Saved Prompts

GST @ Synergetics on the Web

The following are prompts I've used against the Perplexity LLM. Feel free to try them yourself.

• How do Dorion Sagan, author of Into the Cool, and economist Steve Keen overlap, in terms of emphasizing thermodynamics, with Earth as a sun-powered open system? How do Kenneth Boulding and Buckminster Fuller echo this same theme? What other economists pay attention to the "cosmic context" meaning the facts about energy starting from first principles?
  
  
• Follow-up: How might we integrate the thinking of economist Paul Romer into that of the aforementioned thermodynamically-aware systems thinkers: Buckminster Fuller, Steve Keen, Kenneth Boulding and Herman Daly? [Exhibit 1]
  
  
• Explain Steve Keen's critique of the labor theory of value in economics. How might his views be linked to the bigger thermodynamic picture in which Planet Earth is the recipient of steady grant income (not a loan) in the form of terawatts of solar energy, creating the Markov chain reactions describing the daily energy budget? [Exhibit 2]
  
  
• Buckminster Fuller wrote about "the industry industry missed" meaning the coupling of aerospace level know-how to the problem of how to mass produce dwellings. In the US, the mobile home industry has provided shelters for vast numbers of fixed income retirees. China seems to be doing something closer to Fuller's vision, by rolling out dwelling unit options that incorporate better weather proofing and a higher tech image. Do we expect Americans to eventually catch up with something more appealing than "tiny homes", "mobile homes" and "destination trailers"? [Exhibit 3]

Related reading:

Post to Wanderers Group (July 1, 2025)

Rust Never Sleeps

Although I was born in Chicago, I don’t get back there often and always regard opportunities in this regard as exotic occasions.  My most recent trip was in connection with a DjangoCon. I was one of the speakers, as well as an Open Bastion sidekick, helping out as a “snake wrangler” (we’re talking Python) for Steve Holden, the conference organizer.

As a part of this tour (of duty, in the sense of work-related) I went on one of those riverboat rides that focuses on Chicago’s architecture. Passengers look upward as the tour guide speaks knowledgeably, through the amplified speaker system, about high rises one could put down anywhere, versus high rises which reference their environment, by alluding to other buildings in various ways.

Today I was thinking back to that riverboat tour while gazing up at these brand new mid-height office buildings here in Portland, on SE 20th just on the south side of the bridge over I-84, behind the art deco era radio station. These new buildings are so new they’re not yet populated with tenants, and yet its surfaces are rusting already. The facade recalls a kind of dreary (?) industrial landscape wherein it rains all the time.  A landscape like Portland’s. I can see the appeal.

Portland architects have mustered around the “rust motif” in a big way, something I’ve talked about with respect to a certain pedestrian bridge over a railway near SE Clinton and 15th. That rusty hulk references the east side esplanade pylons (dark with rust) which are in turn alluded to by the Oregon Convention Center’s deliberately rusty sculptures. The point being: this is a city where it rains all the time, and rather than fight the rust aesthetic, why not embrace it? Start with new buildings already rusty why not? The rust provides a patina that actually protects the deeper layers, like tree bark, like skin.

Is the rust motif actually dreary? That’s a deeper question about the rainforest ecosystem itself. Portland is close to the Pacific ocean, about an hour west by car. Weather systems like to dump their moisture as they move towards dryer climes, crossing the Cascade range and blowing across the high desert. Winds get sucked from the easterly direction as well, snaking along the Columbia Gorge at high speed, powering countless windmills.

Today, however, was bright and sunny, in the seventies (Fahrenheit), yesterday in the nineties. I was heading for Costello’s, a coffee shop devoted to the theme of world travel, riding the bus, while texting a friend in Cyprus I’ve often texted when in the liminal space of public transportation. I take pride in TriMet and used to work for it tangentially, in the Transportation Reaching People department, through various county offices, Clackamas County in particular. 

Overlapping Scenarios

After my Knowledge Engineering meetup with Caltrop City (nick), I moved my operation down valley. Ryan was ready to rejoin his clan, having been initiated into our reading programs, involving Amy’s classic, a book on Markov chains, other Active Inference relevant readings. 

We talked about the three minds model during the car trip, and the potential role of dreams, and journaling them. “It’s OK to engage in a discipline habitually, religiously, and then suddenly go cold turkey, if that’s what works for you” I recall saying.

A three tier model of the mind also featured in the KE meetup: perception, attention, meta-awareness being the namespaces there. Golden Spike GNN.

Ryan got the tour of the Flextegrity Museum after which I dropped him off at Lorax Manor in Eugene, which to my mind sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss. 

Before we left, Dr. D. had sent the output of his program to solve the Snake Cube, like one of Rubic’s in being 3x3x3, but presenting a different challenge. A string of 3-long and 2-long cubes folds up in a specific way. He later shared his C source code with us, taking  me take to my days at Sunshine Elite Education, and its focus on dynamic programming techniques for solving just such puzzles.

