Done last week (20171202Su - 09Sa)

I wrote a poem! Inspired by The Sciku Project, I figured I could maybe write a CSaiku:

P equals NP?
A Turing award awaits
A proof or disproof.

Of course csAIku is another possible reading, and I may branch out into ITanka at some point.

The big thing this week was the Patreon debacle. I may have more to say in a separate post, so for now I'll just refer you to This post by siderea, who has been writing a series of them, for the details.

tldr: Patreon is changing their fee structure, in part, because the batching of pledge payments from one patron to multiple creators and the use of Patreon balance to pay pledges without processing an external payment requires holding funds in a balance that can then be redistributed and makes them look like a money transmitter money services business, which makes them subject to additional regulation...

It would seem that Patreon is another example of a business that was too good to be true, founded by idealists whose solution to the problems that stopped other people from doing what they did was... to not know about those problems and not actually have a solution for them.

I think they could have done it a lot better, taking fees out of the creator's payment so that patrons pay the amount they pledged. Whether they could also batch payments by doing them all one day/month is an open question.

The real solution, I think, is going to be a distributed system, with payments going direct from each patron to each creator, keeping track of pledged amounts via an app of some sort, and a centralized website (linked to the app) that manages campaigns -- basically everything Patreon does except handle money. As I said, more later hopefully.

I was fairly productive, going out to the garage, bringing in CDs, and shelving them in the tower. Probably cleared 3-4 boxes. There are still quite a few missing, notably all but one of Joan Baez. So there's at least one box I haven't found.

We have a new caregiver (V) for Colleen. M" wasn't really working out; she talked non-stop, didn't think independently, and we didn't trust her driving. It worked out well for her, too; she was commuting from off-island, and had another client who wanted more time. We have V two days / week: Monday and Wednesday, so we've shifted my teaching back to those days.

Quite a few things didn't get done.

Recent reading: a book titled 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Really.

This book is unusual in its focus on a single line of code, an extremely concise BASIC program that is simply called 10 PRINT throughout. Studies of individual, unique works abound in the humanities. Roland Barthes s S/Z, Samuel Beckett s Proust, Rudolf Arnheim s Genesis of a Painting: Picasso s Guernica, Stuart Hall et al. s Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, and Michel Foucault s Ceci n est pas une pipe all exemplify the sort of close readings that deepen our understanding of cultural production, cultural phenomena, and the Western cultural tradition.

Recommended even if you don't know a damned thing about programming.

( Notes & links, as usual )