Southern Circuit

 

Adult Discussion in Eugene

:: retired laptop cover ::

I was fortunate to be the guest of a meetup of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which runs under the auspices of the University of Oregon’s Continuing and Professional Education program. Sam and Jill brought me to this well attended two hour event focused on adult discussion of matters of public record, such as the unfolding situation in the eastern hemisphere. 

Sam introduced me as from a somewhat similar group in Portland, the Wanderers.

I was impressed by the well-moderated discussion session and was reminded of Nick Consoletti’s PhD project focused on Bohmian dialog. Once the number of participants goes beyond a certain threshold level, a kind of meandering (wandering) flow may take over in which consensus for one static position or another fails to coalesce. This is a feature not a bug. It’s the shared exposure to a collective stream of consciousness that matters.

That being said, I sensed a lot of consensus that the Iranian leadership lusts for a satanic weapon, such as those stockpiled by infidels and the morally moronic. 

Given I was a guest among strangers, I didn’t bring up the WILPF narrative, which in many ways runs counter to theirs, and which takes into account what Iran has to gain by throwing its lot in with the more civilized nations in not indulging in a fallen, criminal, craven practice, per the UN Nuke Ban Treaty (informal name).

Iran gets to ride the high road mapped out by the intelligence community, in which not having lust for a nuke, yet being attacked for it anyway, by wildly projecting unconscious politicos, guarantees future support for a civilian nuke program by a sympathetic global community. 

Iran was not irresponsible and was abiding by the NPT when it was attacked by the morally moronic. That’s a line many will stay with, and why wouldn’t they? 

The NPT, in turn, is about the nuclear-armed, more reprobate political gangs learning to rejoin civilization by making peace amongst themselves. When it’s time to verify compliance, Iranians will be on the inspection teams along with everyone else. This has been a goal all along.

However, although I was thinking a lot of these WILPF-like thoughts, I kept my mouth shut, I was there to observe, not to make waves. Again, I admired how disciplined and respectful these folks were. Some joined by Zoom.

Our shared nuclear future as a global university was not the only topic this group tackled. What about the state of education and the role of testing? What about taxes? Is Oregon sufficiently business-friendly? All these subjects were debated.

Finally, as a concluding topic, we got to the question about Jaws: what accounted for the staying power of this movie classic?  Is it a lowbrow Moby Dick? Some of us worried about the global shark population and its exploitation by various human breeds of foodie. Others reinforced the “sharks are scary” meme, which, as a scuba diver, has mostly been trained out of me. Sharks are cool, mostly harmless, and for the most part not gratuitously hostile, and yet Jaws was effective as a scary movie.

Game Night

::  faculty meetup: casey, kirby, dante ::

QuarterWorld was packed last night. Although QW is easily within walking distance, we drove there on a rainy night. Ryan didn't realize ID would be needed to get in, so we returned to fetch that. He's 24 and doesn't drink (me either anymore, but for 0.5% beer), but alcohol is served on the premises, so they screen upon entry after a certain time. 

Minors are allowed entry (we're talking an arcade palace after all) earlier in the day.

I've been mentally keeping and "idiot scorecard" meaning I monitor myself for acts of unintelligence for fun. 

Examples: 

• leaving the car window down, such that Ryan got to sit on a wet seat
• leaving the car door open overnight, risking draining the battery (she started quickly)
• trying to fix a floor lamp switch for many minutes before realizing the lamp was unplugged
• leaving the SD card out of the camera making pix go to internal memory but I can't find the cord

Sometime around when Ryan was playing Tetris, or maybe DigBug, must've been when Operation Pound Sand was going down (my name for it). I woke up to a flurry of YouTubes (today, June 22) decrying the much anticipated strike against some vintage equipment bunkers.

Ryan is visiting faculty within the Cascadia context, in an advisory capacity, as a fellow math nerd. He's been studying my Number Theory notebook and reading up on factorization algebras. 

I'm being connected to other scholars via LinkedIn contacts, including a physicist into lambda calculus according to Rowan. Call it "curriculum hardening" or "tying off loose ends" maybe. The goal is not to become inflexible (a different meaning of hardening), so much as to become riddled with many tiny holes, versus fewer gaping large ones.

Dante and Casey were here earlier in the week, also visiting faculty, although Dante is from outside the Cascadian bioregion. We're working independently of any District think tank and receive no federal funding. Our subculture is more a Pacific Rim based phenomenon, than anything Atlantic-oriented.

Last night we started watching Atlas Shrugged, the movie, a three part DVD extravaganza, set in a parallel universe where train tycoons battle it out against a backdrop similar to ours, technology-wise, with cell phones and private jets, but no commercial air or truck traffic to speak of, only rail lines. Call it a "simulator reality" wherein issues relating to ideology get hammered on.

