Watching Noirs

Dr. D (exNASA) and I watched another noir last night: Murder Inc. (1960), wherein Robert Falk, soon to reincarnate as Columbo, the detective, is here a believable villain. 

The film itself is surprisingly choppy in how it shifts voice to documentary narration, pushing its “true to life” mystique. We the spectators feel we’re being made privy to the gangland badlands of the times (1930s-40s). 

Not unlike now. Prohibition continues, throughout the Union, ensuring a criminal under-culture profitable to prisons.

This was one more in a series of noirs I’ve been renting from Movie Madness.

Two of the noirs, one a Bogart-Becall, had the trope of a villain falling to their death, by accident, at the height of exposure for their crimes (making the death fall cathartic). 

Two had the pattern wherein the male fuckup, caught by police, tells the girl to forget about him, she’s still young and can start over. Murder Inc. was one of those.

These films are informative on several levels, in part simply for their windows on history. My earliest memories dovetail with some of those old Chevies they show us. 

“This is about where I came in” I’m thinking, “just a few years later”.

Building more consensus around lifestyles worth prototyping (the EPCOT mission) stays in focus here in Cascadia. 

Another theme is how scaredy-cat the academics are being, as more GST-informed thinking continues reforming the cyber talk, the often cryptic hubbub on the various channels and meetup networks, where various influencers have juice. 

We continue to look back on the Alaska Accords as another step forward for our World Game grid.

Of course the term “Murder, Inc.” takes me back to the Fletcher Prouty corpus, wherein he quotes LBJ regarding what it’s like around a president. We’re a gangland after all. Bodies happen. Very noir.

The grisly business of packing young men off to war came across as gratuitous violence (mostly self inflicted) to a younger so-called "flower child" generation, folks with an intuitive sense of why outward war was becoming obsolete and therefore farcical going forward.

The 4D Philosophy of Buckminster Fuller

As we enter the final lap of 2025, the above YouTube wins the race for the most views to date, garnering about 3.3K. 

It's not the most viewed overall; it's the runner up in that respect, with the most views overall award going to Learn Python, a 45-second pilot test of a cartoon generator controlled by single letters (I think the underlying app has gone away).

However, let's remember these are accumulative buckets that go online at vastly different times. The 45-second animation is sixteen years old, whereas the embedded lecture on Synergetics, and the concept of Dimension therein, is only six years old, posted October 19, 2019.

As we round out 2025, with a new New Year's ball on Times Square, let's look back on the race so far. Many milestones.

In terms of hypertoons, I've been cycling through the noirs, thanks to Movie Madness, picking up on the tropes and how they interconnect. A noir movie features erotic attraction through several layers of deception, and a happy ending is oft construed as a kind of getting away with out over the border, beyond the scope of enemy reach. 

In two movies now, a conniving female has plunged to her death after her crimes were confessed and/or exposed (one was a Bogart, Dangerous Passage, the other was called Too Late for Tears wherein she'd made it over the border already).

The Geometry of Melodrama might be an interesting way to introduce some Spaghetti Monster approach to history, by which I mean to allude both to the Pastafarian deity, and to the "partially overlapping scenarios Universe" meme familiar to Synergetics readers, the latter (Universe) being "eternally aconceptual".

You get this from the military-minded quite a bit, when this or that face-off reminds them of this or that other wartime situation. We tend to prophecy by analogy, another way of saying we're akin to Bayesian inference engines doing our best to predict and adapt. Engineers debate over when to say "engine".

I've been preparing a Winter Term pathway through the world's fairs and expos again, starting with a couple AI aksings and a YouTube documentary on the World's Fair in St. Louis, which came after Chicago's and featured the same Ferris wheel.

We make our way, as if in a theme park dark ride, to Montreal 67, and thence to EPCOT. We're not taking the maudlin line (already explored) that Fuller got gypped somehow, in their not having him cut some ribbon or whatever. 

He was close enough to the Spaceship Earth operation by then to know he was no more in danger of being forgotten than Mickey Mouse.

Inca Brain Surgery (meme)

Facebook Post

Link to blog post

Autophagy: Comparing T2G Engines

Orange and Black Pilled

Fall Term Recap 

(YouTube vid)

Curriculum Design

Solar Power

The idea of solar power is sometimes dumbed down to mean solar panels and circuits driven by same. The idea of circuits is not wrong, it’s just that the big wheels were all turning long before humans inserted their rotational requirements, in the form of water wheel driven millstones and so on. The sun has been powering evaporation, condensation, rainfall and flows through streams to rivers to the ocean since time immemorial. 

