The S Factor

:: more martian math ::

Demystifying S3

Testing Grok

You'd think with this allusion to Mars ("grok" is from Stranger in a Strange Land), I'd be showing the version I made earlier, with UFOs overhead. I'll add that below. UFOs were not a part of the prompt this time, using Grok.

For context, we triangulate with Maryhill, the palace and museum built by Sam Hill and Friends on the north bank of the Columbia, before the hydro-dams went in. 

There's a Jewish element there too in that my prequel to the Sam Hill story, we join the intrepid Alan Potkin, ecologist and East Asian studies guy, war in Vietnam vet, in Burma (or Myanmar). 

From one great river we hop to another great river and pick up on the Queen of Romania's story, her visit, with entourage, by train, to help stock Sam's museum with many European treasures, that the culture might be transplanted to this fledgling democratic Republic.

The ET point of view (symbolized by UFOs) is that "from the outside" view we sometimes call "meta" as in "metaphysics", and is sometimes translated as "above" as in "aloof" but more in the sense of "overview" or "supervisory". 

When a controller of a controller enters the picture, like an underwriter of underwriters: that's sometimes Twilight Zone in flavor and potentially UFO in the somewhat X-Files sense.

Students of Martian Math (one of four zones of interest, like a "world" or "land" in a theme park) know it as a playground for the imagination, where AI text to graphics and video is certainly appropriate and cleared for takeoff. 

But then our computational geometry is not that stochastic when it comes to the so-called "cosmic hierarchy" (a terminological turn-off for many, I realize). For "our central iconic and canonical sculpture" one might call it, where "sculpture" connotes spatially geometric, not flat against a canvas.

When we get to Renaissance perspective and rendering "3D objects in 2D" (King Hilbert talk), that's a time to wire in Memory Palace ideas (from public spaces, guiding rhetoric, ala speeches in the Roman Senate) and Jesuit delegations to China. 

Two things west Eurasia was proud of: perspectival painting and memory management, these days the province of VR goggles and glasses. 

The Chinese were initially skeptical, goes the story, which is a wise response in the face of anything seriously novel, as there's always an unanticipated downside, witness opium. 

However, in the process of working through skepticism, one makes it one's own, whatever "it" is in this case. Euro culture has dispersed everywhere by this time. The old ideas, of East vs West, have less and less traction by the day. We still have diversity, but it's not so neatly compartmentalized.

Here's a UFOs version:

using imagine.art front end

Martian Math features humans and ETs working together on a hydropower project. 

Yes, science fiction. 

Once you buy the premise, you'll accept that sapiens sent some of their theologically minded, if we can call them that, to meet with these extra-terrestrials. The Sapien-ET API (two way street) is where we focus in conveying some of our geometric concepts. 

The encounter might be patterned after the aforementioned Jesuit-Chinese encounters, likewise somewhat mythologized. I'm not saying which way the analogy has to go i.e. are Jesuits more the ETs? 

I'm not trying to nail down all the hyperparameters, and I'm thankful to CJ for helping me work on this segment in the first place.

Museum Visit

I brought Don Wardwell, captain of Meliptus, Wanderer co-conspirator, to the Lanahan spread near Eugene yesterday. The parking areas were packed with pickups and other construction crew vehicles: both the patio makeover and the main house reroofing were under way.

Steffan and Barbara had extended their stay so we could overlap. Steffan and I had both been directly involved with Sam in promoting C6XTY and the Lattice Gallery in different ways. We had subsequently discussed his dream for a video recording studio (all before covid) and then lost touch. Fast forward and I discovered his dreams all came true.

Steffan is a pro prestidigitator, a stage magician slash illusionist, mostly retired. He gave us an impromptu performance as we all sat around in the trailer. The pounding on the roof by the roofers at the house, meant the destination trailer (a nice one) became the setting for out get together. Steffan did some excellent card and rope tricks.

Don got the tour of the barn, to which the trailer is adjacent, including of the main pump, out of the river for this season and mounted on blocks, and of course, the modest Flextegrity Museum with some of Sam’s souvenir latticeworks. The C6XTY lattice in copper is depicted. The property has other such sculptures on display, including one in colorized aluminum (red white and blue).

Then Don and I clambered onto the Gator, a two-seater carry-all, like a fossil fuel golf cart, and I drove us around the perimeter, including a stop where the pump is actually situated, when in service. The property is by now intensively plumbed. This would be a pretty sweet farm for someone with animals, but for now it’s more an Oregon garden slash wetland. 

But for a rented out portion and a grassland section, Sam had the entire acreage planted in wild flowers this year. The bees loved it.

The entire day was enshrouded in fog. We left Portland before daylight and returned after dark. The dogs likewise had fun.

NavAm Motif

daf + ai

Pythonic Andragogy

Roaring 20s

:: ShoeOnHead ::

Mini Summit

I'm back to the idea of a mini-summit featuring game engineers, physics engine designers, and First Person Physics, the latter being a joint project of myself and Dr. Bob.

The idea is of course didactic simulations, featuring forces, such as attractive and repulsive, in some game situation. The point of view may be first person, one it always pays to think about, and one could say is always first person, but in the context of the genre, you'll go third person just as much. We sometimes call it "god mode".

The one I always come back to is the "hexa pent" shell, what Glenn called a Global Matrix (meaning coordinate system and mapping grid), say a buckminsterfullerene broken up into hexagonal and pentagonal pieces. The fit together to form a hollow sphere, plus they attract one another. The force is akin to gravity in not having a repulsive element, as we have in the magnetosphere.

But then these are precisely the hyperparameters our players might vary, in their explorations in systems dynamics. Turn up the gravity, now add repulsion as they come into docking position, now lock them into one mass etc. These are admittedly idealizations, suggestive of how things might be in reality, but our language is that of models and modeling (simulations being of that rubric).

However, my global matrix "test pattern" simulation is only meant to be suggestive. What we're facing is the prospect of mixed-use high rises filling with game pods and students needing simulations mixed with reading programs of various types. Not every discipline communicates through game pods alone, and in fact few do, but the pods help and double as workstations.

Some of these workstations will be piloting physical devices remotely. The level of bandwidth matters, but then some robots have a lot of onboard capability and don't need to be micromanaged. Likewise drones. The pod design has the advantage of offering simulated acceleration along with other haptic feedback, which keeps pilots sensitized to their remote environments.

Schools of Tomorrow

The schools I imagine are visited by away teams, but also source away teams. It works that way in sports already, but think of a Pycon. My school sends tend peeps to a Pycon in Brazil. Another time, we're visited by Brazilians. As we were here in Portland, for that Pycon. I hosted a guest.

When an away team returns, a debriefing happens, meaning the team reports on its adventures. There's real time monitoring too though. No need to wait until the trip is over to start filing reports. The bizmo teams have their road trip reports. The travelogue as a genre is the ballpark we're aiming for.

What might an away team study? Public health policies, transportation plans, ways of providing people access to necessary infrastructure, a skill sorely lacking in many American cities. The Portland school system has dispatched several teams to Finland, thinking PPS has much to learn from how Finnish do school.

