Comprehensivist Musings

I probably bring in less money in a year than most Wall Streeters put up their nostrils in snow in a week or a month or whatever. I never cultivated that habit, one of many. I have pushed to "put the coke back in Coke" on the theory that what 1800s pharmacists were doing around microdosing was not all that bad for some patients. We all get to be patients, some of us practicing as doctors as well, on Looney Tunes Earth.

Speaking of prohibited substances to which the privileged have largely unfettered access (a measure of wealth, in that potlatch sense: do you have the means to host those wild parties?), I was a student of Col. Prouty, Man X in the Oliver Stone movie, JFK, the Donald Sutherland character. Through books and CD ROM and YouTube interviews and so on; I never actually met the guy personally. 

Prouty goes on and on in some passages about how NORAD is plenty aware of all small plane traffic over the southern borders it need do nothing about. Leave Arkansas air traffic to Arkansas and so on. His implication being (he says so outright): these small planes are often packed with prohibited substances, continuing a tradition going back to at least Prohibition (when it was more about rum than white powder).

Insert: my curriculum has a portal into cryptography here, in the person of another strong woman, Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the Prohibition Era code cracker who, along with her husband, helped dig the ground where the NSA rests today, conceptually speaking.

Focusing on a physical wall or fence is not necessarily what you'd do if focusing on the real smuggling vectors. A Dymaxion Projection with smuggling vectors traced worldwide would make for some spanking new content in one of those Salon-type online magazines. Nice coffee table content: where it all comes from. A lot comes from Oregon I would imagine.

But once again, given I'm a comprehensivist, a tourist passing through, I'm hardly the resident expert and would not be on the team to make that map. So many pros know the Mena stories and others like them more intimately than I do. If you don't know that Arkansas airport then you're even less well read than I am, so remember that about comprehensivists. I know some virology also, without being a Fauci. What glues it together is pattern matching, a fancy name for analogies. Analog: shapewise similar but size-wise not (that's an oversimplification).

Why am I bringing up JFK and narcotics and spooky underworld stuff ala Col. Fletcher Prouty? If you check back in history, around now they were dumping lots of JFK files into the public domain, much of it documents already well known but with redacted shielding now removed, lifting the veil in some cases. Also, the great wall along or in the Rio Grande was a major focus among the various American countries involved, such as the Republic of Texas (also a part of the Federation you learned about).

As a blogger, doing a journal, like any good Quaker, keeping up with my practice, I allude to current events and share my angle. My angle on borders in general is they're a rather new thing in terms of micro-management, surveillance, gait analysis and so on. We didn't always have these drones and monitoring personnel. Borders were easy to draw and defend on paper, such as by scathing memoranda in diplomatic circles, but most people were without documents. They hadn't made it to middle class status yet.

So the proposal to clamp down on the undocumented and criminalize poverty worldwide, starting with using borders as approximations for the prisons within prisons on the drawing boards, is pretty off the scales radical. Future shock is indeed shocking. We're cattle in our own electrified pens. One cow to the other, over an electric fence: at least it's not open borders, or you could eat my grass (a shared thought balloon).

What has DOGE found in terms of prisons in the permit phase, planning phase, or conceptual art. Is there any truth to the rumor that Mars will be a one way trip for volunteer lifers with no prospects, a prison planet? That sounds like a series on Amazon or Netflix, so apologies if I just inadvertently plagiarized. Sometimes I trespass, my devices not having entirely aligned maps compared to what more local maps show.

Russell Towle is another reason I'm hearkening back to the 1960s, to the Merry Prankster Era, which was well before my time in terms of my not having an adult body yet, when Further was plying the highways and byways, criss-crossing North America, running acid tests.  I was twice removed: once in being still in grade school, twice for being in Rome by then. I saw Yellow Submarine (twice, once with my parents) at that little theater in Trastevere that specialized in English language movies. What was it called again? Pasquino. The other one, Archimedes off Piazza Euclide, was within walking distance from my house. So it's not like I was completely disconnected from USA TV culture. I was even a Cub Scout.

Russell Towle was into rhombohedral zonohedra when David Koski and I discovered him online. He kindly helped me over email regarding my having aspect ratios wrong in my rendered POV-Ray output. Thanks to him, my graphics improved. Then suddenly he was gone. The Wolfram people mourned his loss also; he'd helped showcase the powers of Mathematica and Wolfram Language. Now just today I'm reading up on his overlap with Neal Cassady and those folks. As Spock of Leonard Nimoy fame might put it: fascinating, captain.

Politics as Sport

Helmet Man, OPDX, 2011

If you're looking for where I weigh in on matters athletic and/or military, keep looking, because I'm only quasi athletic (does scuba count?) and never served.  

Like I followed from the sidelines when the debate was whether to allow women into combat. As a Quaker (contra outward physical violence -- other kinds too but let's start with that) I found it ironic that the right to keep this a Planet of the Apes was just as much women's work as men's. Demolition engineering that is, the big undo button. 

Many males with chestal displays (medals, insignia) said the presence of women was too distracting and kept the men from focusing on homicide. My read (OK I'll have a view) is: that some men would probably do better as brave heros with lots of women around in a position to notice.  Also: a combatant pilot at ten thousand feet is different from being in boots on the ground, or crammed into a tank.

So many peeps wanna pile on already. When I see a big pile of peeps, piling on, making a mountain or molehill, I'm not one to always run over and leap on. "That issue is already getting lots of attention, so I'm not needed" is more my reaction, to pop culture fad altercations over this and that. 

Which is not to surrender my right to jump in if I feel like it.

Anyway, to the real point of this post:  to what extent is politics run on the model of fans boosting teams at a sporting event? I'm gonna say football, with deliberate ambiguity as to whether I mean ala NFL or FIFA. 