We need not fixate on the sun as our one and only power input. The traveling of the planet through space in an orbital rotating formation, in tandem with our moon, is owing to the sun in a different sense, we could put it. Instead of radiated energy as a result of matter fusing to itself, the mere presence of that mass results in precessional patterns in its surroundings, such as ocean tides, and per the formation of a solar system in the first place. 

Furthermore, we have the geothermal throbbing of the planet itself, again owing to gravity, but also to geological chemistry, which includes melting and boiling points. We have vulcanism, lava flows, geothermal sources of heat.

What solar energy powers is our whole “terrarium” which is likewise our “aquarium” in terms of heat but also circuitry, pathways, channels. 

Photosynthesis turns soil minerals farmed through bacteria into the root systems of seedlings able to sprout stems and leaves, engines of self regeneration. Carnivorous life preys upon the herbivore layer. We get our pyramids of self actualization, our Ponzi schemes, our carnivals. Thanks to gravity squeezing out energy.

Whereas photosynthesis is naturally occurring, with humans yet to duplicate it artificially, where biomimicry achieves the most is in a parallel physiology done in metals, plastics, conductors and insulators, current generators. Conductors through control panels to actuators keep us within cybernetic loops of our own design. 

Consciously implementing experimentally trial-by-error designs, new schemes within nature, is our signature activity.

In the School of Tomorrow curriculum, we look a lot at the hydropower economy of the Silicon Forest, as Cascadian Synergetics is deliberately place-based. Oscilloscopes and trigonometry, energy conservation, alternating and direct current, series and parallel circuits… these are topics one expects in a bioregion focused on metrology, the science of precise mensuration, ala Tektronix and ESI. 

What impedes the flow of current and how? How does resistive impedance differ from capacitive impedance, in terms of waveforms? 

We’re allowing the practical elements of Motherboard Earth to stay in focus even is we probe the generalized principles (the so-called “natural laws”). We’ll be thinking about hydropower dams, what they do, how they work, as early as we think about astronomy more generally, and our civilizational context. Geography may begin with a local grid, a Dufur, but then we zoom out to see where our Dufur is, in relation to, say, Mars. Martian Maths is one of our four maths in our Digital Mathematics.

Picking on Mickey (MIC)

Given I play for the pacifist team, as a Friend and all that, it's not only allowed, but expected, that I sometimes vilify or otherwise mock the MIC (military-industrial complex) or Mickey. 

My approach has been to zoom in on this word "complex" and to make sure we know it refers to a mental pathology; it's a medical term, less than a business or economic one (not that these categories are mutually exclusive).

Zoltar is a stand-in (one might say stunt man) for the individual in the sense of homunculus, within my brand of (spin on) the active inference lingo.

Study Hall

If we were to look at my YouTube viewing history from last night, what would we see? 

A curious number of videos devoted to topics of concern to so-called linesmen, the men and women who have to work in high places sometimes, safely out of reach to most people, with dangerously high voltage equipment, such as transformers and so on.

The first topic I got into was ferroresonance. Your transformers may overheat if your capacitive inductance from the underground feeder cables cancels the magnetic field induced resistance in your delta wired bank. Magnetic inductance is a key feature of transformers that we don't want to inadvertently undermine with a compensatory resonance.

The second topic, related to the first, was leaving an open corner when doing a three transformer delta wiring, and measuring the voltage across this corner before closing it. If the circuit is correctly wired, the voltage will be pretty low, not some household number like 120 or 240, or even higher depending on the complication.

Why am I concerning myself with these topics?  Because I'm a "grid nut" -- someone interested in electrical grids rather generally. I admire those brave linesmen who are sometimes tasked with maintaining or constructing high tension lines at high altitude. If you're looking for ways to be brave, there's no shortage of scary jobs. Don't feel you need to become a soldier, if bravery-testing is your deal.

My Hypertext Trek

My story around hypertext starts with my recognizing myself as “a browser” by nature, when it came to open stack libraries and book stores. I’d browse, taking a somewhat wandering but not entirely random path through the collections, the classic bookworm. However as I became more exposed to computer consoles, what later we called monitors, my dreams took a familiar turn: fantasies about hypertext and the internet, ala Vannevar Bush (USG NSF) in the 1940s (As We May Think).

