Keep Portland Queer

As some of my correspondents are aware, I've finally stumbled across Mark Fisher, the philosopher and commentator on contemporary culture. He extends my study of punk music, which in my curriculum links to the School of Tomorrow and of course solarpunk as an antidote or counter to cyberpunk.

Mark does a lot to dissect the meaning of "weird" versus "eerie" in his book on these two concepts. 

The weird involves a presence, not necessarily horrific or terrifying, but off kilter, eliciting a sense of not belonging or, if it belongs, then our priors (Bayesian speak) must be what's off. We may live in a different world than we expected.

The eerie is more about a rekeying of intentionality, shifting the emphasis from human agents with free will, to tricks and flips of fate. Again, the eerie might be employed or evoked by a writer of horror genre fiction, but the eerie need not be scary so much as haunting, as if by dim memories or a sense of deja vu.

Mark dives into various authors (Lovecraft...) and filmmakers (David Lynch... Hitchcock), as well as musicians (Brian Eno...) to make his points and tease apart these meanings. I'm enjoying such investigations as they jibe with my own philosophical background as a Wittgensteinian. When we want to know the meanings of words, running to a dictionary is the lazy option.

Naturally, the unconscious is not far below the surface in Mark's analysis, and Freud figures prominently, in part as an authority to overcome, as Freud's use of "uncanny" has tended to obscure the nuances Mark is attempting to capture.

As I wrote to a friend in the background:

Is "queer" insulting though?  Deja vu we might've had this conversation?

I'm watching old lectures by one Mark Fisher, philosopher, author of Real Capitalism and other books, including one on the eerie and the weird (just purchased).  That's adjacent to the old meaning of "queer" as in "odd" or "different", but oftentimes in a positive sense as in "novel" or "out of the box" ("the box" being stuffy and stultifying).

Speaking for myself, I like being called an "odd duck" and stuff like that, "a martian" one of my favorites.

Again, summarizing some of my thinking, to another friend I wrote:

Podcast taking up Mark Fisher's book on the eerie and the weird:

https://youtu.be/4gSpNIct1-0

They explicitly address obtuse / dense academic language and how Mark steers clear of it for the most part.

My focus has been Martian Math as embedded within or serving as a portal to science fiction as a genre, which sometimes borders on the eerie / weird as well as on horror (adjacent / overlapping genres).

The sense of humans embedded in an inhuman (nonhuman) intelligence comes through in episodes featuring uncanny synchronicity for example.  "Human writers could not have written this" is the sense.  

Or it'll be a combination:  an outlandish human project goes wrong, or not as planned, thanks to the surreal aspects of life itself.  That can be a good thing, if the human project was misguided or nefarious in the first place.  

The sense of divine intervention, angelic or demonic, is a counter to human hubris. Humans may have had a hand in world affairs, but are ultimately not in control. The Ouija Board comes to mind, and that sense everyone has that they're not the ones moving the planchette.  The (collective) unconscious versus the ego persona.

There's a whole segment towards the end of the podcast about how it sounds weird or strange to remind people that the country they imagine they live in is all make believe e.g. the line between the USA and Mexico or the USA and Canada, is all imaginary-fictional. To remind people that their "world" is a fantasy based in social conventions, is to elicit an alien viewpoint, which I've called ETPV (ET point of view) in other writings.

In the background:  Bucky's Grunch of Giants, about untethered capitalism versus cosmic evolution.

Government Issue

I'm juggling more balls, or spinning more dishes (a different circus act), thanks to my ramping up within my Clarusway work environment again. I get a different email account and access to the various company drives containing courses I'll be teaching and/or have taught previously. Having both accounts active and switching back and forth means blocking / unblocking various Google drives and so on, as I switch identities.

I'm thinking back to my childhood and growing up and how "government issue" took this weird turn such that "GI" meant a lot to people, in terms of both "the GI Bill" and "GI Joes", the latter being plastic dolls with more of a social role than Ken dolls, being soldiers. None of the Kens were military if I'm not mistaken.

In some alternative worlds, Uncle Sam issued "GI phones" as a kind of fallback smartphone anyone could get with sufficient proof of need, maybe not income based. Simply claim one. The apps would offer courseware deliberately tailored to groom (not a bad word) future government personnel. 

If you want to keep living in a democracy, you have to plan ahead, and having everyone grow up in non-democratic hierarchies (not every church or corporation is an unprogrammed Quaker meeting recall) is hardly a way to nurture the relevant skill sets. No wonder we're all out of diplomats.  

When all you have are amateur paramilitary types (Ollie North types as I call 'em), then all you get are covert operations. You need real statesmen to preserve a civilization, vs having rogue gangland mercenaries commit NS2 type terrorism, by definition not the game of proudly overt states. 

We've fallen below threshold, perhaps because we no longer have "GI anything" anymore. GI just means "gastro-intestinal" today, and just about every joe or jill has a tract like that. No government can take credit for such basic gear and equipment.

I wouldn't be the first to suggest Ken needs to learn from GI Joe, in terms of knowing how to fly a helicopter and lift stranded hikers off mountains. EMTs in general like adjacent to the Coast Guard, in turn adjacent to the other branches. 

We learned during that South Pacific tsunami during Dan Rather's tenure that the GI people enjoy responding to natural disasters, helping people, regardless of "race, religion or credo". That's a hint, I think, about how to rebalance. 

We need a breed of GIs that aren't cannon fodder for the grand strategist wannabes who still think like its the 1900s.

Turning Back the Clock

Per my intake interview, as I think of it, I mentioned my goal of "turning back the clock". I was referring to the so-called Doomsday Clock of the atomic scientists, the ones who tell us how "close to midnight" we might be (really close in their estimation). "Midnight" means WW4 (per Critical Path, I'm going with "WW3" as the cold one, still ongoing).

Rather than manufacture a ton of consensus around the clock turning back, let's say to a quarter 'til, I should offer my thesis as to why I'm right about where we're at, relatively far from WW4, based on something other than majority rule (oxymoron?) or majority perception.  

In other words, we're not on the brink of nuke war because both the Russian and American elites (and I'm not talking about average rich people, as clueless as they come) are at ease with where we appear to be going, in terms of World Game and energy sharing. The Chinese too. 

We all read Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in the 1970s. We didn't forget our thinking and plans when the helpless children, grownups in name only, took command of the various dashboards now disconnected from reality.

No, I'm not saying the elites enjoy a level of telepathy the muggles don't experience, or that our oracles at Delphi give us the insider view. I'm saying if you do your homework, you'll find that legacy media tend to waste people's time with low quality narratives designed for know-nothings. More glimmers of the truth shine through here and there.

In a world wherein the default is to get force fed a nasty diet of drivel and bad info, one can't then turn around and blame the hoi polloi for not being able to follow. Of course they can't. Let's hope at least a few find their way out of that cesspool.

If I sound like an elitist snob, that's by design. At least I'm not a mindless hawk like those morons in the US congress, or like those so-called "justices" (no longer respected), or like the dysfunctional executive branch. If I'm not a hawk, does that make me a dove? Why so little imagination? I'll be a crow instead.

Attitude Tuning

If you poke around in my blogs, you'll know I'm big into "citizen diplomacy". But what does that mean? Humans learning to be diplomatic took time. Diplomas had to be invented first, meaning universities. Instead of Universe, call it University why not?

Nowadays we have all these personal workspaces (PWSs) using Zoom every day, or perhaps they use other channels. Or they're recording straight to YouTube, via live stream or as completed, likely edited, projects. By this means, diplomacy proceeds, in the form of continual "attitude adjustments". 

