Revolution By Design

A common refrain, among those familiar with the Fuller corpus, is that his reputation for being a good prognosticator was overblown, as he kept saying that it’d only take ten years, of his Design Science Revolution, and we’d all be living like billionaires. 

Obviously, that never happened, right? 

Many decades have gone by and we still live in a dump of our own making.

True enough:  the DSR never happened, nor did Fuller ever promise it would. 

It’s not like humanity ever woke up to its option and whole-heartedly and self-consciously went for it, like some did around putting a man on the moon. Fuller did invoke the Apollo Project in Critical Path, as what a design science revolution would look like, but with Spaceship Earth at its center rather than its satellite (or Mars). 

But again, we never woke up to that degree and continued committing resources towards Armageddon.

In my narrative, the Open Source Revolution (OSR) was in alignment with a DSR, in terms of both philosophy and methodology. Thanks to engineers willing to step into the role of lawyers, to codify copyleft and Creative Commons, living standards did improve. 

Even the original PC revolution may be attributed to people remaining free and open about their work, dodging the suffocating practices of intellectual property lawyers. The next revolution was sparked by the GNU community enabling Linux, when “dodging” was replaced with outright resistance. 

How about the billions of billionaires? How could that ever happen? 

A closer reading of Fuller reveals what he meant: the King of England in 1492 never had an iPhone or anesthetics, let alone cardiologists of today’s caliber. Money couldn’t buy what did not yet exist. 

Fuller is measuring by an absolute scale, not a relative one. 

Every sailor on a first class navy ship is in a sense a billionaire relative to sailors crewing wooden warships in the 1400s. Submarines improved a lot too. 

A middle class lifestyle today, one involving jet travel, healthcare, telecommunications, potentially far exceeds in quality that of a noble or lord just a few generations back. 

Which isn’t to say one can’t be miserable regardless of one’s physical circumstances. Fuller is accused of going for a “tech fix” for everything, whereas our issues are deeply spiritual. “Solve too many problems and we’d all die of boredom” — one hears that point of view expressed. 

Would that boredom could be our major problem; we’d learn what’s most interesting to think and do. Solving problems does not stop the flow of novel problems. Life will always remain problematic, is my prediction, regardless of how many goals we achieve. But is that really a problem?

Today, we’re all impoverished by living on a ghetto planet that still experiences hellishly high opportunity costs, per our oft-cited GST diagram of the situation. 

Everyone’s life would be better if it wasn’t against a backdrop of mass starvation, mass bombardment, mass disease. 

Poverty impoverishes us collectively, gated communities and limos with darkened windows notwithstanding. That’s why the myth of “richest country in the world” rings hollow, as the inequalities, the disparities, characterize our collective identity. Let’s just say there’s ample room for improvement.

Got Milk?

Greater Philadelphia Meetup (Xmas Eve, 2025)

J. Bullock is doing a great job anchoring Comprehensivist Wednesdays, originally anchored by CJ. 

CJ (Chris Fearnley) was one of the original World Gamers (if I may be permitted that shorthand), a cofounder of the Synergetics Collaborative, and the original compiler of the Fuller FAQ, when the web was still new. I'd visit CJ in Greater Philly, both when I lived nearby in Cosmopolis (Northeast Corridor megalopolis, with Philadelphia a center of gravity), and when NPYM (regional Quakers) flew me to Friends Center for AFSC summit meetups. I didn't skip out on my AFSC functions but would have enough time off to hookup with my designer chums, Kiyoshi also.

Twas my privilege this Christmas Eve to join Bullock and company in a continuing drill-down into the many finepoint distinctions we might want to make, between say "reasoning and understanding" (above the line) versus simply optimizing for predictability ala LLMs (below the line). Several of us engaged with his model, already clearly worked out. Like Shrikant, Joe is into diagrammed heuristics, and that works well given our medium (recorded synchronous Zoom meetup).

I thought the funniest part of the meetup was when the PowerPoint creative confessed to using old fashioned cut and paste techniques, but telling the client this was AI, because the client wanted AI irrespective of the aesthetic impact, which might've been subpar had one of the AI solutions actually been used.

I think what Glenn Stockton found mystifying, and also maddening, was how academics seemed so hell-bent on disagreeing, seemingly only for the sake of being disagreeable. Growing up in the military, but later Antioch (a university without walls), his disposition was to make allies and even friends, and not engage in any aspect of mutual tearing down; that's what one does with an enemy.

My take, coming from videos on digestive juices (I like to study metabolics), is some folks "digest" another's thinking much the way a digestive tract would: by secreting corrosive acids and other chemicals good a breaking something down, because at some level "understanding" is achieved by "eating" (incorporation) which is the opposite of "just leaving it alone".

I'll cop to being "digestive" in my approach to most philosophies simply as a consequence of my "no globals" approach, meaning I test to see if the system has pretensions to ruling the world (most don't). Like in the chat, I invoked my hero Ludwig Wittgenstein again:

2025-12-24 18:54:51 From Kirby Urner to Everyone:

A favorite quote of mine, from Philosophical Investigations (L. Wittgenstein):

We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential, in our investigation, resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, proof, truth, experience, and so on. This order is a super-order between — so to speak—concepts. Whereas, of course if the words “language”, “experience”, “world”, have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words “table”, “lamp”, “door”. (#97)

D LJ:👍🏼

And then later, further down:

2025-12-24 19:51:38 From Kirby Urner to Everyone:

Hinton’s use of high dimensional geometry does not imply people think geometrically i.e. conceive of thinking in geometric terms. LLMs process mathematically in ways we might characterize as geometric.

2025-12-24 19:52:20 From Kirby Urner to Everyone:

Agreement on what all these terms mean: understanding, intelligence, reason, is always going to be limited, as these are token we compute with, not fixed stars in anyone’s private sky.

D LJ:👍🏼

Yeah, typo, shoulda been "tokens" (plural). 

