makes you want to visit, too, but consider what the photos do not show:

• It was not sunny all the time.
• Every one of these photos was separated by a 4-hour drive from every other photo, except where they were separated by a 14-hour plane flight.
• Some people slept in a barn.
• None of the water was really warm.  Often the air was too warm.  Also, sometimes, too cold.
• We ate sand.
• The supply of ice in the ice maker is not infinite and replenishes only slowly.
• There was a fair amount of screaming for a wide variety of reasons.
• Many people were dirty much of the time.
• There were tears.
• The eating of hot dog buns in the absence of hot dogs brought with it derision.
• Things are stupid expensive, including hot dog buns.
• You all got poison oak, even if you didn't know it.
• People fell from heights, though no one got hurt.
• Try as you might, you didn't eat all, or even the best, Scoop flavors.
• In the end, you had to say goodbye.

Whatever the fall brings, I promise to blog more often.

New job, part 4: Pirates

I've written in the past about what I do for work, and no one's been any the wiser. It's hardly your fault: though they value me, my colleagues, my bosses even, often find it difficult to explain what it is I do. Recently, though, I've been given a very concrete and easily explained remit: piracy analytics. People use our software without paying for it. I need to arrange to identify and characterize those "pirates" using data and analytics so that others can reach out to them and, more or less gently, convince them to become proper customers. There, that was easy to explain.

Then there's another question: why does this matter? Because if I succeed in this the value of my Autodesk stock will allow me to save my dear barn. Well, that's what this guy thinks, anyway. He'd better be right and I'd better be successful because things around here are getting...teetery.

Charter

It seems that even on this, the most depressing of days, I have to hear about The War of the Charter, a topic as illustrative of people working against their own self interest as the election of...that. Charter schools and the CA proposition that supports them are important for this, and possibly only this reason: they provide a space to experiment within the confines of a bureaucracy. That bureaucracy--the public school system--will not otherwise do more than cautiously increment and thus can evolve at only a glacial pace. That pace is in no way well matched to the rate of change in the environment--social, business, Earth--for which the school is intended to prepare its students. It is almost certainly the case that the mainstream schooling your child is receiving is inadequate to the challenges we are facing. Change, and the experiments that drive change, is therefore sorely needed.

In business these days the inability of large organizations to innovate successfully is a simmering, sometimes boiling, concern. As one former Yahoo executive mournfully noted, "When you do innovation in a large company, the immune system will come and attack you." When I think of the history of our own long-running MAP educational experiment I observe parental T-cells in action, seeking, with less or more poisonous vigor, to destroy the alien body within. Certainly that accurately describes the narrow-minded response of the Ross Valley School District to the current Charter petition.

Education is an unsolved problem. We should be united in our desire to solve it and supportive of those who seek to explore alternatives that don't cost the student $42,100 per annum, alternatives that, if successful, will influence classrooms throughout the Valley, perhaps throughout the country. We are indeed in the midst of an educational crisis: it's at least part of what's produced the near-majority decision to spit in the face of facts, kick meritocracy in its striving ass, and elect...that. You may, in the overused argot of Facebook progressives, stand with Ross Valley Schools. In doing so, you might preserve a precious few dollars for a gym teacher or library book. Neither will help your child find a role in the coming society. A charter school, on the other hand, just might.

Surveillance self-defense

EFF's SSD logo: https://ssd.eff.org/en

A shout-out to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (I donate, do you?) and to their tireless efforts to get us all to use communications technology more sensibly. EFF provides the total overview for current best practice, but what I'd particularly encourage you to do is:

1. Use two-factor authentication wherever possible.
2. Use a non-default (no 1212!) code on your mobile device, and don't share it.
3. Communicate using using Signal (how to: Android; how to: iPhone), which provides end-to-end encryption, thereby preventing anyone from reading your messages or listening to your calls without possession of (or previous install of malware on) your device. No, your normal texting, Skype, phone, whatever does not do this: though much communications is encrypted in transit it is typically an open channel between your device and the first hop provider, which means that provider (e.g., Comcast, your phone company) has (and can and does share, either upon government request or by whoopsies) access to the content of your messages. (WhatsApp friends: though WhatsApp does provide E2E encryption Facebook now owns that app and you know better than to trust Faceboo, right?)
4. Do most of your surfing via a privacy-protecting browser (right now I use Tor on my personal desktop--how to: Windows; how to: Mac--and Ghostery on my phone; this last is less about avoiding snoops and more about throwing a stick in the spokes of the Attention Economy).

Some of this is security-related, and some of it is for the sake of anonymity. Significantly, it's not just your anonymity that is preserved by your use of encryption, proxying, and the like: the more people who behave this way the harder it becomes to deanonymize anyone. Think of it as protest or protection, as you like, but get on it.