Vilnius, Bi+ Equal Founding Meeting conference 2 - the disagreements
Nov. 13th, 2025 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovingbothThe Founding Meeting for the pan-Europe organisation Bi+ Europe saw almost everyone agree about almost everything. Yay! There's some legal work to do, but it should start up in April next year.
What were the main disagreements? There were five things that more than a couple of people voted against. Not in the order they were in the draft documents, they were...
Voting System ( Read more... )
Non-bi+ members of the board ( Read more... )
Extra vote ( Read more... )
Russia / Belarus ( Read more... )
Definition of bi+ ( Read more... )
Again, thanks to some very deft work during the entire process before and during the meeting, none of these led to shouting matches, and I don't think anyone went away going 'Well, that vote went the wrong way, I'm not going to take any further part...'
Thanks once again to Governance Leader Soudah, Governance Analyst Demet, and polishing sessions chair Darienne for that work.
1. I have done STV votes by hand in Student Union elections in the early 1980s. It is doable; you just don't want to have to do it, and it was the one reason I was glad that turnouts tended to be low in the elections in question.
2. In small elections, ties are rare in STV but can happen. In that case, it can make a difference how high you put someone even without the vote being 'transferred' because there are still people in the running above them. I once won a place on the Liberal Party's Federal Executive because I'd put the person I'd tied with third on my list of preferences, and they'd put me second.
3. Following the formation of a coalition government in the UK in 2010, there was a referendum on adopting AV. It's not a good way of electing a Parliament, but it's better than simple plurality, known in the UK as 'first past the post' even though the 'post' isn't fixed... It wasn't just most of the two largest parties campaigning against it that meant I knew it would lose, it was when the Electoral Commission published the booklet on it that went to everyone and managed to make 'put your choices in order and if your current preferred choice is last, we use your next one, until someone gets over 50% of the votes' so complicated that I could barely understand WTF they were saying.
Here, there was a tiny bit more detail on how STV works than I thought was strictly necessary, but I am not crying foul...
4. Note it doesn't matter what the second preference of the people who voted for 'one or two' is, or even if they had one or not: the outcome of 'none' vs 'minority' is not going to affect its two wins.
5. Five produced a (different) single clear winner and another produced a two-way tie. As well as simple plurality, AV, and Condorcet, there's the French Presidential style (if no-one gets a majority, the top two go into a runoff), Borda (you allot more points to people's first choices than their second etc and see who has the most overall), and approval voting, the one that produced the tie (you can vote for as many as you like, highest one wins). That last one was added by the later book, I think.
At some point, I'm absolutely going to put the table of votes and the various results on a t-shirt...
6. Well this one, anyway.
7. The only possible exception I can think of is Albania, whose horrific situation was more home-grown / China's. And we didn't have anyone saying they were from there.
Vilnius, Bi+ Equal Founding Meeting conference
Nov. 11th, 2025 10:23 amlovingbothMonday 20th October - time to work! ( Read more... )
Tuesday 21st October - more work! ( Read more... )
Wednesday 22nd October - finishing off ( Read more... )
Overall
Like I say, this was an astonishing example of international community building. Congratulations to all the organising team.
Having the amount of money they had helped: it meant a bunch of people got flights and/or accommodation and/or conference fees paid. How many, I'm not sure, but my guess would be somewhere between a third and a half.
It's not necessarily a model I'd want to follow, because without large grants 'gold plated' events are not sustainable and this was one of those. It was a catered hotel event - and hotels tend to go 'ker-ching!' when told you want to have a conference there because they're used to businesses that don't really care about the costs. I would never ever ever had considered having an official photographer, for example.11 But this was Bi+ History being made and the results are very good to look at.
It was also the least fluffy bi conference I think I've ever been to, but that's entirely OK: it was clear from the first mention of it that this was a work event much more than a social one, and attendees were picked according to what they could contribute rather than 'anyone and everyone' or 'first come' basis. And that definitely worked.
I'm already looking forward to the next one.
Oh, since more or less finishing this, I see that the two people who led the governance process have published their version. It's great, and I'm not just saying that because there's a flattering picture of me in the middle of it :)
1. I'd thought the reason they're part of ILGA Europe etc is around safety, but it turns out that they'd prefer to be part of 'European' organisations rather than 'pan-Asian' ones.
