A Last Quaker Meeting in 2024

I made it to Multnomah Quakers today. I finally figured out how to donate using PayPal. Dawn would always write checks from our business account as I recall: Dawn Wicca and Associates (DWA), not publicly traded. Our last meeting of the year. Donations usually go up in December, as we close out our financial year.

Last weekend I visited Bridge City Monthly Meeting in the architecture museum on Grand Avenue, devoted to old Portland. My standing joke is when Quakers sit still, all quiet like that, on the museum's 2nd floor, they turn into a diorama. The way it was. Like a wax museum. Uncanny valley right?  

Kitty-corner is what used to be the two-story US Bank building, with CubeSpace likewise on the 2nd floor. CubeSpace was prototypical of WeWork, a place for geeks to set up offices, and for user groups to hold meetups. I attended a lot of meetings there.

I crossed paths with Lew Scholl at the top over Mt. Tabor the other morning. I'd decided to take the summit relatively early (say compared to yesterday), using the stairs from lower to mid reservoir on the west facing slope. I have lots of pictures of those stairs (see above) as my habit is to carry a camera, in addition to the cell phone being a camera. 

Lew is like the logistics supervisor for the Meeting in a lot of ways, doing property management. He's an engineer by training. Thanks to his efforts, the Meeting, a nonprofit, enjoys rather state of the art equipment, including when it comes to heating and cooling. The building itself has come a long way since the early days, when I first started going there as a kid. 

My friend Dr. DiNucci, long time president of Humanists of Greater Portland, is these days serving in a capacity not unlike Lew's in that he orchestrates these hybrid live action Zoom events that people are into these days. A contingent wants to join from home, whereas the more public in person venue is what others might prefer. The same individual might attend over the internet one Sunday, and in person the next. Quakers have Meeting for Worship by Zoom, although maybe only on set Sundays.

I met Sonya today, one of the Friends I've known for the longest time, since the Urners, Martins and Pinneys would all pool their kids and let us play together. Some of my earliest memories involve the Pinney family. I also recall crashing on their couch briefly, upon returning to Portland that time. Memories fade. 

Everyone in that family is beautiful and vivacious. Phil, the dad, was a master gardener, the kind of guy who could keep whole estates going, and his own on the side.

Sonya was catching up about our way of memorializing Carol Urner, my mom, with the Gatherings for Carol (C4Gs). There's one in the planning for Lesotho this year. Carol and Jack were key players in Maseru for some years, part of the social scene. 

Apartheid was ending and embassies wanting to make a show of keeping their distance, by camping out in Lesotho, were now moving back to the Republic of South Africa. The population of foreigners was shrinking. On the other hand, a gigantic dam was under construction at the center of the country, which dad took me to have a look at.

My French Connection reminded me that if the Roaring 20s are a topic (School of Tomorrow) then I should be watching Betty Boop cartoons. That's what I've been doing today in fact, to help with fasting. I'm kicking my system back into ketosis for a spell. I don't get grumpy when I do it right. I get inspired.

Global Trucker Exchange

by DAF

Winter Solstice: Another Wandering Narrative

:: Meliptus on a random sunny day ::

Our little Wanderers group has gotten very good at this gathering, repeated four times a year, so last night's, on December 20, just seemed to happen. Someone thanked me later for putting it together, but I only played my usual role, bringing lentils.

I didn't even expect to be among one of the first to arrive. The building's main business was only just closing for the evening so as it turned out we were able to smoothly transition to potluck mode when I showed up a few minutes early. I'd just been teaching my data analysis with Python class through 6:45 PDT and wasn't thinking to be the opener, nor to coincidentally meet up with Dr. D.

We're a thinning group. Bob Bornemann had a jazz gig that evening in Camus, and let me know he was thinking of us by texted invite. Trisha Buckland had been expected but, like Lynne Taylor, she lives some distance away and isn't driving these days. A lot of us aren't, for various reasons. 

I'm still gadding about in "maxi taxi" which I used to ferry Don to the farm pretty recently. Don being our captain Wanderer, owner of Meliptus, still in the water in good shape, but Don starting to show it off (a wife to a prospective buyer: "no, you can't have a boat"). Lots about said boat in these logs (blogs, journals). I'll put its picture up top.

