Writing #

I saw a headline float past me recently. I vaguely remember something similar to “Can a gig economy survive with minimum wage?” It flew past as I flicked my screen in a different direction and all I caught was that question, begging me to answer it. Is a “gig economy” really any different than what we as humans have done in the past? Or is it just a buzz word that we’re tossing around because the employment situation looks grim and there’s technology to help facilitate the process?

I spent week at the Oceti Sakowin Camp from 11 November 2016 through 18 November 2016. It was far too short of a time. I felt at home there, among the water protectors. The camp technically begins on the reservation with a group known as the Rosebud Camp. Most of it is actually just north of a bridge with signs marking that one is leaving the reservation. It would be easy to just say it is on US Army Corps of Engineers’ land, however in the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie the land of the Sioux stretches upward along the Missouri River and all the way along the Heart River, which flows just south of Bismarck and through Mandan. The camp barely touches that vast swath of land.

Yesterday, November 15, 2016, Bobby Kennedy Jr. came to stand with us at the Oceti Sakowin Camp. He gave us encouragement and set a gauntlet for others to follow in his footsteps and support democracy by standing with Standing Rock. Below is the transcript of his speech which I recorded [due to back ground noise, certain parts of it were very hard to make out].

Today, I woke up. I was slightly more hungover than expected and, somehow, slightly more entangled in the soul of a friend who, just over a week ago, was hit by a car going full speed while trying to flag down help. At first, she was someone who talked to me at the local bar where she worked. Eventually, our relationship grew little by little. Before long we were talking about art, our traumas and struggles in life, and how we wanted the world to change. About a month ago, she told me, “I’m doing it. I’m giving my notice. I’m going to work on art full time. You should come by my studio sometime and we should work on a project together.” Replying excitedly, I said, “That would be awesome! Yes, let’s plan on it.” — which was all I could get in before she hurried off down the bar to serve a new customer, popping by every now and then to exchange a few words. It was becoming obvious our friendship was blossoming beyond what the structure of hanging out at the bar while she worked could hold.

We should broaden the context from the strict definition of mental illness to general mental health and coping mechanisms. If examined in the scope of psychology as currently practiced, none of this necessarily falls under the purview of mental illness.

There’s, of course, the current tale of Ahmed Mohamed and his clock. He’s a 14 year old boy of Sudanese descent who happens to be an American kid and Muslim (why blame a kid for his religion?). His father happens to have run for presidency in Sudan, twice. Should any of that matter in this case? No, but it seems to have mattered. According to CNN, the teacher to whom he showed the clock was the one who felt threatened. Now, it might be arguable it was just the appearance of an eight inch wide metal pencil box with a time readout that caused the worry. I would say that’s an argument made out of ignorance and poor education regarding electronics.

I’m sure there are quite a few ways to do this. What if we could write something with only two non-repeated conditionals using a few math concepts in eight lines of code?

PHP 5.4.0 will arrive soon. The PHP team is working to bring to some very nice presents to PHP developers. In the previous release of 5.3.0 they had added a few language changes. This version is no different. Some of the other changes include the ability to use DTrace for watching PHP apps in BSD variants (there is a loadable kernel module for Linux folks). This release features many speed and security improvements along with some phasing out of older language features (Y2K compliance is no longer optional). The mysql extensions for ext/mysql, mysqli, and pdo now use the MySql native driver (mysqlnd). This release also improves support for multibyte strings.

A few weeks ago, I started looking into the possibility of functional programming in PHP. I stumbled across the capability of defining anonymous functions — starting with PHP 5.3.0. These can be used to define closures with bound variables and also for partial application or currying. Higher order functions can also be defined.

gRaphael provides an easy way of creating charts through JavaScript. Unfortunately, many people have complained about how poorly it is documented. In the interest of seeing more good looking charts on websites, I decided to go through the code and post documentation here.