USAID Family

Given what's in the news, about DOGE going after USAID, among other agencies, I've taken to bringing up here in my blogs, and conversationally, that we were a USAID family in the Philippines for some years. Of course that identity has entirely to do with my dad's work, which paid the bills. My mom played her counterpoint to dad-the-technocrat (lowercase): she was a pretty serious human rights advocate, standing up for the rights of indigenous peoples vs the colonizing Christian lowlanders. I was proud of them both.

However we got to the Philippines care of UNDP, an agency of the United Nations. We even had UN passports at that point, which as I recall gave us special privileges going through airline security checks. In any case, I was proud of that identity as well.

However, I believe dad was somewhat uncomfortable being a part of a high end serve the wealthy kind of project involving filling in Manila Bay even more, to add room for fancy hotels and / or that Cultural Center of the Philippines they built while we were there. 

He was more into teaching the techniques of grassroots planning, like he'd developed in Libya, wherein local administrations and ministries are empowered to develop their own land use plans, armed with their own locally undertaken demographic and other statistical studies. He knew about how you put a cable-like sensor across a road, to count vehicles, get a sense of the traffic. It's not like I followed him around work all that often, just that I'd pick up dribs and drabs.

So I think his arranging to switch to a USAID job was in line with his wanting to practice planning in a more decentralized, advisory-only capacity. He got to fly around the islands a lot and meet with counterparts. He loved doing stuff like that. I think the USAID job really suited him, probably because he helped design it. Certainly it outlasted my own stay, as I was off to Princeton a year or two before they left Makati.

As an expat 3rd culture kid, I do have empathy for families suddenly finding their future plans canceled because of tumultuous changes back in the imperial capital. I checked a few websites in the Philippines to see what might be going on with some of the families there.

Dad was a freelancer, meaning he was not career USG by a long shot. He'd work for whatever governments, for whatever private firms, and he'd work for the UN. I'm pretty sure his work with Libya followed a similar trajectory to the one he followed vs-a-vs the Philippines: he got started with that EUR-based job (EUR is outside of Rome, Italy) but then shifted over to Whiting and Associates, a Nebraska-based planning firm, and it's with them that he had an office in the Paroli area, right near the South Korean ambassador's residence (I was good friends with the ambassador's youngest son).

Dad spent many years helping Libyans plan for a bright future, looking at least 50 years ahead. He didn't live long enough to see NATO ganging up on Gaddafi and bombing the place, with operatives moving Libyan weapons stashes to Syria as Seymour Hersh would later write about.

I never had much respect for US foreign policy towards Libya. It seemed mostly based on revenge for his having shut down Wheelus AFB and nationalized the oil. Who is sucking up Libya's oil reserves today I wonder?  I'll ask a chatbot.  BP and Shell, among others. Figures. When does NATO plan on bombing Venezuela on behalf of BP?

My Facebook comment on Natasha's Youtube says this, somewhat summarizing the above:

Natasha is one of my favorite YouTubers. Don't be misled by the thumbnail, she's being sarcastic, sassing her critics.

People who dislike her anti-Z messages (Z being code for special military operation) think she must be secretly getting money under the table from the USG. She reassures us she's just another everyday YouTuber of the type that depends on the channel itself for revenue, and on Patreon.

I've been following Natasha since she started her channel, already back from the USA student exchange program, which she has always been open about and proud of. Not a secret.

By the way, my own family was USAID for awhile. I could claim USAID put me through high school (although it was the UNDP that got us there -- to the Philippines -- in the first place). Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya put me through 4th - 8th grade in Italy, if you wanna drum up even more scandal.

The Biology of Fasting

I'm back on the wagon, as they say, predictably with regard to alcohol abstention but in my case I'm forswearing food in general, just for a day or two. While we're on the subject though: yes, I've continued to bill myself as having given up alcohol, whereas in reality the "non-alcoholic" beers I permit myself, in moderation, weigh in at 0.5%, and therefore require proof of age at the checkout.

