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.