Away teams visiting a school might be studying lifestyles that work in conditions of extreme remoteness. The technology begets workflows. Lessons learned.

Free Spirits

:: gypsy nomads (ai) ::

What some of us discover about our fellow humans, which is not that surprising in retrospect, is that indoor-living, so-called, is an anathema to a percentage thereof. 

Whereas I am able to get excited by the prospect of a penthouse or simply an apartment, and have lived in several, I met fellow travelers at Occupy Portland and other places that just couldn't abide being cooped up between the four walls of anything, which doesn't mean they'd eschew all manner of shelter. They just wanted to be free of certain types of restraint.

We don't have to look far to find long-running themes behind this longing for an open sky lifestyle. The crush of cities, especially during the advent of the industrial era, was especially noxious and toxic, and the Romantics rebelled, seeking a back to nature aesthetics that resonates with us today. Although classified a Transcendentalist, a post-Romantic movement, Thoreau's lifestyle at Walden Pond set a template for "off the grid" living.

However beyond not wanting to be cooped up in a high rise or even a suburban ranch style domicile, is not wanting the encumbrances of another system's bureaucracy, where "the other" in this case comprises all those "normies" who want to play-act being members of various nation-states. Some humans take a look at that whole game and would rather opt out.  "No citizenship for me thank you" is their polite enough refusal to go along. Is it that the "right of citizenship" is actually something more mandatory than a right? A duty even? Is a person free to surrender citizenship without adopting another?

Certainly many people would love citizenship in a "real country" that gave them rights to visit other countries besides the real one. If you don't have enough documentation to cross any border whatsoever, then the game of borders will likely seem awfully onerous. You're denied citizenship and therefore even the human right to go somewhere else, where you won't be a citizen either.  Once a person reaches adulthood without citizenship in any country, it's no piece of cake to finally find one.

What the United Nations might have done is come up with a catch-all default nation that anyone could choose if falling through the cracks otherwise.  Plain Vanilla Nation (PVN) would at least provide enough documentation, e.g a passport and ID card, to merit taking out loans, buying property, booking passage. But no, that would have been too easy.

However, even with a PVN in place and/or much easier rules, a percentage of my fellow humans will prefer not to become citizens of any country. I'm thinking as a matter of human rights, their preferences should be respected. 

However, the flip side is an individual does make waves and thereby builds up karma and it's unreasonable to grant a cloak of invisibility to someone who is going to be impacting planetary history, even if only in a small way (who's to judge?). That's why we give each other names, titles, roles, credentials: to keep records and let others predict what they're getting into, if they let so and so join their ranks.  

So whereas I empathize with those wishing to escape citizenship in any nation, I'm not seeing "incognito mode" as a basic human right on the same level.  Just because we don't record your nationality doesn't mean we can't open a file and register events along your timeline.  You'll want a timeline too, for your own protection in some scenarios. You may work harder than most to not show up in files or on radars and I understand that's your preference.

Prompt: Gypsies sit around campfire, enjoying guitar. Some children are wearing VR goggles. HDTV screens glow through the windows of gypsy caravans. Moonlight. Horses.

:: ibid ::

On Color Blindness

I was never a big fan of “color blind” when applied to “race” as a concept. But then I admit up front to having a lot of suspicion of, and bias against, those ethnicities that aspire to teach us about their various “races” (is this a sporting event?).

I accept the kind of “blindness” (we call it) that makes what most would see as two colors seem the same. But then someone had the idea to extend this ophthalmological usage into the realm of eying skin color, making it a be virtue to have a kind of blindness to color, versus an illness or disability.

My views are more statistical:  it’s easy to picture a world wherein skin color really is a reliable guide to ethnicity and who knows what else, maybe extreme correlation in other attributes. After centuries of eugenic breeding, we probably could create the racial regime we (faux “we” as in “not me”) wish we had. Speculative fiction has shown us some of the ramifications. 

We’re good at creating mono-cultures. Sucking all the imagination out of something is one of our specialties. We could have a world wherein everyone was a card-carrying white, brown, black, yellow or red (pure races) with recognized admixtures as “mixed race” impure. If you’re into racism, that probably sounds like heaven.

However as more migrants wander the world, growing to adulthood as itinerants, they learn that skin color in itself is not a reliable guide to much of anything, until maybe one starts to localize, in which case this white guy standing next to me in the supermarket probably is carrying, they all do in this town, people of any color. 

Like duh if she’s wearing a uniform, the kind designed to advertise one’s state supported right to exercise violence against others (talking about “police” but exactly what that means varies widely).

I’m just saying as a matter of self interest and self survival, don’t leap to conclusions based on a facile, unconscious manner, regarding other attributes of a person going on too few clues. And how many clues are too few is what statistics is all about as a subject. 

How small and efficient a data set might I rely on, to predict the future? 

That’s like asking what dashboard of what instruments. You need a temperature gauge (let’s say) and a sense of altitude (aloofness?). What instrument panel would you dare fly by?

I’m saying “skin color” as a dashboard instrument likely dates your dashboard i.e. I can assume more about you if you jump to more conclusions than you should about me, just because I act and look “white” in some sense (including skin color). 

The clueless hick in some movie, most benignly a harmless clown, will behave in a stupid manner towards someone he incorrectly and absurdly concludes he should diss. The crowd roars with laughter.

My ethnicity may not be readily apparent even to me. In novels and movies, those of a certain type, raised by those of another type, are finally reunited with others of their own kind. These make good animal stories sometimes. The chosen all converge, having been seen as strange in their respective villages.

I’d like people to be pleased with their skin color and looks more generally, as I tend to benefit to the extent the planetary population experiences a satisfying enough level of happiness. My living standards drop to the extent everyone around me is miserable, as I’ll feel miserable too in that case.

I’m all for others having happiness, starting with being OK with themselves. But all that is easier said than done as people may have unrealizable ideals for themselves and thereby experience much frustration if there’s no clear progress happening towards that end. Sometimes who you want to play is not how you’re cast. Many could characterize their situations in these terms, whereas a few claim to be living their dreams.

In such a happy world, getting a read on your skin color in RGB terms (it would vary around your body) would not seem surreal or creepy as you would not be thinking in paranoid terms, any more than when you color match a paint to the color of your house. 

You have the eye of an oil painter with a canvas, brushes and pallet. With such any eye, you’d hardly wish a form of blindness upon yourself. You’d wish for the contrary. Skins are beautiful, eyes too. That’s what I mean when I say I’m not into color blindness.

To be fair, I could translate the so-called virtue of color-blindness into terms I’d more agree with. We want to be able to tune out the irrelevant given finite bandwidth to what’s relevant. We all want the sense to sense what’s important and that includes schooling our senses to overlook, marginalize or otherwise deprioritize what’s not germane. 

Sometimes metaphors, like mattresses, need to be turned over and lied on their other side. To overturn and air out is not an implicit criticism of those who went before and flipped them from where they were. Every generation begets its flips or tries to. Some ethnicities pretty much specialize in flipping (or “revectoring” as I call it).

