Ramping Up

Our take on the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics tactic of "doing a recall" (closed book) to cement new knowledge: why not add in a prompt and resulting generated image as an aide-mémoire?

 
The above image is quirky enough to stick (you want quirky; cite The Art of Memory, F. Yates): a tired Santa, like a childish belief, is ready to be retired, and is set upon by the guardian macrophages, charged with keeping the red blood cell fleet in good repair. Cull the oldies.

Likewise when doing Knowledge Engineering: keep the toolset up to date. Or think of outdoor gear in a challenging environment. Think Winter Term.

 
The detailed prompt is saved in Flickr (the picture goes there) but is semi-irrelevant in its details; other than to show how one might encapsulate a homework session on the structure and function of the spleen, that small organ at the tip of the pancreas engaged in bloodwork.

 

The concrete Hs above stem from Grok's misinterpretation of how a Dolos should look. A what? 

Dolosse are concrete elements used in large numbers to build up breakwaters, which are partially submerged barriers to unfettered shore-bashing, during storms or even tsunamis. The ocean's fury is partially absorbed by these artificial reefs.

Crescent City (Cascadia) has such breakwaters made mostly from Tetrapods, an alternative concrete element, a caltrop (as in Quadrays). Related shape: the jack (XYZ).

The analogy we wish to introduce goes back to our Tetrahedron (a grand central) in that opposite edges of a regular Platonic version are mutually perpendicular, yet not touching.

As such these opposite edges akin to the design of the Dolos, and also to the centrioles in the centrosome, that eukaryotic cell organelle responsible for anchoring the cell's cytoskeleton; and in pulling apart the  strands of DNA during mitosis, such that each resulting cell has its copy of the original.

 

The pillar against which the bicycle leans continues the Rust Never Sleeps color palette much of Portland has chosen. Rust, owing to oxidation, is not an irrelevant topic when it comes to hematology and the role of iron in the body.

Marty Supreme (movie review)

So I was back at The Bagdad (that’s how it’s spelled, no h) in my favorite seating area, not too close, taking in this film I’d seen the preview (trailer) for the last time I was here, a few days ago. I’m within walking distance; I get a senior discount.

Marty is the epitome of “driven” meaning in this case he’s crazy-good at ping-pong which he’s coupled to a sense of destiny. At first I experienced the opening shift into a biologically-based reverie, like a medical documentary (about sperm meets egg), as jarring; but then jarring is OK in many a dark ride (theme park talk) and in retrospect (after sleeping on it) I see its point: Marty’s “drivenness” is greater than consciousness, more than just ego. He’s aware of that too. He feels chosen.

The backdrop is Japan rebuilding after WW2 and coming to terms with what had just happened. Sports are a common language, as the Olympic Games recognize. Ping-pong was just as important in creating a positive relationship between Americans and Chinese (fast forward; the film is set in the 1950s), in the Nixon Era. The characters each have their own motives. Marty is Everyman.

The Marty world is deeply unconscious, mired in the ant colony of New York, with its own metabolism, its gut. Marty is both digesting and being digested, with a foray to New Jersey not being any less adrenalin-infused. Gun fights. A mad dog. An exploding gas station. This movie has it all. The texture is close to noir, despite being in living color. Just replace ping-pong with boxing.

I didn’t especially like or look up to Marty, but then why should the point be some moral judgement? Who cares if we’d ever be friends; I wasn’t born yet and I suck at ping-pong. The point is to immerse oneself in a milieu, to soak up a set of scenes, and for that, one needs to be receptive, which I was. “Learn from, don’t judge” is my mantra.

My movie-watching skills are pretty good. I didn’t have to take any bathroom breaks, not last time either. I did drop my cell phone a couple times (it was on mute) and one time it slid under the seats to the next row, where I wouldn’t have found it until the lights came up, however a nice person saw where it slid and handed it back to me, even though this meant leaving her seat and crossing an aisle to do so. New Year’s Resolution: put the goddamn phone away.

The film deals a lot with shame, challenging the audience to see a lot of envelope-pushing, as lines were crossed. Marty is so over the top, especially in his relationship with fame and glory. He sees himself as a top star, a celebrity, a true hero, and wants access to the big leagues. He confronts what a lot of us confront: a reality in which we’re pre-judged to be losers, and full of skeptics if we think we have something to prove. 

