Animation Transformations (Musings)

This animation turns talk balloons (like in a comic book) into sketches of complex molecules, on the theory that language is a chemical transaction, mediated through neurons to and from the musculoskeletal systems in communication. Ants do something similar.

We ("we" -- not me necessarily) say the meanings trigger additional processing and that the chemical sensation of hearing or reading language is not akin to reading or hearing music, in that “music is a dead end” in terms of making all those wheels turn, the ones that language turns. We call this “mental imagery” and music often has that too.

Certainly after listening intently to a human language, something flips to where it’s no longer necessary to do a simultaneous translation, to / from a native language. We could say this happens when another language is no longer “hosted” but is able to run on “bare metal” but we don’t. When we think about brains we’re not that focused on metals.

Where metal gets into our thinking sometimes is through “trains of thought” i.e. in comparing thoughts to a succession of train cars, we’re bringing not only the trains themselves, but rails into the picture. That’s a metallic vista for sure. We could take those comic thought balloons and go from words, to chemical diagrams, to chugging trains going by. All the associations of a train whistle… some are more mesmerized than others.

In telling the history of psychoanalysis, it’s important to not forget the buildup through public interest in both hypnosis and animal magnetism. Electromagnetism was being heralded by some (Thomas Edison included) as the outward manifestation of our thoughts, quite possibly persistent after the death of a body. Looking back though, we see language gearing up for the internet, whereby alchemical diffusion could be (a) more pinpoint switched and (b) global.

Broadcast TV does not lend itself to pinpoint switching such that targeted information needs to travel more by phone and mail. Once video content became super easy to source and share, the comic talk balloons started filling with video communications, a phenomenon remarked upon often by Marshall McLuhan, as he sensed the ripple effects would be enormous.

Killers of the Flower Moon (movie review)

This was my first time in Academy Theater in the Montavilla neighborhood, on the other side of Mt. Tabor, the neighborhood volcano. I’m getting a Wes Anderson vibe from our miniature world here. Dave DiNucci and Leslie Hickcox joined me.

I went in with few preconceptions.  Having since seen some of the negative reviews, I think you just need to be in the mood for one of those serious-minded downers. Also, I think the lead actress was perfect. That’s exactly the kind of understated low-key behavior I find believable in such a woman. She was a good dramatic foil to the more whup it up Leonardo DiCaprio character.

I’m writing this review several weeks later. What impressions stuck? 

The DiCaprio character was a divided mind. On the one hand, he was motivated by money, he’d be the first to tell you. On the other hand, he was in love with his wife, to a threshold she could bear and make reciprocal. But the money motive overruled at the end of the day. He was close to blind to his own predicament, so conflicted he had become.

Weeks later, last night in fact, I saw the newest Hunger Games, the prequel. In my mind, they formed a double feature, as here was another deeply conflicted male who more consciously brought it all together in the end, in a Darth Vadery speech paying tribute to the Will to Power.

I found it most interesting that diabetes was the real killer in this picture, which the money hungry males could aide and abet. Appetites must be balanced against what a body is able to digest and make healthy use of. 

Some appetites become addictions, in the absence of adequate defenses (e.g. insulin), leading to the slow (or fast) undermining of a whole culture. The appetite for oil money was no less destructive in many cases.

What Is Technology?

I whipped through a Neil deGrasse Tyson interview recently, on YouTube, while walking Sydney (using iPhone + AirPods) wherein he affirmed the meaning of technology as "that which is made by humans". 

That got me thinking of course, as I've usually heard "technology means tool use" which has different nuances.

For example, we've all seen monkeys digging ants out of anthills using sticks as tools, so is there no technology use in this picture (other than taking the picture)?  Per Tyson, a beehive can't be "technology" even though bees construct it, because "constructed" is insufficient (forget bird nests, anthills, mole tunnel networks). We need "constructed by humans" to make it stick.

The issue here though is humans never start from scratch when making stuff. They depend on stuff already made, including their own brain-transporting musculo-skeletons. 

Nature provides all the ingredients, including the smarts built in to the human design, and then mixing these ingredients into dough, pounding it and baking it makes it "made by me" the baker technologist. You need that designer mind, with the intent to invent, thereby netting new workflows (algorithms, recipes).

