289. Celebrating the 4th of July

Independence Day

Last week I worked the 4th of July Festival at the Berkeley Marina. I don’t know how many years I’ve worked this event, but it must be close to ten. It’s a nice setting for an afternoon in the sun by the bay. Though I do spend my time in a parking lot. 

Getting there takes a train and a bus and about an hour and a half -- getting home takes over two hours, in part because you have to walk a long way because roads are closed leading to the marina. 

The long parking lot is divided in half, lengthwise with a long line of food vendor tents on one side, an open area for lines, an area of tables, then a landscaped berm and the waters and boats of the marina proper to the north. Just beyond the west end of the parking lot is another parking lot given over to a pony ride, various other kids rides, and our supply area which for Berkeley events includes parked garbage trucks instead of dumpsters. The (union) city crews haul the bags we pull, and the piles of cardboard the vendors leave, back to the proper truck... we hope.

At first, back ten or whatever years, we would monitor the eco-stations when it got busy, which meant standing in the sun for hours pointing to the right container and then fishing out all the things people threw in the wrong one regardless. I still did a little of that this time, along with some “education” for people interested in the process -- there are always a few weirdos at these events -- but mostly we keep in motion, sorting and, when necessary pulling bags and leaving them on the ground for the city crew to haul away. But a large percentage of my time is taken up finding and sorting the bags of trash the vendors are hiding. 

I thought I was keeping ahead of things yesterday, except for the vendor at the far east end of the line who wouldn’t give up their can for me to sort until the end. If I could have gotten my hands on it sooner, I would have cleared out all the (mostly plastic) landfill items, as I could see that it was mostly landfill. But no. When the woman running the booth finally let me have it, they had just added the good compost that they were tossing at the end of the day. It took me forever to separate a couple gallons of noodles and rice from all that plastic. So my mood was not the highest as I started my long hike to the first bus, only to learn then that the expected wait was half an hour. 

At least I got a shuttle bus ride up my hill when I got back to SF, as they had taken the cable cars out of service. And I still have no idea why my cell phone decided to take the day off, leaving me unable to clock-in and out. 

I kind of lost my train of thought there, what I started out to talk about was my memories of celebrating Independence Day. The first celebrations were so of that time. My parents, especially my father, being serious golfers, we belonged to a country club, Owl Creek, in a suburb to the east of Louisville. The club sponsored it’s own little firework display on the golf course. We would gather on blankets and towels on the grass on a hot and humid Kentucky evening, and watch a modest, but very close, display of pyrotechnics, while our parents drank and the mosquitoes drained our blood.

I have no Independence Day recollections from Colorado, which is curious, and possibly a comment on the bleak state of my parents marriage at that time. In SoCal, I remember our first 4th because we spent it trying to recover our dog, who had bolted. After that, I recall us driving into the hills where you could see a half dozen or more distinct firework displays happening at various beaches, and even over the landlocked semi-cities of the LA basin. LA is really more like the Balkans than it’s like an actual “city.”

This train of thought may have started with the little ponies in Berkeley yesterday. I couldn’t help recalling Freckles, my horse for a summer in Prescott, Arizona. Now that was an Independence Day to remember. First we had to ride the horses into town from our camp up in the mountains. It was the longest ride I can recall us taking, since we mostly just rode around up in the mountains. Then we rode in the local parade, with Freckles proving very popular with his bucking and prancing about. I’m sure Rick must have stood on his saddle and guided Prince with voice commands, but I don’t actually remember that in the parade -- probably because I was trying to keep Freckles under control. Then we stopped at A&W for junk food... the thought of taking horses to a drive-through was just too good to resist. And finally we had to ride all the way back home, in the rain, because the 4th of July is also the traditional start of the Arizona monsoon.

That’s a day I would like to see again on video.

After that, 1968, I don’t recall another Independence Day until 1976, two days after I arrived in San Francisco. I rode the 22 Fillmore bus to SF’s Marina Green and spent the day enjoying the sun (a freakish notion for a refugee from Summer in Phoenix) and playing volleyball. The weather was perfect until the sun went down and the fog rolled in. By the time it was dark enough for fireworks, the fog was heavy and low. All you could see was a vague glow of color in the sky. I loved it.

Since then, they’ve moved the SF fireworks further away from the Golden Gate, with mixed results. Some years you can see the fireworks and some years you can’t. I’ve watched them from the roof of Fox Plaza (29 floors up) and from the northern slope of Russian Hill, where we sat of the sidewalk steps and enjoyed whatever we could see between the buildings on either side. And now, for the past ten or so years, I’ve been at Berkeley. 

