Food Services (Global U)

When I want to model a minimal food setup, including for myself, I'm likely to think in terms of water (that's obvious) and Soylent, the white powder jokingly named, but also made of soy, so apropos.

In a place under siege, such as Gaza, it's not sufficient to have stockpiles of the powder, once the water goes bad. Brands like Nestles and Denali may come in too many small bottles, whereas the recipe at scale calls for tanker trucks.

What we hope and pray for, of course, are non-emergency situations. Two teams of scouts have agreed to a meetup, involving game equipment, say paintball, and for the duration of their engagement, canteens and or camelbacks of Soylent are all you get, in terms of nutrients. The point is to stay focused on the game and not get sidetracked into the intricacies of outdoor BBQ.

One may object to the cruelty of using humans as guinea pigs and I'd agree, assuming the collaboration of the humans in question is involuntary. In my own case, I'd go for days of only Soylent out of curiosity. Would my body die of boredom or send of signal flares in the form of cravings? I did not experience myself as self-hating. I was doing science.

What about pregnant women? Am I completely heartless?

Again, I'm more suggesting an approximation or simulation when it comes to Soylent, given the total calories per bag are easy to measure. 

We set up our Sims game "as if" they only eat Soylent, because we're in need of only so much realism, and no more. We keep the dry powder in sealed bags and add potable water as needed, at the point of service. 

Soylent users have been known to introduce alcohols at this point, to keep things lively and or to aid with sleep. If that's something we want to model, or experience for ourselves, that's an option. Again, coercion need play no part in this. I'm free to opt out.

Colluding on Confinement

When it comes to writing the historical accounts, I think we'll find it interesting that the Americans were calling for "a cease fire" but not for "an evacuation" even though Gaza was rubble by then, unlivable, outbreaks of polio.

 
Sure, it's an "open air prison" but you've gotta stay put, because we, the hand-wringers, the pearl clutchers, say so. Talk about collusion on genocide!

 
Obviously the denazification program was never completed in the American mindset. Ukrainians and Bosnians, even Syrians, got to leave the war zone. Palestinians though: they're supposed to love bygone olive groves so much that they'll put up with any amount of carnage. Stay in the cage with the rabid dog kids! They're nostalgic at gunpoint.

If I were a Palestinian, I'd use my sovereignty to get the hell out of there and never return. I'd have the right of return, but I wouldn't use it. Who wants to go back to a hellhole Americans worship as "a holy land"? Not me. I'll take New Jersey over Gaza any day of the week. But wait, I have no sovereignty, that's the whole problem. I'm supposed to just stay here and get bombed while the Americans fret and act stupid (what they're best at).

XREF:
Gazans to Guantanamo?

City of Morons

Why We Fight (movie review)

Drone Fun

I got some valuable drone training in, on my latest visit to the XRL facility, more a prototype in being farm bound, rural, but hardly eXtremely Remote. Mostly flat farmland is a perfect setting for drone training.

Given GST’s immersion into Active Inference, I was quick to appreciate the “sensory input” versus “action output” model, with a Markov blanket wrapping that me-ball self, controlling the aircraft. I brought that up with the Institute during the most recent Coda session, and sure enough, the “drone model” as already well developed, in the Julia programming language.

However Markov comes up in another way where drone action is concerned. Quadcopters easily take the place of “sea turtles” in those “random walk” demonstrations. When only the present position counts, in terms of imparting momentum going forward, then notions of randomness come into play, as what we have is always a probability distribution, perhaps sharp, perhaps diffuse. Markov chains enter the picture, along with some history of Russian greats.

Those sea turtles, you may recall, all start at (0,0,0,0) but then each picks from twelve options, or thirteen if “staying put” is an option. Role the dice. To each option, a permutation of {2, 1, 1, 0}, there corresponds a hop through space to a neighboring zonohedron, with twelve compartments or “voxels” around each. Each hop is through a diamond faced center. We call them K-points, as they’re where the closest packed spheres “kiss”.