As I was telling Ryan, this science fiction story reminds me of another one, The Iron Bridge, which features Quakers who were likewise rail and steel tycoons in a non-egalitarian backroom-governed society: that of the English industrial revolution. 

In The Iron Bridge, our heroine travels (naked) back in time to sabotage said bridge, future analysis having determined that homo sapiens industrialized too soon, before they were sapient enough. Were this hallmark of industrial progress to fail, humans could healthfully be set back on their timeline, vs mutating into monstrous warmongers.

I'm learning some video and computer game lore from Ryan, which is useful going forward in my role of Coffee Shops Network CMO, which is all about winning high scores for charitable causes and projects around the world, and building a profile on that basis.

Teacher Kit

This DIY teacher kit consists of what might be readily obtainable supplies for many, yet hard to find, let alone procure, in some locales. However, even if you the teacher are in the latter category, with no budget or access to a big inventory, it's all about mapping out conceptual content, meaning you'll be able to follow in your imagination, just based on what's depicted.

What's depicted is a pyramid of clay balls, approximately the same size. There's an imperfect handmade feel to the balls and in some claymations I'd substitute more perfectly formed clay spheres. Behind this pyramid are a couple envelopes with balls apparently drying on them. The clay balls must have been painted by what's in those squeeze bottles. We see Red, Blue, Orange, Green, Yellow, and uncolored balls.

Earlier, I'd colored the balls using Sharpie pens, by poking them with colored dots all around, accounting for their roughness now, as what I did is paint over them (except for Yellow, too far gone, started over with that one). 

The goal, using more clay I'm harvesting from around the facility (I hope to not open the sealed clay brick depicted), is to add one more layer of balls to any face and then swap out the corners with their colored counterparts, in a particular ordering orientation we call BRYG.

By adding a layer, taking the displayed 3-frequency 4-eyes (colloquialism) to 4-frequency, I'm creating what we might call a first nuclear ball, equidistant from the four corner balls. By convention, I tend to color that one Orange. 

I'll then calibrate the tetrahedron as a whole such that my edges are one diameter (subdivided into four or whatever frequency), and therefore my spokes, from the Orange ball center to any corner color ball center is 2nd root of 6, over 4 i.e. $$ \dfrac {\sqrt {6}} {4}$$

But why use messy paints to color clay balls when you can buy the clay pre-colored? Or maybe you can't. I can, blocks away at my local supermarket, except none of the clay sticks are red. Red is important in my color scheme. I should check Amazon.

 

Nightmare School Bus

Prompt:  Look, no one is driving the school bus. 
The children pretend to be amused.

Given a lot of practice during covid with getting work done remotely, the logical civilian defense action is to stay out of big cities, avoid trains and airplanes. A ghost town economy is in the offing.

We notice DC is making no preparations for citizen safety, let alone mental health, in its rush to join the lunatic fringe in support of an arch enemy (to many, including within the Pentagon). 

Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Citizens are being held hostage in the unholy land.

The appetite for work and business as usual will dissipate and the economy will grind down to a very low gear if the screens keep showing nothing but chaos and destruction. 

The filthy rich are starting to move to their bunkers some will notice. 

Should we let them emerge?  Maybe under a rock is a better place for them?

Not that the rich have much say in this. The clique maneuvering us towards a conflagration is minuscule. No one is feeling “represented” these days. 

As Jeffrey Sachs put it, we’ve been reduced to the role of helpless passengers. The school bus is running on Tesla auto-pilot, FSD: full self destruction.

We Work Together

 

Making Sense of Quadrays

Some of you "diplo" types will be interested in the cultography here, which isn't always Prime Directive anthropology where the whole point is to not disturb with your own alien culture to the point where you've disrupted the tribe under consideration. 

The paradigm anthropologist in question, the non-interventionalist, is great at (a) blending in but also (b) being forthright with the elders in terms of making it clear this is not some covert operation, not even missionary, but more innocently an opportunity to understand, document, and explain to peers back home. The goal is more mutual understanding, fostering better diplomacy on both sides down the road. 

That style of anthro is closer to what a diplomat does; they're not about undermining "the other" so much as standing up for themselves, and not being undermined. They play a defensive game, for the most part, which doesn't mean withholding criticisms or refraining from polemics to deflect insults. However, a lucky anthropologist has a support team and quick extraction services if need be, as in "OK, I see we're not getting along, I'm happy to get out of your face, let us know if you want another visit". I can see the ETs waving goodbye from their UAP windows.

Another style of anthro is more missionary, where you believe strongly in saving or liberating some target audience from some vile way of thinking organized by satanists or whatever. You're deeply invested in some goodies versus baddies melodrama, and have many unstated ulterior motives. 

