Saturday, December 28, 2019

From the Far West



Would you like a blog with embedded videos? Many ways to go.

Here's a link to a skills-building video where I take you through the steps that I use.

Saturday, December 21, 2019

Apologetics?

Sounding like a Bucky apologist again.

From:

Bucky Fuller 2020 Revival Project

Public group

Kirby Urner Per Critical Path he said "realist not optimist" meaning from his point of view, from 1970s onward, humans had the wherewithal, technologically, to succeed as a species, but there wasn't a "given" we'd work out, ergo "touch and go", "final exam" with expressions of hope. If humans continue squandering their opportunity, it won't be because Bucky was wrong. He wanted to accentuate the positive and show we had the capability, so from 1970s onward he was like "any day now". That's how he needed to be. Seems that way today i.e. nothing is keeping high schools from dropping his "concentric hierarchy" into the middle of an American literature class (the schools wouldn't have to be American, just Bucky's lineage is New England Transcendentalism), mathematical in nature though it is (talking tetravolumes, A,B,T,E,S modules). But they don't, so yeah, the future remains iffy. A prominent futurist with a strong track record left us a conceptual toolbox we don't use for the most part. Not his fault in any way. Bucky is blameless.
http://grunch.net/synergetics/gst2.html

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Dark Waters (movie review)

My technique on this one was to spontaneously accept an invitation from an old friend, as it's a holiday season and family is around. So I hadn't done a lot of homework beforehand.  That's not unusual for me.  Sometimes doing homework afterward is the better idea, and that's the case here as well.  Around movies, we have a lot of agreement that too much "knowing ahead of time" is a way of "spoiling" it.  That's a lesson we might apply outside "the movies".

The movie I'm talking about was Dark Waters, showing in the historic Hollywood along Sandy Boulevard. Those enrolled in my School of Tomorrow may have already encountered my place-based approach, which translates anywhere, as we're all in a place or base.  Dark Waters is about a place we've all lived in, if driving around, going to movies, enjoying city life with paved roads, suburbs, high rises.  We experience birth, death, stress, and other stuff, in between.

Into this karmic world (aberrational matrix) comes this priestly dressed-up group of older men and sharp clerks, other data scientists, that listen to company stories while drinking wine (or sake if we translate to Tokyo).  Swap casual for suits and maybe beer for wine, give them laptop computers at the speeches, and you have geeks at an OSCON almost (other behaviors might change -- we could express an accumulation of deltas, preferably with calculus).

Once you've poisoned the world with your chemistry (a few lights go on in the basement lab, as one or two technicians get it at first, that a meltdown is underway) you need to cover your tracks, postponing heat death, outliving the enemy (whatever wants to take you down a notch).

Admitting to any kind of crime or wrongdoing could be deadly and would go against the interests of investors, making such admissions seem like fireable offenses.  CEOs have to answer to a board, and are paid to stay answerable.

The story captures that side of things:  people thrive off of jobs with DuPont, including around the poisoned wells, the oasis, and having those ways of life disrupted by "change artists" (maybe "hacktivists" of some kind) is unwelcome, even if they see the writing on the wall.

The science will tell us our lifestyle is unsustainable, like that's news.  Tell that to people in a lifeboat.  You want us to do what again?  Advertise the alternatives.  Engineer our path away.

The deeper question is how do we let medical science help us keep healing from these self inflicted wounds?  We need to confess, as a science-minded culture, that we have indeed poisoned ourselves and our planet and all of us are dying a slow death (and not just from C8).  Since Eden.

We also have the capacity to treat ourselves (in the sense of "by means of medicines and therapies") and use our reason, other capacities (these are occidental terminologies), to improve our lot.  Work towards liberating ourselves from enslaving conditions is the vector of civilization according to Alfred North Whitehead.

Settling on some simple technologies that work and that we completely understand, is a goal of some sciences, having cultivated a feng shui.

The responsible engineers want to alleviate drudgery in the workplace, and the idea of a nonstick pan is not in itself anything evil.  Miracle chemicals come with a downside, is the lesson we keep learning.  If we find an ensemble of technologies that work well, including through recycling phases, we might want to stick with it and experiment more gingerly.

The Dymaxion House, on display in Dearborn, Michigan, where an auto industry had its own side effects, was meant to make housewives happier and better company for their children.  That sounds ridiculously stereotyping on purpose, a 1950s Norman Rockwell, but with that retro futurism vibe introduced by a metallic yurt on a pole, equipped with all the appliance amenities, these days HDTV and lots of bandwidth (not necessarily 5G).

The mass market mentality treats the end users as "receptors" as the bureaucrats had come up with. Those were us.  Engineering has this way of objectifying that's really offensive unless we're doing it ourselves to sustain our families.  The protagonist family in Dark Waters is not ostentatious and blends in with the rest of America, as wanting to have a life beyond slime.  A life other than some nightmare is what we all want.  How might we raise living standards on Ghetto Planet?  Even if you own a fancy yacht, if it's just more trash in the dumpster...

My homework so far has suggested what I think a lot of us already new:  the whole corporate personhood thing and surrounding game of incentives isn't working that well.  New engineering is needed, new circuit designs for motherboard earth.  The permutations for "social organization" are endless and we already have the priestly suits doing "social engineering" in the guise of law.  Add code.  That's us in the 21st Century going forward.

Speaking of "social engineering" etc., the movie is especially good at reviewing the decades and rolling us through time, vis-a-vis office technology.  We see a first search, on something other than Google, and a first boot up of Windows 2000.  The cars change.  The characters age and get sick.

The legal process drags on, and on. That's not fair though, as it's really science, and a huge epidemiological study, that's showing us once again: we have poisoned ourselves.  We need help.  But government belongs to "them" (the fictional zombies, the corporate persons, the gods the suits serve).

Today's Teflon, a brand, belongs to some corporate cutout, which assures us the C8 pans have all been replaced, though not at garage sales or in your old waffle iron.  You're going to continue to poison yourself, throughout the day, in a variety of ways.

I'm not saying you'll need reconstructive surgery.  The monster parts that develop might be psychological, and treatable in an asylum-sanctuary sense.

Sunday, December 15, 2019

Wanderers on the Move

Given changes around Yahoo!, our little coffee clutch, which frequents the Linus Pauling House, has revectored a lot of its conversations to other social media.  As a listowner, I've busied myself with downloading the archives, pre shut down.  I've been going back over some of the communications, just to assure myself we still have a record.

I randomly opened a deeply buried example, zipped within zips (the downloaded structure is elaborate), and came across a posting by Brian Sharp.  He was questioning the ISEPP president's controversial stance, which was par for the course in our subculture (cult).  You might think the president of a science organization would hold to mainstream views in academia.  On the contrary, his style has been to take a radically unpopular stance and stir up debate.  That's kept our discussions peppy.

Fast forward to 2019:  here's a link to a similar conversation happening today, but on Facebook instead, and hence with a different audience.  Instead of a smattering of other Wanderers, we reach a random audience determined by Facebook's algorithms.

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Updates from OCN


OCN (Oregon Curriculum Network) has invested in Rust, a computer language. I'm showing the work on Github via Youtube.

