Abi:

Umm ... What's step two?

pedantic peasant @1:
Umm ... What's step two?

Collect underwear differently?

Whoops!

Sorry Abi,

I see now that two is nested in one .. i just missed it when skimming the headings.

Cool ideas ...

Yes, there does appear to be a formatting error on 2.

Those steps make a ton of sense.

Ah, I see it in the html.

My free and open source browser corrected for it in the display. (polishes halo)

Those are wonderful rules, but they wouldn't work in corporate America. Rather, management wouldn't welcome such rules. That doesn't prevent me from telling our users never to be afraid to ask me questions. It's far better for us all if they base their specs on correct assumptions, than on false assumptions they were afraid to question because of programmers who make them feel like idiots for not knowing.

Sajia Heterodyne Dupree
wanted the whole world to be free
to sing unrehearsed opera in public
and recycle oil from plastic
to remix Captain Planet vids with old-school rap music
to dance like ballerinas on elastic
and hold college classes under oak and banyan trees
and make the polar caps refreeze
and learn each others' languages (not just English)
where the best of all cultures could flourish.

Our dear overlord Emma Jane Hogbin
Will change the world we live in.
She will give us all new tools
Embedded in five clear basic rules.

(Clerihews: the cheater's way around limericks.)

Oh, wait -- here it comes:

Our dear overlord Emma Jane Hogbin
Will change the world which we live in;
Giving us all the tools
In five clear basic rules,
Then sitting back to watch us all grin.

I can't decide whether there's no rule number six for the obvious reason, or whether rule number seven should be "Profit!"

Oh, hey...why not both?

Ah, but profit as an objective is evil.

Profit -- as a side effect of some other objective, like 'manufacture better socks' or 'make commercial tomatoes taste like tomatoes' or 'make some really good bicycles' -- can certainly be necessary, but that doesn't make it good.

The increase in the realizable scope of choice is good.

abi,

Is this at all related to this guy's Brief Guide to World Domination? It looks like the same kind of ideas.

IMO, one of the best ways to get fast progress in any area is to make the tools accessible and available for as many people as possible to tinker with and play with at every level of skill. This hits on 3, 4, and 5. The street finds its own uses for technology, and just like with biological evolution, cultural evolution is in some sense smarter than you are, and will have its own direction that may be quite different from what you had imagined.

The alternative model is that you have big, well-funded folks that try to get the best and brightest working on them--NASA building spaceships, Intel building new processors and fabs to make them in great quantities, etc. But the society will only manage to fund a few such large efforts at any given time, and realities of internal politics (the Peter Principle, Pournelle's Iron Law, the agency problem, broken information flow, messed up internal incentives) will break a lot of those efforts.

The second model has another problem: It's inherently based on gatekeepers. If NASA has to hire an engineer, they're going to have a very clear idea what a NASA engineer looks like. Maybe that's white Protestant men with a white shirt and a tie. Maybe that's anyone who graduated in the top 10% of their class at MIT or Caltech in EE. But it will inevitably be an imperfect image.

The first model has much less in the way of gatekeeping. You don't have someone deciding who is to be allowed to learn to program. ("Sorry, you can't be taught programming, you got a C in calc. Besides, everyone knows girls aren't any good at programming.") Instead, everyone who wants it gets access, as nearly as anyone can manage, and people gravitate to their interests, follow their talents and their loves. This permits the development of funny-looking meritocracies, and avoids the situation in which all the participants in some effort are cookie-cutter copies of one another, having been filtered to have the same education and background and life experiences and beliefs and assumptions.

Shorter me:

cathedrals are static
times of progress benefit
from bazaars instead

I, for one, welcome our new overlord-hating overlords.

I clicked back a few pages on Emma's blog but I don't see her latest knitting project. I think we need to know what it is because this could affect the global domination timescale. I mean, if she's knocking off a baby hat - wait, bad image - if she's knitting a baby hat, then world domination will probably happen by the time I finish dinner, but if we're talking knitted moss borders, I've got time to paint the bathroom.

albatross @11:

I don't know whether Emma Jane has read, or was referencing, that. My riffs on her points didn't consciously do so, but I think that there is a level of collective and cultural consensus on these matters.

Of course, that makes me want to get all contrarian and do something else.

Tracey @14:
Emma Jane has been doing lace shawls lately. Plan on double coating, and make sure you clean your brushes*.

-----
* I met EJ through my bookbinding website. We're both big on brush care. And she's going to rule the world.

(Please note that if this thread turns into another pointless brangle, I am going to crossbreed it with the previous one and require all posts on the contentious subject to be in verse. Or something equally evil and oppressive.)

Yeah
Well you can just brangle
threads into a tangle
Well you can scream and shout
and fight it all out
But you won't fool with abi's revolution
No you won't fool with abi's revolution, no no no

Abi @16:

Lace shawls?? *worships* I'm still figuring out what 'knit into the back of the stitch' means.

Tracey, 18: See how your stitch is sitting astride your needle? One leg is on your side of the needle, one leg on the back side. Now put your needle into the back leg of the stitch and knit it. See how it's twisted now? Cool, huh?

Or, put the righthand needle through the stitch like you're going to purl, but behind the lefthand needle, then knit the stitch.

Don't worry, it's really easy. (If all else fails, this is probably covered in 'Knitting for Dummies'. Srsly. It's a handy reference.)

#18, Tracey -

I knew how to knit for nearly twenty years before I learned that.* I still have the potholder I was knitting when I figured it out. The stitches go from slanty and corkscrewing around the piece (where I was knitting into the back of the stitches) to upright and parallel. It makes me smile every time I see it.