Is the ball a hexapent? Adidas telstar pattern (another name for it)? Buckminsterfullerene? Or is it oblong?

When you boost a team, you're feeding encouragement, shouting rah rah. You're not a referee on the field and you're not still deciding which team you are for. If you're an avid sports watcher, you don't pick your team on the fly. Or maybe I should say: if you're actively following a given sport, a whole tournament. 

You know which side you're on, and what your role is. In the back room, there's a lot of betting. Casino Math.

That's what I get about so much that is politics, punditry, and editorializing:  you know which side you're on, and as a loyal fan, your role is to stay loyal, especially when chips are down. Your job is to pump nutrients into your side, feed it energy. I think of my role during Occupy, bringing in food by Food Not Bombs bicycle trailer.

Those others, who don't seem to have a dog in the fight (idiom), or skin in the game (similar), seem colder and more aloof. Maybe they're just being polite when they shout rah rah, because they're a guest of some highly partisan host family. Go along to get along. When in Rome.

The aloof types are more like concessioners, hot dog and cotton candy vendors (would you like a large or diet coke with that?). They don't need to pick a side, but they do depend on a partisan fandom, a polarized audience that has to care and shout "fight fight fight". Without all those hormones flowing, they won't buy the flags and other souvenirs. If you're not here to boost a team, maybe try the symphony down the street?  They say opera is entertaining.

Sharing the Solar Bounty

At a recent think tank meeting, during a time discussing generalities, the conversation turned to whether the game was zero sum. Like I said, very general.

My view was folks oughta get paid to self educate, perhaps starting with self education on how to do self education. UBI (universal basic income) isn’t for nothing. To which the retort was why should anyone pump gas in a gas station while others were subsidized to learn Spanish? It’s zero sum after all.

Where should our share of solar income, vast and ongoing, show up in our lives. Some would say: the sun on your skin, and lighting your way during the day, is your portion. 

That sunlight helps grow wheat, as well as turn the stones that grind it to bread, and are you not inheriting  a stake in said human enterprise?

The Technocracy movement seems antiquated to me too now, but I can see where it was coming from: hook UBI to everyone’s share of the energy harvest, which is owing ultimately to no man nor to the labor of men. What men owed has already been paid.

Spring Equinox Gathering 2025

Every chair was taken in the iconic Pauling House, a heritage site here in Asylum District and in Portland more generally. The occassion: Spring Equinox. We meet four times a year anymore, whereas Wanderers used to keep to a busy schedule of weekly meetings, with invited or indigenous (in-group) speakers.

Our format for gatherings is rambling wandering conversation. Gordon and Barry talked about shipping, motor sizes, tilt angles. Tilt angles for motorcycles had come up earlier. Unfortunately Brenda, our resident biker chick (scientist by day), couldn't make it this time.

I'd characterize Wanderers as scientists and engineers by and large, but with no strict membership requirements, nor really any kind of membership roster. Somehow we always stay the right size for a small meeting room like this.

I brought Sydney the dog and made my brief speech about how non-humans are likewise Wanderers.  I've always been one of those eager to keep things less human-centric. Admitting non-humans in such an informal setting has not been controversial. We've had other pets join us as well. I like to say Keiko is/was an honorary Wanderer.

We managed to include Steve Mastin by Facetime. Although my iPad is not a registered device on the Verizon network, my cell phone is, and played the role of hotspot. We used to have our own Wifi SSID for ISEPP, but president Bristol only works there in the mornings sometimes so no longer maintains his own company Wifi. ISEPP is a 501(c)(3), my late wife the bookkeeper long ago.

I got to chatting with Barry about my "Chinese Peace Corps" meme (he'd been in the US Peace Corps in Brazil some decades back), providing free eyecare (like glasses) from vans in Detroit. Providing a global safety and healthcare net could double as a see-the-world opportunity, in a more benign way than joining the military. Such ideas are apropos in any institution named after Linus (anti-nuke prof) and Ava (WILPF) Pauling.

Charting a Leftist Trajectory

The online Collins dictionary labels "lefty" with [British, informal, disapproval] i.e. built right into the meaning is a negative spin, akin to "cult" or "propaganda". The meaning: "If you refer to someone as a lefty, you mean that they support the ideals of the political left." But that's already secondary to "left handed" meaning someone who defaults to their left hand for precision activities such as handwriting or drawing.

Per my own counterintelligence against standard English connotations, I've worked to rehabilitate "cult" (for example) such that it gains a more neutral sheen, as a nickname or short version of "subculture", which has an almost mathematical dryness in being some subset of a larger culture, which pretty much any culture already is, and with more factions internally, a recursive data structure right down to "a cult of one" (but what about all those split personalities?).

I'd like to get back to "split personalities" following Maurice Nicoll again, as I often do, with a nod to Kierkegaard and his "to will one thing" discussion. A more typical personality is not so single-minded, or is overzealous with tyrannical tendencies, often a self-overthrowing situation, no need to lift a finger.

However I want instead to take up the left-right axis, insofar as their is one, and talk about my owning a leftist placement, even without claiming to be a fan of Marxist analysis. My economics is more a "free money from the sun" thermodynamic analysis, not that intelligence makes no difference. General Systems Theory (GST) seemed free for the taking when I got around to recycling and/or perpetuating some key terms.

I use other language somewhat oddly as well: "fan" is a status one earns through a lot of homework. I might be appreciative of what I've gotten from a talented vocalist, or rhetorician, or movie director, and that's a step towards becoming a fan, but it takes work to really be a true fan of someone or something. I suppose my meaning of "fan of" is closer to that of "acolyte of" and/or "disciple of", closer to "devotee".

