The District

Although my friend who prompted me to give Marianne Williamson another look, has since moved on, to the newest Kennedy, I'm not making any public noise about any switch in loyalty, since I'm not empowered to vote in the DNC primary anyway, and I don't want DNC on my political resume enough to want to surrender my Pirate Party status.  Yes, I'm seeing it as either/or these days, and yet at the same time as statistically insignificant.

I'm reminded of my support for Tulsi for prez.  My line the whole time is she's too straight an arrow for a crooked office, we need a crime boss, and that we got.  I should know better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.  I voted for the guy.  I wanted to try a different Mafia, other than say Kushner and Ivanka's.

But what did I know, right?  We all should have realized from the first Trump impeachment, that standing in the way of NATO was going to be a treasonous offense.  A lot of citizens had never given NATO much thought, but now it was going to make sure Raytheon-Halliburton stayed prosperous, so we'd better get used to it or else.  

Once Trump was out of the way, and the old crew back at the helm, we could get on with the showdown, in some "us versus the world" (a tired play).

I like Marianne because she's into psychology and matters of public mental health.  Clearly the schools are in trouble.  I'm watching the YouTubes from teachers on why they had to quit.  

As a geek heading into teaching, I was always aware of the steady stream coming the other way.  I was like that lone vehicle driving into the city where the oncoming lanes are packed with fleeing refugees.  Was I some kind of hero?

Actually, I don't think it's wrong for some jobs to be primarily taken by young people, who then move on. From the point of view of a prep school middle schooler, somebody who just went through college, and therefore knows what it's like from recent experience, is going to be implicitly more up to date on many wavelengths.  More than a geezer would be.

When I taught at St. Dom's in the 1980s, I was fresh from the university and not that different in age.  I don't begrudge those willing to stay and be Gandalf or Sister Joan.  I'm just saying it's not an automatic diss to say a job is skew-bulge-occupied by a younger crowd.  

Besides, I've gone back to teaching gigs with younger cohorts off and on into my sixties.  Coding with Kids for example.  Many times before that, and on many campuses.  Meaning I've had the best of both worlds:  full time immersion in my youth, as faculty, then pilot programs, field testing some new ideas, in my wizard years.

Speaking of wizard years, yes, I think I'm saying I support Marianne because she's a witch, and not a wicked one.  My wife took the name Wicca as a reminder to seek wisdom, not to tie herself to any subculture.  Marianne has a kind of aristocratic flare that actually comes off as presidential.  I find it easy to imagine her relishing ceremony.

The present could use more of Williamson's piping up on the Wurlitzer.  Ditto Andrew "UBI" Yang.  Ditto many of those who've obtruded into public discourse for having run for top office.  Or held one in the past.  These are not voices to gleefully block simply because the press (and/or cable) has the power to do so (or once had).

So does that mean I'm watching Williamson on TikTok and/or Zoom?  Not currently.  

I'll pig out on TikToks only rarely and pretty much leave it to the algorithm versus seeking out specific content.  

That's all raw intel in my book, whereas I'm relying on several layers of sifter-editor to come up with some choice pieces.  I only have so much time for The District (one of the popular soap operas) after all.

Wild Wild Country (movie review)

This six episode documentary (not "docu-drama") revisits the culture clash, the story of worlds in collision, that was the Rajneeshpuram experiment in Oregon.  The filmmakers find a sweet spot between a lot of rear view mirror distance, from events in the 1980s, yet with many of the principals still able to be forthcoming about their personal experiences.  

We get it from the mouths of the horses involved.  Except not from Osho directly (the Baghwan himself).

Teachers will advise you to look within for your teacher and follow that still, small voice (or whatever shoptalk blah blah), however the truth of the matter is if a lot of us agree on a teacher, other than ourselves, and if we all plunge into service mode, great accomplishments of collaboration might be achieved.  

Rajneeshpuram was in that sense a monument to what humans of like mind and sufficient skill are able to achieve in short order.  They built a dam, shaped the lakes, provided both power and pumps, and turned a desolate ranch into fertile farmland.  They built structures and instituted a form of self governance, based on the model of Master and top drawer Secretary.

