Crescentia (Computed Imagery)

Summer Fair

:: Hawthorne Street Fair 2025 (slides) ::

Yeah, we'll be able to make some use of, as a mnemonic at least (some people say "meme"), of the fact that the White House dubbed its flagship presidential vehicle in Alaska (flown in?) "the beast" for this occasion. I'm not clear on when it was first benighted with this moniker, but it fits. Vlad and Donald rode in it together. 

You might recall: I was going on about the opportunity costs associated with journalistic accounts never linking to the Bucky stuff. That doesn't stop me from making those links myself, journalism be damned (a blog is a kind of journal, so hey, I'm a journalist too).

Those following our literature know how our BEAST modules (BASKET if you add a K) have special meaning for us, in terms of our geometry. 

So how's that for your concordance, if you're keeping one of those (some of our readers come from a Biblical background; I vaguely do but I'm not a chapter and verse kinda guy when it comes to that particular anthology). They're simply geometric shapes, tetrahedral wedges, that we use in various dissections of familiar polyhedrons (snore).

Exactly how that meme wedges into our puzzle will only become more clear in retrospect. What they say about 20-20 hindsight is true, even if 20-20 is a bit of an overstatement. Even with the benefit of an historical record, it all stays kinda blurry, per Lovecraft, or did I get that wrong? I thought Lovecraft considered Universe to be ultimately irrational in the sense of incommensurable.

Speaking of Lovecraft, I was asking Patrick why he thought two entirely separate booths at the Hawthorne Street Fair, both marketing cool art, featured (a) octopus images and (b) anatomically correct hearts. What were the chances? Hidden variables abound. Was there a common studio in the background somehow?

Then it occurred to me the octopus might actually be a rendering of Cthulhu, of whom Patrick had never heard (not everyone has, and even I do not count myself a Lovecraft fan, in the sense of not really having done enough homework to qualify (fan is a rank one earns), a distant admirer maybe?). That flash of insight didn't alter the calculus however, meaning I still found this coincidence surprising.

A tenant of a Jung-informed actively-inferred worldview (model) might include a rule of thumb something like: "expect coincidences that seem insanely improbable, not to mention meaningful" and with that expectation, said Jungian would not experience the same shock and surprise every time such a "miracle" happened. The Synergetics Dictionary contains this relevant meme (you can look it up): only the impossible happens.

D'ya wanna know more about the BEAST particles? This far down in a blog post, we've lost most readers, according to most models, so I put some of those nitty gritty details at the end, for those few who care. "Reward your most loyal readers", that's the rule of thumb, Patreon and all that.

A & B together build the regular tetrahedron, octahedron, cube, dodecahedron (rhombic), whereas the E & S mods have more sway in the five-fold symmetric realm. 

Then we're able to give up rigid assembly ideas and simply think in terms of volume equivalents, like measuring cups. Twenty-four A-fulls of water make a unit volume tetrahedron and all that.

How can we break down the volume of a regular tetrahedron in terms of the S module? 

This latter four-faceted wedge-shape bricks in the empty space between an octahedron (regular) and its inscribed icosahedron (faces flush), likewise regular. 

You might not think of a way right away, but in terms of volume equivalents: S3 + S6 = the UVT (Koski), the four-CCP-ball tet (centers network), meaning scale up your S module by phi (S3) and by phi again (S6) and they add to give us unity. Kinda fun.

Hawthorne Street Fair is mostly about people watching for me, as is the Oregon Zoo. People know they're on display and dress up in their most intriguing outfits, verging on outright cosplay in some cases. I walk around snapping stills, memorializing a yearly event.  Check back in my Flickr Photostream for many similar curations.

:: ruscadian view ::

School of Tomorrow: A Summer of Activism

Democracy's Decline

I had no idea this was happening until a few hours before, when I got a call from a neighbor. Indeed a lot of my neighbors and friends were there, including from other zip codes outside of 97214. 

People lined Hawthorne Boulevard, starting just a couple blocks east of Chavez, and held up signs. Some chanted. Some beat drums. Cars, unobstructed, would honk their support.

