We worked on Netlogo again last night. It still didn't go as well as I'd like, but part of that is that the BCRC is a really difficult place to teach: it's hard to move around and I didn't set up a projector, which would have helped to demonstrate stuff. It's also hot in there. We looked at the leaves and several people came up with interesting features to try to implement. The first was varying the angle of the veins branching out. Several people worked on creating compound leaves, or reticulately pinate leaves, like Gleditsia leaves. One student worked on producing randomness in the pattern. We made the veins curve. Some people made their leaves bend. We figured out a way to make the middle veins longer than the veins at the beginning and end of the leaf. Eventually we posted them to their portfolios. It was at about this time that a student indicated that they were overwhelmed and confused and wanted to have a basic guide for what they needed to know. This is exactly the hump that I'm trying very hard to get students over: I want them to realize that they don't need a guide from me. There are lots of guides already on the web. Or they could make a guide themselves -- they have all the tools they need to do so (and producing such a guide would teach them more than reading one ever would). I struggled to find some way to express this when another student said, "There are three tutorials linked from the Netlogo manual page you had us read." Yes! Exactly! Oh, I felt so much better! At least some of them are beginning to see that, if you want to learn it, everything you need is there -- and you can find it for yourself!
Chatting with Tom this morning, he told me that after the ballgame rioters near where he lived came through his neighborhood smashing cars, including his.
There was a riot here last weekend after the ball game. I spoke with a parent in Charlie's class who works in the residence hall system, who said that her eyes and lungs were still burning from tear gas. It's hard to understand exactly what happened -- there are a variety of claims in the media: 
Mass Live Saturday riot article Monday celebration article Wednesday celebration article. (Thanks for Alisa for tracking down more links.) Evidently cars were overturned and stuff set on fire. As with the riot last spring I have a hard time understanding why people do this sort of thing. I believe part of the behavior is due to anonymity: when people feel anonymous, they feel both insignificant and powerless (which makes them want to lash out and have some effect) and like they have license for uninhibited action because they can not be held accountable. As with the riot last spring I have a hard time understanding why people do this sort of thing. I believe part of the behavior is due to anonymity: when people feel anonymous, they feel both insignificant and powerless (which makes them want to lash out and have some effect) and like they have license for uninhibited action because they can not be held accountable. It still sucks that Tom's car got smashed.
Speaking of mob behavior, I was chatting with the technical staff who have been constantly working to solve problems with people's Windows installations: applying patches and cleaning up viruses. One of the student employees was asking about radmind, so I described how we were using it for MacOS X and how it could work for people's desktop installs as well as for the computer labs, depending on which kind of negative transcript you used. He said, "That's what we need for Windows!" I disagreed vigorously: "No! No! No! You're missing the point entirely!"
Tomorrow is the beginning of the Internacia Semajnfino Esperantista at Okemo, Vermont. Its a nice chance to get away and see the colors for a couple of days. And to speak Esperanto, of course. There are lessons for beginners and a variety of activities for experienced Esperantists. The last time I went, I ran a workshop on writing haiku. I think this time, I may try to get folks to write renga. I'm also developing a presentation of my anti-war haiku, which I may offer at the meeting. For imagery, I found the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs catalog of World War I posters, which are in the public domain.
The images look almost timeless: war reduces everything to rubble and rubble looks much the same now as it did a hundred years ago. They are from posters which served a variety of aims: to support giving for orphans, the purchase of war bonds, and recruitment. They seem old and sad, to me, which assorts well with the feeling I'm trying to capture with my haiku: a feeling of hopelessness, despair, and the finality of our involvement in Iraq.
It will be a big change to offer anything seriousish at Okemo. In the past, I've offered haiku readings of Istvan Bierfaristo's haiku that were funny (or, if not funny, at least orthogonal to the experiences of most other Esperantists). The organizers have never quite known how to pigeonhole what I'm proposing to do. When I first talked about giving a "slide presentation" (I used real slides), there was some rolling of eyes, as if they worried that I was going to show them an hour of pictures of my new Cyclone Fence. They weren't sure what they were expecting, but my haiku slides were not it. The next year, I said I was going to show a video from the previous year's meetings -- I had produced a tight 5 minute iMovie that showed a montage of stills and short clips set to a performance of music from the previous year. They were very surprised again -- I guess they thought I was going to just put in a tape of unedited video from the previous year and let it play for an hour or two. Who knows what they'll think this year.