A primitive calculus goes on, to which kids can relate, regarding whether the alimentary canal is yet empty or not i.e. have recent meals all gone through, leaving an essentially empty gut, but for water or whatever liquids? That's what a typical fast is aiming for: a period wherein the body gets to run on empty, and therefore has to break into its fat supply.

Modern biology has learned a lot about our dual mode digestive cycle, the main one predicated on continuous glucose burning, the backup consisting of fat cell break down and a whole different set of chemical reaction pathways leading to the all important ATP molecule, the spark in our metabolic cycle, providing fast energy in quantities sufficient to power muscle. 

Prompt:

what is the role of the chemical ATP in the neocortex? Is what we call "the thinking process" a big consumer of ATP?

Chatbot (Perplexity): 

ATP (adenosine triphosphate) plays a crucial role in the neocortex and the overall thinking process, serving as the primary energy currency for various neuronal functions. The thinking process is indeed a significant consumer of ATP, as the brain uses about 20% of the body's total energy despite constituting only 2% of its weight.

... followed by many more paragraphs of yada yada, such as:

Neurotransmitter synthesis and release: ATP provides the energy needed for the production and release of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and acetylcholine, which are crucial for cognitive functions such as mood regulation, attention, and memory.

Let's assume a body benefits from having its secondary digestive cycle started up from time to time. Use it or lose it, right? But then who in their right mind would willingly forgo nutrition? Well, many would of course. But so-called "cravings" or "temptations" were the business of religions to fight, to which end they could enlist the angels and devils, making one's heart the center of a cosmic drama. Lose weight before Judgement Day or else.

However in a secularized society, meaning potentially religion-free in many dimensions, the battle for better health must take other forms, with psychological archetypes perhaps replacing the supernatural. The ego still has its work as an heroic performer, all the more so given the preponderance of institutions planning to cash in on overusing the main glucose cycle. Insulin insensitivity sets in, according to many a compelling narrative.

The miraculous ability to store energy in the form of fat, for a rainy day, or even for a week of hunting, is there if we need it, but what defines "need"? A religion may provide sufficient impetus to a would-be disciple. What other frameworks might likewise serve, and prove sufficiently motivational? What do we mean by "a religion" exactly?  

As noted elsewhere in these journals, I can see where the would-be disciple would feel divinely and/or supernaturally rewarded for righteous fasting, given what we know now about the underlying biology i.e. the switchover from glucose burning to ketosis.

Owning Gaza

I understand the protective impulse. Many in the Pentagon would love to get orders to defend the Palestinians and help them to safety. Forcing them to stay in a demolition zone, with their affairs administered by their destroyer, still trying to starve them, does seem inhumane in the extreme.

Step one towards making Palestine a true Diaspora State is to grant its citizens their human rights as free agents, able to bounce around the world the way many USers do, or did in their jet set youth, before new economic realities, such as retirement, made such travel less affordable. 

Expressions of the US taking ownership, while hard to interpret into international law, conveyed at least some sense of taking responsibility and wanting to do right by the surviving Gazans. Of course not all Pentagoners are so charitably disposed, which is why I've long placed its icon on both corners of the GST diagram.

The Virtual States model is about any and every state seeing itself as a planetary agency, however spread about and/or concentrated in specific cities and campuses, port facilities, museums and so on. 

My convoy of cruise ships, Disney's among them, poised to evacuate victims of a monstrous attack, was science fiction when first proposed, with branding added for realism. The discussion then turned to where were these rescue ships going? I had some ideas. 

Given the White House rhetoric, one might think "to the Americas" in many cases. But with what sense of permanence? Clearly the evacuation should not be coerced, with more campus facilities being constructed locally for those electing to remain at the demolition and construction sites. Many would welcome a temporary leave of absence.

My Asylum City drawing boards have been about serving refugees more generally, and creating meaningful work in the process, especially for those in the health care, shelter, and transportation businesses, in addition to everyday support logistics (food, water, clean air). 

