Recap: The Modules of Synergetics

A & B Modules by Richard Hawkins

It would be great to have someone go over the modules with us, and Kirby has agreed to give us a short presentation.

                      Curt

http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/plates/figs/plate03z.html

That's one of my favorite posters (Curt's link above).  So clear.  So "elementary school" in flavor.  

Yet so not shared with many kids. And I don't think because of any invisible committee or meritocracy coming to a conscious conclusion. Inertia and reflex-conditioning (robotic thinking, AI) explains most of what we're up against, in my own sociological model of the global university student-faculty. 

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

For those not on the call, here's a brief synopsis of my talk on the modules, with a few grace notes added, for this archived version.  

Curt let me screen share so that some of the web pages cited below were displayed in the course of my "lightning talk" as we call short Show & Tells in Python world (< 5 mins). 

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On pg. 52 of Cosmography, Fuller mentions A, B, T, E and S "modules".  These are names he gives to tetrahedral wedge shapes that may be: 

(A) used in the assembly of other shapes (e.g. 24 A modules, 12 left and 12 right, build a regular tetrahedron of volume 1) 

and/or 

(B) treated solely as volume measures (like cups and spoons used for liquids) 

For example 24 x 3 = 72 A-modular thimble-fulls of water, would precisely fill a volume 3 cube with edges sqrt(2) and 2-R face diagonals inscribing our unit volume tetrahedron (where R = IVM ball radius; 4 such balls defining the tetrahedron). [0]

To actually assemble said cube from the modules (like a 3D jigsaw puzzle vs. just pouring grain or liquid) you'd need some B modules as well (same volume, different shape).

As & Bs together brick in the cube, rhombic dodecahedron and the Coupler. Both A & B have a tetra-volume of 1/24. Two As (left and right) plus one B (left or right) make the Mite (minimum tetrahedron), a space-filler of no outward handedness (yet left and right may be distinguished in dissection).

I pointed out this chart (Inchbald, Steel Pillow [1]) and table (by Michael Goldberg [2]) showing how the shapes Fuller defines and describes in Synergetics in terms of A & B modules (e.g. Mite, Rite, Coupler...) already appear elsewhere in the mathematical literature, sometimes in the context of answering the question "what tetrahedra fill space, and with no need of left and right versions?" That's a question Bucky took up as well.

Fuller's focus on space-filling tetrahedrons connects him to Sommerville, Hall, Goldberg etc. however Synergetics is not the type of book that footnotes / cites all the previous lit on a given topic.  Nor do mathematicians usually see any pressing reason to cite outsider Fuller on these topics and/or use his vocabulary, or think in terms of tetra volumes.  What peer group would reward such behavior?  An anthropological question.

In terms of outreach, these points of contact suggest possibilities for the interdisciplinary diplomats among us. 

Michael Goldberg intersects Fuller's research in other areas as well, around geodesic sphere classification and hexapents (another name for which are "Goldberg polyhedrons" [3]). E.J. Applewhite got to meet him and liked him ("not a mean bone in his body" I recall him saying), even though citations to Goldberg seem to eclipse and occlude links to Bucky e.g. when Scientific American got around to narrating the discovery of the virus structure, and left Fuller out of its account, much to Bucky's chagrin (I had some access to EJA's archives).

Regarding the T & E modules, that's where I fit the "mind the gap" meme (a meme CJ has been using in a related context).  

Fuller had been seeking a volume 5 to join his family of volumes 1, 3, 4, 6 and 20, for tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, rhombic dodecahedron (RD) and cuboctahedron (VE) respectively (as "flower-arranged" i.e. "nested" in his "concentric hierarchy of polyhedra").  

At first he was attracted to some high frequency idealized sphere as his candidate volume 5.  But in retrospect, and after a battle with his "subconscious demon" [4] he glommed on to the rhombic triacontahedron (RT).  It would have a volume of precisely 5 if its radius were set at 0.9994... i.e. just shy of 1; the exact number may be expressed in closed form involving surds, notation which Fuller did not eschew, even though he did not subscribe to current axiomatic dogmas regarding the so-called Real Numbers.

120 T-mods assemble such an RT5 (30 diamond faces, volume 5), whereas 120 E mods assemble an RT5+ of radius 1 precisely i.e. the RT5+ "shrink wraps" (is precisely tangent to) the uni-radius ball of  the IVM (= CCP ball packing). [5]  We need them both.  The RT5, scaled up by 3/2 to volume 7.5, aligns with RD6 in terms of sharing vertices. T-mods have volume 1/24, just like A & B modules.

The concentric hierarchy is tight.  Compact.  Pregnant with so many relationships.  Worth sharing, even as a purely Platonic construct (pre-frequency, pre-time, pre-size, i.e. "eternal" in parochial-local synergetics nomenclature).

Finally, the S module bricks in the empty space between the octahedron of volume 4, and an inscribed, faces-flush icosahedron.[6]  I took us to a Koski Identities page.[7]  

Curt said David is enqueued to given a presentation sometime (he's vacationing in the upper peninsula these days) and had sent a bunch of materials -- including about phi pi (a close approximation of pi based on phi) which, of all David's research foci, I myself am not really into (I also tend to snub the snubs e.g. snub cube etc.).

I emphasized to the group that whereas Fuller endows his modules with energy-conserving and dispersing properties, and envisions cellular automata type studies that could somehow link his modules to CERN style particle physics, my own focus is on such low budget Platonic stuff, meaning I just stick to the pure geometry of it all and don't myself claim to be doing any high energy physics around the synergetics modules (I'm no Nassim).  I'm just a double-A battery low powered operation, like a wind-up toy bunny.

Should we have some breakthroughs in this area (where Synergetics meets CERN), that'd be another advance for modelability for sure.  For me, Tensegrity = Hypertext = WWW is already a CERN connection, i.e. the computerization of synergetics. [8]

Both Snelson and Fuller had high hopes their respective models would prove relevant to atomic studies.  Snelson focused on electrons, whereas Fuller hoped the atomic nucleus of transformable protons and neutrons could be modeled as closest packed spheres in some way with rhombic dodecahedra and his Coupler (8 Mites assembled in many different ways -- Chapter 2 discusses the permutations) in play.

====

ENDNOTES:

[0]  How could a cube of edges sqrt(2) have anything other than "sqrt(2) cubed" for its volume?  My slideshow on Fuller's meaning of "4D" begins there, by answering that question. Just as he challenges us on saying "up" and "down" instead of "in" and "out", he would have us question our most dogmatic (reflexive) use of "squared" and "cubed".

[1]  http://www.steelpillow.com/polyhedra/AHD/AHD_Chart.pdf (Archimedean honeycomb duals -- starting at its root with a handed half-Mite, what David Koski dubbed a "smite").

[2]  https://controlroom.blogspot.com/2021/02/early-bird-special.html

Table is from a 1972 paper i.e. pre the publishing of Synergetics.  

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0097316574900582

[3]  https://youtu.be/g0RTmVSCsiI

[4]  986.208  "My hindsight wisdom tells me that my subconscious  demon latched tightly onto this 5 and fended off all subconsciously challenging intuitions." (cite Mistake Mystique -- something CJ harps on).

