Fire (movie review)

The religious studies student is visiting again, so when we visited Movie Madness, we each picked one consistent with our areas of investigation.  I'm into the Cult of Bucky (meant tongue-in-cheek) and so picked The House of Tomorrow.

She's into gender studies and gender fluidity, and she picked Fire, a film by Deepa Mehta, also anthropological in flavor.  We watched them as a double feature, Fire first.  One of her contacts in Nepal said this was an important movie.

The film is set in a modern India with lots of background traffic noises and smoggy skies. The Taj Mahal appears, in the new couple's honeymoon, against an uncharacteristically blue background, more of a postcard, and a metaphor for flawed relationships.

We're told a story about some deliberate blemish in the Taj structure, exacted by the slave architect, in retaliation for the master's excessive jealousy (he has the architect deliberately debilitated so he won't design a competing Taj down the road -- as if one couple's love was at the expense of all others).

The love story takes place against a backdrop of tradition and convention, which accepts a lot of cruelty, especially from males.  Women in tech encounter these attitudes when seeking self-sufficiency within the political economy.

The dependence of women, on the social networks of men, is an "in your face" aspect of some societies.  In others, there's more reciprocity.  Sometimes a system will stray from an equilibrium and enter a chaotic phase, which may result in a new equilibrium down the road, some kind of "plateau".

The elder granny character, still able to follow the action, but unable to articulate her thoughts publicly, has a front row seat on a lot of the rule breaking going on.

The younger wife and protagonist has to put up with a very reluctant husband whose primary love interest is Chinese.  The older wife is married to a guy trying to follow the teachings of his swami, but he suffers from overwhelm and occasionally needs mothering. 

Both wives see their relationships as emotional dead ends, and yet the two get a lot out of being together.

Unfortunately for the illicit couple, their relationship is occasion for blackmail and counter-threats.  A family servant is especially prone to resort to spy-and-tell as a ploy to preserve his situation, after his own illicit addictions have been found out.

My comment at the end was I'd been overwhelmed by the sound track, which did a lot to create atmosphere, pretty effectively I thought.  The music gets very ominous sometimes.

I'll bridge to the second movie through the Taj, as in Bucky lore, the Montreal 67 dome was a Taj of sorts, dedicated to his own wife, Anne Hewlett, and their relationship.  This second movie of the evening was more heteronormative as we say, and more lighthearted.

DVD Reviews

I gradually wend my way through these "reviews" taking each as a broad license to talk about whatever. I stray into 911 territory quite a bit, and even fly over the JFK region, in the Land of Lore.

My Ex Machina review is especially cursory, as I'd not yet re-seen it. Last night I did and reiterate what I say in the Youtube. This is a remarkable movie, in terms of exploring what Deep AI would really mean.

The computer would have to know how to lie, for openers, as that's deeply characteristic of what humans do. I like "dissemble" as a synonym.

Then there's employing outright deception. Our usual idea of AI is less real (less like RI i.e. Real Intelligence). This movie points out our naivete.

Access Point

These relate to each other, through the Dymaxion House especially. Watch in any order.

Web Crawling

Everyone knows the world does not really operate according to how textbooks say it does. The sovereignties are paper tigers, dependent on more invisible institutions that prop them up.

A couple quotes from Critical Path by our Medal of Freedom winner:

In our comprehensive reviewing of published, academically accepted history we continually explore for the invisible power structure behind the visible kings, prime ministers, czars, emperors, presidents, and other official head men, as well as for the underlying, hidden causes of individual wars and their long, drawn-out campaigns not disclosed by the widely published and popularly accepted causes of those wars. 

The U.S.A. is not run by its would-be 'democratic' government. All the latter can do is try to adjust to the initiatives already taken by LAWCAP’s great corporations. Nothing could be more pathetic than the role that has to be played by the President of the United States, whose power is approximately zero.

I recently shared these passages on Facebook, in conjunction with this exhibit.

I learned a lot about Gaudi today, over at Glenn's.  Such an amazing individual.  One of his secrets is he saw possibilities in the indigenous crafts and skills of Catalonia.

He was more of a structural engineer than most architects, studying the transmission of forces with string meshes and bags of shot.  His curvilinear style has become more popular now that computer software is doing more of the grunt work.

Triangular Numbers

I find no record in my Activity Log of having shared this on Facebook. 

However it could be that when a group moderator does not approve a post, it vanishes from the accounting.  I'm not completely up on Facebook arcana.  I remember sharing it with Mathematics Education Researchers.

But then this is about Learning to Code, not mathematics, right?

Meanwhile: TV as Usual

Crazy TV: the nutcase killer is lionized in puffed up police punditry as "wanting to weaken the United State" i.e. this was an international event involving a terrorist organization (Mr. ISIS pops up, out of cold storage, right here on CBS).

This isn't another brain dead victim of our zombie media, not a completely out of his depth gun nut with a case of the Columbines. No, this is international warfare, as this veteran (so many of them veterans) was on the brink of joining ISIS, or no, he'd joined already, no wait... the details won't matter, now that the link has been made (for us, by the media mogul caliphate).

Another worn out husk of an NPC (non-playable dead end scenario, no more good cards) of the type we used to see in a medical facility (called an asylum or sanitarium) and not necessarily in a jail. Cuckoos' Nest if you wanna be unkind.

Then compassionate America decided to give them all shopping carts and to push them out on the streets. Vets get shown the same door. "Go enjoy vulture capitalism, they need to feed."  "Go be in some Breaking Bad episode."  "Have a midlife opioid crisis."

We made a distinction back then, in the old country (the one before this one), between a mental case and an enemy soldier, also between a mental case and an international terrorist.

Now we live in Crazy TV Time, wherein every mutant monster, every victim of some hideous epigenetic meme virus disease (some go back centuries), is really who they think they are, in their dying rants and manifestos.

We get to be in their world. Lucky us.

Now the crazies get to help dictate, be a central part of, some epic inter religious violent melodrama, starring heroic fighters who will keep us safe, praise Allah.

Storyboarding New TV Show

The gamer community is always needing to create new ad hoc cities with detailed buildings, in multiple styles. Any help with generative algorithms could be a big hit.

I'm likewise seeking to blend Burning Man type "tribal centers" (experimental prototypes) into networked Country Faire vistas, suitable for year around camping in some cases. Lots of food trucks / carts / pods ala Portland, mix of tents big and small (fractal), also domes big and small (a kind of tent, or yurt).

Creating these vistas on computer, for fly through, gives the script more traction with would-be producers.

I've been talking with John Driscoll an architecture student about the building and city generation algorithms used for games and potentially reality planning. 

I'm thinking Refugee Science will prove an imaginative theme park motif actually adds to camp prosperity, cuts down on crime. This might be in the vicinity of some truck stop such that supplies and transportation are in golf cart distance (light rail?), but the village itself is mostly geared for pedestrians, Disneyland style.

Plain Text Philosophy

One of the dumber arguments some philosophers make, is that one should refrain from using words with well-established meanings, when inventing new language games. "Don't recycle pawn as that's spoken for. How about fawn?" They presume to steer one away from the high inertia high value words. That's like saying to a little kid: "don't use gold in your funny money game, as that's a real adult word, and you're just a little kid. Until you have real gold someday, you should say shmold".

