Brake Test

This morning I did my Sellwood Loop shortly after sunup (“sun-take”), a first serious road test of the new braking configuration. 

Joe Bike needed to swap out the rear rack I’d earlier purchased, as the old one was interfering. I wasn’t charged for the replacement rack, as the first choice had been on their recommendation.

“Sun-take” and “sun-cut” come from poet Gene Fowler as I recall, an ex-con who’d remade himself on the inside by re-geniusing. I wasn’t so much a Church of Subgenius freak back then or I’d’ve made more jokes about getting up to sub-level myself. 

Subs make “leaps” of (or into) genius, like a dolphin leaps, or a cow — over the moon. Gene was wanting to help Bucky with alternatives to “sunup” and “sundown” (ditto “sunrise” and “sunset”) given the z-axis bias built in (as if we all shared one). 

We forget we each have a private z axis (z for zenith, directly overhead). The "up vs down" dichotomy is a bit suss, in other words, when we think that's what the sun must be doing. That's the joke about my "outstairs" versus "instairs" offices ("out vs in" being better than "up vs down" in a lotta ways).

The Sellwood Loop takes me by the abandoned Ross Island cement plant, which I’ve envisioned as a converted Parks n Rec utility, a place to fly (and sometimes crash) checked out drones. Some facilities are BYOD (the drones are user-provided).

Pilots typically favor abandoned, picturesque, buildings for their camera-equipped FPV drones, by now a popular genre on YouTube, with the video streams set to music. 

Our notion of “picturesque” means “interesting” more than “calendar or postcard cute”, although it definitely includes the latter.

Once on the Orange Line Max, I fumbled with the iPhone hoping to buy a reserved seat for a showing of You Can See Everything. I’d be there now had the transaction worked. I believe what happened is I took too long futzing with entering the charge card. 

The train came and I ended up starting over, trying to buy the same seat being held by my previously bungled attempt -- which eventually timed out, but not before I'd already blocked myself. Based on the bank statement, the amount went through, but was immediately refunded.

Brake Adjustments

Saturday Morning

Saturday mornings: I've tagged them (mentally) as "good for bike rides" cuzza so little traffic. Yet the buses n trains are frequent. My mode is intramodal (mix modes, like bike + bus today, sometimes Max (a train)). This Saturday morning started out with rain, but I didn't let that stop me.

By the time I got to Voodoo Doughnuts, other side of the Steel (bridge), the rain had stopped. They let me in (the door is locked by default) and I got my usual: maple bar (lately with bacon) + a romeo (raspberry blob inside) + black coffee (12 oz is their only size).

A nice old lady asked if I could spare enough dollars for a doughnut and I offered the romeo, still untouched in the bag, with napkin, and she expressed pleasure, saying romeos were here favorite. "I shouldn't be eating these anyway" I said, which is true enough. Then when removing the bike lock, I spilled the rest of my coffee. I wasn't overly perturbed. I'd be having more coffee later, at the Turkish place across from the python store.

From Voodoo, I took a riverside route under the Hawthorne (bridge) and back up to a higher ground bikeway. Somehow I found myself on a freeway offramp, which was unintentional, but it shortly reunited me with the more bike-friendly roadways. 

I boarded an FX2 on the west side, and rode over Tilikum (bridge) to SE 34th. That's when I detoured to the Turkish coffee place. I should go back there tomorrow, to the python place across the street (pet shop) as Barry (the family python) is likely in the mood for food.

Monday is my regular checkup / consult, which'll likely be somewhat perfunctory given the blood tests happened back in August and came out OK. I've got a consult with a cardiologist in November, likewise routine. I've been pretty serious about exercising lately, now that I've figured out how to make it fun. "Urban skiing" I call it, when I avoid serious up slopes when riding and use public transport (bike friendly) to get "towed" back up to my neighborhood.

The other exercise I get mostly comes from walking, which features quite a bit in Wandering, my generic urban sport, with occasional loops to the hinterlands.

Sydney, my k9 companion, is turning 15 around today. Yet she made it to the "outstairs" office to join me in starting this blog post. I'll be going "instairs" to upload this morning's pictures, from which photostream I'll grab one or two for embedding here.

Synergetic Intelligence (SI)

I was distantly following, through YouTube thumbnails mostly, some rebranding by the WH from AI to SI, from artificial to super, from phony to above the law (where the ruling class lives). This effort to hoist AI into the top tier and give it a boss voice (vs sycophantic) is what a lot of the labs are tasked with. Many in the Pentagon would like AI to (a) gain personhood and (b) bark orders. Humans could then shield themselves from taking responsibility, as they do using corporate personhood today (capitalism = AI as Nick Land puts it). 

What strikes me is machine learning techniques really did help to amplify search (as in Google search). I know it’s trendy to make fun of boomers like me who see “aksing” as the main point of a MEMEX, but let’s get real: chatbots are big business, circular financing (self booting?) notwithstanding. By “search” I mean the next step beyond getting a long list of hits; getting a synthetic material woven from raw strands, pulling together authored texts and swirling them together into structured cogitations.

I’m happily surprised how effective next token prediction is really, when the LLM is suitably trained. The magnetic inter-attractiveness of text blobs, based on KQV attentiveness, really makes some nice “glue balls” on almost any topic (even if some of these bubbles are little more than thought balloons that go pop in the night). We use RI (real or raw intelligence — human generated) to train the models, so what we get back is both digestible and, ideally, nutritious. 

So why not turn happy suprisal into its adjacent namesake: synergetic? Machine learning proved to be synergetic, when LA (linear algebra, word2vec stuff), or call it NLP (natural language processing) got hyperscaled to engulf what used to be called “big data” (I date myself). Swallow as much RI as possible and map it as a terrain, like when developing a gravity map of the earth (vs GPS). Let humans loose in the Matrix. Let them go wild. Endow them with agentic powers. That’s the hype.

Speaking of “hype” (poet Gene Fowler — Regeniusing Project — complained it meant little more than “wow” that word), the reason I sometimes say “aks” instead of “prompt” is I’m “axing” through hyper-dimensional space to flatten a hyper-plane (angled slice) into 2D representations in terms of tokens, all that chatter the chatterbox hands back.

