Trip Planning

remembering today

I'm posting through Verizon rather than CenturyLink this evening, the latter being my primary provider. The hardware is not the issue, in other words there's no physical disconnect in the optical fiber, just routing issues above my paygrade as the say. I've never worked for the telephone company. CenturyLink used to be USWEST.

Anyway, with that out of the way, let's talk about trips, by various modes. Plane, truck, car... by foot. 

As some of y'all might have seen, I blog about these "inter-modal" trips I'm into, meaning I'll start out on a bicycle from my place, enjoying mostly downhill or flat paved surfaces, but then I'll switch to light rail (around Sellwood) for the trip home, bringing the bicycle on board, which the Max makes easy. Then I transfer to a bus taking me back up the hill, along SE Division.

I'm describing one of my favorite loops, which goes distantly by a famous mausoleum overlooking Oaks Bottom, a wetlands between the cliffs and the Willamette River, flowing north to meet the great Columbia. The Springwater Corridor, bicycle and pedestrian friendly, hugs the river, whereas said mausoleum overlooks the wetlands from high on the cliff. 

The whole area is both a wilderness and an urban setting. I'm reminded of some parts of Vilnius I wandered about in.

In the movie My Own Private Idaho I think it is (I've rented a copy in part to confirm (I was wrong)), they make it look like once you leave your Portland high school (was Wilson renamed?), you can just hop in your flashy car your parents bought you or whatever and, snap snap, you're at the beach, just like that. 

The reality of course is that the drive from Portland to the coast requires substantial commitment of time/energy, we're talking a couple hours even in a muscle car.

If you get into trip planning, by which I mean to broadly include a whole genre of websites and apps, think about altitude, and about accuracy. Does the terrain have significant drops / rises and does you app reflect that? You might be thinking "if there's a drivable road, I shouldn't have to care; cars go there" and you're right. But "intermodal" very much focuses on the pedestrian experience, which when you think about it, extends to mountain-climbing and hiking in general. Altitude matters in those cases.

And then precision. I remember David Ulmer talking about his snowmobile adventures, as an early adopter of GPS. He was a retired Tektronix executive who know the scene and had access to the latest toys. He inspires my idea of a "bizmo" quite a bit, as I've written. So it turns out this GPS he's using is off by quite a bit, let's say by meters. If you're barreling along in treacherous snowscapes, trusting your GPS... well you just might be a fool, right? 

If you're following a known track, fine, but if this is unknown-to-you territory... I'm a big fan of the buddy system, which is not a panacea but which I inherit from my days as a sports diver. If you scuba recreationally, do so with a buddy, at least one other.  It's part of the pattern language that maybe one of you can go for help (especially in mountain climbing situations, where an injury may prove immobilizing).

I probably sound like a veteran hiker, and truth to tell, I've done a lot of trail hiking, especially in my younger days, in Europe, in Bavaria. I was privileged in that way. Our whole family did the walking stick thing, with the souvenir badges, every major hike branded, like with a decal. Collect them and nail them to the front and back of your walking stick, with tiny nails. Do they still do that stuff? I have one or two old ones lying around. They're kinda withered with most the badges fallen off. They were not doubt stored in hot humid places, accelerating their decay.

These days I'm not hiking nearly so much, even though the nearby Columbia Gorge is famous for trailheads. The last major hike I took was with a scouting troupe, up Dog Mountain in the Washington side. A few had injuries and had to turn back, with chaperones, nothing serious, yet by the time we got to the top, our number had whittled away. High winds were a big part of it. As a heavier-set guy, I was probably in less fear of being blown away. The views were great. This is a relatively easy climb.

My funny story is from coming down. I had a somewhat bold descent technique where I'd use a target tree downhill from me as my stop, meaning I could gather momentum a little, then smack into the trunk, we hope not missing and plunging into some crevice or whatever. 

The funny part: I was carrying a jug of Soylent, a white fluid, for nutrition, in my backpack. At one point I slipped and fell on my back, unhurt, but crushing the jug pretty good. White fluid oozed out from me, like robot blood. I felt like that robot guy in Aliens. What a spectacle.

OK, I'm soon to sign off for the evening. I'll try CenturyLink again. 

