Recalling Chicago

a wanderer "hobo" September 2013

My loosely knit study group is looking at Chicago more. I should probe Mercado Group for leads; those are my retired librarians, good on fiction especially, but also non-fiction of various genres. With Chicago, the focus is two institutions, roughly contemporaneous: Hull House established by Jane Addams and friends, and Hobo College. 

A theme in both cases is spreading the fruits of education beyond the cloistered high tuition walls of a formal university, often by means of curriculum variants, meaning the content is not cloned from elsewhere, but home-brewed locally, from multiple sources.

Cascadian Synergetics aims to trod a similar path, this time encompassing the world of seniors, people looking back on choices made, vistas mastered, starring roles, in whatever walks of life. That’s a pool of experience going forward, often accompanied by a reawakened sense of curiosity, especially about roads not taken. Why not take them now, at least in gist?

Jane Addams is a founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), of which my mother was a member, as I am today, as was Linus Pauling’s wife Ava Helen, not what our family knew theirs. 

Urners overlapped the Paulings in a different way: the nonprofit think tank for which my wife and I performed technical services, authorized our engineering and public policy meetups in Linus Pauling’s boyhood home, just blocks from my Asylum District house.

Hobo College comes to me a lot through the writings of one Trevor Blake, someone I’ve always looked up to as conversant with a lot of esoterica. He used to be just blocks from me too, when he was busy curating a Bucky Fuller archive, later sent on to OSU. He introduced me to the Subgenius Church, itself a portal into many subcultures (ethnicities, namespaces, tribes), and well-armed against the kinds of pulpit subterfuge many flocks have to put up with. 

Vanity vanity all is vanity — Ecclesiastes (1:2). There’s no business like show business. We play Show & Tell. We play Hide & Seek. We play branded versions of same.

Chicago is also (a) a hub for the commercial advertising community, as much as New York and (b) asylum city for refugees descending from old countries that are no longer, such as Prussia, Bohemia, Yugoslavia … the whole Austria-Hungarian empire. 

Let’s prompt Perplexity to talk about North American refugees from the old Ottoman Empire.

Adaptive Behaviors

:: a visit to Powell's City of Books (slides) ::

I remember one lazy August when my fridge was on the blink. I hadn’t sufficiently thawed it when the repair man came, with the consequence of waiting more weeks, I forget how many, too many. The thermostat needed replacing, a simple part, no problems since then, from some years before the SARS waves. My sister was visiting. The weather was hot, like it is today, over 100 F.

Well this year, in 2025, the fridge is not a problem, nor the stove (I even replaced a burner coil on a burner I’d not been using for literally years), nor the car (the new AAA-installed battery is working great), but my eyeglasses. 

They (plural needed for some reason) snapped near the nose, and the only backup I could find (still the case) is some old now off-prescription sunglasses at the bottom of some drawer, probably the same ones depicted in my profile picture to the right, from an earlier Life of Kirby chapter. 

I’m still able to safely drive, at least in daylight. I’m sure I see more sharply than a Waymo or Tesla, even without any glasses at all.

I’ve got new glasses on order, after pricing at both LensCrafters and Stanton’s. I had a blast driving around, like alongside that train with the two tier containers configuration. That sure was a long load, as I discovered when it came time for my route to cross its. Guess who had the right of way.

I’m still able to use computers. But I decided to skip the Python User Group organized by New Relic, which was on my calendar. I didn’t want to be wearing shades, or squinting, or be dealing with eyesight issues in any way. Maybe next time. And no, neither eyeglasses outlet was prepared to process my exotic prescription on a “while you wait” basis. The good news is my old frames (the ones that snapped) were approved as reparable and perhaps that shop, the one doing the repairs, will have them ready even before the new ones appear.

Some of the YouTubes I’ve been attending to work pretty well as audio only anyway. I enjoyed Caleb Maupin’s well-researched storytelling regarding some intellectual undercurrents I’m eager to learn more about. I also picked up a lot from these Active Inference related interviews coming from Verses, an AI company.

