Puzzle Pieces

Our family uses the jigsaw puzzle as a source of memes, which I don't suppose is unusual. Many families gather around such a puzzle at family gatherings, ours no exception, even if we’re exceptional in other ways.

The memorial service for Phil Wikelund at Reed College was a well-attended who’s who of a now mature cohort who went through life with Phil, a hub figure in the Pacific Northwest, through his sharp intellect and devotion to helping people pursue their own interests. One podium speaker suggested “edgy but kind” and guessed he typified a specific Scandinavian temperament bespeaking hardship getting to the far west.

Phil owned Great Northwest Books, where Trevor Blake once worked, then near Powells, and getting started on his combined career of bookseller publisher and appraiser. Trevor does the whole pipeline. I just bought his newest book, Does Not Equal. 

I’ve linked to a Perplexity prompt for more of the story regarding Phil. My focus here is to pass along puzzle pieces I’m in a position to provide, not to assemble the whole picture in one blog post.

In driving Don Wardwell to and from his Mt. Tabor campus, and from talking with the other guests at the reception, I was prompted to reminisce about Anthology Books which had been adjacent to the Linus Pauling House on Hawthorne, in that same building, set further back from the street, wherein Adorn, the body art studio, is installed today. 

Gary Wilkie owned and ran Anthology Books and had one of the most interesting privately owned for-sale book collections I’d ever seen, which is saying a lot given the competition (Portland is a bookstore town). I bought some obscure Quaker books, like the published journal of a Quaker opera singer around Philadelphia.  

Gary later redesigned his business making it almost purely online. I got invited to a party at Gary’s place once, quite the fun crowd.

Patrick Barton, whom I talked with later, in Fred Meyer (we crossed paths by chance), mentioned he’d helped out with cleanup in the aftermath of the fire, which consumed Great Northwest Books once it had moved into what used to be called Area One, an urban renewal zone in an earlier chapter, wherein Portland was being pulled in a more Robert Moses like direction.

The fire that took Great Northwest Books reminds me of the one which consumed the photography store and studio in the Bay Area, in which a first collection of Columbia Gorge photographs had been collected by their creator.

Phil’s closest friends and family gave us great insights into Phil’s character. As one of about four Wanderers present, counting Lew Frederick, who spoke from the podium, myself, Ron and Don, we know Phil and Gloria from retreats and a few meetups. 

Ron, from the Reed College matrix, knew Phil way better than the rest of us. I was not in close orbit around Phil, but that just means I have a more zoomed out view, now much clarified thanks to a life well-lived. I’ll hope to see Ron and Don again soon as Wanderers will be gathering per our usual schedule.

Reed College was being its usual peaceful self amidst the horrors of our time. This was when the nation-state minded seemed to snap, or however we tell it (I’m self-admittedly esoteric) and all hell broke out in one of the messiest areas (messiest as in “into messiahs n stuff like that” if I may be allowed a pun).

Happy Pi Day while I’m thinking about it, just past. I did my part to celebrate, which doesn’t mean I can’t do Tau Day as well (what some wish to call two pi). Happy St. Patrick’s Day today. I’m also remembering Dawn Wicca, my late wife and life adventure companion.

Geometry for GenZers

https://groups.io/g/synergeo/topic/118308284

Cascadian Synergetica: The Early Days

On Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 10:09 AM 4D Solutions wrote:

Hi Jim --

I hope you and/or rybo will post summaries of your findings from Lehmanville per your new geometry group. Adderley also has a group with overlapping membership; I've not heard from him lately (he's in Australia, well remembers the heyday when we started up a Synergetics subculture in Cascadia, in Seattle, distinct from the SNEC operation, with its own funding / sponsors).

While on this topic, of booting our Synergetica subculture in Cascadia, the theme of our meetup was Elastic Interval Geometry for the most part, as both Gerald de Jong and Alan Ferguson were present, coders of Struck and Springdance respectively.

