Voodoo Economics?

Back in CrowTown

I've been traipsing around Emerald City, a nickname for Seattle Washington, site of a World's Fair in 1962, which I can remember attending, given our family lived in nearby Portland at the time. Later, around 1966, we moved to Rome, Italy.

Yesterday, I drove through said capital (of Cascadia, per some Oz-themed folklore I've developed), taking I-5 south from north of Everett. 

Two days previously, I'd traversed this route by SoundTransit train and bus. For some time now, when doing my North Circuit, I've noticed these impressive rail bridges paralleling, sometimes crossing, I-5. I was curious to ride it and on this trip I finally got to.

Although I tunneled under and drove alongside said Space Needle City (Seattle Center is where it resides, the aforementioned World's Fair grounds), this trip was more about visiting Los Angeles, about two hours south by jet, maybe not counting taxi time (on the tarmac) and certainly not TSA lines. 

They're enforcing Real ID nowadays, meaning my OR driver's license was insufficient as a travel credential through the TSA checkpoint. I had to show my passport card.

Having been gone for over a week, I have pending tasks to attend to, such as feeding the patient, long-living snake, a co-resident of my outstairs office (where I am now, having resumed my elliptical-based workout -- referring to a piece of gym equipment). 

My aging pup, Sydney, had a health spa experience where she stayed on North Circuit, as I pioneered this Whittier Loop (Whittier is part of Greater LA, kind of like Gresham is to Portland). I'd be happy to repeat this combo. SeaTac has links to everywhere.

However, with the onset of Fall and with Fall Term looming, I need to serve as acting principal for School of Tomorrow, which means employing the services of 4D Solutions aka 4D Studios, my local suite of CrowTown workspaces, variously equipped.

Mixed Use High Rise

Architectural Conception

Classroom; 28th Floor

Lobby Mural

Gemini Generated (gg)

Electronica

Long time readers know one of my key themes is “andragogy” which means “pedagogy but for adults”. How one best trains (I hear some bristling at that word) kids ain’t necessarily what works best with adults. Granted: physical humans are at different levels, mentally, so some kids prefer the parallel “for adults” track in some cases, and vice versa. Common advice: when learning a new natural language, start with reliving your childhood and watch and ingest a lotta kid programming. Then there’s relearning one’s own language…

Along those lines, lets get back to V = IR and substation mechanics, with Queen Transformer (the whole point of the hive) taking the high voltage lower amp feed from the hydro-dam (partly made by ETs in our Martian Math) and dropping it to a lower voltage higher amp juice as needed by the wall panels, on the other side of which we have loads.

Per the word-meaning trajectory of “money”, which maps to petrol already as in the word “petrodollar”, let’s move to another analogy (by natural transformation) in which shoppers stream through a shopping mall, but in a fixed circuit, meaning they all hit the same vendors in the same sequence. 

Coming in from the battery bank, they have X electron dollars (any currency) and upon flowing through a resister, that money shrinks in potential, even though they didn’t transfer any energy (joules = “jewels”) yet. They did, actually: already add to the entropy of Motherboard Earth, broadcasting heat into the coldness of space. Motherboards, especially CPUs and GPUs, get hot.

When they hand over energy to a vendor, and get something in return, that’s called work. Burning off value in the form of empty heat expenditure is nevertheless sometimes necessary. Vendors are known to burn out. Shoppers need to be valved and their credit limited for the whole circuit to make sense.

Let’s turn that into a prompt and see what Gemini comes up with: A textbook picture showing shoppers as electrons moving in a circuit from vendor to vendor, which are the loads. Each shopper has a wallet, an energy budget. The value of their currency shrinks in what it can buy as they go through those resistors (money changers). Gemini’s output is up top.

Not too shabby. I might hand this to a human artist as a start. AI needn’t be top layer. Like our shopper should always face in the direction of DC flow and not get bigger as she gets back towards the source. And should the shopper herself shrink, not just the wallet? How do we indicate the lower voltage potential? It’s not like you have fewer dollars, just you need to push more of them to a vendor to get the desired result because each one is worth less as a unit of energy transfer (P = IV).

What did I mean back there by “word-meaning trajectory”? That’s not a mainstream word is it? Kinda like “quadrays” it’s maybe not in the OED or SEP yet, but we use it a lot here. 

Well, let’s go straight to an example: the word “psychosis”. At the Shakey’s last night over pizza I could be overheard to have said something like (paraphrase): “all my best friends have gone AI psychotic, tsk”. I said it light-heartedly. No one blinked. The CIO at the table talked about how the ambient culture was finally catching up to him, as he’d been warning of encroaching “AI psychosis” for years, and now it’s a trending topic on YouTube n places, with many channels sharing crazy content (but then TV has always had crazy content).