In my inbox, I’m being tutored about the geographical meaning of Bohemian, which has everything to do with a part of Europe, which we could circle even today. Prague and Vilnius might both be in it. People in Chicago remember a lot about this old country. Others think about Yugoslavia and what happened there.

This geographical meaning is in contrast to the literary meaning, which has more to do with a free thinking anti-conformist lifestyle originating among disaffected American writers, many of whom had moved to Paris. Bohemian in this sense gave rise to Beat, which gave rise to Hippies, although it also forked into Bohemian Grove type Bohemians, who maybe wanted the free thinking part, but without the inconvenience of material poverty and/or austerity and/or disciplined lifestyle.

Given my somewhat casual (open minded) attitude to geographical naming, I’d be fine with talking about Bohemia like another Cascadia or Jefferson State. Something not on the radar of the legal beagles? Something more science fiction and even Tolkienesque. 

We could think in terms of Bohemia, Prussia, Mesopotamia, and the Holy Roman Empire, all on a World Game map, engaged in trade. A board game. Mix and match across historical periods, why not? Cosplay as queen of Phoenicia. One could learn a lot of world history this way, if the structuring weren’t too haphazard.

Weapons (movie review)

December, 2010

My route to The Bagdad, for the camera, was by way of a bank, as I had this new bank card, a reissue of an old one, that I hadn't activated. It ended up in the bottom of some box during a scene change. I found it and wanted to see if it was still activatable. It was. Checked balance. So then walking home I realize my timing was perfect if I wanted to see Weapons. I'd made up in my head what I thought it was about, but I was way way off. Someone on YouTube said it was good, so I decided to check it out, really having no idea what I was getting into. I thought it might be a cartoon. Something silly.

What I wanna take credit for up front, as having figured out all on my own without seeing this in any review first, is I got the allusion or tribute or building upon or whatever vs-a-vs Gus Van Sant's Elephant. And by that I mean something specific: we follow multiple characters in series but go over a territory wherein everything was happening in parallel, and when we get to key junctures, we see exactly the same scene but now from the angle of this other character.

For example, we see a drugstore cowboy type, into petty theft to support his habit, trying to pry his way into some apartment. We don't get his backstory at all the first time, and the first time we see him trying to break in, from an alleyway, it's from the point of view of the cop, the teacher's lover, and in the doghouse with his wife. We've already followed the teacher in detail at this point. Later we'll follow the drugstore cowboy. This time we'll see the cop looking back at us, from the end of the alley. We follow the petty thief as he runs away, and there's the cop car, which previously we'd been looking out of. Very clever. Same as in Elephant but even more spectacular.

The only other thing I'll say about this film is it's very competent and knows the genre, which is horror. The setting is mundane middle class America, our suburban USA, with prosaic nuclear families and their variously styled big box houses. That's a great setting for horror. The contrast between the safety and security these power nesters seek, and the deep psychic disruption of the Salem witch aspect of American village life, takes us over the cuckoo's nest more than a few times.

Affluenza

A lot more could have been done with the term "affluenza", coined by the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Unfortunately the word become caught up in moral judgments, rather than treasured for its medical aspects. 

Even thought Freud may have waned in influence since the height of the psychoanalytic movement, the idea of "neurosis" hasn't gone away. People didn't stop being neurotic all of a sudden. Many of us suffer from affluenza.

What are the symptoms? One is hoarding and accumulating, room after room full of unnecessary and unused objects. If this were a rat, the nest would be stuffed with gee-gaws and what-have-yous. 

This is a side effect of shopping for pleasure, finding outlet and reward, not so much in studying or self improvement, but in stocking up on various provisions, in order to fill ones basement and/or garage.

Given we're talking "group illness", the treatments tend to be societal. We see the counter push in my neighborhood: lots of 2nd hand stores, mainly for recycling clothing, but also for recycling things. The Village Merchant does a brisk business. 

But is this really addressing root causes?  

And isn't there a place for curating and collecting?  

Isn't it natural to acquire and pass on, or pass around?  