I've got a service call this morning, turning a dumb home into a smart home with 4G IoT, i.e. the security and heating systems both talk to (update) and take commands from the owner. I have no idea how many sensors may be involved, eventually.  Today is about getting the basics working. 

I was out of my depth with the Blue House furnace right away, despite "homeowner trainings" galore on Youtube these days. I may have learned a trick or two by watching.  The heating system was installed by former owners and is showing signs of age.  I've been an occupant since 1995.  You'll see Blue House in a lot of my videos as the OCN C6XTY sculpture out front is a neighborhood attraction.

Connecting the CCP to Avogadro's Number seems an unobjectionable curriculum dot connector (a scenario) in our CSN hypertoon reveries.  Hypertoons and hypertunes are taken up elsewhere in greater detail (see CSN blog).  You'll be talking about a "mole" of something and depict that as a CCP packing of known radius, say cuboctahedral.  I've blogged some calculations on that score.

Sure, you may come up with a constituent set of XYZ vectors that take integer coefficients, in terms of hitting the centers of CCP balls.  We do the latter in building up the concept of Gnomon, ala The Book of Numbers (Conway & Guy). Triangular numbers are modeled with CCP, as are squares.  It's when we go to the next layer that we might part company, between SCP and a Barlow Packing (CCP a subset of those, as is HCP, anything of that density).

We're all about number sequences (not just Fibonacci type) as something to program around, in various languages. 1, 12, 42, 92... is a sequence revisited in OCN reveries.  Use Python to generate Bernoulli numbers why not?

CSN is about micro-charity transactions originating in fantasy games (as in ordinary gambling, where the player is the beneficiary). Yes, you might donate to a church project which you're currently working on, without scandal.  I'm not saying charitable giving is the polar opposite of self interested. On the contrary, most want their giving profile publicized in various ways.  That's called a track record, and people without one tend to be at a disadvantage (on the other hand, a clean slate is a chance to start over).

Our premise (for some of us, perhaps in conclusion, after numerous studies) is humans with now outlet for freely giving, seen through the Jungian lense of the "hero archetype" are going to suffer, as the economy dries up (drained libido). If you're not giving young and old alike, opportunities to commit winnings to a preferred future, then you have only slaves, who will prefer to sabotage and/or vandalize the current system.  Reserving charitable giving as the privilege of plutocrats, who then shut down competing circuits, is a sure way to get said plutocracy ejected as a viable "planet" (aka "network of frequencies" or "cabal").

OCN is itself the target of charitable giving, by myself first and foremost as I commit hundreds of volunteer hours to its continuing relevance.  Were CSN benefitting from more OCN reveries (hypertoons etc.) we would likely attract more donors.  Having sampled our product, they're campaigning for more.  OCN as a beneficiary of CSN infrastructure is no "conflict of interest" but is rather a paradigm use case and public demo.

Another charity might be ISEPP & Wanderers.  The closing of Yahoo! services (some of them) is setting a fire under our chair.  We've been set in our ways, in terms of telecommunications, for some 19 years. I'm consulting with a professional archivist.  We have over 75K communications.

Friday, December 06, 2019

Project Notes: Zome Inventory

A curriculum piece I'm working on, with project lead David Koski, is the enumeration of Zome buildable tetrahedrons and hexahedrons.  Zonohedra are Zome's forte.

"Enumeration" has technical meanings, and in this context "dissection" is also apropos as in: given this polyhedron X made in Zome, what would its volume be in terms of phi-scaled S and/or E modules?

We lose some of our audience at this point, given S and/or E modules are not a middle school subject, their being building blocks in a little known set, featuring, in addition, A, B and T modules.  Then come the Mite, Sytes, Kites and so on.  Kit and Kat.
Symmetrical Tetrahedron: Syte: Two of the AAB allspace-filling, three- quanta module, asymmetric tetrahedra, the Mites__one positive and one negative__may be joined together to form the six-quanta-module, semisymmetrical, allspace-filling Sytes. The Mites can be assembled in three different ways to produce three morphologically different, allspace-filling, asymmetrical tetrahedra: the Kites, Lites, and Bites, but all of the same six-module volume. This is done in each by making congruent matching sets of their three, alternately matchable, right-triangle facets, one of which is dissimilar to the other two, while those other two are both positive-negative mirror images of one another. Each of the three pairings produces one six-quanta module consisting of two A (+), two A (-), one B (+), and one B (-).

Yikes!

None of this stuff is really hard though, just why would you want to learn it?  Did they think it might help you in art school?  I did.  Design school too.  What's cultural literacy without the Concentric Hierarchy as wrapped in Synergetics?  American literature has its jewels too.

The database would let students retrieve zonohedra by label in some way.  The Koski spreadsheet features a huge inventory of types.  In other records, all 65 tetrahedrons are covered, ala Steve Baer.

I hate to be the bottleneck on this one.  I don't have but a few samples of Zome and don't have the grant.  I'd be bringing some database skills to the equation.  We'd be using vZome.  Build the shape, check its volume.  Again, is working out with E & S modules worth anyone's time?  I'm banking on the venture leading to new vistas.


Thursday, November 28, 2019

A Rust Centric Playlist




The embedded Youtube (if you can see it), is the first in a short playlist of five videos.

 As my viewers come to appreciate, I'm a bit Delphian in my delivery, meaning much is left to the imagination, including to other topics already mentioned, but out of the current scope.

For example, although Rust is in the foreground, in comparison with Python, I'm also showing how I participate in political processes (USA OS), using social media. Case study: what is RSS? In this context, it means Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.  See Wikipedia.

In a follow-up episode, I reflect on my methods and share them with my viewers.

Friday, November 22, 2019

Two Pensive Cowboy Episodes



Thursday, November 14, 2019

Footnote About Buckyballs


Mysteries Behind Interstellar Buckyballs Finally Answered
Mimicking conditions thought to exist around dying stars, researchers discovered a mechanism that could explain why planetary nebulae are teeming with complex carbon molecules.
Rachel Abraham, NASA Space Grant Science Writing Intern, University Communications, Nov. 13, 2019
My understanding of the story is Sir Harold Kroto, astronomer, first detected C60 using telescopic spectroscopy. He hypothesized the buckyball structure, whereas others supposed chain polymers. The Rice University team was enlisted, as their lasers and mass spectrometers would help narrow it down. 

The verdict: buckyballs form naturally in soot. 

Getting pure C60 remained a major technical problem and cost more than gold by weight in the 1980s. In short: C60 was detected in interstellar space before anyone tried to synthesize and detect it in the lab. You can see how my story deviates from the story provided.

Tuesday, November 05, 2019

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Making Media


I was back at the Krobar today (Cork and Tap), where the bartender kindly looked up Tiger Balm (aisle 21) which I procured for Carol, suffering from a well-known chest cold she sometimes gets in Oregon, where the spikes in hot and cold may prove taxing.

This was after producing another video, hoping to connect some dots for myself an others.  I invest in mnemonics, which is to say memory banking.

You'll find a lot of business models bank on customers remembering where they learned a lot, or in some other way got their money's worth.

Customer loyalty translates into repeat business, and without repeat business, you may run out of customers (not always the case, as some needs remain transient).


I'm hoping to orient students who do not consider themselves "true believers" when it comes to deities or a deity. I'm working to tease apart "prayer" and any specific form of deism. 