The NGOs have their prototyping functions, per Project Renaissance. The cities all learn from each other.

The goal of a refugee family is not to get lost in some bureaucracy as nameless numbers, but to get itself well documented and wired up to support services. Having such a goal would require trust on the part of the family vs-a-vs the bureaucracy in question. 

Obviously no one is eager to aid and abet their hunter-attackers, which is why a kind of firewall has been proposed, providing refugees with a degree of privacy as well as protection.

How the process of extending documentation and protection to all humans aboard Spaceship Earth actually pans out depends a lot on how aware of the challenges the various systems architects have become, thanks to their training and previous experience. 

Many systems architects have been seeing through the lens of the United Nations. Putting on USG glasses just makes the world seem crazy-distorted when coming from such a place. The Tower of Babel is still a reality, especially where Abrahamic religions, and their spinoffs, are concerned.

Matryoshka Dolls

:: Simple Tensegrity by Kenneth Snelson (for Tara) ::

Koski and I have developed a conversational habit of sometimes referring to a polyhedron as a "guy" e.g. "smallguy" is shorthand for a certain cuboctahedron in the hierarchy. By "hierarchy" I mean "set of nested polyhedra" and not just any set, but a specific one. 

I don't really expect the "guy" parlance to spread, but it does get me to "dolls" and Chicago, the musical. How do the "dolls" in "Al Capone" world overlap with "flapper" (anthropology hat on)? Perplexity.ai has an answer. 

My cartoon bio of Bucky would have him hanging out with Al Capone during Prohibition, and with rich controller oligarchs who still enjoyed their alcohol. That'd be circa 1927.

The lunge towards Canada provoked a backlash that's great for School of Tomorrow, as our story has centered on parts of the Anglophone world feeling colonized and oppressed by other parts. The UK feels somewhat haunted by those Menwith Hill monsters (giant domes) whereas Canada is always sensitive to its imperial-minded neighbor. 

I remember hanging out with WUSC volunteers, and picking up the vibe way back then. WUSC was in Bhutan, but not the Peace Corps, as the Network of Unaligned Nations (NUN lets call it) was suspicious of siding with any polarizing "superpowers" -- with good reason.

In our curriculum, the University of Toronto types were feeling oppressed because the Defense Early Warning system, while Canada-based, was claiming exclusive use of classified US IP (intellectual property) and was therefore closed off to alien intelligence, even allied. 

Likewise much of the IP wrapped up inside of AI (aka "pseudo-intelligence") is of Canadian origin, yet egomaniac pundits in the USA will blithely take credit, meanwhile accusing others, such as Chinese, of theft (as if it were somehow theirs to begin with).

The fun science fiction around DeepSeek is it trained on Chinese characters, a bigger data set, and the vectorizers were just that much tighter already, accounting for the decreased training energy costs. When you start out Anglophone, you pay for overhead and a lot of GIGO, hence the orders of magnitude bigger training farms with brute force chips.

You may recall (if you fish in my pond) that I draw from the Siobhan Roberts Donald Coxeter bio, The King of Infinite Space, when telling the story of the H.S.M Coxeter - R.B. Fuller relationship, most obviously memorialized with Bucky's dedication in Synergetics. They were employing entirely different disciplines I'd argue, but with overlap. 

Bucky was more running a business, with himself shopped out as faculty to contracting universities and teams of architects wanting unfettered access to his IP. That's more where I've been coming from as well, keeping it a self employment proposition, with School of Technology a welcome exception on many levels, and a resume perk when it comes to teaching Python.

My network has brought me back into LinkedIn thanks to tightening my curriculum a little more in the K-7 arena, whereas I usually pick up around eighth grade and roll forward, building out with more coordinate system experience, continuing Portland's practice of using MIT Logo in the elementary years. Along those lines, I'm studying to what extent artists have already anthropomorphized the polyhedra. Sure "hedron" means face, but how often does our iconic cube (emblem of Neo-Rome) come with facial expressions?

