A Quaker Event

I was glad Gayle emailed me about this event, as I don't always study the Multnomah Meeting newsletter closely and would have missed this event otherwise. I lot of my oldest Quaker friends were present. Lexi (Alexia) joined us for the morning segment.

Walking back to my place, Lexi and I came across the Belmont Street Fair just getting going. I’d just recently enjoyed Clinton Street’s and recognized some of the booths. The dollar books were a good deal, great selection. I had a fun conversation with the glamping lady representing a new Eddie Bauer travel program.

Lexi had something else scheduled, but I was able to return to the meetinghouse for the 4 PM presentation, outside in back, by the Quaker Earthcare Witness (QEW) team. They were looking to us for financial and other support.

I was glad to catch up with people and meet some new characters.

The night before: our Wanderers gathering at the Linus Pauling House on Hawthorne. As I’ve chronicled many times in these blogs, the two venues are linked through Silicon Forest pacifist philanthropists.

Urban Skiing

I don't wake up knowing if I'm gonna do a bike loop, but maybe. Sometimes I do. Today I did. I baked a potluck dish first, and did my elliptical. 

If I do my elliptical, my policy is I'm off the hook from doing much of anything else strenuous (""), but, hey, no one's gonna stop my if I wanna workout more.

Even if you don't know Portland, it might be fun to think of dots, visited in sequence. Let's play Edges n Nodes (or Nodes n Edges): 

1. The usual descent through Ladd's Addition and past Abernathy Elementary to the train crossing on 11th. Except a freight had just started its way across. I'd be better of using the overpass even if the elevators are broken (only one of them was).
   
   



2. On to OMSI. A NARA event was underway; I'd be back. Eastside Vera Katz Esplanade, under the Morrison, under the Burnside, over the Steel, on the lower deck, the deck that raises. Then right along the river, back under all those bridges on the west side, and over the Hawthorne Bridge back to OMSI, and back to the NARA event, with the line for fry bread.
   
   
   
   
   
3. From OMSI / Rail Heritage Museum it's my standard FX2 "lift" back up the hill. 

Urban skiing I call it. Most the cycling is downhill or flat, with mild uphill only, not counting pushing the bike out stairs (broken elevator). Note I said "out stairs" hah hah. Inside joke.

That's my foreground, what's in the background. Timelines will show new circuit designs for Motherboard Earth happening. But then since when has history let us catch our breath? Since global media became light speed, or closer to it, we've enjoyed a suffocatingly (to some) crowded Global Village (McLuhan), a seething melting pot of overlapping ethno-spheres. Some humans are offended that others co-exist (or try to).

I'm chatting with a WILPF lady about all the war propaganda seeping in through gamer world, a primary recruiting ground for those anticipating tomorrow's conflicts. I'll share some verbiage (stuff I wrote):

I don’t think those trying to stoke the flames of outward war by infiltrating the gamer community, are expecting to have their access to real junkyard weapons squeezed off, but that’s what I work towards regardless, as the AFSC motto remains War is Obsolete.

Regarding IAEA, it’s obvious the Iranians need to be invited as full partners when it comes to going max against any who would harness fission or fusion for homicidal purposes. Psychos like that need very restricted access to labs.

Also:

My goal here would be to expect that computer games will continue to feature war as one of many genres (not my favorite) and to gradually close off the “outward weapons” angle i.e. the only weaponized drones you’ll be accessing will be from Parks n Rec, after sufficient training. 

The drones won’t fly outside designated perimeters (players check them out — courses where peeps bring their privately owned drones might be more on the outskirts of town, less of a theme park setting).

https://kirbyurner.substack.com/p/parks-and-rec-drone-zones

If you’re a hormonal Estonian or Polish kid who wants to fight a real Russian, we’ll show you to a booth and you can have it out with your counterpart in our realistic simulator (realistic to a point; we’ll let you live even if your avatar dies).

Machine Learning At Work

 

:: predictive history ::

The concept of "predictive history" suggests a theoretical approach where historical patterns, societal data, and long-term trends are used to forecast future events or potential scenarios. In the context of the image provided, we can explore several elements that resonate with this idea:

Geopolitical and Economic Forecasts: The newspaper details a new Aeroflot route connecting "Cascadia" directly to the Russian Far East (Vladivostok), describing it as "A First in Cascadian History!" This represents a forecasted future where Cascadian regional identity has become formalized and its global connectivity has significantly expanded westward.

