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

Achieving Escape Velocity

This was a period for doing curriculum development around Quadray Coordinates especially, as that meme had caught on and implementations were spreading, from my angle both inside, and outside, the scope of our QuadCraft project. 

QuadCraft had the tagline "A World Beyond MineCraft" or something like that, connoting our escape from rigidly rectilinear thinking. The TEXIT campaign (with variations) goes under this same heading.

Cloud Adventures

I filed a schedule C this year. If you’re new to the IRS tax code, this means I’m running a business, a teaching business in my case, a for profit, meaning I have to keep track of losses (expenses), otherwise how do we see if there’s a profit or not. You can take in a big amount, but what if you pass it all through, and then some, to subcontractors or PR folks of whatever variety? Stuff like that.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, electronic banking simplifies matters, as we no longer rely on a lot of hand-kept records, taught as part of check book 101 in the heyday of paper banking. Now you just download the PDFs or, better CSV files from your pay point (some transactions server, like PayPal), meaning whatever account (I just set up Swipe like a few days back) and there you’ve got all your transactions for the year. 

At this point, many would import the CSV into a spreadsheet, much the same as what I use: a Python DataFrame from pandas.

Anyway, to “cut to the chase” (I should ask Perplexity where that idiom comes from) I tallied up cloud expenses for keeping data in the cloud, and part of my harvesting that data involved using said cloud, at which point I realized my banking files where only in the cloud and I’d need to mirror them back to the local drive, not an immediate process. I was separated from my own banking files by a time delay and mucho geographic distance. Kinda dumb. How do I make sure I have a local copy?

Well, one thing led to another and I know have a 17.5 gigabyte file downloaded to Old Mac, the youngest of my Macs. I’m awaiting a next beefy box, able to run Blender no problem, a focus of Spring Term. However it’s not super important that I be buff with Blender as I’m surfing the ripple effects of having already done the necessary renderings starting in Visual FoxPro times, before shifting the more long term rails (investments) in Python.

An issue is I don’t have 17.5 gig to spare in Old Mac’s long term storage, so the target device of this download is actually an inserted memory stick (thumb drive) connected to Old Mac through its USB port (not USB-C, the older shape).

Big footprints in the cloud (and yes “big” is relative) can’t be shifted around willy-nilly like potato chips (lightweight matter), kinda like some forms of “money” (investments), which can’t always be liquid either. 

The cloud service in question took some days rolling up a zip file with all my stuff in it (the 17.5 gigabyte file I was talking about). Clearly my request went to a queue and needed to wait its turn. I’m not the only one wanting to back up what’s in the cloud with something more local to the scene in question. Cloud services might get cut off for various reasons having to do with internet connectivity.

One may curse and shout about the delay involved (that wasn’t me, I’m just projecting) but in “tree world” (talking about real physical trees) we don’t expect to transplant a particular specimen at the drop of a hat.

Deep excavation and even a crane may be required. The process could take not just days, but a week or two (I’m not the expert — I bet they even use helicopters on occasion). 

Laws of physics (they call ‘em laws) have relevance in engineering. It’s not all about “vendor lock in” and making money.  It’s about figuring out a business plan that doesn’t require “leaps of faith” of the kind the underlying physics simply won’t allow. One may express cynicism about a human design, but how is one “cynical” about Jupiter (for example) or even Saturn with the stupid hexagon? Calling Saturn’s hexagon “stupid” just sounds stupid, right?

It’s not a human-devised system all the way down, let’s remember. Which isn’t saying anything crazy. We’re just remembering humans are johnny-come-latelies to this picture, and aren’t exempt or miraculously excepted from following (“obeying”) those generalized principles (“laws”).

Martian Math

The Martian Math moniker is multi-layered. In the full blown science fiction tale I tell, Earthling kids are being trained in ET math, but the ETs are here, not on Mars, and they want to learn from us about hydroelectric dams, whereas Earthlings have a lot to learn from them, so a 2-way street is posited. Let's build a dam together; a jumping off point into electromagnetics topics.