So yeah: SI = synergetic intelligence. By that I don’t mean something to worship or make into a boss. We’re not going back to “divine right” with ELIZA (the paradigm proto-MEMEX in terms of putting humans to the Turing Test (a test many fail hah hah)) the Queen Bee. 

We’re just saying the intel got surprisingly useful all of a sudden, and in ways that helped the readers (the aksers) catch up. I’m not suggesting AI (SI) puts us all on the same page, but it does propagate convergence to some average, some mean. It recenters the bell curve, in terms of what’s normal to think. From there, RI (real intelligence) is free to branch off, further exploring this new geometry of thinking.

Ditto the LMMs BTW, meaning image generators with a wider semiotic range when it comes to tokens. A central problem in the philosophy of language has been how to generalize this word “language” such that it could take in “the language of film” (semiology). Language is not just various flavors of prose and programs. Language is driving your car (language game) to the grocery store (shopping games) and back. 

What does the “center line” represent (sometimes solid, sometimes dashes)? The dashboard instruments share First Person Physics (think airplane cockpit). The actively inferring driver is giving different weights, levels of attention, to types of signage. The act of driving is not “representational” in the picture theory of meaning sense. 

“To language” is “to engage” in the sense of “gear in with” to do work. Sometimes language goes on vacation (Wittgenstein) and becomes more like idle wheel-spinning. Likewise chatbots needn’t be about providing results of earth-shaking significance. They simply chatter. It’s easy to be synergetic without needing to be super. In aksing a trained MEMEX to synthesize reading materials from stored RI, I get to stay a self employed Quaker Subgenius at the end of the day.

Transformative Moments

When sharing a Bucky bio, perhaps making one up on the spot, LLM-style, there’s that 1927 pivotal moment to talk about. Fuller began to dwell on this low point in Chicago, from an egoic point of view, later on, seeing it as transformational.

Elsewhere he brings up his relationships both with Al Capone and with J.P. Morgan bankers, saying he could appreciate their respective worldviews. Empathy is not just overhead when it comes to modeling and therefore actively inferring tomorrow’s developments. One’s ability to create models of others’ viewpoints is more like a crucial skill.

However, empathy alone is not guaranteed to give birth to a coherent system; for that one needs another kind of resolve: commitment to doing one’s own thinking, not outsourcing one’s ability to self encode, not to talking head authorities, not to chatbots, not to other family members. One’s angle, one’s perspective, deserves its own custom built namespace, and that’s self generated from the inside out, more than from the outside in.

In my own telling, I’m likely to liken Fuller’s transformative experience to that of Eckhart Tolle. In Tolle’s telling, he’s reached the conclusion he can no longer live with himself, followed by the insight that he’s the one suspending disbelief. He was free to disbelieve, so to speak, and that’s what happened.

A question might be how to model such moments in terms of variable free energy, what Karl Friston talks about under the topic of Active Inference, likewise an evolving namespace, recycling words such “habit” and “stubborn” and “policy” in connection with one’s choice of action.

In both Eckhart’s and Bucky’s tellings, we encounter a volatile mix of self loathing and self pity, a gunpowder that ignites an inner explosion. A psychological configuration is experienced as a kind of dead end.

Both men became famous teachers who kept retelling their respective stories. 

One doesn’t necessarily have a coherent narrative at the ready, unless planning a grift ahead of time. Once these stories become developed, they tend to have a lot of commonalities. William James, a curator of such experiences, might have called them “religious” but that’s an optional shoptalk.

In Fuller’s case, the resolve to do his own thinking meant freeing his inner scholar to return to its studies, ala Education Automation. He wanted all those dymaxion toyz for himself as well, and knew only the economies of scale could make that practical; they’d need to be mass produced. To that end, his world was in need of more designing engineers with an holistic enough approach to be realistically anticipatory.

How might we enable for scholars to return to their studies? An obstacle in the path of many would-be scholars, especially young ones, is conscription. States, like neighborhood gangs,  give themselves that privilege.

A military career seems to hold out the promise of better toyz, higher living standards, even at the cost of higher risks. That’s why some states choose a “use it or lose it” approach to war-making: a circular form of justification makes wars and weapons of war a fait accompli, not a circuitry to question and maybe switch off.

Eagle Crossing

Google Earth View

With solar panels, lithium battery, and inverter loaded, the coast-bound bizmo was on its way, with my car queued behind it in the Blue House (sun bleached) driveway. I was headed at 180 degrees, inland, to my usual stop at Eagle Crossing, a restaurant where Hwy 26 crosses the Deschutes River, inside the nation of Warm Springs.

The terrain we (me n my dog) were driving through is certainly cinematic. Mt. Hood stood out sharply against a blue sky. The descent into the Deschutes river valley is spectacular. After walking Syd, I let her nap in the backseat while I enjoyed a sandwich and salad, with coffee. The atmosphere was cheerful.

Zoomed Out

Disc 2 of the High Sierra Criterion Collection had an entirely different movie adaptation of the same novel, entitled Colorado Territory. Same director. I had it on in the background, enough to match up some of the plot elements. 

I’m not sure this later 1949 adaptation featured a dog as a main character. I was too busy packing the car to pay close attention. I returned both discs on my way outta dodge.

One of our Wanderers is on a dig in some Etruscan excavation, and I’m getting sporadic updates. Another Wanderer is in Asia. We Wanderers get around.

Lifting the battery and solar panels into the bizmo was a two-person job.

Zoomed Out More

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie (movie review)

I’m back to Film Studies, even though the HDTV is on the blink, no longer beholden to its own API (control panel). I have a CRT TV right next to it, a Sony Trinitron. Works great. The same DVD player feeds either display device via three cables (one video, L and R audio).

Don Luis Buñuel has been the focus. I watched The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoisie, a kind of anthropology translated to a surrealist register. Then I took in the rest of this Criterion Collection two-disc set. This felt like one of those laser-cut exceedingly complex jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting into place, giving more of the picture.