Technological Advancement: The text on the page references "Modern Fleet" and "Direct Service," hinting at predicted developments in aviation range and infrastructure that enable ultra-long-haul travel that is now only experimental or unavailable.

Cultural Trends: "Cascadia" is not just a geographical region but a bioregional movement. By 2027, the prediction suggests this identity has strengthened and gained international recognition. The small Cascadia flag pin on the coffee mug reinforces the forecasted societal shift towards bioregionalism.

Context of Real Events: Predictive history differs from pure fiction because it is often grounded in current data. While this exact scenario (direct Aeroflot flights from PDX to Vladivostok in 2027) is not a present reality, it is built upon existing geographical proximities and regional identities that could theoretically converge under the right conditions, making it an example of predictive scenario building.

(gg) gemini generated

Morning Musings

Visiting the Larry Yes installation

I didn't have the word for it in my boyhood, or it wasn't central, we might call an "SAT word", but now I do, and would say my Grandma Esther (dad's mom), was a polymath. 

Her reading and conversation, often about what she was reading, was highly eclectic. She displayed a deep interest in whatever topic she was diving into, which I might translate as "a high degree of comprehension" because, again with the passage of time, I've become enamored of  the word "comprehensivist", championed by CJ (Chris Fearnley), as a quasi-synonym for "polymath". 

In some passages I value, I've seen "comprehension" and "apprehension" interlinked in ways I appreciate.

Comprehension is a vital phase in that apprehension is more a lotta dots without connections and therefore no ability to squeeze, shrink down, compress. Information balloons, outta control. Why were "witch doctors" or "logicians of the psyche" (i.e. psychologists) dubbed "shrinks" in beatnik slang (the same slang that gave us "squares")?

The common wisdom is "shrink" is a derogatory reference to shrunken heads, again satirizing a profession in suggesting it's more of a pseudoscience than a fully generalized anything (a real, or hard, science). 

But why not admit another meaning: "to shrink" is to hand back to the customer a simplified model of a dynamic (a diorama of the ego-hero's predicament, customized) wherein the essentials are highlighted and extranea made to retreat into the background. Something big, humongous, and overwhelming, is now more minute and therefore manageable. 

To shrink is to comprehend, and thereby make short work of.

In this blog, we link Polymathy to Wandering. Being a stumblebum among disciplines doesn't imply ricocheting to no purpose, but rather with an eye to shrinking down, make comprehension (attained through processing) the goal of apprehension (collecting data). 

Wandering may be envisioned as a stationary activity in the case of meditating (perhaps upon a pile of pillows) and/or thinking and/or pondering (considering). But a wanderer is usually more adequately portrayed as someone actively engaged in epistemic foraging within a surrounding environment, exercising a wider range of skills and/or ways of coping. The "learning curve" is multi-dimensional.

Homo Correctus

Yes of course it's AI and, at the time of generating, was meant to represent me, of Generation Jones, keeping up with the Joneses. I'd just gained a new Ego-brand weed whacker.

A modern "dweeb" as we're called is hip to Carl Jung and synchronicity, so I'm allowed to bring it up, in character, when I recount how me n Patrick were walking about, checking out the newly remodeled Belmont Branch library, and yakking about typewriters and keyboards and QWERTY versus other layouts, when then, my story goes, the very next morning, my QWERTY keyboard (links to gamer tests) went crazy, as has never happened before (with no precipitating events that I could fathom). 

Off-and-on didn't solve it. 

The Caps Lock key now rotated through the keyboard light colors. Backspace-delete added ASCII patterns to the right. Like I said, crazy. The "show keyboard" key still worked and I'd pick out a message with my mouse on screen.  Voice woulda worked. Patrick and I had talked about that too: voice-controlled text creation.

So yeah, I ordered a new one, through Amazon, which came within hours. 

I could track the delivery vehicle in real time, like it was an Uber. Where it was in the world (the car) was my business until the replacement keyboard showed up. 

I was there waiting, as I knew exactly what was happening, down to a picture of my driver.

Then it got even more dweebie: upon opening the package I realized I'd miss-assumed about its size; it was for a smaller iPad, not my 12.9 inch 5th generation model. Dang! 