If you're in an activist role, then "attitude" has to do with observation and orientation in an OODA loop sense. You'll be taking active measures based on updates to the cockpit (fighter jet talk). If you're passive, you may yet be following closely. These terms come with so many shades of meaning.  As a "passivist" you may feel you're studying for a more active role later.

Americans with relative expertise and education have more powers than before, thanks to the more evolved telecommunications infrastructure. We see the trend is really with respect to Earthians in general. Earth is still becoming more like America, but that doesn't mean "led by the Beltway Mafia" so much as "benefitting from unbridled communications".

The "motherboard" (if we might call it that -- think "the grapevine" if old school) is better able to keep pace with change, in a virtuous circle, to the extent we're all able to participate in the important business of being citizen diplomats. Or shall we say "layman diplomats"? To what extent is citizenship required, to travel the globe? Does every trucker crossing a border someplace have a passport?  Is every gypsy caravan "from a country"?

We've always had "the masses" and / or "public opinion", or have for a long time. The process of "manufacturing consent" might have been more top-down in an age before we all became "channelers" (in the sense of having a channel). 

Nowadays, the processing has to run deeper, and maybe for longer, but the outcomes are proportionally better anchored in real mindsets. Crummy propaganda becomes less effective in proportion to "influencers" becoming familiar with PR techniques. The audience (active and/or passive) has become so much more sophisticated.

Don't Look Up

Spaceship Earth by AI

Speaking of ethnicities and culture wars (aren't all wars about cultures, or between them?), one reason Star Wars fans might be taking out their frustration on Papa Disney is escapism just isn't working across the board. We're in the middle of a hot war between superpowers and the message "don't look up" is ringing hollow. The billionaires are already moving into their luxury apartment bomb shelters.

Mad Max (Furiosa) didn't attract big audiences either. I saw it. A well made film, for what it was, but what it was, was too close for comfort. Showing a post-apocalyptic idiocracy on the big screen is somewhat triggering, not conducive to escapism. 

Dune 2, on the other hand, was in a convincingly different alt universe, and that's what we need, if seeking anti-realism.

As of this writing, the Pentagon, circuitry controlled by outsiders, is busy using high powered weapons to strike inside Russia, with no permission or understanding from the American people. 

The calmness in the streets has to do with their not really following the action. It might also have to do with countervailing media, which throw ice water on the whole business, playing up the war game escapism currently underway and offering a more credible, less dystopian, world game instead.

The stridently arrogant of this world want to plunge us into conflagrations. The result is not surprising: the circuitry is rewiring to lock out the outsiders, if possible, to disconnect them from their arsenals, to which their continued access is now unauthorized. 

When people believing themselves to be insiders wake up to their actual NPC status, that'll be a good day. In the meantime, we're being victimized by morons.

Emerging Ethnicities

My vision of the world rallying to the needs of the besieged in Gaza and setting up an evacuation flotilla was counter what borders are all about: restricting freedom of movement, penning people in, subjecting them to the authority of whomever happens to be exercising jurisdiction over whatever region they happen to be trapped in.

In the SimU game, campuses dot the globe and students, faculty, admins flit about more freely, engaged in work-study. The question "where are you from?" is considered fairly bogus, unless it means "where were you born?". Obviously we're all from Planet Earth and each of us wanders its surface to some degree.

I wouldn't expect any top down "world government" to take care of these movements. Migration patterns are not always subject to tight regulation by bureaucracies. On the other hand, campuses with liberal intake policies may nevertheless be able to track enrollees. I'm able to write science fiction about it all, drawing from existing patterns.

You'll find people deliberately confusing "genocide" with "ethnic cleansing" all the time, because they don't want to think too hard. Nor is ethnicity a static attribute. If your ethnic group has been bombed or otherwise attacked by another one, that tends to change your ethnicity. 

You may now have a permanent grudge, an ax to grind, that you didn't have before. Or perhaps your ethnicity is about not carrying grudges. Your discipline is about working through negative emotions and finding ways to transform them. A lot depends on what anchoring religions and/or metaphysical disciplines you want governing your life, which preferences change with time, as possibilities are revealed.

I still envision mixed-use skyscrapers and other buildings, some of which identify as New Palestine University (NPU) or simply Palestine, but it's more a corporate logo than a national flag, in the sense that no contiguous boundary around a large geographical region is presumed. Diaspora nations (the best kind) dot the world with assets. 

Contiguous boundaries have mostly been replaced with credentials and access to specific goods and services, specific facilities, such as on a US military base in the Philippines, and/or through a university.

Am I saying I'm a practitioner of "zionetics" or one of those, meaning I'm eager to cleanse Palestine of Palestinians?  No. All these ethnicities are already globally distributed. I don't have to lift a finger. 

Let Palestinians come and go as they please, via Palestinian Airlines or whatever. But with an early emphasis on "go" i.e. to get away from toxic neighbors. Return when the neighborhood improves? It's up to individuals, unless they break too many rules. Banishment remains a practice.

I'm free, as an American, to laugh at the Louisiana Purchase as the science fiction it was and is. I'm free to make light of ethnicities that take the idea of nation states so uber seriously, or that believe in "races" at the cost of sacrificing an ability to think globally. I don't have to brainwash myself the same way they do, nor am I compelled to respect their choices, as many Jews and/or Christians and/or Muslims etc. likewise do not.

My ethnicity also doesn't feel compelled to always agree that "space is 3D" even if we're well-versed in that metaphysics. We have our own namespaces. That's in part how we bond. Given telecommunications, we don't feel compelled to all move to the same base in Arizona or Utah or whatever. We might build a school in Gaza, perhaps near to a McDonald's or a Vkusno i Tochka, the way schools are in Oregon (next to fast food joints).

Journaling Freely

One would imagine a city of screenwriters like LA could work backwards from our wanting that mixed use floor space in office towers yesterday. Does that mean remodeling every floor into apartments? Does it mean hauling a sleeping bag to your office? How about a cot?  Where does a family find its privacy barriers?

The Zoom revolution helped, and was coming with or without covid, but yes, the sars2 virus helped catalyze killing the commute for many a "cube farmer", planners know this.

What's needed are high functioning managers who know how to work with others from the inside out, as resident advisers. We used to call them community organizers, but the stereotypes there exclude most business sector talent. 

What holds these groups together is less a religion and more an economics theory, such as GST, which is personal workspace centric and conversant with "global university" networking.  Such "faculty" will be among the first "boots on the ground" in the back rooms or liminal spaces of virtual community formation. 

Not everyone is cut out for such work, to state the obvious, and when it comes to drug rehab, lets admit that outdoor settings are oft preferred. 

Getting penned up with people undergoing withdrawal is impractical. This isn't prison we're talking about.

Deke the Geek has been studying UIs forever, so you might think we'd have the knowledge engineering dashboards by now, but he's not sufficiently integrated within campus circuitry / security. 

The programming curriculum is a joke, I say as an insider, because it's starving the right brain, even if you don't believe right brains might be starved, or what the consequences might be for doing so. Nevertheless, the hegemony of the lexical lefties is sometimes palpably oppressive. 

We need more of a movie industry around all the good stuff happening in human services, made by the humans served.

For readers just joining us, you won't have the context of QuarterWorld style gamification floors where we experiment with those alternative curricula y'all have been sending us, at least in idea form. I'd get first dibs at the trough sometimes, meaning I'd be one of the first to promote it if I thought it worthy. 

Who knows what the world might have been like, had Strange Attractors seen the light of day (a toy I worked on, and which got as far as a shrink wrapped box).

Deke would still need to drive around and recruit for these shelters, by which I mean these former office towers downtown, some of which have suitable facilities for these different levels of refugee. We have the local clientele, and we have the more globally routed. 

