Sacred Geometry (School of Tomorrow)

American Pop (movie review)

Talking to Perplexity about American Pop

A Dreamy Day

So if I’m off the glucose meter for good eating habits, why am I drinking straight glucose, 8 grams per can?  Subculture Ginger Beer. What a find. I’m talking about the can, but the content ain’t bad either. I might be a convert. It’s non-alcoholic, for those who don’t know.

Today was MLK Day, and I was exulting about cults in my journal entry, the day before, saying they (the subcultures) should showcase how to get along, echoing the Parliament of World Religions vibe (Cape Town, 1999, Urners present). 

We all got along fine there, even if a few protestors sounded alarmed outside, suspicious that we weren’t at each others’ throats, like their role models.

My work as a World Game photographer took me to one of the protests, a smaller one as I’m boycotting the ICE part of town (no Old Spaghetti Factory for yours truly with gangs like that) and because my friends were among the organizers. 

I’m talking about a tiny protest featuring die-hard oldsters, outside their campus, some of whom I know.

In the middle of it all, I bopped into Thai Kitchen, which I’d been curious about, for some Tom Yum. I had my man purse handy (as did one of the monks), and had the new bio of David Bowie along for bus reading. I plan to pass it along to fellow faculty (we have Bowie fans in our network, other dark stars).

My subculture is really into geometry, which explains a lot.

Mom and dad were living in Lesotho at the time (1999) and that’s where we went after the Parliament, experiencing New Years and the first day of 2000 in Maseru. 

Dawn and I had flown with Tara from Miami and then Dawn went on by herself to Durban to experience a Dalai Lama training. She rejoined us at the home of the Deputy Defense Minister, a Friend (as in Quaker), formerly ANC: Nozizwe Madlala-Rutledge, also a family friend. 

Psychoanalyzing Pythonistas

By some principle or other, the computer languages one learns have a bleed-through effect on one’s psychology. Now that Python is so prevalent, we might as well study its effect on humans, psychologically, meaning psychoanalysis is apropos.

Implicitly, everything has a self in Python, because everything is an object and objects usually have a way to talk about themselves, to themselves, internally, by means of a “self” moniker (a placeholder, not a keyword). They don’t need the usual pronouns the way humans do, as they’re all “its” (keep it simple). We’re free to add attributes (such as gender), either to the “private bag” (self.__dict__) or to the type itself (class.__dict__).

The self, however, is a clone or more accurately “an instantiation” of some “archetype” (we just say “type” in software engineering), so that when we know the type or types of something (multiple inheritance is allowed), we already have a good idea of how it behaves. 

The duck type objects all behave like ducks and so on.

What we learn about these selves is they depend on others to keep them alive. If no other needs them (by keeping at least a token, soft linking somehow) then why waste memory on entities no one will resurrect? That’s when garbage collection kicks in, when a self’s reference count reaches zero.

This “self only because of others” philosophy is very consistent with the Buddhist model, so lets say Python, in terms of psychology, qualifies as Zen-like, Zen being a psych discipline, a technology, not a belief system in the Protestant sense, unless we count Quakers as Protestants.

This type of psychoanalysis will only flower if other languages are subjected to the same treatment, and insights are gleaned. 

Java and Python are close relatives, however the former has placeholder APIs called interfaces when multiple inheritance is called for. In general, Java is a more bureaucratically well-endowed language, not as spare or sparse as the original Python, which is advancing faster in terms of 3rd party packages than in its core grammar, which has more or less settled down (more than JavaScript’s, although maybe JS is finally seeing its end-of-tunnel light?).

In 3rd party world (beyond the Standard Library), Python has a reputation for being general and all-purpose and therefore suitable for web development and data science, astronomy, molecular biology, artificial intelligence (ala natural language processing) and so on. 

What the Pythonista brings to each discipline is a common mindset, based on these entity-selves of various types, keeping each other alive as long as there’s still work to be done.

AI for Janitors

The kind of course I’d lead in recent times, for adults (or I suppose precocious youngsters bored with the conventional curriculum for their age), was what you might call “AI for janitors”. By that I mean we’d learn the data harvesting and clean up steps prior to siccing one of the divinatators on it. By “divinator” I mean “one that divines” by means of specific algorithms we’d pull up inside of sci-kit learn (sklearn). 

