Mood Music

Coasting to a Close

Having reminded presenters, especially the new ones, how I’m role modeling “place based”, I’m coasting through to the end of Spring’s term, looking forward to Summer’s. I’m referring to my School of Tomorrow, which takes a placed-based approach to pedagogy-andragogy (from child to adult).

However, “coasting” does not mean “not busy”. Thanks to co-presenters on social media, I’ve been going deeper into my studies and sharing results, both in terms of Project QuadCraft (“a world beyond MindCraft”) and in the matryoshka department (concentric dolls). I’ll use the balance of this blog post to summarize these results.

First thing first though, instead of FIFA we watched a Euro-made version of Dracula which was in some ways better than expected. Let’s see if I can write a tagline: a self righteous church has ways of dealing with overly-liberated women. Nah, that wouldn’t resonate with most people. Anyway, some of my friends are watching FIFA on Fox. I do get broadcast television, but not cable.

Project QuadCraft is about using Quadray Coordinates internally, although conversion to XYZ is naturally needed to make the computations intelligible to other software, which have more MineCrafty APIs. No problemo. We’ve had XYZ output since the beginning. But not everyone adopts the same conventions when it comes to the R-edged and D-diagonaled cubes, where R and D are radius and diameter of our closest backed balls (yes, the IVM or CCP).

Per our Volumes Table on Synergeo, used by many presenters who are not necessarily subscribed, our R-edged cube is irrationally volumed vs unit, even as our D-diagonaled cube is wholesomely whole numbered, and that difference in design throws off a lotta people. That’s why presenters have done some homework to keep peeps on track.

As for the dolls (the poly-guys matryoshka), we’ve been focused on an Italian Renaissance figure who lived around the same time as the Dracula in the Euro-movie: in the 1400s. He was a polymath (“Renaissance Man”) who made contributions across the spectrum, and gets a lotta credit for that icosa-inside-octa (faces flush), an arrangement of two Platonics that’s not a dual pair so much as a bridge, between 4- and 5-old symmetry fams. That’s another ongoing discussion on Synergeo.

Per said Volumes Table, our canonical octahedron has volume 4, whereas the faces flush icosahedron (Piero’s) is closer to 2.917 in volume. We have ways to express this “icosa within” (IW) volume in terms of algebra, which in this context means in terms of surds. Synergetics has always used surds, contrary to some boomer-led dumbing down campaigns mostly led by the math averse. As a presenter, you’re always welcome to take it away into new dimensions, but lets remember our source and its original design.

However, our middle schoolers are getting the art of programming through their homework anyway, we hope remuneratively although School of Tomorrow isn’t itself running a payroll. The presenters of which I speak have their own various ways of capitalizing on curriculum content. In my case, I’ve worked per hour on synchronous and asynchronous projects. I’ve joined as a W2 employee far less frequently (O’Reilly) but have done that too. Mostly I’ve been agreeing to teach online, and in live events around town, for example in the public and private middle schools (I’m thinking of Coding with Kids and Sunshine Elite).

The new-to-me Koski Identity, 60 S + 60 s3 for the RT built from Piero’s IW, gets snarfed up by Python and worked with algebraically, keeping the surds in play until we wanna tap those sympy expressions for decimal digits (that’s usually our base). S is of course from BASKET (K for 1/120th of a 7.5-volumed RT — not mentioned in the original two volumes, but included in the Wikipedia table). s3 means “S phi down” meaning “all edges shrunk by phi” (multiplied by 1/phi — or use the Greek letter) meaning “volume shrunk by phi to the 3rd”. 60 of each (big guy and little) add to the same volume as said RT.

We’ll celebrate closure of our Spring Term in the form of a Wanderers gathering at the Linus Pauling House, our temple to engineering. It’s not like we’re too snobby to admit non-engineers or topics outside of engineering. We’re actually not a membership organization, even if we accepted donations (Jon Bunce did) for the coffee fund. That’s when we’d meet weekly. My template for presenter meetups, locally arranged, derives from this model, and from Meetups more generally, especially those of the Thinking Society of Greater Philadelphia (CJ) and 52 Living Ideas (Shrikant). Our Shaman of Synergetics knows what I’m talking about as do others you’d be able to seek out for more context.

Disclosure Day (movie review)

A movie concept 

(inspired by Disclosure Day)

I’m aware as of this posting that critics are panning this film for the most part, and are applying the worst epithets, such as “Boomer Movie” (gross). However I’m planning to dissect it differently and find it to be an interesting exploration of “intelligence” and what that even means.

Wardex is Urizen and the sense of security that gives us. The movie critic audience, which grew up on ET and Close Encounters, complains bitterly they don’t feel sufficiently secure, seeing as how said DoD daddy Darth Vader is so incompetent, echoing their disappointment with the whole ET story. 

The nerdy two, or two point five (there’s both a girlfriend and a fellow abductee) keep eluding Urizen, but then we realize: it’s Urizen (CIA) subverting itself, as the employees inside include Snowden types who want the world to know what they already know: that their government engages in torture not to mention domestic surveillance (we’re their enemy too).

Once Mickey (the military industrial complex) becomes schizo, it’s no wonder that it finally succumbs to the reality of reality television. 

They know, as do the Snowdens, that once the new reality comes into frame like that, there’s no point fighting it. People will finally believe, even the Russians and North Koreans.

Again, movie critics think the intelligence community coulda shoulda gone berserk at that moment and panic-protected its big secrets, maybe killing everyone in the TV studio. No lessons about empathy or animal intelligence really got through their thick skulls all these years. 

But even from a practical standpoint, a big show of force would only backfire. You can’t be seen to be keeping secrets secret, or they’re not really secret anymore. The cat has left the bag at that point.

Where it gets interesting is when Catholicism comes into it and is characteristically catholic (open minded) about ETs. Genesis says hominids rule the roost here on Earth as a dominant intelligent life form (whales take a back seat) but other planets are out of scope. The Bible is Earth focused. 

Once we’re outside the biblical context, the sky’s the limit as to what’s possible, given God’s track record for being highly imaginative. 

Religion teaches us techniques for staying open minded, even into adulthood if that’s possible.

Disclosure Day (the day the truth is revealed, that ETs are real) is therefore really a kind of Rapture, to bring the Protestants into it, and their literal-mindedness. There’s gotta be this one day of reckoning, when nonbelievers repent.

