Cascadian Synergetics: Executive Summary (June 2025)

In Memoriam: Bill Moyers

EBN EBCS

Southern Circuit

 

Adult Discussion in Eugene

:: retired laptop cover ::

I was fortunate to be the guest of a meetup of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which runs under the auspices of the University of Oregon’s Continuing and Professional Education program. Sam and Jill brought me to this well attended two hour event focused on adult discussion of matters of public record, such as the unfolding situation in the eastern hemisphere. 

Sam introduced me as from a somewhat similar group in Portland, the Wanderers.

I was impressed by the well-moderated discussion session and was reminded of Nick Consoletti’s PhD project focused on Bohmian dialog. Once the number of participants goes beyond a certain threshold level, a kind of meandering (wandering) flow may take over in which consensus for one static position or another fails to coalesce. This is a feature not a bug. It’s the shared exposure to a collective stream of consciousness that matters.

That being said, I sensed a lot of consensus that the Iranian leadership lusts for a satanic weapon, such as those stockpiled by infidels and the morally moronic. 

Given I was a guest among strangers, I didn’t bring up the WILPF narrative, which in many ways runs counter to theirs, and which takes into account what Iran has to gain by throwing its lot in with the more civilized nations in not indulging in a fallen, criminal, craven practice, per the UN Nuke Ban Treaty (informal name).

Iran gets to ride the high road mapped out by the intelligence community, in which not having lust for a nuke, yet being attacked for it anyway, by wildly projecting unconscious politicos, guarantees future support for a civilian nuke program by a sympathetic global community. 

Iran was not irresponsible and was abiding by the NPT when it was attacked by the morally moronic. That’s a line many will stay with, and why wouldn’t they? 

The NPT, in turn, is about the nuclear-armed, more reprobate political gangs learning to rejoin civilization by making peace amongst themselves. When it’s time to verify compliance, Iranians will be on the inspection teams along with everyone else. This has been a goal all along.

However, although I was thinking a lot of these WILPF-like thoughts, I kept my mouth shut, I was there to observe, not to make waves. Again, I admired how disciplined and respectful these folks were. Some joined by Zoom.

Our shared nuclear future as a global university was not the only topic this group tackled. What about the state of education and the role of testing? What about taxes? Is Oregon sufficiently business-friendly? All these subjects were debated.

Finally, as a concluding topic, we got to the question about Jaws: what accounted for the staying power of this movie classic?  Is it a lowbrow Moby Dick? Some of us worried about the global shark population and its exploitation by various human breeds of foodie. Others reinforced the “sharks are scary” meme, which, as a scuba diver, has mostly been trained out of me. Sharks are cool, mostly harmless, and for the most part not gratuitously hostile, and yet Jaws was effective as a scary movie.

Game Night

::  faculty meetup: casey, kirby, dante ::

QuarterWorld was packed last night. Although QW is easily within walking distance, we drove there on a rainy night. Ryan didn't realize ID would be needed to get in, so we returned to fetch that. He's 24 and doesn't drink (me either anymore, but for 0.5% beer), but alcohol is served on the premises, so they screen upon entry after a certain time. 

Minors are allowed entry (we're talking an arcade palace after all) earlier in the day.

I've been mentally keeping and "idiot scorecard" meaning I monitor myself for acts of unintelligence for fun. 

Examples: 

• leaving the car window down, such that Ryan got to sit on a wet seat
• leaving the car door open overnight, risking draining the battery (she started quickly)
• trying to fix a floor lamp switch for many minutes before realizing the lamp was unplugged
• leaving the SD card out of the camera making pix go to internal memory but I can't find the cord

Sometime around when Ryan was playing Tetris, or maybe DigBug, must've been when Operation Pound Sand was going down (my name for it). I woke up to a flurry of YouTubes (today, June 22) decrying the much anticipated strike against some vintage equipment bunkers.

Ryan is visiting faculty within the Cascadia context, in an advisory capacity, as a fellow math nerd. He's been studying my Number Theory notebook and reading up on factorization algebras. 

I'm being connected to other scholars via LinkedIn contacts, including a physicist into lambda calculus according to Rowan. Call it "curriculum hardening" or "tying off loose ends" maybe. The goal is not to become inflexible (a different meaning of hardening), so much as to become riddled with many tiny holes, versus fewer gaping large ones.

Dante and Casey were here earlier in the week, also visiting faculty, although Dante is from outside the Cascadian bioregion. We're working independently of any District think tank and receive no federal funding. Our subculture is more a Pacific Rim based phenomenon, than anything Atlantic-oriented.