More about T & E modules:

https://coffeeshopsnet.blogspot.com/2011/01/storyboarding-lcds.html

[5]  That's another point of contact by the way: IVM = CCP = FCC but for minor nuances and connotations. Dr. Arthur Loeb was the interdisciplinary diplomat in this connection, in both what he taught, and in his prelude to Synergetics.

[6]  https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/Python5/blob/master/S_Train.ipynb

Some of the latest research on the S module.  E.g. not in Synergetics 1 & 2:  S:E == VE:Icosa (same ratio) where VE and Icoas are related by Jitterbug i.e. same edge lengths. 

S/E as a factor (about 1.08...) takes us to explorations of a Jitterbug-like transformation, also in Synergetics, wherein the icosa inscribed in the octa (faces flush) turns into a *smaller* VE, faces flush to the same octa. Multiply that VE by (S/E)(S/E) to get the corresponding larger icosa's volume.  Whereas Icosa * (S/E) --> larger VE by Jitterbug.

[7]  https://replit.com/@kurner/SandE-Modules#main.py

(hit green arrow to run the Python, eyeball the source code to see the groovy volume expressions for S and E modules:

φ = (rt2(5)+1)/2 # golden ratio

Smod = (φ **-5)/2 # home base Smod

Emod = (rt2(2)/8) * (φ ** -3) # home base Emod

[8]  http://www.4dsolutions.net/synergetica/synergetica6.html

Shooting the Breeze

About Python Properties and Goldberg Polyhedrons... Subgenius, Die Antwoord

Headmaster's Address (School of Tomorrow)

Asylum City Meme

Many an American suffers from a complication of Affluenza:  too much stuff.  If you have a garage or basement, so much the better, but many pay for storage lockers.  The standard way to cut down on stuff: Good Will.

An Asylum City along a train and/or truck route needs warehouses, apartment complexes, and scattered dwelling units.  EPCOT was a model (Walt's version, not the theme park).  We're envisioning "aerospace yurts" and "domed gardens of eden" for the dwelling units (Henry Ford Museum; Cornwall UK).  But do those moving in need to buy new stuff?  For the most part, they do not.  Bring your own stuff through the triage process, keeping most of what you want and contributing much of the rest of it to the commons.  

People come to Asylum City with a mindset of paring down, starting over, lightening up.  Those leaving have typically absorbed more "urban nomad" skills such that they're able to travel without a lot of stuff, but with appropriate gear.  You've got your yoga.  The dwelling units will increasingly go on a timeshare schedule, as original occupants decide to move on.  Golf carts from the bus terminal.  You didn't need to bring a personal vehicle.  Car ownership, like horse ownership, is mostly a drag.

Chinese Peace Corps

CPC is an old meme around here, by now.  The dire poverty of so many in the Western Hemisphere, is sometimes easier to address outside a competing hemispheric power, meaning India.  Getting exchange programs going on the basis of mutual aid, but also shared experience and language training.  Africa is just as worthy as Greater Detroit of course.

More Wikipedia Talk on Facebook

I don't see the A,B,T,E,S modules as an isolated topic in that they're constituents of the concentric hierarchy, itself defined in terms of the sphere packing lattice (IVM). The concentric hierarchy, with its Jitterbug Transformation, provides the beating heart core of Synergetics.

When we call Synergetics explorations of the geometry of thinking, we mean these streamlining, simplifying heuristics that have more whole number memorability than standard fare e.g. 10th grade "plane geometry" with polyhedrons in the back of the book and not always reached.

Descartes Deficit, Euler's V+F=E+2, and the spherical spin networks fit into the same tight little framework of interconnecting ideas, a "memory palace" of useful concepts. We get the language of systems, spheres of relevance (omnidirectional halo), concavity and convexity, frequency (time/size) and angle (eternal shape).

Given Fuller's (a) overall prominence independently of people reading and commenting on Synergetics and (b) folk fascination with polyhedral geometry, I'm somewhat shocked at how few papers since the 1970s, even if only about obscure corners of grade school pedagogy, deign to take up the concentric hierarchy from any angle. The volumes table in Wikipedia is practically nowhere echoed in the culture by any other authors. Yet that volumes table, which includes the modules, is what Synergetics is so much about.

Sure, there're a few of us, but way too few for comfort, who carry the torch. But I find it semi-incredible, yet true, that elementary and middle school teachers across the board have no exposure to A,B,T,E,S in the course of their training, either in math or in the American literature of the 1900s. People treat the concentric hierarchy as something deep that should be left to the specialists, whereas the actual subject matter is closer to kindergarten than college. By now, the 40 year gap in attention, the malign neglect of these innovations, has become the story, as much as the concentric hierarchy itself. What was the reason for this neglect?

A New Englander from Bear Island writes densely philosophical prose ala Poe's Eureka, wherein he celebrates the Individual, over governments and corporations, as the source of wealth and culture, and with a "hotline to God". Very Emersonian. And his great aunt was Margaret Fuller. To not classify Fuller as in the American Transcendentalist lineage would seem an error, not that such a classification is exclusive of other ways to compartmentalize. But for the sake of curriculum coherence, we've got a useful pigeon-hole. I've taken up the matter with a Transcendentalist group here on Facebook and received zero push-back. They're into it.

Probably the best argument that Fuller should not be considered a Transcendentalist is that by convention that chapter in literature has been tied off as a pre civil war phenomenon. The Buddhist idea of a "lineage" that goes for hundreds of years, does not seem to apply when telling America's story. Were it not for the convention of saying the age of the transcendentalists is over already, I'd say including Fuller within that lineage is a no brainer.

To my mind, Bucky waited until towards the end of his life to publish Synergetics because he knew a strong track record would help. Having people willing to work with you and take business risks with you is testament to their not thinking you're full of snake oil. We already have Applewhite and Loeb attesting from their two different angles that Synergetics is not a waste of time.

Ergo I think the Concentric Hierarchy was already sitting in clover (with color plates and everything) when a next generation showed up and maybe decided to neglect its cultural heritage.

This is not an argument from authority. I dove into the subject and checked the math. Koski has showed directions forward e.g. VE:Icosa = S:E isn't that spelled out. The whole game of using phi-scaled E and S modules to fill other volumes shows me his getting the Synergetics Explorer Award was not based on snake oil.

My story of Synergetics: The Invention Behind the Inventions is also plenty compelling, when you stand it up next to all the papers and lectures devoted to far less ambitious topics than Fuller's memory palace.

The reasons for all this malign neglect do not necessarily trace to shortcomings in Synergetics. Fuller himself put his finger on it in what Nature calls one of the most influential works on the topic of sustainability, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth: he said overspecialization was the biggest threat i.e. no academic department sees fit to tackle anything so manifestly multi-disciplinary. Easier to attack the messenger with all these canards about Fuller's lack of intellectual integrity. Smear tactics and character assassination. The car flipped over, the domes leaked, and every idea he had was a popularization of someone else's. He became a target.

I choose to side with Applewhite and Loeb over these featherweight detractors who are losing the battle for hearts and minds.

