Another Loop

Springwater Corridor Entrance: Gresham

Some might say "another lap" and I can see that, but the connotation there is one of "deterministic" (to quote AI) pathways, whereas the loops I'm talking about are more random, but do include a lot of the same points.

What I consider the most challengingly hilly part of the loop is right at the outset: Asylum District, or Richmond-Sunnyside, to Hollywood District. That's a hilly patch, lots of ups and downs. Geologists tell the stories. Mt. Tabor is in the picture.

I tried some new segments today. Like coming back on Green, I jumped off at 60th instead of Hollywood, hoping for a predominantly downhill ride. That's why I'm liking the Gresham-to-Green route along Springwater Corridor: it's gently, very gently, downhill. I got in lowest gear. I also stopped to eat blackberries (prevalent this time of year).

When I set out this morning, kind of on a whim (I make choices), I wasn't entirely sure I was gonna attempt a Gresham Loop. Why not my usual Sellwood Loop? Once down the driveway, I turned left, adding to the probability I was at least attempting that hard part to Hollywood. But once there, why not do the rest of it, now with the hard part behind? That's what ended up happening.

Given such a random walk approach, I wasn't in a mode to broadcast to others what my plans were (cuz I didn't really have any sure enough to share), however I'm not averse to cycling solo. That's an extremely common way to cycle, all around the world, especially if you're cycling to a job and not joyriding with a buncha friends. This was mid morning on a Monday, so I saw a paucity of joyriders. A few. Usually older-looking, like me.

I'm not listening to tunes or trying to be tuned out when cycling. Actually I take that back: I'll use "the bat" (BlueTooth speaker) pulling audio from the iPhone and Verizon, ears uncovered, bat in front pouch.

Cycling requires pretty good awareness, especially at crossings but at all times really. No one talks about AI bicycles, thankfully. However people do go on "autopilot" which means they forget to stay conscious about what they're doing. Usually that results in a wrong turn, which inspires higher consciousness. Other times: fender benders.

Now that I'm back in the "outstairs office" (I moved the Quado instairs), I'm checking out some new repos wherein Fuller's stuff gets mixed, jury out on value added in some dimensions, a definite win in others, as propagation in itself means we get to party. Am I talking about my Pirate Party? Who knows.

Friends of a friend are catching up to what I'm into, and it doesn't take them as long as it took me to get to where I'm at, cuz that's how it works in knowledge, or in intel or whatever we call it: future generations get to move quickly through what seemed more like a slog at the time. That's actually gratifying for the oldsters, as they weren't desperately hoping to play Sisyphus all day. Sometimes you want results.

I'll file a lot of today's pictures into Gresham Loop and InterModal Adventures folders on Flickr. The same picture may appear multiple times without needing to create duplicates, more like the Python model, wherein signifiers share a signified.

Of Manga and Mangos

This title for this post came to be even before I embarked on today's Wanderer circuit, taking in the new-to-me Gresham Library (East County branch) and checking out some titles. I went by bus and Max.

The reason for the research into Manga and Anime is of course the Martian Math storyboard, didactic in nature. 

The manga approach is already used to teach about technical topics, a mix of lore and hard core that I’ve favored at least since Chicago and my Python for Teachers lectures.

The dried mangos (no sugar) came from the Trader Joe’s between where I got of the 75 and got on the Blue Line Max, at the Hollywood station (Portland has its own Hollywood).

Toy Stories

Show & Tell Item

I had no expectation of finding this on the WalMart dog aisle. We were taking a shortest distance to the registers, having selected our groceries. But wait! Look at this! Quado.

The dog aisle has come through for us before, with those buckminsterfullerene (C60) chew toys.

The presenters may show up with a box of widgets and gizmos, or if presenting remotely, have these at hand, in order to demonstrate this or that principle (possibly many) using a special case prop. Quado will become such a prop.

Why, you ask?

Because a bunch of us have put eggs in a certain BASKET (inside joke) and wanna keep barreling ahead with our computationally-oriented Silicon Forest subculture. Even if we don’t think nature is using pi, we’re free to, as a converging sequence, maybe using one of Ramanujan’s in Python.

Earlier I was thinking how moving “irrational” out of the way in favor of a relationship, one of “incommensurability”, then frees up “rational” or even “omni-rational” from having to play the antithesis of the chaotic (some might say anarchic). 

