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.

Minions 3 (movie review)

I'd seen the preview for this one at Toy Story 5 but didn't quite realize how soon it'd be coming out. 

I walked by Fox Tower in downtown Portland on the off chance I'd wanna take in a film before fireworks. Minions and Monsters was just about to start. Why not? I've always found Minions movies entertaining.

Given the Film Studies focus of these blogs, wherein I interleave movie reviews such as this one, looking to connect the dots, this Minions fits perfectly into the syllabus. Because it's about the history of film-making, Hollywood in its golden era most especially (1920s - 30s), around the time films transitioned from live music accompaniment to "talkies".

The upshot is noobs learn a lot about film-making culture and history, while oldsters appreciate all the allusions mixed with satire, the knowing use of film canards and cliches. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton... and Dort (rhymes with dork), the hilarious Martian robot egomaniac with a crush on the suffragette. Wow, small world. Into this world barge the Minions, ever in search of a "big boss" they can serve as minions do. A faction breaks off to support Dort, whereas the bad guy bank robber on a horse is the other candidate.

The Minions make it big in Hollywood and are living the high life, when the talkies era obtrudes. Minions can't convincingly should like the characters they play. The Humphrey Bogart character just doesn't cut it (my favorite scene? -- during the "homage to noirs" part).

The self-aware "play within a play (within a play...)" dynamic is worked deftly with the closing credits reminding us that minions made this film (Jeff Bridges among them). 

So where do the "monsters" fit in? Is Dort a monster? No, Dort is his own thing.

The story there is one of their interim Big Bosses was a Gandalf or Dumbledore type, a wizard with a book of magic spells, out of which one could summon major demons (monsters). However this book of spells is not the only source of monsters. Per a well-worn trope, monsters may also be thawed out, if you know where to find their hidden ice caves (one of the demons knows). 

The monsters have their assigned roles in the ensuing blockbusters.

The entire story is bracketed within a museum visit to a hall of fame, and the tour guide lady wants to be sure the lore gets passed on intact. She then tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two creatives, Henry and James (minions) whose imaginative powers will eventually make the Hollywood chapter work. 

This is all a prequel to the Gru chapters, which are foreshadowed but come later.

C Suite Hotels

If you’re a denizen of Geekdom then there’s a high probability that, whether or not you’ve been on one (I’ll say I haven’t, unless I count… nah), language-specific cruises, like C-lang Gang to Alaska, exist.

Even less rarified are the organized retreats where sprinting happens, meaning a cohort agglomerates to advance a software project they prolly work on together remotely, but now, all together in meat space, high bandwidth, they can prolly really crack some eggs if that’s an expression.

Fast forward and we’re thinking C-Suites Hotels, a chain of resort locations geared for C-language geeks in particular, which might or might not include C++ depending on the establishment. Some geeks will be comfortable in both C++ and C language lounges, gabbing fluently around the relevant food and beverage options.

Based on my experiences around OSCON, I’d suggest mono-language resorts and/or assisted living facilities, would be self defeating as the whole idea is to stimulate novel thought patterns, or at least that’s why many people are there. So we might express our resort’s offerings more in terms of a ballpark or blend. There might be a shared focus, such as Synergetics (a kind of computational geometry) that attracted a variety of geek guests.

I got to be in a geek retreat around Plone, a descendent of Zope, one of the early object storage databases, ahead of its time in some ways, maybe beyond in others (aren’t we all). Here’s some LLM prose about that ecosystem.

Natural Language Accelerators

I had an interesting conversation with a peer this morning, which touched on where things might be going with the various MEMEX type devices, chatbots and so on. 

Of course MEMEX is not a term of art in current shoptalks, but does come to us from the 1940s with the right connotations and expectations. Rather than clinging to LLMs + LMMs as the presumed architecture, or otherwise overfitting, we bring back an old bottle ready for new wine.  

MEMEX was a term coined by Dr. Vannevar Bush, the original National Science Foundation chief, when describing his vision of today’s AI but in terms intelligible at the time. Microfilm was a big part of it.

Everyone knows the direction in computing is towards ever smaller (vs ever larger) leading Bucky Fuller to propose his UMC (his ultra-micro computer), whereby human subjects might become pinheads in a good way, as metaphysical components within some “hive mind” or “zeitgeist OS”.

The picture on many drawing boards is of massive centralization in the cloud (much talk about data centers), whereas many social engineers are planning for the individual school-level MEMEX, picturing both a physical campus and a virtual sphere in Cyberia (cyberspace), in user space.

The logical boundaries for a typical school would be inclusive of theater and sporting events, debating events, any number of extracurricular, as well as curriculum-related, activities (chess club, glee club… specifics are obviously per school). 

Year books, course readings, pages for faculty (active and retired), pages for students, past research… all would be raw material for the MEMEX, the computer that makes sense from a bewildering variety of saved goodies, with more always being added.