My point being: we can't simultaneously all agree on what all these key terms mean and keep computing with them (an ongoing computation) at the same time. We're coming to terms with our terms, always. They're not a means to an end so much as our continually adaptive framework.

That being said, I do think it obvious that standardization and agreement within and even among networks (schools, professions, subcultures) is possible and I understand the frustration when people want to pointlessly frustrate the task. 

But maybe they're just helping us hammer it out more, in light of feedback? 

That's the attitude Joe takes, and it works. He's learning from whatever pushback he's getting. This won't deter him from continuing to add value to his theory, model or system. That's a good attitude for a group discussion leader and moderator. He's an eager consumer of whatever we have to contribute, which invites participation. 

Having a lot of regulars helps too of course. When a meetup is all strangers (to one another), there's a kind of ice-breaking that needs to occur, whereas if the meetup centers around some well-established core dynamics, then it's more a matter of breaking in to something structured, which is often a lot easier, not to mention more efficient, than starting over from scratch every time.

slide by Joe Bullock

slide by Kirby Urner

Debate Culture

What high school is being like for me is I'm remapping my devices and learning to use Bluetooth more effectively. I've got the iPad clipped to the Elliptic and just need to add the USB C to have the latter power the former. I can watch my vids and listen to my tunes while working out, like when I had a gym membership (I joined Gold's when it moved into what is now a Trader Joe's property, and which later become a 24 Hour Fitness across the street -- that one is still in operation I'm pretty sure, and will soon enjoy greater population density given all the infill going on).

Of course deeper rewiring is going on. I don't see these blogs as a way of getting everything into words. I have no magic bullet nor panacea for curing the shortcomings of words. That words ultimately fall short may be taken as a given to appreciate versus some issue in need of solution. Who said words provided complete testing coverage or however we wanna say it?

The recent posts to Synergeo with PDFs attached have focused on our Silicon Forest curriculum, old hat for that listserv (publicly archived). We're going with "Casino Math" in part because of "Indian Gaming" and the role of tribal resources vs-a-vs regional development, which some Euros might call "de development" as the agenda may be a return to wetlands. Call it "anti pave over" (what Euros like to do). To "pave over" has a double meaning in English. To "pave over" is to "cover up" as in "deliberately overlook" or "purposely ignore" (willful blindness).

The new Winter Term has started at School of Tomorrow. We celebrated the end of Fall and the beginning of Winter at the Pauling House on the 19th (the nearest Friday on or before). Terry Bristol, Nirel... some joined us by Zoom if only fleetingly. We raised our glasses to Jon Bunce, who passed away days before. Nirel has been coordinating Jon's care and invited his caregiver team into our midst. As Bob explained to me later, at least of of that team was a musician, in a band called Voodoo Dollz. We pulled up one of their albums on Spotify.

The word many use in describing Jon is "elegant", as he had a very cultured background, as well as outlook. He was a musician, yet polymathic. He typified Wanderers well, and anchor-managed our coffee fund, showing early to make us coffee. I like to get our meetings out of the way then go to My Father's Place, an eatery on Grand. I used to hang out with the guy a lot when he lived near Westmoreland. Then he moved, and Wanderers stopped meeting weekly, and I didn't see him for like a decade. Then he showed up on my radar again, moving to a facility in the vicinity. The prognosis was positive, however he seemed ready to checkout, eased into a next chapter by angels (I'm remembering my use of "elven chyx" years ago).

Debate Culture is being worked out in the Rumble + YouTube environment from my angle. The casters are evolving best practices, while butting heads. The stakes seem high, with money on the table. Risks are involved. Casino Math. 

My own exposure to Debate Culture was through Cleveland High School, one of Portland's public schools. My daughter helped coach Gonzo form a new team, the Cleveland Cannibals, and as a parent, I got to attend meetups and be a judge, although not of events my daughter was in. 

Driver Education

:: don’t drink and drive ::

Readers here are likely familiar with my “high school every fifteen years” schtick. That’s not a fixed number, and in fifteen years what “high school” means can change a lot. In another sense I’m saying: you’ll have to return to mastering the basics periodically no matter what. But wouldn’t it be swell (nice) to have institutional support?

Let’s look at that vista quite literally. What do we lean in high school, a lot of us (not me, but I’m generalizing): how to drive. My daughter got support through her high school, which contracted out to professional driving teachers. I went to a parents-of-young-drivers presentation and learned how the basics of driving were nowadays taught differently. As a boomer, no one ever told me to keep the headlamps lit (they were gaslit in those days — JK) even in the daytime. Plus we spread the side view mirrors wider in the new paradigm. Trainees think about the car inside an invisible box and so on…

Now imagine investing all the billions we’ve put into driverless cars, robot-piloted, into driver re-education programs instead. These could be fun experiences. Maybe the focus is parallel parking. You’ve been driving for years but hate to attempt that maneuver. Or maybe, for you, it’s the stick shift you never mastered. I remember my earlier confusions with a stick shift (I got good at it, though not to a race car driver level obviously). Imagine a parallel universe in which adults went off to practice car-driving as routinely as they go off to practice golf swings or shooting bullets at live animals. I know, crazy right?

You could go to high school, as a fifty plus year old, to learn sailing a small sailing boat. I got to learn that in my teens at a Club Med. I learned a lot on that trip. Black Sea, Romania.

Clearly I’m blurring the meaning of “high school” quite intentionally. People picture desks in rows and columns with a teacher up front, like a preacher or something. My School of Tomorrow doesn’t operate like that usually. I’ve given talks in colleges and high schools, but where I talk most is on YouTube, which is par for the course. Today’s teachers use social media. Unless they’re stuck in a rut because they haven’t been back to basics in a while. Those are the folks poised to leap frog those actively publishing today.

Now that people live longer, what’s somewhat more evident are the intergenerational alliances that form when people two or more generations apart are getting updated on the latest. For the oldsters, it’s in part review, but it may seem rather alien how they teach it today. For the youngsters, it’s a first exposure, but they’re free to examine how the stuff used to be imparted. A first responsibility of pedagogues is to awaken a sense of what it takes to self educate and / or to educate others; pedagogy and / or andragogy become topics in their own right. 

