The S Factor

:: more martian math ::

Demystifying S3

Testing Grok

You'd think with this allusion to Mars ("grok" is from Stranger in a Strange Land), I'd be showing the version I made earlier, with UFOs overhead. I'll add that below. UFOs were not a part of the prompt this time, using Grok.

For context, we triangulate with Maryhill, the palace and museum built by Sam Hill and Friends on the north bank of the Columbia, before the hydro-dams went in. 

There's a Jewish element there too in that my prequel to the Sam Hill story, we join the intrepid Alan Potkin, ecologist and East Asian studies guy, war in Vietnam vet, in Burma (or Myanmar). 

From one great river we hop to another great river and pick up on the Queen of Romania's story, her visit, with entourage, by train, to help stock Sam's museum with many European treasures, that the culture might be transplanted to this fledgling democratic Republic.

The ET point of view (symbolized by UFOs) is that "from the outside" view we sometimes call "meta" as in "metaphysics", and is sometimes translated as "above" as in "aloof" but more in the sense of "overview" or "supervisory". 

When a controller of a controller enters the picture, like an underwriter of underwriters: that's sometimes Twilight Zone in flavor and potentially UFO in the somewhat X-Files sense.

Students of Martian Math (one of four zones of interest, like a "world" or "land" in a theme park) know it as a playground for the imagination, where AI text to graphics and video is certainly appropriate and cleared for takeoff. 

But then our computational geometry is not that stochastic when it comes to the so-called "cosmic hierarchy" (a terminological turn-off for many, I realize). For "our central iconic and canonical sculpture" one might call it, where "sculpture" connotes spatially geometric, not flat against a canvas.

When we get to Renaissance perspective and rendering "3D objects in 2D" (King Hilbert talk), that's a time to wire in Memory Palace ideas (from public spaces, guiding rhetoric, ala speeches in the Roman Senate) and Jesuit delegations to China. 

Two things west Eurasia was proud of: perspectival painting and memory management, these days the province of VR goggles and glasses. 

The Chinese were initially skeptical, goes the story, which is a wise response in the face of anything seriously novel, as there's always an unanticipated downside, witness opium. 

However, in the process of working through skepticism, one makes it one's own, whatever "it" is in this case. Euro culture has dispersed everywhere by this time. The old ideas, of East vs West, have less and less traction by the day. We still have diversity, but it's not so neatly compartmentalized.

Here's a UFOs version:

using imagine.art front end

Martian Math features humans and ETs working together on a hydropower project. 

Yes, science fiction. 

Once you buy the premise, you'll accept that sapiens sent some of their theologically minded, if we can call them that, to meet with these extra-terrestrials. The Sapien-ET API (two way street) is where we focus in conveying some of our geometric concepts. 

The encounter might be patterned after the aforementioned Jesuit-Chinese encounters, likewise somewhat mythologized. I'm not saying which way the analogy has to go i.e. are Jesuits more the ETs? 

I'm not trying to nail down all the hyperparameters, and I'm thankful to CJ for helping me work on this segment in the first place.

Museum Visit

I brought Don Wardwell, captain of Meliptus, Wanderer co-conspirator, to the Lanahan spread near Eugene yesterday. The parking areas were packed with pickups and other construction crew vehicles: both the patio makeover and the main house reroofing were under way.

Steffan and Barbara had extended their stay so we could overlap. Steffan and I had both been directly involved with Sam in promoting C6XTY and the Lattice Gallery in different ways. We had subsequently discussed his dream for a video recording studio (all before covid) and then lost touch. Fast forward and I discovered his dreams all came true.

Steffan is a pro prestidigitator, a stage magician slash illusionist, mostly retired. He gave us an impromptu performance as we all sat around in the trailer. The pounding on the roof by the roofers at the house, meant the destination trailer (a nice one) became the setting for out get together. Steffan did some excellent card and rope tricks.

Don got the tour of the barn, to which the trailer is adjacent, including of the main pump, out of the river for this season and mounted on blocks, and of course, the modest Flextegrity Museum with some of Sam’s souvenir latticeworks. The C6XTY lattice in copper is depicted. The property has other such sculptures on display, including one in colorized aluminum (red white and blue).

Then Don and I clambered onto the Gator, a two-seater carry-all, like a fossil fuel golf cart, and I drove us around the perimeter, including a stop where the pump is actually situated, when in service. The property is by now intensively plumbed. This would be a pretty sweet farm for someone with animals, but for now it’s more an Oregon garden slash wetland. 

But for a rented out portion and a grassland section, Sam had the entire acreage planted in wild flowers this year. The bees loved it.

The entire day was enshrouded in fog. We left Portland before daylight and returned after dark. The dogs likewise had fun.

NavAm Motif

daf + ai

Pythonic Andragogy

Roaring 20s

:: ShoeOnHead ::

Mini Summit

I'm back to the idea of a mini-summit featuring game engineers, physics engine designers, and First Person Physics, the latter being a joint project of myself and Dr. Bob.

The idea is of course didactic simulations, featuring forces, such as attractive and repulsive, in some game situation. The point of view may be first person, one it always pays to think about, and one could say is always first person, but in the context of the genre, you'll go third person just as much. We sometimes call it "god mode".

