Richard Katz

hey, if anybody wants to get in touch with me, my phone number these days is 510 236 1865 and my email address is richard808 at gmail dot com

cellphone 510 219 4255

social security number is ... yeah, right.

i'm gonna be real impressed if somebody has figured out a robot that's clever enough to turn any of that into a spam addressee address.

Back to Frog's Homepage

A Principal at Frog's, now Emeritus; and an Author: published and unpublished copyrighted works in text format.

Chief Creative Officer at GetSkilz Inc (better open that one in a new window) and the originator of FrogOJT

Update 2004: I wrote out the FrogOJT/GetSkilz method as a Proposal for Veriflo division of Parker Hannifin. I called it FrogOJT2004

Update 2006: HowTo Movies studiously watched form the basis of a System of Human Capital Accounting. I called this Beancounting What They Know.

Update on the Process of Public Art 2006: The Public Art Armature. Here is a presentation to the Belmont CA City Council, with twelve linked illustrations. Some of the pictures show Elliot Katz 's "Cells" sculpture.

  • I-5 (screenplay)
  • Modern Biology (stageplay) Update 2002: Here are some JPG images for an acting troupe or a production company, to introduce the play. Cultured Fibroblasts; Uncultured Fibroblasts; Letter to the Actors Page 1; Letter to the Actors Page 2. I meant to make these four pages into a zippy PDF file, but it didn't work out. They are about a megabyte each. Pretty unusual images, in my humble opinion.
  • Accidents (stageplay) Here is Act 4; and here is Page 26, with the Hebrew in Hebrew, scanned .pdf's
  • Arrested in Grenada (stageplay)
  • The Point (stageplay)
  • In the Best Interest of Anna Freud (stageplay)
  • Toxic Truckin'. Confessions of a Hazardous Waste Hauler (magazine article, scanned .pdf)
  • Skating Unrinked, An Insider's Guide to Outdoor Skating Trails in the San Francisco Bay Area

    Want a quick skating lesson? Andre Lacroix shows you how, in a Quicktime video. Check out Skating Forward (might take a minute of two to download)

    Here's the cover of Skating Unrinked in Black and White.

    Here's one webpage with all updates to skating trails domestic and international I find out, or can think of, or hear about; nowhere near as rigorous as the published work, but perhaps befitting to an electronic medium, i.e. a website. Websites can be anywhere from uptight and stupid (most "corporate" websites, totally lacking information) to blogs (weblogs, full of information and ... well, you've got to read one or two to see what's the good the bad and the ugly about blogs.)

  • Powerful Speech (essay)
  • Yeast, Oxidative Phosphorylation, and Rotenone Sensitivity (1971) UPdate 2003: in PDF
  • A second article about yeast, rotenone, site I, and oxygen concentration, which Prof Britton Chance put his stamp of approval on as a coauthor. I think that the most important finding we made, actually, was that microorganisms in batch culture (or any culture) need an adequate oxygen supply; conversely, it was a finding that everybody else (at least everybody I've ever asked about it) pays no attention to this; they don't even measure the oxygen concentration. Anybody growing a batch culture of microorganisms in a shaker is doing so with zero dissolved oxygen concentration. Got that? in PDF format (scanned PDF, scanned in 2003, thirty years later after publication.) Oh, and that Candida utilis yeast are inhibited by rotenone when harvested in stationary phase, but not when harvested while they are growing (but only if the oxygen concentration is above zero!!!! Think about it: What kind of exponential growth do you expect to observe if they are gasping for air? See Falling off a Log, below.)

    2006 Let me add a few thoughts here, commenting on these early articles:

    The second article doesn't call much attention to the careful attention that must be paid to the oxygenation of the culture of Candida utilis yeast. The first article laid great stress on this, and carefully laid out a method by which adequate oxygenation could be achieved. (like Stanislavski, I don't believe in The Method; but I duly and truly believe that one must have a method, whether it be Acting or Science that one is engaged in.) This is a real failing, a failing that is all too human. You just lose the important lessons along the way. The previous paragraph, the one supra about "... Chance put his stamp of approval on as a coauthor ..." makes it sound like everybody else is some kind of a dumbass, not to recognize this great Lesson of Keep Yer Oxygen Up! But it's pretty obvious, from an inspection of my own two publications, that even the discoveror himself falls victim to this kind of carelessness, right away. How could I expect other biologists to give a damn about oxygenation, when I forgot to mention it myself, ie took it for granted, just like all the rest of them did, and still do?