Having friends in religious camps doesn't cancel my appreciation for secular space as a kind of neutral ground between faiths, much like the emptiness of outer space, not really a vacuum either.


I just had the one Boneyard RPM. Having procured the necessary supplies, I'm keeping a close watch on the household.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

Beertopia

I've gone on and off beer a few times, however not on moral grounds, so much as for health reasons (for going on, not just off). When I go off beer, I up other alcohol beverages, keeping it constant, more or less.

This is not health advice, and I'm no medical doctor.  Call me a witch doctor if you like, but to me that just means I'm not hanging out a shingle, as one who wants to be persecuted for practicing voodoo or whatever shamanistic science (oxymoron alert!).

I'm just another Quaker who likes beer, and who takes pride in Quaker breweries, if the beer is any good.

Anyway, I was at one of my regular watering holes with a friend I'd not seen in a long time, on her way back to an important career, which had sent her here for a conference.  I introduced myself casually to one of the bar customers, and started yakking with the bartender.  My friend took up with the stranger and they talked on and on and on.

Well of course it turned out later that my friend had mistaken my casual introduction to a stranger, for a nod to a well-known friend.  She thought in sharing her life with this guy, she was likewise filling me in, as he and I would be talking later.  I doubt I'll ever see him again.

Another time on the same visit, my friend got my mother talking about her childhood and sharing stories I hardly ever, if ever, have heard.  Not pleasant stories (about how her older brother was killed when he roamed out in a new neighborhood to explore a construction site) but also not often heard.  However my friend assumed mom frequently told this story, and that I'd heard it many times before.

I think that's what old friendships, renewed much later in time, sometimes engender:  new forms of misunderstanding that aren't necessarily damaging, more like instructive. 

I mean, you're free to put a negative spin on just about anything uncomfortable, but if you're able to afford a positive spin, you'll be propelled into new fun adventures.

Or such is the PR.

Monday, September 16, 2019

Studying Ancient Lore

Those already inner circle to "the gossip" know Python, the computer language, got its name from Monty Python, the famous Anglophone comedy troupe. Where did the latter get its name? Ah, well now, feel free to dive down that rabbit hole.

In the meantime, we have the ancient Greeks in the background, with their hallucinogenic (?) rotting snake carcass, if we're to believe the myth, not that myths are designed to be believed (not by Protestants anyway, after what all they've done to that word).

I'm referring to the famous myth of Apollo, who displayed adult masculine qualities quite early in his youth, one of his first feats being the heroic protection of his mother, Leto, and Zeus's ex.  Apollo slew the great Python that the new Mrs. Zeus (Hera) had sicced on Leto, Zeus being his dad.

True also, is Athena enjoyed cult status among the Delphians and her lineage potentially traces back to sybils (female seers) well before the Pythian ones were installed to serve Apollo.  Vapors rising from the rotting Python under Mt. Parnassus is what supposedly gave them powers.

We might use Athena's story as a portal back to a more Amazonian root, wherein women were known to handle snakes (symbolic of their healing power).  Yes, we're somewhat talking about Wonder Woman here, invented later, but with the same Greek pantheon for a backdrop.

Spreading such lore in North America, today, is more the business of the comic book and blockbuster entertainment business, than it is of any practicing cult.  A Python programmer is more likely to absorb memes such as these through pop culture than through anything like formal scholarship.  The latter is about studying myths as these were cast in ancient times.  Contemporary broadcasting is something else entirely.

Apollo is conventionally cast as the archetypally rational, but at what cost?  Some young anglophone gents I was listening to on Youtube, suggested Europe had struck a Faustian bargain to obtain a rationalist enlightenment, at the cost of its soul (Philemon).  Goethe, Nietzsche and others were hoping to revitalize the moral fiber (which translates into morale in many ways), but the collective madness of world wars proved overwhelming.

Contrasting the Apollonian with the Dionysian has become cliche. Indeed, Apollo took off at the end of autumn, allowing the Dionysians to see Delphi through the winter.  Apollo would return in the spring.  The arrangement, from this distance (21st Century) seems symbiotic.  Athena, going back to the original Gaen wisdom, is in her furious form more a Medusa herself.

I'd be off base to suggest I'm alone in my willingness to connect Python, the computer language, to the mythological lore.  From the early days, Medusa was a way to deal with the tangle of asynchronous programming, which reinvented itself as Twisted, and then in the Standard Library, as asyncio.

What Apollonians might call "rot" (as in "rots the brain") is to others the sweet vapor of insight, conferring oracular or ocular powers (points of view) upon the Muse inspired programmer.  Athena is the goddess of crafts, including military (e.g. arts, including martial).  She helps with the process of individuation, within the minds of her PyLadies (Pythians).

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Looking Back on Coding

Coding interactively is a rather different experience than coding "off line" (as it were), then running source through a compiler, then testing the results.  I learned to appreciate that difference early, as I had FORTRAN and PL/1 in my face even as I was using APL (Kenneth Iverson's) from the terminal.

Given how enamored I was with using an interactive shell, more like Logo's, it stands to reason I would follow the dBase "dot prompt" in the direction of FoxPro, and then Visual FoxPro (VFP), which the language eventually became under Microsoft's dominion.

However, those more well-versed and well-rounded, know it's not either/or, given Python itself is written in C, and extended in C++ and all that.  The joy of running C code interactively is what Python is all about, one could say.  Furthermore, it's somewhat inaccurate to say interactive languages don't feature a compilation step.  We have the bytecode layer, and a virtual machine (such as Java's) to think about.

Be that as it may, I stayed with the more interactive environment, which has more recently evolved into the Notebook environment.  Steve Holden was nudging me to look at those early on, and I did, but just a little.  I've subsequently come to better appreciate their significance, along the lines of that article in Atlantic Monthly.

In addition to an interactive chat-like "dot prompt" or "prompted" environment (now sported by JavaScript thanks to Node, right?), another feature that makes language learning so much easier (in my experience) is something concrete and visual, in your face, to code against.  I'm talking about everything from physical robots to virtual on-screen turtles.  Just having something there in the sandbox to play with, that's palpable, is a big aid to comprehension.

Eventually, we come to see a lot of what we're controlling "inside our heads" (goes the expression) and so may be less dependent on training wheel visuals.  If you're into rendering colorful geometries on screen, or fractals or what not, then "leaving the visualizations behind" is not a goal, let alone much of an option.  Under visualization comes plotting (making plots, charts), so it's not like having colorful, shapely output is that esoteric a fascination.

I think a lot of us will agree that a sea-change occurred with the evolution of the web browser atop the internet, given tcp/ip works inhouse as much as publicly.  Why not make the user GUI an HTML defined experience?  Indeed, that would become the norm, even though the web browser itself is what we'd call a "thick" application.  Given how it spreads to look through almost every API out there, we could call it "thin" (a lot for a little, more with less).

However, a subsequent revolution after that, was the evolution of the smartphone-based app.  The general purpose browser is still there, but the special purpose client-side application is again a driving thing.  I didn't jump into the app business.  I'm not that fascinated by tiny screens.  I stayed with Python, especially teaching it, while gradually moving more into video-casting as a medium.  Given my focus on geometry, it makes sense that I'd gravitate to a "show and tell rectangle" more like a movie theater's.

