Working Out

You've probably had the same thought I have, when working out in the gym: gee, here's a lot of energy expenditure going nowhere, a lot of wasted watt-hours. One has fantasies of hooking those exercycles directly to the power grid, at least the building one, and keeping the lights on or something. Those espresso machines take power.

A better solution for some demographics, a Venn Diagram intersection of identity components: age, gender, occupation, current state of health, set goals, expected outcomes, is probably doing housework. This way, you'll kill multiple virtual birds with one stone, reaching moving and standing goals, while adding negative entropy to your space.

If you're anything like me, a guy with internal real estate (several rooms, basement, attic, detached garage), then housework is an endless spigot of chores of varying size and duration, and I'm not only counting or thinking about stereotypical "guy work" just because I'm a male.

I'm talking about vacuuming, sorting books, dusting, excavating old storage piles periodically and recycling their contents from inventory. That all takes work and also hand-eye coordination. 

On the other hand, enough tasks are repetitive to permit daydreaming, and its within these structured daydreams that we plan out what to do next. Unless, that is, you want to surrender your daydreaming time to the studios. Sometimes that's a refreshing alternative, given how professional daydreamers know their business.

Let's set the actual physical tasks aside for a moment and suggest that no matter what your line of work, there's some way to plan your workflow ahead of time. 

As with exercising in the gym, "mental muscles" come in groups (work together) and get tired with overuse (a tautology almost). 

Your faculties benefit from a round robin approach, a spiral staircase, wherein you upgrade gently and gradually when you can, which doesn't close the door on relatively more jarring overhauls and stress tests.

Workout-aholics know to come in with a "lesson plan" or "to do list" and it will likely involve a well-planned sequence of "stations", meaning exercise machines each with a specific muscle group focus.

In computer world, the webserver has to allocate some amount of total bandwidth to each client browser that connects with it. In operating system jargon, you might allocate a process or a thread. A whole process subdivides into threads and is therefore in principle "heavier" than a thread.

Do you have an intense dislike for meetings wherein the way to gain or regain the floor is to interrupt others, even mid-sentence, interjecting somehow? 

Women, on average, trained to be more demur within the patriarchy, were suddenly in management roles without the right default level obstreperousness, and had to take trainings in how to up their level of "bitchiness".

Think about mostly male engineers working all day with operating systems that are indeed "interrupt driven". Everything just chugs along, until the next interruption, in which case the operating system may switch its attention to some other process.

Think of doing housework and getting a call on your cell. Or the doorbell rings. Cell calls go to voicemail but doorbell rings may be harder to ignore, especially if a knock follows. 

Planning models that do not allow for unforeseen interruptions in their conceptualization likely lack enough sophistication for many types of operation, both military and civilian.

Remember, it's your attention span. Consider carefully, not only which machines you'll visit, and in roughly what order (making it up as you go is OK, as long as you know when you've fallen off the path), but also what you'll be doing in your head, with regards to earbuds, VR goggles, or whatever else your workout space comes with. 

Sometimes it'll just be you alone with your imagination. You're ignoring the overhead TVs. What do you plan to think about? Multi-tasking? Event planning? Cosplay? Protein-folding? Your next blog post or YouTube? Explorations in the geometry of thinking?

Keep Portland Queer

As some of my correspondents are aware, I've finally stumbled across Mark Fisher, the philosopher and commentator on contemporary culture. He extends my study of punk music, which in my curriculum links to the School of Tomorrow and of course solarpunk as an antidote or counter to cyberpunk.

Mark does a lot to dissect the meaning of "weird" versus "eerie" in his book on these two concepts. 

The weird involves a presence, not necessarily horrific or terrifying, but off kilter, eliciting a sense of not belonging or, if it belongs, then our priors (Bayesian speak) must be what's off. We may live in a different world than we expected.

The eerie is more about a rekeying of intentionality, shifting the emphasis from human agents with free will, to tricks and flips of fate. Again, the eerie might be employed or evoked by a writer of horror genre fiction, but the eerie need not be scary so much as haunting, as if by dim memories or a sense of deja vu.

