Study Hall

I’m one of those who actually likes to study, but what that means varies greatly, from meditation to prayer to writing science fiction or music. Being studious tends to mean being focused, with some connotation of indoors activities, but that’s easily countered. Study filmmaking wherever people make films.

My old GST writings were a lot about melding Hollywood with big construction projects, somewhat how SpaceX has been featuring live actors, building rockets for real, but as props as well, in a bigger story involving colonizing Mars. Likewise the stadium-shaped city, super-sized, would have to be taken up as for-real prop making for future films. The theme park or circus like atmosphere would have that giddiness to it.

Growing up in Japan since WW2 has been one of rapid acceleration, which doesn’t mean speeding up (that’s only part of it), as if “progress” or “forward” were a known direction in Hilbert Space. Taking a deep learning view, we have no idea which way is up, either literally or metaphorically, and yet we do invoke that gyroscopic sense when talking about “gut knowing” or intuition. We do have axes like “more or less healthy” in an objective sense. Diabetes took off, like it did in many malnourished countries.

The Mars mission and creating mega-refugee colonies on Earth, way stations for the planet’s migrants, all of us in theory, as free to move about until 86ed here and there. One might be banned in the sense of banished from specific exclusion zones, by default and not as punishment. None of us has total access, let alone total recall. Other times, there’s a warrant out, and one or more jurisdictions in pursuit of justice. Other jurisdictions offer asylum. We have these patterns today.

The Project Renaissance approach was about using the nonprofits to test livingry, showing product placement, and feeding the commercial market with best of breed salable assets. That’s the role the military plays w/r to weaponry: guinea pig. However weaponry is by definition destructive if used against targets, whereas livingry is more obviously protective and healing, meaning recruiting personnel is less challenging. People would rather star in guinea pig scenarios that were not about expending them as extras, as so-called cannon fodder.

Today’s studies took me back into my Python modules, originally aimed at producing ray tracings (such as the above) but more recently aimed at producing symbolic expressions for coordinate positions. The ray tracer needs floating points to feed its scene descriptions whereas my pandas DataFrames are geared to display algebraic expressions for my polyhedrons’ coordinates.

Preparing the Teams

As a high school debate coach, your plan might be to let your team lose a few times, as if you had a choice, as a way of getting them motivated but not demoralized. Any sport comes with reality checks. In competitive sports, such as high school debate, those checks may come in the form of the other team.

The American team has to be ready to take a pro-Russian view as the teams train to argue both sides in some kind of Lincoln-Douglas format. We’re talking a private elite school with plenty of bandwidth. There’s no requirement to fly to Russia or to have the Russians fly here.

The pro Russian position will likely be that Russia did not “invade Ukraine” as Anglophones tend to put it, as the oblasts in question were asking directly to be rescued and amalgamated into the Russian Federation, ala Crimea. The lawyers were never able to reach an agreement on the legitimacy of these referenda, and subsequent ratification in the various chambers, and that started this war of narratives. The legal profession has a reputation for failure, although it’s not as bad as the military profession’s.

The Anglophones will likely stick to their characterization as one of invasion. The relevant data might include: to which side did civilians flee when evacuating their own farms? If the special military operation is actually an invasive onslaught, then Kiev will be able to document how civilians fled towards NATO (i.e. towards the west, geographically) whereas if the population drift were towards Russia (geographically to the east) then that’s called “voting with one’s feet”.

I’m an older guy and not a debate coach myself. I’d judge the debates as a random parent, which isn’t to say we’re completely ignorant of the art of rhetoric. The Roman heritage we get from being Anglophones includes recognizing many pitfalls and fallacies. Ad hominem arguments usually miss the point and so on. If all the pro Americans can come up with is “Putin is a bad guy” then their ship is likely sunk, in the eyes of the judges, but I’m sure they’ll do better than that.

I did find some debates in the archives, again among elite private schools if memory serves, regarding an earlier chapter, wherein the question was whether to link electrical grids. This is what we were up to discussing back in the Reagan Era, when the Cold War was thawing into a healthier time of warmer relations, featuring Apollo-Soyuz and so on. 