Might we instead revector "technology" into "high" and "low" without being so specific regarding which species or cellular processing is involved?  Is the meaning of "technology" so set in stone that we're unable to create a new namespace?

The tendency to fuse "techne" with "physis" arises when we discount the "noun view" relative the "verb view" of stuff.

If "stuff" is a "process" (a flow, a scenario through time), then nature is always "doing" and "making". We now know that even rocks aren't "just sitting there" doing nothing. They consist of crystal lattices and chemical happenings, even when no free reflecting light is present. All matter (stuff) is "on fire" in the sense of being energetic (vibrational) at heart.

The human brain-transporting musculo-skeleton registers as "high tech" whereas picks and shovels (used by naturally occurring humans) register as "low tech". Humans are characterized by their ability to approach, comprehend, co-invent, work with even high technology. They have that Promethean power.

Postmortem

I haven't actually lived in WDC (that's Washington, DC for nonlocals) for a long time, and even then, my chapters there were sporadic and short-lived. 

I lived in a finished attic, cram-packed with spy and detective books, that time I worked for Americans for Civic Participation (a nonprofit voter registration outfit). Another time, my parents were housesitting a place near DuPont circle, below ground-level as I recall. 

Speaking of which, Ed Applewhite introduced me to the Cosmos Club, on said circle, on a different visit. A bigger and older version of Wanderers in a lot of ways.

All of which is to say, I wasn't there when the decision was made to provoke Russia into actions egregious and punishable enough to justify the sudden imposition of sanctions up to and including an internet cut-off. So it's speculation on my part, mixed with some remote sensing (based on open sources), when I say the WDC political cast was taken by surprise when no switch got flipped such that all the lights went out in their foe economy. Russia Today (RT) remained accessible to those not dependent on cable.

Russia experienced disruption and inconvenience yet continues to have internet.

The missing puzzle piece, I'll offer, is: 

• the free open source Linux revolution, starting in the 1980s, 
• bringing us the graphical web by the 1990s (with memex vibes from earlier science fiction), 
• and leading to e-commerce changing social dynamics big time (shopping, dating) in the early 2000s. 

Software engineers learned that copyleft collaboration left "every company for itself" strategies in the dust, in terms of advancing the state of the art. Competitors could add some secret sauce and hide proprietary layers inside cloud containers, but the value added was atop publicly scrutable designs.

Making the fundamentals of tcp/ip secret, as in classified, would have defeated the whole purpose: to make a decentralized system that could withstand enemy attacks. That was arpanet (sticking to lowercase unix style).

As a consequence, those with less than a high school education, by today's standards, with respect to cyberspace, continued to think of "the internet" as some uniquely American (as in US) technology that could suddenly be withheld from others with the flip of a switch.  

Let's imagine a TV show wherein a West Winger shouts "do it" through a bat phone to some anonymous corps of engineers in the Pentagon, but then nothing much happens, because there's nothing much to do really, in response to such orders. 

Of course the banks have older games and could just repossess bank accounts. The lawlessness of the "rules based order" would feed a growing counterweight, a bulking up BRICS.

I'm not saying the internet couldn't be physically hampered. However the vote-winning hand was supposed to be a domineering control of cyberspace without the powers of explosives, not an edge in conventional force or special operations savvy. 

Just throw that imaginary switch. Do that thing with the routers. 

Once the sanctions proved ineffective, much to West Winger surprise, the game became more conventionally military -- but not really, and "because internet" again. 

Eyeballs could gain access to the frontlines over coffee from any office. What used to be hard-to-obtain humint, moving sluggishly through the system, was now "open pipe plentiful" both as raw intel and cogent analysis. Propaganda met with counterintelligence at every turn.

So-called secrets would come out immediately, meaning they really had no chance to become hidden in the first place. The engineering cult of open source had transformed the vista, even when it came to waging a more conventional, less asymmetric war.

If my analysis is correct, then perhaps we're on the right track on YouTube, in providing higher education to those most in need, such as those WDC congresspeople and agency staffs.

Seeing how the global economy has swiftly integrated, and proved resilient, it's time to build in more anti-fragility. Fragile egos, suffering from imposter syndrome, need to stay away from hard hat construction sites in the energy department. Whoever blew up Nord Stream is too juvenile to have a place at the grownups' table.