However, the rate of change was too bewildering for the slow-moving, deliberately backwater surroundings of rural Oregon.  Making Wasco County the site for an annual festival (like a Burning Man) for a global network of centers, was not making Wasco correspondingly wealthy.  On the contrary, the locals were being bought out and/or were fleeing, as the aliens invaded.  Some decided to stay and fight, only to be called out as ignorant bigots (i.e. "deplorables").  

The chemistry wasn't clicking.  Curiosity turned to dread and mutual demonization.

Given time, making Rajneeshpuram a tourist experience, and a gateway to Oregon travels more generally (Crater Lake, High Desert Museum...) would have benefited a broader base.  A whole boomer generation has already embraced so-called Eastern Religions.  The cultural DNA is all there.  However, embedding more seamlessly with the surroundings would have required a longer period of mutual adaptation and gestation, more diplomacy, better PR.  

Naming it Rajneesh University from the get go, and encouraging outsider tuition paying visitors to sample the lifestyle, saying "campus" instead of "puram" might've been one way to go.  Osho could have been the prez, a more recognized title, or CSO (chief spiritual officer).

I should be clear that although I am currently a resident in Portland, I didn't return to this city of my early boyhood until around 1985, when the Rajneeshpuram experiment was unwinding.  I was aware this melodrama was unfolding around me, but not until now, in 2023, do I feel like I have a handle on what all went on, thanks to this documentary.

Arming themselves with assault rifles after the bombing of the Portland hotel was a missed opportunity to get Oregon's existing law enforcement agencies more on their side.  

Their willingness to reinvent every wheel (including chemical warfare) was actually a barrier to better intercultural understanding and integration.

I'm not saying it ever could have worked out well.  Some experiments teach a lot more because they failed.  We all have much to learn from this chapter.  I have a lot more to think about.  The experiment contained so many potentially volatile ingredients we still juggle, such as homeless disenfranchised veterans with no existing governments able to realistically address their situation.  At least this group gave it their best college try.

I thank everyone who agreed to be interviewed for this film and for the thoughtful job of splicing it together the editors did.  Top notch.

Debt Ceiling

As regular readers of this blog likely know already, American literature already foreshadows the demise of a special case financial system floating an earlier version of the United States.  

I'm talking about Grunch of Giants, by a Medal of Freedom winner and celebrated poet, associated with the Aquarian Conspiracy, in turn inheriting from the New England Transcendentalist movement:  R. Buckminster Fuller.

In that book, Fuller forecasts how the mumbo jumbo might go from there, were the USA to retire its debt payment responsibilities in favor of a fresh start, as some kind of post nationalist nation, an oxymoron for sure, but perhaps with more staying power vs-a-vs the imposter state that would otherwise persist.  

I called this post nationalist design USA OS in my own writings, OS for Operating System.  Others worked on a complementary OS Earth as a meme.  We were anticipating the continued rise of computer science, with "operating system" a next metaphor for governance.

After Grunch of Giants, Fuller forecast that the post-USA imposter state would try to bury his work in an Orwellian memory hole, by smudging history.  He passed this anticipatory narrative on to Patricia Ravasio, who later wrote a book about their meetings.  His premonitions were on target as usual.

Fuller was an evolutionary more than a revolutionary in that he wasn't a Robin Hood hoping to steal from the rich and redistribute all that cash to his cronies, in exchange for blind loyalty.  

On the contrary, his "gross universal cash heist" (aka GRUNCH) was about voodoo people (e.g. J.P. Morgan types, masters of the soulless corporate personhood zombies) continuing to undermine the ultimate authority of national sovereignties (descended from "divine right" dogmas) by becoming their underwriter sponsors.  The East India Company runs through all his writings as the boilerplate prototype of the limited liability operation, of privatized profits and socialized loss.

Fuller spells out a similar pattern in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, wherein landlubber royalty received their principal backing from offshore and not solely from internal revenue.  Ocean-savvy pirate networks shored up the city-states.  A monarch would have tools and trinkets no one could produce only locally, adding to their "divine right" aura.  Who wants to be beholden to the people, after all?