To get some roots, a starting point, let’s go to Freud and Vienna Circle, a peak time for Urizen (William Blake allusion). The medical profession was charting a course through what would come to be called mental illness, with its various taxonomies of pathologies, like dementia praecox, which no one has anymore, cuz the terminology moves on. 

And there you have it: a “wordmeaning trajectory” (I don’t bother with the hyphen always) for “psychosis”. Nowadays the word is being “revectored” by “AI” to where casual restaurant conversation features it differently than in Freud’s day and age.

I have a whole YouTube-published video on what I call “Cultagory Theory” (a play on “Category Theory” or CT) in which I give more examples of revectoring word meanings. The question is not whether revectoring happens so much as whether we do it consciously or unconsciously. 

We will likely fail in our revectorings (making “self” an agent) meaning the load is beyond our budget to lift (buy) as in “above our pay grade”. Failure is not a failure however, meaning the feedback is valuable either way: both can and can’t send a signal. Indeed, neither makes sense without the other. Boolean logic requires at least two to tango. Grand revectorings take a “movement” meaning the changes need to “snowball” as in “go viral”.

Of Timelines and Markers

Prolly cuz “partially overlapping Universe” connotes “timelines” (a “scenario” may be conceived as such), I’m likely to search up databases with a timeline focused angle (among maybe many other angles).

I recall starting in with Andrius of Anaheim and Lithuania, into maths, regarding where do I find “who influenced or learned from whom” in the tree of mathematicians, and he pointed me to a useful resource. Remember a directed graph may have two-way streets. Contemporaries learn from one another, sometimes. 

The Bernoullis were a hub, as math history students know. I link Bernoulli numbers to Ada in my Defense of Ada essay. I’m gonna fish up more of that story using Perplexity in a sec.

However there’s a difference between “scenario” and “timeline” in terms of dimensionality, by which I mean a “line” comes across as “thin” more like a thread, which is appropriate in a way, as in Greek mythos a lifetime was indeed a thread, which the Fates would cut when it came time to end it. However I’ve come to favor “time tunnel” as more space-timey in flavor, with the spatiality of a tunnel (something one may be “in” as “in a dark ride” at a theme park) and the ticking of a ticker (adding action). Lights, camera, action; Hollywood’s pithy version of Genesis.

Time tunnels twist and turn through the airports and airlines, as mine did at LAX recently, over Cobb salads and sushi nachos (my name for it — SoCal fusion).

Today I’m gonna tunnel my way to a coffee shop and finish reading my airplane reading (that’s an idiom — I didn’t actually read on the airplane). Ender’s Game. A big bestseller its day, but I’d never read it, nor others by this author. It’s about a children’s army. I’m still not clear why they put it on the kids to fight the ETs. The adults want their protection. Child labor if you ask me. But then some children hunger for “adult” responsibilities (as if being a kid weren’t a responsibility).

Facebook knows I’m here (in Greater LA) as my “home” (feeder timeline or “scroll”) is starting to pop up with a lotta local content. I could buy tickets to something called DataLand for example. I feel immersed in a “data land” already, safe to say. If I wanna experience time tunneling in twisty plots (aka Universe), all I need do is head out for that coffee shop, and continue this blog post from there…

…and now I’m there (a translation in both space and in time — we distinguish them, although energy expenditure requires both, seamlessly). I arced around the planet a tad (a smidgen) to get here, while my watch arced around the dial (I have my digital watch set to a dial display).

So what about “markers” (per blog posts title)? Markers help us get a time slice in common, where we can sort of agree on what splashed and rippled next to what, even if a causation story is not the objective. A cargo jet with an onboard motorcade ferries personnel between cities, showing the rest of us how it’s done. Like in Alaska that time, but minus the beast (that’s a nickname).

Road Trip

I’m doing my North Circuit again, but modified to accommodate a side trip I’ll be blogging about soon.

My route took me through the Olympic Peninsula to the Kingston - Edmonds car ferry. 

Sydney, my dog, rode in the back seat.  She’s a great traveler.

Doorbell Donation

As the old guy (senior) about to make a donation, I get to ramble in a reminiscing manner, we hope relevantly. 

I give myself high marks, as the legislation OSPIRG is backing has to do with mitigating food waste, and here I was, veteran of the Food Not Bombs operation (in Portland only, a local chapter), and former computer programmer, on a consulting basis, for the Oregon Food Bank (decades ago). 

Oh, and I was in a small group strategy meeting with Ralph Nader once (he wouldn’t remember: Sandy Newman, Project VOTE!, Reagan vs Mondale) and we’d also been at the same Princeton University reunion, my 25th, his 50th.

Wearing my anthropology hat, I underlined the critical importance of logistics. A legislator may believe that simply by virtue of writing a law, so will it be (amen), as if said law’s implementation were a mere afterthought. 

Drawing from my experiences in the toy biz, it’s one thing to have a great idea for a toy design, but quite another to have a pathway to a profitable (pays bills on time sustainable) mass replication strategy, in itself as much an invention as the design idea, in many respects. I learned this from touring (and working with) Design Science Toys.