*I taught myself to knit at eleven and thought you knit in the back with the yarn in back and purled in the front with the yarn in front.

*pulls out needles and casts on with random stash yarn* Whoohoo! Now I can increase. Thank you, guys!

TexAnne @19 : that's a really simple yet eloquent way to put it.

PJ @20: Thanks, I'll look for KfD. As my completed projects have either been straight-back-and-forth (scarves) or rib stitch + decreasing (hats) it hasn't been a skill I was forced to practice.

R.M. @21: hee!

Er, sorry, Abi.

RM @ 21

I taught myself to knit and had to have my mother teach me how to do it so the knit stitches weren't twisted. I think I was running the yarn wrong way around the needle. (Hey, it was mumble years ago, I don't really remember any more.)
I still hold the yarn in my left hand. The tension sucks, but it works for me, and I can't figure out how to do it with the yarn wrapped around assorted fingers - on either hand - before it gets to the business end of the needle.

Serge @ 6

Those are wonderful rules, but they wouldn't work in corporate America.

That's a feature, not a bug. This way corporate America won't achieve world domination any time soon.

abi

I really like Alan Kay's version of 1: "The best way to predict the future is to create it."

Bruce Cohen @ 24... Hmmm. I had not thought of that silver lining.

A world dominatrix named Emma
created some rules as a lemma
for creating a movement that fosters improvement;
she'll be on the Colbert Report.

Tracey @22

There's a less visible increase than the knit into the front and back of the stitch increase (though that's a useful one, too.) It's called a "make one" increase, and it's my default unless the pattern calls for something else.

Decent video tutorial here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCV0VC0Yim4

#23 PJ Evans

Have you tried combination knitting? It's how I was taught. I find it fast and easy, and it requires carrying the yarn in the left hand.

Abi--ummmmm....long live the knitting revolution?

Knitting is on-topic, by definition, anywhere on this blog. The tagline trumps all. Besides, it's relevant to the thread (see revolution, timing thereof).

Really, it's like apologising for writing a sonnet.

abi #2:differently?

Ok, which is it, "different" or "differently"?!

@ 28... it's like apologising for writing a sonnet

If I wrote one, apologies would have to follow.

It wouldn't be a proper revolution without tricoteuses.

#28

This is just to say

I have put knitting
into the thread
that was on
revolutions

and which
you were probably
saving
for serious debate.

Forgive me.
It is my obsession
so habit-forming
and so on.

#23, P J Evans - What I've learned recently is that it doesn't matter which way you run the yarn around the needle, but if you run it contrary to expectations, then you have to knit in the back of the stitch to get an untwisted stitch.

# 27, Sarah S -

Combination, or continental? I didn't think combination knitting (see the sidebar) had a requirement to hold the yarn in the left hand. (I held my yarn in the right when I tried it, but maybe I misunderstood?) Continental knitting is one of the names given to the style where you hold the yarn in the left hand. (P J, combination knitting would let you run the yarn around the needle the way you used to, but not get twisted stitches.)

Of course knitting is relevant to revolution! What else are the citoyens to do while observing the ancien régime being retired?

Can you have a revolution without winding up with a yarn's race?

About 75 or 80° off topic: while writing my previous post, I accidentally told Hyperword to translate the entire post, comments, ads, Tom Cobley and all, into French. Now I want a Faire la lumière tee shirt.

#33 R.M. Koske

I knit combination while holding the yarn in the left hand. I'm trying to envision (I am at the office, and without yarn) knitting combination with the yarn held in the right hand, but can't quite see it. I'm sure it's possible though.

For the first year that I knit, I thought I was knitting continental (because of the holding the yarn in the left hand thing), and was driven mad by instructions about knitting into the backs or fronts of stitches, and by the fact that my SSKs and my K2togs point the same direction, rather than opposite directions. When I found out that I knit combination, the mists parted.

(Incidentally, in all of Annie's graphics on that site, it looks to me like the working yarn is coming from the left hand, but I'm not great with visuals, so I could be wrong)

Serge #35

Wool you stop it?
That's knot the point!

Sarah S @ 38... Well, it seemed just plain wrong to have a knitting thread without at least one pun. Was my judgment warped?

Serge #39: surely it was wefted? (or woofed, maybe, if the dog barked in the night-time)

The notion "profit as an objective as evil" sounds to me akin to the Geek Social Fallacies: that is, I see it as a "nice" exaggerated derivative of a good idea that ultimately holds back the people that adhere to it.

Yes, pursuing profit to the exclusion of all else, or in a way that selfishly hurts others, is wrong. And nonprofits do lots of great stuff. (I work for one at present.) But for-profit enterprises, whether corporate or individual, do a lot more that nonprofits don't do.

I think that if we say to people "you should be ashamed of seeking purely personal rewards in what you do" we may discourage lots of folks who could be moved to do great things that benefit the rest of us as well as themselves. Part of empowering people (#4 in the list above) is giving them the okay to pursue their own interests, which can include profit.

Tor, Google, Red Hat, Six Apart, and the like all exist as for-profit concerns, and have done some great things for the world at large. I don't begrudge whatever profits they might gain from doing those things, or the ways in which profit has helped motivate and fund them.

Serge #39

Enough of this ribbing!
Eyelet you get away with it once already.

(You've got me in stitches over here.)

#37, Sarah S -

I agree, her graphics show the yarn coming from the left.

To me, combination knitting is all about running the yarn around the needle opposite the way is typically taught, whichever hand you use. The end result is that the leg of the stitch that sits nearest the needle point is in back, not in front.

