Futurism Then and Now

Quaker Alchemy

Yes, of course I'm watching to see if humans escalate the direness of their situation, by continuing to attack themselves.  In the Gnostic tradition, a lesser god makes a boo boo, and we're it.

More seriously, there's a chaos factor in play, wherein everyone tries to spin things their way, regardless of what might eventually emerge as the facts of the matter.  Extended forensic analysis is supposedly underway, regarding the origins of these latest attacks on Aramco.

The oil wars have been going on a long time, back burner for some, life destroying for many others.

The only weapons that matter are psychological, and the best ones of all have a healing purpose.

So how are they weapons then, if their intent is to heal?

Anything that presents itself as an obstacle to the will or agenda of some agent or actor in an altercation, is likely to be considered a weapon and/or "weaponized" (as we say today), even if it's rhetorical in nature.

Put another way, if the agenda is outward war (hot), then those aiming to keep it inward (cold) might be considered weapons-wielding, even if their instruments are metaphysical (psychological).

Women healers were accused of witchcraft, for undermining the authority of those with "authorized" status (high priests, church-ordained).  The old folkways would be stamped out, if at all possible.

Physical weapons matter in their physical plane, of blood and guts, bones and muscle.  Human bodies may die in this space, but not so much ideologies.  "You can't kill the devil with a gun or a sword" say the Quakers, paraphrasing their founder George Fox.

However that's not a level at which the most sense gets made. War that holds meaning -- if that's not an oxymoron -- has a psychological side.

Transmuting war from the meaningless physical to a more meaningful level, might be considered both a calling and a skill.  Quaker alchemy?

Graphing Out Loud

The one above is the wind up.

Then comes the pitch.

Islam in Oregon

By the end of the Oregon Trail, many had shown their true colors, out of necessity, which need not mean anything bad.

By WW2, the idea of women in the workplace, including in factories, was widely accepted, but not without assistance from a propaganda barrage, explaining why such gender bending was necessary.

However Oregon's colonial pioneers had in many cases already discovered the extent to which women could manage farms, run factories, govern towns.

One may counter that I exaggerate about the power of women in the early days of Oregon Territory -- the days of calling it that (before statehood) -- and one is correct for so doing.  I'm anticipating, with the benefit of hindsight.

Rolling forward, to 2019, yesterday I was in the company of a farm-owning, science-lab-running, manager woman, one of the Wanderers.

The seeds had been planted in the culture somewhat earlier.  I was feeling proud of our ability to adapt to grow.

I could branch out here, into anthropology around indigenous cultures, exploring stereotypes.  Gender bending is not a new theme.  The way in which genders relate to one another is indeed part of the tension-compression morphology that goes on, with respect to the many stresses and strains that challenge homeostasis at every turn.

However what's on my mind is the future of the manager woman, the farm owner and tractor driver, in the namespace we call Islam.

Many women come to Oregon to start a business and gain for themselves a level of autonomy taken for granted by business owning men.  Some of these women may speak Arabic, others do not.  Some may come from local families wherein Islam has been a practice.  Others have newly adopted the Muslim faith.  Skin color varies.

I've commented on these themes before.  I suppose what triggered me this time (in a good way) was riding around with a farm-owning science lab manager, listening to her talk about her plans to get a motorcycle.

She was driving a powerful new kind of Volkswagen, hardly a Dead Header micro-bus.  She has no fear of machines or hardware.  She makes big plans for the future.  Praise Allah.

Aristotle's Kiln

Per my comment to CJ today on Facebook, in response to a thread on Martin Heidegger, and bridges to the Bucky stuff, we could take Aristotle's four causes, and integrate MH's observation that they all stick together like a single glue-ball (or glass bead):  materials, design, maker, purpose.

Make that a Tetrahedron next time.

I then thought of calling this a "kiln" in the sense of an oven or cooker, the alchemist's crucible.  We're following the "silver chalice" theme to some extent.  What pops out of the oven is thereby unconcealed, a new truth of some kind.

With modern technology comes the possibility of mass production, or mass reproducibility, which becomes our way of optimizing distribution in the coming digital age (MH was prescient).

The open source free software world (terminology) already includes a lot of baking and cooking metaphors.  We also go through iterations or versions.  Our creations evolve.  The design may be somewhat fluid, and melt with new purpose, without sacrificing all the materials.

