Academia R Us

 

I sense some snobbishness vs-a-vs the domain name academia.edu, even though it has the requisite global extension. 

"It can't be as real as my college" is the reflexive response, always going for the existential, and feeling threatened.  If you mean it has no dorms or physical campus spaces, you might be right (I'm not sure).

To me, it's just another walled garden with pretty flowers, many specimens, some of them Design Science related. I get to network from here, with my peers.  I get notified when another scholar checks out my Python for Calculus or whatever.

Of G & O

I recall a new relative, from South Africa, kind of squirming at TG a few years ago, when I brought up Die Antwoord, the music group.  Although self cast as a duo, the Ninja guy and Yolandi, the group has lots of off screen talent, visiting dancers and the rest.  The movie Chappie...  

I'm a fan.  But in her circles, this showbiz act was an embarrassment, as maybe some UKers felt around The Beatles, at least originally, back in the day.  This is what you admire in British culture?  What about our Victorian tea cups?

That's an odd segue to G & O I suppose:  Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.  These were not heroes in my youth, as I'd barely heard of either.  I followed Freud, Ernest Becker, Norman O. Brown, Wittgenstein... that's up through university, when I jumped into Erhard & Fuller, a dynamic duo back then (see the new bio).  I've continued to add to my graph (tree) of course.  We don't wanna be stuck in the 1980s.

I'll admit I'm thinking politically in making Ouspensky a focus, in wanting to include some folks from St. Petersburg (I'm talking Eurasia, not Florida), Moscow and like that, in the foyer of fecund philosophers.  Yes there's a "self help" angle to what they were doing.  So what?

Whereas psychoanalysts must needs be psychoanalyzed as a part of their training, we might be worried the philosophers have no therapy.  Enter Wittgenstein, with his philosophy a therapy for specific metaphysical pathologies he knew only too well.  

There's no crime in philosophy wanting to have workshops or seminars, meetups with exercises (rituals) or whatever.  The so-called church has no monopoly on soul searching and/or making.

I have other ulterior motives however.  Gurdjieff is someone Bucky jokingly found congenial, and a fellow alcohol user back then, or so Dr. Richard Buckminster Fuller seemed to suggest.  He talked about the interminable toasts to the many types of idiot, with each a raised glass of something.  Wine? Did the great master use colored water?  Random Google:  "Although Gurdjieff did show some of the signs suggestive of alcoholism, such a daily drinking, drinking early in the day, and driving after drinking...". OK, I get it, he liked to drink.  Shades of Alan Watts.

That brings us to EST:  The Steersmans' Handbook, a copy of which I've only recently (relatively) acquired and consumed.  That's where Bucky is mentioned, and this was all pre Erhard Seminars Training.  Then Bucky and est would cross paths (read the new bio for more of the story).  

That's some pretty tight semantics, and summarizes our chapter:  man the machine ("man cannot do"), man the Spaceship Earth program (woman the "womb man" -- if that's the etymology). 

[ Using "man" or "guy" as a generic actually has a feminist dimension.  The words no longer work to discriminate or distinguish.  The default could just as well be female, in our 300 man brigade, task force or group. ]

Is my point that "overcomers" (as in "we shall overcome") might be drinkers?  More to the point is the similarity across these self help systems:  how to address one's robotic behavior, complete with habits one sometimes feels at a loss to control.  Some philosophers look down on philosophies with much of a psychological dimension, especially where self improvement is involved, and use lots of pejorative language (negative adverts, attack modes), versus jumping into the fray as honest competitors (self promoting, proving positive worth).

In other words, both Bucky and G&O accentuated the positive, and we see that in their respective trackers and backers quite a bit.

I'll fade to Medium here, quoting one of my stories:

EST = Electronic Social Transformation in some passages, although Stevens is clear about the Latin meaning as well, as in “to be” (also a part of Erhard’s spin).

The book is McLuhanesque in terms of attributing the great generational divide to respective diets in terms of media, between the linear book-reading Establishment of legislators, and the immersed “simulsense” TV generation he calls the Movement.

What he calls Est people are the bridge types that still read and write in the manner of the older civilization when needing to, but that experience the new ultra high bandwidth of total immersion in an electronic field of simulcast stimuli and programming, of which television was only the beginning.

Buckminster Fuller is a “simulsense man in spite of his advanced years” (page 34) and Bucky blurbs about the book excitedly on the front cover (see picture above):

Magnificent… an extraordinarily lucid and powerful book. It may well be the straw that will save the camel’s back, of Earthean crisis.

For me, this book helps bind Fuller to McLuhan again, an old nexus I’ve talked about before, and paves the future for the “chummy” relationship achieved by Erhard and Bucky around the time I was leaving Princeton for Jersey City and my first job as a high school teacher at St. Dominic Academy.

Place Based Education (PDX and EWR) -- School of Tomorrow

Thinking with the Ancestors

I rarely talk (or write) about my Uncle Earl.  As is the case with Uncle Bill, I'm using ancestry shoptalk in a shorthand, as both uncles are actually siblings of grandparents, not parents.  

Earl was the in-law of my grandma Margie's sis Betty. I recall the last name was Poole or Poolton, I'll ask Bill if he remembers, probably not.  Carol might.  

My dad's side did not get to meet all of my mom's side, but isn't that usually the case?  We meet the most of our respective clans at weddings and funerals, oft times.

Anyway, I recall this conversation with Earl, who seemed enigmatic, yet good humored, happy to have time with me, asking why we say "the campus" instead of "Campus" or something like that.  Why wasn't Campus a proper name?  But for what?

I have only this dreamy recollection, which includes the room.  Then along comes this "the universe" versus "Universe" talk with respect to the Bucky stuff (R. Buckminster Fuller).  These seem to be grammatical investigations.

Where I come out, almost as a sum of these data points, is with Global University in place of and/or as a synonym for Spaceship Earth.  We say Earth as often as "the earth" it seems to me.  So we might say Campus and mean Earth, as in "the planet" (the one we're on).

Campus in Universe.  Works for me, why not?

I'm fine imputing a subjectivity to these terms, thinking of a passage in Synergetics wherein a Universe is like a complete game of how it might have turned out, something subjunctive flavored like that.  There's a wistful "could have been" to one's own world (shades of Wittgenstein again).

On a rather different subject I'll chronicle here that I got up early and started taking in high volumes.  The complete Silva Ultramind commercial, and then free episodes of the new Showtime documentary on Bill Cosby.

And William James Sidis, the smart kid who just wanted to be left alone to think, therefore to be, not unlike Descartes, always pestered by his "friends".  Later they found a manuscript he'd been thinking on (i.e. writing) and it seemed to be about thermodynamics in some way.  They ran it by Bucky Fuller for his assessment.  Small world.

Social Engineering

Middle Americas

In case you're curious what social engineering might look like, let me share some science fiction.  For one thing, I come from the viewpoint of the Americas all being delighted with one another.  

That North Americans have a Mexico to enjoy, and vice versa, is a double blessing.  So many North Americans I know, and not just the so-called Hispanic ones, are in love with Mexican culture, whereas others have retired in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Belize, Panama and so on.

I used to tell EJA I was bound for Costa Rica, just to get away from the oppressive MIC, which is AFSC jargon for "military-industrial complex" (to which I give a Jungian spin, i.e. "complex" is a psyche thing). My sister lived there for some years.

Speaking of teaching, I want to introduce high schoolers to Regexes, and not just inside the domain of "computer science".  We're always reminded that Regular Expressions were invented by a mathematician. Lets expand high school math to include them.  What's on my plate for the next couple days.

So the social engineering centers around weather reports, as broadcast over TV stations.  Some of the GPS / GIS maps in the background are fairly TexMex in their makeup, i.e. we're in some Middle America between Mexico City and Las Vegas.  

There's a road net, a set of mountain ranges, some valleys with rivers.  The Colorado, for example, no longer has much of a delta to speak of.  Humans have diverted 100% of that particular river.  I'm getting off topic w/r to TV weather, but not w/r to global climate.

When TV viewer-voyeurs are as familiar with Middle Americas as with so-called New England, they'll be less prone to fuel the polarizing language factions.  

