Citizenship for All

That’s a snippet of me commenting on YouTube in response to someone’s “globalist = Sorosista” equation, Sorosista being shorthand for George Soros follower and/or minion. As a Pythonista, I consider myself a type of globalist. I write about Python Nation as among the virtual nations of Cyberia, with no physical borders, and yet with adjacencies, such as to the Republic of Perl. I’m quite familiar with that borderland, generally friendly.

I remind people that the nation-state system is relatively new, with the USA especially big on adding properties in recent times, sometimes through associational compacts. I worked on the Belau story for several chapters — without getting there; I got to Truk a couple times. Talking Polynesia.

A lot of aboriginal, indigenous, nomadic peoples have never gotten fully documented, much like the gypsies of old. They’re refugees in many ways, trying to escape the vortex of border-nazi fascists, who dream of impervious fences everywhere, a veritable prison camp of a globe. Then you have diplomats and richie rich types who seem above needing to get their passports stamped.

I think if we’re going to really nail it down such that only documented citizens, of whatever country, have travel rights, then the least we can do is establish a default country of last resort, where anyone needing citizenship somewhere, is welcome to register. The full UN Declaration of Human Rights needs to pertain to every human, no exceptions, and not just to a privileged cast of the “properly documented” (as in pedigreed).

Unless and until everyone is dealt into the game, complete with travel rights if without a record of offenses, I side with those who don’t see that nation-states are all that serious about their game. They don’t seem to care how corrupt it is.  All those humans falling between the cracks, decade after decade, because not citizens of any “real” country. What kind of silly game is that? No wonder it’s fading fast. If you wanna save it, plug the holes. It’s thermodynamics.

A Computational Geometry

Per content in my Youtube channel, on Medium and so on, I've seen Cascadian Synergetics entering local systems through the open Silicon Forest portal. The architect in Bucky left us a computational geometry, something to sink our teeth into by means of computer programs. Simple ones. One or two liners in some cases.

 
This is because of our focus on the CCP, a well-known lattice in crystallography and in mathematics more generally. Other distinct meanings of CCP might get in the way, as name collisions, minus an ability to think in terms of namespaces, a faculty Python provides, Python being an open source, free computer language. We might say OSF instead of FOS sometimes.

 
The CCP may be described in terms of a growing arrangement of layered balls, typically fruits or cannon balls in the textbooks. Concentric layers in a cuboctahedral conformation is the trademark Synergetics way of showing it, giving the cuboctahedral number sequence per OEIS: 1, 12, 42, 92, 162... That's one line of code in Python.

 

What grade levels are we talking here? In my working model, that's up to faculty designers at the individual school level. Curricula typically employ "spiralling" meaning a topic is re-encountered at different levels, not "once and for all" in some strictly linear sequence. Topics get revisited, coming from different angles sometimes.

 
I'd see the power law, freed from any exclusively square-cubic context, introduced early: that area and volume increase or decrease as a 2nd and 3rd power of a shape's linear dimensional increase or decrease. Introduce phi-scaling i.e. a linear grow-shrink ratio (factor) of ~1.618 or ~0.618, phi's reciprocal. 

To these linear changes there correspond scale factors of phi to the 2nd and 3rd power, for computing the new area and volume respectively.

 
Starting with a shape known as the S module in Synergetics, we scale it up by phi, getting a new volume of S times phi to the 3rd power. Scale up this new larger volume's six edges by phi and get S times phi to the sixth power. S3 + S6 = 1, is one way to abbreviate the result, where 1 is likewise the volume of our D-edged tetrahedron, where D = the diameter of a CCP sphere.

In the above code snippet, sympy computes an enormously complicated expression for the S module's volume. We can use sympy to confirm this expression reduces to the integer 1. We also have a much simpler expression for the volume of S to begin with: 1/(2 * phi^5) or (1/2) * phi^-5 (where ^ means "raise to the power of" -- same as ** in Python).

