High Desert Circuits

So I'm back in KPOV country, in what we call high desert Oregon. People take music seriously in proportion to what else is going on, it seems to me. In any case, here and in the midwest I've discovered some of the most seriously music-oriented subcultures. Shout out to WEFT in Champaign-Urbana.

I'm hopeful I'll get to meet with The Other again for a spell, the host of the Saturday noon Psychedelic Rebellion, one of my favorite shows. I tune in just about any radio station via Radio Garden, an app on my iPad. I'm listening to KPOV right now in fact.

Last night, our party made it to Furiosa, the latest mega-movie epic extravaganza in the Mad Max post apocalyptic idiocracy series. We caught it at The Bagdad. All I'll say here is the transition to a more Smith Rock style environment the next day felt prefigured, although we're still in a Land of Abundance here.

This computer book I picked up for free from a Lil Library (curbside) in the hood (foreword by Ward Cunningham), reminds us that Party is a great moniker, akin to Entity in allowing for many subclasses, such as families, any table of clientele at a restaurant. I'm thinking of the famous little tips database. Smokers? Really? We're biased to think in terms of "political parties", not so much "party lines" (as in telephony, a forgotten meaning, not as in "toeing the party line"). These "biases" get reflected in word2vec type data sculptures (slowly moving, heavy mobiles in the wind, tubular bells).

I've been into helping Judy catch up on the various Art World advances occurring on a broad front collectively referred to as EayEai in the literature i.e. "AI". I've just added "EayEai" to my dictionary as I can see reasons to clutter my namespace with such a monstrosity. Right up there with "egg-zist". She's a musician, more into country folk than goa trance. We share a love of Swingle Swingers doing Bach numbers. We were both nerdy as kids I guess.

Part of my demo involved prompting "Giant King Kong gorilla climbs smith rock in Oregon with mountains in the background and surprised hikers in the foreground" and getting the above. No post production editing.

Yes, we stopped at Eagle Crossing, although I didn't take Sydney inside. That's a family favorite, a great place to get fry bread.

Cryptic Crossing

The problem with the unit edge unit volume tetrahedron is it came up against the Bayesian priors. "We can't be wrong about the unit cube" and indeed that's true, and therefore we can't be right about it. Truisms ain't true in the empirical sense. One doesn't discover such a tetrahedron, one defines it into existence.

However there's a popular understanding around mathematics in particular, that adheres to orthodoxies more generally: that there's one right way with some bemusing alternatives. 

This attitude started to waver in maths with the invention of so-called non-Euclidean geometries. What appeared as cracks in the structure, the edifice, were coming from Cantor's corner too.  The priesthood was all about closing ranks and plugging the holes. 

The only window open, through which to discuss incompleteness, would become Godel's.

The way to counter the Bayesian priors was incremental. We had to keep adding to the apparatus, showing applications and advantages. The natural sciences were cooperating. What would the world have to be like for this model to explain this evidence?  

What evidence?  The nucleocapsid of the virus at first. 10FF + 2 got some airplay in the NY Herald Tribune.

Positive whole number addressing of CCP balls looked pretty interesting. The "quadrays" apparatus provided those. Linear combinations of {2, 1, 1, 0} would get us to the Waterman Polyhedrons (a set I helped name, with no objections from Steve).

That children might work with fractions such as 1/8 (Mite) and 1/24 (A & B), with the concept of congruence abetted by chirality (left and right, inside out), while getting more comfortable scaling and rotating polyhedrons, was exciting to a few teachers. Very few.

In these terms, of internal modeling and inferencing, we'll be addressing "bleeped over the Bucky stuff" as an historical topic, the whys and wherefores. 

People have these Bayesian brains deeply stuck in some ruts, and for good reasons. Until those reasons grow stale and the brain's neuroplasticity gets called upon. Time for an update sleepyheads. 

Don't let those three horses, Height, Width and Depth, drag your bandwagon off the road. Make the sign of the Z (zig zag zig). 

Z + Z ⋈ 4D

You can keep saying "space is 3D" though, as XYZ is mucho useful. Then dive off the deep end into any number of Coxeter (spatial) dimensions. You'll wash up on the shores of Natural Language Processing, ready for Word2Vec (and Doc2Vec). King - male = Queen - female etc.

What has to go is the "room for only one way of thinking" school (mindset). Share the road. Impoliteness on behalf of "absolute truth" is nothing if not butt-ugly zealotry. Sometimes God's little monsters ain't pretty to contemplate.

Back to the bleeping: being overspecialized, most boomers assumed other boomers were looking into it, but few were, certainly not the most self admiring. The resulting vacuum or dead spot (dead air) only grew, adding a phony hollowness to an already crumbling (shall we say charlatanical) world view. 

Once it became safer to question boomer authority, people under thirty started to pick up on what had been censored, made verboten, deplatformed. That was an eye-opener.

So does all this cultural crumbling mean all the old orthodoxies are about to be swept away? Of course not. 

Heavy stones with high inertia never turn on a dime, let alone the Titanic. Enjoy the ride!

Knowledge Engineering (KE)

Knowledge Engineering (KE) is a source of mnemonic devices, and we discussed a few of them. Such devices may be literal objects from everyday experience, such as prescription lenses (personalized to correct for distortions), or more fantastical or abstract. 

For example, under Geometry we find the Coupler or "crazy diamond" as some would call it. The combinatorics of A and B modules, in their assembly of the space-filling Coupler matrix, is where Bucky himself expected to find particle physics minded proteges, in search of their GUTs and TOEs.

An entire city may become infused with mnemonic signifiers, both in consensus reality (CR) in the form a statues, memorials, proper named streets, and in non-consensus realities (NCRs), perhaps special to an individual author of specific novels. I'm thinking of James Joyce and Dublin of course.