The ICE raids and police militarization have persuaded a lot of people that we no longer live in our beloved United States. Some alien authoritarian ideology has seized the levers of power and has turned against the citizenry. 

Money gets pumped into the war machine, charity for the bunker billionaires, but not into social services. The generic IQ of the political discourse seems to be dropping by the day, with lots of excuses for funding homicidal policies around the world.

This has all been going on for a long time however. Starting around Iran-Contra, people noticed that Congress was not really in charge. The Contras were being funded illegally, with drug money. 

That kind of "dirty war" was considered patriotic by the knuckle-dragger soldier of fortune types, eager to turn their military training into something remunerative in the private sector. When you train your youth in mostly military skills, what do you expect will be the outcome?

By now, the Pentagon itself has been privatized by defense contractors and their think tank cults, the Beltway Mafia, who dominate in DC and depend on military socialism for their welfare. They want you to believe it's our destiny, nay our fate, to "fight China" as dystopian thinking is their bread and butter.

Their lobby money, derived from profits, has flooded into politics thanks to Citizens United and similar initiatives, whereby astroturf and PACs have completely distorted the system, making it a Frankenstein monster obedient mainly to oligarchs and warmonger churches (these go together, many churches being cults around money grubbers). 

The USSA is an ugly and scary nation. The USA is widely missed. Many would-be tourist have stopped coming for similar reasons, and who can blame them?

Themed Communities

Shades of WestWorld.

Under the heading of spoofy, yet suggestive nevertheless:

could be a movie...

bed made

JPH is dog-friendly

As seen on Facebook

how it got started...

Village of the Future

The Village of the Future franchise starts to seem kind of obvious once you think about it. Manufacturers need to showcase prototypes, and are doing so, but you don’t go to a furniture store to sleep on the bed. If you’ve never slept on a bed before, maybe try a hotel?  But what if you just want to test a particular model of mattress, as seen on TV?

What if a specific hotel advertised itself as a mattress testing facility, and when you booked a room, you could choose which room based on which type of mattress it had. You might even get coupons to stay there in exchange for your testimony. Attend a focus group, fill out some surveys… is there a pool?

Is this all starting to sound a bit silly? Otherwise it would’ve been tried already right?

But then rental car agencies serve a similar purpose: people thinking they might buy a Tesla or Toyota of a certain model, maybe rent one first. Sure, the dealer allows test driving but who wants to deal with a dealer right off the bat? 

That could be further down in the decision tree (or up, depending on your decision tree’s orientation).

Here we’re not talking cars or beds so much as dwelling machines, akin to travel or destination trailers. But they’re not trailers. Closer to yurts. Some are domes. We might even feature some newfangled tents, nearer the sound stage, for use by performers and crew. 

The units might’ve even been helicopter delivered, per comic books of the 1900s, a future come true. 

Or they’re assembled on site, but from kits that get delivered from the factory, perhaps with a mix-in of local materials. They’re “manufactured homes” one could say, but that term has already been taken.

You will easily find prototypes such as the ones I’m talking about made in China. Russia has already staged this kind of showcase village outside of Moscow, ala the furniture store model. One tours, sure, but one does not move in for a period of days and live the lifestyle. 

That would be for a different type of establishment: a Village of the Future with “timeshare” (another taken term). These might become School of Tomorrow facilities overnight, if the prototypes, some of them, became widely adopted for civilian use.

Since these units are already being factory produced in Eurasia, and since Belt and Road has come a long way, the infrastructure is in place. 

The first Villages of the Future businesses will likely not be in North America, EPCOT notwithstanding, as the political leaders in those bioregions seem at a different point when it comes to melodrama and acting out. 

The US federation’s educational system still predisposes folks to long for a “white picket fence” whatever that is. Their ruling donor class is more interested in leisure for themselves than in designing a smart society. We’d need something more demur as a setting, for our startups.

But then this is way too broad brush stroke a characterization. North America is far from some uniform blend or ethnicity, Praise Allah. 

Picture little dots. These little campgrounds of the future will be spread around like granules of salt and pepper, other spices, and like the other franchises already dotting the planet, especially in Africa, where village life is not unknown.

