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)

TetraScroll

Tetrascroll online

Weaponized Religions

Downloading the latest Dogmas (a Matrix Refresh)

As I’ve said many times through my channels, I’m not a Marxist. 

That doesn’t make me an enemy of Marx or Marxism, but does mean I’m not fan, because to really be a fan you need to do sufficient homework, not just offer empty praise, lip service, or expedient flattery. 

I’m not a Taylor Swift fan for the same reason: I couldn’t tell you the name of her songs or recite lyrics. But that doesn’t mean I have a negative opinion of Taylor Swift. On the contrary, I went to one of those three hour movie versions of her road show and enjoyed it — a lot more than most other non-fans have done I’d hazard.

Not being a fan is not the same as being an anti-fan or detractor. A non-fan is closer to being clueless about X than to experiencing antipathy towards X.

Back to Marx. Didn’t he say “religion is the opium of the people”? 

I get that many religions are addictive and foment a detached view of life, and/or provide a fantastic kind of science fiction (e.g. Scientology), but I’m more inclined to see religion as a mind-control tool used by elites vs a ground-up grassroots phenomenon. 

Folk religions provide the raw material. Elites turn folk beliefs into ideologies more useful to their agendas, which often involve conquest and territorial expansion. 

So not so much “opium” as “chip implant” — which of course Marx had no experience with (chips had not been invented yet).

Christianity would not be what it is today without its constant reshaping by imperial powers. That doesn’t mean Christianity is helpless against this type of manipulation, just most people don’t develop their immune systems sufficiently and are easily programmed by the powers that be. 

I’d consider it a topic within anthropology to study how religion is almost always weaponized by the agenda-makers, but not necessarily to their own benefit as miscalculations are common. 

Most schemers and dreamers seeking to use others as cannon fodder find their schemes backfire sooner or later, as people get wise to what’s up.

So am I saying religion is bad? Not really, as I do believe a controlled mind is better than an uncontrolled mind. But it’s best if the individual human is auto-programming through intuition versus submitting to the authority of others. Many religions discourage this, and I’d say those are the religions to stay away from, if you value personal autonomy. 

Some don’t want autonomy — they wanna escape having a sense of self, of responsibility, and just bliss out. Isn’t that what Eric Fromm’s Escape From Freedom was all about? Time to chat with Perplexity again.

Regarding Marxism, if it contains the dogma that only human labor is a source of value-added in an economy, then that I’d certainly disagree with. We could have a debate maybe.

Warm Springs Circuit

The tent is passing tests but for the flaking reflective material used on the reversible (either side up-facing) over-tent, anchored by stretchy hooks pulling down to the tent’s corners (> 4), with a single ridge pole tied to the apex. At the apex, three geodesics form a triangle to support the dome. The skin is hooked to these from below.

However, the air mattress failed completely. I hadn’t tested it in awhile and was please to find both hole plugs. Just like old time, I blew into it, filling the thing with lung exhaust. But it never filled, because a seam had become unglued or was slit or whatever. Not only was this a large hole, it didn’t look at all reparable, so I stashed it in the estate’s trash.

That’s right, this was all happening within the perimeter of a privately owned patch of land with its own facilities: running water, heater, air conditioner, refrigeration, even WiFi (which I’m using now). I slept in a bed instead of outside in the tent, which is just as well, as although I’d brought blankets (not a sleeping bag), anticipating a warm night, it dropped into the low 40s on the Fahrenheit scale (32 water freezing to - 212 water boiling, in equally-sized “degree” gradations).

Getting here through Warm Springs Nation was problem free, for me and the dog, even though fires are raging throughout the region and legions of firefighters are bravely combatting the spread. Spokane, Washington has it worse in a lotta ways. The fires I’ve been seeing on local television includes that one east of us in the Ochoco Mountains. Yesterday we visited Smith Rock at watched hikers and climbers from a picnic table, eating deli-prepared sandwiches. That evening: fresh huckleberry pie from Eagle Crossing, my Warm Springs stop. Fam call with the sisters.

Given WiFi, I’ve continued barreling ahead with Project Manga (as I think of it) which includes Anime of course. We’ve got our design science revolutionaries providing a lotta raw material for didactic comics likely to be more popular in Japan than in Gotham at first.

Testing the Tent (continued)

:: campfire lore ::