Aaron Swartz, in his own words..

The following quoted text is excerpted directly from websites and blog posts written by Aaron Swartz. 

[[Taken from the AaronSW (technology and social change website), as read by Professor Lawrence Lessig in the documentary film “The Internet’s Own Boy” by Brian Knappenberger]]

“I think deeply about things and want others to do likewise. I work for ideas and learn from people. I don’t like excluding people. I’m a perfectionist but I won’t let that get in the way of publication. Except for education and entertainment, I’m not going to waste my time on things that won’t have an impact. I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don’t take me seriously. I don’t hold grudges (it’s not productive) but I learn from my experience. I want to make the world a better place.”

“I believe in good and bad. I support free software and limited copyright. I fight laws the restrict what bits I can put on a website. Politically, I am lower left, but I enjoy any well thought out political views. I’m a pacifist. I don’t believe in the science humanities schism. I want to be an artist. I have several annoying habits; I misremember things and overestimate the accuracy of my memory; I assume I am right even in areas I don’t know much about; and I misleadingly answer questions when I think a more truthful answer may cause confusion or strife.”

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[[Excerpted from “Schoolyard Subversion” Weblog post originally published on December 23^rd, 2001.]]

My Dream

Last night I had a dream of the way I want to live. I'm not sure it would appeal to other people, but I would certainly like it.
I walked in, not quite knowing what to expect. It was a modernly-designed loft with sleeping quarters, a meeting room, ping-pong tables and computers spread around. Windows were everywhere and light streamed making the place feel airy and bright. Many of my friends from the Internet were there, as well as a number of people I didn't know, but who seemed very friendly. We were all about the same age.
We were working together on a project that we thought would change the world. We were committed to it, and worked well as a team: we helped each other out with what needed to be done, and kept each other's enthusiasm up. We worked hard, but we also took time off to play ping-pong or go water-sliding. There was a bulletin board to coordinate events as we tended to keep irregular hours.
The team was rather large, but I got to know everyone on it well and we became good friends. We all worked to support each other, and everything was run democratically. New folks who wanted to help were invited in, but the group had to agree on them before they could join.
We learned all the time, both finding out the skills we needed to know ourselves, and teaching each other how to improve. While we knew there was a lot to be done, we focused on our one project with a single-minded determination, finishing it and solving all the problems that it raised.
If anyone wants to send me the money to make this dream a reality, let me know. :-) I already know the people and the project. The problem is we're flung across several continents, and this is the kind of relationship that just doesn't happen over the Internet.

Dragonflies riding the heat

I was lying on my back at the Rogers Park Metra station yesterday at about noon. I had missed my train by confusing the relative distances between Ravenswood and Edgwater and ended up deciding to just tough it out and walk up Clark street to Evanston, after a break.

The train platform was empty and stayed that way for well over thirty minutes, enough time to just relax and breath. Rogers Park and Clark street were really pretty quiet, for Chicago. The occasional traffic on the road, people working in gardens or on minor construction on nearby buildings. As it happened, I usually take a lunch break, not to eat, but mainly just to let my mind drift and wander. This was when I saw the dragonflies. Lazily riding the thermals about the curving expanse of railroad tracks. Raptors in miniature. Hunting or just enjoying the end of summer, I couldn't say?

I felt really and truly at peace. Couldn't have been more than five minutes, but the moment was a comfortable one. Free of anxiety. Free of fear.

The sudden juxtaposition of nature and the "built" and "engineered" city environment.

-GJS

End of a Chicago Summer

We are just slowly winding down from what I think of as "the sweet spot" in the Windy City.

This is a period roughly between the middle of July and the last few weeks of August when Chicago gets an uninterrupted succession of seventy and eighty degree days, which makes up for some of the months of miserable, grinding cold that sends the well off and less physically hardy, running for the coasts or the sunbelt. I have been distracted with other writing and doing some preparation for a long, cold winter so, no posts here.

I do want to post a top five or ten list of the best fiction books I've read over the past three months and I might have a good reason to increase what I post and when now that I am much less busy hunting for projects?

What I have done is make a commitment to at least another year just living and working in Chicago with a focus on developing my own fiction writing and then we'll see what things are like near the end of 2017?

"H4ppy Tr4ilz"  

Gearing up, Q3 and Q4

Kind of fun seeing those eight or nine hits on a given blog post? At this point, I don't see a really good reason to post big, long form blog posts, for example, at five or ten posts a month.

I'm not a journalist.

And twitter has the benefit of the speed and engagement with a small audience.