Asylum City Logistics

The surveillance monitoring service I’m imagining for festivals and even daily living, allows onlookers to look through the same cameras, ODOT style, to see their loved ones and to get a better view of what’s happening. Many eyes make all bugs shallow as they say, meaning it’s a boon to have random onlookers checking the views and occasionally making reports.

An objection is if one lets the public see what you see then those up to no good will be able to evade monitoring. That’s allowed though, as is full burqa, complete concealment in a body suit or other costume, if that’s your gig. 

We might have Mickey Mouse people running around, not QR or bar coded, not park or grounds officials, just cosplay types. Public surveillance is of limited utility when it comes to tracking everyone’s identity. That isn’t the premise, nor promise.

On the other hand, a good security camera system is able to keep an eye on those objects some in the crowd, maybe children, will feel tempted to tamper with, as when junior tries to reach through the cage to pet this cute monkey. “This is not a petting zoo” some voice might intone, as a warning to parents or guardians if not to the apparently deaf kid himself. 

A lot of banter with the crowd is feasible, with a professional DJ present. The communications will be more two-way in that case. Good morning Walden Four. Welcome to Project Earthala.

In cases where speaker audio would be intrusive, there’s headphone banter, channels devoted to festival organization which include calls for volunteers. Festival goers take official roles on a rotating basis, per qualifications and training, and thereby gain perspective on how the whole show is put together. 

Showbiz, one could say, is a nontrivial undertaking once you factor in all the logistics and maintenance. Consider: the care and feeding of the elephants, back when that was an expected practice. 

The “tunnels under Disney World” metaphor fits here, a trope in many movies, or think of WestWorld if you prefer.

Building shared skillsets among the populace is critical. You won’t have enough volunteer chefs if know one knows the ropes in a big kitchen. 

I’ve had some experience in that regard, including as a dishwasher and cleanup guy, also short order cook (I’m talking Princeton work-study), and later as food prep guy both for the Gathering (a Quaker thing) and for Food Not Bombs, the latter being logistically challenging on several levels, starting with the unpredictability of the fresh produce pipeline. There’d be something, usually, in goodly quantities, but what? You’d have to make up a meal plan almost on the spot. 

Professional chefs, like from hotels, might do a stint with us just to experience that particular front line. Yet with all that experience, I’d be hesitant to step forward as the guy in charge, with hundreds of meals under my supervision. I’d need someone more like Paul, my gardener, but an overview supervisor of institutional cafeterias and hotel restaurants back in the day.

Some of our mixed use facilities, including high rises, include serious game pod floors, kind of like legacy offices were all about cubicles. The games may be serious in the sense that they involve monitoring, as discussed above, but not just of crowds at some Burning Man or Country Fair type festival. Railroad lines, cargo ports, truck traffic… people in pods may have a steering or other decision-making role in what goes on. Some may be teachers, communicating with students around the world.

A game pod player might have a sip straw and something like Soylent to stay sated in times when even a trip to the cafeteria would interrupt the flow. To continue paying attention one needs calories and also breaks in the action if at all possible. Air traffic controllers have serious jobs like this. They need sleep and R&R to stay focused. Many in pods are likewise in training. 

As a home office geek, I’ll be training as a student in the morning, and teaching or training others at night. The roles of faculty and student may be blurred in the Global U. Life is always about learning new stuff, acquiring skills, even while sharing what you know, and conveying skills to others.

At The Beach

I had this fantasy that I’d rocket to the coast along Hwy 30, cross the famous bridge at Astoria. Then I’d walk on the beach with my dog, and then I’d find a cozy bakery with WiFi and donuts, from where I’d blog.

Well, so far that fantasy has been achieved to perfection. As Gus (Van Sant) was saying on Disc 2 (DVD special features), you waste time if you think the job is to get the pictures in your head to match reality exactly. Reality actually has a lot that’s positive to offer. It’s not that you settle for second best. It’s that you’re open to improvements, on the spot. That’s why we call it improv.

That’s my queue to discuss improvisation, as a topic. I was over a mile from my front door, on schedule, when I realized I’d left minus the dog’s leash. Go back? Nah. I would improvise. Sesame Street puppets: “improvise!”. The word of the day. No need to turn back. And as it turned out, I had a very long coiled rope in the trunk. 