Again, the Americas are in love with themselves.  We have so much to treasure.  We are the real West after all (plenty wild), not the pseudo-west of the Atlantic-bounded EU East.

Weather maps, as you've noticed, are used to promote a sense of cohesion, of us versus them. That's why you still see these ludicrous masking algorithms, wherein the "weather of interest" is miraculously masked out.  

As if political boundaries trumped nature.  Hilarious right?  

We get more serious around airports, acknowledging there's an ecosphere (aka a biosphere).  

For the most part, though, we're living (mentally) in a house divided, some us versus them.  

That's your model?  Question authority.

Picture a weather map that strays from Oregon to Washington to Vancouver without a pause.  Bellingham is the belly button of this Cascadia place.  Do we need permission from the District to frame our weather reports as such?  Of course not.  

We might obey conventions out of reflex of course.  "Lets do what we've always done!" is the slogan of Darwin Award champions.

Supergrids

 I've noticed for awhile now that the idea of a "global grid" is nowadays said to be an Asian and, more specifically, a Chinese idea.

Not mentioned here in this Bloomberg vid, is Bucky's World Game making the global grid a top priority.

I guess Bucky is just too scary and troubling a figure to bring up casually in corporate business circles.

The vid also fails to mention one of the oldest HVDC lines, from Oregon to California.

Mind vs Brain

What I'm not expecting the new biography of Bucky Fuller to dive into, given time and space constraints, is Fuller's relationship with P. D. Ouspensky and/or his philosophy. 

We know there was some kind of connection from Linda Darlrymple Henderson's book, on non-Euclidean geometry's influence on modern art.  Apparently Fuller sent a copy of his limited edition 4D Timelock to Claude Bragdon as soon as he self published it, with a note mentioning the importance of Tertium Organum. 

We may conclude Fuller read Tertium Organum, which gets into the "dimension talk" so pervasive at the turn of the millennium (1800s - 1900s). 

Fuller’s appreciation of trailblazers who rose above their peers with pioneering ideas was also influenced by mystically oriented teachers whom he met in New York City at the beginning of the Great Depression. He gravitated to esoteric teachings in spiritual development by the Russian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (whom Fuller met in Greenwich Village in the late 1920s) and his pupils P. D. Ouspensky and Claude Bragdon, and, in the 1930s, the controversial French American scientist Alexis Carrel. Drawing on these various sources, Fuller merged the design conceptions of his single-family house with mystical iterations on self-propelled evolution. [source]

The connection I'm seeing is between Gurdjieff's picture of "man, a machine", striving to awaken, and Fuller's own emphasis on automaticity, i.e. on processes not carried out consciously, such as digesting and growing hair... including consciousness itself?  

We don't know how we do it.  Look ma, no hands.

Our automaticity is not something we need to moralize about or feel guilty about, so much as wake up to. Like they said in est:  guilt is that thing you hold on to so you can keep doing that thing you feel guilty about.  

Per Bucky, and just ordinary language, waking up to inappropriate reflexes is more a matter of correcting for awkwardness, once a habit gets way out of whack vs-a-vs the actual challenges.  But doesn't this beg the question as to what's inappropriate?  Who's to judge?

Taking a page from Krishnamurti, is it a matter of seeing the cost?  Or call it sticker shock.  We snap out of it to the extent we catch ourselves falling into it, whatever that is.  The shock of realizing you about to doze off in the driver's seat is what might finally persuade you to pull off, the better practice in these conditions.

Assuming "the Self" in the Jungian sense is an anchoring equilibrium, then a disequilibrium might be a daydream or system, a set of beliefs, a faith and practice.  We accept an aberrational system, always needing Self correction in principle.  But what shocks us into actually shaking off the old habits to make room for new grooming?

I bring est into it because in retrospect it doesn't surprise me that these two philosophers would precessionally orbit one another, but not necessarily converge.  Fuller never did the est Training.  Yet his and Erhard's karma most definitely intertwined.  

I'm pointing to a common lineage:  "esoteric" teachings that begin with the unconscious and/or sleeping and/or habitual nature of the human psyche (including thought), with respect to a possibly unrealized self awareness potential.  

I put "esoteric" in scare quotes because none of the actors mentioned was actively working to make their teachings private and/or secret.  What makes the teachings "hidden" is the need to work on oneself, which can be difficult and may imply a workshop setting, with exercises and self-disciplines.

As Applewhite mentions in Cosmic Fishing somewhere, Fuller was not prone to demonize.  He was not into pointing the finger of blame or indulging in resentment, the paradigm negative emotion.  

He could see what he was up against, in terms of pattern integrities.  Yet he is adamant about having no goodies or baddies at the heart of his mechanics.  He's taking after Nietzsche in that way, in revaluing all values. "Accentuate the positive" was his motto, from that song.

"Man cannot do, because man is a bureaucracy" might be one way to provide a synopsis of the Fourth Way teachings.  

To will the good is to will one thing, according to Kierkegaard.  But how often are we free of ambivalence?  Don't we fragment into numerous "I" types, each with a point of view?  We fight with ourselves, in a battle of self overcoming.

Fuller wanted to accommodate the namespaces he trusted, even where the shop talks diverged.  He'd have his own way to keep Love and Gravity connected, including through ample discussion of Newton's Law.  

There's that one-on-one love, of two black holes, swirling around one another, one day to converge.  Then there's that peeling off from a 90 degree orbit and making one's own way, neither tugging nor resisting, what Fuller labeled "precession".

In Fuller's shoptalk, the "brain bureaucracy" may be semi-paralyzed in an awkward state, looking to pull out of a tailspin.  The mind is able to reshape the aberrational, provided one stays open to it.  Whether it's able to do so in time is touch and go in some cases.

Game Theory

Those into sports know what it means to root for a team.  Sometimes, if coming to a sport from the outside, there's a default sense of neutrality.  Why root for a team so soon?  Why not watch the game for awhile and learn the ropes.  Pick a team later.

Sports tend to be neat and clean in terms of pitting two teams or two individuals against one another.  The action is easier to follow that way, not to mention the rules.  Once the sport goes to three or four bodies, the complexity gets pretty intense, which doesn't mean there's no point thinking about them?  On the contrary, more thought is needed.

Real life often offers this multi-polar prospect:  many teams or gangs or companies or crews, all vying for position, and in some cases seeking to advantage one another, as teams will join meta teams. The vista may contain a lot of roiling and boiling, a lot of dynamism.

What sometimes gets difficult in these multi-player games is figuring out what teams are really fighting what other teams, versus putting on a show.  Team A perhaps makes a big show of fighting Team B, in order to deceive Team C, whereas in actual fact, A and B are on a meta team together, and their seeming opposition is more about outing their adversaries in the C group.

Like if Bob is actually in cahoots with Alice, yet they portray themselves as opposite poles, then if Eve goes to Bob to betray Alice, Bob might tell Alice.  Eve is caught in the middle with nowhere to go, but may not realize it.  She may believe she can play one side against the other.

The matter of secret understandings and hidden alliances is often a source of paranoia.  The computations get too intricate and a player may blow a fuse.  Conspiracy theories break out at this point, widely shared or closely guarded.  If the theory is testable, then it may not be crazy.

These same dynamics play out on soap operas, in families.  

Sometimes a public stance of neutrality, broadcast to all players, is a best way to stay sane, with backdoor attempts to undermine neutrality thereby countered.  Public declarations of transparency open a space for whistle blowers and ongoing revelations.  Exposing truth is more a process more than an end state.

Am I planning to map all this theory to any specific situation on the ground?  Not at this point.  I'm just looking for patterns.  In my minds eye, I'm flitting between situations, some geopolitical, all psychological.

Acts of kindness, without strings attached, no quid pro quo, sometimes come across as confidence building measures.  

Team A wants to reassure Team C that their stance is not adversarial.  That's all find and good and yet who speaks for the team?  Does it have the one captain?  Does it speak with one voice?

Obviously, the big unknown in these equations is the level of trust.  What has an agent (acting party) come to conclude regarding the predictability and consistency, of either an adversary or friend?  