My expectation is Princeton’s MEMEX will be usable by alumni and in aggregate alumni across classes will represent the bigger slice of the pie, based on demographics. Those currently enrolled are the pipeline into the alumni tiger tank (where we tigers hang out).

However, similar to what happened in the music industry, with barriers to entry falling, thanks to the technology, a smaller personal MEMEX is also forecast and indeed is what many are busily building right now today, after which they make public videos about it. To what degree these individual onboard models are given agency varies of course. 

Clearly we’re in a transitional period with AI, where many small experiments provide the feedback the bigger solution providers will need, if their relatively large scale affordances are gonna be considered affordable, meaning worth their cost. 

Many possible scenarios we simply cannot afford, only fantasize about, and maybe get people to pay for anyway, as they share the same fantasy without critical insights into the practical feasibility of whatever crazy plan. Groupthink is like that. People feel safe and secure as long as they’re not alone i.e. as long as they have a critical mass of true believer subscribers to whatever vision (one would hope for more than a mere vision).

Those with a stronger sense of the Reality Principle serve to help filter out the truly crazy schemes. Some do get through though, and those involved find out the hard way why they should never have gotten funded in the first place. By the time that becomes obvious, it’s too late to course correct, while meanwhile the crazy think tank professors who dreamed this stuff up, are off to other assignments. There’s no one to call.

When the game is to try many things, going with fast and small over slow and big, the consequences of a scenario failing or wiping out will be manageable as well as instructive. 

Some plans look like they could work and one only realizes in hindsight about some of the obvious flaws.

Learning from one’s mistakes is of prime importance, in order to avoid one of those doom loops we always hear about, wherein a failure to realize what’s self-defeating is in itself a blind spot in the analysis.

Investigating English

Let’s look some more into English, in the sense of “investigate”, a verb already colored, by me, for me, by the Wittgensteinian corpus. I’m referring to an Austrian philosopher, first name Ludwig, who also spent a lotta time around military hospitals, as well as in academic settings. 

Mostly LW preferred staying by himself (he secluded himself in Scandinavia somewhere) and thinking deeply about language and how words mean. Our contemporary philosophy owes a lot to this thinking, in synergy with the thinking of others.

The verb that comes to mind this morning is “to rationalize” which usually means “to contrive a rationale in retrospect” when something, likely unbidden, is already a fait accompli yet maybe still in need of some justification, explanation, or excuse. When one endeavors to “rationalize” whatever, one strives to fit whatever into some schema whereby it seems planned, intentional, or at least explicable, and therefore more acceptable.

From the previous paragraph you may gather, correctly, that rationalizations often ring hollow, as they’re used to justify the unjustifiable sometimes. So there’s a negative connotation to the word, as rationalizations have a poor reputation. 

But you might wonder, seeing how “rationalize” is so close to “rational” and also “reasonable” in semantic space that it’d have more of a luster to it, more of a positive connotation. Finding ways to make something seem more reasonable in retrospect should not be judged a weakness. It’s when the reasoning seems “forced” and/or “sketchy” that the proffered rationalizations are adjudged “empty”.

I’d say our ability to rationalize in the sense of “smooth over by applying one’s reasoning powers retroactively” is a part our ability to self heal. In other words, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with making the best of new developments by incorporating them into one’s emerging sense of reality.

The active inferencer, or inferant, seeking to minimize uncertainty (free energy), is always using the wisdom of hindsight to retell a tale already told. 

Revising is not a crime as there’s always more than one way to tell a story when facts underdetermine the spin we put on them. Sometimes the retelling seems phony, no question. We call that “putting lipstick on a pig”. A poor excuse might be a considered a failure to sufficiently rationalize. No rationale seems to work.

We’re taken to task for being “revisionist” sometimes, as thats another verb (“to revision”) with a bad reputation. 

But here too: isn’t revisioning a responsibility more than a sin? 

Both rationalizing and revising may be part of a healthy self-updating process. 

Don’t deny yourself the privilege of seeing events, or even your whole life, in a new light, given the advent of new information, new experiences. A willingness to revise is often called “being open minded” which in most walks of life is at least given lip service as a positive. To be “closed minded” is to be “stuck in a rut”.

Synergetics for Seniors

Curating Propaganda

I especially like this one; I made it myself, using Gemini.

 

XREF: 

The Rabble Babble

Geek Lore

National Intelligence Director

Mood Music

Coasting to a Close

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclosure Day (movie review)

A movie concept 

(inspired by Disclosure Day)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incommensurability

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rounding Out Spring Term

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rose Festival in Portland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martian Memes

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Sushi Train

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

School of Tomorrow Notice

To school presenters:

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

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

Jupyter Notebooks are meant to be interactive. 

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

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

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

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

Here's my Anaconda Navigator as of right now:

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

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

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

Cascadian PR

 copyleft cogsec crescent city