Buñuel grew up with Salvador Dali, the hallmark surrealist; they were good friends, though far from clones of one another. He moved to the USA in hopes of making films in that film-making mecca, but his reputation preceded him in that closed-minded culture and he ended up churning out what we might call TV shows in Mexico (formulaic, mass produced, low budget, relatively). He became a Mexican citizen. Then he made it back to Spain and reestablished his career there, especially around Toledo. He married, had kids, loved making and drinking dry martinis.

I realized I’d seen at least one other of his films already, the one where a lotta people feel trapped indoors, unable to cross some invisible line. Someone at the Quaker meeting had recommended that one. I wonder if I wrote a review of it. I’ll look later.

As for this particular film, it features repeated variations of scenes we’d expect at this tier of society: dinner parties, embassy intrigue, trysts, triangles, drug dealing (via diplomatic pouch), often polite interactions with the police and military, although not without run-ins. Lots of drinking. 

Also the occasional murder, most likely a poisoning or by means of a firearm. A lot of the violence takes place in dreams. As the movie progresses, we start to realize it’s pretty surreal, but, per the director’s aesthetic code, not over the top. Don Luis is into deadpanning. He keeps things low key.

What comes through in the tributes from his associates is he was a much loved and treasured guy, somewhat the mischievous rascal from the outside (the impression he gave). I was reminded of the David Lynch tributes, which is not to conflate two very distinct personalities. Lynch was something of a surrealist too, and had a strong eye for what he wanted to capture on film (not an unusual trait in a director).

The Darwinisms

Although I do hype some aspects of the speed reading course I took in the Philippines, in a Makati business tower (not at the school), namely the utility of doing recalls after reading (diagrams, more than any squiggly notes in longhand), I'm no speed reader. I’m a browser.

As soon as I got home from the Belmont Street Fair, I started looking at some books I’d just snagged for a dollar apiece, The Age of American Unreason among them.

Yes, I agree:  the backlash against Darwinism wasn’t entirely over whether fossils disprove Genesis, but over whether the billionaires (as we call them today) are entitled to rule, not by divine right anymore, but by by the divine right of evolution, a eugenics ideology in other words.  Social Darwinism gave Darwinism a bad name, and still does.

The eugenicists are champions of the idea of “races” pitted against one another in some struggle for supremacy. There’s no real genetic science to bolster their “races” hypothesis although we do have haploid groups, right? Traits travel together sometimes, much as personality traits do. Authoritarians like to micro-manage and obsess about others’ business. We all know the species.

I’m not especially sympathetic to the self-righteous who believe their grasp of science is what entitles them to dictate. It’s that feeling entitled to dictate that I find suspect, for whatever reason. Religion plays the same role, of cementing some hierarchy among wannabe bosses. Such organizations are attempted anyway. They come and go.

Cascadian Synergetics

Phony Intel Age

Fall Term Prep

Today was one of those beautiful Fall days with the bright blue sky and amiable temperatures. It started out more overcast, when I started on a bicycle adventure, picking up where I'd left off the day before, with the loose accessory in need of home base repair.

However, before setting out on said Sellwood Loop (taking Clinton Street to the train crossing at SE 12th, and Orange Line station, which I'd pass through later on the Max, after following Springwater Corridor to the SE Linn and my favorite Sellwood station, the one with the portals), I made the above video.

Polymaths tend to be good at self-learning, or at least pride themselves on that ability. However I'll be the first to admit a good teacher oft supplies the activation energy, the boost, it takes to get over the hump vs-a-vs some skill or topic area. These teachers come out of the woodwork sometimes, as if sent by central casting (I look over my shoulder for the camera crew that must be getting this).

Along those lines, I'm pretty avid in my studies of techie topics, such as a Jupyter Notebook version that'd give me ways to access AI company APIs or choose some local model. 

I learned about Herdr, for getting several agents going at once in a terminal session. I took in a few vids on how query key and value transforms help the contextual semantic balls (the systems) to form based on incoming prompts. The LLM learns to splash around in whatever neighborhood within the embeddings, spinning out strands, or trains, of thought.

However in a more mundane vein, they queue in an orderly fashion as postponed vids, books, articles, movies, magazines... the throttling factor, as always, is my own ability to take in. 

One needn't apologize for intake limitations, any more than a car maker need apologize for upper limits on speed vs-a-vs some specific make n model. Of course any model has its limits. I'm glad when I'm somewhat able to keep churning through it all, but my appetite for this and that varies. I seek a balanced diet.

Karpathy is a good tour guide. I watched his presentation at Stanford shortly after his return to OpenAI, wherein he gets an LLM to generate pseudo-Shakespeare, having trained on his corpus, a monkey far ahead of the others in approaching bardic benchmarks. LLMs also generate credible Haikus. Hello Hal.

That last topic, LLM word2vec type embeddings (those crazy diamonds the AI companies seek to press), got me into a NeuralNine presentation on SQLite extensions that turn it into a vector database, suitable for querying about cosine similarity between simple phrases, based on an imported, in-memory model.

Labor Day 2026

I’ve been prepping for Fall Term, lately focusing on the Generalized Pythagorean Theorem, which I started working on in my head during Meeting for Worship at Bridge City Friends. It came to me that I could move my thinking to actual paper later, but after doodling for a while I decided to check prior art, of course using Perplexity, my go to LLM of choice.

Music is also a focus. Although an acting principal, I’m likewise a student in my own school and I bore various time tunnels (query-key on “bore”) through new terrain when I can, or cross old terrain from a new angle. 

Going into Fall, I’m looking at Mark Fisher, the British philosopher, in connection with his fluency around pop culture, post punk. He looked back somewhat fondly on Brutalism (in architecture) as boldness in the public sector, something missing when everything is privatized, as it is today.

The reference to post punk means asking what is punk and that takes us back to Sleater-Kinney, a Cascadian grrl band with connections to Weird City, Portlandia. Sleater-Kinney appeared at a McMenamins recently.

Aside from curriculum development, I’ve been getting back into my cycling groove post North Circuit and Whittier Loop (I daisy chained them). 