At first I would stay to the end, shutting down our stations and cleaning up after. There was one year I stayed just to actually watch the fireworks, which are launched off the old Berkeley Pier. it’s a perfectly fine firework display, though not as grand as SF’s. But I’ve learned that if I stay even for the fireworks it takes even longer to get home, and if I stay to clean up I will be riding one of the late night buses back home. Better to bug out early. The only fireworks I actually see now are the private (illegal) ones I see out the windows of the bus or train as we pass through the Oakland battlefield. Last night there were two fires in Oakland, though I didn't hear if they were firework related.

Next up on my work calendar: Bastille Day!

277. Himalayan Fair

Himalayan Fair

This is an event I've never greened before because it conflicts with Maker Faire. This year my boss passed on Maker Faire because we were so busy, so I jumped on the Himalayan event to avoid the dreaded Bay to Breakers (B2B) footrace/walk/party in San Francisco. B2B starts too early, stretches all the way across town, and there's a vile tradition of tossing corn tortillas into the air, especially as the "runners" (ha) are waiting to start the race. This would make me want to hit them except that so many are naked.

So instead of walking a few (10?) blocks to the start of B2B, I walked seven blocks to catch the train to Berkeley and then caught a bus to the utterly charming Live Oak Park for Himalayan Fair. This isn't quite as random as it may sound -- a "Himalayan" event being held in Berkeley I mean. Berkeley has a large South Asian population as evidenced by the massive number of South Asian restaurants which have drawn me there for decades -- Indian has been my favorite cuisine, though now I would say Burmese.

I am not familiar enough with the local politics to know how unlikely this mixing of Nepalese, Tibetan, and Indian traditions would seem back in Asia. There used to be a Balkan social club here, which, back in the days before the breakup of Yugoslavia, always made me wonder if it was actually some sort of fight club. Did Serbs and Croats and Albanians really group together to reminisce about the generations of genocidal warfare?

In any event, in Berkeley these populations gather to serve up traditional foods and to sell things of a North Indian/Himalayan character. I can't actually report much about what the non-food vendors were up to as they were setup in a field on the other side of the little creek that runs through the park. I stayed in the food area until it was time to shut down our stations at the end of the day, and by that time the vendors were either buttoned down for the night (on Saturday) or packed up to leave (on Sunday). There was also the local music and, at the end of the day Saturday, a large meditation event with what I suppose was meditative music from a small stage and the contemplative sounds of me sorting down and hauling away the waste from one of our eco-stations at the edge of the zone -- it's not a big park.

Regular food vendors are bad enough (from my waste sorting perspective) but what's worse is when the food is prepared by amateurs/volunteers, which was the case at some of the booths at Himalayan Fair. I was fishing latex gloves out of the compost -- and recycling -- all weekend. Several of the food vendors were eager to feed us, especially on Saturday when it was slower, but I can't help thinking there is a bribery aspect to their largess. "We're not going to pay much attention (if any) to sorting our trash, but enjoy this curry we currently have in abundance." Still the food was good and there were plenty of veggie options for once.

I said it was a small park, and really it's not a big event in terms of numbers, but the dumpsters were placed at the top of the park so there was a lot of hauling up hill. During the day, I would just be hauling a bag or two of compost at a time and tossing them into the dumpsters. But at the end of the day I would fill one of our large toters with bags of sorted trash and then drag the toter to the dumpsters, often up hill. The final haul of the day was from this little nest of Nepalese down by the creek. I was not only carrying the bags of trash (sorted) but also the steel frames that hold the bags. And being food vendors, just as I was about to drag all this all the way up (2 sets of frigging steps, also) the vendor shows me the unsorted trash can they've been using themselves. So I have to pull the bags out and sort this. Finally, after I have refused his offer of nine bean soup three times, it becomes obvious that accepting the soup isn't optional. So now I have a cup of (quite good) soup in my hand while attempting a task that requires two hands. So I have to climb to the top of the slope and set my soup someplace I hope the rats can't get to it before going back and dragging up the heavy toter. 