Media Campaigns

To label the above TV test pattern a case of “cultural appropriation” is one gestalt one could apply. My view is closer to: oh good, n8v America has taken over television i.e. the “appropriation” is going the other way and now maybe the weather reports will be more bioregional, not cutting off at these arbitrary “white man” borders, not that I believe “whites” form a race e.g. the Aryans, the Pueblo of the Caucasus, with me somehow a member of their tribe.

My “media campaigns” don’t tend to have a lot of voltage behind them. My Pirate Party doesn’t rake in the dough, given the esoteric nature of our planks and platform. 

We support new forms of public schooling geared towards building democratic institutions and training future diplomats. As it stands, private prep school alumni remain over-represented in the diplomatic corps (including the Peace Corps) and under-represented in the rank and file military i.e. the Smedley Butler racketeers, employees of USSA-style military socialism with capitalistic characteristics i.e. privatized profits.

In another campaign, I poke fun at the Qyoobists (hint: “Cube-ists”) and no one has a clue what I’m talking about. I like to denigrate and lambast a pseudo-ethnicity, science fictional at best, that no one believes in: people who worship the cube as their golden calf, and make it their symbol of rationality. Sure being “against” these people sounds surreal by design. Talk about straw men!

Another campaign involved taking a test pattern such as the one above and replacing the steady tone soundtrack with something more auditorily interesting: Azan. Why not immerse any viewers tuning in a test pattern in some American heritage of that flavor, Islam having been present in the Americas for some centuries, as a consequence of slavery especially although not exclusively?

However the TV stations mostly eschew test patterns these days and viewers are forgetting what they are and how they would appear in the wee hours of the morning, when a station had no other programming to offer. 

At least we’re free to publish share those Azan segments on YouTube, perhaps unlisted, and perhaps with creative modifications of the test pattern design.

Reflections on Racism

Perhaps to more clearly register my disdain for ethnicities which indulge in race talk, I’ll revert to “Caucasoidal” and maybe go back to “Negroid” and “Negroidal”. 

I was listening to Candace Owens going on around whether candidate Harris was truly black or just colored, and whether she was a deplorable horrible person for cooking collard greens in the bathtub, and sharing a recipe online. 

For Owens, this was posturing, whereas for me it sounded like a genetically complex individual (aren’t we all) attempting to convey her ethnicity, which contained this and that in some Venn Diagram. We could call greens a southern food without getting too chromosomal or hormonal about it. Does Kamala also eat crawdads?

Also, in popular parlance, even though the courts had desegregated schools on paper, it still wasn’t happening, because, as Candace points out, people tended to live in segregated neighborhoods because of history. Segregation is a social phenomenon, and even if Apartheid is over, that doesn’t mean the ghetto townships are gone.

Just saying: stuff on paper, through legislation, is not the whole difference and may make next to no difference at all, as when people flaunt the law, or perhaps scoff at it. “Thou shalt not discriminate against Russian speakers”. Yeah right, I can hear the ridicule among an inflamed Russophobic populace (hypothetical). Private clubs (e.g. NATO) might still keep them out, whole gated communities.

I’m happy to see Kamala as a small girl, feeling herself to be in the front line against desegregation even though bussing wasn’t in itself the legal act of desegregation, which happened earlier in her region, through the courts and legislation. 

Or rather, it was new policy aiming to standardize the schools in some meaningful sense, rather than by appealing to some pie-in-the-sky court decision. 

I just didn’t see a need for Owens to sound so scandalized, because in her little book of definitions, the fight against desegregation had already been won by the time Kamala was a school girl in Berkeley. That’s sleight of hand, to make courts the authority, and not anthropologists.

In asking if we really want to go back to talking about octamaroons and race as some kind of blood substance, Kamala is hoping the answer is no, that we aren’t really that fixated on genetic makeup. 

But Candace herself, racially Negroid, says the answer is yes, we want to speak precisely in racial terms (an oxymoron). As a Caucasoid, I’ll leave that to her then, as I don’t believe it can be done.

Day After Halloween Chatter

Without doing any deep dig as of yet, I'm going to speculate the two memes, "flying spaghetti monster" (FSM) and "string theory" have already amalgamated in some memeplex, hither or yon. Definitely hither, in that I've thought of it, but I'm speculating yon also.

In my cultspeak namespace we already have an identifying functor type object connecting FSM to "partially overlapping scenarios" i.e. that's a spaghetti image also, with hypertoons, and the FSI tetrahelix tunnels — all this stuff blogged about already.

Switching gears, we made it through another Halloween, sans many of the formerly living, and we miss them, will sometime join them. We had a drizzle going, plus the west side of Chavez is less homey than the east side, in terms of costume density per sidewalk. At least that was our shared experience, me, Derek and Dr. D.

My job had me teaching Python upstairs, remotely, over Zoom, fiber optic, while Dr. D. and then Derek (aka "Deke") started minding the door. We had Zoltar outside on a cushy chair, not especially able to sense vibrations (the porch is concrete), so kids climbing the stairs would not set him off.

However, whoever was handing out candy only had to tap on Zoltar's orb, and he'd start randomly reciting one of his four routine remarks, always ending in a cackle. Zoltar has been a mascot in some chapters, such as around this time in 2019, when Lattice Gallery popped up full of c6xty et al.

Speaking of c6xty, I have that pyramid out front, that looks like soccer balls stacked up but kept from unstacking by some basket weaving of plastic members. Everything is plastic, which some of my anti-plastic friends are not really into, but that's the Anthropocene for ya. 

So I added new Christmas lights, all white, with a white chord. I got over 68 feet of 'em for about $11 on sale at the Hawthorne Fred Meyer.

They won't last long though. I'll journal when they go out -- they'll be on through the winter nightly, as our neighborhood supports outdoor lighting like that, as permitted / encouraged decor. My plastic pyramid is pretty popular. I'm the mathematician on the block according to neighbors three doors down (we've talked about the pyramid, when I go by with my dog, and she told me neighbors in between say I'm a mathematician -- so what does the chatterbox say?).

More Pipeline Adventures

The dog and I retired for the night amidst first reports of another salvo in a tit for tat that’s been mostly tat, talking about Mesopotamia again. We got up early and came to Sam’s farm. Sam has been studying the history of Mesopotamia, which apparently hosted a culture that, for some three thousand years, got by with no discernible government, at least in terms of royalty, lineage and like that. I’ll have to ask him the name of this civilization at dinner.

The field work today was unloading lots of three inch pipe segments from the irrigation pipe trailer, pulled by the all purpose Gator, so we could fill it again, from pipes still amidst the flowers. Acres and acres of beautiful flowers. We took a couple breaks, one for me to go get my boots on. We may do some more pipe line dismantling tomorrow, depending on weather. Josh came by and he and Sam spoke casually but in earnest regarding the rest of this year and next year’s first growing season.

University of Oregon was playing Illinois today, here in Eugene. I say “here” because the farm is near the adjacent community of Springfield, home of Homer Simpson per local lore.

My cohort, the group I’m guiding through the foothills of Python, switched over to studying Git for a couple days, letting me off the hook.I packed the car and took off. By the time the sun was coming into view, lighting up the sky, we were already south of Salem on I-5. The rest stop was all about me, not Sydney. I wanted a thermos cup of coffee and a couple plain donuts. The drive is about two hours.