Whether to consider another team adversarial or friendly may come down to decisions based on history, track record.

World Game Museum (WGM)

I've toured a lot of propaganda museums in my day.  We lived in Europe and every chance we got ("we" = my nuclear family), we'd load the car, including the car's rooftop with a family-sized tent (German made), and off we'd go.  

One trip took us across the Adriatic by car ferry from Italy to Greece, I'm guessing that was also the Turkey trip, thence to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary... probably Prague that time too.  You get the idea.  Along the way, we'd visit museums.  Some were about defunct ideologies, and the social engineering that kept them going in their day.

Such educational touring is itself a world game activity, or call it playing, versus warring.  Warring is deadly serious whereas playing contains a lot of lightness.  

In the gray zone in between, war involves playing with war toys in a simulation (training, playing a game), knowing one is bound for a theater.  There's a whole curriculum about making you a hero.  

That's what a War Game Museum might curate:  the many brands of toy soldier they would factory-make or hand-craft, for the benefit ("") of little children (scare quotes on the side in case any become pawns in someone else's game).

I remember a page from TV and movie star Adam West's auto-bio, cited in a documentary film, in which he's being shot from a cannon, in the circus, in his batman suit, when he realizes his whole shtick is self demeaning. He's allowing his fate to be determined in too passive a tense. He resolves to "play a different character" so to speak.  

An awakening sometimes happens when children find themselves scripted into someone else's fantasy, forced to play along.  They may not have had that perspective at first, initially imagining themselves a co-author, or peer screen writer.  To retain integrity and self respect, they maybe have to drop out or peel off.  Such is their transition to adulthood.

In other words, the transition from war game to world game may involve escaping serious child abuse. 

If you discover you're just a guinea pig in some weapons factory's field testing experiment, in a scenario wherein the factory managers and investors become your commanders through rotation, then you might start looking for an escape route.

An underground railroad usually develops in response to any serious master-slave situation, to help funnel said slaves to freedom while frustrating master power grabs.  The WGM will help memorialize some of these railroads, as a source of new recruits (ex slaves).  

Fighting for freedom is not necessarily a weaponry game, as Muhammad Ali could tell you (along with MLK).  Livingry plays a role too, especially psychologically.

Major General Smedley D. Butler had the courage of his convictions when he penned War is a Racket, more a pamphlet than a book, and a message to future generations.  

He had served in the American-Philippine war, prototypical of the war in Vietnam in testing the readiness of the home folks for Empire. The Anti-imperialist League (Mark Twain & Co.) signaled the home folks weren't ready (and never would be) but signals can be ignored. 

The empire-minded had a New American Century (the 1900s) in their sights, even before any plans for a next Reich in Europe.  The UK had set the bar, with a first globe-spanning example.  Some thought the USA was destined to inherit the UK's mantle.  Others thought said mantle smelled a lot like a dead albatross.  The Revolutionary War had been about escaping, not fostering, an imperial mindset.

Theme Park USA

 

 

I'd stumbled upon Defunctland's account of Disney's America, cleverly imitating Ken Burns film making techniques, but little did I know about Freedom Land U.S.A. The two videos do not cross reference the parks specifically. 

 

Freedom Land U.S.A., developed by graduates of the Disney Academy (an imaginary place, I mean Walt himself and his company), actually ran for five seasons, hoping to meet up with the Robert Moses World's Fair of 1964 on the tourist circuit.  

 

These longer term dreams did not pan out (a housing project was in the wings as backup), but a lot of kids got to experience American history through a cartoonish carnival experience, the theme park theme.

By the time Disney's company decided to do its own version, under Eisner, partly to counter the Euro Disney disaster, the American public was less enamored of the theme park theme.  The circus sector could not be trusted to coddle the American ego.

Disney and Henson (Muppets) were fighting the same battle:  to make cartoons and puppets a valid means for communicating culture, including adult to adult.  To some extent, this battle was won, in animation and graphic novels, in robots and AI (more semi-autonomous thanks to coding).

Our telling of history has to be fluid.  Committing to one generation's narrative, in the form of a theme park, is to risk becoming obsolete rather quickly, as a future generation comes to mock the quaint views of the past (that's one dynamic).  The world of screens is less of a financial risk.  Keep it virtual.

Speaking of which, I salute C.V. Wood of dubious engineering credentials (at first) for being a great social engineer when it came to selling the theme park idea, which I am personally enamored of to this day.  Dark rides, as well as real train rides, and later roller coasters, have been deeply influential on my own psyche.  Like I can relate.

Arcs of History

What neocons need to counter are narratives such as the one from Chris Hedges.  Chris is very experienced, so when he calls their views naive and childish, there's some gravitas behind it.  He also has a long memory and knows how to trace the lineage.

For now, the neocons have tricked the neolibs into an alliance, or maybe it's not a trick, just the logical extension of certain trends.  Glenn Greenwald has been tracking this alliance, whereby Trump and Cheney policies get absorbed by the District as permanent programming.  The march to expand NATO had no effective counter in the financial sphere, as the weapons makers held all the cards, and continue to.

What happens when the public decides the swamp includes those who cynically used the American people in service of their own narrow ends?

This is not a new story line.  I'm helping catch people up if they haven't been reading or viewing much.  Chris was a bureau chief for the New York Times and an experienced war correspondent, before turning himself into a full time professorial type.  Glenn Greenwald is the one who flew to Hong Kong to interview Ed Snowden.  He also knew what Julian Assange was up against, in terms of deep state interests.

The history so far shows a lot of resistance, in CIA circles, to neocon thinking.  The assumption might be, given the career trajectory of Patraeus and Pompeo, that the agency had been conquered by their faction, but the bureaucracy was way too sprawling to narrow to the views of any one chief executive. The CIA of Ralph McGehee and Ray McGovern wasn't going anywhere either.  You could see George Tenet taking on Richard Perle in the opening paragraphs of his memoir, At the Center of the Storm.

In my experience, the agency was spreading out away from the District as long ago as during Casey's tenure.  This was not really a new development however, as the whole point of the agency was to be a global network, self informing. 

Climate Change

Compartmentalized thinking is when one thinks war and/or military operations are not climate change. 

They're more than mere weather change.  

 What the quasi-incoherent seem to mean, by "climate change", is something about global average temperature and ocean sea level.  The "biosphere" on the other hand, goes neglected, as that's the messy theater of viruses and wars, whereas "the climate" is more important.  

As if there's a difference between economy and ecosystem, human health and planet health.  

We may stipulate that there is, i.e. that humans are at war with their own habitat.  Certainly they're at war with themselves, which makes for an unfriendly habitat in many regions.  

Were humans to be less warlike, the biosphere would change for the better.  

Short of that, why should it?  

Nuclear winter is climate change.  

The ash of cities, blown around the planet, obscures the sun, most likely ushering in an ice age as industry won't be available to warm us up again with those greenhouse gases, not to that high a level.  Was this the plan then, to save the planet from further "civilization"? 

When we're facing climate change in the form of returning to coal or before, maybe that has something to do with the price of rice?  Are those "fighting climate change" content with their own views on war?  They insist war must end, right?  But it's not like they're the ones giving orders.

Rebuilding Ukraine

The billions allocated to Ukraine could be spent on civilian reparations (repairs) in case Ukraine is still a sovereignty.  The choice to not spend that money on a military spectacular is probably not theirs to make however.  Those billions would not even rebuild the army, navy and air force already lost.  But do they need to be?

The number of civilian jobs open to EU, UK and US types would be proportionally higher in a neutral, vs a NATO, Ukraine. In terms of employment, insisting on narrow specialization in weapons training is an anathema, the opposite of diversified growth, more of what brought the USA to the brink of extinction (some would say that brink has been crossed).

Syria is a good example.  After years of civil war, there's been some chance to rebuild in Aleppo.  Not every apartment building has to be restored.  Sometimes the better plan is to finish the demolition, level, and build atop the rubble of what came before.  That's if the new building techniques are any better.  Perhaps people would prefer a Nomadland, featuring semi-mobile vehicles they could live in.

