Wanderers At Large

I might confess to being a tad self-indulgent in getting the tiramisu French toast, more of a desert, but then breakfast-desert is a thing, per any Waffle House. Petite Provence is a tad more upscale. 

We had planned to rendezvous at Landmark across the street, but as the new owner informed Dave, who go there first, it’d be a couple more weeks at least before it opened. 

The new owner is a former owner of Float On, the floatation tank boutique at one time managed from the top floor of the Pauling House, the website talking about John C. Lilly, a floatation tank pioneer. 

Dr. Lilly  used his flotation tank time attempting telepathy with the dolphin species. The tanks themselves were further east on Hawthorne Boulevard, at street level, and remain in use to this day, the business having reconfigured.

Don Wardwell brought along a book by Stephen Hawking he was borrowing, for us to skim while we awaiting our orders. We boasted to the wait staff how Don had been in tight orbit around Stephen at times when Dr. Hawking was working with ISEPP, Terry’s NGO. Stephen came to Cascadia a few times.

That’s how Wanderers arose, in conjunction with the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series that ISEPP organized. 

The Linus Pauling House itself was not a main venue for these lectures, although occasionally we’d get lucky, and a visiting MVP would join our group for a more intimate talk. Dr, Susan Haak for example, talked to us about Pragmatism. 

These around-the-table discussions were in contrast to the large public lectures they’d be giving to ticket holders in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall (“The Schnitz”) and in the nearby stone church, likewise on the South Park Blocks (shared with PSU and Portland Art Museum). 

Sometimes we would take our guest to lunch at Than Thao, a few doors down. Mario Livio comes to mind.

Terry, ISEPP president, would also drive his guests around Oregon to visit schools, such as high schools, community colleges and universities. Some of these schools were also donors to the lecture program. We also had corporate donors, such as Mentor Graphics.

Special ticket holders for the lectures, many of which are written up in these journals (Sir Roger Penrose, Jane Goodall…), got another perk: a catered dinner at the Heathman, after the lecture, during which the invited guest could be plied with more questions, over wine, coffee and dessert. 

My wife Dawn Wicca was the bookkeeper for this operation (I’d help out with the mailing database), getting us on the list for this special Heathman dinner privilege. The Pauling House itself is only a few blocks away from my domicile. 

These days, with the lecture series in the rear view mirror, Wanderers still find ways to meet, and of course to wander solo, perhaps as hikers. Or to wander in packs, like Brenda the biker (although she drove her car into town this time).

Speaking of Brenda, see ordered a fancy beet juice drink, which she let us sip, which got use talking about Jitterbug Perfume, the book by Tom Robbins. She was able to find the forward online, and read it allowed to our party.

A Quaker Rant (School of Tomorrow)

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (movie review)

The backstory here (hey, it’s my journal) is I’d hoped to return the five DVD set of Orson Welles content to MMU on SE Belmont, and maybe score something else (F for Fake maybe? They didn’t have that — or maybe I searched wrong? I’ll double-check later). 

However, after I’d plunked the vids case through the return slot, a sharp clerk fished them up and cued me to the fact that I’d only returned four of the five disc (despite the printed reminder message on the case, and despite my having glanced at the multi-DVD container before heading out and persuading myself I had all five). 

Nope. Number five was still at home in the player, I realized at that point. My bad. So I’d need to come back later on a second try. 

But in the meantime, on the way home (I was walking), why not see this 3:45 matinee, a cartoon (animation), at The Bagdad? End of backstory.

OK, now let’s cut to a central scene in the movie, one I considered most relevant to a subject I study, namely Synergetic Geometry as pioneered by the late, great, one-and-only, R. Buckminster Fuller (RBF). 

I’m talking about the geodesic sphere we found ourselves within as a point of view, the concave inner surface omni-triangulated (I was looking for pentagon patterns)). At the center of this sphere is like a Marvin the Martian and/or Darth Vader gun, set to destroy a whole civilization or planet — the backdrop for this story is the whole galaxy of many planets, reminiscent Little Prince.

Surrounding the giant gun, which is drawing power from the imprisoned princess (a mommy to minions), are concentric gyroscopic wheels (not unlike in Lawnmower Man, the B-movie). 

I could see why the baddies felt powerful in controlling such a precessional gizmo. All they needed was some girl-boss-turned-slave energy to make their evil and destructive dreams come true.

But then the other girl boss, the older sister, appeared with the Mario Brothers and a friend, and, deus ex machina, convexity met concavity (their two hands) through the glass, eliciting an even more primal energy, and the evil design was exploded. 

Precession favors the regenerative. I could see kids might be getting the message. 

