Windows

clipped from southeastmain.wordpress.com

The Ins and Outs of Windows

By june

My ventures into painting in 2010 have been pathetically few. One of these was actually begun in Nevada in February of 2009. It was the first Nevada painting I did at the Red Barn. It was colder than [fill in the blank] and even with two electric heaters and my Montana winter coat and gloves, I was shivering. Jer wasn't due for an hour and a half. The only thing that would keep me from walking the four miles to Beatty was painting (well, that and the south wind at about 25 mph).

So I painted my first Nevada painting, shivering, as if I were working in watercolor:

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From the Red Barn, oil on canvas, about 20 x 30″, 2009

I really liked the effect of the landscape reaching into the barn's concrete walls and taking over even my shivery body. Later in that residency I tried to recapitulate something of the effect. The paintings were dreadful and ultimately discarded. But I kept this one; I still have it, hanging alongside of a watercolor done in the first painting class I ever took. Both mean something to me personally.

Too much pi

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Today is Pi Day, in honor of the mathematical constant pi (π), an irrational number that begins 3.14 — like today's date, March 14th or 3/14.

π is a letter of the Greek alphabet, and it's the symbol for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. In other words, if a circle has a diameter of 10 inches, we could find out its circumference by multiplying 10 inches by π, and we'd find out that the circle with a 10-inch diameter has a circumference (or perimeter) of approximately 31.4159265. It can only ever be approximate — never exact — because π is an irrational number, meaning that it goes on forever without repeating or having patterns. Using powerful computers, π has been calculated in recent years into trillions of decimal places.

Pi Day began in 1988, started by a physicist named Larry Shaw. And just last year, in 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution designating today as National Pi Day.

Pi Day celebrations around the nation today involve eating dessert pies or pizza pies, throwing cream pies, and listening to lectures on the importance of the irrational number — sometimes all of these things occurring in unison.

There are legions of people worldwide devoted to memorizing π to as far as they can memorize it. And today around the world, there are π recitation contests. The world record, according to the Guinness Book, is currently held by Lu Chao, a grad student from China, who over the course of 24 hours and 4 minutes recited pi to the 67,890th decimal place without error.

To aid in the memorization of the never-ending, pattern-less number, people have written poetry and stories in a mnemonic called "Pilish," which is a way of constrained writing "in which the number of letters in each successive word "spells out" the digits of π." One of the earliest and best-known examples of it was a sentence by English physicist Sir James Jeans, who wrote: "How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!" 'How' has three letters, 'I' has one, "need" has four — so it forms 3.14, the start of π — and each successive word's letter count represents the next digit in π.

Then, in 1996, a piphilologist (as these people are called), wrote a 3,834-digit Cadaeic Cadenza, which begins with a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven"; every single word adheres to the constraints that render letter counts into accurate successive π digits.

Be Informed: DOJ Consumer Complaint Search Now Online

One of my highest priorities as Attorney General is to protect Oregon consumers. Our strategy has two parts. First, we are aggressively investigating and taking legal action against companies and individuals who commit fraud. Second, we are expanding our efforts to educate consumers, helping them get the information they need to avoid becoming a victim in the first place.

As part of this consumer education effort, I am pleased to announce that we have now put all of our consumer complaints online, in a searchable database. This new tool will allow Oregonians to research individual companies to see whether they engage in responsible business practices or not. In a few short minutes, consumers can get all they information they need to make informed, responsible decisions for themselves and their families.

You can access this new resource at www.oregonattorneygeneral.gov/beinformed.
Please take a look -- and spread the work to family, friends, and colleagues.

I am very proud of our work to protect Oregonians and their families but we can't do it without your help. If you have been the victim of a scam or consumer fraud please contact the Oregon Department of Justice Consumer Hotline at 1-877-877-9392 or at
www.oregonattorneygeneral.gov.

JOHN R. KROGER
Attorney General of Oregon

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Douglas Adams

Spring Blooms in NW Portland

Spring Blooms in NW Portland

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Spring Photos

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War-opoly

clipped from online.wsj.com

War-opoly: How History's Most Popular Board Game Helped Defend The Free World

By Brian McMahon

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During World War II, the British secret service hatched a master plan to smuggle escape gear to captured Allied soldiers inside Germany. Their secret weapon? Monopoly boxes. The original notion was simple enough: Find a way to sneak useful items into prison camps in an unassuming form. But the idea to use Monopoly came from a series of happy coincidences, all of which started with maps.

