I didn't make it to the bloggers meetup today. The entire universe conspired to prevent it.

I was up all night arguing with my intestines, so I got up late. Got to the bus stop, the bus was late. Since the ferry was late too I wound up on the 1:00 boat (get together was 1:00, 131st Street).

Hit downtown Manhattan at 1:30 Track constrcution meant I had to take a shuttle bus to Chambers Street. That's where I had to switch to an express train to 96th...except all trains were running local.

1. I would like to thank you for keeping my traffic intact with the lighter posting and all.
2. I have cleared my in boxes. People should not subscribe me to mailing lists. Try telling me about it first. I will try this one for a couple of days because I suspect I will meet the person who subscribed me next Sunday. In fact, if I don't meet the person Sunday, the only way I will remain subscribed is if the list is better than oxygen.
3. T. Rasul, if you are out there, you are the sole exception to point number 2...in fact, I was looking for YOU.
   
4. Why would a music site look for a link exchange from me? Especially by sending it to an address that hasn't been connected to the site for years? Whoever they hired to promote their site is doing a piss poor job.

I was a heartbeat from change a line in Well, THAT sucked pretty bad from

I realized I would have sucked anyway.

to

I realized I would probably have sucked anyway.

I'm such a punk today... 

Writing this up before I change my mind...

The panel was rescheduled. I had the slot just before lunch and immediately following a really interesting panel we hoped we could tap for audience. My new position was at 8:30 am. Great. Even better, much of the rescheduling (and there was a significant amount of it) was done after the program was printed. Much of what I prepared on collectivity made little sense in a basically empty room, and improvising in my first academic panel wasn't what I was ready for.

Excuses out of the way, I realized I would have sucked anyway.

Present your counter arguments, your links that dispute mine. If you are respectful they will be approved. If you are not respectful, they will not be approved. You won't even get the vampiric satisfaction of a public reaction going forward.

In other words, act like an adult and you'll be treated like one. 

Just thought I'd save you some effort.

You probably won't see many posts from me between Sept. 27 and Oct. 1. I'll be at ASALH's 91st Annual Convention in Atlanta. In fact, I'll be on a panel...a little more detail a little later.

There's a lot of stuff going on in and around the Convention. Some of you may remember when I used to go out every Friday to a lecture, usually at Columbia University, usually on something sociological. This is almost a week of the stuff, a broad array of subjects, and I just found the scheduling tool that lets me browse the sessions and mark the ones I'm interested in. This is vacation time for me too...it is conceivable the Convention may not fill my whole day. Which is to say I'll have plenty of opportunities to get online and post but probably won't.

I wanted to use "Status " as the title but that aleph-0 sigil is a graphic.

Sometimes as you stand still, the world turns beneath your feet and you find yourself in a different country. When I touch the earth again in a couple of days one thing is sure: I will have somewhat more time and considerably more free energy.

What to do, what to do... 

One thing I want to do is get my other web sites either working or folded. During the first incarnation of the Niggerati Network I found it only takes one thoughtful post per day to start the momentum. I've been unable to maintain that...polemics is hella easier than analysis. Things change, though.

Funeral will be Tuesday. Arrangements will be completed today. It wasn't very difficult because Pop thought ahead.

Which leaves me in a peculiar situation.

Folks are telling me I've done this and that over the years. They are handling most of this; my function is mostly calculator with digital memory. They are actually trying to give me a break.

The problem is, my mourning generally takes the form of taking care of survivors. What the hell do I do when what they feel the need to do is to take care of me?

First, thank you to those who left the kind comments.

There'll be a couple few posts then I'm out for the day. I'll check for anonymous comments periodically but I won't be playing myself until my father's funeral, which looks like Monday or Tuesday. Normal complaining about the normal shit will return some time in the middle of next week.

Won't leave you hanging with nothing to do though. I'll plumb the archives a bit...for instance, I'd been considering reposting the racism discussion from Blogger days like I did the Reparations discussion. I didn't because I wanted to go over it to make sure it still holds up. It does, but I'm not sure I'd write it like that today. Anyway it will make nice filler for the next few days.

My girl devorah gave me a call, which was especially kind because she just lost her uncle and I was too wrapped up in my shit to give her a call. She's so much cooler than me that my linking to her interview and site isn't promoting her, it's me doing a serious case of name dropping.