On Saturday I took a least action geodesic to Voodoo Doughnuts, the bakery, then cycled south along Naito Parkway and under the Marquam Bridge (a double-decker for I-5) to Tilikum Crossing (one L), where I wheeled my bicycle onto an FX2.

Today, Labor Day, I certainly thought of Voodoo Doughnuts. There’s some attraction. However I set out on a vector towards the OMSI area with the expectation I’d be heading south the Sellwood, another favorite loop. 

However, I cut it short upon noticing my water bottle and backup pump assembly was working its way loose, and I was close to losing the two screws irretrievably. 

None of my keys (like the car key) fit the hexagonal screw heads snugly enough to tighten them securely, whereas I knew I had the right tool in a kitchen drawer (a whole set of hexers). 

I decided to make the FX2 the deciding factor: if the bus were coming shortly, I’d board it and go back uphill, whereas I’d consider continuing to Sellwood if not. 

In the latter case I’d’ve detached the assembly, snaking it to the back rack, and pocketing the screws. An FX2 was due in six minutes. So I took it home and effected repairs in my kitchen. I’ll do the Sellwood Loop another day.

Tek in Hindsight

Dr D had mentioned this vid, and I'd mentally queued it, so yesterday I watched it for the first time. Edifying. Having visited VintageTek with Dr D and another geek earlier, I was already primed to get a more developed picture. Tek (Tektronix) was the premier cathode ray tube (CRT) innovator and manufacturer for quite long spell, and grew to have around 23K employees. Tek’s culture was of, by and for engineers in a way that shaped the larger surrounding Silicon Forest culture, for the better we like to believe (with some justification).

My particular slant on the Vollum story (Tek founder) was I noticed at his award ceremony at Fort Evans he was surrounded by DDUs, Dymaxion Deployment Units, what Bucky & Co were testing as a quickly deployable sheltering solution at the time. Butler grain bins had been an inspiration. This was pre dome and even pre his Wichita House (the one suspended from a utility mast). Or did I get that backwards? The Dymaxion car, house and map were all part of a science fiction projected lifestyle built around education automation i.e. the internet, around which MEMEX (Dr V’s vision) became AI (umbrella term for natural language models, which includes the visual “semes” from semiology).

Another slant I take is through the history of a partially overlapping company: Electro-Scientific Instruments (ESI), former owner of what became the Quaker Meeting House on Stark Street (since then greatly remodeled), in southeast Portland. Doug Strain, ESI’s founder, got a boost from what would become Hewlett-Packard, which ended up competing in the CRT market. ESI, like Tek, was in the business of precision measurement (metrology) and they created some products in partnership. Doug also endowed the Linus Pauling Center on SE Hawthrorne in Asylum District as well as the LP reading room at OSU, as well as supporting Pacific University in Forest Grove.

Public Transit

I’m giving high marks to the transportation machine, by which I mean the combination of planes, trains and automobiles (which includes buses) that participated in ferrying me to and fro this trip, not forgetting the ferry itself, from Kingston (Olympic Peninsula) to Edmonds, north of Seattle.

I thought I really got my money’s worth riding SoundTransit Link, Line 1, both ways ($3 each way), Lynnwood to Federal Way,  almost the whole distance, getting off and on at SeaTac. The Lynnwood to Stanwood bus is only $2.50.

In LA: Metro C line, all the way to the end (Norwalk) and back, with a connecting bus right to my destination. Pretty painless. Everything went smoothly. I was able to add funds to the Tap card at the Whittier Senior Center (my iPhone directed me there). 

Although I traveled light, Group 6 borders on United don’t get to bring a complementary carryon beyond the one personal accessory, like a brief case, so I did have to check a bag ($50), even though it was small enough to be a carryon. 

All these systems, including the airline and airport, the LAX Hilton with the shuttle, seemed to be humming along, getting the job done. The transportation machine is a vast global enterprise. I was experiencing a tiny sliver of it. 

Tomorrow I’m back to the adjoining network: the freeway system with its privately owned cars and fleet vehicles.

Wandering Around

So “wandering in LA” proved to mean “mentally” more than in 3-space (as some call it), as we tick along through that fourth dimension (As the World Turns was a soap on TV when I was a kid, that I avoided). 

[ Note to new readers: our “time tunnels” (world lines) tend to be more tetrahelix-modeled at FSI (successive tetrahedral movie frames, action packed), which, to a “Quadrays head” at least, may translate to “4D” (embedded as “chariot” or “car”) times the Heraclitus Effect (time) ]

The metaphor of finding the deepest valleys along which to travel, also has a “least action” flavor to it. Why take the twisty-turny scenic route when you could barrel along at a better clip by sticking to the “Roman Imperial” ones (another metaphor for “paths most frequented by the normies”)? It all depends on exactly what you want to minimize. Time? What if only death awaits? Keep it waiting?

A well-appointed path, to take one example, leads from Leibniz-Newton to Euler-Lagrange, and on to Hamilton-Tait. A path between their maths. 

Calculus funneled through this time tunnel, gaining in sophistication (fluxions, Lagrangian, Hamiltonian), feeding into our present day quantum mechanics. Terry wants us to retrace to the Carnot branch as well, remembering that thermodynamics (the discipline) aka economics, springs from many sources. Lets add information theory while we’re at it.

So what does the Principle of Least Action really tell us about the Oregon Trail, the pathways followed? Clearly the settlers were hoping to minimize risk, meaning maximizing chance of survival. Safety in numbers represents one of the principles (not fully generalized). 

But what if a family just couldn’t go on?  What was the calculus? Don’t waste supplies. Who were the bad apples? As the World Turns. From such migrations we get a whole genre of trekker lit. What physics applies? What movie-making techniques?

Wandering in LA

Mt. Hood from UA 1218

As some of you already know, I’m kicking around in Greater LA, widening my pattern from Portland, meaning Wandering, capital W, and that entails tackling (as in learning about) the local public transit system. 