Divinators: random forest, K nearest neighbors, support vectors (multidimensional, hyper), and of course whatever deep or shallow neural nets. But these data devouring beasts require “clean” food, meaning you’re better off not feeding them raw data. There’s a lot of “food prep” that needs to go on, and that’s where I’d come in with my Jupyter Notebooks and so on.

However, going back to Pythonic basics (Pythonica), I’m not averse to barking up a different branch, meaning SQL roots might take you towards website development (back end mostly still, if using Python), which involves entirely different skill sets in many cases, or at least until recently. 

I’m showing this “river delta” or “tree” pattern above, which is how entropy fans out and burns calories, to paraphrase Adrian Bejan. Up the left side (house left) we see the web developer namespaces, such as Django (named for the gypsy) and Flask. Up the right side: data science, which was numpy + pandas in my day and age.

What’s happening more recently is data visualization world is colliding with web-displayed dashboard world (remember the Johns Hopkins dash during covid?), so you end up learning HTML / CSS either way, and the JavaScript DOM. JS tends to be less about data science and more about web development, whereas Python frequents both sides of that membrane.

I’m not saying you can’t do data science in JavaScript, and with my Jupyter Notebook solution (the solution I favor, I’m not a developer on that project) we have JS built right in, to use in combo with our Python kernel.

Am I leading such an “AI for janitors” course today? Nope. I’m barking up the web developer side focusing on Flask, in a demo for my Supermarket Mathematics. In the meantime, we study Fred Meyer (the local Krogers) from an intellectual historical point of view. Meyer Memorial Trust is a former client of mine actually, although I haven’t gotten into the FreeGeek chapter yet, in my Winter Term chronology. 

Diving Into Supermarket Math

I’m back to building out my school’s curriculum in the Supermarket Math domain. That’s one of four domains in my Silicon Forest Digital Maths: Supermarket (logistics), Casino (risk, prediction), Neolithic (retro), Martian (futuristic). These are purposely broad-brush-stroke typical areas with lots of overlap and nebulous boundaries.

Supermarket Math includes everything from pumping gas to pushing a shopping cart to driving a truck or working in construction / demolition. Or maybe you’re in healthcare or fashion, entertainment (some kinda showbiz). The everyday economy in other words, chugging along into the future: in the direction of Martian Math, with Neolithic Math receding in the rear view mirror, yet laced with core principles.

These days, a “shopping cart” could be virtual, meaning metaphorical next to a literal shopping cart in a literal supermarket. Virtual shopping carts get built into websites. Browsers go around picking and choosing, like they do in a supermarket, and then check out at the end, paying for everything all at once.

So how does a website work? 

We expect it’s facing browsers using HTML and CSS, whereas on the back end it’s talking to some database. The LAMP architecture is still there: OS-host; web-server; database; application. We can map that to Linux, Apache, MySQL, a language starting with the letter P (Perl, PHP, Python) but that dates us.

Where I’m currently building out is at my Pythonanywhere site, hosted by Anaconda, likewise the source of my Python distribution, packed out with 3rd party tools, such as one of my favorite IDEs (Spyder) and Notebook environments (Jupyter with a Python kernel).

Today I expanded the locally hosted version of that website with a fourth SQLite database: airports of the world. I’m not saying it’s a complete list. Gaza’s might be missing. The three already on tap: Elements (as in Periodic Table); Shapes (as in Polyhedra); Glossary (of geek terms). 

I’ve used airports.db quite a lot through the notebooks, like when teaching for both Saisoft and Clarusway, but I’d yet to add it to the Pythonanywhere website, likely because doing so is semi-redundant. I’m off the critical path.

Zooming out for more overview: many School of Tomorrow scholars, each embarked on a personal work-study journey, enter by the Martian Math trailhead. They’re attracted to this futuristic, esoteric wrapper around a 20th century magnum opus, the two-volume Synergetics (not to be confused with Dianetics). 

But Martian Math is number crunchy digital, as well as rewarding to the dexterous. A programming language is not out of place, and it doesn’t have to start with P, even though for me it often does.

Once you’re through that Platonics portal, a Genesis story, you’re in our playground, our sandbox. That does not require forsaking computation, or developing those muscles newly.