Science is not about pandering to nationalism at every turn. The idea that the sciences have to wall themselves in and compartmentalize "because nations" has always seemed semi-ludicrous, given how the science cults (e.g. the Pythagoreans) long predate the United Nations. 

The melodramas and game shows staged by the political cast constitute so much fluffy daytime TV for the least informed, from the standpoint of more snobby genres.

At another level (intertwined), you have a US military that was willing to go along with a "communism bad, capitalism good" ideology, but was unwilling to shift gears to an "our mafia versus their mafia" ideology once communism caved. 

If it was just "our conglomerates versus their conglomerates" then it's more like a mercenary Europe, with gangs of thugs selling their services to some highest bidder, some Machiavellian.

Putting a lot of weight on rotting trestle timbers is a great way to lose a train. 

Many in high leadership never lost that sense of detente and rapprochement that followed the reunification of the two Germanys. The Americans and Russians had been allies, with Russia taking the brunt, and the reason both felt safe to let the Germanys fuse was a sense of overcoming their own differences. 

But not everyone got the memo, and out of sheer reflex and unthinking momentum, Russophobia persisted even when so-called communism had become harmless.

We have the old Smedley Butler screed War is a Racket, his shot across the bow of a business class thinking to heist (hijack) the US government (see Business Plot). 

Humans need high ideals to die for, and if it's gonna be like Coke versus Pepsi, then the heroics ain't really there anymore. Interest in serving will wane, and civilians will forget why it's OK for a world military cast to prey upon them, forcing servitude (enslavement), compliance at gunpoint. 

How are we "defending democracy" by allowing bought politicians to sell us out to highest bidders?

The American people are getting narratives from respected military figures with no special animosity towards Russians. Various ethnic groups continue grinding their axes, but their specific beefs have a way of sounding parochial, especially outside of Old Europe. 

It's probably not fair to say that Ukrainians have burrowed more deeply into the molehill than Russians. Russian settlers date way back, including here in Cascadia for example. 

Our ethnic Russians and Ukrainians get along with Estonians and Lithuanians (they share news and stores), just as our Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and Laotians are not at each others' throats. 

AFSC's Portland branch was involved in diffusing Hispanic-Asian tensions. A melting pot can get hot, but it's not likely to boil over if democratically managed.

In sum... 

The WDCers who masterminded the war on Russia didn't understand the global internet. Once it was no longer about communists under every bed, in every closet, many career military minds disengaged. Dot commie engineers weren't the same species, and their warez clearly underpinned the workings of today's capitalism. So why war against them? Pythonistas were not the enemy.

Virtual Nationhood

A sense of how to start a Diaspora State online comes from business law with its supranational (globally dispersed) corporation, not that other structures, say nonprofits, aren't also supranational. 

Say on leaving Gaza (uninhabitable at this time) a guest (a Global U person) receives a choice of nationalities, including Palestinian, but with a separate set of choices regarding where to go next.  We know Egypt and Jordan have said they're not offering vacancies, however let's expect some vacancies elsewhere.

Per this journal, a science fiction story got rolling wherein Cubans, friends of Palestinians, likewise embargoed (BDS hits everybody it seems), are offering some Cuban slots and the documentation is done digitally. Head shot in a booth, printable record, memory stick, database, and you're on a plane from Gaza to Cuba (via Malta? I don't know). 

This would be a tiny pilot study, and no, this isn't a torture taxi to Gitmo. There's no need for any overt US involvement. Cuba does have some olive groves. That some Palestinians were showing up around Cuba would not be kept secret. This would be positive PR, a story of helping families escape a hell hole.

The process of documenting with a Palestinian flag icon, for those choosing it, is not a United Nations thing, but a datum in a database thing. We have all the national flags, or do we? Who gets a flag in Unicode? How about flags gone by? How about flags in the future? Unicode is not "full" we all know i.e. there's plenty of room for new glyphs. OK, here it is, one of the emoji. That's sufficient for Postgres or SQLite or what have you.

I believe Florida's governor declined to offer any slots or vacancies. I don't know what the other states are saying. I'm guessing they feel semi-paralyzed because any innovations around getting people evacuated from the Gaza killing fields will be labeled "human trafficking" by critics. 

When it comes to exporting human beings around the planet, there's lots of paperwork. That's what your university is endeavoring to help with, with a student visa, but there's that sensitive "town-gown" relationship to consider. What if your home country wants to draft you, what rights do you have to stay away?