A big project for me is really getting to know the Chicago area and it's history, which with access to really good local libraries on a daily basis, means I can focus really deeply on whatever research area I want to work in. That freedom on a daily basis is deeply satisfying.

My skill in writing right now is limited by experiential factors and so just reading massive amounts is a key goal for the next twelve months. I have the time and ability to just build something slowly and build it well. I need to get a few more of the posts in my draft pipeline finished here and if things change it will be updated here. My plans for this space are definitely in flux right now. 

The moral aspect of the creative individual, Intro

This is something I've been considering for a very long time in terms of useful work. To summarize somewhat broadly, "what moral and ethical duties does a creative person or an artisan in any field, science or industry or any broad field of endeavor have to oneself vs. the requirements of larger society?"

In one sense, we can say that any person who exhibits creativity is inherently unique and finding ways and means to enhance their creative output over the course of a lifetime is in the best interest of the creative individual and in what utility and quality that person can contribute to society? In the best case scenario, both of these vague and generalized entities benefit where maximum utility and maximum quality of life converge. This is a very idealized case but one that has been born out to a significant extent by the success of democratic legal frameworks and market capitalism in tandem, to a point.

Where the more general case from an ethical standpoint starts to become more interesting is where the individual diverges from society given that absence of a clear path to reasonable utility and quality of life? I think I want to give this line of inquiry more thought and get more deeply engaged in a series of posts, so I hope you will be patient while I refine my thinking on some of these questions?

-GJS

The Past Three Months, Q2, 2016

This post is sort of a follow on, now that I've arrived at a more stable schedule. In part, this is also to encourage accountability from myself in terms of what I've been dealing with and working on?

I'm also going to get into some of my reticence and a sense of the ambiguity of full, un-censored disclosure in a later post, but for right now, I want to establish a format where I post one of these every quarter or so and update goals or just explain why updating here has been erratic or what exactly is going on?

First off, it is probably fair to address the fact that this blog's url is "urbanengineering" and is written by an erratically employed Engineer with Engineer in Training (EIT) Licensure in the state of Illinois.

However, (yechh pardon the grammar choice) this blog rarely deals with specific engineering or science topics and is more a repository for fiction or writing projects that don't fit anywhere else and sometimes has more to do with philosophy and culture.

I have a plan for creating another blog, possibly in Fall or Winter of 2016 that is going to deal more directly with science and philosophy of technology, but this project is strictly in the planning stages and might be deferred to my "hold" or "wait" lists until 2017, depending on how or if my employment situation changes?

All that having been gotten out of the way, the past few months have been busy adjusting to a new schedule, getting research reading in order for the rest of the summer (maybe even the Fall) and doing planning and initial note taking for some fiction stories. Rest of my time is divided between looking at employment, interviewing for jobs and trying to bootstrap a chunk of my old thinking on real world testing of emerging machine cognition theory into something more complete?

I may get to that in a future post here, but for right now, that is what I've been working on. You can get a closer look at some of my more recent thinking by following me on twitter @GregStaskowski or search for most of my previous work just by typing in "gjsengineer" into the search engine of your choice?

I don't expect this blog to have a significant audience anytime real soon, but for those of you who do check in from time to time, I expect my posting frequency to go up possibly targeting five to ten posts a month depending on what specific posts seem most useful or relevant?

"Happy Trailz"

So, what have I done for you lately? 1

Answer, not much.

My problem in writing when I'm trying to build something entirely new is I eventually reach a point of compounding and stacking unrealistic expectations and anxiety where I go from "trying to write" to "now it is impossible to write" and there is no way to make progress whatsoever.

This leads to a very simple and specific outcome where I need to stop hammering on myself, step back from the computer, close the awful thing down and then find something, anything, else to do, for two to three weeks until this amorphous, soul destroying negative feedback loop has effectively dissipated and I can try to get back to work.

So, how was your end of May?

I did end up doing quite a few things I really like that had absolutely nothing to do with real specific work. These included.

1. Hiking the Green Bay trail in the Chicago Far North and just generally doing my bohemian dropout routine. Took pictures and explored quite a bit, finding really nice comfortable libraries I like and just getting exercise and thinking.

2. Found a number of fun used book and record stories in various strategic and useful places.

3. Spent some time at the Chicago Botanic Gardens which always hugely relaxes me even when I get to hike back to the Metra train station in the rain, which somehow was still pretty fun.

I admittedly should have said something before now, but if you keep up with me on twitter, I think I made the point that I needed a vacation and I took one?