So as I see it, you can be both a combination knitter and a continental knitter (which is what you do.) I am learning continental, and the only way I can get a purl stitch that I'm happy with is by using a combination method, but I do my knit stitches in the more traditional way.* I usually knit English style (throwing the yarn) and I tried combination knitting in that style. I didn't have any trouble accomplishing it, but it made my knitting unbalanced - the purl stitches weren't the same size as the knit stitches to a degree where it showed, so I gave up combination knitting when I'm throwing.

Maybe that means it does need to be done with the yarn in the left hand to get a good result. Hm. The annoying thing is that I can't remember where I learned it to check if I completely misunderstood or if this is something that depends on your gauge and balance to begin with.

*That means when I'm doing stockinette, I knit into the backs of my stitches and purl into the fronts, and end up with stitches aren't twisted.

#41

Thank you for that, John Mark. I've been wanting to say something like that in this thread, but every way I found to state it was less gentle, more annoyed, and less graceful than the way you put it.

I merely add, "Amen. Hallelujah."

The moment I stepped away from the computer I realised that the first two lines of #17 don't work at all.

In apology I note that Lennon and McCartney said what I wanted to better and earlier.

(Also why is my bedroom featured in that slide pack?)

Neil @45:
(Also why is my bedroom featured in that slide pack?)

Coulda been worse. You could have confessed to the necktie.

response as haiku
I am humbled by your words
speechless, with much thanks

I think discussion of the linked material may already be OT, however...

Good points. A social enterprise that's not attractive to women usually has something wrong with it. On the other hand it's hard to engage the the crafting types without simplicity and usability. Those are two of the big weaknesses of FOSS. (And marketing, but at bottom EJH's proposal is a marketing program.) Perhaps usability and appearance design would be areas that women could contribute to FOSS? Or that would engage women? Most of the men working on FOSS don't seem to care about them, or care only in certain narrow ways.

Randolph @48:
What is this OT of which you speak? I know not the term.

I think that communities like the crafting community could have some interesting inputs to FOSS.

For instance, how about hijacking a crafting convention for usability testers? You want articulate naive users with a strong aesthetic sense and a deep sense of what makes a good tool. Last time I was in a scrapbooking store, I couldn't swing a cat without hitting three people who fit that description*.

On the other hand, I am hesitant to draw the line between women and men and say that only one side has aesthetic sense, or a priority on design. That's generally a geek/non-geek distinction in my book, and geekery crosses gender lines nicely. There are some women I've met who would stink at interface or interaction design.

-----
* They were all articulate in Dutch, admittedly, but I could tell

#48, Randolph -

Simplicity and usability aren't necessarily the same thing as appearance design. I ranted a while back about Linux (isn't that what FOSS is related to/about?) that I can't find the places to learn about it. I don't need a prettier OS, I need an OS that I can either figure out on my own* or learn from the internet using Google.

Which, heck, may be a bar Windows can't pass either, but Windows isn't in the same position.

Usability is the big thing for me and Linux. In a discussion I read recently about Linux and appearance, many people cited having to go to the command line as an issue, and several more said it wasn't the only option to solve the problems that were mentioned, just the one that people who answer questions tend to offer as a solution. If that's true, there may be something there to focus on. I don't want the shortest a to b route. I want the one with the easiest landmarks, and command line does not have easy landmarks, no matter how fast it is once you know it.

But I don't think that's a gendered issue. I can't say anything about Linux from a programming standpoint.

(Won't I feel dumb if FOSS has nothing to do with Linux?)

*No, you can't do that with any of them, but I ought to be able to poke at it and be successful at least occasionally.

I left out my favorite thought about making Linux prettier. "I'm a Windows user, I don't trust pretty."

RM Koske @50:

Feel not dumb. FOSS = Free and Open Source Software = Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc, etc.

RM Koske @ 50... Speaking of Linux, have you seen today's xkcd cartoon?

Rule Four: common sense, and thus uncommon,
neglected, undervalued, forgotten --
submerged 'neath a sea of covered asses
who judge the lack of blam'ed error WIN.

"But wait!" cries a lonely, distant voice --
"this is batshit! makes no sense! are you mad?
Cov'ring the error, you won't find a fix.
Only more errors, and asses well-clad."

A bitter pill not dreamt of. Can't be done.
Something in corporate America hates
it more than lies. The PHB prefers
the lies; less work. No waves. And no debate.

So smile wide, and let the lies slip in
Lest ass-veil slip and force admitted sin.

Aaah! Many thanks.

I did want to try to participate in the building of KnitML, but I couldn't figure out where to go to begin building the skills to play with it at all. Apparently that's my biggest peeve - if I can't even figure out *where to start*, then you've lost me.

Serge - I did. It isn't sufficiently scary to stop me from considering (don't look abi!) another tilt at the windmill but it does look like a what I'm afraid will happen. Especially the "her wireless hasn't worked for weeks" part.

I should say, it looks like what I'm afraid will happen if I ever succeed with Linux. I don't really expect it to be any time soon.

abi @46 - Not at all! My camera's missing in Putney, but it runs out if you stick your tie in a scanner, it comes out just fine.

(A friend was downplaying the formality of a supper last week; an online argument about the correctness or otherwise of tie-wearing lead to me wearing this beauty to the event.)

RM Koske @ 55... My best wishes with the Linux Adventure.

R. M. Koske @ 56

Munroe is having us on a bit. Unless you really need to dink around with the insides of Linux (and you certainly shouldn't need to, since all you want to do is load it up and use it), most of what you need to do is simple. Perhaps not as simple as it could be, but that's why we need some naive users to beat it up and see what happens.

