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.