Diving Into Supermarket Math

I’m back to building out my school’s curriculum in the Supermarket Math domain. That’s one of four domains in my Silicon Forest Digital Maths: Supermarket (logistics), Casino (risk, prediction), Neolithic (retro), Martian (futuristic). These are purposely broad-brush-stroke typical areas with lots of overlap and nebulous boundaries.

Supermarket Math includes everything from pumping gas to pushing a shopping cart to driving a truck or working in construction / demolition. Or maybe you’re in healthcare or fashion, entertainment (some kinda showbiz). The everyday economy in other words, chugging along into the future: in the direction of Martian Math, with Neolithic Math receding in the rear view mirror, yet laced with core principles.

These days, a “shopping cart” could be virtual, meaning metaphorical next to a literal shopping cart in a literal supermarket. Virtual shopping carts get built into websites. Browsers go around picking and choosing, like they do in a supermarket, and then check out at the end, paying for everything all at once.

So how does a website work? 

We expect it’s facing browsers using HTML and CSS, whereas on the back end it’s talking to some database. The LAMP architecture is still there: OS-host; web-server; database; application. We can map that to Linux, Apache, MySQL, a language starting with the letter P (Perl, PHP, Python) but that dates us.

Where I’m currently building out is at my Pythonanywhere site, hosted by Anaconda, likewise the source of my Python distribution, packed out with 3rd party tools, such as one of my favorite IDEs (Spyder) and Notebook environments (Jupyter with a Python kernel).

Today I expanded the locally hosted version of that website with a fourth SQLite database: airports of the world. I’m not saying it’s a complete list. Gaza’s might be missing. The three already on tap: Elements (as in Periodic Table); Shapes (as in Polyhedra); Glossary (of geek terms). 

I’ve used airports.db quite a lot through the notebooks, like when teaching for both Saisoft and Clarusway, but I’d yet to add it to the Pythonanywhere website, likely because doing so is semi-redundant. I’m off the critical path.

Zooming out for more overview: many School of Tomorrow scholars, each embarked on a personal work-study journey, enter by the Martian Math trailhead. They’re attracted to this futuristic, esoteric wrapper around a 20th century magnum opus, the two-volume Synergetics (not to be confused with Dianetics). 

But Martian Math is number crunchy digital, as well as rewarding to the dexterous. A programming language is not out of place, and it doesn’t have to start with P, even though for me it often does.

Once you’re through that Platonics portal, a Genesis story, you’re in our playground, our sandbox. That does not require forsaking computation, or developing those muscles newly.

By “Platonics portal” I mean something like what gets covered in the segment on our 20th century Cascadian businessman Fred Meyer. The Asylum District store in the Fred Meyer chain has Martian merch on its 2nd floor. How come? What keeps Portland so weird? 

The five Platonic Polyhedra are in the foreground in our narrative, but with the argument that maybe there’re really six. How could that be? Because in our Genesis story the Platonic polyhedrons come as three dual pairs, which in turn beget the rhombohedrons by combining them together.

• Tetrahedron + Inverse Tetrahedron = Cube (a rhombohedron, as squares are likewise rhombuses).
• Cube + Octahedron = Rhombic Dodecahedron (the RD; 12 diamond faces)
• Icosahedron + Pentagonal Dodecahedron (PD) = Rhombic Triacontahedron (RT; 30 diamond faces)

And then the dual of the RD: the cuboctahedron, which is close in meaning to what in Martian Math we call the VE, introducing the alien Synergetics terminology.

I put a first installment of my curriculum tutorial on Medium, advertising and promoting it through my LinkedIn profile. This initial reading is about getting stuff installed and becoming familiar with the workflows. 

Develop locally and test, only pushing to the cloud (GitHub) when you think the website is actually ready to be load bearing. 

I’m using Flask as my web framework, plus those four SQLite databases. It’s a minimalist website, yet involves using a templating language: Jinja2.

I’ve yet to make a next YouTube about this project, but when I get to it I’ll be sure to advertise O’Reilly as worth subscribing to as a kind of community supported library, versus stockpiling physical wood-pulp books in everyone’s home office. That company has everything neatly organized.

In Memoriam: Bill Lightfoot

committal ceremony + pancake house gathering of family

Revolution By Design

A common refrain, among those familiar with the Fuller corpus, is that his reputation for being a good prognosticator was overblown, as he kept saying that it’d only take ten years, of his Design Science Revolution, and we’d all be living like billionaires. 

Obviously, that never happened, right? 

Many decades have gone by and we still live in a dump of our own making.

True enough:  the DSR never happened, nor did Fuller ever promise it would. 

It’s not like humanity ever woke up to its option and whole-heartedly and self-consciously went for it, like some did around putting a man on the moon. Fuller did invoke the Apollo Project in Critical Path, as what a design science revolution would look like, but with Spaceship Earth at its center rather than its satellite (or Mars). 