Tuesday, September 03, 2019

On Turing, Coding, and Gender


Thanks to greater STEAM-PATH integration, intersecting on A (for Anthropology), I'm able to segue to and from Engineering and issues around gender, pronouns and stereotyping.

In the School of Tomorrow, you're chugging along in cryptography when, boom, you're looking at white supremacist propaganda or some other flavor Social Darwinism.  We don't shy away from social issues, just because we're focusing on maths.  Who has that luxury?

That being said, when we do buckle down and focus on code, it's against the backdrop of a more relaxed philosophy, meaning we know we're free to think globally, even while coding locally.

The Python community has had to wrestle with Codes of Conduct already, so it's not like we're new at this game.  You may be able to find some public archives wherein we've done some of our processing (search on Python Software Foundation).

Friday, August 30, 2019

Recruiting and Orientation (Back to School series)


Nothing too fancy here.  Some homegrown Oregonian response to the real Fuller challenge:  how to get this newer stuff integrated.  I show by example.

For those just joining us, we've been recently investigating an extension of the Wayne Roberts' "etu" idea (equilateral triangular units) to the "etu" of Bucky Fuller's Synergetics ("equilateral tetrahedral units"), a core concept in so-called Martian Math.

I'm somewhat bumbling along in this one (below), reiterating how three edges a, b, c multiplied, give abc the volume  by "closing the lid" in a tetrahedral model of multiplication.

 What are the practical applications? A better understanding of American literature you say?

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

More Film Analysis


Analyzing old films like this is a common pass time on Youtube.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Wanderers Happening

P1090815
:: Hawthorne Street Fair ::

I'm calling what's happening tonight a "Wanderers Happening" while being deliberately vague on what that means. We've never gone with a membership roster.  Dues were for the coffee fund.

You'll have seen the drift into video as my medium of choice a lot of the time.  I appreciate the bandwidth and the different blend of skills.  We learn by doing.  Since I'm doing stuff like teaching online anyway...  staying in practice.

The venue is not Linus Pauling House nor anywhere in Asylum District, and no, not at the gallery either, although that seems to be coming along.

P1090825

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Wiring in Heidegger


As a matter of historical fact, I was one of those students in Walter Kaufmann's philosophy classes not long after Martin Heidegger died, in 1976, the year of my high school graduation.

Kaufmann has been identified as a "forgotten philosopher" (not by me anyway) by Wes Cecil on Youtube, whom I also follow.  Not to be confused with Stuart Kaufman of Santa Fe Institute, Walter was a native German who immigrated to the United States and joined its military to fight the Nazi party, which Heidegger had by then joined.

One of Walter's chief missions in life as a translator was to bring to German writings a fresher more contemporary English.  He tackled translating Frederick Nietzsche's writings and devoted himself to disentangling this corpus from what the Nazis later did with it.  He was fighting the Nazis even then.

He tackled translating a lot of other German writers as well, including Goethe.

I finished my BA degree in 1980 having written a thesis on Wittgenstein's stuff, with Rorty an adviser. Victor Preller was my main Wittgenstein teacher.

C.J. Fearnley asks the question, as to what criteria to apply when mining in philosophy. 
My question was: can I read, study, embrace, and even love the ideas of someone with such connections to Nazism? It is a difficult question, reasonable people may disagree.
Does it matter if some parts of a philosophy stink?  Maybe not.  We mine stinky, sometimes toxic stuff for real in the Earth, and then send it through supply chains to manifest in our own personal lifestyles as finished goods, theater props from prop inventory.

Lets "get off it" with Heidegger why not?  We talk about the "stink of Zen" a lot, yet respect it.

I'd tackled some Heidegger, despite Kaufmann's warnings (fruit never far from the tree etc.), but without serious tutelage.  I had a full docket as it was.  I wasn't looking into Buckminster Fuller much yet, either.  I just never got around to reading much Heidegger, nor listening to much Wagner, either.

My trajectory through philosophy took me into the Wittgenstein corpus, which I'll liken to a "particle accelerator" wherein words themselves develop "meaning trajectories" in semantic space.  Plus new ones (new words) pop up all the time, already deliberately self-entangled, such as Tylenol (medical space) and Corolla (motor vehicle space).

Weird right?  That I'm mentioning commercial brands?

My online philosophy mentions Pepsi a lot, investigating its "meaning" (just a dark colored carbonated liquid? -- I think not).  I'm influenced by advertising (especially Italian flavored) and mass media.  That means I see how action through language changes our coordination (think of dance numbers) and sense of timing (comic sense), over time.  Programming matters.

What impressed me as I emerged in the World Trade Center lobby, from the PATH train, that time, was how big business is metaphysical in flavor.  The displays were thick with diagrams of processes and workflows, as people strove to come to grips with the tenuous.  Business people don't call what they do philosophy or metaphysics, as marketing tells them not to.

Now that 21st Century philosopher Peter Sloterdijk embraces Fuller to some extent, if not the specific skeletal structure of Synergetics quite yet (the "concentric hierarchy"), and given he's considered a "next Heidegger" among some German language thinkers, I'll accommodate the fact that, even though I fly the Kaufmann flag (I like to think), in terms of combating creeping fascism (neo-Romanism?), Martin is by now a part of the team, a consultant, when it comes to "technology" and its meaning (and its dangers), going forward.

We'll be linking up with AI here somewhere, I'm sure.

Where Heidegger has also popped up on my radar, is back when I was tracking Hermenet (a company) and Fernando Flores, its founder.  Flores was partnering with Werner Erhard around various projects, per The est Graduate Review.

I could see where a Cult of Hermes might fit in, even as I've worked on my Cult of Athena programming (a kind of Narnia for me?) over the years. I was still in Jersey City at that time, having my fantasies about re-purposing The Stanley. I was into Synergetics by then, and in communication with Bucky.

A serious student of Fernando's,  Lorena Barba, recently delivered a keynote at a Pycon here in Portland, which closed some circuits for me in that direction as well.

Looking for Part Two of the above video?

Monday, August 19, 2019

Remembering CubeSpace

I was reminiscing about Cubespace recently, with a Golang startup guy, at one time located at the top of a US Bank building, but probably not the one you're thinking of, if you're thinking of one.  East side.  On Grand.

The point of Cubespace was cross-fertilization, which in horticulture is an important topic, as in gardening, but when it comes to tending a fragile open source ecology... we don't have much practice thinking in those terms.

I'll sidebar here to mention Sheri Dover popped up at OSCON, fond memories of our OMSI-side party the year before.  She knows horticulture and went to OSU for the purpose of studying it. Cross-fertilization would not be lost on her as an accelerator cornerstone.

The Ruby and Python meetups would be far enough apart to not mutually interfere with presentations, yet might be going on in parallel.  Universities foster synergy the same way, which is why maybe in a parallel universe a University of Portland might have made a Cubespace its priority.

We get the reality we get.

Today I imagine we would have Clojure and Golang groups adding to the mix, with more opportunities for all of us to lurk in on meetings.  I pick up Java going to Java meetups and just taking in whatever they say and do.  I'm not a missionary here to secretly convert anyone.  I'm brushing up on Java.

Perhaps a Language Palace will again materialize out of the mists.  Portland hasn't surrendered its forgotten crown of Open Source capital, bequeathed by Christian Science Monitor some decades ago.