Walden Four

Saved Prompts

GST @ Synergetics on the Web

The following are prompts I've used against the Perplexity LLM. Feel free to try them yourself.

• How do Dorion Sagan, author of Into the Cool, and economist Steve Keen overlap, in terms of emphasizing thermodynamics, with Earth as a sun-powered open system? How do Kenneth Boulding and Buckminster Fuller echo this same theme? What other economists pay attention to the "cosmic context" meaning the facts about energy starting from first principles?
  
  
• Follow-up: How might we integrate the thinking of economist Paul Romer into that of the aforementioned thermodynamically-aware systems thinkers: Buckminster Fuller, Steve Keen, Kenneth Boulding and Herman Daly? [Exhibit 1]
  
  
• Explain Steve Keen's critique of the labor theory of value in economics. How might his views be linked to the bigger thermodynamic picture in which Planet Earth is the recipient of steady grant income (not a loan) in the form of terawatts of solar energy, creating the Markov chain reactions describing the daily energy budget? [Exhibit 2]
  
  
• Buckminster Fuller wrote about "the industry industry missed" meaning the coupling of aerospace level know-how to the problem of how to mass produce dwellings. In the US, the mobile home industry has provided shelters for vast numbers of fixed income retirees. China seems to be doing something closer to Fuller's vision, by rolling out dwelling unit options that incorporate better weather proofing and a higher tech image. Do we expect Americans to eventually catch up with something more appealing than "tiny homes", "mobile homes" and "destination trailers"? [Exhibit 3]

Related reading:

Post to Wanderers Group (July 1, 2025)

Rust Never Sleeps

Although I was born in Chicago, I don’t get back there often and always regard opportunities in this regard as exotic occasions.  My most recent trip was in connection with a DjangoCon. I was one of the speakers, as well as an Open Bastion sidekick, helping out as a “snake wrangler” (we’re talking Python) for Steve Holden, the conference organizer.

As a part of this tour (of duty, in the sense of work-related) I went on one of those riverboat rides that focuses on Chicago’s architecture. Passengers look upward as the tour guide speaks knowledgeably, through the amplified speaker system, about high rises one could put down anywhere, versus high rises which reference their environment, by alluding to other buildings in various ways.

Today I was thinking back to that riverboat tour while gazing up at these brand new mid-height office buildings here in Portland, on SE 20th just on the south side of the bridge over I-84, behind the art deco era radio station. These new buildings are so new they’re not yet populated with tenants, and yet its surfaces are rusting already. The facade recalls a kind of dreary (?) industrial landscape wherein it rains all the time.  A landscape like Portland’s. I can see the appeal.

Portland architects have mustered around the “rust motif” in a big way, something I’ve talked about with respect to a certain pedestrian bridge over a railway near SE Clinton and 15th. That rusty hulk references the east side esplanade pylons (dark with rust) which are in turn alluded to by the Oregon Convention Center’s deliberately rusty sculptures. The point being: this is a city where it rains all the time, and rather than fight the rust aesthetic, why not embrace it? Start with new buildings already rusty why not? The rust provides a patina that actually protects the deeper layers, like tree bark, like skin.

Is the rust motif actually dreary? That’s a deeper question about the rainforest ecosystem itself. Portland is close to the Pacific ocean, about an hour west by car. Weather systems like to dump their moisture as they move towards dryer climes, crossing the Cascade range and blowing across the high desert. Winds get sucked from the easterly direction as well, snaking along the Columbia Gorge at high speed, powering countless windmills.

Today, however, was bright and sunny, in the seventies (Fahrenheit), yesterday in the nineties. I was heading for Costello’s, a coffee shop devoted to the theme of world travel, riding the bus, while texting a friend in Cyprus I’ve often texted when in the liminal space of public transportation. I take pride in TriMet and used to work for it tangentially, in the Transportation Reaching People department, through various county offices, Clackamas County in particular. 