Princeton gave me the opportunity to feed my appetite for browsing big time, a big step up from our tiny yet respectable Media Center at the International School of Manila (IS we called it, usually ISM today). I was learning APL and other computer languages, and thinking how I’d redesign high school. We moved to Jersey City (myself and some friends) and my fantasies about hypertext ticked up a notch, as the internet was becoming a reality, for me in the form of New Jersey Institute of Technology access, to what later became known as PeaceNet and the IGC (Institute for Global Communications).

Around this time is when I first encountered Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib / Dream Machines. I grokked his Project Xanadu, but wasn’t so invested in the details that I felt a need to counter what eventually emerged from CERN and what became W3 i.e. HTTP/HTTPS and all the rest of it. That was all fine with me. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol was born, and was not proprietary in any way that would prevent its viral spread. “Going viral” could be a positive, oddly enough, given viruses are usually best known for being negatively impactful. To this day, post covid’s peak, Gen Z sees the point of “going viral” in that special upbeat way.

Given my predilections, I was quick to find an ISP and start making web pages when this became practical. Chris Fearnley and I were two of the first to publicize the Bucky stuff. He and I both did ray traced polyhedrons, plus he put out his famous FAQ, which quoted me quite a bit. We were off to the races, so to speak (I think of dogs racing, different breeds, as hand drawn or computed anime maybe). I created Synergetics on the Web on the Teleport platform, pdx4d my public facing user account. You will find my old URL under GRUNCH in the Encyclopedia of Conspiracies (RAW). Later I moved Synergetics on the Web to grunch dot net, where it resides to this day.

Retro Futurism

:: stochastically generated (casino math) ::

BridgeSpace: A First Visit

Judy, my sis-in-law, phoned me as I was awaiting the 14, heading home from a location scouting expedition. Would we want to rent BridgeSpace? Definitely maybe! 

We talked through my earbuds as if to an imaginary friend all the way home. October 18 is her late husband Sam's birthday, my late wife's Dawn's brother. Carpenter, poet, writer, thinker. 

We talked about Dawn's high school days after she and Sam moved with their mom to a new life with her new stepdad, Bud, in Satellite Beach, Florida. 

I was fortunate to get to visit with this side of the family while Bud was still alive. I never managed to meet Dawn's mother in person as she had passed away unexpectedly, in the hospital, after a supposedly successful procedure, not long before we met at CUE.

Cascadian Synergetics: Tips for Presenters (School of Tomorrow)

Western Young Friends Gathering

:: internal decorating ::

Regarding my near-beer fasting experiment, remember it's "guinea pig me" that we're talking about and I'm free to fuck up and to be a cautionary tale and yada yada. I'm actually running several experiments at once and have to weigh tradeoffs. Another goal is to sample a huge variety of near beers, so I can't afford to slack off on that front.

I was out testing blazers, as in jackets, at the thrift stores yesterday, more to get a sense of how to calibrate. I didn't study grooming at Princeton and at the Catholic school, my female students offered lots of counseling. When I showed up the first day in a three piece suit (as I recall) they said I was overdressing for the part, and so on.

However, worry not, and allow me my mental model, however misguided, of my insulin-ketone system as like that of a Honda hybrid: it flips back and forth effortlessly between "gas" and "battery" and at a higher frequency than you might think. 

One could say that's BS and the inertia is actually way higher (one near beer will trigger hours of glucose fueling), but I'm working that out proprioceptively, more like a juggler. You can't learn juggling from reading books or watching YouTubes, the problem being you're in your chair and not learning juggling.

Speaking of juggling, some of the finest physical specimens I met in terms of their level of coordination and gracefulness in body movement, were actually Friends, meaning Quakers. One might stereotype that group one way or another. Mine were like circus performers, arriving from Hippie Land California (the way I thought of it) and teaching me all kinds of stuff that I'd missed, living in Rome and then Manila. I also knew stuff they didn't of course. That's why we enjoyed these gatherings of western young friends near Myrtle Point, Oregon, in mid-winter, over the New Year. 

You might wonder why, if I was of that young age, I didn't marry into my clan and find my future wife at this annual winter gathering. I almost did, a couple times. However where I did encounter my wife-to-be was no more off the beaten path: at my place of work, as a new hiree (the bookkeeper) since I'd taken a working break in Bhutan. Dawn and I would then attend the gathering together, I forget how many times. She would also join me in Bhutan, where my parents were then living, on a next visit. 

