Tetrahelix

We're still waiting for some enterprising blockchain company to choose the tetrahelix for a core animation. The successive blocks form the twisting path of face-bonded tetrahedra why not? Blocks are blocks. No one said the chained "blocks" have to be orthonormal, an aesthetic considered uncool in some circles, given the alternatives.

Gary Doskas is one of the current masters of tetrahelix lore and I ran the idea by him, but maybe he doesn't straddle the geomtech - fintech divide. Few do apparently, or we would have a lot more better toyz by now, counting computer games.

Clearly I've got tetrahedrons on my mind again, as I recently published a narrative to a couple listservs talking about the so-called "Goldberg Table" wherein Michael Goldberg summarizes what was known about space-filling tetrahedra up to the time of his publishing his paper.

The point of my Goldberg story was that Buckminster Fuller is repeatedly cut out of accounts where he's making serious contributions, either to virology, geometry, architecture or whatever, because there's always a convenient "inhouse luminary" better positioned to take the credit. From TrimTab (April 25, 2024):

It just so happened that Fuller's research carried him over territory being surveyed by professionals in many walks of life at the same time. Virology, the discipline, was bringing them together even more than architecture. 

The price RBF paid for his comprehensivity (anticipating CJ's book) was not being best of the best in any of the various fields he was visiting, meaning one could always swap in a home team star come trophy day [1], leaving "good at skipping rocks" his only real claim  to fame (I say that whimsic-sarcastically).

The dismissive attitude I'm circling is well-demonstrated by the lengthy reply we saw from Andrius:

The best we have is this Goldberg table. The point would be to show that polyhedra can fill space. Perhaps that would be useful for a model of dividing up conceptual space, which is actually what I do. But no, you have no interest in actually applying this math scientifically. Your interest is to validate Buckminster Fuller. An honest investigation would dive into that, what is that all about?

I have not been at all reticent to discuss my interest in validating Fuller's research. That America's premier futurist of the 1900s has been deplatformed by so many universities, after their milking his popularity when he could draw the big crowds, and paying students, is somewhat scandalous to say the least. Applewhite was always wondering how they got away with it, with impunity.

Quoting more from my TrimTab post:

Apologies if the ordering was confusing, between Fuller's compact vocab (mite, rite, bite...) and the Goldberg table of tetrahedral space-fillers coming to be known at the time. That slide (in my BEAST deck) is still evolving.

Speaking of Michael Goldberg, Applewhite said he'd met him (I recall asking him about Goldberg specifically, given his key role in our narrative) adding "he didn't have a mean bone in his body" meaning in that context Ed didn't believe the guy had any malevolent intention of deliberately messing with Fuller's self promotion / reputation i.e. he was no kind of villain or foe.

Easy to believe I'd say. "Space filling tetrahedrons" is a pretty obvious topic, when you get right down to bare bones and/or brass tacks, as are subdivisions of a sphere using variable frequencies. "Aristotle was right, remember the MITE" could be are our high school chant, in some weird sci-fi School of Tomorrow. Cue cheerleaders.

This was the footnote (see above):

[1] per Ed, Fuller was especially hurt when a certain Scientific American article summarizing recent breakthroughs in the field of virology, skipped mentioning him completely. I got to see some of the primary materials.

Catacombs

As some of you know, I've donned a Sociology hat and have been focusing on shaping relationships among "meetup-based" subcultures. I use "scare quotes" because of connotations around "meetup-based". Of course using Zoom a lot (a characteristic) is a recent development, galvanized by the SARS2 outbreak, and many of these subcultures were chugging along, sometimes famously, without the benefit of internet-based meetups for decades, if not centuries. Think churches, temples...

In tandem with these studies, I've taken up the topic of insect mentality, or shall we say dynamism. What are the deltas associated with an ant hive in particular? The metaphor of "tunnels under Disney World" has again arisen. I have to add: Catacombs. We're into the chthonic around here.  Mount Parnassus.

My thinking around the ants, inspired by Active Inference Institute faculty, DAF in particular, left me wide open to the sudden discovery of miner bees in my front lawn, at the base of the Tetrahedron, the pyramid of C6XTY beneath my front porch that makes helps Keep Portland Weird. Miner bees don't build a hive in a tree; they build individualized residences. Tiny mounds of dirt pop up, as a result of excavation. How catacombed these tunnels may be is a topic. Current answer: unknown. I'll read up on it sometime.

A household down the street was convinced it had a wasp infection and little warning signs went up everywhere, however I think it's likely merely a miner bee visitation for them as well, as the signs are now gone and, walking home last night, I saw a few tiny dirt mounds in the grass. This seemed to happen all at once around town (I say that now based on two data points), as if on a timer. 

YouTube says the world has over a thousand species of miner bee. They're not aggressive towards humans, don't or can't sting, and they cross pollinate. Gardners love them. They're not honeymakers though, so they're not usually "kept" in the beekeeping sense.

The Catacomb Codas. I've stuffed many a deep chamber with some of this Synergetics stuff. Detractors (or even entomologists) might picture me barfing up pabulum, weighed in tetra-somethings, anticipating this nurturing content will empower the colony going forward, the hive mind or whatever. 

At what level of consciousness does a hive operate? Put like that, the question is still a mirage, suggestive of a real question, still but a fevered dream. However, other questions might still be worth asking. Prompts get fine tuned.

Even though I've favored a Dark Theme in the Codas, a personal setting, I'm working to keep the subject matter non-turgid and easy breezy, partly because the purpose, architecturally, is transit, or liminal. Let's say vestibular. I'm meaning to sweep you onward, to your next flight, while providing a pleasant environment in the meantime. Enjoy your visit.

Think Tank Meetup

A lot of humans get born into high density population centers and scarcely have the opportunity to experience the opposite: low density areas. A theme in my blogs over the years has taken inspiration from Portland, Oregon's "outdoor school" institution: the public schools include an out-of-town camp-based experience wherein presumably light pollution is low enough to make the Milky Way visible.