    Tell you what, though: I'm going to find some kid, some high school kid, and I"m going to talk him/her and his/her parents into doing the oxygenation experiment for a high school science project. The kid will set up cultures of yeast in nephelometric culture flasks with side arms (from, say, Bellco); which are being cocultured on a shaker with some Vibrio (nee Achromobacter) fischeri in , say, seventy percent seawater; and using a video camera you make a movie of the luminescence extinguishing from asphyxiation. You show that movie in fast forward, with an analog or digital clock face in the frame at all times, you've got a PUBLICATION. That would be the first scientific publication on YouTube.

  • o157 and Hotrod Genes. An article speculating on the origin of E coli 0157:H7 (1998) UPDATED in 2002 and further updated in 2006 about Popeye and spinach
  • The Big Shrug 2002. This is a PDF of an essay written in longhand in the margins of a bunch of Impressionist paintings, displayed as a PDF , about germ warfare and those scientists who are like Ken Alibek, "the Devil's right hand man." While you're at it, check out Notes on The Big Shrug, a kind of Making of ... essay.
  • Sculpture - A Short Story (1997)
  • In the Best Interest of Elian Gonzalez (2000)
  • Training, Naval Training & What's Next(1997) Update 2003 Check out the DarpaVideos page; well, maybe not; my coworkers at GetSkilz Inc didn't particularly cotton to the Deckwinch movies, so the Naval Training part kind of got left out. That's okay; if you go to the Naval Training page, you'll see links to DeckWinch1 and Deckwinch 2, movies in which a Barlow deckwinch on a racing sailboat gets disassembled and then further disassembled. Someday it will get cinematically put back together.
  • Just Chemicals: A Script. Louis Pasteur teaches you biology, and chemistry (2000) updated 2002
  • Biology Education from 2006 about how biology should be taught: Teach the universality (on Earth, anyway) of the Biochemical Pathways metabolic chart, and eventually people will stop dwelling on the supposedly huge differences between say chimps and humans; or for that matter chimps and yeast.
  • Stationary Phase a poem (2000)
  • Batch Culture (2001) about how humans are a batch culture, and that's not so good
  • Who's in the Driver's Seat? Who's really running the show, biologically? An essay (2000)
  • Falling Off a Log + NADH2 , a graphical depiction of the life of a culture of microorganisms suffering from chronic degenerative ischemia, superimposed on a tree laid over on its side. Falling off a log. You've never seen anything like this before. You can read an explication of Falling Off a Log if you like, which tells you the underlying problem of microbiologist's use of the shake flask and the air sparger. (There are no datapoints, because I drew the curves from memory, thirty years after I did the experiments, and the data are like Hilary Koprowski's lab records: Gone. That's a long story, why the notebooks and stripcharts are gone. All I've got left is a picture of me doing the experiment, getting a readout of total NADH fluorescence in a culture of yeast, not shaken (in a shake flask or otherwise) and stirred only to give a little more retention time to the bubbles of oxygen that were servometrically i.e. oxystatically released, or sparged, into the culture medium. (Sparger, sparge, sparging, et seq, going for the keywords here. Shake flask and shake flasks. That should do it. )
  • Ophelia Obverse and Ophelia Reverse , a wallhanging/sculpture collage done in 2000. The texts that you see pasted onto the motherboard canvas have to do with fuzzy logic and data mining. They are not on this website (in case you're looking for them). I don't want anybody to think they've seen this thing or experienced it because they saw a picture of it or because they read something.
  • Digital and Analog A short story 2001 About an art professor who needs to get her laptop repaired. It's about digital art.
  • Thunder A short story 2002 About a guy (obviously me) who is trying to peddle the idea of digital videos as training tools or marketing tools or whatever and comes up against the "steal your thunder" problem. (This was removed Sept 2004, temporarily; it names names, and i'm gonna change those names before putting it back up, since i went back to a certain company looking for work and i had vilified said comany, by name, in this story. Good story, though.)
  • VideoSoftware 2002 An essay about buying software to edit digital videos with. As told by a maven. He wants you shouldn't get ripped off.
  • Lots of Quicktime videos, all HowTo's, at this page of Sample Videos. How to do surgery, plant tissue culture, sports, home repair, lots of stuff.
  • Some videos that, for one reason or another, I don't want to associate with FrogOJT or any other entity, just myself. At the bottom of this page, for example, there''s a link to amazingly improved ("tweaked") ultrasound images. And what follows are movies that, for one reason or another e.g. confidentiality I want to be able to link to, but not heavily advertise (like anybody is actually listening here)
    Check out
    split screen video1 split screen video 2 of how to make coffeedrinks. You see a left and a right view simultaneously of a person doing something quick and complicated. This is the stuff of essays on left and right and mind and all that, but not now. The reason this was shot at all is shown in split screen video 3, which was marketing monkey material for getting some work at Peet's maybe.
  • Work from 2003 that I like:

    GetSkilz Inc applied to the Defense Advanced REsearch Projects Agency = DARPA for some money to use short unadorned digital video sequences as the stimulus for cognition research DARPA is interested in. Particularly, it's research that Professor Britton Chance is spearheading. Here's our Proposal and Application for 2003. That proposal mentions something about cutting boards, the things you use to cut meat and veggies in a kitchen. Wood good; plastic bad. Here's a pdf that proves that once and for all (i.e. that wooden cutting boards dissolve bacteria and plastic cutting boards grow bacteria). Save some time here; just look at a quick jpg of the relevant data showing that wooden cutting boards ace them bugs (from Dr Cliver's lab, when he was in Wisconsin; now at UC Davis.)

    I tried to teach that, about the cutting boards, as a canonical Experiment, to some high school students. Now that was a Big Project: I went to all the trouble of getting certified as a teacher in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, headquartered in Richmond, California, just so I could get access to some students, so I could see what the real deal is with learning & teaching. I signed up to teach biology, but ended up taking over classes in everything from English to Computers to Chemistry to ... well, hell, one day, at Portola Middle School in El Cerrito, I was The Principal! No kidding! I was actually sitting in the Vice Principal's office, but the Principal was ALSO gone for the day unexpectedly, and I did a great job (everybody said) of administering the school that day. Lots happened; maybe some day I'll write a little history of that. But suffice it to say, that what I really had in mind as The Teacher was first, to see if showing VHS videos to the kids is a good way to teach (answer: by actual count, there were always zero kids with their eyes on the screen); and second, that the kids are not learning any science. They don't know what an experiment is, despite their rote lessons in the Scientific Method and their little exercises doing "experiments". But, they are interested in Rap Music. Very interested. So I wrote some Rap Lyrics about cutting boards. It's called Bad Bugs. My kid, Abe, said he's gonna set it to a beat. He tells me that the guy who does that part is called The Producer. Yay Abe.

    Oh, and while I was at it, it occurred to me that short unadorned digital video sequences were brainfood, i.e. an exogenous substrate for whatever reaction is being catalyzed by the brain. These exogenous sequences get processed by the brain in a mysterious fashion; similar (?) endogenous sequences are the stuff of which dreams are made; right, The stuff that dreams are made of, like Sam Spade said. I made a picture of that. It's the DARPA/IPTO/AugCog logo with the additon of some unspooled movie film on the brain part and a roll of paper computer tape on the circuit board side; not a bad piece of digital art. Unspooled movie film is something you might want to think about. It's actually a jpg of a Pinkerton hat, bought from Bill KNudsen proprietor of Golden Gate Western Wear of San Francisco and Richmond. The Art is inspired by Commander Dylan Schmorrow of DARPA/IPTO/AugCog, who gave a speech somewhere, that I read on the net here, and he said he had a hat out in the car that did some remarkable things for your cognitive abilities. Well, actually he just said that he would have that hat one of these days.

  • This cognition proposal, and Dr Chance's research into cognition, where he goes on the Teaching that cognition can be measured biophysically as increased flow and volume of oxygenated hemoglobin to specific tissues of brain, got me to thinkin'. Read the pdf WmHarvey of the Brain. Then have a look at what seems to me is a pretty good stab at what the brain is dealing with most of the time: Producing, editing, distributing, exhibiting, and screening movies. Yes, and short unadorned digital video sequences would be an exogenous substrate for the normal metabolic activity of the brain, which is to deal with these movies. My version of what kind of material the brain is dealing with is unspooledmoviefilm.jpg I read in the New Yorker magazine that Einstein once told an interviewer that he thought in pictures; the article in the New Yorker didn't mention if they were moving pictures or not. The trick with unspooled movie film (bearing in mind that most people have never seen any unspooled 35 mm movie film) is that you can look at it with your naked eye and see quite clearly at any point what image you've got at that point. That's a Colt .45. An M1911A Government model, to be exact. Ideal for home defense.
  • Here's a picture of Dr Chance himself getting his brain scanned with the brain imaging apparatus of his own design.
  • 2004 I elaborated on that unspooledmoviefilm idea to encompass the process for creating FrogOJT short unadorned digital video sequences with text tracks for indexed expertise. This is my magnum opus. I should put in some keywords here: katsu ben; katsuben; descriptionist; jargonist; compressionist; linguist. That should do it. Have a look, it's fascinating. If I do say so myself. Here's a lower rez version of the Process etc that's "smaller" (fits on the screen); and here's a Commentary on the Process for creating short unadorned digital video sequences with text tracks for indexed expertise. and here's a picture borrowed from some other website of the Japanese benshi from the days of silent movies in Japan. 2005 Here's an updated version of the unspooled movie film graphic.
  • 2006 The short unadorned motion picture idea comes from the earliest movies, back when that was of necessity all there was -- a few seconda of moving images, and no tricks yet, of any kind. This letter to Louis Vuitton is chauvinistic about the Lumiere Brothers contribution, and what followed. Remember, the whole idea of FrogOJT/GetSkilz movies is not to tell the story; it's to tell the truth.