The dream of ETs literally comes true in our literal universe, which means “on television” as TV is reality’s gatekeeper.  The movie spends a lot of time looking at this TV network gatekeeping environment and how people do as they’re told once they accept you as their boss. 

Our abductees have a knack for emanating persuasiveness (they’re basically mind readers, a lot like Lucy who also has a Morgan Freeman type on her side). They’re “est people” to use an outdated jargon (from even before the est Training). Shades of Olivia Butler right?

The same movie critics who wonder at the lack of violence (Wardex seems so nonviolently tame but for the aggressive mind control experiments) plus can’t imagine that their little ET friend from that first Spielberg movie, is now all grown up, just as are they. If there’s any alien intelligence in the pipeline, it must be inside us, because clearly the Rapture isn’t happening. We’re not getting to X-Day in time.

Catholicism and ETism both have a lot in common: they keep us waiting, in expectant anticipation, for the Judgement Day that seems always just around the corner. A few maybe seem to get something from “the now” (mundane reality) but that’s too Zen. Mostly ETism is about the endless suspense, that state of waiting (so more like Quakers then?).

Incommensurability

The term “incommensurability” is more encompassing than mere “irrationality” as it embraces “transcendental” as well. That was a topic this morning over breakfast. Terry Bristol bounces around among the Greeks, such as Archytas of Tarentum (c. 435–350 BC) and  Eudoxus of Cnidus, precursors to Euclid, and inspirational for Archimedes. 

Incommensurability opens a space of incremental or successive approximations, each closer to some ideal, but perhaps with insufficient means to ever reach that ideal, even in principle. For example, by means of specific algebraic operations, one may reach closed form expressions for certain irrational numbers, but not for pi or e.

The analogy to geometry is deeper than mere resemblance; it’s a tighter mapping. Given the conventional Euclidean constraints of straight edge and compass, what are the limits to construction? The classic example was squaring the circle: by simple construction, construct a circle and square of identical area. This proved elusive, leading to a maturing of the concept of incommensurability itself.

Terry has been exploring the not-commutative aspects of geometric procedures. The order of instructions clearly matters and going forward (picture an arrow) does not always imply going backward. Some functions are what we call one way.

What I added to the discussion was a quick recap of that Python generator function I learned about from Guido and Tim, which in just a few lines using rational steps, creates a pi digits generator. Somehow remembering state may lead to chaotic output, as we also learn from Wolfram. A deterministic generative process may not imply any shorter or more compact expression is out there, other than the generator itself, in whatever language. Ramanujan’s generators are a case in point.

Terry parked his car in front of my place and we walked to Bread and Ink on Hawthorne. Passing under the Bagdad marquee, we came across a free books pile, not unusual in Portland. I set aside the Narnia books 2-5 (hard cover), resolving to take them home if they were still there after breakfast. They were, and I did.

Rounding Out Spring Term

What themes are we getting back to, now that we’re winding up the Spring Term, which in Portland means Rose Festival? Our school is async so it’s not a matter of everyone being on the same page. Rather, it s a matter of students being encouraged to chronicle their journeys, with teachers role modeling how that’s done. “Where am I in the curriculum?” is always a relevant question.

Speaking for myself, I find myself circling a well-known meme in these parts, namely 4D vs 4D vs 4D, by which I mean to define a triangle of three namespaces, kind of how DAF does the triangle between his, professor Jiang’s and William Blake’s namespaces. 

In my case, I’m mapping what I consider to be the primary shoptalks talks making use of 4D by the end of the 1900s, with all of them having trajectories since then, up to the 2020s where we are at this tick mark. Those three shoptalks would be: that of Hilbert Space and linear algebra; the non-Euclidean geometry of the Relativity Theorists; the lesser known esoteric geometry of the American pragmatist R. Buckminster Fuller.

Linear algebra took off with the emergence of computing power, while Relativity continued to wrestle with its quantum mechanical counterpart. Fuller’s namespace emerged as a more distinct entity thanks to the self-reinforcing feedback loops of the LLMs, which thrive on stochastic alignment. 

Whereas the subculture was small, the usage patterns were consistent enough, when coupled with Synergetics itself, to preserve a lot of the patterns, even as a few were adding even more refinements (e.g. the Koski Identities, Gerald de Jong’s Pretenst, more computer languages, such as my own Pythonic implementation of the concentric hierarchy, using quadrays).

On Synergeo I’m looking into a Pandora’s Box of issues regarding the power of Synergetics to assist us in reaching escape velocity vs-a-vs obsolete patterns in the Anglosphere (the world of English speakers), by jiggering with the logic and showing us some off ramps from Ye Olde English juggernaut. Debugging takes work, including trial and error. 

America has always been a meme pool in ferment, a confluence of many cultures, so it’s not that surprising that its curricula would morph accordingly, even if exactly what that looks like remains unpredictable. On Synergeo I’ve been recalling the New Math, if only to remind readers that curricula, including in Math World are not static. High school in 2026 might be a lot different from what you remember from your own experience, to the point of unrecognizable in a lotta ways, but then quite familiar in other ways. Times change in how they express the generalized principles, even if those principles stay eternal in principle.

Rose Festival in Portland

The Rose Festival is in full swing. The Grand Floral and Starlight parades were combined this year. That happened yesterday and I was not in attendance. 

Nor did I make it to the Criterion Collection BizMo that came through earlier (not as a part of the festival), filming visitors as they perused the merch. I could have recorded myself for up to 3 minutes.

However I did come across the floats, all lined up in Waterfront Park, instead of in the Lloyd Center area per years past. Some years I’ve stood in the crowd watching the parade. With kids. As a kid.

I arrived at Waterfront Park on my bicycle, coming over the Hawthorne from the OMSI area, with a plan to join another Wanderer for the next segment of my intra-modal loop. 

The Fun Center (by Funtastic) was happening; the annual carnival. I remained outside the fenced-in areas, being a cyclist, but stopped to take pictures or walk the bike.

The next segment was along Springwater Corridor to Sellwood, left on Linn, and continuing on Springwater to the Tacoma-Sellwood Max station, while my riding partner, on an e-trike, continued onward, back to Gresham. 

This paved network of carless roads is quite extensive, often thanks to paved-over train lines from  previous chapters.

Upon first arriving in the OMSI area, before taking the Hawthorne Bridge to see those floats (I didn’t know in advance that they’d be there, a fun surprise), I’d come across a Roaming Library full of high brow pro-chaos (aka discordian) literature in languages I can’t read. But I recognized the name David Graeber, another Occupy guy like me.

