"I find it so entertaining a small group of whack jobs wants me expelled from UW-Madison."

"Can I only say what the crazy women approve of?"

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The corpse flower is about to bloom.

Here at the University of Wisconsin. The horrible smell only lasts for a day or 2, so I'm watching the D.C. Smith Greenhouse Facebook page to know when to run over there.  I have very little sense of smell — anosmia bad enough to have submitted to an MRI over it — so I welcome the opportunity, like a blind person facing the sun or a deaf person at a heavy metal concert.

Back in 2005, I blogged a UW corpse flower bloom: "Visiting the corpse flower with pro-sunsetters."

How did the flower smell? I thought it had a zoo smell. Maybe I've never smelled a corpse, but it didn't smell dead to me, just funky and animal-y. It wasn't at all fishy. More mouse-y. It wasn't nauseating or even terribly strong, in my opinion. I can't really understand the distinct aversion felt by the three persons who humored me by coming along.

I wasn't aware at the time that I was losing my sense of smell. From the comments, back then, Goesh said, "Botany be damned, what we have here is a burgeoning phallic cult." And I said "The scientific name for the plant is Amorphophallus Titanium. 'Amorphophallus' means 'shapeless phallus.'"

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How the Obama 2012 campaign — replete with hugely tusked mascot — mined and processed data.

Dan Balz writes about "How the Obama campaign won the race for voter data," quoting the campaign manager Jim Messina about the obsession with tracking and measuring data.

It took the technology team nearly a year, but it produced software that allowed all of the campaign’s lists to talk to one another. The team named it Narwhal, after a whale of amazing strength that lives in the Arctic but is rarely seen....

So, "amazing strength" and Arctic habitat are the distinguishing features of the narwal? Here's a picture to help you think about what these folks really said when choosing this name:



Back to Balz:

The next goal was to create a program that would allow everyone... to communicate simply and seamlessly... That brought about the creation of Dashboard... 

The Obama leaders not only wanted all the lists to be able to talk to one another, they also wanted people to be able to organize their friends and family members.... “... what if we could build a piece of software that tracked all this and allowed you to match your friends on Facebook with our lists"....

It took months and months to solve, but it was a huge breakthrough. If a person signed on to Dashboard through his or her Facebook account, the campaign could, with permission, gain access to that person’s Facebook friends.... The [Obama] team could supply people with information about their friends based on data it had independently gathered.... It knew who was solid for Obama and who needed more persuasion — and a gentle or not-so-gentle...

 Tusked!

... nudge to vote. Instead of asking someone to send a message to all of his or her Facebook friends, the campaign could present a handpicked list of the three or four or five people it believed would most benefit from personal encouragement....

On Obama’s target lists, the voter file contained no good contact information for half of those young voters — they didn’t have land lines, and no other information was available.

Here's an idea: Get the officials at huge universities in swing states to let you hold big rallies on campus, cancelling classes, and let the campaign require students seeking access to send the campaign their email addresses.

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"This was shot over the course of the 2012/2013 academic year, where I was lucky enough..."

"... to get the chance to study abroad at the University of Wisconsin Madison. This film is longer than most of my timelapse projects, but I hope the video is just as enjoyable to watch. It's been amazing to live in Madison for the last year and it will be sorely missed."

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"With this kind of work it is not push, push, push; you need to relax... you have to massage the stone rather than push it."

Said Jacob Arndt, one of 2 men doing the stone carving restoration work on the University Club building here in Madison. Arndt has been working alongside Gayal Oglesbay since last fall.

“I really rarely find someone who carves stone,” Oglesbay said. “A lot of people will putz around or use machinery, but people who carve it originally with hammers and chisels and use math and come up with the exact product are hard to find.”

There are 50 to 90 stone carvers in the United States, according to Walter Arnold, treasurer and past president of the national Stone Carvers Guild, who says the number depends on what standard you apply: "if you limit to those good enough by 1913 standards to have held down a job in a good shop back then, the current numbers are significantly lower."

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I'm making a new tag for this, artisans. I almost went with one of my old tags: art, sculpture, architecture, careers. Those are all almost there, but they are off in a way that amplifies the very problem the article is talking about. I also have a tag I'm not making a tag for this, but I could make a second new tag I am making a new tag for this. Having made the new tag, I wish I could go back and add it to all the old posts where it could have been used. I'd like to be able to see what has come up over the years, discussing the highly skilled work of those who produce beautiful things but do not think of themselves as artists. Or perhaps some of these people do think of themselves as artists (and maybe some painters and sculptors don't like to think of themselves as artists). I'd be interested in pulling together all that old material. If only I'd had better blogging craftsmanship.

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