That's all preamble to explaining how I see our subcultures, our dialects, our namespaces, as only partially overlapping, because we do, in fact, ignore these obstreperous philosophers, and use the words we want, including gold, energy, vector, gravity, radiation and whatever else we might get our paws on and hold on to (I'm not saying it's easy to hold on, given precession and all that).

We all want to build for the ages, and we know that using words like fawn or shmold (i.e. off-beat, never-heard-of) is going to put us at a disadvantage.

Fuller gets a lot of notoriety for coining a couple words, such as tensegrity and in-stairs versus out-stairs (he doesn't even take full credit for dymaxion) but really what he did most is take some high value high inertia "physics words" (as if any one discipline owns them) and bend them into his own basket-weaving language of Synergetics.

Tension is "that which holds together" (over very long distances sometimes) whereas islands of compression (shorter range) keep stuff apart or keep separate. Synergetics inspires lots of mental cartoons, mental imagery, along with tactile experiences, to show us what gravity and radiation mean in that namespace.

Three rods of a tripod press down and want to splay apart (radiational) on the slippery ice, but a triangular tension band around the base (gravitational) keeps them from so doing. Nothing moves, yet we appreciate the dynamism in this equilibrium.

Did he need Newton's permission to invent this new gravity & precession suite? Einstein was bending space-time in new ways. Isn't "bending space" just what we do, as science minded? We make bubbles, we subtract 720 degrees, we systematize.

Hadron collision accounting (CERN stuff) and Synergetics are not "at odds" so much as they co-develop as different language games (or sets thereof); different tools, different engines. Synergetics has a section on its vocabulary's remoteness, which is intentional, and designed not to interfere with others pursuing their own disciplines. But, per my preamble, he's not about to deny himself access to the gravity well of high value words, when inking his own thinking.

This idea that language boils down to names, and names point at the thing they mean (which is how they mean) is not an idea I hold on to. I let go of that way of thinking long ago.

My universe therefore has room for many partially overlapping discourses that flow downhill, like mountain streams, without needing to "point" to anything.

To take another example: I cast General Systems Theory as *versus* Economics, i.e. have GST on your resume and you're more likely to play an intelligent role in my company. Economics is too superstitious. But from another angle, we're talking about two ways of thinking that cover a lot of the same bread and butter topics, regarding ecosystem management and so on.

Spaceship maintenance. Janitorial services, Global U.

Regarding 2D, 1D and so on: if you see a circle (flat) or rectangle (tennis court) in your head, where is your viewpoint? Every line could be a pencil, every plane a sheet of paper. Have you ever experienced "infinitely thin"? Philosophers claim to picture it on private TV somewhere. Chalkboards don't help.

Besides, I always have an angle on any 2D shape. Even an infinite plane has a position relative to mine. I cannot myself be a 2D being, Abbott's Flatland notwithstanding, not even mentally. I occupy volume. Volume is enclosed by four walls, a tetrahedron. My Kantian idea of space, even res cogitans, not just res extensa, is 4D. Four walls. Four windows.

But ya'll steeped in Cartesianism and its 3-axis octahedron of six vectors, three basis, three not, are stuck in the a specific 3D talk. I empathize about the stuckness part, but readily admit to the utility of the apparatus. I use it too, all the time.

But when I'm wanting to communicate Synergetics, I'm all about the four windows and how anything you see on brain-TV is in a 4D studio. I can hold up pieces of paper and pencils and talk about all these shapes, but I have no need of either infinite extension nor infinite thinness. It's easier to just see everything topological as a morphed tetrahedron, rolled flat, rolled thin, made into a ball, whatever. It's 4D all the way down.

Truck Stop Based Futurism

[ originally a social media conversation with architect John Driscoll ]

Interesting how Cybernetics (like Synergetics) became more twilight zone after these authors (Alan Turing, John von Neuman, Ross Ashby, Norbert Weiner, and Herbert Simon, Stephen Wolfram). 

Like who champions this discipline today, or General Systems Theory for that matter, ala Kenneth Boulding et al? 

Did computer science get sidetracked somehow, in failing to come together with architecture? In addition to individual buildings, are the plans for camps, colonies, communities (bases, villages, forts) i.e. multi-structure agglomerations that might or might not be planned. 

If planned, by what algorithms? Fractal dimensions come in again.

In my science fiction development banking, truck stops play a big role, as hubs in a campus system, where citizen diplomats have opportunities for R&R, including for religious services and classes, eat, sleep, games, multi-functional. 

We have our standard image of what a truck stop looks like.

A lot of people are expecting all that trucking to become automated, however I see a rapidly growing freeway system from deep inside China to the Indian Ocean and Europe.

Africa is planning more freeways. We need more tourism as a lifestyle, including by working tours of duty, involving truck driving around the world. That would kill two [virtual] birds, as they say.

It's another way to see the world, while working, which we could consciously shape and design versus ignore as beneath our calling.

Why not have Cybernetics and General Systems Theory both come alive with global trucking and inter-modal transportation a central theme, unifying maritime architecture with land-lubber architecture?

Collusion

Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based psyops firm, with state of the art algorithms, tricks Facebook into divulging the data of millions (for which it now faces fines). Bannon is vice president, working closely with Trump. Cambridge Analytica has meddled in the foreign affairs of other countries as well. It's one of these new technology PR = covert ops manipulation companies.

The dupe Americans, though told this story (free press!) are Pavlovian creatures, trained to snarl and show fangs when Russians are mentioned, but flip over and show their cute tummies if ever a Brit needs a pet. So even though Trump overtly colluded with a foreign power, the FBI carefully said nothing about it. The story was 100% redacted from the Mueller report.

Congratulations Americans! You've fooled yourselves again. Lincoln was right about you (before the Brits had him snuffed).

Healing Meditation

I took my eye off the ball today, when Carol went to purchase a ballpoint pen.  Rather than shuffle along behind her, I decided to hit the Cork & Tap on the first floor, for a single pint.  We reunited and headed over to Powell's, on foot, but there she didn't seem to have her wallet.  Uh oh.  She must have lost it when my back was turned (figuratively).

The punch line is she did have her wallet but just didn't reach for it enough.  The walker has a pouch that hangs in front.  I'd been home and to several cashier stations, making inquiries.  The day had turned bleak, as I realized we'd need to cancel her bank card or whatever.  A pleasant outing had turned gray.  These turns don't usually get to me but...

There's a big ugly world out their churning too, and so I did indulge in some despair.  But fortunately I didn't bottle it up, and found ways to release the pressure.  I still consider myself sloppy though, as I could have easily found the wallet had I really looked.  Second guessing in the rear view mirror.

Yeah, I'm worried about all the craziness, from Julian Assange, to Flint (new movie coming), to Venezuela, to the Refugee Science we may need to invent.  What have our universities been planning all this time?  They don't actually plan, they teach planners.  The planners go to work for city, county and state governments.  Does Oregon State have any thoughts about refugees?  I know there's a tight legal meaning wrapped around that word, that wouldn't cover homeless on the streets of Portland.  But then there's also English.

We're acting like the humanitarian crisis we need to solve is somewhere far away.  I'm seeing a need to up the level of conversation, meaning sharing more intelligent data.  I realize it's up to me to look for sources.  I can't expect everything to just fall in my lap.  But then I don't have a real job description when it comes to Refugee Science, other than I've been working on GST as a counter to the more oblivious forms of Economics.

