The Alto Knights (movie review)

I picked this out almost at random it seemed, though the MMU angel might’ve been guiding my hand to stay within the noir lineage somehow. I was in the mood for something in New Releases and paid an extra dollar for that privilege. We rented Scarlett Pimpernel at the same time.

Robert De Niro plays both gangster principals, friends turned enemies, meaning he appears playing against himself in several scenes, in ways film allows but not live theater. You’re not meant to be thinking “special effect”; you’re expected to forget entirely there’s just the one actor behind both characters. Dave looked it up later to confirm. We went in no realizing this was going to happen.

What I found interesting in terms of timeline is the events were right around the time of my birth, late 50s, early 60s (in the 1900s). I remember those car makes and models were indeed prevalent on the road back then, although these memories are dim, plus cars evolved quickly in terms of shape and size, and even underlying technology to some degree.

The idea that “everything changes” and yet some people find it hard to adapt, to let go of old patterns, as one of the two principals most clearly demonstrates. He has come back from hiding overseas to an entirely changed United States, New York City in particular, and he expects to pick up where he left off, in his own mind, as supreme leader of the underground crime scene.

The friend who returns to New York, from hiding out, is the hot head version of De Niro. The friend to whom he left the racket pre WW2, to manage in the meantime, has done so quite successfully, per the consensus of other crime bosses. Costello is the relatively cool-headed De Niro, who most anchors this drama. He’s the one who get shot in the opening moments, put somehow lives (inconvenient).

One of the funnest parts was on the drive to upstate NY, seeing the signs for Palmyra. The hot head gets into an argument with the driver, against whom he holds a grudge, about whether the Mormons really got started in Palmyra. The driver is correct in thinking they did, but given he’s already botched the murder of the other principal he was tasked with by this one, his boss on the backseat starts to physically attack him, causing the car to swerve a bit. A third passenger tries to restore equilibrium as a moderating influence.

The film is meant to be anthropological as well as historical. We’re exploring an ethnicity, and how it operates, albeit highly dysfunctionally. 

Education vs Research

Education vs Research:  this distinction came up in our Knowledge Engineering meetup this morning. Research advances the frontier of a discipline, or call it a subculture. Education is about catching people up, getting them to the frontier in the first place. 

Not that getting to the front has to be a long trip. Low hanging fruit in abundance is a characteristic of many of budding ecosystem. But then you want to be sufficiently trained when you get there.

And that’s the pitfall:  in the mad dash for fame and glory, for one’s original research, the commitment to teach, to educate, and thereby pass the torch, gets overlooked. How many are willing to forego mining for gold in order to teach mining?

In my First Person Physics endeavor, which gained me entry to the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), I got to know some of these education-focused pros, such as Dr. Bob Fuller, who considered Dr. Robert Karplus to be one of his mentors.

Princeton University is supposed to focus on Education over Research in being more about giving undergrads a fast track vs trying to make a name for oneself by heading a pack of grads and postdocs. 

Celebrating a Centennial

I know most of the entertainment channels plan to focus on the 250th, a nice round number, counting up from 1776, but as I'm telling my peer planners, that's not my gig. The Times Square ball has already been programmed. That's big corporate account PR stuff outside of my price range or market. However, Route 66 is in my ballpark or bailiwick or whatever we call it (arena?).

The “desert highway” trope is important, such as in my introduction to the “vane” in various lesson plans, where one might picture a rusted windmill, and say a gas station. Then came the rhyme with 1.06066… which was like a puzzle piece fitting in (Wittgenstein: to what?).

I’m not suggesting Route 66 itself is in Cascadia at any point, and yet as memes they share that property, of being memes, not official, off the grid in a sense. Route 66 was officially decommissioned in one corpus, but resurrected in another. This kind of stuff happens in anthropology. It goes the other way too: something alive and with agency in one subculture, will be seen as innocent of any agency in another.

