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The Heart of St John Vianne

The Heart of St John Vianne

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St John Vianne is the patron saint of parish priests. Considered a slow learner who struggled with academics, he even got lost when trying to get to his first assignment in the tiny town of Ars, France (pop. 230 people). It was a difficult time of rebuilding as the French Revolution’s reign of terror had previously forced repression of Catholics. But his patient work with his tiny flock began to spread. Known as a great mystic, he spent long days in the confessional with people who would flock to him from all over Europe and the world. By the end of his life, almost 20,000 people a year would go to confession with him and many miraculous events are well documented by those that confessed with him.

The shrine of Ars has entrusted his incorrupt heart of St John Vianne to the Knights of Columbus who are hosting him traveling the US. His heart will be arriving here in the Pacific Northwest the first week of March. Find the locations and dates here, but act fast because his relics will only be at some locations for mere hours:
https://www.kofc.org/en/events/vianney.html#/

Brief info about St John Vianne from wikipedia:

Around 1790, the anticlerical terror phase of the French Revolution forced many priests to hide from the regime in order to carry out the sacraments. John Vianne’s parents were ardent Catholics and gave often to the local poor as well as raised John with the same faith despite the persecution. After the Catholic Church was re-established in France in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte, 

John entered the seminary, but struggled academically. Considered too slow, he was returned to Abbé Balley. However, Balley persuaded the Vicar general that Vianney’s piety was great enough to compensate for his ignorance. The seminarian was ordained priest on 12 August 1815.

He was then appointed the priest of Ars, a town of 230 inhabitants. Vianne got lost trying to find the town and two young men tending flocks in the fields pointed him in the right direction. With Catherine Lassagne and Benedicta Lardet, he established La Providence, a home for girls.

As parish priest, Vianney realized that the Revolution’s aftermath had resulted in religious ignorance and indifference, due to the devastation wrought on the church in France. At the time, Sundays in rural areas were spent working in the fields, or dancing and drinking in taverns. Vianney spent time in the confessional and gave homilies extorting people to turn towards God.

Despite the tiny parish of just a few hundred souls, Vianney came to be known internationally, and people from distant places began travelling to consult him as early as 1827. By 1855, the number of pilgrims had reached 20,000 a year. During the last ten years of his life, he spent 16 to 18 hours a day in the confessional.

The hours he spent in the confessional were surrounded by mystical experiences for both he and his confessors. Numerous tales are told of his humility, holiness, and miraculous knowledge of people’s sins and the disposition of their souls.

Oregon Ranks worst in Mental Health

Oregon Ranks worst in Mental Health

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The nonprofit Mental Health America recently ranked Oregon the worst in the country for mental illness rates and how little access to help for it we provide. That study says we have some of the worst rates for homelessness, high school graduations, and child abuse. All of which link to mental illnesses.

Sadly, it is not surprising when you see the masses of homeless camps, mentally ill, and drug addicted wandering the streets in downtown Portland. The famous movie ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest’ was filmed in Salem Oregon – which some said was one of the big nails in the coffins for state-sponsored mental health services.

Read some of the sad history of Oregon’s Mental Health services here:
http://www.mentalhealthportland.org/about-2/oregons-mental-health-history/

Other sources:

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/oregon-ranks-worst-in-us-for-mental-health-study-says/283-449141620

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte

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Near the end of his life, while exiled on the rock of St. Helena, Napoleon called Count Montholon to his side and asked him, “Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was?” Upon the Count declining to respond Napoleon countered,

I know men, and I tell you Jesus Christ was not a man.

Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist.

There is between Christianity and other religions the distance of infinity.

Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne and myself founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon sheer force. Jesus Christ alone founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men will die for Him. In every other existence but that of Christ how many imperfections!

From the first day to the last He is the same; majestic and simple; infinitely firm and infinitely gentle. He proposes to our faith a series of mysteries and commands with authority that we should believe them, giving no other reason than those tremendous words, ‘I am God.’

The Bible contains a complete series of acts and of historical men to explain time and eternity, such as no other religion has to offer.

If it is not the true religion, one is very excusable in being deceived; for everything in it is grand and worthy of God.

