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.