Oregonians have connections to Ukraine and have no reason to withhold from speculation, when it comes to plans to rebuild.  A demilitarized Ukraine could be just as prosperous, with tourism permitted from all corners.  Ecotourists especially.

Of course the big money showcased as passing through Congress, a choreographed maneuver, presupposes this funding is spoken for, and is designed to enter the coffers of NATO's vendors, to pay for new inventory, under the command of their socialized military personnel.  

Ukraine does not have a say in NATO currently, but as the recipient of so much largess, is cast as forever grateful.  Without NATO, where would Ukraine be today?

The Russian side is already starting to rebuild, as winning over a new citizenry implies a trajectory back to civilian normalcy. The best PR is to begin repairs.

Russia does not need the EU to crumble, as basket case neighbors are prone to poor judgement.  Their "nothing to lose" mentality gets the better of them.  Extremists exploit extreme conditions.  Who wants to deal with freezing Germans?  NS2 could be turned on tomorrow.  Of course DC would object.

The challenge has been the challenge of brain surgery:  how to address the issue without killing the patient.  In being a huge part of Europe, Russia has been operating on itself.

Rebuilding Ukraine might not be a high priority for every developer though.  Many on the sidelines, in a cheerleading capacity, are convinced they're in a position to extract their pound of flesh.  Their desire for vengeance is high.  Civilians getting on with their lives takes a back seat.  Perhaps the plan is to keep them as displaced refugees and stoke their resentment?

Allowing Ukraine to carry on without being remotely controllable from Washington DC, goes against what many a control freak requires, to feel secure.  If they don't feel secure, then it's their business to make sure none of us do.  

Stopping the rebuilding of a civilian Ukraine, in favor of more combat and degradation, could be what some of the limited liability boards have in store for us.  They're maybe not in the rebuilding business.

The question is whether the large bureaucracies will follow them, or expel them, as no longer representing the more profitable way forward.  Helping refugees, while rebuilding a humane habitat is potentially one of the biggest businesses of all time.

Driverless Cars and Automation

The Scott Ritter thesis, that the privatized and gutted post-USA corporate navy is ill prepared to be sunk in the Pacific, neglects outside-the-box, non-military points of view.  That's not really a criticism, as Scott is trained to see issues militarily and was on the channel, with Ray McGovern, to discuss the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon, a hot (i.e. trending) topic on YouTube more generally.

These high brow prophecies regarding End Times (which wouldn't follow Revelations and so lead many Christians to despair, but not just Christians -- the whole exercise is suicidal and pathological) cannot be other than biased and Scott knows that. His role is to give full vent to his bias and hope he's wrong due to countervailing forces, potentially of a non-military nature.

I'm back in touch with a Lithuanian math guy who might help me tighten up my hypertoons.  The LCDs powered by Raspberry Pis are already on the market and there's little to stop a Coffee Shops Network from emerging more publicly into peoples consciousness, as a design pattern.  

By "tighten up" I mean "make more useful to scholars trying to pack a lot in" in the sense of densely packing information, with aids from mnemonics, frameworks, models, whatever holds water.

Picture yourself in Oregon, at a coffee shop, with a laptop and stuff to study.  The hypertoons are on the screens around you, and with ear buds, you might tune them in.  What's available at the bar?  The Oregon legislature is still working on this, with pressure from various sanctioning agencies that have lost too much credibility to be taken seriously.  We bide our time.  

I wouldn't say I've been too activist in trying to assert our right to allocate our video lottery winnings as we see fit (when the state wins, we being Oregonians).  Let the built-in sense of that whole scheme drive it forward, not inordinate bullying from my corner.  

I have no bully pulpit to speak from, no specific legislative agenda.  I'm a blogger with a point of view.  I've talked about a pirate party, with only planks, no candidates.  Kinda ghostly in that sense.

You might be learning biology and medicine, and/or some form of computer science.  Of course you dial up the specific videos you need for homework and research, or for on the job training, but the shop-provided hypertoons (jukebox model) remind you to relax and take your weight off the foot pedal so to speak.  

Surrender to a higher power and let the "driverless car" paradigm take over from time to time.

Speaking of driverless cars, I am not from the Silicon Valley and never got fully immersed in the venture capital vision being promulgated.  I've always preferred rails and rail systems anyway, ever since dad bought us a great model railway spread for the rec room (Marklin, HO scale).  I gave that up when we moved to Rome and resorted to belts modeling subways in the halls of our EUR apartment.

Anyway, my model of "surrender mode" is when and where your car is indeed "possessed" and controlled by external intelligence, in theory even another human driver, but in most scenarios we posit automation, an operating system designed to maximize safety and efficiency.  

However it's not a matter of every car for itself, with autonomous decision making.  Not every car has to be a genius to join the network of the driverless.

That protective security layer might well be there (for when the pedestrian dashes out, chasing that dog), but the golf course or theme park or model city is expecting to control all the vehicles according to algorithms, involving routing and waiting.  Cars become people movers.  But only in patches.  In practice many vehicles only operate in one of the two modes, meaning you might need a rental to get around in Philadelphia or whatever (if your car doesn't transition).

Individual vehicles might go in and out of this mode at allowed switch points, transition zones.  

Enter the zone on autopilot, leave with yourself in command, or vice versa.  If you don't take over, your car is programmed to park safely and await customer assistance.  Or wait in the lot for your car to start moving, steering itself to your final destination, perhaps on someone's private property.

Yes, border patrol is listening, but then any weigh station or check point or toll booth could take command once a threshold was crossed.  Those avoiding that threshold might have exemptions.  

I'm not prepared to write all the software in this blog post.

Consider the Parallels

[copied from Facebook]

So was The Revolution of Dignity, which ousted an elected president (facing new elections shortly) a "successful" Jan 6, by the standards of its instigators?

Had Trump been successful, wouldn't far right nationalism have triumphed? But no, some states would have questioned Stop the Steal had it really thrown the electoral process into swing state managed ad hockery and chaos. Bernie never said they stole it from him, nor had Gore.

 

The mob ruled that February in 2014. They stormed the place and got their way (thanks to months of planning). An insurrection, and one way more violent than the maga one. Lots of shooting. Surrounding states were appalled, some of them, as now marijuana would never be legalized (how it feels to speak the language of an underclass).

 

What if Oregon had started to move towards greater autonomy after Pence's decision to channel Trump after all, in this alternative reality? Were we going to blame the Venezuelan voting machines after all? The socialists of the world were tipping it to Biden and brave Pence had stood his ground.

 

Oregon's people are already quite alienated (the prez sent his border patrol to quell the wall of moms and leaf blower dads). Their biggest industry (one of them) is prevented from using the banking system. Sanctions destroy the lives of ordinary people while the rich get to smoke their dope unimpeded.

 

Anyway, how do we prevent too many "compare and contrast" pieces looking at 2014 and 2021? Any linking of these two attempted mob takeovers of government on behalf of a ruling cast, could just further confuse the politics of the two countries. Fortunately, "we" have a great way to flush away unwanted thoughts by inducing amnesia.

Classic Bucky

Yes, I know, in the URL it's "clasic". What of it, right?

Breakaway Republics

The Feds seem to have no sense of urgency with regard to the various breakaway republics, mainly because that's not the terminology we use.  Never mind the sanctions, and the fact that they throw our people in prison for what our republics consider non-criminal behavior.  

They attack us.  Their president sent his border patrol to Portland to "quell" our supposed siege of the Federal building (not at all what was happening, but never mind).

However, since Prohibition, Gangland has learned to use soft power and bribes DC to keep up the illusions.  They need their drugs too.  Once the crime bosses have the goods on the politicians, they'll do as they're told for the most part.  A lot of them have expensive habits that must be catered to.  Most would call this "symbiosis" and thank the Supreme Court for making bribery a lifestyle.

We've also endured our share of coups.  The upset against Gore, settled in the Supreme Court, was a soft verdict, affirming the Court's jurisdiction if nothing else.  

The JFK / RFK / King assassinations were hard core and to present those as connected with any coups d'etat is to stray into Man X country i.e. to sound like Prouty.  Prouty cites Bucky in his book JFK regarding the Malthusian motivations of a self styled cabal. 