The main point here is these pilot projects need not and should not be huge at first, as we have bugs to work out. The EU has gained more experience with processing and documenting those coming in illegally, although Florida has been dealing with Cubans for decades. Ever since Texas became a state, we've had tensions with the state of Mexico in the human trafficking department, along with Drug Wars.

The question is what are the next steps, once an evacuation system is established, for besieged refugees everywhere (with Gaza the showroom exhibit)? We're talking about a global underground railroad. As a Quaker, I'm just "talking the walk" meaning you'd expect stuff like this from a "human libber" i.e. someone wanting more, or wanting to better secure, liberty for humans -- and so, like a Humanist in that regard.

I've been dreaming of Asylum Cities, which are not all the same and which learn from the mistakes of others. A first objection here is: don't we already have asylum cities?  Am I dreaming of anything we don't already have? Just look at history right?

Refugees from all over the place gravitate to these various urban centers, where they often find congenial groups engaged in the same or similar struggles, sometimes in Diaspora Nation mode. New York City is a haven for many such virtual nation global subcultures. France has been a refuge for Iranians in exile. The US is home to a Chinese Diaspora as well as a Cuban Diaspora. Given the relatively open switchboard nature of domestic media, the psychological battlegrounds move to where Americans get a front row seat.

Once some small elite, enrolled in this "Escape from Gaza" program (thinking of the movie Escape from New York) -- perhaps to return there when sanity again prevails someday -- starts getting documented as Palestinian (i.e. database fields, allowing multiple citizenships and affiliations), pressure will likely build to let more people register, which could lead overnight to a Global Registry and all the paranoias that would entail.

Short of such a system, the possibility of international travel with a Diaspora Nation document (somewhat ceremonial in function) would help plug the holes in the current UN system, which seems unable to register the world's peoples for any humane form of nationality whatsoever. Too many fall through the cracks, like Tom Hanks in The Terminal -- which is why alternatives might well be arising (the Zeitgeist is creative). Too many are deprived of their human rights per the UN's own declaration of what those might be.

A Diaspora Nation might also be a Nostalgia Nation e.g. one puts an icon for Persia or Prussia on one's travel van. There's no campaign to make passports or citizen ID cards for these places. More and more students are getting a standard university World Pass by default (by 2050?), and relying on university infrastructure to maintain a basic standard, in terms of providing orientation classes and onramps to lifestyle options. 

Someday national citizenship may be an unnecessary frill for some, yet still an essential component of one's identity for others, or somewhere in between. 

One's ability to move about the planet need not depend on having a declared nationality. You have your resume, transcript, health record. Your social media help convey your ethnicity. You have joined some cradle to grave work-study program perhaps. You're a nuclear materials scientist with a specialty in medicine. 

Perhaps the nation you most identify with no longer exists within in the UN system (or never existed), but that doesn't force you to pick a different one. Databases support these additional fields.

That's the big picture of where we're maybe heading in Global U terms (its own namespace).  Global U == Spaceship Earth in this cosmography.

What we're against is forced confinement of innocent people using the ruse that they have the right to remain in place, and that no one is allowed to "force" these prisoners to freedom. That's a pretty cynical rhetoric a lot of us see through. Whatever happened to freedom of choice?

If you're all for human liberties not being interfered with, then that includes the liberty to move yourself and your loved ones out of harm's way. 

Contriving to pen the Gazans inside Gaza requires collaboration among nation states well beyond those in Mesopotamia or Eurasia. But then the nation states violate one another's sovereignty routinely, to where they're clearly only notionally sovereign. It's not a system still in need of undermining. That system sank a while back (Grunch of Giants, St. Martin's Press, 1983). We're already floating in its wake, trying to make sense of a chaotic world.

In sum, not everyone is OK with forced confinement policies and some may take it into their own hands to catalyze the emergence of a virtual Palestine with or without UN representation. The parallels with Zionism are obvious, but then "let my people go" is an age old protest. Jews are especially well positioned to understand Diaspora Nationhood, whereas Christians and Muslims have felt more secure in respective empires.

Go where though? In search of a homeland, a promised land, a place on the planet, the planet as a whole, as a last resort, although not exclusively. We co-exist. We enjoy our time as guests and explore our campus freely.