Portland, favored by the movie and TV industries, has been weirdly lensed through several fictional series, most famously Portlandia, officially comic satire.

The idea of an entirely open source farm becomes pretty all-encompassing once we factor in the computer chips we're using. 

The apps target smartphones, so those have to be open as well. 

The apps control or at least schedule the tractors, the irrigation systems, some of the bookkeeping. Transparency in accounting is also required. 

Who would do this? A university wanting to show off the "model farm" with no deceptive tricks, perhaps. Or a government in the business of proving ideal cases, which the private sector might learn from.

Spirit of Portland

(embedded slides, takes longer to load sometimes)

Articulating Globalism

As some of my readers might recognize, I invest in "globalism" as a term, given it's out of fashion at the moment, meaning few are using it for anything positive, which leaves the field to risk takers like me.  TV personalities get to sneer when they say globalism, as if we all share the same meaning. I find their sneering attitude on the incomprehensible side sometimes.

If anyone is gonna carry on with the "globalist" label, it oughta be a guy like me (right?), with an expat background and massive exposure to the Dymaxion™ product line aka the Bucky stuff.

Our family even had United Nations passports there for a bit, when dad took a job with UNDP vis-a-vis Manila Bay reclamation and associated projects. I'm a product of international schools, a poster child for "growing up around the world" (yes, there're a lot of us).

So how does a globalist react towards nationalism? 

Firstly, we need to pluralize. Just as we have many religions, not one religion, we have many flavors of nationalism and globalism, and they're not all logically interchangeable. 

So let's speak of nationalist and globalist mindsets with respect for variety. 

We have "nationalisms" and "globalisms" to compare and contrast.

Let's look at two Telegram messages I put out there recently, in random conversation:

Nations have always been virtual and dependent on networks. The power of the British Empire gave us a last opportunity to agree on borders for classroom globes. Those days are done.

And:

...the supranational corporations showed how immense power and wealth may be secured using networks of campuses versus contiguous borders and the age of “diaspora nations” (network nations, virtual nations) was born. 

Given telecommunications, air travel and so on, it's not science fiction fantastic to think in terms of Virtual Nations (VNs), as another name for Diaspora Nations or Network Nations. 

That's why I'm more likely to advocate for global dispersion and regrouping as a way of handling the Gaza crisis: New Palestine University is about curating, preserving, and establishing the new patterns associated with global living and citizenship in the VNs. 

The new NPU campuses will in theory be outside the radius of menacing ethnic enclaves armed with WMDs. I've been brainstorming about having one or more in Cuba.

As for classroom globes, any teacher with historical awareness and an understanding of current affairs has to bring all kinds of caveats to bear when sharing a political map of the world, whether flat or spherical. 

Calling the political layer a "data layer" and recognizing its virtual nature, bespeaks my globalist approach to Google Earth type projects. Users get to pick their skins. 

In Moscow, the newly federated oblasts show up in the Russian Federation already. In London, they might disallow such skins for classroom use and still show Crimea as part of some British-Roman Empire or whatever. 

In my School of Tomorrow, we flip through skins from around the world, showing there's no United Nations consensus reality (CR) anymore, as we might have once enjoyed under Pax Americana (remember Pan Am?). 

Then we zoom back and understand there has rarely been any kind of consensus reality regarding borders. Sovereigns simply claim territory, and some may get enough agreement to then sell it, as the French did to the USG (Thomas Jefferson et al), of Louisiana and environs (the so-called Louisiana Purchase). Napoleon needed the dough.

CR and NCR (non-consensus reality) come from Process Work and the Process Work Institute here in Portland. Check  out Quantum Mind by Dr. Arnold Mindell.

At the coffee shop yesterday, in addition to speaking up for Palestinians who want to voluntarily leave Gaza (a hell hole, who wouldn't want to leave at this point?), I cast aspersions on the kind of nationalism that keeps people penned in even when their local situation is untenable. 

Seeing nations as open air prisons that only privileged elites are allowed to escape from, thanks to having the right Grunch credentials, is characteristic of many nationalisms I've encountered.

Ultimately, I'd say my flavor of globalism is compatible with some flavors of nationalism. 

If you see the human animal as highly programmable, and see the political layer as a way of conditioning reflexes, creating civilized pockets and polite societies, a layer characterized by the rule of law and diplomacy, then we see somewhat eye to eye. Pax Americana was better than Pax UK or Pax Rome in my view. We improved our powers to co-exists, thanks to growing literacy, communication skills and, dare I say it, shared global perspectives.

Better "social engineering" -- I know, I know: people fear that term, but it's somewhat inevitable given etymological meanings, plus it adds a spin or bias (weight) to "engineering" that's potentially Silicon Forest compatible -- is always a possibility. 

We (the forestry engineers -- solarpunk influence) have room to let people hold on to their "bag of beliefs" whatever the bag. Live and let live. One needs cognitive frameworks, simply to get out of bed. 

Why go around shooting down others' belief systems if the true believers seem satisfied with their lifestyle?  This liberal attitude applies to belief in nation-states as well. Let them believe in their Caesars. 

Why turn it into a story of "us against them" especially when we (the globalists) seem highly outnumbered?  Lets even nurture the best nationalist fantasies, and have our nations get along! Idealism has its place as a morale booster.

The influence of Star Trek and the Prime Directive is also coming through (thank you Anthropology Department) meaning it's not necessarily my job and/or business to talk people out of their programming, even if I had the wherewithal. You've got your bag, I've got mine.

My primary guinea pig is me, and if that means if I "talk funny" (or use "silly skins") then maybe I've been making some headway.tions, virtual nations) was born.