Remote Base Designs

So it’s Curry Week in Portland. I should explain. We have this “food of the week” tradition, that doesn’t map to every week, in which eateries voluntarily sign up to offer said food in the form of a “special” of some advertised amount, say $10.

My peer group tends to take these weeks semi-seriously in that we’ll go out of way to plan a stop at this or that restaurant or food truck or pub or whatever, that is showing up on the maps. Social media plays a big role obviously. In my neighborhood, food trucks abound and today I have two on my list, meaning I’ll be flipping a coin (so to speak) at some point.

Speaking of coin flipping, as you might know if a connoisseur of my curated content (these blogs), my statistics and probability vane (think of a windmill) goes by Casino Math, a search term herein and elsewhere in my writings, where a certain Digital Math of the Silicon Forest is featured. Is Wikieducator still working? We were getting indications it was taking on water.

Casino Math is meant to highlight both the history of the social sciences, and the physical sciences as an offshoot (contrary to stereotypes), and the fact that the institution we know as “the casino” (minus aberrational examples such as on Catalina Island (no gambling)) is a concentrated example of what we know about “odds” as well as human psychology (they go together — predicting human behavior is an art, true, but also a science).

I wonder if I’ll be able to wire my Visa card to my bitcoin wallet at some point. Use the card mechanism but backend it into whatever store of value you’re able to make fungible in the moment. Best to have a buffer in hard currency with a backend able to take more time, as bitcoin sometimes required, especially with mining costs what they are.

Yes, money talk is Casino Math in a lotta ways, but also Supermarket Math. So now you’re wondering about Neolithic and Martian Maths, as the two remaining. Of course we’re free to look at “money” through all four lenses, with Neolithic reminding us of how “kind” and “currency” might overlap, in the form of promised cows (bovines), redeemable thanks to IOUs issued in their stead. With the sovereign’s picture. A man of his word? A hard currency would suggest yes.

What about on Mars, will we use money? Did they need money on the starship Enterprise in the TV show? 

I don’t really see these as the questions to be asking, at least not of me. I wouldn’t know. More to the point is what will “money” mean when we’ve had some centuries of experience using crypto?

When I hand over my Visa (or swipe it myself actually — most food trucks don’t need to even touch the card), I imagine paying in something worth burritos, or curried chicken wings, or… you name it. Once in the catalog as a priceable item, you’re in the world of “frequencies” (how rare a thing is). Statistics is all about the relative frequencies of various types of event. Lookup the etymology of “fluke” as in “unlikely thing happening”.

We have these plans for “glamping” campuses in extreme remoteness, meaning the airplane or helicopter doesn’t come every day, more like a base camp, as in mountain climbing, but without presuming that specific climate. Some base camps are too high for planes or helicopters anyway. So maybe one needs to hike in. The circuitry is based on “food trucks” which are like the animal branded lodges of old, with extended families and exogenous relationships.

In our diagrams, we have stratification based on length of stay, planned or actual. Some faculty or staff are full timers and stay during off season, when the tourists have left, but with more to come. In Las Vegas terms, you need the locals to offset the peak and valley rollercoaster of feast or famine. At the height of tourist season, the locals have work. When visitors taper off, they get more of a playground, given they know the ropes already.

Revisiting Grunch of Giants

What killed the USA as we knew it was the Supreme Court legislating that money is speech and corporations are people. At that point, AI (phony intelligence) took over. If there’s such a thing as human intelligence that’s not just AI, we still have a chance of pulling out of this tailspin. But I doubt we’ll have nations as we know them today. Too impractical. I’m glad the US led the way, in celebrating its own demise amongst a small circle who actually get it, what’s going on. Most people are clueless, which has always been a challenge where democracy is concerned.

Interpenetrating diaspora nations, people of all nations mingling, touring, basing bases… that’s the reality on the ground, not pens with fences around them, although that’s the logical conclusion of the nation state mentality, quite psychotic, good thing the boomers won’t be with us forever (present company included).