We're suddenly in Esozone, hello Paul Laffoley.  The secret history channel and all that.

I think the west coast is fine with being the West or Far West.  

Back east, we have the East, where they think more like Euros and/or the Anglos aka the Yukes, i.e. the UKers, with puritanical Yanks their descendants.

The EU is in the eastern hemisphere lets remember (as is Ukedom aka Ukraine).  

They think their "western civilization" is something distinct from Eurasian civilizations, as if Europe  weren't part of that very same continent.  However when the easterners got here, there was already a west here to greet them, and not one to be "won" so much as "won over" (in some dimensions).  

We're still here, absorbing a melting pot, fusing ethnicities.  Portland is your gateway to the Pacific Rim (PacRim), with its own center of gravity.

Academic Contrarians

Part of Fuller's legacy results from his example proving attractive to others fighting some uphill battle of their own against a skeptical academia.  

These up hill fighters have tended to rally around King Bucky as someone who voiced the right criticisms, regarding overspecialization and so on.  Those looking askance from afar see what appears to be a roiling mob psychology, with a semi-incoherent center.  

An entourage of crazies follow their beloved pied piper out of town and over a cliff.  Was that an inadvertent social service, that Bucky performed, in serving as a lightning rod and gathering point for the most disaffected?  Was he a Vortex 1,  turning the center ring counterculture into a sideshow of docility?

I've seen some DC presidents I might interpret in this way.  Their technique is to use a magnetic ideology to sweep up a lot of people and deliver them, pre-packaged, to alternative spinmeisters, which might as well mean "down the drain".

Some think GWB committed a gaff when he cited "Iraq" instead of "Ukraine" as his example of an undemocratic war led by authoritarians.  He corrected himself of course.  He's used to getting laughed at. His message to the Iraqi people on the eve of the invasion:  "Don't burn the oil wells" (smirk), i.e. that's what we're coming for.  

An American people used to mocking their president appears tone deaf when the mocking goes the other way.

Some riding the Bucky coattails will offer spurious details about what Synergetics is really about.  "It's about never needing to use mathematical symbols" some will tell you, seeming to completely ignore all the radical signs, all the 2nd root symbols, that decorate the Synergetics pages.

However Fuller's dedication of the work itself, to H.S.M Coxeter, a practitioner of n-dimensional Euclidean geometry, suggests Fuller saw himself more as a metaphysician than a straight geometer.  His agenda was to leverage whatever it might take to make humanity successful.

Happy Birthday to Me

Storm (see post below) says she's not really leaving Portland, just that apartment on Hawthorne we all knew about. 

I exaggerate. Dr. D. knew where it was, as a true fan, who goes to her shows and tracks her career. He even hopped in his car to see if he could catch her last act, the final moving out scene, which she'd been streaming live on Facebook.  However, she was pretty much done before he got there.

I wandered around on Division with a friend, who took me out for Thai Food.  "Every time I try to cheer myself up" I told him, "I run into something even more bleak".  Surfing Youtube, the Shanghai lock down added yet more weight to these shoulders.  

I know Chinese feel the stress, and not just because of omicron.  The District seems hell bent on ramping up tensions.  Some talking heads babble about "weakening Russia in order to take on China".  So much crazy talk, from the perspective of an elder in my school (meaning me).  

An ideology is like a fatty lipid sphere, studded with talking points.  That's how they spread, by injecting those talking points.

Thank you Tara, a calling to offer your birthday wishes.  I answered Dick Tracy style from the Thai restaurant, talking on my Apple Watch.  There's no FaceTime on it yet.

Today is a work day.  I'm in the gig economy and have a gig.  Yesterday I had two gigs.

I told Maurice I'm in no mood to go on stage and take a bow anywhere, because that "Bucky was a failure" airbrush might just as well paint me.  The world seems interested in investing in the dreams of its most bellicose.  Realism is associated with jingoism.  

No, I don't think the Russians were eager for war.  Given my own Youtube channel features the old RT logo here and there, I'm easy to brand as not a NATO lover.  That means I'm likely fated to languish in obscurity when it comes to my own brand of positive futurism, given the climate. 

On the other hand, the Trucker Exchange Program is something we could work on for Chinese and African drivers.  It was never my intention to involve DC all that directly i.e. I wasn't especially trying to go "dot gov" with these plans.  

Turning truckers into citizen diplomats would just be seen as more competition.  Probably a lot of State Department types already resent how some of those Youtubers have been doing their job for them.

Talk of the Town

I suppose if I had to pick one story to top the charts, it'd be that Storm Large is leaving us.  She's a great avatar to have out there though, with Portland a big part of her past.

I've read her autobiography, which was making the rounds, but I haven't haunted the nightlife scene since I was going out with a Palestinian I knew through CUE, indirectly.  I was also tracking a signature talent seeking to break in to the Portland music scene and maybe then move to Canada, one Lindsey Walker, just search in these blogs if curious; you'll find a window on the Portland music scene, long ago (think One Laptop per Child era, remember the XO?).

Yes I've been known to read and sometimes chuckle along with Willamette Week and The Mercury.   Both are free and feature rapier sharp wit.  

I've not yet figured in either, not being that much of an entertainer, nor cartoonist.  I promoted Portland as ToonTown, that's for sure. 

I figured in the Oregonian twice but then I stopped being newsworthy.  The second time I was the prescient futurist going on about "hypertext kiosks" that would one day offer to sell you health plans.  I remember David Lansky showing me, when Providence later installed a few.  

Providence was my biggest client for awhile there.  Separation was difficult and I had to work with a consultant to get back in gear.

Storm Large is a performer and went to the semi-finals on Americans Have Talent or one of those.  I'm in touch with her local fan base to some degree.  Consider me a fan once removed, if that makes sense.  I'm happy for her light in this world.

CUE, or Center for Urban Education, was into training small nonprofits on PageMaker on the Mac, connected to LaserWriters, brand new tech at that time.  We were on SE 12th near the Jolly Roger. That was one of our core businesses, around which we had some government funded training services and other consulting.  

My work then was not that different from my work now, in terms of offering training in mundane computer skills, and also esoteric.

My Jordanian friend worked as adjunct faculty or some similar academic capacity. She was senior to me, given I'd jumped ship after my BA from Princeton and pursued other means of leaving a track record.  

My credentials as a futurist were not sufficient to catapult me into a life of fame and fortune.  Futurism is mostly deprecated these days.  It's just supposed to happen to us, without much planning or forethought on our part, seems to be the mood of our time, at least in some circles.

If you check back through these blogs, you'll find them laced with various plans, speculative in nature.  Asylum City.  EPCOT West.  Other memes.

I, Robot

My story on Medium, about a Physics of the Unconscious, is staying with me, as I work towards greater awareness myself.  First Person Physics.  Dr. Bob Fuller helped me evolve it, as a meme.

But when we wake into the first person, as a subject, it's not just a matter of like a light going on.  That's all Physics may seek to explain, the light.  The idea of consciousness as something pure and essential, some phenomenon we all agree on, brings a sense of solidarity at least.

The psychologist, on the other hand, awakens to new pathologies, new mental illnesses, both personal and collective.  What Physics seeks to explain our inner darkness, our waking dream?

The inertia of great forces tears at the fabric of what we all took for shared reality.  We're back to fighting like ghost armies, cast inside new fantasy worlds.  And so the world rolls forward, as we seek to improve its course.  We have a stake in the outcome.

Speaking of climate change, the climate has changed.  The machinery of mass death stalks us, our shadow self, our bot self. I, robot.

I admire diplomats trying to wrestle with the beast.

As a younger man, I remember being astounded that war would again erupt in Europe, and take out Yugoslavia.  I somehow imagined the seething cauldron of nation states had congealed its borders before I arrived.  I was just not that conscious of my place and time, in retrospect.

I felt Grunch of Giants, a Bucky Fuller book, was on the money when it talked about worlds in collision (paraphrase), i.e. the inevitability of a new psyche.  We would have to grow into our smaller world.  Growing pains.

Base Housing

I fall into the skeptics camp when it comes to "real AI" as some call it, oxymoronically.  