But again, we never woke up to that degree and continued committing resources towards Armageddon.

In my narrative, the Open Source Revolution (OSR) was in alignment with a DSR, in terms of both philosophy and methodology. Thanks to engineers willing to step into the role of lawyers, to codify copyleft and Creative Commons, living standards did improve. 

Even the original PC revolution may be attributed to people remaining free and open about their work, dodging the suffocating practices of intellectual property lawyers. The next revolution was sparked by the GNU community enabling Linux, when “dodging” was replaced with outright resistance. 

How about the billions of billionaires? How could that ever happen? 

A closer reading of Fuller reveals what he meant: the King of England in 1492 never had an iPhone or anesthetics, let alone cardiologists of today’s caliber. Money couldn’t buy what did not yet exist. 

Fuller is measuring by an absolute scale, not a relative one. 

Every sailor on a first class navy ship is in a sense a billionaire relative to sailors crewing wooden warships in the 1400s. Submarines improved a lot too. 

A middle class lifestyle today, one involving jet travel, healthcare, telecommunications, potentially far exceeds in quality that of a noble or lord just a few generations back. 

Which isn’t to say one can’t be miserable regardless of one’s physical circumstances. Fuller is accused of going for a “tech fix” for everything, whereas our issues are deeply spiritual. “Solve too many problems and we’d all die of boredom” — one hears that point of view expressed. 

Would that boredom could be our major problem; we’d learn what’s most interesting to think and do. Solving problems does not stop the flow of novel problems. Life will always remain problematic, is my prediction, regardless of how many goals we achieve. But is that really a problem?

Today, we’re all impoverished by living on a ghetto planet that still experiences hellishly high opportunity costs, per our oft-cited GST diagram of the situation. 

Everyone’s life would be better if it wasn’t against a backdrop of mass starvation, mass bombardment, mass disease. 

Poverty impoverishes us collectively, gated communities and limos with darkened windows notwithstanding. That’s why the myth of “richest country in the world” rings hollow, as the inequalities, the disparities, characterize our collective identity. Let’s just say there’s ample room for improvement.

Got Milk?

Greater Philadelphia Meetup (Xmas Eve, 2025)

J. Bullock is doing a great job anchoring Comprehensivist Wednesdays, originally anchored by CJ. 

CJ (Chris Fearnley) was one of the original World Gamers (if I may be permitted that shorthand), a cofounder of the Synergetics Collaborative, and the original compiler of the Fuller FAQ, when the web was still new. I'd visit CJ in Greater Philly, both when I lived nearby in Cosmopolis (Northeast Corridor megalopolis, with Philadelphia a center of gravity), and when NPYM (regional Quakers) flew me to Friends Center for AFSC summit meetups. I didn't skip out on my AFSC functions but would have enough time off to hookup with my designer chums, Kiyoshi also.

Twas my privilege this Christmas Eve to join Bullock and company in a continuing drill-down into the many finepoint distinctions we might want to make, between say "reasoning and understanding" (above the line) versus simply optimizing for predictability ala LLMs (below the line). Several of us engaged with his model, already clearly worked out. Like Shrikant, Joe is into diagrammed heuristics, and that works well given our medium (recorded synchronous Zoom meetup).

I thought the funniest part of the meetup was when the PowerPoint creative confessed to using old fashioned cut and paste techniques, but telling the client this was AI, because the client wanted AI irrespective of the aesthetic impact, which might've been subpar had one of the AI solutions actually been used.

I think what Glenn Stockton found mystifying, and also maddening, was how academics seemed so hell-bent on disagreeing, seemingly only for the sake of being disagreeable. Growing up in the military, but later Antioch (a university without walls), his disposition was to make allies and even friends, and not engage in any aspect of mutual tearing down; that's what one does with an enemy.

My take, coming from videos on digestive juices (I like to study metabolics), is some folks "digest" another's thinking much the way a digestive tract would: by secreting corrosive acids and other chemicals good a breaking something down, because at some level "understanding" is achieved by "eating" (incorporation) which is the opposite of "just leaving it alone".

I'll cop to being "digestive" in my approach to most philosophies simply as a consequence of my "no globals" approach, meaning I test to see if the system has pretensions to ruling the world (most don't). Like in the chat, I invoked my hero Ludwig Wittgenstein again:

2025-12-24 18:54:51 From Kirby Urner to Everyone:

A favorite quote of mine, from Philosophical Investigations (L. Wittgenstein):

We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential, in our investigation, resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, proof, truth, experience, and so on. This order is a super-order between — so to speak—concepts. Whereas, of course if the words “language”, “experience”, “world”, have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words “table”, “lamp”, “door”. (#97)

D LJ:👍🏼

And then later, further down:

2025-12-24 19:51:38 From Kirby Urner to Everyone:

Hinton’s use of high dimensional geometry does not imply people think geometrically i.e. conceive of thinking in geometric terms. LLMs process mathematically in ways we might characterize as geometric.