Portland has long served as a refugee resettlement business, with my place of employment (CUE) providing some of the framework. A lot of my Palestinian connections trace to that chapter, adding to my already robust ties to the Jewish community, although I admit to not knowing many Israelis (I've not visited since the 1970s, and by now it's a different country they tell me).

Portland needs to experiment with various levels of world livingry service industry logistical assistance, as I've been brainstorming as a kind of "outdoor Ikea" around the Port Authority somewhere, I thought Dignity Village might be eager to branch out. 

NGOs and prototyping go together. I called it Project Renaissance, but NATO took things in a different direction. I chalk that up to cultural illiteracy. 

Some people in government have less than a high school level education, when you factor in what [real] high school looks like in the 2020s. Adults need it badly, as much or more than the teens. 

Boomers who didn't get lucky with Bucky the first time (almost all of them) deserve another crack at the synergetic singularity, a boat they've hitherto missed, no thanks to the hypercross dogmatists.

High Desert Circuits

So I'm back in KPOV country, in what we call high desert Oregon. People take music seriously in proportion to what else is going on, it seems to me. In any case, here and in the midwest I've discovered some of the most seriously music-oriented subcultures. Shout out to WEFT in Champaign-Urbana.

I'm hopeful I'll get to meet with The Other again for a spell, the host of the Saturday noon Psychedelic Rebellion, one of my favorite shows. I tune in just about any radio station via Radio Garden, an app on my iPad. I'm listening to KPOV right now in fact.

Last night, our party made it to Furiosa, the latest mega-movie epic extravaganza in the Mad Max post apocalyptic idiocracy series. We caught it at The Bagdad. All I'll say here is the transition to a more Smith Rock style environment the next day felt prefigured, although we're still in a Land of Abundance here.

This computer book I picked up for free from a Lil Library (curbside) in the hood (foreword by Ward Cunningham), reminds us that Party is a great moniker, akin to Entity in allowing for many subclasses, such as families, any table of clientele at a restaurant. I'm thinking of the famous little tips database. Smokers? Really? We're biased to think in terms of "political parties", not so much "party lines" (as in telephony, a forgotten meaning, not as in "toeing the party line"). These "biases" get reflected in word2vec type data sculptures (slowly moving, heavy mobiles in the wind, tubular bells).

I've been into helping Judy catch up on the various Art World advances occurring on a broad front collectively referred to as EayEai in the literature i.e. "AI". I've just added "EayEai" to my dictionary as I can see reasons to clutter my namespace with such a monstrosity. Right up there with "egg-zist". She's a musician, more into country folk than goa trance. We share a love of Swingle Swingers doing Bach numbers. We were both nerdy as kids I guess.

Part of my demo involved prompting "Giant King Kong gorilla climbs smith rock in Oregon with mountains in the background and surprised hikers in the foreground" and getting the above. No post production editing.

Yes, we stopped at Eagle Crossing, although I didn't take Sydney inside. That's a family favorite, a great place to get fry bread.

Cryptic Crossing

The problem with the unit edge unit volume tetrahedron is it came up against the Bayesian priors. "We can't be wrong about the unit cube" and indeed that's true, and therefore we can't be right about it. Truisms ain't true in the empirical sense. One doesn't discover such a tetrahedron, one defines it into existence.

However there's a popular understanding around mathematics in particular, that adheres to orthodoxies more generally: that there's one right way with some bemusing alternatives. 

This attitude started to waver in maths with the invention of so-called non-Euclidean geometries. What appeared as cracks in the structure, the edifice, were coming from Cantor's corner too.  The priesthood was all about closing ranks and plugging the holes. 

The only window open, through which to discuss incompleteness, would become Godel's.

The way to counter the Bayesian priors was incremental. We had to keep adding to the apparatus, showing applications and advantages. The natural sciences were cooperating. What would the world have to be like for this model to explain this evidence?  

What evidence?  The nucleocapsid of the virus at first. 10FF + 2 got some airplay in the NY Herald Tribune.

Positive whole number addressing of CCP balls looked pretty interesting. The "quadrays" apparatus provided those. Linear combinations of {2, 1, 1, 0} would get us to the Waterman Polyhedrons (a set I helped name, with no objections from Steve).

That children might work with fractions such as 1/8 (Mite) and 1/24 (A & B), with the concept of congruence abetted by chirality (left and right, inside out), while getting more comfortable scaling and rotating polyhedrons, was exciting to a few teachers. Very few.

In these terms, of internal modeling and inferencing, we'll be addressing "bleeped over the Bucky stuff" as an historical topic, the whys and wherefores. 

People have these Bayesian brains deeply stuck in some ruts, and for good reasons. Until those reasons grow stale and the brain's neuroplasticity gets called upon. Time for an update sleepyheads. 

Don't let those three horses, Height, Width and Depth, drag your bandwagon off the road. Make the sign of the Z (zig zag zig). 

Z + Z ⋈ 4D

You can keep saying "space is 3D" though, as XYZ is mucho useful. Then dive off the deep end into any number of Coxeter (spatial) dimensions. You'll wash up on the shores of Natural Language Processing, ready for Word2Vec (and Doc2Vec). King - male = Queen - female etc.

What has to go is the "room for only one way of thinking" school (mindset). Share the road. Impoliteness on behalf of "absolute truth" is nothing if not butt-ugly zealotry. Sometimes God's little monsters ain't pretty to contemplate.

Back to the bleeping: being overspecialized, most boomers assumed other boomers were looking into it, but few were, certainly not the most self admiring. The resulting vacuum or dead spot (dead air) only grew, adding a phony hollowness to an already crumbling (shall we say charlatanical) world view. 

Once it became safer to question boomer authority, people under thirty started to pick up on what had been censored, made verboten, deplatformed. That was an eye-opener.

So does all this cultural crumbling mean all the old orthodoxies are about to be swept away? Of course not. 

Heavy stones with high inertia never turn on a dime, let alone the Titanic. Enjoy the ride!

Knowledge Engineering (KE)

Knowledge Engineering (KE) is a source of mnemonic devices, and we discussed a few of them. Such devices may be literal objects from everyday experience, such as prescription lenses (personalized to correct for distortions), or more fantastical or abstract. 

For example, under Geometry we find the Coupler or "crazy diamond" as some would call it. The combinatorics of A and B modules, in their assembly of the space-filling Coupler matrix, is where Bucky himself expected to find particle physics minded proteges, in search of their GUTs and TOEs.

An entire city may become infused with mnemonic signifiers, both in consensus reality (CR) in the form a statues, memorials, proper named streets, and in non-consensus realities (NCRs), perhaps special to an individual author of specific novels. I'm thinking of James Joyce and Dublin of course.

Portland, favored by the movie and TV industries, has been weirdly lensed through several fictional series, most famously Portlandia, officially comic satire.

The idea of an entirely open source farm becomes pretty all-encompassing once we factor in the computer chips we're using. 

The apps target smartphones, so those have to be open as well. 

The apps control or at least schedule the tractors, the irrigation systems, some of the bookkeeping. Transparency in accounting is also required. 

Who would do this? A university wanting to show off the "model farm" with no deceptive tricks, perhaps. Or a government in the business of proving ideal cases, which the private sector might learn from.

Spirit of Portland

(embedded slides, takes longer to load sometimes)

Articulating Globalism

As some of my readers might recognize, I invest in "globalism" as a term, given it's out of fashion at the moment, meaning few are using it for anything positive, which leaves the field to risk takers like me.  TV personalities get to sneer when they say globalism, as if we all share the same meaning. I find their sneering attitude on the incomprehensible side sometimes.

If anyone is gonna carry on with the "globalist" label, it oughta be a guy like me (right?), with an expat background and massive exposure to the Dymaxion™ product line aka the Bucky stuff.