On continental and combined knitting: yes, you can do both, that's how I learned. Furthermore I'm a true lefty, so my yarn's in my right hand and the stitches go right needle to left needle. I stopped doing combined because I couldn't control the tension of my purls, so my stockinette was ridged in a manner which I found distinctly unpleasing. Lace is *so* much easier now, too. But I still do uncrossed purls when I'm playing with foofy yarn. The unevenness doesn't show and it's a lot faster.

R.M. Koske, #50: There's a lot of Linux info online, though some things are only available print. An OS is different to different users; as a programmer I know a very different Mac OS X than as a designer or photographer, so the first question to ask is, "What do you want to do with it?" and that helps you find where to start. BTW, I generally don't recommend Google as a primary study tool; an organized curriculum is usually friendlier to beginners, and the problem of misinformation is much less.

abi, #48: "What is this OT of which you speak? I know not the term." It's an abbreviation for Off Topic. Hey, wait, did you just steal my leg? I think hijacking a crafting convention for usability testers is an excellent idea, but am uncertain as to what the test design would look like. With UI testing one must first have something with a UI for your testers to use, and I'm not sure what app one would try crafters on.

R. M. Koske @ 55: I took the wifi thing to be a further joke on the switch to gentoo. Gentoo linux users being infamous for living on the broken edge and obsessively recompiling things just because they can.

Wireless is a sore spot with linux because wifi and 3d graphics acceleration are the two areas of mainstream hardware with the worst, obstructionist support. But "hasn't worked in weeks" implies it did work at some point, which suggests she broke it herself and hasn't gotten around to making it work again.

Ralph Giles @ 62

which suggests she broke it herself and hasn't gotten around to making it work again.

That's the way I interpreted it, and my guess is she's obsessing on something deep in the drivers or the kernel. People who don't do that usually don't break things very badly. People who don't obsess on details in the source code can uaually fix anything they break pretty quickly.

#58, Serge - Thank you. It likely won't start up again for a while, but I can use all the help I can get.

#59, Bruce -
Munroe is having us on a bit. Unless you really need to dink around with the insides of Linux (and you certainly shouldn't need to, since all you want to do is load it up and use it)

I've lost track - who's Munroe?

What I wanted to do was install a program. I shouldn't need to go under the hood for that, no. Installing a program actually fits neatly into the category "should be able to figure it out by poking at it, with minimal help from Google."

#61, Randolph -
the first question to ask is, "What do you want to do with it?"

I want* to build a homebrew DVR using hardware I've already got. At one time, the answer included "...on an existing Linux box," but I think I'd be better off not putting my complicated and fragile toy on the same box with my husband's complicated and fragile MUSH. Besides which, I get the impression that forcing a DVR to use the hardware I have instead of buying hardware known to be compatible with the available programs is asking for trouble to begin with. No need to compound the issue by using some random flavor of Linux that is also only minimally compatible with the program.

I think I'll invest in a book (probably a brightly colored one whose title insults my intelligence.) I never considered a class. Any advice on how to choose one? Given my choice, I'd rather hit a class that's over my head than a class that's too easy.

The next time I play with Linux, I think I may just boot from a memory stick or CD and surf the web on it for a while. I'd do it tonight, but I can't find the bootable Linux memory stick that I thought I had. I don't know if I've lost it or if my husband reclaimed it from my desk.

*Well, wanted. Now that we've replaced the old, slightly buggy TiVo, my motivation on the project has gone way down.

#58, Serge (again)

Now that I've thought a moment, I'm imagining a "choose your own adventure" book. But I don't know enough about Linux to make any jokes. Drat!

#61, Randolph -

For the right crafting convention, you could probably have them swarming all over The Gimp and other image-manipulation programs. Many scrapbookers work digitally, and so do some fiber artists. Plus, taking photos of your work and sharing them on the web is popular with computer-savvy people in all crafts.

Other than that, my guess would be ordinary web applications (browsers, chat, email) and possibly a database or spreadsheet UI if you populated it with the kind of data that showed how it would be useful to crafters. The problem with all of those except chat and browsers is they wouldn't lend themselves well to a casual, drop-in UI test and feedback.

R. M. Koske, #64: Ah. Look at MythTV. There are a couple of books--you might get them from your local library (possibly on ILL) before purchasing any hardware. MythTV is said to work on Ubuntu, which is said to be the easiest of the Linux distributions for new users.

YMMV.

TexAnne@#60, THANK YOU. I'm trying to knit a scarf with an eyelashy foofy yarn and I've started, gone 'yuck", pulled it apart and started over about three times, the put it aside for some value of later.

I was taught to knit at 5 or 6 by my best friend's mom, and she was left handed. I've had a few people watch me knit and go 'WTF?" then,"oh,you are knitting left-handed, aren't you?"

Paula, if you're doing the foofy bit, try garter stitch first. Stockinette will give you a lovely scarf, but you might not want it curled into a cylinder. Of course, if you have enough yarn, you can knit a tube in the round. Twice as warm, and no purling!

#67 - Randolph -

Yes, MythTV was what I was planning on. And of course, someone bought me a tuner card already, so who knows if it will work or not.

The books are news to me. Thanks!

RM Koske @ 65... I'm imagining a "choose your own adventure" book

I wonder if xkcd ever did a cartoon about upgrading one's computer as if it were a D&D game.

"The evil wizard is about to turn your O/S into Windows Vista."

Serge #71:

I swear, I've been here. Fairly recently, in fact.

albatross @ 72... A couple of weeks ago, the XP o/s of my wife's laptop was sent some upgrades, without being given any choice. I was allowed not to implement the improvements right away so I backed up what I could. With much trepidation, I then let the upgrades be deployed. Only after the reboot was complete did I allow my heart rate to decrease.

(#64: "Munroe" is Randall Munroe, the creator of XKCD.)

#74, Bob -

Ah, thank you.