I wasn’t suggesting the GOP intentionally instigated the USA’s demise. I’m alluding to a long history during which the Supreme Court went along with the railroaders, expanding the upgrading of slaves to full humans per 14th amendment (still not with voting rights in practice) to include promoting corporations to full personhood (still limited liability, still monsters) by the “same” reasoning / rationale. That all happened a long time ago, post Civil War. 

Then you have Citizens United opening all the power chairs to Corporations (dead, soulless, artificial beings with no conscience or consciousness — AI in other words — with superpowers endowed by law). That Business Plot (echoing the earlier failed attempt, frustrated by Smedley Butler) was completed by the 1980s and ever since it has been downhill for the vast majority, as silly humans fail to compute the consequences of their own actions. 

Like of course the nation-state system would never survive a corporate takeover. A takeover is a takeover. You live in the private sector today. There is no public sector to speak of, only a fake one. If you want to rebuild a public sector, go ahead, is what I’d advise and encourage people to do. But in the meantime, I don’t see anything but oligarchy, around the world. City-states. Nations are for children to believe in, like Santa Claus. I’m not being cynical. I’m OK with nations gone. I don’t have any religious conviction that any of them are still real.

Mapping Quadrays

Mapping Quadrays @ School of Tomorrow

Jane Eyre (movie review)

That I’m on some kind of Film Studies kick makes sense, given the proximity of MMU. I also credit my book club (“Mercado Group” if you’re into search), for always pipelining curated content. 

I always have a full queue. Last night it was the 1943 Robert Stevenson version of Jane Eyre, the one with Joan Fontaine (as the older “Jane”) and Orson Welles.

“Why play up the MMU angle when we can all watch this movie on YouTube?” asks one of my imaginary mental chat box bots. Because the DVD versions come with loads of Special Features, only some of which I’ve taken in at the time of this review (I also have a whole other version of Jane Eyre waiting, from yet further back on the timeline).

My particular curriculum (the one I develop, the railroad I work on) features Orson Welles through a number of segments, with a double underline for Martian Math, where science fiction and Synergetics converge. 

From War of the Worlds (and that fateful Halloween evening in radio land, back to Orson) we might segue to H. G. Wells and his corpus, including Morlocks (geeks) versus Eloi (politicians), my adaptation of The Time Machine for a contemporary audience.

Speaking of contemporary audiences, Jane Eyre has a plot line that resonates with its script, and behind the script, Bronte’s novel. Perverse religion oppresses the young Jane, an orphan, and through referrals, she gets trafficked into nightmarish situations wherein she remains essentially powerless.

As things got underway, I felt convinced I’d fallen through the cracks in not knowing this story, whereas at Princeton I knew my share of Brontë fans. But when we got to the “troll in the tower” subplot, an obstacle to the romantic interest, I started remembering to the point of déjà vu. Of course I knew this story, this nightmare dream.

Be that as it may, I’d never seen this movie, and I found it edifying in terms of my Film Studies / Film History focus (I’ve been at this for a while).

Anyway, I was alluding to 2026 headlines and dashboards, all about how the underprivileged get sold to the more privileged as sex slaves, or at least as servants. The degree of depravity depends on the subculture. Not everyone gets to be in presidential circles (or even C-suite).

Speaking up for the women was medical science to a small degree, underwriting a new kind of skepticism towards more established religious rackets and their codifications of the various pathologies, sometimes as templates for a religious life.

The revenge Jane has is her childhood tormentor, a brat her own age, grows up to be a total loser, hangs himself (she finds out in the end; not a major plot point), plus she’s able to restore her crazy guy to health and sanity (unlike the tower bitch), without that much damage to her orphaned self pride. 

In the real world, outside of fiction, vengeance would rarely be so sweet.

We know as the movie fades that Jane will likely get to see those great cities after all. Her guy is a man of means. Their child will know its parents.