Martian Math Meets Electric Vehicles

Martian Math and the Alchemical Tradition (School of Tomorrow)

Part One in Coffee Shops Network (philosophy blog).

Teacher Training

This short talk gives the flavor of what's in latter day American Transcendentalist Buckminster Fuller's magnum opus. The content is highly geometrical, yet mostly prose and incorporates the word "metaphysical" running counter to trends in philosophy ever since the linguistic turn (Rorty).

 
This is Margaret Fuller's grand nephew we're talking about, the geodesic dome guy (he also invented a 3-wheeled car and an hexagonal house, the latter on display in the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan). He was Elliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard (1962) decades after getting expelled from same decades earlier, for treating the entire cast of some play to drinks on him, blowing his entire stipend.

Picture me the headmaster of a tiny Quaker school in the Ozarks (I'm making this up, I'm in Portland and teach online for my Oregon Curriculum Network) trying to gain market edge by pushing the Fuller geometry down through the K-16 curriculum, all the way to kindergarten in some activities. 

Can geometry be literature at the same time? The subtitle of Synergetics (the magnum opus) is: explorations in the geometry of thinking.

I believe Edgar Allan Poe is usually considered more of a romantic (in the sense of gothic) writer, but then he wrote Eureka (1848), seemingly out of character. I've seen Synergetics compared to that work.

I share all this suggesting teaching and research opportunities, lectures you could give, that'd be off the beaten track, such as the tracks have been beaten.

Early Bird Special

from BEAST slides (2024)

I'm being somewhat tongue and cheek in this episode, as the "early bird" is finding a "worm" we've been following since the early 1920s.  Duncan Sommerville was hot on the trail of all space-filling tetrahedrons.

The "early bird" was also me, as I was up around 5:30 AM to get an early start on what I expected would be today's Youtube, for my channel.  I'm doing these things for free because I'm a teacher and I get paid in the cryptocurrency of Universe.

The night before, David Koski and I had the Goldberg Chart on the screen (above). He was looking from Minnesota, me from Oregon.  We also had onlookers around the table, a figurative table as this was happening on Facebook, not literally a book of faces either.

Before he introduces his three new "infinite classes" of space-filling tetrahedrons, Goldberg wants to survey what's known so far, about tetrahedral space-fillers.  He does a good job summarizing.

Another student of this same puzzle, who'd bitten off a lot, especially considering his life expectancy, managed to apply some fairly memorable nomenclature to this same set, but probably without consulting Goldberg's paper, because he left some holes in his system too.

What Sommerville had known about already, were what Fuller calls the Mite, Bite, Rite (both Sytes, i.e. made of two Mites).  That's three of the total five Goldberg identifies, other than his newer infinite families, not in the same table.

The Rite is the source of two more space-fillers, the quarter rite our "fourth Rite" and the half Rite. This very last, column five, was apparently not known to Sommerville, just as the fourth and half Rite were overlooked by Buckminster Fuller.

What's true about Fuller is he's boring a time tunnel of his own, on his own tour, partially overlapping his fellow time-tunnelers. Whereas Goldberg was able to complete Sommerville's work, and also add to the classification of geodesic spheres, in turn overlapping virology, as Fuller had, he wasn't looking to assign relative tetravolumes. 

Nor was the Goldberg Mite about constituent A and B modules, each of tetravolume one twenty-fourth. Those were Bucky's concerns. Coxeter showed a half Mite in his Regular Polytopes, what Koski calls a Smite, introducing it as the "orthoscheme of a cube".  

Overlapping nomenclatures.  

The scenario time-tunnels twist past one another in some multi-dimensional Hinton Space.

When you're planning to follow an author's tunnel, that's when you might at least temporarily adopt her or his nomenclature, at least some of it. You want to be able to follow the thinking, the explorations, and so commit to memory, a set of defined terms.  These may fade away later in some cases, even while leaving some valuable residue.

The myth about Fuller though is that he's always piggybacking on someone else, attempting to "popularize" and given that makes Fuller a lightweight, there's no need to swim alongside him and take in his shoptalk.  

Once that bubble pops, and you see Fuller belongs in the conversation, then it's on with mastering some of the vocab.

Initially, neither David nor I knew the half-Rite's shape.  We started speculating.  That's when I whipped out my green felt tip pen, a Sharpie.  The chart gave us numbers to go on and David focused on those.  We each independently arrived at the same place with our dissection, not surprising given the two (complementary) answers.

With the A and B modules, we may embark upon some interesting explorations of chirality, or handedness.  We may explore additional dissections, leveraging the one twenty-fourth volume. We may explore additional primitive assemblies, with pairs of Mites (Sytes) and pairs of Sytes (Kites).

Under Sytes we have the Bite, Rite and Lite (hexahedron).  Under Kites, we have the Kit, Kat and Kate.  These are the terms Fuller was distilling. If you fine tooth comb through his two volumes, you'll find some inconsistencies. The Bite and Lite switch places. No version control back then.

Anyway, not so bad, learning these ropes, especially once you have the cartoons, and/or vZome.

I recorded two drafts of the Youtube but wasn't sufficiently pleased with either.  Then I got sucked into the impeachment hearings, about Trump's alienating everyone, turning this into some foreign country, unrecognizable, bankrupt, defunct.  He had a lot of help.

Cyborgs in Cyberia

The realm of true facts (truths), whatever they are, under determines our moral and ethical response thereto, meaning objective facts are insufficient to provide an existential framework. 

We have to supply the interpretation, which is where free will enters the picture i.e. subjectivity, such as there is any. 

Objectively speaking, most thoughts and emotions arise just as mechanically as any other programmed phenomenon. 

Humans should not be afraid of being cyborgs. For the most part, that's what we are. And we're reprogrammable, our saving grace though perhaps insufficient, especially if we have no faith in it i.e. if we deny intuition.

TrimTab Book Club: Guest Appearance

Remembering MLK Day

I've continued to weave the net, keeping pages with pages.  The original Wiki, started by Ward Cunningham, explains the philosophy behind the Wiki design.  As a newly invited denizen of Citizendium, I've done a new autobio.  

Why not do double duty and link my Wikipedia page to the same page and vice versa?

On Facebook, I've been talking about my heros (a few of them) from the Civil Rights movement...

My superhero of the civil rights movement is Muhammad Ali. He stood up to the suits, who wanted to send him to Vietnam. He'd give up the world title before he submitted to the corporatocracy that was even then destroying our democracy from the inside.

I'm a big MLK fan too of course. I took in some of my civil rights movement lore from Kiyoshi Kuromiya, who worked closely with MLK's people on the March on Washington event. 

Kiyoshi was nearly killed by rabid racist cops in the south. Like Bayard Rustin, he was taking up gay rights as part of civil rights (being civil means not dictating / imposing the customs of some ethnic group).

Another healer I admire is Father Divine, the short black guy who professed to be God and who had a very mixed bag following (many walks of life and shades of coloration). 

Their idea of a cult was to live in big hotels and have lavish banquets. Pretty benign.

Civil Rights Gallery:

Bayard Rustin: Civil and gay rights activist. Nowadays celebrated by AFSC (libtard Quakers -- my brand too).