In that case, Bruce, let me say that my fears of Linux being unmanageable have nothing to do with XKCD. I grew them all by my ownself. (And who's to say that I wouldn't learn to love it and be one of those crazy ones at the bleeding edge? Well, okay, probably not.)

Are the threads in further fear of collapsing if I point out that Randall Munroe also created LimerickDB.com?

R. M. Koske, #66: well, the Gimp runs on Windows (sort of), after all. And my experiences with most free graphics apps have been pretty poor--I still remember how frustrated I got with Inkscape. There aren't good CAD apps on Linux that I am aware of, sigh. Rhino is being ported to Mac, but it's a pretty painful process (I know, I'm a beta tester). Linux might follow on...or might not.

Hmmmm. Tough problem.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) @34: Of course knitting is relevant to revolution! What else are the citoyens to do while observing the ancien régime being retired?

WWMDD: What would Madame Defarge do?

#36, Bruce: And I want to design it! Just not sure when, though.
It's crunch time in the Death Star trash compactor of my day job.

Patrick Conners @ 79

If you do a rough sketch, or even a verbal description, I could (in my copious spare time, of course) try to do a mockup. Or, if you can draw dragons (I do wiah I was a better illustrator), there's an idea I had for a Making Light tee shirt that I have not been able to draw well enough. Maybe we could trade.

Randolph @ 77

To be fair, Inkscape is an early beta, and has been for years; I think they use turtles for programmers. They actually do good work; I tried to break it, oh, must be a couple of years ago now, by feeding it a file with just shy of 100,000 vectors in a single path (on a Mac G3, at that). It wasn't fast, but it didnt break. Gimp on the other hand has a worse user interface than Photoshop itself, which must have take some skill.

R. M. Koske @ 75

You may not need to bleed to get what you want done. As Randolph said, Ubuntu is the easiest Linux distro to install and use, for values of "installation" that don't require you to modify the kernel or install exotic drivers, and values of "use" that don't involve running multiple virtual machines simultaneously in order to have several Linux an Windows systems all running together (I do that, and I suffer for it).

In most cases, installing a new software package on Ubuntu is as simple as picking "Software Package Manager" in a menu, picking the package(s) you want to install, and waiting until it's done downloading and installing the version that works on your version of the OS. It even installs the new package in the application menu.

The first model has much less in the way of gatekeeping. You don't have someone deciding who is to be allowed to learn to program. ("Sorry, you can't be taught programming, you got a C in calc. Besides, everyone knows girls aren't any good at programming.") Instead, everyone who wants it gets access, as nearly as anyone can manage, and people gravitate to their interests, follow their talents and their loves. This permits the development of funny-looking meritocracies, and avoids the situation in which all the participants in some effort are cookie-cutter copies of one another, having been filtered to have the same education and background and life experiences and beliefs and assumptions.

Is there any actual data one way or the other?

There's at least one gatekeeper in the first model -- who has the free time to engage in such activities?

The gatekeeper is ultimately a function of limited resources (i.e, not everybody can be taught C, nor design rockets), and I'm very skeptical it can be got around by the bazaar model, especially given that the ISS is probably more gender and geographically diverse than most FLOSS projects.

The bazaar model hasn't been a great success when it's been put into practice in general, and actual literal revolutions tend to work on the Leninist/Jacobin method.

Rather, management wouldn't welcome such rules.

Oddly enough, 4 and 5 are pretty much conventional business wisdom these days, though obviously honoured more in the breach than the observance. If you get interviewed for a job and they ask you to describe the biggest mistake you ever made, finessing the answer to sound like all your failures led to greater success is not what they want to hear.

Also, all the books on consultancy have a section about when and how to leave the project.

In practice, it isn't often like that, clearly, but they understand at some level that they'd do a better job if it was.

#77, Randolph -

I didn't know that the Gimp was only Windows, but if we're talking FOSS in general, doesn't it still fit the mark - FOSS programs that crafters can offer constructive critism on?

If you're drawing this much of a blank it almost sounds like the problem is that there aren't any programs that people who aren't dedicated Penguin-heads can help with. But that doesn't seem possible so I must be not understanding the criteria you're applying to the problem.

#80, Bruce -

Have we had this conversation before? I ranted about this a while back here, and I don't really want to bore everyone who was there back then. Short recap:

I had an existing Linux box my husband had set up. I needed to know if it would run MythTV. Therefore I needed to know what distro it was running. I spent 45 minutes surfing the web to try to find out how to get it to tell me. Eventually my husband told me what it was and I still couldn't figure out if the program would work because it seemed like his information was in imperial and the websites I was looking at were in metric.

Ubuntu does sound like it is user-friendly, but I don't tend to trust Linux to be that way as a whole*, and since the box I was planning to use wasn't mine, I couldn't install it anyway.

Don't worry about me too much, Bruce. I'm bitter over my bad experiences, but I don't think I'm incurably so. The only thing that will cure me is getting Ubuntu and playing with it. (The MythTV project is on hold until I build the box, and that won't be until September at the absolute, most unrealisitically earliest.) Until I have time to do that, talking with me is a waste of your effort, because all my experiences are still bad ones. You and others have convinced me to not give up, and that starting simple isn't a cop-out on this.

*As part of "Linux as a whole" I'm including "Linux stuff out on the web", which means that just because installing it is easy once I find it, I don't trust the installers out there to work as advertised. (That's happened to me, too. Maybe it's better with Ubuntu.)

R. M. Koske @ #83: I didn't know that the Gimp was only Windows

It isn't; it's a Linux program mostly. What Randolph meant by "the Gimp runs on Windows" was that it can, in addition, be made to run on Windows. (And what he meant by "(sort of)" - well, you can probably work that one out, right?)

