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.

Cogitations

:: Leap of Faith ::

Our Knowledge Engineering meeting was wide ranging this morning. I was a tad late, having immersed myself in the USSA meme, one I've used, but so have others. There's that sense of a no longer, yet hauntingly familiar, state: the USSR, undergoing somewhat convulsive changes (perestroika and glasnost), much as the USSA is undergoing today, in the DOGE chapter. 

We must return to our roots to stay grounded (sounds like something AI might write).

A chief topic was DAF's meetup (recorded) with Dante, another influencer in the Synergetics-on-YouTube space (where I too am active). I caught up later, whereas Struppi and Andrius both joined the Livestream. 

Dante is conversant with some of the same esoterica I first learned from that Frances Yates book, The Art of Memory. Both in M4W and 52LivingIdeas (YouTube communities with Zoom meetups, led by Andrius and Shrikant respectively), we were always coming up with "schemata" or "circuit diagrams" (networks, graphs, toons...) i.e. more graphical than lexical, and this continues a Mnemonics or Memetics tradition (a science of Memes). 

Per some namespaces, one could say we're encountering, as well as encouraging, a more right-brained based blend, without meaning anything specifically right vs left wing politically. 

Biology and politics each keep to their own sets of axes, where bilateral symmetry is concerned. I was ranting about how "right vs left" is so often too vacuous, if allowed to remain un-nuanced by beaucoup other dimensions. Data science teaches "too few axes" is a pitfall.

Robert Fludd works in this right brain lineage, as does William Blake, both in some ways prefiguring the geometric philosophy in Synergetics. I'm tempted to speak of Neoplatonism.

Fuller has a lot of trust on automated processes, not of human origin, humans themselves not having designed themselves. That humans haven't the know-how to go beyond robots, is less any theological argument than an acknowledgment of a kind of epiphenomenalism in Fuller's writings. 

Our cogitos have a steering function, but then life supplies a somewhat "on rails" experience, has the aspect of a dark ride, with"dark ride" being theme park jargon for one of those indoor guided "tunnel of love" type experiences, e.g. Pirates of the Caribbean at Disney's. 

Some project Bucky as a naive type of technocrat engineer who thinks he has a technofix for human nature. Yet for Fuller, the nature in human nature isn't the problem. The "cosmic conspiracy" is on our side, and doesn't depend on our all being awake at the same time.

My goal these days is to credit the CERN physics community for the web first, the LHC second, in terms of making a big difference. 

Great to have both. 

I was ravenous for hypertext just out of Princeton, but everyone was reinventing the wheel by going proprietary, whereas Tim Berners-Lee did something open source and therefore viral. HTTP spread on its own, into all the nooks and crannies of the emerging internet, as another protocol, and the Web as we know it was born, fulfilling the Dr. Vannevar Bush vision -- and feeding the MEMEX to come (LLMs a good example). 

LHC comes in 2nd place because we're not pushing for a GUT or TOE in finding out about the smallest physical phenomena possible, perhaps with least heat (cryogenics, superconductivity). 

All of which is to say, we're not stressing Physics to be a "controller discipline" able to take over governance because we don't believe in Free Will. We're not looking to "reduce everything to Physics" so much as we're willing to let the Sciences each have their respective layers, with laws and walls of their own, separate cities, yet with traffic between them. 

The larger does not "rest upon" the smaller in the sense of the former bringing nothing new to the table. On the contrary, the Principle of Synergetic Advantage assures us of a yet more meta environment and higher level of play, provided we don't get too stuck in these teachings from the lower levels. 

There's more to life than black holes.

Regarding the leaping circus tiger jumping back and forth through a flaming hoop: the represents something Dante and Daniel talked about, a core meme in Synergetics, that of the pumping VE. 

The VE, like a heart, twist down into a more Icosahedral (five-fold) pattern, left or right handed, jumping through a "cosmic zero" in between. The VE phase is not a stable stopping point even if it serves as anchor. 

The dichotomy is "open versus closed minded" with "closed" a sign of adequacy and appropriate reflexing, and "open" a sign of taking new information into account, retraining to some extent. Neither "open" nor "closed" need be morally rated given they're two sides of the same proverbial coin.

:: Mirrored Observer ::

:: Eye of AI ::

Claymation Station

Yesterday was about Claymation i.e. stop-action movie-making using clay figures. One builds a flip-book i.e. a film with delta t determining frame rate or frequency. Shoot for at least 24 frames per second for that smooth motion appearance. There's also the "claymation look" where the video is actually developed using ray-tracing with clay-like textures. I don't call that "cheating", I call it "emulating".

