Prospectus

prospectus: [noun] a preliminary printed statement that describes an enterprise (such as a business or publication) and that is distributed to prospective buyers, investors, or participants.

I'd put the emphasis on "participants" but in the vernacular one participates because one "buys in" and/or "invests" in a particular way to go, lets call it a lifestyle. You wanted to be in the movies? Don't tell me you're not recording right now. And right now. So be a star, you're on.

Anyway, the above YouTube has the flavor of a New Years type recap, where I'm projecting forward based on the both recent and more distant past.  The Urbit theme is somewhat new.  Martian versus Terran is more ancient, and connects to a certain Digital Math in the Digital Forest.

Quakerism is a theme for me, and my channel, but I'm not proselytizing so much as perpetuating that New England Transcendentalist tendency to transcend current normal lifestyles and try (experiment with) new things.  Quakers wanted to try ending slavery, upgrading mental health care facilities, humanizing prisons.

The promise of the open West in Westward-Ho! years was space to try stuff, to build in an empty canvas, but of course bringing along one's own demons and cultural baggage, aye, there's the rub.  But in this age of coast to coast zoning, the challenge is more one of leveraging density.  

Urban areas have long experimented with packing many ethnicities into overlapping enclaves.  Yes, there's been gang violence and yes, there've been advances in self governance.  We've taken these lessons of "getting along" to the large scale outdoor events, such as Rainbow Gathering (which I hasten to add I have yet to attend in person, but many in my cohort did), or Burning Man.  Or Woodstock (not the 1999 one).  Vortex One.

Alan Potkin, Viet Vet, educated me about Vortex One, and Oregon's role.  This is one of the few "counter-culture" events developed with overt state government support.  But then lets think how important the Oregon Country Fair is to Eugene and surroundings.  Think also of what a disaster Rajneesh Puram became, because the relationship with Salem (and of course Antelope) was adversarial.

The edge to work on is "camping" (the fun part of military campaigning), considered a recreational activity and leftover relic of self-reliance lifestyles, as also practiced in "Nomadland".  Urban street camping is in no way sexy.  FEMA camps, helping with drug rehab, are only feared, believed by praying Christians to be filled with state of the art guillotines, meant for them.  Meanwhile, we die from oxy.

The key to good camp design is transparency and a good mix of personnel, such as we had at Occupy Portland.  True, police steered all their long time hard cases in our direction, to see if we had ways of coping they didn't.  We did, but without sufficient sanitation, we were hardly in it for the long term.  OPDX was "doomed" from the beginning, but as I've posted elsewhere, we executed an orderly pullout, with some not getting the message.

Lots of therapist yoga teacher types would like to staff MASH units for the refugee addicts, if provided with sufficient sanitation.  That's the kind of asylum city we need to prototype anyway, for fast deployment where needed.  Our population is in the prototyping business.  You can call them paid lab rats, but then you can call me that too, paid with my daily bread I thank the Lord for, meaning not you (smile).

Hey, on that subject, I get it about thanking The Lord for His bounty (a Thanksgiving theme) in lieu of making one's obeisance to the Sheriff.  Democracy and monotheism are not a contradiction in terms, as in making God the King (yes I'm sticking to patriarchal motifs, sounding old timey) we're depriving any human peer of that role.  We're the sheeple, so don't get uppity and start calling yourself "our shepherd" or anything -- not unless we elect you, with term limits.

Likely a lot of this chatter sounds kind of alien, and of Cascadian origin.  Who thinks about "OPDX" (Occupy Portland) or Vortex in this day and age, let alone Rajneesh Puram?  I do, as the son of a city and regional planner, with a career starting in Portland, and with a long term interest in zoning and urban growth boundaries and such.  

But yes, in terms of demographics I'm more "barely off the reservation" in some respects, and a dark side of my Quakers might involve flashing lights and casino bling, as seen in carnivals.  I'm referring of course to Casino Math, my label for combinatorics and risk management (CROs study here).  In terms of the Cascadian economy (ecosystem), some of the funds funnel through Oregon State Lottery, and also the N8V network establishments (Tulalip, Stillaguamish, Grande Ronde... a long list of nations).

Playtime

Clockwise: Mastodon instance (dobbs.town); 52 Thinking Ideas Meetup (iPhone); assorted wireframe polyhedra

Glass Beads

The title is with reference to a famous Hermann Hesse novel, wherein intellectuals in the future, in our future too, play an academic game that generates the rest of culture, I don't remember to what radius, i.e. was this a whole planet, a global culture that GBGers created?  Rather than reread the book, I've been enjoying "3rd party" (i.e. critic) YouTubes.

Probably FSI comes closest to a GBG play Castle with respect to my own weekly routine, a HQS for glass bead game playing, a Hogwarts.  Was this Hogwarts under siege in the book, or otherwise threatened?  The very term "Castle" implies an continual fighting off of entropic forces, an effort to maintain a dynasty, some continuity in culture.  Castles require a lot of maintenance I bet.

Yesterday I skipped out on being in the audience, not for lack of curiosity (expecting a YouTube), but did join TrimTab (these are Zoom calls).  FSI = Field Structure Institute, with the central conversation pieces being like intersecting twisted inner tubes.  Their twist patterns hold significance.  