The meetup hosted by BFI, featuring D.W. Jacobs, was still giving me some ideas about how we might take it from here with the BEAST modules, now BASKET. David Koski is tackling the icosidodecahedron (ID), the RT’s dual, sizing it in a specific way vis-a-vis the 2F Cube of volume 24. I’m behind having an ID to play with in my flextegrity.py sandbox. For outputting to POV-Ray. 

For those of y’all new to these blogs, Flextegrity is a trademark given by this farm’s owner to his lattice-based inventions, within which branded category one has sub-brands, such as C6XTY. We did a whole museum on C6XTY in December of 2019, in downtown Portland. Lattice Gallery we called it. As a contracted 3D graphics guy, I developed my Python around this same lattice, hence the module name is no coincidence. My GIFs and PNGs have featured prominently in the Flextegrity corpus.

In terms of overlapping scenarios, Sam knew Bucky Fuller through the Applewhites from back in the DC metro area. He went with Bucky to the Philippines as a guest of the Marcos family, around the same time my dad was there working for UNDP, UP, USAID and maybe some others. I was in high school at the time, at ISM, which just had a reunion in Dallas, which I attended vicariously through Facebook.

Sam’s grandparents were the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald of Great Gatsby fame (an American novelist), and Zelda, a southern belle from Alabama or something along those lines. However it’s not like having famous grandparents entitles one to a farm in the Willamette Valley, some of the best farming country in the world. Sam’s entrepreneurial ventures encompass way more than just the Flextegrity chapter. I’m not the expert, more just a beneficiary with a shared interest in Lattice Graphics and other matters lattice related.

I’m sure that sounds cryptic to outsiders (the lattice stuff) so it helps to know that Bucky Fuller, the American inventor and futurist mentioned above, had a fondness for a uniform distribution of points in space known to science by several names, and to architects as the octet truss. NASA uses it a lot, for space frames, but so do ordinary Earth-focused construction companies. Alexander Graham Bell famously dove into the same scaffolding. If your high school failed to connect the dots for you here, that might be symptomatic of the dark ages we’ve been enjoying. Keep bouncing around in these journals if you wish to bone up on what you’ve been missing.

Hate Watching

In the world of TV criticism, we have this concept of “hate watching”. I heard one of the talking heads in a YouTube use that just now, and I was reminded of an old train of thought that rattles through my head from time to time, to wit that not paying for what you’re viewing is not always this unprincipled thing one does on the sly, while maybe feeling guilty if caught doing it. 

No, sometimes a censor watches videos by an adversary, looking for a good excuse to take it down. We’re free to make up a model here: let’s have the censor really hate that X is going out to viewers, such that the last thing the censor wants to do is support X financially. 

When you consider programming destructive and want to counter it, you do not, in the same moment, fish for your Visa card. You want to monitor, maybe frustrate, not support.

Without meaning to become a Bible thumper, I will point to the famous dictum of Jesus that one should “love not the world” (John 3:16). You’re free to “hate watch” all the ignorance and cruelty in a way that focuses your mind and gives you more powers as a monitor and supervisor.

Out of “hate watching” comes distance, disavowal, non-complicity, one might say innocence, but not apathetic aloofness. To “hate X” is to have some stake in X and its outcome. The divided mind is a divided will. Rather than be of two minds about something, be clear what your ethical duty is: to disrupt, obstruct and derail.

Returning to the theme of jihad, said world you disown may include your own sorry psyche, meaning you’re actively inferring your new psyche into existence. Self hate in this sense is more like preparing to jettison a booster, or to break free of an eggshell. You hate being stuck in a form you’re clearly growing beyond. There’s not much victimhood nor even fear, only fury. The Biblically minded speak of righteous wrath, but there’s no need to be loud about it.

Ghost Nations

:: gentrification ::

The world is replete with peoples who believe they would benefit from nationhood if only the nation in question existed, but it's not on the list. But already it's not that simple: maybe it does exist, but as a sub-nation within another nation: the Navajo nation comes to mind. It's defined within US law. But what is the US defined within? A community of nations, which tries to achieve some form of stability and rules based order, but fails in many dimensions.

What's to keep a Ghost Nation from recruiting citizens without upsetting pre-existing citizenships? A Ghost Nation has no existence in the eyes of the United Nations, or maybe quasi-existence. Take Palestine for example. Some states recognize it as a state, but there's not enough gravitas in the picture to rescue its would-be citizens from extermination programs undertaken by some UN members.

That the UN is unable to keep its own members from cross-border incursions by military forces is a fact of life. Indeed, frustration with international law has led to a general breakdown in the whole structure, leaving the question open as to whether this current configuration was more transitory than many at first believed. Is anyone working on restoring its integrity?

When people hear other people say "race is a social construct" they have no idea what that means. Aren't nations social constructs too then? Yet we take them seriously. Just because a concept is a "social construct" doesn't mean it comes with a strong opt out option. Racist states insist on labeling by race, which is how we know they're racist. You can't have apartheid if people won't play the game in the first place.

Those hoping to keep the idea of nation-states intact may not see time running out the way I do. They see nothing to be concerned about. But then I'm not seeing anything all that melodramatic about calling out melodrama. 

We all know what programming means. We're programmed to act in our various roles as social creatures. I'm not seeing that changing or needing to change. What's always changing are the programs themselves, not our ability to self-reprogram.

In the newer programs, perhaps one gains citizenship in a ghost nation without moving anywhere. There's no specific place you need to be to be a citizen of X. On the other hand, you may be expected to fulfill  duties of citizenship in some way, let's say not by joining a military necessarily, but maybe that too. Citizens work to serve their fellow citizens. Service to others is what gives rise to a sense of nationhood.

Existing UN member nations may feel their sovereignty is threatened by ghost nations, but given they've  learned to co-exist with various global entities already, such as banks, shipping companies, airlines, oil companies... it's not a stretch to see ghost nations as akin to universities, with spread-around campus facilities. 

That's how I'm seeing Palestine these days. 

Not all its facilities are in West Asia by a long shot. Nor is its citizenship clearly defined. People of any religion might choose to "dualize" and identify as Palestinian in addition. I could be a Palestinian. So could you. We could have another million Palestinians by the end of the month, which sounds pretty meaningless and empty. So what? I'm not saying I know exactly. I'm exploring the space of possibilities.

Doing Philosophy in 2024

I'm not using chatbots myself yet much, not directly, but I'll share prompts with collaborators and get results back, plus I do hands on text-to-image almost daily. Ergo, if asked whether I use AI on the job, I'll definitely cop to it.

Case in point: I was doing text-to-image drawing from one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous memes: beetle in a box. LW was a 20th century luminary around whom a huge volume of secondary literature has been generated, about the man, about his philosophies. Ergo the LLM had a lot to train on.

Possible prompt: Write a few pithy paragraphs about the point Ludwig Wittgenstein was trying to make in his Philosophical Investigations when he wrote about the beetle in the box that only he could see into. He was doing philosophy of language, we know that much. Say a few things about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in the context of contemporary philosophy more generally.

