Aidan Walker, among other things Creator-in-Residence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes about his appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

I don’t understand what exactly he was there to talk about, other than that it had something to do with memes. What saved the piece for me, though, was this paragraph, referring to Maher:

You must feel empathy for the Boomer marooned in a world he is not adapted to exist within. It is as if they have been sailing on a boat all their life, a boat which they understood had some problems and was not always pleasant, but it remained afloat. And now that entire boat is sinking, at the same moment they are growing weak and feeble, approaching death. They reach for any kind of floating material they can wrap their hands around. With media types — the people who look into cameras for a living — this clutching is especially desperate because so much of their power came not just from youthful good looks but from an ability to intuit things about the audience, to hop on a trend — to have a read not just on what was going on, but how people would want to feel about it and what you could say to bring them there. Now they have no such orientation.

What an evisceration, one that I can’t help but feel the target of, if even just a little. (See “something to do with memes,” above).

With Province House reopening this week after a long restoration, I thought it high time to improve the rendering of the building—and Queens Square around it—in OpenStreetMap, in three dimensions.

OpenStreetMap is not, at its heart, a 3D map, but it supports tagging buildings and other objects with information about the third dimension—height, roof shape, etc.—and there are experimental websites that will use these tags to render in 3D.

There’s a degree of unsatisfying hopeful magic to figuring this out, especially as different renderers render buildings differently.

Lately I’ve been using the Urban Eye 3D plugin for the JOSM OpenStreetMap editor to aid in the effort: it helpfully shows a real time 3D representation as I’m editing, which is lightyears ahead of the old-school “make edits, wait a long time for rendering engines to update, repeat” process. 

Here are some screenshots of Queens Square in the Urban Eye 3D viewer:

The editing is excellent exercise in really looking hard at buildings and their parts, not unlike using Tinkercad to make a model for a 3D printer.

Given that few people will actually ever see the 3D rendering, that’s its primary utility for me. I find it meditative.

Some places you might eventually see my updates show up in various degrees of 3D:

• F4map Demo
• OSM Buildings
• Streets.gl
• Osm2world (just Province House)

These sites are updated on an irregular basis, so it could take weeks for the latest changes to appear there.

I found my way to Jacinta Palud’s blog through a link in Stephen’s guestbook.

It’s a blog in a very old-school sense, and I enjoy the mix of links, photos, and Winnipeg insights. Subscribed.

My old friend Stephen has started a blog, Sout.ca, using the very simple (and inexpensive) Pika platform.

From his first post:

Anything except the fact, for me, that social media is heartbreaking. And sickening. So to some degree, this is a replacement for social media for me. And that means that I hope to hear from people. I will tell my funny little stories and in response many people will finger paint. I might finger paint myself.

Stephen is decamping from Facebook, where he’s been writing for many many years. It’s good to have him here (in the blogosphere).

Here’s a photo of me and Stephen from 2002, proving our longstanding friendship (which longstands back to 1985).

(Credit to Annie Mueller for first turning me on to Pika).

Peter Bihr, in Do we all want to be middle-managers for AI assistants?, writes:

These AI assistants are like putting an intern in charge of your life. Do you really want to middle-manage all of this, focus on quality control and all, rather than just do the thing yourself? The doing, that friction that it brings, that is the life, that is the work!

I mean, who wants to be a middle-manager for their own life?

An echo of a similar sentiment from China that I linked to yesterday.

Peter’s reference to his father’s generation reminded me that there was a point in my father’s career as a research scientist where he was promoted to middle-management. 

At the Canada Centre for Inland Waters there were sections and divisions, and at some point, in his late 40s if memory serves, he was promoted to become a section head. He hated it, eventually gave up the position, and returned to being a full-time researcher for the rest of his career.

The imprint on me of this, which I recall being a frequent topic of dinner conversation at home, was that there are doers and there are people who manage the doers, and that there is a nobility in being a doer, and a strong crass, demoralizing quality to being a manager.

Peter asks “I mean, who wants to be a middle-manager for their own life?”, and I think he’s speaking directly to that schism: there is joy, accomplishment, self-knowledge, in the friction of doing. On the other hand, once we get beyond the thrill of bossing agents around and having them do our bidding (and becoming their managers), the demoralizing realization that, in Cory Doctorow terms, the horses are riding us.

For the first time in 9 years, there’s no fence surrounding Province House in Charlottetown. The building re-opens later this month, following extensive restoration.

From chinese period of my life (a visit to China pt.1) by Spencer Chang:

I can’t imagine giving up my frictionful everyday human encounters. The inconvenience is the cost we pay to encounter each other, to stumble onto a new discovery, to expand our ways of seeing. These kinds of things can’t be engineered.

The post is about the lack of friction in everyday China, but it could equally as well be about the lack of friction when we us AI to answer all our everyday questions.

A few weeks ago Lisa and I made some heftier handmade paper, and experimented with pressing previously carved lino blocks into the still-wet pulp.

Today I took one of those sheets and used it for the cover of a notebook.

We gathered in the print shop today with niece A. and sister-in-law K. to make some pink paper.

The pulp is simply recycled paper shredder tailings, mixed with water, coloured with acrylic paint in a household blender. The hanging-on-J-cloth method was Lisa’s idea.

From Of Triumphal Arches by Margaret Atwood:

When I heard A Certain Orange Person say that every country had a Triumphal Arch and so the United States had to have one too, I wondered if Canada had a triumphal arch. It does have an arch of sorts in Ottawa, but it’s not a triumphal arch: it’s a war memorial, put up after WW 1 and adding several other wars in which Canadians punched above their weight. It doesn’t say Hooray Victorious Us, but rather We Made It Through, Though Not All of Us Did; and it’s not about a single person, it’s about teamwork. You can’t drive through it in a chariot or other vehicle because a lot of soldiers are passing through.