"Interventionist anthropology" is not really in the same ballpark as doing "objective science" to the point of sounding oxymoronic, thanks to a gentleman (mainly male) class in a certain polite society awhile back. I'm thinking of Victorian England, at the height of the UK empire, and the emergence of "anthropology" as an academic and secular discipline, adjacent to curation and natural history.  The National Geographic Society comes to mind -- less a tool of imperialism, usually (I confess to not reading their magazine recently, is it more like The Atlantic these days?).

What does all this have to do with Quadray Coordinates? 

Put simply, Cascadians strongly notice they have a different pantheon when it comes to subcultures. More Blake and Swedenborg, less Galton, less of a NeoRoman eugenicist "us versus them" vibe. In those terms, that's hearkening back to the European schools, but then more to the point is how we don't really have to depend on Europeans that much to keep it grounded, meaning we have folk traditions that don't piggyback on eastern hemispheric mythos all that much. 

Lots to put in your pipe there, I know. Smoke it for awhile and see if it clicks. Watch the embedded YouTube to pick up on some of the cultography I'm talking about, if curious.

Andragogy with AI

:: testing some Python code in Spyder ::

In the mood to be a teacher, of self and others, I asked Perplexity.ai to remind me how Bitcoin adds to its blockchain. In case just that sentence rings no bells: imagine a tower of blocks, they can be cubes although I've argued a tetrahelix for marketing purposes, with multiple children competing to add the next block. One gets payment for adding a next block. People make a living adding next blocks.

Prompt:  In the bitcoin schema, the mining computers compete to solve a problem and the winner gets to add to the blockchain. What is the nature of this problem and can you write some Python code to simulate setting up and solving this problem?

In the initial prompt, I asked for some Python code to simulate setting up the problem and solving it. 

In the above screenshot, I've copied the code it gave me to Spyder and hit the run button, without any modifications. 

I notice it doesn't include a timer. It stops when the hash code is below a specific size, using an algorithm anyone should be able to rerun and verify.

At that point I wondered if I could get Perplexity to rewrite the Python in Hoon, the Urbit language, as it's really Nockchain that I'm looking into. I got some Hoon code back, and asked where I could run it in the cloud. Perplexity suggested I fire up my own moon or planet. 

:: running my moon ::

My planet is pretty crashed out these days, so I accessed the Dojo (Hoon prompt) through my moon instead, by pressing the Terminal button on the dashboard.

:: moon dashboard | Urbit ::

Although the Dojo appeared to digest the Hoon code for running a bitcoin style hash puzzle, I was unable to get it to actually run. The second code block returned by Perplexity was indigestible as provided, perhaps in part because of spacing issues?

:: in the dojo ::

Another InterModal Adventure

Having recently turned 67 (odometer rolling over, starting on 68th year), i.e. I passed the 67th milestone (if measuring in miles, or intervals of lifeline per one's palm), I figured I'd better get my kicks while I can. 

Bicycle riding is still a doability and I still get a kick out of it. 

Bring both tires up to pressure, don helmet, scoot out the front door and onto the "tarmac" as it were.

My journey is "intermodal" in the sense that I take advantage of TriMet's bicycle-friendly design. The TriMet system was designed to be inter-modal as the original trip planner showed. 

Put your bicycle on the bus, no problem. Unlike Seattle, Portland doesn't have a ferry system to integrate. But it does have a cable car, the kind suspended from a wire held up by towers. The cable car connects a new dense urban sector with high rises, to the OHSU hospital complex nestled in West Hills, also densely populated with campus buildings. The VA is there too.

In truth, riding a bicycle requires some level of athleticism, a level of nimbleness, which TriMet also assumes in putting a rack on the outside front, with three slots usually. Stack your bicycle in a slot, if there's room (otherwise wait for the next bus maybe), and board the bus, paying passage using the Hop sensor. 

I use my Apple Watch wallet to transfer funds to TriMet via Visa, paying senior rates since I'm 67.

My route starts with some mild uphill, which will be a challenge in proportion to not doing this recently (riding a bicycle), then comes a long downhill, where I'd consider brakes mandatory, not just for avoiding jutting in vehicles from side streets, but for avoiding insane amounts of acceleration, to where stopping gracefully just comes to be hopeless. 

With that busy SE 20th at the bottom, you'd better not be going too fast, just sayin'. Anyway, not to scare anybody, as everybody has brakes if they ride anywhere. Just use them.

Once down to the Willamette River level, close to OMSI, I hang south and follow said river all the way to Sellwood by Springwater Corridor. 

Said corridor manifests an urban renewal strategy that's not about disrupting or destroying neighborhoods so much as benignly connecting them with more solutions than before, thanks to pathways catering to non-motorized vehicles and pedestrians.