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Boosting Visibility


The Youtube channel has been wending its way through the details of C6XTY, as a way of familiarizing viewers, without needing to own the material (plastic in this case), with a space frame known to NASA space station designers as the octet truss.  Bell (the telephone guy) used it to make what he called "kites" (also towers).

A reason for those bends in the story line is Sam's decision to open a popup gallery in downtown Portland, just east of the North Park Blocks, between the US Customs House building, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art.  The Youtubes could mix in with other screen projections, as standalone movies (media files).  We won't need to stream over the network, in other words.  Visitors will have their own cell phones (if they so choose).

Tonight I found myself commenting on Willamette Week whereas not so long ago my commentary turned to Joe Rogan, Abby Martin the guest, with Oliver Stone and "Man X" among the topics.

Although I'm an older "pensive cowboy" type, reminiscent of some more high desert stereotype (an Oregonian from Redmond maybe?), I'm able to keep up with a lot of the big city banter, such as we find in Willamette Week regarding the latest developments on the punk scene.

I'm media-savvy enough to maybe have something new to say.  I get to be trendy, from time to time.

I'm touching the bases in the Youtube arena, shall we say.  I'm not going for megachurch status, in terms of viewership, however I do want to have my ducks sufficiently in a row to stay intelligible.  For that reason, more recent Youtubes, when not focused on the CCP, have been documenting 4D Solutions (the DBA) and the Oregon Curriculum Network (OCN), sculpting them to have clear definitions.

Working with the Lattice


The chronological sequence is more place-based, in that we saunter down SE Division apiece, establishing a role for a school in a neighborhood: both teach the history (of the place), and share it with students (including with people from far away, tourists).

In the blogged excerpt here, I'm skipping directly from "latticeWorks 1" to what might be considered its sequel. Making C6XTY is the focus in both, as a way into understanding our School of Tomorrow lattice (a major station stop).


Then I'm rounding it out with a followup on what I was thinking with regard to OMSI and the "whole number volumes" meme.

Thursday, August 08, 2019

More Bread Crumbs


Tuesday, August 06, 2019

Medical Library Supply


Multnomah Medical Library Item <

ATTN: Friendly Care Committee

Monday, August 05, 2019

Maps of the Mind


I'm not ripping off a title so much as pointing to that very title:  Maps of the Mind by Charles Hampden-Turner. I believe I have more than one copy.

The one open next to me has yellow highlighter pen annotations and is open on Map 44:  Freud's French Revolution: Jacques Lacan interpreted by Sherry Turkle.

That sounds pretty cerebral doesn't it, and that's just one of so many maps of the mind contained herein.  Having these collected and presented in "map" format is valuable, if only because "map" and "planet" go together, or "cosmic body" or "polyhedron" (thinking of wire-frames, i.e. networks or graphs).

Yes, R. Buckminster Fuller gets a map in tandem with others.  Not the "omnidirectional halo" (No More Secondhand God) or biosphere model (with twilight zones).  However I'm going back to Lacan for the purposes of this post.

In a recent Youtube I feature another Youtube about the genesis of the new logo of the International Mathematicians Union (IMU).  I cite the opening section on the Jitterbug, however this is a hypertoon that passes on to the three intersecting phi rectangles of the icosahedron, and then Borromean Rings.

Borromean Rings are displayed as the Lacan mind map, three interlocking head-shaped rings.  These rings form a special topology and were used in the branding associated with the Borromeo family, hence the name.  Lacan finds a use for this metaphor.  So does the IMU.

I'm planning to share these details in my next Youtube, as I'm expecting content in that form will provide the higher bandwidth people often need to get first impressions.  If the judgement is sufficiently in favor of exploring more, then maybe my writings become more what to study.

In my case, I came to Alan Watts through his writings in my teens and twenties, whereas I didn't take in much audio until I could mine Youtube for that purpose.

Friday, August 02, 2019

American Philosophy 101


Approximately zero universities are teaching these basics of Synergetics?

Is that a good idea?

I've been funding the Oregon Curriculum Network out of my own pocket, with a little help from my friends.

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

OCN Again


For context, I used to write a lot about how the natural unit of curriculum, was the school itself.

By that I meant: each school might import a lot of similar content, but the final customization would fit the place, another way of saying the curriculum would be "place based".  Winterhaven PPS had Oaks Bottom.

This makes sense if you think about teaching the local history, not just some generic overview that in no way depends on a person's viewpoint. Lets allow the schools to be viewpoints, to some degree.  They have their own lore and charming lunacy.

Geography spreads outward from wherever your school happens to be.

Whereas an "Oregon Curriculum Network" may sound grandiose, as if some guy with a home office could be more than a node in said network, my role is indeed that of one more node, one more contributor to an already highly developed set of overlapping cultures.  We form "a thousand dots of light" to hearken back to a would-be education president, a reluctant warlord.

Moreover, the Digital Math website more vaguely roots itself in the Silicon Forest, which extends beyond state boundaries, well north of Vancouver, Washington.

The purpose of the branding is to convey origin and place, not to suggest a conquered nor even cornered market.  Most Oregonians have never heard of me as of 2019.

I think what I'm doing makes more sense in a culture where there's no strict firewall between computer science and mathematics, down through the lower grades, from high school to kindergarten (if we agree to think in these terms).

We enjoy a blend of coding and guided geometric meditations (cite "hypertoons") or reveries, in a coffee shop context.  The guiding philosophy (or spirit) is somewhat indigenous.

Not everything I'm defining as curriculum need first surface in a formal school setting.

I recognize that social media, especially television, constitute a hefty percentage of the cultural amperage.

I attribute the pressure behind "Martian Math" to as yet largely unexplored telegenic potentials. I'm encouraged by the anime and manga arising from our storyboards, and remain on the lookout for more.  Lets build more momentum, shall we friends?


Saturday, July 27, 2019

The New Segregation


I don't have much incentive to "slug it out" with the functional programmers, regarding my continuing to use OO languages in K-16.

My focus is at least getting enough of a workspace to contain a decent-sized display and keyboard, plus room to stretch.

The tight ergonomics of the "no coding required" math classes, the education economy that makes coding "elective" (for the privileged few), is a source of major inequity.

If you're a CS student, you likely have your own laptop.  Otherwise go buy a TI graphing calculator and join your classmates in "cattle car" -- the new back of the bus.

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Dobbs Town

Saturday, July 20, 2019

Virtualizing Nations


Over twenty years ago, I started writing about USA OS, meaning the USA Operating System, and sharing these writings to the web.  

The web was pretty new then, and I was brainstorming how it might be used to make government more comprehensible.  Lets develop an "over the shoulder" aesthetic, wherein we could see the world through the eyes of various office holders.

First though, I go back to revise my remarks regarding a Joe Rogan episode (1316) wherein Joe and Abby Martin are discussing "Man X" in Oliver Stone's JFK.  He cited Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path in particular, in his book JFK.  I talk about that in my followup video.

Given an "over the shoulder" view, through the eyes of government office holders, we end up seeing the whole world through the eyes of the various nations.  The whole world, through the eyes of the USA, is "USA world" (one could say).  The whole world, through the eyes of Israel, is "the Promised Land" (our planet).  Does it make me a Zionist to see the world in this way?