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Smooth As Silk

Maps are harder to smuggle than you might think. They fall apart when wet, and they make a lot of noise when unfolded. Allied officials feared paper maps might draw the attention of German troops, so they turned to an unlikely source for help—silk. Not only would silk maps hold up in all kinds of weather, but they'd also come with the life-saving benefit of being whisper quiet.

To produce these silent maps, the Brits turned to John Waddington Ltd., a company that had recently perfected the process of printing on silk and was already manufacturing silk escape maps for British airmen to carry. What else was Waddington known for? You guessed it—being the licensed manufacturer of Monopoly outside the United States.

Suddenly, the popular board game seemed like the perfect way to get supplies inside German-run POW camps. At the time, the Nazis were hard-pressed to get provisions to their own troops, much less to the Allied soldiers they'd captured. Wishing to hide this less-than-stellar upholding of the Geneva Convention, they happily welcomed Red Cross aid packages for POWs. So throwing Monopoly games into the care kits along with food and clothing was met with little scrutiny. Monopoly was already a well-known game throughout Europe, and the German guards saw it as the perfect way for their detainees to remain occupied for hours.

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Community Chest

In 1941, the British Secret Service approached Waddington with its master plan, and before long, production of a "special edition" Monopoly set was underway. For the top-secret mission, the factory set aside a small, secure room—unknown to the rest of its employees—where skilled craftsmen sat and painstakingly carved small niches and openings into the games' cardboard boxes. Along with the standard thimble, car, and Scotty dog, the POW version included additional "playing" pieces, such as a metal file, a magnetic compass, and of course, a regional silk escape map, complete with marked safe-houses along the way—all neatly concealed in the game's box. Even better, some of the Monopoly money was real. Actual German, Italian, and French currency was placed underneath the play money for escapees to use for bribes. Also, because of its collaboration with the International Red Cross, Waddington could track which sets would be delivered to which camps, meaning escape maps specific to the area could be hidden in each game set. Allied soldiers and pilots headed to the front lines were told to look for the special edition game if they were captured. The identifying mark to check for? A red dot in the corner of the Free Parking space.

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Get Out of Jail Free

By the end of the war, it's estimated that more than 35,000 Allied POWs had escaped from German prison camps. And while there's no way to set an exact figure on it, more than a few of those escapees certainly owe their breakout to the classic board game.

But despite its brave and noble role in all of it, Monopoly's heroic war deeds would go unrecognized for decades. Strict secrecy about the plan was maintained during the war, not only so that the British could continue using the game to help POWs, but also because Waddington feared a targeted reprisal by German bombers. After the war, all remaining sets were destroyed, and everyone involved in the plan, including the escaped prisoners, were told to keep quiet. In the event of another large-scale war, Allied officials also wanted to make sure the seemingly innocent board game could go back into action.

Uncle Pennybags Goes Behind the Iron Curtain

Believe it or not, it wasn't long before Monopoly found itself in the middle of yet another international conflict—this time defending itself from Communist leaders in Russia.

Being that Monopoly is essentially a game in which one player gets rich at the expense of others becoming poor, Soviet officials had long seen the board game as an overt symbol of capitalistic frivolity and greed. So, as its popularity soared, Communists took more and more efforts to curb the enthusiasm. Cuba, the U.S.S.R., and other Eastern Bloc countries outlawed the game for fear it would corrupt the public with positive notions about a free-market economy. Soviet leaders even tried coming up with their own Marxist-themed spin-off games designed to highlight the virtues of frugality. The title of one such knockoff from Communist-era Hungary loosely translated to "Save," while another in Russia had a name that roughly meant "Manage."

But bans and spin-offs couldn't hold down the individualistic drive of the human spirit. Monopoly became an underground success, secretly coveted and played behind the Iron Curtain as a way of escaping the drudgery of Soviet life. It wasn't until 1987, four years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, that Monopoly was allowed to be legally sold there.

Today, Monopoly is licensed in more than 80 countries, and no fewer than 200 spin-off versions exist. Of course, playing it in the cozy confines of your living room, it's easy to take for granted that there was a time when, to many, Monopoly was a lot more than just a game.