Subject: Chat with Clark Robinson
From: Clark Robinson <robinsonchicago@gmail.com>
To: barriticus@gmail.com

Clark: caution: may consume a lot of time: http://www.nowykurier.com/toys/gravity/gravity.html -- from S/J participant Seb Gillen
Clark: Seb's blog, fascinating: http://www.weareinthefuture.com/
me: hmmm, open-sourcing of public safety codes
me: yeah, he's central committee material
me: incidentally
me: Emma's going to be serving as my assistant
me: and coming in from London to move in with me for a while
Clark: ok, i will share all the spreadsheets to her, i am becoming weary of them
Clark: so good news
me: after which I may go back to London with her
me: as I don't plan to stay in Dallas permanently whereas she has a daughter and other such things
Clark: london = enviable place to live
me: we've sort of had a whirl-wind romance
me: which is probably for the best insomuch as that could use a woman to run my affairs
Clark: seb says that "create proto disk" is a must-click in the gravity toy
me: how now?
me: oh, I see
Clark: see link above
me: will click now
me: what exactly is this?
me: oh, I see
Clark: it appears to be computer modeling of the effects of gravity on matter, using planet like objects as a display
me: huh, occurs to me suddenly that no one's made simple app like this
me: now to prove capture theory regarding luna
me: I guess one "game" to play here is to establish a stable solar system?
Clark: actually a display like this could model the distributional patterns of blogger/journalist posts in the network
me: or is that even possible
me: we do indeed need a better visual representation but I think I've got that covered
Clark: i think you could get something fairly stable by starting with one huge object and some tiny ones and extremely slow speeds so you can understand the effects you have created
me: familiar with Conways game of life?
Clark: no
me: incidentally, was reading about heuristics last night - another thing I should have learned about long ago
me: fuck, my "sun" is careening away
Clark: I managed to get one that moves extremely slowly and so a few little objects are in loopy orbits around it, though not really stable
me: anyway, I've been intentionally looking into new subject matter plus little games/apps like this in order to help get my mind in such a state as to be able to create new and ever better schematics for organization of groups
me: playing Dwarf Fortress, shooting through Wikipedia, reading Bucky Fuller, etc
Clark: seb says he is interested in being an administrator of the science journalism project within the limits of his health
Clark: i will copy him and emma a bunch of documents this afternoon
me: great
Clark: emma will need to get G mail
Clark: i only have a yahoo address for her