Global U vs Planet of the Apes

What the present does is leave records for the future, called the future's past. The present creates the future's past, by making recordings, curating, remembering, memorializing.

These days, humans are engaged in making the collective movie of how they brutalized one another in subhuman fashion, in ways we hope future humans transcend. This was Planet of the Apes. We see it everywhere.

The planet is a mental hospital of sorts, an asylum, and a healing one insofar as we're able to invoke our humanity and create humane conditions. Bucky Fuller's futurism wasn't saying this was our inevitable fate, to act humanely, but that we might choose oblivion instead. Oblivion = Farce. We chose farce.

Closing Time by Norman O. Brown is somewhat required reading for those wanting to trace the transition to the Aquarian Age, as it's all about the coming farce we're now within. We act out, play our roles, dress up, go before the cameras. Politics = Theater.

Fuller's futurism was about how in principle we have the props, the inventory, to stage a "success for humanity" play, and a big part of the challenge is convincing people that was true. China's rise as an economic power, OBOR et cetera, has been encouraging on that front, likewise the growing prosperity of Asia's other little tigers. Portland, a hub city in Cascadia, is a gateway to Asia on the Pacific Rim.

A lot of folks with obsolete educations want to star as heroes but they don't get that it's a farce, because myopic hand wringing about our plight as humans is empty juvenile whining at this point. We have arrived at the point where we see ourselves in the mirror and that it's our choice to keep making this a Planet of the Apes. Our tragic circumstances are self-inflicted at this point, which is what makes them farcical.

The idea behind New Palestine University is the Global University, the university being an older institution than the nation-state. Enrolling refugees into a global system that takes care of them as students and faculty is the name of the game.  A benign global company in support of the GU would be Global Data, likewise science fiction (or investment banking once real enough) going back to the 1980s in this author's schemes and dreams.

The refugees of this world should be free to explore the whole planet, without trespassing, because they'll be within their rights on campus facilities, interconnected by airlines. This is really more a model of the status quo than an aspiration, with the caveat that the curriculum is low quality at the moment, by definition. When we see it's Planet of the Apes out there, we look to faculty and ask what they plan to do about it, curriculum-wise.

What I do about it is join with other faculty in finding new shared memes we can build on, such as Global University, Global Data, OBOR, Trucker Exchange, BizMos, Chinese Peace Corps and so on. A big part of what I do is geometric animations, simple GIFs, based in Synergetics, one of our GU disciplines.

Prophetic Words

I fished this set of paragraphs out of Critical Path, digitized, before heading into downtown Portland for the big protest.

These do seem like prophetic words, given how they were written close to a half-century ago (2030 - 1980 = 50).

From Critical Path (1981):

The plotted curve of the rate of gain for increasing proportions of all humanity being thus swiftly advantaged by the doing more for more people with less and less matter and energy per function all accomplished with computers, satellites, alloys, etc.indicates that 100 percent of all humanity will be thus advantaged before 2000 A.D. In less than twenty years (less than one generation) all humanity is scheduled by evolution (not by any world planning body) to become physically more successful and metaphysically more interestingly occupied than have any humans ever been in all known history-provided that humanity does not commit ignorance-, fear-, and panic-induced total-species suicide. 

Why might they panic? All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities. This is because all of them are founded on the premise of ameliorating individual cases while generally exploiting on behalf of their respective political, religious, or business organizations the condition of nowhere- nearly-enough-life-support-for-all and its resultant great human suffering and discontent.

Reason number two for fear-wrought panic is because all of the 150 nations of our planet are about to be desovereignized by evolution; that is, they are about to become operatively obsolete about to be given up altogether. There are millions in the U.S.A., for instance, who on discovery that their government was about to become bankrupt and defunct would become activist “patriots,” and might get out their guns and start a Nazi movement, seeking dictatorially to reinstate the “good old days.” If people in many of the 150 nations succeeded in re-establishing their sovereignties and all the customs-barrier, balance-of-trade shacklings, it would soon be discovered that the 150 nations represent 150 “blood clots” imperiling the free interflowing of the evolution-producing metals and products recirculation as well as of the popular technical know-how disseminating.

We have today, in fact, 150 supreme admirals and only one ship Spaceship Earth. We have the 150 admirals in their 150 staterooms each trying to run their respective stateroom as if it were a separate ship. We have the starboard side admirals’ league trying to sink the port side admirals’ league. If either is successful in careening the ship to drown the “enemy” side, the whole ship will be lost.

I don't think Fuller was under any illusions that his simply forecasting the demise of nationalism would magically occur right when he penned the lines about its so doing. He was anticipating trends and looking at moving targets, like the rest of us are. What he was saying here is, to look for signs. A last surge, a final hurrah, for nationalism, might involve activists rising up to re-establish their balance-of-trade shacklings.

I know "globalists" are the enemy at the moment, for nationalists everywhere, where "globalist" is predefined as this or that. In my day, "think globally, act locally" was one of those Bucky-inspired boomer slogans. 

But then skeptics such as Wendell Berry wondered if "thinking globally" was actually possible, or, more likely, a dangerous chimera. I think of him, along with Charles Olson, as someone with little patience for the techno-laced lingo of the Fuller-inspired futurist crowd, into which I have blended.

Where does Wendell Berry cast aspersions on "thinking globally"? 

I've been cultivating the habit of letting Perplexity do some of the heavy lifting, in terms of searching the corpus and graphing a path through it, connecting whatever dots I throw at it, or maybe telling me some dots don't connect.

Prompt:  Did Wendell Berry express skepticism regarding the boomer slogan "Think globally, act locally". Did he find something disingenuous about thinking globally? More generally, did Wendell Berry ever comment on Buckminster Fuller's brand of futurism, expressing distaste for it. We know Charles Olson, the famous poet, did not hold Fuller in high regard. Are we able to document Olson's views. He and Fuller were both associated with Black Mountain College.

Here's the essay Perplexity wrote, in a few seconds, minus the footnotes and citations for brevity. 

Here's a link to the full session online. 

Good job Perplexity.

More Media Analysis

Speaking of media analysis, I've been recently reminiscing about all the silos I've been going down. 

I say "going down" even though, originally, a silo, the agricultural construction, pointed up, like a grain elevator, like a Butler grain bin, right? 

But then "silo" was co-opted by the ballistics industry and now our image of them is more that of "shaft into the earth". We now "go down" a silo, or at least that's what I do.

Then "silo" became further co-opted by the business metaphysicians, the ones who diagram on whiteboards how our organization is overly siloed. And don't get me started on academia, right?

Among those silos: the Snow White remake, and all the controversy. I track that because of DefunctLand in large degree, my favorite YouTube channel or right up there. 

Kevin Perjurer makes brilliantly entertaining documentaries about the Disney saga, a saga I've studied since I came across Donald In Mathmagic Land (1959)  as a 2nd grader (early 1960s).

I don't hate Rachel Zegler, a talented actress and good singer, in Hunger Games also (lotsa snakes!). I think it's fair to attack the content as that's what we do with films; they're fair game to diss.

Probably a lot more is going on though, in terms of the expectations EPCOT brought, the World's Fairs also, and the dystopian tunnel we seem to have entered. There's a blame game going on. Why aren't we having the positive future some prophets told us we might enjoy?

Disney always seemed so optimistic, and a lot of kids wished on a star to two, and now wonder if they were just never heard. "Didn't Santa get my letter?" Quivering lip.

Hey, to change topics (and silos): I finally saw Little Miss Sunshine in a home theater environment (not my home). Now there's a "dark" comedy for ya. Thumbs up. Quite compelling.