I've tacked on the "make the Milky Way visible" tagline, i.e. I don't believe I'm cribbing it from official outdoor school literature, but if that's explicitly part of that program's mission statement, so much the better. Bill it as a psychological health requirement. You need outdoor living experience for that high school diploma.

Which brings me to our topic last night at the Think Tank (what we've taken to calling it): housing around Portland. My long term readers know I've hoped to get Portland into the "Refugee Tech" business, where "refugee" fades in and out with "camper" and "nomad". 

Some people hit the open road by choice, in a high end RV they've been saving for, and now have, in retirement. Others might fancy a pre-retirement business oriented vehicle that doubles as a place to stay, the so-called "business mobile" or BizMo option. Then you get people forced out of their homes by natural and/or economic disaster (e.g. war), and becoming reliant on social engineering, i.e. back to the "refugee" paradigm.

Portland has done some pioneering work along these lines, according to our guest, especially when it's not too proud to learn from other metro areas, and not just San Francisco and Seattle.

My approach focused on enrolling people into the business of shelter testing, with ideas flowing from the prototyping front lines to the commercial market as finished products. I used to send my little diagrams about it under the rubric of Project Renaissance. This was before public-private partnerships got such a negative reputation (long story).

Integrity Testing

Welcome to my journals. Welcome back if you're returning.

Let's recap: 

Facts I use as evidence, that Verboten Math is subversive include: 

(a) it's not taught 

(b) it won't go away

(c) it has practical applications

Most candidates are revealed to be (i) nonsensical (ii) false or (iii) trivially true. No such verdict has been established in this case, ergo it won't go away.

However, most people have no clue what Verboten Math even is (it's not taught), and calling it Martian Math instead doesn't really help matters. 

In fact, Verboten Math is a source of good ideas for the mainstream, once these ideas are sanitized, their  radical roots obscured.

In today's meetup (recorded) I mentioned Quakers had a history around creating schools, and with schools come their hallmark curricula and faculties. As Quakers, we need to compete in order to enhance our brand, and bring glory to God. We're not afraid to share Verboten Math. On the contrary, we relish the opportunity.

The New England Transcendentalist aspects, Margaret Fuller and so on, were always conducive to Quakers taking an interest, as is the inbuilt skepticism regarding Manifest Destiny style imperialist mindsets, a skepticism shared by Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain of the Anti-Imperialist League.

In a move to repair the damage brought on by a narrow-minded and short-sighted global plutocracy, wrapping itself in the Stars and Stripes, American schools overseas have a special incentive to phase in elements of Martian Math, given both its highly geographic content, and its potency as positive PR, as Americana and as a vanguard for USA OS.

Refugee Planet

first published Oct 21, 2023

Meeting Notes

I was admiring the curriculum materials shaping up around ant colonies, their study. Daniel knows a lot about ants, and yet humanity on the whole still has a lot to learn. The study of ants is somewhat humbling, in terms of revealing our own ignorance.

Picture a queen ant, surrounded by layers of caretakers and apparent hangers on. We say "apparent" because in some theories the seeming passive crowds may store collective memories, ready to be expressed if triggered. The queen never ventures forth and workers tainted with experience of "the outside" don't get anywhere near her. If she serves a decision-making role (unclear) it's from within an abstracted layer where experience consists of pheromones.

Remembering that Andrius wants to "know everything" (the answer to the prayers of those with boundless curiosity), I'm eager to introduce him to CJ's work on comprehensivity. The commitment to "learn everything" is inherently problematic, and sounds like empty chutzpah unless qualified with self awareness and acknowledgement of the inherent paradoxes. 

"Tackling it all" is not only possible, but what we all do every day. It's just that, depending upon strategy, resources, and the practice of specific disciplines, how much we accomplish towards our impossible goal varies by orders of magnitude.

I took some time this morning, after feeding the dog, adding to my M4W repo on Github, where I chronicle recent progress. I haven't expressed a "know everything" goal, but I do value "comprehensivity" as CJ calls it, as many of the levers one needs to discover, as an activist, come to light only through considerable experience. Those into ML (machine learning) have a lot of concrete mathematics to show why quantity, not just quality, matters.

As a Quaker journalist, i.e. blogger, I need to keep twisting my strands together, and pulling tight, making a strong alloy, the way we often talk about our metaphorical language. The No More Secondhand God approach to religion means cutting out the middleman, a Buddhist teaching as well. We might be able to come up with more neurological-sounding explanations for why individuation is a positive. Transcendentalism here we come.

But we're also talking about sanitation and fish farms and Global Village communities. Where might we get to go, to gain all this leveraging experience?

On my end, I follow David Koski's research into phi-related topics. Phi (the golden mean) is already a hugely popular topic, but combined with Verboten Math it provides a goldmine of new material.

Knowledge Engineering Study Group

The story behind this meetup is we've started playing around with Coda more, "we" being the math4wisdom clique based around a figurative memory castle in Lithuania (not Transylvania).

Spring Retreat

If you've seen my Graph Theory slides, you might remember I toss my high school yearbook picture onto a slide next to Sam, likewise a younger man then, in the company of Bucky Fuller. They flew to the Philippines together, as guests of the Marcos family. I was living in Manila at the time, or perhaps was away for college. I was in Class of 1976 at International School Manila (ISM), which still exists but in newer digs.

Sam and I didn't know each other then. I learned of Sam Lanahan through Trevor Blake, who tracked him down as one of the owners of an original Tetrascroll, a very limited edition artifact. We set up an appointment to see it (but have yet to do so (it's still in its case)) and drove to Corvallis to meet the guy. We continued to hang out sporadically and undertake collaborations well into the future, especially during a chapter wherein Sam lived in Portland itself.