Marty is not only driven to succeed, he succeeds, in his own dimension. However his success is thanks to his preternatural skill, which comes more as a gift than as something self-willed (not that he doesn’t ever practice).

So is it that reviewers hated the play? Is that why the actress (the star) was in tears? 

Wake Up Dead Man (movie review)

Like with Hunger Games (we saw a preview -- for November 2026), this Knives Out franchise snuck up on me. This was episode two of three said the blurb I checked before going. Seeing the word "standalone" was reassuring. No priors required.

Hey, what a well-made movie! A whodunnit murder mystery that pokes fun at itself and the genre, while milking for all it's worth (which is a lot when the handling is expert). 

I didn't kick myself for not solving it beforehand, just based on the clues, Sherlock Holmes style. I'm not a superman. Yet the plot steered refreshingly clear of the supernatural elements i.e. any cheap ex machina plot devices (so-called miracles).

Mostly, the film developed my hunger for a bully pulpit; to have permission to unleash like that, the way those Catholics do, it least in the movies (a lot of them B-grade black 'n whites on late night television). 

Quakers in my lineage (unprogrammed) don't do fire and brimstone like that. I was called back to est -- which was never "like Tony Robbins" gimme a break. More like EBN (OK, Tony is part of it).

RIP Wikieducator

Archeological traces:

• WayBack Machine 
• Flickr Album

Spaghetti Monster

More Noiring

Viale Parioli 25 on Google Earth

At the time, musing on the FX2 (articulated bus), listening to tunes, probably minimalist techno, I thought seeing Nuremberg would mark my break, from the noir streak. I'd been binging on noirs.

Well, contrary to my expectation, I'm back to noir-ing. Last night it was The Harder They Fall, Bogart's last. He passed away shortly after that.

Let's remember I came in in the 1950s, and I recognize those cars (the ones in the movie), but back then Bogart seemed impossibly old to me, and that's the relationship I canned: me the little guy, Bogart the craggy old man, right up there with Rod Steiger, but even craggier.

Rod Steiger was in this one too, by the way, and I'll get back to a story about him.

What amazes me is although I've always seen Humphrey Bogart as so much my elder, now today I'm ten years older than when he passed. "I'm older than Humphrey Bogart" says the wondering homunculus, the one who asks what time it is.

As is characteristic of a person my age, a senior as we've agreed to call us, which has resonance from high school, and also college, I'm given to perspectivals (made up word; retrospectives) of one kind or another, in my case reminiscing about Wanderers during the decades we'd meet almost weekly, alternating mornings and evenings for the convenience of different lifestyles.

I'd go to almost all, regardless of time, because the venue was so walkably convenient in my case, whereas others would need to cross town. Given I've been an avid blogger this whole time also, you'll find many of these meetups written up herein (check out Grain of Sand and BizMo Diaries for the other 2/3rds).

The way I tell local history is in terms of concentric spheres:

1. Pauling House; boyhood home of Linus Pauling is in..
2. Asylum District, a business / marketing name in keeping with...
3. Keep Portland Weird, so Greater Portland (GP), also known as Metro (several counties)...
4. Silicon Forest has a big presence in GP, we could even say origins, but spreads...
5. throughout Cascadia, distinguishing us from Silicon Valley, a parallel but different universe centered around the Bay Area

To recap my own bio: born in University of Chicago but we Urners moved to Portland, Jack and Carol having met in Seattle at U Dub. Jack's career as a planner took us to Rome, Manila (where I vectored off to college and a life on the east coast), them on to Cairo, Dhaka, Thimphu, Maseru. I vectored back to the west coast to resume living in Portland (1980s) where I've been ever since.

So, with that as context, my Rod Steiger story: we were told (but is it true?) that he and Claire Bloom were among the previous tenants at our Rome address of Viale Parioli 25.

Also, back to the Bogart movie: it features a boxer, a big, gentle Andre the Giant type guy who can't box worth beans but he's big and looks dangerous, so they build him up as Toro of the Andes. When they introduce him to the boxing ring, the announcers says he weighs in at some 270 plus pounds, a heavyweight. Except not only am I older than Bogart, I'm heavier than Toro.

