Toronto, Ontario; San Francisco, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; Phoenix, Arizona.
Walking on College Street, Sottovoce Wine and Pasta Bar license suspended for 10 days beginning January 1. It must have been a wild New Years Eve (Toronto, Saturday) 20110101 2130Biked to Canada Computer on College Street, found boarded up from fire in September. New store at old location across the street. I haven’t bought computer parts in months! (Toronto, Sunday) 20110102 1600Jade hairpins, worn by women, as well as men before the Qing Dynasty. In the “Hidden Meanings: Symbolism in Chinese Art and Culture” display by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, at the SFO pier for United Airlines. A pause, as an alternative to zooming by the moving sidewalk behind (SFO, Tuesday) 20110104 1230 PT“Bleaker”, Don Olsen 1978, acrylic on canvas, special exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Art, in the G. W. Anderson Family Great Hall (Salt Lake City) 20110108 1400 MTGrilled catfish from the Jam Burritos food truck at the Phoenix Public Market on Friday, There’s a videographer from the Food Network shooting Eat Street (Phoenix, AZ, Friday) 20110128
Express walkway at Pearson Terminal 1 International gates is running. A January Monday afternoon doesn’t seem busy. DY dropped me off for the CPH-HEL outbound, 26 hours after picking me up from PHX inbound (Toronto) 20110131 1630
We had chosen public transportation for our week in the Sydney area. To transport the six of us from Sydney to Brisbane, we opted not to fly, instead reserving a minivan (called a people mover, down under). Diana and I woke up early to catch buses to the rental location on William Street in central Sydney. We drove back over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and missed the freeway exit by the Lane Cove Tunnel. We circumnavigated back to the hotel, our sons loaded up the luggage, and we embarked following directions leading through the narrow streets of Pymble. We reached the Sydney Newscastle Freeway in time for a traffic jam. I gradually became more comfortable driving on the left side of the road.
Our plan was to route through the Lower Hunter Valley to visit some wineries. We had a short list of potential places to visit, but no real sense of the region. Trying out Broke Road around Pokolbin taught us that the wineries are spread across vast distances in this region.
Some random decisions led us to Hunter Valley Gardens. We got out to stretch, but we didn’t find any lunchtime alternatives to suit our palates.
We doubled back to Cessnock, where our son enjoyed Portuguese-style chicken for lunch. Watching the clock, we figured that we had time to visit only one winery. We headed northeast via Wine Country Drive to Dalwood, passing by some well-developed residential areas on the way to Wyndham Estate. In Australian winter, we weren’t expecting to see any grapes on the vines.
Toronto, Ontario; Provo, Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah; Denver, Colorado.
Veal panino at local Italian deli restaurant Tommaso’s, casual with tablecloths, a short walk from the house. A pre-birthday lunch for DY because they don’t serve panino at dinner. Maybe we’ll try the tavola calda next time, so the fork and knife will be less messy. (Toronto, Thursday) 20101202 1400Kim Adams 2004 Minnow Lure, commissioned for the North Bay exhibition, Ice Follies. National Gallery of Canada, at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Queen Street West (Toronto, Saturday) 20101204 1515View from our second story bedroom window, a city forester pruning the tree in front of our house, at below zero temperature. In Toronto, that’s not “our tree”, that’s the city’s linden tree covered under urban foliage. Municipal taxes at work. (Toronto) 20101207 0945Eric St. Laurent Trio at the Rex Hotel. @ericstlaurent and I talked during the break about his career as a self-contracting musician in the Future Shock age. It’s such a luxury for me to be able to catch great musicians on Queen Street West. (Toronto, Saturday) 20101211 2000Atrium at the Marriott School of Management at BYU. Quiet with students off for Christmas break (Provo, Utah) 20101220 1500MTKids play area at Salt Lake City Airport two days before Christmas, Vacant, with two non-parents sipping coffee. Does this suggest that early morning flights are preferred to avoid kids needing to burn off energy? (Salt Lake City, Utah) 20101223 0730Passengers lined up on the tarmac at DEN, waiting to board regional jets. Sunny day, but cold enough to see my breath. Walking and taking train from terminal B to A, with Lufthansa staff checking into Air Canada flights, lesser partners in Star Alliance with elite lounges in other terminal (Denver, Colorado, Thursday) 20101223 1130
Traditional Christmas spread at Aunt Pearl’s. We were counting the years that we’ve been coming, it’s our tradition (Christmas Day, Willowdale) 20101225 1845
For our last day in Sydney before departing for Brisbane, we got a late start. We decided to have lunch in Chinatown, and had heard about Chinese Noodle Restaurant as specializing in northern style food. We wandered around Quay Street looking for a storefront and eventually walked around a corner to find a plaza with multiple restaurants.
The exterior of the restaurant was modest. When I saw the short stools, I knew that we were in for a Beijing-style experience.
The tapestries on the wall seemed foreign to us as Southern Chinese.
Adam and Eric said that the grape leaves hanging from the ceiling mimicked a natural form of cooling in China.
Having left Beijing less than 2 weeks earlier, Eric led ordering from the menu. We asked for the meat and the noodles to not be too spicy.
As an alternative to seeing Australian animals at the Taronga Zoo Sydney, we thought a trip to the Featherdale Wildlife Park would be a bigger adventure. The latter is northwest of Sydney in Doonside, and we were staying at a hotel on the north shore in Macquarie Park. Since we had bought a 7-day orange travelpass with prepaid paths that radiates out from the city centre, taking the train southwest with an easy connection to a scenic Parramatta River ferry bound northwest seemed to be a reasonable routing. The first leg on our journey was the train that would bring us to Meadowbank. The direction to the ferries seemed clear.