2. An obscenely low £61, a quid over twice the cost of the train to and from the airport.
3. Just over £370, but mostly because I had eight nights in Vilnius rather than three and at one point, the plan was for L to come too. Staying at the hotel effectively cost €290 in a single room for four nights, so more per night than I paid. There was also the option to share for €40/night.
4. €250, or about £220.
5. In the end, I spent around £95 during my time there.
6. It 'obviously' couldn't have been both: with one normal meeting a year, you'd almost always be within six months of the previous or the next one.
7. This is how we realised the published programme was wrong - when registering, there was a form for signing up for this walk on Monday or Tuesday. I was about to go for Tuesday anyway when one of the people on the desk mentioned that I had no choice because of when my session was scheduled. "No it's not, it's in the first afternoon slot, look..." "Ah."
8. I do wonder if I was the only person to go 'that's 25% non-bi+ identified...' I should also note that I'm presenting this in a slightly different way: the text was around having all or a majority of people being bi+ identified, but this is the way the discussion in the session was actually framed.
9. I tried doing some typing on governance lead Soudah's laptop with a French keyboard but gave up. Having a few of the letters change position wasn't a problem, but what sort of keyboard has a key that has both full stop and semi colon on, but makes you press shift for the one everyone uses the most? :) :) More seriously, given that English was most people's second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth language, the other way I felt a minority there was in my monolingualism.
10. There was a noise warning, but I'd have moved away to avoid the smell if I'd realised what the noise warning was about: the smell of these really irritates my nose. Fortunately, this one wasn't too bad.
11. Even before he was occasionally irritating! Presumably being more used to doing weddings, he wandered around coming into sessions, walking around the room one way or another taking photos from various angles of various people, then leaving and coming back later to repeat that. Had he come to my one, I'd have been very tempted to tell him he had two minutes and that was it. In the end, he went with the first of the walking tours and, as mentioned, the results are great to see.
[DJing/Setlist] The 80s Night, Friendship A.R.C., Whitby, Mon 3rd Nov 2025
Nov. 10th, 2025 01:52 amdancefloorlandmineOur second time running The 80s Night at the welcoming Friendship A.R.C. and thankfully higher numbers than last time, who seemed to have a good time.
The playlist is below¹ ...
( The 80s Night (1900-2300) )
We're back at the Friendship A.R.C. again next time, but also back on Sundays again, on Sunday 26th April 2026. There's also something else as well, but that's a different matter. And probably requires a new usericon.
¹ Yes, I know that there's a song in there that I shouldn't have played, according to our rules - it snuck in while I was unsupervised, as Kat wasn't up this time.
The playlist is below¹ ...
( The 80s Night (1900-2300) )
We're back at the Friendship A.R.C. again next time, but also back on Sundays again, on Sunday 26th April 2026. There's also something else as well, but that's a different matter. And probably requires a new usericon.
¹ Yes, I know that there's a song in there that I shouldn't have played, according to our rules - it snuck in while I was unsupervised, as Kat wasn't up this time.
[Gigs] Utah Saints @ The Garage, Highbury, 18th October
Nov. 9th, 2025 05:39 pmdancefloorlandmineThe day after watching Mark Steel in Bromley, I took the Windrush line up to Highbury and Islington to the Garage.
I remember a promoter friend who'd booked Utah Saints quite a few years ago recounting the conversation with them, which could be summarised as them saying "You do know that we're DJs, not a band, don't you?", and him replying "Yes, that's why I've booked you."
This night was also an entirely DJ'd night - which meant much less time to rest before sets. When you have bands, there's obviously a certain amount of time required for changeover, usually at the very least swapping out the snare drum and the cymbals on the kit and possibly shifting some amps off stage. When you have DJs, especially using laptops, it's as quick as swapping from one input lead to another¹ or just selecting a different input on the mixer.
Opening was the chap from St. Etienne, doing a very smooth DJ set that built up steadily as one continuous piece of loops and beds. I didn't recognise any actual tracks, but that might have been due to a lack of familiarity.
He was followed by Richard 23 of Front 242, who performed more of a traditional DJ set, moving from track to track, some of which I'm pretty sure I recognised (including Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adriano Celentano (mostly known now as the tune from two different Italian beer adverts at the same time)).
Next up was billed as a film by Jimmy Cauty (formerly known for being part of the KLF) as Towerblock1, but was much more of an audio-visual experience, with the music and the visuals evolving together (and impressively).
And then it was over to Utah Saints, who did their usual, and put out a storming set. Although, being them, it was almost three sets at once, switching between snatches of recognisable tracks overlaid with samples, loops, and other elements to create a single continuous hole. I recognised a number of the ingredients, but they were then morphed and added to in entirely new ways. And it was excellent.