What do my clay creatures do? I was thinking of snakes as the default denizen of our somewhat stark and austere geometry world, each representing a quantum of clay. The regular tetrahedron, or regtet, what we call "home base" in our geometry, made of four unit-radius balls packed together (also clay) is likewise our unit of volume, our quantum. It rolls out into a snake.

We make cubes too of course. The duo-tet cube, so-called, is actually three snake's-worth of clay mushed together. It's called a duo-tet because of the Merkaba, the 3D version of the 2D Star of David. These patterns get used in sacred geometry scenarios over the centuries and so have all these names. We're not trying to hide from this heritage, but nor need we brand our work as "religious" in nature, though we're free to.

A 3-snakes cube plus another snake's-worth, creates the 4-snakes octahedron. Then we have the 5-snakes rhombic triacontahedron (RT). Any time we have a shape, we're free to scale it up and down, called growing and shrinking, such that it hits other volume stop points. 

The RT stops at volumes 5 (120 T modules), 5+ (120 E modules), 7.5 (120 K modules) and at 21.21 where it is comprised of radius-2 icosa edges and its 30-edged dual, the pentagonal dodecahedron. The icosahedron has edges 2R and volume 18.51..., expressed in surds as $${5}{\sqrt{2}} {ϕ^{2}}$$.

Free Range Humans

What I object to is outsiders deciding the fate of the Palestinians collectively, in terms of where they should go or shouldn't go en masse, as a managed population. 

This stance that they'd stay in Gaza no matter what and fight to the last Palestinian, is mostly speaking for someone else. Sure, many feel that way, but many would love to see the world.

If Palestinians had real citizenship, they'd go where they want, irrespective of projected role-playing responsibilities. They could settle anywhere, including in Tel Aviv, or elsewhere in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Cuba, in Portland, as private citizens, welcomed by the locals through managed resettlement programs.

Portland has done managed resettlement before, turning itself into Little Asia (no longer Little Beirut), or Little Lhasa as I call it, alliteratively. The merging works when you have NGOs who know how to diffuse tensions. Portland had AFSC for example, brokering relationships twixt Asian and Latino minorities, starting at the high school level (the LAAP program -- with me in a consulting role).

Even if Gaza were a paradise, free of foreign rule, some would want to leave temporarily, if only to return a generation or two later. USAers have such rights. The hallmark of an Israeli is the freedom to come and go. Is it too much to ask that Palestinians should have such rights as well? "Yes, way too much" some will respond, with me not among them.

To me, that's what membership in a global nation-state system, centered around the United Nations, was all about providing: a set of privileges consistent with world tourism and cross-enrollment, which is tantamount to a safer world. Students and faculty both could hop from campus to campus, perhaps within the same university system, as globally distributed. A USA kid gets to study abroad. A kid from Kazakhstan gets to study here.

If you're undocumented, that means you've been left out of the human rights game and even the United Nations may not have a solution, as you have no citizenship as yet, and so no country claims you and fights for your rights. 

Were Palestine to have legitimized advocates on the world stage, then we would hear more voices demanding their right of free passage, on a par with what citizens of other nations are getting.

Of course the ugly truth is freedom of travel has been severely curtailed by the statists, and being welcomed into the company of nations is no guarantee of citizens' right to join the jet set, or even the ocean-going ship set. "Being documented" does not equate to having generous travel rights.

Would-be tourists of the world unite!

Surveillance Center

I was asking Perplexity, the chatterbox, to draw a line twixt “peep show” of the 1800s, and the genre of TikToks and Reels going big time today. Now each has a handheld device to watch short scenarios, whereas privacy around peeping was more about stepping into a booth, to become isolated from distractions.

Perplexity synthesized a very plausible response, obeying my prompt to keep “voyeurism” a connecting thread. The 1800s booth was more like a diorama, likely a miniature, with the eye seeing the scene through a peep hole. Or perhaps the experience involved some live action? What were the possibilities? Picture a miniature garden, with a mechanized figure in the foreground, perhaps with energy to perform some action coming from a wound spring.

My own image of a Peep Show is the Tin Pan Alley arcade, wherein I imagine a viewer depositing a coin or two, and then peering though a viewfinder at some hand-cranked flip book of consecutive photographs, perhaps organized in a kind of Rolodex, creating animation the way film does, hitting a threshold frame rate.

Am I moralizing against this evolving technology, heading towards VR and AR (virtual and augmented reality)? Invoking the theme of voyeurism maybe sounds like it. “Viewerism” sounds less obnoxious, whereas “tourism” is where it’s at, especially when undertaken voluntarily, vs compelled, as in “tours of duty” (still acceptable) and/or human trafficking (considered wrong).