Mark dives into various authors (Lovecraft...) and filmmakers (David Lynch... Hitchcock), as well as musicians (Brian Eno...) to make his points and tease apart these meanings. I'm enjoying such investigations as they jibe with my own philosophical background as a Wittgensteinian. When we want to know the meanings of words, running to a dictionary is the lazy option.

Naturally, the unconscious is not far below the surface in Mark's analysis, and Freud figures prominently, in part as an authority to overcome, as Freud's use of "uncanny" has tended to obscure the nuances Mark is attempting to capture.

As I wrote to a friend in the background:

Is "queer" insulting though?  Deja vu we might've had this conversation?

I'm watching old lectures by one Mark Fisher, philosopher, author of Real Capitalism and other books, including one on the eerie and the weird (just purchased).  That's adjacent to the old meaning of "queer" as in "odd" or "different", but oftentimes in a positive sense as in "novel" or "out of the box" ("the box" being stuffy and stultifying).

Speaking for myself, I like being called an "odd duck" and stuff like that, "a martian" one of my favorites.

Again, summarizing some of my thinking, to another friend I wrote:

Podcast taking up Mark Fisher's book on the eerie and the weird:

https://youtu.be/4gSpNIct1-0

They explicitly address obtuse / dense academic language and how Mark steers clear of it for the most part.

My focus has been Martian Math as embedded within or serving as a portal to science fiction as a genre, which sometimes borders on the eerie / weird as well as on horror (adjacent / overlapping genres).

The sense of humans embedded in an inhuman (nonhuman) intelligence comes through in episodes featuring uncanny synchronicity for example.  "Human writers could not have written this" is the sense.  

Or it'll be a combination:  an outlandish human project goes wrong, or not as planned, thanks to the surreal aspects of life itself.  That can be a good thing, if the human project was misguided or nefarious in the first place.  

The sense of divine intervention, angelic or demonic, is a counter to human hubris. Humans may have had a hand in world affairs, but are ultimately not in control. The Ouija Board comes to mind, and that sense everyone has that they're not the ones moving the planchette.  The (collective) unconscious versus the ego persona.

There's a whole segment towards the end of the podcast about how it sounds weird or strange to remind people that the country they imagine they live in is all make believe e.g. the line between the USA and Mexico or the USA and Canada, is all imaginary-fictional. To remind people that their "world" is a fantasy based in social conventions, is to elicit an alien viewpoint, which I've called ETPV (ET point of view) in other writings.

In the background:  Bucky's Grunch of Giants, about untethered capitalism versus cosmic evolution.

Government Issue

I'm juggling more balls, or spinning more dishes (a different circus act), thanks to my ramping up within my Clarusway work environment again. I get a different email account and access to the various company drives containing courses I'll be teaching and/or have taught previously. Having both accounts active and switching back and forth means blocking / unblocking various Google drives and so on, as I switch identities.

I'm thinking back to my childhood and growing up and how "government issue" took this weird turn such that "GI" meant a lot to people, in terms of both "the GI Bill" and "GI Joes", the latter being plastic dolls with more of a social role than Ken dolls, being soldiers. None of the Kens were military if I'm not mistaken.

In some alternative worlds, Uncle Sam issued "GI phones" as a kind of fallback smartphone anyone could get with sufficient proof of need, maybe not income based. Simply claim one. The apps would offer courseware deliberately tailored to groom (not a bad word) future government personnel. 

If you want to keep living in a democracy, you have to plan ahead, and having everyone grow up in non-democratic hierarchies (not every church or corporation is an unprogrammed Quaker meeting recall) is hardly a way to nurture the relevant skill sets. No wonder we're all out of diplomats.  

When all you have are amateur paramilitary types (Ollie North types as I call 'em), then all you get are covert operations. You need real statesmen to preserve a civilization, vs having rogue gangland mercenaries commit NS2 type terrorism, by definition not the game of proudly overt states. 

We've fallen below threshold, perhaps because we no longer have "GI anything" anymore. GI just means "gastro-intestinal" today, and just about every joe or jill has a tract like that. No government can take credit for such basic gear and equipment.