     

  • Analogies and Homologies: A graphical depiction with dolphins and sharks and human forelimbs of why a VCR or other movie format is not going to cut it for teaching anybody anything. You need short unadorned digital video sequences in Quicktime format; nothing else has a text track.

     

  • Here's an essay about Lou Kahn, the architect who designed the Richards Building. His son, Nathaniel, made a movie called My Architect about Lou. I'm in it. I worked in the building; I'm the last guy to see Lou alive; and it's a really good movie. Dr Chance and Lou Kahn did that building kind of the way Jonas Salk and Lou did the Salk Institute, I guess. Dr Chance moved out of it eventually, around the turn of the century. Doesn't matter. For me it will always be Richard's Richards Building building Richard. 2004 I have my own thoughts now about that movie, partially derived from the making of the movie; the Process, wherein I came to realize a thing or two. So there's a movie script at the end of the file.

     

  • Professor Chance told me that international sailing, also called offshore sailing, or just sailboat racing, is a good place to study cognition. "When to Tack" is decisionmaking of the highest cognitive order, according to him, and that's good enough for me. So here's a start in that direction, How To Grind. Maybe one of these days I should live long enough to actually get to When to Tack. And here's a dumb movie of me shooting a still shot with a SteadicamJR of how to rig a camera on a sailboat. That movie was shot by accident.

    (Shifting into truckdriver mode here for just a second, I'd say, "Now see, look: There's lots of ways to do this, but this here is the way I do it," referring strictly to the rigging job on the camera, using two shroud cleats from Johnson Marine of San Jose CA bought at KKMI chandlery in Point Richmond. That there [wait a sec, gotta shift back out of truckdriver mode here, there we go], that is a trucker's way of being nonthreatening. I'm going to concentrate in future on variations of that "... this here's the way I do it ... " phraseology; how can anybody get pissed off at you when you put it like that, eh?)

    Putting on the gentleman scholar's cap, once again, and puffing on the old meerschaum: One little thing I've noticed is the disconnect between the written language and the spoken language. This is very pronounced in a school, like a high school for instance. You ask the kids to read something to you, from a book, and it sounds like a foreign language; but if you ask them a question, or just talk to them, it's obvious that they are native speakers of English. If you ask them to read something to you, most of them simply refuse to do so. If you insist on it, they'll read it (they can all read pretty well, by the way, despite what you've read in the newspapers) but it will be halting. If you make them read it, out loud, several times, it transmogrifies into something that starts to sound like English. That is a major breakthrough for the one who is reciting, by the way. Changes his/her life, I've noticed. (Doesn't matter what the book is; Shakespeare even.)

    Now, generalizing on this just a bit, look at books on How to Sail. Sailing Fundamentals, for example, by Whatsisname; or Learning to Sail, by the other Whatsisname. Big names. Guess what? The disconnect between written and spoken language is nearly complete with these dudes and their publishing houses. The word "grind" simply does not appear. On a boat, the ONLY word that is used to refer to operating the deckwinches is "grind". 'Nuff said; but let me throw in just for good measure that the only word used to refer to operating of of them there winches, on a boat, is the word "grind". And "grinding". And "Grinder." Let's e'en give it a name worthy of such a grand concept: Study_Grind. That there, that's what we call "literary", see? Go ahead, explicate that all you want. It's definitely worthy of it.

     

  • On the Process of Acquiring Public Art. An essay. More of a rant.

     

  • My friend Danny Forer and his crew made a trailbike trail or two out in Marin. We went out there, I took some pictures, my friend Bud Helms made a movie out of it (and whatever else was on the camera memory card at the time), and here it is.