We also see a lot of free piles. Items just put out on the sidewalk for the taking, often with the sign "free" in case there's any doubt.

In one of my scenarios, as a Village of Tomorrow guy, I was proposing folks could offload worldly goods to such places, where inventory would be shared with new arrivals wanting to furnish a unit to their own sense of taste. 

Although the unit would be futuristic and factory made, the inventory would feel more vintage, and it's a combination of the new and old that makes for an interesting, and livable, aesthetic. 

I called it Hand Me Down City on reddit, in one of the SolarPunk groups. My suggestion was widely ridiculed as I recall and eventually removed.

DEQ 2025

What I did today is get the 1997 Nissan, the muscle car jalopy, with a gash on the side, a battle scar shall we say, through DEQ, an every other year ritual. I'm good until September 15, 2027. So yes, I went through earlier than I really needed to, having got the paperwork in the mail.

What got the wheels turning, was the Wednesday before, when I met Dr. D. at Lloyd for the burger week flagship at Stoopid Burger (3rd floor Food Court, overlooking the ice skating rink), I was thinking: "before the movie starts at 1 PM (Naked Gun, across the street), I could probably make it to DEQ and back. I mean heck, I'm like half way there already."

As luck would have it, I stayed at Lloyd until the movie, hanging out with Dave, milling about in Barnes & Noble, snapping a few pix, and thereby encountering a glossy Python magazine, more a large size book in some ways. 

You see it depicted up top, from earlier today, Friday, August 15, Alaska Day (today's Kremlin - White House summit).

So this morning I'm thinking: "I could get the DEQ thing out of the way today, while I'm still thinking about it why not?" 

Then, about a mile up the road I thought: "and while I'm at it, provided I pass, I can celebrate with another Kooky burger. It's still burger week, and that was a mighty good burger for $10." If I failed? I'd console myself with sushi, which'd be healthier.

Then, having passed the emissions test at DEQ, I was thinking "and I could go back and get that Python magazine at Barnes & Noble, it'd make a good gift, and maybe I'll even learn a thing or two." As a teacher, it pays to pay attention to the state of the art (the art of andragogy that is).

When I got home, it was time to walk Sydney, which proved fortuitous as I wanted to tune in my programs but CenturyLink was having issues, so I was needing to use Verizon anyway, through my hand-me-down iPhone (works great!). 

So why not walk around the block, which we did. Pick up on my channels. Sydney is allowed to saunter off leash given she's a highly trained emotional support animal (she still has the vest, which even still fits), enjoying retirement.

A lot of my peeps seemed pleased with the day's events, and even more pleased by the time I awoke from my afternoon nap. There're still a lotta haters out there, but there's not much we need to do about that when the circuits are equilibrious and robust. 

I'd say the chatbots are helping, by making the research a lot easier. People have a lot to catch up on in some cases. We all do, regarding this or that vital topic. Get a robot detective to comb through big data and pop out with a succinct report. The detective may have been drinking (hallucinations) so be sure to omni-triangulate (crosscheck from many sources, including by drawing from your own experience).

By evening, I was tripping down memory lane, with Python and food both topics again. Something about polish comfort food, posted by my old friend Seth Tuska, went by on Facebook, and that got me asking Perplexity (a gossip bot) about Chicago and pierogi. 

I was remembering Djangocon 2013. Patrick and I took off, prowling the streets of downtown Chicago for pierogi. Patrick's wife is from the Chicago area. Maybe she's the one who reminded us to track down this ethnically Polish food menu item.

We go through DEQ to prove the car's emissions and other records are in good order, and re-registration through the DMV is therefore warranted. Drivers queue up in their vehicles across several lanes for parallel processing. Their objective: sticky "tags" that go on the license plate showing the car is "street legal". Police sometimes use outdated tags as an excuse to pull a driver over and run random checks.

This Nissan has never given me problems passing the emissions test, and not this time either, so I was able to pay the registration fee (a hefty $280 plus) to keep my car legally on the road for another two years. Insurance is a separate monthly tab.