#80, Keir -

I think part of the problem is that revolutions of the bazaar model in history are not necessarily recognized as such. No government or Church policy/doctrine authorized the Rennaisance or the Enlightenment. Certainly some of the consequences of those periods were large-scale political/forceful revolutions, but no one planned or authorized the changes in society that led to the events.

I think there is some evidence that we are in the *beginning of a similar period. We have had a massive flowering of creativity and private artisanal work/play (increasing exponentially over the last 20-30 years) that has been made possible as unintended side effects of the policies of top-down hierarchies. Governments created and encouraged computers and computer networks, and the extreme wealth of the developed world allowed ordinary people historically unprecedented amounts of free time to engage in personal, non-profit motivated projects (i.e., hobbies).

*Admittedly it is probably next to impossible to see/understand/grok such historic-scale events from inside them. Everyone wants to believe there is something special about their period of time -- makes them special too, right?

In the interests of making this be not a Linux-only thread, I'm trying to think of other places the five steps can be applied.

The various subsets and versions of the green movement are one place that occurs to me right away. Green movements* that seem to be eligible for the five steps: bicycling, recycling, composting, home gardening, line-drying clothes, electrical conservation, alternative fuels, alternative electrical generation.

Hm. My original thought was that the green movement doesn't like to allow people to make mistakes. Treehugger.com recently had an article criticizing some green celebrities for their un-green behavior,** for example. But many of those activities are ones where step four is easy or an obvious thing that you just do. Composting, gardening, drying your clothes - if you make a mistake in these the costs are trivial, and I know that advocates of composting in particular stress that the best way to learn is just do it with a few guidelines and see what happens.

The main issue I see with the others is that either the cost of mistakes is utterly unacceptable (mistakes can kill bicyclists) or else they're systems where the feedback loop is slow or inaccessible to the mistake-makers. If a pizza box in the recycling bin can ruin a batch of paper but the office workers don't ever see that, then letting them make mistakes might be counterproductive. The wrong choice for investment in new electrical generation won't be visible for years, and correction for it is not going to be easy.

No conclusions, sorry, just trying to seed the thread a bit. *grins*

*For some of these "green movement" isn't really accurate in various ways, but I can't think of a better lumping header.

**I think it was intended to be a "no one is perfect" piece, but it didn't seem to be generally received that way, and really, do we need to be told that no one is perfectly green?

Keir #81:

You're right that there are still filters on participation. But the filters are organic and distributed and often relatively flexible. For example, there's a certain way of thinking and looking at the world that does well with programming, which I think explains why programmers tend to be visibly different from the general population in some areas (such as politics, literary tastes, movie tastes, and sometimes even sexual tastes). I don't see how to fix that in general, though it's worth trying to in specific areas.

But think about the flowering of art in the Renaissance, or the flowering of science in 17th-19th century Europe, or the flowering of tinkering and industry in 19th-20th century Europe and the US. Think about the biotech and computer revolutions now. All these had/have some elements of support from the powerful institutions of their societies, but no boss, nobody really in charge and driving them, no person or small committee deciding who is to be permitted to do art or who is to be permitted to do science.

One aspect of this that's important is that millions of experiments run in parallel. No hiring committee or credential requirement can select geniuses for you, and if you let a million people work on something in parallel, you've a much better chance of getting that one in a million genius (probably just the right person to work on this one problem) than if you first filter the participants down to a few hundred who've gotten the degrees, jumped through the hoops, impressed the hiring committee, and passed the background check. Those few hundred will on average be smarter and better prepared than the million unfiltered participants, but they most likely won't contain the one-in-a-million genius.

#85, Paul A -

My experience with the Gimp is that it runs just fine on Windows, but I'm usually not doing heavy image manipulation. Since I know it runs on Windows, when he said it "was Windows" I assumed I'd misunderstood and it was not also Linux.

But I'm even more confused about his point now. I interpreted "hijacking a crafting convention for usability test[ing]" as "setting up a station where you can have users sit down and play." Whether you have hour-long panels with small groups of users or a booth in the vendors hall for drop-ins, it seems like a good plan. What difference does it make if the Gimp also runs under Windows if you sit them in front of a Linux box running it?

RM #87:

If you think in terms of, say, addressing global warming/greenhouse gasses, I think these steps are pretty sensible. Get people involved in discussing what they can do differently, make the tools to work on interesting parts of the problem widely available, and accept that people will do weird crap with those tools that often isn't what you would have done.

I keep thinking that if you want to help along a flowering in any area, the best thing to do is to find a way to put the tools needed to tinker with it into lots of peoples' hands. Write a popularization of the field that leads the small fraction of really interested people into the literature. For example, Bruce Schneier's book Applied Cryptography is a much-criticized popularization of crypto. It encourages lots of amateurs to play around with crypto ideas. It surely has led to a lot of mistakes and bad systems designed by people who didn't know what they were doing. But it's also probably brought thousands of people into the field, and gotten tens of thousands to understand enough of the field to recognize when they need to find a cryptographer to solve some problem, or to recognize that some problem is addressed in the crypto literature. I think most fields tend to have a certain disdain for popularizations. And yet, a good popularization probably drives a great deal of progress in a field.

Similarly, tools, even toys, that put the technology in a lot of hands can drive amazing progress. Probably 99%+ of the cool technical stuff we see on the net today is the direct result of putting personal computers on the desks and kitchen tables of millions of Americans 20+ years ago. Those computers kind of sucked, the tools to use them were often crude and poorly thought out. But Turbo Pascal on a Win 3.1/DOS box running on a 33MHZ 386 was a powerful programming environment, and you could *do* stuff with it. So, for that matter, was the built-in BASIC interpreter on a Vic-20, on which I learned to program as a young teenager.