Sam's grandparents were pretty famous: F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, their daughter "Scottie" (Frances) being his mom and one time columnist for the New Yorker. Sam's dad, Jack Lanahan, had been a boxer in his Princeton years. After Frances died, he remarried. 

After moving from Corvallis to Portland, Sam moved a few more times, winding up in a well appointed farmstead in the Willamette Valley. Which is where I am right now, on retreat, working on projects, such as on Quadrays for M4W (math4wisdom).

My backyard in Portland is an outdoor museum for c6xty exhibits. The plastic sculptures become somewhat brittle after years in sunlight so we probably won't move them. 

These prototypes were meant to provide lots of feedback, about stressability, durability, replicability, constructability and so on. Several test materials were employed: plastic, steel, copper, aluminum. 

The farmstead is likewise decorated with specimens of each. C6XTY is a subtype of Flextegrity, which is adjacent to Tensegrity (ala Kenneth Snelson et al) but is more lattice-oriented.

What I've done around Flextegrity is develop my Python code base to render computer graphical versions, sometimes in the form of animated GIFs. My graphics generating pipeline involves using Quadrays sometimes, a type of vector akin to XYZ but featuring "basis vectors" at 109.47 degrees to one another. They're designed to make lattice work easy, as in closest sphere packing arrangements (Conway: Barlow packings). All the CCP balls (that's a specific packing pattern) have whole number 4-tuple coordinates, such as (2,1,1,0).

Nowadays I'm collaborating on Quadrays via the M4W Coda. We're seeing to what level AI might get involved, among other experiments. I'm taking advantage of the high level of fluency around mathematics I'm encountering at math4wisdom, which is anchored by Andrius Kulikauskas, a math PhD. 

Does a "vector space" have to have a dot product? Even if it doesn't, might it still include Euclidean Distance? 

Must basis vectors be unit length by definition? 

What if they span space without relying on negative mirrors of themselves, shouldn't that count for something?

In XYZ, we have three positive basis vectors that may be scaled by -1, which means reversed, which some might classify under rotation (i.e. to "face the other way" is to rotate by 180 degrees). 

Thanks to negation, -X, -Y, -Z will also participate in space-spanning, but as secondary, non-basis vectors. They're second bananas.  (4, -1, 0) entails adding an X basis vector, stretched to 4 times its original length of 1, added to a negated Y (so a -Y), and no Z involvement, giving this point in space, now uniquely addressed.

Thanks to vector reversal, the three positive basis vectors (X, Y, Z), abetted by their second bananas (-X, -Y, -Z), span all of space by means of addition and further stretching or shrinking, but without further need for rotation. (4, -1, 0) = 4X + 1(-Y) + 0 where X and -Y are vectors (pointy arrows, directed rays of definite length (i.e. not rays "to infinity")).

In the IVM, using Quadrays, we have four positive basis vectors that may optionally be scaled by -1 (reversed), but we don't need that "rotational" feature to have adding with scaling span our space. We never needed the help of a supplementary cast of negated basis vectors, to reach all the stars in our universe (points in our spatial volume). Just stretch or shrink at most three of these four Quadrays, without changing direction, add, and you're done. (4, -1, 0) is equivalently (4 sqrt(2), sqrt(2), 0, 5 sqrt(2)).

IVM = Isotropic Vector Matrix, Fuller's coin, but not unrelated to the Matrix of science fiction, since aberrations of Fuller's IVM give it "frequencies" (think of wind chimes) which are like immersive radio channels or scenarios in those Matrix cubicles. 

The IVM is like the Star Trek holodeck in other words, but with no exit or off switch. 

However, more prosaically, it's simply the skeletal scaffolding one gets from the aforementioned CCP (cubic close packing), a ball packing pattern of ball:space density of about 74%.

Sam's C6XTY (or c6xty) lattice places a compressive soccer-ball-looking element (same Adidas Telstar hexapent geometry) at every IVM hub, such that those most immersed all have twelve balls around one. But unlike in the CCP, these plastic balls do not touch one another. They're suspended in a network of connecting armatures, adding lots of flexibility, permeability and variability to the design. 

Flextegrities could be more like jellyfish, with thin yet stiff enough filaments holding sensors in a neutral buoyancy lattice submerged in water, perhaps in the open ocean. The sensors might be whole number addressed, as by Quadrays, and selectively illuminated or otherwise activated by Wi-Fi.

My dad and I took up scuba diving in the Philippines, so it's not unusual for my mind to drift to these undersea vistas. Sam had some experience in marine biology as well, as did my cousin Mary (who went on to get a medical degree). Therefore the posters Sam had made for Lattice Gallery (a West Broadway popup in that winter of 2019), showing off Flextegrity in its underwater context, did not seem as far-fetched to me as they might have for other visitors. Experiments with immersed flextegrity lattices could be undertaken today, and/or may already be underway without my knowledge.

Automatic Writing

Prompt: Is Kirby Urner a mathematician?

Bot: Kirby Urner is not conventionally recognized as a mathematician in the academic sense but rather as an educator and curriculum developer with a strong interest in mathematics, particularly in the context of educational reform and innovative teaching methods. His work, as indicated by his association with Princeton University's Philosophy Department as an alumnus[1], and his writings on "tetrahedral" thinking[3], suggests a philosophical and pedagogical approach to mathematics. Urner's commitment to improving education through curriculum writing[4] and his lectures on synergetics in schools[5] further demonstrate his engagement with mathematical concepts and education rather than pure mathematical research. Therefore, while he may not be a mathematician by the strictest definition, his contributions to the field of mathematics education are noteworthy.

Citations:

[1] https://princeton.academia.edu/kirbyurner

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-new-math-gnu-kirby-urner

[3] https://www.math4wisdom.com/wiki/Research/KirbyUrner

[4] https://www.linkedin.com/in/4dsolutions

[5] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lzv30IKvfZs

[6] https://youtube.com/watch?v=g14mu4uWD4E

[7] https://github.com/4dsolutions

Asylum Cities

When people talk "billions for Ukraine" it's usually not with some accompanying breakout, meaning it's left to our imaginations how much is for hospitals and care units of various kinds. One might imagine an entirely civilian budget in other words, and then ask how far short of that are we willing to sacrifice. Another dime on mayhem might not be a dime well spent.