Cyber Footprint

on X

Nuremberg (movie review)

The ball got rolling, for me to see this one, at Mercado Group, my name for our bevy of professional librarians, now retired, who (a) devour media (b) have opinions about what’s worthwhile and (c) are Russell Crowe fans. And Nuremberg was just opening in theaters they told me, Russell Crowe a star therein.

I’d been casting about for a next film, ready to break the streak of rented noirs, and putting off Wicked 2 in case I could coordinate with another movie buff. So the fact it was pouring rain was no deterrent. The HotSpot Trip Planner (same as TriMet’s) advised an FX2 would get me to Fox Tower with time to spare that very afternoon (earlier today).

Having gotten there early (to the theater lobby) and with no one else around, I started doing voice to text into my phone, as I’m wont to do. This time my words were bound for Lithuania, which my longer term readers may recognize as part of my far-flung network. That’s apropos as the Baltic states are where a lot of this particular war happened, and is happening still depending on how you look at it. Lots of German armor has been heading towards Russia again.

Yes, I’m finally getting to the movie, which I thought sturdy, robust, well-made. It had all the elements. We’ve already had decades of WW2 movies haven’t we? Part of the challenge is cutting through that blanket of make-believe atop reality. Documentary footage helped.

Believe it or not, I’ve become a tad forgetful and even though I well-know Gladiator and should easily recognize the Beautiful Mind guy, I actually wondered for far too long, which one was Russ. Obviously he’s the fat German. Most people know that going in.

How could I be that confused? Maybe I’ve been indulging in too much Oregon cannabis? At least I’m not into salvia, also legal, and thanks to Paul, I own a specimen which, being a tropical plant, may not make it through the winter even indoors. That one gets lots of negative trip reports.

Anyway, back to the movie, we were 98% to the end I’m pretty sure. Our psychiatrist was back on the train, after the verdicts were in. We had taken in some gallows action, when all of a sudden a movie theater employee broke into the 1940s to bring us back to the 2020s: we needed to leave the theater now, as Fox Tower was on fire. The five or six of us left in an orderly fashion (this was a matinee on a Monday and most people are at work).

I came outside to an eerily calm scene, with fire trucks and firefighters everywhere, in full battle gear, but no one was running or shouting or seemed very flustered. Had the fire been put out already? 

I scanned the building but didn’t see anything. This was no towering inferno spectacle. I decided my dog probably needed out, so I didn’t stick around long. I was on the FX2 heading home pretty quickly, snapping a few pictures as I exited the scene.

I haven’t read any reviews yet. I expect a lot of them will be positive. I thought the performances were all stellar. 

The topic is very serious: man’s inhumanity. As a species, we fall short of what we think humanity should be. Do we have any institutions that might address these shortcomings? A lot of hope gets put into being law abiding, but as this movie points out, there’s not been much law in this area of altercation between nations, let alone enforcement thereof. We witness a similar situation some hundred years later (counting WW1 and 2 as a single war with an interregnum).

Incyder Talk

TG 2025

Synergetic Geometry: Volumes Table

As rendered by pandas in a Jupyter Notebook

TG in CrowTown

TG is an accepted moniker (token) for Thanksgiving in these parts. Xmas is likewise not controversial in my circles, not a sign of disrespect or other baggage. 

“CrowTown” as a moniker for Portland, on the other hand, might be met with objections, perhaps more for the CamelCase than the confession (that we’re overrun with crows, a welcome phenom). 

Would crow_town be better? Lowercase and snake_case might indeed be closer to the metal.

My TG scenario starts with wardrobe and accessories for a change, as opposed to always thinking about the food. My new Men’s Wearhouse suit is suitable, shall we say. I’m not trying to flaunt wealth with G7-G8 level skins, just blend in as another KFC Colonel in Japan. 

Hah hah, that’s with reference to Japanese pop culture in 1985 Japan. 

Let me quote my account from Facebook this morning:

Language Project Poster

Hoopla Two

Learn the Ropes Village

In a generic sense, we've seen "learn the ropes" villages a million times, again and again. Every Christian camp or the like, if we're talking evangelicals, but speaking from my background as Unprogrammed Friend (that's a thing), we had them also. 

Rainbow Gathering? I missed out on going, but a lot of my friends went. My influences are varied. I also lived in a trailer park, I mean mobile homes estate, in Gulf Coast Florida.

Inevitably, these camps will have a ropes course, and I'm not saying mine wouldn't necessarily (nor would), just what I mean by "ropes" is not that literal, but from the English idiom, meaning "developing the skill sets necessary" for whatever specific kinds of work.

For example, when you learn the ropes on a farm, that may involve keeping to a calendar, following workflows involving heavy equipment. If you're an airplane pilot, you might get time in a flight simulator. In geek speak, one could liken "learning the ropes" to becoming the master of some API.

Speaking of geeks, I'd liken my projected School of Tomorrow camps to computer camps in that, although outdoors, we'll have indoor experiences, including perhaps in a portable planetarium, even if the stars are clearly visible. It's not either/or when it comes to map vs territory.

I'm recycling the above 4D Solutions channel vid because of the showcase prototype villages already in operation in the eastern hemisphere. I'd be looking to assemble something similar, with a cast of prototypers willing to test out "pod life" while "learning the ropes", in the Rogue Valley area, for example.

Naturally anything so cinematically interesting would be captured to video and shared with patrons, other viewers, would-be joiners, those looking back. Self chronicling is built into the workflows, as is product placement in some cases, meaning vendor donors get critical feedback on their artifacts in action, ala the Project Renaissance model, wherein nonprofit biofirms, such as Project Earthala, have front line test piloting responsibilities.

Sometimes we're not just learning the ropes as apprentice newbies, but experimenting with developing the initial rope system, establishing templates, such as were developed at New Alchemy Institute and by John Todd and other bioengineers. Before we're ready to pass on working systems to apprentices, we need those working systems to pass on.