Muhammad Ali: One of the most effective equalizers of all time.



Kiyoshi Kuromiya: born in a prison camp for Japanese Americans; worked closely with MLK; gay rights HIV activist; colluded with Bucky Fuller on some of his most catalyzing works.

R. Buckminster Fuller: American Transcendentalist, worked with Harlem and East Saint Louis community leaders on megaproject futuristic visions, disavowed racism, celebrated Americans as the most cross-bred (mongrelized, with a pun on Christian) population ever.

Postmortem

These crazy rioters, egged on by a tiny cabal of true believers in authority, including the president and General Flynn, symbolize the energy that swept Trump into office four years ago. Pizzagate. Conspiracy mindedness.

However, rather than face the mental illness, Russia was blamed, I think by untrusted sources, e.g. CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS.

Going further back, the conspiracy theory that Saddam had something to do with 911 and was plotting to nuke the US, was just as nutty, and was the thinking encouraged by Condoleezza and her crowd. 

Trump incited a crazy populace to storm the Capitol. Cheney incited a crazy populace to trash a hundred palaces and ransack an entire country. I don't see how that was more sane.

We've been without leadership since at least the Reagan Years, when we discovered lunatic nut cases like Ollie North (General Flynn's prototype) were secretly running "US" foreign policy.

The USA (1776 - 1983) descended into Fake Government during the Grunch Consolidation Period (GCP), bringing us to where we are today, to our new world disorder (NWD).

Pyramid in the Sky

Constructing a health care infrastructure that's based on single payer (for what, citizens?) is going to be a huge undertaking, requiring algorithms and computer science beyond the knowledge of current legislators.

If they felt they had the money, they might opt for experiments. Expand the care given to veterans for example. Start there?

It's like asking people who've never built a pyramid to suddenly build one. We do private insurance. We barely do public health. We haven't solved the citizenship puzzle.

If Congress waved a magic wand and allocated a trillion for M4All what would happen? Everyone would scurry to build the pyramid they don't know how to build?

No, the illusion would be broken. The idea that money combined with laws actually drive outcomes (like magic!) would pop like a soap bubble on a warm day.

Congress needs to preserve the illusion of power. Approving pipe dreams no one knows how to put into practice is not the way to fool most of the people most of the time.

Wars on the other hand... Congress knows it can fund nightmares and make those happen. It's the good happy stuff people don't know how to do. No one taught them.

"Well.... I mean no offense... but the Italians managed it."

Yes, but they started decades ago. Italians are Social Democrats and like that. Like in that Michael Moore film about who to invade next: a lot of Euro countries thought they were imitating the American Dream, only to find out later the Americans weren't really serious about it. 

Americans chose to be Team America World Police (South Park Studios). We could have been a health care destination place, or a theme park capital, or... so many choices. But we had the war machine and knew how to crank the handle. 

So now we're decades behind even China, when it comes to caring for our own people. It's humiliating. We hope they notice our fancy weapons instead, as that's where the ego is. Others may have healthcare, but we have more nukes than all of them combined. So there.

Spy Stories

The Navalny story has gotten cringe-worthy, what with the underwear-borne novichok, ew. The tabloids have their readership, expanded immensely by cable television. Hearst was just the beginning.

The SolarWinds story is more interesting. I'm dubbing it Solaris (Солярис), since everyone has their clever "burst of sunlight" metaphor, and Solaris has the Russian angle, although the original author was Polish.

Will Self got me watching it again recently.

The story stays shallow around the most interesting part, which we can leave to "made for DVD" movies. That's where a basement test lab will imitate one of the Fortune 500. Call it Project 501. 

This is where an elite core of Russian hackers, working for the Russian government, set up SolarWinds Onion (a subtle clone, but with a lethal difference) on a supposedly secure platform.  Get ready to infiltrate.

But don't we have to exfiltrate first, to get the new Cozy Bear payload inside the DLL? Rolling a DLL requires source code tobacco.  Microsoft:  almost 4000 lines.

A dynamically linked library that still does its regular job, if triggered, or at least looks like it will.  

If it's seriously bloated with all these fancy new features, you won't need a SHA sig to see it's been tampered with.  Apparently the cybersecurity whiz team doesn't notice when a DLL suddenly bloats. Nothing goes blip on the radar. Makes sense: that's why the digitally signed certs.

I'm looking forward to some side by side comparisons, of:

SolarWinds.Orion.Core.businessLayer.dll

 as usual, next to the one with the payload. The museum of clever hacks is readying a display case even now I bet.  Actually, Microsoft is providing some of that.

Indeed, I'm "advising all my clients" to preserve their businesslayer.dll (just make a copy) if they find out they're using Onion (vs Orion), and many would likely be doing that, even if not my clients. 

The compromised configuration is valuable and any Fortune 500 company worth its salt is going to snag a working version of the hacked product for its people to train on, and for its lawyers to write suits about. Actually, without the source code, the raw binary ain't that useful.  Still... a souvenir. 

We're hoping SolarWinds coughs up the source soon (it has, we're seeing some of it), or is the story it was black bagged in a perfume bottle?

A Late Debate

John Bolton is disappointing. If he was my professor, I'd want my money back.

Penalty Box

I got slapped on the wrist for some unfortunate use of "cannibals" and "Tyson" (as in chicken) in the same comment. Some story about the spread of covid in some corporate setting: we get a lot of those stories in our news feeds these days. Our feed bags.

The last time I got a time out, or maybe it was just a deletion, is when I forwarded a political cartoon in which Mickey Mouse appeared in an unflattering light.  Again, covid related.

OK, that's fine. I'm treading on the edge, hitting up against the Facebook electric fences. I'm assuming this is AI all the way, given the blizzard of snowflakes (comments) assaulting the service very second. There's no time for a human censor.  Perhaps these come along after the fact and audit, en masse.... if government were transparent, we'd know more.

Thinking over the situation, I'm pretty content with the ammo anyone would have, thanks to me in particular, if wanting to pursue a positive futurism, probably the best we've got, since for the most part people don't consume themselves with "planning" as a pass time. I was born into a planning + activist family.  My education was appropriately big picture, as was my worldly upbringing.

Part of the promise of the Synergetics philosophy is inherent in its reliance on tension over compression. This isn't about pushing hard to make happen.  Lets see if humanity wants to pull itself together.  We know it could, has the option.  If it doesn't, that looks more like a choice than some tragic heroic failure.  The angels will chuckle.  Or call 'em demons, whatever.

My efforts and curriculum design have been enabled at every turn by the latest technology, so it always feels like my skills might be equal to the task.  To a point.  Then it's no longer about my skills in particular. I'm happy to kick back. Show me what you've got.

Journaling My Day

Today started with my job at Portland Energy Strategies, Patrick's think tank. We'd agreed on 10 AM for a VS Code workout, experiment with collaboration features, but I overslept.

The experiment for me included finding out if staying with OSX 10.10 is fatal, as far as Live Share is concerned.  It is.  Thanks to C6XTY, I had an alternative desktop available and from there forward, everything went swimmingly.