Some of our celebrants were new so more than the usual amount of explaining went on: Linus Pauling had lived here, an Oregon son and times two winner of the Nobel Prize, in both chemistry and peace. 

We're a kind of Peace Studies think tank, or have been, under the auspices of the nonprofit ISEPP, for which my late wife's bookkeeping partnership had been the bookkeeper. I tagged along as a database guru, meaning I knew my small timer dBase 'n stuff. I could help grow the ISEPP mail list, which list helped recruit Greater Portland's cognoscenti to some excellent science and culture lectures, the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series, with Mentor Graphics one of our leading sponsors, amidst many others.

Our lecturers included Cousteau (Jacques' son), Leakey (another son), Jane Goodall, the Black Sea and Titanic guy, Ballard, and of course Stephen Hawking, whom Terry (president of ISEPP) wrote a book about, Give Space My Love: little anecdotes about his times with Stephen, amidst his own musings on matters thermodynamic (Terry is a specialist in that Carnot family, father Lazare and son Sadi). 

These lectures were almost monthly, although not all year and ran for over a decade, keeping Portland very much in the loop in terms of the state of the art in various fields, at least from a layman's perspective. We took over some of the biggest venues downtown, in the heart of Portland's theater district.

We were not zealously devoted to researching Linus Pauling's legacy so much as thinking about engineering and public policy, however we'd done enough homework to visit, as a group, the Oregon State University Pauling archives. We went on that field trip to the reading room, which Doug Strain helped endow. 

Ava Helen's WILPF connections lived on in my mom and Dr. Linda Richards, both of whom gave presentations at the Pauling House itself.

The big name guests Terry would invite to Portland sometimes joined us in the Pauling House for get togethers. Mario Livio was among these roamers. We'd often take our guest to Tanh Thao next door, a favorite Thai-Vietnamese restaurant in our neighborhood (I live pretty close by to this location, on the more westward side of Chavez).

If you take some of the words above such as ISEPP and Wanderers, as search terms, and scan these blogs, you'll fish up a lot of what these lectures featured, often with notes from the dinners after. All those lectures and dinners helped knit a rather closely networking social group, meaning the Wanderers, this being another Winter Solstice gathering thereof. 

Barry Redd brought ribs, which are excellent. Don has continued networking from his new location. I brought my dog as we have a policy of welcoming animals (I expressed animal pride at the event), nonhumans included. Lynn usually brings her dog, as did David Feinstein his English mastiff, Shomar. Cats aren't as easy to haul around and haven't been so dominant but we nevertheless talk about them and other animals that weave through our lives, both living and dear departed. Oregonians think about Keiko sometimes, or at least the older ones do, and the historians.

Dr. Steve Mastin joined us by Zoom. I used the ISEPP account (it still exists). Given it's a place of business, and has very limited kitchen facilities (we have theories about a dumb waiter, from when it was a boarding house, but maybe that's all wrong I forget). I'm referring to when this was Linus Pauling's mother's place, Linus's dad having died. 

How much do I know of this history? Not a whole lot. I know Doug Strain, ESI president (by the time I knew him), had been a student of Pauling's at CalTech and had helped rescue this place, with Terry's assistance. So the original house still stands, across from the old Third Eye here on SE Hawthorne, adjacent Adorn and the new weddings outfitter, previously a photocopier repair place. We share the block with a Newar Buddhist temple and the district New Seasons, and with Movie Madness, now owned by Hollywood Theater. Those were the days.

Derek was missed. Dr. Ronald Sato was present, one of our regulars in this chapter, with our four-times a year gatherings. We used to meet weekly. Our dear departed would come up in conversation. "I think about Glenn Stockton every day" I recall saying to Dr. D., as he took the serving table back down to its basement storage place (a space Glenn would frequent).

The S Factor

:: more martian math ::

XREF:

• Hypertoon Scenario (on Medium)
• All Aboard the S-Train! (Jupyter Notebook)
• Sfactor and IcosaWithin (Synergeo)

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