So will the various religious denominations be involved?  Of course. Some camps will be the result of collaborations, suggesting a sophisticated secular infrastructure that keeps the various religions in productive configurations, versus butting heads.

I've always seen Quakerism as connecting with meticulous recordkeeping, including bookkeeping, whereas I associate Mormonism with a focus on mapping ancestry. 

These are stereotypes to some degree, yet help predict the flavor of the apprenticeships on offer. Quaker campers might study SQL / NoSQL, while being encouraged to get into blogging (journaling already being an encouraged practice). 

Some Quaker camps might feature beer making, and all the farming that goes into that.

Calculus with Python

:: profile ::

I'm on academia dot edu. Even though many don't consider that to be a meaningful institution, I have to congratulate them on snagging that domain. For that alone, they deserve some applause.

Anyway, of the papers I share through that venue (channel), probably the one getting the most attention is Calculus with Python, which is short and pithy.

In that paper, I account as a shortcoming (to overcome) in most calculus intros that they eschew the Bell Curve, the Gaussian, the Normal Curve, because it's not easily integrable, no matter that the area under that curve is the bread and butter of a whole branch of maths: data science.

Since that paper has been in circulation, we've seen some advances in some curricula, where tackling the integration of the Bell Curve, in a relatively simple manner, is accomplished. I've seen the calculations popularized on the Numberphile channel. Textbook authors have more to go on in popular culture now.

In other words, everything I write about tends to be a moving target.  However, from that it doesn't follow that I need to remove my record of "aimed and fired" i.e. the debugging I was proposing may have happened since then, so let's applaud those improvements and move on.

:: user activity ::

:: profile views ::

No Kings | Cascadia: Who's Behind the PR?

Substack version

Before the Show

Internet Outage

:: CNN reports on internet failure ::

On top of the USG shutdown ("she's not rebooting kiptin!"), Americans woke up to a dead internet, not in such a theoretical way. Something east coast and AWS-related was being implicated, but on Garble News (aka legacy media) everything stays murky, only sometimes by design.

I'm assuming the massive outage is what's behind Flickr being down as well.

Facebook (Meta) is up and running and I'm continuing to monitor the Food Not Bombs channels for feedback on No Kings. FNB is often obstructed by DNC types who don't like the messaging around free food, no means testing. 

From my Portlandia perspective, I'm not as certain as FNB seems to be that Dems really are in control of Frogtifa. It's a pretty disobedient bunch. GenZ is restless (flash on Nepal). 

Dems tend to be too old and stuffy for their tastes (that's just a consequence of demographics; I'm not suggesting any deep theory).

Speaking of old and stuffy, take that so-called "pacifist" in Escapade, an insufferable jerk in a movie I'd never heard of until the other day, and made before my time (1955). 

These kids are like the polar opposite of those in Lord of the Flies. Left to their own devices, rather then turn into uncivilized morons, these GenZers instead employ subterfuge to circumvent their elders, and engage in their own brand of coordinated heroics.

No Royals!

Royals: not what the colonies had in mind.

Doing Homework

I’ve got my head back in ai this morning, poking around in recent British history. Oswald Mosley again. Remember Systematic Ideology? Dora Marsden.

I see Subgenius (Church of) as a kind of Hobo College, or Hull House, receptive to off-beat or simply heretical teachings. I think of Chris Hedges, trained for the church, speaks Arabic, NYT bureau chief, since turned renegade, and these days a YouTube influencer.

Therefore I shared a link to my newest sharable deck on one of the Subgenius Mastodon servers, inviting anonymous others, unknown to me, to anchor their symposium with these slides, and other decks like it. This was the deck I came up with right after this post to BizMo Diaries.

For those new to these blogs, the science fictional trope or pattern language is that the bizmo fleets get deployed and dispatched by Control Room, and are operated by the World Game players. A bizmo is like an RV but built for business, not retirement. The piloting crews might include retirement-age seniors either way. Each bizmo keeps its log or chronology, hence “BizMo Diaries”.

I’m only watching the Stephen Miller Show (not to be confused with the Tim Dillon Show) out of the corner of my eye, as I am nowhere near the infamous ICE building at the tip of Portland’s newest bevy of high rises, connected by cable car to Pill Hill. How many pills does the cable car hold I wonder?

The Stephen Miller Show was a live action cosplay encounter between his agents and the so called antifa, which I gather came along after Occupy (my cohort). We didn’t demonize police (part of the 99%) and left the OPDX campus in an orderly fashion (not everyone got the memo). 

I don’t know any antifa, but then my friends tend to be in retirement homes these days. Does antifa have those? Sounds like an SNL skit.

Juggling Tasks

Continuing on the theme of juggling, starting with Friends doing that in remote rural Oregon, during a winter festival, I now turn to “juggling tasks” as my topic, otherwise known as multi-tasking. 

Anyone who does chores, which is just about everyone, knows what it means to switch one’s attention from A to B to C, back to B, then C, then A and so on.  Both farmers and housekeepers multitask. But then so does everyone. Life is a juggling act in a lot of ways. The phrase “juggling a busy calendar” is idiomatic and applies to any randomly active worker bee.

In computer languages, multitasking is addressed in various ways. But before diving into any of that, we should zoom back and look at the Liberty ships and their construction, across from Vanport, Oregon, a company town set up by the Kaiser company during the Great Patriotic War, to help the Russians. 

Fast construction of war machines motivated the evolution of operations research into project management and other such sciences (queuing theory…) devoted to multi-tasking and optimization. Some will remember Taylorism in this vein (book: Cheaper by the Dozen).

The short-order cook is often your paradigm multitasker in textbook analogies. The cook has a queue operationalized as a literal wheel mounted horizontally above the counter, to which customer orders are clipped. The cook returns the chit (order) next to the plate when it’s finished (in this restaurant anyway). 

In between, the cook is preoccupied with flipping eggs and pancakes, frying  hash browns, toasting toast. Maybe there’s more than one cook, plus a prep team keeping the supplies coming as needed, from the walk in refrigerator and so on. A single human has limited capacity, no matter how skilled. One juggler is able to juggle only so many balls.