Um, drawing a blank here. So let me do the necessary things.

[PDF] Wrestling with Stigma
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, by Shelby Steele, copyright 1998
by Shelby ... In the way that blacks had been stigmatized as inferior, ...
www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/books/fulltext/colorline/69.pdf - read more | Prometheus 6's blog | 3 comments

Not really, but...

Most times when I use a graphic around here I link back to the source, especially if the wole graphic is used in it original resolution and all that. But when I posted this story

Photos Show Climate Change; Ministers Meet in UK
Mon Mar 14, 2005 08:54 AM ET
By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - A photo of Mount Kilimanjaro stripped of its snowcap for the first time in 11,000 years will be used as dramatic testimony for action against global warming as ministers from the world's biggest polluters meet Tuesday.

1 - Note this is an open thread. It may take a couple of days for you guys to use it but I've noticed you do, so you get one periodically. And fact is, several of the most popular threads started this way.

2 - We got changes coming...you probably noticed the title... 

Two things I've realized: I need a mission to run a web site, and since P6 is the center of my activities any major move I make will have to branch out from here. I'm not really thrilled by that realization because my major plans involve being more...open than I am here. P6 started as my personal blog and I really wanted it to stay that way but my major plans are more important.

Bet you want a hint...

Okay. Go to Negrophile and check out the blogroll. And if you like what I do (no guarantees, y'all) thank George (but don't we all?).

The good thing, from my perspective, is that everyone seems to be waiting for results before giving Bush credit for he miraculous turnaround.

I don't know how many people recognize that the plans to rebuild New Orleans will invoke the same institutional processes that created the race and class issues that have been exposed over the last few weeks. I suspect it's even fewer than the number of folks that were aware of the race and class issues pre-Katrina.

Me, I'm hoping people...okay, Black people...learn to stop pledging loyalty to promises instead of rewarding (or punishing) results.

Black people in particular...but it's a lesson everyone needs to learn. A lesson I'm not sure I know how to teach. Especially when so many people are high on really low grade opiate of the people. It's not your religion that's the problem, it's your church and your preachers. Never trust a multimillionaire that got rich from YOUR tithes while explaining how you have to accept your own lot to get into hebbin.

So I'm less than friendly this week. I am not a dispassionate man. More precisely, my execution is dispassionate but my decision process is not.

Between the images of Black people left to live or die neck deep in sewage, the denials of responsibility, the racist rants against the victims lowcrawling through the Republican blogosphere (I always hated that word, so I use it in this instance...you may never see it again in this space), it feels sometimes like my nerve endings have extended beyond my skin and available for direct activation.

I got some stuff on that still...PTCruiser shipped me a link to On Our Own by Darryl Pinckney in The New York Review of Books

Maybe Bush can't respond convincingly to the calamity because to do so would require thinking, along New Deal lines, of the kind of governmental agencies and radical programs that he is ideologically opposed to.

As soon as all the muscles in the back of my neck relax, I'll finish what I was working on when that call came in.

I just got a call from the hospital about my father.

Anonymous comments will not be reviewed for a while. Be nice. 

Suppose you owned a factory. You make world-class widgets as a step in manufacturing a product for a market you've dominated years.

Suppose someone else also makes widgets for their product in a different market. Their widgets are aren't as good as yours, but they're made by a different process at significantly less cost.

Do you adapt their widget technology, maybe putting a little more expense in to bring it up to your quality standards? Do you buy widgets from them?

Suppose the widgets are people?

My father is the kind of sick that only ends when the laws of thermodynamics take full effect...and that may not be for a while. I'm kinda hiding behind writing and coding right now.

I can stand up and do what I have to do, but I wish I knew how to comfort people rather than just help. I wish I was capable of being comforted. I keep seeing with my memory instead of my eyes. Probably because I don't really want to see with my eyes.

My parents have been married for over 50 years. I can't imagine what my mom is feeling.

And what's really fucked up is I can't stop being clinical in my observations of my father. I can't help recognizing every fragment that falls away.

I'm hanging out with my nephew Jaiden (don't worry, he has a nice employable first name. We use his middle name so when we take over he'll have a Black name to use).

My sister only has Internet Explorer on this beast and the blockquotes look really bad.

Well, I know templating now...