A couple years ago my silo was girl punk bands like Sleater-Kinney, an I-5 exit I sometimes drive by. Listen to the music, tune in the gossip, make some "knowledge graphs"... lots of dots to connect, right? Portlandia being a more obvious one.

Media Analysis

I'm been binging on Marshall McLuhan YouTubes, as all the knowledge graphs show he's going to continue popping up within the networks we care about. There's the University of Toronto connection for starters. We're already focusing on Coxeter and Hinton. Canadians play a big role in our story.

Going over the disembodied interviews, I see his avatar clarifying many matters. A primary driver in his case is irritation. He finds what the next or downline generations are doing, with the new media, is frequently jarring and unpleasant, and not just because "too loud" although that's certainly part of it. So in some interviews he explains why he maybe comes off as somewhat cranky.

Also, let's talk about his Global Village meme, not far at all from Spaceship Earth. He and Bucky were co-conspirators, that's already established. Wasn't McLuhan all pollyanna Small World After All, the way Bucky was, or was rumored to be? "Global Village" sounds so quaint, so pat, as if we're all supposed to get along with obnoxious neighbors. By what Show White magic? 

On the contrary, explains McLuhan, a Global Village may be claustrophobic, like a Winesburg, Ohio which a read a long time ago. Tiny towns can get oppressive, as everybody knows everybody else's business. Secrets become hard to keep. Privacy is lacking. Gossip is rampant. That's a global village for you.

Reading McLuhan tends to revector (re-aim) what I consider to be the meaning of "tactile" in the sense of "visceral" in Synergetics, what Fuller hands over to "the Gibbisian" those vectorial degrees of freedom (visceral energy flows), those deltas around phase changes, around going between frozen, liquid, and gaseous states of being. One the other hand: "the Eulerian" which is the visio-conceptual.

McLuhan somewhat scrambles my senses such that TV becomes the aural-tribal-tactile side of the senses, the Gibbsian, whereas the reader of phonetic alphabets, with an imagination, is the visualizer, able to conjure mental imagery in a private theater driven by text. That imagery went to film, and then was taken in by all the channels and programming and network talk of the broadcast and cable stations, by way of radio in between.

McLuhan didn't live to see the internet take-off, but would have used that development to underline the same lesson: the next medium uses the previous as its raw material. Theater uses literature, which uses real life. Television uses the movies, which came from theater, and the internet uses television, as streams. The golden age of television is feeding into the power of point to point and a PWS that's fully personalizable. PWS = Personal Workspace in the GST namespace.

Television is "cool" but by that McLuhan didn't mean "non-hormonal". On the contrary, the 3rd parent reaches into our skulls and squeezes the endocrine system, gooses glands. The electronic media manage to scare up and harness veritable blobs of groupthink emotions. The "EST people" may have a better immune system (better antibodies) according the the Handbook.

Mass Exodus

My response to October 7 as my loyal readers might recall, was to hope for ways to let the noncombatants in Gaza get away from the violence, by land, sea or air. I pointed out that Ukrainians had a period of mass exodus in connection with the Russian intervention, or invasion, with civilians escaping in both directions from the front lines. Syrians fled a combination of drought and civil war, most over land.

The focus going forward, in Eastern Europe, will be civilians returning, to whatever extent practical, perhaps with assistance from outside agriculturalists, the FAO for example. 

I take for granted that the FAO and IAEA might be needed to assess whether any toxins (e.g. depleted uranium) have crept into the food chain, just as local authorities are doing in Northern California, around the lithium battery storage facility fire.

Didn't Governor DeSantis of Florida preclude Florida's accepting any Palestinian refugees shortly after October 7? The premise to such declarations is that there would be an exodus of refugees, needing to go somewhere, anywhere other than the bombing theater. As it turned out, Gazans were told to slosh around inside Gaza whereas their prisoner status, as entrapped and besieged, would not be ameliorated. 

For some reason, authorities felt compelled to move a million plus Palestinians as a group, to maybe Egypt or Jordan (both said no), to hastily thrown together refugee camps for the evacuees. I could see providing a default destination for those with nowhere else to go, and suggested one myself, but surely charitable groups, churches, NGOs, would rise to the occasion and accept Palestinians in places all over the world, besides Florida.

I realize that against the rhetoric of providing evacuation fleets and buses, more like in Yugoslavia, is the rhetoric about right of return and never leaving. However I have a hard time, from my distance, judging if the decision to stay is really voluntary, given no choice is given. Why call it an "open air prison" and then pretend that it's actually just a concentration of people eager to keep living in a slum?

OK, sure, better than a slum in many neighborhoods, but nevertheless a blockaded ghetto, a sieged land. 

I'd get into arguments that ethnic cleansing, so-called (gentrification is another word for it), is at least way better than genocide (murder). Letting the victim run away versus trapping the victim in a dead end alleyway, is less traumatic for the victim. 

I'm assuming Israeli authorities would be happy to let Palestinians leave en masse, and that this is what President Trump was also promising. I could see a lot of Palestinians choosing to stay, to work on building a new airport for example. But why not let family members take refuge elsewhere, given that Gaza is certainly a slum now, if it wasn't before October 7?

I see Chechnya built about 200 units for Palestinian refugees. That's far short of a million.  Not all the boat people from Vietnam came to Portland either, but a lot of them did, with a network of NGOs to support them. 

That's a scene I know something about given my agency (CUE) was a management hub for such refugee work in the aftermath of the American War in Indochina.  I understand any African country saying "no, we won't take them all en masse, what a silly idea". That's like how Poland was thinking about Ukrainians: sure some, but not all.

That we have no news stories about American countries accepting any Palestinian refugees, or even making plans to do so, tells me that the world has bought in to the concentration camp model, and even though we're witnessing a steady slaughter, they're thinking evacuation is not a realistic goal. Why? Because Palestinians are too in love with olive trees? They just can't help themselves, poor things. That's the propaganda I'm seeing.

If I were trapped in Gaza with my family, being bombed, I'd be asking the world why I'm made to stay here. Don't tell me how much I love olive gardens. Let me out of here, and do it now. I don't care if that's what the Israelis want as well. Let me out of this cage with the rabid dog. Instead, the onlookers express pity for my plight. It's like Hunger Games. The viewer-voyeurs are using my suffering for their entertainment.

Knowledge Graphs

:: my first use of mindmap.ai ::

The approach to Synergetics I'm recommending within Cascadia traces local history and so counts as "place based". 

We follow Ken Kesey (Cuckoo's Nest...) and his Merry Pranksters, aboard bus Further (in several versions) back from the hippie-psychedelic generation (Grateful Dead) to the Beat generation (Kerouac, On the Road), with Neal Cassady a bridging figure.

The criss-crossings of North America by car and bus by wandering youth helps knit together the recent history, along with the relocation of the film industry from New Jersey to Hollywood. Ralph Bakshi's American Pop would fit in here.

Yes, Ken and Jack had a meetup, if muted. Ken had returned to New York in time for the New York World's Fair (Robert Moses, urban renewal...). Wavy Gravy. Woodstock. Burning Man.

So where does Bucky fit in? Whole Earth Catalog, J. Baldwin... pillow domes in Cornwall (Eden Project). The industry industry missed. Resistant architects, their designs for the rich. Privatization. Reaganomics. Grunch of Giants.

Bucky the Bohemian (not Beat), was not party to the lavish excesses of the Roaring 20s, but was a maverick and rebellious in his own way. Disappointed by Harvard.

He eventually reinvents himself and invents futurism, buys Shelter. He joins the Board of Economic Warfare and his prototype later pops up in the Pentagon's garden, along with his newfangled DEW line radomes. Fortune Magazine. Kabul dome.

Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson... rural electrification. Spreading networks.

So we bring in the Cold War and Russophobia. John Birchers, McCarthyism, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Angleton. Kennedy assassination. LSD. Mary Meyer. Colonel Fletcher Prouty. Oliver Stone. Richard Nixon. Nikita Khrushchev. Moscow Dome. Kitchen Debates. Montreal dome, 67.

We already have The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner to help anchor Bucky as a literary figure, but how do we anchor Synergetics?  We come across it, like the ruins of a temple, deep in a jungle book forest. What are these alien hieroglyphs? What's all this cryptic stuff about a tetrahedron? Martian Math. Ties to virology and crystallography.

Operation Duckrabbit (Wittgenstein). New language games for motherboard Earth. World Game. est. The Hunger Project. Positive futurism vs the doomer boomers. Economics vs GST.

Consistency Check

People ask me how it's consistent to tell a story in which America's leading futurist and Medal of Freedom winner (under Reagan) pronounces the USA we have known morally bankrupt and financially non-viable, and yet global imperialism, under the guise of the USA, continues on for decades thereafter, with nation-states continuing to occupy a central place in the belief systems of the collectively unconscious. 

How can I say the Business Plot of FDR's day was ultimately successful, and yet still wave the flag and speak of a continuity in ethos? And is that the Cascadian flag I'm waving, or the modified East India one favored by the District? Or both? Or neither?

I'm seeing the USA as a conquered people, effectively subjugated by "the complex" president Eisenhower warned us against. It's a psychological self-subjugation that we're experiencing, wherein the word "complex" has its psychological meaning. We're straitjacketed by reflex-conditioning, media programming, keeping us slavish. 

A soul-extinguishing ideology has maintained its grip on the popular imagination, leading us towards oblivion. 

So in that sense, there's still a counter-culture, a resistance, a sense of an underground, a sense that a buried version of the USA is continuing to fight back, to regain lost freedoms. USA OS I call it, where OS stands for "operating system". 

That particular language echos the "cosmic computer" tropes of the futurist in question, as he believed human evolution was more a result of a cosmic computation than the leadership of political ideologues.

Doesn't a belief in some cosmic pressure towards greater liberty and higher living standards (these go together) echo the Technocracy ideology? 

I'd say it echos those who believe in a transcendental Zeitgeist that guides at least an intuitive minority along more promising paths. 

In Quaker parlance, that's like saying I believe in God's will. Not that controversial. Humans are like neurons on a planet that's still growing a brain. We're still in a touch and go juvenile period, developing an immune system that's less inadvertently self destructive than the one we've had.

Comparing Timelines

I'd trace my awareness of the Trump family, mostly in hindsight, through the Mayor Koch chapter in New York City. Donald was making it happen, whereas I was the penniless speculator in Jersey City, just outside of Manhattan, hoping I could do something with the Stanley Theater, 2nd largest of its kind after Radio City Music Hall they told me. 

And that wasn't the full extent of my urban dreamscape. A single ticket, no off and on (no transfer needed) train line: EWR to/from JFK. That'd be so great. Plus that Dymaxion billboard, just outside my front door (the Loew's blank wall was so inviting).

That movie The Apprentice, that I take as historical fiction, is set in around that same time. I could sense at the time that my acting as a booster for Jersey City, like some self-bootstrapping speculator, was somewhat redundant with what else was going on at the time. 

I got tracked into other lines of work: protecting the right to vote in DC; upholding academic standards in NYC. I was very much the east coaster back then, having acclimated through Princeton, post Philippines. I wouldn't resume my west coast lifestyle, interrupted in the mid 1960s, until around 1985, upon arriving in Portland from Bangladesh, where mom & dad had pulled up stakes (Bhutan still ahead).

On the right to vote front, I learned that many don't believe their ballots stay secret and they fear retribution from the powers that be if they go against the local rulers, whomever these may be, most likely the party in power, but possibly a company, gang or family network, whatever astroturf. That's only the beginning of the intimidation gauntlet. Making you believe that they'll know is more effective than knowing, and way more efficient. Heightening paranoia levels is a tool in every bully's tool chest.

On the academic standards front, I was learning about the economics of serving every public school child with the requisite hard copy textbooks, and milk (food logistics was not my focus back then, although the connection between nutrition and work-study productivity I'd clearly made). 

The observation I'll make now in that connection is voluntarily fasting in a condition of mindfulness, as many religions recommend, is different from feeling deprived in a Dickensian condition of servitude. A true fast begins with the promise of a feast on the other end, if that's what's wanted. This is why you'll get your rich and famous touting a lean and mean yoga that works for them: they have a choice in the matter.

Exactly what that school textbook market looks likes today I couldn't say as I'm no longer closely following that literature, except when it comes to Silicon Forest stuff. The electronification of learning resources was just starting back then, and they set me up as a new kind of gatekeeper. Nowadays I'm on the other side of things, feeding the local schools with what big publishing keeps unavailable.

Some of the stuff I'd review for McGraw-Hill was too good to become standard and would be a threat. The wholly local, community sourced curriculum, faculty generated, would spell the end of big publishing, so our business model was to take a pass, but best of luck. 

I remember how years later, Microsoft would swallow FoxPro, which competed internally with the Visual Basic (VB) line of products, Microsoft Access in particular. From my point of view as an outsider, the freelance developer, MSFT seemed involved in something of a DIY exorcism after that, trying to extricate the better, but alien project, from it's VB beating core. Like a science fiction movie.

I'm sketching where my headspace went, aftering thinking for-credit viewing for college audiences would be a thing. It would be, but they don't need to all go to the same theater on a scary train. VHS would be sufficient, or community television. My vision was too Disney in the sense that I was treating The Stanley as a theme park pavilion. All before JCNJ would star as Gotham in the Joker movies (along with Newark).

Did I watch The Apprentice (the TV show, not the movie)? I barely watched any game shows back then. I got into networking downtown (in Manhattan), by taking up duties voluntarily. I had my choice of cults, one could say, in a city of that size. 

I forget the exact set of stepping stones that took me from the Bonnie and Ray (and Julie) Simon chapter (friends and neighbors) to the Americans for Civic Participation chapter (Reagan-vs-Mondale) and thence onward to the 28th floor of that Rockefeller Center building, now back in Ray's orbit, but based in Brooklyn (and maybe Queens?).

Anyway, I couldn't have watched The Apprentice back then as it was still years into the future. I'd be back in Portland, Oregon by the time it aired, and again I had little time for game show TV, let alone wrestling shows. If I was staring at a screen at it, I was likely eyeballing Visual Foxpro, or VFP as we called it, through version 9. 

By 2015, the exorcism was finally complete: Microsoft was no longer supporting its super popular FoxPro line. Which doesn't mean FoxPro went away. That was one of the issues: FoxPro was subject to rampant piracy, and open sourcing it was never an option, or maybe it was. I'd still get a last chance to dabble in it, in connection with long haul truck scheduling and routing. I was back in apprentice mode myself in that case, working with a skilled transportation engineer and another independent application developer, a lot like me.

Protected Values

(ɔ) DAF | cogsec

Meanderings

Watching The Cycle, an Iranian movie tracing the hospital blood supply back to those desperate enough to sell blood, the geeks of that society, geek in the old sense of chicken head carnival act, got me thinking about blood flows more generally. 

Terry has lent me a copy of Shape and Structure: From Engineering to Nature, by Adrian Bejan. The book in reminiscent of a D’Arcy Thompson work, in focusing on how form follows function. 

You might find where I was querying Perplexity about the relevance of Bejan to the GST approach to eco-thermodynamics, i.e. surfing the solar gradient per Into the Cool, another book on the ISEPP shelf.