Were we to connect the dots in an alternative curriculum, we would link Alexander Graham Bell to Bucky Fuller through their shared focus on the "octet truss".

But American history is being lost and submerged.  We've forgotten these threads.

Butler grain bins, dymaxion car, dymaxion house, geodesic dome...  positive futurism we've shelved.

I tell the story of helping to build a swimming pool, working with Palestinians, in Ramallah, long ago.

Weren't we more civilized back then?  Our family took a public bus through the Khyber Pass, from Peshawar to Kabul, not that many years later.

Might we roll back and go forward again, following a different fork or branch?  We do this in version control.

Part of that roll back would involve taking the "whole number volumes table" more seriously.


Lets look at the world through the eyes of different nations.  What does the world look like if we're Iran?  If we're Russia?

Does Iran really seek to become a nuclear weapons power?  Why would it seek to do so?  What does the USA really want from Iran?  Have the terms been spelled out?

This chapter wherein siege warfare predominates, bespeaks of a lowering of intelligence and a corresponding rise in cruelty -- a dark age.  Might the nations of the world signal to one another that they're ready for a more positive futurism?

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Opening Keynotes

Our first speaker, Tiffani Ashley Bell, is pleading with engineers to do socially responsible things with their skills.

Are we enabling people who want to build concentration camps?   She managed to use those words ("concentration camps").  Brave.

Tiffani at The Human Utility has developed a website to help people stay connected to the Detroit water system.

People with compassion have a way to pay water bills for people who've been cut off or are at risk of having this happen.  The "system" is merciless.  If you don't pay your bill, you're cut off, regardless of circumstances.  You're no longer a customer.  Non-customers might as well be undocumented non-citizens, which is turning into a death sentence for so many.

The UN declaration of human rights no longer applies.  Actually I see the US never ratified this convention.  Nor Rights of the Child:
Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely and rapidly ratified human rights treaty in history. Only the United States and Somalia, which has no functioning national government, have failed to ratify the treaty.
Then the fire alarm came on.  We had to evacuate.  I met the Python tutorial guy, William, who let me play with Python Circuit, once we got back.

IBM had a good story about their competition to develop tools for responding to natural disasters.  Your team should use IBM resources such as the Watson API.  There's a monetary reward for the winners.  Not unlike the old BFI challenge.

I got my Learning GraphQL book. The graph theory in the beginning, which I perused over donuts, does not link the concept of graphs to polyhedron. Dang. I think that's an important link between nodes.  Graphs connect around in all circumferential directions -- a lot of them do.

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Little Darlings (movie review)

A visiting anthropologist (a guest) was curious about this film, which we found in its entirety on Youtube.

My first impression is I was watching a long cigarette commercial aimed at getting young teens hooked as early as possible.  All the cool kids smoke.

Monday, July 15, 2019

OSCON 2019 Begins

Outwardly, things are going OK.

From my Missed Opportunities (previous post), you might be able to tell I'm in a somewhat alienated state.  As a pioneer of Martian Math, I suppose that's not entirely surprising.

Walter Kaufmann has been on my mind, as I've mentioned in a few Youtubes.  He was a native of Germany who interrupted a career in philosophy and religious studies to join the American intelligence services to fight the Nazis.

He resumed his studies at Harvard and ended up teaching at Princeton, where he was one of my professors.

Kaufmann's views were somewhat dark, and I don't blame him, as these many decades later I feel (it's a feeling) that we live in dark times.

I'm also remembering Nick Consoletti, my drifter friend who managed to get to England (to attend Schumacher College), France (to find his biological mother) and Budapest (to work with the Club of Budapest).

Nick was part of my network of friends who thought highly of Buckminster Fuller.  Had I not pushed ahead with my philosophical studies, after leaving Princeton, focusing on Fuller in particular, I would not have made many of these friendships.  I'm thankful for how these connections have made a big difference to my scenario.

My choice to focus on philosophy put me on the margins of computer programming and I managed to wring a career out of working for nonprofits.  I worked with my wife to be as an independent contractor.  We were a business partnership even before we got married.

The open source movement embodied a lot of ideals, regarding the sharing of intellectual property.  I was able to continue working in programming using mostly open source tools, especially Python.

I'm doing two tutorials today, one in Rust, one in Ethereum.

I'm expert in neither, curious about both.

I decided to bring the Asus tablet (Windows 10).  I started doing the preparations for the Rust tutorial around 6:30 AM and hit a roadblock around installing ZeroMQ (0mq) in a way that would let the Rust stuff compile.  That's OK, as I'm mainly a lurker.  I've been in Nathan's tutorial before.  Three hours is never enough time.

I left the C6XTY as a conversation piece in the speaker's lounge, and collected my special hoodie.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Missed Opportunities


Both journalists and university professors have done a great job of studiously avoiding any opportunity to link to the Bucky stuff.  What's the opportunity cost?

 

Was my "techno-invective" effective in any way?

Thursday, July 11, 2019

Open Source Campus

In Refugee Science, we tend to say "campus" rather than "camp".  The former connotes "schooling" while the latter connotes "soldiering".  Not that soldiers can't use schooling, or that schools can't be militant.  There's maybe a spectrum, or a phase space.

Open source designs show what's possible.  What are the neighborhoods?  Where are the guilds?  Do the bead makers live near the kiln?  Where are the costumes kept?  What are the podcasts like?  Is this close to a freeway?  How do the trucks come and go?  Do electronic currencies play a role?

Those seeking asylum, that have nothing, get to come here.  What does the campus have for them, to get them back on their feet?  "Education" is a good answer but is in no way detailed enough.  A lot of them need to watch videos.  The kids need cartoons.  Cultural literacy is a goal, and not just for the asylum seekers.

We don't want any campus where no one would be there voluntarily given a choice.  We need to see people choosing to move there.  People already functioning at a high level in their current context.  Like me for example.  The mark of a well-engineered campus is the engineers will be willing to "eat their own dog food" as we say.

We know of the Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto, but what about the campus facilities?  Refugee Science is looking to flagship engineering firms (not necessarily architectural firms, but those too) to give us some blueprints.

I'll be at OSCON next week.  Lets see if any of the booths feature entire "cities from scratch" beyond the Toronto project, geared more towards the needs of Americans in distress.  SOS Cities.  Asylum Cities.  We're hungry to see those on TV, but so far the screenwriters are just giving us more people in cages.

Monday, July 08, 2019

Esoteric History


No doubt I've told this story before in some form, but while I'm on a roll with the Youtubes, let me tell it again here.

Saturday, July 06, 2019

A Telephone Conversation


I'm capitalizing on the current news cycle, which is focused on Alexander Graham Bell's nationality, subsequent to the now infamous "broken teleprompter" Salute to America speech.  Even more press attention went to the 1775 seizing of airports or whatever that was.

I'm getting the information second hand, through press reports.  I did not watch the "junkyard parade".

I know some might be offended by my not appreciating military porn, but I've been trained since birth by my parents and community in these Quaker values, which tend to scorn outward wars as a feature of prehumanity.  We're eager to become more fully human, more civilized.

However that doesn't mean denying history.  I'm certainly OK with memorializing and honoring the war dead.  I've spent a lot of time studying wars past and present.  I know a lot of war vets.