More Stories

In recent journal entries, we created a beachhead surrounding Napoleon, remarking on his playing The Turk, ostensibly a chess playing machine (count Babbage a skeptic). Omni-triangulating from there, you might move laterally around the earth, as we have been doing, from Eurasia to the Americas, and/or forwards and backwards through time. 

Rolling forward, we come to Margaret Fuller, who, like Ada (student of the Babbage engine), was another polymath, though perhaps with less interest in math per se. Ada liked Bernoulli numbers. 

Fuller was surrounded by the Romantics (mostly men), who felt mostly repulsed by industrialization and its psychological costs. A free thinking woman, on the other hand, might anticipate better times ahead, once they were finally made equals to men, in terms of privileges and power. 

Industrialization could liberate them from onerous tasks, even if men were making a mess of it all with their unchecked egos and susceptibility to alcohol.

Margaret was educated by her father, but had that built-in love of learning that, once accelerated, kept its inertia, such that she could make it her economic lifeline and not marry early. She kept to scholarship and entered male academic society as a fellow bachelor, as literary magazine editor and proverbial single woman in a big city newspaper columnist, head for fame as an international correspondent, for the New York Herald Tribune (run by Greeley).

The overseas chapter was catalyzed by a Quaker couple, who wanted her to serve as au pair for their kid. Some of the highbrow learning might rub off. They would travel Europe together, including Italy, and Italy is where she decided to resign her au pair job and fall in love with Ossoli. 

By this time she was already a fan the Revolution going on, for an integrated place called Italy, versus a patchwork of vassal states (of Spain, of Austria) with Papal Lands around Rome. Germanic states were in a similar mood: to unify as Germany, which they (the nationalists) wanted to include Prussia (and yet the King of Prussia refused their offered "gutter crown" in one scene). 

What was at most at stake in these times, from a Transcendentalist viewpoint, was:

1. the present and future role of slavery; the USA was expanding and the anti-slavery activists wanted to make sure slavery, as an institution, did not continue to grow as the USA did (they wanted the practice contained and preferably abolished).
   
   
2. the present and future role of women; all this talk of freeing the underclasses and expanding voting rights to the masses was reminding women they were an underclass too, deserving voting rights as much as anyone
   
   
3. the present and future role of nobility; shorthand for the role of class (a focus of Marxism), with a landed aristocracy distinct from capitalizing industrialists, with organizing (unionizing) workers, and peasants resisting (as in ending) feudalism while contemplating various kinds of land reform
   
   
4. developing egalitarian relationships with Native Americans, anti-imperialist values

To quote Terry Bristol, a promulgator and champion of engineeringly based thinking, the key question, then and now, as always, is "how shall we live?".

My tendency as a Quaker is to remember John Cadbury (1801 - 1889) and also Robert Owen (1771 - 1858), not a Quaker, for their company town utopianism, a hybrid of capitalism and socialism featuring ownership by workers and shared institutional wealth. My university ideal likewise has that company town aspect, with work-study trajectories and student-faculty (4D brand?) housing around the world.

Margaret Fuller and her Transcendentalists proved that a middle class or "bourgeois intelligentsia" could be both radical and instrumental. "Middle" means "in the midst of" i.e. where memes mingle from other social classes, above and below (or we might talk about subcultures, or cults), including religious and military hierarchies.  

Studies of any middle class might start with their social organizations, be that synagogue, mosque, temple, church or what have you. Girl Scouts? Rotary Club? Therapy sessions? White collar work and organized crime have a long history together too. We use a lot of fictionalized TV shows to show ourselves these partially overlapping scenarios (e.g. Breaking Bad), with screenwriters tasked with keeping it at once both real, and entertaining.

Transcendentalists were into self empowerment. Once God was "within" as a Unity (versus "out there" as some Trinity), why not explore and introspect as a way of discovering divinity, meaning one's own potential as a human.  No More Secondhand God, by Margaret's grand nephew, would propagate this doctrine or attitude forward. The idea of self betterment, of working on oneself, would echo forward through the Work of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (and Maurice Nicoll).

Bucky delved into his great aunt's corpus once at Harvard and picked up on her "better times ahead" attitude. She, like Emerson, anticipated a post-Romantic more purely American mindset that embraced technology in a way that didn't at the same time deny nature, as these would become one and the same in the new American philosophy. Was this Pragmatism? Are we talking philosophy or architecture?