The Cycle is a 1977 film set and made in Iran, that won much acclaim on the film festival circuit.

Bejan cites Geoffrey West, author of Scale, a book here in my own collection. Scale is all about power relationships by which I don’t mean in geopolitics but in geometry. When you grow or shrink a shape by a scale factor, the change in linear dimensions is a 3rd root of the change in volume. If I double all the edges of a cube, its volume multiplies by a factor of eight i.e. two to the 3rd power.

How is a heart supposed to pump oxygen to every nook and cranny in a camel or elephant, dinosaur or giraffe, when there’s so much volume? The answer of course is tubing, and what Bejan shows is that two trees intertwined, one sending warm blood distally, the other harvesting cooler blood to bring back, actually reinforce each other in measurable ways, bumping that 3rd to 2nd root transition, from size to body surface area, to a 4/3rd root instead (still a 2/3rd root if cold-blooded). Klieber’s Law.

In grade school we might look at it this way: we know the D-edged tetrahedron has about 6% less volume than its R-edged cubic counterpart, where D = 2R, diameter and radius respectively, of our reference sphere. S3 is the signifier we sometimes use, for the R-cube/D-tet ratio of 1.06066, the 3rd root of which we call S1. Take that D-edged tet, say made of clay, and add to any face, by a linear amount of S1 times initial length, which isn’t much. Surface area will increase by a factor of S2. S1 = ~1.01982445133,

One of my Google slide deck slides cites Huffington Post as my source for a D’Arcy Thompson letter, written to Alfred North Whitehead. He wants to know where all this “three dimensional” jazz is stemming from, in the process of questioning his own allegiance to orthogonality. His concerns prefigure a later architect’s. Can’t a tetrahedron bear the brunt, when we talk quaintly about the square-cube law?

A cool thing about a tetrahedron is: if you slice parallel to any face, like from a tetrahedral loaf of bread, or chunk of cheese, all six edges will decrease in proportion. The face has been foreshortened, and so have been the edges to the opposite corner, keeping all the angles the same overall, including central angles, meaning no change in shape, only size. 

In contrast, a clay brick, cut parallel to any face, will keep its 90 degree surface angles yet suffer changes in relative proportions, meaning in radial central angles. A brick has to shrink inwards in all directions, giving that more tesseract-looking outline, of cube within cube. The tetrahedron keeps shrinking towards a corner.

This distinction between angles (central and surface), meaning shape, and scale (meaning size), is commonly considered core curriculum. The size spectrum is likewise our frequency spectrum, from the tiniest intervals to the largest we need. This might as well be the electromagnetic spectrum of polarized oscillations, otherwise known as vibrations, or frequencies. Pure shape = Platonic.

Our beginning might be methane, or CH4, with the idea of an idealized gas per Avogadro, a uniform distribution of molecules, but with random variations from CCP origins. Then zoom in on one molecule and focus in on the angles of 109.47 degrees between any two CH vectors. Arccos(-1/3). We learned trig for a reason apparently. 

We know have a fun API for the XYZ apparatus, with four basis vectors instead of three primary and three secondary. No differences in class, between positives and negatives. All twelve permutations of (2, 1, 1, 0) will give the 12 radials of a home base shape, the one we associate with dynamic equilibrium. Chaotic perturbations test our sanity sometimes.

To Be Continued

:: narrating my Google slides (February 2025) ::

Many of my readers know about the Google slide decks, which I tend to make public and encourage others to use, because they share what I consider to be vital content, coming from a background as a high school math teacher at St. Dominic Academy, and later contributing editor and educational software evaluator, for McGraw-Hill.

One of those decks (the focus of the embedded YouTube) is more of a personal nature in that I feature my own visage among others in a narrative aimed at fitting puzzle pieces together, pieces of a large size, such as American Transcendentalism versus German Idealism. 

I say "versus" to distinguish them, not to posit some polarizing dialectic. In large degree, these were on the same page. My slides trace a vector from Kant through Coleridge to Emerson and Fuller (both Margaret and her great nephew, Richard Buckminster).

Where I fit in is as a Princeton student learning about all of the above, although being a scholar is a lifelong endeavor and, truth to tell, I'm still putting the puzzle together and some of the above is post Princeton for me. I've simply continued to take an interest in following the action. 

I was Class of 1980, and much of the action I wanted to track would come after that. In my slides, I use the est Training as a bridge, as I started with that at Princeton but was still volunteering after moving closer to New York.

Although said Google deck about me 'n people shows a picture of my dad, whom I credit for feeding my interest in GST a lot, Kenneth Boulding also (both Quakers), the last slide says To Be Continued and I haven't gotten around to my mom yet, but that's where I'm focusing in my latest studies. 

DAF suggested, through prompts to Obsidian, that Jane Addams be reckoned among the pragmatists, along with Rorty, Dewey and William James. She's a co-founder of WILPF, in which both my mom, and Ava Helen Pauling were active members.

Since I've already invoked memories of Margaret Fuller, Loïe Fuller (no relation), Ada Byron (Countess Lovelace), Queen Marie of Romania, and Zelda Fitzgerald, the women of WILPF will fit right in, as an influential intelligencia helping to guide world affairs. 

Strong players of "world game" in other words (my jargon for engaging in Earthian participation, as human or otherwise). 

Mom's bio (Carol Urner's), will then open doorways to other narratives: Jacoba Settisoli, Abdul Ghaffar Khan (عبدالغفار خان), MLK and why not Cub Scouts of America, for which she served as a den mother, in Rome?

Ava Helen is memorialized at Lake Oswego Cemetery, whereas PSU's Walk of the Heroines, provides reminders of Carol Urner and Mary Bolton. 

Ava's partner Linus Pauling was the famous 2x Nobel Prize winning chemist, with one of those prizes for Peace, and credited to her in large degree, the WILPF activist. Terry Bristol, ISEPP president, in collaboration with former Pauling student Doug Strain, a Silicon Forest industrialist, salvaged the boyhood Pauling residence and made it a Center for Science, Peace and Health.

Domestic Matters

We really lucked out with this house in a lotta ways. I've been here since the mid 1990s, and the house was built in 1905. Yet so far I haven't had to replace the roof. There's like a double layer.

I do have critters in the rafters and have used a ladder and like chicken wire to block the one ingress and/or egress I could find, northwest corner, near where we used to have that TV aerial. The dish is unused. The house gets 99% of its TV from optical fiber, with digital broadcast receiving another option, used less often.

Mostly those critters are squirrels. Do the neighbor's chickens attract rats? They'd be around anyway. More exotic: racoons.

The property has a detached garage, which I don't use for my car, a 1997 Nissan, highly weathered, with a still healthy powertrain and new tires. I've got some boxes of C6XTY components in said garage and no, that's nothing dangerous, inert shaped plastic, designed in Oregon, manufactured in China. The components assemble into the sculptures at the front and to the rear of the main building.

The previous house we just rented (own this one) was only a block or so away, around the corner, and it would flood really badly if the sump pump had problems. It was also much more permeable to the elements. We had it checked, as a student thesis project. The wind throughput was considerable. In contrast, this "new" place (since mid 90s) has a leaky basement, true, but that's Portland. The furnace is not endangered. With palettes, stuff stays dry. The space is pretty high humidity though, and low ceilinged except in the washer-dryer area.

After we moved in here, we replaced all the doors and windows with highly insulated hardware, and sprayed insulation into the wall spaces. Yes, the furnace burns fossil fuel, which comes in a tank truck. The fuel tank is under the driveway and when I want to know how much fuel is left, I lower a wooden stick and read the height. Very National Geographic.