"Guinea pig me" is of course a play on "Guinea Pig B", Bucky's perspective on his own avatar as well. He was doing a Flowers for Algernon experiment wherein he reached a point of dynamic equilibrium that buoyed him up, as it were. He just needed his "lab rat" to stay healthy, and he managed that with various experiments, exploring the paleo diet, and jogging (loping wolf ganter), before either were mass-adopted.

I've blogged about our Gathering of Western Young Friends previously, as a part of my life's story. The Camp Myrtlewood site has been an influence in my projections of Project Earthala. We had a large well equipped kitchen with a walk in refrigerator and all that. Our logistics team procured food in bulk for the whole group enroute, and "fooding" (a Himalayan term) was a big part of our experience, as we could practice meal prep and cleanup together, team activities that don't preclude social interaction as much as race car driving might. We had some experienced chefs amongst us. This all became a precursor to Food Not Bombs in my case (a later chapter).

Reviewing a Filed Proposal

One could read my originally filed proposal as consistent with what many of the developers want (gentrification, with or without genocide), whereas I was suggesting with the right of return, the same as Israelis have when persuaded their place in Haifa, or wherever, is safe to reoccupy. 

Probably not now as the news keeps signalling more immanent hostilities.

In the meantime, however, the historical precedent is civilians are allowed to leave before hostilities begin in earnest, between militias. That protocol was obeyed in Ukraine and to some extent in Syria. Today I was sharing the above synopsis with a WILPF listserv. More in my blogs and elsewhere. 

That's a joke about Florida although I do recall its governor saying Palestinian refugees were unwelcome. That's before people realized the plan was to keep penning them inside their Gaza ghetto. This was to be more like a Punishment Park scenario.

First World Problems

Given this is a personal journal, kept in public, a chronofile of sorts, or log -- we say blog -- I sometimes bring up the minutiae of daily living. 

For example I joked about losing my credit card (I still had the debit card), during that "trust the universe" experience at OMSI, and having to rely on (as in trust) internet banking infrastructure to lock it.

Earlier, I talked about my eyeglasses breaking, and getting new ones made. Mundane stuff like that, and a window into my life. Some guy in Portland.

In follow-up to that credit card story, I did end up declaring it lost, with the bank issuing a virtual replacement right away, over the web, and following up with a plastic card by snail mail, which I needed to activate, and did last night. 

Well, the next day (meaning today) I was returning two movies to Movie Madness, on foot, and noticed I  couldn't listen to any YouTubes on my iPhone through my connected AirPods. 

I was eager to listen to some of my favorite influencers. Also, I've been indulging in Electro Swing as a genre, sometimes with a spooky Halloween aural seasoning. Listening to music while walking has always been a favorite pastime. No such luck.

I quickly (well, maybe not that quickly) put two and two together and realized I had a first world problem: the new card activation coincided with Verizon attempting to take it's ahead-of-time monthly payment. 

I don't think these two events were tightly connected even though they happened but hours apart. The old lost card was already lost, and Verizon's monthly draw was inevitably going to get stopped, meaning my Verizon account would be as well, until I updated my Verizon account with the new bank card number and paid my bill.

Whereas I might've done this updating task using Verizon app on my mobile (or in my web browser, from home, as my WiFi through CenturyLink was not interfered with), since I live but a short drive away from a Verizon-authorized store near Powell (Hwy 26) and Chavez (SE 39th), in that strip mall with the car wash (a you-wash design), across from Safeway, I decided instead to get some help from a real person, in person. 

So upon returning from my walk to Movie Madness to return the Christian Bale DVDs, and after doing some blogging (I'll blog more than once a day sometimes), I took off in Maxi Taxi (the jalopy muscle car) to address my problem.

As it turned out, I arrived a good forty-five minutes before the Verizon store would open, at 10 am. After walking around for a bit, confirming I was indeed cut off from the internet (my test text messages to Dr. D. wouldn't send), I realized I could wash MaxiTaxi in the me-wash. 

The you-wash slots have all been upgraded to take only credit cards whereas we used to have to use quarters, lots of quarters. I swiped the new "bizplat" (nickname), more than once, my first use of it ever, and the charges went through. I gave the car a much needed high pressure soap 'n water treatment. She'd gotten a bit moldy.

The Verizon guy at first said maybe I'd need to call customer service and/or even get a new SIM card, but I persuaded him that the situation was much simpler: the lost card, backing autopay, needed to be replaced with the new card. 