I grabbed some copies, per signs saying I was welcome to do so.

Occupy Portland (OPDX) is well documented in these blogs, and should not be confused with what I call the Joker Riots that came later, as we descended into idiocracy. 

Our Food Not Bombs group helped establish a temporary community, like a Hooverville, re-enacting the Bonus Army encampments of an earlier chapter. Our relations with the police were civil and we ended the occupation voluntarily with only a few incidents (not everyone got the memo).

Food Not Bombs was already going strong when our household got involved and became a hub for storing both food and bike trailers used to haul the food, from warehouse to church or house kitchen, and on to the park for public food sharing. 

Free food; no charge; no means testing; bring your own bowl and utensils but we have extra of you forget or didn’t know. 

We managed to interest the local Quakers in our project and for some months or years (I forget how long) and used the Stark Street kitchen from time to time. We also used the bigger kitchen at St. David of Wales.

I’m not currently actively involved with FNB. I’m glad I was though, and that I pulled food trailers around town a lot on my bicycle, a good workout for some guy in his 50s. 

Most my cohort was younger but I didn’t experience a lot of age discrimination. 

My mother also stayed with us while Occupy was going on, and came downtown to visit the tent city, including the FNB tent. Some of my friends were camping there in the park, but I stayed in my own home.

Happy Birthday to Tara. Looking forward to our next fam call.

Martian Memes

You'll need to be something of a Geek to decipher these references on your own, so let me help out. Hoon is a computer language, but also a place in Libya, and a "name collision" may also be an opportunity. From a desert oasis community such as Hoon, one gets to camels, mirages, other movie tropes. 

Also, I have that link to my own family, given my dad worked for Libyans on fifty year plans, back in the 1960s up to the beginning of the 1970s. Then we were out (that was the Rome chapter). I never made it to Libya myself, but I saw lots of slide shows.

However, here I’m exploring a different way of connecting with the Cult of Urbit, a subculture, such as my own, with Hoon starting to look more like Python given this latest facelift (yes, I mean yamoon).

Above, I’m talking about how our respective subcultures (a) both use Martian tropes and (b) both have a “martial arts” tinge to our verbiage, in talking about a Dojo vs-a-vs a language.

I’m saying our hero “Seem to Be a Verb” Bucky is an action figure, a man in motion, and we might liken his practice of Synergetics to “SynFu” playing off “KungFu” as a martial art form.

I did solicit the assistance of Perplexity on this one (the LLM mentioned above), regarding the etymology of “martial”.

 

Sushi Train

I'm not giving myself top marks for the day's operations cuz I managed to let the new Canon fall to the floor from the sushi train restaurant table. It didn't break nor even show signs of stress, but that was just dumb luck. 

I don't award points for dumb, even if the outcome was lucky. Otherwise though, I turned in a smooth performance. I hit my marks.

Later, my little film group (two or more) watched The Revolutionary, an old John Voigt film with Robert Duvall the connecting thread, even though he’s not the star in this one (I’d picked two films at random from the shelf devoted to his films at MMU).

I hadn’t paid money for the Canon SX740 (twas a gift), which is in the same category as my Lumix, a pointer shooter. 

In the parallel universe (a figure of speech) where it had exploded into tiny parts upon hitting the masonry,  I woulda been pretty hard on myself for such a dummy maneuver. 

“Don’t put breakable expensive things near the edge like that” he said to himself, at 68.

I have a pretty booked-up week happening. If you’re wondering whether my strategy is working, I’d have to say I’m not in a position to know. I could relate to the emptiness of the revolutionary lifestyle depicted in the movie. But not because I feel under the boot of The Man (or Men).

That this was a movie starring John Voigt got us reading up on Angelina Jolie again, and all that Hollywood melodrama, which I don’t track all that closely, anymore than I spend time on royals, although I’m not above watching gossip YouTubes. 

I’ll also “shake the rain stick” and chat with the gossip bots.

As I was mentioning on Synergeo, the Backrooms movie, all about an endless maze of aberrational interiors, and of liminal (vestibular) spaces, there’s a hyperlink the David Lynch movies. Backrooms also has the computer game flavor of eXistenZ, and of course it feels a lot like Severance. 

Later I was able to get the Canon and iPad talking over WiFi. That means I’ll be able to upload to Flickr without worrying about a USB adapter for an SD card. Sometimes it’s nice to have a backup workflow.

School of Tomorrow Notice

To school presenters:

The slide decks are working fine as of now, but the GitHub site is completely FUBAR when it comes to rendering Notebooks over the wire. This isn't the first time GitHub has interrupted its service w/r to said file type (ipynb). Usually the situation gets resolved but we're coming up on a Week of Snafu.

So, my advice is to clone the repos you need and project them locally. Encourage your students to do the same. 

Jupyter Notebooks are meant to be interactive. 

I have a lot of em wired to Colab versions of themselves, for those with Google Drives, and you're welcome to use some other online Docker-like solution (meaning you'll be running a Jupyter server in the cloud). nbviewer tends to throttle my account, prolly cuz they don't like me using their free service much.

A better solution than relying on weak links in the cloud, is to have the repos locally and to call the Notebooks up within your own local copy of JupyterLab. 

I recommend grabbing and installing the Anaconda distro for all this, including the Python interpreter itself. 

However you may have a preferred stack starting with the official Python, then maybe uv and PyPi (Python Package Index) for adding 3rd party packages (such as JupyterLab).

Here's my Anaconda Navigator as of right now:

Once I click on the JupyterLab panel, I get into my localhost file tree, to the School of Tomorrow repo clone, and pull up the home page. 

YouTubes will show inline, and be playable, unlike on GitHub even with its rendering working. 

Plus this will be your Python workbench for a lotta projects. So come on in, the water's fine!

Cascadian PR

 copyleft cogsec crescent city

Drive-Through Zombie

In one of my recent rhetops, I make fun of the “drive-through zombies” who wanna stay oblivious by choice (vs ordering brain shakes?).

Well, invective comes from experience as they say: I was a drive-through zombie myself in that WinCo parking lot, seeking escape to Coburg Road but finding myself in a mini-golf course, so to speak, of tiny one-laners, designed to trap the cars of the unwary.  I became trapped, in a Taco Bell.