My upstairs office was space for successive daughters, who painted it aquamarine and bright red respectively. It's still bright red, with yellowish trim. That sounds kinda loud for an office but the lighting is muted, sometimes is no more than computer screens. There's no bed. This is not a guest room. 

Some years I let my agent fill out the IRS schedule whatever to declare my home office, and its portion of household expenses. The guest room, was Carol's room, sleeps one, although I do have a spare bedroom upstairs that's only habitable outside peak summer, as we don't do upstairs air-conditioning. The office gets hot too but is fine with the deck door open, and a fan.

Yesterday I was out front on my hands and knees repairing the bottom northwest corner of the C6XTY tetrahedron. The stuff gets brittle in sunlight and parts will pretty easily snap off. Solutions were within reach when the prototype run ended, and the product got shelved and time capsuled. My sculpture garden showcases how far Sam got with this spatiotemporal rendering of a scale-independent lattice concept.

This blog is full of information on Flextegrity, as are some of my Github repos.

USAID Family

Given what's in the news, about DOGE going after USAID, among other agencies, I've taken to bringing up here in my blogs, and conversationally, that we were a USAID family in the Philippines for some years. Of course that identity has entirely to do with my dad's work, which paid the bills. My mom played her counterpoint to dad-the-technocrat (lowercase): she was a pretty serious human rights advocate, standing up for the rights of indigenous peoples vs the colonizing Christian lowlanders. I was proud of them both.

However we got to the Philippines care of UNDP, an agency of the United Nations. We even had UN passports at that point, which as I recall gave us special privileges going through airline security checks. In any case, I was proud of that identity as well.

However, I believe dad was somewhat uncomfortable being a part of a high end serve the wealthy kind of project involving filling in Manila Bay even more, to add room for fancy hotels and / or that Cultural Center of the Philippines they built while we were there. 

He was more into teaching the techniques of grassroots planning, like he'd developed in Libya, wherein local administrations and ministries are empowered to develop their own land use plans, armed with their own locally undertaken demographic and other statistical studies. He knew about how you put a cable-like sensor across a road, to count vehicles, get a sense of the traffic. It's not like I followed him around work all that often, just that I'd pick up dribs and drabs.

So I think his arranging to switch to a USAID job was in line with his wanting to practice planning in a more decentralized, advisory-only capacity. He got to fly around the islands a lot and meet with counterparts. He loved doing stuff like that. I think the USAID job really suited him, probably because he helped design it. Certainly it outlasted my own stay, as I was off to Princeton a year or two before they left Makati.

As an expat 3rd culture kid, I do have empathy for families suddenly finding their future plans canceled because of tumultuous changes back in the imperial capital. I checked a few websites in the Philippines to see what might be going on with some of the families there.

Dad was a freelancer, meaning he was not career USG by a long shot. He'd work for whatever governments, for whatever private firms, and he'd work for the UN. I'm pretty sure his work with Libya followed a similar trajectory to the one he followed vs-a-vs the Philippines: he got started with that EUR-based job (EUR is outside of Rome, Italy) but then shifted over to Whiting and Associates, a Nebraska-based planning firm, and it's with them that he had an office in the Paroli area, right near the South Korean ambassador's residence (I was good friends with the ambassador's youngest son).

Dad spent many years helping Libyans plan for a bright future, looking at least 50 years ahead. He didn't live long enough to see NATO ganging up on Gaddafi and bombing the place, with operatives moving Libyan weapons stashes to Syria as Seymour Hersh would later write about.

I never had much respect for US foreign policy towards Libya. It seemed mostly based on revenge for his having shut down Wheelus AFB and nationalized the oil. Who is sucking up Libya's oil reserves today I wonder?  I'll ask a chatbot.  BP and Shell, among others. Figures. When does NATO plan on bombing Venezuela on behalf of BP?

My Facebook comment on Natasha's Youtube says this, somewhat summarizing the above:

Natasha is one of my favorite YouTubers. Don't be misled by the thumbnail, she's being sarcastic, sassing her critics.

People who dislike her anti-Z messages (Z being code for special military operation) think she must be secretly getting money under the table from the USG. She reassures us she's just another everyday YouTuber of the type that depends on the channel itself for revenue, and on Patreon.

I've been following Natasha since she started her channel, already back from the USA student exchange program, which she has always been open about and proud of. Not a secret.

By the way, my own family was USAID for awhile. I could claim USAID put me through high school (although it was the UNDP that got us there -- to the Philippines -- in the first place). Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya put me through 4th - 8th grade in Italy, if you wanna drum up even more scandal.

The Biology of Fasting

I'm back on the wagon, as they say, predictably with regard to alcohol abstention but in my case I'm forswearing food in general, just for a day or two. While we're on the subject though: yes, I've continued to bill myself as having given up alcohol, whereas in reality the "non-alcoholic" beers I permit myself, in moderation, weigh in at 0.5%, and therefore require proof of age at the checkout.

A primitive calculus goes on, to which kids can relate, regarding whether the alimentary canal is yet empty or not i.e. have recent meals all gone through, leaving an essentially empty gut, but for water or whatever liquids? That's what a typical fast is aiming for: a period wherein the body gets to run on empty, and therefore has to break into its fat supply.

Modern biology has learned a lot about our dual mode digestive cycle, the main one predicated on continuous glucose burning, the backup consisting of fat cell break down and a whole different set of chemical reaction pathways leading to the all important ATP molecule, the spark in our metabolic cycle, providing fast energy in quantities sufficient to power muscle. 

Prompt:

what is the role of the chemical ATP in the neocortex? Is what we call "the thinking process" a big consumer of ATP?

Chatbot (Perplexity): 

ATP (adenosine triphosphate) plays a crucial role in the neocortex and the overall thinking process, serving as the primary energy currency for various neuronal functions. The thinking process is indeed a significant consumer of ATP, as the brain uses about 20% of the body's total energy despite constituting only 2% of its weight.

... followed by many more paragraphs of yada yada, such as:

Neurotransmitter synthesis and release: ATP provides the energy needed for the production and release of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and acetylcholine, which are crucial for cognitive functions such as mood regulation, attention, and memory.

Let's assume a body benefits from having its secondary digestive cycle started up from time to time. Use it or lose it, right? But then who in their right mind would willingly forgo nutrition? Well, many would of course. But so-called "cravings" or "temptations" were the business of religions to fight, to which end they could enlist the angels and devils, making one's heart the center of a cosmic drama. Lose weight before Judgement Day or else.

However in a secularized society, meaning potentially religion-free in many dimensions, the battle for better health must take other forms, with psychological archetypes perhaps replacing the supernatural. The ego still has its work as an heroic performer, all the more so given the preponderance of institutions planning to cash in on overusing the main glucose cycle. Insulin insensitivity sets in, according to many a compelling narrative.

The miraculous ability to store energy in the form of fat, for a rainy day, or even for a week of hunting, is there if we need it, but what defines "need"? A religion may provide sufficient impetus to a would-be disciple. What other frameworks might likewise serve, and prove sufficiently motivational? What do we mean by "a religion" exactly?  

As noted elsewhere in these journals, I can see where the would-be disciple would feel divinely and/or supernaturally rewarded for righteous fasting, given what we know now about the underlying biology i.e. the switchover from glucose burning to ketosis.

Owning Gaza

I understand the protective impulse. Many in the Pentagon would love to get orders to defend the Palestinians and help them to safety. Forcing them to stay in a demolition zone, with their affairs administered by their destroyer, still trying to starve them, does seem inhumane in the extreme.