Actually there's likely a breakout and I'm just not seeing it when I make my rounds of the various channels and repositories I visit when harvesting information. Probably a pie chart or other visualization. We're told some of the biggest slices go to the prime contractor irrigation system (Beltway Mafia) and for a lot of family estates, that's reason enough to slobber, in anticipation of more lucrative contracts.

Out here in the Pacific Northwest, we're more concerned with preserving wetlands and salmon. As to whether Oregon could host some civilian construction operations (healthcare oriented), I'm not so sure. My nudging us in the direction of doing epcots, with university connections, encounters resistance, I'm guessing partly because of the negative Rajneesh Puram experience. 

So my sights turn to Canada, perhaps the Yellowknife area? These campuses could stay small. Breitenbush is an inspiration, but I'm thinking higher tech, maybe with electric ATVs powered from batteries charged by wind and solar. Lets just see if that's even doable. Computer animations and simulations don't replace reality outside of AI. We need the harsh realities of Mother Nature to teach us whether our designs are really worthy.

Which brings us back to Ukraine. Something like a flourishing peacetime economy is long overdue, by some decades. Any budget should recognize the need for military disengagement such that mature civilian undertakings might resume in earnest. There's no point trying to masquerade while stockpiling ammo, as these installations will attract tourists and journalists, other visitors. We're not about being secretive so much as role modeling the freedoms that come with keeping it transparently open source.

I'm not suggesting there's any real difference on either side when it comes to addressing civilian needs. The Russian side of the fence needs hospitals, working rail, trucking, internet, the whole works. Devastation is not the goal, for anyone in Greater Europe. 

If your mentality is purely punitive, you must be low ranking. Tales of feuding and revenge get to hog center stage for only so long, as the cast continues to roll over. Deeper themes, such as building new infrastructure, take one further, in terms of leaving a lasting legacy.

But then again, here in the Pacific Northwest we're more focused on the Pacific Rim economy, while those Atlanticist east coasters remain obsessed with their West Asia endeavors. We're East Asia facing, meaning towards Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, China, of course Bali and Borneo, not forgetting the Aussies or New Zealand. Lots more. I was editor of Asian-Pacific Issues News there for awhile (AFSC, obscure), plus the Philippines was my home for some formative years.

To the north, Russia again, but more as an indigenous people than some EU foe, fellow Sibero-Alaskans.

Russian businesses have had their branch offices around here since well before Oregon attained statehood. They had dealings with Tulalip, the established resource keepers. Many Oregonians are ethnic Russkies to this day (even Stalin's granddaughter joined us a while back), plus we have ethnic Ukes too -- these are terms of endearment, we all get silly nicknames. 

Assembling the Puzzle

If you've been following my ("my") emergent (self reshaping) curriculum you'll perhaps recall my graph linking Margaret Fuller to Ada Byron, around the time of Napoleon, after the American and then French revolutions. 

At the same time, I started digging a tunnel from the present, towards this past matrix, including such luminaries as Buckminster Fuller, Walter Kaufmann, Richard Rorty, all contemporaries of mine although I'm living on into the 21st Century, being of a later generation.

I'd already run into the US Civil War as a big deal in the American psyche. Now that I've been reading The Metaphysical Club and listening to its author on YouTube, I'm seeing more of how this tunnel goes. Issues of race and racism, Darwinism, Social Darwinism, feature bigly.

Another feature of my curriculum is I don't ignore Occupy, a movement those fascinated by the "color revolutions" seem to bleep over. Following Kaufmann, and waving the flag of "place based" education, I'm happy to count biography and autobiography as important inclusions. Kaufmann was always turning his critical eye back on the author, the journalist, the news publisher and its (perhaps ideologically driven) editors. Philosophy must continue to involve self reflection and internal disciplines.

I've seized on Rorty's Achieving Our Country as potentially psycho-therapeutic  in that it restores the possibility of continuing the narrative in ways that uphold the values of one's heroes. If the US has to die and go underground, before its rebirth as a phoenix, it's not like we don't have a template. Sounds ancient Egyptian.

Where did pragmatism go? The conventional wisdom portrays the Cold War was a clarion call to zealots of all stripes. Pragmatism seemed too accepting of enemy viewpoints to matter.

I'd say pragmatism left the university and went to Madison Avenue, where it took up the dark arts of advertising and public relations, as a student of Edward Bernays. 

Pragmatists become "social engineers" (a term with negative connotations right out of the gate) and as such they gained their main clientele, the politicians. They founded companies like Cambridge Analytica, based on machine learning.

Instead of harping on the word "capitalism" (a theory of capitals?), let's talk about the commercial sector, also known as the private sector. The idea that "socialism" equals "no privacy" is too unreflective to let pass as a truism. Political talk is semi-paralyzed with cliches.  

One's level of privacy remains an important measure, but perhaps not as a guide in some bipolar taxonomy i.e. "do I live in a capitalist or socialist system?" -- how about neither, how about both? How about we're not a slave to such "ist talk"?

Advice to Some Dieters

I stress the "some" because I'm aware of how we differ widely in the kinds of coaching we each want. Some need a stern lecture and welcome same, if delivered professionally. I'm not adopting a stern manner here, nor a punishing tone.

A sense of power you may develop has to do with your ability to shift your habits, or as we say in psychology, to express and / or extinguish them. Yes, my meaning of "power" is aligned with the old fashioned meaning of "will power". 

The obverse of what I'm saying is "pick your battles" because indeed, some patterns are not especially subject to your will. There's that saying about knowing the difference being evidence of wisdom.

