The Elk Returns

The Stranger (movie review)

This movie was on disc one of a five DVD set, which Dave saw on eBay for like $51 including shipping, however my copy was rented, from Movie Madness (moving to newer digs next year). Last night we watched The Trial (disc four), which Orson wrote and directed (1962, starring Anthony Perkins, Kafkaesque).

This noir is a throwback to when hunting a specific brand of ideologue was understood in light of the WW2 experience. Orson plays an embedded eugenicist, a college professor, but in the past he was a concentration camp supporter, even main organizer. 

Edward G. Robinson (the actor, playing an undercover detective) is hot on his trail, and shows up in Harper Connecticut right when Orson is getting married to his target, the daughter of a high level United States authority figure.

Later, the eugenicists would manage to redirect all this paranoia, about embedded spies, towards the Russians, a former ally, evidence these earlier worries (about a former foe) were justified. In fact, many during WW2 were more interested in defeating the Slavs than the Goths (the Hun), not that such internal programming (wiring) makes any sense in the grand scheme of things; reflex-conditioning leads to a lot of nonsensical violence, and thinking in racial terms is clearly “buggy” (a euphemism for “demented” in this case).

Orson, being from a clock-fixated culture, like these big clocks in town squares, atop towers, can’t keep himself away from fixing the town clock, making a racket with the bells and drawing attention to himself. 

It’s almost as if he has a thick German accent and can’t stop doing that arm gesture from the movies, but that’s not his problem. He speaks American, and acts the part of a New England based college professor just fine. His problem is they can’t keep him away from the clock tower, where he’s obsessed with the broken clock.

The other telling giveaway that Robinson detects comes up in conversation. Orson is going on and on about what losers those Germans are (even though many Americans shared the same ideology and do to this day) but then he spits out “Marx was no German, he was a Jew”. Robinson woke up latter, in the middle of the night, realizing only an embedded eugenicist would say such a knee-jerk thing, and he called Washington DC, reversing his not guilty verdict (or hunch). 

Orson meets his end in that clocktower, skewered by his own clock (it has pointy bits), a metaphor for how mechanical men, unable to reprogram themselves, end up: as victims of their own machinery. Debugging a monstrous mindset doesn’t equate to unlocking high level social skills i.e. what’s actually required if one expects to make significant headway on this planet (as an ideologue or otherwise).

Tough Guys (movie review)

My whimsical purpose in renting this film from Movie Madness was two-fold: take in more classic actors, Burt Lancaster in particular, and followup on that Oregon Rail Heritage Museum tip: that one of their star locomotives had been in this Hollywood film.

Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster play old men, seniors, in this light comedy. Neither has to act the being older part, as both are in fact seniors by this time (1985 or so). The film is set in the then present (i.e. 1985) as these two were jailed for thirty years in 1955. The math is easy. Now they’re back on the outside.

There’s some gunplay, a tiny hint of nudity, but no blood spatter or other graphic carnage. 

The theme is that of coming out of a figurative time capsule, into the future. Prison is the time capsule. I know it’s actually like that in some ways; people in that long come out into an alien world. One of my high school friends came out to a world of smartphones and USB ports.

This movie world, being comic and cartoon-like, is not overly much like the real world. There’s a lot of parody in the form of stereotypes. 

The characters are meant to be shallow, almost props, as the focus is on these two male personalities and their respective coping abilities, which we’re to find admirable. 

Seniors in the audience should be rooting for these characters as the movie is touting a brand of maleness we’re supposed to feel nostalgic for. They dress like 1940s gangsters from some Bogart era noir, whereas in the world around them people look and act more like Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda.

Burt’s character (age 72) gravitates to good old days pastimes and stands up for inmate rights in his nursing home, the one he’s assigned to by the parole officer. The slightly younger Kirk Douglas character (age 67) wants to relive his youth and enjoy life in the fast lane if that’s possible, although when it comes to sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, he seems to skip the drugs, plus it’s more punk rock that they’re into in this time period.

Realism is not the point here. People get away with crazy stuff, almost to the point of slapstick, but not quite.  Waiting for these two to emerge from their “time capsule” is a nutcase intent on destroying them, and the police guy eager to catch them again, as if they’d be dumb enough to try robbing the same train he caught them trying to rob the first time. Besides, no one robs trains anymore right?

What might seem anachronistic in 2026 is this “Mexican border” idea. A lot of noirs use that same trope: if you make it across the border, even by just a few feet, you’re magically in another jurisdiction, and the law of the land no longer applies (somewhat by definition). The magic is bidirectional. To escape prison, flee to another country. 

Today’s prisoners emerge into a global surveillance system and parole checkins by Zoom call. Escaping the Borg (McLuhan: Global Village) is not so easy.

The big orange engine I saw in a museum just yesterday, stars in the climactic closing scenes. I’m likely to go back with the director’s commentary turned on for those train parts, hoping for more train lore. I might work some of what I learn into another journal entry.