Step one towards making Palestine a true Diaspora State is to grant its citizens their human rights as free agents, able to bounce around the world the way many USers do, or did in their jet set youth, before new economic realities, such as retirement, made such travel less affordable. 

Expressions of the US taking ownership, while hard to interpret into international law, conveyed at least some sense of taking responsibility and wanting to do right by the surviving Gazans. Of course not all Pentagoners are so charitably disposed, which is why I've long placed its icon on both corners of the GST diagram.

The Virtual States model is about any and every state seeing itself as a planetary agency, however spread about and/or concentrated in specific cities and campuses, port facilities, museums and so on. 

My convoy of cruise ships, Disney's among them, poised to evacuate victims of a monstrous attack, was science fiction when first proposed, with branding added for realism. The discussion then turned to where were these rescue ships going? I had some ideas. 

Given the White House rhetoric, one might think "to the Americas" in many cases. But with what sense of permanence? Clearly the evacuation should not be coerced, with more campus facilities being constructed locally for those electing to remain at the demolition and construction sites. Many would welcome a temporary leave of absence.

My Asylum City drawing boards have been about serving refugees more generally, and creating meaningful work in the process, especially for those in the health care, shelter, and transportation businesses, in addition to everyday support logistics (food, water, clean air). 

The NGOs have their prototyping functions, per Project Renaissance. The cities all learn from each other.

The goal of a refugee family is not to get lost in some bureaucracy as nameless numbers, but to get itself well documented and wired up to support services. Having such a goal would require trust on the part of the family vs-a-vs the bureaucracy in question. 

Obviously no one is eager to aid and abet their hunter-attackers, which is why a kind of firewall has been proposed, providing refugees with a degree of privacy as well as protection.

How the process of extending documentation and protection to all humans aboard Spaceship Earth actually pans out depends a lot on how aware of the challenges the various systems architects have become, thanks to their training and previous experience. 

Many systems architects have been seeing through the lens of the United Nations. Putting on USG glasses just makes the world seem crazy-distorted when coming from such a place. The Tower of Babel is still a reality, especially where Abrahamic religions, and their spinoffs, are concerned.

Matryoshka Dolls

:: Simple Tensegrity by Kenneth Snelson (for Tara) ::

Koski and I have developed a conversational habit of sometimes referring to a polyhedron as a "guy" e.g. "smallguy" is shorthand for a certain cuboctahedron in the hierarchy. By "hierarchy" I mean "set of nested polyhedra" and not just any set, but a specific one. 

I don't really expect the "guy" parlance to spread, but it does get me to "dolls" and Chicago, the musical. How do the "dolls" in "Al Capone" world overlap with "flapper" (anthropology hat on)? Perplexity.ai has an answer. 

My cartoon bio of Bucky would have him hanging out with Al Capone during Prohibition, and with rich controller oligarchs who still enjoyed their alcohol. That'd be circa 1927.

The lunge towards Canada provoked a backlash that's great for School of Tomorrow, as our story has centered on parts of the Anglophone world feeling colonized and oppressed by other parts. The UK feels somewhat haunted by those Menwith Hill monsters (giant domes) whereas Canada is always sensitive to its imperial-minded neighbor. 

I remember hanging out with WUSC volunteers, and picking up the vibe way back then. WUSC was in Bhutan, but not the Peace Corps, as the Network of Unaligned Nations (NUN lets call it) was suspicious of siding with any polarizing "superpowers" -- with good reason.

In our curriculum, the University of Toronto types were feeling oppressed because the Defense Early Warning system, while Canada-based, was claiming exclusive use of classified US IP (intellectual property) and was therefore closed off to alien intelligence, even allied. 

Likewise much of the IP wrapped up inside of AI (aka "pseudo-intelligence") is of Canadian origin, yet egomaniac pundits in the USA will blithely take credit, meanwhile accusing others, such as Chinese, of theft (as if it were somehow theirs to begin with).

The fun science fiction around DeepSeek is it trained on Chinese characters, a bigger data set, and the vectorizers were just that much tighter already, accounting for the decreased training energy costs. When you start out Anglophone, you pay for overhead and a lot of GIGO, hence the orders of magnitude bigger training farms with brute force chips.

You may recall (if you fish in my pond) that I draw from the Siobhan Roberts Donald Coxeter bio, The King of Infinite Space, when telling the story of the H.S.M Coxeter - R.B. Fuller relationship, most obviously memorialized with Bucky's dedication in Synergetics. They were employing entirely different disciplines I'd argue, but with overlap. 

Bucky was more running a business, with himself shopped out as faculty to contracting universities and teams of architects wanting unfettered access to his IP. That's more where I've been coming from as well, keeping it a self employment proposition, with School of Technology a welcome exception on many levels, and a resume perk when it comes to teaching Python.

My network has brought me back into LinkedIn thanks to tightening my curriculum a little more in the K-7 arena, whereas I usually pick up around eighth grade and roll forward, building out with more coordinate system experience, continuing Portland's practice of using MIT Logo in the elementary years. Along those lines, I'm studying to what extent artists have already anthropomorphized the polyhedra. Sure "hedron" means face, but how often does our iconic cube (emblem of Neo-Rome) come with facial expressions?

You might think I'm trying to sneak in Quadrays at the 8th grade level, and you'd be right, although I might quibble with "sneak" as the right word, as there's nothing especially sneaky about pointing to one's own research, when in a teacher role. I'd argue it's expected. Quadrays are an XYZ lookalike in some respects and therefore reinforce what we typically teach anyway.

The lunge towards Canada was also a new Golden Age in US history, which connotes / connects to the Roaring 20s, already a focus on my end, given the ladies farm and Great Gatsby connection, back to flapper, back to doll, as in Guys and Dolls and the "djangsta pony".

G4C 2025

G4C: a Gathering for Carol. 

One of Carol’s TRC associates in Lesotho reached out some time ago for some links. Maseru folks have been processing her passing, two years ago yesterday, on January 30 of 2023. 

She (mom) was born in 1929 and lived to be 93. Husband: Jack Urner (dad); Kids: Julie (my sister) and me.

We were of course aware of the date here, with Tara visiting. Sheila Goldberg called, well-knowing the date, and sending a well-meaning heads up regarding the active volcano some 300 miles off the Oregon Coast.

The day before, we celebrated Chinese New Year. Dr. DiNucci joined us. He played a big role in Carol’s care, especially when it came to those blood tests, home administered after awhile.

Fortunately, said submarine volcano, while quite likely to blow, even this year is, not of the kind likely to beget either an earthquake or a tsunami, Oregon being vulnerable to both.

TRC: Transformation Resource Center.

Playing with Patches

Whether to "chalk it up to coincidence" means anything, or not, I found it interesting to come across a ping, someone pinging me, with what looked to be a matplotlib figure. 

That prolly doesn't make much sense; lemme explain: getting good-looking plots, like bar graphs, histograms, pie charts, more exotic yet expected other statistician-invented forms (KDE plot, HeatMap), and having them be data-driven i.e. painted by numbers you're studying, is the job of a few open source tools such as matplotlib.

But then matplotlib can do so much more, providing general purpose geometric objects and control over their attributes and relative placement. A subpackage even gets into 3D (rotatable) 3-way renderings. One may enjoy hours exploring the ins and outs of this fascinating free package. Most users learn just enough to get by, as is true in my case, so I was letting Gemini shoulder the burden and boost the coding proficiency, which it did, dutifully.

The guy pinging me was on Facebook, Esteban again, regarding a narrative he has, regarding a point and/or ball and it's Flatlandesque transitions through some stairway to heaven dimensional ladder, only to start back at the beginning, somehow transformed. I'm referring to Flatland by Edwin Abbott, a satirical work about the varying degrees of awareness enjoyed by strictly dimensionally-defined beings.