Recycling happens.

Futzing Around

I present this as a tribute to the MacBrook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009), on which I live install mplayer using Homebrew, and run a Python script to control it, all the while recording in Camtasia.

The work I'm doing is rather inconsequential we might say, but helps orient a School of Tomorrow student in the world of laptops, with their many surfaces (or "windows" as some call them).

While mplayer compiles from source, I pip install the Python package mplayer.py, Darwin M. Bautista's work (GPL) and tweek a script already tested on Windows.  Here we're on OSX.

Although it looks like the Calculator of Tomorrow (i.e. a laptop) is all about "programming" in the coding sense, this video goes out of its way to draw attention to the "programming" going on in the TV editing sense.  

The contemporary desktop features talking heads, both synchronous and asynchronous, thanks to video and audio recording and playback capabilities, and public repos (repositories).

More Revving Engines

Observing Multitasking

We'll see if I get to show Uncle Bill around the lattice works gallery, during one of his future trips to Union Station, which is really nearby.  I'm going to suggest a Sunday schedule next time he calls, for traffic reasons.  I think everything we'd want to do, is doing business on Sunday.

In one of my recent videos, I encourage watching oneself through task switching, which continues the observer pattern as "one who watches the attention span".  I'm not saying to judge or immediately set out to redesign.  I'm only saying that "scheduling" is an important responsibility of an operating system.

When I first got to Princeton, our role, as undergrads learning to program, was to submit batches of cards through a card reader, with some JCL (job control language) to start and end the deck.  We were queuing work to be done, not immediately, but whenever the computer had time of undergrad, and grad, projects.  Other jobs had priority.

That was an IBM 360 / 370 mainframe.  I watched it through glass in the basement of the computer center, where monitors also displayed the jobs queue.  We could read in our cards from one of several locations as I recall.  I usually frequented the Equad.  I was from the other side of the C.P. Snow chasm, some might say, however I didn't mind lurking and learning.  I'd always wanted to know about computers.

Nowadays a lot of us have personal computers meaning they're not shared with others in real time.  However, we still want to run numerous apps in the foreground and background, and switch between processes.  The OS (operating system) is just as busy as if a lot of people were using it, or might be.  Single users have the capacity to be resource hogs and max out memory and CPU cycles.

Accepting the finitude of throughput is akin to trusting others to also be interested in problem solving.  I go to use FORTRAN and other languages (APL interactively, at the terminal, more like Logo) on these mainframes, but by the time I arrived at the university, the machines were already well thought out and had been through several editions.

I accepted that world without a lot of benchmarks as to the speed with which it was changing.  Looking back, I have a somewhat better appreciation for how the technology is morphing, but I'd still say my window is limited, which is more accepting of finitude, likewise an innate curiosity to discover more.

About Town

Given my Quaker ethnicity, I keep up a brave talk about how we're able to get along well enough, at least as Quakers, to not let differences in nationality or language get to us (divide us).  How true this is has to connect to my experience, if I'm not to just spout empty statistics.

I'll say about my network in Portland that I'm pretty pleased with it, but like with electricity, the flow of current is a function of the network continuing to change.  I see new polyhedrons (graphs) drifting into view.  For example, yesterday I saw myself in relationship to a native Chinese population in a new way.

On the east side, I do a lot of shopping at El Mercado, which has its own politics.  I get into that source of short stories in some of my Youtubes.  I also show a lot of slides from that location.  In the movie of my life that I'm chronicling (and directing to some extent), I have some settings to which I frequently return.  Most movies are like this, inheriting from theater.

What's my relationship to the Russians?  Johan Maurer comes to mind.  I think of the Russian River near Sebastopol, the one near the Charles Schultz airport in Santa Rosa.  I'm wearing an O'Reilly School of Technology T-shirt right now.  I'm still in touch with some of my students.  One of them was in Afghanistan.  He learned some Python from me.  Fluent in Russian.

My point is any one of us can play these games, do these exercises.  Recast your image of your own network exploring for connections to some random ethnicity, take your pick.

In my postings about CUE (Center for Urban Education), I get more into my ties to Asian-Pacific and Latino communities.  However, as I say above, a static image from a past chapter is not a source of electricity so much as is reinventing (recasting) said image.  Reinvention is still invention.