Hello Don Wardwell. He just phoned to invite me to something at his campus, but of course I’m over two hours away from Portland.

I’ll be uploading my pictures later and embedding them here. I also Telegrammed Dante from behind my car, where I was consuming my first cup of coffee. The tables and counter were all taken the first time, but upon going back for more coffee I saw the seats had mostly vacated. This was my chance to post to my blog. On the road from my BizMo (Nissan sedan) except in this case I’m in Control Room, we could say filing my report.

I’ll be departing shortly and per my dad’s habit and style, will find a different route. It doesn’t have to be all different. I’ll retrace through Astoria but then at Rainier I’ll turn left and head over the Columbia on a different bridge. Then back to Portland along I-5.

We had a great beach run before this. Sydney loved sniffing the carb carcasses, even nibbling on a few.

Studies in Punditry

I don’t think anyone goes to school with the expressed goal of becoming a pundit. That’s not how the word is used. 

“Punditry” is not a college major. And yet many hope for a career in the News Biz, which is punditry-adjacent.

Most people in Ukraine would really like a return to a civilized state vs the nightmare state they’re in, and believed that’s what they were voting for long ago, not realizing how caught up they were in geopolitical board games such as they play in the basement of the RAND corporation. 

They grew up to find themselves pawns in someone else’s “great game” except it’s far from great, let alone noble. We’re talking about 1900s conditioned-reflexing ("knee-jerk" stuff) and geriatric brains, brains that forget (forget what?) what we already said about Taiwan some decades back. 

There’s no there there, when it comes to brains among these particular pundit-posers. We learned all about it on The Walking Dead (AMC). They salivate for more violence under the veneer of selling commercials. “Good for ratings” means tacky and grotesque.

As Portlanders, we empathize with all municipalities wherein civil life has or had been replaced by strife. Perhaps the buildings still stand? Or are we a ghost town? 

Or has order been restored and civilian life returned? Good news if so. 

Or are we under martial law. Do we hide behind locked doors?

There’s no victory for Ukrainians in some kind of endless wars situation of perpetual buildup on both sides. The USers are already caught up in that racket and have been for decades, since Eisenhower, and it’s a no-win proposition. 

A lifestyle of enjoying peace and neutrality (not taking sides as a right of self determination), and with no real interest in training for homicide as a profession, among young men especially, should be an acceptable option on Planet Earth. Any nation not free to be a non-belligerent, is not a free nation.

Not training to become a killer for some state or mercenary force, should be an OK choice, in any civilization worth that word.

However pundits will unconsciously equate “victory” with “engaging in endless wars” and judge your patriotism by your willingness to role model being menacing, towards whatever enemy du jour.

They take for granted that war is the default state, whereas world peace would be something freakish and weird. That’s the mirror world these demented pundits live in. 

Hypernormalisation of the freakish: that’s something Mark Fisher wrote about. We feature his thinking at our School of Tomorrow.

Doing Homework

The Real Mad Men of Chicago

My tutor, a rhetorician, knows a lot about the "mad men" outta Chicago, meaning advertisers -- some were women (more and more as time goes on). 

Above is a screenshot from an assigned viewing, a YouTube documentary about the ad industry in Windy City..

I grew up around spin doctors (more slang), many of the Italian, as I was living in Italy. 

Advertising was big business in Rome, as is/was glamor more generally. TV commercials on RAI TV were gathered into a show of their own, one of the popular, called Carosello. 

Science Fiction World

control yurt

I've been diving into the subculture of science fiction writers and publishers more, thanks to someone I met through WILPF, my mom's organization (meaning she was super active therein -- that org is over a 100 years old (she lived to be almost 94)).

My correspondent writes:

Forry Aackerman knew L. Ron Hubbard in LA when they were young men. Early 1930s. Forry would rail against Hubbard and his Scientotlogy. According to Forry, that whole religion was started after a card game of several SF writers. No false modesty in Hubbard so not surprising that he bragged, "I bet I can start a religion and lots of people will follow it." It was a joke that night among just those few SF writers and a dare to Ron L. Hubbard to "Go on--let's see ya do it!"