Rod Steiger really made an impression on my younger self with his performance in Illustrated Man. Claire was in that one too.

Watching Noirs

Dr. D (exNASA) and I watched another noir last night: Murder Inc. (1960), wherein Robert Falk, soon to reincarnate as Columbo, the detective, is here a believable villain. 

The film itself is surprisingly choppy in how it shifts voice to documentary narration, pushing its “true to life” mystique. We the spectators feel we’re being made privy to the gangland badlands of the times (1930s-40s). 

Not unlike now. Prohibition continues, throughout the Union, ensuring a criminal under-culture profitable to prisons.

This was one more in a series of noirs I’ve been renting from Movie Madness.

Two of the noirs, one a Bogart-Becall, had the trope of a villain falling to their death, by accident, at the height of exposure for their crimes (making the death fall cathartic). 

Two had the pattern wherein the male fuckup, caught by police, tells the girl to forget about him, she’s still young and can start over. Murder Inc. was one of those.

These films are informative on several levels, in part simply for their windows on history. My earliest memories dovetail with some of those old Chevies they show us. 

“This is about where I came in” I’m thinking, “just a few years later”.

Building more consensus around lifestyles worth prototyping (the EPCOT mission) stays in focus here in Cascadia. 

Another theme is how scaredy-cat the academics are being, as more GST-informed thinking continues reforming the cyber talk, the often cryptic hubbub on the various channels and meetup networks, where various influencers have juice. 

We continue to look back on the Alaska Accords as another step forward for our World Game grid.

Of course the term “Murder, Inc.” takes me back to the Fletcher Prouty corpus, wherein he quotes LBJ regarding what it’s like around a president. We’re a gangland after all. Bodies happen. Very noir.

The grisly business of packing young men off to war came across as gratuitous violence (mostly self inflicted) to a younger so-called "flower child" generation, folks with an intuitive sense of why outward war was becoming obsolete and therefore farcical going forward.

The 4D Philosophy of Buckminster Fuller

As we enter the final lap of 2025, the above YouTube wins the race for the most views to date, garnering about 3.3K. 

It's not the most viewed overall; it's the runner up in that respect, with the most views overall award going to Learn Python, a 45-second pilot test of a cartoon generator controlled by single letters (I think the underlying app has gone away).

However, let's remember these are accumulative buckets that go online at vastly different times. The 45-second animation is sixteen years old, whereas the embedded lecture on Synergetics, and the concept of Dimension therein, is only six years old, posted October 19, 2019.

As we round out 2025, with a new New Year's ball on Times Square, let's look back on the race so far. Many milestones.

In terms of hypertoons, I've been cycling through the noirs, thanks to Movie Madness, picking up on the tropes and how they interconnect. A noir movie features erotic attraction through several layers of deception, and a happy ending is oft construed as a kind of getting away with out over the border, beyond the scope of enemy reach. 

In two movies now, a conniving female has plunged to her death after her crimes were confessed and/or exposed (one was a Bogart, Dangerous Passage, the other was called Too Late for Tears wherein she'd made it over the border already).

The Geometry of Melodrama might be an interesting way to introduce some Spaghetti Monster approach to history, by which I mean to allude both to the Pastafarian deity, and to the "partially overlapping scenarios Universe" meme familiar to Synergetics readers, the latter (Universe) being "eternally aconceptual".

You get this from the military-minded quite a bit, when this or that face-off reminds them of this or that other wartime situation. We tend to prophecy by analogy, another way of saying we're akin to Bayesian inference engines doing our best to predict and adapt. Engineers debate over when to say "engine".

I've been preparing a Winter Term pathway through the world's fairs and expos again, starting with a couple AI aksings and a YouTube documentary on the World's Fair in St. Louis, which came after Chicago's and featured the same Ferris wheel.

We make our way, as if in a theme park dark ride, to Montreal 67, and thence to EPCOT. We're not taking the maudlin line (already explored) that Fuller got gypped somehow, in their not having him cut some ribbon or whatever. 

He was close enough to the Spaceship Earth operation by then to know he was no more in danger of being forgotten than Mickey Mouse.

Inca Brain Surgery (meme)

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