You might picture a tumbling tetrahedron inside each loop, to get more of a sense of the animations we've been sharing. 

I'm immersing myself in older mathematics these days. Glenn's aura of intense scholarship now haunts the building, in the form of binders, sculptures, collected buckyball dog toys (chew toys).  This gives me a boost, the influence of his Global Matrix.

Skeptics don't think dividing math into Casino, Supermarket, Martian and Neolithic is sufficiently sensible as, for example, how do we see Bernoulli math as "Neolithic" when so much of it is still state of the art, vital circuitry? I'm talking about my Silicon Forest concoction.

The short answer is we don't; we slide the Casino+Supermarket slider back to then, the time of Bernoullis, and look at their service to contemporaneous modeling, approximating, predicting, anticipating:  all Casino Math with Supermarket implications for what gets to the stomach, figuratively but also literally speaking.  Bernoullis (a mathematical family) remain in our future as well, I anticipate.

Relative to them in the past, looking forward, we're the Martians.  "Neolithic" is just a direction i.e. "in the rear view mirror" with respect to some now.  Looking forward:  the word "Martian" evokes strange and alien, maybe threatening, but also within reach, already being touched and probed:  the future is almost tangible, and will be, as its onrush has that air of inevitability.  The past may become stranger as well, as it recedes, or perhaps we just never had much time to explore it.  

The study of history is a luxury we should all be able to afford, InshAllah (إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ).

Here in the Matrix, our "daily bread" may be insufficient because others have risked our demise and deemed that a risk worth taking i.e. we were expendable in their eyes and now we have no bread.  Or maybe no others were in any position to save us.  That seems unlikely given the rhetoric.  So we die of starvation, or maybe they're aggressively hunting us as in wartime.  I've been watching some Philip K. Dick (adapted) scifi on the telly.  People are on the run from oppressors throughout The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime.

Picture another situation: being in a casino and running out of any more options.  Leaving broke is your next step.  There's a supermarket on the block but you have no money to buy stuff with.  Welcome to Las Vegas.

However, thanks to mathematics and its ability to give us models and more rational choice making, we steer clear of obvious money losing Ponzi schemes in the first place, by anticipating correctly what will more likely be a winning strategy.

Of course all that seems very remote from Bernoulli Numbers and how to compute them.  That was algorithmic knowledge i.e. step by step one could generate these humongous fractions.  Nowadays, in SymPy or Mathematica, you might just ask for the nth one.  Were Bernoulli Numbers what Ada was aiming for in her Babbage machine inspired notebooks?

The Data Center (Casino) is humming with tools, from Wolfram Alpha on down.  Wolfram is a good example of a Hogwarts or GBG HQS perhaps. On the timeline, from ancient past (Neolithic) to alien future (Martian) we have this axis populated with star mathematicians and their rational constructions, partially overlapping and feeding our appetites for automation.

To be more concrete, today I was working on Py4HS_Bernoulli, a Jupyter Notebook, where I tackle this idea of generating functions, and the coefficients of so-called Bernoulli Polynomials.  I am in no way expert on these topics, and my goal is to exercise the mechanics of specific tools:  numpy, sympy, pandas.

Why?  In the background I'm reading about Sheffer sequences in the context of a discourse also hoping to bring healing to warring regions, in this case the region in Eurasia currently experiencing tank and trench warfare, with missiles and drones.  

Casino + Supermarket again; risk versus likelihood of survival, as whatever one considers oneself to be.  The word "existential" is often used.  So there's a connecting theme: how to more successfully wire Planet Earth going forward, literally, as well as figuratively.

Remembering Glenn Stockton

In memory of my good friend Glenn Stockton. My thanks to his support team, who helped him through his last weeks of life. Glenn grew up in Montana, then St. Helens and The Dalles, Oregon. The family then moved to Page, Arizona where his dad, by then an electrician, worked on the Glen Canyon Dam. 

Always a naturalist, Glenn learned the ways of the desert and its creatures.

After a short stint following in his dad's footsteps as a union journeyman, Glenn joined the military and, given his high aptitude scores, was sent to the language school in Monterey, then on to a secret base in Vietnam, as a code cracker. Glenn had huge respect for the Vietnamese language and culture.

He subsequently served at the NSA headquarters (Fort Meade) before enrolling in Antioch College and joining the counter-culture. Living both on and off the grid, he continued developing his skills. He built a stone home from scratch, and started a family.

He helped get a small factory up and running in Jerome AZ. The company made the most sensitive mercury vapor detectors in the business, important in gold mining.

I got to know Glenn when he moved to Portland, partly to stay close to his son and daughter. He became a Wanderer and continued to explore and develop his ideas as a widely read scholar and polymath.

He coined the term "Global Matrix" to encapsulate his research themes. We overlapped a lot in our thinking and enjoyed exploring ideas together. 

Sometime around the Fall Equinox in 2022, he checked himself into the VA. He was released the next day, but with a terminal diagnosis. He made it to Halloween, with help from his support team.

Glenn Stockton, 1962
Page, Arizona