Food Pod Simulators

I know from my own career that many math teachers rightly take a cynical view when it comes to the commercialization of their classroom (real or virtual) content. The equivalent of what Edward Tufte calls "chart junk" sometimes threatens to take over with garish irrelevancies, obnoxious clutter, calling attention to fast foods and or fizzy drinks. Story problems may be among the worst offenders.

All that being said, there's a place for realism, even in a fictional setting. Portland is home to many a "food pod" as we call them, meaning organized spaces geared for food trucks to come in and out of. A "food truck" is more accurately described as a trailer in many cases, not designed to supply its own mobility. Other food trucks are indeed trucks, and in that case open on one or both sides to serve customers. The trailers tend to open in the back, providing a deeper kitchen.

The game we imagine, for the classroom, might use the names of actual food trucks, with permission, or at least closely mirror the usually multi-ethnic character of these food courts, which inherit from the World's Fair aesthetic. People came to expect yakisoba noodles in close proximity to hot dogs, pizza near Pandas Express -- one of the major chains, usually mall-anchored but food court versions might exist someday.

The game predictably focuses on workflows within each cart, as well as on crowd modeling, especially queuing theory. We might follow sim families, studying their expenditures. The Food Pod is a lot like a Theme Park (hello Disney), just turn some of the food pods into rides.

If you know your food cart culture, then you know the radio activated buzzer is commonplace. The customer places and order, pays up front, then gets a hand-held device with a blinking light. When the light blinks faster, and the device vibrates and or dings, that means it's time to retrieve one's order. In the meantime, one might've been having a beer at the bar (put a coaster over it, and bring your meal back). A similar practice is used for seating at Spaghetti Factory.

Internally to each food cart, we get the "short order cook" model. Oft times a cart will have two crewing, one taking orders and accepting money, the other multitasking on the backlog, with orders fulfilled not in first come first serve order, but in "whenever ready" mode. Some menu items take a lot longer to prepare. These facts of life are familiar to any restaurant owner, any chef, but for some students, playing Food Pod, with realistic commercial graphics, will be an eye-opener.

So is this more of that much-vaunted Supermarket Math you may have heard that I push? How much SQL is in this picture? Are the carts using crypto? Clearly we anticipate spiraling, with Fisher-Price level Food Pod at the low end, entry level, leading up to MIT Food Pod (thinking of MIT Scratch) at a pinnacle of sophistication. Linear programming will enter into it (mini-max and all that).

I'm saying "yes" to the Supermarket Math question but want to suggest we always mingle our four directions in this "future vs past vs reap vs sow" environment. That's "martian vs neolithic vs supermarket vs casino". 

To sow is to take a gamble, but then not to sow is usually to take an even greater risk. To reap is to then face distribution and allocation issues, which is where all the supermarket stuff comes in, transportation most especially, from field to table to sanitation facility -- garbage pickup is part of any FoodVille.

The supermarket-casino anchors an ever-present, whereas the martian-neolithic axis suggests a trajectory, the and freedom to rewire the ever-present circuits. Invest in AC generators, and enjoy a surplus of kilowatt hours. This presumes harnessing the Columbia. Our Food Pod will posit hydropower generation in the background. We're always free to simulate natural gas and or coal, even geothermal, in our various versions. We're looking to OSU for the virtual mini-nuke plants.  Around here, with existing options, they might not be that economical.

You might be think this all sounds fine and good but what about matters of diet? When do we talk about health? Obviously, there's a seamless link between recipes used inside the carts, and the food available to students, although likely requiring preparation. By performing a systems analysis of parallel workflows, the students develop an appetite and move on to food prep as a next pre-lunch activity.  Student teams learn to prep for larger groups. Others clean. Roles rotate. Sounds Quaker.

Tell Us More

Hey "Mayor Pete", tell us more about digital license plates. Are license number-letter combos allowed to repeat? Ever? Can I pay to have a movie plate only a few people might recognize?  

All the best vanity plates will be gone soon. I wanted FOMO.

DLPs: not his problem!

We don't bother the old and infirm with brain twisty questions about Digital License Plates, but you're Transportation Secretary and they promised us progress. 

We don't have to wait for Optimus to get a driver's license (and insurance) before we get to work on the license plate upgrades plan, including at the District level.

DLPs: his problem!

What is happening with the DMV? Let's hear from Mayor Pete, the DMV Czar. 

Remember, we're still car crazy. America hasn't changed that much.  And truck crazy.  

Added to bucket list: joining the inner circle of Texan and other long haul truckers who drive the OBOR network in Eurasia.

Pirate Party Politics (School of Tomorrow)

Alien: Romulus (movie review)

:: ET 🖤 OJ ::

I could see from some distance that the Bagdad marquee had changed. Deadpool & Wolverine had moved on. Carrying my full shopping bags, I took the longer route home so I could read the sign up close: Alien: Romulus had arrived. 

I resolved to drop off the groceries and walk right back for the 7 pm show. Neighbors were already converging, in the mood for a summer movie.