According to my pedometer, if my steps had been actual paces, I would have done about seven miles that night.
¹ On decks, it can be even more seamless, with one DJ cued up on one deck while the other's final track is still playing on the other.
I remember a promoter friend who'd booked Utah Saints quite a few years ago recounting the conversation with them, which could be summarised as them saying "You do know that we're DJs, not a band, don't you?", and him replying "Yes, that's why I've booked you."
This night was also an entirely DJ'd night - which meant much less time to rest before sets. When you have bands, there's obviously a certain amount of time required for changeover, usually at the very least swapping out the snare drum and the cymbals on the kit and possibly shifting some amps off stage. When you have DJs, especially using laptops, it's as quick as swapping from one input lead to another¹ or just selecting a different input on the mixer.
Opening was the chap from St. Etienne, doing a very smooth DJ set that built up steadily as one continuous piece of loops and beds. I didn't recognise any actual tracks, but that might have been due to a lack of familiarity.
He was followed by Richard 23 of Front 242, who performed more of a traditional DJ set, moving from track to track, some of which I'm pretty sure I recognised (including Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adriano Celentano (mostly known now as the tune from two different Italian beer adverts at the same time)).
Next up was billed as a film by Jimmy Cauty (formerly known for being part of the KLF) as Towerblock1, but was much more of an audio-visual experience, with the music and the visuals evolving together (and impressively).
And then it was over to Utah Saints, who did their usual, and put out a storming set. Although, being them, it was almost three sets at once, switching between snatches of recognisable tracks overlaid with samples, loops, and other elements to create a single continuous hole. I recognised a number of the ingredients, but they were then morphed and added to in entirely new ways. And it was excellent.
According to my pedometer, if my steps had been actual paces, I would have done about seven miles that night.
¹ On decks, it can be even more seamless, with one DJ cued up on one deck while the other's final track is still playing on the other.
Managed some hobby coding.
Nov. 7th, 2025 10:37 amjackrust tile game
I split my rust tile game into two. That was a slog but very satisfying. The base engine stores a map with objects, each game specialises the objects and the interaction logic. Originally "push blocks, avoid enemies" and I want to add "follow user's flow-chart like program" instead.
That's compile-time templating not run-time polymorphism. Rust made me realise that for many many purposes those are conceptually incredibly similar. I think the difference is, almost all the types in the engine need to be templated on game-specific data because an Engine containing a Map containing an Obj they likely all need to be compiled knowing how many bytes Obj's Property struct uses.
git shortcuts
I also updated my git shortcuts with something I wanted to add for ages:
`git extract commithash path1 path2`
Rebases a commit on the current branch, to split the changes in those paths out into a separate commit. I often find myself accidentally combining a comment change in a different place, or wanting to separate out a piece of functionality which is all in one module, and it seems to take half a dozen steps to do it manually.
I made a bunch of shortcuts for me, common ones:
g a: git add, but add everything if no paths are given
g c: git commit
g d: diff, sometimes with some extra info
g dh: diff to HEAD
g l: log of current branch from fork point
g ls: log, showing file names with --stat
g lp: log, showing diff with -p
g r: rebase onto given branch, *or* else rebase interactive from current fork point.
g t: Add a tag with current branch name and date and comment
I split my rust tile game into two. That was a slog but very satisfying. The base engine stores a map with objects, each game specialises the objects and the interaction logic. Originally "push blocks, avoid enemies" and I want to add "follow user's flow-chart like program" instead.
That's compile-time templating not run-time polymorphism. Rust made me realise that for many many purposes those are conceptually incredibly similar. I think the difference is, almost all the types in the engine need to be templated on game-specific data because an Engine containing a Map containing an Obj they likely all need to be compiled knowing how many bytes Obj's Property struct uses.
git shortcuts
I also updated my git shortcuts with something I wanted to add for ages:
`git extract commithash path1 path2`
Rebases a commit on the current branch, to split the changes in those paths out into a separate commit. I often find myself accidentally combining a comment change in a different place, or wanting to separate out a piece of functionality which is all in one module, and it seems to take half a dozen steps to do it manually.