I get to be a leftist through a Mark Twain style anti-imperialism. The Anti-imperialist League included Andrew Carnegie. Quakernomics, the book, is about industrialists with utopian visions of company lifestyles, from janitorial staff, to HR, to officers on the bridge. This commitment to egalitarian structures, sometimes associated with "communism" is likewise associated with horizontally structured private enterprises, where management intermingles with specialists, such as we have in Macrodata Refinement (joke: an allusion to the back rooms in our corporate mazeways).

I'm sympathetic to Hemingway and to the Spaniards who stood up to the fascists, already back then (pre WW2) cutting their teeth as right-wing bad guys. We (e.g. Wikipedia) still think of Franco as a rightie, anti-Franco Republicans as lefties. Those were impressions I developed through the Laughing Horse Books video collection. I've also chronicled in the Coda, March 2025 meeting minutes, regarding my radio-listening habits of some fifteen years ago (waiting in the car for pickup at Winterhaven), then tracing the crackup of Air America and the trajectory of Thom Hartmann and others into the RT America sphere, a bevy of leftists before banned; an iron curtain came down in TV world, with the attempted neocon-NATO coup-takeover of American media.

My other connections to leftism would be through both WILPF and AFSC. I probably don't want to complicate the story further with too many ideological affiliations beyond those two. For example, I'm not planning to tally up clients I've had, as to where they might weigh in on any left-right spectrum. I'm more apolitical than that, less partisan, in my business dealings. Like I'm not a front for any political party other than my own, my Pirate Party, to keep it simple. I believe I'm officially registered as in independent.

Mickey 17 (movie review)

Dr. D. joined me at the last minute for this 7 pm showing at The Bagdad. The theater (part of a brewpub empire) was reasonably well attended. Folks lined up for brew and 'za. Outside it had turned cold. Keeping this place well heated has gotta be one of the number one expenses.

Previews: remake of Superman coming; rectilinear brainwashing ala MineCraft Movie coming too. That'll be good for our own PR as we promulgate the IVM in contrast to XYZ, so we need XYZ to stick around. Never mind if that's over your head jargon. Poke around.

My practice was to avoid all YouTube or other reviews of this movie until after watching it. I'd seen the previews several times. I've been going to films more in recent weeks, as well as using my home theater. Then right after the film I came home, hooked the iPad to the HDTV and we watched reviews by deepfocuslens and Critical Drinker, both of whom found it disappointing. 

I'm not so down on it, but then I liked Joker 2.

I guess a question is how tight and in control of itself we found the movie to be. In terms of reality construction, I think it did well. The movie created a believable world, by science fiction standards, in which "expendables" might be 3D printed and with memories restored, shades of Avatar 2 more than anything. The associated props developed over time. Especially strong: allusions to Covid. Mickey goes through like nine lives being a guinea pig for the mRNA vax they'll all need, to survive their new home planet.

The new home planet is inhabited by an intelligent life form that's half tardigrade (but bigger) and half potato bug. They’re both cute and terrifying at the same time, like this movie (both a comedy and horrific). The scientists, per stereotype, are starting to work out a translator and are on the brink of establishing a dialog, while the militarists are (again per stereotype) looking for opportunities to chronicle themselves being heroic, striking courageous postures (like a general on a rearing horse).

Probably where I part company from the reviewers, and maybe even from the actors and script, is I didn't see the preacher pair, the Jim and Tammy Bakker cult leaders, the evangelists, as trying to parody Trump, let alone Trump and Melania. If we insist on presidential parallels, I'd say the Tammy Bakker character, the Lady Macbeth (into sauces, a cooking show maven) is more of a Jill Biden, with Jimmy a younger Joe. But why push either analogy? The stereotype these two present is more culturally ingrained than specific politicians, in my experience.

That we're looking at two consecutive Mickeys, printed the same way, with memories from the same brick, leads to a meditation on how they're nevertheless completely different personalities. One seems more meek and mild, the other more temper driven and self protective. Their attitude towards one another forms a kind of internal monolog made public. They want to kill each other at first, but their shared anima (soul figure) unites them as allies and friends in the end. The more selfish one turns altruistic. Together they usher in a new era.

I thought having a black African heritage female cop excited for sex with two white guy twins was a comment on science fiction's role in pushing the envelope. A first famous "inter-racial" kiss on TV was between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Urhuru on Star Trek, a sensitive moment (a risk) for the network and somewhat uncomfortable on the set (Kirk insisted on several rehearsals). "How far we've come" this movie was saying, in having its women so aggressively (and jealously) interested in the Mickey bros.

That's what the critics didn't like: science fiction that takes on too many social issues is too hard to follow and think about. But I'm thinking its satirical flavor extends to making fun of how science fiction is expected to tackle social issues, by tackling them all. It reminds me of The Good Place in being almost academic about the ethics issues. That transparency to philosophy in the background, the plot little more a thin veneer, is characteristic of comic book works, catering to young readers coming to grips with their own values, whatever these turn out to be.

Dr. D. pointed out a paradox in that Mickey is always being asked what it's like to die, but at no point would the memory brick be refreshed enough to remember dying, so he's really as clueless as anyone about what it's like in the rear view mirror. He simply has the cognitive security of knowing (because of affirmation from others, and because of accumulating memories with gaps) that he's exceptional in being an expendable. What might seem an especially lucky outcome (immortality of sorts) comes across as anything but.

Another factor that maybe colored my experience was the "laugh track" provided by the living theaters; the two guys sitting behind us, that one guy in particular, laughed loudly and riotously, and as the credits scrolled they expressed delight with the movie. Their enthusiasm was quasi-infectious, boosting the comical quality of the film. The potato bug monsters, both cute and ugly, were alone worth the price of admission (with a senior discount, admittedly).