Tim Tyler also did an EIG implementation named Springie (he wasn't at this meeting though).

Russ Chu was the main organizer, the same dude who organized the founding of SNEC at that rented house in Washington DC I was mentioning, where Bob Gray, Ed Applewhite, Joe Clinton, CJ, and Yasushi Kajikawa were among those present.

For this earlier meetup, we met at Russ's Seattle house (he would move to DC temporarily in a future chapter, a move having to do with Deb's career). He was by then married to Deb Kasman and they had two kids: Liana and Daniel.

The time frame of our Seattle meetup is pretty easy to triangulate in that Gerald was in the Bay Area for a JavaOne, a kickoff of the new Java language, after which he came by train to Cascadia, and also: the cult named Heaven's Gate had just drunk the kool-aid, the appearance of the comet Hale-Bopp being their X-Day type event (some kind of abduction).

I recall Ed Applewhite phoning me while our meeting was ongoing and joking "they got the wrong Applewhite" or something funny like that (he was a bit of a joker). So this was 1997 I'm thinking.

Gerald went on after coding Struck in Java to developing Darwin@Home and then Pretenst, eventually abandoning Java in favor of Rust, which compiles to WebAssembly or something along those lines.

Alan and Karl Erickson were "lost to followup" eventually (shoptalk from my outcomes research days at CUE / CORE), meaning I lost touch with both of them. Jon Braley passed away.

These were long distance friends of Peter Adderley and he hoped I could help him re-establish contact, but I wasn't able to. I have maintained contact with Russell Chu over the years as well as his ex, Deb, and saw them both not so long ago (they're on amicable terms even though they've gone their separate ways). Russ was my best man at my wedding, September 11, 1993 (near Reed College).

In terms of sponsors and donors, special mention to Sam Lanahan, inventor of Flextegrity and former collaborator with Joe Clinton. Sam also was a sidekick for Bucky himself on a trip to the Philippines. He's currently traveling abroad.

Sam helped organize another summit later, in Portland, which included Nick Consoletti, the wandering bard, steeped in lore, and in contacts, and also Trevor Blake, at that point still a Portland resident and inheritor of the Joe Moore archive, the Buckminster Fuller Virtual Institute I think he called it.

That Joe Moore archive, after being sorted and upgraded by Trevor (a professional archivist), ended up at OSU in Salem, where Linus and Ava Helen Pauling's papers are also housed.

Friday in Hillsdale

I got to hang out with Bradford again yesterday, and return the L. Gordon Plummer book mentioned in the above video, to the Theosophical Society Library. I made sure they knew about this video, as they're included therein, as is Bradford.

Bradford gave me more of a picture of his network. Given we've both been receptive to the Bucky stuff (many if not most are not) we unsurprisingly know or knew many of the same people. 

I told him about the one time I met Bob Gray in person, in Washington DC, at the founding of SNEC (later renamed to Synergetics Collaborative). Yes, Bradford knew who CJ Fearnley was (another friend of Bob's, and mine). Applewhite was there at the SNEC summit, as was Yasushi Kajikawa of Scientific American fame (Japan edition).

Given the pre-emptive attack by President Rubio, of the District, against the Middle East, I was naturally effusive in my distrust and dislike for the Beltway Mafia, entangled with the Las Vegas Mafia historically and contemporaneously. 

DC and LV have a lot of shared personnel and similar mindsets. I understand why Canadians are leery of both (tourism is way down). DC has a bright future as a tourist town, even if we no longer take it seriously as a seat of government, outside being an important part of the Northeast Corridor (Cosmopolis or Gotham). The DC-NYC line, with Princeton in the middle, has long been a part of my consciousness. 

I'd visit CJ in Philly, by train when I lived on the east coast, but also by plane, when NPYM (a west coast Yearly Meeting, RSF) was paying my way to AFSC corporation meetings.