What I noticed right away with Atlas Shrugged Part III (its original name) was it used different actors for so many key roles.

I’m thinking of a science fiction movie in which Ayn Rand tunes in Bucky big time and becomes a fan, altering her philosophy accordingly, not in the direction of Marxism, which was never a Russian ideology to begin with, but in the direction of Ouspensky. 

Man cannot do. 

Some get lucky though, like “Bob” Dobbs, and/or John Galt.

Post Tournament

I thank President Id as we Freudians might call him, for spilling the beans regarding what the numbskulls all around him are thinking, in terms of further decapitation exercises. Their rhetoric sounds kinda head choppy, not unlike Al Qaeda’s.

Sometimes the best a president can do is spill beans, as an insider, to where they don’t want you in meetings, at which point those meetings are delegitimized, so Catch 22.

My faculty visitors popped by for another photo shoot this morning. Toronto has been to Germany (back to that shorthand I was talking about). He showed us his skills as a foot bagger. Dante doesn’t tend to say Hacky Sacker out of respect for the copyright holder of that term, the giant Wham-O. He lives proximally to Toronto, not in Toronto.

Yes, our network is obviously global, always has been, given how much RBF got around, never traveling as a tourist.

The tournament was in Willamette Park, West Linn. By “tournament” I mean a whole set of events, some competitive, some less so. Dante is more a freestyle artist, and he treated Casey and I to a display of his skills at the food court last night, the new one on Hawthorne.

Synergetics Punk

Tripping on Tetrahedra (School of Tomorrow)

:: zig-zagging ::

It's not like my phone suddenly starts ringing off the hook when DC (The District) suddenly goes crazy. 

The District has always been crazy, ever since I was born, right around the time of the Kennedy assassination, and it's been downhill from there. I dodged the draft in that window after the American War in Southeast Asia (with people now egging on another one) plus as a Quaker I'd have fought for my right to not participate in such "organized" madness (i.e. chaos).

All of which is to say, I'm paying attention, but really have no active short term role in Atlanticist affairs.

With my eye on the longer term, I've continued to be productive on Synergeo, going ahead with how I'd think MHCC (a local community college) would wanna look at it: as a how best to teach teachers, who in turn take it to the frontline. 

By "it" I mean "whatever" but in this case I'm also speaking more specifically about Quadray Coordinates, an aspect of Cascadian Synergetics I've been sharing through my Philosophy Talk blog lately, among other places.

I'm continuing to hammer on some sharable color scheme, thanks to earlier meetups with Germany and Mexico, using those nation names as shorthand mnemonics for some individuals on the call. I'm in Portland, as we all know (PDX in Oregon, Cascadia, Pacwest or whatever... PNW). 

I call it "landing the spaceship" i.e. coming in from Zero G in a tumbling tetrahedron, where we wanna no longer postpone or equivocate as to "which side is down", time to choose, with the most logical thing being, with a caltrop, to put three legs on the ground, in tripod formation, with the fourth spoke straight up. 

Now that the ship has landed (up ahead of us) let's establish a color code that also locks in an angle of view vs-a-vs some "my left" (blue) and "my right" (red), with yellow in back (3rd leg) and green up top. I might be a human on foot, I might be a drone about head high. The apparatus ahead is like a radio antenna with a blinking green light at the top.

The point (one of them) is to well-establish the mathematical (and computer scientific) notion of "mapping" e.g. of 

A to Red
B to Green
C to Blue
D to Yellow. 

If that all seems arbitrary, it is. 

In Python we'd go: {A: 'Red', B: 'Green', C: 'Blue', D: 'Yellow'}. That my A, B, C, D have no quotes around them means they're names of objects in the namespace. 

That's right: they're the names of IVM vectors, instances of the Qvector class (quadray class) in my Python framework, all free online at the School of Tomorrow.

That's a screenshot of me in Spyder, constructing the dict I was just mentioning, in Python.

The Digital Mathematics curriculum I favor, native to the Silicon Forest, mixes computer programming with math as a single subject, and pays a lot of attention to "types" as in "floating point" versus "integer" but then also in the mathematical sense of Real type (R) versus Rational type (Q). 

N < W < Z < Q < R < C as some put it (progressively broader categories of number type). 

I'm supposed to use different Unicode glyphs for some of them, so call me lazy (a geek virtue).

WILPF Memo

Per my memo to the WILPF listserv just now, wherever enrichment is happening geographically, the consortium structure, mirroring CERN's lets say (an afterthought, not in the memo), would allow faculty and engineering departments to keep up to date on the (monitored) process, meaning Iranian scientists will continue contributing their talents while the Iranian admin continues securing enough inventory for the civilian programs.