Rather than power through admitting my mistake, I sheepishly ordered a random beverage. I tried something blue, and frozen, all the more fitting given my role in this scene.

GST for Beginners

GST seemed relatively uncontested in that General Systems Theory had been proposed, written about, but then seemingly largely discarded. When I picked up the abandoned banner, lying in the field, I didn’t see much of an army. So I took it in my own direction, which was to build a bulwark against old school Economics. “Planet Earth is a spherical nonprofit” we would say “its charitable donor: the sun.” That about sums it up. Not a closed system, don’t let them tell you that.

OK, now zoom in: let’s talk about the PWS, the personal workspace. Think “bubble” and have it encompass an entire workspace. Maybe you have a veritable MakerSpace, with lots of tools, 3D printers, lasers… call it a lab. That’s wonderful. Or more typically: a nerd cave, screen and keyboard, other peripherals… The point being: to value-add. The operation: edit-recombine. 

Some of you are thinking “he means alchemy” at this point, and in a way, that’s right, mainly because we’re generalizing and that takes us to the realm of analogy and metaphor, wherein “alchemy” makes more sense (versus some literal “chemistry” or “physics” — not that people haven’t worked it as such). You wanna turn some lead (inputs) into gold (outputs) and for this you’ll be rewarded, if there’s any justice in this Universe (another good, or service).

The PWS is potentially a reverse-entropy gradient, which is not to neglect the entropy-adding that we may show in our bookkeeping. Expenditures, costs, abound. Having a daily energy budget, per those Markov chain diagrams, showing energy conversions and feedback loops, means needing the overhead of decision-making. Money doesn’t spend itself. Intelligence steps in, or not. A lotta times we’re demonstrating shortcomings, a paucity, and not for lack of joules or calories, but for lack of imagination.

Another way to approach the PWS is through the well-established idea of “role”, common to both theater and computer programming. These two go together. It’s not called a “programme” for no reason — what they hand you when you enter the theater. We’ve had “scripting languages” which started out a term of derision. The scripters hit back, renaming themselves “agile”. Management liked “agile” and took that to mean its own things.

GST gets into the hydro-dams early, dovetailing with Martian Math (per this YouTube), because of the thermodynamics involved. When doing history, we go back to waterwheels. Sources of power connecting to superhuman scales, such as rivers flowing down slopes, with oceans evaporating into rain-heavy clouds to perpetuate the cycle, add wind. There’s your solar energy, from our extraterrestrial donor. We channel that energy much as we channel water when irrigating rice paddies or fields in general. Lots of switching goes on. Like on a motherboard.

Depoe Bay

Looking down on the drone on its launch pad, we project a triangle flat to the earth, with reference vertexes: Blue, Red, Yellow. We think of a Green beacon high above (out) or far below (in) vs-a-vs the surface of Planet Earth.  At the center of BRYG: orange (O for origin, also).

That’s the horizontal plane (triangle BRY), combined with the 90 degree  ± G adding a “normal regime” and giving us: plus-vs-minus; up-vs-down; in-vs-out. 

The six XYZ spokes always come through the mid-edges of the reference BRYG tetrahedron, used to anchor quadrays.

The drone in question was meant to spy on a certain steer that had escaped the neighbor’s property and was squatting near Walden Pond (this is a west coast Walden). 

By the time we’d re-figured out the setup, we’d burned through the drone’s rather limited battery. 

What to remember: the base unit controls the drone through ordinary radio, but if you want a real time picture (you obviously do) then the phone itself, mounted in the base unit, needs to connect to the drone’s WiFi channel, emanating from the drone itself. 

Mere radio contact is insufficient but for the most limbic of systems.

Some in our school are aware I’m on another Cascadian circuit these days, this time a coastal versus a  mountain, although there’s a range of mountains to go over twixt Portland and the coast. 

Despite its name, Portland is far inland, on a north-flowing river (like the Nile) entering the Columbia, more like the Nile in size, which flows west to the Pacific and is navigable, thinks to dredging around the mouth at Astoria. 

My route took my past the McMinnville Air and Space Museum, playfully decorated with hand-me-down 747s (Boeing) and made over to advertise Evergreen, the company behind this museum.

My activist friends used to protest outside of Evergreen cuz it was in cahoots in Central America with what would end up destabilizing the USA: secret teams operating off the books and under the radar, thereby destroying any chance might weddcall our way of life “democratic”. 

All water under the bridge by now, now that the USA is gone, leaving the empty shell we still salute and pledge allegiance to, especially if we’re not yet thinking adults i.e. are still juveniles (not yet geeks, just nerds i.e. “ugly ducklings” (awkwardly unaware)).

I made a beeline for D River, the world’s shortest (east to west) only to discover, upon arriving in my parking lot, that I had degraded my not-tinted lenses and in fact one was missing from its frame. How did that happen? 

All I remember is Dr. Jiang coming through on Verizon, with audio through my Bluetooth Bat (a tiny amplifying speaker device), talking about Dante, Virgil, Purgatory, Heaven & Hell. A great lecture!

Somewhere in the drive, I switched glasses, from not-tinted to tinted. How I managed to mangle the non-tinted pair is still a mystery, a miracle. I’ll need to get replacement eyeglasses when I get back to Portland.

I bring up Dr. Jiang in part because my “bus binder” homework reader contains a 40-pager mapping three namespace, that of Jiang, that of Blake, and that of Friedman, the paper’s author. 

I showed that binder to a Wanderer in Depoe Bay, over oyster stew. We could find a common language in archeology and geology, and changing sea levels. 

Depoe Bay owes its craggy gothic shoreline to pyroclastic flows that happened millions of years ago, whereas similar flows from Vesuvius buried Herculaneum just moments ago, relatively speaking.

The wayward steer and drone action all came later in that same trip. I was only in Depoe Bay for the one night.

Shopping Spree

I thought to get this day's adventure blogged about while memories are still fresh. Again, I'm illustrating wandering with a capital W, meaning "with a purpose" I suppose. 

In this case I was shopping (carrot mob of one) to emphasize solidarity among some cultures sorely pitted against one another of late. Of course I'm talking about Russia-Ukraine and all of that.

Here in peaceful Cascadia, all these Baltic and Slavic peoples (by which I mean ethnically, not talking about genes per se, I'm not a eugenicist or any of that), with the different-from-English (NeoRoman) alphabets, share the same storefront and nobody thinks twice about it. 

