Driverless Cars and Automation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider the Parallels

[copied from Facebook]

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Classic Bucky

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

Breakaway Republics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic Contrarians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Birthday to Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talk of the Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I, Robot

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

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

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

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

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

I admire diplomats trying to wrestle with the beast.

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

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

Base Housing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easter Sunday 2022

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

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

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

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

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

Advancing the Frontiers

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

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

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

World Game Planning

 

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

from Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-2.0 license

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

from the GENI website

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

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

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

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

Disambiguating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

St. Patrick's Day 2022

I had a good class today. 

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

I gave them all top grades.

Now it's time for Spring Break.

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

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

Synergetic Andragogy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Letter Land

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

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

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

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

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

Loving Guinness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geometric IQ

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Movies

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

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

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

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

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

We talk a lot about Bucky on my Youtube channel.