Our family even had United Nations passports there for a bit, when dad took a job with UNDP vis-a-vis Manila Bay reclamation and associated projects. I'm a product of international schools, a poster child for "growing up around the world" (yes, there're a lot of us).

So how does a globalist react towards nationalism? 

Firstly, we need to pluralize. Just as we have many religions, not one religion, we have many flavors of nationalism and globalism, and they're not all logically interchangeable. 

So let's speak of nationalist and globalist mindsets with respect for variety. 

We have "nationalisms" and "globalisms" to compare and contrast.

Let's look at two Telegram messages I put out there recently, in random conversation:

Nations have always been virtual and dependent on networks. The power of the British Empire gave us a last opportunity to agree on borders for classroom globes. Those days are done.

And:

...the supranational corporations showed how immense power and wealth may be secured using networks of campuses versus contiguous borders and the age of “diaspora nations” (network nations, virtual nations) was born. 

Given telecommunications, air travel and so on, it's not science fiction fantastic to think in terms of Virtual Nations (VNs), as another name for Diaspora Nations or Network Nations. 

That's why I'm more likely to advocate for global dispersion and regrouping as a way of handling the Gaza crisis: New Palestine University is about curating, preserving, and establishing the new patterns associated with global living and citizenship in the VNs. 

The new NPU campuses will in theory be outside the radius of menacing ethnic enclaves armed with WMDs. I've been brainstorming about having one or more in Cuba.

As for classroom globes, any teacher with historical awareness and an understanding of current affairs has to bring all kinds of caveats to bear when sharing a political map of the world, whether flat or spherical. 

Calling the political layer a "data layer" and recognizing its virtual nature, bespeaks my globalist approach to Google Earth type projects. Users get to pick their skins. 

In Moscow, the newly federated oblasts show up in the Russian Federation already. In London, they might disallow such skins for classroom use and still show Crimea as part of some British-Roman Empire or whatever. 

In my School of Tomorrow, we flip through skins from around the world, showing there's no United Nations consensus reality (CR) anymore, as we might have once enjoyed under Pax Americana (remember Pan Am?). 

Then we zoom back and understand there has rarely been any kind of consensus reality regarding borders. Sovereigns simply claim territory, and some may get enough agreement to then sell it, as the French did to the USG (Thomas Jefferson et al), of Louisiana and environs (the so-called Louisiana Purchase). Napoleon needed the dough.

CR and NCR (non-consensus reality) come from Process Work and the Process Work Institute here in Portland. Check  out Quantum Mind by Dr. Arnold Mindell.

At the coffee shop yesterday, in addition to speaking up for Palestinians who want to voluntarily leave Gaza (a hell hole, who wouldn't want to leave at this point?), I cast aspersions on the kind of nationalism that keeps people penned in even when their local situation is untenable. 

Seeing nations as open air prisons that only privileged elites are allowed to escape from, thanks to having the right Grunch credentials, is characteristic of many nationalisms I've encountered.

Ultimately, I'd say my flavor of globalism is compatible with some flavors of nationalism. 

If you see the human animal as highly programmable, and see the political layer as a way of conditioning reflexes, creating civilized pockets and polite societies, a layer characterized by the rule of law and diplomacy, then we see somewhat eye to eye. Pax Americana was better than Pax UK or Pax Rome in my view. We improved our powers to co-exists, thanks to growing literacy, communication skills and, dare I say it, shared global perspectives.

Better "social engineering" -- I know, I know: people fear that term, but it's somewhat inevitable given etymological meanings, plus it adds a spin or bias (weight) to "engineering" that's potentially Silicon Forest compatible -- is always a possibility. 

We (the forestry engineers -- solarpunk influence) have room to let people hold on to their "bag of beliefs" whatever the bag. Live and let live. One needs cognitive frameworks, simply to get out of bed. 

Why go around shooting down others' belief systems if the true believers seem satisfied with their lifestyle?  This liberal attitude applies to belief in nation-states as well. Let them believe in their Caesars. 

Why turn it into a story of "us against them" especially when we (the globalists) seem highly outnumbered?  Lets even nurture the best nationalist fantasies, and have our nations get along! Idealism has its place as a morale booster.

The influence of Star Trek and the Prime Directive is also coming through (thank you Anthropology Department) meaning it's not necessarily my job and/or business to talk people out of their programming, even if I had the wherewithal. You've got your bag, I've got mine.

My primary guinea pig is me, and if that means if I "talk funny" (or use "silly skins") then maybe I've been making some headway.tions, virtual nations) was born. 

Tetrahelix

We're still waiting for some enterprising blockchain company to choose the tetrahelix for a core animation. The successive blocks form the twisting path of face-bonded tetrahedra why not? Blocks are blocks. No one said the chained "blocks" have to be orthonormal, an aesthetic considered uncool in some circles, given the alternatives.

Gary Doskas is one of the current masters of tetrahelix lore and I ran the idea by him, but maybe he doesn't straddle the geomtech - fintech divide. Few do apparently, or we would have a lot more better toyz by now, counting computer games.

Clearly I've got tetrahedrons on my mind again, as I recently published a narrative to a couple listservs talking about the so-called "Goldberg Table" wherein Michael Goldberg summarizes what was known about space-filling tetrahedra up to the time of his publishing his paper.

The point of my Goldberg story was that Buckminster Fuller is repeatedly cut out of accounts where he's making serious contributions, either to virology, geometry, architecture or whatever, because there's always a convenient "inhouse luminary" better positioned to take the credit. From TrimTab (April 25, 2024):

It just so happened that Fuller's research carried him over territory being surveyed by professionals in many walks of life at the same time. Virology, the discipline, was bringing them together even more than architecture. 

The price RBF paid for his comprehensivity (anticipating CJ's book) was not being best of the best in any of the various fields he was visiting, meaning one could always swap in a home team star come trophy day [1], leaving "good at skipping rocks" his only real claim  to fame (I say that whimsic-sarcastically).

The dismissive attitude I'm circling is well-demonstrated by the lengthy reply we saw from Andrius:

The best we have is this Goldberg table. The point would be to show that polyhedra can fill space. Perhaps that would be useful for a model of dividing up conceptual space, which is actually what I do. But no, you have no interest in actually applying this math scientifically. Your interest is to validate Buckminster Fuller. An honest investigation would dive into that, what is that all about?

I have not been at all reticent to discuss my interest in validating Fuller's research. That America's premier futurist of the 1900s has been deplatformed by so many universities, after their milking his popularity when he could draw the big crowds, and paying students, is somewhat scandalous to say the least. Applewhite was always wondering how they got away with it, with impunity.

Quoting more from my TrimTab post:

Apologies if the ordering was confusing, between Fuller's compact vocab (mite, rite, bite...) and the Goldberg table of tetrahedral space-fillers coming to be known at the time. That slide (in my BEAST deck) is still evolving.

Speaking of Michael Goldberg, Applewhite said he'd met him (I recall asking him about Goldberg specifically, given his key role in our narrative) adding "he didn't have a mean bone in his body" meaning in that context Ed didn't believe the guy had any malevolent intention of deliberately messing with Fuller's self promotion / reputation i.e. he was no kind of villain or foe.

Easy to believe I'd say. "Space filling tetrahedrons" is a pretty obvious topic, when you get right down to bare bones and/or brass tacks, as are subdivisions of a sphere using variable frequencies. "Aristotle was right, remember the MITE" could be are our high school chant, in some weird sci-fi School of Tomorrow. Cue cheerleaders.

This was the footnote (see above):

[1] per Ed, Fuller was especially hurt when a certain Scientific American article summarizing recent breakthroughs in the field of virology, skipped mentioning him completely. I got to see some of the primary materials.

