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.