Turning to computer languages, in FoxPro (a flavor of xBase) we had the famous READ EVENTS which we’d but at the end of a block of code wherein all manner of GUI widgets, interactive gizmos, had been defined. The event reader would play the role of the scheduler-juggler, awaiting events such as mouse clicks and keypresses, and handling them, right there and then. Like a short order cook. 

Do whatever is ready to be done. If the pot hasn’t boiled yet, keep waiting and don't just stand there watching it; do something else. 

Computer code can be a lot like that: many pending tasks, each handled when ready. Picture eggs incubating. When an egg hatches, deal with it, whatever that means. These are figurative eggs representing awaited outcomes. When your ship comes in, unload it, give the crew shore leave and so on.  Ships sometimes queue, awaiting an unloading dock, ditto airplanes.

Switching topics (tasks): I’m thinking that for andragogical reasons, when we get to the tetrahedron’s two perpendiculars, not touching each other, we’ll talk about the centrioles and their mutual orientation within the centrosome. 

What’s a centrosome? 

It’s a kind of puppet master criss-cross (the centrioles) from which strings descend to puppet limbs (we’re talking marionettes), except in this case the strings go to chromosomes. 

When a cell splits (mitosis), the centrosome does so first and then each attaches strings to all the chromosome in its portion, and the two pull these DNA coils apart, such that by the end of mitosis, each cell has secured its complement of genetic code.

That’s not the whole story with centrosomes though. They anchor the entire cytoskeleton by means of microtubules, of which nine pass, like cables, through each centriole. The tension network holding the cell together starts from there, with microtubules cooperating with intermediate microfilaments and so forth.

What’s important to us is the geometric configuration of the centrioles within the centrosome. We’ll stylize the relationship as that of two opposite edges of a regular tetrahedron.

Cascadian Entomology

Back in the day, when I was more under the late Ed Applewhite's tutelage, or lets say when I regarded him as a key mentor (who wouldn't?), which I still do, he pointed me towards E.O. Wilson's writings, wondering what my assessment was. He was curious as he already knew I'd be a torch bearer for Synergetics, the thing he'd worked on all those years, with his mentor Dr. Fuller.

Fast forward and I'm still circling entomology, the study of insects, partly in my study of "hive minds" in the sense of trans-individual, by which I mean social and perhaps institutional. I was introduced to the vocabulary of sociology pretty early, in 8th grade, by Fred Craden, our Sociology teacher at the Overseas School of Rome (OSR), as it was then called (AOSR today). 

I'm currently thinking Applewhite would've seen why I'm fan of David Graeber, who came along later, and who was involved in Occupy, as I was, though on the opposite coast. 

Portland's Occupy was special because of how the Bonus Army began its campaign (there in Portland, in that very city square) that ended up in the infamous Hooverville, the vet encampment outside the White House. We've seen this pattern repeat too. Smedley Butler was a witness to MacArthur's thuggish vanquishing of the veterans' village, on Hoover's instructions.

Through my study of the Active Inference corpus, I've also re-encountered Applewhite's own writings about ants in his Paradise Mislaid. He was engaged in a polymathic, cross-disciplinary study around the perennial "what is life really?" question. What are its characteristics? Does it have an essence? 

He'd cross paths with biologists much as he'd crossed paths with crystallographers in connection with his work on Synergetics and Synergetics 2 (both Macmillan) plus he'd authored the Synergetics Dictionary (Garland Press). E.O. Wilson is in PM's index, right before Wittgenstein.

Asylum District

The casual tourist might assume that our Asylum District fixation has to do with the ongoing immigrants vs native Americans melodrama and the Sanctuary Cities movement. 

Whereas Portland is sympathetic to the natives' plight, our Asylum traces to an actual mental hospital, or sanitarium, in what was once a grassy wooded area with streams and creeks, between the Willamette River and SE 12th Street.

The process of urbanization long ago obliterated that property, but the memories linger in the place names. 

Hawthorne Blvd. is named for the leading doctor administrator of said institution, officially Oregon State's before facilities in Salem had been constructed.

One might disagree with my terminology in calling myself one of the immigrants, even though I was born in Chicago and my family goes back some generations on the North American continent (to even before 1776 along the Urner line), but that's how a lot of locals think of later archeological layers, as unwelcome interlopers but maybe with some welcome aspects as well, depending on the scenario we're talking about.

For example, those who considered themselves the original native Bhutanese ordered a kind of ethnic cleansing of their territory of later "immigrant populations" where the families in question might've been there for several generations and considered themselves citizens. We're not talking about a bloody genocide, just an expulsion. I'm not the expert. My family had left Thimphu before all this happened.

So in that longer term sense, we might speak of "immigrants" from both the Atlantic and Pacific side (Eurasia from both directions), with their "conquer what you can" Doctrine of Discovery, whereas the natives were here already going back to Aztec and Inca times, and before.

It's easy enough to declare the Louisiana Purchase a done deal on paper, with signatures and everything, but the consequences of such declarations take awhile to unfold and sometimes encounter other narratives which don't come pre-equipped with a lot of buy-in.

History is continually being revised, even as "revisionists" are usually despised for what they're doing.

Podcasting from Cascadia

:: broadcasting from Mt. Tabor ::

Electric ATVs

Given my evident seniority, a euphemism for senior citizen status, or geezer-hood as Jane Snyder started calling us, long before due I thought — she got me ready — I’m thinking about whether people my age should be riding electric ATVs through the forest. That’s isn’t the only cohort I think about, it’s just that I think about my niche.

The electric ATV motif goes back to Project Earthala in these blog posts, which we might see as a branch of “EPCOT West” (another motif). We have this science research campus somewhere near Great Slave Lake (that’s in Canada) and we get around on these rechargeable battery powered ATVs a lot of the time. That’s like a cinematic video clip, something AI could do pretty easily.

