Homeowner Talk

Neighbor (texting): It’s amazing what you can do with the right tools. Thanks for the glamour photos.

Me (texting back): Yeah, today I learned that pressure washer fitted with rooter nozzles on the business end, will snake and “jet” a pipe i.e. scour it from the inside. Not cheap but might give up to five years of service. This is according to a pro who came by, free of charge. We also discussed the pipe replacement option. This is all in reference to my upstairs rusty downpipes, shared by sink and tub (we’ve worked on it). He informed me my mental model of the downpipes inside a protruding encasement was incorrect, it does something else. I was glad to have my thinking corrected.

A MultiModal Adventure

Although I gave up alcohol completely back in February, I've mostly retained the mostly sedentary lifestyle. I have a bicycle, a pretty nice one, sturdy enough to handle my frame (idiom for meaty skeleton), but I haven't been riding it much. 

True, I added a bike rack to the car, upside down at first, but that was to take Yarrow to and from his bike camp (in town). I have yet to mount my metal steed (the two wheeler) on the back of my four wheeler (maxi taxi). 

Sam diagnosed the upside down problem when I was visiting his farm. I specifically asked him to take a look at it. I got the frame from Steve Mastin, one of our Wanderers. Sam gave me the bike in the first place, some years ago when he lived closer by and working on Flextegrity.

But that's only to say I have no real excuse for not driving out the Columbia Gorge and taking advantage of some of the best bicycle-friendly routes ever.

Anyway, this weekend I had a realization: that I have access to multi-modal transportation, meaning I'm free to start my journey on the bicycle, but then roll it onto a light rail train, or clamp it to the front of a bus. 

In practice, I was looking forward to rolling the metal steed onto an FX2 articulated bus, as it was getting dark. I was coming back from Oaks Park on Springwater Corridor, having paid a visit to the business side of the mausoleum where Humphrey Bogart's 3rd wife's remains are kept, an historical fact about which Portland is proud. 

I'd take the FX2 from the OMSI stop to around 36th and Division, was my plan. Alas, the bus that came wasn't one of the articulated ones, and both bike slots were already full. So I got more exercise then, taking Orange Line to SE Clinton and cycling up the hill to SE 36th, home to Harrison, instead of bussing it.

The main event we attended (Beth and Derek by car), was free summertime music, Hank Sinatra in the parking lot.

I'd done a similar ride the day before, cycling to Sellwood and riding the Orange line coming back. This is a habit I could see getting more into: multimodal adventures. One of the perks of living in an urban area with bike-friendly infrastructure.

Bucky Birthday Lecture

MathArtStream 4 ~ Kirby Urner: “Dimension" in Synergetics

I'm pleased with this pithy synopsis of key elements within my signature Silicon Forest curriculum, namely Quadrays and how these integrate well with Synergetics (Bucky's).

July 12 would have been Fuller's 129th birthday. Active Inference Institute just happened to have an open slot. 

Thanks to Daniel for introducing me to this little bevy of math-artist enthusiasts, already on the topic of visualizing a 4th dimension, and giving me the floor for an hour.

I felt like I was finally able to give the talk I'd have given at Bridges (rejected), although since then, the content has only multiplied, while becoming increasingly incisive.

True, I somewhat flubbed my last answer, miss describing what the hypertetrahedron would look like in 3D. The pentatope or pentachoron (5-cell) looks like the quadrays apparatus itself. Thanks to Tom Ace for the correction.

Movies for Kids

I took in both Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 at the Bagdad this summer. Both times, I attended a matinee with plenty of kids and their parents in the audience. Although having food and drink with the movie is encouraged, I didn't indulge in either (I have plenty in the past) and so didn't need a countertop in front of me. I sat fairly close, probably in the same seat both times.

Inside Out 2 is about diving into the psyche of one child in particular, Riley, a female entering puberty and intensely anxious about her future popularity and acceptance levels while adapting to the high school scene. The fact that her best friends from middle school are headed to a different high school raises the spectre of loneliness and abandonment. She will end up sacrificing these old friendships at the risk of flubbing the more critical new ones.

The story focuses on Riley's constituent personalities: joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. With the onset of puberty, anxiety, embarrassment, envy and ennui (boredom) enter the picture. The newer emotions, anxiety especially, seize control of the "bridge" leaving the original team to recover and resurrect Riley's old self, a journey that eventually leads to a better-integrated, more adult, newer self, a more inclusive amalgam of internal empaths.