That doesn't mean I'm unimpressed by what I'll call AI proper.  

On the contrary, what artificial intelligence has accomplished in my lifetime is as much if not more than we should have expected.  Breakthroughs in linear algebra ala University of Toronto lead to a revolution in voice recognition,  recommendation engines, Alpha Go.

Where I look is to institutionalized wealth such as in the military, but also such as in resort hotels. The guests don't own, and yet they share, the facilities. Ditto on a cruise ship. The opulence is a collective experience, as may be the experience of ownership, as a shareholder.  

All of which is to say:  believing in institutional wealth is not "anti capitalist" nor "anti socialist".  This relationship, of self to wealth, is as old as organized religion, with its shared houses of worship and ceremony, feasts.  Hello, Father Divine.

What "institutional" might mean, in the case of housing developments, is a certain amount of uniformity, even conformity.  We saw that in the case of Levittown, Long Island, New York, widely recognized as the first modern American suburb.

Every Apple Mac or Air of a certain era looks like every other.  Models of cell phones look and work the same. Yet when it comes to architecture, we're often encouraged to express our individuality by commissioning a custom home.  We're talking about the rich and privileged here.  But might we be privileged without being rich?

"Rich enough to actually own" is precisely where we don't have to go in the case of "base" and/or "campus" housing i.e. we might accept the privilege, yet without the curse and/or responsibility of private ownership.  We don't need to design the cruise ship.  That's for the cruise ship designers to undertake.

The book Quakernomics tends to idealize the notion of a "company town" (or "corporate campus") but only because that's what Quakers of the period were idealizing. The more prescient could see and almost taste a future in which those operating the facilities would not experience themselves as under the tyranny of some ruling class.

Too good to be true?  A lot of skeptics think so, and believe driverless cars or even "real AI" might be easier to achieve.

After generations of mobile homes of various design, one might imagine the experimental encampments, the hexayurts or whatever, would not be too much of a stretch.  Indeed, we've seen such encampments appear.

But just envisioning these mirages, as it were, does not replace the hard work of self governance or self management.

Easter Sunday 2022

Greetings to the blogosphere.  We used to call it that more, back when we used the word "sphere" about everything, a German language influence no doubt (half kidding:  thinking Sloterdijk).

I'm a working class hero, or lets say "essential worker" this Easter.  I'll be working through Ramadan as well, but with adjusted hours (many in this cohort will be observing).  My clock time schedule today is not too onerous.  I do have visiting family, as this Easter coincides, almost, with Carol turning 93.

Back to the theme of institutional wealth:  there's a lot of momentum from wills past.  Foundations and so on.  In terms of targeted funding, that's where fund accounting comes in, the kind of bookkeeping that makes it easier for donors to trace and audit whether their earmarks were respected.  If the check was sent for a groundwater pump, where's the pump?  With their name on it (figuratively, in the bookkeeping).

Software allows nit-picky micromanagement whereas human intelligence is about when to break some silly rule.  Management is always reshaping the clay of organizational intelligence, a beast in its own right some say.  Church politics is somewhat similar.  Even when practiced by Methodists I would assume.

I woke up to some new Graham Phillips footage from Mariupol, which I watched beginning to end and then forwarded onto Facebook.  Sometimes we mark great tragedies against the wheeling calendar of whatever holy days. During class tonight, I'll be presenting some Naval Observatory program, recast in Python, designed to find Easter on any given year, within a range.

Advancing the Frontiers

We’re very close to Carol’s birthday.  She’ll be 93 on the 21st.  Julie, my sister, her daughter, is coming for a visit.

Before I head out to the airport tomorrow morning, I’m expecting to lurk in on Gerald de Jong’s presentation to FieldStructure Institute.  

Glenn has been having a lot of fun with Don Briddell’s book, as did I, even though neither of us specializes in neutrinos.

World Game Planning

 

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and  Vice President Richard Nixon
tour the U.S. National Exhibition in Sokolniki Park, Moscow, July 1959

from Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-2.0 license

Per my Facebook comment on Cynthia Lazaroff's profile (another 2D alum), I don't see in current affairs any reason to slow our GENI plans to effect greater electrical grid integration, including across the Bering Strait eventually.  

from the GENI website

Plans are inexpensive, which is why the Pentagon churns them out to keep the incinerators fired up.  We're free to dream in other words.  Plus there's no way to slow something that's already stationary.

On TrimTab (a listserv), we picked up on the Kitchen Debates and their backdrop, the Moscow Dome and these yurt-like kiosks, suspended from utility poles, that don't get remarked upon by most historians, but which I'll take as a throwback to the Dymaxion House idea.

Personally, I'm still bullish on Nord Stream 2 (as of this writing, they're talking about closing Nord Stream 1, let alone opening its twin).  I have nothing to do with the natural gas lobby behind all those senatorial gasbags in the Puppet Kingdom (aka the District of Columbia).

I'm seeing a day when we're able to work more dispassionately in the infrastructure sector, without all the faux nationalism.  I call it faux because it rings hollow.  There's a difference between true children and children who didn't mature, but spoiled instead.  To remain a true child in adulthood, one must regain or retain wisdom.

Disambiguating

I haven't noticed any slacking off in my contact with Russians through the edu channels I inhabit.  Some TCP/IP supplier was said to have dropped from the scene, but like a rock in a lake.  

The internet was designed to not have single points of failure.

That being said, we weren't on the same page in any case, given the Tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues.  How does anyone understand anything in such a polluted environment?  Good thing we have namespaces right?  import this (that's an insider Python joke).

Like ever since I've searched and more recently joined academia.edu, I noticed great market penetration for Haken's, but not for our guy's product line.  No one was intentionally jamming the frequencies.  Both 5G and some airplane altimeters want to use the same space.  That's an analogy.

Wikipedia has disambiguated the two Synergetics (Haken's and RBF's) for several years.  We have a link to and from Tetrahedron on the RBF side (one way to keep telling them apart).  So only now are some Russians starting to see double, and realizing the potential for cross-eyed confusion.

No harm done.  Language is always folding and unfolding, sometimes getting people confused.  Like I said at the outset, it's Biblical.

Hey, I just noticed the disambiguation page for Synergetics now has a link to Tensegrity.  Is there something to disambiguate?  And the definition that's given:  

Tensegrity, the use of internal forces to overcome external forces, as in a self-supporting sculpture.

...that seems kinda weird doesn't it?  Who gave it that meaning?  I suppose I could dig into it, but for now I'm just passing through on my way to other places. I reported my finding to FSI.

St. Patrick's Day 2022

I had a good class today. 

Students have been working hard on their projects, with stellar results.

I gave them all top grades.

Now it's time for Spring Break.

We think of Dawn Wicca on St. Patrick's Day.

I'm in a pensive mood, slurping a Guinness.

Synergetic Andragogy

The last thing people want is a brainwashing, unless that's precisely what they want.  

However, what I've been presenting is simply a lecture that lets you see the duckrabbit, whereas before maybe it was only the duck, or only the rabbit.

Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics, somewhat dismissed, in favor of investigations only, does help with its notion of "language games".  The key term "dimension", aside from being "key" is really not that august or imperial that we need put it on a pedestal. Indeed, the dimensions of said pedestal could be very concrete, in terms of linear, surface area and volumetric dimensions, the "first three" (with volume relating to weight per properties of the construction material).

So for a few minutes maybe, you stop thinking of the space around you as "3D" (which it isn't anyway, thank you Einstein) and imagine it's "4D" but not quite in Einstein's sense.  That we all have "our own sense" of these words is diametrically opposed to the possibility of an establishment, think the authorities. But they're wrong.  

Just as we each have our own fingerprints and retinal patterns, so is our understanding, through neural wiring (some would say), all our own.  Private language and yadda yadda.

But when the show or program is over and you get your hat back, or whatever checked garment, you will have finished suspending your disbelief, the same way you've done countless times at the movies.  The world is 3D again, and you'll still butter your toast on the right side.