I'm thinking of Denny Barnes of course, having attended his memorial service today. Such a wonderful family. Denny had Quaker roots and was a member of our meeting. I was the clerk of his Clearness for Membership Committee, per our Faith and Practice of the time. 

Nomenclature is known to change over time. Business meeting takes its time to season a membership recommendation. 

The applicant starts the ball rolling with a letter, typically read aloud at some point. Lots of workflows; we're talking about a subculture that goes back to the 1600s, and that experienced quite a bit of duress.

Denny came already prepared with a lot of research into his ancestry. His Quaker roots want way back, through generations. Such a pedigree is in no way a requirement for membership, but nor would we want to discourage anyone from exploring the role of Quakerism in their ancestral tree, were such to be found. 

Denny was a scholar and professional diplomat who loved to study history, so of course he'd already done an impressive amount of homework into his lineage, when we first met.

Joining the Religious Society of Friends through a Monthly Meeting is by the book, how it's done, and that's what Denny did. We continued our friendship.

exiting River View Cemetery

I'm grateful to be "living in the future" as it were. I used to think of the year 2000 as "the future" (I'd be old, like 42!) and I didn't think much about how there'd be a lot of "after" (as in after the future had already started, which it already has). I'm astonished in my own time, in a good way. Everything seems new and different, even as so much seems to stay the same. You know what I mean, right?  

Like I'm grateful to have had this much time enjoying Portland, from very early in my life, to sometime visits, to returning to live here, and we haven't had to reckon with any seismic disasters, this being the Ring of Fire as we all know. 

There's that sense of precariousness of it all that makes it all seem more precious, whereas in reality  everything is fleeting per some time scale. 

Committee Binder

I inherited a large number of 3-ring binders from Trevor, who had used them to organize the Buckminster Fuller archive he inherited from Joe Moore, and later passed on to OSU. 

I use these binders for many purposes, including to distribute to students during workshops e.g. when teaching Coding with Kids. The kids really liked getting their own binder. 

Workshop leaders and conference goers sometimes traffic in binders as well. The Centers Network used them, along with golf pencils and other standard office supplies.

Another source of binders was the Glenn Stockton archive. His story weaves through my journals, in connection with his Global Matrix and Institute for Integral Design "blueprints" (i.e. research). I inherited some of his archive after he passed away.

That's Glenn from Glen Canyon, Arizona (and other places before that), who was deployed as a code cracker in Vietnam and later joined Antioch and its school without walls (similar to the Union Institute that Nick Consoletti attended, in terms of hybridizing academics with real world experience).

Excerpt from Cascadian Synergetics

link to full video at the end

HB2U RBF

I take a lot of inspiration from this brave philosopher.  Some detractors imagined he talked so much about integrity, staging Integrity Days and so on, because he was suffering from self doubt. 

I’d say it’s a bigger Self that’s in its final exam period and Fuller hoped this Self (the Self of humanity) would have the integrity to keep reprogramming and improving itself, including by taking advantage of whatever insights we were gaining through Fuller, which were mathematical in nature, not simply architectural.

Along those lines, Koski and I have been looking at the S3 + S6 = Regtet volume formula, which is our shorthand for the Synergetics S module amplified by the golden mean. S3 = S volume times phi to the third power (with each edge extended linearly by phi). S6 = S volume times phi to the sixth power, the same as S3 bumped up by phi once again. 

What if we wanted to model these as apex + frustum, two pieces of a tetrahedron?

If S3 is the apex volume, the slice is around 0.57588, meaning all edges of the apex tet have that length, the 3rd root of S3. If S6 is the apex volume, the slice is at around 0.931792. The Regtet itself has unit edges, so once we know where to slice, we know the frustum’s edge lengths as well.

Remember, we always work in tetravolumes. If your math curriculum had a modicum of integrity, you’re already quite familiar with that practice.

These floating point approximations have symbolic expressions behind them. I use sympy to keep them in memory until such time as I want a decimal number output.

Fuller received a Medal of Freedom for Synergetics and many small-S selves have taken it in. I’m fortunate to have a network of folks willing to take on faculty-level duties when it comes to sharing our subculture / ethnicity.  Even Fuller himself did not have this Koski Identity to play with.  We have continued to pick low hanging fruit.