The Quakers seem to be coming around to my "military socialism" characterization, which I admit works pretty well for some families.  Some of those housing units on Okinawa look pretty spiffy, and those aren't even the high ranking officer accommodations.  I'm just finding so little willingness to bend away from rigid adherence to yesteryear's ways of talking.  People get stuck in a rut.  Me too.

New Schools?

We're bracing for a next attack, a round of sanctions maybe.  Like Canada, we're out from under, a Free State.

However saying they'll flood our cities with refugees (trial balloon) is less of a threat than they think.

We've had influxes before and know that higher ed has a role.  The difference between "camp" and "campus" is minute.  Yes, we enjoyed a friendlier Feds back then.

I worked with CUE, which started out under Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon.  For awhile, we were free flying, until refugees were no longer a priority.

This was in the aftermath of Nixon-Kissinger.

I taped a Youtube about our role, with some mention of past AFSC work.

Hypernormalization (movie review)

I'm on an unplanned Adam Curtis kick, a marathon, starting with The Century of the Self, and moving on to Hypernormalization, but remembering The Power of Nightmares from earlier blog posts.

Watching a lot of the same style in one go is to become aware of the thematic backdrops, impressive skyscraper vistas, which scream two messages:  planned and unplanned.  The narrator holds to a dialectic between chaos, and politics losing all ability to shape events, versus some renewed sense of hope in a new managerial philosophy, which then inevitably falls by the wayside.  The crashing of waves on a beach comes to mind.

The style is one of reverie, with the narrator sometimes leaving us to interpret for ourselves the blizzard of images, or maybe just a few.  The music and other soundtrack, as distinct from the narrator track, is also impressive.

These movies tell stories, I think effectively, and so take their place as potentially reality-shaping.

As I mention in my earlier blog posts of today and yesterday, although I was caught up in Occupy Portland,  I don't have a strong sense of how it connected to any events in the Middle East.  I'm not saying there weren't connections, only that I wasn't doing anything to influence events there, nor aware of people around me doing so.

Where Hypernomalization is into connecting dots, I'm sometimes not making the same connections.  However I do like connections-making narratives, so if we focus on different dots, that's not a criticism on my part.  I learn from some stuff I've been missing.  Like I'd forgotten, if I ever knew, Qaddafi got to stay in a tent on a Trump property that time.  Both were into getting publicity.

The angle on Nine Eleven (911) is to focus on the sense of foreboding and literal foreshadowing leading up to those events in 2001.  Syria is a core focus.  The arc is vengeance for Kissinger's betrayal, in terms of never planning a real future for national boundaries.  I'm not saying the movie blames Syria-Iran, having argued effectively that reality is plastic.

When we get around to the Russians, it's as if they've invented "reality shaping" all over again. We've had the Vienna Circle, through the Freuds (including Anna) telling us to tame the id through conformity, or, through the human potential movements (e.g. est) channel it to overturn and reinvent a stultifying earlier reality.

Either way (whether for controlling or unleashing), politics is projected for (and by?) a collective unconscious, an irrational side.  I'm venturing into Self episodes, having seen those last night.  But then we're supposed to believe the Russians suddenly came to similar conclusions only after the USSR had faded?  Or does every generation discover these same truths?

In the sight of God, no nations may exist, except in the minds of little humans, post Babel (I'm getting Biblical).  But that's where it (existence) most matters (in peoples' beliefs).  One doesn't dismiss something as not existing by saying that thing is widely believed in.  That's not a recognized logic or rhetorical device.

The youth of cyber-America don't have any real solutions once technology gets them to show up in large numbers.  They stand around going duh.  Lets be practical though:  OPDX in downtown Portland was not sustainable.  We had an experiment in self management.

The people threw a big party, coming in from Beaverton and all around, a kind of victory celebration, very nonviolent, after which the leadership was happy to call it a day.  Now of course "the leadership" is oxymoronic in anarchic situations, and I'd be one of the first to admit that.

At the end of the day, I'm prone to marvel at the same tenuous picture of a creature with free will, somehow left adrift to figure a way forward in ways crows and cattle don't have to worry about.  We've been given this gift of a big intellect, and we're still not sure what it's for, after all this time.

Clearly, our big intellect suggests we're here on Planet Earth to tackle some big problems, and before we start sounding hopeless lets at least take note of some abilities, some track record.  Yes, we've done a lot to disappoint Freud and lead people of conscience and insight to despair for the human animal.  I've already admitted to a streak of misanthropy.

These films keep circling around that same conundrum, of in what sense is humanity free and is there a constructive, intelligent way to exercise this freedom, insofar as it exists?  The question seems apropos, but points to an unsettled science, or to philosophy in other words.

How to Not Make Money

 If you don't wanna hype outward war, or legal drugs either, what good are you, as a blogger, or as a participant in our economic give and take?

Drug dealers have a bottom line, like everyone else.

"If you're reaching a significant number of eyeballs, you should take our message to the public.  We're not asking you to push our press releases, just let us buy commercials on your show.  Be a good capitalist already, and let us push our products."

Meanwhile, it's the news that's insane.

Revisiting a Demon

The second video references the first, with both shot on April 1, two years apart.

The first, entitled Bucky's Subconscious Demon, is based on a quote from Synergetics that arises amidst Fuller's recounting the story of his Volume Five.

The second video, which dances around the same subjects, shows how Python, the computer language, fits in to the puzzle.  Concentric Hierarchy Generator shows off a generator that spits back the familiar volumes table Americans all learn by heart in school (not).

I'm clearly struggling with springtime allergies in the second one, but don't let those stop me.

Subterrenean Maths

Absent energy to keep Math Forum going, I suppose the Math Wars went underground to some extent. Visit Forum 206 and extrapolate somehow, if you wish to get a better sense of it.

Part of the issue:  climate change active youth are less likely to stand for wasteful wood pulp textbook rackets if the PR doesn't find a way to offset the impression the dead tree ghettos are not privileged.

I'd been decrying the heavy book bag culture for years, on similar environmental grounds, but I wasn't surrounded by activists back then.  This next generation is ready to fight.

A lot of the currents were not of my making.  I didn't invent "charter school" as distinct from a "school with no charter" as two breeds of tax funded institution.  Portland's charters didn't get buildings.  They had to forage.

Now that Franklin and soon Grant are rebuilt, better constructed to withstand earthquakes, there's a spreading sense we need to be more like Tokyo and rebuild lots of blocks.  Those hoping to hold on to Old Portland, at least in some areas, have the tourism industry on their side, or at least I would hope so.

My last couple Youtubes have been about not overselling the Oregon Curriculum Network product.  I don't have magic pills and I'm not advertising I will do any makeovers on the people.  The cast is whoever shows up.  I'm more into props and supplies, keeping options open.

You'll remember I was reaching out to Turkey here and there.  I tend to see Truckers for Peace as working in tandem with any truck stop ethos involving strong links to higher ed.  The Coffee Shops Network is about spreading the practice of philanthropy.  OCN is more about conventional learning.

Dot Operator Politics

The "dot operator" is ubiquitous in programming, but weren't these languages supposed to extend logic as well as mathematics, in philosophy?  Yes, electrons flooded in an animated these new notations from the inside.  We had new ways to channel energy, to shape it into computations.

Fast forward and it's time to pass the torch to coming generations.  However, curricula have bottle-necked and in many cases tanked.  I network with my people, as best I can, to come up with something more designed, more attuned to present needs.  That means casting the "dot operator" as an operator "within math".  Where the Polyhedrons live.