In the Facebook Epistemology chatter (General - anything goes), Isaiah posted two audios voicing his concerns about abusing AI: in sum, using it to off-load practicing thinking and thereby rendering oneself dumb minus continuous propping up by AI. 

Fallon circled Perplexity as the best chatbot to use and shared what Perplexity came back with when prompted as shown above (possible prompt).

Perplexity:  

In his later work, particularly in "Philosophical Investigations," Ludwig Wittgenstein uses the "beetle in the box" analogy to illustrate the private language argument. He suggests that if everyone had a box with something called a "beetle" inside, but no one could see into anyone else's box, the term "beetle" would have no public meaning. This demonstrates that language derives its meaning from public use, not private experiences.

Wittgenstein's later philosophy marked a shift from his earlier views in the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," where he saw language as a logical structure mirroring reality. In contrast, his later work emphasizes language as a social activity, where meaning is determined by use within specific contexts or "language games"25. This perspective has influenced contemporary philosophy by challenging the idea of fixed meanings and highlighting the fluidity and context-dependence of language.

KU: the above two paragraphs are quite acceptable. The secondary literature is vast.

KU (copypasta from chat window): 

I appreciate Isaiah's voiced qualms re chatbot abuse. In this particular case I'm in the role of human expert who knows the Wittgenstein stuff really well and wants to see if the chatbot has anything well-informed to offer. 

My friend Daniel whom I conspire with on Math4Wisdom (that Coda I mentioned) has access to Perplexity and I agree it seems one of the best. 

There's another topic "Quadray Coordinates" (see Wikipedia) which hardly anyone but me and a few others know about, meaning there's precious little secondary literature [typo fixed] to train on, and not surprisingly, even Perplexity gave back a lot of crap when Daniel prompted it about quadrays. But I bet down the road, when more training data exists, the quality of chatbot chatter will much improve.

Morning Meditation

I invite more YouTube essayists to join me in talking about the varieties of speech and what if anything to do about them. Not that I get into any of that in my latest YouTube (above).

We talk about love a lot in Christianity and in that way sound a lot like garden variety mystics of the type people celebrate, because love has a feel good hallmarky quality, that goes with scented candles and memento gift shops. But what about hate?

What the psychologists understood pretty quickly, in making "soul studies" a science (bypassing the quantum mechanics behind it all), was that hypocrisy and projection are interlinked. 

Hatred directed towards the self is considered unhealthy (warning to the reader: I'll be taking issue with that), whereas hatred towards others might even be OK if they deserve it.  So a first move of the psyche (soul) is to take a quality or trait one would hate to find in oneself (such as homophobia) and puts it out there in those others (those homophobes). Hate is thereby transmuted, in the sense of redirected.

What I'd say from my pulpit is love and hatred aren't that far apart, certainly they're close in Hilbert Space in that talk of one is oft in close proximity to talk of the other. They co-define, as concepts do. We don't really hate our little brother, we love him, but he drives us crazy. Others "make us" (the victim tense) jealous and we may hate them too. Or is it that others hate and we must do penance for our jealousy by defending its target? That sounds twisted.

A more Buddhist approach is simply to focus on the bare phenomenon of hate, if that's feasible. Distill a pure sample if you have the hormones for it, the calzones (hah hah), and now ask yourself where does fear come into play. But even before that: doesn't hate entail commitment? "At least you cared" is what the newly bulletholed newlywed says to the camera.

I've many times resurfaced Maurice Nicoll in these blog posts. That's the Jungian Scot who admired and relayed Ouspensky's teachings, in turn acquired from rubbing shoulders with (sometimes fighting with) Gurdjieff. His work was to gather successful adults together and have them go through some group therapy process, we could call it, wherein management of the psyche would be a core focus. Where do "negative emotions" as he called them, come from?

Just having the self monitoring skills to detect and label what's arising is going to help with the self training. Is what I'm experiencing "negative" or not? The other question being: "who is this 'I' that does the judging"?

Still at my pulpit, I'd look for times when hatred felt pure and not like some hot potato that others must feel, poor sinners, bless their hearts. Own the hate, maybe by calling it something else. It's so hard to not prejudge where love versus hate is concerned. How about "fury"? You're furious. Own your fury. That's a good bumper sticker. Now replace "fury" with "voltage pressure" and look up "teleology" in the Synergetics Dictionary (a real thing, you can find it online).

In Gnostic terms, I might say hatred is a measure of God's commitment, and maybe a lesser god, say an angel is channeling it, say a demon, a type of angel in our cult's taxonomy (I'm making up a cult as we go). A demon is hate inspired, we could say relatively purely, which accounts for the immortality, meaning the eternal validity, of what moves them, ultimately love. God's, not yours, not to worry if you're in fury mode.

RoboTown

:: eerie dude ::

I think we're mostly in agreement that a driverless cab system such as Tesla's, would be a no brainer in a managed environment, say a theme park. We're in people mover territory, sans rails, because wireless provides the rails. We also potentially don't need all the redundantly duplicated lidar, because the system knows where all the cabs are. It's just a matter of that bouncing ball some tourist lost, or tossed.

Regarding the RoboVan or whatever we call it, and the fantasy of no windows: I'd say the fantasy there is to republish the outside windows vista via camera and adding layers of info ala tour guide in Rome. I don't know if this'd work nor to what extent it's lab tested. I'm not the geek in charge. I'm just speculating based on what comes my way from the demo shots.

The unveiling of Tesla RoboCab and RoboVan concept cars was in the context of a constructed studio environment, a made-for-TV town. That's what I'm thinking too: a TV town turned into a livable 24/7 town. But we'd have spectators from the beginning. You don't build an OMR "under cover". 

Any substantial construction needs breathing room, which means partial discovery. Hard secrecy is a strategic burden. When you make a film, the locals know. Later, when they see it on the big screen, they remember, with some locals maybe joining the cast (or comprising it).

When I say theme park, I mean highly managed and engineered, a planned community. Florida has a lot of those, consisting of boxy prototype units, replaceable in case of hurricane, each with an allotted slot in a grassy park, perhaps with golf links. 

Golf Lakes Estates is a good example, in Bradenton. I used to live there. No complaints. Not a bad lifestyle for this cohort of retirees. My grandparents invested money saved, by not buying a "real house" (hand-me-down monster), on trips to Europe, which, as a stylish trend, helped heal some of the war wounds and boosted the German car industry.

The challenge to the driverless car vision has always been: actual drivers. Positing autonomy to every vehicle, versus centrally routing, is the expensive step. Or am I wrong? The only way to conquer an existing city, a Cincinnati, in the hybrid model (driven and driverless), is to make the robotic system intelligently aware of what the "uncontrollables" are doing, and that's what you don't want.

Vehicles in a mobile home park are by definition slow moving. We don't need any robocab Ferraris unless we devote dedicated lanes, entire freeways, to automation. That could happen along some routes. The most common fallacy is either/or is it not? So often we're presented with the false dichotomy. It's either everywhere or nowhere. Really? Not always.

