Month: January 2018

Decentralizing PAOM

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Some asked me on slack today what my thoughts on decentralizing paom were.

I have had lots of thoughts on the matter and I figured I would include my thoughts here.

So for many years I have wanted to decentralize PAOM or decentralize parts of it. There are so many moving parts to PAOM (manufacturing, design, apparel development, marketing, online marketing, accounting/designer payments, discovery/curation, community development, various software systems) that if I could decentralize it and let experts work on each part and just be the glue, PAOM would be much more successful. Even right now I ruthlessly going through our product and I am cutting as much as possible that is not designer or manufacturing focused.

Let me split  this brain dump into a) long term impractical goals b)  blockchain paom c) blockstack paom.
a) long term completely insane impractical wish – i cannot even call it a goal because I feel like going to mars is more realistic:

A fully decentralized, just in time, local apparel manufacturing, with access to all manufacturing information to reduce cost of manufacturing overhead and production/inventory waste – block chain supply chain dream.  Think IoT powered optimization of supply chain with as close to zero marginal cost as possible for a manufactured good.
in this scenario you order a ‘paom’ piece, the piece goes to the local manufacturer (like your local kinkos or artisinal baker), and your garment is made with locally available goods, you know who designed the piece, made the piece, the mill that made the fabric- everyone is paid via smart contract.

All paom does is maybe supply the garment ‘pattern’ or perhaps the sample piece and the photoshoot, although this could be decentralized as well
b) Blockchain things I have wanted to do with PAOM for a while.
i) First off I want a way to remunerate all activity on the Paom (creating, selling, etc). this is more a crypto issue than a decentralization issue – but there it is – I am considering integrating Steem but everyone hates on Steem and I am not sure of the legal implications.
I think we need to get away from the notion of customers and merchants, buyers and sellers, we are all part of the same ecosystem. Amazon is successful because they have good product and low prices but because people buy from them.  I’m just saying it is not a one way street of money flowing into the seller’s wallet.

I am interested in ways to increase the velocity of money through a system (in this case the PAOM system) rather than hoarding money or extracting value.
ii) theoretically designers should own all their own product designs and analytics and all order and order changes should be public (but obfuscated) and immutable because unlike most marketplaces (like etsy), the designers do not know when a piece sells because they dont ever touch the finished good – again this may be a solution without a real problem – but its how the world should work.

c) blockstack paom
So my thought for blockstack is something i am now calling the tee shirt protocol.
Just like we have one login (thanks blockstack), we also have one address (or at least one list of addresses), we also have one size (or perhaps a few different sizes like some shirts i like to wear big some small). This is information that you should own, any shopping site you access should be able to just use the information that you have already entered once – this is the essence of the tee shirt protocol – it is decentralizing the core of shopping.

I create a tee shirt on my blockstack paom app. Here I keep all the design collateral, I pay some nominal fee for the blockstack tee url, I decided how many shirts I want to allow to be made, I even keep the garment pattern of the tee shirt and outsource it to whatever printer/manufacturer i want.

Someone sees the shirt, maybe i am selling it on blockstack open bazaar. This person can buy the tee shirt and manufacture it through any manufacturer they want, or they can buy the virtual tee shirt (the rights to the tee)
Should the blockstack ecosystem really take off – I should also own my order history of everything I have ordered on a blockstack, everything i have visitted or surfed. If there are marketing or curation apps I can decide what parts of my order history or search history i want to expose to the those algorithms

major stumbling block – I have been stymied a bit by setting up and testing against blockstack test network.

 

And there it ends… for now… I am waiting on the rest of the conversation to unfold

 

Flu Shot

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I finally got the flu shot. I delayed but was worn down by the flu fear. I was thinking about invasion, immunity, protection. I was thinking of the fantastic book by Eula Biss on immunity an inoculation.  I thought about that scene in the John Adams series when, Abigail Adams exposes her kids to smallpox.  It is strange and mysterious to me the way our bodies work, the way we try and protect them. Its sort of like watching those inflight safety movies before your airplane takes off.  But I believe in shots, even though I cannot trace the line of cause and effect. There is a gray area where all the work happens that is hidden by my powers of observation and reason.   How do I know the flu shot works? Can I know ? How can I know that the probabilities are correct? How are they calculated? This thing “knowledge” starts to become complex and complicated.