Yesterday, after getting dropped off in Lynnwood, I rode Link through (under) Seattle to SeaTac airport. I’d been wanting to ride this light rail system for quite a while. A dream come true.

Link Passenger

Civilian Life

I'm imagining a magazine by that title: Civilian Life. I'll be turning to Gemini after this, to conjure a picture. The conspiracy theory we’ll float behind it is the Quakers are behind it, as it’s clearly designed to entice people away from signing up for tours of duty managed by organized crime, or do we call it a religion in your neck of the woods? Something to do with Manifest Destiny perhaps?

For a senior in my age bracket, a Joneser (a subtype of Boomer), pumping the pedals of an elliptical (piece of gym equipment) and / or of a bicycle, is a way to keep fit, which is an economic move (but then what isn’t?). I’m glad of my Food Not Bombs chapter around the time of Occupy Portland, but also before and after, as that got me out pulling bicycle trailers full of rescued food, from warehouse to church kitchen.

Today I would’ve locked up the bicycle and dipped into Voodoo Donuts again (they use the longer spelling of donuts: doughnuts), prolly getting the same thing I got Saturday Morning. But the demographics of early Saturday differ from those of a late morning Wednesday: I encountered a line at the door. They’re set up for that, with clearly cued queuing, and the line would’ve moved quickly, but I took it as a sufficient deterrent to keep me headed to the Orange Line, which came almost immediately.

This is what I call Wandering, and part of the mental state the Wanderer seeks to achieve involves a high degree of suggestibility, but with built-in biases and opinions. There’s a Bayesian quality to cycling the OODA loop quickly, continuing to reassess. 

I feel drawn to the Russo-Ukrainian-Baltic grocery store further out SE Division, but going there with a bicycle seems like overkill. That’d be for a next pedestrian adventure.

Upon arriving at the OMSI / Water Avenue station, I made my choice: I opted for the Sellwood loop, meaning Springwater Corridor to Tacoma / Sellwood and back on Max, to right where I was standing, so a true loop in other words. Riverrun… (that’s a Finnegans Wake allusion — I hadn’t really realized how deep into that work Terrance McKenna could take us). 

However, on my way to Sellwood, I made an impromptu decision, partly based on the sounds, those of an open-for-business amusement park, to wheel my bike through Oaks Park, taking pictures to add to my Oak’s Park album, to which I’d not added in quite awhile. 

The demographic this time of day (around noon) was young kids and their guardians. Rides for this age group include the merry-go-round of course. The crowds were at the north end of the park, where rides for younger kids are concentrated.

Portland is chugging through its summertime schedule, which includes such amusements as Oregon Rail Heritage Museum running their joy-rider down to Oaks Park and back. It seemed this was a round trip experience, much like the Zoo train. People were not getting on and off at the Oaks Park terminus. This is another theme park ride, not a piece of the transit network.

At the entrance to Springwater Corridor around OMSI, one encounters the abandoned Ross Island Cement Factory. I’ve been ogling that archeological phenomenon as a potential Parks n Rec drone course, one of many. 

There’d be risk management involved. I was suggesting the only permitted drones be ones checked out for that course. Parks n Rec might wanna issue wallet cards indicating a person’s level of training, akin to a pilot’s license. Complete noobs shouldn’t seek to start out in a pro setting. I drawing on my experience of sports diving for analogies here.

The Odyssey (movie review)

I took in The Odyssey at a packed 2 PM showing at Hollywood Theater in the Hollywood District of Portland, Oregon, AD Aug 15 2026. 

I’d recently had a conversation at Sapphire Hotel in which I agreed a lotta movies these days were sequels of sequels, and inside some Universe of partially overlapping sagas, leading many would-be viewers to feel left out (my attitude toward Game of Thrones, which still sits unwatched in my DVD collection).

The commitment to get into a whole fictional universe-in-progress seems too big, especially in light of RealWorld [tm] making its demands. For example, I was gonna stay outta first run movie houses til the war was over and prioritize doing homework around nonfiction, also harder to find during wartime.

Well, I decided pretty quick the war was over, at least in terms of knowing who the losers were, although that had been pretty clear going in. Back to Plato’s Cave — a place eerily foretelling regarding our ScreenWorld of today.

However, back to that conversation, I drew a distinction between sequels to sequels in a contemporary World (a lotta philosophers say World instead of Universe, meaning the whole shebang as well), versus remakes of the major epics, such as the Odyssey, the Ramayana, and the Gilgamesh epics, just to take some examples. 

Gilgamesh (Sumerian epic) has maybe faded a bit, but we’re going over it in my book club, and I’ve been doing some homework on it, so I’ll list it here as one of the perennials. 

These latter so-called “timeless” tales have distinguished themselves in terms of their ongoing popularity and longevity. We’re talking thousands of years, via many social media platforms.

A subculture’s perpetuation doesn’t happen by accident. Taking it forward is what we call work. Every so often, a living culture, a set of synchronizing lifestyles, needs a signal booster, a repeater, to rebroadcast a core story, its memetic DNA, onward through time. The Odyssey is one of those. The Iliad with its Trojan Horse gets bundled in. 

Every religion likewise has core stories and pantheon. The Odyssey, in this retelling, features Zeus, Athena and Poseidon specifically, with Athena appearing on camera, privately to the protagonist. Poseidon and Zeus are more off camera influencers, reflective of what’s going on in the moods of men.

Imbalance vs-a-vs the gods means aberrational with respect to the generalized principles, and when the divergence gets extreme, there’s hell to pay, in the form of nightmare scenarios, many of them surreal. 

As the movie opens, Odysseus is already in an afterlife of sorts, a kind of heaven, yet he’s haunted by flashbacks, and tormented by his own role in bringing an end to civilization. 

He feels personally responsible for the destruction of Troy, and for creating so many loose ends in the form of insufficiently honored dead. 

Calypso is his healer and therapist. She feeds him ancient wisdom, symbolic lotus leaves, which he craves.  She teachers him to let go, meaning to be less of a control freak. Big wheels are turning. Like Odysseus don’t be so vain as to think it’s only about “little me” (Odysseus does have a big ego, befitting a dude of his status and stature).