2025-12-24 19:52:20 From Kirby Urner to Everyone:

Agreement on what all these terms mean: understanding, intelligence, reason, is always going to be limited, as these are token we compute with, not fixed stars in anyone’s private sky.

D LJ:👍🏼

Yeah, typo, shoulda been "tokens" (plural). 

My point being: we can't simultaneously all agree on what all these key terms mean and keep computing with them (an ongoing computation) at the same time. We're coming to terms with our terms, always. They're not a means to an end so much as our continually adaptive framework.

That being said, I do think it obvious that standardization and agreement within and even among networks (schools, professions, subcultures) is possible and I understand the frustration when people want to pointlessly frustrate the task. 

But maybe they're just helping us hammer it out more, in light of feedback? 

That's the attitude Joe takes, and it works. He's learning from whatever pushback he's getting. This won't deter him from continuing to add value to his theory, model or system. That's a good attitude for a group discussion leader and moderator. He's an eager consumer of whatever we have to contribute, which invites participation. 

Having a lot of regulars helps too of course. When a meetup is all strangers (to one another), there's a kind of ice-breaking that needs to occur, whereas if the meetup centers around some well-established core dynamics, then it's more a matter of breaking in to something structured, which is often a lot easier, not to mention more efficient, than starting over from scratch every time.

slide by Joe Bullock

slide by Kirby Urner

Debate Culture

What high school is being like for me is I'm remapping my devices and learning to use Bluetooth more effectively. I've got the iPad clipped to the Elliptic and just need to add the USB C to have the latter power the former. I can watch my vids and listen to my tunes while working out, like when I had a gym membership (I joined Gold's when it moved into what is now a Trader Joe's property, and which later become a 24 Hour Fitness across the street -- that one is still in operation I'm pretty sure, and will soon enjoy greater population density given all the infill going on).

Of course deeper rewiring is going on. I don't see these blogs as a way of getting everything into words. I have no magic bullet nor panacea for curing the shortcomings of words. That words ultimately fall short may be taken as a given to appreciate versus some issue in need of solution. Who said words provided complete testing coverage or however we wanna say it?

The recent posts to Synergeo with PDFs attached have focused on our Silicon Forest curriculum, old hat for that listserv (publicly archived). We're going with "Casino Math" in part because of "Indian Gaming" and the role of tribal resources vs-a-vs regional development, which some Euros might call "de development" as the agenda may be a return to wetlands. Call it "anti pave over" (what Euros like to do). To "pave over" has a double meaning in English. To "pave over" is to "cover up" as in "deliberately overlook" or "purposely ignore" (willful blindness).

The new Winter Term has started at School of Tomorrow. We celebrated the end of Fall and the beginning of Winter at the Pauling House on the 19th (the nearest Friday on or before). Terry Bristol, Nirel... some joined us by Zoom if only fleetingly. We raised our glasses to Jon Bunce, who passed away days before. Nirel has been coordinating Jon's care and invited his caregiver team into our midst. As Bob explained to me later, at least of of that team was a musician, in a band called Voodoo Dollz. We pulled up one of their albums on Spotify.

The word many use in describing Jon is "elegant", as he had a very cultured background, as well as outlook. He was a musician, yet polymathic. He typified Wanderers well, and anchor-managed our coffee fund, showing early to make us coffee. I like to get our meetings out of the way then go to My Father's Place, an eatery on Grand. I used to hang out with the guy a lot when he lived near Westmoreland. Then he moved, and Wanderers stopped meeting weekly, and I didn't see him for like a decade. Then he showed up on my radar again, moving to a facility in the vicinity. The prognosis was positive, however he seemed ready to checkout, eased into a next chapter by angels (I'm remembering my use of "elven chyx" years ago).

Debate Culture is being worked out in the Rumble + YouTube environment from my angle. The casters are evolving best practices, while butting heads. The stakes seem high, with money on the table. Risks are involved. Casino Math. 

My own exposure to Debate Culture was through Cleveland High School, one of Portland's public schools. My daughter helped coach Gonzo form a new team, the Cleveland Cannibals, and as a parent, I got to attend meetups and be a judge, although not of events my daughter was in. 

Driver Education

:: don’t drink and drive ::

Readers here are likely familiar with my “high school every fifteen years” schtick. That’s not a fixed number, and in fifteen years what “high school” means can change a lot. In another sense I’m saying: you’ll have to return to mastering the basics periodically no matter what. But wouldn’t it be swell (nice) to have institutional support?