WILPF of course sides with Iran in supporting the proposed UN ban treaty on nuke weapons. Such weapons, the choice of juvenile cowards, are used to threaten more principled and noble entities with destruction "or else". 

Said ban treaty is distinct from the more watered-down Nonproliferation Treaty which Iran has abided by (unlike some non signatory states or stans we might mention).

Iranians will have no problem procuring and operating more up-to-date civilian tech once the dust settles, and will now have more reason to do so. The technology just keeps getting better. 

Wherever enrichment happens, Iranians will be monitoring the supply chain, as they're part of IAEA as well, and it's in Iran's interest to enforce the UN ban treaty, once it's ratified.

Quoting from my memo (I don't have an URL for it):

Per these attacks by the neocons on Iranian nuke facilities: hardware in the nuke industry has a short half life meaning it amortizes rather quickly in terms of newer, better models coming online with support tech to boot, ergo Iran can't be stopped from at least planning to buy into the next round of nuke tech. Murdering a few scientists, however vicious, isn't going to change anything on that score. Iran will be able to procure and operate newer versions of whatever is destroyed, especially in a world without sanctions and United Nations banned nuke weapons (WILPF's goal).

Should Iran give up on domestic enrichment? Where enrichment operations are sited has less to do with ownership than with monitoring. Iran was eager to let IAEA keep monitoring its programs because it was proudly anti nuke weapon (nuke weapons are for cowards, obviously), but if the IAEA has to only monitor enrichment outside the Middle East for now, that won't mean Iranian faculty and stockholders can't nevertheless benefit from participating in the consortium. Iran will still be in the enrichment business, wherever the facilities are geographically located. That's my prediction.

I don't see Netenyahu accomplishing anything positively significant on behalf of the people he claims (weakly) to represent with his silly "Rising Lion" scenario (scoff, snicker), a tawdry piece of melodrama like something only a really poor-quality Hollywood studio would come up with. Rotten tomatoes x 10. 

Yeah, I spelled the dude's name wrong. Who cares, right?

Apex Outward Packing

Me to designer of the above: on this one I’d maybe put the labeling spheres right over the tet corners and not have them inside the tip tetras. Colored balls label vertexes more than they do volumes. 

Then of course I’ve proposed using the term “CCP-sized” if the balls are more than just heuristic labeling devices for the purposes of description, and actually are a part of the objective vista, important in their own right. Not ideological symbols but actual objective phenomena. In that case, their precise size actually matters, as I want CCP balls to touch each other (four balls make an IVM tetrahedron). Yours rarely do. You’ve come across as disinterested in the CCP of CCP-sized balls, but then seem OK with Struppi’s colored ball packings and consecutive numbering schemes.

Yes, there’s a school of thought says all these polemical word acts, such as sarcasm, are “violent” however I come from the “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” nursery down the hall, where “use your words” to a preschooler means “rather than indulge in physically outward violent acts that may lead to physical injury, express your attitude verbally in a clear and simple language.” 

That’s what “alternatives to violence” workshops, like in prisons, often feature: better verbal communication skills. We don’t punish people who “use their words” (versus “act out”) by name-calling them “violent” (that comes across as a low blow, a dirty trick, kinda “forked tongue” if you ask me). 

So sarcasm is OK. We Quakers forswear outward violence meaning it’s all about the power of the pen being greater than that of the sword. That means edgy writing, sharp wit, is encouraged, not dumbed down with a lot of waffle whiffle sniffle piffle.

I was familiar with apex-outward packing as an option, but was doing animated GIFs of center-outward (1, 12, 42, 92, 162…), and such, so long ago that OEIS itself mentions my name in the links section, has for a long time. You never link to OEIS. I judge a scholar on how much room they have for egos other than their own (without necessarily dismissing their own egos).

Your rigorous insisting on same (apex outward), versus concentric (starting with Orange or Black), starting with Blue (so arbitrary!) and growing in the direction of the RYG triangle, 3, 6, 10, 15… with cumulative tetrahedral numbers (1, 4, 10, 20 35…) showing up on Reds, because Red is always the last in our Top Down Left to Right algorithm (TDLR), helped me hammer on my codebase and produce more content in my Jupyter Notebooks. 

That’s what I was taught by Struppi when he briefed me on what you’d been doing, then I learned later it was still up for grabs to some degree. Oh well, what’s important is internal consistency. Internal to my own corpus. We can swap in different algorithms, just give them names so we can tell them apart. 

For my purposes, I had to choose one when I had a window to number all the balls out to what was it? 

Ball 15 is at the body center of a 4-frequency so the next triangle out is what triangular number? 