Similarly, blogging tools, spreadsheets, image processing/photo editing tools, math programs like Maple and Mathematica, statistics programs, all these things put the tools in thousands or millions of hands, without anyone needing to make it past a grant review panel or a hiring committee or even past graduation. *Anyone* who bothers to learn what's going on can take part, and for the good tools, there's a nice progression of learning--you can quickly do your work, and as you use it longer, you can do more and more impressive stuff. The best tools reward play. If we could develop tools and popularizations to help people work on sustainable energy[1], we'd likely do more to get quick progress than by funding a few more multimillion dollar grants. (But those are important, too.)

Sorry, I'm ranting on this because it's important to me. I wouldn't be in my field if I'd had to ask anyone's permission to learn about it or study it.

[1] I suspect these already exist, in which case pointers to them would be worthwhile. This isn't something I've spent a lot of time on.

#90, albatross -

Maybe I'm trying to apply the steps to a too narrow movement or idea. Not "bicycling" but "reducing greenhouse gases" (or even "getting Americans moving more".) Hm.

I can't quite see how to apply your points to some of what I was thinking of (how *do* you get the tools for improving how much Americans move into the hands of the people? What are those tools?) but that's not because your point doesn't apply. It's a failure of my knowledge and imagination.

I don't think it was an excessive rant, no worries.

(And I don't really know what the tools are to help people work on sustainable energy other than "the web." There's info out there on building solar or wind installations for homeowners, and probably fora and groups talking about it in more large scale ways, but I don't play in those sandboxes so I can't offer specific pointers.)

I wonder, how do those of us who crochet fit into the revolutionary hierarchy?

Dawno @ 92... Haven't you ever heard of Crochet Guevara?

Serge @ 93 -
Dawno @ 92... Haven't you ever heard of Crochet Guevara?

Lieutenant Serge, your Agonizer, please.

BzzzzTTTTT!!!

R.M. Koske waaaay back @ 50 (I was typing a reply last night when my battery died, which was also when I realized I'd left my power cable at work):

I totally agree, usability and interface design is not the same thing as appearance design. Something can be pretty and a huge pain to use, if the way you actually need to use it wasn't taken into account. Conversely, though, I find that anything designed to take into account exactly how people will use it, is almost always beautiful. It may not be ornamented but it's elegant.

It really is important that the software bend to serve the needs of the user, not the user bending to serve the software. Making it explore-able and learnable by experimenting is part of that.

It seems to me like a lot of FOSS doesn't consider the end user, or not well. If it can be made to work, it's considered done, even if making it work takes a considerable amount of time and energy. In fact, there's often a certain kind of elitism -- if you know enough to make it work, then you're in the club of people who are good enough to use it, and if not, well, you're just not good enough.

And if something is easy to learn and use, that automatically means it's "dumbed down" and can't be worth anything.

This particular view tends to drive me up a wall, and I find it implicit -- often unintentionally -- in lots of FOSS. I think it's because, well, the whole idea of FOSS is that the users can also be developers. So stuff gets developed for users who are developers, and not for the much larger group of users who are not developers. And there's an underlying expectation that if you use FOSS, you should learn to be a developer, dammit.

I do see this starting to change -- Firefox is a great counterexample. But I also still see it there.

And John Mark Ockerbloom @ 41, yes yes yes. The CEO of the company I used to work for used to say, "Do good while doing well." Money is how this society places value on work, and you have the right to place monetary value on your work. Especially as a woman -- raised to always put others first -- I've had to get through my head that it is not selfish, greedy, or bad to expect that a fair value will be placed on my work, skills, and knowledge. What's not okay is to lie, cheat, steal, and hurt people to get money. But making money does not automatically mean you are lying, cheating, stealing and hurting people.

#96, Caroline -

In fact, there's often a certain kind of elitism -- if you know enough to make it work, then you're in the club of people who are good enough to use it, and if not, well, you're just not good enough.

I haven't used enough rough-edged FOSS* to know from experience, but I mentioned this thread to my husband this morning and got a rant about exactly this. (He's been fighting with Ubuntu for the last two or three days, and he's pretty irate about it.)

And if something is easy to learn and use, that automatically means it's "dumbed down" and can't be worth anything.

This may not be only an FOSS problem, it may be more society-wide. I specifically didn't go for the easy, all-in-one-disc distros of Linux when I started looking at it, because I didn't trust them to not be too simple or lacking features. I've changed my mind, but it took a while.

*I use Firefox, Thunderbird, and the Gimp but I don't have to fight them to get them to work.

Serge, thank you. I now feel I can proudly take my place in the upcoming uprising, size 10 crochet hook in hand. ¡Viva la Revolución!

Oh. At first I thought you were actualy talking about revolution. Like the Durruti Column or the Makhnovshchina. In which case, these excellent rules are radically incomplete because the counter-revolution strikes before the revolution is self-sustaining.

What you are talking about is a subculture strongly biased toward certain personality types. Who, in turn, tend to be strongly biased against certain truths incompatible with their emotional comfort. e.g.:
Most people already have jobs and hobbies and very much do not need another.
"User" does not begin with the letter "L".
Users pay the bills.
If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read. NOT

etc.

#86 Fishwood Loach
I think there is some evidence that we are in the *beginning of a similar period. We have had a massive flowering of creativity and private artisanal work/play (increasing exponentially over the last 20-30 years) that has been made possible as unintended side effects of the policies of top-down hierarchies.

