Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Fixing the G

earlier photo by K. Urner
I took a picture of the electric utility truck, hoisting a man in a bucket to fix the G on the vertical Bagdad sign. Finally they got around to it. But I forgot to actually save the picture, and besides this was just with my cell phone. So just use your imagination.

Glenn and I were across the street having coffee, me pumping the guy for Wild West imagery. The Chinese apothecary will be important.

The partnership (say Smiley Dog Ranch) gets to explore itself as a virtual reality, like a miniature WestWorld -- or choose a different motif, and define your own mappings. The point is to show assets, liabilities, net worth.

Thinking globally (me in October of 1996):
Combined with this picture of our ‘Earth-appliance’ plugged into a ‘solar wall socket’, comes a ‘global balance sheet’ of assets minus liabilities, and resulting net worth. GST builds human intelligence into the model on the assets side, with the definition of intelligence as ‘energy channeling programming.’ Just as software processed through the CPU channels electrons in their to-and-fro trajectories enroute to the ground (motherboards being fancy detours between the wall socket source -- AC converted internally to DC -- and the ground), so human intelligence exercises energy-channeling control over whatever energy units, be these currency units or other assets (props).
Given Glenn's strong Southwest background, tanking up on good imagery wasn't hard. He also talked some about the politics of optical fiber around Portland -- what we'll need to use more of, if the projected toon-like "business worlds" keep getting more Uru-like.

Once back at the office, I dove head first into more mundane forms of telecommuting, wherein the eye candy is a lot less flashy.

People who don't need a lot of frills, like a spare or austere interface, have something in common with those Morlock command liners in Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning...

I'm somewhere in between these extremes: comfortable with stark simplicity in some of my native spaces, but needing more guidance and imagery when exploring less familiar terrain.