The new keyboard worked, which proved which device was at fault (not the iPad). I could prop the iPad up in the old case and type to it from the new one, cordlessly, cuz BlueTooth is like that. Or I could loosely stand the iPad vertically in this over-small shell. Dweeby! Like taping together eyeglasses across the bridge of one's nose.

Should I keep it in inventory and plan to get a smaller iPad? 

Should it be a gift? 

Who do I know that needs this size case? No one, off hand.

So: the middle class booji thing to do was return it, free of charge, having the website spit out a printable UPS return label. I used a different computer for all this, the one in the outstairs office.

I hadn't disturbed the contents nor lost any inclusions (padding, power cord), so it was a cinch to repackage the case and send it back from a nearby location I could walk to, that UPS Store next to that New Seasons. I'll likely go by it again later today, but not stopping, on a 14 bus.

The replacement keyboard n case should come tomorrow, this time the right size.

Going through all this, I'm thinking back to one of my YouTubes wherein I paraphrase Richard Rorty, one of my teachers at Princeton, a leftist, but in favor of middle class living standards as the Bell Curve average (somewhat by definition) without needing gross outliers in either direction. No K-shaped economy. No two humps.

Uber poor and uber rich are less important to sustain than one or two standard deviations around the middle, which measures physical circumstances, such as access to food-water, travel-shelter, entertainment-education. 

One's psychological well-being deserves its own probability curves, which has different constraints than the physical plane (that's speaking more from a data science angle than from some idealist metaphysics). I'm not saying the M and P planes (U=MP) are unconnected; clearly architecture and the human psyche are intimately conjoined. It wasn't called Globe Theater for no reason.

We're not talking about malign neglecting of the uber poor. but rather about sustaining a healthy median not dependent on uber-exploitation and so-called dead-end lifestyles. 

A lot of "dirty jobs" give bragging rights (think military) not to mention useful skills, such as driving in traffic without going crazy (a lotta dweebs listen to the radio then, me included). 

Cascadian Pragmatism aims to offer PhDs in global trucking, which doesn't preclude having favorite and/or native-familiar locales, as most of us do and even more of us may in the future.

I admit a part of me is playing at being Bill Bixby in My Favorite Martian, while another part of me plays the Martian, or some other booji-compatible (sympatico) ET. A nod to Mork n Mindy.

Pipelines From the Future

So am I talking about future pipelines? Is this about oil?  Not so much. This is more about GST, general systems theory, used to manage Global Data, my science fiction world company. The pipeline feels like it’s piping goods from the future because it contains actionable information of relevance to anticipatory design scientists.

In an animation house, a place that makes movies for a living, a pipeline is more like a workflow and its final results will be in the future. The School of Tomorrow is packed with ideas for animations, and some have materialized, while others stay out of reach in the future. Along with those simulations. Toyz. Outdoor and indoor props. Movies.

The Project Renaissance idea was / is pretty simple: frontline nonprofits do the field testing while venture capital watches and decides what prototypes could become profitable product lines. Picture an NGO installing solar powered water pumps. People queue to gain experience with this technology as they’ll have valuable skills going forward. Having a team that knows the score and how to move forward, is as valuable a component as any prop, when it comes to making movies.

Why do I keep mentioning “making movies”? Because any undertaking of significance is likely to be a source of recordings these days, given recording equipment is ubiquitous. The raw recordings feed the pipeline, along which editing occurs. “Censorship” falls under editing. Editors tend to have an agenda and want to make one or more points with their documentaries, usually. Or is it a science fiction film? A fantasy?

GST is indeed about theater and roleplaying, cosplay, one could say. However per Project Renaissance, the props may well be real, in the sense that once the movies are made, the scenes persist, becoming a site for more movie-making. The architecture is not necessarily of the flimsy stage-prop variety. An OMR (a type of city) would actually take shape. As a prototype. Investors would decide based on real world experimentation. Trial and error has not magically gone away, even in this age of computer simulations and game theory.

The pipeline in question is actually the BE DO HAVE projects completion cycle. Planet Earth is a solar-powered nonprofit, a recipient of grant wattage, a daily energy budget, and a multiplier for intelligent life. A mark of intelligence is an ability to actively infer and to engage in anticipatory behavior. Intelligent life plans ahead. Unintelligent life is purely reactive, never proactive. Passivism < Activism.

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”.