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 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.

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

Coasting to a Close

Having reminded presenters, especially the new ones, how I’m role modeling “place based”, I’m coasting through to the end of Spring’s term, looking forward to Summer’s. I’m referring to my School of Tomorrow, which takes a placed-based approach to pedagogy-andragogy (from child to adult).

However, “coasting” does not mean “not busy”. Thanks to co-presenters on social media, I’ve been going deeper into my studies and sharing results, both in terms of Project QuadCraft (“a world beyond MindCraft”) and in the matryoshka department (concentric dolls). I’ll use the balance of this blog post to summarize these results.

First thing first though, instead of FIFA we watched a Euro-made version of Dracula which was in some ways better than expected. Let’s see if I can write a tagline: a self righteous church has ways of dealing with overly-liberated women. Nah, that wouldn’t resonate with most people. Anyway, some of my friends are watching FIFA on Fox. I do get broadcast television, but not cable.

Project QuadCraft is about using Quadray Coordinates internally, although conversion to XYZ is naturally needed to make the computations intelligible to other software, which have more MineCrafty APIs. No problemo. We’ve had XYZ output since the beginning. But not everyone adopts the same conventions when it comes to the R-edged and D-diagonaled cubes, where R and D are radius and diameter of our closest backed balls (yes, the IVM or CCP).

Per our Volumes Table on Synergeo, used by many presenters who are not necessarily subscribed, our R-edged cube is irrationally volumed vs unit, even as our D-diagonaled cube is wholesomely whole numbered, and that difference in design throws off a lotta people. That’s why presenters have done some homework to keep peeps on track.

As for the dolls (the poly-guys matryoshka), we’ve been focused on an Italian Renaissance figure who lived around the same time as the Dracula in the Euro-movie: in the 1400s. He was a polymath (“Renaissance Man”) who made contributions across the spectrum, and gets a lotta credit for that icosa-inside-octa (faces flush), an arrangement of two Platonics that’s not a dual pair so much as a bridge, between 4- and 5-old symmetry fams. That’s another ongoing discussion on Synergeo.

Per said Volumes Table, our canonical octahedron has volume 4, whereas the faces flush icosahedron (Piero’s) is closer to 2.917 in volume. We have ways to express this “icosa within” (IW) volume in terms of algebra, which in this context means in terms of surds. Synergetics has always used surds, contrary to some boomer-led dumbing down campaigns mostly led by the math averse. As a presenter, you’re always welcome to take it away into new dimensions, but lets remember our source and its original design.

However, our middle schoolers are getting the art of programming through their homework anyway, we hope remuneratively although School of Tomorrow isn’t itself running a payroll. The presenters of which I speak have their own various ways of capitalizing on curriculum content. In my case, I’ve worked per hour on synchronous and asynchronous projects. I’ve joined as a W2 employee far less frequently (O’Reilly) but have done that too. Mostly I’ve been agreeing to teach online, and in live events around town, for example in the public and private middle schools (I’m thinking of Coding with Kids and Sunshine Elite).

The new-to-me Koski Identity, 60 S + 60 s3 for the RT built from Piero’s IW, gets snarfed up by Python and worked with algebraically, keeping the surds in play until we wanna tap those sympy expressions for decimal digits (that’s usually our base). S is of course from BASKET (K for 1/120th of a 7.5-volumed RT — not mentioned in the original two volumes, but included in the Wikipedia table). s3 means “S phi down” meaning “all edges shrunk by phi” (multiplied by 1/phi — or use the Greek letter) meaning “volume shrunk by phi to the 3rd”. 60 of each (big guy and little) add to the same volume as said RT.

We’ll celebrate closure of our Spring Term in the form of a Wanderers gathering at the Linus Pauling House, our temple to engineering. It’s not like we’re too snobby to admit non-engineers or topics outside of engineering. We’re actually not a membership organization, even if we accepted donations (Jon Bunce did) for the coffee fund. That’s when we’d meet weekly. My template for presenter meetups, locally arranged, derives from this model, and from Meetups more generally, especially those of the Thinking Society of Greater Philadelphia (CJ) and 52 Living Ideas (Shrikant). Our Shaman of Synergetics knows what I’m talking about as do others you’d be able to seek out for more context.

Disclosure Day (movie review)

A movie concept 

(inspired by Disclosure Day)

I’m aware as of this posting that critics are panning this film for the most part, and are applying the worst epithets, such as “Boomer Movie” (gross). However I’m planning to dissect it differently and find it to be an interesting exploration of “intelligence” and what that even means.

Wardex is Urizen and the sense of security that gives us. The movie critic audience, which grew up on ET and Close Encounters, complains bitterly they don’t feel sufficiently secure, seeing as how said DoD daddy Darth Vader is so incompetent, echoing their disappointment with the whole ET story. 

The nerdy two, or two point five (there’s both a girlfriend and a fellow abductee) keep eluding Urizen, but then we realize: it’s Urizen (CIA) subverting itself, as the employees inside include Snowden types who want the world to know what they already know: that their government engages in torture not to mention domestic surveillance (we’re their enemy too).

Once Mickey (the military industrial complex) becomes schizo, it’s no wonder that it finally succumbs to the reality of reality television. 

They know, as do the Snowdens, that once the new reality comes into frame like that, there’s no point fighting it. People will finally believe, even the Russians and North Koreans.

Again, movie critics think the intelligence community coulda shoulda gone berserk at that moment and panic-protected its big secrets, maybe killing everyone in the TV studio. No lessons about empathy or animal intelligence really got through their thick skulls all these years. 

But even from a practical standpoint, a big show of force would only backfire. You can’t be seen to be keeping secrets secret, or they’re not really secret anymore. The cat has left the bag at that point.

Where it gets interesting is when Catholicism comes into it and is characteristically catholic (open minded) about ETs. Genesis says hominids rule the roost here on Earth as a dominant intelligent life form (whales take a back seat) but other planets are out of scope. The Bible is Earth focused. 

Once we’re outside the biblical context, the sky’s the limit as to what’s possible, given God’s track record for being highly imaginative. 

Religion teaches us techniques for staying open minded, even into adulthood if that’s possible.

Disclosure Day (the day the truth is revealed, that ETs are real) is therefore really a kind of Rapture, to bring the Protestants into it, and their literal-mindedness. There’s gotta be this one day of reckoning, when nonbelievers repent.

The dream of ETs literally comes true in our literal universe, which means “on television” as TV is reality’s gatekeeper.  The movie spends a lot of time looking at this TV network gatekeeping environment and how people do as they’re told once they accept you as their boss. 

Our abductees have a knack for emanating persuasiveness (they’re basically mind readers, a lot like Lucy who also has a Morgan Freeman type on her side). They’re “est people” to use an outdated jargon (from even before the est Training). Shades of Olivia Butler right?

The same movie critics who wonder at the lack of violence (Wardex seems so nonviolently tame but for the aggressive mind control experiments) plus can’t imagine that their little ET friend from that first Spielberg movie, is now all grown up, just as are they. If there’s any alien intelligence in the pipeline, it must be inside us, because clearly the Rapture isn’t happening. We’re not getting to X-Day in time.

Catholicism and ETism both have a lot in common: they keep us waiting, in expectant anticipation, for the Judgement Day that seems always just around the corner. A few maybe seem to get something from “the now” (mundane reality) but that’s too Zen. Mostly ETism is about the endless suspense, that state of waiting (so more like Quakers then?).