Cascadian Economics: Querying AI

:: Union flag, Portland, Oregon ::

Just for fun, I prompted Perplexity about the prospects of Oregon vendors when it comes to escaping Prohibition, which sounds like a 1920s question, and yet it's really from 2025. Like in many states in the Union and like in some UN states such as Canada, restrictions on recreational cannabis use are minimal here, relative to those states of a more punitive nature. 

Not only is possession not a crime, but neither is vending. You're basically buying and selling a type of whiskey, a substance not to be sold or shared with minors (people below a specific age).

I notice Perplexity calls this a query, not a prompt, however the idea is the same, to get the ball rolling, to rustle the leaves, to avail of human chatter on the subject, by means of a synthesizing ML/DL bot net. Here's the prompt:

Oregon and other states within the Cascadia bioregion feature a large commercial economy around cannabis, and yet local laws disallow vendors from making use of the usual banking system, meaning customers are not allowed to use credit cards. Given the evolving BRICS payment system, might Oregon vendors look forward to offshoring their transactions to a credit card system that is more open to trade in Pacific products?

The output is relatively long-winded, as one would expect. Ordinary union citizens are expected to be good doobies and remain obedient to Prohibition laws, whereas the rich and powerful already have immunity from prosecution regarding alcohol (whiskey) or whatever consumption. 

Any encouraging of vendors, by a chatbot (aka a "chatterbox") to go around the Feds, by transacting outside the American Express / Visa / Mastercard system, presumably keeping more accounts offshore, or in crypto, would go against our expectations rather radically, which is the opposite of what LLMs are all about. 

On the other hand, LLMs are permitted a cautionary if not outright prosecutorial tone when prodded to describe activities of dubious legal status per whatever AI bias introduced through raw training data.

In the meantime, Cascadian vendors incur extra risks and live under a Sword of Damocles in being forced to the margins by legal systems and needing to buy the services of sympathetic legislators to keep their businesses in operation. Tax cuts don't really address their core situation. 

The psychological costs, not on the books, may be sensed in terms of an increasing distance between westerly and easterly power centers within North America. Prohibition laws dovetail with voter suppression strategies that many in power cannot afford to abandon and/or don't see a way to relinquish.

The former territories, such as Oregon, have a relatively shorter history as Union states and whereas bastions of various types of supremacist have taken refuge here, the sweeping majority is not in need of voter suppression as a core strategy and therefore Prohibition is seen more as a curse and an obstacle to economic growth, and less as a lid on some kind of lurking social chaos.

:: 1925: Great Gatsby published ::

Citizen Diplomacy

:: from The Portland Red Guide ::

Whereas Portland has a proud history working in cahoots with the Russians and its amazon ship captains, in defending against fascism, according to the gossip machine (chatbot), Oregon's relations with Russia are currently "strained" owing to institutional capture of the legislature by the pro NATO crowd. 

Nevertheless, this historic sister city relationship, twixt Khabarovsk and Portland, has persisted, even grown strongly in light of the world's need for citizen diplomats, crucial for restoring, or rather attaining, a new equilibrium.

Khabarovsk and Portland have the ability to share curriculum elements, both when it comes to recounting history, and when projecting forward towards a positive future.

In addition to that particular sister city relationship, I've been floating a new Portland - Mariupol sister city relationship. This proposal is more dicey given NATO is still toeing the party line by not recognizing the jurisdiction of ethnic Russians over their western borderlands. 

There's currently a war on aimed at imposing the British narrative, that those referenda (by which various oblasts were transferred, including Crimea) were null and void.

For this reason, many Oregonians would approve of a Portland - Mariupol sibling relationship only if the latter were recognized as still a Ukrainian city, meaning no border changes since the coup in Kiev in 2014 would be recognized. 

That feels like living in the past to other Americans. Borders in Europe have proved fluid and there's no reason to assume an end to all the VUCA in that region.

My suggestion is we continue the relationship with Khabarovsk and explore this new one with Mariupol, without rushing ahead to any new official declarations from the mayor's office. 