Illumination: Despicable Me 4 is more about family and sociopolitical dynamics and exploring the concepts of truth-telling, deception, blackmail, secrecy and villainy. One of Gru's arch enemies, Maxime Le Mal, is on the loose and out for vengeance with a plan to kidnap Gru's baby. So Gru and his whole family are put into the Anti-Villain League's protection program, which necessitates assuming phony identities, which for the adults means roleplaying in new professions. Felonius Gru becomes a solar panel salesman and his wife Lucy Wilde, a beautician. Neither has much of a clue what to do.

However, Poppy Prescott, about the same age as Riley, is a budding villain like Gru and uses blackmail, the threat of revealing Gru's identity, to get the latter's assistance on her risky prank: the theft of a school mascot, a crazed otter, from Gru's old alma mater. Chaos ensues, abetted by the famous Minions for which this franchise is best known. Yes, I caught the allusion to Ian Flemming.

Fast and Efficient

A lot of times people take to their blogs and / or to X, with the intent to register some complaint regarding some insult to their person. I'm not saying I'm not guilty of doing that. Negative feedback is a commodity in and of itself, like garbage, or rather its removal and recycling.

Especially in movie reviews and such, one is expected to be critical, even if "critical thinking" doesn't have to involve dissing. Seeing what might be called flaws and deficiencies need not involve excessive moralizing, such as is characteristic of righteous outrage.

However, for a change of pace, I have to say I received fast and efficient service on two fronts today, and some positive feedback is in order. I'm using my blog to log some figurative fist bumps and high fives.

Over the weekend, I complained on MyChart about a medical condition that I thought maybe shouldn't wait until my regularly scheduled  appointment in August. My own primary care doc was out of the office until the end of this month.

Likewise around July 4, when I was driving all over Seattle, my "service engine soon" light came on, just around when Maxi Taxi was due for an oil change anyway.

I had my own theories around both conditions and wasn't far off. However what I needed was help from professionals and that I got, for both conditions, and with practically zero waiting time. A doctor saw me the next business day, even though the expected wait time is more like five.

That "service engine soon" light will likely go off by itself, as the underlying condition was likely transitory. I blame my inexperience with Seattle's steep streets, and unnecessarily gunning the engine that one time.

We'll see how it goes with my medical treatment. The prognosis is quite positive, and I'll have the follow up visit with my regular doc soon enough. I expect to continue using these blogs to chronicle how things are going healthwise. I don't have any large public or fan base, but I do have my trackers and backers. I believe in transparency, to a point.

So thank you Jiffy Lube (Hawthorne and 39th) and Portland Clinic (NE 50th and Sandy).

A Gentle Genius

remembering Tom Connolly

Explorers of these blogs may find references to Transportation Reaching People, a "socialist" version of Uber, meaning run by the county (Clackamas at first) and involving mainly retirees, compensating their mileage, and providing a socially useful role, an opportunity for community service. Tom Connolly was a main reason it all happened.

Tom and his family hailed from Missoula. One of my big adventures was packing up Gutless, my first car, a Honda Civic, and driving back to Montana with Tom, so he could show me around. We backpacked in to Lake Bertha in Glacier Park along the way. He helped me relive some of his memories as a thespian, connected to some troupe in that university city.

Tom looked like a pirate and knew how to act like one if called upon. He had a comedic stage presence, mixed with a gentle intelligence, that endeared him to all the volunteer drivers who signed up to take mostly elders to various doctor appointments, and to shopping malls. Trimet's mandate is to get people from where they are to where they need to go, a challenge only partially solved with fixed route busses.

Tom played several other characters, including a goofy version of Zoltar.

What I learned from Tom is community organizing is a lot about entertainment. Providing a fun working atmosphere around projects with purpose is not just icing on the cake, it's substance. We're talking about volunteers. Only mileage was compensated. They would get to know their regulars. My role was to code a match-making scheduler, to pair up rider requests with drivers. This was in an age pre phone app. It wasn't precisely like Lyft or Uber. One needed a lot more advanced notice for one thing.

Tom was like an older brother and mentor for me in a lot of ways. Upon his retirement, we didn't manage to stay in touch. He passed away several years ago. Tomorrow, I will gather with his family, whom I'd come to know, and we will honor him with a more formal ceremony at a military cemetery.

Just Use It

Speaking of osmosis and diffusion, I summoned up this mnemonic of Athena (the goddess) with her Python. 

Exactly how Athena and the Python relate in Greek mythos is complicated and would take a long time to chronicle if going by what's already in the record. However our goal is not to scrape through all the layers of wallpaper so much as to apply yet another tomographic pattern, sensitive to the same grooves (archetypes).