By “Platonics portal” I mean something like what gets covered in the segment on our 20th century Cascadian businessman Fred Meyer. The Asylum District store in the Fred Meyer chain has Martian merch on its 2nd floor. How come? What keeps Portland so weird? 

The five Platonic Polyhedra are in the foreground in our narrative, but with the argument that maybe there’re really six. How could that be? Because in our Genesis story the Platonic polyhedrons come as three dual pairs, which in turn beget the rhombohedrons by combining them together.

• Tetrahedron + Inverse Tetrahedron = Cube (a rhombohedron, as squares are likewise rhombuses).
• Cube + Octahedron = Rhombic Dodecahedron (the RD; 12 diamond faces)
• Icosahedron + Pentagonal Dodecahedron (PD) = Rhombic Triacontahedron (RT; 30 diamond faces)

And then the dual of the RD: the cuboctahedron, which is close in meaning to what in Martian Math we call the VE, introducing the alien Synergetics terminology.

I put a first installment of my curriculum tutorial on Medium, advertising and promoting it through my LinkedIn profile. This initial reading is about getting stuff installed and becoming familiar with the workflows. 

Develop locally and test, only pushing to the cloud (GitHub) when you think the website is actually ready to be load bearing. 

I’m using Flask as my web framework, plus those four SQLite databases. It’s a minimalist website, yet involves using a templating language: Jinja2.

I’ve yet to make a next YouTube about this project, but when I get to it I’ll be sure to advertise O’Reilly as worth subscribing to as a kind of community supported library, versus stockpiling physical wood-pulp books in everyone’s home office. That company has everything neatly organized.

In Memoriam: Bill Lightfoot

committal ceremony + pancake house gathering of family

Revolution By Design

A common refrain, among those familiar with the Fuller corpus, is that his reputation for being a good prognosticator was overblown, as he kept saying that it’d only take ten years, of his Design Science Revolution, and we’d all be living like billionaires. 

Obviously, that never happened, right? 

Many decades have gone by and we still live in a dump of our own making.

True enough:  the DSR never happened, nor did Fuller ever promise it would. 

It’s not like humanity ever woke up to its option and whole-heartedly and self-consciously went for it, like some did around putting a man on the moon. Fuller did invoke the Apollo Project in Critical Path, as what a design science revolution would look like, but with Spaceship Earth at its center rather than its satellite (or Mars). 

But again, we never woke up to that degree and continued committing resources towards Armageddon.

In my narrative, the Open Source Revolution (OSR) was in alignment with a DSR, in terms of both philosophy and methodology. Thanks to engineers willing to step into the role of lawyers, to codify copyleft and Creative Commons, living standards did improve. 

Even the original PC revolution may be attributed to people remaining free and open about their work, dodging the suffocating practices of intellectual property lawyers. The next revolution was sparked by the GNU community enabling Linux, when “dodging” was replaced with outright resistance. 

How about the billions of billionaires? How could that ever happen? 

A closer reading of Fuller reveals what he meant: the King of England in 1492 never had an iPhone or anesthetics, let alone cardiologists of today’s caliber. Money couldn’t buy what did not yet exist. 

Fuller is measuring by an absolute scale, not a relative one. 

Every sailor on a first class navy ship is in a sense a billionaire relative to sailors crewing wooden warships in the 1400s. Submarines improved a lot too. 

A middle class lifestyle today, one involving jet travel, healthcare, telecommunications, potentially far exceeds in quality that of a noble or lord just a few generations back. 

Which isn’t to say one can’t be miserable regardless of one’s physical circumstances. Fuller is accused of going for a “tech fix” for everything, whereas our issues are deeply spiritual. “Solve too many problems and we’d all die of boredom” — one hears that point of view expressed. 

Would that boredom could be our major problem; we’d learn what’s most interesting to think and do. Solving problems does not stop the flow of novel problems. Life will always remain problematic, is my prediction, regardless of how many goals we achieve. But is that really a problem?

Today, we’re all impoverished by living on a ghetto planet that still experiences hellishly high opportunity costs, per our oft-cited GST diagram of the situation. 

Everyone’s life would be better if it wasn’t against a backdrop of mass starvation, mass bombardment, mass disease. 

Poverty impoverishes us collectively, gated communities and limos with darkened windows notwithstanding. That’s why the myth of “richest country in the world” rings hollow, as the inequalities, the disparities, characterize our collective identity. Let’s just say there’s ample room for improvement.