So why doesn't Florida already have robocab oases? Why is the future on that score always around the corner? Doesn't even a single golf course offer automated golf carts, just for grins? Perhaps golfers would feel insulted? Is there something about golfer culture that means you can't press a button for which hole you want, and the cart takes you there? 

How about a zoo then? How do we mix with pedestrians? How do we do that at airports, with their long concourses and beeping vehicles transporting the elderly and disabled, or tired kids?  They have human drivers. 

So how about we segregate the two streams?  Paths for humans and vehicles.  But isn't the whole point of a taxi that you can wave one down?  True, but we still have streets vs sidewalks.  We've already learned to segregate from traffic. The humans are already trained on that score.

Travelogue

:: Road Trip ::

I've been on the road again, enjoying my 1997 Nissan. Barry suggested we patch up the right exterior with some heavy cosmetics, and I'm open to it. In the meantime, she certainly doesn't look worth stealing, unless for a museum about the DSR ("Kirby's Maxi Taxi"), given the car's starring role in these journals of mine. She was also "Torture Taxi" in a couple chapters, having come from a Gulfstream heritage. I'm alluding to one of those books on my "spy books" shelf.

Back in Portland, I'm moving ahead on the hypothesis that I'll be strapped in and teaching Python from my PWS (that's GST talk) here in Slabtown, starting the day after IPD (Indigenous People's Day). I'm getting a new landing page ready. I've been using this for Monty Python named language since around version 1.3 and here we are up to 3.13 or whatever, with the big jump being from 2.x to 3.x, per the lore I'll be sharing.

Per my teacher workshop near O'Hare (airport, Chicago) years ago, my andragogical style involves oscillating twixt the technicalia of a shoptalk, and timeline context, i.e. history. As you dive into Python, start tuning in the key players (Tim Peters, Guido, Alex Martelli... Steve Holden) and their on-stage roles. Guido is the inventor, Tim a chief contributor and booster, Alex a genius teacher of, and Steve an instigator of the conference circuits latter formalized under the PSF banner.

I've met all of the above, both online and in person. Indeed, Steve lived here in Portland for several years and I played assistant and sidekick at numerous conferences. He liked my calming influence, kind of how Sydney (my dog) is a comfort to me I'm thinking. I took Syd on this recent 530 miles car journey, though I parked her with friends when changing cars to a Mustang Mach-E. One of my relatives shared his fantasy of having a vanity license plate "avelli" as in Mach-E-avelli. Syd stayed on the farm with other dogs for that part.

If you wanna be in my basic Python class it's probably not too late to enroll, although I'm pretty sure the recruiters are wanting you to join a cohort that doesn't stop with the basics. We climb "data science mountain" (easier than "calculus mountain" -- I've been a tour guide there too) to a fairly high base camp, were we look over the crater rim into the volcanic cauldron of Machine Learning. Another instructor takes over at that point, now that the cohort is well prepped and ready for the Pythonic approach (I believe using TensorFlow more than Pytorch -- I use scikit-learn during our preamble).

I've been batting AI-generated art back and forth with a toy company CEO who shares my interest in cartoon animation. I've been focused on the Burbank pipeline, but I understand his wish to avoid unnecessary entanglements, now that animation generation is a thing. We're talking kid characters doing team explorations in the geometry of thinking, our revectoring of American Transcendentalism into such as my School of Tomorrow curriculum. We're both into science fiction, and Cloud Nine or C9 has been a focus. That's the floating city meme, with a focus on everyday physics (relevant right now).

I've filed chronicles of this planning in the TrimTab archive, which is members only. A subset of the membership meets every two weeks to check in and talk about different "wings" of "the business" (let's call it the show and tell business) such as Zome and Zometool, vZome and so on. These toys are somewhat in the erector set tinkertoy lineage. I originally joined the thread on two fronts: through Design Science Toys (DST -- no longer in business) and through Koski's BASKET weaving (adding K to BEAST). Then came the Reed College gigs and I started sprinkling in Lux and C6XTY. You could call it product placement I suppose, but I didn't do any sales talks. C6XTY was never really for sale and vZome is free online.

For all my talk at Multnomah Quakers about supporting NavAm casinos, such as by booking events if not playing the slots or tables, I didn't visit my old haunts or venture into the Tulalip facility, which I still haven't visited (talking about the casino, not the museum, which I visited on my last trip). 

I bought some cheaper gas at Angel of the Winds filling station is all, for the trek home. Anyone who follows my curriculum writing (this is some of it) eventually discovers my Casino Math meme and how I used that to carve up Silicon Forest digital maths: Casino, Supermarket, Martian and Neolithic. These are simply shorthand monikers, one might say for: risking and developing; harvesting and distributing; looking forward; looking back.

I'll have more stories to share from this road trip, but in other journal entries as this one is sufficiently lengthy. I haven't pumped out any new YouTubes lately. My attention has turned to stills, key frames, and upgrading my Python source base on Github.

Martians Landing

Prompt: 

A red haired boy with his dog sit by a telescope and watch the Martian spaceships land in the distance, on a peaceful night in the desert. He knew they were coming.

Joker 2 (movie review)

I'd been seeing the previews for a long time, and was intrigued. The first Joker of this series, with Joaquin Phoenix, had punched me hard with its Gotham. I knew that place. Indeed I did. They'd filmed it in my old haunts around JCNJ and EWR, I found out later.

My YouTube dashboard started flickering some negative thumbnails even as the Bagdad marquee rolled over from Beetlejuice 2, which I'd also seen. Without much hesitation, I made a beeline for the theater.

What I was thinking during the film a lot was (a) wow, I hadn't expected a musical, with dance numbers, but with Lady Gaga I should have and (b) wow, what a canvas, what a work of art, like the Dutch masters.

However, in being so arty, I think it went over the line into David Lynch territory, which gets me thinking art cinemas (Bagdad is first run mainstream) but then I think of how Lynch movies are far from obscure; they're on a spectrum.

These Joker movies have become intensely psychological. The depiction of prison life and archetypes is priceless. The court scene is likewise every court scene, every trial. In terms of drama, this movie strives towards perfection, overshoots, compensates, and so on, perfection itself never attainable, by definition. 

The musical numbers are clearly "in the Joker's head" but then the Joker has a lot of time to fantasize, and as the movie gets more and more unruly and surreal, one begins to wonder if "the Joker's head" is all there is. He's living the dream as they say, and a nightmare it is, but for the bright light of a fellow soul.

So yes, it's a love story on top of all that. I might delve into what the critics didn't like about it. It's not really an action thriller. Watching it takes actual patience, as the claustrophobia of the Gotham world is oppressive. I wouldn't call it a comfortable movie. But entertaining? Absolutely.

Put a Bird In It

Aside from the obvious allusion to buckminsterfullerene, this campaign keeps it localized, more Asylum District, as "put a bird on it" (on not in it) was a signature episode of the Portlandia series.

Given we're branding around the Silicon Forest, Pacific Rim, it stands to reason that Portlandia would be a source of memes for us. Too bad that Portorando video went away -- by some Japanese travel agency.