Next I was on the porch with a retired librarian, who lent me, or gifted me with, these novels about one Reverend Bebbe (Lion Country is what I'm reading). These are fictional characters, and I've done most of my life fairly cold turkey when it comes to fiction, with lots of caveats.  These days, I'm ready to feed again on fiction, if only to limber up the imagination, which can always use more libering.

For those mystified by the VS Code talk, that's a running program that many of today's coders are using to write stuff in the many computer languages.  The motif is rectangles within rectangles on a screen, with lots of typing, but also a shared whiteboard if you install the right extensions.  Both Patrick and I did.

Patrick, for those just joining us, designed a new kind of snake trap, with pythons especially in mind, because of the situation in the Florida Everglades.  Pythons have thrived there.  The trap doesn't keep the snake necessarily, but it does have that capability, as once you've gone to all the trouble to identify the species (AI goes here), you want to reserve that option in front of the patent office at least.

Anyway, after Patrick and Rosalie, I got to visit with Glenn, who is deeply immersed in Korzybski at the moment.  He has done some more homework and I can now see a path from my Youtube channel, through Korzybski, back to Alan Watts.  But an even more intriguing link suggested itself around "timelock".  Korzybski as a specific meaning for that work.  Of course I'm thinking of 4D Timelock by Bucky Fuller.

Now I'm back at the Oregon house, one of the campus dots on the world map.  Another dot would be some 47th floor in Singapore someplace.  We have our virtual nationhood, after all.  I've been discussing that on Facebook, in the sense of how curriculums overlap or are distinct.  The "concentric hierarchy" is my focus, and that implies "tetravolumes" without needing to say so.

Revisiting Intelligent Design

A researcher on one of these Facebook groups I'm monitoring, brought up Intelligent Design (ID) innocently enough, only to be reminded of the religious wars this shield, or logo, was a part of.  

However, far from being a conversation stopper, that's where my interest picks up, as I'm looking for a graph (in the sense of nodes and edges), a map, explaining the battlefield.  What other shields or logos played a part, and as friends or foes?  

"Intelligent Design" was friendly to whom and shunned by whom and so on?  I'm interested in that stuff. 

Not that "shunning" is the only way to counter a devious foe.  Perhaps we belittle or dismiss with a show of force.  Sometimes in battle, we run full on, like those crazy braveheart guys in the movies, swords drawn. Not intelligent at all apparently.

Ditto for the 911 debacle. Just show me the forks and branches. I'm not looking for the truth, not at first. Did the "no planes" branch fizzle, or merge?  It's like on Github.  I'm looking for the Git history.  Schisms. Regroupings.

We the Wanderers, a group in Portland, had our paths crossing ID's through Terry's interest in widening the platform. Terry helped us keep the Pauling House a center of intellectual activity in our Asylum District here in Portland (Odonarotoop)

I'd categorize Terry, president of ISEPP, as anti-scientism, which is not at all the same as anti-science.  However Terry is also anti-science, but from a relatively undefended angle: engineering > science.

The engineering mindset doubles back on the intelligent design mindset.  Then we look around and admit, our best science and engineering is not yet up to either explaining or recreating the technology around us. Nature's tech is higher than ours.  And in saying "ours" just who are we talking about exactly.  Programs?

Bucky Fuller [link]:

In its complexities of design integrity, the Universe is technology. The technology evolved by man is thus far amateurish compared to the elegance of nonhumanly contrived regeneration. Man does not spontaneously recognize technology other than his own, so he speaks of the rest as something he ignorantly calls nature.

Let's agree if there's a vector towards a kinder, gentler humanity, with higher intelligence to boot, then there's an extrapolation of that vector, along which we'd like to move. Saying God wills us to keep moving along that vector is another way of saying we acknowledge a gradient.  

We feel under some time pressure to finish the work, might be another way of putting it.  

A scientist might easily argue such a "teleological sense" is purely glandular (hormonal) and has its analogs in other nonhuman limbic systems.  Another "god gland" bites the dust.  Is that what just happened?

From an intelligent design point of view, the association of a vector gradient with a molecular processes is not considered some reductionistic objection to an empirical claim, but more as reinforcement for our thinking: that even lizards feel it too, the need to better their lot in life, if not to achieve management level responsibilities, as some say the angels have, and to which some humans may aspire.

Quaker High School

:: Advice to Teachers ::

I did another walk through of my slides.  I'm finally starting to use the Youtube feature that lets one embed hyperlinks to other videos, within the video.  

When I talk about Ezra Pound, I like to Graphing the Poets.  

When I mention Sam Hill, I link to Sam Hill's Quaker Legacy.

My Synergetics talks are about Bucky Fuller's Synergetics, not this other Springer-Verlag Synergetics that the Russians are always writing about.  Fortunately, Wikipedia does a good job of disambiguating.

I entitled this post "Quaker High School" because, speaking as a curriculum writer, in my estimation there's simply no excuse for bleeping over the Bucky stuff, especially given it's had over forty years to mature (Synergetics was published in 1979, Synergetics 2 two years later).  

It's plenty mature now, and highly teachable.  All IVM tetrahedrons have whole number tetravolume, nice.

Ever since Fuller died in 1983, which I learned about on my way to a Friends General Conference, I've connected him to Friends (I wrote an obit in the FGC daily newsletter).  

However, in terms of content, we're talking everyday cultural literacy, as you'll see if you watch the video.

If you feel somewhat comfortable with the content already, as many of my readers already do, I recommend playback at double speed.  

I'm speaking slowly enough that the sped up version isn't incomprehensible, assuming a practiced ear for American English (Amerish).

You'll find in the Youtube notes that I catch myself regarding M.C. Escher's citizenship. He was Dutch. The Canadian connection is through his eldest son.

On Virtualizing Government

Facebook comment:

Like I'd like Housing and Urban Development to have a whole government cable channel to explain itself and show off its inner workings, major scrutiny, FEMA likewise. We have a long way to go when it comes to shelter. Share those simulations, those computer games. Help us see what you see.

A president is someone to meet with foreign dignitaries and sit in on top level meetings, to interpret, for the American people, what the mega trends are, and to personalize it a little. Fireside chats was a good idea. Someone personable.

The idea that a president is at the same time Captain of State, a Monarch, the Ruler, is one we must hope to stamp out in elementary school, as a pernicious myth circulated by would-be monarchists and other vaguely irrelevant schools of thought. A lot of immigrants come here with crazy ideas, especially from Britain and Europe.

The missing ingredient is "cybernetics" i.e. "self organization" i.e. "ouija board". At first, kids are uncomfortable with idea that "no one is in control" as that sounds like anarchy. But just remind them, Spaceship Earth was a disciplined and smoothly running operation LONG before humans got here. Take comfort. The USA operating system, as an engineering feat, is like a ship in the wind, lots of distributed tension, a tensegrity. I may be accused of heresy for saying that though.

Related Reading:

ON VIRTUALIZING GOVERNMENT:
A DESIGN SCIENCE APPROACH

Geek Speak

:: world domination ::

Geeks were collectively smart enough to start down the World Domination road some decades back, and have since lapped the track a few times, owning a next virtual reality time and time again.  Each time around, we make a great leap forward, to sound Chinese about it.