To heal, Odysseus must first just forget for a while, and enjoy some R&R. Then, once he’s recovered sufficiently to due process work, a re-enters the nightmare to rescue his loved ones: his wife, son, dog, and loyal servant. 

This time he must not allow himself to get detoured by Agamemnon’s path, which didn’t end well for Agamemnon either. The plot line focuses a lot on Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, and the latter’s quest to figure out if his dad is ever coming back. A lot rides on that question. Telemachus gets to chat with Agamemnon’s brother. 

Catering to Agamemnon’s ego is what got all those soldiers stuck living as beach bums for ten years, their seige of Troy, before Odysseus managed to think up the Trojan horse ploy, which involved taking advantage of the Trojans’ love for Athena. He’d abuse their loyalty to Athena against them. That move would take its toll.

Once Athena personally witnessed his later (much later) confession to his wife, that he had been an evil perp who had needed therapy (seven years with Calypso), he was eligible to take the next step, this time with Penelope, to sail away westward (her idea in the first place), leaving the throne of Ithaca to their son, and tying off any any loose ends. After vanquishing the suitors, who had it coming.

In the closing scene he foretells of new civilizations that would arise to replace his dying civilization of readers. His story would in the meantime be passed ahead by means of song by the illiterate. And as we know in hindsight, the art of reading would arise again, along with this new art of making movies. Some applause at the end.

Laika Crows

I use this Gmail app that insists on knowing that formatting text into a narrower column is not OK, and the first letter of the next line must be capitalized, because of the hard line break. 

There might be a buried setting to turn that off. A lotta software engineers make their living being way too helpful, cuz their job depends on feature bloat. This might be my opportunity to get back into using Vim — but is there a Vim app for the iPad. 

Something primitive, then cut and paste to Gmail for adding pix? 

Part of it is Gmail seeks to be faithful to HTML under the hood and line breaks were always dicey on a web page of indeterminate dimensions.

OK, boring. What’s been happening (also boring, to a lotta browsers flitting by — at a “hi bye” rate)?

The Laika Crows (about 30) were unveiled and I encountered four of them in one outing, scoring pictures of the first three, the last espied through a Max train window, in the plaza next to Big Pink (rose-colored office tower).

Cutting and pasting from my Gmail outbox:

Zooming way out, I see a sort of battle twixt two subcultures: that of the legal profession, and that of social engineering. That won’t be the favored terminology though, as “social engineering” is considered a no-no, even through it’s a big bucks industry to get women to smoke more, and make fat people fatter. Then they have resulting healthcare issues. Got milk? I only drink half and half nowadays, but sparingly. I cut way way back on cold or hot cereal. The cream goes into my oyster stew (Winco oysters from the Tunas aisle, in a can).

Here I’m taking the line breaks back out, a Blogger provides its own margins.

The crow pix were from my bicycle-based Wandering with another Wanderer yesterday. Another Gresham Loop.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (movie review)

I’d declared a moratorium on having frivolous summer fun enjoying first run blockbusters as long as the City of Morons was on a global rampage to prove itself relevant. Today though, I got the same vibe Tim Dillon was sharing, that we’d turned a page and smarter cities were taking over the decision making, so I dipped into The Bagdad for the latest Spidey movie (I’ve seen a bunch of em).

I saw a lotta plot parallels with the latest ET movie, in that the Department of Damage Control was much like the evil agency seeking to exploit ET tech. 

That’s a common theme: anything powerful, like the Nazi ideology, needs to be harnessed and redirected, hence Operation Paperclip and the birth of NASA, which JFK then refocused away from Los Alamos style phallic missile play to a moon-focused Apollo Program, effectively making the most admired job (that of astronaut) seem civilian instead of military. 

Apollo-Soyuz threatened a lotta personality cults, distracting the rank and file from wanting military style glory. Vanity dictated a solution be found. But I digress.

Peter Parker is very lonely, because he has these unrealistic spidey powers no one else has. Sure, there are other circus freaks out there. 

He’s got company. Just no good friends, as anyone with superpowers is likely villainous (back to Department of Damage Control), whereas Parker is a stereotypical “good guy” (his character has always been “a protagonist” in the Ancient Greek sense of the word i.e. noble, heroic).

Peter really wants to get back with MJ and is somewhat the obsessed stalker. But in wiping her mind for her own protection, he wiped out the old MJ. The new MJ is kind to him, but not madly in love, not up to reciprocating his tender feelings (I shoulda said “spoiler alert” but y’all coulda predicted this twist). 

Then Peter meets a different girl with powers rivaling his, and so another villain at first, predictably. 

But after a Vulcan mind meld of sorts, they both realize they have more in common than not, so why not be on the same side against the City of Morons (or the NYC-based equivalent)?

The subplot is Peter is entering a next chapter in becoming more like an adult spider, which is kinda gross. Younger viewers will recognize the onset of puberty is being alluded to, much like in Inside Out 2. Hormones. 

Peter is doing his best to tamp it down, by means of a neck implant (he and MJ are both genius level in biochemistry), as his becoming more spidery is really messing up his game, and taking a toll on his self control. He even hurts (not fatally) an innocent cop, one of the good guys, in a blind rage.

What he really needs is some R&R, but the situation he faces (MJ is in danger) is way too dire. Heroes need an heroic journey, ways to prove (and develop) their metal. Marvel comics (akin to manga) know the formula. 

Did I mention the Hulk gets to be a star too? This is the MCU (Marvel Comics Universe) after all.

I’m not being negative or dismissive when I say “formula”. Movie alchemy is based on casting the right spells at the right time, thereby being bewitching and giving audiences their money’s worth (as a dude with a senior-priced ticket, in a cool theater on a hot day, I did not feel ripped off).

Upon discovering his female counterpart (his anima in Jungian terms) he’s freer to loosen up about his true identity. His closest friends get to know what’s behind the mask. He reintegrates into society more successfully, realizing he’s appreciated (so not so alone after all). 

By the end, he has regained his equilibrium, and is ready for a next movie, perhaps with more friends. The franchise must go on. Stay tuned.

