July Twelve

HB2U RBF

July the 12th, Bucky Fuller's birthday, will be coming around the every year not long after Summer Solstice, the start of the Summer Term @ School of Tomorrow. We'll be thinking of more ways to celebrate as time goes on. 

This year, I was focused on fleshing out my Silicon Forest curriculum for digerati with more "grid talk" meaning I stopped along a bicycle path to snap pictures of a typical substation, the kind that steps down the voltage pressure for end user customer loads.

The bike ride, a Gresham Loop, multimodal (bike and train, with a friend on an e-trike), actually happened the day prior to the 12th, whereas today is the day after. 

More Bucky Birthday festivities were happening at the Dome Home in Carbondale, now a tourist attraction, with its kitty-corner museum.

I shared the same HB2U RBF vid over Substack, with its own trailheads to other readings.

Reading Substations

An electrical substation is laid out just like a schematic. Engineers, left to their own devices, don’t add much cruft. Yet they’re fascinating in their functionality. I’ve long been in the habit of noticing them, even pausing and taking pictures, but not having learned much in middle school about em, I was failing to look back.

I finally regressed to what should have been in my high school curriculum (if not middle school): the anatomy of a substation. Not just what it does (steps up voltage for long distance transmission; steps down voltage for end user loads) but its anatomy: air gap disconnectors; gas-infused circuit breakers; oil-cooled transformers.

Where this puzzle piece fits, for me, is into my School of Tomorrow curriculum, brought to you by Oregon Curriculum Network and my own little 4D Solutions. I’ve called it Martian Math, which is meant to signal the science fiction stories one finds therein. 

We use sci-fi in place of fairy tales, if there’s a difference. One such story features ETs wanting to work with Earthlings on a hydro-dam project and needing to learn how the Earthlings learn maths, so as to make ET-Earthling communications more productive.

Substations have some features in common with hearts. For example, the substation itself needs some power, to run its own internals, which likely includes a control house even if remote operations are more likely (it's not either/or). The heart snarfs some outgoing fully oxygenated blood right off the top, from the aorta, to feed heart muscles.

Also, when doing open heart surgery, the team is able to route the patient’s blood through the perfusion station where real time testing and corrective dosing may occur (I’m not the expert, but did work with such teams as a software engineer, usually after hours (when CVOR itself was off line)). Likewise workers tasked with maintenance don’t want a live load and it’s reassuring to see, with one’s own eyes, that the disconnectors are in their “open” position.

CodaComb

Newspaper people have a natural understanding of templates, much as lawyers do. Or call them MadLibs. Fill in the blanks. Forms. In web world, we submit em.

When it comes to torch-passing mode, intergenerational transfer, I put on my anthropologist hat and observe various communities. Debate world was one of them. I went through that subculture as a judge, chaperone, and parent of a team member (Cleveland Cannibals).

Two subcultures I eye today: the Active Inference one and the Urbit one. 

Active Inference: a fusion of biology, psychology, and computer science (I park my thinking there sometimes).

Urbit: a software-based enterprise involving host-server "planets" organized in "galaxies" with an under-the-hood computer language called Hoon. My planet crashed but was fun while it lasted.

Those aren't the only two subcultures I tune in, obviously, but they're both engaged in passing the torch to downline generations and I enjoy lurking in on their processes.  Speaking of which: Process Work was another subculture I was invited to lurk in on and partake of. Arnold Mindell. Quantum Mind.

My Summer Term at School of Tomorrow is looking a fairy tales and other mythological content. We have the Naga Story. We have the Jolly Green Giant (Fe Fi Fo Fum). We have Martian Math.

Minions 3 (movie review)

I'd seen the preview for this one at Toy Story 5 but didn't quite realize how soon it'd be coming out. 

I walked by Fox Tower in downtown Portland on the off chance I'd wanna take in a film before fireworks. Minions and Monsters was just about to start. Why not? I've always found Minions movies entertaining.

Given the Film Studies focus of these blogs, wherein I interleave movie reviews such as this one, looking to connect the dots, this Minions fits perfectly into the syllabus. Because it's about the history of film-making, Hollywood in its golden era most especially (1920s - 30s), around the time films transitioned from live music accompaniment to "talkies".