You know other geeks like you, working for other bosses, using a lot of the same tools, are spreading a global culture, combining many languages and ethnicities.  You've developed a shared namespace, a vocabulary, a set of concepts.  You've been working on Codes of Conduct.

However, like most everyone else, the geeks tend to not distill themselves as a class, as their conditioning is they're nerds, and therefore working to fit in, to gain in popularity, to become more socially accepted.  

As nerds, they may even want revenge, for their outcast status.  But as geeks?  What's the difference?

In my lexicon, a geek is a fully matured nerd, meaning early introvert tendencies have largely been transformed into social and media skills, and increasingly, diplomatic skills.  

Relative idealists sometimes have an easier time communicating, as they're not in need of more secretive agendas. Once you're playing poker, you have to factor in more game theory, including calling a bluff.

Business transactions happen faster against the background of shared values.  You're on the same time, as Humans in Universe.

We've talked about some of the buffer zones, in Germany, in Korea, where a kind of reunification in cyberspace creates new opportunities for identification. Hackers live on the edges, connecting and reconciling. They're regarded with suspicion, because of the invisible worlds they frequent.

If the code is all open source, freely fixable and upgradable, then one has the basis for an economy, in terms of accessible tools and marketable skills.  The hackers found a way to survive, if not always thrive. They inhabit an underground, complete with comics.

We call it a "gig economy" and are working on a safety net layer, as actors aren't always working on a project.  We remember Education Automation by RBF, about freeing us, as scholars, to study.  Andrew Yang and MLK pop up in our conversations.

Attachments (Grunch.net)

 I'm still attached to my grunch.net, a literary venture and obvious allusion to Grunch of Giants, a bold work to begin with.  Today it verged on turning into a 403, but for some serious interventions.  I wasn't finding my backup...

I lot of us pile up a body of work out in cyberspace, or really anywhere.  The attachments criss-cross through time and space.

Grunch.net is on a budget server somewhere, not that well protected.  What triggered today's saga was the obvious presence of malware.

Reading Ahead

Let's say you're breezing through Heuristics for Teachers, Fall 2020, as a Youtube experience. You're not doing Orientation, Kick Off Talks, Chirality... exactly, but no matter, nevermind. 

You've discovered the curriculum is multi-modal, a fancy way of saying multi-medium. 

You've become more of a devotee of the blog genre anyway, and so here you are, let us say.

I'd reward you then, with some previews.  

J. Krishnamurti in particular has a language not unlike Ouspensky's in recognizing the botness of we hubots. We Are the Robots (Kraftwerk). Since we're busy bridging to what Russell Brand calls "some sort of Russian shamanism thing" on the channel, i.e. to Ouspensky & Co., Maurice Nicoll in particular, a Scottish Jungian, why not rope in JK? The insights seem consistent.

The ending of the latest Youtube, featuring a Russian Art Museum, is a bridge back to Minnesota, where you'll remember we're finding Sam Hill and family, escapees from the pro-slavery economy.  Today, your average "abolitionist" is chipping away at the tyranny of the nuke weapons lobby, anti-slavery still the objective.

Hexapents for Everyone! (School of Tomorrow)

Tetravolumes with Python

Homework (Fall Term)

Homework:

If you're doing Fall Term, Heuristics for Teachers, consider viewing the below with special attention to the word "secondhand" and its context. Get your hands on a copy of No More Secondhand God. Find the essay on the Omnidirectional Halo, which later appears in Synergetics. American Transcendentalism. 

Soon you'll know American Lit better than most English PhDs (who don't know what "IVM" means guffaw).

TikTok Wars 2020

As one of those grandfatherly Boomers with empathy for GenZ, I'm not on the side of the cowards in the TikTok Wars.  Here are some of my remarks on Facebook, copied here to my blog:

The TikTok platform is bringing the world's people together, psychologically, in a way Facebook has been failing to do. 

The cowardly capitalists have a simple solution: make DC politicians bully TikTok into selling itself to a DC-friendly corporation. I can understand why "American" business is now seen as both craven and insidious -- there's nothing American about it.

Save TikTok from the disgusting low life who want access to all its back doors, but can't get it legally, because they're not in control. Poor dears. When the Lebanese turned off Whatsapp, people poured into the streets. Americans though, are relatively meek and obedient in the face of tyranny, as we've seen. Their Constitution was taken away and they didn't lift a finger, poor slobs.

I have a political cartoon about the situation, showing a GenZer feeling beset by the "powers that be". Although I grabbed said cartoon from Facebook, when I tried to share it on, I got dinged. "We know you probably didn't mean it, but next time..." It had a Mickey Mouse face.  You don't mess with The Mouse (as they say in Orlando). 

#CowardlyCapitalism

Fall Orientation: Welcome to Asynchronous Schooling

Kick Off Lectures

Global Data Corp Update

Looking back on my science fiction:

Much of the Islamophobia was underwritten by banking establishments fearful that certain Sharia practices might challenge compound interest as the de facto standard.
That North American market consumers might simply enjoy the choice to factor in religious affiliation, looks really troubling to bankers, who count on the Secular look and feel of Roman columns, marble floors, the claptrap of a catholic (liberal) Empire.

The strategy was to pretend there's someone in charge of Islam who forbids innovations in FinTech unless that comes with hand chopping and burning at the stake (taking a page from the Christians there). In fact, none of the world religions are actually organized, as admitting mere mortals are behind the scenes (as the organizers) would undermine the underlying premise: that religions transcend mere mortality and somehow reflect a transcendent will.

In point of fact, enterprising imams have the ability to shape the law to suit local community standards. Rather than allow liberal Islam to flower, drawing even with Christians in having female hierarchies, the strategy has been to trap this world religion in its own bad PR, a strategy similar to the one pursued against Russians, making Putinism (invented for the purpose) akin to Stalinism (no need for discussion, just mimic the attitudes).

Christian sects with a strong background in Capitalism are more likely to see how the rules get made (like sausage), and some, like the Quakers, may co-venture with likewise contrarian Islamic sects, in the realm of FinTech.

None of this venturing precludes the participation of other competing religions of course. No one can beat the Mormons in Las Vegas, as the saying goes. Religions and Fintech have gone together like blood and wine over the eons.

The course I've been pursuing, as a science fiction plot, revolves around creating another tech giant, similar to well-known brands, but inside the jurisdiction of a "different Delaware" meaning the foundational DNA doesn't have the look and feel of British bylaws. We're not that Anglo of an operation (not using Tea Company boilerplate).

Picture something Hopi. A kind of movie-making studio, with data centers a necessary part of its business. I gave it a name and started running some ads, ala some kind of Banksy business, in the 1980s.

Time has been on the march all along, and devout Muslims at least, do have alternatives to compound interest, even in Greater LA. It's not like they give you free money, those Islamic bankers. No, bankers want you to make them richer, that's pretty much true across the board. Yet the permutations are endless. Like casino games.

But banks also compete for high profile clients, the kind that doesn't mind bragging a bit, about having Swiss bank accounts (not something to keep hidden). Remember American Express ads?