Packing CCP balls (in the mind’s eye — no physical objects necessary if you’re unable to obtain educational supplies, you might be a prisoner in some XYZer jail):

Layer: Tri-number: Enumeration: Comment

• L0: 1: (1) (B): apex beginning starting with BYRG-Byrd duotet of volume 3
• L1: 3:  (2 3 4) (GYR): (2 is green, then Y then R) 
• L2: 6: (5 6 7 8 9 10): (make 10 red) 
• L3: 10: (11… 15… 20): (11 is green, 15 is mid tetrahedron)
• L4: 15: (21… 35): (21 is green)

https://github.com/4dsolutions/School_of_Tomorrow/blob/master/Packing_algorithms.ipynb

Now you and Struppi are refining and defining on ahead without me regarding all kinds of additional color coding matters. I’ve had a consistent color coding of Holy Grail polyhedra since the 1990s I’m not about to mess with any more than I’d mess with the Lakota mapping of Red to North. 

I’m content with my harvest of BRYG-bryg color coding for the DuoTet. I know that’ll be compatible with whatever plumbing you guys work out. In the meantime, although I practice teaching synergetics to the “Wtuff Guy” I think my readers all know that’s supposed to seem pretty hopeless. They’re supposed to figure it out while you’re still scratching your head. They feel smart and rewarded. You have been of much service. Keep it going!

Top Down Templates

Top Down Template is maybe just a synonym for Framework. Using a canned framework is the opposite of home growing all the code, which may amount to reinventing the wheel in the pejorative sense. 

Gene Fowler would argue that we do need to reinvent wheels from time to time, to keep up with our own innate abilities and to not lose touch with first principles, something like that.

Codomyrmex is a Github repo with what we might call generic code, already modularized, well organized, and generalized to a high level. It's a framework. Just reading it is instructive, as it radiates page after page of state of the art best practices.

Grokking History

:: thirsters meet (on a different night) ::

At Thirsters last night, I proposed my thesis that Donald Trump's strategy, of blaming Biden for the war in Ukraine, while maybe not historically accurate, seemed to be working. A side benefit is Biden wouldn't really be taking the blame because his mind was going at the time and he was running on empty shibboleths.

In actuality, the B team (B for president Blinken) was going with a flow established way back in Zbigniew Brzezinski's time. The momentum stemmed from a longstanding insecurity regarding being the world's only superpower through a next American Century. How could this be accomplished?

From one of my outbound emails of April 1, 2025:

Is it fair to characterize Anne Applebaum's views as consistent with those of Zbigniew Brzezinski? Does Applebaum ever explicitly praise Brzezinski? Who are her adjacent ideologues, meaning what historians are most similar to her in terms of how they view contemporary geopolitics. What thinkers would we consider diametrically opposed to Applebaum meaning who are her chief critics, if she has any?

That'd be quoting a prompt I'd already sent to Perplexity.ai.  Here's a link to the LLM's reply.

What Trump is attempting to do is break the news to the American people that the neocon project to "weaken Russia" by allying with Uke Russophobes, was misguided from the beginning and engaged in by losers. 

Their loss could be our win, if we manage to root out the decrepit and obsolete thinking that drove Biden's geriatric policies in the first place.

One of our number used Grok during our meetup, to check up on the likely views of General McPeak (a four star general and former member of the joint chiefs of staff), who may be joining us again. I missed that earlier meetup, but maybe I'll make the next one. 

I'll ask Grok about him too (for this blog post).

Excerpt from Grok's reply:

Comparing the views of General Merrill A. McPeak, a former four-star general and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with those of retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor on the war in Ukraine is challenging due to the limited public statements from McPeak on this specific topic. McPeak, who served as Air Force Chief of Staff from 1990 to 1994, has not been prominently associated with detailed public commentary on the Ukraine conflict, particularly in recent years. His public record focuses more on military strategy, leadership, and historical operations like the Gulf War, rather than current geopolitical conflicts such as Ukraine. In contrast, Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and former Trump administration advisor, has been vocal and controversial in his commentary on the Ukraine war, often expressing views that align with a pro-Russian perspective and skepticism of U.S. involvement. Below, I’ll outline their respective positions based on available information, noting where gaps exist for McPeak, and provide a comparison.

We talked about the movie Dr. Strangelove a lot. I hyped one of my other fave Peter Sellers movies: Being There, based on the novel by Jerzy Kosiński. This was before our host, Art, showed up. These days Thirsters meet in his beautiful old Portland home, whereas we used to meet at a McMenamins.

Pound Era Mathematics (School of Tomorrow)

Debate Circuits

I’ve been off the high school debate circuit for a good long while by now. At my high point in participation I co-chaperoned our Cleveland Cannibals to nationals in Indianapolis. Our other chaperone was an assistant coach for the team and an army recruiter who had served in Afghanistan. He did all the driving in our rented Jeep Cherokee.