Another scenario in which electric vehicles figured was my Ben & Jerry’s in Cuba scene. That was about Unilever standing up to Procter & Gamble and deciding to establish an ice cream factory near Havana somewhere, offering those kinds of jobs the wandering task taking tourists like to get, like driving an ice cream truck around Cuba. Again, AI renderings played a role in the slide decks or whatever.

Fall Equinox 2025

Technically speaking, going by the astronomy tables, the actual Fall Equinox isn't until sometime around Monday, meaning day after tomorrow from the standpoint of today, the Saturday morning prior. 

However, our Wanderers group, which at one time met weekly (more like Mercado Group for me), now meets about four times a year, to celebrate / acknowledge the two solstices (winter, summer) and two equinoxes (fall, spring). The closest Friday to this fall's equinox was yesterday, so I'm looking back on our most recent gathering (wave to everyone).

When we get to a part of the conversation where people are talking about their first religion (which could still be their religion, or not, life stories vary), my standard line is "OMSI was my religion" by which I mean the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, just across the parking lot from Oregon Zoo when I was little. OMSI has since moved, to the east bank of the Willamette River, taking over the site of a PG&E power station, incorporating that building into its own footprint. Oregon Zoo has continued morphing and expanding.

By "OMSI was my religion" one might think I'm claiming loyalty to materialist reductionist science, however in 2nd grade (the age I'm remembering), I wasn't yet schooled enough to think in those terms. For me, it was about the interactive exhibits, the giant heart we could walk through, and all those buttons. You'd push some button and a little show would take place, better than a stiff-still diorama, the more standard alcove exhibit when one walks the great halls of any random museum about something 3D (add motion for 4D -- some of the dinos might swivel their heads).

A museum one might in retrospect call the MotherShip is the Deutsches Museum in Munich (Munchen) Bavaria, Germany. I got to visit there when I was a little older, and Nirvana Я Us (or were us), I have to say. That's when our family lived in Rome and Bavaria was but a few autostradas and autobahns away.

Speaking of "backwards R" (Я), you may pronounce that "Yar!" in Cascadian, connoting "talk like a pirate" like in cartoons. Yesterday, September 19, was also Talk Like a Pirate Day, a theme in these blogs. Portlanders like their pirate memes. "Piracy" even still has current meaning, as in "what the FBI is up against" when it comes to kids using Napster and like that. Pirate Bay and all that. 

Come to think of it, I recall attending a luncheon seminar in an OMSI conference room (near the entrance) where the topic was how police were monitoring electronic copying at PSU (this was back when I was affiliated with the Hillsboro West Precinct via Saturday Academy).

As a capital of Software Libre (you wonder where that "liberal" went, a favorite flavor), Portland doesn't advocate breaking the dinos' laws, but does encourage co-creating alternative ecosystems wherein copying digital assets around among network hosts is not considered illegal; it's a feature not a bug. 

When we make our media, our business models already work backwards from the assumption of infinite free copiability, as a rule of thumb. Some call it the "Grateful Dead model" (for good reason: the Dead encouraged private recordings and bootleg distributions of their performances). 

Free copiability is not incompatible with restricted access. We're not compelled to share; a treasure might still get buried, per the map. Sometimes a puzzle only resolves per the individual in a not-copiable way.  Published solutions come across as a lot of blah blah to most readers. Nature has lots of membranes, barriers, other semi-permeable manifolds (veils, curtains...).

So, full circle: last night I found myself in the OMSI planetarium getting brainwashed by my old boyhood religion, like getting reinitiated. But now that I've been a Princeton philo guy, I wouldn't say materialist reductionist would describe it. OMSI was casting (projecting) Trusting the Universe: the Philosophy of Alan Watts, a mesmerizing experience by Amir Aziz wherein we get mandala computer graphics (animations) mixed with Alan Watts in his own words (a voice recording), subtitles projected, in English, in the margins, slightly above the planetarium's horizon line. 

Most people there last night likely didn't need the subtitles, as their native tongue is close enough to English to make Watts pretty easy to understand.

At the moment I decided to buy a ticket for this event, an electronic document in my Apple Wallet, a QR code admission thing, I'd spaced out that the Wanderers Fall Equinox Gathering was that same night, the nearest Friday as you'll recall.  Fortunately, our gather starts at 7 PM and the show wasn't until 9:30 PM and OMSI is not far away in terms of time, by motor vehicle. 

Per plan, I dropped Sydney the dog back home around 9 PM and was paying for parking via ParkingKitty (another app) well before they started running their program. 

I got to relax in a comfy seat (even if my back was killing me, not literally) and trust the universe for a little while, while Alan poked holes in the idea of our treating him as a guru, opening his hand (nothing!), putting his cards on the table, to show we each had an instructive vantage point, and letting ourselves be shaped by our own experience of Universe is no crime. He also wanted to talk us out of making "experiencing nothing" our goal in meditation, moving the needle closer to the "experiencing everything" end of the spectrum.

School Chatter

Some of my School of Tomorrow topics are like tent stakes for me, in helping me define the tent inside from outside, but then I haven’t had much time within the tent yet. The Mark Fisher stuff, for example, is dense with cultural allusions that go right by me, because I haven’t yet had time for much immersion in that particular floatation tank. 

So I’m quick to defer to experts who come bustling in saying I don’t seem to know the first thing about X. That could be right. Lecture away, oh expert mam or sir or… help me fill in what I’m missing. You have the floor.

As a result of a Syn-U faculty convergence (harmonic enough) earlier this summer, there’s a new Syn-U preview of an interviews anthology in which I’m presented as an icebreaker interviewee. I knew the cameras were rolling and did my best to ignore them, sticking to a conversational persona wandering around the neighborhood and sharing my views. 

I’ve got a Crusty the Clown look going that gets me thinking of my funny line: that, like Christian Bale sometimes does, I had to put on a lot of weight to play this role.

In making that joke a few times (I plan on continuing with the intermittent fasting BTW), about gaining weight for the role, I found myself in Movie Madness renting a couple Christian Bale movies, why not: Laurel Canyon and The Machinist. 