Flag waving tin horn patriotism was another form of organized religion in Fuller's accounts, semi-transparently designed and field tested by his much anticipated World Livingry Service Industry (WLSI).  Supranational giants, corporate personhoods, now run the show, at least on paper.  Their cash heist is complete.

The UN, in contrast, pays the corporations as contractors (as do the state-funded militaries), effectively returning any money paid to states, and then some, in the form of profits.  The Grunch is self-irrigating, although it's not a closed system, as neither is Spaceship Earth (its principal theater of operations).

Most readers probably understood this outcome as dystopian, but in Fuller's case we need to remember he had long projected a nation-free world in the form of his Dymaxion Projection.  The political data layer might still persist on Google Earth, but in seeming even a little less diminished, it would lose persuasive power.  People would find themselves increasingly unable to suspend their sense of disbelief.

That's about where we are today.  Phony Intelligence (so-called AI) is always in danger of ringing hollow, popping its own bubble, and leaving its followers to wander off in search of something more secure.  Keeping the show on the road takes work, including the manufacture of consent.  Real intelligence (RI) is still needed.

The propped up legalistic framework known as the Federation (in my scifi: the FSNA or Federated States of North America, or USSA for mocking purposes), continues to teeter on the brink of fiscal meltdown in a kind of ritualistic political theater.  It leans on the EU and UK, and to some extent the UN, for continued credibility and legitimacy.  These bureaucracies prop up each other.  Lets not forget NATO either.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Grunch continues to wrestle with its new responsibilities as the defacto experimental prototype community maker (military bases get much of their attention).  Refugees, both documented and undocumented, pour across borders here and there, sometimes as invaders in uniform, other times as medical tourists seeking affordable healthcare.

The camps many of them get herded into tend to be more like prisons than like transitional prototypical housing (ala Burning Man), with no free journalists permitted.  Even members of the congress in DC don't get to see much of what goes on, when it comes to the TexMex region for example, the province of narco-terrorism.  

For-profit prisons answer to the actual stakeholders, not so much to the taxpayers.  Gitmo defies any attempts by any White House to close it.  AI has a lot of autonomy.  The feared takeover seems a lot in the rear view mirror already.  Planet of the Apes Я Us.

Conventionally, the Grunch has used its PЯ shield of tax-funded nation states to conceal its activities.  The state is the responsible actor whereas the private sector merely does what is asked of it, patriotically of course.  

With the shrinkage of the public sector comes the loss of this veneer.  Again, the outcome sounds dystopian, whereas Fuller continued to insist we could do better than choose oblivion.

Grunch of Giants points back to Critical Path, which does more to take up the war in Vietnam and even anticipates Afghanistan.  Both were written in the 1980s.  

In that thicker book, Fuller does more to make his case, that our transition to a post nationalist era need not spell an end to our awareness of either history or ethnicity ("race" might have to go).  On the contrary, he expected many more museums to return their stolen loot to the indigenous.  Hegemony and imperialism were falling by the wayside.

Synergetics in Schools

I get to present to the 52 Living Ideas folks, an online study group, about Synergetics in Schools this evening.  Once the recording appears, I'll embed it up top.

My plan is to start where Casey House left off last time, on April 30th, embedded below.  He took us on a tour of his Synergetics University website, showing as a link to my website from his Resources section.  

I'll start from there and jump to Synergetics on the Web, my site from the 1990s which I preserve "as is" while continuing to develop curriculum in other venues.  I'll talk about my chronology, prototyping here in the Silicon Forest, right up to the present day.

Thanks to Saturday Academy, I've had several opportunities to teach Python programming in conjunction with various kinds of mathematics.  I've always been a "math through programming" kind of guy, i.e. lets blend the two topics already, given high school is more about overview than getting specialized.  Ever since Guido van Rossum's Computer Programming for Everybody (CP4E), the idea that learning to program could be as common as learning to drive, has been mainstream.