You might think I'm trying to sneak in Quadrays at the 8th grade level, and you'd be right, although I might quibble with "sneak" as the right word, as there's nothing especially sneaky about pointing to one's own research, when in a teacher role. I'd argue it's expected. Quadrays are an XYZ lookalike in some respects and therefore reinforce what we typically teach anyway.

The lunge towards Canada was also a new Golden Age in US history, which connotes / connects to the Roaring 20s, already a focus on my end, given the ladies farm and Great Gatsby connection, back to flapper, back to doll, as in Guys and Dolls and the "djangsta pony".

G4C 2025

G4C: a Gathering for Carol. 

One of Carol’s TRC associates in Lesotho reached out some time ago for some links. Maseru folks have been processing her passing, two years ago yesterday, on January 30 of 2023. 

She (mom) was born in 1929 and lived to be 93. Husband: Jack Urner (dad); Kids: Julie (my sister) and me.

We were of course aware of the date here, with Tara visiting. Sheila Goldberg called, well-knowing the date, and sending a well-meaning heads up regarding the active volcano some 300 miles off the Oregon Coast.

The day before, we celebrated Chinese New Year. Dr. DiNucci joined us. He played a big role in Carol’s care, especially when it came to those blood tests, home administered after awhile.

Fortunately, said submarine volcano, while quite likely to blow, even this year is, not of the kind likely to beget either an earthquake or a tsunami, Oregon being vulnerable to both.

TRC: Transformation Resource Center.

Playing with Patches

Whether to "chalk it up to coincidence" means anything, or not, I found it interesting to come across a ping, someone pinging me, with what looked to be a matplotlib figure. 

That prolly doesn't make much sense; lemme explain: getting good-looking plots, like bar graphs, histograms, pie charts, more exotic yet expected other statistician-invented forms (KDE plot, HeatMap), and having them be data-driven i.e. painted by numbers you're studying, is the job of a few open source tools such as matplotlib.

But then matplotlib can do so much more, providing general purpose geometric objects and control over their attributes and relative placement. A subpackage even gets into 3D (rotatable) 3-way renderings. One may enjoy hours exploring the ins and outs of this fascinating free package. Most users learn just enough to get by, as is true in my case, so I was letting Gemini shoulder the burden and boost the coding proficiency, which it did, dutifully.

The guy pinging me was on Facebook, Esteban again, regarding a narrative he has, regarding a point and/or ball and it's Flatlandesque transitions through some stairway to heaven dimensional ladder, only to start back at the beginning, somehow transformed. I'm referring to Flatland by Edwin Abbott, a satirical work about the varying degrees of awareness enjoyed by strictly dimensionally-defined beings.

Geometry in other words; we're comparing notes about circles 'n stuff. I take Abbott to be taking us through Hilbert Spaces, each rung of higher D. 

Esteban shares this graphic of mechanically perfect circles, shaded by color, semi-transparent, while meanwhile, on other nights, I'm leading a class in precisely this area: a how-to vs-a-vs matplotlib and related packages within the Python ecosystem.

I should digress and remind readers how each computer language is like "of a tribe" in that an ecosystem of users and developers emerges to staff positions and administer tribal governance. Maybe it's an inhouse language that belongs to an academic department. If you make friends there, they let you use it. Circumstances vary.

My trajectory was to see a Perl culture somewhat suffused with Python, and then with Ruby. Then Java took off. We've enjoyed a design science Renaissance, with a plague and everything! 

My portal into these undercurrents was via O'Reilly's open source conventions in Portland, Oregon. In some of those years, I was even helping staff an O'Reilly School booth, long story. Nowadays we're up to Rust and Zig. Which isn't to say some of the old die-hards aren't still around.

Open source is an umbrella term for a lot of such languages, and accounts for how they've become widely spread. Right now "open source" is in the buzz because of DeepSeek's splash debut, causing another "Sputnik moment" in the 'Murican Psyche. 