I also bought another XL Movie Madness T-shirt to add to my collection. I’m wearing it today, right now (and both movies are still in my possession at the time of this posting).

The plan with me playing a Dymaxion clown is to show it at RISD later this month as a kind of project portal. We’re recruiting, as usual, with Cascadian Synergetics, continuing to drum up the many opportunities for collaboration, including but not limited to being interviewed. 

This wasn’t the first time in my case (like Mike Acerra had me on his channel), plus I’m a known quantity appearing solo on my own low key not-monetized channel.

In other autobiographical news, I got that second pair of eyeglasses half off, even more it worked out thanks to specifics, this pair tinted. I’ve been testing them out, and also celebrated this return to high living standards with a visit to a sushi train in the Hollywood neighborhood. I’d been imagining going there for weeks, and this week I finally found the time.

Urban Vistas (Fall Term)

In saying "urban" I'm not pitting it against "rural" as in "yes, the two go together but not every relationship has to be one of opposition; antonyms share the workload, of characterizing a spectrum". And then we have suburban, and, no doubt, semi-rural.

What I am saying, in contrast, is that I appreciate urban studies as a discipline and/or area of concentration as we'd say at Princeton (mine being philosophy at that time), and of late I've been binging on video documentaries about Portland (mixed with walk-throughs around China and clips from Burning Man). 

This focus syncs with my bold talk about Place-based Education being a great way to go, in terms of mnemonics and keeping stories anchored in personal experience. Autobio and first person perspective are implied, meaning not out of bounds, but rather encouraged. We're free to be Bayesians.

Urban renewal: I've already blogged about Robert Moses, picking up much of my info through Defunctland, a favorite YouTube channel, and its focus on old theme parks, expos, world’s fairs. Some fairs were officially recognized as expos by the expo recognizers (Seattle, Montreal...), whereas others were not (New York, Portland...). 

Portland? I'm talking about the Lewis & Clark Centennial of 1905, staged in North Portland, and mostly gone without a trace but for the NCR pavilion, now a McMenamins in St. Johns. So Portland hires Robert Moses to do another one of his famous freeway clearings, this time right through SE PDX. But the citizens fought back, and won. I-80N never happened.

Speaking of "gone without a trace", probably the most eye-opening documentary of them all, speaking subjectively, given my prescription, was the one on Vanport, its rapid rise as a microcosm of the United States then emerging: shipyard workers from everywhere, congregating all at once and working out a lifestyle, with support from Kaiser, that really rocked, according to kid testimony especially. It verged on being a true company town of the kind envisioned by John Cadbury (see Quakernomics).

But Vanport was never designed to be permanent, one reason it was allowed (Kaiser and the Feds largely paid for it), and was being gradually dismantled after the war, but also made into a large community college, serving vets (GIs on the GI Bill) especially. 

The utopian town (too loud, working class, kinda grungy, but always hopping) was pressing on towards the present, until the freak flood of 1948, which was devastating all over, to downtown Portland as well, although the Rose Festival came off as scheduled (Vanport even had a float in the Rose Parade, whereas Vanport itself had washed away in the meantime).

Vanport housing was segregated, and when it flooded, many of its African heritage families, now refugees, strangers in a strange land, moved to the Albina area, which in a later chapter was to face a lot of forced redevelopment, ala the Robert Moses chapter. I-5 and the Rose Quarter (Memorial Coliseum -- no Paul Allen Moda Center back than) had eminent domain. 

Portlanders tend to know this Rose Quarter story and nowadays celebrate what's left of the mowed down (as in bulldozed) area, from SE Mississippi north along MLK to Alberta and such places. Take it all the way to Lombard if you wanna, or to Columbia Boulevard.

But fewer, I'd wager, remember the urban renewal projects that took place closer to downtown, which explains the Keller Auditorium and environs. They took out an old European Jewish neighborhood with lots of single old men (many white ones) in hot-plate-equipped apartments, also Afro-Chinese and Native American, i.e. another microcosm, against which many of the mostly-whites in City Hall (in many cases Klan-friendly) had an immune response and wanted to erase not only physically, but from public memory.

Portland (aka Rust City) has always been a "frontier town" in many ways, with a positive spin on "pioneering" even in an age which acknowledges the imperialist nature of the immigrants' project. Quakers experienced the drive to conquer and enslave first hand in the New World, as the institutions of slavery and militarily enforced expansion filled the ambient culture around them. The Neo-Romans never left us. They established us, coming from an already-established British Empire (United Kingdom).

Generative AI

Buckminster + Herman Munster = thebuckmunster 

We've seen several experiments already around generating text, voice, imagery from the Bucky Fuller corpus. 

thebuckmunster is a convenience meme for handling machine-generated Buckyisms that it'd be inappropriate to attribute to the man himself.

This isn’t necessarily a best rendering. Roll the dice yourself why not?

Show & Tell: The BASKET Modules

:: BASKET weaving for high schoolers ::

Pythonica: A New Slide Deck

Recalling Chicago

a wanderer "hobo" September 2013

My loosely knit study group is looking at Chicago more. I should probe Mercado Group for leads; those are my retired librarians, good on fiction especially, but also non-fiction of various genres. With Chicago, the focus is two institutions, roughly contemporaneous: Hull House established by Jane Addams and friends, and Hobo College. 

A theme in both cases is spreading the fruits of education beyond the cloistered high tuition walls of a formal university, often by means of curriculum variants, meaning the content is not cloned from elsewhere, but home-brewed locally, from multiple sources.

Cascadian Synergetics aims to trod a similar path, this time encompassing the world of seniors, people looking back on choices made, vistas mastered, starring roles, in whatever walks of life. That’s a pool of experience going forward, often accompanied by a reawakened sense of curiosity, especially about roads not taken. Why not take them now, at least in gist?

Jane Addams is a founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), of which my mother was a member, as I am today, as was Linus Pauling’s wife Ava Helen, not that our family knew theirs. 

