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.

Depoe Bay

Looking down on the drone on its launch pad, we project a triangle flat to the earth, with reference vertexes: Blue, Red, Yellow. We think of a Green beacon high above (out) or far below (in) vs-a-vs the surface of Planet Earth.  At the center of BRYG: orange (O for origin, also).

That’s the horizontal plane (triangle BRY), combined with the 90 degree  ± G adding a “normal regime” and giving us: plus-vs-minus; up-vs-down; in-vs-out. 

The six XYZ spokes always come through the mid-edges of the reference BRYG tetrahedron, used to anchor quadrays.

The drone in question was meant to spy on a certain steer that had escaped the neighbor’s property and was squatting near Walden Pond (this is a west coast Walden). 

By the time we’d re-figured out the setup, we’d burned through the drone’s rather limited battery. 

What to remember: the base unit controls the drone through ordinary radio, but if you want a real time picture (you obviously do) then the phone itself, mounted in the base unit, needs to connect to the drone’s WiFi channel, emanating from the drone itself. 

Mere radio contact is insufficient but for the most limbic of systems.

Some in our school are aware I’m on another Cascadian circuit these days, this time a coastal versus a  mountain, although there’s a range of mountains to go over twixt Portland and the coast. 

Despite its name, Portland is far inland, on a north-flowing river (like the Nile) entering the Columbia, more like the Nile in size, which flows west to the Pacific and is navigable, thinks to dredging around the mouth at Astoria. 

My route took my past the McMinnville Air and Space Museum, playfully decorated with hand-me-down 747s (Boeing) and made over to advertise Evergreen, the company behind this museum.

My activist friends used to protest outside of Evergreen cuz it was in cahoots in Central America with what would end up destabilizing the USA: secret teams operating off the books and under the radar, thereby destroying any chance might weddcall our way of life “democratic”. 

All water under the bridge by now, now that the USA is gone, leaving the empty shell we still salute and pledge allegiance to, especially if we’re not yet thinking adults i.e. are still juveniles (not yet geeks, just nerds i.e. “ugly ducklings” (awkwardly unaware)).

I made a beeline for D River, the world’s shortest (east to west) only to discover, upon arriving in my parking lot, that I had degraded my not-tinted lenses and in fact one was missing from its frame. How did that happen? 

All I remember is Dr. Jiang coming through on Verizon, with audio through my Bluetooth Bat (a tiny amplifying speaker device), talking about Dante, Virgil, Purgatory, Heaven & Hell. A great lecture!

Somewhere in the drive, I switched glasses, from not-tinted to tinted. How I managed to mangle the non-tinted pair is still a mystery, a miracle. I’ll need to get replacement eyeglasses when I get back to Portland.

I bring up Dr. Jiang in part because my “bus binder” homework reader contains a 40-pager mapping three namespace, that of Jiang, that of Blake, and that of Friedman, the paper’s author. 

I showed that binder to a Wanderer in Depoe Bay, over oyster stew. We could find a common language in archeology and geology, and changing sea levels. 

Depoe Bay owes its craggy gothic shoreline to pyroclastic flows that happened millions of years ago, whereas similar flows from Vesuvius buried Herculaneum just moments ago, relatively speaking.

The wayward steer and drone action all came later in that same trip. I was only in Depoe Bay for the one night.

Shopping Spree

I thought to get this day's adventure blogged about while memories are still fresh. Again, I'm illustrating wandering with a capital W, meaning "with a purpose" I suppose. 

In this case I was shopping (carrot mob of one) to emphasize solidarity among some cultures sorely pitted against one another of late. Of course I'm talking about Russia-Ukraine and all of that.

Here in peaceful Cascadia, all these Baltic and Slavic peoples (by which I mean ethnically, not talking about genes per se, I'm not a eugenicist or any of that), with the different-from-English (NeoRoman) alphabets, share the same storefront and nobody thinks twice about it. 

Here's what I did: set off on foot along Hawthorne (the raw Photostream has a lot more than the album does), on up those steep steps on Mt. Tabor, connecting the bottom set of reservoirs to the the mid-level. But then short of heading on up to the top I vectored down to the roadways and found may way to the FX2 (new articulated buses, bright green, used to be named bus route 4 before a redesign) out SE Division (towards Gresham).

I got off at 113th on the south side, having just passed the Roman Russian place, I believe it's called. I've been here many times, including with Andrius Kulikauskas when he visited. The place was bustling and I queued at the deli counter for my selected items (lamb kebab, 2 of and chicken meatballs, 4 of). I also bought chocolate bars as gifts (I used to wolf them), and a couple unfamiliar brands of salmon and sardine.

On the FX2 back to my neighborhood, I used lingering battery power to keep uploading about my politics in this case: don't expect Cascadia to support some kind of ethnic war between Eurasian factions. Been there done that. We're long beyond refighting old wars.

Class of 76: Fifty Years (and counting)

Alaska Cruise: High School Reunion

So you might be eyeballing that crowd of strangers (you were there?), looking for me in my black hat and psychedelic tie or whatever Ken doll outfit, but I'll save you the trouble: I'm not there.

No, I’m enjoying the experience vicariously via Meta media, Our high school class was pretty small, by US American standards, but not that small. Maybe just over a thousand? I’m talking the whole grade. I joined this cohort in the early seventies and stayed for the duration. Makati, Manila. The school itself has since moved.