Synergetics is more coming from the ETs than from the Earthlings; ergo Synergetics seems alien, strange, weird (pedagogical positives when managed properly). The Earthling kids in our Martian Math class also learn how the ET kids learn Earthling math. TetraBook goes here. Tested at Reed College and other places around town c/o Saturday Academy.

And once we’re in the mood (mode) for science fiction: War of the Worlds and the Orson Welles reading thereof are important, as a fork to both H.G. Wells and his non-fiction (world between wars) as well as fiction (Time Machine), and to Orson Welles going forward into Film Studies (Media Studies). That War of the Worlds anticipates the virus (as yet unknown) in some dimensions (see web pages) is a jumping off point into biology, virology, crystallography, STEM in general.

Finally, Martian Math may be contextualized in its Silicon Forest context as one of four maths: Casino, Supermarket, Martian, Neolithic. The idea here is Martian is forward-facing futuristic (all the future), Neolithic faces back in the direction of prehistory (all the past), Casino covers risk and chance, probability and Supermarket is all about logistics, commerce and distribution. 

Martian - Neolithic is a time arc, whereas every age, every time slice (every now), has to compute in terms of possibilities, probabilities, and operate logistically using inventory (the BE DO HAVE of GST).

However it’s all supposed to stay flexible and optional. There’s no one right way, but when I do it I experiment and expand in specific directions, as would anyone.

Looking Ahead

The above was a quick sketch I then shared on Telegram in a faculty lounge context, while at the same time adding a record to Photostream; my usual workflow. The meme is an old one in these journals and elsewhere: General Systems Theory as competition for Economics as conventionally imparted. Once you change Econ enough, it starts to look a lot like GST, so lets agree these labels, as in what they mean, is malleable.

In GST, we’re not bound by some theory that humans are somehow the source of all economic value, as in value added, as if nature’s bounty were somehow off the books or unaccounted for. Likewise we value free software and its role as a serious good, hacked on by a few, of benefit to a few million or more.

What I expect some teachers will do is similar to what I do: mix in a lot of David Graeber’s stuff, such as Debt: the First 5000 Years.

A lot of explorers (wanderers by choice) come to our corner because they are looking for geopolitics, some flavor of language game that’s world focused. Fuller was known for his global map and his geoscopes, in addition to the spheres and domes, which were of course related. The corporate schools never wanted to touch the stuff, and so here we are.

As a boomer… except there seems to be some movement to carve out a Generation Jones, not saying I get it, as if the other generational boundaries weren’t likewise blurry? (how much is superstition vs sound anthropology?) …in any case, atop my being a Joneser, I’m one of those “third culture” expat types by upbringing, even if I’m back in the homeland by now (and have been for decades)… As a boomer I’m atypical in having picked up the GST banner, which most my cronies here left to languish (ditto Cybernetics).

You’ll find David Graeber in the School of Tomorrow orientation materials on GitHub, in case you’re still looking for a place to get started.

The Alto Knights (movie review)

I picked this out almost at random it seemed, though the MMU angel might’ve been guiding my hand to stay within the noir lineage somehow. I was in the mood for something in New Releases and paid an extra dollar for that privilege. We rented Scarlett Pimpernel at the same time.

Robert De Niro plays both gangster principals, friends turned enemies, meaning he appears playing against himself in several scenes, in ways film allows but not live theater. You’re not meant to be thinking “special effect”; you’re expected to forget entirely there’s just the one actor behind both characters. Dave looked it up later to confirm. We went in no realizing this was going to happen.

What I found interesting in terms of timeline is the events were right around the time of my birth, late 50s, early 60s (in the 1900s). I remember those car makes and models were indeed prevalent on the road back then, although these memories are dim, plus cars evolved quickly in terms of shape and size, and even underlying technology to some degree.

The idea that “everything changes” and yet some people find it hard to adapt, to let go of old patterns, as one of the two principals most clearly demonstrates. He has come back from hiding overseas to an entirely changed United States, New York City in particular, and he expects to pick up where he left off, in his own mind, as supreme leader of the underground crime scene.