Amazon Expands Into Book Printing
By BOB TEDESCHI

SURE, Amazon.com can sell books. But can it make them?

The company itself raised that question, among others, last week when it purchased BookSurge, a book printing business based in Charleston, S.C., that specializes in so-called on-demand printing. BookSurge, which was privately held, is among a handful of companies spawned during the dot-com boom that rely on Internet technology to print a few books at a time, or even one at a time.

The services have been most popular with writers who are unable or unwilling to strike deals with publishing houses, and who do not want to spend thousands of dollars to complete a print run of, say, 2,000 books on a traditional offset press. Publishers, too, have used digital printing companies to satisfy small orders of obscure titles.

April 6th, 2005 marks two years of the existance of P6 in one form or another. It feels weird to make note of it when I don't really make note of my birthday, but it seems traditional on the blognet.

Because of the anniversary thing, I thought I'd share the first fruit of my page-per-day project. It needs editing.

I'm keeping the rest to myself until I figure out what I'm writing it for.

Well, I got my first page of my page-per-day done.

And I'm right annoyed at my web host right now. I've had serious down time over the last few business days, and it is NOT my software...of that I am convinced. I've already had a few unfortunate Internet incidents...one blogger that became annoyed that my (actually very polite) comments kept blowing holes in her statements, promised me a message via email...and suddenly the MX records (which DNS uses to route your...my...email) were blown away by someone propagating crap. The host fixed that in a couple minutes, and my personal email doesn't run through the P6 domain anyway.

Asked same blogger what that message was. She claimed she was looking to put together a list of Internet hotties (like I got an ego that's affected by that particular sort of thing) and asked me to email her. I did so from a P6 address (no picture included)...and that was the last I heard of that.

If you're planning to write a page per day, do so BEFORE you start programming.

I'm not ignoring you guys, seriously. But I have a new tech issue I have to figure out. The site had a temporary blackout today and a total blowout yesterday. The times were when I expect my highest volume, so I may need to increase the number of processes my server can run.

The other thing is, both times I noticed when I was posting something remotely. Hm.

And I've been writing documentation for some stuff you probably don't care about.

It has been suggested I write a book. I think I'm considering it this time.

I am. MAJOR dental work yesterday.

How major? We put those yellow cones on my forehead and routed street traffic around my head for several hours. I considered leaving my jaw there overnight, pick it up later after the swelling goes down.

In case you didn't know, frequent commentor cnulan blogs at Vision Circle, where, in discussing the discussion about Roland Fryer's promotion in the NY Times, points out an article on the development of cooperation in humans.

The article in its entirety focuses on the structural and functional basis of cooperation. It's economics alrighty, or game theory at least, but anytime you add the fMRI data and watch what the old noodle is up to whilst the sapiens are sapienting, BLAM!!! it kicks it up just that extra little notch required to give me a mental buzz and make me feel like we're no longer in the land of just-so storytelling, but have meandered into the domain of an objective science..., oh, and I very much respect the Punisher role itself..., I think we'll see more and more of this as we enter the twilight of the western era..., and that's a good thing!!!

Damn good article. How good? Check the category assigned to this post.

I have absolutely no proof for anything in this post.

We live in this four dimensional universe, right? Three dimensions plus time. Did you ever wonder why you can perceive the tree dimensional nature of things and not the temporal one?

What if I said you not only can, you do...you just don't call it that.

Picture this. If you stand on the geographic north pole of the Earth, it's like being at the peak of a hill. In every direction you look, the curved surface of the earth falls away from you, curves in a single direction you could call "down." Looking out across the universe, what you see "curves" in a direction you could call "the past."

When you look into the night sky, you're looking into infinity. And the average human interprets it as a bowl. You flatten it out. There's some stuff we can recognize, the moon planets, and everything else is the horizon.

Another weird one...just about everything in this category will be.

Jordan Ellenberg ends his Slate article, Does Gödel Matter?, with this:

His work was revolutionary, yes, but it was a revolution of the most unusual kind: one that abolished the constitution while leaving the material circumstances of the citizens more or less unchanged.

If you know what the incompleteness theorem says:

Given any system of axioms that produces no paradoxes, there exist statements about numbers which are true, but which cannot be proved using the given axioms.

you'll immediately understand its appeal to non-mathematicians of a mystical bent.