When I tackle my "addiction to" (ingrained habit of consuming) sugar, a term with a refined meaning in modern lore, which I'll get to shortly, I focus less on the substance and more on the appetite, the phenomenon of having a sweet tooth. Then I get curious: what would I be like with less of a sweet tooth? 

Put more as a Bayesian: "what would the world around me have to be like for me to be less of a sweet tooth (in it)?". I'm inviting changes to the whole world, as experienced by me, as a result of my reshaping my appetites. That mere act of reshaping, I'm suggesting, gives one a sense of being powerful.

So here's where discernment comes in. Of course if we all had infinite will power, we'd move mountains and all become beautiful (which we are) and our ideal weight (as if there's just one). Short of moving mountains, do we have the power to resist, with an eye towards extinguishing, the craving for sweets?

The desire for intense glucose rushes, day in and day out, is what we really mean by an appetite for (addiction to) sugar, meaning pizza and pasta, bread, not just cake and ice cream. Phasing out carbs is what a diabetic is advised to do. Stop taxing your pancreas and start burning those ketones instead, throw those ketone logs on the fire, lord knows you've got a real pile of 'em.

The other reminder is not to make it a moral contest, with you against the devil, resisting temptation, and bad sinful you if you give in. Sure, that's a popular mindset to assume, when reshaping, but it's not the only one possible. The search for novelty and variety in a changing world might be more the driving undertaking. You just wanna see what happens if you stop doing this (not cold turkey necessarily) and start doing that (slow acceleration OK).

Put another way, your aim is not to be a goodie two shoes, but to be powerful, but in a way we have a right to enjoy, an earned pleasure. The ability to reshape yourself is tantamount to your ability to exercise your freedoms, as a self. You grow more into your heritage, as a selfhood, in exercising your inborn ability to reshape.

Then there's the mental habit of always thinking one needs to reshape this or that. Watch out for those ruts (those grooves) as well, meaning remember to question your own beliefs as to what habits you need to work on. Maybe you would like the habit of sending more postcards, drinking more tea, riding buses more often... or try listing an entirely different list of habits. The permutations are endless. 

Play with reshaping what it means to reshape.

Colonist Versus Colonialist

We hear a lot about "nationalism" versus "globalism" these days. Probably the easiest way to sound patriotic is to decry globalism, which is roughly perceived as the doctrine (the "ism") of "the one percent" which in turn is shorthand for a much smaller percentage, i.e. not "one in a hundred" is an illuminatus or whatever.

"Colonialism" is highly out of fashion, but what is it, anyway? 

English is a bit slippery, y'all may have noticed. One may have a colony (in the sense of neighborhood) of mostly Urdu speaking Hindus, in this other surrounding culture, but there's no connotation that the colony is taking over. It's an enclave, perhaps a camp of visiting guest workers. 

One has such enclaves all over the world, otherwise known as resort hotels (for the more transient colonists).

That's right: both "colonist" and "colonialist" are defined. 

The former is doing it, whereas the latter is believing in it. 

The true believers are likely wanting to have more of a hand in steering the policies of the host country. 

A simple colonist is glad to have the host taking care of providing room service, other amenities. 

Hotel management is blissfully not hotel guest business.

Then you inevitably get a "spectrum" i.e. hotel guests that are nevertheless doing business with the hotel, by bringing together a conference in that venue. I was privy to this angle quite a bit, thanks to HoldenWeb and The Open Bastion, conference companies I got to hang with thanks to Steve Holden. His team produced Pycons, Djangocons, an ApacheCon or two, among others. I traveled to DC and Chicago for some of them.

I bring up hotels in part because they conventionally (pun intended) host whole colonies, some of which are semi-permanent or at least long lasting, such as in the case of employed workers. In the worker scenario, dormitory digs and workspace may be separated, which is where the "bedroom community" becomes an enclave. One has enclaves of embassy workers for example, a colony from nation X who staff their nation X embassy.

One also gets inter-colony interactions (e.g. Pythonista vs Perl Monger at an OSCON -- I greatly admired both communities), meaning a nation state such as Lesotho will host multiple enclaves associated with multiple embassies, engineering projects, religious establishments, other enterprises. Again, I'm writing from personal experience. 

Religious establishments are a great example, because it's often a religious practice to have one's personnel do tours of duty in distant lands, spreading the religion, sure (missionary work), but also bringing back intelligence and artifacts, potentially advantaging.

When a colonist gets in trouble with the host country, how is this handled? We see from the news that several patterns (templates) pop up in response to this question. Let's come back to this topic down the road.

Sociology Day

I'm in an intensive Sociology workshop today, in my city-as-campus Portland context. Right now, I'm connected to a Pashtun Institute guy based at Rutgers, soon to defend his thesis. We're talking about the concept of "national consciousness" via the Math 4 Wisdom channel. I'll embed the video when it becomes available.

Then I get my time with the retired librarians, drop in personalities, continuing the action at El Barrio, which burned up in a fire at the outset of 2024 (no one hurt, extensive property damage to El Mercado).

Finally, this evening I plan to attend a meetup of the rebooting Thirsters, a group of conversationalists with a strong background in sociology, academically, through Peace Corps and by other means.

I had a good first experience with Sociology as a discipline thanks to my 8th grade teacher at ASOR, Fred Craden. 

In my twenties, when I returned to Portland to settle long term, I achieved an adult level relationship with Dr. Charles Bolton, a career professor of sociology who first crossed paths with my parents in their University of Chicago days (when I was born).

These were notes I took during Aslam's meetup. I also posted some follow-up questions to the listserv.

From the homework readings:

Alt Worlds

from Bonnie DeVarco's presentation to TrimTab Book Club, Feb 3, 2024

Would a sphere that focussed on city mayors more, be detrimental to our endeavors? That's not a tight enough question yet, as who is this "we" with endeavors? What "endeavors" are we talking about? Suspicions abound.