Overlapping Scenarios

After my Knowledge Engineering meetup with Caltrop City (nick), I moved my operation down valley. Ryan was ready to rejoin his clan, having been initiated into our reading programs, involving Amy’s classic, a book on Markov chains, other Active Inference relevant readings. 

We talked about the three minds model during the car trip, and the potential role of dreams, and journaling them. “It’s OK to engage in a discipline habitually, religiously, and then suddenly go cold turkey, if that’s what works for you” I recall saying.

A three tier model of the mind also featured in the KE meetup: perception, attention, meta-awareness being the namespaces there. Golden Spike GNN.

Ryan got the tour of the Flextegrity Museum after which I dropped him off at Lorax Manor in Eugene, which to my mind sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss. 

Before we left, Dr. D. had sent the output of his program to solve the Snake Cube, like one of Rubic’s in being 3x3x3, but presenting a different challenge. A string of 3-long and 2-long cubes folds up in a specific way. He later shared his C source code with us, taking  me take to my days at Sunshine Elite Education, and its focus on dynamic programming techniques for solving just such puzzles.

What I noticed right away with Atlas Shrugged Part III (its original name) was it used different actors for so many key roles.

I’m thinking of a science fiction movie in which Ayn Rand tunes in Bucky big time and becomes a fan, altering her philosophy accordingly, not in the direction of Marxism, which was never a Russian ideology to begin with, but in the direction of Ouspensky. 

Man cannot do. 

Some get lucky though, like “Bob” Dobbs, and/or John Galt.

Post Tournament

I thank President Id as we Freudians might call him, for spilling the beans regarding what the numbskulls all around him are thinking, in terms of further decapitation exercises. Their rhetoric sounds kinda head choppy, not unlike Al Qaeda’s.

Sometimes the best a president can do is spill beans, as an insider, to where they don’t want you in meetings, at which point those meetings are delegitimized, so Catch 22.

My faculty visitors popped by for another photo shoot this morning. Toronto has been to Germany (back to that shorthand I was talking about). He showed us his skills as a foot bagger. Dante doesn’t tend to say Hacky Sacker out of respect for the copyright holder of that term, the giant Wham-O. He lives proximally to Toronto, not in Toronto.

Yes, our network is obviously global, always has been, given how much RBF got around, never traveling as a tourist.

The tournament was in Willamette Park, West Linn. By “tournament” I mean a whole set of events, some competitive, some less so. Dante is more a freestyle artist, and he treated Casey and I to a display of his skills at the food court last night, the new one on Hawthorne.

Synergetics Punk

Tripping on Tetrahedra (School of Tomorrow)

:: zig-zagging ::

It's not like my phone suddenly starts ringing off the hook when DC (The District) suddenly goes crazy. 

The District has always been crazy, ever since I was born, right around the time of the Kennedy assassination, and it's been downhill from there. I dodged the draft in that window after the American War in Southeast Asia (with people now egging on another one) plus as a Quaker I'd have fought for my right to not participate in such "organized" madness (i.e. chaos).

All of which is to say, I'm paying attention, but really have no active short term role in Atlanticist affairs.

With my eye on the longer term, I've continued to be productive on Synergeo, going ahead with how I'd think MHCC (a local community college) would wanna look at it: as a how best to teach teachers, who in turn take it to the frontline. 

By "it" I mean "whatever" but in this case I'm also speaking more specifically about Quadray Coordinates, an aspect of Cascadian Synergetics I've been sharing through my Philosophy Talk blog lately, among other places.

I'm continuing to hammer on some sharable color scheme, thanks to earlier meetups with Germany and Mexico, using those nation names as shorthand mnemonics for some individuals on the call. I'm in Portland, as we all know (PDX in Oregon, Cascadia, Pacwest or whatever... PNW). 