I'm not saying to throw away the past, as if you could, just respect it has momentum going forward.

Keeping Synergetics Front Burner

A Deep Dive Into Racism

The Bellingham Museum of Civil Rights sets the stage for this scenario.

My usual banter about race is the annoying cleverism "a racist is anyone who believes in races". That doesn't get me very far on some dates (just kidding).

However in my two part lecture below, plus addendum, I go for some deeper history, and no, I don't mean the story of Noah again.

We've connected racism to some related concepts: eugenics (considered as pseudo-science); and labeling more generally. Edwin Black also wrote about the evolution of database technology in connection with denying people privileges.

My addendum gets into the specifics of the "bridge" we're using across the C.P. Snow chasm.

I wrote a companion Racism: A Study Guide, as a companion Medium story for these videos.

The Genre of Synergetics

New Circuit Designs

Primordial Politics

Jounalistas Meet Pythonistas

A Twitter List by pyladies

Back from the Future

I'm taking the view, here at OSCON, that I'm visiting from the future, looking for signs that we might be choosing a smart way forward, and not choosing a dystopian future.

The movie 12 Monkeys follows this plot line.  They sent a guy into the past to figure out what went wrong.  The premise of that movie is we already knew the future, and it was dark indeed.

Currently, I'm learning about how the mega-fires in California last year were a result of grid failures.

A frequency control algorithm running on the edge (at the end user end i.e. on the client), as well as on the server side (generator) is supposed to deal with the spikes.  In short, the plan is to escape vendor lock in and go open source with the IoT smart grid.  California is allocating a lot of money to this plan.

The old grids are incapable of dealing with reverse flow energy coming from the DERs, or distributed energy resources (wind, solar...).  The challenge with these energy sources, of course, is they're highly variable, like the price of bitcoin.  The original distribution networks were never engineered to accept a lot of power from such sources.

CalTech is supposed to save us with calculus.  Open OPF, the visualizer, is going to help vectorize (spread the news of) these innovations.  You'll be able to simulate how your community would not have burned up, had this IoT smart grid been in place.

Thinking back to SimCity, I'm thinking how children and dabbler amateurs will not have easy access to these fancy tools, designed to be used by universities and national labs.  Even though Open OPF is open source, I don't expect to get it running on my laptop. Something simpler, showing how, when phase and frequency get out of whack, or whatever it is, you get heat instead of usable power, would make more of a simple game.

Simple videogames, about real world subjects, are like documentary films, a genre.  I'd say a somewhat rare genre, compared to all the fiction games we get.  Simulations are needed at every turn, such as when playing blockchain games.  That's what Ganache is all about (a tool featured in my second tutorial on Monday).

I didn't get to ask my question, which would have been whether DERs give us more opportunities to disintegrate and create self monitoring smaller grids that don't even attempt microsecond load balancing on such a huge scale.

The macro grid still exists in this scenario, but not everyone is a customer.

I was thinking back to my crude drawings of Asylum City.  I joined the lunch table where open source and cities were the focus.  I talked about my interest in the "cities from scratch" idea.  Two from our table were from Mexico City, where earthquake tremors were recently felt (same in southern California).

None of the geeks at this table had ever heard of Sophia, although once I described it they knew the topic area was "uncanny valley".

Back to the session... No one talked about how peak loads might be offset by a more global grid.  That would allow more transmission across time zones.  Of course that's a World Game meme of longstanding.

The speaker managed to suggest that Germany might be doing something wrong in piping in natural gas from Russia, but it wasn't clear to me in what sense that might be a mistake.  Some bold mayor took his town off the mega-grid, which was fragile.  Back to my question about going with smaller more easily managed grids (town sized?) in some circumstances.

Of course storage technology figures in to all this.  I think we all have the vision of a wind farm and solar panels, coupled with batteries, providing energy autonomy to a region.  If the macro grid still needed to tap in to buy power, or vice versa, this could happen, maybe.

An electric car is a battery on wheels.  Do we have the storage capacity to power a small town for several hours?  Are the batteries managed at the household level, at the town level, or both?

Some of the people after the talk went up front to talk more about the big picture.

I met Sheri Dover of PDX Code Guild.  We haven't crossed paths since OSCON 2018.