Again, this was something I probably could of done myself. He did it for me, using my phone and my face. He handed it back to me so it could do the facial recognition step, and I handed it back to him. In a couple minutes, the task was complete, and service to my cell phone was restored.

The other thing going on is I'm trying out a near-beer fast, meaning I'm just sipping fluids and doing a kind of system reset, but allowing myself fluids other than water, including the occasional can of non-alchie beer. I just had two. 

I've had no solid food since Sunday. It's science. I'm the guinea pig, or rat, as the case may be.

Meanwhile, forced food deprivation is the name of the game in depraved dirty wars (the only kind anymore).

Current Affairs

The Referee

Another Ringside Attraction

Leading the Charge

Bioengineering Interlude

I don't claim that I was any kind of bioengineer back in the day. Seeing bioengineering as a field, with professional farmers, I was outside the inner circle, contract-consulted, as someone with relevant skills in the bioinformatics department.

I'm including the picture above (let's assume it still exists), in this instance, because of the Q-Cath box to the left. Inside is the manual I'd consult when developing code for parsing through what were called "prologs", a technician-entered time-stamped chronology made during a cath procedure, whether diagnostic, an intervention, or both -- a diagnostic might turn into an intervention on the spot if an indication were found.

My coding language at the time: Microsoft Visual FoxPro, a paid legal copy, although pirate copies were also out there, more so today probably since every VFP copy is officially unsupported by MSFT since 2015. 

My shift over to Python had everything to do with:
 

(a) the xBase language (VFP's family tree) fading away and 

(b) my steep involvement in education + reform (slogan: “reshape or die”)

(c) my involvement in the open source libre software movement

Meaning I didn't pick up Python in isolation, but in tandem with my K-16 teaching background. I plunged into the deep end, but more in a "philosophy for children" sense than a "look at me I'm a math whiz" sense. Learning coding and maths in tandem is not a controversial topic in this neighborhood (Silicon Forest), like of course we do, who wouldn’t?

I'm more a product of the Princeton philosophy department than its maths department however. I did study linear programming under Harold Kuhn. Mostly I dove into computer science through engineering courses. We’re talking undergraduate mind you, Class of 1980. My first love was APL.

My idea of liberal arts was more like Hugh Kenner's: let's know our letters, but also our figures, our numbers. At the cost of skipping Latin and Greek maybe, but, living in Rome, I got those by osmosis (in terms of cognates).

Where I might show the most ignorance is around music. One of my frustrations in reading Wittgenstein is he'll include some literal musical bars amidst his prose, telling us what he was humming and its significance for him. He reminds me of Schroeder in Peanuts.

However, as a kind of polymathic writer, I'm not obligated to display omniscience, which is not my forte, but simply to share my maps insofar was they maybe penetrate into some area of interest, such as bioengineering for example, or high school teaching. The trail system is of limited scope, I assure of that in advance. 

Funny Footnote (and more)

c9, mixed use, hosting space

Perhaps I should be saying "ironic"? You be the judge. 

What's synchronistic is right after viewing Trusting the Universe with Alan Watts at OMSI, one of my credit cards went missing, a business platinum (that's a color code only, only stiff plastic, a magnetic strip, and a chip, are involved in the card itself, no platinum per se). 

So now I get to trust the banking system to keep that particular card from getting used, so long as it's not in my possession. 

I locked it (through the bank website), and am gradually switching anything it autopayed to some other card, in preparation for declaring it lost.  I'm waiting for pending transactions to clear (including a balance payment) before I close it down.

Wanderers Cross Paths

I got to meet up with Sir Jon again yesterday. I'd seen him briefly upon is moving onto the campus, near Mt. Tabor, but this time we had a longer visit. I brought my iPad and jumped on campus WiFi so we could reminisce. I had quite a few pictures of Jon, that I'd bothered to label. A lot of my 80K pix lack captions beyond the camera stamp. Sometimes I go back and add verbiage.

Jon features often going back through these journals, but without any meetups for almost a decade I believe, as we stopped doing the coffee fund at Linus Pauling House and that was Jon's deal: he tracked contributions, purchased, and made coffee for our morning meetings. We also met alternate weeks in the evenings. Jon was not a night guy as I recall.

When we spoke yesterday he reminded me that the house I remember visiting him in, at one time a grocery story I'm guessing, given its shape, in the East Moreland area, on Harold, had not been his residence for long. He'd been on the west side before that, around 2nd, and after that he'd had another place built, and that's the one I never got to see, given we stopped doing the coffee fund or meeting weekly. 