Catacombs

As some of you know, I've donned a Sociology hat and have been focusing on shaping relationships among "meetup-based" subcultures. I use "scare quotes" because of connotations around "meetup-based". Of course using Zoom a lot (a characteristic) is a recent development, galvanized by the SARS2 outbreak, and many of these subcultures were chugging along, sometimes famously, without the benefit of internet-based meetups for decades, if not centuries. Think churches, temples...

In tandem with these studies, I've taken up the topic of insect mentality, or shall we say dynamism. What are the deltas associated with an ant hive in particular? The metaphor of "tunnels under Disney World" has again arisen. I have to add: Catacombs. We're into the chthonic around here.  Mount Parnassus.

My thinking around the ants, inspired by Active Inference Institute faculty, DAF in particular, left me wide open to the sudden discovery of miner bees in my front lawn, at the base of the Tetrahedron, the pyramid of C6XTY beneath my front porch that makes helps Keep Portland Weird. Miner bees don't build a hive in a tree; they build individualized residences. Tiny mounds of dirt pop up, as a result of excavation. How catacombed these tunnels may be is a topic. Current answer: unknown. I'll read up on it sometime.

A household down the street was convinced it had a wasp infection and little warning signs went up everywhere, however I think it's likely merely a miner bee visitation for them as well, as the signs are now gone and, walking home last night, I saw a few tiny dirt mounds in the grass. This seemed to happen all at once around town (I say that now based on two data points), as if on a timer. 

YouTube says the world has over a thousand species of miner bee. They're not aggressive towards humans, don't or can't sting, and they cross pollinate. Gardners love them. They're not honeymakers though, so they're not usually "kept" in the beekeeping sense.

The Catacomb Codas. I've stuffed many a deep chamber with some of this Synergetics stuff. Detractors (or even entomologists) might picture me barfing up pabulum, weighed in tetra-somethings, anticipating this nurturing content will empower the colony going forward, the hive mind or whatever. 

At what level of consciousness does a hive operate? Put like that, the question is still a mirage, suggestive of a real question, still but a fevered dream. However, other questions might still be worth asking. Prompts get fine tuned.

Even though I've favored a Dark Theme in the Codas, a personal setting, I'm working to keep the subject matter non-turgid and easy breezy, partly because the purpose, architecturally, is transit, or liminal. Let's say vestibular. I'm meaning to sweep you onward, to your next flight, while providing a pleasant environment in the meantime. Enjoy your visit.

Think Tank Meetup

A lot of humans get born into high density population centers and scarcely have the opportunity to experience the opposite: low density areas. A theme in my blogs over the years has taken inspiration from Portland, Oregon's "outdoor school" institution: the public schools include an out-of-town camp-based experience wherein presumably light pollution is low enough to make the Milky Way visible.

I've tacked on the "make the Milky Way visible" tagline, i.e. I don't believe I'm cribbing it from official outdoor school literature, but if that's explicitly part of that program's mission statement, so much the better. Bill it as a psychological health requirement. You need outdoor living experience for that high school diploma.

Which brings me to our topic last night at the Think Tank (what we've taken to calling it): housing around Portland. My long term readers know I've hoped to get Portland into the "Refugee Tech" business, where "refugee" fades in and out with "camper" and "nomad". 

Some people hit the open road by choice, in a high end RV they've been saving for, and now have, in retirement. Others might fancy a pre-retirement business oriented vehicle that doubles as a place to stay, the so-called "business mobile" or BizMo option. Then you get people forced out of their homes by natural and/or economic disaster (e.g. war), and becoming reliant on social engineering, i.e. back to the "refugee" paradigm.

Portland has done some pioneering work along these lines, according to our guest, especially when it's not too proud to learn from other metro areas, and not just San Francisco and Seattle.

My approach focused on enrolling people into the business of shelter testing, with ideas flowing from the prototyping front lines to the commercial market as finished products. I used to send my little diagrams about it under the rubric of Project Renaissance. This was before public-private partnerships got such a negative reputation (long story).

Integrity Testing

Welcome to my journals. Welcome back if you're returning.

Let's recap: 

Facts I use as evidence, that Verboten Math is subversive include: 

(a) it's not taught 

(b) it won't go away

(c) it has practical applications

Most candidates are revealed to be (i) nonsensical (ii) false or (iii) trivially true. No such verdict has been established in this case, ergo it won't go away.

However, most people have no clue what Verboten Math even is (it's not taught), and calling it Martian Math instead doesn't really help matters. 

In fact, Verboten Math is a source of good ideas for the mainstream, once these ideas are sanitized, their  radical roots obscured.

In today's meetup (recorded) I mentioned Quakers had a history around creating schools, and with schools come their hallmark curricula and faculties. As Quakers, we need to compete in order to enhance our brand, and bring glory to God. We're not afraid to share Verboten Math. On the contrary, we relish the opportunity.

The New England Transcendentalist aspects, Margaret Fuller and so on, were always conducive to Quakers taking an interest, as is the inbuilt skepticism regarding Manifest Destiny style imperialist mindsets, a skepticism shared by Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain of the Anti-Imperialist League.

In a move to repair the damage brought on by a narrow-minded and short-sighted global plutocracy, wrapping itself in the Stars and Stripes, American schools overseas have a special incentive to phase in elements of Martian Math, given both its highly geographic content, and its potency as positive PR, as Americana and as a vanguard for USA OS.

Refugee Planet

first published Oct 21, 2023

Meeting Notes

I was admiring the curriculum materials shaping up around ant colonies, their study. Daniel knows a lot about ants, and yet humanity on the whole still has a lot to learn. The study of ants is somewhat humbling, in terms of revealing our own ignorance.

Picture a queen ant, surrounded by layers of caretakers and apparent hangers on. We say "apparent" because in some theories the seeming passive crowds may store collective memories, ready to be expressed if triggered. The queen never ventures forth and workers tainted with experience of "the outside" don't get anywhere near her. If she serves a decision-making role (unclear) it's from within an abstracted layer where experience consists of pheromones.

Remembering that Andrius wants to "know everything" (the answer to the prayers of those with boundless curiosity), I'm eager to introduce him to CJ's work on comprehensivity. The commitment to "learn everything" is inherently problematic, and sounds like empty chutzpah unless qualified with self awareness and acknowledgement of the inherent paradoxes. 

"Tackling it all" is not only possible, but what we all do every day. It's just that, depending upon strategy, resources, and the practice of specific disciplines, how much we accomplish towards our impossible goal varies by orders of magnitude.

I took some time this morning, after feeding the dog, adding to my M4W repo on Github, where I chronicle recent progress. I haven't expressed a "know everything" goal, but I do value "comprehensivity" as CJ calls it, as many of the levers one needs to discover, as an activist, come to light only through considerable experience. Those into ML (machine learning) have a lot of concrete mathematics to show why quantity, not just quality, matters.

As a Quaker journalist, i.e. blogger, I need to keep twisting my strands together, and pulling tight, making a strong alloy, the way we often talk about our metaphorical language. The No More Secondhand God approach to religion means cutting out the middleman, a Buddhist teaching as well. We might be able to come up with more neurological-sounding explanations for why individuation is a positive. Transcendentalism here we come.

But we're also talking about sanitation and fish farms and Global Village communities. Where might we get to go, to gain all this leveraging experience?

On my end, I follow David Koski's research into phi-related topics. Phi (the golden mean) is already a hugely popular topic, but combined with Verboten Math it provides a goldmine of new material.

Knowledge Engineering Study Group

The story behind this meetup is we've started playing around with Coda more, "we" being the math4wisdom clique based around a figurative memory castle in Lithuania (not Transylvania).