We are at the end of the period of ultra-cheap energy for the masses of the favored few countries. The United States economy peaked in "The Sixties"*, and it has been harder and harder to support a family ever since. Now the decline appears to be accelerating.
In this week's news alone, Starbucks is culling and Bennigan's is shuttering.

*I date the end of "The Sixties" in '73 with the first OPEC oil embargo and '74 with Nixon's resignation. (Yes, those are a year apart. Historical periods don't usually begin or end on exact days.)

#98, Dawno -

Size 10? Have you by any chance done any flying with such an object? If I'm remembering right, that's one of the fine steel ones that will poke right through the weave of your jeans. I'm curious if the TSA has noticed their weapons potential. (Or is that a metric size, which would be a different thing?)

(And someone asked if there was a Ravelry group for ML. Did we get an answer? I'd start one, but I am not moderator material.)

No, haven't taken crochet needles traveling for ages - definitely pre 9/11 was the last time. I only crochet sporadically now.

My current o/b/s/e/s/s/i/o/n/ hobby is beaded badge lanyards. I even finally broke down and got a reseller's license - the hobby started making me some real money and I want to eventually show at more cons - I did really well at BayCon's Artist's Alley back in May.

I just pack the stuff I want to work on in my checked luggage and if I need anything I didn't bring, I'll run off to a Michael's and pick it up. I have picked up a few extra pliers that way.

R M Koske @ 101 - Sorry, I didn't answer the question about the size - yes, the #10 (Boye) hook is one of the smaller ones - I use it for a number of things other than crochet and keep it in my pen mug at my desk.

R. M. Koske @97 / Caoline @96
There's an old joke, "Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are."

Also relevant is Neal Stephenson's _In the beginning ... was the command line_ ( http://adam.shand.net/iki/library/in_the_beginning_was_the_command_line/ or http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html ) which attempts to explain why some of the things that appear to be user experience bugs are actually features.

R.M. Koske,

Hilary Hertzof asked last Fall, but no one seems to have started one since then.

I don't know that we need a satellite group on Ravlery. We do talk about knitting and such here, and I wonder what a Ravelry group would add - perhaps a place exclusively to talk about making stuff?

I would be willing to start one if enough people are interested, and I am willing to try to mod it, though if someone else is willing as well, that would be good.

(I looked at group creation, and one can invite people to join when starting the group. If you are interested in joining, please post your Ravelry name so that I can invite you!)

Serge @ 95 -
BzzzzTTTTT!!!

[Marvin the Mirror-Martian]
Where was the scream? There was supposed to be a soul-shattering scream?!?! Ooooooo this makes me very angry!! Very Angry indeed....[/Marvin the Mirror-Martian]

#105, Nancy -

Maybe we don't need one. I've gotten a bit spoiled about the ease of posting and looking at projects there, so I was thinking I'd like to be able to see what others are working on. But that doesn't mean it is a good idea. *grin* Maybe all we need is a roundup of Ravelry names so we can find each other.

My Ravelry name is essentially the same as my handle here. "RMKoske."

100: Neil,

Yes, we are at the end of cheap energy.

I think that we will *innovate our way out of the crisis, and I doubt that all or most of the innovations will come from businesses or governments. Some of those changes to our society are going to come from millions of people making gradual changes and/or creating new ways to maintain the old+ standard of living with less energy.

I said I thought we were in the beginning of a new era -- I was talking on the grand sweep of history. Like the examples I gave, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, I'm talking of a global change that may take a century or more.

In the shorter time horizon, I think I agree with you -- we are facing a crisis that could easily disrupt/destroy our entire way of life. I just happen to think it is a bottleneck that we will come out of better, stronger, more egalitarian (globally), and smarter.

*innovate = not necessarily all technological innovation, though, we will need societal reforms as well.

R.M.,

I am redrose, and I have just friended you!

Nancy, back at you! (And am I the only one who immediately goes and looks at new friends' groups for new places to hang out?)

Nope!

Re: flying with crafts implements

They're paranoid about knitting needles, even circs over 30" as someone could be strangled with the loop. HA. On the TSA site, I found NO restrictions on crochet hooks. They even suggest you tuck in an extra length of yarn and a hook so you can sit off to the side (mumbling darkly) and at least transfer your work before they dispose of your needles for you, should they be having a snarky day.

I live in Denver, will be at the ML gathering, and have another event in the central part of town at 6 p.m. on Thursday. So, if people are in by that afternoon and need to be picked up for a quick jaunt to a store, let me know.

No promises. Let me know what kind of shop. There's a good yarn one not too far out. Most crafts stores are further afield. Also the Argonaut, a big, competitively priced liquor store.

Knitting needles are also good for sneak attacks on plates of goodies. With care, cherry cordials. "Oh, it couldn't have been her, despite the smears of chocolate on her face. She's quietly knitting."

I flew a *lot* Jan-May, and I never had a problem with my bamboo DPNs. I startled a few flight attendants with how I could make a sock with satay skewers, but that falls under the heading of "evangelism."

Nancy @105 and other Ravelers -- I'm Chatelaine. Contact with other Fluorospherians in other venues would be neat.

I think I may put a note in my Ravelry profile that I hang out here, if I can find a way to phrase it that doesn't sound too self-aggrandizing. (Also, Debbie, I friended you.)

As I alluded to obliquely in point 5, one good example of this sort of revolution is the change in childbirth and baby care that has taken place in the US and the UK since the 1950's. (The natural childbirth movement, having fathers present, the return of breastfeeding, etc).

Its important to remember that when you work with a group of people, you get more ideas out of it than you went in with. New people bring them in, and they breed as you go forward. So although RM Koske doesn't see any way forward for bicycling in this context, others may: anything from changing laws so cars are more at fault in accidents to cre