I made a bunch of shortcuts for me, common ones:
g a: git add, but add everything if no paths are given
g c: git commit
g d: diff, sometimes with some extra info
g dh: diff to HEAD
g l: log of current branch from fork point
g ls: log, showing file names with --stat
g lp: log, showing diff with -p
g r: rebase onto given branch, *or* else rebase interactive from current fork point.
g t: Add a tag with current branch name and date and comment
(no subject)
Nov. 5th, 2025 01:13 amvvalkyriI know this sounds kinda weird
But I just remembered eggs and cheese can be very quickly made into a meal
I've had a lot of trouble of late with what to eat. And a lack of Easy Food. It's hard to explain.
I also went through so many years of my life never encountering a rotten egg; if I left them too long in the fridge they'd just dehydrate. Making two eggs and cheese involved a surprising number of badd eggs. Knowing the eggs were unknown old (I decant them into a different container) meant I was smart enough to break into a separate container.
At some point I should talk about halloween and the weekend. There was a lot of lack of cope on halloween itself, born from no eating enough (see above) which meant I hung out with my local noisemakers and later saw 28 days later.
Y'know, I'm really tired. I think to sleep at this point. I wish we had a hot tub here, but toe warmers moved to my back really helped.
But I just remembered eggs and cheese can be very quickly made into a meal
I've had a lot of trouble of late with what to eat. And a lack of Easy Food. It's hard to explain.
I also went through so many years of my life never encountering a rotten egg; if I left them too long in the fridge they'd just dehydrate. Making two eggs and cheese involved a surprising number of badd eggs. Knowing the eggs were unknown old (I decant them into a different container) meant I was smart enough to break into a separate container.
At some point I should talk about halloween and the weekend. There was a lot of lack of cope on halloween itself, born from no eating enough (see above) which meant I hung out with my local noisemakers and later saw 28 days later.
Y'know, I'm really tired. I think to sleep at this point. I wish we had a hot tub here, but toe warmers moved to my back really helped.
Possible progress on rhodod smoothing, with images
Nov. 3rd, 2025 03:56 pmsonata_greenEyeballing it, it looks like there are two types of planes that we'd want to smooth out: a slope with shallow triangular pyramids (blue/teal), and a wall with deep square pyramids (red).
Rhombic_dodecahedra.jpg: en:User:AndrewKepert, Rhombic dodecahedra, cut-lines added by Sonata Green, CC BY-SA 3.0
Putting it together, it looks like we have a cuboctahedron (green) augmented with pyramids (red and blue). (These pyramids are relatively shallow, compared to those that would be required in order to form the first stellation of cuboctahedron.)
Rhombic_dodecahedra.jpg: en:User:AndrewKepert, Rhombic dodecahedra, image cropped and cut-lines added by Sonata Green, CC BY-SA 3.0
For both types of pyramids, we want to override the base's color if the other 3 or 4 faces unanimously disagree. The tricky cases are if anything else happens.
For the triangular pyramid, we can have 0, 1, 2, or 3 of the outer faces agree with the base. 0 and 3 are easy; an obvious idea would be to have 1 act as 0 and 2 act as 3, but then the base has no input at all. What would this look like? Is it what we want?
For the square pyramid, we can have 0-4 agreements, with the nontrivial cases being 1, 2, and 3. The obvious choice would be to tiebreak in favor of the base, so that we group {01|234}. Again, I don't have a good sense of what this would look like. Note that for the square grid, the analogous approach would (1) ignore the diagonally opposite cell entirely, and (2) have the diagonal-corners case look like this:
[240 words, running total 998/750.]
A Place To Tell Me Stuff and Things
Nov. 3rd, 2025 09:13 pmludySo my poll about polls (and other things) came down slightly on the side of not bothering with a Great Annual Do You Fancy Me Poll with the lack of new people here on DW. But there was more support for making a post with screened comments for people to tell me stuff and things including (if you want to) if you fancy me more not…
So here that is.
You can tell me anything you want to here - comments are screened and will stay screened - I’m doubting that any of my regular readers are going to confess an unexpected crush (though feel free - attraction can be fluid and surprising. It’s a bit depressing to only hear about any changes from people who used to be attracted to you and no longer are!) but I would love to know about ways you like to do (virtual or IRL) socialising and any other stuff and things you want to tell me/you would like me to know
So here that is.
You can tell me anything you want to here - comments are screened and will stay screened - I’m doubting that any of my regular readers are going to confess an unexpected crush (though feel free - attraction can be fluid and surprising. It’s a bit depressing to only hear about any changes from people who used to be attracted to you and no longer are!) but I would love to know about ways you like to do (virtual or IRL) socialising and any other stuff and things you want to tell me/you would like me to know
More smoothed-diagonal honeycomb thoughts
Nov. 2nd, 2025 03:00 pmsonata_greenI've installed Emacs, git, and wc-mode. My $100 Windows laptop is gradually learning to pretend to be a real computer.