I wouldn't be the first to suggest Ken needs to learn from GI Joe, in terms of knowing how to fly a helicopter and lift stranded hikers off mountains. EMTs in general like adjacent to the Coast Guard, in turn adjacent to the other branches. 

We learned during that South Pacific tsunami during Dan Rather's tenure that the GI people enjoy responding to natural disasters, helping people, regardless of "race, religion or credo". That's a hint, I think, about how to rebalance. 

We need a breed of GIs that aren't cannon fodder for the grand strategist wannabes who still think like its the 1900s.

Turning Back the Clock

Per my intake interview, as I think of it, I mentioned my goal of "turning back the clock". I was referring to the so-called Doomsday Clock of the atomic scientists, the ones who tell us how "close to midnight" we might be (really close in their estimation). "Midnight" means WW4 (per Critical Path, I'm going with "WW3" as the cold one, still ongoing).

Rather than manufacture a ton of consensus around the clock turning back, let's say to a quarter 'til, I should offer my thesis as to why I'm right about where we're at, relatively far from WW4, based on something other than majority rule (oxymoron?) or majority perception.  

In other words, we're not on the brink of nuke war because both the Russian and American elites (and I'm not talking about average rich people, as clueless as they come) are at ease with where we appear to be going, in terms of World Game and energy sharing. The Chinese too. 

We all read Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in the 1970s. We didn't forget our thinking and plans when the helpless children, grownups in name only, took command of the various dashboards now disconnected from reality.

No, I'm not saying the elites enjoy a level of telepathy the muggles don't experience, or that our oracles at Delphi give us the insider view. I'm saying if you do your homework, you'll find that legacy media tend to waste people's time with low quality narratives designed for know-nothings. More glimmers of the truth shine through here and there.

In a world wherein the default is to get force fed a nasty diet of drivel and bad info, one can't then turn around and blame the hoi polloi for not being able to follow. Of course they can't. Let's hope at least a few find their way out of that cesspool.

If I sound like an elitist snob, that's by design. At least I'm not a mindless hawk like those morons in the US congress, or like those so-called "justices" (no longer respected), or like the dysfunctional executive branch. If I'm not a hawk, does that make me a dove? Why so little imagination? I'll be a crow instead.

Attitude Tuning

If you poke around in my blogs, you'll know I'm big into "citizen diplomacy". But what does that mean? Humans learning to be diplomatic took time. Diplomas had to be invented first, meaning universities. Instead of Universe, call it University why not?

Nowadays we have all these personal workspaces (PWSs) using Zoom every day, or perhaps they use other channels. Or they're recording straight to YouTube, via live stream or as completed, likely edited, projects. By this means, diplomacy proceeds, in the form of continual "attitude adjustments". 

If you're in an activist role, then "attitude" has to do with observation and orientation in an OODA loop sense. You'll be taking active measures based on updates to the cockpit (fighter jet talk). If you're passive, you may yet be following closely. These terms come with so many shades of meaning.  As a "passivist" you may feel you're studying for a more active role later.

Americans with relative expertise and education have more powers than before, thanks to the more evolved telecommunications infrastructure. We see the trend is really with respect to Earthians in general. Earth is still becoming more like America, but that doesn't mean "led by the Beltway Mafia" so much as "benefitting from unbridled communications".

The "motherboard" (if we might call it that -- think "the grapevine" if old school) is better able to keep pace with change, in a virtuous circle, to the extent we're all able to participate in the important business of being citizen diplomats. Or shall we say "layman diplomats"? To what extent is citizenship required, to travel the globe? Does every trucker crossing a border someplace have a passport?  Is every gypsy caravan "from a country"?

We've always had "the masses" and / or "public opinion", or have for a long time. The process of "manufacturing consent" might have been more top-down in an age before we all became "channelers" (in the sense of having a channel). 

Nowadays, the processing has to run deeper, and maybe for longer, but the outcomes are proportionally better anchored in real mindsets. Crummy propaganda becomes less effective in proportion to "influencers" becoming familiar with PR techniques. The audience (active and/or passive) has become so much more sophisticated.