Other work today (not for Oregon State) involved recruiting alpha testers for the lastest QuadCraft experiments. We've tapped into gamer culture to help make Cascadian Synergetics relevant to the animation world more generally. I'm excited to learn about the newest Blender.

Time Management

“What other kind of management is there” one might ask, “besides that of time?”. Our idea of time is bound up with energy expenditure, both in the Newtonian sense and in the vernacular. In the Newtonian sense, the more energy we spend in an interval, the more powerful that event. Powerful events need not be either or explosive, or destructive — that’s just a stereotype. Picture a hydropower generator, its blades turning more slowly than you might expect, but they’re huge, with lots of momentum behind said angular velocity.

In early childhood psychology, a lot of work goes into separating actions (acting out) from having the idea of doing those actions. One may imagine doing something, and yet not do it. Or, more likely, one may imagine doing something and then do it later. Few are the actions that must be done on the spot, right now, although we get those too.

Once a delay is introduced, we get to concepts like “procrastination” and often a lot of moralizing creeps in. One thinks of a positive action, something that would be good to do, like sending a birthday card to one’s grandmother, but then one delays the action, per one’s training, only to decide that “delay” equals the choice to “not do”, and therefore one rolls into “why am I so lazy?” type contemplations, whereas it’s those contemplations that might be the real waste of time.

Instead, when you imagine a good thing to do, a right action, something you actually need to get around to, like getting your car through DMV another year, add it to your queue with gusto, and then think a lot about said queue. 

Queuing Theory is a whole branch of operational research, involving such concepts as critical path analysis and prioritization, basically scheduling. Scheduling is a deep topic in computer science. Learn to think like a computer science by managing your own schedule. Extrapolate from your experience locally to think about larger operations happening more globally, such as the construction of electrical power grids. What’s in the queue on that score?

You might be wondering when I’m going to bring in money. Don’t they say “time is money” and isn’t “time management” likewise “money management”. Well sure, we can look at money as a measure of energy and in particular anti-entropic energy expenditures in the form of work, as opposed to anti-work, which is entropic (like bombing and killing). When you get a lot of work done in a short interval, doing more with less, you feel like (a) you’re getting your money’s worth and (b) you’re being powerful, in the sense of efficiently working through your queue of pending actions.

Prompt:  An office working running an electrical grid simulator across several screens is surrounded by clocks reminder her to spend her time wisely and to think ahead. Calendars on the walls. Blueprints. Globes and even a Dymaxion map fuller projection.

Meme Channels

link to album: Wanderers Join Comprehensivist Meetup

This meetup, and another one, Greater Philadelphia Thinking Society, have been primary vectors (channels) for disseminating a lot of the ideas my subculture is into. 

We should give the Meetup infrastructure a lot of credit, going forward, for its role in promoting learning by osmosis. 

True, the "for credit" incentive of formal education, aimed at attaining degrees, is largely absent. It's closer to what the universities nowadays call "continuing education", under which heading they're always doing outreach to actively employed school teachers (summer enrichment) and to seniors, retired yet actively curious and wanting to catch up on what they missed by doing whatever they did for a living.

Classroom Theme

Alaska-Siberia HVDC

At School of Tomorrow, we plan to play up the focus on Alaska as another missed opportunity to discuss those megaprojects we heard alluded to, and which are not all about gas, coal and oil, contrary to some lobbyist propaganda and/or to popular belief.

This theme was our focus before, when Boston schools adopted the Peters Projection and journalists failed to give even lip service to their own New England son of Bear Island, Maine, and his world famous projection. More unoriginal reporting would be hard to imagine.

Bear Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine

The problem is a lack of canned / archived articles to draw from. 

A story that hasn't been covered in forty to fifty years is hard to get started on newly. Where's the boilerplate to cut and paste from?  You might need to unearth some old Whole Earth Review or one of those. 

So maybe turn to one of those gossip bots? Some of which are widely read, in the sense of trained.

Assuming journalism meets my low expectations, we'll use this occasion to shovel more dirt into that legacy media grave. Good riddance right? We needed more of an attention span, longer format, deeper dives. 