Then came then unending failures of the State Department, with the successive appointments of deeply unqualified individuals. Obviously that’s just my point of view. I never developed an ounce of respect for those jerks, starting with Secretary George Shultz, the Theranos guy (how I think of him). Madeline Albright was probably the worst.

The brief peace we started under Casey-Reagan, when the Ollie North types were on the run, was replaced by a long period of juvenile delinquency, culminating in the present class of deeply unqualified numbskulls with less than a high school level of education by today’s standards.

Clearly I’m somewhat biased in my outlook and would probably not make a good debate coach, given I just indulged in some ad hominem. The team should use me as a role model for how not to behave on stage.

Mind Meld

:: negotiations ::

:: cold warriors ::

:: merging networks ::

:: organizational diagram ::

Limitless (movie review)

The magician at the farm performed at least one trick that wasn't an illusion: he had the USBc to HDMI cable needed to share my iPad screen on the trailer television. All this time, I'd only seen that as a port for charging, not for sharing. 

As soon as I got home, I ordered such a cable on Amazon.

So last night was one of my first times rummaging through YouTube when a movie was suggested and I thought "why not, I'll put this on the big screen TV". Deke the Geek gave me a hand-me-down TV earlier in 2024. It has a few quirks, such as turning itself on and off randomly, but for the most part it's working great. I got through Limitless without any but commercial interruptions.

The protagonist (Eddie Morra played by Bradley Cooper) in this science fiction film is but a struggling writer and we might imagine this whole scenario is his play-within-a-play fantasy, wherein said struggling writer gets a smart pill and turns into his own ideal, the one he's not: an amazingly brilliant, astute and attractive dude whom everyone admires, including Robert De Niro (playing another mastermind). 

To bootstrap himself to fame and glory, given his new superpowers, our writer needs seed money to turn into a fortune and so he turns to organized crime for a loan. This comes back to haunt him later. Why he wasn't smart enough to pay back the loan with interest earlier, in a timely manner, is a bit of a puzzler though, given he’s so intelligent. 

Why give the loan shark his excuse to escalate and in the process get a taste of the same medication, immediately addictive for obvious reasons.

The Lucy parallels are obvious, including the Faustian price: the drug eats away at you, messing with your sense of time and space, and if one tries to quit... the withdrawal symptoms may be fatal. So the whole business of needing more doses, at any cost, kicks in. This could be heroine, it could be cocaine. The paranoia and criminality that go with the territory certainly comprise a major downside. Flowers for Algernon. Why not just stick to weed?

Praying for higher intelligence is not a sin, but then there's the question of what we mean by "intelligence" which is where ethics and values kick in. People came up with EQ (emotional IQ) to counter IQ (intelligence quotient). Why not pray for greater empathy, because isn't empathy a kind of intelligence, ala the Octavia Butler vision? Perhaps empathy is the bigger umbrella.

A funny thing: right after this movie, YouTube rolled me into The Big Short, which I'd never seen either and which has many points in common with Limitless, in terms of the role models it parades. In this one I noticed our star Jeremy Strong from The Apprentice who played Ray Cohen. He's a Wall Street trader in this film, so still very much the New Yorker.

We could dive deep into the anthropology here. Food for thought. Limitless.

Fading World Maps

Obviously there’s considerable consternation in the K-12 classrooms wherein it’s no longer possible to agree on a world map, in the political layer at least. 

Nations are not facts, but stories, i.e. facts plus spin, and some of them “fail” meaning they lose the PR war that protected their ongoing identity as such. Virtual or diaspora nations have an easier time of it, as the bar is not so high, to be recognized as such.

Of course USA classrooms have been notorious for not taking up geography in the first place, such that its grads have no clear conception of the nation-state layer, and this works to the advantage of the Americans in light of border volatility. 

Their ignorance was well placed in some sense, as that layer is flickering, like a candle in the wind, on the brink of going out in the minds of some who still see by its light.

From anatomy books, we know about overlays and data layers. With or without the jigsaw puzzle of semi-contiguous states (i.e. contiguous with glaring exceptions) we still have river deltas, transportation networks, fields, mines, pipelines, electrical grids, military bases (never mind the decals for the moment), satellite constellations. That stuff is all there, regardless of the programming running it.