We know from AI what a declaration might look like, should the time come. 

In the meantime, the point is to encourage citizen diplomacy, not some burgeoning semi-irrelevant bureaucracy. Cascadia is already home to many native Russian speakers (the fourth largest language community by some accounts, after English, Spanish and Vietnamese), given America has been a melting pot for some hundreds of years.

Russia, like Cascadia, borders the Pacific Rim.

:: a Portlandia classic ::

Study Topics

:: yakking about this cartoon on FB ::

What are my study topics today, you might be asking, given you think of me as someone who studies, which would not be far wrong. Here's my answer: Rust, sentence similarity, science fiction.

On the topic of Rust, my focus is how best to explain it to a veteran Python user, which is something I am too. Absent the garbage collector, Python programs would pile up with garbage, but they're not allowed to, as long as the gc is turned on (which it is, by default). In Rust though, there's no room for some running program besides the one. Rust runs close to the metal, like C. Python runs atop a virtualization layer, running bytecodes of its own making, more like Java or any CLI language in the .NET environment (if you're a Microsoft speaker). That the JVM is bytecode based is what allows to be targeted by the likes of Scala and Clojure.

Regarding sentence similarity, I owe it to myself to stay in touch ML as a namespace, meaning word2vec and GloVe, meaning cosine distance in a Hilbert Space (my shorthand for linear algebra space, with its flowing tensors). So I've been diving into YouTubes showing more about that branch of NLP: measuring sentence similarity by means of a vector db. You might need to import  BERT. I watched a similar demo in Socratica, using Wolfram Language. I'm not that partisan about Python; it's the lingua franca of our day. 

Back to Rust: so, absent a garbage collector, that job is thrown back on the programmer: memory management is once again my responsibility, whereas Python largely let me forget about it, at the cost of running more slowly, with periodic garbage collection hosted by Python runtime on my program's behalf. "Python wipes your bottom" might be the anti-slogan here (true but perhaps inelegant). 

The way in which memory management becomes the coders job in Rust inherits from the C and C++ family (I haven't studied Holy C yet, but know about it). All kinds of semantics creep in involving indirection, meaning you're mostly in voyeur peeping-tom mode, lurking in without write access. Only the owner of a thing is allowed to change it, meaning the compiler keeps track of ownership before any runtime is allowed to occur. Keeping track of ownership means getting very explicit about who sees what, and how long what lives.

Another thing about Rust that Python coders will take for granted, is how hard it works to give us duck typing at higher levels. Using traits and dynamic dispatching, an object gets accepted through the proverbial door (where looming bouncers mass, where type checking happens ("show your ID")) thanks to its "having the right interface" as a Java coder might put it. Or: "you walk like a duck" (how a Pythonista might put it) -- likely not an insult, coming from a Pylady. "Our types quack" (said with pride).

What makes programs unsafe are memory glitches, wherein threads or whole processes contend for the same resource, leading to DNS suicide. 

Null pointers are the other death knell, thanks to which a program will run off a cliff, given no road ahead. 

The Rust compiler makes sure the race track has no cliffs before the drivers have to drive it. The security provided by compile-type checking is what drives the dynamic languages to reinstate "harness programming", adding stiffness. "More than enough rope to hang yourself" is what dynamic programming provides. "Use at your own risk" (the South Africa mantra, malesh if shit happens).

Science fiction: Skeleton by Ray Bradbury. I have yet to actually read the story, having just found out about it this morning. I eyeballed the PDF and found the type-font distracting. No matter: like everyone else in her brother, I'm exploring what chatbots might do. I asked Perplexity to follow-up on a TrimTabber's suggestion that I could link the two (the cartoon and the story). I found Perplexity's response plenty informative.

Copypasta from FB:

Women get cranky when the hubby implodes, likely due to mounting pressures at work, combined with a sense of overwhelm with respect to domestic responsibilities. 

Fortunately, medications developed by the latest science will help the missus calm down and come to accept hubby’s low energy state.

Ask your doctor if CalmAden [tm] is right for you.

Cascadian Synergetics: Executive Summary (June 2025)

In Memoriam: Bill Moyers

EBN EBCS

Southern Circuit