Sharing the Solar Bounty

At a recent think tank meeting, during a time discussing generalities, the conversation turned to whether the game was zero sum. Like I said, very general.

My view was folks oughta get paid to self educate, perhaps starting with self education on how to do self education. UBI (universal basic income) isn’t for nothing. To which the retort was why should anyone pump gas in a gas station while others were subsidized to learn Spanish? It’s zero sum after all.

Where should our share solar income, vast and ongoing, show up in our lives. Some would say: the sun on your skin, and lighting your way during the day, is your portion. 

That sunlight helps grow wheat, as well as turn the stones that grind it to bread, and are you not inheriting  a stake in said human enterprise?

The Technocracy movement seems antiquated to me too now, but I can see where it was coming from: hook UBI to everyone’s share of the energy harvest, which is owing ultimately to no man nor to the labor of men. What men owed has already been paid.

Spring Equinox Gathering 2025

Every chair was taken in the iconic Pauling House, a heritage site here in Asylum District and in Portland more generally. The occassion: Spring Equinox. The meet four times a year anymore, whereas Wanderers used to keep to a busy schedule of weekly meetings, with invited or indigenous (in-group) speakers.

Our format for gatherings is rambling wandering conversation. Gordon and Barry talked about shipping, motor sizes, tilt angles. Tilt angles for motorcycles had come up earlier. Unfortunately Brenda, our resident biker chick (scientist by day), couldn't make it this time.

I'd characterize Wanderers as scientists and engineers by and large, but with no strict membership requirements, nor really any kind of membership roster. Somehow we always stay the right size for a small meeting room like this.

I brought Sydney the dog and made my brief speech about how non-humans are likewise Wanderers.  I've always been one of those eager to keep things less human-centric. Admitting non-humans in such an informal setting has not been controversial. We've had other pets join us as well. I like to say Keiko is/was an honorary Wanderer.

We managed to include Steve Mastin by Facetime. Although my iPad is not a registered device on the Verizon network, my cell phone is, and played the role of hotspot. We used to have our own Wifi SSID for ISEPP, but president Bristol only works there in the mornings sometimes so no longer maintains his own company Wifi. ISEPP is a 501(c)(3), my late wife the bookkeeper long ago.

I got to chatting with Barry about my "Chinese Peace Corps" meme (he'd been in the US Peace Corps in Brazil some decades back), providing free eyecare (like glasses) from vans in Detroit. Providing a global safety and healthcare net could double as a see-the-world opportunity, in a more benign way than joining the military. Such ideas are apropos in any institution named after Linus (anti-nuke prof) and Ava (WILPF) Pauling.

Charting a Leftist Trajectory

The online Collins dictionary labels "lefty" with [British, informal, disapproval] i.e. built right into the meaning is a negative spin, akin to "cult" or "propaganda". The meaning: "If you refer to someone as a lefty, you mean that they support the ideals of the political left." But that's already secondary to "left handed" meaning someone who defaults to their left hand for precision activities such as handwriting or drawing.

Per my own counterintelligence against standard English connotations, I've worked to rehabilitate "cult" (for example) such that it gains a more neutral sheen, as a nickname or short version of "subculture", which has an almost mathematical dryness in being some subset of a larger culture, which pretty much any culture already is, and with more factions internally, a recursive data structure right down to "a cult of one" (but what about all those split personalities?).

I'd like to get back to "split personalities" following Maurice Nicoll again, as I often do, with a nod to Kierkegaard and his "to will one thing" discussion. A more typical personality is not so single-minded, or is overzealous with tyrannical tendencies, often a self-overthrowing situation, no need to lift a finger.

However I want instead to take up the left-right axis, insofar as their is one, and talk about my owning a leftist placement, even without claiming to be a fan of Marxist analysis. My economics is more a "free money from the sun" thermodynamic analysis, not that intelligence makes no difference. General Systems Theory (GST) seemed free for the taking when I got around to recycling and/or perpetuating some key terms.

I use other language somewhat oddly as well: "fan" is a status one earns through a lot of homework. I might be appreciative of what I've gotten from a talented vocalist, or rhetorician, or movie director, and that's a step towards becoming a fan, but it takes work to really be a true fan of someone or something. I suppose my meaning of "fan of" is closer to that of "acolyte of" and/or "disciple of", closer to "devotee".