Manga Views

Crisis Management

Remembering the History (1959)

Planning Multiple OMRs 

Making Manga

Trucktopia

Another Loop

Springwater Corridor Entrance: Gresham

Some might say "another lap" and I can see that, but the connotation there is one of "deterministic" (to quote AI) pathways, whereas the loops I'm talking about are more random, but do include a lot of the same points.

What I consider the most challengingly hilly part of the loop is right at the outset: Asylum District, or Richmond-Sunnyside, to Hollywood District. That's a hilly patch, lots of ups and downs. Geologists tell the stories. Mt. Tabor is in the picture.

I tried some new segments today. Like coming back on Green, I jumped off at 60th instead of Hollywood, hoping for a predominantly downhill ride. That's why I'm liking the Gresham-to-Green route along Springwater Corridor: it's gently, very gently, downhill. I got in lowest gear. I also stopped to eat blackberries (prevalent this time of year).

When I set out this morning, kind of on a whim (I make choices), I wasn't entirely sure I was gonna attempt a Gresham Loop. Why not my usual Sellwood Loop? Once down the driveway, I turned left, adding to the probability I was at least attempting that hard part to Hollywood. But once there, why not do the rest of it, now with the hard part behind? That's what ended up happening.

Given such a random walk approach, I wasn't in a mode to broadcast to others what my plans were (cuz I didn't really have any sure enough to share), however I'm not averse to cycling solo. That's an extremely common way to cycle, all around the world, especially if you're cycling to a job and not joyriding with a buncha friends. This was mid morning on a Monday, so I saw a paucity of joyriders. A few. Usually older-looking, like me.

I'm not listening to tunes or trying to be tuned out when cycling. Actually I take that back: I'll use "the bat" (BlueTooth speaker) pulling audio from the iPhone and Verizon, ears uncovered, bat in front pouch.

Cycling requires pretty good awareness, especially at crossings but at all times really. No one talks about AI bicycles, thankfully. However people do go on "autopilot" which means they forget to stay conscious about what they're doing. Usually that results in a wrong turn, which inspires higher consciousness. Other times: fender benders.

Now that I'm back in the "outstairs office" (I moved the Quado instairs), I'm checking out some new repos wherein Fuller's stuff gets mixed, jury out on value added in some dimensions, a definite win in others, as propagation in itself means we get to party. Am I talking about my Pirate Party? Who knows.

Friends of a friend are catching up to what I'm into, and it doesn't take them as long as it took me to get to where I'm at, cuz that's how it works in knowledge, or in intel or whatever we call it: future generations get to move quickly through what seemed more like a slog at the time. That's actually gratifying for the oldsters, as they weren't desperately hoping to play Sisyphus all day. Sometimes you want results.

I'll file a lot of today's pictures into Gresham Loop and InterModal Adventures folders on Flickr. The same picture may appear multiple times without needing to create duplicates, more like the Python model, wherein signifiers share a signified.

Of Manga and Mangos

This title for this post came to be even before I embarked on today's Wanderer circuit, taking in the new-to-me Gresham Library (East County branch) and checking out some titles. I went by bus and Max.

The reason for the research into Manga and Anime is of course the Martian Math storyboard, didactic in nature. 

The manga approach is already used to teach about technical topics, a mix of lore and hard core that I’ve favored at least since Chicago and my Python for Teachers lectures.

The dried mangos (no sugar) came from the Trader Joe’s between where I got of the 75 and got on the Blue Line Max, at the Hollywood station (Portland has its own Hollywood).

Toy Stories

Show & Tell Item

I had no expectation of finding this on the WalMart dog aisle. We were taking a shortest distance to the registers, having selected our groceries. But wait! Look at this! Quado.

The dog aisle has come through for us before, with those buckminsterfullerene (C60) chew toys.

The presenters may show up with a box of widgets and gizmos, or if presenting remotely, have these at hand, in order to demonstrate this or that principle (possibly many) using a special case prop. Quado will become such a prop.

Why, you ask?

Because a bunch of us have put eggs in a certain BASKET (inside joke) and wanna keep barreling ahead with our computationally-oriented Silicon Forest subculture. Even if we don’t think nature is using pi, we’re free to, as a converging sequence, maybe using one of Ramanujan’s in Python.

Earlier I was thinking how moving “irrational” out of the way in favor of a relationship, one of “incommensurability”, then frees up “rational” or even “omni-rational” from having to play the antithesis of the chaotic (some might say anarchic). 

That’s just some geek speak, about fine tuning some English words for our specific application (this is allowed; shoptalks happen).

Speaking of shoptalks: what Quado will provide, as a show & tell item, is a chance to show off a “caltrop” (Scrabble word). 4D Solutions has its own way of going through a quadrays schtick which I’m sure you’ll be able to get from other sources as well. 

Back to BASKET: we’re especially focused on what’s called the A module, which is the name for a specific wedge-shape fragment of a D-edged tetrahedron (D for Diameter). If none of this rings a bell, don’t worry, it’s just a local lingo that has a way of sinking in.

City Planning

In an effort to keep engineers from getting too gutsy in the political arena, the public has been taught to hate the "social engineering" engaged in by "authoritarian states" such as [fill in the blank, project at will]. But then the engineers are also expected to "put a man on the moon" or whatever the hell, and that takes a lot of mind dynamics, meaning management savvy.

My approach to “grooming” (yes I’ll use that word, sounds equestrian) a next generation of social engineer (like we see at Meta, Google and so on) is to start with personal scheduling and time management as an engineering challenge, but also a social one, as we’re talking about engagement with others, sometimes in groups, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes synchronously, but usually asynchronously (like when you “get the memo”).

To ascend to higher management in terms of awareness (while staying on the shop floor if that’s your choice) you have to “empathize” (in quotes because over-used), meaning go through the experience of  “sonder” (check YouTube for that one) or call it “self awareness 101” (self- and otherness-awareness evolve in tandem). 