     

  • The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF Rwy) wants to take these wigwags out of commission. The People of the City of Richmond want to keep them, because they are quaint. The People would also like to have the Railroad stop driving over the grade crossing at Richmond Avenue in Point Richmond, where the wigwags are located, since it's a mighty inconvenience, and probably in noncompliance with California Public Utilities Commission General Order 135, which states in relevant part that "... switching operations at a grade crossing are to be avoided whenever possible." My take on this is that BNSF ought to replace the cast iron coverplates on the wigwags with clear plastic ones. Why? Because we all need to see a one hundred year old electrical device that is All Analog, in operation. And here it is, a Wigwag in Operation with the Cover Off. All the schoolchildren should see that. Strikes me that it's the other end of some spectrum, where Solid State is on one end and the WigWag is at the other. It's nothing BUT moving parts, but it ain't just some mechanical gizmo neither. The general idea of trains switching at a grade crossing is probably unlawful anyway, as detailed in California Public Utilities Commission General Order 135

     

  • Here's something special: My brother Gary is the inventor of the Periodic Roundtable. This thing isn't "3D", not just some dopey computer graphic; it's a real object. We'll have more about it soon, but for right now, check out Assembling the Periodic Roundtable . The guy in the movie is pointing to the halogens, indicating that astatine-iodine-bromine-chlorine-fluorine are on successive layers of the Roundtable IN THE SAME VERTICAL PLACE. Contemplate that. Think orbitals and shells. Pretty profound.

    (Here's some pretty special information about that video: It's just impossible to assemble the Periodic Roundtable, or most any object that's got a nice arrangement and fit, in a rapidfire fashion. Well, there are exceptions; I've seen folks who could fieldstrip a .45 Colt auto and the disassembly was smooth as hot butter, and the reassembly would go damn near as smooth. [Maybe that's what made that gun the answer to what its inventor, John Browning, called tradition; Tradition, he said to his son John N. Browning, is ALWAYS your stiffest competition. In order to get his radically new pistol adopted by the US Army, it had to be not just as good as a revolver, it had to be better. More reliable, in fact totally reliable; and completely maintainable in the field. That was back in 1905.] So how do we get the Periodic Roundtable to go back together zip zip zip? Easy. You run the video backwards; or more precisely, you run the Quicktime taking-it-apart movie through your fancy video-fiddling program with the Backward (Video Only) filter checked. Not available in Quicktime pro, unfortunately; I think I used Adobe Premiere, or maybe it was Adobe GoLive 5. Then save it under a different name, and record some guy saying the names of the elements in the order they appear in the backward movie, and Add the "backward" sound track. That you can do with just Quicktime Pro.

    By the way, that movie was shot with some pretty new hardware, a Toshiba digital still camera, the PDR-M81, which as you see can take a 30 sec Quicktime movie and write it to its SmartMedia card. Everybody oughta have something like that. You get one of those, you could make little HowTo's yourself. Nothing would make me happier than to have that kind of competition. Because right now, the stiffest competition for these short little no-bullshit HowTo's is Tradition. )

     

  • Work from 2004 very little narrative from now on:
  • Items from 2004 that used to reside on Jason Katz-Brown's server but got relocated to this server, after a cracker attack
    • Sept 2004 not uploaded yet

       

  • Work from 2005
    • Flu. a personal narrative about virology back in the 1970s. I sent this to the New Yorker magazine, to the Shouts and Murmurs editor. Sometime in 2005 the New Yorker seems to have acquired a column called Personal Narrative. Hmmm. Here's a better title for this piece: Adventitious Agent.

 

A picture of An Insanely Great Sculpture by Alan Rice and Richard Katz entitled Soap.

A series of pictures of Al Rice cast aluminum sculptures from the 1970s

A Picture of Richard in 1969 with an essay on doing experiments.

A Picture of Richard in 1995 . A headshot, with no explanation whatsoever.

A Picture of Richard with his 1959 White Diesel eighteen-wheeler, hauling a whale up to the Lawrence Hall of Science in the 1970's; with an essay on context and inflection entitled "Just Freight". Here's a movie of it, running

That model of truck - the "HiCab" 5000 by White Motor Truck Company of Cleveland, Ohio - was known as a Japanese White. It was (and still is) the only tractor ever made that was made entirely out of Fibreglas. That was (and to some extent this still is) the era of the Corvette; the deeply sculpted "look" that the designers got from the fiberglass was admired by hotrodders and hotshots of all stripes. The truck had a naturally aspirated Cummins 220, so an amateur (like me) could take it out and haul 80,000 and not punch a hole in the side of the block the first time out.
It takes a mile or two until you learn how to keep your R's up in the real world, even on flat ground like they have a lot of out in California's Central Valley where I went to haul tomatoes in 1976. Going up steep hills and then down the other side, though, with eighty grand of truck pushing you as hard as it can, that's definitely best left to the professional drivers. And one way or another, I became one.