The advertisers refused to give us the diet we needed, and so we had to find other food supplies to feed our heads with. An old story.

Or rather, we'll continue excavating our own underground media networks (no, I'm not just talking about Urbit), which are only underground metaphorically. Chthonic is another word we use. Legacy media will simply bury itself with its own irrelevance. 

Schools tend to work the same way: enrollment drops, recruiting falters, once word gets out that the curriculum offered is obsolete, behind the times, backwater. Sound familiar?

Instead of "new versus legacy media" some people just say "alternate" as in "alt right" or "alt left". I'd be a creature of the alt left per my own account, which doesn't mean I can't or won't mingle with those with other stripes and coloration.

Homeowner Banter

I have the proverbial siding salesman coming over today, thanks to the professionalism of his scout, the earnest young college guy working his way through OSU in finance, but willing to let me blah blah about all those decals on the porch, and how Linux was such a big focus in this region for so long. It still is. I’m not saying the Linux story is over. On the contrary… I’m picturing like a Danny DiVito type. He’ll be showing me samples.

Anyway, after talking about my front yard C6XTY, the Sam Lanahan 5-frequency CCP (no, not communist, but yes Chinese in part), we turned to the business of siding and I let him book me for the free estimate, out of which a contract might emerge, though not today. I haven’t even mentioned to my family that I’m doing this as they all have busy lives. I happen to be between gigs and have a window in which to build my knowledge-base in the home maintenance department.

The south and east facing blue painted wooden exterior facets are sun-baked. The back side is brand new, and the west facing facet is submerged in a rainforest jungle, replete with cougars, coyotes, and maybe bear. I exaggerate for effect. Let’s just say the priority would be to address the sun-baked sides. But if I went with siding, that’d result in a hybrid, and would future owners forgive me for making that choice? I should ask a chatbot. And my friends.

I told the scout I was just starting to build an up to date file on a remodel. I’m usually immersed in cyber-space and am not wearing a general contractor hat. Is there a logical order to roof versus side work? Do they ever offer pre-painted custom logos on the siding. What if I wanted something Tlingit, or Tulalip?

I’m talking about back by the BBQ, while keeping the public facing facets more demur, as they are today (deep blue in hue). The sun-baked sides have become oxidized with a kind of “white rust” and this has made them pale and somewhat cracked, and obviously therefore aging more quickly than the other facets.

I probably won’t explain to the siding guy about my secret identity as a once and future trailer park mogul. Yes, I’ve lived in trailers full time, but I’m talking about the Cascadian Synergetics storyboards and those prototype camper communities, field testing futuristic "tripods" made in China and other places (they might have more legs than three; not all models have legs). 

These will be unlike conventional domestic dwelling units in this early 1900s neighborhood, made mostly of wood. We won’t need “siding” per se, although every domicile needs a fuselage of some sort. Families book 'em and check 'em out, rate their experiences, make suggestions. Models that make the grade are more likely to be cloned in greater numbers.

The OSU student was interested in my tales involving Hewlett-Packard and its global calculator repair facility, which is not how the market went, so they turned it into a nanotechnology R&D hub instead. I’ve toured it. In that vein, he went on to talk about the new nVidia computer science building in downtown Corvallis. That got me to thinking even more deeply about our Cascadian Synergetics.

I’m not saying we won’t have tripod suppliers closer to the campsites. Chinese might stock inventory stateside much as Subaru does, a popular brand of car, meaning spare parts need to be easily obtained. Ditto for dwelling machines; parts in inventory, close at hand, is a plus. Fulfillment center technology is still in its infancy no doubt. Amazon’s are among the biggest and most visible. Civilians don’t see some of the military’s warehouses, which also come at various scales. 

Remember BE DO HAVE in GST. Remember Supermarket Math. 

The upshot of our meetup was: forget about siding, lets focus on the roof instead. It's past pull date, that much is clear. I just need to pick a next solution. I'll be soliciting additional advice. I've not replaced the roof in the thirty years I've live here, so it's no surprise that I'm contemplating my options in that regard.

Memoirs Snippet