You would think that, after all this "good work" in what was, at least in parts, a Buddhist event, doves would escort me to my bus stop where the bus would magically appear -- possibly proceeded by an apparition of the Dalai Lama (I originally typed "Deli" Lama, which I really like. "Would you like a pickle with your transcendence?") But no. My transit luck was about normal. The bus that was to take me to the train, passed as I was on the other side of the street so I had to walk ten blocks. I could hear the train leaving as I entered the train station, so I had to wait for the next train -- my usual 20 minute wait at Downtown Berkeley. On the train I decided I would take advantage of my senior rate $3 fare for riding the cable car seven blocks to my house, but the cable car was pulling away as I came up the escalator and there were no more cable cars waiting, so I walked up my hill, as usual.

I'm really close to finishing a juicy section of the Pirenne book, but I need one more day.

218. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness

Link to Table of Contents

90 degrees F in Berkeley

I had not planned to come to Berkeley today. It was supposed to get up into the mid 80s so I decided to take the bus to Emeryville where I could hang out in the air conditioned Barnes & Noble Bookstore, viewing design porn, while eating snacks and using their WiFi. It was such a simple plan.

It only took an hour or so to get through what design magazines they had -- nothing I was tempted to buy -- so I got out my list of books to read and started looking for something to buy. Boy did I strike out. The clerk, who was actually helping me, happened to mention that I was more likely to find these titles at Moe's (in Berkeley). 

And I thought, "well, of course." And then I thought, "And I could have lunch at The Butcher's Son!" (that wonderful vegan deli on University.) By chance, the bus that brought me to Emeryville also goes to central Berkeley, so I got back on. Lunch was fantastic.

Moe's was a mixed bag. I did find The Tale of Genji -- or at least a truncated version of the original. I'll see how I like it. But I struck out on all the other books on my short list: Experiences In Translation by Ecco, Reflections On Violence by Sorel, and The Life of the Mind by Arendt. While looking for those I did recall another title I had been looking for, and actually found The Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach. 

Then I walked over to Caffe Strada (I'm surprised it's still here, just off campus) where I'm sitting in the shade drinking iced tea and sampling my new books. The Feuerbach is almost Scholastic in its dullness. (And, yes, this is the George Elliot translation.) The Tale of Genji looks more interesting. 

The Essence of Christianity

by Ludwig Feuerbach - Prometheus Books, 1841

The first eleven pages seem to me unreadable. I almost wonder if this isn't intentional, to drive away any but the most determined reader. Or, as in my case, someone willing to skim and skip ahead. 


The Essence of Religion Considered Generally
p12 ... In the perceptions of the senses consciousness of the object is distinguishable from consciousness of self; but in religion, consciousness of the object and self-consciousness coincide. The object of the senses is out of man, the religious object is within him, and therefore as little forsakes him as his self-consciousness or his conscience; it is the intimate, the closest object. "God," says Augustine, for example, "is nearer, more related to us, and therefore more easily known by us, than sensible, corporeal things." The object of the senses is in itself indifferent -- independent of the dispositions or of the judgement; but the object of religion is a selected object" the most excellent, the first, the supreme being: it essentially presupposes a critical judgement, a discrimination between the divine and the non-divine, between that which is worthy of adoration and that which is not worthy. And here may be applied, without any limitation, the proposition: the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively. Such as are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God: so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man his God; The two are identical. Whatever is God to man, that is his heart and soul; and conversely, God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of a man -- religion the solemn unveiling of a man's hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.

Wow! And this was published in 1841. Forty years before The Brothers Karamazov. 

It would be interesting to read this passage to a person of faith while they were in an fMRI machine to see how their brain would light up like a pinball machine. The confirming circuits ("my religion expresses my inner being") alternating with the conflicting circuits ("my religion has no basis outside my self"). The most devout (and particular) Protestants are no different from football fans devoted to their home club. Though perhaps a club of people suffering from Celiac Disease might be a better metaphor, since football clubs exist independently of their fans. Celiac Disease (and any support groups) exist only if there are people with the required internal deficiencies. 

Which is why I'm cautious of blaming cults for the beliefs of their adherents, as the cult only exists because the adherents hold those beliefs. Obviously there are exceptions.

My edition of this books runs to 339 pages, with Appendices, and yet I'm not sure I really need to read any more. I'll at least give Feuerbach and Eliot the credit of skimming ahead, but this was what I was looking for.