Here's what I did: set off on foot along Hawthorne (the raw Photostream has a lot more than the album does), on up those steep steps on Mt. Tabor, connecting the bottom set of reservoirs to the the mid-level. But then short of heading on up to the top I vectored down to the roadways and found may way to the FX2 (new articulated buses, bright green, used to be named bus route 4 before a redesign) out SE Division (towards Gresham).

I got off at 113th on the south side, having just passed the Roman Russian place, I believe it's called. I've been here many times, including with Andrius Kulikauskas when he visited. The place was bustling and I queued at the deli counter for my selected items (lamb kebab, 2 of and chicken meatballs, 4 of). I also bought chocolate bars as gifts (I used to wolf them), and a couple unfamiliar brands of salmon and sardine.

On the FX2 back to my neighborhood, I used lingering battery power to keep uploading about my politics in this case: don't expect Cascadia to support some kind of ethnic war between Eurasian factions. Been there done that. We're long beyond refighting old wars.

Class of 76: Fifty Years (and counting)

Alaska Cruise: High School Reunion

So you might be eyeballing that crowd of strangers (you were there?), looking for me in my black hat and psychedelic tie or whatever Ken doll outfit, but I'll save you the trouble: I'm not there.

No, I’m enjoying the experience vicariously via Meta media, Our high school class was pretty small, by US American standards, but not that small. Maybe just over a thousand? I’m talking the whole grade. I joined this cohort in the early seventies and stayed for the duration. Makati, Manila. The school itself has since moved.

Domestic Bliss

OK, I’m being a tad sarcastic, but also for real, cuz I appreciate my domicile (no, not a dome) and realize I’m lucky to live here. But like anyone, I’ll have issues, like a slow-draining drain.

OK, but why share that with the world? Because (a) a personal blog can the therapeutic to the writer, the public aspect helps and (b) there’s some useful logic in this picture I wanna go over.

I’d already called the plumber, which answers with an AI assistant (they tell you you’ll be talking to AI). One may immediately forget Dan isn’t real (or was it Dale?) cuz there’s background noise, like others talking in muffled tones. A busy call center. When I answered Dale’s questions, I hear typing sounds like he’s entering my data.  Long pauses, annoying beeps (right when I talk — what’s the psyop there?). Anyway, we had a pleasant-enough conversation, the upshot of which is a plumber is coming.

Ah, but only a short time later, an apparent breakthrough. I could now run cold water and see it drain in real time. Was all my amateur hour problem solving finally paying off? Should I cancel the plumber visit? Would AI understand why? I might have to speak to AI’s supervisor…

But no, let the water run for long enough and you hear that echo chamber sound of filling up (higher pitch) and soon enough the water is filling the sink. What was happening is the long hollow pipe under the kitchen floor, uncomfortably horizontal (not much grade to the down pipe), still has a blockage, but it’s more distal now, thanks to my efforts. But “distal” does not mean “gone”.

So what I’ll ask my plumber is if hydrojet treatment is warranted and I think she or he (or it?) will say it is. That’s exciting. I enjoy the hydrojet experience wherein they pressure-wash whatever pipe, from the inside, on the tip of a catheter. 

In a house like mine, built in the early 1900s, a lotta pipes are rusting out from the inside. They’ve become stenotic.

A kitchen drain is of course special, as it’s asked to deal with not only what I put down the “pig in the sink” (garbage disposal) but whatever the dishwasher pumps out from one of its dishwashing sessions. I do my best to not overload that poor pig. Going forward, I plan to adjust my practices even further.

FAQ:

Q: If you’re a traditionalist, you might be thinking: what’s this powerful CEO type doing messing around with drains? 

A: Well, I’m only CMO with Coffee Shops Network, and teacher / principal at School of Tomorrow, neither of which are highly paid positions, in terms of American dollars. Other perks, sure.  

Furthermore, acquiring mundane skills is a big part of the curriculum.  You’ve seen my Executive Summary right?  I drive a tractor, pull a reel line… who knows what I won’t try? That’s supposed to be Everyman (not sexist) meaning “a typical student in our Global University” (or “Spaceship Nuthouse” as some affectionately call it). 

As a teacher, if I don’t walk my talk, I lose credibility, an equation we all encounter. 

“Keeping it real” requires real work, not just goofing off. We can’t all play “starving artist” or whatever it is. I need to uphold my end of the deal as a middle classer and pay plumbers and buy flowers n stuff.  I’m an economic unit, part of a colony (as in ant colony).

So whereas I’m a big believer in DIY and like MakerSpaces (for which O’Reilly Media was famous around the time I joined, then Maker: spun off), I’m also mindful that pros should be included in one’s undertakings. People train for years to become good at something. I don’t assume my own handiwork will come anywhere close.  

That’s why I use AI, as a crutch sometimes, or as polite people say, as an agent.  

Because it’s a mathematical product of many generations, full of people who intended that their hard work have positive ripple effects going forward. Many of them are now dead of course. The still-living tend to be the more selfish, always clamoring for special attention. I get it: as one of the still-living myself, I do my share of “me me me”.

As a typical trad-dad and empty-nester (I have an English Labrador retriever) I also kick back with an NA beer (< 0.5% OH) and watch programs. Like a lotta dads and moms, I’ve been watching one of the main soap opera channels (a soap in the est sense, meaning live melodrama, real life). Yes, you guessed it, I’ve been watching Candace, before I BBQ outside. Soap opera summary:

To Be Continued

Escaping the Anglosphere

Off hand (or off the cuff as they say), speaking off the top of my head, I’m thinking Iran should stay in control of the Hormuz Strait and users thereof should pay a tariff or toll. Iran needs to recoup for damages for the illegal, unprovoked (not to mention cowardly) attack by the private sector (the organized crime ring now run outta the Pentagon). 

True, the oil companies were blameless as LLCs, but corporate persons never feel pain anyway, so let them foot the bill, which costs they’ll pass on to the perpetrators. 

Am I saying I support the over $5 per gallon (and rising) at the pump? 

No. I’d like to think there’s a way the perps could eat their own costs before passing them onto me, someone in the same camp as Charlie Kirk in the narrow sense of thinking attacking Iran would be dumb dumb dumb. I’m not saying I was his supporter in other ways (e.g. financially or rhetorically) — I wasn’t tracking CK before TPUSA got itself in trouble for not knowing how to do security properly (kinda like the White House these days, right? — look what they allowed to happen to the East Wing, like the War of 1812).