Spring Retreat

If you've seen my Graph Theory slides, you might remember I toss my high school yearbook picture onto a slide next to Sam, likewise a younger man then, in the company of Bucky Fuller. They flew to the Philippines together, as guests of the Marcos family. I was living in Manila at the time, or perhaps was away for college. I was in Class of 1976 at International School Manila (ISM), which still exists but in newer digs.

Sam and I didn't know each other then. I learned of Sam Lanahan through Trevor Blake, who tracked him down as one of the owners of an original Tetrascroll, a very limited edition artifact. We set up an appointment to see it (but have yet to do so (it's still in its case)) and drove to Corvallis to meet the guy. We continued to hang out sporadically and undertake collaborations well into the future, especially during a chapter wherein Sam lived in Portland itself.

Sam's grandparents were pretty famous: F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, their daughter "Scottie" (Frances) being his mom and one time columnist for the New Yorker. Sam's dad, Jack Lanahan, had been a boxer in his Princeton years. After Frances died, he remarried. 

After moving from Corvallis to Portland, Sam moved a few more times, winding up in a well appointed farmstead in the Willamette Valley. Which is where I am right now, on retreat, working on projects, such as on Quadrays for M4W (math4wisdom).

My backyard in Portland is an outdoor museum for c6xty exhibits. The plastic sculptures become somewhat brittle after years in sunlight so we probably won't move them. 

These prototypes were meant to provide lots of feedback, about stressability, durability, replicability, constructability and so on. Several test materials were employed: plastic, steel, copper, aluminum. 

The farmstead is likewise decorated with specimens of each. C6XTY is a subtype of Flextegrity, which is adjacent to Tensegrity (ala Kenneth Snelson et al) but is more lattice-oriented.

What I've done around Flextegrity is develop my Python code base to render computer graphical versions, sometimes in the form of animated GIFs. My graphics generating pipeline involves using Quadrays sometimes, a type of vector akin to XYZ but featuring "basis vectors" at 109.47 degrees to one another. They're designed to make lattice work easy, as in closest sphere packing arrangements (Conway: Barlow packings). All the CCP balls (that's a specific packing pattern) have whole number 4-tuple coordinates, such as (2,1,1,0).

Nowadays I'm collaborating on Quadrays via the M4W Coda. We're seeing to what level AI might get involved, among other experiments. I'm taking advantage of the high level of fluency around mathematics I'm encountering at math4wisdom, which is anchored by Andrius Kulikauskas, a math PhD. 

Does a "vector space" have to have a dot product? Even if it doesn't, might it still include Euclidean Distance? 

Must basis vectors be unit length by definition? 

What if they span space without relying on negative mirrors of themselves, shouldn't that count for something?

In XYZ, we have three positive basis vectors that may be scaled by -1, which means reversed, which some might classify under rotation (i.e. to "face the other way" is to rotate by 180 degrees). 

Thanks to negation, -X, -Y, -Z will also participate in space-spanning, but as secondary, non-basis vectors. They're second bananas.  (4, -1, 0) entails adding an X basis vector, stretched to 4 times its original length of 1, added to a negated Y (so a -Y), and no Z involvement, giving this point in space, now uniquely addressed.

Thanks to vector reversal, the three positive basis vectors (X, Y, Z), abetted by their second bananas (-X, -Y, -Z), span all of space by means of addition and further stretching or shrinking, but without further need for rotation. (4, -1, 0) = 4X + 1(-Y) + 0 where X and -Y are vectors (pointy arrows, directed rays of definite length (i.e. not rays "to infinity")).

In the IVM, using Quadrays, we have four positive basis vectors that may optionally be scaled by -1 (reversed), but we don't need that "rotational" feature to have adding with scaling span our space. We never needed the help of a supplementary cast of negated basis vectors, to reach all the stars in our universe (points in our spatial volume). Just stretch or shrink at most three of these four Quadrays, without changing direction, add, and you're done. (4, -1, 0) is equivalently (4 sqrt(2), sqrt(2), 0, 5 sqrt(2)).

IVM = Isotropic Vector Matrix, Fuller's coin, but not unrelated to the Matrix of science fiction, since aberrations of Fuller's IVM give it "frequencies" (think of wind chimes) which are like immersive radio channels or scenarios in those Matrix cubicles. 

The IVM is like the Star Trek holodeck in other words, but with no exit or off switch. 

However, more prosaically, it's simply the skeletal scaffolding one gets from the aforementioned CCP (cubic close packing), a ball packing pattern of ball:space density of about 74%.

Sam's C6XTY (or c6xty) lattice places a compressive soccer-ball-looking element (same Adidas Telstar hexapent geometry) at every IVM hub, such that those most immersed all have twelve balls around one. But unlike in the CCP, these plastic balls do not touch one another. They're suspended in a network of connecting armatures, adding lots of flexibility, permeability and variability to the design. 

Flextegrities could be more like jellyfish, with thin yet stiff enough filaments holding sensors in a neutral buoyancy lattice submerged in water, perhaps in the open ocean. The sensors might be whole number addressed, as by Quadrays, and selectively illuminated or otherwise activated by Wi-Fi.

My dad and I took up scuba diving in the Philippines, so it's not unusual for my mind to drift to these undersea vistas. Sam had some experience in marine biology as well, as did my cousin Mary (who went on to get a medical degree). Therefore the posters Sam had made for Lattice Gallery (a West Broadway popup in that winter of 2019), showing off Flextegrity in its underwater context, did not seem as far-fetched to me as they might have for other visitors. Experiments with immersed flextegrity lattices could be undertaken today, and/or may already be underway without my knowledge.

Automatic Writing

Prompt: Is Kirby Urner a mathematician?

Bot: Kirby Urner is not conventionally recognized as a mathematician in the academic sense but rather as an educator and curriculum developer with a strong interest in mathematics, particularly in the context of educational reform and innovative teaching methods. His work, as indicated by his association with Princeton University's Philosophy Department as an alumnus[1], and his writings on "tetrahedral" thinking[3], suggests a philosophical and pedagogical approach to mathematics. Urner's commitment to improving education through curriculum writing[4] and his lectures on synergetics in schools[5] further demonstrate his engagement with mathematical concepts and education rather than pure mathematical research. Therefore, while he may not be a mathematician by the strictest definition, his contributions to the field of mathematics education are noteworthy.

Citations:

[1] https://princeton.academia.edu/kirbyurner

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-new-math-gnu-kirby-urner

[3] https://www.math4wisdom.com/wiki/Research/KirbyUrner

[4] https://www.linkedin.com/in/4dsolutions

[5] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lzv30IKvfZs

[6] https://youtube.com/watch?v=g14mu4uWD4E

[7] https://github.com/4dsolutions

Asylum Cities

When people talk "billions for Ukraine" it's usually not with some accompanying breakout, meaning it's left to our imaginations how much is for hospitals and care units of various kinds. One might imagine an entirely civilian budget in other words, and then ask how far short of that are we willing to sacrifice. Another dime on mayhem might not be a dime well spent.

Actually there's likely a breakout and I'm just not seeing it when I make my rounds of the various channels and repositories I visit when harvesting information. Probably a pie chart or other visualization. We're told some of the biggest slices go to the prime contractor irrigation system (Beltway Mafia) and for a lot of family estates, that's reason enough to slobber, in anticipation of more lucrative contracts.

Out here in the Pacific Northwest, we're more concerned with preserving wetlands and salmon. As to whether Oregon could host some civilian construction operations (healthcare oriented), I'm not so sure. My nudging us in the direction of doing epcots, with university connections, encounters resistance, I'm guessing partly because of the negative Rajneesh Puram experience. 