I'm really not finding much else (through p35) I need to quote except for one tiny thing I couldn't over look,

p34 ...The understanding shows us the faults and weaknesses even of our beloved ones; it shows us even our own. It is for this reason that it so often throws us into painful collision with ourselves, with our own hearts. We do not like to give reason the upper hand: we are too tender to ourselves to carry out the true, but hard, relentless verdict of the understanding. The understanding is the power which has relation to species: the heart represents particular circumstances, individuals, -- the understanding, general circumstances, universals; it is the superhuman, ie., the impersonal power in man. Only by and in the understanding has man the power of abstraction from himself, from his subjective being, of exalting himself to general ideas and relations, of distinguishing the object from the impressions which it produces on his feelings, of regarding it in and by itself without reference to human personality. Philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, physics, in short, science in general is the practical proof, because it is the product of this truly infinite and divine activity. Religious anthropomorphisms, therefore, are in contradiction with the understanding; it repudiates their application to God; it denies them. But this God, free from anthropomorphisms, impartial, passionless, is nothing else than the nature of the understanding itself regarded as objective.

Thanks to our new friend the Internet, I was able to quickly look up the German text for this passage and, yes, I find:

...er ist die übermenschliche, das heißt: die über– und unpersönliche Kraft oder Wesenheit im Menschen...

So Nietzsche may have popularized the concept of the Übermensch, but it looks like it originated with Feuerbach.

p35 God as God, that is, as a being not finite, not human, not materially conditioned, not phenomenal, is only an object of thought... To the imagination, the reason is the revelation of God; but to the reason, God is the revelation of the reason; since what reason is, what it can do, is first made objective in God...

After this, the book goes into some minutia of Christianity that I'm not that interested in. I'm sure there are things here worth reading, but I'm going to pass. This brings to a close my reading of Ludwig Feuerbach. I am happy I thought to look for this at Moe's.

79. Backpack + Base isolation

Previous - 78. Kant + Music + Wisdom

Little black backpack

I was thinking today that my small black backpack may be one of the best purchases I've ever made. It's rare when I'm out of the house and don't have it with me, most usually when I'm going to the gym or to work. I bought it in 1993 when I bought my first PowerBook Mac laptop,

I spotted the backpack at a MacWorld booth that year. It is custom designed for that particular laptop, with a well padded area at the back for the computer, and special pockets for essentials like 3.5" floppy disks. When I stopped using the PowerBook a few years later, I also stopped using the backpack. 

But when I bought my first netbook I dug it out of storage and resumed using it. That old PowerBook is also in storage, but the hard drive is dead so it's not getting revived. After the netbook, came my current Chromebook. Both of these little machines fit in the outer flap, not in the main part of the bag and never in the padded area intended for my PowerBook. 

Besides the usual daily use, this backpack has held all my essentials on my train trips -- the padded area holds underclothes, the main pocket toiletries along with books and documents. I even wear it for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass so I have room for more bags and water. There are undoubtedly fiendishly clever backpacks on the market now that would make me green with envy, but I'm not aware of having any unmet needs, and I'm amortizing the hell out of this purchase.

Structural engineering

Speaking of fiendishly clever, a new building in Berkeley was written up recently in the Chron that uses a new method of base isolation to protect the upper floors from earthquake damage. Even after reading the article (this is probably behind a pay wall) -- actually two of them -- it still took me a long time to figure out how this system works. The ground floor looks normal, it has to be because it abuts a neighbor on one side, and the retail tenant on that floor actually occupies both the new space and the one next door. But everything above the ground floor rests on four large columns -- not on the edges but more toward the center of the structure. The columns include a dish like surface that the upper part of the column can slide around on in the event of a quake. If it were totally frictionless -- which it isn't, of course -- the top part of the building would not move at all in a quake until the end when it would slide into the low, center point of the relocated dish. 

This is a sample of the dish that moves under the top of the building. I'm unclear what the puck in the center is, possibly an abbreviated version of how the building actually sits in the dish?

This is one of the four actual comumns. The yellow beam is marked to show how much it can move but the gray band of sealant above the beam is the actual dividing line between ground floor and floating upper building. During a quake the lower yellow band on the column would move right and left relative to the upper yellow band, which should stay relatively still.

Besides the seriously expensive columns, the tricky part is running in utilities given that the building parts can slide a foot in any direction. Also, there needs to be a gap around the part of the building that doesn't move, so that surrounding buildings that are moving don't run into it. There's a massive band of sealant between the two parts of the building that will probably have to be replaced after a quake. I would have done that part differently, using something more like a door sweep. But I know there would be problems with that too.

In this particular building the seismic measures are a curiosity (the structural engineer's office is in the floating part of the building), but a system like this would make real sense when you had to take into account large weights like brewery tanks or wine vats. (Of if you wanted to prevent a potentially dangerous chemistry lab from being shaken.) You wouldn't need to spend effort securing each tank or vat since the entire floor would be isolated from the quake. 