The domineering male archetype (symbolized a father-son pair of death cult dinosaurs) takes a back seat to a more nurturing civilization-building female energy.

By the time I got home and had all five DVDs ready, it had started raining, so I accomplished the return (successful this time (I cued the guy: “all there this time”) by car, while steaming an artichoke in the Instant Pot pressure cooker.

Marvin the Martian in AI Art

Of Meetups and Queries

Per these recent movie reviews, I’ve been continuing my Film Studies with MMU, thinking ahead to where “a production” produces more lasting results than mere movie lot props, as our props will be made for the real world. 

Tough Guys links me to trains and thereby to steel (I think of that Amtrak on the Steel bridge — a digital picture I took during No Kings 3.0) whereas the five disc set on Orson Welles takes me back into Martian Math, as well as the noir genre.

Picture one of those yurt-n-dome-based windmill-powered communities I’ve been positing for Mongolia or Siberia, with Alaska-Cascadia-based campground prototypes. Such installations would naturally attract documentary makers, as well as inspire science fiction (such as about a train tunnel under the Bering Strait perhaps).

On the Wanderers front, Terry passed me his latest thinking at the Spring Equinox, which I triple-hole punched and added to my “bus reading” binder, to which same binder I today added a hardcopy of Daniel’s paper on Blake vs Newton and Bimetallism i.e. Gold vs Silver (so also Economics in flavor). 

We had a follow-up breakfast at Bread and Ink, as Tom’s (our customary venue) was still closed owing to that kitchen fire.  

Speaking of Tom’s, the new food pod is almost complete: the food carts are open and operating, it’s just the indoor commons that’s still under construction.

Terry’s paper traces what he considers to be two flavors of thermodynamics, one tracing through the Carnots and the other through Boltzmann and others. Did Newton really recant infinitesimals?  Lots to track down. Terry’s thinking inspires me to see in terms grand polarities, with equatorial geodesics tracing a tightrope walk between the two, a dialectic hybrid or unity-of-opposites.

As usual, I left the meeting with a lot to think about, and while my queries were fresh in my mind, I ran a Deep Research prompt through Perplexity and got back what I consider to be worthy Philosophy of Engineering, which I file under Cascadian Pragmatism (a useful categorization more than some textbook definition).

That’s the second time in about a week that the LLM’s (“gossip-bot’s”) output as come across as worthy of memorializing on GitHub, directly pasting the Markdown copy into Markdown cells in a Jupyter Notebook. The earlier prompt, regarding namespaces using the 4D meme, was likewise “perfecto” (picture an Italian chef, making that perfecto gesture).

Refreshing a Teaching App

I didn't expect I'd be spending my morning wrestling with the Periodic Table. Talk about back to basics. The back story is I was visiting my PythonAnywhere application, a teaching stack, Flask atop Python with SQLite on the side, and noticed my half-assed demo wasn't actually bullet-proof. I'd only disable any editing later, before the hack. A couple lines in my Glossary had been defaced.

In the process of refreshing the Glossary (geek terms, wrote it myself), I noticed the Periodic Table was far from complete, with less than half the 118 elements I knew were out there. That's when I fired up a new Jupyter Notebook, to document the process, top to bottom, of taking two CSV sources, merging them, and extracting just what I needed to fit a pre-existing mold.

That's all in the foreground. In the background, an out-of-control city-state known as The District (aka City of Morons in these journals) is threatening to attack Persia and destroy it, in retaliation for its own psychotic war of aggression. If this were a farm animal, we'd put it down, quick and easy, but given we're dealing with the Pentagon (now private sector), we have to factor in the criminal element (organized crime runs that shop, we all know).

I'm far away in Portland, Oregon and don't engage in any message traffic with any official DCers, except on Facebook maybe, where I'll write comments like "too late" if it's someone posing as “from the USA" (snicker). Sorry Charlie, you're not persuading me any more with that flavor of BS; we haven't had a real USA in some decades, per our Medal of Freedom winning hero.

BTW, I recommend not contacting the defacer sticking an email address in my database. I never did. But I wanted to show what enterprising hackers might accomplish. Actually, in this case, nothing all that special had to happen as the code's weaknesses were all mine. Fortunately, it's a learning application, designed to be hacked on. I'm learning. 

Also, I'm not gonna try Manus through Meta. If I try Manus, it won't be in a way Meta knows anything about.

Oregon Rail Heritage

School of Tomorrow: Spring Term Update

No Kings Day

The No Kings 3.0 uprising (demonstration, protest) has not happened yet in Portland, and exactly what my day will be like is unclear given I'm coordinating with others and their plans are only starting to gel as well. Likely public transportation will be involved. Left to my own devices, I'd likely head into town on the Max from the Hollywood station, looking to join the throng near the Steel, as I did recently (one week ago) for the cherry blossom experience.

