Oregon Fever

Prompting Perplexity: Sometimes the word "fever" has a positive connotation. What can you tell me about that?

Response:

While fever is typically associated with illness, the word "fever" can indeed have positive connotations in certain contexts:

1. Excitement and enthusiasm: "Fever" can describe a state of intense excitement or enthusiasm, as in "football fever" or "election fever"[3]. This usage conveys a sense of heightened energy and passion.

2. Creative intensity: In artistic or creative contexts, a "fever dream" can refer to something wildly imaginative, surreal, or bizarrely captivating[7]. This usage suggests a positively intense or mesmerizing quality.

3. Intense focus or dedication: Phrases like "gold fever" or "spring fever" imply a strong, often positive obsession or desire for something[3].

4. Cultural phenomena: "Fever" can describe widespread, enthusiastic interest in a trend, event, or cultural phenomenon, as in "Beatlemania fever"[3].

5. Beneficial bodily response: From a medical perspective, fever can be seen as a positive defensive mechanism. It stimulates the immune system, potentially preventing the proliferation of pathogens[2].

In these contexts, "fever" metaphorically represents intensity, passion, and a heightened state of being, often with positive associations despite its primary medical meaning.

Citations:

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7717216/
[2] https://straightbamboo.com/purpose-meaning-fever/
[3] https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/fever
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Febrile
[5] https://healthmatters.wphospital.org/blogs/got-a-fever-find-out-what-it-may-mean/
[6] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2367118/
[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/p5w9kc/what_does_the_phrase_fever_dream_mean/
[8] https://www.dictionary.com/e/denotation-vs-connotation/

Hiker Paradise

That's the PR anyway ("hikers' paradise"). I've been sampling the YouTube genre of "hikes gone wrong", a lore passed along by hikers themselves as a set of cautionary tales. Sometimes they're just reminders: you can do everything right and still lose out. Taking along a device with the new "rescue me" button, which sends an sos signal over cell, is often recommended, but even one of those won't save the day in all circumstances. I think we all know this, but the details still matter.

From such cautionary tales, I'm able to feel reminded of life's lessons, which merit going over, even if one is not doing any neck-risking mountain climbing or even skiing. My Seattleite side of the family has the skiers, both on water and on snow. I managed to get somewhere with downhill skiing but haven't tried it since the 1980s after a successful run in New Jersey (I forget which mountain, maybe Eddie knows). That was back when I was a math and history teacher for a small elite academy for young ladies, and in my 20s.

One of the best hiking trips I did was backpacking into Lake Bertha with Tom Connolly. We elected to forge ahead even though hikers coming the other way said the weather was against us. What's a little rain storm? This sounds like the beginning of a cautionary tale, but we made it fine, if drenched. 

My main memory of that sojourn was the little deer eating my T-shirt off the line, like a goat might do. Damn. But it let me walk right up to it (no fear) and yank the T-shirt back out, as a little bit of it was dangling out of its mouth. I hung it up to dry without rinsing it and it turned stiff as a board thanks to deer saliva.

Lake Bertha is in Glacier Park and this was part of a longer trip involving Gutless, my Honda Civic, and our road trip to Montana. The late Tom Connally and his family (whom I'm still in touch with) hailed from Missoula. He wanted to show me his roots. We had a blast.

Yakking on Facebook (continued)

Another tie-in with Wittgenstein is that Part 2 of his posthumous Philosophical Investigations focuses on "aspect shifts" and their importance to "getting the meaning of". Like "gestalt shifts" -- with the easy example of the duckrabbit. 

It's when one is able to shift one's perceptions somehow, that it all clicks into place, and one might even say "ah hah!" or "eureka!"  

Going from "5+5=12 is nonsense" to "5+5=12 makes perfect sense -- in base 8" might be like a light going on. 

That's more likely to happen if you're already primed to know about bases and just need a little reminder from your post-Sputnik 2nd grade New Math or whatever. Or you went into computers and learned octal and hex.

But if they've not self-consciously studied "number bases" as a topic (as the Common Core recommended dropping, making Americans dummies again) then explaining the punchline is like explaining a joke. If they don't smile and chuckle right away then you face the ordeal of explaining about position notation, carrying, powering and all that (yawn). Not worth the effort maybe. Save your jokes for those who might get them (hard to know in advance).

Cubes may fill space, but if we wanna start by closest packing same-size marbles, and filling in space that way (with gaps), then the cubes lattice might not be where we want to end up. 