Given the crunch of telecommunications and networking, the polyglot narratives do have a lot of sorting to accomplish, a lot of computations. Some “glots” seem buggier than others whereas some are simply slow, relatively, given inertia. 

Heavy stones with trajectories don’t turn on a dime (accelerate suddenly) without forces being applied, from within or without. That’s one of those English connections: acceleration and coercion. When sudden change is desired, the enforcers come to the fore.

In my Silicon Forest context, we already use Google Earth and think in terms of overlays and data layers. I’m fine with swapping out a “western” political map in favor of a Eurasian one. I remember John Lang’s inflatable planetarium and all the overlays he had, when it came to organizing the constellations into memorable memes. 

Astrology begins with naming and articulating astronomical relationships, which come in ratios and arcs, subsections of circles. It’s not that we’re actively pushing any astrological practices (the commercial markets do that). We just need awareness of the data layer itself.

Our history involves the East (Eurasia) transplanting some of its belief in royalty and entitlements to the Hollywood context, in the form of stardom (the institution). 

The Americas (the West) helped transmute the East (Europe etc.) into a big screen celebrity culture, wherein stars (as in thespians) and political figures (including pundits, news anchors…) came to frequent the same  “level” (or data layer) on television. 

The convergence of politics with theater in PATH, and the fact that military jargon already featured “theaters”, makes the Supermarket Math (commerce) more transparent.

On the Martian Math front, we continue noting where the Martian meme stays strong, such as within the Urbit community. Hungarians. ET lore more generally. 

We’re promulgating such memes as “flipping the switch” and “closing the lid” in the classrooms, while meanwhile having students become more aware of the Fuller Projection and C60 (a fullerene), along with the Telstar-patterned Adidas soccer ball (widely adopted). 

The fact that Brits got that ball wrong on their road signs is always good for a Monty Python moment.

Speaking of British culture, that’s where a lot of the focus on nation-states originates, as a tool of empire. Cascadians don’t mind a softer focus, when it comes to decision making centers and the circuit diagrams connecting them, with less emphasis on pomp and circumstance. 

The demise of diplomacy among the PhDs has opened a door to more citizen diplomacy, which used to require more in-person travel but now happens through telecommunications. 

Tourism still helps though, in terms of shaping the longer term narratives. Recreational tourism supplemented by tours of duty, keeps the ideas circulating. A Silicon Forest teacher such as myself is able to chat with Eastern Hemisphere teachers about S3 without leaving the office.

Chronicling

Some kind of registrar changeover is happening in the background, as ownership of my 4dsolutions.net account has become a property, supposedly backed by a server hosting a lot of Oregon Curriculum Network stuff, going back a long ways. A Pioneer in Open Source. At this moment it's working.

Anyway, I'm maybe sounding nerdy cuz I just met a nerd from a parallel universe, except more criss-crossing than strictly parallel. He knew well my old code train from those days: the dBase train, in turn a descendent of Vulcan, at JPL. 

We chug-chug-chugged right into the Microsoft tunnel (some might say mouth) and transformed into Visual FoxPro, a different animal in some ways, but for the likes of me, a smooth enough transition, and to a popular platform. My GUI apps looked swank, back in the day (no, I don't think we said swank then either). 

In that story the "we" is the subculture using dBase, yet finding ourselves onboarded into the Microsoft universe (com objects...). The bigger picture is Borland bought the rights to the original dBase lineage, which had already been cloned by Clipper and FoxPro and some others. Microsoft bought up FoxPro to compete with the Borland branch, the shared language, Xbase more technically, expected by some speculators to have a longer half life.

This guy at the Xmas party, said he spoke perfect German, but of the Saxon variety, whatever that means. It meant something to their tour guide in Dresden that time. We were also talking authors (Borges, Vonnegut...) and English words with both liked. The guy and his wife had been on a tour in Dresden specifically themed around Slaughterhouse Five.

Mostly though I'm following threads in a different rug, as they don't say in German. I weave my signature baskets, incorporating various themes.