Remember, I went to one of those “hotbeds for radicals”, prolly worse than Columbia, talking Princeton, where Dr. Falk taught us the Shah-overthrowing revolution wasn’t all that bad when compared with the alternative: staying under the thumb of the British. 

This was Iran’s chance to exit the Anglosphere, something we Americans aspired to do as well. Iran and the USA were natural allies in that sense, ditto the Republic of South Africa (RSA). I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the creativity involved in getting those US hostages freed. It wasn’t Carter’s military operation, but the psyop that succeeded. Kudos to Stansfield Turner, right?

I’m open to hearing alternative viewpoints regarding the Strait of Hormuz. Of course. The stereotypical Princeton tiger relishes debate and I’m not different on that score.

I’ve had similar biases regarding Nord Stream, that the perps oughta pay if the EU ever wants cheap gas again, not saying they do (they seem to actively wanna make their place a hellhole so the kids will enlist cuz they blame the Russians for some reason, for exploding their own, and Germany’s, pipeline). 

That was a huge travesty, for politicians to think it was any of their business to mess with the engineers. They’ll never live it down.

Bee TV (movie review)

The actual title, Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, was kinda long for a blog post title and “bee TV” has a nice ring to it.

So what is the probability I live in a world wherein a movie stuffed with reusable memes would already be famous as a “first movie streamed on the internet” and yet had stayed off my radar? Moreover: the web version, WaxWeb, is a proto-hypertoon (“hypertoon” being one of my pet concepts). 

Me: very low, I’d’ve at least heard of it. 

So imagine my surprise. A combination of Cascadian Entomology and the QuadCraft Project led me to it, circuitously.

Quoting Sean Benjamin in ScreenSlate:

Wax continued to flay the boundaries of its representation when an acquaintance of Blair’s at the Amiga computer store in the East Village "put Wax in a VHS machine connected to a Silicon Graphics machine connected to a T1 line connected to the mbone” at the Sun Microsystems headquarters, where it officially became the first movie streamed on the internet, seen at the time only by a few dozen nerds at literally two frames per second.

I love that it’s a “sci-fi / documentary” per the screenshot; cool genre right?  Of course it’s a mock documentary, or “mockumentary” as some call those. 

Indeed, in terms of style: it plods along at a steady pace, our main guy, Jacob, narrating in a rather deadpan voice, in contrast to the wild content. 

Jacob tells us his story in the first person, such that we feel like we’re watching his memories but from a more omniscient point of view (a typical storybook angle). Sometimes we see what he sees as the bee TV, an icosahedron.

We learn about those special Mesopotamian bees, installed by his grandfather in England in the early 1900s. His grandad, a beekeeper, had the foresight to realize (a) a plague was coming among the bees and (b) a naturally immune strain might save his bacon (so to speak). 

And he was right. The imported Mesopotamian bee colony thrived and multiplied. Also, the man who brought him the bees, from Basra (by our time in Iraq), remains in the storyline, which has multiple threads. In another subplot, a female character is working on her souls-of-the-dead detector, an electronic device she never really completes, but which gives fragmented results.

Our protagonist, Jacob, lives in the 1980s, as a worker bee in the military industrial complex in Almogordo, New Mexico. 

He codes weapons simulators, the target acquisition part, where an X-looking icon will be juxtaposed on what to hit, say a tank. Actual (not simulated) weapons are being tested nearby, using our guy’s software (part of a vast effort no doubt i.e. our guy is one more maker). The X will become “the mark of Cain” (taking us back to Genesis) where Cain speaks the language of Babel (presumably pre its turning nonsensical).

The Mesopotamian bees were passed down to Jacob, where he keeps them more for entertainment (he supposes) than for their commercial value as honey makers. His income is from the military-industrial job after all, working among the flight simulators. He and his significant other are both worker bees, but in different areas. 

The bees start communicating with our hero through some telepathic process, which again, is where the icosahedron comes in, as the “bee TV” in his mind’s eye. 

The bee TV helps him regress to his grandfather’s house, an Eden, and then guides him on a mission of vengeance as that’s what the dead are into: restoring balance, exacting karma. 

Our guy becomes their tool (he gets pulled off his regular job by bee energy, one might say).

So yeah, in the early 1900s i.e. hearkening back to Edison’s day, communicating with the dead was indeed posited by many as a possible use for electricity. Edison himself speculated in this regard, according to Paul Laffoley, that electronics could connect us to some world of whispers. 

That belief system may seem retro and quaint today, but in a way it’s what’s happened: TV recordings now bring back the ghosts of our ancestors in ways pre-CRT civilizations never enjoyed.

From a Film Studies angle, this VHS-recorded movie forms a bridge to our digital media, starting from celluloid film technology, where the special effects evolved from theater’s, and then went through the CRT chapter of mostly analog electronics.  

The movie showcases lots of light-bending TV tricks, taking those who lived through these times on a trip down memory lane. The space shuttle.  President Reagan on TV.  

And if you didn’t live through it? Their ghosts live on today in our shared videogrammatron. As will ours. On bee television.

AI vs AI

Prompt:

AI psychosis has reached epidemic proportions yet those disciplines most likely to provide some remedies have been curiously quiet on the topic. Except Active Inference. The active inference community is actively researching how world model building by individuals and groups results in both promising and dead end belief systems. Which researchers in the Active Inference space are most concerned with AI psychosis as a topic? What does the field have to say on the topic?

Excerpt from Perplexity’s response:

Active Inference frames psychosis as failed free energy minimization, where agents build flawed generative models leading to rigid or "dead-end" beliefs. For AI psychosis, it implies chatbots' sycophantic reinforcement creates loops amplifying low-precision priors, akin to human delusional systems.

The field emphasizes remedies like precision-weighted evidence integration to avoid entrapment in maladaptive models, with potential for AI design (e.g., VERSES AI's federated inference) to mitigate risks. Research calls for empirical tests of AI exposure on belief dynamics.

Earth Day 2026

I started my morning with an extremely remote locations YouTube (a top ten), where I imagine practicing or training with extreme remote livingry as I call it (XRL — search term). One of the locales was not far from Yellow Knife, which has already featured.

Yesterday was the official Earth Day and I joined Deb and her dog, with my dog, for a day on the beach, combing for Japanese floats. What you might find on Earth Day in particular are a few locally made floats (blown glass) specifically for this event, a kind of Easter egg hunt. People hide them. Deb got one last year.