In going for maximum ball-to-space density (~0.74) and omni-symmetry, we end up with one ball to start, 12 around it (6 squares, 8 triangles), then bump up the frequency (between ball intervals) to 42, then again (92), then again (162) and so on: 10 * F * F + 2 where F = 1, 2, 3, 4... See HSM Coxeter's remarks to that New Yorker fact checker, verifying Bucky got it right.

Anyway, that's where we get our skeletal frame, our iconic ghost ship (cuboctahedron) adrift in the IVM ocean. Always 12 balls around 1. 42 around that... 

Said lattice is all tetrahedrons and octahedrons, of relative volume 1 to 4 (no matter how long each edge, just keep them the same) and relatively twice as many 4eyes as Richard Katrinho Rasteirinho Haileisela shows in his video, with the omni-triangulated space-filling rhombohedron of volume 1+4+1 = 6, same as the space-filling RD.

I suppose there's a chance Bucky invented "allspace" as a term, however the practice of filling space with uniform and/or complementary space-fillers, the volumetric analog of tiling a surface (without gaps), is a game played since ancient times (since Archimedes at least). Within that scope, there's the game of finding shapes that do so all by themselves, like cubes and RDs do, without need of left and right handed versions. 

Some tetrahedra do that, if not the regular ones, and Synergetics does a lot to map this territory, overlapping work by mathematicians such as Sommerville and Goldberg. 

Fuller's A & B make an AAB (left and right A plus a left or right B ) the so-called MITE (MInimum TEtrahedron), an important space-filler that ends up with no outward handedness.

Sure we can throw the door open to other iconic representations of surface and volume, beyond the square and cube. There's the hexagon. There's the sphere. 

What's true about the triangle and tetrahedron though, is they're each more minimal than their respective counterparts, nor is it clear that either might be undercut. 

In that sense, the tetrahedron makes a strong case for being primary: the simplest cage, the fewest edges to carve inside from outside (the sphere being a complex membrane relatively speaking). The tetrahedron beats the cube at its own game so to speak, with only six edges instead of twelve. Now that it's finally had a chance to strut its stuff, as unit volume, the cube feels a bit on the ropes these days. Some qyoobists are circling the wagons already.

The cube-minded orthogonalists are very much not accustomed to having their authority challenged and I enjoy seeing them get so annoyed, as they don't have a leg to stand on, if their goal is to make us go away. 

Even if I have more tolerance for imaginary "fictional" structures (prefrequency) that do no load-bearing, I'm still able to appreciate the many advantages this new brand of 4D talk brings to the table. 

It's a privilege to question the authority of the hypercross dogmatists, even from the perspective of another ghost ship captain.

Yakking on Facebook

Esteban Trev HNY ET. I studied philosophy in university with everyone saying “whaddya gonna do with that?”. They predicted I’d end up in IT, which is fairly correct, but I also kept doing philosophy as a hobby, and that ended up adding to my net worth.

Anyway, the philo guy I zoomed in on most was Ludwig Wittgenstein, wondering if you’ve grokked him. I live until the 1950s. He came out with essentially two famous philosophies with an interim in between. From a very rich Vienna based family, fought for Austria as an artilleryman, made a prisoner of war.

But he skipped out on being rich, ironically because his family put pressure on the siblings to really succeed, make a name for themselves, and since he was born into a rich family, becoming rich was not an option, as he was rich already. No fame and glory down that road for sure.

So he lived like a hermit so he could pal around with other philo guys, like Bertrand Russell, and investigate the meaning of language to its logical (or illogical as the case may be) core.

When it comes to your example of 5 + 5 = 12, his later talk was of “language games” and he’d give examples of simple games in his posthumous Philosophical Investigations (book) which overlapped his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Some guy says “slab” and another guy brings him a slab. He sketches these actions, sometimes involving color coding and lookup tables.

It’s branching off the latter philosophy that I’d bring up the game of Quadrays and the Alternative Volumes Table (AVT) that goes with.

Games as a concept come with rules, fouls, but also innovation, and maybe episodes of ambiguity, when people just aren’t in agreement on how the rules should extend in some special case situation.

Speaking of which, this will seem tangential: I’m interested in sports wherein someone does an amazing move that’s not explicitly against the rules, but then it’s banned right away after.

I learned of two such examples recently on YouTube. (1) A figure skater does an actual flip on the ice, heals over head. She lands gracefully but the sport’s judges don’t relish all the neck-breaking and cleanup that’d stem from many imitators failing, on and off camera. Similarly: (2) a long jumper dude set a record by including a flip in mid air. Wow. Banned. Same reasons I imagine.