It's not like city mayors don't talk and compare notes already. Portland celebrates an end to the nuke weapons era, now about you guys? Clearly the problem of radio-toxins in need of safe storage has not gone away regardless, with or without an intelligible treaty situation. 

Mayors might compare notes on the safety of their power grids, especially in light of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. But also in light of Maui. That's a part of the job, goes with the territory. Beyond electrical concerns one has transiting traffic, such as chem trains through East Palestine.

But then some avid cable TV view viewer might pipe up saying: only congressional representatives, and even in that case, only a few committees have any official government business prying into the affairs of the Department of Energy and associates. 

Mayors are not invited to that clique. Don't make such calls into interesting, crowd-informing TV. Which lobbies are telling us that I wonder?

I agree though, there's little consensus on how the circuitry must be designed. 

Would it be "wrong" to have a Refugees Channel, as I proposed? Would the religious denominations support it, if it were ecumenical enough to reach their laities? How are generous denizens of the first world going to take part in improving these people's lives -- versus trapping them with razor wire no one told them about -- unless some channel opens up between them?

The improvement I'd make to the Sanders-Yang idea of a socialist safety net (civilian instead of military) would be to (a) make college the norm, work-study the default and (b) make the UBI a scholarship that pays for it, without precluding making more of an income on top of that. At least the UBI level puts a floor under things, meaning lots of jobs building OMRs or whatever futuristic "monstrosities" (a term of endearment in this context). We already have the pattern in our socialist military, with base campuses.

But no, the screenwriters can think of nothing better than a scorpions in the jar scenario, between old laser eyes Biden (out for Maga) and Orange Jesus (Maga King). What a weird cartoon, eh? And yet they say I'm the one who's bizarre? Tell me about it bozos.

Having more mayors weighing in and doing Zoom (or other) calls, with cable and streaming both allowed, would boost a sense of camaraderie among municipalities along with a healthy sense of competition. "What are you doing about the house-less"; "I dunno, what are you doing?" and like that, but more substantial maybe, less Planet of the Apes.

OK, so that doesn't sound like a credible option to you? It was just an example, an exercise in imagination.

When I got to Manila for the rest of high school I was surprised to find some of the dominant corporations were fielding the sports teams on television, meaning the companies themselves were fielding teams, not just sponsoring them with lots of decals. 

The Royal True Orange company, which likely had a parent I'm not remembering, had a team called the Pulp Bits. Their flagship beverage featured pulp bits in case that's not obvious.

I've seen a lot of demonizing of the public-private partnership concept, on which my whole Project Renaissance was premised. By now I must have horns or something, given all the heaped scorn.

Government would get out in front with the prototyping and research, in the nonprofit sector, and the donor funders would turn around and profit from the derivative products. Put that way, I'm guessing many readers will think "well, that's hardly a new idea". Exactly right. The military uses it today.

I was gratified to see Bonnie making so much room for fat pipes between our school of thought (Bucky Fuller informed) and the General Systems Theory literature (GST). I've been milking that connection myself, as some of you know, but it's always heartening to find others who appreciate the continuity here, while roping in Gregory Bateson in the process.

Cultish Thinking

Hollywood East is trying to figure out a screenplay whereby the White House might be seen as taking heroic action in some way, against an advertised foe. 

However the think tanks are at odds and firing at one another, adding to the sense of semi-paralysis that bedevils District "comic strips" these days. Very little consent has been manufactured, that driving the Pentagon over a cliff would be the best thing.

Of course my contemporary readers are well aware of world circumstances and will readily fill in the blanks. West Asia as we're now calling it has turned to jello, such that strict borders seem to no longer persist, such as between Jordan and Syria and Iraq in some places. I've heard the joke about "messy potamia" (not necessarily funny in every context).

You'll remember, if reading in my journals, that I could imagine some Palestinians voluntarily choosing, say at the extended family or neighborhood level, to escape the mayhem for now, and I wasn't restricting their options to elsewhere in West Asia. I well recall how hard it was for Jews during the holocaust to find safe refuge far away from Berlin.

That made me a minority thinker, as evacuation (removing from harm's way) was not a priority. No one wanted my cruise ship flotilla (I was imagining like a rotating convoy, not really knowing in advance how many Gazans would opt to dispatch).

The civilian viewers of channeled media are getting a front row look at what happens when diplomacy breaks down among players. I'm not on the phone with the District either. This is faraway Portland, lightyears distant. I'm more likely to be talking with Canadians these days (a hotbed of the kind of free thinking mixed with geometry I find attractive).

We all know what various characters in that soap opera want to do. If we're free of "just cable" and tuning in YouTubes, we're aware of a wider cast than just the ones the cable cabal puts on. I bounce around watching some of the VIPS crew, often as talking heads on others' programs.

Hollywood East

I was saying to Thirsters, on a Zoom call the other night, that I think America is a great country, but that this greatness is not somehow championed nor best advertised by the city-state of WDC, aka The District, home of the Beltway Mafia. We have many great cities, not to mention rural areas. The wilderness is what’s greatest of all.

For semantic convenience and thought-organizing purposes, I have come up with a trivium / quadrivium type thing, cross STEAM and PATH, Scrabble-style, on the letter A (for Anthropology). T = Theater (which is a lot about psychology, cite the Oedipus Complex, or the Military-Industrial one); whereas H = History, what one might call “theater writ large” (not just a simulation). 

We often use fiction (especially science fiction) to forecast and simulate what’s eventually non-fiction (what will eventually be, versus what might have been). 

We rehearse in the imagination (the simulator), before popping the question (whatever question, let’s assume consequential), or taking the stage, podium or battlefield. We plan and cogitate, before launching some campaign.

The transition from Theater to History is fairly seamless in that thespians have real lives, as do playwrights, directors, storytellers of every feather. Theater production is anchored in the real world. 