I keep harping on the Fuller syllabus because I think the "whole number volumes" meme is uniquely powerful in its ability to interrupt conversations that would normally proceed obliviously to any awareness of positive futurism.

Mathematics is usually taught without much regard for history.

Sunday, June 30, 2019

More City Planning


City planning runs in the family, as does travel.  We would take side trips to visit model cities my dad knew about.  He was a connoisseur of city plans.  We subscribed to The Futurist.  A lot of this rubbed off.

What if instead of retiring to a mobile home in Florida, you could move into a dymaxion yurt in a city designed to help older people and younger families alike?  We have a lot of donated used stuff and need shops to fix and repair, so you also have opportunities to learn fix and repair skills.

Here in Portland, we have Free Geek, which is about recycling and salvaging.  I'm thinking of The Zabbaleen (I visited their place in Cairo, but not recently -- wrote some GST there and mailed it to Bucky, check the archives, early 1980s).

Thursday, June 27, 2019

Underground Comic


Catching up?

Archival.


Check Coffee Shops Network for more.

Saturday, June 22, 2019

Solstice Gathering 2019


I haven't seen this many in our group together in a long time. Gus may have captured a few seconds in 360, with his new two-camera GoPro. He's on the cutting edge in VR, job related (fire inspections, recording the scene).

Stig, new in Portland, was our guest of honor. He not only looked Spanish, he's in love with Catalonia and Gaudi. We got right into it.  New cities.  How to mitigate trash through new lifestyles, advertised through media.

When FNB (I went to one tonight, before the potluck, and stuffed myself) set up the tent at Occupy Portland, that held the space. Then the less disciplined took over, using plastic utensils and paper plates.  That grossed us out and we moved our smaller operation to a different area.

You'll remember I was focusing on the recruiting vehicles around the periphery, meaning I was sensitized to various vehicles, some of them bizmos.  I was eyeing the camp with a recruiter's eye myself.  We had some serious, committed individuals with good social skills, all concentrated in one place.

Anyway, we want to prepare people for a life as more nomadic tourists, if they're up for it (many are). That means traveling light and not leaving a trail of waste.  Big junk piles, guarded by armed personnel, is not our idea of "not leaving a trail".

That doesn't mean a city the size of Old Man River is going to have no waste streams.  I discussed sewer systems with a Friend at the FNB event.  I'm putting some of the puzzle pieces together.

When you're not wasting a lot on packaging, you save a lot.  Bringing your own bags to the store rooms is only the beginning.  We're in no way wanting to duplicate the lifestyles of ranch style home commuter suburbians.  The idea of media rooms still makes sense.

The refugee camps on the drawing boards pipe in audio and video services.  The kids watch cartoons and play games.  The parents have a wide range of options.  We're not building a punishment park here.  We have playgrounds, even roller coasters.

We would all like New Cities TV I think.  But the old networks won't give it to us.  They don't have sufficient movie-making ability perhaps.  They fall back on the old standbys.

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Integrity Day


"So what about the whole number volumes already! They're not all whole number. What's the fuss?" That's my impatient viewer wondering why I harp on themes in literature.

The intersection of pragmatism and transcendentalism might put American philosophy on the map, but for that to happen, we might need to see Synergetics on more reading lists.

"Thanks but no thanks" say the philosophers.  Unless they're using the Bucky stuff around the edges to thrill audiences at conferences.  Something about free energy and maybe living forever?  In that case the A & B modules are too mundane, too trite.  Playing with blocks is for children.  But then when do we share A & B modules with children?

In the meantime, for those taking The School of Tomorrow more seriously, we have a kind of fluency to offer, starting with the IVM (sphere packing matrix).  We segue to architecture over here, to crystallography over there... to the morphology of the virus.  A kind of liberal arts generic literacy -- some call "cultural literacy" -- pops into the foreground, like a duckrabbit.

True enough, they're not all whole number, nor all commensurable with each other.  Incommensurability is real.  See my Invisible Landscapes series?

However Fuller wasn't buying "the Real Numbers" lock, stock and barrel. What if we stick to shape?

Isn't energy at bottom approximate in the sense of quantized discretely?  What if our mathematical concepts took their cues from reality for a change?

Where is the need for infinite precision, or "one over infinity" so to speak?  What if we remove "infinity" in most contexts?  If it wasn't really there to begin with, except in hand-waving... what of substance changes? 

We're still free to compute pi a trillion of digits.  No bubbles burst as a result (nor wait for the answer).

Fuller wasn't alone in questioning "real number" metaphysics.  In Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein elicits a new kind of skepticism regarding what these "foundations" might consist in.  "Forms of life?" (On Certainty) "What does that mean?" 

Other mathematicians chip away.  There's room for ferment.

What I question is holding back the information that's known to check out, just because it comes mixed in with more speculative material, with a potentially shorter half-life.

The Concentric Hierarchy is purely Platonic, all angles without frequency (fixed scale) one might put it (i.e. "pre-frequency").  More accurately, I don't question the holding back so much as adamantly insist it's wrong, ill-advised, cowardly, unprofessional.

At least I'm not the bottleneck, is my attitude.

Saturday, June 15, 2019

Friday, June 07, 2019

Yakking About Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy


Sometimes a spoken communication adds some useful dimensions to what is otherwise mostly written.

Monday, June 03, 2019

The School of Tomorrow


Thursday, May 30, 2019

Silicon Forest Curriculum Network


Jake Vanderplas - Keynote - PyCon 2017

I've been sharing about the Oregon Curriculum Network with a wider audience this afternoon, on Medium

I trace several trends in industry in order to back up my claim that my curriculum is state of the art, worth exploring

I'll likely be adding some pictures and of course fixing typos.

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

The House of Tomorrow (movie review)



Nana, a Fuller fan, is sheltering her ward (her grandson actually) in an almost-literal bubble, a multi-faceted domicile based on the geometry of an icosahedron:  a 1970s classic geodesic dome one-off, mostly wood, and semi-deep in a quasi-dark forest. Cue "she's some kind of witch" music. 

Per Education Automation, the place is wired (pre internet) to "in-cast" (screen) the Bucky stuff 24/7, so both Nana (the guardian) and her ward (main protagonist) are by this time thoroughly brainwashed (Nana has been into Bucky a long time), but without being too dysfunctional, a testament to the curriculum's holism.

The dome is marvelous and well-maintained and both enjoy a high standard of living.  The movie viewer is quickly introduced to Bucky's alternative (aka "parallel") universe, with its own solutions to the problems of transportation, shelter, and social relationships (we use a different world map in Buckyverse, to visualize our global predicament).  The viewer thereby partakes of a bit of the brainwashing, to the point of gentle claustrophobia (think "laughing gas" -- it's a comedy).

Tourists come to see what the house of tomorrow might look like (they all live in the houses of today).  To the young boy, these tourists represent the great outside world beyond the granny matrix, full of people the grandson's own age, some oppositely sexed, all differently programmed.  He recognizes he could learn a lot from these aliens.

Although home schooled, our hero has a bicycle and frequents hardware stores.  He's not a prisoner, except of his own conscience, and is free to leave.