The friend who returns to New York, from hiding out, is the hot head version of De Niro. The friend to whom he left the racket pre WW2, to manage in the meantime, has done so quite successfully, per the consensus of other crime bosses. Costello is the relatively cool-headed De Niro, who most anchors this drama. He’s the one who get shot in the opening moments, put somehow lives (inconvenient).

One of the funnest parts was on the drive to upstate NY, seeing the signs for Palmyra. The hot head gets into an argument with the driver, against whom he holds a grudge, about whether the Mormons really got started in Palmyra. The driver is correct in thinking they did, but given he’s already botched the murder of the other principal he was tasked with by this one, his boss on the backseat starts to physically attack him, causing the car to swerve a bit. A third passenger tries to restore equilibrium as a moderating influence.

The film is meant to be anthropological as well as historical. We’re exploring an ethnicity, and how it operates, albeit highly dysfunctionally. 

Education vs Research

Education vs Research:  this distinction came up in our Knowledge Engineering meetup this morning. Research advances the frontier of a discipline, or call it a subculture. Education is about catching people up, getting them to the frontier in the first place. 

Not that getting to the front has to be a long trip. Low hanging fruit in abundance is a characteristic of many of budding ecosystem. But then you want to be sufficiently trained when you get there.

And that’s the pitfall:  in the mad dash for fame and glory, for one’s original research, the commitment to teach, to educate, and thereby pass the torch, gets overlooked. How many are willing to forego mining for gold in order to teach mining?

In my First Person Physics endeavor, which gained me entry to the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), I got to know some of these education-focused pros, such as Dr. Bob Fuller, who considered Dr. Robert Karplus to be one of his mentors.

Princeton University is supposed to focus on Education over Research in being more about giving undergrads a fast track vs trying to make a name for oneself by heading a pack of grads and postdocs. 

Celebrating a Centennial

I know most of the entertainment channels plan to focus on the 250th, a nice round number, counting up from 1776, but as I'm telling my peer planners, that's not my gig. The Times Square ball has already been programmed. That's big corporate account PR stuff outside of my price range or market. However, Route 66 is in my ballpark or bailiwick or whatever we call it (arena?).

The “desert highway” trope is important, such as in my introduction to the “vane” in various lesson plans, where one might picture a rusted windmill, and say a gas station. Then came the rhyme with 1.06066… which was like a puzzle piece fitting in (Wittgenstein: to what?).

I’m not suggesting Route 66 itself is in Cascadia at any point, and yet as memes they share that property, of being memes, not official, off the grid in a sense. Route 66 was officially decommissioned in one corpus, but resurrected in another. This kind of stuff happens in anthropology. It goes the other way too: something alive and with agency in one subculture, will be seen as innocent of any agency in another.

Remote Base Designs

So it’s Curry Week in Portland. I should explain. We have this “food of the week” tradition, that doesn’t map to every week, in which eateries voluntarily sign up to offer said food in the form of a “special” of some advertised amount, say $10.

My peer group tends to take these weeks semi-seriously in that we’ll go out of way to plan a stop at this or that restaurant or food truck or pub or whatever, that is showing up on the maps. Social media plays a big role obviously. In my neighborhood, food trucks abound and today I have two on my list, meaning I’ll be flipping a coin (so to speak) at some point.

Speaking of coin flipping, as you might know if a connoisseur of my curated content (these blogs), my statistics and probability vane (think of a windmill) goes by Casino Math, a search term herein and elsewhere in my writings, where a certain Digital Math of the Silicon Forest is featured. Is Wikieducator still working? We were getting indications it was taking on water.

Casino Math is meant to highlight both the history of the social sciences, and the physical sciences as an offshoot (contrary to stereotypes), and the fact that the institution we know as “the casino” (minus aberrational examples such as on Catalina Island (no gambling)) is a concentrated example of what we know about “odds” as well as human psychology (they go together — predicting human behavior is an art, true, but also a science).