A lot of people aren’t familiar with what a contrarian Cantor was. I’ve read some of his original stuff and found out he took on our notion that “space is three dimensional” big time. If you ever allow your space to be both finite and discrete for some reason, i.e. let infinity drain away, then Cantor will say: hey, I can visit all your points in sequence, like we do in computer memory, so why do we say your space is “3D” even if XYZ works for ya?

At which point the mathematicians get defensive and say “yadda yadda” and innovation occurs.

A lotta layfolks will answer “space is 3D because I only need 3 coordinates, x, y, and z” (Cantor: you sure you don’t need less?). But then an athlete stunt man comes along and says “space is 4D because 4 coordinates works just as well and the minimum inside-outside made of edges faces four ways when enclosing a center”.

At this point, I could add: 5 + 5 =12 i.e. if you make your base different, a tetrahedron instead of a cube (different base shape), or 12 instead of 10 (arithmetic base), you get new moves, new rules, and therefore new truths. You get new truths for new games. Language games. And sometimes there’s confusion about which game we’re playing.

A Last Quaker Meeting in 2024

I made it to Multnomah Quakers today. I finally figured out how to donate using PayPal. Dawn would always write checks from our business account as I recall: Dawn Wicca and Associates (DWA), not publicly traded. Our last meeting of the year. Donations usually go up in December, as we close out our financial year.

Last weekend I visited Bridge City Monthly Meeting in the architecture museum on Grand Avenue, devoted to old Portland. My standing joke is when Quakers sit still, all quiet like that, on the museum's 2nd floor, they turn into a diorama. The way it was. Like a wax museum. Uncanny valley right?  

Kitty-corner is what used to be the two-story US Bank building, with CubeSpace likewise on the 2nd floor. CubeSpace was prototypical of WeWork, a place for geeks to set up offices, and for user groups to hold meetups. I attended a lot of meetings there.

I crossed paths with Lew Scholl at the top over Mt. Tabor the other morning. I'd decided to take the summit relatively early (say compared to yesterday), using the stairs from lower to mid reservoir on the west facing slope. I have lots of pictures of those stairs (see above) as my habit is to carry a camera, in addition to the cell phone being a camera. 

Lew is like the logistics supervisor for the Meeting in a lot of ways, doing property management. He's an engineer by training. Thanks to his efforts, the Meeting, a nonprofit, enjoys rather state of the art equipment, including when it comes to heating and cooling. The building itself has come a long way since the early days, when I first started going there as a kid. 

My friend Dr. DiNucci, long time president of Humanists of Greater Portland, is these days serving in a capacity not unlike Lew's in that he orchestrates these hybrid live action Zoom events that people are into these days. A contingent wants to join from home, whereas the more public in person venue is what others might prefer. The same individual might attend over the internet one Sunday, and in person the next. Quakers have Meeting for Worship by Zoom, although maybe only on set Sundays.

I met Sonya today, one of the Friends I've known for the longest time, since the Urners, Martins and Pinneys would all pool their kids and let us play together. Some of my earliest memories involve the Pinney family. I also recall crashing on their couch briefly, upon returning to Portland that time. Memories fade. 

Everyone in that family is beautiful and vivacious. Phil, the dad, was a master gardener, the kind of guy who could keep whole estates going, and his own on the side.

Sonya was catching up about our way of memorializing Carol Urner, my mom, with the Gatherings for Carol (C4Gs). There's one in the planning for Lesotho this year. Carol and Jack were key players in Maseru for some years, part of the social scene. 

Apartheid was ending and embassies wanting to make a show of keeping their distance, by camping out in Lesotho, were now moving back to the Republic of South Africa. The population of foreigners was shrinking. On the other hand, a gigantic dam was under construction at the center of the country, which dad took me to have a look at.

My French Connection reminded me that if the Roaring 20s are a topic (School of Tomorrow) then I should be watching Betty Boop cartoons. That's what I've been doing today in fact, to help with fasting. I'm kicking my system back into ketosis for a spell. I don't get grumpy when I do it right. I get inspired.

Global Trucker Exchange

by DAF

Winter Solstice: Another Wandering Narrative

:: Meliptus on a random sunny day ::

Our little Wanderers group has gotten very good at this gathering, repeated four times a year, so last night's, on December 20, just seemed to happen. Someone thanked me later for putting it together, but I only played my usual role, bringing lentils.

I didn't even expect to be among one of the first to arrive. The building's main business was only just closing for the evening so as it turned out we were able to smoothly transition to potluck mode when I showed up a few minutes early. I'd just been teaching my data analysis with Python class through 6:45 PDT and wasn't thinking to be the opener, nor to coincidentally meet up with Dr. D.