However, given another passion of mine is Bucky Fuller's approach to geometry, embedded in philosophy, yet not theosophy per se, yet metaphysical, and definitely Americana, I'd molded the Python component to be about polyhedrons.  

How would you mix Python and polyhedrons?

Most obviously, there's the ray tracing angle, i.e. actually rendering 3D spaces as stills, or as animated GIFs with successive frames.  I also experimented with Visual Python, also known as VPython, which led me to hypertoons.   

Hypertoons consist of morphic "time tunnels" (scenarios) running between keyframes, in directed graphs through which the playheads wander.  I did a dual playhead prototype with Fuller's concentric hierarchy of polyhedrons my central focus.  I also furnish my Coffee Shops Network bars (in the planning phase) with hypertoon reveries on the screens.

With my middle and high school aged students, though, I developed a different blend of maths and science fiction I've dubbed Martian Math.  I like the alliteration there, but ET Math might do as well.  There's a storyline in the background of humans (Earthlings) and ETs making contact and choosing to collaborate on some project.  

One might imagine on a space program, however these ETs want to focus on hydroelectric power generation, because this is the Pacific Northwest and Silicon Forest is all about affordable hydro-power.

I think I'll weave in at least three Silicon Forest based personalities to further regionalize my presentation.  I'm thinking of Doug Strain and Linus Pauling and how those two did a lot to create an ambient culture, one running counter to reckless militarism.  Then I'm thinking of Sam Lanahan, a personal assistant to Buckminster Fuller and the inventor of Flextegrity.

Pauling helped Americans learn the truth about nuclear weapons testing, the environmental and health effects, even short of testing them in an actual war time scenario.  

Strain, himself a pacifist, founded one of the big companies in our region, and funneled funds towards keeping Pauling's legacy alive.  I was a beneficiary of his largess, in getting to attend the Linus Pauling Memorial Lectures which Silicon Forest industries supported, via ISEPP (Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy).

How about autobiography?  Will I have enough time to squeeze some of that in?  Yes, I intend to emphasize my trajectory from Princeton through Jersey City, around the east coast (including the District), and back to the west coast (Portland) to have a programming career and raise a family.

Mostly I'll tour my Martian Math websites, and then show my School of Tomorrow and Elite School repositories.  We'll also look at what I developed for Winterhaven (a Portland public school) when my daughter was going there, although she wasn't in this class.

I fully realize, through years of Math Forum debates (mostly on the math-teach forum) that my views are to this day considered exotic and esoteric.  Neither one of those attributes is in itself a turn-off however, and tomorrow is another day.

No mathematics faculty that I know of has embraced Fuller's treatment of the polyhedrons, which starts with a different model of 3rd powering and a unit volume unit edge tetrahedron.  

I've been pressing the American Literature angle, suggesting that if you have not heard of Grunch of Giants, you have not encountered one of the critical works in that syllabus.  We might find book clubs based outside the Lower48 that do more to propagate American culture than those in the censorious inside.

Mnemonics

From way back when, I've been interested in mnemonics. I've been developing what we geeks like to call "in opinionated framework" meaning it comes with an initial set of defaults such as a practiced developer might have implemented over time.  

In my case, given my druthers, that means diagrams more than lists, and so on.  Spatially geometric structures are made manifest, but then dollhouses and castles (memory palaces of old) are likewise spatio-geometric.  My preferences and biases need not be foregrounded as somehow contrarian, when it comes to the ancient disciplines of memory management.  My aesthetics are consistent in many dimensions (I would claim).

Those who dump on "reflex conditioning" must not play a musical instrument, or be creative in any skilled way. Why they say (whether correctly or not) that it takes ten thousand hours to master a discipline, is because it takes that long to hard wire the brain, and yes, I'm fine with reading brain stuff metaphorically, even when there's a literal truth component.

There's a slower, more tentative mode, called learning, that even great maestros partake of.  When I shared Python programming with a tiny team of Hubble savants (as in space telescope), I had people of enormous gifts who seemed all thumbs when it came to keyboarding.  That's how it is.  