We also have celebrities, movie stars, who step off the stage or out of the big screen to become political leaders, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

I explain all of this as background for why I think “Hollywood East” is a good synonym for The District. People flock to DC for the same reason they flock to LA: they want speaking parts, and/or parts as extras, in some lifestyle drama that also pays the bills. They want to be paid actors. Don’t we all?

A reason for thinking of DC as another Hollywood is that both cities specialize in fueling our imaginations. Indeed these cities work together, and tend to speak the same language of public relations behind the scenes.

So am I forgetting the role of New York? What about Las Vegas?

I’m not trying to forget anything, so much as remind people we have a choice of where we buy our melodramas. WDC wants to sell both Sinophobia and Russophobia simultaneously. Are we in the market for that kind of drivel?  Maybe we’d like to sample other phobias for a change, not to mention “philias” (affiliations).

Some cities might want to opt out of DC’s unhealthy programming. That’s their freedom: to free their own minds from glitchy, cultish brainwashing pushed by competing think tanks.

We hear a lot of talk about community standards. Perhaps we regard WDC’s output as too much in the “disgusting” category. Maybe Hollywood hasn’t been that great either, in recent memory, with stellar exceptions.

So am I just engaging in more boosterism, pushing Portland (the weird one, in Oregon) as a countering / competing source of memes and dreams? I would not say “just” but that’s an element of my agenda for sure. 

I’d like to keep America great by rebalancing the relationships among its cultural capitals. That’s a global calculus as well. Or call it World Game, in some dimension.

North Circuit

Tomorrow is to be about walking along semi-urban wilderness trails and perhaps visiting a cultural center devoted to local tribal lore. I'm on my north circuit, visiting friends and relatives, with a goal of retrieving Sydney, a four legged companion I’ve grown fond of.

My thanks to Sam Lanahan for the gift of new tires. My Sunday drive in the pouring rain marked my first time distance driving since visiting McKenzie Farm.

My cousin Mary (my grandmother Esther's sister Elsie’s granddaughter) is well versed in the nature trails in this area and today we sampled one in Arlington, close to the new Amazon fulfillment center. I enjoyed riding in her luxurious electric Ford Mustang. She misses her Ford Bolts, but those got recalled.

On math4wisdom I’ve been writing about two notions of a nation-state: the ethno-state and the unum-state.

The unumstate gets its name from E Pluribus Unum and is about achieving dynamic symbiosis among diverse ethnicities. 

The ethnostate idea is older and is more about establishing a self-preserving, self-determining monoculture.

I see a lot to think about in terms of how an unumstate might have its foreign policy captured and/or dominated by an internal ethnostate. US history is characterized by ethnic factions with specific axes to grind who go to Washington, DC with high hopes of mobilizing the vast resources of the US (its military especially) to tromp some historic foe.

In the meantime, so many American people remain rather clueless about all these ethnicities vying for control. The dynamism of diversity always seems to border on chaos.

One of those ethnicities was the subculture of the free and open source geeks. Their objective, world domination, was proffered jokingly, satirizing those who take themselves more seriously as conquerors. 

I see global geekdom as leading a design science revolution, with an emphasis on supplying and improving artifacts (e.g. tractors) over promoting any specific political ideology (e.g. communism or capitalism).

Speaking of artifacts, I was able to load my cousin’s walking machine with a circuitous route in the Parioli neighborhood, in Rome, Italy, a former stomping grounds. I walked at 2 mph from Piazza Euclide across to Viale Parioli and past our old digs to Piazza Ungeria, spending under 200 calories. Sam has similar equipment.

Mary works 10 hour days with no breaks, seeing one urgent care patient after another. To say the economy undervalues personnel is an understatement, and derives from thinking purely in terms of money. A similar mentality has destroyed a great many economies. Thinking purely in terms of money is a symptom of mental incapacity. 

Simply throwing money at a problem is woefully insufficient as a surplus of funds does not compensate for a deficit of skills and imagination. Conversely, skills and imagination may well be able to compensate for a lack of funds.

Deep Learning

Something valuable I got from the Buckminster Fuller corpus: no need to pile on. Like he was saying his gift was to find his niche and stick to that, not jumping on the next bandwagon that came by, another kind of hobo one could say. He was more solo.

I'm somewhat echoing the oft said phrase: choose my battles wisely or; not gonna die on that hill. I picture a hill of zombies like in that movie World War Z with Brad Pitt: do I want to pile on in that way? You could say it's the diva in me that suggests I avoid choruses.

On the other hand, I'm happy enough as the lurker, meaning the attendee who isn't present to make a splash but simply to take in, as an observer, an eager learner. I like being a student and I'm willing to listen to others with more to say. They have their niches just as I have mine, and I seek them out, to hear them vent in their native languages, so to speak.

I'll sum this up saying I'm "university minded" meaning I still treasure the mindset that boldly ventures, and is neither plodding nor hurried. We're speaking of an eternal ideal clearly, as life itself tends to be "too this" and "too that" (e.g. plodding or hurried) such that "just right" sounds more like a fairytale.

When it comes to "math camp" I'm not saying I'm the fat kid everyone likes to tease because he's slowing them down, and peer pressure serves as leverage. That's an archetype for sure, but I'm a stronger athlete on the playing field we're talking about. That being said, I'm hardly a "good at everything" skydiver ski champion. I suck as a skier and tried jumping from an airplane (not diving, i.e. static line) only once, as a part of a fundraising stunt.

I have my limitations in other words. Oft times I'll be reaching back in my autobiography for something to contribute, and that can sound narcissistic (there's a rant I could go on) to the point of egomaniacal. Especially when I repeat the same stories. However I've grown more tolerant, with age, of people rifling through their own memory bags. As time goes by, stuff accumulates, the tetrahedron grows (subdivides).