Pedestrian lifestyles tend to be healthy, meaning those who walk a lot have time to devote to their own health and well being. Relaxed walking may also involve listening to podcasts, as the vehicles are quiet anyway, and their controllers very pedestrian aware. These paths are not provided with illumination at night. They follow the same protocol as a railroad, trains carrying their lights with them.

I'm not walking, however, not in this scenario, but pedaling, gear shifting, braking. I'm also stopping to take pictures with my Lumix camera. I don't rely on my old iPhone for pictures but instead carry a separate device, which is a little unusual, but a habit I've acquired and see no reason to break. The Lumix takes great pictures. That's what I'm using throughout the embedded album above, brought over from Flickr here in the Blogger context.

This time, instead of suffering a chain coming off, like last time (thanks to non sequitur gear shifting), I allowed myself to simply dismount and exercise my walking and pushing skills, which are needed also, as a form of exercise. 

Sometimes I get in the mindset of pedaling forward no matter what, such that if I dismount I'm disallowed forward motion by foot. Get back on when ready to gain distance. It's a training technique. But I'm not looking ahead to a Seattle to Portland (S2P) at the moment (what I was training for back then). 

Just push it, why not?

Then it's through downtown Sellwood, still a relatively small town considered part of Greater Portland or the Metro area or whatever we call it. Sellwood has a newly installed bridge taking over the duties of the old one, which were and are considerable, as crossing the Willamette, a major river, is no joke and doesn't happen that often once south of the CBD (central business district). 

Sellwood is a first or final chance to change from west to east side or vice versa. The route is through downtown Sellwood west to east, but not on busy Tacoma (where the bridge is), but through sleepier side streets. I pass a school I at one time would teach at, when working with Coding with Kids. Other memories.

At this point one needs to know the secrets of Springwater Corridor, as in where to rejoin it, having left it to push uphill.

As I was saying, in this type of urban renewal one is often repurposing an old rail line, no longer used, but with right of way and an already stable bed. Turn it into a paved path but limit what can drive on it, as pedestrians will be sharing it and are known to veer unpredictably when texting and using earbuds. 

Replace rails with pavement in a lot of cases, or maybe just run something parallel to the tracks through the same corridor, taking advantage of a widenable right of way. Such is what Metro has supplied to interconnect far-flung neighborhoods by modes of transportation other than motorized vehicles.

By secrets I mean Springwater intakes, places to join it, having left it after pedaling directly under Sellwood Bridge, after an optional stop at Oaks Park if only to take pictures. I didn't do that this time, but I did stop to shoot pix of the old industrial facilities now with relic historic status. They're covered with folk art aka graffitti. 

Now when I was training for S2P, I'd rejoin the Corridor and pedal all the way out to I-205, passed Precision Castparts and other landmarks, then turn north and follow a paved bike path hugging the Max line, all the way to SE Division or Mt. Tabor latitude, then take city streets home (the Division bike lane was recently improved). 

In this new abbreviated inter-modal trip, I veer off the Springwater shortly after crossing over the bridge over SE McLoughlin, a major thoroughfare, and follow the signed path, still riding, down to the Tacoma / Sellwood Max station, the Orange Line branch of Metro's light rail system. Light rail: halfway between streetcars and passenger trains, more like subways but on the surface. Max does get to play subway through a long tunnel under the West Hills on its way to and from Beaverton, famously deep under Oregon Zoo. I could ride it out to my consulting gig at the hospital, back in the day.

So then I ride the Max with my bicycle, removing the helmet, and having paid with my Apple Watch, back to Tilikum Crossing, another new bridge, also not for cars, but for Max, buses, bicycles and pedestrians. I haven't seen any segways yet. I would imagine they're legal if able to manage the grade (Tilikum has a slope to it). 

Note that my loop is entirely on the east side. I've talked about ways to cross the Willamette (lots of bridges in town) but in this routine I the cyclist don't need to.

What I do next is hop on the FX2, a new articulated bus, or on a regular 2 if there's room for my bike on the front rack. If it's an FX2, one takes the bicycle inside, and again there are only limited slots, meaning there's an iffiness to the schedule. 

During rush hour one might as well just plan to cycle back the whole way, if not from Sellwood, at least from Tilikum, or better, if riding, from 12th and Clinton, the stop before.

Since I don't want to do that much cycling on this workout, I plan this trip for an off-peak lower-demand interval. I was the only one in need of a bike slot this time (score!). The entire loop went pretty smoothly. I celebrated by buying myself a burrito from a food trailer just off 34th and SE Division, near where I got off the FX2. 

I stuffed the burrito in its bag in my Python sweater and cycled the last few blocks back to where I started, and where my dog Sydney awaited my return. 

Since a lot of the fun for me is the photography, the first thing I did, even before eating the burrito, was upload from the camera to the pictures computer, then onward to Flickr, home of the Photostream. The next day, I'd get around to this blog post, embedding said Flickr album.

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