Specialization has not been the problem.  However over-specialization means losing a center, having only extremists, only freaks.  Without a glue of polymathy, a kind of semi-paralysis sets in.  Such was the critique in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, one of Buckminster Fuller's best known books.

Suppose you're in the humanities, a reader of Borges, you've tackled Infinite Jest a few times, and love Love's Body.  You want to preserve some level of fluency when it comes to reading the sciences and the maths.  You want an illumined right brain (remember, metaphoric OK) when doing so.  You have a good imagination and don't want it to stumble in what, in principle, is highly visual territory.

Your obstacle is likely the machinery of whatever coordinate system and all the differential equations used to show the next tock tik.  Given now, what's next?  This depends on rates of change.  There's a perpetual "falling" going on, called the conservation of energy with momentum a big part of that, i.e. inertia.  Nothing turns on a dime unless it's small and nimble, and nothing just stops, period.  Not without its cause. Not without so-called "forces" and/or "influences" and/or "contributing factors" (the vectors of change).

So one aspect of mnemonics is harnessing this momentum and using it to one's advantage, which might mean taking aspects of one's immediate environment and imbuing them with memory palace type attributes.  

Start with your own locale.

Weave your memories and sensibilities into where you live.  

Why that maybe sounds like strange advice is we do this unconsciously anyway and don't need anyone telling us to do this.  However the memory palace discipline is about extending our unconscious abilities into consciousness, itself a teaching in harnessing momentum.  Do what you do anyway, just more consciously.  Awaken your inner interested observer.

What staves off taking this more concerted "place based" weaving exercise are fears and superstitions about interacting with a private text to the point of deviating too significantly from established dogmas, faiths, practices.  If you read too much into your local private experience, don't you run the serious risk of becoming a weirdo, which comes at a price, such as (maybe) being ostracized or even confined?

However, the psychological sciences, designed for conscious application, are precisely the controls we have in place to keep the show on the road, meaning operable and functional (well adjusted).  

We as dream weavers (practitioners of the pragmatic art of memory management) remain collaborative and cooperative by nature, without much coaxing or cajoling.  We're spontaneously contributing members of society.  We want to build worlds together, and understand that it takes a village.

Lets take an example.  I want you, as a Borges reader, a James Joyce friend, cognizant of Ezra Pound cantos and so on, to have access to my hypertoons, featuring fast and slow dissolves among geometrical (i.e. spatial) topics, many involving spheres.  

We might have spheres in an astronomical context, as in cosmology (e.g. Hubble),  or we might have spheres integrated within a coordinate system, such as XYZ or the CCP, a grid, a lattice.  

We in the humanities embrace the lattice concept, without relinquishing it to STEM.  We might call it a Matrix (emphasizing its pro-generative nature).

To that end, towards the ball-packing lattice, I introduce triangular and tetrahedral numbers, meaning stackings of idealized fruits in the market, pyramiding in two ways:  with a square base, and with a triangular base.  

We will discuss these features, and then point out how these options unify, as both square based and triangular based are patterns within the same CCP or FCC.  Through the Buckminster Fuller vocabulary, we also get the IVM, which he patented briefly.

Once we've made it over the C.P. Snow chasm, from the humanities (PATH) into the sciences (STEAM), via the ball packing bridge, we're ready to reintroduce the polyhedrons, which resonate throughout the arts.  We accomplish this with another mnemonic construct, the concentric nesting of a primitive set, which includes the Platonics, taking the dual (a unary operation) and their first generation "begets".  

Combine a polyhedron with its own dual by criss-crossing edges, to beget a beget.

Those of you who've been our students or share the same lineage, are already high familiar with these well-trodden paths.  I'm preaching to the mainstream, once we narrow that to mean "the choir".  We also slap on some volume numbers, associated with relative size.  

But in so doing, we're diverging from some mnemonic systems already in place.  Which need not be a problem.  Bifurcation, or forking, is not inherently a threat to anyone, but a smart investment.  We have the old ways of remembering, in addition.  No either / or calculus need step in.  We're fine with co-existence.