Here's what I wrote (excerpt):

Lemme say what I think about Scientology:

Important in my bio is/was Ray Simon, and his wife Bonnie, their baby Julie. I became the babysitter for newborn Julie in Jersey City when Ray and Bonnie both had to head off to work in Manhattan. Ray was an office temp, assigned all over NYC. Bonnie was a professional nurse and I believe worked in a hospital.

Here's the thing: Ray was a big fan of both Werner Erhard and L. Ron Hubbard. I even witnessed him getting a letter from L. Ron when I was there in his Jersey City home. It said something like "I'm not sure what you want to know", a one-liner, but all Ray wanted to know is if L. Ron was still alive or not. He suspected foul play. He found that letter reassuring. I could write a lot more about Ray.

What I discovered about both Scientology and Erhard's est, is TV-raised Americans are desperate to have a life in showbiz. I'd say nothing has changed on that score except lower barriers to entry: start your own YouTube channel for like no dollars. Would-be actors are like me: gig economy, long spells unemployed, then super busy, then off again, on off on off.  But when you're off, not on a gig, you don't want to let your skills get shallow. Like you're a professional athlete and just because it's not the Olympics on TV right now, you can't afford to slob out. So what do you do? You check out those human potential workshops for one thing, partly just to see how the hucksters are huckstering. You wanna get some clues on how to be convincing and on how to break into showbiz. You wanna network.

So as a logistics supervisor around the Centers Network (Erhard's op), I met a lot of actors.  A lot of those actors were checking out Scientology at the same time and discovering the latter's Improv Theater workshops. Scientology was supposed to help you do better at improv, because as you ascended the levels ($$!) to get "clear" (top level), you'd be shedding the kinds of emotional baggage that keep you inhibited and not spontaneous. As an actor, being "clear" sounded like just the ticket, not to mention how you'd be meeting other actors and showbiz people and... well you get the idea.

In sum, the Venn Diagram overlap twixt Erhard's and Hubbard's operations was showbiz. The same people (like my friend Ray, also wanting to be in showbiz) would flock to both outfits.

Differences: Centers Network was a nonprofit, but never billed itself as a religion, and if pressed to point to an adjacent religion, would choose Zen.  Centers Network had roles, such as logistics supervisor, outside security (two I played), assistant trainer, trainer... but not levels or ranking other than "did the training" (graduate) versus "didn't do the training" (so still might). Buckminster Fuller didn't do the training but his grandson and I believe daughter both did. I'm only sure about the grandson actually, Jaime (we've talked on the phone). 

One reason Applewhite (Fuller's collaborator) was suspicious of me at first, but also curious, was I was coming from a Princeton philo + est background, and Werner + Bucky was a thing in the late 70s early 80s. From Ed's point of view, I might be a big asset or a major pain. I like to think I was a big asset and have reason to think that.

I'll have to research this Forry Ackerman guy. Not on my radar until you introduced him.

In a later email I wrote:

When I talk about Synergetics to School of Tomorrow folks, I say it's easier to read than Finnegans Wake and that it's a kind of natural language Pound Era mathematics. That's not inaccurate.

Yes, General Semantics, another ics. Cybernetics. Economics... I think about English disciplines that end in ics.  Oh, lookie here: Dianetics.  

Synergetics is not Dianetics, let's be clear. There's also another book titled Synergetics that claims somehow to be in Fuller's lineage, by one Haken, but Fuller never regarded Haken as his protege (me he did).

I think Hubbard was offended by Erhard's characterization of Scientology as tacky, corny, not nearly as high tech and streamlined as the Erhard's operation. I tend to share this view.

The Centers Network eventually morphed into the Landmark Forum.  At least one Friend (Quaker) I know has been through it and I went to her graduation.  But as they say "I got it the first time" i.e. no need to repeat (they tell me the Landmark version has been toned down a lot, not quite the same polemics as the est trainers were using -- and that Dr. W. Kaufmann, whom I mention, one of my Princeton profs, enjoyed, or found interesting).