Fold Poetry

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So I have a magnum opus epic poem I am working on called ‘Transductions’.  It is about change and becoming.  I think of it like a contemporary Ovid metamorphosis. Instead of myths about the Gods, there will be new myths that express the contemporary feeling of change becoming.

On thing I am thinking about is the changing notion of measurement and geometry. How geometry in many respsects has been replaced by topology.  I recently read Deleuze’s The Fold, an analysis of Leibniz and Baroque architecture through the lense of nomadology. What is nomadology? I am not sure, but it is something like movement centered versus matter centered. If Monadology was all about unchanging monads that expressed all aspects of  the world, nomadology are the lines between the monads, the folds.

I am thinking about what a nomadic poetry is versus a monadic poetry.  I am also thinking about a damonic poetry because really after the move from the monadology to nomadology we have damonology.

 

What is transduction?  It is when you convert one type of signal to another. In grad school my thesis project was about transduction converting wifi signals into audio.  But I digress.

One of the things I am thinking about is geometry and oragami. yo

Cockatiel

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I was going to blog about the philosopher Simondon, but I became distracted by my Cockatiel research. I have become obsessed with getting a bird.  I am not sure why, but I think it started with my mushroom box. I some how feel like I need more nature in my life.

I attempted to signup up for flower deliveries, that have not been successfully delivered yet, and I am waiting for my mushrooms to fruit so I can get the entire back to the roots homesteader kit (if anyone wants to get me a gift).  Does the fish come with the fishtank?? I started googling pet fish and saw these GloFish ™ on petsmart  – are these genetically modified fish??

Anyway, I moved from fish to birds, although if I become the owner of the homesteader kit, I will need a fish as well.  I did some research and decided that perhaps a Cockatiel would be idea.  A rescue cockatiel at that!  I am not an impulsive person, or a pet person, and all of this seems very out of character for me.  But there is something exciting about breaking out of character. And doesn’t that Cockatiel look cute??

 

Piano Concerto for the Left Hand

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Tonight I went to the Symphony to hear a few pieces by Debussy and Ravel.  The ‘denouement’ of the program was Ravel’s Bolero.  It is a fantastic spectacle to watch. First you see each individual musician as his or her instrument enters the composition then you see the increasing intensity of their playing. The cymbals at the end are my favorite.  It is all about endurance and timing.  According to the program notes, Bolero premiered with a dance that took place in a bar scene, but Ravel thought it should take place in a factory since the music seemed mechanical and repetitive.  There is something interesting here to meditate on but I want to move on to the true peak of the evening. Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

I was not familiar with this piece.  I only heard about it by reading a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  To recap, Wittgenstein came from a very wealthy and accomplished family. His brother Paul was an accomplished Pianist, who lost his right arm during WWI. Later Ravel was commissioned to write a piece for him – the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

I sat watching this performance. Why is the pianist only playing with his left hand, I thought? Is he missing a hand?  Then I thought! Ahh that piece for Wittgenstein.  I was delighted after reading the program notes.  My hunch was correct, my theory and accurately matched reality.  What a terrifically virtuosic piece! What a performance by the Pianist, to appear to only have one had!  I loved it, for its musicality, its performance, and its cultural history.

Bitcoin!

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The last few days there has been some massive price fluctuations in bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market in general. One of the founders of Ripple lost 44 billion dollars. Btc went from a high of 20,000 USD a few weeks ago to under 10,000 USD. and ether fluctuated between 700 and 1200.  A lot of the discussion around the price action in crypto is in the Language of Technical Analysis. Technical Analysis is analysis of charts, on the end of day price, start of day price.

In many ways technical analysis is like a personality test, geomancy, and the tarot. The 100 day moving average, the falling hammer, these are like the Tarot chariot, or the geomantic Puer.   TA  is a a form of augury. But even these days augury, personality tests, and the like can reveal something and provide a framework for action.  Many people use technical analysis, so it is in some respects a fulfilling prophecy.  What the relationship between the symbols of the charts and the price of bitcoin is anyone’s guess.   I have never been one for TA, but maybe I just dont have the metaphysical framework for that yet.

