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)

Facebook Post

Link to blog post

Autophagy: Comparing T2G Engines

Orange and Black Pilled

Fall Term Recap 

(YouTube vid)

Curriculum Design

Solar Power

The idea of solar power is sometimes dumbed down to mean solar panels and circuits driven by same. The idea of circuits is not wrong, it’s just that the big wheels were all turning long before humans inserted their rotational requirements, in the form of water wheel driven millstones and so on. The sun has been powering evaporation, condensation, rainfall and flows through streams to rivers to the ocean since time immemorial. 

We need not fixate on the sun as our one and only power input. The traveling of the planet through space in an orbital rotating formation, in tandem with our moon, is owing to the sun in a different sense, we could put it. Instead of radiated energy as a result of matter fusing to itself, the mere presence of that mass results in precessional patterns in its surroundings, such as ocean tides, and per the formation of a solar system in the first place. 

Furthermore, we have the geothermal throbbing of the planet itself, again owing to gravity, but also to geological chemistry, which includes melting and boiling points. We have vulcanism, lava flows, geothermal sources of heat.

What solar energy powers is our whole “terrarium” which is likewise our “aquarium” in terms of heat but also circuitry, pathways, channels. 

Photosynthesis turns soil minerals farmed through bacteria into the root systems of seedlings able to sprout stems and leaves, engines of self regeneration. Carnivorous life preys upon the herbivore layer. We get our pyramids of self actualization, our Ponzi schemes, our carnivals. Thanks to gravity squeezing out energy.

Whereas photosynthesis is naturally occurring, with humans yet to duplicate it artificially, where biomimicry achieves the most is in a parallel physiology done in metals, plastics, conductors and insulators, current generators. Conductors through control panels to actuators keep us within cybernetic loops of our own design. 

Consciously implementing experimentally trial-by-error designs, new schemes within nature, is our signature activity.

In the School of Tomorrow curriculum, we look a lot at the hydropower economy of the Silicon Forest, as Cascadian Synergetics is deliberately place-based. Oscilloscopes and trigonometry, energy conservation, alternating and direct current, series and parallel circuits… these are topics one expects in a bioregion focused on metrology, the science of precise mensuration, ala Tektronix and ESI. 

What impedes the flow of current and how? How does resistive impedance differ from capacitive impedance, in terms of waveforms? 

We’re allowing the practical elements of Motherboard Earth to stay in focus even is we probe the generalized principles (the so-called “natural laws”). We’ll be thinking about hydropower dams, what they do, how they work, as early as we think about astronomy more generally, and our civilizational context. Geography may begin with a local grid, a Dufur, but then we zoom out to see where our Dufur is, in relation to, say, Mars. Martian Maths is one of our four maths in our Digital Mathematics.

Picking on Mickey (MIC)

Given I play for the pacifist team, as a Friend and all that, it's not only allowed, but expected, that I sometimes vilify or otherwise mock the MIC (military-industrial complex) or Mickey. 

My approach has been to zoom in on this word "complex" and to make sure we know it refers to a mental pathology; it's a medical term, less than a business or economic one (not that these categories are mutually exclusive).

Zoltar is a stand-in (one might say stunt man) for the individual in the sense of homunculus, within my brand of (spin on) the active inference lingo.

Study Hall

If we were to look at my YouTube viewing history from last night, what would we see? 

A curious number of videos devoted to topics of concern to so-called linesmen, the men and women who have to work in high places sometimes, safely out of reach to most people, with dangerously high voltage equipment, such as transformers and so on.

The first topic I got into was ferroresonance. Your transformers may overheat if your capacitive inductance from the underground feeder cables cancels the magnetic field induced resistance in your delta wired bank. Magnetic inductance is a key feature of transformers that we don't want to inadvertently undermine with a compensatory resonance.

The second topic, related to the first, was leaving an open corner when doing a three transformer delta wiring, and measuring the voltage across this corner before closing it. If the circuit is correctly wired, the voltage will be pretty low, not some household number like 120 or 240, or even higher depending on the complication.

Why am I concerning myself with these topics?  Because I'm a "grid nut" -- someone interested in electrical grids rather generally. I admire those brave linesmen who are sometimes tasked with maintaining or constructing high tension lines at high altitude. If you're looking for ways to be brave, there's no shortage of scary jobs. Don't feel you need to become a soldier, if bravery-testing is your deal.

My Hypertext Trek

My story around hypertext starts with my recognizing myself as “a browser” by nature, when it came to open stack libraries and book stores. I’d browse, taking a somewhat wandering but not entirely random path through the collections, the classic bookworm. However as I became more exposed to computer consoles, what later we called monitors, my dreams took a familiar turn: fantasies about hypertext and the internet, ala Vannevar Bush (USG NSF) in the 1940s (As We May Think).

Princeton gave me the opportunity to feed my appetite for browsing big time, a big step up from our tiny yet respectable Media Center at the International School of Manila (IS we called it, usually ISM today). I was learning APL and other computer languages, and thinking how I’d redesign high school. We moved to Jersey City (myself and some friends) and my fantasies about hypertext ticked up a notch, as the internet was becoming a reality, for me in the form of New Jersey Institute of Technology access, to what later became known as PeaceNet and the IGC (Institute for Global Communications).

Around this time is when I first encountered Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib / Dream Machines. I grokked his Project Xanadu, but wasn’t so invested in the details that I felt a need to counter what eventually emerged from CERN and what became W3 i.e. HTTP/HTTPS and all the rest of it. That was all fine with me. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol was born, and was not proprietary in any way that would prevent its viral spread. “Going viral” could be a positive, oddly enough, given viruses are usually best known for being negatively impactful. To this day, post covid’s peak, Gen Z sees the point of “going viral” in that special upbeat way.

Given my predilections, I was quick to find an ISP and start making web pages when this became practical. Chris Fearnley and I were two of the first to publicize the Bucky stuff. He and I both did ray traced polyhedrons, plus he put out his famous FAQ, which quoted me quite a bit. We were off to the races, so to speak (I think of dogs racing, different breeds, as hand drawn or computed anime maybe). I created Synergetics on the Web on the Teleport platform, pdx4d my public facing user account. You will find my old URL under GRUNCH in the Encyclopedia of Conspiracies (RAW). Later I moved Synergetics on the Web to grunch dot net, where it resides to this day.