We'd become a meet-four-times-a-year group even prior to covid as I recall. Jon would come to those gatherings, which we did even when we still met weekly. He overlapped with Doug Strain, Eve Menger, and many others in these blogs.

Jon's dad had been a major canvas artist, a painter who was conversant with cubism and abstract non-representational painting more generally. At one point he was regularly on public television, interpreting modern art to Portland audiences. I've seen snippets. He also had a large mural at the Portland airport (shown above).

I brought up the painting yesterday, saying my best information, which was maybe not that good, is that the painting was preserved in storage and there were plans to bring it back in the newly remodeled airport. Portland's PDX has undergone a major overhaul, not the first, but one of the most major. 

The luggage collection floor is mostly the same, the the 2nd floor departure area is completely different, with ticket counters perpendicular to instead of facing the front of the terminal, with much more relative floorspace devoted thereto. 

Random shopping by non-passengers might not be so encouraged anymore. There's already lots of shopping right nearby (Best Buy, Ikea...), where loved ones might say their goodbyes before those leaving head for the terminal. Once checked in, you might as well go through to the passengers-only concourse areas. But maybe there will be more pre-security stores than I realize; the remodel is not done yet.

Jon at first didn't remember the "cube" he had 3D printed per his instructions. Each face contains a funnel to the cube's center, where the funnel tips touch. 

Although a professional musician, I'd say Jon was also a visual artist, in terms of his artifacts (polyhedrons sometimes) and in terms of taste. His home was museum quality one might say, in terms of what he'd curated over the years. One felt in the presence of culture. 

He'd gone to Catlin Gabel before it was called that, and then attended an east coast school, so lets say he had an elite education, in the sense of first class, what we'd wish more could avail of (by choice, if desirous), not fewer, although what counts as "first class" is a moving target, like I'm not saying we should always stay stuck in the same mud, like fossils.

Bracketing our visit with Jon: we dipped into the campus theater a couple times, where the movie De-Lovely was playing, about Cole Porter. I was pretty much entirely ignorant of this story. Now I have some more culture too (it rubs off).

Fall Term: Synergetics for Teachers

If you've been presenting the Cascadian Synergetics slide decks I introduce in my channel, then you've realized there's a lot of overlap and you'll probably have opened different decks in different tabs to exploit this advantage. 

Depending on where you want to take your presentation, you can treat the slide decks as a kind of switching yard, like a "hypertoon". 

Visit the slides in an order that makes sense in terms of the storytelling you're most engaged with. 

Are you diving into the technical details of the computational geometry, or are you discussing the interpersonal relationships we find in Graph Theory. Or are you doing both?

Google slide decks on tap:

• "Dimension" in Synergetics
• Quadray Coordinates
• BASKET Modules
• Graph Theory

Python: Just Use It

:: kirby on quora ::

:: a slide from the BASKET deck ::

Clonable Assets

The physics of private property was upset by the uber clonability of digitally etched electrochemical patterns, as now obviously valuable and useful assets could be duplicated with high fidelity, meaning pixel-perfectly and bit identically. 

The physics before was: a valuable bauble, a gemstone, a geegaw, would be one of a kind and worth coveting, even stealing, and for the thief to gain possession, the victim would of necessity be deprived of the thing’s use. 

But now a generous soul could distribute digital copies freely and western civilization was driven to its knees over how to do the books and make profit.

The FBI was called in, to put scary messages on children’s television. A campaign to scare kids silly was mounted through the schools. Rather than rethink the economics, given the boon of engineering advances, the bounty, the humans would be sacrificed, to the gods of making money.

Rather than adjust to the utopian possibilities, the choice was made to perpetuate the pre-existing squalor and postpone any reckoning with the “new magic”. Devices could be dumbed down, and the FBI would continue to scare people. Some were driven to suicide.

The loaves & fishes miracle was not welcome in the temples (meaning the banks), that much is clear. 

The inability of capitalism to respond rationally to its good fortune is pretty damning if you ask me.

However the engineers who understood best about these powers did manage to free themselves from a lot of the dreck, creating a design science revolution of sorts, based on redesigned social contracts (I’m talking about the free open source movement, as documented in old movies like Revolution OS).

I watched all these developments unfold from my perch as an educator. I got called in, along with another guy, by a former FBI guy, a policeman, to help break the cycle of fear by teaching the kids of the Silicon Forest all about Linux. 