Conversations

I’ve been yakking with friends about AI, part of everyday conversation, an ongoing computation. Here’s me writing to a professor and former classmate:

[I]n general I'm very impressed by AI, not because I believe in AGI or the Singularity or am a transhumanist muskrat, but because stochastic algorithms are able to distill vast quantities of human authored verbiage into a navigable topology of strung-together tokens, wow. The art too: I'm blown away by it.  Not all of it. Not every bit of AI slop is goldilocks.  More like panning for gold.

We talk about other topics too of course, especially Gaza. I’ve been bringing up the need for an airport over on Facebook, branching off plans from 2016.

Whereas most of these conversations are in cyberspace, I sometimes have the privilege of a non-virtual visitor, as was the case on Thursday. 

Daniel was on his way back to California and stopped over to spend the day with me, 9 to 5, and we got a lot of work done. He’s a boss user of AI tools when in his element.

The branch-out to Obsidian involved, as an exercise, copying down the text of these blogs. That alone was worth the price of admission, to his interesting demo. AI wrote the scripts to pretty much bootstrap itself.

The Cycle (movie review)

:: iranian festival, portland, 2009 ::

As mentioned over on BizMo Diaries (hinting at Motorcycle Diaries at first), I've been treating myself to some Iranian films, not the first time since Portland is on the global circuit when it comes to Film Fests, hosting many of the international variety, wherein Iran's filmcraft is respected. This time I'm renting from a local vid store, our 'hood still having one of those. Vid stores once were commonplace up and down the boulevards, in shopping malls, and then they all went away thanks to streaming services, point and click Netflix.

The Cycle is from way back in 1977 and is gloriously bleak. I have a real soft spot for Stalker-like Zone vistas, middle of nowhere, like behind Jersey City where I'd hike at night, out to that I-95 turnpike overpass. It cuts through a bluff. I wasn't trespassing or going anywhere illegal exactly, just savoring one of those no man's lands. I'd go in the day too as I recall. Good exercise. In Portland I have Mt. Tabor, the polar opposite of bleak.

The boy is taking everything in at high bandwidth. We're seeing adaptation, learning curves. By the end, when he's eyeing the inside of the blood broker's mansion, we see his ambition. He's learning how the game is played. We see a judgement in the end, by another player, that the son has become cold hearted and disrespectful of his dying (dead) father. But as omniscient viewers, we've just seen him on a mission of mercy. How terrible is being the chief blood getter really? No one wants to do it. You can see why the hospital can't compete: the healthcare staff would rather not be the ones to donate.

I've also been thinking more about The Circle. The special features were useful.

Playing with DSR1

:: naga story ::

Continuing with the topic of the Naga Myth per Critical Path, labeled speculative prehistory, we're able to establish a narrow gap between Sundaland and Sahul. Sundaland is roughly Southeast Asia whereas Sahul is Greater Australia (roughly). However this was all during the most recent ice age and the geography was all different, such that names from today's map don't really apply.

To quote DeepSeek R1:

Land Bridges in Southeast Asia

At the glacial peak (~26,000–19,000 years ago), the Sundaland shelf connected modern-day Indonesia, Malaysia, and Borneo into a contiguous landmass twice the size of India [34]. Key features included:

• A continuous land bridge from mainland Asia to Java, Sumatra, and Borneo.
• Exposed continental shelves forming coastal plains and mangrove forests.
• The merging of Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania into Sahul, separated from Sundaland by narrow straits [15].

The Indonesian Archipelago was dramatically easier to traverse during this period, with only narrow sea channels (e.g., the Makassar Strait) separating Sundaland from Sahul [5].

Fuller's inventive narrative traces a vector following Sahulis migrating westward, bringing their maritime savvy and Naga religion to the sapiens coming the other way.

Much as Fuller's telling prompts a gestalt switching land-ocean flip, with oceans becoming the connecting medium vs lands connecting oceans, his "Naga peoples moving westward" is akin to flipping positive with negative charges in viewing circuit diagrams. All the textbooks of our time talk about humanity sprawling eastward, out of Africa.

However prehistoric Polynesians, without our modern knowledge of the fossil record, would speculate about other morphogenetic pathways, wiring in alternative metaphors.

Included in this speculative Naga religion are stories wheren whales and dolphins connect to humans through liminal figures, roughly translated as "mer people" in today's English.

DSR1 again (extending the previous query):

Transitional Life Forms: Mermaids and Hybrid Beings

Many Pacific and South Asian cultures feature liminal beings bridging humans and marine mammals:

• Māori Pania of the Reef: A mermaid-like figure who married a mortal but returned to the sea, embodying the tension between land and ocean [6].
• Javanese Nyai Roro Kidul: A sea goddess often depicted as a mermaid (Nyai Blorong), ruling the Southern Seas and influencing maritime fortunes [6].
• Cambodian Sovanna Maccha: A mermaid princess from the Ramayana tradition who initially obstructs but later aids heroic endeavors [6].

We have evidence of Papuan-Sahulis as long as 40K years ago, coinciding with the aforementioned changed geography and climate. 

Human civilization in the South Pacific has a complex and layered history, with archaeological and genetic evidence revealing migrations spanning tens of thousands of years. The earliest confirmed human presence dates back at least 33,000–40,000 years, based on remains found in the Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands [1][2][4]. However, recent studies suggest migration to islands like West Papua may have begun over 50,000 years ago, with seafarers navigating equatorial routes from Asia [4].

In sum, Critical Path posits a Naga-informed mindset stemming from Polynesia and morphing along a timeline connecting it eventually around to the Americas, via Thailand, Egypt, Phoenicia, Venice, Russia-Viking... thereby closing circuits and encoding the basis of a new world mythology or cosmic poem, one among several. YMMV.

