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 that Judgement Day 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?).

Incommensurability

The term “incommensurability” is more encompassing than mere “irrationality” as it embraces “transcendental” as well. That was a topic this morning over breakfast. Terry Bristol bounces around among the Greeks, such as Archytas of Tarentum (c. 435–350 BC) and  Eudoxus of Cnidus, precursors to Euclid, and inspirational for Archimedes. 

Incommensurability opens a space of incremental or successive approximations, each closer to some ideal, but perhaps with insufficient means to ever reach that ideal, even in principle. For example, by means of specific algebraic operations, one may reach closed form expressions for certain irrational numbers, but not for pi or e.

The analogy to geometry is deeper than mere resemblance; it’s a tighter mapping. Given the conventional Euclidean constraints of straight edge and compass, what are the limits to construction? The classic example was squaring the circle: by simple construction, construct a circle and square of identical area. This proved elusive, leading to a maturing of the concept of incommensurability itself.

Terry has been exploring the not-commutative aspects of geometric procedures. The order of instructions clearly matters and going forward (picture an arrow) does not always imply going backward. Some functions are what we call one way.

What I added to the discussion was a quick recap of that Python generator function I learned about from Guido and Tim, which in just a few lines using rational steps, creates a pi digits generator. Somehow remembering state may lead to chaotic output, as we also learn from Wolfram. A deterministic generative process may not imply any shorter or more compact expression is out there, other than the generator itself, in whatever language. Ramanujan’s generators are a case in point.

Terry parked his car in front of my place and we walked to Bread and Ink on Hawthorne. Passing under the Bagdad marquee, we came across a free books pile, not unusual in Portland. I set aside the Narnia books 2-5 (hard cover), resolving to take them home if they were still there after breakfast. They were, and I did.

Rounding Out Spring Term

What themes are we getting back to, now that we’re winding up the Spring Term, which in Portland means Rose Festival? Our school is async so it’s not a matter of everyone being on the same page. Rather, it s a matter of students being encouraged to chronicle their journeys, with teachers role modeling how that’s done. “Where am I in the curriculum?” is always a relevant question.

Speaking for myself, I find myself circling a well-known meme in these parts, namely 4D vs 4D vs 4D, by which I mean to define a triangle of three namespaces, kind of how DAF does the triangle between his, professor Jiang’s and William Blake’s namespaces. 

In my case, I’m mapping what I consider to be the primary shoptalks talks making use of 4D by the end of the 1900s, with all of them having trajectories since then, up to the 2020s where we are at this tick mark. Those three shoptalks would be: that of Hilbert Space and linear algebra; the non-Euclidean geometry of the Relativity Theorists; the lesser known esoteric geometry of the American pragmatist R. Buckminster Fuller.

Linear algebra took off with the emergence of computing power, while Relativity continued to wrestle with its quantum mechanical counterpart. Fuller’s namespace emerged as a more distinct entity thanks to the self-reinforcing feedback loops of the LLMs, which thrive on stochastic alignment. 

Whereas the subculture was small, the usage patterns were consistent enough, when coupled with Synergetics itself, to preserve a lot of the patterns, even as a few were adding even more refinements (e.g. the Koski Identities, Gerald de Jong’s Pretenst, more computer languages, such as my own Pythonic implementation of the concentric hierarchy, using quadrays).

On Synergeo I’m looking into a Pandora’s Box of issues regarding the power of Synergetics to assist us in reaching escape velocity vs-a-vs obsolete patterns in the Anglosphere (the world of English speakers), by jiggering with the logic and showing us some off ramps from Ye Olde English juggernaut. Debugging takes work, including trial and error. 

America has always been a meme pool in ferment, a confluence of many cultures, so it’s not that surprising that its curricula would morph accordingly, even if exactly what that looks like remains unpredictable. On Synergeo I’ve been recalling the New Math, if only to remind readers that curricula, including in Math World are not static. High school in 2026 might be a lot different from what you remember from your own experience, to the point of unrecognizable in a lotta ways, but then quite familiar in other ways. Times change in how they express the generalized principles, even if those principles stay eternal in principle.

Rose Festival in Portland

The Rose Festival is in full swing. The Grand Floral and Starlight parades were combined this year. That happened yesterday and I was not in attendance. 

Nor did I make it to the Criterion Collection BizMo that came through earlier (not as a part of the festival), filming visitors as they perused the merch. I could have recorded myself for up to 3 minutes.

However I did come across the floats, all lined up in Waterfront Park, instead of in the Lloyd Center area per years past. Some years I’ve stood in the crowd watching the parade. With kids. As a kid.

I arrived at Waterfront Park on my bicycle, coming over the Hawthorne from the OMSI area, with a plan to join another Wanderer for the next segment of my intra-modal loop. 