Geometry in other words; we're comparing notes about circles 'n stuff. I take Abbott to be taking us through Hilbert Spaces, each rung of higher D. 

Esteban shares this graphic of mechanically perfect circles, shaded by color, semi-transparent, while meanwhile, on other nights, I'm leading a class in precisely this area: a how-to vs-a-vs matplotlib and related packages within the Python ecosystem.

I should digress and remind readers how each computer language is like "of a tribe" in that an ecosystem of users and developers emerges to staff positions and administer tribal governance. Maybe it's an inhouse language that belongs to an academic department. If you make friends there, they let you use it. Circumstances vary.

My trajectory was to see a Perl culture somewhat suffused with Python, and then with Ruby. Then Java took off. We've enjoyed a design science Renaissance, with a plague and everything! 

My portal into these undercurrents was via O'Reilly's open source conventions in Portland, Oregon. In some of those years, I was even helping staff an O'Reilly School booth, long story. Nowadays we're up to Rust and Zig. Which isn't to say some of the old die-hards aren't still around.

Open source is an umbrella term for a lot of such languages, and accounts for how they've become widely spread. Right now "open source" is in the buzz because of DeepSeek's splash debut, causing another "Sputnik moment" in the 'Murican Psyche. 

When Python takes off in Brazil and South Africa and no one is confused about why: smart language, smart peoples. The language was a product of Dutch brains in the first place. EuroPythons predate Pycons. 

Many representatives come to Pycons, which I'd also go to (in addition to OSCON). 

In the course of doing all this, I'm passing out some of the latest AI write-ups about me and what I've been up to. I know of cases where individuals have been displeased by stochastic gaffs. In my case however, with Perplexity at the helm, I wasn't disturbed by the results. Predictable. As the doctor ordered. I'm interested in curriculum and education, and have worked on some examples, such as on what I've called Martian Math.

Anyway, to continue with my story, I went onto colab.research.google.com, like I do in the class I'm leading, and asked Gemini to write me a matplotlib-using Python program that'd blend together shaded semi-transparent circles and thick black dotted lines. I prompted for that in the Gemini prompt box and got back a complete program, that ran correctly unmodified.

The result was not diagrammatically significant, given how much it depends on random numbers, but then I wasn't aiming to produce something significant, so much as in the style of, a similarity in one dimension, we could say a tenuously narrow one.

So here's the resulting Gemini-generated graphic, in response to my prompt:

 And what was that prompt again? 

Use matplotlib to draw a figure containing several partially overlapping circles of different colors and partial transparency, along with assorted dotted thick black lines at various angles.

Of course if I wanted it even more perfect, I could omit the spines, labels, tick marks, and take manual control of Circle placement. 

On class the night previously, we were not considering Circles at all, but Rectangles, which were used to construct the data-driven count and bar plots, even histograms, of our dreams. 

I'm harkening back to the coincidental juxtaposition of this content, with the schematics of another Facebook artist, Esteban Trev.

By the way, Circles and Rectangles are both in a taxonomy with a more umbrella term: Patches.

 

Pilot Study

MLK Day 2025

Did DT mention MLK anywhere in his inaugural speech today? Follow-up: he did. Did many, if any, commentators mention his taking advantage, or not, of this coincidental convergence or church and state? 

My schedule had me working through the speech, walking the dog Sy etc. but I’m taking in the postmortems. Yes, I think of MLK as standing for “the church” side of the culture. He was martyred. But then the church has been an agent of secular apartheid as well, in other chapters.

I’ve been somewhat focused on the TikTok USA story as it has a lot to teach about network dynamics, what with the short Sunday ban and the migration of many TT USA refugees to RedNote (more Yelp like than TT), to try it out, and to raise a finger to those with a “war with China” agenda. 

Those who wanna use the game board for juvenile Superpower Wars oughta settle for simulations, complete with retro skins. I’ve already got my Planet of the Apes sims going, modeling present reality (wave to Bibi).

Beyond that, I was back to rendering around Matryoshka Dolls, the polys, which I’ll sometimes call guys as well. 4guy rhymes with 4eye, the latter being a term Struppi (German connection, Telegram) uses. For tetrahedron if you need some decoding. I’m part of an inbred cliquey elite that does “tetra-volumes” or — tvs, complete with old fashioned “rabbit ears” (that’s a pun on the Quadrays apparatus).

In IVM world (vs XYZ world), we have a couple diamond faced dolls, the RT and RD, R for rhombic. The polys show up in Casino Math as dice, blending into the decor as more bling. Crazy Diamond combinatorics: those Coupler builds, of As and Bs.

I’m picking up on “Golden Age” (a meme) as echoing “gilded” i.e. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s world of high income inequality but with giddy hopes, pre the 1929 Wall Street crash (another ponzi pop) and the rise of Military Socialism as a means of defeating a Reich, and depression bailout. Social Darwinism took on new forms, given its strong roots in Angloterra. 

Military style base-centric development has its perks, as the Russians are experiencing today. But it’s a myopic strategy over the long haul, to focus on killingry (decay) over livingry (cay). Uncle Sam became a decadent addict and passed away, after prescient warnings. USA OS survives in the underworld, still a figment of the  collective unconscious.

:: curated usa os iconography by daf w/ ai ::

Oregon Fever

Prompting Perplexity: Sometimes the word "fever" has a positive connotation. What can you tell me about that?

Response:

While fever is typically associated with illness, the word "fever" can indeed have positive connotations in certain contexts:

1. Excitement and enthusiasm: "Fever" can describe a state of intense excitement or enthusiasm, as in "football fever" or "election fever"[3]. This usage conveys a sense of heightened energy and passion.

2. Creative intensity: In artistic or creative contexts, a "fever dream" can refer to something wildly imaginative, surreal, or bizarrely captivating[7]. This usage suggests a positively intense or mesmerizing quality.

3. Intense focus or dedication: Phrases like "gold fever" or "spring fever" imply a strong, often positive obsession or desire for something[3].

4. Cultural phenomena: "Fever" can describe widespread, enthusiastic interest in a trend, event, or cultural phenomenon, as in "Beatlemania fever"[3].

5. Beneficial bodily response: From a medical perspective, fever can be seen as a positive defensive mechanism. It stimulates the immune system, potentially preventing the proliferation of pathogens[2].

In these contexts, "fever" metaphorically represents intensity, passion, and a heightened state of being, often with positive associations despite its primary medical meaning.

Citations:

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7717216/
[2] https://straightbamboo.com/purpose-meaning-fever/
[3] https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/fever
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Febrile
[5] https://healthmatters.wphospital.org/blogs/got-a-fever-find-out-what-it-may-mean/
[6] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2367118/
[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/p5w9kc/what_does_the_phrase_fever_dream_mean/
[8] https://www.dictionary.com/e/denotation-vs-connotation/

Hiker Paradise

That's the PR anyway ("hikers' paradise"). I've been sampling the YouTube genre of "hikes gone wrong", a lore passed along by hikers themselves as a set of cautionary tales. Sometimes they're just reminders: you can do everything right and still lose out. Taking along a device with the new "rescue me" button, which sends an sos signal over cell, is often recommended, but even one of those won't save the day in all circumstances. I think we all know this, but the details still matter.

From such cautionary tales, I'm able to feel reminded of life's lessons, which merit going over, even if one is not doing any neck-risking mountain climbing or even skiing. My Seattleite side of the family has the skiers, both on water and on snow. I managed to get somewhere with downhill skiing but haven't tried it since the 1980s after a successful run in New Jersey (I forget which mountain, maybe Eddie knows). That was back when I was a math and history teacher for a small elite academy for young ladies, and in my 20s.