You wouldn’t think the police would have to do that (teach Linux), but the school system had been completely co-opted by the capitalists, the ones who couldn’t wrap their heads around basic principles in engineering.

The police set up Linux Labs in the housing projects, on the model of Tux Labs in South Africa. The experiment seemed pretty successful from my vantage point, but then my part of it didn’t work out so well, is it would have meant kids coming to the police station itself for Linux training. 

Some did, but not the “at risk” kids we were trying to attract.

Yes, I’m being vague on the details, but I’ve got this whole thing written up in detail in other places, such as on Medium and like that.

Crescentia (Computed Imagery)

Summer Fair

:: Hawthorne Street Fair 2025 (slides) ::

Yeah, we'll be able to make some use of, as a mnemonic at least (some people say "meme"), of the fact that the White House dubbed its flagship presidential vehicle in Alaska (flown in?) "the beast" for this occasion. I'm not clear on when it was first benighted with this moniker, but it fits. Vlad and Donald rode in it together. 

You might recall: I was going on about the opportunity costs associated with journalistic accounts never linking to the Bucky stuff. That doesn't stop me from making those links myself, journalism be damned (a blog is a kind of journal, so hey, I'm a journalist too).

Those following our literature know how our BEAST modules (BASKET if you add a K) have special meaning for us, in terms of our geometry. 

So how's that for your concordance, if you're keeping one of those (some of our readers come from a Biblical background; I vaguely do but I'm not a chapter and verse kinda guy when it comes to that particular anthology). They're simply geometric shapes, tetrahedral wedges, that we use in various dissections of familiar polyhedrons (snore).

Exactly how that meme wedges into our puzzle will only become more clear in retrospect. What they say about 20-20 hindsight is true, even if 20-20 is a bit of an overstatement. Even with the benefit of an historical record, it all stays kinda blurry, per Lovecraft, or did I get that wrong? I thought Lovecraft considered Universe to be ultimately irrational in the sense of incommensurable.

Speaking of Lovecraft, I was asking Patrick why he thought two entirely separate booths at the Hawthorne Street Fair, both marketing cool art, featured (a) octopus images and (b) anatomically correct hearts. What were the chances? Hidden variables abound. Was there a common studio in the background somehow?

Then it occurred to me the octopus might actually be a rendering of Cthulhu, of whom Patrick had never heard (not everyone has, and even I do not count myself a Lovecraft fan, in the sense of not really having done enough homework to qualify (fan is a rank one earns), a distant admirer maybe?). That flash of insight didn't alter the calculus however, meaning I still found this coincidence surprising.

A tenant of a Jung-informed actively-inferred worldview (model) might include a rule of thumb something like: "expect coincidences that seem insanely improbable, not to mention meaningful" and with that expectation, said Jungian would not experience the same shock and surprise every time such a "miracle" happened. The Synergetics Dictionary contains this relevant meme (you can look it up): only the impossible happens.

D'ya wanna know more about the BEAST particles? This far down in a blog post, we've lost most readers, according to most models, so I put some of those nitty gritty details at the end, for those few who care. "Reward your most loyal readers", that's the rule of thumb, Patreon and all that.

A & B together build the regular tetrahedron, octahedron, cube, dodecahedron (rhombic), whereas the E & S mods have more sway in the five-fold symmetric realm. 

Then we're able to give up rigid assembly ideas and simply think in terms of volume equivalents, like measuring cups. Twenty-four A-fulls of water make a unit volume tetrahedron and all that.

How can we break down the volume of a regular tetrahedron in terms of the S module? 

This latter four-faceted wedge-shape bricks in the empty space between an octahedron (regular) and its inscribed icosahedron (faces flush), likewise regular. 

You might not think of a way right away, but in terms of volume equivalents: S3 + S6 = the UVT (Koski), the four-CCP-ball tet (centers network), meaning scale up your S module by phi (S3) and by phi again (S6) and they add to give us unity. Kinda fun.

Hawthorne Street Fair is mostly about people watching for me, as is the Oregon Zoo. People know they're on display and dress up in their most intriguing outfits, verging on outright cosplay in some cases. I walk around snapping stills, memorializing a yearly event.  Check back in my Flickr Photostream for many similar curations.

:: ruscadian view ::

School of Tomorrow: A Summer of Activism

Democracy's Decline

I had no idea this was happening until a few hours before, when I got a call from a neighbor. Indeed a lot of my neighbors and friends were there, including from other zip codes outside of 97214. 