The Fun Center (by Funtastic) was happening; the annual carnival. I remained outside the fenced-in areas, being a cyclist, but stopped to take pictures or walk the bike.

The next segment was along Springwater Corridor to Sellwood, left on Linn, and continuing on Springwater to the Tacoma-Sellwood Max station, while my riding partner, on an e-trike, continued onward, back to Gresham. 

This paved network of carless roads is quite extensive, often thanks to paved-over train lines from  previous chapters.

Upon first arriving in the OMSI area, before taking the Hawthorne Bridge to see those floats (I didn’t know in advance that they’d be there, a fun surprise), I’d come across a Roaming Library full of high brow pro-chaos (aka discordian) literature in languages I can’t read. But I recognized the name David Graeber, another Occupy guy like me.

I grabbed some copies, per signs saying I was welcome to do so.

Occupy Portland (OPDX) is well documented in these blogs, and should not be confused with what I call the Joker Riots that came later, as we descended into idiocracy. 

Our Food Not Bombs group helped establish a temporary community, like a Hooverville, re-enacting the Bonus Army encampments of an earlier chapter. Our relations with the police were civil and we ended the occupation voluntarily with only a few incidents (not everyone got the memo).

Food Not Bombs was already going strong when our household got involved and became a hub for storing both food and bike trailers used to haul the food, from warehouse to church or house kitchen, and on to the park for public food sharing. 

Free food; no charge; no means testing; bring your own bowl and utensils but we have extra of you forget or didn’t know. 

We managed to interest the local Quakers in our project and for some months or years (I forget how long) and used the Stark Street kitchen from time to time. We also used the bigger kitchen at St. David of Wales.

I’m not currently actively involved with FNB. I’m glad I was though, and that I pulled food trailers around town a lot on my bicycle, a good workout for some guy in his 50s. 

Most my cohort was younger but I didn’t experience a lot of age discrimination. 

My mother also stayed with us while Occupy was going on, and came downtown to visit the tent city, including the FNB tent. Some of my friends were camping there in the park, but I stayed in my own home.

Happy Birthday to Tara. Looking forward to our next fam call.

Martian Memes

You'll need to be something of a Geek to decipher these references on your own, so let me help out. Hoon is a computer language, but also a place in Libya, and a "name collision" may also be an opportunity. From a desert oasis community such as Hoon, one gets to camels, mirages, other movie tropes. 

Also, I have that link to my own family, given my dad worked for Libyans on fifty year plans, back in the 1960s up to the beginning of the 1970s. Then we were out (that was the Rome chapter). I never made it to Libya myself, but I saw lots of slide shows.

However, here I’m exploring a different way of connecting with the Cult of Urbit, a subculture, such as my own, with Hoon starting to look more like Python given this latest facelift (yes, I mean yamoon).

Above, I’m talking about how our respective subcultures (a) both use Martian tropes and (b) both have a “martial arts” tinge to our verbiage, in talking about a Dojo vs-a-vs a language.

I’m saying our hero “Seem to Be a Verb” Bucky is an action figure, a man in motion, and we might liken his practice of Synergetics to “SynFu” playing off “KungFu” as a martial art form.

I did solicit the assistance of Perplexity on this one (the LLM mentioned above), regarding the etymology of “martial”.

 

Sushi Train

I'm not giving myself top marks for the day's operations cuz I managed to let the new Canon fall to the floor from the sushi train restaurant table. It didn't break nor even show signs of stress, but that was just dumb luck. 

I don't award points for dumb, even if the outcome was lucky. Otherwise though, I turned in a smooth performance. I hit my marks.

Later, my little film group (two or more) watched The Revolutionary, an old John Voigt film with Robert Duvall the connecting thread, even though he’s not the star in this one (I’d picked two films at random from the shelf devoted to his films at MMU).

I hadn’t paid money for the Canon SX740 (twas a gift), which is in the same category as my Lumix, a pointer shooter. 

In the parallel universe (a figure of speech) where it had exploded into tiny parts upon hitting the masonry,  I woulda been pretty hard on myself for such a dummy maneuver. 

“Don’t put breakable expensive things near the edge like that” he said to himself, at 68.

I have a pretty booked-up week happening. If you’re wondering whether my strategy is working, I’d have to say I’m not in a position to know. I could relate to the emptiness of the revolutionary lifestyle depicted in the movie. But not because I feel under the boot of The Man (or Men).

That this was a movie starring John Voigt got us reading up on Angelina Jolie again, and all that Hollywood melodrama, which I don’t track all that closely, anymore than I spend time on royals, although I’m not above watching gossip YouTubes. 

I’ll also “shake the rain stick” and chat with the gossip bots.

As I was mentioning on Synergeo, the Backrooms movie, all about an endless maze of aberrational interiors, and of liminal (vestibular) spaces, there’s a hyperlink the David Lynch movies. Backrooms also has the computer game flavor of eXistenZ, and of course it feels a lot like Severance. 