When Python takes off in Brazil and South Africa and no one is confused about why: smart language, smart peoples. The language was a product of Dutch brains in the first place. EuroPythons predate Pycons. 

Many representatives come to Pycons, which I'd also go to (in addition to OSCON). 

In the course of doing all this, I'm passing out some of the latest AI write-ups about me and what I've been up to. I know of cases where individuals have been displeased by stochastic gaffs. In my case however, with Perplexity at the helm, I wasn't disturbed by the results. Predictable. As the doctor ordered. I'm interested in curriculum and education, and have worked on some examples, such as on what I've called Martian Math.

Anyway, to continue with my story, I went onto colab.research.google.com, like I do in the class I'm leading, and asked Gemini to write me a matplotlib-using Python program that'd blend together shaded semi-transparent circles and thick black dotted lines. I prompted for that in the Gemini prompt box and got back a complete program, that ran correctly unmodified.

The result was not diagrammatically significant, given how much it depends on random numbers, but then I wasn't aiming to produce something significant, so much as in the style of, a similarity in one dimension, we could say a tenuously narrow one.

So here's the resulting Gemini-generated graphic, in response to my prompt:

 And what was that prompt again? 

Use matplotlib to draw a figure containing several partially overlapping circles of different colors and partial transparency, along with assorted dotted thick black lines at various angles.

Of course if I wanted it even more perfect, I could omit the spines, labels, tick marks, and take manual control of Circle placement. 

On class the night previously, we were not considering Circles at all, but Rectangles, which were used to construct the data-driven count and bar plots, even histograms, of our dreams. 

I'm harkening back to the coincidental juxtaposition of this content, with the schematics of another Facebook artist, Esteban Trev.

By the way, Circles and Rectangles are both in a taxonomy with a more umbrella term: Patches.

 

Pilot Study

MLK Day 2025

Did DT mention MLK anywhere in his inaugural speech today? Follow-up: he did. Did many, if any, commentators mention his taking advantage, or not, of this coincidental convergence or church and state? 

My schedule had me working through the speech, walking the dog Sy etc. but I’m taking in the postmortems. Yes, I think of MLK as standing for “the church” side of the culture. He was martyred. But then the church has been an agent of secular apartheid as well, in other chapters.

I’ve been somewhat focused on the TikTok USA story as it has a lot to teach about network dynamics, what with the short Sunday ban and the migration of many TT USA refugees to RedNote (more Yelp like than TT), to try it out, and to raise a finger to those with a “war with China” agenda. 

Those who wanna use the game board for juvenile Superpower Wars oughta settle for simulations, complete with retro skins. I’ve already got my Planet of the Apes sims going, modeling present reality (wave to Bibi).

Beyond that, I was back to rendering around Matryoshka Dolls, the polys, which I’ll sometimes call guys as well. 4guy rhymes with 4eye, the latter being a term Struppi (German connection, Telegram) uses. For tetrahedron if you need some decoding. I’m part of an inbred cliquey elite that does “tetra-volumes” or — tvs, complete with old fashioned “rabbit ears” (that’s a pun on the Quadrays apparatus).

In IVM world (vs XYZ world), we have a couple diamond faced dolls, the RT and RD, R for rhombic. The polys show up in Casino Math as dice, blending into the decor as more bling. Crazy Diamond combinatorics: those Coupler builds, of As and Bs.

I’m picking up on “Golden Age” (a meme) as echoing “gilded” i.e. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s world of high income inequality but with giddy hopes, pre the 1929 Wall Street crash (another ponzi pop) and the rise of Military Socialism as a means of defeating a Reich, and depression bailout. Social Darwinism took on new forms, given its strong roots in Angloterra. 

Military style base-centric development has its perks, as the Russians are experiencing today. But it’s a myopic strategy over the long haul, to focus on killingry (decay) over livingry (cay). Uncle Sam became a decadent addict and passed away, after prescient warnings. USA OS survives in the underworld, still a figment of the  collective unconscious.

:: curated usa os iconography by daf w/ ai ::

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.