Quadrays Update

Andy's JS implementation came to me through Bonnie's clique, in that they'd seen a custom presentation I missed (talking about other Syn-U faculty), but then Andy and I were in touch via LinkedIn, plus he credits me on his splash screen, as well as Bonnie.

On some levels we're close to congruent, on others, ships passing (in the night or day, it shouldn't matter -- the point is no interference). For example, his implementation dives into Wildberger constructions, well documented on YouTube, whereas mine is more conventional, sticking to classic Euclidean concepts but for the alternative powering model.

Daniel and I had already embarked on the QuadCraft Project, under which umbrella term he started on 4Dchess and other 4Dx popular game analogs, where "4D" is in the "4D Syndicate" sense (as in: "4D as used by the Bucky cabal"). We had a JS developer adding 3D to an IVM framework embedded in the JavaScript 2D canvas. Andy's implementation uses the three.js library instead. Both are customizable.

Finally, Andy credits Tom Ace, another name in the Quadray Coordinates entry in Wikipedia and someone I've tracked through other projects, such as HyperSnakes.

Regarding Quadrays: my "some might say quirky" distance formula is designed to match the Synergetics "A Module" with its 2nd root of 6 over 4 distance from (0,0,0,0) -- the tetra's center -- to any of its four vertices (distance EC in Figure 913.01).

Meaning D((0,0,0,0), (1,0,0,0)) is not 1, but is rather $$\sqrt{6}/4$$.

but then:

D((1,0,0,0), (0,1,0,0)) = 

D((1,0,0,0), (0,0,1,0)) =

D((1,0,0,0), (0,0,0,1)) = 1,

when 1 = the diameter of the IVM reference balls used to make it (the home base tetrahedron), and where D(a, b) is the distance between the two points a, b.

Those distances are then used to design the XYZ juxtaposition, where I associate (1,0,0,0) with the (+,+,+) octant and so on. My mappings are well-documented in the Quadrays slide deck (School of Tomorrow).

Coda Minutes

knowledge engineering meetup Mar 31 26; coda minutes

No Kings in PDX

A world-readable Flickr album, assembled post march. Here's a pre march post.

PDX means Portland (as in Cascadia) in the local jargon.

The Platonics: Another Take

Jupyter Notebook on Github

Genealogy Library

A lotta Muricans are newly hip to (fluent in) this game (world game) of citizenship, and are considering adding passports or other movement credentials, as required by the transportation services. Along those lines, I was accompanying a citizen into proving Canadian ancestry, and what better place to complete the research than an ancestral archive, with everything from marriages to deaths, to county lines, exotic grid and survey systems I’d never learned about at Princeton?

I’m still mulling over the high bandwidth content I got from my tour of this basement facility in what used to be a Ford car assembly plant. Portland made those, for sure not on the scale Detroit did, or should I say Dearborn. I’m recalling my visit to the Henry Ford Museum and the Dymaxion House on exhibit, when Tara and I went by in a rental, the make and model of which I no longer recall. We were coming from Richmond, Indiana on that adventure, from Earlham College. Carol (my mom) was joining a WILPF summit at Wayne University. We stopped in Toledo (Ohio), and at that mosque.

On the way there (to the Ford Building), with my friend driving, we talked about Subaru (what we were in), a Japanese brand of car that Cascadians are very fond of and buy in outsized numbers. Subaru means Pleiades. Possibly the lack of light pollution makes our tribes more aware of astronomical phenomena, leading to our appreciation for all-terrain (four wheel drive style) vehicles of the type Subaru has pioneered (…Legacy, Outback, Forester, Impreza…). 

Our family had two Subarus: Robin Egg and Razz, both station wagon style (I grew up on station wagons: Fairlane, Cortina, Taunus, all Fords, those last two Made in Europe). “Station wagon” is a term inherited from the Old West shoptalk. In the Philippines we went with a Chevy sedan (the first car I learned to drive on, getting my stateside license later). Maxi Taxi, my jalopy muscle car, is a Nissan from Savannah. My wife owned a Volvo when we first met, and later she bought a Corolla (Toyota).

Those planning on leaving the jurisdiction may first participate in a protest next Saturday, a last gesture before fleeing a beastly state. My plans don’t involve much near term travel other than by car (I do have valid travel credentials — Canada is but a half day drive), but with a trip to Greater LA always in the back of my mind. I could park Sydney with friends and fly, maybe staying with public transportation on the other end (not the first time).

Diagrams

Achieving Escape Velocity

This was a period for doing curriculum development around Quadray Coordinates especially, as that meme had caught on and implementations were spreading, from my angle both inside, and outside, the scope of our QuadCraft project. 

QuadCraft had the tagline "A World Beyond MineCraft" or something like that, connoting our escape from rigidly rectilinear thinking. The TEXIT campaign (with variations) goes under this same heading.