Random Post to Social Media

If we want serious change, we might want to revisit how the most positive futurist the USA once offered, through world’s fairs for starters (Afghanistan, Montreal…), commemorated by the Buckyball at EPCOT (“Spaceship Earth”), and for whom buckminsterfullerene was named, got written off as a kook and/or crackpot and/or failure by those with far fewer accomplishments or fans. How many other philosophers had that many patents to their name?

Might it have something to do with his declaring “the USA we have known” to be “bankrupt and extinct” way back in the 1980s (Grunch of Giants, St. Martins Press), and getting a Medal of Freedom around the same time (from Ronald Reagan)? He cited income inequality and the ascendancy of corporate power, talking about corporate personhood before that became popular. Covert ops and dirty wars were already replacing the constitutional authorities. What we call “the deep state” today is but the tip of the Grunch iceberg.

Does it matter he came up with new pedagogy around polyhedrons accessible to any 6th grader (and above)? No public or private school that I’m aware of deigns to share his primitive volumes table. So was he wrong then? Or was he a source of too many inconvenient truths? How about his focus on the global electrical grid, long before “we” made that be a Chinese idea (and therefore scary)? Former president Johnson was so popular in Texas precisely because he helped extend the electrical grid to rural areas.

From my point of view, we’ve let the soulless corporations he wrote so eloquently about write him out of history, or portray him as quaintly retro (e.g. The House of Tomorrow). Why was using our highest technology to mass produce something yurt-like and affordable (not talking about domes now, see Henry Ford Museum) considered less interesting than what we got instead: so-called mobile homes?

Is it too late to build cities from scratch, such as Old Man River? Was “lack of funds” ever the real problem? Doesn’t the Earth plug into the Sun?

As someone who studied philosophy at Princeton under Walter Kaufmann, who warned us of times to come (we’re in them now), I think the choice to expunge and/or besmirch one of America’s all time greatest philosophers was a huge mistake. Not a mistake; a willful desire to nip something in the bud. And “we the people” march ahead blindly, not questioning the theft of our heritage.

His message that we don’t have to make politicians be the ones in charge (check “design science revolution” in Wikipedia) is one you’re never going to hear from those who channel our frustration through all the usual circuits. When will independent journalists finally decide it’s time to connect the dots?

Cosmic Computer

In this video, I take up Bucky Fuller's notion of a "cosmic computer".  What did he mean by that, and might we find a contextualizing literature?

I'm following up on some recent videos.

Did Hard Brexit Just Happen?

The seizure of an Iranian oil tanker, bound for a non-EU country, seems enormously egregious to a lot of people, Europeans especially.  People remember when England and the USA formed alliances to relive colonial dreams of empire, pretty recently, and resent being abused as a consequence.

The warmongers in Britain may have miscalculated however, as there's no momentum for war with Iran, given the mainstream media no longer has a grip on the North American psychology.

A tiny oligarchy of dim bulbs may entertain the fantasy that owning media is their ticket to glory, but that's far from clear at this point.

What was NATO's role in all this?  The "coalition" since the invasion of Iraq under Bush 2 has been steadily shrinking.  Invading Iraq was seen as momentous and Europe had to be on board.  Attacking Iran is more the senile fantasy of nursing home candidates and their moneyed friends.  There's little patience, including in the armed forces, for dunderhead bosses.

Where does the White House come out in the wash?  Trump seems to agree with Tucker about the tapeworm infestation.  He played his usual role in the speech-making, but when there's no last minute save-the-day diplomacy opportunity, as in the case of the DPRK, he tends to lose interest.

Iran has chosen the safest course for itself:  denounce nuclear weaponry, but make clear there's no deal if the EU can't live up to its side.  The EU is calculating furiously, wondering if it needs to stay on the far right, with the warmongers.  The unilateral seizure of the supertanker may have tipped the scales.  The Brits are no longer welcome members.  They're too into reckless spazing out.

People question Trump's sanity and he's able to take the brunt, by staying outrageous.  Bolton's sanity is more tender.  They say he's heartless, but is he also mindless?  That does seem likely at the moment.  I've done some more commentary on Youtube.

I realize "hard Brexit" means something else to most people.  My angle is psychological.  The EU is now sufficiently alienated to be glad of Britain's leaving.  But where will Britain go?  The island won't budge.

Ongoing Debates