As with most mythologies, the various threads serve a mnemonic function, by stringing together, in memorable narratives, various technical gems, such as knot-tying and net-making, basket-weaving, navigation data etcetera.

Deja Vu

DAF | CogSec | M4W Coda

My Pipeline

I just ate some popcorn. Glenn Stockton introduced me to the silicone popper genre, goes in the microwave. Two minutes is enough in mine. I use corn oil at the bottom, where the kernels get to explode.

By “my pipeline” (blog post title) I mean a sequence of steps or transformations, in this case going from a computer programmed framework, to a scene description language, to a rendering engine, to picture files (png format) to animated gif (with additional tools needed to accomplish that transformation).

That’s what I’m talking about in the above Facebook post, snipped for my Flickr Photostream scrapbook. My framework makes use of sympy, allowing me to keep computations algebraic until I’m ready to write out to scene description language, at which point actual numbers are needed. You don’t want to say (sqrt(5)+1)/2 or phi, or 𝞍 or whatever, you want to say 1.618, maybe with a few more optional digits.

This use of the word “pipeline” is pretty standard. For example in data science we think of a pipeline starting from whatever gathered raw data, through a sequence of cleaning, rectification and normalization steps, in preparation for feeding some idol, who spits out the magic flutes.

Woah! WTF? Data science doesn’t have any magic flutes! What perversity am I spewing?

I’m referring to the matrix of weights computed during training phase, of a working model, a multi-layer neural net. Once steeped in terabytes of data you get an object that’s lean and mean, might fit in a phone, and that has prophetic properties.

When I say “prophetic” you might think back to Thomas Paine and his thesis that being prophetic has everything to do with knowing how to generate music, and not just any music, but trending, viral music, already in alignment with the Zeitgeist. 

In that sense, prophecies do often tend to be self fulfilling in that they give expression to what people are thinking but can’t quite get into rhyme.

A chatbot is “prophetic” in the sense that it strives to be predictive of what the most articulate and acculturated would likely say, given some initial momentum, a direction in Hilbert Space, by the prompt, the impetus input. 

From there, the magic flute takes over and plays what sounds like music to our ears. If you find yourself nodding along in agreement, even humming the same hum, that means you’re finding the music credible, and so the magic flute has done its job. 

Or call it a mind reader, wherein here “mind” potentially means the collective verbiage, the universe of discourse, of an entire civilization, distilled to weights.

Another pipeline has to do with Hubble, or these days JWST, which instruments beam back lots of raw data that has to go through signal processing, various kinds of filtering, before most prepared for the human eye. Our own neural nets absorb the info and thereby accrete awareness of the cosmos.

I just add yeast and salt to the popcorn sometimes, like tonight. No need for melted butter. The initial oil pool is sufficient when it comes to adding lipidity. 

Recent Projects

Consequent to cutting way back on calories for an interval, and not actually going to zero, I've sparked some dormant energies and managed to power through some pending projects.

Per the still above, I was able to get that animated GIF showing a cuboctahedron unfurling inside an octahedron, riding its rails as it were, with wheels starting at mid edges. The edges of the eight embedded triangles are allowed to stretch, as each rotates inside an octahedron face, staying equilateral. At one station, early along the journey, an icosahedron is reached, named IcosaWithin in some memeographies.

My achievement was not out of the blue, as I was using a simple framework I've been hacking on for quite awhile, wherein I have a vocabulary of named vectors and already-defined polyhedrons made from pairs of those Vectors (so-called Edges, from any point to any point, vector tip to tip), which stay origin originating. 

Didn't Wayne Bishop adopt this convention in his Linear Algebra textbook? I used to debate with the guy in Math Forum. I didn't quarrel about his vectors though. I did yak a lot about Quadrays, the Qvectors of which I define in Python, as a subclass of the Vector types.

A next project was to read more of those two library books I checked out from the downtown library. They were part of a display on a topical issue, much in the news these days: borders and immigration, also emigration if you think about it. White Borders by Reece Jones (Beacon Press, Boston, 2021) is one of the two and I got about half way through in a sitting. 

Then I checked the index for either Ashley Montagu or Buckminster Fuller. I wasn't really expecting to find either. His focus is mainstream journals, cults, and Congress. The debates around "race" have been expansive and my blogs continue stirring the pot in that respect.

All that reading prompted me to query Perplexity for some answers regarding Bucky's essay No Race, No Class. I found it listed in a table of contents in a World Game document (a PDF) that proved interesting in itself, open source at the BFI Wordpress site. That site links to my stuff too, see bfi dot org slash synergetics and scroll down for a Jupyter Notebook on Synergetics.

Last on this list (of projects powered through), I became aware of some recent advances around Magic Squares, a favorite topic of recreational mathematicians, such as Martin Gardner. Numberphile on YouTube. I learned late in life (at 66) of that famous 128-by-128 magic square by Tarry in the 1800s and turned it into a modern day exercise using pandas and numpy (just to verify it's correct) with a little help from AI. This square is trimagical, a whole new idea to me. I wouldn't have thought such a thing possible. Live and learn.

One more thing: I'm only just tuning in Steve Keen over there with the economists and note his emphasis on thermodynamics. Perplexity was again of some help just now. I probably first learned of him thanks to a Lex Friedman interview.

Cogitations

:: Leap of Faith ::

Our Knowledge Engineering meeting was wide ranging this morning. I was a tad late, having immersed myself in the USSA meme, one I've used, but so have others. There's that sense of a no longer, yet hauntingly familiar, state: the USSR, undergoing somewhat convulsive changes (perestroika and glasnost), much as the USSA is undergoing today, in the DOGE chapter. 