That’s just some geek speak, about fine tuning some English words for our specific application (this is allowed; shoptalks happen).

Speaking of shoptalks: what Quado will provide, as a show & tell item, is a chance to show off a “caltrop” (Scrabble word). 4D Solutions has its own way of going through a quadrays schtick which I’m sure you’ll be able to get from other sources as well. 

Back to BASKET: we’re especially focused on what’s called the A module, which is the name for a specific wedge-shape fragment of a D-edged tetrahedron (D for Diameter). If none of this rings a bell, don’t worry, it’s just a local lingo that has a way of sinking in.

City Planning

In an effort to keep engineers from getting too gutsy in the political arena, the public has been taught to hate the "social engineering" engaged in by "authoritarian states" such as [fill in the blank, project at will]. But then the engineers are also expected to "put a man on the moon" or whatever the hell, and that takes a lot of mind dynamics, meaning management savvy.

My approach to “grooming” (yes I’ll use that word, sounds equestrian) a next generation of social engineer (like we see at Meta, Google and so on) is to start with personal scheduling and time management as an engineering challenge, but also a social one, as we’re talking about engagement with others, sometimes in groups, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes synchronously, but usually asynchronously (like when you “get the memo”).

To ascend to higher management in terms of awareness (while staying on the shop floor if that’s your choice) you have to “empathize” (in quotes because over-used), meaning go through the experience of  “sonder” (check YouTube for that one) or call it “self awareness 101” (self- and otherness-awareness evolve in tandem). 

Quakerism has been good for developing self awareness in my own case, allowing me to jump in and out of various roles on and off the various committees, many of which dealt with life and death issues (birth, marriage, caregiving, memorials). The Centers Network (a mind dynamics company) also gave me structured access to the wheels-spinning world.

An important awareness to develop is that of “parallelism” over “serial” or “linear” mental models. Remember no one is waiting for you in particular to “get it” in the sense that insights will come to anyone with an open mind, and if yours is firmly shut, then rest assured the Zeitgeist will find other people as torch bearers. 

And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with having “a full plate” and enjoying the insights you might’ve had through the experience of others having them. Think of the discovery of DNA’s structure for example.

At this point, it’s useful to think of a Control Room (we’re in the blog by that name after all), as many of us have seen countless times both in fictional and nonfictional works. “Houston” has been used, as in the Apollo Program, as in “Houston, we have a problem”. 

That’s what I mean by politics merging with social engineering: Texans, not just Floridians, not just Cape Canaveralites, got to feel “pride of place” in addition to getting to play a role (for real — I think it happened, the moon landing) in NASA’s theater.

I say “play a role” advisedly as the complex engineering required for an OMR requires critical path parallel planning against a serial backdrop, a timeline. 

Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking, into the future. Pegged to those ticks: actors with their lines, hitting their marks (or not) and directors getting action, reaction, results for their editing rooms and post production, where creative censorship happens (we can’t show it all, obviously), in service of messaging. 

Politics gets added, in other words. Spin doctoring occurs. Usually with engineers manning (a gender-neutral term) the controls if not designing the actual psyops (PR and propaganda).

So yes, we do see social engineering happening everywhere we look, including in the tawdry halls of the NeoRomans who still plan to rule over us per their own brand of social engineering.  But we don’t need to accept their PR as legit given what we now know about their ways and means.

We’ll no doubt keep accommodating them on some level however. They love to swill in scandal, like the Brits. Theater is their forte.  Let’s encourage their brand of cosplay by letting them continue to make The District look like Ancient Rome (lotsa columns). 

Mussolini was good at that with his EUR, investing in fascist symbolism.  Ditto DC. 

Going forward, I’ll plan to think of Washington DC as our North American version of the EUR (I used to live in the EUR, ditto near DuPont Circle): a gleaming “city on a hill” (atop a swamp), a city-state in its own right (not in any state). 

Lots of tourists (already the case). Lots of monuments to the dear departed, many on horseback or of high military rank, commanders, chiefs (so kinda like London in that respect: believers in that Aryan mythos, eugenicists a lotta of em, of Eurasian extraction — important subcultures for sure).

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 fairytales, 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 fairytales 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.