A cubic honeycomb meets four cells around an edge, and eight at a vertex. I think (I might be wrong) that a rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb meets three at an edge, six around one type of vertex, and four around the other type of vertex.
If I want an odd number of cells around a vertex, then it seems to me that the arrangement of cells must be described by a polyhedron with an odd number of faces (each face corresponding to the vertex figure of the relevant vertex of one of the cells). (This is not the same operation as forming the dual honeycomb; the cubic honeycomb has a 🐛vertex polyhedron🐛 of an octahedron, while its dual honeycomb is another cubic honeycomb that's syncopated relative to the original.)
What about hexagonal prisms, arranged in a face-centered cubic lattice? No, those meet four (or more) at a vertex. In particular, three hexagons are met by a fourth on the next layer. Syncopated cubes give five to a vertex by the same logic, but where edges cross we necessarily get four cells meeting, so the syncopated-prism strategy in general is out.
Can we make a honeycomb with a vertex polyhedron of a triangular prism? This requires three cells with square vertices and two with triangular vertices.
We've come a long way from the original problem, though. We're only interested in vertices in the context of a half-honeycomb that meshes with its rotation or mirror image. Furthermore, the problematic case with the square tessellation was opposite corners matching across a diagonal (▚); if there's a two-and-two with matching corners being adjacent, the result is fine.
In the rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb, the four-cell vertex has a tetrahedral arrangement, where any two cells are necessarily adjacent. (You can cut a tetrahedron in half by bisecting four of its six edges, making a square cut-face. Each half has two of the original four vertices.) The six-cell vertex's vertex polyhedron is a cube; for three-and-three, there are two possible arrangements: each three can meet each other around a single vertex, or they can make a C shape (the Cs are making out sloppy style). Each of these lends itself to a fairly straightforward choice of plane of bisection, though in the latter case we bisect four of the cube's faces, so it's not as simple as "this corner of the rhombic dodecahedron is a certain color".
[440/250 words, running total 758/500.]
Translation notes
Nov. 2nd, 2025 09:58 pmwildeabandonOne of my assignments this semester is an exegesis of Psalm 139, and I figured it would be good to start by doing my own translation of it, which is how I discovered that in verse 15, which the NRSV renders "My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth." the verb used, קרם, means specifically to weave variegated, colourful material. I found this delightful.
ETA. Also, in verse 13, the bit which the NRSV renders "it was you who formed my inward parts" could also be read as "it was you who bought my kidney". This is also delightful, in quite a different way.
ETA. Also, in verse 13, the bit which the NRSV renders "it was you who formed my inward parts" could also be read as "it was you who bought my kidney". This is also delightful, in quite a different way.
Let's try this again
Nov. 1st, 2025 02:13 pmsonata_greenIt's been a decade since the last time I tried something like this. Let's see if this time goes any better.
My goal is 250 words per day. Extra words from previous days can roll over to subsequent days (so I can build up a buffer), but I can't slosh in the other direction (so each day has a hard deadline). In other words, the goal is that by the end of the Nth of November, I'll have published a total of 250N words. For sleep-schedule reasons, the deadline is 23:00 UTC.
...and I'm at like 100 words so far. Not ideal.
The thing I want to talk about right now unfortunately requires pictures to really convey properly, but let's have a go at it.
Suppose you have a square grid where each cell can be in one of two states, and you want to smooth out stairstep diagonals into proper diagonals. You can subdivide each cell into a central diamond and four triangular corners. Let the diamond be colored according to the initial/naive state of the cell; let each corner follow the rule that it's colored according to the majority of the four cells that meet at its right-angled vertex. (Break ties by matching the center.)
The need to break ties makes this slightly ugly. On a grid of hexagons, we can similarly inscribe a smaller hexagon whose vertices are the midpoints of the edges of the cell. This lets us smooth out lines with no special cases.
How do we generalize this to three dimensions? On a cube, we have two different types of diagonals: the "wide staircase" where we cut off an edge, and the "Q*bert staircase" where we cut off a corner. If we pick one or the other, it's not too horrible, but ideally we want to handle both cases.
The 3D analogue of the hexagon might be the rhombic dodecahedron?
[318 words.]