If you've seen my show, you know I get H.S.M. Coxeter in on the act, in that I dig up a quote from Regular Polytopes wherein he's at pains to distinguish the research he's doing, from the physics-minded relativity stuff happening just down the hall, say at Princeton (Coxeter was at University of Toronto, and the "4D" geometric philosophy I'm discussing was actually dedicated to him, now that he and Bucky were friends cite the Siobhan Roberts bio of Donald).  

Coxeter tried philosophy at Cambridge, with star teacher Wittgenstein no less, famous for his intimate classroom, with Alan Turing and others.  Even after Coxeter decided this language game philosophy was not for him, a career in Extended Euclideanism beckoned, he lent his cozy quarters to the Wittgenstein group, for a meeting space.

In other words, the 4D of nD machine learning, and its multi-axis data structures, indexed with (a, b, c, d...), is not the 4D of 3D + Time and the rotating axes of spacetime.  Those were, and are, different language games.

Then Bucky comes along, somewhat from left field, and tosses his own hat in the ring, in a bid to be taken seriously as more than a great architect.  How could Harvard allow that?  Sure, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had forsaken the path of ever higher education to boldly go, but into vast and respectable moneymaking enterprises, which may be forgiven even as the endowment grows.

But Fuller had failed in becoming a billionaire tycoon and settled for the role of verbal rock star, vagabond poet, instead.  How could a mere Bohemian be accredited, a gypsy, other than as another bard of mythopoetry?  But with Synergetics to his name, and all these other books, patents, inventions.  A treasure trove. Maybe he was some sort of Kubla Khan after all?  Recall Montreal 67.  The USG in its finest.

So maybe "stand up comic Bucky" was a great destiny after all?  I'd advocate doing more, as we have witnessed.  I've got my canned slides and lecture examples on Youtube, encouraging my colleagues to fan out and re-deliver, with personal spin.

The Charles Eliot Norton roster should be consulted again and connections made to William James and Peirce, not just Whitehead.  This is how we anchor our new Bucky in the Harvard matrix, through American Transcendentalism turning into Pragmatism.  

I've already provided a pretty clear roadmap, encompassing Rorty (one of my profs, along with Kaufmann and cast).

Five Letter Land

I was in Horse Brass again yesterday, loving Guinness.  That was after ascending Mt. Tabor, by means of the west side steps.  Then we (Dr. D. and I) descended to Belmont.  Deke was in the loop, and joined us later, from his beat.  Derek (Deke the Geek) is a generic community helper, delivering food 24/7, a discipline reminiscent of earlier gigs in less Mad Max conditions.

I was celebrating a successful restoration of drivability to my car earlier.  I'd made it out to Bethany Village and back.

The little private Silicon Forest school where I field test and further develop my online curriculum, consistently with whatever they hand me, has been a source of gigs for some time.  During the height of covid I only worked over Zoom, but these days I show up in person, masked and vaxxed for my own protection.

Our focus has been Number and Group Theory of the type that's relevant when developing coding skills, which these students very much are, and pretty quickly.  I like to showcase several technologies:  JupyterLab, Github, Replit.  Python features as one of many languages, not necessarily the be all end all. I'm somewhat partial to Clojure and could use some classes.  I'm 80% in student mode, 20% in teacher mode, a healthy ratio given there's always so much more that one doesn't know, than one knows.

For example, when the popularity of Wordle (which I still haven't played at the official website) took off, I found that famous five-letter word list at Stanford Graphbase.  Except at first I didn't know the size of this tiger I had grabbed by the tail.  Computer Science itself branches out from this file and some others, given the curriculum (that metaphoric set of circuit boards) we have today.

Loving Guinness

This is the "best enjoyed if poured into a glass" canned stuff.  With the floating bobble and nitrogenated air. Ah nitrogen.  In most beers I prefer a carbon dioxide infusion, but Guinness really knows what it's doing.

I've been liking Guinness so much I've become outwardly symptomatic. In a recent supermarket scene I was hovering near the long-closed-due-to-covid Kroger Bar (Krobar), reopened in other Kroger clones, and asking Jenn if they'd be serving Guinness.  Jokes about the bar reopening are common, as one would expect.  Also, there's a wall of Guinness for sale, enclosing the bar, reminding customers to forget it.

Anyway, a staffer I know well said "Kirby, I know you're really smart and all, but you sound really stupid at the moment". That's when I knew my love for Guinness was starting to goad people.  I was being triggering.

So what would a life coach tell me to do in this situation?  I'll tell you what I came up with.  One of my favorite hikes (i.e. walks) is a circuit around Mt. Tabor, along one or another well-worn path (we stay off the growing flora, not to mention fauna). The Narnia Light comes to mind.  Even Willamette Week has called it that.  

Then, on the way down off Mt. Tabor, comes Belmont Street and Horse Brass Pub.  Their number one tap is Guinness, and the place is decorated throughout with Guinness art.  

So I'm right at home, blending in, with no one to disturb or offend.

Geometric IQ

 

When I was growing up, I picked up on the "multi-dimensional meme" and on how "thinking in higher dimensions" was a hallmark of geometric IQ or something along those lines.  

I'd say that's still the case, and when people first encounter Bucky's 4D lingo and connect with his being a recognized genius, past president of Mensa and so on, they just assume he's thinking "multi-dimensionally" too, like one of those super smart people, or at least intuitively gifted people.  And in a way, he is.  But in what way?

Since studying computer science more, and developing an appreciation for "namespaces", I'm better able to compartmentalize the terrain of human discourse into "language games", thereby fragmenting most monolithic meanings -- and lets throw "God" into the mix, most assuredly i.e. there's no monolithic meaning attaching to monotheism either.

Nowadays, I no longer spontaneously think of space as 3-D (especially with the hyphen (smile)). I have to work at it. I'm able to psych myself back into it through machine learning (ML), which is closely related to Coxeter-type polytope geometry, not least because they both thrived at the University of Toronto.  Canadians have a higher geometric IQ than their neighbors to the south perhaps. 

Through ML, I get back to the n-D meme and conventional Extended Euclideanism (EE), with "3-D" a visualizable subspace, a kind of Minecraft or Lego World for doing XYZ "three directional" physics.

We learn space has these independent directions called the X, Y and Z. We learn to spontaneously say "cubed" when confronted with a 3rd powering.  Anything flat, like a pancake or screen, is "2-D" whereas the horizon betwixt the ocean and sky is "1-D".

"Schooled people" (me one of them) all think in this way.  However, since Synergetics (Fuller's, not Haken's), I'm not so sure we sound quite as smart as we used to.  Osmosis has taken its toll.  The Euclideans have no monopoly on philosophical underpinnings anymore, presuming they ever did.

In EE and ML, whether you had other family on board with you, were female or male, had a nice cabin or were in a certain age range, all become dimensions locating you along various axes, giving you a multi-dimensional "address" with a Euclidean distance to other addresses.  

We'll compute some weighting factors using "neural networks"and pretty soon, in knowing your multi-dimensional Euclidean neighborhood, we'll also have a very educated guess as to whether you survived or drowned when the Titanic went down. Such is EE + ML.  

If we're Cambridge Analytica, we'll use our prowess with ML to scare you into believing we know "where you live" in the sense of knowing how you'll vote in the next election.  Or we know what to do to tilt you more in a specific direction (dimension), through tailored messages, targeted ads. We'll sell politicians on this idea we have these superpowers, leaving it to others to counter our grandiose claims.

The Minority Report (a dystopian movie) seems already here, or at least some people would like you to believe they know the future. Any wannabe priest caste has conventionally claimed clairvoyance, based on whatever passes for "tea leaves" in a given generation.

In Synergetics, we part company with those saying they can visualize but a single dimension, such as width but no breadth or height, or height without width and breadth.  Whatever we're visualizing, it's already in a container defined by the observer's apparent subjective distance from the observed.  There's your space.

We find it quaint that 3Ders include, as one of their chief documents promoting "hypercross mysticism", a work not of mathematics, but of political satire.  I'm speaking of Flatland of course, by Edwin Abbott, quite important to this namespace, as a kind of cultish tract.

When you start fresh with with a Kantian a priori sense of space, it's a box, a container, ab initio. Then comes a creation story about successive dimensions (starting from zero) explaining why said paradigm box is "3-D".  We go to school for the privilege of learning this creation myth, as a part of our early indoctrination.