We must return to our roots to stay grounded (sounds like something AI might write).

A chief topic was DAF's meetup (recorded) with Dante, another influencer in the Synergetics-on-YouTube space (where I too am active). I caught up later, whereas Struppi and Andrius both joined the Livestream. 

Dante is conversant with some of the same esoterica I first learned from that Frances Yates book, The Art of Memory. Both in M4W and 52LivingIdeas (YouTube communities with Zoom meetups, led by Andrius and Shrikant respectively), we were always coming up with "schemata" or "circuit diagrams" (networks, graphs, toons...) i.e. more graphical than lexical, and this continues a Mnemonics or Memetics tradition (a science of Memes). 

Per some namespaces, one could say we're encountering, as well as encouraging, a more right-brained based blend, without meaning anything specifically right vs left wing politically. 

Biology and politics each keep to their own sets of axes, where bilateral symmetry is concerned. I was ranting about how "right vs left" is so often too vacuous, if allowed to remain un-nuanced by beaucoup other dimensions. Data science teaches "too few axes" is a pitfall.

Robert Fludd works in this right brain lineage, as does William Blake, both in some ways prefiguring the geometric philosophy in Synergetics. I'm tempted to speak of Neoplatonism.

Fuller has a lot of trust on automated processes, not of human origin, humans themselves not having designed themselves. That humans haven't the know-how to go beyond robots, is less any theological argument than an acknowledgment of a kind of epiphenomenalism in Fuller's writings. 

Our cogitos have a steering function, but then life supplies a somewhat "on rails" experience, has the aspect of a dark ride, with"dark ride" being theme park jargon for one of those indoor guided "tunnel of love" type experiences, e.g. Pirates of the Caribbean at Disney's. 

Some project Bucky as a naive type of technocrat engineer who thinks he has a technofix for human nature. Yet for Fuller, the nature in human nature isn't the problem. The "cosmic conspiracy" is on our side, and doesn't depend on our all being awake at the same time.

My goal these days is to credit the CERN physics community for the web first, the LHC second, in terms of making a big difference. 

Great to have both. 

I was ravenous for hypertext just out of Princeton, but everyone was reinventing the wheel by going proprietary, whereas Tim Berners-Lee did something open source and therefore viral. HTTP spread on its own, into all the nooks and crannies of the emerging internet, as another protocol, and the Web as we know it was born, fulfilling the Dr. Vannevar Bush vision -- and feeding the MEMEX to come (LLMs a good example). 

LHC comes in 2nd place because we're not pushing for a GUT or TOE in finding out about the smallest physical phenomena possible, perhaps with least heat (cryogenics, superconductivity). 

All of which is to say, we're not stressing Physics to be a "controller discipline" able to take over governance because we don't believe in Free Will. We're not looking to "reduce everything to Physics" so much as we're willing to let the Sciences each have their respective layers, with laws and walls of their own, separate cities, yet with traffic between them. 

The larger does not "rest upon" the smaller in the sense of the former bringing nothing new to the table. On the contrary, the Principle of Synergetic Advantage assures us of a yet more meta environment and higher level of play, provided we don't get too stuck in these teachings from the lower levels. 

There's more to life than black holes.

Regarding the leaping circus tiger jumping back and forth through a flaming hoop: the represents something Dante and Daniel talked about, a core meme in Synergetics, that of the pumping VE. 

The VE, like a heart, twist down into a more Icosahedral (five-fold) pattern, left or right handed, jumping through a "cosmic zero" in between. The VE phase is not a stable stopping point even if it serves as anchor. 

The dichotomy is "open versus closed minded" with "closed" a sign of adequacy and appropriate reflexing, and "open" a sign of taking new information into account, retraining to some extent. Neither "open" nor "closed" need be morally rated given they're two sides of the same proverbial coin.

:: Mirrored Observer ::

:: Eye of AI ::

Claymation Station

Yesterday was about Claymation i.e. stop-action movie-making using clay figures. One builds a flip-book i.e. a film with delta t determining frame rate or frequency. Shoot for at least 24 frames per second for that smooth motion appearance. There's also the "claymation look" where the video is actually developed using ray-tracing with clay-like textures. I don't call that "cheating", I call it "emulating".

What do my clay creatures do? I was thinking of snakes as the default denizen of our somewhat stark and austere geometry world, each representing a quantum of clay. The regular tetrahedron, or regtet, what we call "home base" in our geometry, made of four unit-radius balls packed together (also clay) is likewise our unit of volume, our quantum. It rolls out into a snake.

We make cubes too of course. The duo-tet cube, so-called, is actually three snake's-worth of clay mushed together. It's called a duo-tet because of the Merkaba, the 3D version of the 2D Star of David. These patterns get used in sacred geometry scenarios over the centuries and so have all these names. We're not trying to hide from this heritage, but nor need we brand our work as "religious" in nature, though we're free to.

A 3-snakes cube plus another snake's-worth, creates the 4-snakes octahedron. Then we have the 5-snakes rhombic triacontahedron (RT). Any time we have a shape, we're free to scale it up and down, called growing and shrinking, such that it hits other volume stop points. 

The RT stops at volumes 5 (120 T modules), 5+ (120 E modules), 7.5 (120 K modules) and at 21.21 where it is comprised of radius-2 icosa edges and its 30-edged dual, the pentagonal dodecahedron. The icosahedron has edges 2R and volume 18.51..., expressed in surds as

$${5}{\sqrt{2}} {ϕ^{2}}$$ .

Free Range Humans

What I object to is outsiders deciding the fate of the Palestinians collectively, in terms of where they should go or shouldn't go en masse, as a managed population. 