Whereas the German Idealists and depth psychology groundbreakers liked to counterpose Apollo with Dionysus, symbolizing a sunny rationality versus a countervailing more emotive, more irrational panpsychism, our Athena springs directly from the mind of Zeus and is plenty rational. Yet her disciples at Delphi speak in a dreamy, oracular, white noise of a language, inspired by vapors wafting up from the chthonic Python's cavern under Mt. Parnassus.

So when Apollo moves in to take over the Delphi complex and, by Apollonian accounts, proves victorious against the snake, resistant counter-intelligence, from the prior paradigm, is not Dionysian but that combo of war and wisdom for which Athena was renowned. 

The snake escaped, in our fork off canon. Athena's guild had new business in the New World to attend to, even as Old Europe fell under the spell of an Apollonian hegemon battling anti-science Bacchanalians, the reasonable versus the unthinking.

The good people of Nashville accepted their new Parthenon with open arms, a fully restored version of the one at Athens itself. The other pavilions and monuments were allowed to fade away, but Athena stayed, standing tall, her penchant for music consistent with her mastery of fight songs (trumpet) and propaganda (flute).

Python the computer language diffused throughout STEAM, then crossed the A bridge, from STEAM to PATH, via Natural Language Processing (NLP). The humanities crowd, including later versions of German Idealists, are now able to follow more of the math, thanks to Athena's pythonic mind in this Aquarian Age. The infusion of smarts via Anthropology (or the Arts) is bidirectional. Apollonian brittle rigidity becomes more flexibly pneumatic, for a smoother, safer ride.

More Shop Talk

Around the time of Deep State Synergetics, I was reconnecting with talent I'd met through edu-sig, the vibrant Python community listserv (implemented in Mailman, itself a Python app), and getting some tutoring about French geography and MIDI.

I've always posed to myself those questions about where to spot-weld the maths to music. We're used to the frequencies approach, focusing on pitch, but how about MIDI itself, the entire protocol? Pitch is included, as data bytes following specific command bytes, but so is so much more, such as channel selection, emphasis (key pressure), attack (velocity) and so on.

MIDI is a code language, not in the sense of "encrypted" so much as "encoded". What's the diff? Encryption is about concealing a message from all but an intended receiver. Encoding is about sending payloads of information by means of discernable signals, which in our Digital Age means ones and zeroes.

Given I'm at the headwaters, where the salmon come to spawn and die, it's not for me to now downscript all the lesson plans, down to the minute or even to the specific devices.  I might do that for my own workshops naturally, but I'm not publicizing those plans. I do go down to the slide deck level, so it's not like I'll avoid a good demo, especially if it's my own value added.

I remember at Junior English School we had two instruments to choose from: recorder and melodica. I took the recorder fairly seriously and my parents indulged me, by buying me a bass (same shape, but bigger). But I never got any serious instruction on that instrument (I did on piano) and to this day can't read music at speed. I'm retarded in that respect (lag behind, don't keep up). 

So I'm grateful my own disabilities do not define the limitations of what I record as my curriculum.  

Let's do some stuff with MIDI is all I want to say.  Leave it to Faculty XYZ to decide what their focus will be. Some might mandate attention to some specific tune, such as Star Spangled Banner or some school anthem. For local faculty, mandating such specific content would go with the territory, whereas such mandates from me might constitute an abuse of power (serving only to make my performance seem awkward and out of step).

Indeed, my French connection is reminding me that MIDI doesn't need to be about music creation. As a protocol, we're free to map it, taking advantage of existing devices yet making them control geometric objects instead. 

Replace pitch with color, volume with size, and allow pitch bending to mean rotation around some axis why not?  

Again, the details are beneath me (i.e. above my paygrade) to have to specify.  Don't let me be the bottleneck for a great idea. I don't even have Python midi modules installed, yet.

The French Connection

My Zoom session was with Blender / Python talent in France today. 

The new studio sounds exciting and I look forward to resuming real time work after the remodel.

We talked about the Arabic language, among other topics.

A tetravolumes table:

20	مكعب السطوح	mukab al-sutuh
18.51	إيكوساهيدرون	icusahedron
6	المعينية دوديكاهيدرون	al-muiniya dudicahidron
4	ثماني السطوح	thamani al-sutuh
1	رباعي السطوح	rabai al-sutuh

How'm I doin'? 

The premise is we're over the hump in terms of showing relevance. 

The main barrier now is a language barrier, not so much a credibility gap.

We're not waiting for me to learn Arabic or develop masterclass Blender skills. I'm not the bottleneck.

