Special interest

“Special interest” is a misnomer. Every interest is special. And you can become of a geek of anything. “Soccer is the only broad shared cultural expression.” (said by a Frenchman, explaining why hackerspaces are not “marginal” or “narrow” culture; everything is narrow compared to European soccer.)

Met a guy tonight that wanted to hear biographical anecdotes about Townes Van Zandt before he could listen to his music. He knew everything there was to know about Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys fame. Since we were at a loud club, he was unable to tell me anything about Wilson’s music. He mentioned an inaudible Beach Boys record title, with the gnomic description:

They were trying to pick up (inaudible, “pieces”?). And they sound so bad. But it comes out very good. Sincerity.

I retorted by gushing a little about Van Zandt. Recently, me and Luisa went to see Steve Earle who looks precisely like he does in The Wire. It turned out that the concert was part of a tour for a recently recorded album of Townes songs. With Earle’s telling yarns between singing great songs, it all swept us up into the New Country legend.

Meredith L. Patterson has an anagram for a URL. Envy poisons my fingers as I type this. Meredith is a defender of learning skills yourself. (See Autodidacticism for more poetry on this.) She defends rights to educate oneself. She kicks anyone’s ass that says she university’s the only place to learn biology. Ergo, she is my heroine.

But what I wanted to point to was this special interest item, from the CNC world.

TUBE is a bi-annual conference about tubes, held in Düsseldorf. I saw it mentioned in a very old news item from Nissin, makers of this:

And, at the music event tonight, I came to realize that I’m becoming more entrenched here in Malmö. I have friends here. I was dragged to dancing by my friend the illustrator, and my college buddy the moviemaker reinvited me to his opening night tomorrow. A Forskningsavdelningen biologist stepped up and asked if I knew her, I had to introduce myself. Again. She unmasked herself (this was Halloween, and a folk theme was in full swing, around us you could find Herne the Hunter, the Green Man, and other weird wooden masks). We talked science, quit the club, and had Middle Eastern fast-food (At “Jalla Jalla”, whose slogan is “Best falafel”), and then it was time to report all this. Oh, the biologist will equip herself with skills at the Royal Holloway in London. She can tell it all to me in a few years.

Bonus link: GPL3-licensed chemistry tools.