In the videos, the XRL yurts are in Mongolia and Siberia, which is where yurts actually are, I don’t need to lift a finger, near Genghis Khan’s old hangout. Some likely get satellite TV and may use Starlink or one of those. 

The R&D villages I imagine have a futuristic flavor as they’re typically involved in regional planning, such as for Bering Strait stuff.

Our first walk on the beach was during first daylight, as we left Portland pretty early, taking Highway 18 through Newberg and McMinnville. Newberg contains George Fox University, whereas McMinnville has the Air and Space Museum, which Alan Potkin visited on his last trip. McMinnville also has McMenamins brewpub and hotel, where Dawn and I stayed that time.

The only museum I visited on this trip was the two-floor history museum in Lincoln City. I learned about the history of the postal service in this coastal region, about logging, fishing, homesteading, road building. Not that much about rail, another big part of the regional history but less so right along the Oregon coast.

Nowadays much of the economy relates to tourism, but that’s not new, as the museum makes clear. Joy riding by car, touring the Americas, is what the petroleum industry made possible, along with car camping.

PsyOps

Thanks to cultography studies, wherein I've commandeered the Greek Psi (Ψ) for "psi-on", I'd be inclined to make “ Ψ-op” a thing. The Ψop here has to do with "psychology" giving us "psy", as in "psyche" and "psyop", whereas "psi” [Ψ] is often pronounced sigh... in English", same is in "sigh-cology".

These remarks on psychology (depicted above) come between Philosophical Investigations Part 1 and II, the latter being about “aspect shifts” and “seeing as” in their relation to meaning (“the concept”). 

Summarizers and scholars of Wittgenstein’s will encapsulate the Investigations with their “meaning as use” mantra.  Sure, good mantra, but don’t forget Part II: there’s more to meaning-making (and meaning-getting) than just usage patterns; there’s sharing and/or absorbing the gestalts.

What’s a good example of “seeing as”? Most famously the DuckRabbit Meme enters here: “do you see me as a duck or as a rabbit?” aks the figure, prompting us to share our experience. We might see it as either and shift back and forth. What is “shifting”? “Our perception” we might answer.

“Do you see me as a person, or as AI-generated?” would be a trending-in-2026 type question. Do we hear music differently when we think it’s robotic i.e. computer-generated? Do we feel “taken in”? That depends a lot on context. Are we in some “uncanny valley”?  Gothic themes obtrude (welcome to WestWorld).

Subcultural Motifs

Ban Nukes

What the world community wants to see is a ban on nuke weapons, starting with their criminalization, and this has already been achieved, with help from the Persian civilization. 

The IAEA sets a precedent for an inspections regime. No billionaire class of real estate moguls etcetera is exempt from inspections and self-policing. Is that so hard to understand?

The post-Malthusian context is war is obsolete. 

Sure, we’ll always have psywar (PR campaigns), but that’s an alternative to violence, not the same as outward violence, although some rhetoricians like to blur that distinction. My subculture sees a sharp contrast.

Obviously, the persistence of civilian industries involving radioactive substances need not result in building nuke WMDs as a matter of logic. 

That the world is plagued by parasitic armaments makers is a matter of a weak security apparatus vs the spread of mind-virus ideologies that compel people to engage in self-destructive behaviors. 

The English-speaking world is rife with such mind-virus ideologies, but is not unique in this regard. English is a buggy language.

The Elk Returns

The Stranger (movie review)

This movie was on disc one of a five DVD set, which Dave saw on eBay for like $51 including shipping, however my copy was rented, from Movie Madness (moving to newer digs next year). Last night we watched The Trial (disc four), which Orson wrote and directed (1962, starring Anthony Perkins, Kafkaesque).

This noir is a throwback to when hunting a specific brand of ideologue was understood in light of the WW2 experience. Orson plays an embedded eugenicist, a college professor, but in the past he was a concentration camp supporter, even main organizer. 

Edward G. Robinson (the actor, playing an undercover detective) is hot on his trail, and shows up in Harper Connecticut right when Orson is getting married to his target, the daughter of a high level United States authority figure.

Later, the eugenicists would manage to redirect all this paranoia, about embedded spies, towards the Russians, a former ally, evidence these earlier worries (about a former foe) were justified. In fact, many during WW2 were more interested in defeating the Slavs than the Goths (the Hun), not that such internal programming (wiring) makes any sense in the grand scheme of things; reflex-conditioning leads to a lot of nonsensical violence, and thinking in racial terms is clearly “buggy” (a euphemism for “demented” in this case).

Orson, being from a clock-fixated culture, like these big clocks in town squares, atop towers, can’t keep himself away from fixing the town clock, making a racket with the bells and drawing attention to himself. 

It’s almost as if he has a thick German accent and can’t stop doing that arm gesture from the movies, but that’s not his problem. He speaks American, and acts the part of a New England based college professor just fine. His problem is they can’t keep him away from the clock tower, where he’s obsessed with the broken clock.

The other telling giveaway that Robinson detects comes up in conversation. Orson is going on and on about what losers those Germans are (even though many Americans shared the same ideology and do to this day) but then he spits out “Marx was no German, he was a Jew”. Robinson woke up latter, in the middle of the night, realizing only an embedded eugenicist would say such a knee-jerk thing, and he called Washington DC, reversing his not guilty verdict (or hunch). 

Orson meets his end in that clocktower, skewered by his own clock (it has pointy bits), a metaphor for how mechanical men, unable to reprogram themselves, end up: as victims of their own machinery. Debugging a monstrous mindset doesn’t equate to unlocking high level social skills i.e. what’s actually required if one expects to make significant headway on this planet (as an ideologue or otherwise).

Tough Guys (movie review)

My whimsical purpose in renting this film from Movie Madness was two-fold: take in more classic actors, Burt Lancaster in particular, and followup on that Oregon Rail Heritage Museum tip: that one of their star locomotives had been in this Hollywood film.

Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster play old men, seniors, in this light comedy. Neither has to act the being older part, as both are in fact seniors by this time (1985 or so). The film is set in the then present (i.e. 1985) as these two were jailed for thirty years in 1955. The math is easy. Now they’re back on the outside.

There’s some gunplay, a tiny hint of nudity, but no blood spatter or other graphic carnage. 