We already have those skillsets covered.

Our main focus is the need for a Blender toolkit specifically engineered for teachers including memes from Synergetics e.g. 

• the concentric hierarchy in its IVM context
• the spin-generated 25 + 31 great circles
• the corresponding 48 and 120 LCD triangles

See the Figure Index, 900 section especially. The CH includes its BEAST beginnings.

Political Parties

student poster, Portland public school

I was tuning in this NYT opinion piece, a YouTube-archived recording of a conversation, which to my ears sounded very NPRish, from a production values standpoint (pretty good in other words, if too uber-slick in places, that's journalism), and musing further about the partisan role of political parties.

Discussing the role of parties, as in political parties, is of intrinsic interest. 

My rhetorical flourish was to create yet another Pirate Party, distinct from the others, with only planks, no candidates. Folks in the other camps should feel free to walk 'em. For example where are the "by application process only" Fed boarding schools that ain't militaristic? 

We need to breed diplomats, not just sore losers. We have West Point and... ?

Looking back, I'd say Uncle Sam's public offerings, since privatized (given his passing), insufficiently prepared young Americans for the debates of today. 

As a parent, I don't have that criticism, as our Portland debate team culture was well-developed, reaching  national championship level twice during our family's period of patronage. However I'm able to see my fortunate experience in contrast to the norm.

I'll admit I haven't recently sought out the YouTube channels where high school aged debaters are taking on serious resolutions reflecting today's events. I used to do that more.

What are the teams allowed to say, regarding the blowing up of gas pipe infrastructure, as in the case of Nord Stream? I'd have to go look. 

What I surmise, though, is most subcultures are too nervous about being politically correct to risk too much realism.

Not until I was chaperoning our Cleveland "we'll eat you alive" Cannibals did I tune in Model NATO as a thing. I met some recruiters in Indianapolis, at one booth among many (Reed College had a booth). 

Model UN we'd all heard of, but here the kids were trained to thinking more like NATO states first and foremost, or at least that's what I'd expect. I'm not curating comments here in my Quaker journals (blogs) but do feel free to be in touch or elsewhere record what Model NATO was really like. 

I didn't do much Model UN either, as a parent or high schooler. I've got my little story about all that.

Back to the NYT thing: so why just the two parties? 

Anytime I bring up my experience of moving to Italy, wherein the number of parties was more open ended, people tell me that's a "parliamentary" system and the US doesn't have a prime minister, ergo (the logic goes), so many parties, including Socialist and Communist parties, maybe several of each, a Christian Party if that's feasible (too many factions?), could never coexist within our US motherboard's design. 

Our OS is inherently duopolistic, is the thesis there.

Like in that NYT piece, they're talking about William Buckley's encouragement of anti-communism more as a witch-hunt FBI thing than as a big tent Congress thing with at least a seat or two for pinkos. 

With different, more up to date public school offerings, Uncle Sam might've prepared today's Feds for such as "zionetics" as well as "dianetics" i.e. leading "ics" of the last century. Cybernetics. General Semantics. Of course "zionetics" is usually cast as an "ism" not an "ics" but we needn't get lost in esoteric grammatica here.

Will today's high schoolers be familiar with talking points on all sides, or were the speeches of Lavrov not curriculum-included, only press conferences by WDC admin spox John Kirby? That'd be insufficient prep to score highly. Time to cram?

Will the forensic societies be so lackadaisical as to lose all debates at the global level? Losing a round of poker and resorting the one's pistol versus paying debts is an old timey sad story. The more honorable course is to cash out and settle.  

Of what worth is high school if no one is equipped to talk about the Minsk Agreements (for example) when debating the Ukraine debacle. They'll miss the thrust and parry that only realism in simulations might provide, if they don't know the history. 

Bone up in a gamepod why dontcha? Find some way to self brainwash that works for ya. No one else can do your own thinking quite so effectively, so take the helm.

So what's my solution, as a curriculum developer, to all debate team deficiencies? Do I have one? Not directly.

I trickle charge my 4D solutions through mathematical fantasies and science fiction, with my "synergetics" (another "ics"). I pipe in lots innocuously neutral content (see "hypertoons"), that's yet "outside the box" enough to get more teachers amused and in a mood to be open-minded. 

If the mathy mind (STEM) is so able to spring open so smoothly, then why can't debate culture in the humanities (PATH) be likewise infused by a painless osmotic process, resulting in more relevant models and imagery?  That the teachers feel thought-provoked is about all one might shoot for and expect positive results. Being too pushy only delays right action further.