Let’s look at that vista quite literally. What do we lean in high school, a lot of us (not me, but I’m generalizing): how to drive. My daughter got support through her high school, which contracted out to professional driving teachers. I went to a parents-of-young-drivers presentation and learned how the basics of driving were nowadays taught differently. As a boomer, no one ever told me to keep the headlamps lit (they were gaslit in those days — JK) even in the daytime. Plus we spread the side view mirrors wider in the new paradigm. Trainees think about the car inside an invisible box and so on…

Now imagine investing all the billions we’ve put into driverless cars, robot-piloted, into driver re-education programs instead. These could be fun experiences. Maybe the focus is parallel parking. You’ve been driving for years but hate to attempt that maneuver. Or maybe, for you, it’s the stick shift you never mastered. I remember my earlier confusions with a stick shift (I got good at it, though not to a race car driver level obviously). Imagine a parallel universe in which adults went off to practice car-driving as routinely as they go off to practice golf swings or shooting bullets at live animals. I know, crazy right?

You could go to high school, as a fifty plus year old, to learn sailing a small sailing boat. I got to learn that in my teens at a Club Med. I learned a lot on that trip. Black Sea, Romania.

Clearly I’m blurring the meaning of “high school” quite intentionally. People picture desks in rows and columns with a teacher up front, like a preacher or something. My School of Tomorrow doesn’t operate like that usually. I’ve given talks in colleges and high schools, but where I talk most is on YouTube, which is par for the course. Today’s teachers use social media. Unless they’re stuck in a rut because they haven’t been back to basics in a while. Those are the folks poised to leap frog those actively publishing today.

Now that people live longer, what’s somewhat more evident are the intergenerational alliances that form when people two or more generations apart are getting updated on the latest. For the oldsters, it’s in part review, but it may seem rather alien how they teach it today. For the youngsters, it’s a first exposure, but they’re free to examine how the stuff used to be imparted. A first responsibility of pedagogues is to awaken a sense of what it takes to self educate and / or to educate others; pedagogy and / or andragogy become topics in their own right. 

Cyber Footprint

on X

Nuremberg (movie review)

The ball got rolling, for me to see this one, at Mercado Group, my name for our bevy of professional librarians, now retired, who (a) devour media (b) have opinions about what’s worthwhile and (c) are Russell Crowe fans. And Nuremberg was just opening in theaters they told me, Russell Crowe a star therein.

I’d been casting about for a next film, ready to break the streak of rented noirs, and putting off Wicked 2 in case I could coordinate with another movie buff. So the fact it was pouring rain was no deterrent. The HotSpot Trip Planner (same as TriMet’s) advised an FX2 would get me to Fox Tower with time to spare that very afternoon (earlier today).

Having gotten there early (to the theater lobby) and with no one else around, I started doing voice to text into my phone, as I’m wont to do. This time my words were bound for Lithuania, which my longer term readers may recognize as part of my far-flung network. That’s apropos as the Baltic states are where a lot of this particular war happened, and is happening still depending on how you look at it. Lots of German armor has been heading towards Russia again.

Yes, I’m finally getting to the movie, which I thought sturdy, robust, well-made. It had all the elements. We’ve already had decades of WW2 movies haven’t we? Part of the challenge is cutting through that blanket of make-believe atop reality. Documentary footage helped.

Believe it or not, I’ve become a tad forgetful and even though I well-know Gladiator and should easily recognize the Beautiful Mind guy, I actually wondered for far too long, which one was Russ. Obviously he’s the fat German. Most people know that going in.

How could I be that confused? Maybe I’ve been indulging in too much Oregon cannabis? At least I’m not into salvia, also legal, and thanks to Paul, I own a specimen which, being a tropical plant, may not make it through the winter even indoors. That one gets lots of negative trip reports.

Anyway, back to the movie, we were 98% to the end I’m pretty sure. Our psychiatrist was back on the train, after the verdicts were in. We had taken in some gallows action, when all of a sudden a movie theater employee broke into the 1940s to bring us back to the 2020s: we needed to leave the theater now, as Fox Tower was on fire. The five or six of us left in an orderly fashion (this was a matinee on a Monday and most people are at work).

I came outside to an eerily calm scene, with fire trucks and firefighters everywhere, in full battle gear, but no one was running or shouting or seemed very flustered. Had the fire been put out already? 

I scanned the building but didn’t see anything. This was no towering inferno spectacle. I decided my dog probably needed out, so I didn’t stick around long. I was on the FX2 heading home pretty quickly, snapping a few pictures as I exited the scene.

I haven’t read any reviews yet. I expect a lot of them will be positive. I thought the performances were all stellar. 

The topic is very serious: man’s inhumanity. As a species, we fall short of what we think humanity should be. Do we have any institutions that might address these shortcomings? A lot of hope gets put into being law abiding, but as this movie points out, there’s not been much law in this area of altercation between nations, let alone enforcement thereof. We witness a similar situation some hundred years later (counting WW1 and 2 as a single war with an interregnum).

Incyder Talk