Last night I wrote a story on Medium recalling the politicization of the math curriculum in the 1920s.  Anti-German sentiments were motivating textbook publishers to purge some of the existing Number Theory, according to a reliable source.  Looking up to some guy named Gauss wouldn't do.

Barriers to "Gnu Math" have been different.  There's a wish to keep K-12 mathematics recognizable by not mixing in much code.  However, if code does enter the picture, then why not usher in the dot operator of object oriented language fame?

If we're going to have "math objects" we might reach into, through the dot, then why not have these be polyhedrons?  Cast polyhedrons as the paradigm objects to which "the dot" gives us access.

Perhaps the only new idea here is to keep calling it math even after we've automated it to such a degree as to be using electronics i.e. computers.

Patrick and I wandered on Mt. Tabor today, with Quinn the dog.  I'm fine with flights of stairs and all that.  Patrick has been playing with a certain Kali Linux, "a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing".  Sounds interesting.

I'd like to be paid to learn stuff I could then turn around and teach in some value-adding manner.  That's what an edit-recombine PWS does in the GST ecosystem:  it adds value.

Making polyhedrons the generic object in object oriented programming, in a math curriculum context, is a way to bring more coding skills into the picture, without waiting for CS to pave the way.

The attempt to boot up CS (computer science) in every high school, as its own track with its own faculty, whereas mathematics is already under pressure to be more relevant, is a mistake we might all learn from.  Lets hope South Africa doesn't make the mistake of copying Texas.

Pi Day 2019

Towards the end of the embedded video, I say "Happy Pi Day" in a talk balloon, when Ramanujan's likeness appears, on a stamp facsimile.

Ramanujan came up with some amazing equations, some of them involving pi, which Hardy really wanted to see proved.  Short of proof, extended precision number types give us ways to investigate what is claimed.  I have some Jupyter Notebooks devoted to that topic.

I also allude to March 14 being an anniversary of Stephen Hawking's death.  I think birthdays are usually considered happier occasions, deaths more solemn, OK I'll say it, more grave.

There's an undertone of mourning for Synergetics too, which never made it into schools, much as the Concentric Hierarchy of Nested Polyhedrons is Sesame Street simple.

No one nests polyhedrons anymore, ever since Kepler's stack failed to jibe with the solar system in any precise fashion.

Those seeking literal truths are more easily disappointed, whereas "as above so below" is really about "analogies across scale" (a topic I begin to address in the embedded Youtube).  Angle and frequency are separable aspects (shape and size).

I advance the thesis that the high priest language currently centers on "whatsons", especially bosons, the God particle in particular, whereas "thinking about thinking" (philosophy) is considered a relatively stale (as in marginalized) set of language games.

CERN stuff is center ring.  It gave us hypertext as another internet protocol (HTTP), recently celebrated this month in the media for turning thirty.

The initially remote vocabulary of Synergetics, with its "quantum modules", was indeed becoming more of a swirling vortex, as particle physics found uses for many of the same names ("spin").

These namespaces became neighbors, with Fuller thinking up a six-edged model for a proton-neutron Feynman diagram.

Maybe some schooling in Synergetics will help one memorize the standard model?

How about organic chemistry?

How does one apply "spherical thinking" in either case?

Wanderers 2019.3.13

I was up by 4 AM, deciding to make my daily Youtube earlier rather than later. Carol had set her alarm for more like 6:30 AM, given she intended to attend this Wanderers meetup, about the Green New Deal and its relationship to the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

I was in chauffeur mode for this one, unable to take the indoor lifestyle of a round table discussion.  They talked for two hours.  Between tours outside, including to the tax company down the street, I would sip coffee and listen to the conversation.  Carol managed to get her words in edge-wise, as a respected elder and storyteller.

Sometimes I just don't have opinions I consider worth something and/or any patience for politics.  I'm more the dumb animal, the ox or lion. 

The tax office had a Time article about the Dalai Lama and Tibet, which I perused.

I mused on the impact of Tibetan culture on my own life, which has been considerable, especially if one takes in the Tantric and Vajrayana subcultures of Bhutan (a family home for a spell) and Nepal.  The Newar temple around the corner from the Linus Pauling House has also had ripple effects in my life.

I first started tuning in Tibetan culture in a big way when I was still living in Jersey City.  At this point, I had no inkling that my parents would be moving to Thimphu.  Sometime later, I would be Alan Potkin's best man for the Buddhist wedding ceremony in our living room in Druk-yul (the Dragon Kingdom).

John Driscoll, the architect, was present, after many months of absence from Portland.  Our presenter, Pat Haynes, on the other hand, was on the verge of leaving the west coast for the east, for an indefinite period.

John phoned after I got mom home and we (Glenn, Don, John and I) adjourned to Pepinos for lunch.

Python in the Workforce

This is a test, to see if outsiders can see the video without logging in to the service. Sorry about the audio quality.

Phi Fun in Python

Curriculum Development

These videos back-to-back show one way to lower a ladder to the younger set, just getting into academic subjects.

I'm starting from the bigger picture (above) and then showing how Python might supply the ladder's rungs.

What is Globalism?

In this "thoughts for the day" video, I challenge the stereotype that a "globalist" is interested in some New World Order featuring some one world government. That we have one world, in the sense of planet, is indisputable (OK, maybe "have" is the wrong word -- it has us), but there's no one world government today. Lets focus on the cybernetic truths of the present moment.

Indeed, what I bring up instead are "virtual nations" or "diaspora nations".  A lot of would-be nations failed to luck out, or had their native lands stolen from them.  Rather than read these out of history, doesn't it make more sense to include them?  We already have supranational corporations, and world religions.  Humans self organize on many "levels".

Although the battle lines were drawn, and the nationalists were keen to intimate that the globalists were the bad guys, no debate really happened.  That a globalist has to be some billionaire oligarch is also highly questionable.  Why do we settle for the "for dummies" version of everything?

Global Grid

What's going on here?

I'm inserting myself into an ongoing debate, but at a different frequency.

The global grid is not just a Chinese idea.  You need to tune out an important chapter in Western Civ, namely World Game, to think so.  That's what historians have been doing:  tuning us out.

Chinese and Russians enjoy playing World Game with us, because we've done our homework.

Wanderers 2019.2.19

I haven't chronicled a Wanderers meetup in awhile.  Tonight's had all the elements.  Or at least the more unstable ones.  I will explain.

Dick Pugh, the former high school physics teachers, meteor man, and sometime before that, a worker on top secret projects for government labs, also known as the Manhattan Project.  He launched into his well-rehearsed lecture on radioactive decay, through all the byproducts.  Isotopes anyone?

I used a pause to interject Hugh Thomforde's story of going to the Cook Islands to share about pearl farming.  The locals seemed interested until he mentioned the pearls would need to form around  "nuclei".  They suddenly lost all interest, thinking he was starting down that ugly path. Hugh had to further "disambiguate" as we say on Wikipedia.

Dick went on with the radioactive decay lecture (shades of Asimov).  I remembered I needed to buy fish and ducked out through the back door to grab the last sockeye salmon fillet.  I was back in my chair before anyone missed me.

The history books say Japan was the only country nuked, forgetting the fact that the US nuked itself, over and over, and yes, with people there.  Sometimes the people were put there on purpose.  Who knew that lithium might get involved in the chain reaction?  The Bikini explosion was a bit more than was planned for.  Even the mainland got nuked, many locals irradiated, although not on the scale of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The long and short term health effects on Americans in the vicinity was all a part of the experiment.