Last night we started watching Atlas Shrugged, the movie, a three part DVD extravaganza, set in a parallel universe where train tycoons battle it out against a backdrop similar to ours, technology-wise, with cell phones and private jets, but no commercial air or truck traffic to speak of, only rail lines. Call it a "simulator reality" wherein issues relating to ideology get hammered on.

As I was telling Ryan, this science fiction story reminds me of another one, The Iron Bridge, which features Quakers who were likewise rail and steel tycoons in a non-egalitarian backroom-governed society: that of the English industrial revolution. 

In The Iron Bridge, our heroine travels (naked) back in time to sabotage said bridge, future analysis having determined that homo sapiens industrialized too soon, before they were sapient enough. Were this hallmark of industrial progress to fail, humans could healthfully be set back on their timeline, vs mutating into monstrous warmongers.

I'm learning some video and computer game lore from Ryan, which is useful going forward in my role of Coffee Shops Network CMO, which is all about winning high scores for charitable causes and projects around the world, and building a profile on that basis.

Teacher Kit

This DIY teacher kit consists of what might be readily obtainable supplies for many, yet hard to find, let alone procure, in some locales. However, even if you the teacher are in the latter category, with no budget or access to a big inventory, it's all about mapping out conceptual content, meaning you'll be able to follow in your imagination, just based on what's depicted.

What's depicted is a pyramid of clay balls, approximately the same size. There's an imperfect handmade feel to the balls and in some claymations I'd substitute more perfectly formed clay spheres. Behind this pyramid are a couple envelopes with balls apparently drying on them. The clay balls must have been painted by what's in those squeeze bottles. We see Red, Blue, Orange, Green, Yellow, and uncolored balls.

Earlier, I'd colored the balls using Sharpie pens, by poking them with colored dots all around, accounting for their roughness now, as what I did is paint over them (except for Yellow, too far gone, started over with that one). 

The goal, using more clay I'm harvesting from around the facility (I hope to not open the sealed clay brick depicted), is to add one more layer of balls to any face and then swap out the corners with their colored counterparts, in a particular ordering orientation we call BRYG.

By adding a layer, taking the displayed 3-frequency 4-eyes (colloquialism) to 4-frequency, I'm creating what we might call a first nuclear ball, equidistant from the four corner balls. By convention, I tend to color that one Orange. 

I'll then calibrate the tetrahedron as a whole such that my edges are one diameter (subdivided into four or whatever frequency), and therefore my spokes, from the Orange ball center to any corner color ball center is 2nd root of 6, over 4 i.e. $$ \dfrac {\sqrt {6}} {4}$$

But why use messy paints to color clay balls when you can buy the clay pre-colored? Or maybe you can't. I can, blocks away at my local supermarket, except none of the clay sticks are red. Red is important in my color scheme. I should check Amazon.

 

Nightmare School Bus

Prompt:  Look, no one is driving the school bus. 
The children pretend to be amused.

Given a lot of practice during covid with getting work done remotely, the logical civilian defense action is to stay out of big cities, avoid trains and airplanes. A ghost town economy is in the offing.

We notice DC is making no preparations for citizen safety, let alone mental health, in its rush to join the lunatic fringe in support of an arch enemy (to many, including within the Pentagon). 

Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Citizens are being held hostage in the unholy land.

The appetite for work and business as usual will dissipate and the economy will grind down to a very low gear if the screens keep showing nothing but chaos and destruction. 

The filthy rich are starting to move to their bunkers some will notice. 

Should we let them emerge?  Maybe under a rock is a better place for them?

Not that the rich have much say in this. The clique maneuvering us towards a conflagration is minuscule. No one is feeling “represented” these days. 

As Jeffrey Sachs put it, we’ve been reduced to the role of helpless passengers. The school bus is running on Tesla auto-pilot, FSD: full self destruction.

We Work Together

 

Making Sense of Quadrays

Some of you "diplo" types will be interested in the cultography here, which isn't always Prime Directive anthropology where the whole point is to not disturb with your own alien culture to the point where you've disrupted the tribe under consideration. 

The paradigm anthropologist in question, the non-interventionalist, is great at (a) blending in but also (b) being forthright with the elders in terms of making it clear this is not some covert operation, not even missionary, but more innocently an opportunity to understand, document, and explain to peers back home. The goal is more mutual understanding, fostering better diplomacy on both sides down the road. 

That style of anthro is closer to what a diplomat does; they're not about undermining "the other" so much as standing up for themselves, and not being undermined. They play a defensive game, for the most part, which doesn't mean withholding criticisms or refraining from polemics to deflect insults. However, a lucky anthropologist has a support team and quick extraction services if need be, as in "OK, I see we're not getting along, I'm happy to get out of your face, let us know if you want another visit". I can see the ETs waving goodbye from their UAP windows.