I call it "landing the spaceship" i.e. coming in from Zero G in a tumbling tetrahedron, where we wanna no longer postpone or equivocate as to "which side is down", time to choose, with the most logical thing being, with a caltrop, to put three legs on the ground, in tripod formation, with the fourth spoke straight up. 

Now that the ship has landed (up ahead of us) let's establish a color code that also locks in an angle of view vs-a-vs some "my left" (blue) and "my right" (red), with yellow in back (3rd leg) and green up top. I might be a human on foot, I might be a drone about head high. The apparatus ahead is like a radio antenna with a blinking green light at the top.

The point (one of them) is to well-establish the mathematical (and computer scientific) notion of "mapping" e.g. of 

A to Red
B to Green
C to Blue
D to Yellow. 

If that all seems arbitrary, it is. 

In Python we'd go: {A: 'Red', B: 'Green', C: 'Blue', D: 'Yellow'}. That my A, B, C, D have no quotes around them means they're names of objects in the namespace. 

That's right: they're the names of IVM vectors, instances of the Qvector class (quadray class) in my Python framework, all free online at the School of Tomorrow.

That's a screenshot of me in Spyder, constructing the dict I was just mentioning, in Python.

The Digital Mathematics curriculum I favor, native to the Silicon Forest, mixes computer programming with math as a single subject, and pays a lot of attention to "types" as in "floating point" versus "integer" but then also in the mathematical sense of Real type (R) versus Rational type (Q). 

N < W < Z < Q < R < C as some put it (progressively broader categories of number type). 

I'm supposed to use different Unicode glyphs for some of them, so call me lazy (a geek virtue).

WILPF Memo

Per my memo to the WILPF listserv just now, wherever enrichment is happening geographically, the consortium structure, mirroring CERN's lets say (an afterthought, not in the memo), would allow faculty and engineering departments to keep up to date on the (monitored) process, meaning Iranian scientists will continue contributing their talents while the Iranian admin continues securing enough inventory for the civilian programs.

WILPF of course sides with Iran in supporting the proposed UN ban treaty on nuke weapons. Such weapons, the choice of juvenile cowards, are used to threaten more principled and noble entities with destruction "or else". 

Said ban treaty is distinct from the more watered-down Nonproliferation Treaty which Iran has abided by (unlike some non signatory states or stans we might mention).

Iranians will have no problem procuring and operating more up-to-date civilian tech once the dust settles, and will now have more reason to do so. The technology just keeps getting better. 

Wherever enrichment happens, Iranians will be monitoring the supply chain, as they're part of IAEA as well, and it's in Iran's interest to enforce the UN ban treaty, once it's ratified.

Quoting from my memo (I don't have an URL for it):

Per these attacks by the neocons on Iranian nuke facilities: hardware in the nuke industry has a short half life meaning it amortizes rather quickly in terms of newer, better models coming online with support tech to boot, ergo Iran can't be stopped from at least planning to buy into the next round of nuke tech. Murdering a few scientists, however vicious, isn't going to change anything on that score. Iran will be able to procure and operate newer versions of whatever is destroyed, especially in a world without sanctions and United Nations banned nuke weapons (WILPF's goal).

Should Iran give up on domestic enrichment? Where enrichment operations are sited has less to do with ownership than with monitoring. Iran was eager to let IAEA keep monitoring its programs because it was proudly anti nuke weapon (nuke weapons are for cowards, obviously), but if the IAEA has to only monitor enrichment outside the Middle East for now, that won't mean Iranian faculty and stockholders can't nevertheless benefit from participating in the consortium. Iran will still be in the enrichment business, wherever the facilities are geographically located. That's my prediction.

I don't see Netenyahu accomplishing anything positively significant on behalf of the people he claims (weakly) to represent with his silly "Rising Lion" scenario (scoff, snicker), a tawdry piece of melodrama like something only a really poor-quality Hollywood studio would come up with. Rotten tomatoes x 10. 

Yeah, I spelled the dude's name wrong. Who cares, right?