Machine learning (deep learning in particular) shows off the same principle: reliability comes with age and sensitivity both. The algorithm is as sensitive as it will ever be, from the start, shall we stipulate, yet the model only really gets good with age. Age does not represent deterioration so much as specific shaping to a specific purpose, like a lump of clay becoming a statue of some phase space (namespace) such as "dog or cat?".

Our global university language of today (such as it exists: on a spectrum) uses "journalist" somewhat synonymously with "student" i.e. you don't have the right to punish me for citing sources, I'm simply journaling about what I've learned. I take notes, you read them, no crime in that. The journalist had a kind of immunity for being a wide open channel for opposing views, meaning both sides in a debate (polarized) would get represented. When a journalist refines the bias in a more niche way, that's an indication that the journalist is now ready to profess in certain areas, more as a professional (guild member) than as a well-informed (educated) layman.

When it comes to the professoriate and the guilds, a different politics applies, as these tend to vie with one another, true, but also tend to form alliances. We might call this Think Tank Alley, a kind of geekdom. Here live the people the journalists like to interview, as sources. The way one climbs the rungs in journalism is by means of curating sources in ways that somehow advantage the sources. At this point I would defer to others to profess about ethical journalism. What are the rules again?

MyFlickrYear 2023

Random Walks

:: ghost church ::

I'm a fan of small vans when it comes to helping minors (or others not into driving personal vehicles) get around. The martial arts school down the street, here in Asylum District, upper Hawthorne, has some well appointed, branded vans to round up the trainees and later take them home.

In some cases a van route might intersect a city bus route, plus today we have more individualized taxi options. No one size fits all. The van might cover a last leg of the journey, into the hinterlands and onto the farm or jungle garden (some ecosystem).

I learned about the importance of transportation, to one's program, from an AFSC tour of duty that took me to a planning meeting the Daniel Ellsberg Manhattan Project Part 2: the cleanup. He knew about Hanford and such places (Chernobyl and Fukushima had not happened yet), where the water table was endangered.

The Portland office paid my way, as back then I was young enough to be considered a youth leader, and what I focused on was how to program around the youth. Square one: you might need a van, or a fleet of vans. I later, as an older guy, clerked the Latin America Asia Pacific program, “clerk” being different from being on paid staff; I was more like an outside consultant.

Glenn Stockton and I entertained similar visions, for a youth center, but with seniors too, all ages, that was all about skill sharing. Making video, jewelry, clothing... Portland is already somewhat ablaze with maker spaces and this was to be in that ballpark, as a teaching center. Glenn had the institute’s name picked out. We would be a respected studio.

Glenn had plenty of supplies in storage (for lapidary, for metalworking…) and was always on the brink of finding was to truck it out and assembling personal workstations, variously specialized. I’m remembering the basement of Dollar Scholar, the time he came closest but the store had to close. Finding space for a maker-space is not always that easy, given the state of the market, plus Glenn despised the term “maker”. CubeSpace was long gone by then, with WeWork soon to follow. Yet the whole idea had not died.

We had another property picked out later, but it went for more conventional uses. Then another after than (more like a house than a commercial building). Two guys with a nice banter don't a full blown business make in the eyes of money lenders. AFSC was never really on board with that first one anyway, as a nonprofit with some clout as in street cred. It was more in the process of closing down our Portland office (the one I had worked in over the years, including as a contributing editor for Asia-Pacific Issues News).

Later, our project morphed into the Ghost Church property, one of those Methodist hulks that no longer attracts churchgoers, despite its enormous legacy charm. We toured the place and imagined beaming a  signal to/from OMSI, and having like an extension program. Fun science fiction.

I've always been a source of improbable plans. But aren't we all in some way? We plan our lives, to an extent, but then always have to leave room for randomness. A plan might be more like a direction sometimes, an intention. The wake behind is nothing like a straight line in retrospect.

Giant Domes

I was surprised to learn that modern computer models have shown geodesic domes to be unstable. This was the word from Princeton that time, a TrimTabber meetup. However I think the speaker suggested workarounds. How reliable is software alone, when it comes to anticipating synergetic properties?

You'd think more experimentation with giant domes would be some university's business, just for the opportunities it'd create for its students, to experiment with such advanced engineering. Are we talking a one mile diameter dome or what? How tall would it be? Would it be heated?

The idea was: if voluminous enough, and effective as a weather shield, then the interior could be designed imaginatively. If people want a more rectilinear scaffolding with a surrounding climatron, so much the better, but how far could we push such designs into extremes of hot and cold weather patterns? Would the software model tell the whole story? How much would that software cost, versus simply building the thing and taking real world measurements?

The problem was Bucky had a lot of charisma and could get the wheels turning, such that universities inviting him to campus could expect its students to co-create one or more novelties, many of which could be kept for various practical purposes, such as PR.  "Come to University X where we make giant domes in the desert!" the billboard might say, with some alluring pictures. Why leave it all to burners at Burning Man to prototype tomorrow experimentally?

I'd like to see the real deal (a giant dome) and the software model side by side. Is the Tacoma Dome unstable? Our speaker sounded anti standardized parts, as modern architecture always celebrates the "one off" versus the industrially repeatable. 

Designs that repeat (clone) put architects out of work, as now you're sheltering millions of people with one standard design. Yet the car industry thinks nothing (or everything) of standardization, and yet also comes with many makes and models. Then customize all you like with aftermarket products. Ditto for airplanes.

Fuller permitted himself this critique of architecture, such that his recognition and awards in that area were sometimes begrudged. He was critical of other disciplines too, and many developed chips on their shoulders, and had axes to grind. We've had to thread the needle in such a way as to take all this professional jealousy into account. We being like some invisible army of die hard Buckynauts.

The Cornwall pillow domes were daring and are no doubt a source of useful data, for those wishing to continue with this type of experiment. You might think Florida would take the initiative, given The Mouse in Orlando, but various culture wars seem to be sending us off on a detour. The whole "livingry" business held up by people uptight about "livingry" even being a word, whereas "weaponry" is to them a no brainer.