One of the best hiking trips I did was backpacking into Lake Bertha with Tom Connolly. We elected to forge ahead even though hikers coming the other way said the weather was against us. What's a little rain storm? This sounds like the beginning of a cautionary tale, but we made it fine, if drenched. 

My main memory of that sojourn was the little deer eating my T-shirt off the line, like a goat might do. Damn. But it let me walk right up to it (no fear) and yank the T-shirt back out, as a little bit of it was dangling out of its mouth. I hung it up to dry without rinsing it and it turned stiff as a board thanks to deer saliva.

Lake Bertha is in Glacier Park and this was part of a longer trip involving Gutless, my Honda Civic, and our road trip to Montana. The late Tom Connally and his family (whom I'm still in touch with) hailed from Missoula. He wanted to show me his roots. We had a blast.

Yakking on Facebook (continued)

Another tie-in with Wittgenstein is that Part 2 of his posthumous Philosophical Investigations focuses on "aspect shifts" and their importance to "getting the meaning of". Like "gestalt shifts" -- with the easy example of the duckrabbit. 

It's when one is able to shift one's perceptions somehow, that it all clicks into place, and one might even say "ah hah!" or "eureka!"  

Going from "5+5=12 is nonsense" to "5+5=12 makes perfect sense -- in base 8" might be like a light going on. 

That's more likely to happen if you're already primed to know about bases and just need a little reminder from your post-Sputnik 2nd grade New Math or whatever. Or you went into computers and learned octal and hex.

But if they've not self-consciously studied "number bases" as a topic (as the Common Core recommended dropping, making Americans dummies again) then explaining the punchline is like explaining a joke. If they don't smile and chuckle right away then you face the ordeal of explaining about position notation, carrying, powering and all that (yawn). Not worth the effort maybe. Save your jokes for those who might get them (hard to know in advance).

Cubes may fill space, but if we wanna start by closest packing same-size marbles, and filling in space that way (with gaps), then the cubes lattice might not be where we want to end up. 

In going for maximum ball-to-space density (~0.74) and omni-symmetry, we end up with one ball to start, 12 around it (6 squares, 8 triangles), then bump up the frequency (between ball intervals) to 42, then again (92), then again (162) and so on: 10 * F * F + 2 where F = 1, 2, 3, 4... See HSM Coxeter's remarks to that New Yorker fact checker, verifying Bucky got it right.

Anyway, that's where we get our skeletal frame, our iconic ghost ship (cuboctahedron) adrift in the IVM ocean. Always 12 balls around 1. 42 around that... 

Said lattice is all tetrahedrons and octahedrons, of relative volume 1 to 4 (no matter how long each edge, just keep them the same) and relatively twice as many 4eyes as Richard Katrinho Rasteirinho Haileisela shows in his video, with the omni-triangulated space-filling rhombohedron of volume 1+4+1 = 6, same as the space-filling RD.

I suppose there's a chance Bucky invented "allspace" as a term, however the practice of filling space with uniform and/or complementary space-fillers, the volumetric analog of tiling a surface (without gaps), is a game played since ancient times (since Archimedes at least). Within that scope, there's the game of finding shapes that do so all by themselves, like cubes and RDs do, without need of left and right handed versions. 

Some tetrahedra do that, if not the regular ones, and Synergetics does a lot to map this territory, overlapping work by mathematicians such as Sommerville and Goldberg. 

Fuller's A & B make an AAB (left and right A plus a left or right B ) the so-called MITE (MInimum TEtrahedron), an important space-filler that ends up with no outward handedness.

Sure we can throw the door open to other iconic representations of surface and volume, beyond the square and cube. There's the hexagon. There's the sphere. 

What's true about the triangle and tetrahedron though, is they're each more minimal than their respective counterparts, nor is it clear that either might be undercut. 

In that sense, the tetrahedron makes a strong case for being primary: the simplest cage, the fewest edges to carve inside from outside (the sphere being a complex membrane relatively speaking). The tetrahedron beats the cube at its own game so to speak, with only six edges instead of twelve. Now that it's finally had a chance to strut its stuff, as unit volume, the cube feels a bit on the ropes these days. Some qyoobists are circling the wagons already.

The cube-minded orthogonalists are very much not accustomed to having their authority challenged and I enjoy seeing them get so annoyed, as they don't have a leg to stand on, if their goal is to make us go away. 

Even if I have more tolerance for imaginary "fictional" structures (prefrequency) that do no load-bearing, I'm still able to appreciate the many advantages this new brand of 4D talk brings to the table. 

It's a privilege to question the authority of the hypercross dogmatists, even from the perspective of another ghost ship captain.

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Esteban Trev HNY ET. I studied philosophy in university with everyone saying “whaddya gonna do with that?”. They predicted I’d end up in IT, which is fairly correct, but I also kept doing philosophy as a hobby, and that ended up adding to my net worth.

Anyway, the philo guy I zoomed in on most was Ludwig Wittgenstein, wondering if you’ve grokked him. I live until the 1950s. He came out with essentially two famous philosophies with an interim in between. From a very rich Vienna based family, fought for Austria as an artilleryman, made a prisoner of war.

But he skipped out on being rich, ironically because his family put pressure on the siblings to really succeed, make a name for themselves, and since he was born into a rich family, becoming rich was not an option, as he was rich already. No fame and glory down that road for sure.

So he lived like a hermit so he could pal around with other philo guys, like Bertrand Russell, and investigate the meaning of language to its logical (or illogical as the case may be) core.

When it comes to your example of 5 + 5 = 12, his later talk was of “language games” and he’d give examples of simple games in his posthumous Philosophical Investigations (book) which overlapped his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Some guy says “slab” and another guy brings him a slab. He sketches these actions, sometimes involving color coding and lookup tables.

It’s branching off the latter philosophy that I’d bring up the game of Quadrays and the Alternative Volumes Table (AVT) that goes with.

Games as a concept come with rules, fouls, but also innovation, and maybe episodes of ambiguity, when people just aren’t in agreement on how the rules should extend in some special case situation.

Speaking of which, this will seem tangential: I’m interested in sports wherein someone does an amazing move that’s not explicitly against the rules, but then it’s banned right away after.

I learned of two such examples recently on YouTube. (1) A figure skater does an actual flip on the ice, heals over head. She lands gracefully but the sport’s judges don’t relish all the neck-breaking and cleanup that’d stem from many imitators failing, on and off camera. Similarly: (2) a long jumper dude set a record by including a flip in mid air. Wow. Banned. Same reasons I imagine.

A lot of people aren’t familiar with what a contrarian Cantor was. I’ve read some of his original stuff and found out he took on our notion that “space is three dimensional” big time. If you ever allow your space to be both finite and discrete for some reason, i.e. let infinity drain away, then Cantor will say: hey, I can visit all your points in sequence, like we do in computer memory, so why do we say your space is “3D” even if XYZ works for ya?

At which point the mathematicians get defensive and say “yadda yadda” and innovation occurs.

A lotta layfolks will answer “space is 3D because I only need 3 coordinates, x, y, and z” (Cantor: you sure you don’t need less?). But then an athlete stunt man comes along and says “space is 4D because 4 coordinates works just as well and the minimum inside-outside made of edges faces four ways when enclosing a center”.

At this point, I could add: 5 + 5 =12 i.e. if you make your base different, a tetrahedron instead of a cube (different base shape), or 12 instead of 10 (arithmetic base), you get new moves, new rules, and therefore new truths. You get new truths for new games. Language games. And sometimes there’s confusion about which game we’re playing.