A Synergetics Slide Deck with Narrative (4D Solutions)

A lot of geeks I know are already into this stuff and pretty well versed. We didn't waste the forty years and established a track record, including websites, published sources, plays, exhibits.

Then you have a lot of 2nd tier think tanks, a lot of them too derivative and downright lazy to have taken a defined position regarding the design science revolution (which has included free open source backlash against intellectual property inventions).

Russiagate Recap

Me on Facebook (today), hyperlinks added.

The CrowdStrike narrative included in the Mueller Report is cleverly crafted, regarding timelines, such that Trump's public speech, calling on Russians to find those missing Hillary emails, actually came to GRU's attention in real time, and there and then they got to work on the phishing expedition that led to Podesta's emails appearing on Wikileaks.

How did CrowdStrike know all this, and more? What forensic evidence was presented to the grand jury? We were never made privy to any of this, and the story sounds rather far fetched without evidence. Putin offered to let the FBI do some recorded interviews of any GRU agents named in the report, if, in return, the Kremlin could do some taped interviews of Browder, the UK oligarch behind the Magnitsky Act, the guy who touts himself as Putin's greatest enemy.

Trump thought that sounded like a good idea, as he saw a path to exoneration (this was before the Dems went for impeachment, only to be stopped in the GOP Senate). He was excoriated of course, because it sounded like he trusted Russian intel to get to the bottom of the story more than he trusted the purveyors of the Steele dossier (British meddling and collusion was never far from the surface).

CrowdStrike, for its part, has not done anything impressive to substantiate its case. On the contrary, the word on the street is they don't really have the evidence to substantiate their version of the Guccifer 2 chapter. That's why the common wisdom, as I sense it, is that Russiagate fell apart and re-stoking it with new fuel has become an important priority of the anti-Trump movement. I'm thinking Trump has done enough and should go play golf in Mar-a-lago, but I don't buy that the GRU played an integral role in the Wikileaks chapter. Not until we see some proof, then I'd be willing to reconsider.

I support the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. I know Biden and his cronies are all about pushing Ukraine into NATO and trying to "win the cold war" all over again, but in my book, the USSA lost Cold War 2. That's over already.

https://www.axios.com/senate-intelligence-russia-interference-971619a8-a806-470a-9de6-1416220ab35b.html

I've been reading the report. Mostly it seems to trace to the same indictments found in the Mueller Report. It repeats the allegation that GRU officers took their cues from Trump when he said in a public speech that the Russians should find Hillary's emails. The Russians then set about spear phishing in response, got Podesta's emails among others, and turned everything over to Wikileaks? Proof?

How exactly this story is proved is not discussed. Rather, it's sufficient in the legal sphere to make allegations, make any evidence secret from the reading public, and then later quote these allegations as further proof. If one is skeptical, as I am, including based on counter-evidence and alternative narratives, then there's a nagging feeling of illusionists at work. This doesn't seem like forensic science.

Black Studies

In recent Youtube channel activity, I've been tracing links between Fuller's positive futurism, and the civil rights movement in North America, through the life story of Kiyoshi Kuromiya in particular.

Kiyoshi and Bayard Rustin were also gay rights activists, which comes under the heading of civil rights.

New Circuit Designs

Always the same mental cartoon about the super rich handing over assets in a "redistribution", if the less super rich get richer (see 23:07 in the above cartoon model).

If your mental picture is motherboard earth the computer is plugged into the wall socket sun, then if neighborhoods start looking better it's not "at the expense of the rich" or "as a result of redistributing wealth" from the rich, it's a matter of redesigning the irrigation system so the daily new flow of wealth, fresh from the solar source, distributes more equitably / efficiently / intelligently than it did before.

I don't want Bezos to have to give up his fancy house. But if other people start living relatively better, in aerospace study-pods, I'm not seeing that as coming from Bezos in the first place. 

Our collective species IQ is learning how to design the motherboard better. Amazon is a part of that circuitry in providing study pods with Amazon Web Services. However the smarts behind Amazon isn't localized to some single 100W bulb (which is the average power consumption of a human animal).

The Columbia Gorge was flowing without help from humans, who figured out later how to plug into the gorge and make street cars go up and down, along with elevators, in Portland. 

It's not that we need hugely more power from the sun. 

It's that keeping millions under arms, drilling / marching / "training", pushing menacing battleships this way and that, burning time in nuclear mass suicide submarines, is squandering 80% of our fortune on inherently meaningless ideologies.

We're a Ghetto Planet with a rotted Cult (set of beliefs), an amalgam of past beliefs we're too lazy to get out from under.

I'm thinking we wouldn't need more raw power to make this a relative utopia, compared to what we have, with simple onboard reprogramming of our neural matter, an undertaking that requires bits and bytes, not heavy steel making.

Pirate Party Planks

Pirate Party Planks:

* copyleft > copyright
* ethnicities are not races
* Govt runs some businesses to showcase its values
* special public schools focus on training for work in govt
* some public schools are residential, some are same sex
* Tulsi's reprimand of Trump > impeachment verbiage
* Russia is not an enemy
* China either
* protect electoral infrastructure
* until elections are more trusted, no party has a mandate

Pirate Party USA: no candidates, only planks, feel free to steal

Shakespeare in the Park

Shared with Public

July 27 at 9:19 AM ·

Midsummer Nights' Comedy (satire):

City: Look there's no socially responsible way to be publicly engaged in making our world better than outdoor summer rallies right now, so we'd like to let this keep going, even support it.

Feds: oo oo, you make our buildings ugly, we sending apes, you not strict.

City: um, no really we know our people, that graffiti can be cleaned up. Our police can handle it, we know our own people, we'll make your building look like new down the road.

Feds: you not strict, we angry, you Portlanders don't respect authority of God

City: anthropological differences exist between us...

Feds: STFU, apes on plane. We coming now.

Experimental Prototype Communities

The military abuses AI, per Manning et al, which is why so many at Google advocate severing ties, with certain programs at least (death dealing by AI doesn't make anyone look good, least of all collaborators).

My philosophy is keep lowering the barrier to entry i.e. all the tools you'll need to build a utopia are within range of the pooled resources of the first investors.

Then grow your community by trial and error yes, but also by reading up on good ideas and/or better, visiting parallel utopias likewise experimenting with new ideas. Watch the video feed that comes from your competition. Send your spies to see if they're lying.

We all learn from the dystopias too (e.g. Rajneesh Puram as a great case study, speaking of Oregon).

What I try to get away from is any implicit assumption that the debate is about how "we all" as in "all of us" need to agree on some innovation before we try it out.

I think in terms of thousands, maybe millions of little campuses, dotting the Earth, each trying different mixes, different fusions of ethnicities.

Some will be more into AI and tech, wanting to dress unisex like on Star Trek. Others will be more into creative anachronism, dressing like we're in some Monty Python episode, lots of rustic implements, amidst some high tech (say for powering the place).

I think of theme parks. I think of EPCOT, the original meaning: Experimental Prototype Communities of Tomorrow.

We need lots and lots of epcots. The design science philosophy is about facilitating in their creation, less about judging them in advance.