Fuller disrupts that genesis story and supplies another one, likewise firmly based in topology:  space is one inseparable concept, indivisible into independent dimensions, one of containment, and the most primitive (in the sense of simple) container is naturally the tetrahedron (spheres stay complex and may be reshaped accordingly), a tetrahedron that says "four" way more loudly than "three".  

Beyond timeless 4D space, we get to Time, which we may call a dimension too (as Einstein does), but then, while we're in time, lets not forget to break it down further, into weight, density, molecular makeup, color, temperature... the "dimensions of chemistry " we could call them, and indeed the word "dimension" does carry that kind of water in many a namespace, including in ML. 

For Fuller, there's 4D space + Energy, where Energy = Frequency i.e. a specific "program" full of physics happening.  "Event space" we could call it.  Shape alone is angles.   Frequency steps up the mere eternal into the actually existent, the space of "special cases" in time/size.  

Such was the state of Fuller's philosophical lingo, by the 1970s. "Angle + frequency" had become his shorthand for all physical information about stuff in general.

Going back and forth between namespaces sometimes does involve training the senses, inducing new perspectives.  Gestalt psychology shares this notion of "aspect shifts" with philosophy.  

Getting into Fuller's way of thinking does require a kind of re-education, and getting there may involve what we might call "brainwashing" if we're resolved to put a negative spin on it.  

Or consider "brainwashing" something healthy, apply a positive spin. 

If you haven't washed your brain in decades, maybe it's high time?  Smile.

Design Science

Bucky Fuller is credited for popularizing a lot of memes, some of which developed into full-fledged physical artifacts, such as the geodesic domes, which blossomed everywhere in architecture, most impressively on the industrial scene, but also in the form of do-it-yourself affordable shelter solutions. 

However "the industry industry missed" (Archibald MacLeish) is still missing for the most part.  We have the mobile home industry instead, which gets little input from the aerospace sector.  Fuller's overall strategy was to introduce more tension over compression, as a design principle, thereby making artifacts more performant per pound.  

He pointed out this was a general trend:  as humans become more confident and competent with a technology, they optimize it to become less wasteful of resources.  He called this trend "ephemeralization" (Arnold Toynbee: "etherealization").  Ephemeralization was evidence of our growing mastery of the generalized principles (or "natural laws" as we say in English).

Other memes he coined were more nebulous in terms of outcome.  Consider his "design science revolution" (DSR) aimed at ending world hunger (The Hunger Project), bringing electricity to currently under-served millions (World Game), and improving the general public's comprehension of our human potential (Synergetics).  

To what extent were these hopes and dreams realized?  Are we still on track to utopia, or did we choose oblivion?

Fuller's emphasis on "design science" was somewhat unique in that he saw it as an alternative to the political process and its "warring state" model (War Game).  He would tell his students that politicians were in no way in a position to deliver the goods, lacking the appropriate training and background. 

The internet itself would be a good example of a life-changing invention that was not a product of the legal imagination, even if it was aided and abetted by the inventor of the algorithm, Al Gore (joke).

Fuller walked his talk, delivering working prototypes of a new kind of car, house, world map, curriculum.  His work seemed on track to dovetail with Disney's, who envisioned experimental prototype communities wherein these new ideas might be tested.  

Fuller's geodesic structures became a fixture at World's Fairs and Expos, subsequent to the Kabul and Moscow Domes of 1956 and 1959 respectively, and culminating in the Biosphere, the US Pavilion of 1967 in Montreal.  The geodesic dome became synonymous with "American know-how" the world over, thanks to the USIA.

Old Man River City, domed-over and stadium-shaped, was to be a crowning achievement, in terms of mega-projects he hoped to see in his own lifetime.  OMR was an attempt to rescue people from the ghettos and slums of North America, as it fell into disrepair under supranational rule. 

Fuller even declared the USA we had known "bankrupt and extinct" in one of his last books, before receiving a Medal of Freedom from its "final" president.  Narratives vary, as to the ongoing role of "nation-state theater" in world affairs.  

Fuller's world map was conventionally published in border-free form i.e. without the political data layer most people insist on seeing, giving ammo to those calling him a crackpot. The map is rarely shared with young people, in the course of their indoctrination in whatever nationalism.

Even more nebulous than "design science" was Fuller's evolving description of "the computer" and how it would revolutionize the human psyche.  

Much as Dr. Vannevar Bush anticipated the internet, complete with search engines, as long ago as 1945 (As We May Think, Atlantic Monthly), Fuller anticipated our hard core number crunching capabilities would keep us on track towards making humanity a lasting success.  

His own computations told him we still had a chance.  His notion of "the computer" had a cosmic dimension, as a metaphoric stand-in for the mind itself, our connection to that synergy of synergies some would call God (a term Fuller himself did not eschew).

Making Movies

I just watched the commentary on the restored version of Metropolis that Glenn retrieved from our library. The story line followed is closer to the original, not the distorted and overly shortened version that got through the censors of that day.  

That's what adults have to look forward to regarding our time as well:  a less juvenile take on world events that we get from our contemporaries, who have little choice but to react from the hip, especially if not well versed in history and generic patterns ala GST and all the rest of it. 

One of the movies we're making is about Pearl Harbor, and the water table, the drinking water.  A Flint-like situation is starting to unfold.  That's a movie in the making.

We have uplifting films too, about true heroes and great ideas.  Lots of people are ready and willing to star in these productions.  Old Man River City comes to mind.

The idea that a UBI is "for nothing" is maybe too squanderous a vocab.  You're being paid to get yourself educated and on to the world stage as a persona.  That takes doing homework.  You'll be grateful for a safety net.  Perhaps your elders didn't have time to plan.  Some of them did.

We talk a lot about Bucky on my Youtube channel.

Applying to Tlon

I went so far as to zap a resume to Tlon, the Urbit hoster.  Coincidentally, they were looking for a copy writer with React.js skills. My inbox is always humming with job offers, none of them usually at all a good fit.  This one leapt out at me.

Although I've read up on React (the client Facebook pioneered to make their complex update cycle work), the better to teach at O'Reilly (this was years ago), I don't promote myself as a Reactionary (joke, they don't call themselves that, I'm pretty sure).  

The Angular people could call themselves Crooks (as in crooked).  Angular meaning "bent".

I'd say I submitted my resume as a sign of respect.

Although the world domination fantasy is always inspiring, it's the kind of self discipline / self mastery it takes to get there that's appealing, whether one ever gets there or not.  You get a great set of abs by trying (that's a metaphor).  My belly shows off that other kind of six pack.

Linux was the same way, the eternal underdog against the behemoths.  That's somewhat of a romantic telling, as the giants got on board in the Giant Wars.  IBM wanted its revenge against Microsoft, which had veered away from OS/2.  

More to the point, when you're a behemoth with expensive proprietary products (e.g. Tivoli), what you want most is for your clients to run a free open source operating system (low barrier to entry) with no vendor lock in.  All the better to lock them in then.

However Urbit doesn't need to dominate the world any time soon, in order to start making a positive difference in the world.  The joy of Hoon + Nock is you get to think like a computer scientist.  

You have a binary tree in your head as you code ("the subject") and your tiny set of nock codes go against it, computing the effects of your Hoon expressions.  I've only climbed this steep learning curve for a week and already I feel smarter.  Wing expressions.  Runes (like bar-tiz or |=) for starting a generator of one arm, i.e. a gate i.e. a (battery payload) cell.

The effects get applied, in an atomic manner, and your whole machine is now updated, shades of Smalltalk, with its self-saving image.

The new media campaign is around the Crystal Ball Sequence, at OEIS, which links back to my websites. The idea is public schools with sufficient imagination to live up to our American heritage, will also share it (and by American, we're free to mean planetary, the same way we mean Chinese or Russian in the Global U).

Virtual. USA OS.

Some of the Urbit nouns seem to be German.

I already feel somewhat on the hook to a queue of clients and don't think my resume will actually percolate to the top, what with 18 other applicants, especially sans a cover letter, but I'd clear the decks and dive deep into React should a tour of duty call.