After Doctor Strangelove came out, the word went around the circuits Dick was in (top secret) to keep quiet about it. No comments were welcome.  What was eerie about that film was the cockpit sequence, wherein they had the whole procedure realistically displayed.  Dick said they'd redacted some of those parts, in later editions of the movie.

We talked about other topics of course.  Barbara brought up the PDX Death Café events:  "At a Death Café people drink tea, eat cake and discuss death. Our aim is to increase awareness of death to help people make the most of their (finite) lives."  How would you like to be remembered?  What were your accomplishments and so on?

I've been looking back on some of that myself, doing a retrospective set of videos.  From the Underground Railroad is my latest attempt to encapsulate what I've been up to, all these years.  At sixty, I'm statistically likely to get some more years, but that's never a promise or guarantee.

Francher has been reading 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep and gave us a synopsis. I see I can get it for my Kindle for $10, however I recently split for Safari Books and might have reached the end of my reading budget.  Besides, I'm still plowing through the free Gutenberg Press version of H. G. Wells, on Washington and the Riddle of Peace.

Don's boat Meliptus almost went down last night. A leak around the exhaust pipe went undetected until he was back to the boathouse and about the close down. He heard the aft bilge pump working. That was his cue.

After stuffing a towel in the hole, he managed to turn the boat around and hoist it up be its rear (no room at the gas dock). Had he not heard the pump, it very likely would have sank to the bottom.

Heading into the Linus Pauling
House, #Portland #Oregon
for a fascinating presentation
on nuclear history, concepts,
and builds.
Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, oh my.
A Wanderers meeting is always
an education.#pdx #science #history #nuclear pic.twitter.com/VRptCi3bzU

— Deke Bridges (@dekebridges) February 20, 2019

Casino Math

Digital Math:

Martian Math
Supermarket Math
Neolithic Math

Neolithic Math

Supermarket Math

Regarding Waterman Polyhedra

Steve was into a lot of projects besides the polyhedrons these videos are about. I was not a collaborator on these projects. Many besides myself worked on the Waterman Polyhedrons.  I was maybe the first to promulgate the term "Waterman Polyhedron" (Steve was too modest to do that himself).

A Triple-A Story

So Carol and I were all set to back out of the driveway, when I realized the battery was dead.  I have a Python script you'll have maybe heard about, if you've come here through other blog posts (they tend to link to each other).

Time to call AAA, but was my membership up to date?  I feared not as my wallet card had expired.  However, the good news is I was paid up and membership services switched me over to the jump starter crews, by way of dispatching (why we're here in Control Room).

My Android (smartphone) was meanwhile at death's door on the charger and not up to taking calls.  I kept looking out the front door so as not to miss the AAA business mobile.

The battery bounced back with sufficient infusion from the car's internal recharging system, petrol powered.  We joked about the mountain of World Cup soccer balls in my front yard (the C6XTY sculpture).

AAA's parting advice was to take the car on a journey, an adventure, off the beaten path (I added that last bit).  I invited Carol but she'd rather just stick to the original itinerary post test drive.  I took the Nissan to FuBonn, the giant ("") Asian mall (biggest Asian mall in Portland) and stocked up on noodles and some international beers (Myanmar and Singha).

The 1997 sedan performed well, having a newly rebuilt underneath.  Melody's rig had gotten that same way when she got hers redone in Olympia, not even risking it to Portland where repairs were planned.  You need a strong rig if heading over the ridge to California.

In between all this car talk, I've been pumping out some new "U200bs" as I call them, again inventing my own slang.  Hashtag hashtag.

I'll end with a flashback to the Superbowl on NFL Day, an event in Atlanta in the opulent Southwest. I started watching the preshow at Hop House with Glenn, then raced over to Cork & Tap (the formal name) for a growler refill while still happy hour.  But they'd extended it.  I stuck around for an IPA then headed home with some groceries.  I ended at Derek's place where he used the kitchen to bake our pizza.  I brought the growler but we stuck to coffee.  All of this going around was on foot.

Python 3.8 has been released to the curious testers and I'm tempted to grab a copy.  Python is under active development and isn't expected to contort as it did when we jumped from 2.x to 3.x -- a jump announced well in advance and managed bravely.  The was to work out a few kinks in the first iteration and shift the language to a more comfortable long term form.

I'm glad AAA was able to respond quickly, and also that the event was not a roadside emergency, or getting stranded in a parking lot downtown, again with Carol as I recall.  I blogged that event too, and others before it.

Does Your Truck Run Linux?

Independent operator truck owners used to customize their own dashboards with various after market instruments.  Create your own GUI.  In hardware.

This capability has not gone away, but today's fleets tend to feature controls in a large display of some kind, per Tesla and others.  Behind those displays are the sensors and controllers, a small "internet of things" perhaps glued together using TCP / IP.

As a result, the truck's cab, the personal workspace (PWS) is starting to double as a kind of devops space.  In addition we get the navigation and business accounting apps, what it takes to keep up with the truck's businesses.

Not every PWS is running Linux, nor is every (any?) jet airplane (avionics is its own thing) -- when it comes to the in-flight movie service some do.

However, the fact remains we need to give students "cockpit" experience (in the driver's seat) with whatever operating systems.

Even if your truck does not run Linux, Linux may run your truck, in the sense that remote platforms may be tasked with scheduling you're contracted to carry out, as a driver.  You meet Ubuntu in the cloud a lot.

Time for Blender?

I woke up this morning to Youtubes about Blender Beta 2.8, perhaps to be out of beta by June, 2019?  Blender is a large open undertaking aiming at the 3D sculpting and animations market and has a large loyal following.

For many, it provides a training pen, sophisticated enough, for the less free commercial products they'll end up using, such as products by Autodesk or maybe ESRI.

I remember when Kenneth Snelson, a star developer of CGI, was expressing some distress over the prospect of tackling Maya. No matter how many peaks one has ascended, there's always another, and peaks are difficult by definition, and one is only getting older.  So should I learn Blender 2.8 in 2019 and work at getting really good at it?

The motivations would be many here: (1) I'm a curriculum developer around the Bucky stuff (2) hypertoons were my invention and I should make more of them (3) for Coffee Shops Network (4) which is about pumping funding to the field.

According to this workflow, the bottleneck between getting funding to the field, and the status quo, is my not knowing Blender nor having made those synergetics hypertoons yet.

This is probably where I start to rebel against myself (my own science fiction) as (a) I have done some simple synergetics hypertoons and had them on Youtube years ago (b) lots of folks are way better at that animation stuff than I am right now and (c) the field needs its funding now, yesterday, not in some fond future when Kirby has had time to reinvent himself yet again.

I'd rather jump on the advisory team doing the 4K IMAX type movies for science museums, that will pump out the Bucky stuff in super high def, and have those coffee shop reveries downloading right away.  So I keep looking around looking for who else is in the business and doing the work?

"When you can't be the best, buy the best" is a slogan close to what I'm getting at.  Let's not wait for Kirby, is the main idea.

That being said, Kirby has signed up for a Maker Space lesson, presumably in 3D printing.

I have the STL files from Jeff and I'm looking at Koski identities using phi-scaled S-modules as my opening topic, with a UVT (unit volume tetrahedron) used to scale everything else in this Sculpture Garden (SG).