So the goal here is to have the drones hover in such a matrix, with illumination patterns signifying the wandering sea turtles, four of which make a tetrahedron. Drones light up or go dark depending on whether the corresponding zonohedron, conceptual only, would be occupied. Variations on that theme. I’ve cast the neutral buoyancy IVM nets in other action frames. In both cases we might take advantage of unique (a, b, c, d) whole number addressing for matrix positions.

An ideal gas may be modeled in a static moment as gas molecules in IVM positions, with random offsets, although you’ll likely put science mag editors in an uncomfortable position if you do that; “IVM” (or “isotropic vector matrix”) is verboten terminology within the sphere of capitalist realism. Don’t say “A-” or “B-particle” either, or risk accusations of promulgating “the BEAST” (a specific geometric vocabulary, considered 

GST Meets Neuroscience

:: enclosed enclosure ::

Whatever happened to GST after it featured in my science fiction as the planning discipline behind our Global Data Corporation, amalgamated outside "whiteman law"? In that form, it stayed on the periphery, affiliating itself with Synergetics, and thereby drawing us closer to Discordians and Subgenii, usually avoided by university faculties and prosperians, as too wild and risky for purely academic treatments.

Synergetics, in the meantime, got picked up by the Markov Blanket tribe, the Active Inference folks with their Bayesian brains. Markov membranes feature here in two contexts:

(a) nothing makes it to the future from the past but through the present (where change is made)

(b) the Markov blanket divides an inside from an outside in an agent-based model of any self + other

Yes (a) may be regarded as a truism, and (b) is likewise part of a framework, a setup, and one consistent with the Omnidirectional Halo pattern of No More Secondhand God. 

The Markov blanket, in this (b) case, encloses the neural network we like to probe, seek clues from, a black box in many respects, but also protective, like a skull casing, keeping our delicate modeling systems from damage by the rough and tumble outside. 

Sensory organs mediate between these two worlds (outer and inner), bringing in news. From that inner black box, full of unknown unknowns, then spring the agent's actions, responses to what's incoming, robotic and reflex-based, or perhaps thoughtful and considered, or maybe initiated from out of the blue. 

Our own models may find another's actions rather impossible to predict, or even our own may elude explanation sometimes. We rationalize, after the fact. 

Our models may adapt and improve, or get hot swapped (radically updated), over time.

In the older (a) sense, GST long included "edit/recombine" as shorthand for "value adding", a correlate of the old economics concept of "doing work". 

Incoming are all the "factors" that make up one's circumstances including a "free energy" allotment, so-called "disposable (or discretionary) income" i.e. what's left to a worker to work with in an uncompelled, not automatic manner.

We typically symbolize the incoming as a pie chart, with slices as mundane as air and water, in a temperature controlled space. Do we have bandwidth? What inventory? 

Outgoing is our performance, including all manner of communications: vocalizations, facial expressions, gestures of all kinds. Perhaps one paints, writes poetry, programs, plays roles in theater, all of the above. Perhaps one is a craftsman and makes beaded necklaces.

Neuroscience and computer science have knit themselves together rather inextricably, which stands to reason, given the cell-silicon interface is highly populated with busy devices, with more in the pipeline.

With machine and deep learning, we now have what we call "neural networks" on both sides of that same interface, with many analogies bridging the two flavors: chemical wetware versus software on hardware. 

Electrochemistry has bonded what at one time were separate disciplines.

Python: Still Relevant

This professor works in the same ballpark as I do: Python as applied to data science, Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL: a subtype of ML) in particular. However my bailiwick has been earlier in the pipeline, between data gathering and feeding said data to Machine Learning models. That includes: preliminary analysis, normalization, standardization, cleaning, reorganizing, visualizing.

Statisticians didn't have all these fancy ML tools until recently and their discipline up until then hasn't faded so much as abetted what has of late become center ring: deep learning. 

In practical terms, what used to be managed in spreadsheets (volatile) and databases (more secure) is now managed with a hybrid of the two: the programmable DataFrame. Bring your rows and columns into a single complex object, and work with it in code, rather than with fleeting mouse clicks or other unreplicable magic dust.