Gonzo, the lead coach, generously gave me first dibs on the Indianapolis meetup as my daughter had played a pivotal role in both forming the team and propelling it to fame and glory. He’d waited a long time to see the National Forensic League national level game and had earlier accompanied the team to Dallas after their previous best in state showing.

I’ve written about these events before, and shared pictures. I’d never been to a national level National Forensic League championship either and found the whole adventure a highly educational experience.

What I’m wondering about today, from my sideline position, with no contacts in the local high schools to speak of, is whether teams are using current affairs as an opportunity to educate themselves. To what extent have the Cannibals been wrestling with the war in Ukraine for example, or the genocide in Gaza?

I’m turning 67 today and predictably have no kids in high school. My offspring are both working professionals. 

So my habit,, when looking for such information, is to turn to YouTube and search on high school debate teams as a topic, looking for maybe a juicy Lincoln Douglas debate on whether said war in Ukraine was provoked or unprovoked, to use the semantics of this time frame. Or are all such debates confined to Model NATO or Model UN?

To some extent the debate world became self-ostracizing when it came up with “spreading” as somehow a sporting technique. The Lincoln Douglas format was not degraded to quite the same extent in my experience. The sport should work backwards from what’s actually a needed skill, such as speaking in measured tones amenable to simultaneous translation. 

Getting good at spreading i.e. learning to talk insanely fast with breath control coaching, was mostly useful if your career goal was to read those fast-scrolling disclaimers tacked on to some commercials, especially drug commercials. 

But those careers have been turned over to bots by now, for the most part. Real humans aren’t needed when it comes to speed-reading those scripted legal-language voiceovers.

Tiny Homes

For sure we've noticed the Space Capsule Homes website, and I've launched into my usual chatter I'll call "EPCOT West", meaning I'm advocating for alternatives "tiny home" concepts, on the model that the campground offers amenities outside of the pods, such as a cafeteria and meetup spaces, workshops (as in "makerspaces" -- Glenn disliked that term "maker") and whatever.

Today the focus was Caltrop City, or Crescent City, with its monument to the Tetrapod (a caltrop variant). We could have contemplative types, already engaged in religious studies, say, do a stint in a Capsule and report back on the experience. 

The whole point is to (a) garner feedback and (b) give would-be adopters of novel lifestyles a "try before you buy" experience.  We have some of the business model worked out, with help from AI.

Speaking of religious studies, Julian of Norwich has fast becoming a patron saint, for reasons we might discuss in other journal entries.

The period between the two world wars is of core interest in School of Tomorrow coursework. We talk about Huey Long, and we talk about H.G. Wells and his 1922 Washington and the Hope of Peace. 

We study H.G. Wells anyway, for his science fiction, but in this corpus he's hoping to sober up (even though 1920s post-war New York is making him giddy -- that Roaring 20s sensation) and buckle down to prevent a next world war. An exercise we know now was unsuccessful. 

A main takeaway: my recollection, confirmed by AI, is Wells thought the UK and Europeans were overly punitive towards the Russians. Many parallels to the present situation.

Zombie Apocalypse

We have a lot of bureaucracies thinking their job is to determine where to move large populations en masse. Another approach is give every camper a valid travel pass and an expense account (no, not open ended) and let them chart a course for themselves. Asylum Cities might try to recruit them, and might succeed in some cases, but there's no predicting in advance what the dispersal pattern will be.

However the Earthlings currently are trained to think in terms of fenced or walled off territories, with the portculus coming down on any unauthorized movements. You'll need some real ID and a credit score before privatized services, a long time ago public, let you onto their property. With everything privatized, the public has no space, and is expected to sign on with one oligarchy or another is a valued mercenary.

The idea of "nation state" as "holding pen" was popularized by such movies as Hunger Games and Punishment Park. The younger generation is desperate to get out from under the tyranny of oldsters, who've hardened their hearts over the years, calcified their thinking, and now steer with cold dead hands. 

Or call them corporations: unoccupied zombie hulks, long gone inside, but persisting as mega-donors and sponsors of Supreme Court Better Living [tm]. Such is our "democracy racket" today, designed to fool everyone always, but a failure in that respect. Many see through the ruse.

Most of the Palestinians I know are Americans and they have passports to travel back and forth to old haunts in Jordan or Kuwait or whatever places. I don't personally know any who are hankering to return to the Middle East in its present state of lawlessness and borderless no mans' lands. That's a hell hole to be escaped. 

But the United Nations seems content to run open air prisons indefinitely, because the alternative is to offer the privileges of nationhood (e.g. human rights) to the world's dispossessed, its undocumented, and this would be upsetting to the zombie class.

In allowing (a) giant corporations to be seen as people with human rights -- the right to lie included -- and (b) in allowing money to count as speech, such that those with the most money have the most speech, the legislating lawyer class destroyed the worth (the jurisdiction) of the English language, pretty much, in its default state. 