We're a thinning group. Bob Bornemann had a jazz gig that evening in Camus, and let me know he was thinking of us by texted invite. Trisha Buckland had been expected but, like Lynne Taylor, she lives some distance away and isn't driving these days. A lot of us aren't, for various reasons. 

I'm still gadding about in "maxi taxi" which I used to ferry Don to the farm pretty recently. Don being our captain Wanderer, owner of Meliptus, still in the water in good shape, but Don starting to show it off (a wife to a prospective buyer: "no, you can't have a boat"). Lots about said boat in these logs (blogs, journals). I'll put its picture up top.

Some of our celebrants were new so more than the usual amount of explaining went on: Linus Pauling had lived here, an Oregon son and times two winner of the Nobel Prize, in both chemistry and peace. 

We're a kind of Peace Studies think tank, or have been, under the auspices of the nonprofit ISEPP, for which my late wife's bookkeeping partnership had been the bookkeeper. I tagged along as a database guru, meaning I knew my small timer dBase 'n stuff. I could help grow the ISEPP mail list, which list helped recruit Greater Portland's cognoscenti to some excellent science and culture lectures, the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series, with Mentor Graphics one of our leading sponsors, amidst many others.

Our lecturers included Cousteau (Jacques' son), Leakey (another son), Jane Goodall, the Black Sea and Titanic guy, Ballard, and of course Stephen Hawking, whom Terry (president of ISEPP) wrote a book about, Give Space My Love: little anecdotes about his times with Stephen, amidst his own musings on matters thermodynamic (Terry is a specialist in that Carnot family, father Lazare and son Sadi). 

These lectures were almost monthly, although not all year and ran for over a decade, keeping Portland very much in the loop in terms of the state of the art in various fields, at least from a layman's perspective. We took over some of the biggest venues downtown, in the heart of Portland's theater district.

We were not zealously devoted to researching Linus Pauling's legacy so much as thinking about engineering and public policy, however we'd done enough homework to visit, as a group, the Oregon State University Pauling archives. We went on that field trip to the reading room, which Doug Strain helped endow. 

Ava Helen's WILPF connections lived on in my mom and Dr. Linda Richards, both of whom gave presentations at the Pauling House itself.

The big name guests Terry would invite to Portland sometimes joined us in the Pauling House for get togethers. Mario Livio was among these roamers. We'd often take our guest to Tanh Thao next door, a favorite Thai-Vietnamese restaurant in our neighborhood (I live pretty close by to this location, on the more westward side of Chavez).

If you take some of the words above such as ISEPP and Wanderers, as search terms, and scan these blogs, you'll fish up a lot of what these lectures featured, often with notes from the dinners after. All those lectures and dinners helped knit a rather closely networking social group, meaning the Wanderers, this being another Winter Solstice gathering thereof. 

Barry Redd brought ribs, which are excellent. Don has continued networking from his new location. I brought my dog as we have a policy of welcoming animals (I expressed animal pride at the event), nonhumans included. Lynn usually brings her dog, as did David Feinstein his English mastiff, Shomar. Cats aren't as easy to haul around and haven't been so dominant but we nevertheless talk about them and other animals that weave through our lives, both living and dear departed. Oregonians think about Keiko sometimes, or at least the older ones do, and the historians.

Dr. Steve Mastin joined us by Zoom. I used the ISEPP account (it still exists). Given it's a place of business, and has very limited kitchen facilities (we have theories about a dumb waiter, from when it was a boarding house, but maybe that's all wrong I forget). I'm referring to when this was Linus Pauling's mother's place, Linus's dad having died. 

How much do I know of this history? Not a whole lot. I know Doug Strain, ESI president (by the time I knew him), had been a student of Pauling's at CalTech and had helped rescue this place, with Terry's assistance. So the original house still stands, across from the old Third Eye here on SE Hawthorne, adjacent Adorn and the new weddings outfitter, previously a photocopier repair place. We share the block with a Newar Buddhist temple and the district New Seasons, and with Movie Madness, now owned by Hollywood Theater. Those were the days.

Derek was missed. Dr. Ronald Sato was present, one of our regulars in this chapter, with our four-times a year gatherings. We used to meet weekly. Our dear departed would come up in conversation. "I think about Glenn Stockton every day" I recall saying to Dr. D., as he took the serving table back down to its basement storage place (a space Glenn would frequent).

The S Factor

:: more martian math ::

XREF:

• Hypertoon Scenario (on Medium)
• All Aboard the S-Train! (Jupyter Notebook)
• Sfactor and IcosaWithin (Synergeo)

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.