The one I always come back to is the "hexa pent" shell, what Glenn called a Global Matrix (meaning coordinate system and mapping grid), say a buckminsterfullerene broken up into hexagonal and pentagonal pieces. The fit together to form a hollow sphere, plus they attract one another. The force is akin to gravity in not having a repulsive element, as we have in the magnetosphere.

But then these are precisely the hyperparameters our players might vary, in their explorations in systems dynamics. Turn up the gravity, now add repulsion as they come into docking position, now lock them into one mass etc. These are admittedly idealizations, suggestive of how things might be in reality, but our language is that of models and modeling (simulations being of that rubric).

However, my global matrix "test pattern" simulation is only meant to be suggestive. What we're facing is the prospect of mixed-use high rises filling with game pods and students needing simulations mixed with reading programs of various types. Not every discipline communicates through game pods alone, and in fact few do, but the pods help and double as workstations.

Some of these workstations will be piloting physical devices remotely. The level of bandwidth matters, but then some robots have a lot of onboard capability and don't need to be micromanaged. Likewise drones. The pod design has the advantage of offering simulated acceleration along with other haptic feedback, which keeps pilots sensitized to their remote environments.

Schools of Tomorrow

The schools I imagine are visited by away teams, but also source away teams. It works that way in sports already, but think of a Pycon. My school sends tend peeps to a Pycon in Brazil. Another time, we're visited by Brazilians. As we were here in Portland, for that Pycon. I hosted a guest.

When an away team returns, a debriefing happens, meaning the team reports on its adventures. There's real time monitoring too though. No need to wait until the trip is over to start filing reports. The bizmo teams have their road trip reports. The travelogue as a genre is the ballpark we're aiming for.

What might an away team study? Public health policies, transportation plans, ways of providing people access to necessary infrastructure, a skill sorely lacking in many American cities. The Portland school system has dispatched several teams to Finland, thinking PPS has much to learn from how Finnish do school.

Away teams visiting a school might be studying lifestyles that work in conditions of extreme remoteness. The technology begets workflows. Lessons learned.

Free Spirits

:: gypsy nomads (ai) ::

What some of us discover about our fellow humans, which is not that surprising in retrospect, is that indoor-living, so-called, is an anathema to a percentage thereof. 

Whereas I am able to get excited by the prospect of a penthouse or simply an apartment, and have lived in several, I met fellow travelers at Occupy Portland and other places that just couldn't abide being cooped up between the four walls of anything, which doesn't mean they'd eschew all manner of shelter. They just wanted to be free of certain types of restraint.

We don't have to look far to find long-running themes behind this longing for an open sky lifestyle. The crush of cities, especially during the advent of the industrial era, was especially noxious and toxic, and the Romantics rebelled, seeking a back to nature aesthetics that resonates with us today. Although classified a Transcendentalist, a post-Romantic movement, Thoreau's lifestyle at Walden Pond set a template for "off the grid" living.

However beyond not wanting to be cooped up in a high rise or even a suburban ranch style domicile, is not wanting the encumbrances of another system's bureaucracy, where "the other" in this case comprises all those "normies" who want to play-act being members of various nation-states. Some humans take a look at that whole game and would rather opt out.  "No citizenship for me thank you" is their polite enough refusal to go along. Is it that the "right of citizenship" is actually something more mandatory than a right? A duty even? Is a person free to surrender citizenship without adopting another?

Certainly many people would love citizenship in a "real country" that gave them rights to visit other countries besides the real one. If you don't have enough documentation to cross any border whatsoever, then the game of borders will likely seem awfully onerous. You're denied citizenship and therefore even the human right to go somewhere else, where you won't be a citizen either.  Once a person reaches adulthood without citizenship in any country, it's no piece of cake to finally find one.

What the United Nations might have done is come up with a catch-all default nation that anyone could choose if falling through the cracks otherwise.  Plain Vanilla Nation (PVN) would at least provide enough documentation, e.g a passport and ID card, to merit taking out loans, buying property, booking passage. But no, that would have been too easy.

However, even with a PVN in place and/or much easier rules, a percentage of my fellow humans will prefer not to become citizens of any country. I'm thinking as a matter of human rights, their preferences should be respected. 

However, the flip side is an individual does make waves and thereby builds up karma and it's unreasonable to grant a cloak of invisibility to someone who is going to be impacting planetary history, even if only in a small way (who's to judge?). That's why we give each other names, titles, roles, credentials: to keep records and let others predict what they're getting into, if they let so and so join their ranks.  

So whereas I empathize with those wishing to escape citizenship in any nation, I'm not seeing "incognito mode" as a basic human right on the same level.  Just because we don't record your nationality doesn't mean we can't open a file and register events along your timeline.  You'll want a timeline too, for your own protection in some scenarios. You may work harder than most to not show up in files or on radars and I understand that's your preference.

Prompt: Gypsies sit around campfire, enjoying guitar. Some children are wearing VR goggles. HDTV screens glow through the windows of gypsy caravans. Moonlight. Horses.

:: ibid ::