Not only is English a buggy junkyard of broken code, of course. We're all wrestling with the challenge of coding up some new protocols that won't repeat these egregious and thoughtless (actually highly premeditated) mistakes of past, long-gone, generations of naked ape who didn't know any better.

Cultagory Theory: Revectoring Psyons

Experienced readers in the humanities may want to link this lecture, or presentation, to Harold Bloom's Map of Misreading, as to "revector" as I call it, is to willfully, or perhaps unconsciously, "misread", meaning to "warp the meaning of", to re-aim or re-spin. 

Sometimes one misreads "under the influence of" meaning one can hardly help but apply such-and-such an interpretation, because of one's operational context and background i.e. one's world view (gestalts). Is "misreading" a bad thing then? That's not the right question.

I think of Synergetics as "an alloy", meaning another tensive through-line within the culture serving a binding or interconnecting purpose, as an airline does over a geometry, or a weather report over a region. We get a more informative map from flyovers, ala the U2 or that other one, on exhibit in McMinnville (SR-71). 

An alloy is strong because of the electromagnetics and how local adjacency adds up to global properties and capabilities. But then Synergetics brings "gravity" into the equations where a regular chemist might not, because the language itself is the alloy in this picture, and "gravity" is always being "revectors" or "accelerated" as some invisible membrane. The field gets bestirred. 

What's interesting about spy novels and TV shows, including kid cartoons about Gru and his minions, is the emphasis on psychological, meaning theatrical, concepts of persona and mask. Felonius Gru and his wife Lucy Wilde have to take regular jobs and act like muggles. They're not good at living in disguise though, to comic effect. The point for the more casual reader though, just going for the gist, is that one is thinking one way and acting another. The outward character does not reveal in inward thought process. That's what's oft highlighted in spy novels, but it's characteristic of the human condition more generally and a major topic in psychology.

What is the point of my point though? I'm suggesting the Synergetics is a "spy discipline" in that it's masked as some sort of particle physics maybe, and yet it's a work in the humanities, all about keeping its vocab remote and applying spins of its own. If you want to move towards Synergetics, then think about words revectoring, such as in advertising, such as in Cultagory Theory, wherein the re-vectoring of words along new word-meaning trajectories, is the whole point of the science.  Both doing it, and appreciating how it's done.  Precession, in other words. That's a keyword in Synergetics. The side effects turn out to be the effects we're after. There's a link here to "misdirection" as well then, as in stage magic.

We might characterize Synergetics as a "fast lane" or "fast track" that continues to provide traction, allowing purposeful motion, closer to "as the crow flies" (or the drone). Thanks to the memorized maps, obtained through misreading (warping lenses), we're ready to see our way clear between subcultures along routes that definitely appear as shortcuts to those just starting to tune in. You'll get to virology quickly, without tuning out, without needing a long detour in the medical sciences. The icosahedral nature of the nucleocapsid, not a feature of all viruses, is something you can read about, and even visualize, without glazing over (tuning out).

Campus Visit

:: faculty lounge ::

I finally got to visit some campus housing in the Cascadian region that I'd never seen. 

Those visiting faculty from July, 2020, during tumultuous political theater, the downtown Joker Riots, gave me the tour. 

As mentioned then, these are hardy types, used to off-grid living and installers of their own solar panels, battery packs, and water cistern to serve their shared faculty lounge unit. 

The back road is unmarked so you kind of have to know where you're going ahead of time.

My excuse for getting to this neck of the woods, taking a car ferry, was Uncle Bill's 100th birthday celebration in West Seattle. His kids, fully grown adults with kids and in some cases grandkids, had organized it well, including by inviting some sea shanty singers to lead us through some verses, while encouraging our joining-in. Bill seemed to know quite a few.

The card I gave Bill, with the partial family tree diagrammed inside, was decorated with CogSec decals, originally sent from the UC Davis area near Sacramento.  CogSec = Cognitive Security. We think of it as part of the USA OS infrastructure.

Speaking of Cascadia and campus facilities, I was back at MHCC last Friday for another Dead Mathematician Society meetup. We played some fun games this time. Then we retreated to a Wanderers haunt, the site of gatherings, a farm in Boring.

My Oregon Curriculum Network stuff is presumably queued for review, at both MHCC and OES. At the latter because I heeded a heads up from Alison, exGoogle, and part of my LinkedIn network.

:: DMS @ MHCC ::

Breakfast at Tom’s

I continued my discussions with Terry of ISEPP this morning, over omelettes at Tom’s. 

I’m scanning some of my notes from the meeting, which included me briefly indication why we might not couple “squares” with “to the second power” (or “cubes” with “third power”) because other, simpler shapes (triangle and tetrahedron) work better, at least in some special cases (all cases are :special”) — a point I feel past, having made it many times.

