Overview from the Silicon Forest

Quadrays in Game World

{{ jumping through hoops }}

I might need to given in and buy myself a standard game controller. I'm happy to absorb information from gamer world, but not at the cost of needing to get good at any particular current favorite. I grew up on Doom, Quake and that genre, following Valve into Half Life 2, but without controller or console. The other lineage I got immersed in was Myst, Riven, Uru, by Cyan in Spokane. I'm abbreviating of course, skipping over any arcade favorites such as Tetris.

Anyway, as a side effect of being a "professor of Quadrays" (nuts to talk about 'em), I'm piggy-backing on a Crescent City project to fund a wider variety of implementations, beyond my own. Today was our hour meeting with the developer and it was partly about how to express the idea of quad-thrusters, per the QuadPod, in our evolving QuadCraft environment.

Defining my terms: Quadrays are by some assessments a juvenile toy used by crazies who want to challenge the dominant paradigm, but I push them as a conversation piece, aimed at opening space in the philosophy of mathematics that's friendly to children, with a tip of the hat to Montclair State (a "philosophy for children" headquarters), but is even more engaging once you're thoroughly familiar with the XYZ apparatus. 

That's a pretty big tent. A good portion of the n-dimensional conventions copy over, even if lose the distinction of being a Hilbert Space.

What's the difference between Reflection and Rotation? That's a deep one. 

Your reflection in the mirror is not simply a rotation of yourself in that a "mirror you", walking around, would seem curiously reversed, compared to if you simply turned around and walked in the opposite direction. Side-by-side, you'd not be identical twins.

But with simple arrows, directional edges, without distinguishing characteristics besides tip, tail and body, we might find it easy to define only rotation, such that -x, -y, and -z are 180 degree rotations of x, y, and z. 

Were we to forbid vector rotation, and accept only scaling (grow and shrink without change in direction), and tip-to-tail vector addition, then the x, y, z basis vectors would be helpless to add to any points outside the first octant, or call it (+,+,+), no matter how much the stretched. They need their negative twins to reach the other 7/8ths of space, the other seven octants.

If the above paragraph made sense, you're likely ready for Quadrays then.

The four quadrays, without need of rotation, only addition and scaling, reach all the points a full XYZ would reach, starting from the same center. 

Linear combinations of the four quadrays, in other words, span XYZ space, where XYZ space is only spanned by its own x, y and z basis vectors if we re-introduce rotation (we never needed reflection), where rotation is, in effect negation (vector reversal).

The quadrays permit vector reversal. Negation is just fine. But it's a form of rotation and is not needed to span volume omni-symmetrically about the origin.

All the above yammering is incredibly boring not to mention hard to decipher if your focus is on getting on with some game. But then later in a math class you might have some controller-based kinesthetic experience thrusting through the quadpod's four thrusters, and that'd help bolster your appreciation for the diagrams.

So our project is to turn these quadrays into a component of the game world, without making them the whole point. 

They'll be the point for a small minority maybe, of tourists, the ones I bring to the repo (on Github these days), as their tour guide. 

I'm the professor of Quadrays, after all, who wants to show off how they're implemented.

Citizenship for All

That’s a snippet of me commenting on YouTube in response to someone’s “globalist = Sorosista” equation, Sorosista being shorthand for George Soros follower and/or minion. As a Pythonista, I consider myself a type of globalist. I write about Python Nation as among the virtual nations of Cyberia, with no physical borders, and yet with adjacencies, such as to the Republic of Perl. I’m quite familiar with that borderland, generally friendly.

I remind people that the nation-state system is relatively new, with the USA especially big on adding properties in recent times, sometimes through associational compacts. I worked on the Belau story for several chapters — without getting there; I got to Truk a couple times. Talking Polynesia.

A lot of aboriginal, indigenous, nomadic peoples have never gotten fully documented, much like the gypsies of old. They’re refugees in many ways, trying to escape the vortex of border-nazi fascists, who dream of impervious fences everywhere, a veritable prison camp of a globe. Then you have diplomats and richie rich types who seem above needing to get their passports stamped.

I think if we’re going to really nail it down such that only documented citizens, of whatever country, have travel rights, then the least we can do is establish a default country of last resort, where anyone needing citizenship somewhere, is welcome to register. The full UN Declaration of Human Rights needs to pertain to every human, no exceptions, and not just to a privileged cast of the “properly documented” (as in pedigreed).

Unless and until everyone is dealt into the game, complete with travel rights if without a record of offenses, I side with those who don’t see that nation-states are all that serious about their game. They don’t seem to care how corrupt it is.  All those humans falling between the cracks, decade after decade, because not citizens of any “real” country. What kind of silly game is that? No wonder it’s fading fast. If you wanna save it, plug the holes. It’s thermodynamics.

A Computational Geometry

Per content in my Youtube channel, on Medium and so on, I've seen Cascadian Synergetics entering local systems through the open Silicon Forest portal. The architect in Bucky left us a computational geometry, something to sink our teeth into by means of computer programs. Simple ones. One or two liners in some cases.

 
This is because of our focus on the CCP, a well-known lattice in crystallography and in mathematics more generally. Other distinct meanings of CCP might get in the way, as name collisions, minus an ability to think in terms of namespaces, a faculty Python provides, Python being an open source, free computer language. We might say OSF instead of FOS sometimes.

 
The CCP may be described in terms of a growing arrangement of layered balls, typically fruits or cannon balls in the textbooks. Concentric layers in a cuboctahedral conformation is the trademark Synergetics way of showing it, giving the cuboctahedral number sequence per OEIS: 1, 12, 42, 92, 162... That's one line of code in Python.

 

What grade levels are we talking here? In my working model, that's up to faculty designers at the individual school level. Curricula typically employ "spiralling" meaning a topic is re-encountered at different levels, not "once and for all" in some strictly linear sequence. Topics get revisited, coming from different angles sometimes.

 
I'd see the power law, freed from any exclusively square-cubic context, introduced early: that area and volume increase or decrease as a 2nd and 3rd power of a shape's linear dimensional increase or decrease. Introduce phi-scaling i.e. a linear grow-shrink ratio (factor) of ~1.618 or ~0.618, phi's reciprocal. 

To these linear changes there correspond scale factors of phi to the 2nd and 3rd power, for computing the new area and volume respectively.

 
Starting with a shape known as the S module in Synergetics, we scale it up by phi, getting a new volume of S times phi to the 3rd power. Scale up this new larger volume's six edges by phi and get S times phi to the sixth power. S3 + S6 = 1, is one way to abbreviate the result, where 1 is likewise the volume of our D-edged tetrahedron, where D = the diameter of a CCP sphere.

In the above code snippet, sympy computes an enormously complicated expression for the S module's volume. We can use sympy to confirm this expression reduces to the integer 1. We also have a much simpler expression for the volume of S to begin with: 1/(2 * phi^5) or (1/2) * phi^-5 (where ^ means "raise to the power of" -- same as ** in Python).

Walden Four

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.