This stance that they'd stay in Gaza no matter what and fight to the last Palestinian, is mostly speaking for someone else. Sure, many feel that way, but many would love to see the world.

If Palestinians had real citizenship, they'd go where they want, irrespective of projected role-playing responsibilities. They could settle anywhere, including in Tel Aviv, or elsewhere in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Cuba, in Portland, as private citizens, welcomed by the locals through managed resettlement programs.

Portland has done managed resettlement before, turning itself into Little Asia (no longer Little Beirut), or Little Lhasa as I call it, alliteratively. The merging works when you have NGOs who know how to diffuse tensions. Portland had AFSC for example, brokering relationships twixt Asian and Latino minorities, starting at the high school level (the LAAP program -- with me in a consulting role).

Even if Gaza were a paradise, free of foreign rule, some would want to leave temporarily, if only to return a generation or two later. USAers have such rights. The hallmark of an Israeli is the freedom to come and go. Is it too much to ask that Palestinians should have such rights as well? "Yes, way too much" some will respond, with me not among them.

To me, that's what membership in a global nation-state system, centered around the United Nations, was all about providing: a set of privileges consistent with world tourism and cross-enrollment, which is tantamount to a safer world. Students and faculty both could hop from campus to campus, perhaps within the same university system, as globally distributed. A USA kid gets to study abroad. A kid from Kazakhstan gets to study here.

If you're undocumented, that means you've been left out of the human rights game and even the United Nations may not have a solution, as you have no citizenship as yet, and so no country claims you and fights for your rights. 

Were Palestine to have legitimized advocates on the world stage, then we would hear more voices demanding their right of free passage, on a par with what citizens of other nations are getting.

Of course the ugly truth is freedom of travel has been severely curtailed by the statists, and being welcomed into the company of nations is no guarantee of citizens' right to join the jet set, or even the ocean-going ship set. "Being documented" does not equate to having generous travel rights.

Would-be tourists of the world unite!

Surveillance Center

I was asking Perplexity, the chatterbox, to draw a line twixt “peep show” of the 1800s, and the genre of TikToks and Reels going big time today. Now each has a handheld device to watch short scenarios, whereas privacy around peeping was more about stepping into a booth, to become isolated from distractions.

Perplexity synthesized a very plausible response, obeying my prompt to keep “voyeurism” a connecting thread. The 1800s booth was more like a diorama, likely a miniature, with the eye seeing the scene through a peep hole. Or perhaps the experience involved some live action? What were the possibilities? Picture a miniature garden, with a mechanized figure in the foreground, perhaps with energy to perform some action coming from a wound spring.

My own image of a Peep Show is the Tin Pan Alley arcade, wherein I imagine a viewer depositing a coin or two, and then peering though a viewfinder at some hand-cranked flip book of consecutive photographs, perhaps organized in a kind of Rolodex, creating animation the way film does, hitting a threshold frame rate.

Am I moralizing against this evolving technology, heading towards VR and AR (virtual and augmented reality)? Invoking the theme of voyeurism maybe sounds like it. “Viewerism” sounds less obnoxious, whereas “tourism” is where it’s at, especially when undertaken voluntarily, vs compelled, as in “tours of duty” (still acceptable) and/or human trafficking (considered wrong).

To stay briefed on a complex world, requires lots of screens. Some eccentrics, I recall Walter Alter, were experimenting with multiple screens way back then, before the internet takeover. 

Nowadays your typical nerd cave comes with a number of monitors, whereas the communal (shared) nerd cave is the typical surveillance center, with aesthetics similar to that of the Control Room and/or Mission Control. Air traffic control centers fit here too. 

This very blog is named after, or “in honor of”, this very archetype (you can almost see the diorama in your mind’s eye right? — as readers, some will — some read because they love the television they get from it, meaning mind’s eye programming). My Control Center serves fielded “Bizmos” i.e. the van fleets, the business buses, all engaged in the various work-study activities of a shared World Game.

Kirby Kibitzing

I checked the etymology of “kibitz”: something to do with watching others playing card games while running his, her or their mouth, opining on the state of play, and likely giving unsolicited advice.

Along those lines, I found it a refreshing change in the conversation to have DT sound ethnocentric (what else?) regarding who won WW2. Many USAers are now getting an education on the Russian view. 

Former allies try to one up each other on who was the star and who the co-star. Mission accomplished: both were on the same side (some of the new people wouldn’t remember). The statement seemed customized to create a productive backlash. People enjoy lecturing DT.

Then comes a supposed pause in propping up the Neocon-Nuland regime in Kyiv, but with conflicting messages, as few believe there’s been any real change in permissions. The sense of a looming audit is not enough to brake the juggernaut. 

Global gangs raid and loot the old world arsenals pretty much unchecked, provided they grease the right palms and are well connected in Gatekeeper City. 

The Contras in Nicaragua were likewise weapons traffickers, with cocaine a common currency. What to do with an excess of junk weapons was a problem solved, once “fighting to the last Ukrainian” became a thing. As long as weapons are shipping, some people are happy campers.

However there’s a public perception of increased reluctance to fuel the psychotic mayhem in Eastern Europe, on the part of those ostensibly running the so-called government. The public tries its best to follow from a distance.

At the same time, the tone towards Russia was “this is bad for you too” (more “same page” rhetoric) with the threat that if this conflict isn’t stopped, the Prez will fall back on imposing even more onerous financial penalties, a far cry from threatening to send twice the number of javelins and bayonets, let alone threatening big arrow offensives by military socialist forces (the military base economy).

“Figure this out or I’m really gonna put my foot down, you don’t wanna see me having a hissy fit do ya? I can assure you it’ll be ugly.” If that’s what passes for tough talk, then we’re maybe making some headway.