So my sights turn to Canada, perhaps the Yellowknife area? These campuses could stay small. Breitenbush is an inspiration, but I'm thinking higher tech, maybe with electric ATVs powered from batteries charged by wind and solar. Lets just see if that's even doable. Computer animations and simulations don't replace reality outside of AI. We need the harsh realities of Mother Nature to teach us whether our designs are really worthy.

Which brings us back to Ukraine. Something like a flourishing peacetime economy is long overdue, by some decades. Any budget should recognize the need for military disengagement such that mature civilian undertakings might resume in earnest. There's no point trying to masquerade while stockpiling ammo, as these installations will attract tourists and journalists, other visitors. We're not about being secretive so much as role modeling the freedoms that come with keeping it transparently open source.

I'm not suggesting there's any real difference on either side when it comes to addressing civilian needs. The Russian side of the fence needs hospitals, working rail, trucking, internet, the whole works. Devastation is not the goal, for anyone in Greater Europe. 

If your mentality is purely punitive, you must be low ranking. Tales of feuding and revenge get to hog center stage for only so long, as the cast continues to roll over. Deeper themes, such as building new infrastructure, take one further, in terms of leaving a lasting legacy.

But then again, here in the Pacific Northwest we're more focused on the Pacific Rim economy, while those Atlanticist east coasters remain obsessed with their West Asia endeavors. We're East Asia facing, meaning towards Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, China, of course Bali and Borneo, not forgetting the Aussies or New Zealand. Lots more. I was editor of Asian-Pacific Issues News there for awhile (AFSC, obscure), plus the Philippines was my home for some formative years.

To the north, Russia again, but more as an indigenous people than some EU foe, fellow Sibero-Alaskans.

Russian businesses have had their branch offices around here since well before Oregon attained statehood. They had dealings with Tulalip, the established resource keepers. Many Oregonians are ethnic Russkies to this day (even Stalin's granddaughter joined us a while back), plus we have ethnic Ukes too -- these are terms of endearment, we all get silly nicknames. 

Assembling the Puzzle

If you've been following my ("my") emergent (self reshaping) curriculum you'll perhaps recall my graph linking Margaret Fuller to Ada Byron, around the time of Napoleon, after the American and then French revolutions. 

At the same time, I started digging a tunnel from the present, towards this past matrix, including such luminaries as Buckminster Fuller, Walter Kaufmann, Richard Rorty, all contemporaries of mine although I'm living on into the 21st Century, being of a later generation.

I'd already run into the US Civil War as a big deal in the American psyche. Now that I've been reading The Metaphysical Club and listening to its author on YouTube, I'm seeing more of how this tunnel goes. Issues of race and racism, Darwinism, Social Darwinism, feature bigly.

Another feature of my curriculum is I don't ignore Occupy, a movement those fascinated by the "color revolutions" seem to bleep over. Following Kaufmann, and waving the flag of "place based" education, I'm happy to count biography and autobiography as important inclusions. Kaufmann was always turning his critical eye back on the author, the journalist, the news publisher and its (perhaps ideologically driven) editors. Philosophy must continue to involve self reflection and internal disciplines.

I've seized on Rorty's Achieving Our Country as potentially psycho-therapeutic  in that it restores the possibility of continuing the narrative in ways that uphold the values of one's heroes. If the US has to die and go underground, before its rebirth as a phoenix, it's not like we don't have a template. Sounds ancient Egyptian.

Where did pragmatism go? The conventional wisdom portrays the Cold War was a clarion call to zealots of all stripes. Pragmatism seemed too accepting of enemy viewpoints to matter.

I'd say pragmatism left the university and went to Madison Avenue, where it took up the dark arts of advertising and public relations, as a student of Edward Bernays. 

Pragmatists become "social engineers" (a term with negative connotations right out of the gate) and as such they gained their main clientele, the politicians. They founded companies like Cambridge Analytica, based on machine learning.

Instead of harping on the word "capitalism" (a theory of capitals?), let's talk about the commercial sector, also known as the private sector. The idea that "socialism" equals "no privacy" is too unreflective to let pass as a truism. Political talk is semi-paralyzed with cliches.  

One's level of privacy remains an important measure, but perhaps not as a guide in some bipolar taxonomy i.e. "do I live in a capitalist or socialist system?" -- how about neither, how about both? How about we're not a slave to such "ist talk"?

Advice to Some Dieters

I stress the "some" because I'm aware of how we differ widely in the kinds of coaching we each want. Some need a stern lecture and welcome same, if delivered professionally. I'm not adopting a stern manner here, nor a punishing tone.

A sense of power you may develop has to do with your ability to shift your habits, or as we say in psychology, to express and / or extinguish them. Yes, my meaning of "power" is aligned with the old fashioned meaning of "will power". 

The obverse of what I'm saying is "pick your battles" because indeed, some patterns are not especially subject to your will. There's that saying about knowing the difference being evidence of wisdom.

When I tackle my "addiction to" (ingrained habit of consuming) sugar, a term with a refined meaning in modern lore, which I'll get to shortly, I focus less on the substance and more on the appetite, the phenomenon of having a sweet tooth. Then I get curious: what would I be like with less of a sweet tooth? 

Put more as a Bayesian: "what would the world around me have to be like for me to be less of a sweet tooth (in it)?". I'm inviting changes to the whole world, as experienced by me, as a result of my reshaping my appetites. That mere act of reshaping, I'm suggesting, gives one a sense of being powerful.

So here's where discernment comes in. Of course if we all had infinite will power, we'd move mountains and all become beautiful (which we are) and our ideal weight (as if there's just one). Short of moving mountains, do we have the power to resist, with an eye towards extinguishing, the craving for sweets?

The desire for intense glucose rushes, day in and day out, is what we really mean by an appetite for (addiction to) sugar, meaning pizza and pasta, bread, not just cake and ice cream. Phasing out carbs is what a diabetic is advised to do. Stop taxing your pancreas and start burning those ketones instead, throw those ketone logs on the fire, lord knows you've got a real pile of 'em.

The other reminder is not to make it a moral contest, with you against the devil, resisting temptation, and bad sinful you if you give in. Sure, that's a popular mindset to assume, when reshaping, but it's not the only one possible. The search for novelty and variety in a changing world might be more the driving undertaking. You just wanna see what happens if you stop doing this (not cold turkey necessarily) and start doing that (slow acceleration OK).

Put another way, your aim is not to be a goodie two shoes, but to be powerful, but in a way we have a right to enjoy, an earned pleasure. The ability to reshape yourself is tantamount to your ability to exercise your freedoms, as a self. You grow more into your heritage, as a selfhood, in exercising your inborn ability to reshape.

Then there's the mental habit of always thinking one needs to reshape this or that. Watch out for those ruts (those grooves) as well, meaning remember to question your own beliefs as to what habits you need to work on. Maybe you would like the habit of sending more postcards, drinking more tea, riding buses more often... or try listing an entirely different list of habits. The permutations are endless. 

Play with reshaping what it means to reshape.

Colonist Versus Colonialist

We hear a lot about "nationalism" versus "globalism" these days. Probably the easiest way to sound patriotic is to decry globalism, which is roughly perceived as the doctrine (the "ism") of "the one percent" which in turn is shorthand for a much smaller percentage, i.e. not "one in a hundred" is an illuminatus or whatever.

"Colonialism" is highly out of fashion, but what is it, anyway? 

English is a bit slippery, y'all may have noticed. One may have a colony (in the sense of neighborhood) of mostly Urdu speaking Hindus, in this other surrounding culture, but there's no connotation that the colony is taking over. It's an enclave, perhaps a camp of visiting guest workers. 

One has such enclaves all over the world, otherwise known as resort hotels (for the more transient colonists).