However, having arisen early, as is my custom, I did spend a couple hours doing some deep cleaning, in the bathroom and kitchen. My meditation was along the lines of: No Kings means a lifestyle with no servants, no court, no sycophants. One might contract with assistants for sure, as when needing an appliance repaired or installed, or even housecleaning by professionals, but there’s no sense in which these companies are necessarily socially lower on the totem pole. No ranking is required. No proof is social station is involved. More like Food Not Bombs.

The American Dream does not involve “winning the lottery” and retiring to some tasteless McMansion with lots of servants, for a life of partying and superficial pursuits. That’s more the antithesis of the American Dream of you ask me. Americans would like to live in a world where none are oppressed on their behalf. On the contrary, Americans would love to be of net benefit to this world. That’s the dream anyway. The reality is a lot of people feel they represent the Americans and set up in offices pretending as much. At least they’re not kings or queens (or other royalty), except on floats or in the theater.

I shared this same picture (above) on my Meta timeline, and in the comments section went somewhat deeper into the Jesse Jackson story. I was involved with his campaign in 1984 as well, especially after he dropped out after the primaries, and we could use his picture to help motivate people to vote from whomever remained. 

As usual, Dems did their bait and switch, to make sure only middle of the roaders would enter the final contest — leading to my Vote for Nobody pin, popular during the Occupy movement, in which I was active (and no, I was not and am not connected to “Antifa” the nebulous organization — Portland has a more imaginative resistance scene than most stereotypes allow for).

Project Hail Mary (movie review)

As I do somewhat often, I deliberately avoided any opinion pieces (aka reviews) regarding this movie, but had seen the previews. However I’d stereotyped the type of film somewhat inaccurately. The film proved somewhat surprising in other words, such as by including a song number, a female vocalist (and main character) hearkening back to those noirs of the 1930s-1950s I’ve been sampling.

I’d expected more of a special effects high action movie, with a lot of kinetics, and this film had that, but its axis of emotional depth as well as intellectual depth was more than that of many comic book derivatives I associate with this genre. I haven’t read the novel behind it, which explains a lot of my cluelessness, which I was fine with (I’m clueless about a lotta stuff).

The smart part is its juxtaposition of high school biology with phenomena of an astrophysical scale, condensing solar systems to Petri dish ecosystems model-able in the lab. Suns are dying because of an infection, and antibodies must be sought. The humans push their technology, leveraging the very biohazard they’re fighting, and the one guy at the tip of the human spear encounters a counterpart with the same objective, so they form an alliance.

As we were leaving the theater I overhead one viewer saying “I didn’t expect it would be that funny” which well-encapsulates my own sense of surprise as well. 

A Hamlet Rendering

For some readers, "rendering" may have a negative connotation, perhaps associated with something a butcher might do vs-a-vs meat. In my namespace, it's a softer meaning: ray-tracings, renderings into visible vistas of mathematical objects ("making the invisible visible"), as in "render farms". 

However, as an English speaker and as someone into Shakespeare, as well as Norman O. Brown, I can't claim to control all the connotations. Misreadings are ever possible, and are not even discouraged.

With that opening for context, let me say Johnny Stallings knows how to render Hamlet effectively, as a read performance, presented at a podium, but with props, a mini-play. He actually dons hand-puppets when he gets to the play-within-a-play (a big part of Hamlet is the play staged in its interior), and when we get to the Alas Poor Yorick part, he pulls out Budget Skull from its box.

The Yorick part got me off on a tangent later as I associate that scene with a performance by one Andrius Kulikauskas in my backyard, with a bubble-head named Zoltar, an homunculus. Hence the selfie (one of the embedded slides), as even though Andrius was the principal actor, we're talking about my memories.

The setting for this rendering was also a big part of the experience: a maze of rooms in a gigantic space, a Presbyterian Church that has creatively morphed into a dual-purpose community center named Taborspace (it's on the northwest slope of Mt. Tabor). 

Until one of the other invitees pointed it out, I hadn't realized there was a literal labyrinth just outside our Artspace window.

Speaking of the other invitees, this was a very hip-to-Hamlet crowd. One guy immediately noticed Johnny's version omitted some famous concluding lines. However Johnny's pithy densification of a four-hour plus marathon is told from Hamlet's viewpoint, and since he's dead by this scene, it makes no sense to include it.

You'll find Johnny appearing throughout these blogs over the years, not only in association with Shakespeare, but Walt Whitman as well. I have Nick Consoletti to thank for cluing me into the Stallings namespace lo these many years ago, when I saw him do King Lear as a one man show.