I get to be a leftist through a Mark Twain style anti-imperialism. The Anti-imperialist League included Andrew Carnegie. Quakernomics, the book, is about industrialists with utopian visions of company lifestyles, from janitorial staff, to HR, to officers on the bridge. This commitment to egalitarian structures, sometimes associated with "communism" is likewise associated with horizontally structured private enterprises, where management intermingles with specialists, such as we have in Macrodata Refinement (joke: an allusion to the back rooms in our corporate mazeways).

I'm sympathetic to Hemingway and to the Spaniards who stood up to the fascists, already back then (pre WW2) cutting their teeth as right-wing bad guys. We (e.g. Wikipedia) still think of Franco as a rightie, anti-Franco Republicans as lefties. Those were impressions I developed through the Laughing Horse Books video collection. I've also chronicled in the Coda, March 2025 meeting minutes, regarding my radio-listening habits of some fifteen years ago (waiting in the car for pickup at Winterhaven), then tracing the crackup of Air America and the trajectory of Thom Hartmann and others into the RT America sphere, a bevy of leftists before banned; an iron curtain came down in TV world, with the attempted neocon-NATO coup-takeover of American media.

My other connections to leftism would be through both WILPF and AFSC. I probably don't want to complicate the story further with too many ideological affiliations beyond those two. For example, I'm not planning to tally up clients I've had, as to where they might weigh in on any left-right spectrum. I'm more apolitical than that, less partisan, in my business dealings. Like I'm not a front for any political party other than my own, my Pirate Party, to keep it simple. I believe I'm officially registered as in independent.

Mickey 17 (movie review)

Dr. D. joined me at the last minute for this 7 pm showing at The Bagdad. The theater (part of a brewpub empire) was reasonably well attended. Folks lined up for brew and 'za. Outside it had turned cold. Keeping this place well heated has gotta be one of the number one expenses.

Previews: remake of Superman coming; rectilinear brainwashing ala MineCraft Movie coming too. That'll be good for our own PR as we promulgate the IVM in contrast to XYZ, so we need XYZ to stick around. Never mind if that's over your head jargon. Poke around.

My practice was to avoid all YouTube or other reviews of this movie until after watching it. I'd seen the previews several times. I've been going to films more in recent weeks, as well as using my home theater. Then right after the film I came home, hooked the iPad to the HDTV and we watched reviews by deepfocuslens and Critical Drinker, both of whom found it disappointing. 

I'm not so down on it, but then I liked Joker 2.

I guess a question is how tight and in control of itself we found the movie to be. In terms of reality construction, I think it did well. The movie created a believable world, by science fiction standards, in which "expendables" might be 3D printed and with memories restored, shades of Avatar 2 more than anything. The associated props developed over time. Especially strong: allusions to Covid. Mickey goes through like nine lives being a guinea pig for the mRNA vax they'll all need, to survive their new home planet.

The new home planet is inhabited by an intelligent life form that's half tardigrade (but bigger) and half potato bug. They’re both cute and terrifying at the same time, like this movie (both a comedy and horrific). The scientists, per stereotype, are starting to work out a translator and are on the brink of establishing a dialog, while the militarists are (again per stereotype) looking for opportunities to chronicle themselves being heroic, striking courageous postures (like a general on a rearing horse).

Probably where I part company from the reviewers, and maybe even from the actors and script, is I didn't see the preacher pair, the Jim and Tammy Bakker cult leaders, the evangelists, as trying to parody Trump, let alone Trump and Melania. If we insist on presidential parallels, I'd say the Tammy Bakker character, the Lady Macbeth (into sauces, a cooking show maven) is more of a Jill Biden, with Jimmy a younger Joe. But why push either analogy? The stereotype these two present is more culturally ingrained than specific politicians, in my experience.

That we're looking at two consecutive Mickeys, printed the same way, with memories from the same brick, leads to a meditation on how they're nevertheless completely different personalities. One seems more meek and mild, the other more temper driven and self protective. Their attitude towards one another forms a kind of internal monolog made public. They want to kill each other at first, but their shared anima (soul figure) unites them as allies and friends in the end. The more selfish one turns altruistic. Together they usher in a new era.