The upshot is noobs learn a lot about film-making culture and history, while oldsters appreciate all the allusions mixed with satire, the knowing use of film canards and cliches. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton... and Dort (rhymes with dork), the hilarious Martian robot egomaniac with a crush on the suffragette. Wow, small world. Into this world barge the Minions, ever in search of a "big boss" they can serve as minions do. A faction breaks off to support Dort, whereas the bad guy bank robber on a horse is the other candidate.

The Minions make it big in Hollywood and are living the high life, when the talkies era obtrudes. Minions can't convincingly should like the characters they play. The Humphrey Bogart character just doesn't cut it (my favorite scene? -- during the "homage to noirs" part).

The self-aware "play within a play (within a play...)" dynamic is worked deftly with the closing credits reminding us that minions made this film (Jeff Bridges among them). 

So where do the "monsters" fit in? Is Dort a monster? No, Dort is his own thing.

The story there is one of their interim Big Bosses was a Gandalf or Dumbledore type, a wizard with a book of magic spells, out of which one could summon major demons (monsters). However this book of spells is not the only source of monsters. Per a well-worn trope, monsters may also be thawed out, if you know where to find their hidden ice caves (one of the demons knows). 

The monsters have their assigned roles in the ensuing blockbusters.

The entire story is bracketed within a museum visit to a hall of fame, and the tour guide lady wants to be sure the lore gets passed on intact. She then tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two creatives, Henry and James (minions) whose imaginative powers will eventually make the Hollywood chapter work. 

This is all a prequel to the Gru chapters, which are foreshadowed but come later.

C Suite Hotels

If you’re a denizen of Geekdom then there’s a high probability that, whether or not you’ve been on one (I’ll say I haven’t, unless I count… nah), language-specific cruises, like C-lang Gang to Alaska, exist.

Even less rarified are the organized retreats where sprinting happens, meaning a cohort agglomerates to advance a software project they prolly work on together remotely, but now, all together in meat space, high bandwidth, they can prolly really crack some eggs if that’s an expression.

Fast forward and we’re thinking C-Suites Hotels, a chain of resort locations geared for C-language geeks in particular, which might or might not include C++ depending on the establishment. Some geeks will be comfortable in both C++ and C language lounges, gabbing fluently around the relevant food and beverage options.

Based on my experiences around OSCON, I’d suggest mono-language resorts and/or assisted living facilities, would be self defeating as the whole idea is to stimulate novel thought patterns, or at least that’s why many people are there. So we might express our resort’s offerings more in terms of a ballpark or blend. There might be a shared focus, such as Synergetics (a kind of computational geometry) that attracted a variety of geek guests.

I got to be in a geek retreat around Plone, a descendent of Zope, one of the early object storage databases, ahead of its time in some ways, maybe beyond in others (aren’t we all). Here’s some LLM prose about that ecosystem.

Natural Language Accelerators

I had an interesting conversation with a peer this morning, which touched on where things might be going with the various MEMEX type devices, chatbots and so on. 

Of course MEMEX is not a term of art in current shoptalks, but does come to us from the 1940s with the right connotations and expectations. Rather than clinging to LLMs + LMMs as the presumed architecture, or otherwise overfitting, we bring back an old bottle ready for new wine.  

MEMEX was a term coined by Dr. Vannevar Bush, the original National Science Foundation chief, when describing his vision of today’s AI but in terms intelligible at the time. Microfilm was a big part of it.

Everyone knows the direction in computing is towards ever smaller (vs ever larger) leading Bucky Fuller to propose his UMC (his ultra-micro computer), whereby human subjects might become pinheads in a good way, as metaphysical components within some “hive mind” or “zeitgeist OS”.

The picture on many drawing boards is of massive centralization in the cloud (much talk about data centers), whereas many social engineers are planning for the individual school-level MEMEX, picturing both a physical campus and a virtual sphere in Cyberia (cyberspace), in user space.

The logical boundaries for a typical school would be inclusive of theater and sporting events, debating events, any number of extracurricular, as well as curriculum-related, activities (chess club, glee club… specifics are obviously per school). 

Year books, course readings, pages for faculty (active and retired), pages for students, past research… all would be raw material for the MEMEX, the computer that makes sense from a bewildering variety of saved goodies, with more always being added.