I'm just going to capture a few impressions here, having to do with Romulus and Remus looking like two halves of the same brain, an organ haunted by its own icky sticky fears. Life is gross.

Wow, deep huh? 

I happen to be reading An Illustrated History of the Horror Films by Carlos Clarens, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1967. I appreciate the Alien franchise for planting itself firmly in two genres: science fiction and horror. These genres only partially overlap, and when their tropes and motifs combine, one gets new synergies.

We have the climactic Golum at the end, and the uneasy Dr. Frankenstein question: what characterizes the line between living and not living? The androids, still cogent when disemboweled, bring up the question in Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence (inherited from Kubrick). I see the overlap with Jeepers Creepers, and the Half Life computer game series from Valve through Steam. I see Solaris.

The protagonist, and her relationship with her Black android, hearkens back to Huckleberry Finn, transposing slavery and racism to the robot realm. Andy is an energy slave, with a prime directive (re-programmable). But then what are we then? Some of us certainly seem to put the company first, even if that means betraying crew and family.

The Aliens movies have generated their own aesthetic, down to minute detail. The ships are ponderous, heavy, and present their own laws of physics around gravity, which may be switched on and off. We switch it on, but not before the director proves this movie is fine with tackling zero g. We're among professionals. The effects are masterful.

The claustrophobia of a mining planet where the sun never shines, and where indentured servant workers might as well be slaves: we've all been their many times in science fiction, and likely for real in our least favorite roles. 

Our heroic crew seeks liberty and we can hardly begrudge them that. But how does one escape one's own brain? Such a separation is usually considered catastrophic, in terms of keeping it together as a coherently animated team player.

The homunculus, a mutated version of what would have been a human baby, reflects the biology of ambivalence that mothers may express. It's not far fetched to cast the aliens' aggression in terms of rape, a serious violation of personal space, which violent act may literally result in progeny, but of a parasitical nature. 

Horror, when serving a therapeutic role, helps us process in a different register, in a galaxy safely removed from what's darkly private and personal, unmapped to the perennial and archetypal. Not all horror films have an ability to inspire higher consciousness. Besides, it's the viewer, the spectator, who provides the ultimate projection booth. Given the right critical mood, even bad films may prove instructive.

I'm not saying Alien: Romulus is a bad film however. I think it upheld its side of the bargain, and since I was in a mood to be erudite, I found it cathartic to "pen" this review.

I'll be thinking more about the Roman or NeoRoman aspects of this movie. My seeing the preview for Gladiator 2 (again) in the lead-up to the feature, only primed the pump in that respect.

You might be wondering what's up with me studying horror as a film genre in the first place. That has to do with my tuning in the "liminal spaces" meme thanks to Ryan B. 

The liminal spaces include these ostensibly empty backrooms and hallways (a trope, a motif), that may turn out to be haunted, by an apparently inhuman or nonhuman intelligence, giving to lie to our "control room" labs, not always so capable in retrospect, given how mother nature is so wild.

The mapping of these memes to our movie is pretty obvious then. We're both haunted and hunted by this sense of a predatory "other". Welcome to Planet Earth my hominid friend, a dangerous place, but certainly not without its upsides. No aliens. No Godzilla. We make up for it though, by scaring and abusing each other. How NeoRoman.

Code of Conduct

I took in the Rachel Maddow show last night, something I normally do not do, as I don't subscribe to any cable television; the internet is more than sufficient in terms of offering me various viewpoints.

She used her time to plug a book by her friend and producer, about the Republican plot to rewrite recent history, history we all lived through and have personal knowledge of. So how do they get away with it? 

When it turned out the GOP had been hacked such that emails and dossiers had come spilling out to Politico, the idea was to blame Iran, much as Russia was blamed for the successful phishing attack against Podesta.

Was it ever proved, as Rachel implies, that the Russians were actually behind that hack of the DNC? Skeptics such as myself never bought the Guccifer 2 story. The FBI outsourced that investigation to CrowdStrike, which came up with a colorful narrative, but not necessarily an especially credible one.

We never saw proof that Assange got his Wikileaks files from Russian sources, and even if he did, those files were fair game for journalists once Wikileaks had them, according to the old rule book.

Not so anymore, according to Maddow from her pulpit. She would prefer that when a foreign power is named, with respect to some leak, that the leaked info, whatever it is, not be spread around, as clearly that's to serve the interests of a foreign power, an adversary, which borders on treason. 

This is always the line taken by a national security state:  if we signal the intelligence has an adversarial source (e.g. the Hunter Biden laptop story) then your job, as loyal Americans is to (a) believe us unconditionally, we're the government, and to (b) shut up about whatever it is, or appear disloyal.

I was disappointed to hear Rachel, an effective demagogue, railing against journalists who, like whistle blowers, may feel it's their job to sometimes counter government narratives, no matter the sources and methods behind the info they're now privy to. 

As long as a journalist cannot be directly linked to criminal acts, it's fair game for them to share their news and views. Rachel apparently disagrees.