Fortunately for our collective sanity, PDX in Cascadia is not a co-belligerent with the District (or LV) and has its own way of coping with the post-USA neoRoman fascists trying to dominate the world these days i.e. we have the Portland Frogs etcetera (meaning we use a lot of satire and ridicule, other forms of propaganda).

As a veteran of Portland Occupy and Food Not Bombs, I've never been an allie of the neoRomans and their rackets (as Smedley Butler called 'em). I think both Dulles brothers were imperialist fools, as was General MacArthur. These men are not heroes in my version of history.

The Scarlett Pimpernel (movie review)

This was the 1982 version; I hear there’s another one. I’d have to say it’s an early spy story, set after the American Revolution set off the one in France (per some tellings), and wherein the “Bond” character is quite effete, a dancer-prancer type, a flaneur, a fop. But it’s all an affectation (a disguise) as in reality he’s fighting bravely for the crown, against depraved terrorists.

The terrorists in this case are the scary hoi polloi, a Pol Pot style mob some might say, chopping the heads off anyone with eyeglasses or who otherwise looks like they can read or, worse (code): dance the minuet and other courtly numbers. People of culture in other words, not riffraff.

“Chop chop” goes the guillotine, and the crowd roars its approval, “Off with their heads!”.

Our movie audience (the spectators, those for whom this spectacle was made) should be feeling revulsion and disgust by now, mixed with righteous outrage. How is this “Enlightenment” in any meaningful sense? It all seems so cheap and tawdry.

Countering all this madness is the Scarlett Pimpernel, who / which understands the necessity of a strong monarchy to prevent just these kinds of mental illness from spreading virally. 

The SP is somewhat a Society, a peer group (think Three Musketeers) but also is lead by our hero, the faux dandy, so “fake n gay” to sound like Candace.

It’s obviously a spy movie because it’s all about betrayal, defections, switching sides, or at least appearing to, or… unless you’re quite dedicated to puzzling it all out (cut to snoring on the couch) there’s no way to be much besides confused. 

And the disguises, let’s not forget the disguises.

We’re always wondering if SP is sincere in his love for his lady love, as in the first chapter of their relationship he uses their romantic picnic together as another occasion to smuggle another aristocrat out of the looney bin (where the patients now run the show). So he’s using her as a human shield of some kind?

No, he sees her as fighting the same oppressor. At first that is. Then he has reason to doubt. Then he has reason to have faith again. See what I mean? He has his ups and downs. She, meanwhile, is trying to fathom his calculus and is likewise doubtful of his integrity.

Anyway, there’s a superhero superpower coloring to the whole thing, which is of course intentional as that’s what fiction is all about doing, usually:  creating larger-than-life characters who swashbuckle their way through all kinds of obstacle courses in unlikely, sometimes oddball, ways.

Spring Term

I started pitching my Spring Term, given it's March 1 already, the Equinox coming on the 20th.

For those new here, we're talking School of Tomorrow, an umbrella term for a buncha sigs (special interest groups; like edu-sig), study groups, asynchronous threads, Github pages and so on. They criss-cross every which way ala that "Spherical Pinball Machine" I like to go on about.

The right margin here has a lotta links to related social media, where I commit some of my writings. I was always cut out for hypertext, which is why I'm not as popular among print only bookstore types, although you'll find me in acknowledgments (a Historical Dictionary of Wittgenstein's Philosophy by Duncan Richter; Bucky Works by J. Baldwin, which front matter typically nobody reads).

Monster U Strikes Out

We woke up to the dreaded news of Monster U outta control again. 

I’m seeing Biden and Trump were human shields, too senile to really take the heat for the dummy beginner mistakes made by presidents Blinken and Rubio respectively. I’ll do more satire some other time.  

Grok completely rewrote my prompt.