Wanderers 2019.1.8

This was our first evening Wanderers (alternate weeks) in 2019. We're named Wanderers because we sometimes practice Open Forum, which means the conversation is allowed to wander, in a kind of Bohmian dialog, and takes on Ouija-board like qualities.

Especially if we have a critical mass, which I won't call  quorum as we're not following Robert's Rules or anything like that.  The Quaker practice of consensus is just beneath the surface.  We're not doing business, usually, so it's closer to Meeting for Worship.

However, tonight some business came up, as the estate / campus is under some pressure to do its nonprofit business of memorializing Linus Pauling and his contribution to humankind.  He received a Nobel Peace Prize among other prizes.

His wife Ava Helen was active in WILPF (Womens International League for Peace and Freedom).

Speaking of WILPF, my mother has been a long time WILPF activist, even went to the The Hague for its centennial.  Today she got some copies of Western Friend, January - February 2019, the On Weapons issue.  She has an interview published in this issue.  She's what we call a weighty Friend.

Speaking of weighty Friends, I'm back on beer as it's 2019.  Glenn just phoned to say Wanderers was finished and I could join the after party at his place.

Anyway, very public talks about ISEPP and the Pauling House, with "strangers" (members of the public) present, is very much in accordance with the spirit of nonprofit management.  We're servants of the public, not shareholders.  As a socially responsible form of capitalism, we compete with the non-profits who set up around cost plus military contracts.

Speaking of government, Don came by early from the hospital to watch the president's speech on the telly.  We went through CBS.  President Trump was about done when Don arrived.  Then we heard the rebuttle from the other party.  Don visited with Carol a bit and then gave me a lift to the venue.  I took some time over at Fred Meyer's to tweet, on @4DsolutionsPDX, one of my channels.

Tweets

In the movie reviewed below, Vice, we have a scene wherein they install offices for the veep all over town, which I found appealing.  People do that when they move around a lot.

Anyway, my two main perches are Blue House bound, in the sense that I have an outpost on each of two floors.  I have some work stations.

We're talking about a residential type of place, nothing unusual.  "Work station" is normal parlance for a home office and workspace, where a guest might have a laptop with WiFi.

I've bounced around a lot and had a lot of offices, but as a single individual, I'm bound to a sequential trajectory.  I'm not in all places at once, unless we all are, in which case what point am I making?

Guests have departed.  I visited Peter's model train setup, which is truly cool.  Lots of pictures taken.

Vice (movie review)

Movies that strive to make some sense of the recent past should be in high demand, if only as a source of mnemonic touch stones, memory devices, which this film is filled with.  The events come in as a jumble in time, and we piece it together through flashbacks (afterimages as we sometimes call them, in real life scenarios).

Clearly there's no way to reliably penetrate the cloak of secrecy that surrounds a high office that keeps mum.  The movie deals with uncertainty by breaking the fourth wall and otherwise reminding us of the impossibility of an omniscient viewpoint.  How does a dead man organ donor narrate a film from beyond the grave?

Clearly no cameras were present to document the intimate details of the Cheney bedroom, and there's a Lady Macbeth aspect to Lynne Cheney's role.  Having them break into Shakespearean dialog is a sure fire way to remind the audience they're watching theater, movies being an evolved form thereof.

Scenes are designed to tell a story.  During 911, Dick and Lynne head for the underground apartments and, from there, Dick insists on consuming raw, unfiltered intelligence.  Powell gets strong-armed, against his better judgement, into making his famous pitch for war to the UN, which in retrospect had the effect of lowering public confidence in so-called "intelligence".

DC has never really recovered its reputation for knowing what's going on in the world.  Justifications for recent cruise missile attacks against targets in Syria have met with derision outside of legacy media.

From Cheney's angle, however, the challenge was to capitalize on 911 in order to improve the prospects of the energy companies, with whom he liked to meet in secret.  The goal was not tit for tat, but to demonstrate overwhelming executive branch military power in conjunction with its power to shape pubic opinion.

Much of the innovative legislation, post 911, was focused domestically and internally, on building a surveillance state, although the movie has only limited time to explore the ramifications of these developments.  Hollywood is still free to make and distribute questioning films like this, which put the inner workings of the White House under a critical director's eye.

At the time, mid-career, I was one of those critical of the raw intelligence, such as we were privy to in the internet newsgroups (lots of spam), and questioning the rationale for "shock & awe".

My focus (then as now) was preventing hanky-panky with nuclear waste products, with webcams and the like, about which science fiction planning I posted fairly frequently.

This wasn't my paid day job, as a coder and skills trainer with CUE, so much as my volunteer service as a Quaker, a sect opposed to acting out with outward weapons.

But then we don't control the world now do we, and our views are easily dismissed as irrelevant by the outward war minded.  I'm used to being marginalized.

Ethnocentrism

I'm putting a positive spin on "ethnocentrism" here, which may surprise some readers, but I think it goes with education being "place based" which I also favor.

Also, I see a lot of nuance when it comes to ethnicity, as one may easily adopt a fusion approach and combine several layers.  I tend to differentiate based on what's slow moving (slowly changing) versus what's potentially more fleeting, easy come easy go.

For example, in educating myself about Portland, I'm always encountering its Asian aspects, and consider that a part of my ethnicity.  "Ethnocentric" need not mean conforming to some stereotype, in other words.

Negative vibes around "ethnocentric" stem from how people foist ethnicity on one another, insisting upon conformity to this or that norm.  People don't like being coerced, so the ethnocentrism of others may leave a bad taste, to say the least.

However, one's ethnicity includes one's profession and the professions often require a lot of background and training.  Those resisting a hostile takeover of their corporate culture are unlikely to rise through the ranks of the invader.  You never know though; lots of fiction celebrates those who do.

More T4P

The idea of truckers as citizen diplomats is not new, as camel trains, and ships' crews, were always a medium of two way traffic, diplomatic and otherwise.  The technology has changed, certainly, in that camels were not equipped with ELD devices providing a log of the driver's up time, down time, sideways time.  A kind of quantum physics.

The driver's upkeep and well being are not necessarily those of a truck's.  True, the custom is for a given driver to haul the load from end to end, but there could be a switching yard, where the driver gets to rest (as mandated), but the truck continues with nothing more than a refuel and driver-ready check / inspection.

Again, I'm not being original, just borrowing from the airline companies, which vector crews and airplanes on different circuits.  Even the cockpit teams have their own autonomy, such that a given airplane my enjoy a lot of turnover in staffing in the course of a single day.  Truckers and pilots have always enjoyed many similarities.  I don't know if commercial routes are called lanes ever, but they could be.  Namespaces overlap a lot like that.

In GST, the cockpit or truck cabin tends to meld with what we call the "personal workspace" or PWS. Sure, it might be mobile, even hurtling through space.  The PWS is distinct from the Control Room, as a place, in that the latter brings many people together to monitor the same stream of events.  They provide overview, or what Quakers call oversight, and with supervisory powers come greater responsibilities for keeping aircraft safely separated.

Reignition

In the process of dropping out of the middle class, upon dissolution of the partnership, owing to the death of the partner, I gave up heating the whole house.  I had a hole in the roof, and that took priority, as well as other bills.

However, with a lot of company expected and Carol (mom) incapacitated, I was able to dedicate earmarked funds to a worthy line item:  resurrect the old Honeywell in the basement with a tune up ($229), a new master control board ($242.25 including labor) and of course fuel (200 gallons for a start).