I thought having a black African heritage female cop excited for sex with two white guy twins was a comment on science fiction's role in pushing the envelope. A first famous "inter-racial" kiss on TV was between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Urhuru on Star Trek, a sensitive moment (a risk) for the network and somewhat uncomfortable on the set (Kirk insisted on several rehearsals). "How far we've come" this movie was saying, in having its women so aggressively (and jealously) interested in the Mickey bros.

That's what the critics didn't like: science fiction that takes on too many social issues is too hard to follow and think about. But I'm thinking its satirical flavor extends to making fun of how science fiction is expected to tackle social issues, by tackling them all. It reminds me of The Good Place in being almost academic about the ethics issues. That transparency to philosophy in the background, the plot little more a thin veneer, is characteristic of comic book works, catering to young readers coming to grips with their own values, whatever these turn out to be.

Dr. D. pointed out a paradox in that Mickey is always being asked what it's like to die, but at no point would the memory brick be refreshed enough to remember dying, so he's really as clueless as anyone about what it's like in the rear view mirror. He simply has the cognitive security of knowing (because of affirmation from others, and because of accumulating memories with gaps) that he's exceptional in being an expendable. What might seem an especially lucky outcome (immortality of sorts) comes across as anything but.

Another factor that maybe colored my experience was the "laugh track" provided by the living theaters; the two guys sitting behind us, that one guy in particular, laughed loudly and riotously, and as the credits scrolled they expressed delight with the movie. Their enthusiasm was quasi-infectious, boosting the comical quality of the film. The potato bug monsters, both cute and ugly, were alone worth the price of admission (with a senior discount, admittedly).

Conversations

I’ve been yakking with friends about AI, part of everyday conversation, an ongoing computation. Here’s me writing to a professor and former classmate:

[I]n general I'm very impressed by AI, not because I believe in AGI or the Singularity or am a transhumanist muskrat, but because stochastic algorithms are able to distill vast quantities of human authored verbiage into a navigable topology of strung-together tokens, wow. The art too: I'm blown away by it.  Not all of it. Not every bit of AI slop is goldilocks.  More like panning for gold.

We talk about other topics too of course, especially Gaza. I’ve been bringing up the need for an airport over on Facebook, branching off plans from 2016.

Whereas most of these conversations are in cyberspace, I sometimes have the privilege of a non-virtual visitor, as was the case on Thursday. 

Daniel was on his way back to California and stopped over to spend the day with me, 9 to 5, and we got a lot of work done. He’s a boss user of AI tools when in his element.

The branch-out to Obsidian involved, as an exercise, copying down the text of these blogs. That alone was worth the price of admission, to his interesting demo. AI wrote the scripts to pretty much bootstrap itself.

The Cycle (movie review)

:: iranian festival, portland, 2009 ::

As mentioned over on BizMo Diaries (hinting at Motorcycle Diaries at first), I've been treating myself to some Iranian films, not the first time since Portland is on the global circuit when it comes to Film Fests, hosting many of the international variety, wherein Iran's filmcraft is respected. This time I'm renting from a local vid store, our 'hood still having one of those. Vid stores once were commonplace up and down the boulevards, in shopping malls, and then they all went away thanks to streaming services, point and click Netflix.

The Cycle is from way back in 1977 and is gloriously bleak. I have a real soft spot for Stalker-like Zone vistas, middle of nowhere, like behind Jersey City where I'd hike at night, out to that I-95 turnpike overpass. It cuts through a bluff. I wasn't trespassing or going anywhere illegal exactly, just savoring one of those no man's lands. I'd go in the day too as I recall. Good exercise. In Portland I have Mt. Tabor, the polar opposite of bleak.

The boy is taking everything in at high bandwidth. We're seeing adaptation, learning curves. By the end, when he's eyeing the inside of the blood broker's mansion, we see his ambition. He's learning how the game is played. We see a judgement in the end, by another player, that the son has become cold hearted and disrespectful of his dying (dead) father. But as omniscient viewers, we've just seen him on a mission of mercy. How terrible is being the chief blood getter really? No one wants to do it. You can see why the hospital can't compete: the healthcare staff would rather not be the ones to donate.

I've also been thinking more about The Circle. The special features were useful.

