Lee

Saw this hat at a grocery store several days ago. It was child-sized. If it was my size I’d probably be wearing it right now.

Lee

For me the most emotional moments in the exhibit on Japanese American internment at #janm yesterday occurred when I read the individual stories of resistance (for example, the lawsuits of Mitsuye Endo and Fred Korematsu), allyship (Ralph Lazo), and service (posthumous medal of honor recipient Sadao Munemori).

Lee

Statelessness is an extremely vulnerable position to be in. #janm exhibit on the mistreatment of Japanese American and Japanese Latin American civilians by the US government during WWII

Lee

Exhibit about the US internment of Japanese American civilians in concentration camps during WWII #janm #concentrationcamp

Lee

Learned yesterday that the US government had made lists of Japanese American community leaders years before the WWII internment of civilians. Also learned about the US government acquiring Japanese Latin American prisoners. #janm

Lee

Composelicious: I fantasize about a WordPress plugin that doesn’t exist

I blog the way that I do because of cer­tain men­tal quirks [digres­sion deleted] that make it hard for me to blog any other way. Still, I’m con­vinced I could do bet­ter, with a lit­tle help. So I fan­ta­size about a Word­Press plu­gin that could take care of at least some of the bits that I find dif­fi­cult… what it would have to do, how would it inter­act within Word­Press, what would the user see, how to avoid wheel rein­ven­tion, etc.

I call it the Com­pose­li­cious Magic Note Assis­tant. Here’s what it (hypo­thet­i­cally) does:

Are you good at microblog­ging? Semi-auto­mate the process of com­pos­ing and post­ing longer arti­cles in a way that pre­serves your indi­vid­ual writ­ing style and avoids look­ing like a spam­bot.

Hourly, Com­pose­li­cious grabs your new book­marks from your deli­cious account and/​or other social book­mark­ing sites, sav­ing them as “notes” which you can use as the build­ing blocks of future arti­cles. You can also con­vert exist­ing draft posts into “notes”.

Com­pose­li­cious sorts your notes, assem­bling rough arti­cle Paste­boards on your assorted top­ics, and searches for blog posts you’ve pre­vi­ously pub­lished and/​or for off­site con­tent which you may want to link to in your final draft. It minds the options you’ve entered regard­ing min/​max amount of post con­tent, and it also helps you post in a timely man­ner by pri­or­i­tiz­ing urgent/​aging notes. And then it can send you an email to prompt you to review a nearly-com­plete Paste­board.

When you’re at the Paste­board, you can change the order of the notes; add, delete, or hide them; move notes to dif­fer­ent Paste­boards if the plu­gin has erro­neously cat­e­go­rized their top­ics; and finally press the Go but­ton. Com­pose­li­cious then makes the Paste­board into a draft Post; you do your final read-through and rewrite on the con­ven­tional Edit Post page, and then pub­lish the arti­cle.

Cus­tom post types that Com­pose­li­cious needs: two. Mag­ic­Notes and Paste­boards.

Ques­tions begged: sort­ing notes by topic; what if I don’t use any social book­mark­ing sites; note urgency/​aging and the post­ing sched­ule; automag­i­cally find­ing related con­tent on other sites; pre­ven­tion of dou­ble-post­ing a book­mark or other con­tent; should it really be called Com­pose­li­cious Magic Note Assis­tant. For now, I will spare you my fur­ther thoughts on those sub­jects.

Any­one inter­ested in kick­ing some ideas around with me?

Lee

A quest for magic and better magic

The magic with which I am con­cerned is any­thing you do in your mind to bring about a desired result.  Prayer, visu­al­iza­tion, analy­sis, practice–magic can be all of these and more.

Magic is the dif­fer­ence between per­fect accu­racy and peak effi­ciency. We all use it; it’s indis­pens­able.

The kind of magic that involves break­ing the laws of the phys­i­cal uni­verse is sim­ply impos­si­ble.  It is there­fore impor­tant to pur­sue, as much as you can, a true and accu­rate under­stand­ing of what is going on in the world and how things work.

Human brains evolved to oper­ate more-or-less suc­cess­fully even in the near-total absence of accu­rate under­stand­ing.  Some peo­ple get through their whole lives by magic alone.

Never mis­take the map for the direc­tions.  Truth is an impor­tant sup­ple­ment to effec­tive action, but focus­ing on cre­at­ing an overly pre­cise descrip­tion of truth can dis­tract us from act­ing effec­tively.

You never hear an actor say that she applied X joules of force within her facial mus­cles to bend her mouth into a 41° curve.  Such might be an accu­rate descrip­tion of what she did, but it is prob­a­bly not how she expe­ri­enced it; nor is it of any assis­tance to an act­ing stu­dent who wants to por­tray emo­tion as pow­er­fully as the pro­fes­sional does.

Any magic that you do to make life more won­der­ful for your­self and every­one,  I sup­port.  But not all of the magic that you are able to use can be suc­cess­fully used by oth­ers.  Magic is not wis­dom unless it can be passed to many oth­ers and actu­ally ben­e­fit them.