Google Earth model of Multnomah Meeting by Lew Scholl (link)

(former Masonic Temple on the right -- used during the 2nd major remodel)

For those wishing to catch up on all the changes in our region among the many churches and meetings, I recommend this…

Exhibit:  bfi.org/synergetics

Me on Quaker-P, May 14 2005 "What Every Quaker Should Know":

This is the geometry curriculum I'd like to see phased in to Quaker schools (not to displace all of what's already there, but in a way that supplements and complements). And Bucky himself: twas an…

Both my parents were convinced Friends, thanks to deep discussions they'd been having with their peers at a YWCA closely associated with the University of Washington, where they met.  Jack was a Seattle native whereas Carol was a precocious kid at Garfield High, her dad an itinerant Linotype operator.

Dad was having conscientious objections to the university's compulsory ROTC gun training. Mom would later join the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). All that…

I mention my Quaker ethnicity in this one. I'm sharing my sense of history. 

For related videos, see my School of Tomorrow playlist.

I find this "sermon" somewhat comical, and coming from the unprogrammed side, that's not an unusual attitude, since we don't do sermons that much (as a genre), nor even recognize "recorded ministers" all that much (some of us do). 

Nevertheless, I dive into the Bible from my own Quaker perspective, discussing the concept of races, which probably has something to do with racism as well.

[ I also sound like I have a cold, which I probably do.  My voice varies over my corpus of…

Sort of science fictiony:

More autobiographical:…

The Religious Society of Friends group on Facebook is very quiet on the subject of impending war with Iran. That's a kind of silence I don't want to be around.  I left the group.  Not enough authentic Quakerism for my taste.

As a clerk of IT (information technology) for our Yearly Meeting, I studied the work of our indigenous members, who were busy building our multi-meeting database. That baton has since been passed, and the work continues.  We haven't outsourced (yet) to a non-Quaker commercial firm.  We use PHP with MySQL.

In my day, we kept track of meeting…

I'm reaching out to Friends in higher education with my recent Youtubes, which I'm free to distribute outside of Alphabet (Google) just as well.  A lot of my viewers don't ever watch Youtubes.

Scouting developed as a result of some folks wanting to abstract the fun part of military campaigning. Lets not…

Quaker Journaling 2.0 was ordinary blogging.

[ originally posted on Medium ]

Do you know the etymology of “grok”? To the best of my knowledge, it comes from Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein.

You’d think I’d have talked a lot more about…

[ EXHIBIT 1: Recent posting to npym-it-discuss, a listserv for those in NPYM interesting in yakking about matters IT ]

The Unitarians are more at the forefront than Friends on this initiative, however we had a number of Quakers at the Iran Forum where this proposal was floated, receiving much interest and applause. I'll give a link in the comments to my journal entry on our meeting.  Portland is already sister cities with a lot of others, like Chicago is, including Sapporo (Japan) and Ashkelon (Israel).

Given my connections to higher education, I'm especially keen to share Silicon Forest curriculum…

[SNEC = Synergeticists of the Northeast Corridor ]

Because I went to a fancy school (Princeton) and studied philosophy, I'm used to such as Dr. Walter Kaufman suggesting that "university philosophy" was a subject with zero backbone, a spineless trajectory for dweebs.  That was a challenge to us of course, to make it be otherwise. We were the new generation. He told me directly in his office he thought I was best of breed, in terms of my writing.



Wittgenstein too begged his…

[memo to a listserv for faculty and Peace Corps vets, a couple typos fixed, I think I'll add this to Medium]



I was pleased to see the militaries colluding to put on a fun show for the vicious masses, eager for fireworks. TV voyeurs love a great spectacle. Many are whining they want more. They want to "rubbleize" Damascus. "Please please please give us more violence".



Choosing to attack supposed…

One might think "mumbling" describes it better, as more incoherent than not, however "murmuring" sounds better.  Today is Easter, and April Fools.

I'm meditating on the foolishness of Man, quite appropriately. I'm going back to Genesis 2-3 when they apparently had the choice of a second tree's fruit, the fruit of Eternal Life.

Given a choice between Eternal Life and this other thing God said no about, and that had a snake on it, a talking one, Man chose this other thing. How…