Fortunately, this winter is being very mild, with dips into the 30s.  We've gotten this far with only a few rooms heated, two downstairs and one upstairs.  The kitchen and (usually) main living area stayed in the 40s at least.

Portland, Oregon is close to snowy peaks, but is not itself at high altitude.  Our surrounding bedroom communities get more snow than the CBD (CBD = central business district, in case you didn't grow up in a planner family).

The First Call company inherited my account from Montag, which came with the house, as did the Honeywell, when we put money down on this place in 1995.  We had been renting just around the corner and despaired of again finding affordable digs we could invest in, as we knew then this was a trendy neighborhood.

Laurie, Dawn's first friend in Portland, showed us a property just going on the market.  We lucked out.  I've lived here ever since.  Dawn (partner, DWA) died in 2007.  We still celebrate Hanukkah at Laurie's place.

I tried to keep DWA (the partnership) alive, not realizing a partnership with one partner was totally an oxymoron.  IRS was seeing double.

The H&R Block down the street helped me back out of my mistake and fly solo as a sole proprietorship.  I continued with the DWA sourced DBA:  4D Solutions.  That part stayed by the book.  DWA held the business checking account.

Around then I met LW who was looking to anchor a career as a Portland-based musician, having given up a whole lifestyle in Savannah, Georgia working in high tech as a manager.

She had a lot of good ideas for dropping below the poverty line and still surviving, having been saving all her money herself.  She was working at living on next to nothing when we met, and had a car she would no longer drive, because of her evolving ethics around Peak Oil.

Razz had been totaled. I was driving a loaner at that point.

Fast forward, I got used to eating for free at Food Not Bombs servings, and also provided kitchen space, storage space, even freezer space, for the network, which meant having some inventory at home.  I'd fully entered the barter economy and started cutting back on any use of the furnace.

However, somewhere in there, Steve Holden came to my rescue in putting my name in the hat as highly qualified to teach his Python 3 course, then in the making for the O'Reilly School.  I was hired, and for the first time since the 1980s I had a salary with benefits.

I'd been winging it as an independent contractor, then partner, ever since.  Given Dawn was a skilled bookkeeper, that wasn't as hard as it sounds.  I could focus on programming for my many clients, and fine tuning my skills as a skills trainer.  My resume is online.

By the O'Reilly School (OST) closed its doors, some years later, I had paid to have my roof fixed and had helped a strong student through college (with help from her Quaker institution).

I was looking at once again waving good bye to such middle class benefits as furnace oil heat.  Space heaters would have to do, and did.

I don't know that I'll be able to sustain this highfalutin lifestyle.  Will Earthlings want to learn Martian Math the way I teach it?

Will my productivity stay high?

Last year at this time, unbeknownst to me in December, I was just weeks away from an emergency room visit and lots of concern about my longevity.

A year later, my vitals are looking like those of an overweight sixty year old, mas o meno.  My next doc appointment is six months out, which says something I hope.

Physics in the First Person

"First Person Physics" was a meme I started using on some listserv of physics teachers. Dr. Bob Fuller saw what I was driving at, including and especially the so-called "energy slave" concept.  The idea here was not to get rid of slavery but to not enslave humans or even mammals, but machines.  Don't make a horse lift the stone, let a diesel engine do it.  You enslave things like toasters and microwave ovens, which working humans in tandem with robots need to make in the first place.

Bucky Fuller was asking humans to pause and look around and see how many calories were being expended by machines every moment on their behalf.  But instead of reckoning in horsepower, lets take this opportunity to convert into work units humans could more easily relate to (< horses).  Some positive conversion constant might apply, and there you'd have it:  a small army of robots (non-animal energy slaves) all working on your behalf.

You may need some assistance, at least at first, seeing where the work is being done.  Photons don't weigh much, and wiggling fingers over a keyboard is not a fast way to spend calories.  Better get up and make coffee frequently if that's your gig.  Lift weights.  Stay in shape.  Yet the internet is a vast energy slave army that produces lots of heat.  You, the one sitting in that chair, burn at about the rate of a one to two hundred watt bulb, which is the figure we were trying to get at, in place of horsepower.

Think about forklifts, warehouses, trucks on the freeway, stuff in your possession.  Non-slaves are allowed to possess (not be possessed), and humans typically think beyond their being 150 watt bulbs, to being this whole internet of things that burns, such as cars, trucks, trains and jets.  The internet of things comprises their lifestyle, which they value, whereas a "daily bread" of 150 watts burning 24/7 is no more sexy than enjoying a metabolism.

Your body heat needs to stay at roughly some level, pretty warm but not too hot, and just breathing and maintaining body temperature spends energy, which is work.  That's right, in physics just staying alive one second to the next is considered work, and it's paid for.  You get about what you need to stay lit, or you don't, but in each case the requirement is in a bell curve between extremes. Getting enough calories to people is the bread game.  The truth is everyone requires about the same, even accounting the difference between babies and athletes.

Aside from measuring units of work in terms of humans (watt burners) replacing horses (also watt burners), First Person Physics is about being in the "controller seat" oneself (which doesn't connote omnipotence) as a "first person" (a viewpoint and presence) and experiencing acceleration.

Riding roller coasters helps make acceleration real, but then many roller coasters in life are not in the XYZt dimensions.  Precession is omni-dimesional.  We experience those deltas, as we traverse a less literally topographical phase space (a primordial soup), in a mix of Eulerian (spatial-visual) and Gibbsian (tactile-visceral) dimensions (more on that later).

In lieu of demanding a steady supply of expendable slaves, we harness the big calorie spenders such as the wind and downhill flowing water.  The sun is what lifts the water up again, and keeps the gases roiling.   Humans tap in to big dynamos to keep their wheels turning.  They burn stuff.

Windmills turn large radius rotation into smaller blade defined rotation of sufficient umph (power) to light a lot of bulbs.  Instead of ordering a servant to make an omelet, we switch on a stove and do the job of being a cook all by ourselves.  Humans have a wide repertoire.  They can type, talk, tinker.  Cooking is a fun pass time for some, an onerous duty for others.  Lets talk about Stoicism again.

Finally, I was nudged by something Keith Devlin said, about taking film more seriously, as a way of getting at those deltas.  The "lights, camera, action!" call of Hollywood, with stress on "action" (as the content of each frame), got me thinking "action per time interval" which is mvd/t or mvv or E or hf, units measuring what I considered "energy buckets" (or quanta), frames of film.  When the film runs too fast (E/t = power), it starts looking surreal.  We know from experience at what pace time goes.

If you'll be the star (first person) in your own film of action packed frames, in a "scenario" then that brings us to another definition of Universe in the literature:  as a set of eternally regenerative yet simultaneously aconceptual partially overlapping scenarios.  This definition was embedded in the American literature feeding into what I was calling Martian Math, nothing conventional within physics, yet a bridge to some of the memes some of the liberal arts people were convergent with, if into reading said literature.

Occupy University

OPDX - Occupy Portland

Those of you looking for Occupy University (OU) have come to the right place.  I've been out recruiting faculty, as I did when we staged a non-virtual OPDX in downtown Portland, in the same place where WWI vets staged their March to Washington.

That led to the DC Hooverville which General MacArthur destroyed, in a misplaced show of bravado (a form of friendly fire).

In the faculty lounge, one discussion is whether animation, both 2D and 3D, constitutes a form of "coding" or not.  These are the kinds of nitpicky debate one expects in Faculty World.