As readers know, I’m a big fan of citizen diplomacy, with a lot of emphasis on truckers as among those who interact the most with counterparts from other backgrounds. How do we get more PhDs in that job? Lots of data science. I could say the same for global airline crews etc. 

It’s the tone of those anonymous semi-private person to person conversations that I like to track.  These latest few moves by the new White House team, with respect to the NATO war, seem relatively benign in a Chuckles the Clown kind of way. 

The comedy index has ticked up, if only a little.

Launching 2025: Keeping It Going

Fake Views

As one might expect, I've been using the spike in interest in Greenland to draw attention to its distorted size on the oft used Mercator projection. I'm not saying fact checkers should take those posts down. We have to give the slow folks a role. I'm happy to see interest in geography, but seriously... really? A Mercator in 2025? What school did you go to?

I'm fine with all these mental exercises around borders turning fluid, Canada becoming a state even before Puerto Rico. Other groups are talking about selling off Florida to Cuba (how much ya want?), or Texas to Mexico (free!), now that the ball has started rolling, and it's OK to buy and sell in a virtual space of the imagination. I feel like we're gambling those Valve "skins" (textures).

I'm fine with this kind of mental exercise precisely because it empowers the human imagination, which is the source of these kinds of things (nations) in the first place. We're clearly in a time of shifting borders wherein nations come and go, as well as gerrymander. 

No one agrees on the maps of West Asia or East Europe anymore. That data layer has gotten rather corrupted, which in turn makes the concept of "citizenship" more difficult to get clear on.

What we do see is the geography of our playing board, in terms of its physical features, versus what the human ethnicities project. The ethnic projections are still important, on many levels, and have to do with self organization, operating as a group. That's something humans are not spontaneously any good at. They need enculturation and education, to customize their outward behavior.

How is mandatory conscription not slavery? A government that people want to support only need provide myriad opportunities for public service. Maybe you're on UBI and regard your government service as volunteer work. So much the better. Those of independent means are much harder to bribe or sway with the promise of funds.

They say "money talks" and say "rich and powerful" as if those two go together, but a lot of the time what talks is not the money but the perceptions it may assist in creating. Or not. Perceptions spread like wildfire without needing a big push from the sponsors sometimes.

Flatlandia

ET: Wow that sounds ambitious and like the architecture of some computer game, with levels, as we progress up the dimension ladder.

Your beginning seems influenced (in the poetic sense, cite Harold Bloom) by Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, a classic piece of satire, not a math book at all, but relied upon heavily by popularizers of what became Hilbert Space retrospectively i.e. the n-dimensional playground sandbox of ML and AI.

You follow the textbook grooves pretty closely through point, line, square, and cube but then veer off in going from cube to sphere, as in conventional university maths there’s no change in dimension when a cube morphs like that into a bowling ball i.e. the introduction of curvature doesn’t add a new dimension. 

The door to higher dimensions in Hilbert Space is through adding more and more orthogonals, with the caveat being: you get to confess visualization becomes difficult beyond the first three. But some high priests and gifted amateur mystics are able to witness said Hypercross, the Holy Tesseract. 

Yes, the math goes kinda culty in this ‘hood, in terms of jargon, but in terms of analogy and metaphor it works well, as “Euclidean distance” keeps being meaningful no matter how many dimensions are involved, as does the notion of address adjacency. 

N-dimensional sphere packing comes with an elegant algebra. 

Those at home in Hilbert Space tend to do well economically. The metaphysical heritage of the British Empire. Except it’s French and German just as deeply. XYZ coordinates are quasi-universal, as is the scholastic consensus that “space is 3D”. Few ever fight City Hall on that one (Bucky an outlier for sure, and perhaps the best known of such mavericks).

Flatland concerns itself mainly with a sphere talking down to a circle as I recall. The circle gets a headache trying to imagine the space the sphere is in, whereas we readers consider the sphere’s space our home stomping ground — we have the opposite problem: imagining ourselves in an entirely flat world. Is this possible? I’ll admit it’s a challenge as the tendency is to “look down” on some squares-ville meaning we’re still in god’s eye mode and haven’t yet lost the 3rd dimension. Try again?

This little comic book has to be one of the most influential tracts ever published, right up there with the theses of Martin Luther.

I’m intrigued by your neutrality talk and in the background I’m thinking of “neutrality studies” a branch of “peace studies” which some colleges and universities have had a major in, although I don’t believe the genre “peace college” has anything to counter the well-established “war college” trope. My storyboard “schools for diplomats” might qualify someday.

I’m saying I spontaneously connect your (|+.0.-|) neutrality talk to geopolitics, which I’m somewhat geared into. When it comes to word2vec and inter-word hyper-distance, “neutrality” definitely haunts the world stage, in the sense of “appears frequently”.

I’ll be somewhat in the bleachers (innocent bystander, observer, spectator) vs-a-vs your starting over from scratch dimension ladder project, as I’m already pre-committed to hammering out my own (inherited, extending a lineage). 

I’m also interested in what you mean by “pre point” as we have our “prefrequency” notion in the 4D talk I espouse (4D being like a brand, a logo, me having registered 4Dsolutions.net as a domain name awhile ago). 

I’ll check in on your progress and see if I can make use of some of your PR. From my angle, all systems require spin and PR to have a half life. PR is akin to propaganda, that which propagates. In the old Catholic bureaucracy, which spoke Latin, there was nothing especially disreputable about the term. It only lost its neutrality, even positivity, when it became associated with the dastardly nefarious activities of that other guy, the baddie. I find English (the language) especially colored by “goodie vs baddie” ideas, which extend to colorizing the mathematics e.g. negative secondary to positive, left secondary to right. They’re imbalanced.