Got Milk?

Greater Philadelphia Meetup (Xmas Eve, 2025)

J. Bullock is doing a great job anchoring Comprehensivist Wednesdays, originally anchored by CJ. 

CJ (Chris Fearnley) was one of the original World Gamers (if I may be permitted that shorthand), a cofounder of the Synergetics Collaborative, and the original compiler of the Fuller FAQ, when the web was still new. I'd visit CJ in Greater Philly, both when I lived nearby in Cosmopolis (Northeast Corridor megalopolis, with Philadelphia a center of gravity), and when NPYM (regional Quakers) flew me to Friends Center for AFSC summit meetups. I didn't skip out on my AFSC functions but would have enough time off to hookup with my designer chums, Kiyoshi also.

Twas my privilege this Christmas Eve to join Bullock and company in a continuing drill-down into the many finepoint distinctions we might want to make, between say "reasoning and understanding" (above the line) versus simply optimizing for predictability ala LLMs (below the line). Several of us engaged with his model, already clearly worked out. Like Shrikant, Joe is into diagrammed heuristics, and that works well given our medium (recorded synchronous Zoom meetup).

I thought the funniest part of the meetup was when the PowerPoint creative confessed to using old fashioned cut and paste techniques, but telling the client this was AI, because the client wanted AI irrespective of the aesthetic impact, which might've been subpar had one of the AI solutions actually been used.

I think what Glenn Stockton found mystifying, and also maddening, was how academics seemed so hell-bent on disagreeing, seemingly only for the sake of being disagreeable. Growing up in the military, but later Antioch (a university without walls), his disposition was to make allies and even friends, and not engage in any aspect of mutual tearing down; that's what one does with an enemy.

My take, coming from videos on digestive juices (I like to study metabolics), is some folks "digest" another's thinking much the way a digestive tract would: by secreting corrosive acids and other chemicals good a breaking something down, because at some level "understanding" is achieved by "eating" (incorporation) which is the opposite of "just leaving it alone".

I'll cop to being "digestive" in my approach to most philosophies simply as a consequence of my "no globals" approach, meaning I test to see if the system has pretensions to ruling the world (most don't). Like in the chat, I invoked my hero Ludwig Wittgenstein again:

2025-12-24 18:54:51 From Kirby Urner to Everyone:

A favorite quote of mine, from Philosophical Investigations (L. Wittgenstein):

We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential, in our investigation, resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, proof, truth, experience, and so on. This order is a super-order between — so to speak—concepts. Whereas, of course if the words “language”, “experience”, “world”, have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words “table”, “lamp”, “door”. (#97)

D LJ:👍🏼

And then later, further down:

2025-12-24 19:51:38 From Kirby Urner to Everyone:

Hinton’s use of high dimensional geometry does not imply people think geometrically i.e. conceive of thinking in geometric terms. LLMs process mathematically in ways we might characterize as geometric.

2025-12-24 19:52:20 From Kirby Urner to Everyone:

Agreement on what all these terms mean: understanding, intelligence, reason, is always going to be limited, as these are token we compute with, not fixed stars in anyone’s private sky.

D LJ:👍🏼

Yeah, typo, shoulda been "tokens" (plural). 

My point being: we can't simultaneously all agree on what all these key terms mean and keep computing with them (an ongoing computation) at the same time. We're coming to terms with our terms, always. They're not a means to an end so much as our continually adaptive framework.

That being said, I do think it obvious that standardization and agreement within and even among networks (schools, professions, subcultures) is possible and I understand the frustration when people want to pointlessly frustrate the task. 

But maybe they're just helping us hammer it out more, in light of feedback? 

That's the attitude Joe takes, and it works. He's learning from whatever pushback he's getting. This won't deter him from continuing to add value to his theory, model or system. That's a good attitude for a group discussion leader and moderator. He's an eager consumer of whatever we have to contribute, which invites participation. 

Having a lot of regulars helps too of course. When a meetup is all strangers (to one another), there's a kind of ice-breaking that needs to occur, whereas if the meetup centers around some well-established core dynamics, then it's more a matter of breaking in to something structured, which is often a lot easier, not to mention more efficient, than starting over from scratch every time.

slide by Joe Bullock

slide by Kirby Urner