All this comes on the heels of the Python Software Foundation reprimanding Tim Peters, one of the community's most treasured members, for behaving like himself. I'm sure that move makes certain people feel more powerful and important.

Twisting Threads

Recently, I've been giving some more foreground treatment to my School of Tomorrow background context, in a section on Github in a Jupyter Notebook markdown cell, near code cells filled with runnable Python. 

I'm working in some of the newer threads such as the Mark Fisher thread, intertwining them with older threads, starting literally in Napoleonic times and before (hello William Blake). 

How should we counterpose Mark's philosophy with Peter Sloterdijk's? The equations, for both thinkers, involve consensus realities (CRs) versus non-consensus ones (NCRs) -- terms from Process Work. Both types may be pictured as bubbles, and therefore as both mass producible (as in AI foams), and poppable (as in theories of anything).

Who or what circumscribes my world, by means of language? "Circumscribe" has an ambiguous, and therefore ambivalent meaning. Constructive or constrictive? Protective or suffocating? Liberating or bewitching?

As another instance of such interweaving, let's recall that Hugh Kenner, author of a Bucky bio (Bucky), James Joyce scholar and author of The Pound Era, wrote a column for Byte Magazine. 

He also studied under Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, a base he shared with Drs. Geoffrey Hinton and Donald Coxeter, both practitioners of n-D Hilbert Space based mathematics. 

Bucky's magnum opus Synergetics (itself outside the Hilbert hypercross namespace) is dedicated to this same Donald Coxeter of Regular Polytopes fame. McLuhan and Fuller were outright co-conspirators in many dimensions.

In November, 1984, Hugh Kenner's column, entitled A Travesty Generator for Micros, co-authored with Joseph O'Rourke, hit the stands with immediate, and longer term, ripple effects within the field of natural language processing (NLP).

The English professor had teamed up with a computer science professor, both from Johns Hopkins, to feature a generative language algorithm, the output of which was based on conserving n-grams within the input, in terms of their statistical frequency. The listed computer program, called Travesty, was under 300 lines of Pascal.

Granted, Travesty is a far cry from the prediction-based generative language models of today, and yet is a milestone along the journey, much as MEMEX, imagined in the speculative 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, As We May Think, by Dr. Vannevar Bush, prefigured yesterday's hypertext and search engines, as well as the AI of today and tomorrow.

Donald Coxeter, we should remember, tested the waters of contemporary philosophy in England, encountering Ludwig Wittgenstein (LW), in the process of deciding his own path, which was geometry. LW would later prove influential within American Pragmatism, helping the leftist, yet non-Marxist Richard Rorty get free from traditional Anglo representationalism, an umbrella term for both nominalism and Platonic realism. Enter operationalism, within a philosophy of mathematics.

Back to the roots of contemporary AI, we have Emerson remarking in his journal that perhaps Babbage would be coming up with a novel-generating machine. I'm guessing this remark was tongue-in-cheek, yet expressing the same anxieties as were occasioned by The Turk, ostensibly a mechanical device that could win at chess against humans, including against Napoleon. 

The brave midget hiding within The Turk's mechanical exterior symbolizes the homunculus, the self we imagine must, pretty much by definition, awaken within, if ever our AI machines do attain general consciousness. We picture a soul as a smaller man, a 3rd eye viewer of an inner television, the ghost in the machine, a solipsistic cogito-spectator. These images may seem to force themselves upon us, once we choose to resist them that is.

Little Tehran

:: our representatives ::

Of course I'm referencing some previous potus calling us by that name, "we the city" that is, "Little Beirut". Of course that's an honor. Beirut, like Portland, is a great university town, and as such, is plugged into the whole world, not just into the regional motherboard.

We've had a lot of big name and not so well known Portlanders go to Iran for various reasons, over the years, me included, in the time of the Shah. I have memories of Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz. Portland hopes its sister city relationship with Shiraz will be acknowledged. Certainly it's been overt on our side, how we feel about another Rose City of such awesomeness.

I'm reposting my slides of a past Iranian Festival, celebrating our Farsi-speaking population, which is no recent newcomer, nor our Russians. What made America great, if it was, were Iranians and Russians, among others, and any politician who forgets that is simply broadcasting what's weak about our public education system: it breeds know-nothings, who run for office and, worse yet, win.

Oh so does that mean Portland is Judeophobic? Are you kidding me? You've never been here right? I can barely fathom the simple-mindedness of New Yorkers sometimes. They say you're sophisticated, but having taken the PATH over from Jersey City more than a few times, I have to say, you think in obsolete stereotypes and it shows.

Anyway, we're hotly contesting DC's rule as a city-state, how it overlords over the real states, the united fifty, and pretends to be sovereign somehow, above the law. I'm for driving the District out of the union. We won't lose any stars over it. We already don't have a real president; another impotus pretends to man the cockpit.

I've changed my mind about reposting the Iranian Festival slides and decided to enlist the help of AI in doing a more Logan's Run fantasy view of the City of Morons, suitably allowed to age in place.