I wonder if I’ll be able to wire my Visa card to my bitcoin wallet at some point. Use the card mechanism but backend it into whatever store of value you’re able to make fungible in the moment. Best to have a buffer in hard currency with a backend able to take more time, as bitcoin sometimes required, especially with mining costs what they are.

Yes, money talk is Casino Math in a lotta ways, but also Supermarket Math. So now you’re wondering about Neolithic and Martian Maths, as the two remaining. Of course we’re free to look at “money” through all four lenses, with Neolithic reminding us of how “kind” and “currency” might overlap, in the form of promised cows (bovines), redeemable thanks to IOUs issued in their stead. With the sovereign’s picture. A man of his word? A hard currency would suggest yes.

What about on Mars, will we use money? Did they need money on the starship Enterprise in the TV show? 

I don’t really see these as the questions to be asking, at least not of me. I wouldn’t know. More to the point is what will “money” mean when we’ve had some centuries of experience using crypto?

When I hand over my Visa (or swipe it myself actually — most food trucks don’t need to even touch the card), I imagine paying in something worth burritos, or curried chicken wings, or… you name it. Once in the catalog as a priceable item, you’re in the world of “frequencies” (how rare a thing is). Statistics is all about the relative frequencies of various types of event. Lookup the etymology of “fluke” as in “unlikely thing happening”.

We have these plans for “glamping” campuses in extreme remoteness, meaning the airplane or helicopter doesn’t come every day, more like a base camp, as in mountain climbing, but without presuming that specific climate. Some base camps are too high for planes or helicopters anyway. So maybe one needs to hike in. The circuitry is based on “food trucks” which are like the animal branded lodges of old, with extended families and exogenous relationships.

In our diagrams, we have stratification based on length of stay, planned or actual. Some faculty or staff are full timers and stay during off season, when the tourists have left, but with more to come. In Las Vegas terms, you need the locals to offset the peak and valley rollercoaster of feast or famine. At the height of tourist season, the locals have work. When visitors taper off, they get more of a playground, given they know the ropes already.

Revisiting Grunch of Giants

What killed the USA as we knew it was the Supreme Court legislating that money is speech and corporations are people. At that point, AI (phony intelligence) took over. If there’s such a thing as human intelligence that’s not just AI, we still have a chance of pulling out of this tailspin. But I doubt we’ll have nations as we know them today. Too impractical. I’m glad the US led the way, in celebrating its own demise amongst a small circle who actually get it, what’s going on. Most people are clueless, which has always been a challenge where democracy is concerned.

Interpenetrating diaspora nations, people of all nations mingling, touring, basing bases… that’s the reality on the ground, not pens with fences around them, although that’s the logical conclusion of the nation state mentality, quite psychotic, good thing the boomers won’t be with us forever (present company included).

I wasn’t suggesting the GOP intentionally instigated the USA’s demise. I’m alluding to a long history during which the Supreme Court went along with the railroaders, expanding the upgrading of slaves to full humans per 14th amendment (still not with voting rights in practice) to include promoting corporations to full personhood (still limited liability, still monsters) by the “same” reasoning / rationale. That all happened a long time ago, post Civil War. 

Then you have Citizens United opening all the power chairs to Corporations (dead, soulless, artificial beings with no conscience or consciousness — AI in other words — with superpowers endowed by law). That Business Plot (echoing the earlier failed attempt, frustrated by Smedley Butler) was completed by the 1980s and ever since it has been downhill for the vast majority, as silly humans fail to compute the consequences of their own actions. 

Like of course the nation-state system would never survive a corporate takeover. A takeover is a takeover. You live in the private sector today. There is no public sector to speak of, only a fake one. If you want to rebuild a public sector, go ahead, is what I’d advise and encourage people to do. But in the meantime, I don’t see anything but oligarchy, around the world. City-states. Nations are for children to believe in, like Santa Claus. I’m not being cynical. I’m OK with nations gone. I don’t have any religious conviction that any of them are still real.

Mapping Quadrays

Mapping Quadrays @ School of Tomorrow