We reminisced about his dealings with various institutions, which were win-win in the sense that Portland enjoyed a strong lecture series, whereas sponsors got to advertise their sincere support for such a lecture series, and help out in other ways. 

In cases where the sponsors were schools, Terry would make sure the invited speakers, big names in many cases, also made it to said schools.

We went through many cups of coffee.

Economics Meets Thermodynamics

A sequence of discoveries for me is: I'd long been listening to Terry Bristol, ISEPP president, wrestle with the twisted story of thermodynamics, the discipline, still ongoing. 

Words like "entropy" continue to pick up new spin, as different disciplines, such as Machine Learning, have a go at working it in. I'd say successfully enough, from my angle.  As long as there's "noise...".

Terry goes to the Carnot corpus, both father (Lazare) and son (Sadi), and traces the evolution of basic concepts vs-a-vs a more Anglophone corpus, which, although in the same ballpark is not quite the same. 

The English and French were tugging the emergent field of thermodynamics in different directions, in ways not always easy to sort out or disentangle.

Careless conflation of subtle differences in meaning, in the rear view mirror, is always the temptation, especially when one's goal is to employ the supposed advantages of hindsight. Thomas Kuhn makes the same point in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions: the storytellers like to airbrush out the messy details.

Thanks to cosmetic censorship, the lay public may think everyone in a subculture is thereby on the same page. A stereotype around mathematics, for example, is it's a universal language and, as such, is hardly marred by the unsightly disagreements that fracture the less settled disciplines.

Put another way: revisionism is endemic to history-telling, especially when the topic is as ephemeral as the meaning of technical terms in co-existing namespaces.

From that trampoline-background, I jump to my General Systems Theory view, echoed by Dorion Sagan and Eric D. Schneider in their book Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life.  I see planet Earth as an open system, not as zero-sum. Humans channel the energy, per water wheels et cetera. Plants turn air and dirt into animal-powering edibles by photosynthesis.

Dorion took the stage here in Portland that time (as had his dad Carl Sagan, and his mom Lynn Margulis, all generously sponsored through the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy, Terry's nonprofit) to give us a coherent picture of where Earth is getting its energy from -- and it's not really controversial once you see it. 

Like of course. 

So our daily energy budget isn't entirely from taxes and human labor then?

From that last question one can see I'm sounding themes in Economics, one of my interests. 

Then, through YouTube, I saw some clips of Steve Keen. His talk sounded more enlightened, and of course I mean from my angle. I'm not claiming some exalted objective authority regarding what matters, so much as narrating a sequence of new-to-me discoveries: from Terry talking thermodynamics, to Dorion, to Keen, not forgetting Paul Romer, another economist Terry would speak highly of.

Plus my GST work traces back to Kenneth Boulding, Bucky Fuller... maybe all the way back to Pharaoh Akhenaten. 

Only then, after getting Perplexity, the chatbot API, to fill me in more on Keen's thinking, did I learn, again from YouTube, that Keen and David Graeber were close associates. 

Learning that was a "small world moment" for me as I'd already wired in Graeber within my School of Tomorrow namespace (context), the anthropologist who taught at Yale and wrote about Bullshit Jobs, among other topics.  Debt: the First 5000 Years and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity are two others he authored or co-authored.

The picture here is of Earth getting to surf the energy gradient supplied by our star. The star powers the water cycle, keeping the rivers flowing, the turbines turning, the lights on, the TV on, the games going. Games like Rat Race and so on, whatever the humans are into (anthropology goes here). 

Ants, other bugs, have their own pattern languages.

Laying Track

:: Flying to the Moon by Russell Towle ::

I retired to the Ikea queen, my back room snooze nest, with the dog log, and the iPad, so I could drift off to the sounds of YouTube channels, at first consciously selected, then coming up in the algorithm on autopilot as I started fading in and out. 

I got into the weeds of Wall Street, with veteran traders explaining global economics and the widening living standards spread. 

What that one guy was saying is economists live in a bubble because their theories average way too much, hiding the spreads. The janitor plus the CEO, divided by two, or rather an army of janitors, divided by N, gives an income level for the matrix (algebra), whereas one of the key parameters has just been whitewashed. The economists miss the boat all too often. I've always suspected as much.

I guess the question this time is whether there's really a "no risk" option in state issued bonds, meaning US Treasuries, when the states issuing said bonds are on such shaky ground. The evolutionary clock continues ticking and a lot of the old thinking has a half life. Really, all of it does. That's why we have new thinking.

People are having a hard time making sense of what AI seems to be planning for them, but then there's a lot of trust in "the computer" however defined. Per Active Inference, we have our reality models and devote any free time to making them work, as that's a survival thing: having a sense of what's coming.