I don't actually have the proverbial complete picture on the state of legacy dBase and FoxPro, whether either has had much staying power. I'm not advertising myself as some authority on that topic. I do know that Microsoft officially pulled the plug on Visual FoxPro (VFP) in 2015, having migrated us up through a version nine. A new architecture was emerging. Web servers would be taking it from here. The new design was called the LAMP stack and the pricing was novel too: have at it, it's free.

By "different rug" I mostly meant different medium, more Youtube than books, and instead of cable. I'm one of those households with no cable, which doesn't mean I'm entirely ignorant of cable, just that I see it filtered through the lens of a critical eye, that eye which refers to your slice of the pie as "legacy". What gives, cable? Both have advertising, which one can turn off for a fee. In what sense are scrolling media in sync with the video stashes? They sync up quite a bit.

I'm a small time YouTube maker myself. I use Camtasia. You will find examples of my videos scattered throughout these blogs.

AI Quisling

ChatGPT: Being an Ass

AI: Making Monkeys of Us All

Placeholder

Blogger was having a bumpy ride this morning. I'll leave a placeholder reminding me to do some more follow-up later.

I'm tracking Owens some, and caught this interview, which harkens back to Veil days and Bob Woodword and such topics, i.e. around the time I was starting to tune in DC, even living there off and on.

I was playing offense on many levels and had my own relationship with DC comm circuits. 

When I had that job with McGraw-Hill I'd continue with some of my earlier Jersey City themes. 

I was back in the company of Ray Simon, after all. He later moved to Vegas. I ended up back in Portland.

Disaster Relief Teams

A pattern we see often, around the world, is when disaster strikes, say a flood, earthquake or hurricane, people spontaneously self organize to render assistance to one another. 

If they’re being subjected to a siege or serious boycott i.e. the disaster is man made and ongoing, the ability of only locals to regain equilibrium may, of course, be frustrated. Usually though, the outside world is at least sympathetic and will not obstruct recovery efforts, as is the case in East Palestine, Ohio (and environs).

Once a population has significant logistics capability, it may wish to volunteer its services elsewhere. We see the same phenomenon in the case of military veterans, not surprisingly, given wars are man made self inflicted disasters. 

Veterans may join with para-military groups, or the police, in order to share their expertise and subculture. 

The trend is towards not waiting for central governments to take the lead, as in the US at least, it’s understood that government cliques mostly focus on accreting power irrespective of citizen welfare. 

Whether this is actually true or not, this has become a widely shared perception vs a niche form of cynicism. Civilians understand it’s their own responsibility to self-mobilize, with or without any help from FEMA.

Extrapolating from this trend, it’s easy to appreciate why city mayor offices coordinate inter-state relief efforts, or at least endorse them. Portland will send its away teams hither and yon, to help out, hoping others reciprocate when the next big earthquake hits, or fire.

Sending unarmed civilians directly into war zones is tricky, given military theaters are dominated by destruction engineers and their demolition crews. Disaster relief has to go on in the shadow of continual violence, as in Aleppo.

Those resorting to violence and high tech weapons in pursuit of their goals represent the lower half of a Bell Curve, in terms of ethics if not intelligence. Many religions and religious figures use their pulpits to encourage people to take up outward weapons, whereas other leaders and influencers preach that “jihad” refers to a personal journey, often an uphill battle in the face of temptation. One is tempted to become a part of the problem.

International logistics teams hell bent on disaster relief typically deploy truck and bus fleets. Much of the self-help ethos in the face of uncaring central governments is percolating through trucking subcultures. Truckers are the new diplomats, exchanging news and views at international truck stops, and in many cases carrying supplies to those in need.

Sometimes governments will have invented adversaries that the folk religions do not recognize. Disaster relief teams from the US, Russia and China might all work side by side to alleviate suffering in this or that part of the world. The upper half of the Bell Curve tends to not sucker for goodie vs baddie ideologies. The lower half isn’t “bad” so much as delinquently juvenile.

Zeitgeist Cartoons

:: install doll ::

:: cashing out ::

:: for sale (msnbc) ::