The screenplay I-5 is about the trucking business, and about nuclear finance. When I was in the trucking business, we hauled a lot of big outdoor sculptures (which inspired Sculpture - A Short Story some years later.) One big outdoor sculpture gets hauled to LA in the screenplay, I-5. In the real world, I worked on a big sculpture that's for sale right now (October 1997). Take a look at

An Insanely Great Sculpture by Alan Rice and Richard Katz entitled Soap.

Two more pictures of Richard Katz hauling stuff around on the back of a truck. The Indo Arch on a truck; and here's the Indo Arch as it stands today and possibly forever at 16th and K Streets in Sacramento CA. Here's a scan of a color print of Hauling Tomatoes circa 1976. That picture is a little hard to interpret. Don't worry about it.

Here's something else Alan Rice and I built, something completely different. It's a forklift trailer , which Alan and I built from the elevator cab from that same soap factory. Alan never ever signed his work. I asked him to sign this one. He grabbed his welding rod and while I thought he was inscribing his name on the back bumper, he wrote Frogmobile on it. That was back in about 1980 or so. Twenty three years later, Harold Harbarth of Berkeley came into possession of this forklift trailer (different view in this picture) and "restored" it, or reconditioned it, as Harold puts it. So Harold gets a lot of credit here, including credit for the pictures (which I scanned into jpg's. More credits: Gunther of Gunther's Welding in Richmond made the pedestal in the front end, and the ramps (fashioned from the frame rails of a Utility flatbed), and attached the axle, and fashioned the inside out wheels (to increase the width between the tires, so you could haul an ungodly big forklift with it), and aligned that axle with so much toe in that even though it only has one axle it runs true down the boulevard; and John Woods contributed the front axle, from a garbage truck. Good choice; any truck front axle can haul eight thousand legally, as I recall, but the fact is that this sumbitch could probably handle twice that much and not even grunt, as long as you didn't run'er too hard nor too fast and overheat the tires. The only thing lacking here is a picture of this trailer with a forklift on it. It used to look pretty classic when it was out there hauling Tree Frog Trucking's 1948 MotoLift. 'Course, we never painted it. We never painted anything. Harold Harbarth, on the other hand, wouldn't have anything to do with any vehicle that wasn't nicely cherried out. Wish I was like that.

Here's another sculpture for sale, not too expensive all things considered: Minimalist Tree by Paul Horesby

Speaking of sculpture, my kid Jason Katz-Brown does some mean origami. Here's an original. and here's bear12_37_AM5_31_99.html, BlueShark4_00PM5_30_99.html, Dinosaur4_10_PM5_30_99.html, dragonPtA12_37_AM5_31_99.html, eagle4_20_PM5_30_99.html, stegosaurus12_37_AM5_31_99.html, and turtlePtA12_31_AM5_31_99.html. He's gonna try and put them for sale on ebay.com. You'll have to link to ebay.com on your own. don't want to lose you right now.

An essay about Frog's and Writing-- Written a long time ago, as you can see, and now surprisingly anachronistic

Once upon a time, back when the Internet was just a teenager and the Macintosh hadn't been invented yet --- around 1983-- there was a guy in Berkeley who wanted to write professionally. Me. I looked around and decided that I ought to use some kind of word processor, because from what I had heard, you could type the stuff and not have to retype it.

I tried going to a Word Processor, a tradesperson who owned a word processing machine and you paid him by the page.

The Word Processing service was real cumbersome. They apparently couldn't read my handwriting, and there were tons of typo's. And it was really expensive.

So I went to a computer store. And this guy in the store just about sells me a Leading Edge computer for $3500. A real ripoff.

So I looked around for a place to maybe rent a computer, just to try one out. No such luck; there's no such place.

So I bought a brace of computers and opened up a shop to rent computers.

This is a picture of the shop.

The picture was taken with an Apple Quicktake. You can rent the camera for $25 a day. It comes with pretty good software. Frog's made up a set of For Dummies instructions so you can turn your "photos" (your electronic images inside the camera when you get back to your studio) into PhotoShop®files.