It’s a bit of a walk from the train station to the ferry. Constitution Road in Meadowbank offers little appeal for tourists.
We wended our way through residential areas to find a few signposts directing us to the wharf through the park.
Obviously, the way to the ferry would be down to the riverbank.
From Meadowbank on the north side of the Parramatta River, the south shore suburbs are a little farther than I would want to swim.
Having ended the previous day at King’s Cross station, we returned back to the same station in the morning to walk north on Victoria Avenue. In the daylight, we got a better view of the large houses and apartments.
Looking west down the McElhone stairs was Woolloomooloo, and central Sydney beyond that.
We had mapped out a stroll to see the Sydney neighbourhoods, so we proceeded down the stairs.
Wended our way west and north, we approached Cowper Wharf across a wide roadway, on the edge of Potts Point.
Two years after submitting an academic manuscript and responding to double-blind reviews, “Rethinking work, with the pandemic disruption” has now been published in the International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior (IJOTB) as earlycite. The article has a DOI (Document Object Identifier), and should be streamed with an official volume and issue number soon. The […]
The 128th meeting of Systems Thinking Ontario was convened in person. The classroom was filled with current students, alumni, our regular participants, and a few curious newcomers. Moderated by Zaid Khan, the conversation was sparked by Stephen Davies and myself (David Ing) on the evolving styles in learning systems thinking. Stephen has been leading SFIN-6011 […]
The “Understanding Systems” SFIN-6011 course is a requirement in the master’s program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCADU. For winter 2025, the class is now led by Stephen Davies, breaking the incremental evolving of content since 2008. While still on faculty at OCADU, the original course designer Peter H. Jones is now a Distinguished […]
In the 1970s, five ways of knowing were established by C. West Churchman in The Design of Inquiring Systtems. In the 1990s, his student Ian Mitroff carried on the tradition and extended that work in The Unbounded Mind. Now in the 2020s, the technology of Generative AI opens up opportunties to query or request responses […]
For readers with an interest deeper than the 15-minute presentation given in August, the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Socio-Technical Perspectives in Information Systems (STPIS 2024) have now been formally publishied. The invited paper on “Reifying Socio-Technical and Socio-Ecological Perspectives for Systems Changes: From rearranging objects to repacing rhythms” was reviewed by the […]
The 125th meeting of Systems Thinking Ontario coincided with the closing day for the RSD13-RSDX online program. As a regular systems convening group, we’ve had monthly meetings since January 2013. Zaid Khan moderated a discussion including me (David Ing), Tim Lloyd, Allenna Leonard, and Kelly Okamura. We recollected starting as a spinoff from Design with […]
Rhythm and pitch are primordial to language. Susan Rogers, after a career becoming Prince's recording engineer, turned to complete a PhD in psychology focused on music cognition and psychoacoustics.Read more ›
David L. Hawk (American management theorist, architect, and systems scientist) has been hosting a weekly television show broadcast on Bold Brave Tv from the New York area on Wednesdays 6pm ET, remotely from his home in Iowa. Live, callers can join…Read more ›
Following the first day lecture on Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 1 for the Global University for Sustainability, Keekok Lee continued on a second day on some topics: * Anatomy as structure; physiology as function (and process); * Process ontology, and thing ontology; * Qi ju as qi-in-concentrating mode, and qi san as qi-in-dissipsating mode; and […]
The philosophy of science underlying Classical Chinese Medicine, in this lecture by Keekok Lee, provides insights into ways in which systems change may be approached, in a process ontology in contrast to the thing ontology underlying Western BioMedicine. Read more ›
In conversation, @zeynep with @ezraklein reveal authentic #SystemsThinking in (i) appreciating that “science” is constructed by human collectives, (ii) the west orients towards individual outcomes rather than population levels; and (iii) there’s an over-emphasis on problems of the moment, and…Read more ›
In the question-answer period after the lecture, #TimIngold proposes art as a discipline of inquiry, rather than ethnography. This refers to his thinking On Human Correspondence. — begin paste — [75m26s question] I am curious to know what art, or…Read more ›
In 2024, WordPress Studio was released, making installation on a local computer simpler. The instructions were modified from MacOS to Ubuntu Linux, by Daniel Kossmann, “How to install WordPress Studio in Ubuntu Linux” | Jun 15, 2024 at https://www.danielkossmann.com/how-to-install-wordpress-studio-ubuntu-linux/ I already had NVM installed, but in Terminal, with the result “command not found”. In the […]
The appreciation of change is different in Western philosophy than in classical Chinese philosophy. JeeLoo Lin published a concise contrast on differences. Let me parse the Introduction to the journal article, that is so clearly written. The Chinese theory of time is built into a language that is tenseless. The Yijing (Book of Changes) there […]
In trying to place the World Hypotheses work of Stephen C. Pepper (with multiple root metaphors), Nicholas Rescher provides a helpful positioning. — begin paste — Philosophical perspectivism maintains that substantive philosophical positions can be maintained only from a “perspective” of some sort. But what sort? Clearly different sorts of perspectives can be conceived of, […]
Finding proper words to express system(s) change(s) can be a challenge. One alternative could be diachrony. The Oxford English dictionary provides two definitions for diachronic, the first one most generally related to time. (The second is linguistic method) diachronic ADJECTIVE Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “diachronic (adj.), sense 1,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3691792233. For completeness, prochronic relates “to […]
The selection of readings in the “Introduction” to Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2, Penguin (1981), edited by Fred E. Emery, reflects a turn from 1969 when a general systems theory was more fully entertained, towards an urgency towards changes in the world that were present in 1981. Systems thinking was again emphasized in contrast […]