That's how her grand nephew saw himself, as fulfilling her prophetic hopes, living up to her expectations as a poet of the industrial era. He did not see his own work as entirely derivative of anything European, e.g. the Bauhaus school.

Alt Left?

Probably "alt left" is taken, by someone quick, given how "alt right" flew off the shelves, making new space, opening possibilities for self branding. I'll avert mine eyes and not go searching for spoilers, and carve the alt left niche as I choose, knowing I'll be ignored by some of my imitators.

Alt Left will include Occupy and Dr. David Graeber, the Yale anthropologist, who died early of Covid. I've got a take on Occupy starting from the Elk Statue (now hidden away) in Portland, Oregon. Occupy Portland (OPDX) disbanded peacefully, although not everyone got the memo (we did, and relayed it). 

For the record, OPDX (2011) did not fight with police all that much. We were all part of the 99% per the shoptalk of the day. I tracked the Joker Riots (2020) too, through social media and in these blogs, but didn't wade into them personally (no, not even here in Portlandia), as a caretaker for a 90+ year old in the middle of a pandemic. I got vaxxed and stayed semi-isolated (doable in my line of work), but I wasn't vexed by the unvaxxed, who included scientists. 

Like Dr. Bucky Fuller, Graeber is good at scrambling what people take for granted, as when writing his history of debt. Bucky helps us revector "socialism" as what we've been implementing through our prime contractor irrigation system and cost plus defense contracts, base housing, base schooling, hospitals for veterans, cradle to grave. One way to frustrate capitalism in its more cowardly forms is to not buy its ridiculous presuppositions.

Rorty's Achieving Our Country, figuratively circled in the above YouTube, traces leftism to anti-imperialism, non-interventionism. When Jefferson suggested the USA support Napoleon in spreading the French Revolution, Washington and Hamilton pushed back. I'd throw in the reluctance, on the part of many Friends (Quakers) to engage in proselytizing, i.e. arm twisting others to imitate one's ways.

The "alts" have to be interesting to libertarians to survive (do we need to survive?), which I link to "libretarians" i.e. those who believe in (fight for, exercise) the freedom to read anything and everything (libre for books, and for freedom). I reveled in Princeton's open stack libraries (Firestone, Jadwin...).

Going with the freedom to browse comes the freedom to explore, the planet for starters. My declaration of human rights admits that bars or other establishments might ban access to specific customers over time, that relationships should be voluntary (where "serving strangers" is also relationship e.g. "I'll voluntarily treat new people, given my doctor codes" is a kind of business professionalism).

Which brings us to the libre software movement and the leverage that transparency and code sharing brings to the picture. At some point, "reading" became "running" i.e. "to read" meant "to execute", to carry out orders, to tackle tasks. Writing came to include programming, i.e. filing such executable scripts. 

The alt left is bold about not championing closed box architectures, even if it has to use some. By "it" I might just mean "me" as I'm using black boxes routinely, but to run open source pretty often.

I'll extend the "energy slave" and "no race, no class" concepts, as revolutionary in the lefty sense, of creating more civil rights for people.  The "nature is technology" school recognizes a universe "slaving away" in the sense of orbiting planets, exploding stars, transforming energy, and reckons in those terms. 

In contrast, the moral abomination we call "slavery" wherein people are coerced to perform labor against their wills with no powers of negotiation or opting out, may be offset by automation, such that our machines (our energy slaves) do the dreary stuff. That was a big part of the vision: freeing the scholar to return to his [sic] studies.

Keeping those machines running can actually be interesting work, for someone in the mood to pay attention to such things. For example, I get mental benefits from coding, including debugging, even when I'm not being paid. 

Left to their own devices, many humans enjoy playing with model trains.  Those who get to drive the trains for real should have opportunities for job enjoyment.  Job satisfaction among railroad workers is a critical diagnostic. Likewise healthcare workers need ample access to their own "dogfood" including mental health care. Too many ER doctors get the stress without the benefits (just money doesn't cut it).

Religions should be recognized for contributing to professionalism and selflessness in performing necessary jobs with a sense of volunteerism, in celebration of a cosmic order.  Religious orders may have widely differing beliefs and practices and yet work in symbiosis. Diversity is desirable. 