Another style of anthro is more missionary, where you believe strongly in saving or liberating some target audience from some vile way of thinking organized by satanists or whatever. You're deeply invested in some goodies versus baddies melodrama, and have many unstated ulterior motives. 

"Interventionist anthropology" is not really in the same ballpark as doing "objective science" to the point of sounding oxymoronic, thanks to a gentleman (mainly male) class in a certain polite society awhile back. I'm thinking of Victorian England, at the height of the UK empire, and the emergence of "anthropology" as an academic and secular discipline, adjacent to curation and natural history.  The National Geographic Society comes to mind -- less a tool of imperialism, usually (I confess to not reading their magazine recently, is it more like The Atlantic these days?).

What does all this have to do with Quadray Coordinates? 

Put simply, Cascadians strongly notice they have a different pantheon when it comes to subcultures. More Blake and Swedenborg, less Galton, less of a NeoRoman eugenicist "us versus them" vibe. In those terms, that's hearkening back to the European schools, but then more to the point is how we don't really have to depend on Europeans that much to keep it grounded, meaning we have folk traditions that don't piggyback on eastern hemispheric mythos all that much. 

Lots to put in your pipe there, I know. Smoke it for awhile and see if it clicks. Watch the embedded YouTube to pick up on some of the cultography I'm talking about, if curious.

Andragogy with AI

:: testing some Python code in Spyder ::

In the mood to be a teacher, of self and others, I asked Perplexity.ai to remind me how Bitcoin adds to its blockchain. In case just that sentence rings no bells: imagine a tower of blocks, they can be cubes although I've argued a tetrahelix for marketing purposes, with multiple children competing to add the next block. One gets payment for adding a next block. People make a living adding next blocks.

Prompt:  In the bitcoin schema, the mining computers compete to solve a problem and the winner gets to add to the blockchain. What is the nature of this problem and can you write some Python code to simulate setting up and solving this problem?

In the initial prompt, I asked for some Python code to simulate setting up the problem and solving it. 

In the above screenshot, I've copied the code it gave me to Spyder and hit the run button, without any modifications. 

I notice it doesn't include a timer. It stops when the hash code is below a specific size, using an algorithm anyone should be able to rerun and verify.

At that point I wondered if I could get Perplexity to rewrite the Python in Hoon, the Urbit language, as it's really Nockchain that I'm looking into. I got some Hoon code back, and asked where I could run it in the cloud. Perplexity suggested I fire up my own moon or planet. 

:: running my moon ::

My planet is pretty crashed out these days, so I accessed the Dojo (Hoon prompt) through my moon instead, by pressing the Terminal button on the dashboard.

:: moon dashboard | Urbit ::

Although the Dojo appeared to digest the Hoon code for running a bitcoin style hash puzzle, I was unable to get it to actually run. The second code block returned by Perplexity was indigestible as provided, perhaps in part because of spacing issues?

:: in the dojo ::

Another InterModal Adventure

Having recently turned 67 (odometer rolling over, starting on 68th year), i.e. I passed the 67th milestone (if measuring in miles, or intervals of lifeline per one's palm), I figured I'd better get my kicks while I can. 

Bicycle riding is still a doability and I still get a kick out of it. 

Bring both tires up to pressure, don helmet, scoot out the front door and onto the "tarmac" as it were.

My journey is "intermodal" in the sense that I take advantage of TriMet's bicycle-friendly design. The TriMet system was designed to be inter-modal as the original trip planner showed. 

Put your bicycle on the bus, no problem. Unlike Seattle, Portland doesn't have a ferry system to integrate. But it does have a cable car, the kind suspended from a wire held up by towers. The cable car connects a new dense urban sector with high rises, to the OHSU hospital complex nestled in West Hills, also densely populated with campus buildings. The VA is there too.

In truth, riding a bicycle requires some level of athleticism, a level of nimbleness, which TriMet also assumes in putting a rack on the outside front, with three slots usually. Stack your bicycle in a slot, if there's room (otherwise wait for the next bus maybe), and board the bus, paying passage using the Hop sensor. 

I use my Apple Watch wallet to transfer funds to TriMet via Visa, paying senior rates since I'm 67.

My route starts with some mild uphill, which will be a challenge in proportion to not doing this recently (riding a bicycle), then comes a long downhill, where I'd consider brakes mandatory, not just for avoiding jutting in vehicles from side streets, but for avoiding insane amounts of acceleration, to where stopping gracefully just comes to be hopeless. 

