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.