Playing with DSR1

:: naga story ::

Continuing with the topic of the Naga Myth per Critical Path, labeled speculative prehistory, we're able to establish a narrow gap between Sundaland and Sahul. Sundaland is roughly Southeast Asia whereas Sahul is Greater Australia (roughly). However this was all during the most recent ice age and the geography was all different, such that names from today's map don't really apply.

To quote DeepSeek R1:

Land Bridges in Southeast Asia

At the glacial peak (~26,000–19,000 years ago), the Sundaland shelf connected modern-day Indonesia, Malaysia, and Borneo into a contiguous landmass twice the size of India [34]. Key features included:

• A continuous land bridge from mainland Asia to Java, Sumatra, and Borneo.
• Exposed continental shelves forming coastal plains and mangrove forests.
• The merging of Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania into Sahul, separated from Sundaland by narrow straits [15].

The Indonesian Archipelago was dramatically easier to traverse during this period, with only narrow sea channels (e.g., the Makassar Strait) separating Sundaland from Sahul [5].

Fuller's inventive narrative traces a vector following Sahulis migrating westward, bringing their maritime savvy and Naga religion to the sapiens coming the other way.

Much as Fuller's telling prompts a gestalt switching land-ocean flip, with oceans becoming the connecting medium vs lands connecting oceans, his "Naga peoples moving westward" is akin to flipping positive with negative charges in viewing circuit diagrams. All the textbooks of our time talk about humanity sprawling eastward, out of Africa.

However prehistoric Polynesians, without our modern knowledge of the fossil record, would speculate about other morphogenetic pathways, wiring in alternative metaphors.

Included in this speculative Naga religion are stories wheren whales and dolphins connect to humans through liminal figures, roughly translated as "mer people" in today's English.

DSR1 again (extending the previous query):

Transitional Life Forms: Mermaids and Hybrid Beings

Many Pacific and South Asian cultures feature liminal beings bridging humans and marine mammals:

• Māori Pania of the Reef: A mermaid-like figure who married a mortal but returned to the sea, embodying the tension between land and ocean [6].
• Javanese Nyai Roro Kidul: A sea goddess often depicted as a mermaid (Nyai Blorong), ruling the Southern Seas and influencing maritime fortunes [6].
• Cambodian Sovanna Maccha: A mermaid princess from the Ramayana tradition who initially obstructs but later aids heroic endeavors [6].

We have evidence of Papuan-Sahulis as long as 40K years ago, coinciding with the aforementioned changed geography and climate. 

Human civilization in the South Pacific has a complex and layered history, with archaeological and genetic evidence revealing migrations spanning tens of thousands of years. The earliest confirmed human presence dates back at least 33,000–40,000 years, based on remains found in the Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands [1][2][4]. However, recent studies suggest migration to islands like West Papua may have begun over 50,000 years ago, with seafarers navigating equatorial routes from Asia [4].

In sum, Critical Path posits a Naga-informed mindset stemming from Polynesia and morphing along a timeline connecting it eventually around to the Americas, via Thailand, Egypt, Phoenicia, Venice, Russia-Viking... thereby closing circuits and encoding the basis of a new world mythology or cosmic poem, one among several. YMMV.

As with most mythologies, the various threads serve a mnemonic function, by stringing together, in memorable narratives, various technical gems, such as knot-tying and net-making, basket-weaving, navigation data etcetera.

Deja Vu

DAF | CogSec | M4W Coda

My Pipeline

I just ate some popcorn. Glenn Stockton introduced me to the silicone popper genre, goes in the microwave. Two minutes is enough in mine. I use corn oil at the bottom, where the kernels get to explode.

By “my pipeline” (blog post title) I mean a sequence of steps or transformations, in this case going from a computer programmed framework, to a scene description language, to a rendering engine, to picture files (png format) to animated gif (with additional tools needed to accomplish that transformation).

That’s what I’m talking about in the above Facebook post, snipped for my Flickr Photostream scrapbook. My framework makes use of sympy, allowing me to keep computations algebraic until I’m ready to write out to scene description language, at which point actual numbers are needed. You don’t want to say (sqrt(5)+1)/2 or phi, or 𝞍 or whatever, you want to say 1.618, maybe with a few more optional digits.