People lined Hawthorne Boulevard, starting just a couple blocks east of Chavez, and held up signs. Some chanted. Some beat drums. Cars, unobstructed, would honk their support.

The ICE raids and police militarization have persuaded a lot of people that we no longer live in our beloved United States. Some alien authoritarian ideology has seized the levers of power and has turned against the citizenry. 

Money gets pumped into the war machine, charity for the bunker billionaires, but not into social services. The generic IQ of the political discourse seems to be dropping by the day, with lots of excuses for funding homicidal policies around the world.

This has all been going on for a long time however. Starting around Iran-Contra, people noticed that Congress was not really in charge. The Contras were being funded illegally, with drug money. 

That kind of "dirty war" was considered patriotic by the knuckle-dragger soldier of fortune types, eager to turn their military training into something remunerative in the private sector. When you train your youth in mostly military skills, what do you expect will be the outcome?

By now, the Pentagon itself has been privatized by defense contractors and their think tank cults, the Beltway Mafia, who dominate in DC and depend on military socialism for their welfare. They want you to believe it's our destiny, nay our fate, to "fight China" as dystopian thinking is their bread and butter.

Their lobby money, derived from profits, has flooded into politics thanks to Citizens United and similar initiatives, whereby astroturf and PACs have completely distorted the system, making it a Frankenstein monster obedient mainly to oligarchs and warmonger churches (these go together, many churches being cults around money grubbers). 

The USSA is an ugly and scary nation. The USA is widely missed. Many would-be tourist have stopped coming for similar reasons, and who can blame them?

Themed Communities

Shades of WestWorld.

Under the heading of spoofy, yet suggestive nevertheless:

could be a movie...

bed made

JPH is dog-friendly

As seen on Facebook

how it got started...

Village of the Future

The Village of the Future franchise starts to seem kind of obvious once you think about it. Manufacturers need to showcase prototypes, and are doing so, but you don’t go to a furniture store to sleep on the bed. If you’ve never slept on a bed before, maybe try a hotel?  But what if you just want to test a particular model of mattress, as seen on TV?

What if a specific hotel advertised itself as a mattress testing facility, and when you booked a room, you could choose which room based on which type of mattress it had. You might even get coupons to stay there in exchange for your testimony. Attend a focus group, fill out some surveys… is there a pool?

Is this all starting to sound a bit silly? Otherwise it would’ve been tried already right?

But then rental car agencies serve a similar purpose: people thinking they might buy a Tesla or Toyota of a certain model, maybe rent one first. Sure, the dealer allows test driving but who wants to deal with a dealer right off the bat? 

That could be further down in the decision tree (or up, depending on your decision tree’s orientation).

Here we’re not talking cars or beds so much as dwelling machines, akin to travel or destination trailers. But they’re not trailers. Closer to yurts. Some are domes. We might even feature some newfangled tents, nearer the sound stage, for use by performers and crew. 

The units might’ve even been helicopter delivered, per comic books of the 1900s, a future come true. 

Or they’re assembled on site, but from kits that get delivered from the factory, perhaps with a mix-in of local materials. They’re “manufactured homes” one could say, but that term has already been taken.

You will easily find prototypes such as the ones I’m talking about made in China. Russia has already staged this kind of showcase village outside of Moscow, ala the furniture store model. One tours, sure, but one does not move in for a period of days and live the lifestyle. 

That would be for a different type of establishment: a Village of the Future with “timeshare” (another taken term). These might become School of Tomorrow facilities overnight, if the prototypes, some of them, became widely adopted for civilian use.

Since these units are already being factory produced in Eurasia, and since Belt and Road has come a long way, the infrastructure is in place. 

The first Villages of the Future businesses will likely not be in North America, EPCOT notwithstanding, as the political leaders in those bioregions seem at a different point when it comes to melodrama and acting out. 

The US federation’s educational system still predisposes folks to long for a “white picket fence” whatever that is. Their ruling donor class is more interested in leisure for themselves than in designing a smart society. We’d need something more demur as a setting, for our startups.

But then this is way too broad brush stroke a characterization. North America is far from some uniform blend or ethnicity, Praise Allah. 

Picture little dots. These little campgrounds of the future will be spread around like granules of salt and pepper, other spices, and like the other franchises already dotting the planet, especially in Africa, where village life is not unknown.