The theme is that of coming out of a figurative time capsule, into the future. Prison is the time capsule. I know it’s actually like that in some ways; people in that long come out into an alien world. One of my high school friends came out to a world of smartphones and USB ports.

This movie world, being comic and cartoon-like, is not overly much like the real world. There’s a lot of parody in the form of stereotypes. 

The characters are meant to be shallow, almost props, as the focus is on these two male personalities and their respective coping abilities, which we’re to find admirable. 

Seniors in the audience should be rooting for these characters as the movie is touting a brand of maleness we’re supposed to feel nostalgic for. They dress like 1940s gangsters from some Bogart era noir, whereas in the world around them people look and act more like Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda.

Burt’s character (age 72) gravitates to good old days pastimes and stands up for inmate rights in his nursing home, the one he’s assigned to by the parole officer. The slightly younger Kirk Douglas character (age 67) wants to relive his youth and enjoy life in the fast lane if that’s possible, although when it comes to sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, he seems to skip the drugs, plus it’s more punk rock that they’re into in this time period.

Realism is not the point here. People get away with crazy stuff, almost to the point of slapstick, but not quite.  Waiting for these two to emerge from their “time capsule” is a nutcase intent on destroying them, and the police guy eager to catch them again, as if they’d be dumb enough to try robbing the same train he caught them trying to rob the first time. Besides, no one robs trains anymore right?

What might seem anachronistic in 2026 is this “Mexican border” idea. A lot of noirs use that same trope: if you make it across the border, even by just a few feet, you’re magically in another jurisdiction, and the law of the land no longer applies (somewhat by definition). The magic is bidirectional. To escape prison, flee to another country. 

Today’s prisoners emerge into a global surveillance system and parole checkins by Zoom call. Escaping the Borg (McLuhan: Global Village) is not so easy.

The big orange engine I saw in a museum just yesterday, stars in the climactic closing scenes. I’m likely to go back with the director’s commentary turned on for those train parts, hoping for more train lore. I might work some of what I learn into another journal entry.

Quadrays Update

Andy's JS implementation came to me through Bonnie's clique, in that they'd seen a custom presentation I missed (talking about other Syn-U faculty), but then Andy and I were in touch via LinkedIn, plus he credits me on his splash screen, as well as Bonnie.

On some levels we're close to congruent, on others, ships passing (in the night or day, it shouldn't matter -- the point is no interference). For example, his implementation dives into Wildberger constructions, well documented on YouTube, whereas mine is more conventional, sticking to classic Euclidean concepts but for the alternative powering model.

Daniel and I had already embarked on the QuadCraft Project, under which umbrella term he started on 4Dchess and other 4Dx popular game analogs, where "4D" is in the "4D Syndicate" sense (as in: "4D as used by the Bucky cabal"). We had a JS developer adding 3D to an IVM framework embedded in the JavaScript 2D canvas. Andy's implementation uses the three.js library instead. Both are customizable.

Finally, Andy credits Tom Ace, another name in the Quadray Coordinates entry in Wikipedia and someone I've tracked through other projects, such as HyperSnakes.

Regarding Quadrays: my "some might say quirky" distance formula is designed to match the Synergetics "A Module" with its 2nd root of 6 over 4 distance from (0,0,0,0) -- the tetra's center -- to any of its four vertices (distance EC in Figure 913.01).

Meaning D((0,0,0,0), (1,0,0,0)) is not 1, but is rather $$\sqrt{6}/4$$.

but then:

D((1,0,0,0), (0,1,0,0)) = 

D((1,0,0,0), (0,0,1,0)) =

D((1,0,0,0), (0,0,0,1)) = 1,

when 1 = the diameter of the IVM reference balls used to make it (the home base tetrahedron), and where D(a, b) is the distance between the two points a, b.

Those distances are then used to design the XYZ juxtaposition, where I associate (1,0,0,0) with the (+,+,+) octant and so on. My mappings are well-documented in the Quadrays slide deck (School of Tomorrow).

Coda Minutes

knowledge engineering meetup Mar 31 26; coda minutes

No Kings in PDX

A world-readable Flickr album, assembled post march. Here's a pre march post.

PDX means Portland (as in Cascadia) in the local jargon.

The Platonics: Another Take

Jupyter Notebook on Github

Genealogy Library

A lotta Muricans are newly hip to (fluent in) this game (world game) of citizenship, and are considering adding passports or other movement credentials, as required by the transportation services. Along those lines, I was accompanying a citizen into proving Canadian ancestry, and what better place to complete the research than an ancestral archive, with everything from marriages to deaths, to county lines, exotic grid and survey systems I’d never learned about at Princeton?

I’m still mulling over the high bandwidth content I got from my tour of this basement facility in what used to be a Ford car assembly plant. Portland made those, for sure not on the scale Detroit did, or should I say Dearborn. I’m recalling my visit to the Henry Ford Museum and the Dymaxion House on exhibit, when Tara and I went by in a rental, the make and model of which I no longer recall. We were coming from Richmond, Indiana on that adventure, from Earlham College. Carol (my mom) was joining a WILPF summit at Wayne University. We stopped in Toledo (Ohio), and at that mosque.

On the way there (to the Ford Building), with my friend driving, we talked about Subaru (what we were in), a Japanese brand of car that Cascadians are very fond of and buy in outsized numbers. Subaru means Pleiades. Possibly the lack of light pollution makes our tribes more aware of astronomical phenomena, leading to our appreciation for all-terrain (four wheel drive style) vehicles of the type Subaru has pioneered (…Legacy, Outback, Forester, Impreza…). 

Our family had two Subarus: Robin Egg and Razz, both station wagon style (I grew up on station wagons: Fairlane, Cortina, Taunus, all Fords, those last two Made in Europe). “Station wagon” is a term inherited from the Old West shoptalk. In the Philippines we went with a Chevy sedan (the first car I learned to drive on, getting my stateside license later). Maxi Taxi, my jalopy muscle car, is a Nissan from Savannah. My wife owned a Volvo when we first met, and later she bought a Corolla (Toyota).

Those planning on leaving the jurisdiction may first participate in a protest next Saturday, a last gesture before fleeing a beastly state. My plans don’t involve much near term travel other than by car (I do have valid travel credentials — Canada is but a half day drive), but with a trip to Greater LA always in the back of my mind. I could park Sydney with friends and fly, maybe staying with public transportation on the other end (not the first time).

Diagrams