The ability to collaborate and cooperate are marks of Darwinian superiority (ironically). The individuating individualist need not be a simpleton, singularity or soliton. "Self made" does not imply "hermit" or it might, for a spell.  I'm not suggesting leftists have to be extroverts and gregarious. Many a leftist  intellectual is more of a hub and server, in the W3 sense, multitasking.

Teaching Martian Math

Driverless Vehicles?

The thesis here, let's say unproved, still taking evidence, is that USA PR has become too thin a gruel, as in insufficiently nutritious, when it comes to fueling a world's imagination with hopeful visions about the future. In the past, a one word synopsis for the American Dream was "promising", especially if one subtracted the Affluenza and bipolar (pathological) "USA versus USSR" dimensions (both ongoing themes (memetic streams) to this day).

A symptom of this paucity: embracing driverless cars over a world without death by starvation, as a Silicon Valley priority. AI in general has a cruel side, which may be shaped and tempered, especially when left in the hands of Malthusians. 

Of course the banks will retort that SV is not an epicenter of bioengineering i.e. other centers have taken on the data science (GIS / GPS intensive) of feeding humanity (is that Bayer's job? Cargill's?). I still think SV failed to think globally enough in creating its profile / reputation. There's room for a makeover.

The problem with the driverless car (vs a people mover) is over duplication of relevant technologies. The waste-filled suburban living template, wherein everyone has the same well-appointed kitchen, gadgets, garage full of toys, means zero cooperation is necessary. Neighborly relations stay undeveloped in bedroom communities, commuter villages, because everyone has and does the same things. There's no pooled funding for shared meals until you get to senior living facilities and through a few churches serving the most needy.

If the individual carriers (cars) have a common brain, and run on perhaps invisible tracks (radio guided), and are sufficiently shielded from pedestrian walkways (we call them road beds), then each car needn't have such fancy sensing equipment when going into driverless mode. Automated guided vehicles (AGV).

We've seen such systems in the big warehouses and fulfillment centers. But to achieve integration at that level, we would want a large campus, base or megastructure, with all cars under the same AI (plus some I) management.

USA PR is not entirely dependent on Big Tech, nor is Big Tech synonymous with dreams of autonomous driverlessness (an oxymoron?). But then DC has been as glitchy as SV, falling into too many pitfalls, getting caught up in too many outward wars since its own Civil War, meaning insufficient healing. 

The darker dirtier covert operator class started asserting behind-the-scenes dominance over Congress etc. during the war against Nicaraguan insurgents, the ones who won (Sandinistas etc.). Citizens learned of a secret government or deep state, populated with Ollie North / Admiral Poindexter type characters seeking "total information awareness" (not such a terrible goal) atop of special privileges to play by a different rulebook than any published, for those with access to public funds.

I've made the claim that the Silicon Forest is distinct from both SV and DC and has its own blend of PR that could be working in the USA's favor at this time. Some curious bystanders have been looking into it, as to whether my claim has any substance. What are my sources and who are my influencers and why should anyone care? That's the kind of thing I talk about in my blogs, among other topics.

Teachers' Strike

FaceBook chatter...

Kirby Urner:  They're going to announce at 7 pm tonight (Halloween) whether the Portland Public Schools strike is on or off starting tomorrow. I got an email from a former employer about these new online sessions for affected students.

Julie Urner:  Maybe you will get a few gigs, but my guess is that the strike won't last long. What to Know

Hayden Dunn: going to cross the picket line?

Kirby Urner:  I'm not with Coding with Kids anymore. I could go back, but they want you to sign a non-compete, and I'd prefer to compete. 

My angle during the strike is to encourage high school math teachers to keep occupied and up on their game by studying the curriculum I wrote when teaching 8th grade, for Sunshine Elite Education (SEE), a private school for techie families in the Silicon Forest.

That's all free and cloneable, as well as forkable, presuming said teachers are Git savvy. If said teachers want to meet me in person and set up a workshop, that's not strike breaking activity. That's like striking actors trying to stay in shape by hiring some kind of coach. Maybe the union itself wants to contract with me. I'd rather work with teachers than directly with their students.

Hayden Dunn: I was wondering. I didn’t really see you as a scab.

Kirby Urner: even if I stayed with CwK, it was an after school program that depended on cooperation from faculty. In moving to an online format, per Covid, they’re probably not seen as scabs as their program does not count towards a degree within the system. They don’t do the same job in other words.