Nowadays the shop rents all kinds of computer gear. It provides access to the latest information age equipment with none of your money invested.

The shop rents some pretty high end computers. You can come in and rent a relatively expensive setup to produce digitized videos. There's a Quicktime®video on another page of this Website that was produced right here at the shop. Bud Helms did most of the computer work. You could hire him at this shop to make you a Hollywood production, and it would be as good as anybody's and better'n most.

The video shows how to shoot a hockey puck and score a goal. By the time we're done we're gonna have little videos of how to do just about everything that's tricky, everything and then some that requires a "knack."

The video is maybe where this computing thing is going in the future. Because it's available on the Net, and that's a big thing. Because it's knowledge that's not available any other way. Because it's a lot of information. Because it's free. Like the rest of the Net, it's free; with a big But. It's Free, But ...

The shop rents Walt Whitman Specials, too. That's what you might call an old machine that's only really suitable for word processing. It doesn't take much of a computer to create text files. You don't need much hardware and you don't need much in the way of software either. A Mac SE30 is all you'll ever need to get a Nobel prize in literature (or a Powerbook 140 and a cup of coffee.) Generally you can't rent software (read the print on the envelope your software came in), but Macintosh always shipped with a free text processor (TeachText, now SimpleText) and Windows always shipped with a free word processor (Windows Write, now NotePad). Pretty soon now we're gonna try and get some really cheap Net access machines to rent out, complete with Net access -- you know, those $500 wonders the Silicon Valley heavy hitters are always talking about. We'll rent them for about $50 a month, if our current biz model holds up in the near future like it has in the past.

So you see I did get a computer to write with (like I'm writing with it right now,) and I did turn out a few manuscripts. You can download them as text files, free.

There's a folder of

skating trails around the San Francisco Bay Area. (That folder was actually published by HarperCollins as Skating Unrinked, An Insider's Guide to Outdoor Skating Trails in the San Francisco Bay Area; but I kept the electronic rights to the manuscript, including Internet rights.) For the skating trails, you aren't getting the graphics, you're just getting the text. If you actually read through a few chapters, you'll want to buy the book. You can order it from Amazon.com here on the Web. It shouldn't set you back more than about ten bucks. Update - 9/98 Out of Print.

I want to get an insanely great list of all the skating trails in the world together. This International List of Skating Trails is under construction on the International Skating Trails page.

There are plays and screenplays (you can produce any or all of them, but don't forget who copyrighted them and to whom, therefore, you owe a percentage) :

the plays are

There will someday be a text version of Toxic Truckin'. Confessions of a Hazardous Waste Hauler. East Bay Express, 6, 2, 1983. Front page. (This was before the word processors came along, so there is no "text" version. There's a paper version, and it's got pictures that tell half the story [by Mark Sarfati]; and maybe I'll scan it in some day.) Good Story. And Here It IS! August 2002 Toxic Truckin'. Confessions of a Hazardous Waste Hauler (magazine article, scanned .pdf)

I have a passing interest in semiotics, and if you want to read a manuscript I wrote dealing with Powerful Speech, it's available on this Website too.

2002 Working on ultrasound in medicine. An interesting thing, that the totally artificial, or "false", ultrasound image is something that exists only insofar as you see it on a screen; (think about that; the last thing you could ever claim to see is a sound wave;) thus The way it looks on a monitor (in fact, on different monitors) is crucial to how well you can interpret the moving image, the ultrasound video. We're going to use it to learn from, to teach with, so of course we're very concerned with the look , which is the feel. Here's an ultrasound image and a tweaked ultrasound image. (If anybody wants to know the Materials and Methods section for this experiment, katz@frogojt.com and I'll ask Dr Harness what the answer is to whatever it is you want to know.) For those who have fast connection to the Internet (as opposed to half-fast) and also have a fast computer (as opposed to a halffast computer), you'll see it perfectly clearly with the movie UltrasoundTweaking.mov 2009 looking back I see that this writing never included the name of the video tweaking program from Steve Schaffran. Must have been some patent problem or other. Well, screw that, th program was/is called VideoPrism and a damn fine program it was/is.