Clearly the art of television programming, the sequencing of shows to fill dead air space, is a kind of programming.  Think "programme" when it comes to theater.

English makes a big point of not using "programme" to mean "program", obscuring the fact that source code scripts actually orchestrate and direct platform action, much as a play does, or a musical score.  English is somewhat (horse and) buggy, we all know that.

The word "code" is likewise ambiguous, as we have "codes of conduct" at geek events, which tend to be treated like Codes of Hammurabi, meaning they're enforced, with transgressions confessed or uncovered.  That's "code as law" one might say, where "obedience" is a keyword.  However "code" also means what computers execute directly (we could say "obey" but usually don't for some reason).

If you think the bottomline is "it's all semantics" you're correct.  "There's semantics, and there's nothing" is about as helpful as my other dictum "There's science fiction, and there's nothing."

Both are meant to emphasize the universality of the leading term, in contrasting them with nothing.  The dialectic goes away at that point, but then tautologies provide no traction.

Tautologies are more about emphasizing and underlining a grammar, and show more than say.  They're not about making empirical claims so much as delineating the boundaries of sense-making.

This is what Wittgenstein meant when he said his philosophy was not about stating theses, as if it did so, they'd by of the kind no one could disagree with.  In delineating sense, one borders on nonsense, by definition.

Martian Math

Black Friday

Black Friday is a day of mourning.  We lament that Christmas has nothing to do with "peace on Earth" anymore, if it ever did.  Crass commercialism has taken over.  Tastelessness abides.

On Black Friday, we apologize to God for being a planet of spoiled brats.

Time Management

People go to school to learn about scheduling in the software sense.  The operating system's primary job is to protect processes entrusted to its care, meaning it gives them each attention.  We hope the OS is not stretched to capacity, as might be USA OS version 0.2, or whatever that is still running in the District. A former image.

Here in Asylum District I talk to a leading expert in concurrency.  Synchronous parallelism with multiple CPU cores is distinct from letting a coroutine sit on the shelf in pause mode, because it has no new work.  A lot of your bureaucracy consists of people waiting for results, and not pressing the matter, because already working with earlier requests.

Case in point:  I'm heading down to county elections this afternoon, on behalf of my mom.  We stopped by in mid September to make sure her ballot would come here and not go to California.  It went to California.

If they try to mail another one today, it will also go to California.  No one in the bureaucracy has gotten that far in the queue.  The request is on file, but there's nothing immediate about updating the main database.

I was trying to strike up a conversation with other businesses on social media about whether gambling for charity is still gambling.  I see these restrictions against gambling over the wire, but in these games, the winnings go to the charity of your choice, and you get to be the one with a hero's profile.

People will commit to your potential winnings on the basis of your wise use (in their eyes) of their commitments.  I've spelled out all the plans and protected them for the public, in this sister blog.

Speaking of being a hero, I understand how people use the I Ching as a mnemonic device.  There's a pattern language to the hero's journey, and in being willing to have the I Ching be the labyrinth, one gets a well trodden, spelled out adventure.

Welcome to LARP.  Live Action Role Playing.  Your life. What's wrong with feeding your inner hero?  Isn't that what psychologists say to do?  Lets be consistent.

The empiricists and frequentists cry foul, saying it's "superstitious" or "magical" thinking to consult the I Ching or look at Tarot decks or whatever.  They're not thinking of how reinforcing a Memory Palace using the events of one's day is simply taking up the raw material of everyday living and applying that as a kind of glue language, to something worth holding together (a model). 

Having a Memory Palace is not in itself a bad idea.

So what if a random billboard reminds you of one of its many rooms?  Would you rather just obey the billboard?  Some would prefer that you would.

Volume Formulas

As a young adult, I was adamant that I wanted a Web to publish within, meaning I was salivating for hypertext, just at the time of its advent.  I was a fan of the Web before it popped up at CERN, my Higgs.

So once HTTP was in vogue, I published to that "medium" (i.e. to cyberspace).  However, my peers in academia were schooled to channel their thinking to subscriber audiences through specific journals.  These were not using hypertext for the most part.  I felt my thinking required hypertext.

Fast forward, and a lot of interesting mathematical results are rattling around in a volatile medium.  I say "volatile" because Forum 206, where I published over a decade of writing, was taken over by the NCTM, which appears to have killed the entire Math Forum website [Followup: it was kept].  The Web is more of a war zone in some ways.

For example, there's a lineage through Piero della Francesca to volume formulas for a Tetrahedron given only its six edges.  Euler came up with something like that too.  On Synergetics-L, a listserv that's gone belly-up, Gerald de Jong came up with something simple we could implement in code (see below). A lot of my tetravolume computations come from there.  Just today I was doing these:

Koski is on the other end of the line doing some work around the S-factor.  He fed me another test to try, which came out as expected.

Marxist?

on Medium

Yes, I went to Princeton, so maybe you think I've been steeped in Marx, given current stereotypes of what universities are like, cite Jordan Peterson et al.  However way back in the late 1970s, my thing was Freud and Jung.  Even in high school, psychoanalytic literature was my bag.

I found the whole idea of "mental illness" rather fascinating, and I don't think in a creepy way.  What a vast landscape, this inner world, and how weird it could become.  Very Tantric (is how I sometimes think of it).

So yes, when I got to Princeton, I dove into Jacques Lacan, some Adorno, certainly Marcuse.  It's not like I didn't do any homework whatsoever.  I looked at the Hegelian system as a precursor to Marxism. The whole idea of Logic versus History seemed pretty special.

I do remember students protesting the one-sidedness of the Economics curriculum.  We used Samuelson for a textbook in 101.  Stagflation was a problem back then.
 
Those hoping to get some Marxism in the mix were to be sadly disappointed, or so I gathered from the raging debates, which were printed in various issues of the Daily Princetonian.  I was housemates with the editor.

I do recall roaming the open stacks in the reserve reading room (is that an oxymoron?), and coming across collections of old high school textbooks.  Some of them were so biased, when it came to mentioning Marxism.  Having seen museums filled with textbooks from Nazi days, I've taken to studying the history of ideas through the lens of what we share with kids.

I was focused on philosophy as my long time readers know.  I felt I had a chance at international relations and applied to the Woodrow Wilson School.  However, during my interview I expressed some ambivalence.  I was talking myself into philosophy instead.  Dr. Kahler was disappointed.

My early fascination with psychoanalysis and the inner world is likely what predisposed me to choose philosophy over international affairs, but then I've never really seen these as all that separate, from psychology either.  I learned about James Hillman from Sue and Bryan.

Process Work, as developed by Arnold Mindell, somewhat expresses my own sense of unity in this area.  Logic & History...  Like Alex says, mathematics is everything.

People sound Marxist to me when they see someone getting public sector benefits as being supported by taxes, and in turn by their work.

"Only the work of the working provides any value, so if others get value and aren't working, they're gaining at my expense."  Missing from this equation: (1) the great bounty of the environment, starting with the sun; (2) the fact that we're all working, regardless of our title and job description in whatever role playing capacity.

I'm not saying taxes don't make a difference (I just wrote a check for $4,831.28 for property taxes). I'm saying that World Game is not zero sum and public sector wealth owes more to the sun, wind and rain than to any issuer of debts.  Banks may pretend to loan us our cosmic heritage, but we're only gullible to a point.