This use of the word “pipeline” is pretty standard. For example in data science we think of a pipeline starting from whatever gathered raw data, through a sequence of cleaning, rectification and normalization steps, in preparation for feeding some idol, who spits out the magic flutes.

Woah! WTF? Data science doesn’t have any magic flutes! What perversity am I spewing?

I’m referring to the matrix of weights computed during training phase, of a working model, a multi-layer neural net. Once steeped in terabytes of data you get an object that’s lean and mean, might fit in a phone, and that has prophetic properties.

When I say “prophetic” you might think back to Thomas Paine and his thesis that being prophetic has everything to do with knowing how to generate music, and not just any music, but trending, viral music, already in alignment with the Zeitgeist. 

In that sense, prophecies do often tend to be self fulfilling in that they give expression to what people are thinking but can’t quite get into rhyme.

A chatbot is “prophetic” in the sense that it strives to be predictive of what the most articulate and acculturated would likely say, given some initial momentum, a direction in Hilbert Space, by the prompt, the impetus input. 

From there, the magic flute takes over and plays what sounds like music to our ears. If you find yourself nodding along in agreement, even humming the same hum, that means you’re finding the music credible, and so the magic flute has done its job. 

Or call it a mind reader, wherein here “mind” potentially means the collective verbiage, the universe of discourse, of an entire civilization, distilled to weights.

Another pipeline has to do with Hubble, or these days JWST, which instruments beam back lots of raw data that has to go through signal processing, various kinds of filtering, before most prepared for the human eye. Our own neural nets absorb the info and thereby accrete awareness of the cosmos.

I just add yeast and salt to the popcorn sometimes, like tonight. No need for melted butter. The initial oil pool is sufficient when it comes to adding lipidity. 

Recent Projects

Consequent to cutting way back on calories for an interval, and not actually going to zero, I've sparked some dormant energies and managed to power through some pending projects.

Per the still above, I was able to get that animated GIF showing a cuboctahedron unfurling inside an octahedron, riding its rails as it were, with wheels starting at mid edges. The edges of the eight embedded triangles are allowed to stretch, as each rotates inside an octahedron face, staying equilateral. At one station, early along the journey, an icosahedron is reached, named IcosaWithin in some memeographies.

My achievement was not out of the blue, as I was using a simple framework I've been hacking on for quite awhile, wherein I have a vocabulary of named vectors and already-defined polyhedrons made from pairs of those Vectors (so-called Edges, from any point to any point, vector tip to tip), which stay origin originating. 

Didn't Wayne Bishop adopt this convention in his Linear Algebra textbook? I used to debate with the guy in Math Forum. I didn't quarrel about his vectors though. I did yak a lot about Quadrays, the Qvectors of which I define in Python, as a subclass of the Vector types.

A next project was to read more of those two library books I checked out from the downtown library. They were part of a display on a topical issue, much in the news these days: borders and immigration, also emigration if you think about it. White Borders by Reece Jones (Beacon Press, Boston, 2021) is one of the two and I got about half way through in a sitting. 

Then I checked the index for either Ashley Montagu or Buckminster Fuller. I wasn't really expecting to find either. His focus is mainstream journals, cults, and Congress. The debates around "race" have been expansive and my blogs continue stirring the pot in that respect.

All that reading prompted me to query Perplexity for some answers regarding Bucky's essay No Race, No Class. I found it listed in a table of contents in a World Game document (a PDF) that proved interesting in itself, open source at the BFI Wordpress site. That site links to my stuff too, see bfi dot org slash synergetics and scroll down for a Jupyter Notebook on Synergetics.

Last on this list (of projects powered through), I became aware of some recent advances around Magic Squares, a favorite topic of recreational mathematicians, such as Martin Gardner. Numberphile on YouTube. I learned late in life (at 66) of that famous 128-by-128 magic square by Tarry in the 1800s and turned it into a modern day exercise using pandas and numpy (just to verify it's correct) with a little help from AI. This square is trimagical, a whole new idea to me. I wouldn't have thought such a thing possible. Live and learn.

One more thing: I'm only just tuning in Steve Keen over there with the economists and note his emphasis on thermodynamics. Perplexity was again of some help just now. I probably first learned of him thanks to a Lex Friedman interview.