My expectation is Princeton’s MEMEX will be usable by alumni and in aggregate alumni across classes will represent the bigger slice of the pie, based on demographics. Those currently enrolled are the pipeline into the alumni tiger tank (where we tigers hang out).

However, similar to what happened in the music industry, with barriers to entry falling, thanks to the technology, a smaller personal MEMEX is also forecast and indeed is what many are busily building right now today, after which they make public videos about it. To what degree these individual onboard models are given agency varies of course. 

Clearly we’re in a transitional period with AI, where many small experiments provide the feedback the bigger solution providers will need, if their relatively large scale affordances are gonna be considered affordable, meaning worth their cost. 

Many possible scenarios we simply cannot afford, only fantasize about, and maybe get people to pay for anyway, as they share the same fantasy without critical insights into the practical feasibility of whatever crazy plan. Groupthink is like that. People feel safe and secure as long as they’re not alone i.e. as long as they have a critical mass of true believer subscribers to whatever vision (one would hope for more than a mere vision).

Those with a stronger sense of the Reality Principle serve to help filter out the truly crazy schemes. Some do get through though, and those involved find out the hard way why they should never have gotten funded in the first place. By the time that becomes obvious, it’s too late to course correct, while meanwhile the crazy think tank professors who dreamed this stuff up, are off to other assignments. There’s no one to call.

When the game is to try many things, going with fast and small over slow and big, the consequences of a scenario failing or wiping out will be manageable as well as instructive. 

Some plans look like they could work and one only realizes in hindsight about some of the obvious flaws.

Learning from one’s mistakes is of prime importance, in order to avoid one of those doom loops we always hear about, wherein a failure to realize what’s self-defeating is in itself a blind spot in the analysis.

Investigating English

Let’s look some more into English, in the sense of “investigate”, a verb already colored, by me, for me, by the Wittgensteinian corpus. I’m referring to an Austrian philosopher, first name Ludwig, who also spent a lotta time around military hospitals, as well as in academic settings. 

Mostly LW preferred staying by himself (he secluded himself in Scandinavia somewhere) and thinking deeply about language and how words mean. Our contemporary philosophy owes a lot to this thinking, in synergy with the thinking of others.

The verb that comes to mind this morning is “to rationalize” which usually means “to contrive a rationale in retrospect” when something, likely unbidden, is already a fait accompli yet maybe still in need of some justification, explanation, or excuse. When one endeavors to “rationalize” whatever, one strives to fit whatever into some schema whereby it seems planned, intentional, or at least explicable, and therefore more acceptable.

From the previous paragraph you may gather, correctly, that rationalizations often ring hollow, as they’re used to justify the unjustifiable sometimes. So there’s a negative connotation to the word, as rationalizations have a poor reputation. 

But you might wonder, seeing how “rationalize” is so close to “rational” and also “reasonable” in semantic space that it’d have more of a luster to it, more of a positive connotation. Finding ways to make something seem more reasonable in retrospect should not be judged a weakness. It’s when the reasoning seems “forced” and/or “sketchy” that the proffered rationalizations are adjudged “empty”.

I’d say our ability to rationalize in the sense of “smooth over by applying one’s reasoning powers retroactively” is a part our ability to self heal. In other words, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with making the best of new developments by incorporating them into one’s emerging sense of reality.

The active inferencer, or inferant, seeking to minimize uncertainty (free energy), is always using the wisdom of hindsight to retell a tale already told. 

Revising is not a crime as there’s always more than one way to tell a story when facts underdetermine the spin we put on them. Sometimes the retelling seems phony, no question. We call that “putting lipstick on a pig”. A poor excuse might be a considered a failure to sufficiently rationalize. No rationale seems to work.

We’re taken to task for being “revisionist” sometimes, as thats another verb (“to revision”) with a bad reputation. 

But here too: isn’t revisioning a responsibility more than a sin? 

Both rationalizing and revising may be part of a healthy self-updating process. 

Don’t deny yourself the privilege of seeing events, or even your whole life, in a new light, given the advent of new information, new experiences. A willingness to revise is often called “being open minded” which in most walks of life is at least given lip service as a positive. To be “closed minded” is to be “stuck in a rut”.

Synergetics for Seniors

Curating Propaganda

I especially like this one; I made it myself, using Gemini.

 

XREF: 

The Rabble Babble

Geek Lore

National Intelligence Director

Mood Music