The more I consider the Gospel, the more I am assured that there is nothing there which is not beyond the march of events and above the human mind. Even the impious themselves have never dared to deny the sublimity of the Gospel, which inspires them with a sort of compulsory veneration.

What happiness that Book procures for those who believe it!

  • https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Napoleon_I_of_France
Umami

Umami

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Umami’s simplistic animation style belies some relatable (or not) and somewhat disturbing existential experiences. Watching them is a little like jumping into a selection of dank memes that work on 2 or more layers of sarcasm, so maybe only consume them in doses.

Program old standup arcade systems from your browser!

Program old standup arcade systems from your browser!

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The folks over at 8-bit workshop have some neat resources. Learn to write 8-bit code for a ton of old standup arcades and tv console systems – right from your browser.

I’m personally a big fan of the 6502 Vector systems, but these are available for you to try out

  • Atari 2600 (6502)
  • VIC Dual (Z80)
  • Midway 8080 (Z80)
  • Galaxian/Scramble (Z80)
  • Atari arcade vector system – (6502)
  • Williams (Motorola 6809)
  • Apple II+

https://8bitworkshop.com/

Sprite Dicing

Sprite Dicing

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Handy technique for saving texture space! There are various tools to do this, but the basic scheme is to split up a large texture into much smaller chunks, individually trimming these chunks, and seamlessly reconstructing the sprite in the viewport.

Source image
Compresses down to this!
Designing with Sound

Designing with Sound

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I went to a recent UX Book Club Meetup (Calagator) given by Amber Case. She spent two years as a fellow at MIT’s Center for Civic Media and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society studying the interaction between humans and computers.

First off, the talk was given in a really cool spot I’d not been before. A converted 1900’s fireboat house turned into the Boathouse Microcinema. It’s located under a waterfront overpass heavily cross-crossed with active rail lines and inside a non-descript red door in a sketchy industrial neighborhood surrounded by homeless camps.

Inside were the artist spaces for a number of film, music, and art productions.

This talk, however, was focused on her recent co-published book on the use of sound in modern appliances and technology.

She covered a lot of interesting topics.