With that busy SE 20th at the bottom, you'd better not be going too fast, just sayin'. Anyway, not to scare anybody, as everybody has brakes if they ride anywhere. Just use them.

Once down to the Willamette River level, close to OMSI, I hang south and follow said river all the way to Sellwood by Springwater Corridor. 

Said corridor manifests an urban renewal strategy that's not about disrupting or destroying neighborhoods so much as benignly connecting them with more solutions than before, thanks to pathways catering to non-motorized vehicles and pedestrians.

Pedestrian lifestyles tend to be healthy, meaning those who walk a lot have time to devote to their own health and well being. Relaxed walking may also involve listening to podcasts, as the vehicles are quiet anyway, and their controllers very pedestrian aware. These paths are not provided with illumination at night. They follow the same protocol as a railroad, trains carrying their lights with them.

I'm not walking, however, not in this scenario, but pedaling, gear shifting, braking. I'm also stopping to take pictures with my Lumix camera. I don't rely on my old iPhone for pictures but instead carry a separate device, which is a little unusual, but a habit I've acquired and see no reason to break. The Lumix takes great pictures. That's what I'm using throughout the embedded album above, brought over from Flickr here in the Blogger context.

This time, instead of suffering a chain coming off, like last time (thanks to non sequitur gear shifting), I allowed myself to simply dismount and exercise my walking and pushing skills, which are needed also, as a form of exercise. 

Sometimes I get in the mindset of pedaling forward no matter what, such that if I dismount I'm disallowed forward motion by foot. Get back on when ready to gain distance. It's a training technique. But I'm not looking ahead to a Seattle to Portland (S2P) at the moment (what I was training for back then). 

Just push it, why not?

Then it's through downtown Sellwood, still a relatively small town considered part of Greater Portland or the Metro area or whatever we call it. Sellwood has a newly installed bridge taking over the duties of the old one, which were and are considerable, as crossing the Willamette, a major river, is no joke and doesn't happen that often once south of the CBD (central business district). 

Sellwood is a first or final chance to change from west to east side or vice versa. The route is through downtown Sellwood west to east, but not on busy Tacoma (where the bridge is), but through sleepier side streets. I pass a school I at one time would teach at, when working with Coding with Kids. Other memories.

At this point one needs to know the secrets of Springwater Corridor, as in where to rejoin it, having left it to push uphill.

As I was saying, in this type of urban renewal one is often repurposing an old rail line, no longer used, but with right of way and an already stable bed. Turn it into a paved path but limit what can drive on it, as pedestrians will be sharing it and are known to veer unpredictably when texting and using earbuds. 

Replace rails with pavement in a lot of cases, or maybe just run something parallel to the tracks through the same corridor, taking advantage of a widenable right of way. Such is what Metro has supplied to interconnect far-flung neighborhoods by modes of transportation other than motorized vehicles.

By secrets I mean Springwater intakes, places to join it, having left it after pedaling directly under Sellwood Bridge, after an optional stop at Oaks Park if only to take pictures. I didn't do that this time, but I did stop to shoot pix of the old industrial facilities now with relic historic status. They're covered with folk art aka graffitti. 

Now when I was training for S2P, I'd rejoin the Corridor and pedal all the way out to I-205, passed Precision Castparts and other landmarks, then turn north and follow a paved bike path hugging the Max line, all the way to SE Division or Mt. Tabor latitude, then take city streets home (the Division bike lane was recently improved). 

In this new abbreviated inter-modal trip, I veer off the Springwater shortly after crossing over the bridge over SE McLoughlin, a major thoroughfare, and follow the signed path, still riding, down to the Tacoma / Sellwood Max station, the Orange Line branch of Metro's light rail system. Light rail: halfway between streetcars and passenger trains, more like subways but on the surface. Max does get to play subway through a long tunnel under the West Hills on its way to and from Beaverton, famously deep under Oregon Zoo. I could ride it out to my consulting gig at the hospital, back in the day.

So then I ride the Max with my bicycle, removing the helmet, and having paid with my Apple Watch, back to Tilikum Crossing, another new bridge, also not for cars, but for Max, buses, bicycles and pedestrians. I haven't seen any segways yet. I would imagine they're legal if able to manage the grade (Tilikum has a slope to it). 

Note that my loop is entirely on the east side. I've talked about ways to cross the Willamette (lots of bridges in town) but in this routine I the cyclist don't need to.

What I do next is hop on the FX2, a new articulated bus, or on a regular 2 if there's room for my bike on the front rack. If it's an FX2, one takes the bicycle inside, and again there are only limited slots, meaning there's an iffiness to the schedule. 