To stay briefed on a complex world, requires lots of screens. Some eccentrics, I recall Walter Alter, were experimenting with multiple screens way back then, before the internet takeover. 

Nowadays your typical nerd cave comes with a number of monitors, whereas the communal (shared) nerd cave is the typical surveillance center, with aesthetics similar to that of the Control Room and/or Mission Control. Air traffic control centers fit here too. 

This very blog is named after, or “in honor of”, this very archetype (you can almost see the diorama in your mind’s eye right? — as readers, some will — some read because they love the television they get from it, meaning mind’s eye programming). My Control Center serves fielded “Bizmos” i.e. the van fleets, the business buses, all engaged in the various work-study activities of a shared World Game.

Kirby Kibitzing

I checked the etymology of “kibitz”: something to do with watching others playing card games while running his, her or their mouth, opining on the state of play, and likely giving unsolicited advice.

Along those lines, I found it a refreshing change in the conversation to have DT sound ethnocentric (what else?) regarding who won WW2. Many USAers are now getting an education on the Russian view. 

Former allies try to one up each other on who was the star and who the co-star. Mission accomplished: both were on the same side (some of the new people wouldn’t remember). The statement seemed customized to create a productive backlash. People enjoy lecturing DT.

Then comes a supposed pause in propping up the Neocon-Nuland regime in Kyiv, but with conflicting messages, as few believe there’s been any real change in permissions. The sense of a looming audit is not enough to brake the juggernaut. 

Global gangs raid and loot the old world arsenals pretty much unchecked, provided they grease the right palms and are well connected in Gatekeeper City. 

The Contras in Nicaragua were likewise weapons traffickers, with cocaine a common currency. What to do with an excess of junk weapons was a problem solved, once “fighting to the last Ukrainian” became a thing. As long as weapons are shipping, some people are happy campers.

However there’s a public perception of increased reluctance to fuel the psychotic mayhem in Eastern Europe, on the part of those ostensibly running the so-called government. The public tries its best to follow from a distance.

At the same time, the tone towards Russia was “this is bad for you too” (more “same page” rhetoric) with the threat that if this conflict isn’t stopped, the Prez will fall back on imposing even more onerous financial penalties, a far cry from threatening to send twice the number of javelins and bayonets, let alone threatening big arrow offensives by military socialist forces (the military base economy).

“Figure this out or I’m really gonna put my foot down, you don’t wanna see me having a hissy fit do ya? I can assure you it’ll be ugly.” If that’s what passes for tough talk, then we’re maybe making some headway.

As readers know, I’m a big fan of citizen diplomacy, with a lot of emphasis on truckers as among those who interact the most with counterparts from other backgrounds. How do we get more PhDs in that job? Lots of data science. I could say the same for global airline crews etc. 

It’s the tone of those anonymous semi-private person to person conversations that I like to track.  These latest few moves by the new White House team, with respect to the NATO war, seem relatively benign in a Chuckles the Clown kind of way. 

The comedy index has ticked up, if only a little.

Launching 2025: Keeping It Going

Fake Views

As one might expect, I've been using the spike in interest in Greenland to draw attention to its distorted size on the oft used Mercator projection. I'm not saying fact checkers should take those posts down. We have to give the slow folks a role. I'm happy to see interest in geography, but seriously... really? A Mercator in 2025? What school did you go to?

I'm fine with all these mental exercises around borders turning fluid, Canada becoming a state even before Puerto Rico. Other groups are talking about selling off Florida to Cuba (how much ya want?), or Texas to Mexico (free!), now that the ball has started rolling, and it's OK to buy and sell in a virtual space of the imagination. I feel like we're gambling those Valve "skins" (textures).

I'm fine with this kind of mental exercise precisely because it empowers the human imagination, which is the source of these kinds of things (nations) in the first place. We're clearly in a time of shifting borders wherein nations come and go, as well as gerrymander. 

No one agrees on the maps of West Asia or East Europe anymore. That data layer has gotten rather corrupted, which in turn makes the concept of "citizenship" more difficult to get clear on.

What we do see is the geography of our playing board, in terms of its physical features, versus what the human ethnicities project. The ethnic projections are still important, on many levels, and have to do with self organization, operating as a group. That's something humans are not spontaneously any good at. They need enculturation and education, to customize their outward behavior.

How is mandatory conscription not slavery? A government that people want to support only need provide myriad opportunities for public service. Maybe you're on UBI and regard your government service as volunteer work. So much the better. Those of independent means are much harder to bribe or sway with the promise of funds.

They say "money talks" and say "rich and powerful" as if those two go together, but a lot of the time what talks is not the money but the perceptions it may assist in creating. Or not. Perceptions spread like wildfire without needing a big push from the sponsors sometimes.