I was telling DK on the phone yesterday that I didn't think Oswald had "handlers" and it's not like a lot of people were testing the rules, in terms of going to the USSR and returning. He didn't really defect in either direction. He'd file paperwork. 

The guy (LHO) was aloof to the ways of his fellow humans but was willing to, had no choice but to, play their games. Lots of USers today are moving to Russia, meaning it's not a one way street. They might prefer the more orthodox culture, not that Oswald did.

DK mentioned the base in Japan (where LHO was stationed) was involved with U2 work, which as always, connected me mentally to the Prouty corpus. I know a lot of experts have been over this territory and know his line: that U2 was never "shot down" and there was good reason for an embarrassing-to-Dulles psyop at that time. Allen was not privy to that particular inner circle, but then I'm not saying Oswald was either, based on Prouty's elliptical writings.

On the bright side, a lot of the WW3 talk has shifted to the past tense recently, as the sense is the USG is less actively involved in poking the bear. That job has been turned over to the EU and west Ukrainians. 

My focus of late is formerly eastern Ukraine (New Russia) and intourist possibilities, not that I expect there's really any longer an Intourist. That's the agency our family booked with, for that Kabul --> Tashkent --> Moscow --> St. Petersbug --> Helsinki trip that time. The tour guides of Mariupol will tell their tale from the eastern angle, complete with new museums.

Mainly though, DK and I were focusing on Bilinski's rhombic dodecahedron, and how DK can model it with U, V, W modules, which make the fat and thin rhombohedra. Russell Towle came up in the conversation. I hadn't realized before how close that guy was to Merry Pranksters, which ties all three of us in the Cascadia culture a lot more, metaphysically speaking.

:: two BDs in an RT ::

Crypto Carts

I believe some avid researchers, hot on the trail of this or that, come to my blogs hoping for a lot of insights and tips into crypto, meaning crypto currencies. 

Why? 

Partly because Alec Nevala-Lee, a Bucky Fuller biographer, has helped spread awareness that Robert Kiyosaki the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy is a Fuller fan. I don't recall if Alec's book actually makes this connection; I'm recalling a 2022 podcast I recently came across thanks to Nurse Ratched (codename).

Well, not wanting to disappoint, I am cultivating a crypto thread, but it's somewhat narrowly focused to a template ecosystem we find here in Portland, Oregon: that of the food pod, consisting of food trucks, which all take credit and debit cards.

My mental model is especially influenced by two experiences: getting to enjoy Club Med as a family and, the The Chinook Book, which apparently died of covid (from the economic contraction associated therewith).

Image: I can stoke up my crypto account with a "tourist currency" (locals use it to), good at participating establishments, that gives me discounts if we reckon dollar for dollar. You could call these "dollars that go further than ordinary dollars" if you spend them wisely i.e. pay attention to where to go, what to buy.

The "stretched dollar" crypto, measured in units, given a name, goes to my account. I've paid for these tokens using a mainstream currency. The card and/or app associated with this account is able to pay merchants in that same crypto currency. They have the requisite device readers.

The crypto is pegged to my identity, like credit card money, meaning transactions leave more of a trace than in a strictly cash-based economy. This is part of the appeal:  transaction logging.  Big Brother, perhaps the name of a software suite back at headquarters, knows when and where you buy a burrito. We already have shopper cards that work the same way.

That's right: to my influences, I should add having a Fred Meyer card in my wallet, and getting discounts for using it, almost daily. The discount coupons Freddies sends me in the mail are customized towards what purchases I routinely make, I've noticed. Smart. I use the coupons when I think of it. My friend Dave is more of a master at this game, and I've learned from him.

What about Club Med you're asking? That's easy: we had to buy plastic beads, colored gold, copper, tan, and where these around our necks as necklaces. We might be scantily clad in beachwear, so who wants a bulky wallet? If I wanted a drink, I shortened my necklace, by handing over some beads to the vendor. 

Club Meds always seemed well-managed and well-designed. That's from a teenager's perspective. We already lived in Europe so joining the French working class on their vacations was actually more affordable than most ways of enjoying some fun in the sun. I especially remember the one in Romania, on the Black Sea. We drove there from Rome, with many stops before and after.

Getting all these ideas more concrete would require a simulation. I've written Python code to simulate a supermarket, with a shopper class, inventory class et cetera, from which instances get made. But it's too simple and has no graphical components. I'm just using it to teach Python, not research crypto carts inside the context of a SimCity.  SimCity would be another influence, or Sims more generally.

None of this crypto cart stuff really has to happen in Portland, if that's impractical. I'm thinking more in terms of refugee cities, Asylum Cities. I think refugee camps have already done stuff with crypto, am I wrong?  It's time to hit the chatbot I currently favor (Perplexity) and do some more digging.

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.