He feels the natural urge for companionship and adventure and ends up landing a gig as a geometry tutor in one of the tourist houses.  Thanks to his STEM-intensive upbringing, he knows his "Mr. Euclid" (as Fuller referred to him), clearly way better than the more humanities oriented dad (which explains why a tutor is appropriate). The movie does not really get into Dr. Fuller's alternative unit of volume, as that'd take us too far off on a tangent.

They enjoy pretty good living standards in suburbia too (including top notch health care), with semi-private rooms for the siblings and a den for the single dad, ample leisure time.  The single mom is a heavy drinker and TV watcher (the dad has custody of the kids), but is friendly and fun.  She helps enable the final party with a donation of alcohol.

Beyond a lot of drinking, the film stays away from the weed economy.  Prohibition was still only partially rolled back, back then. Although police get involved, it's to break up the loud party (on what pretext again? -- lots of citizens were freely enjoying their right to assembly), and not to bust any otherwise law-abiding Lutherans for weed.

No one is sent to a for-profit "Grunch prison" ("Grunch" was a Bucky term, and stood for a dystopian post-nation-states global conglomerate, controlling all the money, that stages a lot of TV shows, including many with nationalistic programming, such as shocking, awesome wars).

The kids pack into state-approved mosh pits and express their rebelliousness in safe controlled ways.

To my ears, the Bucky sound bites on the videos were dubbed in.  What I heard was someone imitating Fuller's voice, saying the kinds of things he said.  Am I wrong?  Was that a permissions issue?  Was the Buckminster Fuller Institute (not of Minnesota) involved?

When it's time to really party, the dome interior is certainly the more inviting. Neither a suburban home, nor a church basement social hall, was as suitable a venue as grandma's bewitching house, for the new punk band's debut. The Rash.  The geometry tutoring was also about practicing chords, recapitulating that age-old synergy betwixt music and math, so appreciated by the Pythagoreans.

The less sheltered geometry tutor and his death-defying tourist friend express their anxieties and desires in an authentic and culturally approved manner.  The police arrive and help catalyze a new bond between the sixties dad and his punk son, as both show similarly defiant tendencies.  A new (vector) equilibrium is being established.  The two cultures have been bridged, and healthy circulation established.

That the Bucky stuff is actually punk-friendly comes as a heartwarming realization at the end.  Good movie. I saw it as the second movie in a double feature, with Fire first.

Monday, May 20, 2019

Anthropological Investigations


Yes, I've been studying Brexit.

Geography and bureaucracy are different dimensions.

I'd put more eggs in the geography basket.

We'll always have bureaucracies but they come and go at a faster rate, on average, than geological phenomena.

That being said, geographies also change suddenly.  In terms of time scales, it's understandable why these two get confused.

Saturday, May 11, 2019

Recent Studies

I don't consider myself a "gamer" in that I've not had much time to play computer games.  I don't hang out on Reddit, or 4chan, or 8chan for that matter.  However, as a student of anthropology, I do embrace Memetics as a discipline.  I study Meme Wars in other words, a kind of war it's OK for a Friend to study.

People who want to use the word "Conservative" to label their world view, tend to fight over that label.  The William F. Buckley camp, typified by the National Review, wanted nothing to do with the John Birch Society, and this camp had the loyalty of Ronald Reagan, and Goldwater. 

A bone of contention: the JBS claim the President Eisenhower had been a Communist.  When the Tea Party came along, and then Breitbart.com, we saw further jockeying for position.  I've been looking in to all that this morning.

Uncle Bill phoned from Seattle, eager to come down on Amtrak for a visit, like he does.  This time, however, he wants to being his motorized gadabout, park it at Union Station somewhere (lets hope baggage claim will take it), and have me take him around with just a cane.  I've been somewhat skeptical on this score.  We've always done it with a walker.  He talked me into it though, and is coming tomorrow.

Glenn and I just had a beer together at Cork & Tap, our new watering hole.  Kroger has set these up across the nation, including at our corner Fred Meyer, now a part of that chain.  The $3 a pint price cannot be beat, and because they're union, they tend to refuse tips.  Is that what the John Birchers would call socialism?  I'm there quite a bit. 

Glenn has been studying the life and career of Christopher Alexander, the architect, who has a long history with U of O (University of Oregon).  I taking this all in vicariously.  I also learn about architecture from John Driscoll, already a blog character, as is Glenn.  We talked about concrete, and "aircrete" as well.  We've been continuing this conversation for awhile.

I've been taking my Meme War studies into UBI territory (Universal Basic Income), tracking the president Yang campaign and exploring essays on Medium.  I've even written a few things.

Saturday, May 04, 2019

Town Planning (reverie)


My dad was a town planner, zooming out to regional, and winding up doing educational planning, which includes organizing teacher trainings, budgeting for WiFi and so on.  This was well before 5G, in Lesotho, where he later retired. 

Lesotho is adjacent to the Orange Free State in South Africa, on current political maps.  Bloemfontein was pretty close, by car.  I've done Bloem to Maseru and back many times.  Dad was killed in a car accident on that stretch of road, in 2000, my mom severely injured.

Living in so many countries, I got used to storefront development along highways, which had no restrictions against such business corridors, and to large "shanty towns" as we called them.

Whereas most transplants in the Philippines from a foreign country, meaning families like ours, would avoid getting too deeply in the domestic affairs of the host, my mom was never like that.

She dove into volunteer work in Carmona (in those days more of a shanty town), and latter worked with the Zabbaleen in Cairo.  She's always had a strong community service ethic.

The Zabbaleen, by the way, were an are an interesting sect of mostly Coptic Christian, and had been relegated to the job of scavenging, or trash collecting, for much of Cairo.  Let's let Wikipedia tell it:
The Zabbaleen (Egyptian Arabic: زبالينZabbalīn, IPA: [zæbbæˈliːn]) is a word which literally means "garbage people" in Egyptian Arabic.[2] The contemporary use of the word in Egyptian Arabic is to mean "garbage collectors". In cultural contexts, the word refers to teenagers and adults who have served as Cairo's informal garbage collectors since approximately the 1940s. The Zabbaleen (singular: زبال Zabbāl, [zæbˈbæːl]) are also known as Zarraba (singular: Zarrab), which means "pig-pen operators."[2] The word Zabbalīn came from the Egyptian Arabic word zebāla ([zeˈbæːlæ], زبالة) which means "garbage".
My parents were there at the time of Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated, much to the disappointment of so many.  I remember wandering the streets of Cairo back when the ousted Shah of Iran was staying in Cairo as a guest.

I've wandered around in a lot of cities, especially Rome.  One could say I grew up wandering in Rome, both alone and with friends.  My parents considered Rome a safe city and did not practice any overprotective child-rearing techniques.

The movie industry throws together city vistas not designed to stand the test of time. These are just props. Wild West towns were close to movie sets in terms of presenting impressive facades, sometimes backed with very modest buildings.  I'd like the made for TV experimental towns to feature traveling experimental communities.

The Yurt People will be taking those acres over there, for three months.  You like 'em, everybody does. A few may stay behind, a few here may want to join them.  However it's not required to make up your mind on the spot.  Give it some thought.  You don't have to run away and join the circus.

When you have a large dome (possibly rural) or a warehouse (industrial part of town), you can afford lighter weight partitions (walls).  You're already inside the "castle" like in some universal studio somewhere.