All of which is to say: legislation is not self-implementing and the further a legislative body is from the actual executive front line, the less likely the laws will be followed closely, let alone “to the letter”.  

Are judges the referees? Or are they likewise too cloistered to see the disconnects? Maybe only the police are in a position to really experience the absurdity sometimes. Or the soldier. Or the guard.

Let’s go back to Food Not Bombs as a good example. Imagine a subculture, let’s say non-denominational religion-wise, that took serving free food, to anyone, as a calling. They adopted many Food Not Bombs practices, but also upscaled everything to where average suburban middle class normies looked forward to participating in all the logistics involved. 

A festive atmosphere prevails. Voodoo Doughnuts? Corporate sponsors? I’m just imagining the science fiction. Remember scouting? Cascadian Pragmatism?

Like I told the doorbell fundraiser, I’m kind of a TV head. If I want to say counter racism or other unfortunate bigotry, it’s not the legislators in Salem I’m likely to petition. I’m more likely to look to screenwriting and radio-television, social media. 

How we got to healthier social practices, looking back, is a topic for a whole genre of science fiction novel and/or series. Or are more utopian-flavored simulations of possible realities simply too hard to program and/or enact logistically vs-a-vs the more familiar dystopian standard?

That’s a query worth a deeper dive.

:: Mathematically Generated View ::

Designing Simulations

People still look to diplomats to represent flag-flying city-states scattered about, in this Steam OS compatible video game we’re designing. However, the truckers have their own channels, and a PhD trucker outranks most diplomats.

In the meantime, in RealWorld [tm], a play-to-pay media game, we might see some parallels. In terms of bandwidth, the pro diplomats are being displaced by those more willing to keep it more public sector (accessible). 

However it’s a blurry boundary given retired pro diplomats have flooded into the influencer space. They still have the same skillsets, which means their content is less cringe, more watchable (in some cases).

What started as “troll farms” some years ago is the new normal, in terms of paid influencers fanning out to test their PR powers in the public debate arena. The gossip bots help level the playing field in a lotta ways.

The idea of a global network of truckers swapping routes as a part of an inter-network exchange, is a theme in these blogs. The video game is of course curriculum-oriented.

The theme of our games tend to be SimCity-like in that they feature the buildout of infrastructure, electrical infrastructure in particular. That’s a tie-in to our Martian Math of course, which focuses on teaching ETs the basic principles of building out power grids. 

We’ve been focusing on substations recently, as they condense a lot of these principles at a macro level. Direct current logic gate stuff is of course complementary to this material.

The newest Python release candidate for 3.15 includes a frozendict, which I tweeted about approvingly: a logical extension of the language. Frozendicts are hashable, meaning we’ll be able to use them as keys in dictionaries of the conventional mutable type.

I’m working with other Wanderers on getting the geometry out there, in some ways piggy-backing on what’s already a theme for us: structural chemistry (such as crystallography) ala Linus Pauling. 

There’s a passage in Synergetics 2 (995.34) we might use for a bridge into the Pauling corpus. Insofar as Bucky wanted to get the Pauling “Magic Numbers”into the mix (e.g. 28), this passage is apropos. 

The also passage hints at the correspondence we might find in the OSU Pauling Archives, with Fuller pushing back that the overlap is no just merely coincidental.

Burger Week Continues

I’ll prolly be accused of a non-sequitur vs-a-vs my blog title, in turning to Debate World and the much ballyhooed Great Debate twixt Andrew Wilson and Candace Owens. 

I was gonna watch it on the hand-me-down HDTV but that piece of hardware may finally have gone back to free energy, as the buttons I push no longer correspond the the reality of what it does. I fought with it for a while, then gave up and pulled the plug. Back to iPad viewing. Not complaining. The debate began.

The Burger Week plans came into the mix so that right around the 2nd deep dive into the Steakhouse mystery (did Tyler Robinson really eat there?), I was heading on foot along Hawthorne to meet Dr. D for his choice of food cart, named Hunker Down. He had just ordered when I arrived. 

The outdoor seating area had a lotta fans going, yet it was only a pleasant 71 Fahrenheit. I know, crazy right? That I still use Fahrenheit.

So the segue, the sequitur, if you missed it, was the steakhouse. True, a burger is not a steak. Just I’d been thinking of myself as a carnivore recently, having seen a Paleo Friendly sign on my way to the previous Burger Week burger (see previous post).

The burger was excellent. 

Dr. D mentioned another channel he was newly tracking, focusing on a guy specializing in debate coaching and critiquing. This is actually the theme I’m continuing, if you wanna go back in these blogs. We’re preparing for a lot more debating, as we move away from passively following our non-leaders into oblivion. The very human reflex, before following others off a cliff, is “let’s talk.”

The Heist (Food Pod)