Urners overlapped the Paulings in a different way: the nonprofit think tank for which my wife and I performed technical services, authorized our engineering and public policy meetups in Linus Pauling’s boyhood home, just blocks from my Asylum District house.

Hobo College comes to me a lot through the writings of one Trevor Blake, someone I’ve always looked up to as conversant with a lot of esoterica. He used to be just blocks from me too, when he was busy curating a Bucky Fuller archive, later sent on to OSU. He introduced me to the Subgenius Church, itself a portal into many subcultures (ethnicities, namespaces, tribes), and well-armed against the kinds of pulpit subterfuge many flocks have to put up with. 

Vanity vanity all is vanity — Ecclesiastes (1:2). There’s no business like show business. We play Show & Tell. We play Hide & Seek. We play branded versions of same.

Chicago is also (a) a hub for the commercial advertising community, as much as New York and (b) an asylum city for refugees descending from old countries that are no longer, such as Prussia, Bohemia, Yugoslavia … the whole Austria-Hungarian empire. 

Let’s prompt Perplexity to talk about North American refugees from the old Ottoman Empire.

Adaptive Behaviors

:: a visit to Powell's City of Books (slides) ::

I remember one lazy August when my fridge was on the blink. I hadn’t sufficiently thawed it when the repair man came, with the consequence of waiting more weeks, I forget how many, too many. The thermostat needed replacing, a simple part, no problems since then, from some years before the SARS waves. My sister was visiting. The weather was hot, like it is today, over 100 F.

Well this year, in 2025, the fridge is not a problem, nor the stove (I even replaced a burner coil on a burner I’d not been using for literally years), nor the car (the new AAA-installed battery is working great), but my eyeglasses. 

They (plural needed for some reason) snapped near the nose, and the only backup I could find (still the case) is some old now off-prescription sunglasses at the bottom of some drawer, probably the same ones depicted in my profile picture to the right, from an earlier Life of Kirby chapter. 

I’m still able to safely drive, at least in daylight. I’m sure I see more sharply than a Waymo or Tesla, even without any glasses at all.

I’ve got new glasses on order, after pricing at both LensCrafters and Stanton’s. I had a blast driving around, like alongside that train with the two tier containers configuration. That sure was a long load, as I discovered when it came time for my route to cross its. Guess who had the right of way.

I’m still able to use computers. But I decided to skip the Python User Group organized by New Relic, which was on my calendar. I didn’t want to be wearing shades, or squinting, or be dealing with eyesight issues in any way. Maybe next time. And no, neither eyeglasses outlet was prepared to process my exotic prescription on a “while you wait” basis. The good news is my old frames (the ones that snapped) were approved as reparable and perhaps that shop, the one doing the repairs, will have them ready even before the new ones appear.

Some of the YouTubes I’ve been attending to work pretty well as audio only anyway. I enjoyed Caleb Maupin’s well-researched storytelling regarding some intellectual undercurrents I’m eager to learn more about. I also picked up a lot from these Active Inference related interviews coming from Verses, an AI company.

In my inbox, I’m being tutored about the geographical meaning of Bohemian, which has everything to do with a part of Europe, which we could circle even today. Prague and Vilnius might both be in it. People in Chicago remember a lot about this old country. Others think about Yugoslavia and what happened there.

This geographical meaning is in contrast to the literary meaning, which has more to do with a free thinking anti-conformist lifestyle originating among disaffected American writers, many of whom had moved to Paris. Bohemian in this sense gave rise to Beat, which gave rise to Hippies, although it also forked into Bohemian Grove type Bohemians, who maybe wanted the free thinking part, but without the inconvenience of material poverty and/or austerity and/or disciplined lifestyle.

Given my somewhat casual (open minded) attitude to geographical naming, I’d be fine with talking about Bohemia like another Cascadia or Jefferson State. Something not on the radar of the legal beagles? Something more science fiction and even Tolkienesque. 

We could think in terms of Bohemia, Prussia, Mesopotamia, and the Holy Roman Empire, all on a World Game map, engaged in trade. A board game. Mix and match across historical periods, why not? Cosplay as queen of Phoenicia. One could learn a lot of world history this way, if the structuring weren’t too haphazard.

Weapons (movie review)

December, 2010

My route to The Bagdad, for the camera, was by way of a bank, as I had this new bank card, a reissue of an old one, that I hadn't activated. It ended up in the bottom of some box during a scene change. I found it and wanted to see if it was still activatable. It was. Checked balance. So then walking home I realize my timing was perfect if I wanted to see Weapons. I'd made up in my head what I thought it was about, but I was way way off. Someone on YouTube said it was good, so I decided to check it out, really having no idea what I was getting into. I thought it might be a cartoon. Something silly.

What I wanna take credit for up front, as having figured out all on my own without seeing this in any review first, is I got the allusion or tribute or building upon or whatever vs-a-vs Gus Van Sant's Elephant. And by that I mean something specific: we follow multiple characters in series but go over a territory wherein everything was happening in parallel, and when we get to key junctures, we see exactly the same scene but now from the angle of this other character.

For example, we see a drugstore cowboy type, into petty theft to support his habit, trying to pry his way into some apartment. We don't get his backstory at all the first time, and the first time we see him trying to break in, from an alleyway, it's from the point of view of the cop, the teacher's lover, and in the doghouse with his wife. We've already followed the teacher in detail at this point. Later we'll follow the drugstore cowboy. This time we'll see the cop looking back at us, from the end of the alley. We follow the petty thief as he runs away, and there's the cop car, which previously we'd been looking out of. Very clever. Same as in Elephant but even more spectacular.

The only other thing I'll say about this film is it's very competent and knows the genre, which is horror. The setting is mundane middle class America, our suburban USA, with prosaic nuclear families and their variously styled big box houses. That's a great setting for horror. The contrast between the safety and security these power nesters seek, and the deep psychic disruption of the Salem witch aspect of American village life, takes us over the cuckoo's nest more than a few times.