Why am I plugging Python in the philosophy blog? For many obvious reasons, but let's just say because the School of Tomorrow, powered by latter day American Transcendentalism (a kind of intuitionism), is using Python to yak up the 4D meme. Yes, I'm referring to Quadray Coordinates and so on, not to be confused with (x, y, z, w) coordinates within the hypercube, or Quaternions. Disambiguation is important at this point, or you'll get rather lost in the 4D jungle.

A less obvious reason: I think the philosophers' obsession with such as propositional calculus, ala Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege et al, was really about laying the groundwork for Turing and Von Neumann types to add the electronic dimensions. Logic meets circuit boards, giving us logic boards, and eventually the CPUs and GPUs we think about, and program, today. Philosophers should learn to program, in other words, if only to keep in touch with the atomic layer, the domain of Democritus.

Homer Davenport Festival

What may feel eerie, and more as an absence than a presence, is deja vu. What's absent is a secure memory which the current episode clearly resonates with, such as the last time one waited for the bus at this very stop. "Deja vu" is not the correct term in this situation, just as when I show up for work every morning, same bat time, same bat station, I don't say "deja vu!" unless maybe I'm trying to be funny.

My car trip with Derek (Deke the Geek) to Silverton this afternoon, was not so much deja vu as an opportunity to reminisce. Glenn Stockton and I had come to Silverton at least once before, to that building with the Norman Rockwell paintings, blown up big, outside. A community center, right? We passed it on the way out of town, after the lecture, and by way of Mt. Angel.

This time, the Gus Frederick lecture on Homer Davenport was in the Silver Falls Library, two doors down from the museum, which I thought about visiting, but what about the soundstage across the river? That was the more anomalous event. The museum is but an hour away by car, open weekends, from 1 to 4 pm. 

Once the lecture was over, around 3 pm, we decided to roam back over the wooden foot bridge to the soundstage, the festival booths, the rides. This was a family friendly beer-oriented festival, one of several to grace the region. Mt. Angle has a big one, in October. Here we were in early August, inaugurating the beer festival season. Not that either of us had any beer. We ended up not spending any money at all, only gas.

Who was Homer Davenport again? I've blogged about him before. He lived during a more civilized age, before the weapons got so much uglier, with psyches to match. We're safe in calling him a political cartoonist, but he was also an influencer, someone with a keen eye for the critical elements within some story of the day, in the public eye.

Davenport also did some "straight" journalism, meaning not so cartoonish, although still with the hand drawings, high quality and precise, because photography was still difficult to include in daily newspapers. In his younger years, he was sent to New Orleans to cover a prize fight featuring a native son of Silverton, who lost. In his older years, he had a front row seat at the Paris, France trial of Dreyfus, of Dreyfus Affair fame.

I filled in that hole in my knowledge, regarding that Dreyfus business, from another angle when viewing the French language film Antisémitismes, by Ilan Ziv. The Ziv documentary weaves together a number of threads, many of them on the theme of demonizing Jewish people as scapegoats or simply as uber-rich. In the case of Germany and Poland, one senses envy, mixed in with various other flavors of unconsciousness. 

Psychoanalysis was still a new science. The public was even less in control of projection as a psychological phenomenon, we may project.

Davenport's "He's Good Enough for Me" meme, starting with Uncle Sam saying that of Theodore Roosevelt (a campaign slogan), got picked up by others, to where one sees the British analog of Uncle Sam (John Bull) so saying of prime minister Balfour, of Balfour Declaration fame. 

These "synapses" are apt even today, in 2024, so many decades later, as life in the eastern Mediterranean region becomes less civilized than in Homer's day, around the time of the Chicago World's Fair, followed by Portland's Lewis & Clark Exposition. Homer was really into animals (as in nonhumans) and sometimes traveled with a whole menagerie, such as when exhibiting the family farm at said exposition, as part of a living diorama.