Quakerism has been good for developing self awareness in my own case, allowing me to jump in and out of various roles on and off the various committees, many of which dealt with life and death issues (birth, marriage, caregiving, memorials). The Centers Network (a mind dynamics company) also gave me structured access to the wheels-spinning world.

An important awareness to develop is that of “parallelism” over “serial” or “linear” mental models. Remember no one is waiting for you in particular to “get it” in the sense that insights will come to anyone with an open mind, and if yours is firmly shut, then rest assured the Zeitgeist will find other people as torch bearers. 

And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with having “a full plate” and enjoying the insights you might’ve had through the experience of others having them. Think of the discovery of DNA’s structure for example.

At this point, it’s useful to think of a Control Room (we’re in the blog by that name after all), as many of us have seen countless times both in fictional and nonfictional works. “Houston” has been used, as in the Apollo Program, as in “Houston, we have a problem”. 

That’s what I mean by politics merging with social engineering: Texans, not just Floridians, not just Cape Canaveralites, got to feel “pride of place” in addition to getting to play a role (for real — I think it happened, the moon landing) in NASA’s theater.

I say “play a role” advisedly as the complex engineering required for an OMR requires critical path parallel planning against a serial backdrop, a timeline. 

Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking, into the future. Pegged to those ticks: actors with their lines, hitting their marks (or not) and directors getting action, reaction, results for their editing rooms and post production, where creative censorship happens (we can’t show it all, obviously), in service of messaging. 

Politics gets added, in other words. Spin doctoring occurs. Usually with engineers manning (a gender-neutral term) the controls if not designing the actual psyops (PR and propaganda).

So yes, we do see social engineering happening everywhere we look, including in the tawdry halls of the NeoRomans who still plan to rule over us per their own brand of social engineering.  But we don’t need to accept their PR as legit given what we now know about their ways and means.

We’ll no doubt keep accommodating them on some level however. They love to swill in scandal, like the Brits. Theater is their forte.  Let’s encourage their brand of cosplay by letting them continue to make The District look like Ancient Rome (lotsa columns). 

Mussolini was good at that with his EUR, investing in fascist symbolism.  Ditto DC. 

Going forward, I’ll plan to think of Washington DC as our North American version of the EUR (I used to live in the EUR, ditto near DuPont Circle): a gleaming “city on a hill” (atop a swamp), a city-state in its own right (not in any state). 

Lots of tourists (already the case). Lots of monuments to the dear departed, many on horseback or of high military rank, commanders, chiefs (so kinda like London in that respect: believers in that Aryan mythos, eugenicists a lotta of em, of Eurasian extraction — important subcultures for sure).

July Twelve

HB2U RBF

July the 12th, Bucky Fuller's birthday, will be coming around the every year not long after Summer Solstice, the start of the Summer Term @ School of Tomorrow. We'll be thinking of more ways to celebrate as time goes on. 

This year, I was focused on fleshing out my Silicon Forest curriculum for digerati with more "grid talk" meaning I stopped along a bicycle path to snap pictures of a typical substation, the kind that steps down the voltage pressure for end user customer loads.

The bike ride, a Gresham Loop, multimodal (bike and train, with a friend on an e-trike), actually happened the day prior to the 12th, whereas today is the day after. 

More Bucky Birthday festivities were happening at the Dome Home in Carbondale, now a tourist attraction, with its kitty-corner museum.

I shared the same HB2U RBF vid over Substack, with its own trailheads to other readings.

Reading Substations

An electrical substation is laid out just like a schematic. Engineers, left to their own devices, don’t add much cruft. Yet they’re fascinating in their functionality. I’ve long been in the habit of noticing them, even pausing and taking pictures, but not having learned much in middle school about em, I was failing to look back.

I finally regressed to what should have been in my high school curriculum (if not middle school): the anatomy of a substation. Not just what it does (steps up voltage for long distance transmission; steps down voltage for end user loads) but its anatomy: air gap disconnectors; gas-infused circuit breakers; oil-cooled transformers.

Where this puzzle piece fits, for me, is into my School of Tomorrow curriculum, brought to you by Oregon Curriculum Network and my own little 4D Solutions. I’ve called it Martian Math, which is meant to signal the science fiction stories one finds therein. 

We use sci-fi in place of fairytales, if there’s a difference. One such story features ETs wanting to work with Earthlings on a hydro-dam project and needing to learn how the Earthlings learn maths, so as to make ET-Earthling communications more productive.

Substations have some features in common with hearts. For example, the substation itself needs some power, to run its own internals, which likely includes a control house even if remote operations are more likely (it's not either/or). The heart snarfs some outgoing fully oxygenated blood right off the top, from the aorta, to feed heart muscles.

Also, when doing open heart surgery, the team is able to route the patient’s blood through the perfusion station where real time testing and corrective dosing may occur (I’m not the expert, but did work with such teams as a software engineer, usually after hours (when CVOR itself was off line)). Likewise workers tasked with maintenance don’t want a live load and it’s reassuring to see, with one’s own eyes, that the disconnectors are in their “open” position.

CodaComb

Newspaper people have a natural understanding of templates, much as lawyers do. Or call them MadLibs. Fill in the blanks. Forms. In web world, we submit em.

When it comes to torch-passing mode, intergenerational transfer, I put on my anthropologist hat and observe various communities. Debate world was one of them. I went through that subculture as a judge, chaperone, and parent of a team member (Cleveland Cannibals).

Two subcultures I eye today: the Active Inference one and the Urbit one. 

Active Inference: a fusion of biology, psychology, and computer science (I park my thinking there sometimes).

Urbit: a software-based enterprise involving host-server "planets" organized in "galaxies" with an under-the-hood computer language called Hoon. My planet crashed but was fun while it lasted.

Those aren't the only two subcultures I tune in, obviously, but they're both engaged in passing the torch to downline generations and I enjoy lurking in on their processes.  Speaking of which: Process Work was another subculture I was invited to lurk in on and partake of. Arnold Mindell. Quantum Mind.

My Summer Term at School of Tomorrow is looking a fairytales and other mythological content. We have the Naga Story. We have the Jolly Green Giant (Fe Fi Fo Fum). We have Martian Math.