My California driver's license number is N0801008 . I recently found a nice old screwdriver on the road that had S908146 neatly engraved on it. Definitely a screwdriver that had some character. A Philips. Somebody with a mind like mine had engraved all his tools with his driver's license number, long enough ago that it didn't have the right number of characters (my tools mostly say N801008 , because that's how a driver's license number was supposed to look; the DMV had to add another alphanumeric for some reason, back in the Eighties, I believe). Who cares? Well, it's traditional in the truckdriving trade to say, "He's got about as much brains as God give a screwdriver." Now, in the Millennium, a screwdriver can have enough brains , via Google, to find its way home. Could. Maybe. Or , as we say in the truckdrivin' trade and in the common parlance, to come in outta the rain. I'll know this system is working when I can do a Google search for N0801008 and get to this page. Come to think of it, I don't know what pages I'll get. That will be interesting. Google is interesting. Definitely the next level in intelligence. BTW, I made a link out of that alphanumeric of my CDL from the DMV because supposedly Google pays more attention to things that are links. August 2002 Update October 2002: Google finds N0801008 just fine, and brings you very rapidly to This Page. And, in a preface of how things are going to be and to some extent are now, about half of the links referenced by Google in this fashion are to webpages entirely in Chinese. May 2003 And now there's an interesting link to John Doe's S908146 driver's license number as well. Careful, it's pornographic. In fact, it's REALLY pornographic. Well, it's graphic anyways.

 

  • Here at the end, something totally anonymous. Update 2006: Frank Quattrone was cleared of all charges. These pictures are all that's left of a sculpture called Frank's Cross to Bear.

     

  • A picture of the sunrise from the porch of our condo in Los Barriles, Baja California Sur, Mexico. The real reason to have this on this page, or this website, is so I can have it coughed up by Google Adwords. You need a fixed IP address to do that. the actual address of this picture of the sunrise form the porch in Los Barriles, which is actually in the next town called Buenavista, is www.frogojt.com/bajagoogle.com . There should be some pictures of the condo, so here they are, but they are out of date, it's been improved since these were taken. bajacondo1 bajacondo2 bajacondo3 bajacondo4

     

  • I asked Dr Chance if he called his quantitative cognition studies in humans "neurophysics" ; he emailed back that he preferred the term "neurobiophysics". One could not improve on that term. It was Chance who envisioned (and asked me about) indexed, or rather indexable, movies; hence my concept of Indexed Expertise. I've been thinking about this for a while now, and wrote it up in Biophysics of the Boulevard
  • 2005 An article about Awa Kenzo, the legendary Japanese archer, entitled Awa Sensei
  • 2005 Biological Oxygen about oxygen demand by yeast and by human brain -- what it means to not have enough
  • 2006 Biological Oxygen Part 2 , mostly about shake flasks ; and a picture of a shake flask ( a culture flask with sidearm )
  • 2006 The full text of Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, provided by Project Gutenberg back in 1996; with a very short introcduction about the wages of sin. Marlovians (like me) believe that Marlowe faked his own death to avoid persecution for the capital crime of -- get this -- atheism. Well, JC had been prosecuted and nailed to a cross for the capital crime of working miracles on Shabbos, so it was a good idea to do this real-life, no-bullshit roleplaying and disappear to avoid the fundamentalists. Marlovians (real fundamentalist ones, like me) further believe that Marlowe wrote plays after that under the nom de plume of William Shakespeare.

     

  • gsgsbk.html (just in case I personally forget what the file is called)
  • More 2006 about biological oxygen, particularly the NADH dehydrogenase genes of some yeasts, like Candida; a sculpture called Expression of ND . It's genesis was occasioned by reading about how the problem with mitochondrial diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimers and Friederich's and Leber's et seq is Complex I , otherwise known as NADH dehydrogenase like Candida utilis has when it goes into stationary phase. 2007 should have a link to a genuine scientific experiment where it has now been demonstrated that a shakeflask doesn't work. But now, in 2007, it is possible to upload your discoveries directly to Google, ie Google Docs and Spreadsheets just came out yesterday, free for the public to use and enjoy. So Richard Katz is going to upload Oxygen and Population Density versus Hours in Culture for Candida guilliermondii, pretty soon now.
  • 2007 Here's a yarn called Carmel and the Company Store , about Carmel New Jersey and Carmel California and a relative of mine named Ned Rogovoy who took on Millville Manufacturing Company and defeated the Company Store.
  • 2008 I discovered a cure for bladder infections, the uncomplicated cystitis that women get. Obviously that's a whole megillah. I call it Supermannan. I wrote it up in an epic called Supermannan and the Cranberry Blues. Trust me, I cured bladder infections, nowadays commonly known as UTI (urinary tract infections ; one of those dumb medical obfuscatory euphemisms). Anybody reading this can call me up or email me and I'll share it with you. Actually I discovered this back in 2005 and applied for a patent.

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