What Grok wrote (based on my initial input):

A cinematic movie theater screen displaying the iconic final scene from Thelma & Louise: a 1991 Ford Thunderbird convertible driven by Benjamin Netanyahu as Thelma and Marco Rubio as Louise, both in character as the heroic women, plunging off the edge of the Grand Canyon cliff into the abyss in a dramatic leap of defiance, dust and sunlight streaming dramatically, wide shot of the car mid-air against the vast canyon, the scene framed as a large movie screen in a dark theater with faint audience silhouettes, humorous and satirical political comedy style

Try it yourself?  I’m outta tokens.  Not everyone uses Grok, I realize, but at free tier I’ve found it generous with how many freebies it lets me choose from.

From my outbox:

From my angle both Biden and Trump were way too burned out to be key decision makers.  They're just human shields, these senile presidents.

What I see is Secretary Blinken, and now Secretary Rubio (doubling as NSC chief) arrogating "superpowers" (extraordinary authority, as in extra judicial) in the background, aggressing against Russia and Iran respectively, and losing big time because neither is the brainiac each supposes.  

Damn, vanity sure is rampant among the so-called "leadership" (snicker).

Printing Polys

See: Printing Polys (Jupyter Notebook)

Faculty Lounge Chatter

Where it looks to me Fuller was headed was towards a “geared trig” based on what he called Scheherazade numbers. With gear teeth that fine, would we ever need something finer for physics engines (models)? Instead of trailing off indefinitely, we could stay with definite terminating numbers — as we must anyway in the real world.

When it comes to visualizations on a computer screen, the threshold is pretty low i.e. there’s no way to register a difference of higher frequency than the resolution of the monitor. Under the hood though, we can carry the overhead needed to go higher precision if we need to, which is where computer algebra systems come into play.

In the world of frequencies (energy world), we come down to measurement. Even though physics formulae are redolent with pi (π), we learn in high school that the uncertainty in measurement trumps theoretical “infinite precision” i.e. no one in physics needs pi to a thousand places (unless working on a pi algorithm for some reason — I like Ramanujan’s). “Nature is not using π” is akin to saying: in a discrete quantized universe, “infinite precision” is a mirage.

When I introduce Synergetics to people, one of my first moves is to talk about “namespaces”, a concept with concrete literal meaning in the Python language, but also kind of a shorthand for “subculture” (Wittgenstein: way of life). We can identify three namespaces that use the meme “4D” as in “four dimensional”.

(1) n-D, n-dimensional linear algebra, home of E8, Leech Lattices, Machine Learning and all the rest of it, very established and highly productive.

(2) 4D as 3D + Time, owing to Einstein / Minkowski. Donald Coxeter (to whom Synergetics is dedicated) is at pains, in Regular Polytopes, to distinguish Einstein’s 4D from his own n-D 4D, the 4D of extended Euclideanism (i.e. the 4D in (1)).

(3) 4D as referring to the the four directions of the tetrahedron, the most primitive polyhedron, the “ab initio” beginning for conceptuality in prefrequency (Platonic) space (Fuller’s shoptalk).

There’s a tendency to confuse (sometimes deliberately) all these different meanings of 4D, on the assumption that math is some “universal language” whereas in reality it’s an amalgam of partially overlapping namespaces, or “language games” as Wittgenstein calls ‘em.

Assuming an IVM ball of radius R, diameter D, I think what Synergetics does that’s both easy to understand and revolutionary is we trade in the R-edged cube of unit volume (XYZ, unit cube) in favor of a D face-diagonalized cube of volume 3. The inscribed tets have volume 1. 

The payoff is the octa (same D edges) is now volume 4, and the rhombic dodeca (D long face diagonals) is volume 6. 

We get more whole numbers if we let the old R-edged cube be the “odd man out” with volume 1.06066… √(9/8). 

That’s heresy, meaning to fight against it is to merely uphold an established dogma, not to mount a rational thought-out defense (which the orthodoxy is not prepared to do). Fuller’s system has merit, there’s no way around that fact. Even if XYZ still works, as it does. 

The epithet Fuller applied to XYZ “Qyoobism” (I’m making it sound like a cult) is not “it’s wrong” but “it’s awkward” (relatively).

Blake Meets Bucky

More context