That's right: both "colonist" and "colonialist" are defined. 

The former is doing it, whereas the latter is believing in it. 

The true believers are likely wanting to have more of a hand in steering the policies of the host country. 

A simple colonist is glad to have the host taking care of providing room service, other amenities. 

Hotel management is blissfully not hotel guest business.

Then you inevitably get a "spectrum" i.e. hotel guests that are nevertheless doing business with the hotel, by bringing together a conference in that venue. I was privy to this angle quite a bit, thanks to HoldenWeb and The Open Bastion, conference companies I got to hang with thanks to Steve Holden. His team produced Pycons, Djangocons, an ApacheCon or two, among others. I traveled to DC and Chicago for some of them.

I bring up hotels in part because they conventionally (pun intended) host whole colonies, some of which are semi-permanent or at least long lasting, such as in the case of employed workers. In the worker scenario, dormitory digs and workspace may be separated, which is where the "bedroom community" becomes an enclave. One has enclaves of embassy workers for example, a colony from nation X who staff their nation X embassy.

One also gets inter-colony interactions (e.g. Pythonista vs Perl Monger at an OSCON -- I greatly admired both communities), meaning a nation state such as Lesotho will host multiple enclaves associated with multiple embassies, engineering projects, religious establishments, other enterprises. Again, I'm writing from personal experience. 

Religious establishments are a great example, because it's often a religious practice to have one's personnel do tours of duty in distant lands, spreading the religion, sure (missionary work), but also bringing back intelligence and artifacts, potentially advantaging.

When a colonist gets in trouble with the host country, how is this handled? We see from the news that several patterns (templates) pop up in response to this question. Let's come back to this topic down the road.

Sociology Day

I'm in an intensive Sociology workshop today, in my city-as-campus Portland context. Right now, I'm connected to a Pashtun Institute guy based at Rutgers, soon to defend his thesis. We're talking about the concept of "national consciousness" via the Math 4 Wisdom channel. I'll embed the video when it becomes available.

Then I get my time with the retired librarians, drop in personalities, continuing the action at El Barrio, which burned up in a fire at the outset of 2024 (no one hurt, extensive property damage to El Mercado).

Finally, this evening I plan to attend a meetup of the rebooting Thirsters, a group of conversationalists with a strong background in sociology, academically, through Peace Corps and by other means.

I had a good first experience with Sociology as a discipline thanks to my 8th grade teacher at ASOR, Fred Craden. 

In my twenties, when I returned to Portland to settle long term, I achieved an adult level relationship with Dr. Charles Bolton, a career professor of sociology who first crossed paths with my parents in their University of Chicago days (when I was born).

These were notes I took during Aslam's meetup. I also posted some follow-up questions to the listserv.

From the homework readings:

Alt Worlds

from Bonnie DeVarco's presentation to TrimTab Book Club, Feb 3, 2024

Would a sphere that focussed on city mayors more, be detrimental to our endeavors? That's not a tight enough question yet, as who is this "we" with endeavors? What "endeavors" are we talking about? Suspicions abound.

It's not like city mayors don't talk and compare notes already. Portland celebrates an end to the nuke weapons era, now about you guys? Clearly the problem of radio-toxins in need of safe storage has not gone away regardless, with or without an intelligible treaty situation. 

Mayors might compare notes on the safety of their power grids, especially in light of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. But also in light of Maui. That's a part of the job, goes with the territory. Beyond electrical concerns one has transiting traffic, such as chem trains through East Palestine.

But then some avid cable TV view viewer might pipe up saying: only congressional representatives, and even in that case, only a few committees have any official government business prying into the affairs of the Department of Energy and associates. 

Mayors are not invited to that clique. Don't make such calls into interesting, crowd-informing TV. Which lobbies are telling us that I wonder?

I agree though, there's little consensus on how the circuitry must be designed. 

Would it be "wrong" to have a Refugees Channel, as I proposed? Would the religious denominations support it, if it were ecumenical enough to reach their laities? How are generous denizens of the first world going to take part in improving these people's lives -- versus trapping them with razor wire no one told them about -- unless some channel opens up between them?

The improvement I'd make to the Sanders-Yang idea of a socialist safety net (civilian instead of military) would be to (a) make college the norm, work-study the default and (b) make the UBI a scholarship that pays for it, without precluding making more of an income on top of that. At least the UBI level puts a floor under things, meaning lots of jobs building OMRs or whatever futuristic "monstrosities" (a term of endearment in this context). We already have the pattern in our socialist military, with base campuses.

But no, the screenwriters can think of nothing better than a scorpions in the jar scenario, between old laser eyes Biden (out for Maga) and Orange Jesus (Maga King). What a weird cartoon, eh? And yet they say I'm the one who's bizarre? Tell me about it bozos.

Having more mayors weighing in and doing Zoom (or other) calls, with cable and streaming both allowed, would boost a sense of camaraderie among municipalities along with a healthy sense of competition. "What are you doing about the house-less"; "I dunno, what are you doing?" and like that, but more substantial maybe, less Planet of the Apes.

OK, so that doesn't sound like a credible option to you? It was just an example, an exercise in imagination.

When I got to Manila for the rest of high school I was surprised to find some of the dominant corporations were fielding the sports teams on television, meaning the companies themselves were fielding teams, not just sponsoring them with lots of decals. 

The Royal True Orange company, which likely had a parent I'm not remembering, had a team called the Pulp Bits. Their flagship beverage featured pulp bits in case that's not obvious.

I've seen a lot of demonizing of the public-private partnership concept, on which my whole Project Renaissance was premised. By now I must have horns or something, given all the heaped scorn.

Government would get out in front with the prototyping and research, in the nonprofit sector, and the donor funders would turn around and profit from the derivative products. Put that way, I'm guessing many readers will think "well, that's hardly a new idea". Exactly right. The military uses it today.

I was gratified to see Bonnie making so much room for fat pipes between our school of thought (Bucky Fuller informed) and the General Systems Theory literature (GST). I've been milking that connection myself, as some of you know, but it's always heartening to find others who appreciate the continuity here, while roping in Gregory Bateson in the process.

Cultish Thinking

Hollywood East is trying to figure out a screenplay whereby the White House might be seen as taking heroic action in some way, against an advertised foe. 

However the think tanks are at odds and firing at one another, adding to the sense of semi-paralysis that bedevils District "comic strips" these days. Very little consent has been manufactured, that driving the Pentagon over a cliff would be the best thing.

Of course my contemporary readers are well aware of world circumstances and will readily fill in the blanks. West Asia as we're now calling it has turned to jello, such that strict borders seem to no longer persist, such as between Jordan and Syria and Iraq in some places. I've heard the joke about "messy potamia" (not necessarily funny in every context).

You'll remember, if reading in my journals, that I could imagine some Palestinians voluntarily choosing, say at the extended family or neighborhood level, to escape the mayhem for now, and I wasn't restricting their options to elsewhere in West Asia. I well recall how hard it was for Jews during the holocaust to find safe refuge far away from Berlin.

That made me a minority thinker, as evacuation (removing from harm's way) was not a priority. No one wanted my cruise ship flotilla (I was imagining like a rotating convoy, not really knowing in advance how many Gazans would opt to dispatch).

The civilian viewers of channeled media are getting a front row look at what happens when diplomacy breaks down among players. I'm not on the phone with the District either. This is faraway Portland, lightyears distant. I'm more likely to be talking with Canadians these days (a hotbed of the kind of free thinking mixed with geometry I find attractive).

We all know what various characters in that soap opera want to do. If we're free of "just cable" and tuning in YouTubes, we're aware of a wider cast than just the ones the cable cabal puts on. I bounce around watching some of the VIPS crew, often as talking heads on others' programs.