But more technically, what am I getting at here? The Active Inference allusion is also present, where the cage protects potentially delicate internals (say a living bird) from external exigencies, such as a cat. The interface system, twixt outside and inside, involves "sensing" (in) and "acting" (out).

The "active" in Active Inference means the agent or activist is intentionally probing and experimenting to falsify or reinforce the mental model, always working to bring the two (model and modeled) closer together, minimizing the chaos of misalignment with what's so. There's enough intrinsic chaos, in reality, as it is, so why add gratuitous, extraneous noise, right?

We may think of the gilded cage as a prison for the bird, but perhaps it's likewise a protective dwelling machine. Perhaps the bird gets time off when not in a cartoon. A lot depends on the Yoneda Lemma here (just kidding).

In our model of "inside-system-outside" we're alluding to the four-triangle topology of the 4-eyes-in-the-sky minimum cage-enclosure. That's a Platonic root for our Genesis story, about that set of five polys and their begats, those rhomboids. Know what I'm talking about?

Five Platonics: Tet, Cube, Octa, Icosa, Pentagonal Dodeca (PD). To each poly there corresponds a dual poly and these may be added once inter-sized such that edges criss-cross at right angles.

Poly + Dual Combos:  Tet + Tet = Cube (a rhomboid); Cube + Octa = RD (another rhomboid); Icosa + PD = RT (rhomboid again). Volumes: (Tet, 1), (Cube, 3), (Octa, 4), (RD, 6), (Icosa, 18.51), (PD, 15.35), (RT, 21.21).

I know, I know, not everyone has been to high school recently, and even then, not to one of my elite academies, asynchronous, free online. "So what's your excuse?"

hs us lit

PDX Python

 

Our first presentation, by Rey Abolofia, was on how to speed up Amazon Lambda processing by sending it compiled Python (pyc) instead of source (py). The time-to-load on a large package, such as numpy or matplotlib, may be drastically decreased (by some 45% in the demo data). 

The Lambda service only charges when a lambda is processing, based on memory and duration (size and time). 

Rob Bednark presented about CHOP, Chat Oriented Programming, which is what a lot of geeks are experimenting with this days, for a low entry cost of about $10 per month. CHOP only became a viable reality this year. 

Through a process of refining prompts, a generative LLM may be coaxed into doing a lot of the grunt work around programming. It's like having an apprentice, or, if you're new to the ecosystem, a mentor. I predict AI will free a lot of grad students from slaving for their supervising faculty quite as much.

During the discussion, I mentioned experiments with AI performed by Daniel vis-a-vis Quadrays and ivm-xyz conversion. Daniel fed my Python repo to Perplexity, asking for a clearer more documented version of the code. The results were not up to par, but helped motivate me to improve my original.

I came with Dr. DiNucci, a computer scientist who observes Python culture from a distance. His area of expertise is parallel and concurrent processing, around which he has been designing an orchestration language named Scalpel.

Fall Semester 2024

from my Martian Math stash on Flickr

I’m not averse to this term “pipeline” with respect to education, even if some of the pipelines I view with disfavor, such as the so-called “school to prison” pipeline, whereby “school” becomes little more than an encounter with authority and a first chance to taste the limiting of options that goes with becoming powerless, pretty much by definition. 

That’s not the pipeline I’m working on.

Having worked on this particular railroad a long time, you could say my “dark ride” is complete, or at least finished enough for one to avail oneself of. 

Find an entry point and hop on. Ride this love boat through a tunnel of love. 

By “dark ride” I don’t necessarily mean anything creepy; I’m using theme park jargon for the kind of ride that takes you through a sequence of experiences, usually indoors, usually riding in some kind of “gondola” or “car”, typically rail-guided. 

Disney’s Wild Ride of Mr. Toad, and Pirates of the Caribbean come to mind. 

Disney is famous for its highly engineered dark rides.

Treating a sequence of readings, YouTubes, web pages, hands on coding sessions, model making, maker spaces, 3D printing, playing with VR goggles, and so on, as a “ride” or even “work-study scenario” takes some ability to think metaphorically, and that we encourage. 

Use that imagination of yours and let freedom ring.

Cropping a Hilbert Space

I'm back to goofing off with DALL-E, what I believe to be the back end image generator. However, again my belief, there's a lot of "cropping" going on, whereby children, say, are not allowed to look truly terrified. 

My prompt uses "Frightened" as its first word, to characterize these would-be pilots trying to replace the more experienced ones, who've all died. That's all the context we get, this was one of four results, all of which showed children apparently enjoying themselves.

How I picture this working is some really long and detailed prompts on the back end, take in whatever an end user like me writes, and melds them into a single prompt. My prompt:  "Frightened child pilots in the cockpit are trying to steer Python Airlines to a safe landing in stormy weather, like in some horror movie by Stephen King. All the adults are dead."

Beyond that, maybe some directions and distances are strictly limited and by that I mean, in a Hilbert Space, one eigen-dimension might be "how scared". 

It'd be like an n-space vector, and the further long it, the more scared we'd be (we being whoever is in the picture). But in this sanitized public facing free tier API, the goal is not to produce offending output. No nudity, no lots of things. 

Embedded X tweet:

Alludes to inside baseball, Python Community politics, in passing, but really continuing my AI investigations (scroll in my timeline for more experiments, DreamTeam etc.):https://t.co/yOfMXE2NTG

— Kirby Urner (@thekirbster) September 19, 2024

One the other hand, "scary" in the conventional sense of Halloweeny is allowed, and somehow the machine knows how to tell them apart, praise Allah for so many axes.

For example, these below, related to GENI work (adding more of a Portland flavor, Voodoo Donuts an influence), popped out no problem. There's a difference between being scary (frightening) and being scared (frightened), a grammatical nuance the AI might have been trained to exploit.

By the way, regarding the political cartoonery involved, I don't play Discourse when it comes to flying Python Airlines, but I do follow from a distance, all the current chicanery. 

The PSF bylaws don't say anything about Discourse mattering, so I'm just thinking some people have a lot of time on their hands.

Debate Teams

Per Facebook, I’m collaborating on with other schools regarding how we might ramp up the debate team scene. If you’re not on Facebook, maybe Medium?

Excerpt:

Remember the rules of debate: as a team, you’ll be expected to be prepared to argue either side of the resolution. The US team could well get the job of trashing the resolution, vs upholding it.

So if you’re on the US team, my advice is you learn to think like a Russian and vice versa. People who only know how to think on one side are just morons when it comes to Lincoln-Douglas face-offs of this type.

Micro Economics

The workhorse Mac Pro likely bit it last weekend, halting mid-sentence, as I was crafting some nuclear energy policy (just kidding: I was yakking with an informed lobbyist on Facebook). Had to hard reboot, but she never came back.

Fortunately, I was surrounded by acres of wildflowers and getting tractor skills, plus had an iPad for telecoms, so no time for a self pity party. My plan is to take my time casting about for solutions, without feeling overly pressured. Laptops die. I have backups. Maybe I should write a grant proposal, and or try to get by on a Pi.