Next - 80. Medium + Nostalgia

6. The East Bay

Previous - Transbay Transit Center

But first...

Back in 1992 I had an idea for a movie. Over the years I've had lots of "ideas" for movies but this one was different, for one thing I plotted it out scene by scene and even wrote it all down -- someplace. But just now the idea came back to me and, 24 years later, I still have the whole thing in my head. All the connections and character overlaps... the whole thing.

I'm no more likely to do something with it now than I was then, (for one thing the idea built on two movies that had recently come out and the context was important to the surprising place the story was to go), but that something as ephemeral as an imagined movie can hang around in your head for so long really surprises me. 

Oakland 

Oakland, not San Francisco, really should be the first city of Northern California. The transportation connections are much better. The weather is better. There's more room to expand. True, it is sitting on a fault that is due to cut loose at any moment, but that's not the kind of thing we hold against a city here in California.

On Friday I took the train to Oakland and then transferred to a bus to go up in the hills to the surprising location of a lawyer's office. I'm in Oakland so infrequently that when I do pass through I really see it. The area between Broadway (downtown) and Lake Merritt seems to have been redeveloped during those ghastly (for redevelopment) decades after the war. The scale is wrong for cities but right for "California." The message the built environment is sending is "we all have cars now so let's spread out."

I rode the bus about half way to Piedmont (an enclave of wealth in the Oakland hills) and walked a convenient block to the lawyer's office in a great old house. The house across the street was a grand old Victorian stripped down, but not as brutally as you sometimes see. You really had to look before you notice there must once have been much more decorative trim. The vent duct sticking out the second floor turret wall facing the street is an unfortunate addition, but I bet the wall heater or, better, stove in that bedroom is a wonderful addition on rainy winter nights. It would have made much more sense to have set the TV show Charmed here rather than in SF. Here houses really do have front, back and side yards.

The lawyers house is a completely different California look: Stucco walls and arched windows. More rambling and not as tall. There's even a citrus tree just outside the conference room window. These streets are closer to Pasadena than SF.

The only time I worked in Oakland (in my coding days, I mean) we were located in an even grander house than this right on Lake Merritt. It was wonderful, though a long walk from the train, until it caught fire and we had to move to a more conventional office in another neighborhood. 

Berkeley 

This weekend I worked both days of the Berkeley Kite Festival. The setting is wonderful. Caesar Chavez Park sits atop an old landfill in San Francisco Bay. It's connected to Berkeley by a causeway. You might be thinking this is a flat park, but it is anything but. There are hills. It has had many years to become "natural." So natural, in fact, that they've had to start a program to exterminate the burrowing animals that were disturbing the seal that separates the bay from all the tons of waste under the park.

The festival itself is quite spectacular with huge kites and experts flying kites in formation and kite fights. (Do a Google Image search.) But on the hills overlooking the main venue and to the north, just behind the row of food vendors, there are hundreds of people putting on their own show with their own kites. Many are as spectacular as the ones featured in the event.

Normally our home base is wherever they leave the giant debris boxes (dumpsters), but the City of Berkeley pays their (union rate) sanitation people to man a couple conventional garbage trucks and haul the bags of waste we sort to the trucks. (Until the end when they drive the trucks through the event and pick up anything that remains.) 

The trucks -- and therefore our home base -- are located in a saddle between two areas of hills. Looking west from that vantage point you see across the bay past Alcatraz to the Golden Gate and its bridge. I stress the Gate and not the bridge because the weather here (the micro climate) is determined by the wind and fog blowing directly through the Gate. North and south it might be sunny and warm but here it is often foggy, cold, and very windy. Hence a great location for a kite festival. 

I tend to get really wrapped up in my work so I can be oblivious to my surroundings, but I really do try to pay attention -- especially in Golden Gate Park and here on the Bay (Treasure Island is even better). Every time I would climb the slope up to our home base I would see the stunning vista of the Bay with SF's skyline to the south and the hills of Angel Island and Marin to the north. And then I would turn around (looking down wind) and see the sky (often blue on Sunday) full of colorful kites.

And then I would go back into the crowd to sort down a badly contaminated three container (compost, recycling, landfill) trash station only to have someone toss their plate full of food into the landfill container I had just cleaned out, and I would want to drag that person to the bay (by the hair or the junk) and drown them... slowly.

Next - 7. Socks & concrete