  • Most of design in public is visual. How do we do public design for sound?
  • How do you feel sound? Low frequency can be felt, but requires high volume. Previously this has been limited by tech that distorts too much. But now we’re finally able to push high volume, low frequency sound without the high distortion.
  • You cannot have an uber-solution or norm for using sound in all devices. People try again and again, but there is no one size fits all.
  • Hospital devices are regulated to frequencies in the most optimal frequency hearing ranges. This is both a blessing and a curse – alarm fatigue
  • Can we have an alphabet of frequency?
  • Spectra iPhone app for the iPhone does live spectral analysis/visualization of sounds around you. Experiment and record places you go and see what you find.
  • Altitude on a plane makes salty+sweet tastes actually distort/deaden. So they played certain sounds with certain dishes to augment the food taste and ‘restore’ the proper flavor.
  • Sound isn’t like your eyes. With eyes you can close your eyes or look away – you can’t just close your ears when you hear something. This makes the sounds our devices/world makes much more important to pay attention too when designing things. NYC is a loud cacophony.
  • megaphonics of the late 18-1900’s – art to make loudest sounds possible.
    • One experiment of having 5 marching bands playing towards each other at the same time.
    • Corvallis group is re-doing that experiment
  • Open office spaces are bad! Open concrete restaurants are stylish – but bad!
    • Service workers are exposed to 90+ decibels for hours
  • Loudness fatigue is a thing. Tiredness and irritability rise. Documented as ‘alarm fatigue’ or ‘alert fatigue’
    • See earplug links below she recommends
    • base traps and sound absorbing panels
    • Audimute
  • Cisco hold music
    • Fellow did a podcast that said when he was diagnosed with cancer, he’d go listen to this hold music to feel better.
    • Most phone audio compression algorithms are tuned for the best voice response. This means almost all ‘normal’ music sounds horrible when run through those compression algorithms. That’s why orchestral music sounded terrible.
    • Cisco hold music, however, used lots of electronic tones that turn out to map very well to those algorithms. Done by accident, but actually sounds better than orchestral or live bands due to the phone compression.
  • Non-places
    • With advent of modern cities, these places came into being.
    • Places where you enter and have no identity. Stores went from personal encounters for goods with people to places where you are an anonymous shopper.
    • industrialization created dehumanizing non-spaces everywhere
    • mooji music
  • Steven Wolfram “New Kind of Science“
  • Sound Design for Designers – book
  • “Two Trains” inequality in NYC subway. A project that tries to ‘sonify’ data.
  • Tips for better design:
    • Use better equipment when reproducing sounds on your devices. Better speakers, better recordings, etc. Sawtooths/etc are bad.
    • Particle physicists – they sonify their data to know when something interesting happened in a particle collision. Added little chimes and upsweep sounds to indicate desired types of particles were found.
    • Incomplete chord progressions get people’s attention. We look up to see why the upwards/downwards sequence stopped before completing.
    • Notification chime that listens to db rating around it and chimes just above the ambient noise it finds itself in. That way it’s not too loud/quiet for wrong environment.
    • We have all-or-nothing privacy settings. This is bad. We need a middle-ground. Example: for gps you might want exact location. For many purposes, however, just a city or country is sufficient. We need to make ways for us to share only what is needed and no more.
    • Remove sounds – motors, HVAC, hair driers, etc – quality is communicated sometimes as the lack of sounds
      • Dyson devices (fans/hair driers) show people will pay BIG premiums for less sound.
      • We put foam in car doors to deaden sound
      • Pay close attention to component fit – poor fitting = rattling
      • Use containerization to absorb sound. All the blenders in Jamba Juice (Blendtek) have shell containers to seal in the sound. And they charge an absolute fortune for them and get it to protect workers hearing.
      • High quality things are category breakers – not killers due to high price. People will pay for these devices.
      • Apartment floors? Can we soundproof them better?
      • You’ll make a mint if you can fix super-loud leaf blowers
    • Allow sounds to be turned off or changed into a different sense
      • For phones, we turn off beep and use buzz/vibrates instead. Much better
    • Tiny homes sound great – until she tried it. They were WAY too noisy. Everything is in one space and makes noise. This is why Japanese appliances stress silence so much.
    • Tech can communicate, but it doesn’t need to actually speak. Voice speaking is tricky
      • Don’t do ‘universal design’. One size does not fit all. Nor does it fit all cultures/contexts. Thinking you can come up with one motif of sound for all your entire product line is a terrible idea and fails.
      • Roomba vacuums went from a few simple tones to indicate stuck/complete/etc to actually using voice. This was STUPID. extra costs of localization + unnecessary and not as intuitive/easy to hear.
    • Designing with Sound book
    • Experiment: she used a contact mic on umbrella to hear rain. Didn’t sound like rain at all!
    • To make big sound from small phone, old technique is to calculate cavity resonance of the phone and play sounds to resonate the case as well.
    • Barbican Waltz
    • Watch out for serious privacy issues. People could turn on Live Listen on their Airpods. Then, they’d leave the room with their phone in the room while leaving their airpod buds in. They could hear everything said in the room through the phone transmitting it to the airbuds. Effectively creating unknown surveillance through the phone.
    • Abelton 10 – simply record a few basic piano chord progressions and time stretch them. Amazing sounding
    • Being Mortal – by Atul Gawande
    • Paro Robotic Seal – This therapy doll for alzheimers patients worked stupid well after attempts with more human-like models or animals. Turns out, the unfamiliarity with a seal means the uncanny valley for seal not the same as for people.
    • Open thinking time:
    • She talked about fact people walk around now without talking/interacting. Terrible isolation. My idea: how about headphones that bleed into neighbors as you walk past them?
    • Robert Moses vs James/Jane Jacobs
    • Does simply sticking to ambient music isolate you?
    • Oregon Dill Pickle comics on Oregon history

Links:


Tour of Untimely Departures at the Lone Fir Cemetery

Tour of Untimely Departures at the Lone Fir Cemetery

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Every Halloween the Friends of the Lone Fir cemetery put on a ‘Tour of Untimely Departures’ where volunteers would dress in period garb and guide you through the cemetery to hear stories about some of the deceased buried there.


It appears that this tradition may be at an end, but hopefully it comes back. Until then, maybe check out some videos of older trips.