Later I was able to get the Canon and iPad talking over WiFi. That means I’ll be able to upload to Flickr without worrying about a USB adapter for an SD card. Sometimes it’s nice to have a backup workflow.

School of Tomorrow Notice

To school presenters:

The slide decks are working fine as of now, but the GitHub site is completely FUBAR when it comes to rendering Notebooks over the wire. This isn't the first time GitHub has interrupted its service w/r to said file type (ipynb). Usually the situation gets resolved but we're coming up on a Week of Snafu.

So, my advice is to clone the repos you need and project them locally. Encourage your students to do the same. 

Jupyter Notebooks are meant to be interactive. 

I have a lot of em wired to Colab versions of themselves, for those with Google Drives, and you're welcome to use some other online Docker-like solution (meaning you'll be running a Jupyter server in the cloud). nbviewer tends to throttle my account, prolly cuz they don't like me using their free service much.

A better solution than relying on weak links in the cloud, is to have the repos locally and to call the Notebooks up within your own local copy of JupyterLab. 

I recommend grabbing and installing the Anaconda distro for all this, including the Python interpreter itself. 

However you may have a preferred stack starting with the official Python, then maybe uv and PyPi (Python Package Index) for adding 3rd party packages (such as JupyterLab).

Here's my Anaconda Navigator as of right now:

Once I click on the JupyterLab panel, I get into my localhost file tree, to the School of Tomorrow repo clone, and pull up the home page. 

YouTubes will show inline, and be playable, unlike on GitHub even with its rendering working. 

Plus this will be your Python workbench for a lotta projects. So come on in, the water's fine!

Cascadian PR

 copyleft cogsec crescent city

Drive-Through Zombie

In one of my recent rhetops, I make fun of the “drive-through zombies” who wanna stay oblivious by choice (vs ordering brain shakes?).

Well, invective comes from experience as they say: I was a drive-through zombie myself in that WinCo parking lot, seeking escape to Coburg Road but finding myself in a mini-golf course, so to speak, of tiny one-laners, designed to trap the cars of the unwary.  I became trapped, in a Taco Bell.

Rather than power through admitting my mistake, I sheepishly ordered a random beverage. I tried something blue, and frozen, all the more fitting given my role in this scene.

GST for Beginners

GST seemed relatively uncontested in that General Systems Theory had been proposed, written about, but then seemingly largely discarded. When I picked up the abandoned banner, lying in the field, I didn’t see much of an army. So I took it in my own direction, which was to build a bulwark against old school Economics. “Planet Earth is a spherical nonprofit” we would say “its charitable donor: the sun.” That about sums it up. Not a closed system, don’t let them tell you that.

OK, now zoom in: let’s talk about the PWS, the personal workspace. Think “bubble” and have it encompass an entire workspace. Maybe you have a veritable MakerSpace, with lots of tools, 3D printers, lasers… call it a lab. That’s wonderful. Or more typically: a nerd cave, screen and keyboard, other peripherals… The point being: to value-add. The operation: edit-recombine. 

Some of you are thinking “he means alchemy” at this point, and in a way, that’s right, mainly because we’re generalizing and that takes us to the realm of analogy and metaphor, wherein “alchemy” makes more sense (versus some literal “chemistry” or “physics” — not that people haven’t worked it as such). You wanna turn some lead (inputs) into gold (outputs) and for this you’ll be rewarded, if there’s any justice in this Universe (another good, or service).

The PWS is potentially a reverse-entropy gradient, which is not to neglect the entropy-adding that we may show in our bookkeeping. Expenditures, costs, abound. Having a daily energy budget, per those Markov chain diagrams, showing energy conversions and feedback loops, means needing the overhead of decision-making. Money doesn’t spend itself. Intelligence steps in, or not. A lotta times we’re demonstrating shortcomings, a paucity, and not for lack of joules or calories, but for lack of imagination.

Another way to approach the PWS is through the well-established idea of “role”, common to both theater and computer programming. These two go together. It’s not called a “programme” for no reason — what they hand you when you enter the theater. We’ve had “scripting languages” which started out a term of derision. The scripters hit back, renaming themselves “agile”. Management liked “agile” and took that to mean its own things.

GST gets into the hydro-dams early, dovetailing with Martian Math (per this YouTube), because of the thermodynamics involved. When doing history, we go back to waterwheels. Sources of power connecting to superhuman scales, such as rivers flowing down slopes, with oceans evaporating into rain-heavy clouds to perpetuate the cycle, add wind. There’s your solar energy, from our extraterrestrial donor. We channel that energy much as we channel water when irrigating rice paddies or fields in general. Lots of switching goes on. Like on a motherboard.