More Lesson Plans from School of Tomorrow

The Glass Key (movie review)

The Hollywood, on Sandy Blvd, exhibited in miniature at Movie Madness

I texted David I was "working through the 'The's" at Movie Madness, meaning titles starting with the word The, which librarians know not to alphabetize by, as, as tokens go, "The" is too frequent to be a good hash table marker (lookup feature). Skip the "The" and go on to the next word in the title, is the rule of thumb. 

Sorting by too-common features is like sorting fruits into "round" and "not round". You can do it, but it'd be a jumble. And how "round" do you have to be to count as "round"? What's a "fruit racist" gonna be like?

The Glass Key is filed under genre "Film Noir" at MMU, in the Classics section. Their filing system is interesting, and the key to it is a computer lookup service, as the filing system is mainly just a "where to go" map. Every DVD has to be shelved somewhere; here's a coherent system. 

I agree: it's coherent as long as the computer is up and running (these days it seems to always be, Praise "Bob").

What I learned from this classic is (a) Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an established generator of trend-setting crime fiction (a John le Carré in his niche), his novels adapted to movies well, The Glass Key being one such and (b) Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, the pair of them, were a thing, like another Bogart-Bacall.

The Glass Key makes you keep track of quite a few relationships, chiefly siblings and offspring among two families, so somewhat Romeo and Juliet in that sense. Indeed, one family is blaming the other for the death of one of its sons, the one with the gambling problem. 

Alan Ladd is not actually a blood relative of anyone, but he's a main character nonetheless, and the sparks are between these two camps, the one with the murdered son, and the politically ambitious family seeking to run the town behind the scenes.

What's interesting is how characters are "on the spectrum" but by that, what "spectrum" do I mean? This film explores impulsive unthinking behavior versus planned out conniving. 

The "brusque brother" as I thought of him, chief suspect in the murder, Ladd his fixer friend, is impulsive but also a planner, and therefore less extreme w/r to said spectrum than the big dope beat-um-up type who gets suckered into doing the dirty work for others. 

Ladd is the epitome of a deep thinker and has a Sherlock Holmes super detective role. Veronica is starving for guys with brains (in short supply) and begs to join his thread (program). He declines pending permission from his parent process, which comes at the end (not to spoil it or anything).

Fine Tuning some Lessons

We're doing some pedagogy today, meaning mapping out more of the graph, such as filling in a picture connecting Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to Russell Towle, a zonohedron master. They were not intimately connected, more adjacent, same neck of the woods. Russell was in my network.

STEM-wise we have two lesson plans (flight plans) under discussion: 

• the density of the CCP (cubic close packing) using S3 (Synergetics Constant) to make a ratio of S3 times XYZ ball volume, divide by six, its domain's volume, that of the "spheric" or rhombic dodecahedron. Answer: about 74% full, 26% empty.
  
  
• the dimensions of the six Vanes, we call em, in our homebase tetrahedron, the "gossamer membranes" as we might think of them, sectioning off the four quadrants, congruent isosceles triangles with an included angle of about 109.47 degrees, or acos(-1/3) to be precise.

The two plans go together in that the homebase tetrahedron is defined by four CCP balls, intertangent, of radius R and diameter D. 

Those Vane dimensions give a D-edged tetrahedron say of edges 1 (so R = 0.5), with four center-to-corner spokes of about 0.61237, or sqrt(6)/4 to use a symbolic expression. Our segue here is to the A module of Synergetics, where all these lengths and angles come into focus.

Make any sense?

Russell Towle was aware of my early work and saw I was using a squashed aspect ratio he knew how to fix, as he'd also used POV-Ray. I followed his suggestion and my renderings have looked better ever since.

The term "vane", associated with windmills, also has currency within the Urbit realm, Urbit being a kind of internet-like communication technology with its own shoptalk and indigenous computer languages, higher (Hoon) and lower (Nock). 

In Urbit, the operating system kernel Arvo, is in touch with its world by means of vanes. Ames and Clay would be vanes, in charge of networking and the filesystem respectively. I'm not the expert. I had a planet up and running, but then it crashed.