Regarding social media (telecoms), I’ve picked up the pace on X a bit, looking back on 2024 and imagining a DreamTeam. I parodied the Russiagate genre by having free tier AI do a wonderful Bernie and Tulsi meme, as Superman and Wonder Woman. As hackneyed as it gets, and also so nostalgic, as neither is even running for president this year.

I also mocked State dot gov for trying to make RT sound more sinister than it is. Unable to compete on a level playing field, Cowardly Capitalism (scan blogs) is trying to re-enact the Hua Wei model and simply ban the competition. Pretty wimpy, but that’s President Blinken for ya, now out of favor in Poland they tell me (the list keeps growing).

I cleaned out some of my old FSI posts, which I can always refresh when the time comes. FSI is one of the Mighty Networks (that’s the hosting platform — very iPhone compatible). Then I use Synergeo a lot, for promotional materials. Example 1. Example 2.

I alerted the FSI via forum posting (vs in a group) that the most up to date summary of my thinkings and doings, with respect to the Bucky stuff at least, was archived at TTBC. This is where I overlap with BFI members a lot (I was made a lifelong member with the Synergetics Explorer Award, amidst ceremony).

If you’re not familiar with all these acronyms, I suggest a blog search, from the box upper left. Use the right margin navigation widget to jump to my other blogs.  Field Structure Institute and TrimTab Book Club are both entangled with BFI, for which I was webmaster in the 1990s, in cahoots with Kiyoshi.

Having archived my thoughts on working with Disney / Pixar, and summarized the Lithuania chapter, I retired from TTBC as the protocol there is to keep it apolitical, and in this particular season that’s not in the cards for me. I’m called to grapple with various political powers that be, were, or are still in the pipeline. That means I’m back to small group comms. I use Telegram a lot.

Some might wonder if I stay in contact with Princeton alums and is there anything to the idea that Ivy Leaguers have a rule the world complex? Yes, I stay in touch with some classmates, including at a recent picnic in the park (local Princeton Club chapter). But I wouldn’t say there’s any world domination tone to it. We’re all over the map.

Where you might still encounter “world domination” talk is in the world of free and open source engineering, where copyleft commies still reign supreme. If you go back in time quite a ways you’ll find a bemused mass media discovering geekdom’s memes, “global dom” being one of them. 

The full meme comes with a lot of penguin pictures (March of the Penguins had been big) i.e. Linux iconography. That was the David and Goliath myth of the day: Linux and open source were gonna rule the world, displacing the slower, dumber giants, not agile enough to keep up.

So how did that go?

Well, it’s a long story. The short version is the giants swallowed a lot of the open source philosophy (PayPal: “InnerSource”), not to mention source code, making Big Tech more dot commie. But the language of capitalism is still what’s macho among tech bros. They see the business sense in copyleft, which is padding the bottom line. Imagine paying IBM prices for all that stuff.

The equilibrium we’ve achieved might be imagined as a skyscraper or any tall office tower. As you rise or descend in the elevator, you find some floors are public and open, whereas others are authorized personnel only, with not all personnel authorized on closed off floors. Developers tend to get authorized access to a smattering of proprietary floors, work there and in the public spaces, contributing to both.

Most economists speak of “the commons” thinking of an old fashioned grazing area near a town, where anyone could park their sheep or whatever. Not closed off, not like BLM land, not proprietary. In geekdom, the gold has a different character in being infinitely copiable so long as electricity and storage is made available. My School of Tomorrow repo goes out over the wire to any point on earth, firewalls notwithstanding.

That being said, my curriculum writing is needle in a haystack stuff, spread by word of mouth vs by high pressure advertising. Pressurizing the content is more a job for downline repackagers and resellers of our open source content, MIT license a lot of it. We use Python a lot and you know how liberal that license is. I’m a copyleft king in my kingdom, practicing Potlatch Economics (tagline: “there’s more where that came from”).

The copyleft movement is more an outgrowth of academic protocols than any flavor of Marxism. We already had those concepts of “fair use” and “public domain” whereby scholars are allowed to excerpt and cite X, without financially supporting X. Why would I want to pay a school to which I’m philosophically opposed? If they’re pumping out memes, affecting change in the public spaces, then as a member of the public, I have a right to investigate. Greg Palast is one of my heroes.

Thursday Think Tank

I was testing some of my comedy lines last night at the Think Tank (what we’re calling it now, after Thirsters). Better to have jokes bomb in a small group, then fine tune or abandon the ones that don’t work. A lot of the feedback is high bandwidth. Mostly it’s others talking anyway. I fired off some one liners.

We had a former IDF tank driver from Israel at the table, but he was hardly pro what’s going on there. I was somewhat the odd man out in not being Jewish, with Barbara the odd woman. Actually, no, that education expert (3rd grade reading scores are the key indicator — but just in the one language) seemed to be, like me, on a different spectrum. I’ll study Judaism but wouldn’t claim to be Jewish.

Mostly we talked about the upcoming citywide elections, which will mark the debut of a new voting protocol Portland has never tried, involving ranked choice and four districts, newly drawn. We’ll get a new mayor, as distinct from a city manager. 

The new plan addresses perceived weaknesses with the old system, but some of our group saw an overcorrection and still no clear pathway to getting competence into government.

My jokes had to do with my snobbish elitism. It’s easier to fall into that vs fight it, given the oddball trajectory through Chicago, Portland, Italy, Florida, Philippines, Princeton, Jersey City, DC, New York, back to Portland. 

Such programming turned me into a globalist also, but not of the Soros kind (whatever that means). There’s gotta be room for a vast variety of globalist, just as nationalists come in all flavors (more than 31 at last count).

For one thing, although a globalist, I encourage talk of virtual nations, network nations, diaspora nations. Contiguous borders are for the birds. Citizenship is about creating your public service resume and turning your life support benefits into more life support. Coffee Shops Network has lots of ideas for channeling funds that would flood the starving motherboard with alternative power (yes, crypto might be involved).

I didn’t bring up NPU or any of my writing on an evacuation plan, one of many I hope others are storyboarding too. Am I the only one looking for ways to rescue the Gazans from this onslaught? The nationalists seem to think Gaza is more of a prison than anything else. I’d have had a lot of them out by now, transitioning through way stations, and many of them eager to return someday, when the real estate has some value. At the moment, no one should be forced to live in such conditions.

So would my NPU blueprints result in another diaspora nation? Palestine is already a diaspora nation, that’s my point. To the extent the conventional UN system of nations fails to offer a conventional solution, our backup idea gets more energy. Picture city skyscrapers with a Palestinian logo and mixed use dorms, classrooms, gyms, shopping centers, not exclusively for a specific citizenry. These assets could pop up anywhere, and the neon outdoor logo might be subtle, which isn’t to preclude blanket sized flags in many of the apartments.

Regarding the mayoral position, I said I was open to the Portland mayor flying around the world a lot as our civic ambassador, with a small entourage of course, of rotating “minions” (Mayor Gru?). I haven’t been following closely meaning I hadn’t heard much about the candidates. Now I know one of them is a professional stripper. Should she be our ambassador abroad, and to other cities in North America? Maybe. We like keeping it weird here in Portland. Good for business.