Bump It Up

Memorandum to Global U

Memorandum

As y'all know, I'm into putting PWSs (personal workspaces) on like an AirBnB network, except I called it the Housing Project in the 1980s, and a lot of it was about swapping, so more like those timeshare vacation spots. 

Dorm space, faculty lounges, study pods...

Wiring up the Harrison Street facility to the global Coffee Shops Network (charitable) and to the connected think tank community, has been a long term project. 

Known to some as the "Blue House" in our Buddhist Ghetto (Portland proud of), or in Asylum District  (also celebrated -- named for the sanitorium that used to anchor the neighborhood), we've been a hub for Food Not Bombs, established covens (music bands).  

Portland's creatives called us Blue House to distinguish us from Pink House and some others.

Tomorrow I'm having a contractor spec the place for roof replacement.  Long overdue.  The other big project would be the upstairs bathtub drain situation.  

Then you'd have the perfect faculty housing or student group housing, with included study space and studio, just like it is now, perhaps re-furnished.  Do you like the diner kitchen, a relic of the 1950s?  The main timbers date back to 1905 according to my records.  There've been some add-ons.

In my dreams, I'd like to come back on a circuit and stay here myself from time to time.  The XRL (Extreme Remote Livingry) "middle of nowhere" type boarding schools, the mixed use skyscrapers, the other city-as-campus configurations... I might not be in Portland as frequently as I have been.

My daughters, friends and family would be welcome here, perhaps in some admin capacity.  Tara is next in line to help design the circuit.  

The family business is merging with the Global U in a way that keeps logistics non-onerous.

I'm a big believer in institutional wealth.  You don't need to own an aircraft carrier or submarine to live on one. Ownership of the supersonic jets, the space station, the racetrack, is likewise not my forte.  On the other hand, I'm into storyboarding, like an investment bank, or movie-maker.

As one more student-faculty member, I'm into enjoying the Global U responsibly.  That's how I bring credit to my school.

Air America Reunion?

I think we need to help Rachel Maddow pull out of her tailspin. Remind her it's a small world and all these networks, like the one she works for, interpenetrate in mysterious ways.

Maybe if Russia buys MSNBC and lets her keep her job going on and on about the re-education camp she's worried about, people will settle down and stop worrying. 

As it is, Russia basically bought up Air America (the radio network) which had Ed Schultz, Randi Rhodes, Rachel Maddow, Thom Hartmann... some went to MSNBC, others ended up on RT. 

For RT to buy MSNBC would be like a family reunion in a lotta ways.

Control Room Simulator

Tibet TV

Recent screenshots.  From Facebook.

GST for Dummies

I think all will agree that a planet, any planet, is an instance of a system. An open system. Here's my question: does it make sense to apply the concept of Entropy to a planet? In principle. Doesn't have to be a question about Earth.

More specifically: can a planet be Syntropic i.e. Negentropic?

Or is that a meaningless question?

I ran this by a list of physics teachers awhile back and didn't seem to reach a consensus, but maybe I posed the question wrongly. The question above is a new attempt to phrase it more correctly.

If you know the right Youtube to answer my question, I'm open to any all suggestions in that regard. Thoughts?

Like I've heard some people invoke the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to explain why worsening conditions for Humans in Universe over the next 10K years is a necessary consequence. Of course that's not correct, as a planet may in principle harvest the free energy around it, if an open system, and capitalize on the grant income.

For further reading:

GST [1][2][3]

Talk Like a Pirate

Mind Control

I have no ethical problems with consenting adults getting together and agreeing to take some personality test (say OCEAN) that shrinks each to a set of numbers.  Then feed those numbers as machine learning features, paired with one extra Y, such as "voted for...", such as "preferred to purchase...". Do we have a model? Did we discover some predictability?  Not?

What data scientists sometimes ignore or forget to study is whether outliers in one study might be outliers in another or, put another way, are those least predictable (a measurable trait) in turn predictive? Lots of mythology swirls around this question. The predictably unpredictable, the anomalous, do they exist and, if so, what do they teach us?

You might call this an artificial intelligence class, with the twist being our question: so just how artificial is our intelligence, anyway?  Are we all really phonies?  There's some fear of that, which psychoanalysts raised in saying they could predict our lot in life on the basis of our relationship with the mother, or per some other archetype.

But that's astrology in a nutshell: shrink me down to some numbers. Comforting. Back to OCEAN.

I know what you're thinking: we already know OCEAN is predictive and that's what Cambridge Analytica used to tip the election to Trump and blame the Russians.  That's why Facebook was duped, then later took the fall, accused of being too greedy or too loose with its data or whatever.

Americans are stuck believing their every belief is in a database somewhere, and that these beliefs make them predictable, pliable, dupable. That's disturbing.

No one likes learning, from machine learning, that they're a machine.

My response is no, we don't know any of that.  The mythology of marketing and PR is to create an aura of all-knowingness, if that's your line of business (omniscience sells by the "square" they tell me), creates a swirl of doubt around what the true state of psychology is.

What is the state of the art?  With uncertainty so much a tool in the toolbox, how could we know?

The uncertainty principle is not about minimization in psychology, as it is in physics.  The squid ink of purposeful juxtaposition of intended states is what keeps the whole situation fluid, and that's a plus when you're hoping to hover above any literal meaning, indefinitely.

I'd happily join other grad students in this experiment, with or without the Float On floatation tanks. Float On, a nearby business in Asylum District, has also ventured into publishing, resharing some of the John C. Lilly works, on telepathy with dolphins.

I know that's all fringe culture silly stuff, but thar  (as in them thar hills) is where the pirates encode their secret treasures.

A Bridge Over Troubled Water

Kirby Urner
Yesterday at 1:37 PM ·
Shared with Public

My Youtube channel conceit (that's an OK thing to have in literary criticism) is I'm designing curriculum for an Elite Quaker School (warning: stereotype), like Sidwell or one of those. I've got the New England Transcendentalism going, but also Pound and Poe. So yeah, heavy on the humanities but with a bridge from Xanadu across the C.P. Snow Chasm, to STEM, land of the Stemites (not a typo). That bridge is made of C6XTY it seems, a commercial product or artwork or something mirage-like and shimmery, on the brink of esoteric to the point of occult.

A Ramanujan Identity

Concentric Hierarchy in Blender (School of Tomorrow)

More Sausage (as seen on Facebook)

Regarding this "news" article.

"The documents were obtained through the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative project funded by Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky. NBC News has not independently verified the materials, but forensic analysis by the Dossier Center appeared to substantiate the communications."

Somehow dossiers from England don't impress me anymore. We've made too many wrong turns based on "British intelligence". I'm going to use this story as more evidence of British meddling and plans to keep inflaming Russophobia within the North American psyche.

Because they use the word "forensic" they think we sheeple should be impressed. The Mueller Report is already a big part of the history going forward. Any high school history class that doesn't bring up Guccifer 2 is totally bogus in my view, I laugh in their general direction (Monty Python allusion). NBC stinks of police state and militarism very distinctly. That's a network I no longer hold in high esteem, right down there with CNN.

I'm still loyal to CBS though.