Readers of Audiobooks

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I am a big listener of audiobooks. I listen while I cook while I am laying down with the kids, while I’m on airplanes, trains, and automobiles – you get the idea…

Last year I obsessively listened to podcasts but the pendulum has swung. It is the difference between reading a New Yorker article vs a book.   My favorite audiobook reader is Anton lesser. He ready paradise lost. It’s fantastic !  He was also Thomas More in the BBC production of Wolf Hall.  But audio books is really where he shines.

I am currently listening to Jung, Memory Dreams and Reflections narrated by James Cameron Stewart.  He is also … fantastic.   

I listen to mainly non-fiction on audiobook. Fiction I find difficult to listen to, especially when the author uses different voices for different characters.

Although when I was a little girl I made my family listen to forward the foundation on audible read by Issac Asimov in his Brooklyn accent on a trip to visit the grandparents in DC.

They did not enjoy the narration and  I was banned from selecting audio for family trips.
I however loved this personal reading from one of my favorite series – The Foundation.

Equality Vs Freedom

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A few weeks ago I read Isonomia, about the Ancient Greek notion of Isonomia and its relationship to democracy.  It is a fantastic book.  Aside from the discussion of political philosophy and history there is also a  little metaphysical discussion on matter and motion.

However, I think this tug between equality and freedom is interesting to think about. We can all be equal, like in a communist society, but our freedom is restricted. Or we can be (relatively) free, as in a capitalist society, but there is lots of inequality.

I am enjoying thinking of this dichotomy. The question is, is this a false dichotomy. If we are thinking equality-freedom can we also think of three terms equalty-x-freedom. What is the x?  What is that third pole? I am not sure, but there must be one? Maybe technicity?

Gym Classes

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This morning I went to a spin class, which caused me to meditate on gym classes and workouts in general.

I used to love going to gym classes. One of the first things I did when I was young with a corporate job, was to join Crunch (I think membership was covered by my company). Over the years I would do yoga classes, kung fu classes, I even took kick boxing classes in hong kong – what a work out.   My favorite class is bikram LES yoga.  For me it is the best class because every time I get out I am very happy that I have survived and I am too exhausted to do anything but live in the moment.

When I started having kids, I really had no time to do classes any more. This was a difficult transition for me.  It seemed I had not really exercised unless I was in a class – unless other people saw me and I was instructed my an expert.

This is all totally absurd, but it is how I felt at the time.

Instead I started working out on my own. First situps/pushups/jumping jacks- think 10 minute workout. Then I decided I would try to do tai chi, but I forgot all the moves so I too a ba gua class and now I do ba gua circle walking and basic ba gua/qi gong exercises in the morning. I love this routine and now the idea of going to a class is odious.

This morning I went to spin with my Mom.  My parents are spin fanatics – they go every single morning.  Spin is an incredible work out, but I feel like I am undergoing some sort of mind control experiment. The music reminds me of a night club, and the spin instructor shouting inspiration and affirmations is something like a shaman or a guru. There are new spin bikes, but I miss the old ones.  They looked like a physical computing experiment, with wires and raspberry pis hanging precariously off the bikes.

I always had a fantasy that there would be a network hack of all the raspberry pis and my spin class would be  ground zero of skynet.  This also would make a great sci fi book / movie-  David Cronenberg if you are reading this.  In the meantime, if in the middle of the spin class the instructor tells you to do something new world order like – please RESIST!

Culture and Code

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When I was a young programmer I worked with people from many different countries: Russia, China, India, Brazil, Africa. Of the the things that I would think of, was that all the code was in english.  Even though we would write, C++ or Java, or Perl (this was the early 00s), they were really derivative of english. A conditional in programming languages, uses the English words IF.. Then.. Else, even if case of Ruby, which was created in Japan.

I would think about this, what would a programming language look like in French, would there be a tense ending for conditionals instead of  if.. then … else.   What about a Latin programming language, would there be different kind of loops to refer to different types of time spans ? A future perfect loop, a perfect loop, an imperfect loop. What does a programming language look  like if it was built with the Japanese katakana syllabary?

This morning I ran across bato, it is a programming language written in Filipino. I dont read Filipino but this is an example of an if – then else statement:

kapag 1 > 0
  iprint "Kumusta mundo!"
kung_hindi
  iprint "Mayroong sira"
wakas

Would love to see more experiments like this in the future.