During rush hour one might as well just plan to cycle back the whole way, if not from Sellwood, at least from Tilikum, or better, if riding, from 12th and Clinton, the stop before.

Since I don't want to do that much cycling on this workout, I plan this trip for an off-peak lower-demand interval. I was the only one in need of a bike slot this time (score!). The entire loop went pretty smoothly. I celebrated by buying myself a burrito from a food trailer just off 34th and SE Division, near where I got off the FX2. 

I stuffed the burrito in its bag in my Python sweater and cycled the last few blocks back to where I started, and where my dog Sydney awaited my return. 

Since a lot of the fun for me is the photography, the first thing I did, even before eating the burrito, was upload from the camera to the pictures computer, then onward to Flickr, home of the Photostream. The next day, I'd get around to this blog post, embedding said Flickr album.

Get Your Kicks in Cascadia

 copyleft, cogsec, cc

Project Cascadia

As Cascadians we're used Cascadia to being the name of a bioregion more than a country, even though we have our own flag and sport a form of nationalism. That's because nationalism is a well-known trope. We also have Rogue Nation, with its own networks. Python Nation is another virtual nation I'm a part of.

Recognizing the reality of Cascadia doesn't keep us from seeing these other political data layers, such as that of the US and Russian federations. Oregon is like an oblast, a stan, a state.

If the situation were more dire, one might imagine the Oregon oblast trying to get on the other side of some border, outside the jurisdiction of the Feds, who might send Border Patrol to help the process along (maybe they want to kick us out of the Union once and for all).

As it stands, Cascadia has no problem being within more than one jurisdiction, with Canada the administrator of our northern areas, and the United States claiming much of our south. We also host several indigenous (n8v) nations, making our geography quite complex.

In this same sense, the oblast of Donetsk might be in Ukraine, but in this sense we're talking like in Cascadia, whereas the administrative line, by Russian constitution, is such and such, and maybe there's another constitution in the works for the oblasts out west, closer to Poland and Romania. 

I'm not aware that the western oblasts have gotten to work on such a document, but one surmises it must exist in draft form at least.

Does Cascadia have a president? No. Does it have a government at all? That's what I'm saying. No. Or rather, it has the various governments currently operating within the bioregion, none of which self identify as the government of Cascadia per se.

Cascadia is a PR project, and featured prominently during Occupy Portland as a beacon for an alternative reality, wherein we're not as fixated on the current post Napoleonic narrative, wherein the Louisiana Territories were purchased. That was obviously a European fantasy, indulged in by the lawmakers of their time. 

In retrospect, we don't have to accept the Doctrine of Discovery (the rumored Papal Bull) or any of that early lawmaking. We're free to reprogram.

Whether we do (reprogram), or not, is another question. Some generations prefer to take the work of the ancestors for granted and just perpetuate it. Why fix what ain't broken? I'm in that camp with respect to a lot of cultural and ethnic practices. I don't find them flawed. 

But when it comes to how we conduct ourselves with respect to national borders, let's just say I've become disillusioned and well understand if Gen Alpha and so forth decide to reject a lot of the presumptions and declarations we currently never think to question. 

Now that social engineers have made it possible to impose oppressive surveillance regimes on the rest of us, to an unprecedented degree, we have to think about which of these engineering cabals is promulgating the better designs. 

There's no point granting in advance that any one of them has an inherent right to tell the rest of us how it has to be.  The debates have not all been settled.  Most of them have yet to begin.

From the Framework

Martian Math Storyboard (School of Tomorrow)

I mention not working directly with the Russian schools on this Storyboard, but why the disclaimer? Who would even think that I would be, and why? Because I talk about Siberia (in Russia) and the hydroelectric dam we imagine building, and hooking up, to the global grid.

When I say Martian Math includes dharmas about hydropower, complete with dynamos and AC / DC current flows, am I saying we'll be featuring Maxwell's Equations? Why not, right? But initially I'm just focused on Energy as a quantity, and as something that drains away, even as it's replenished. I picture a "tank of joules" (like a tank of calories) and picture all the work one might get out of it, were said joules to be provided in the form of fuel.

So what about small nuke plants, of the kind OSU is reputed to have been working on. That's not an entirely different topic, especially when one considers the fusion reaction driving the condensation cycle, whereby evaporating lakes and oceans lead to rains, refilling rivers at their origins (higher up). The gravity of water flowing downhill, its inertia, is what's behind a hydrodam, and therefore nuke energy, the holy grail kind (i.e. fusion).

I'd be happy to sit in as a student auditor on some of these. We're not waiting for Kirby to get his PhD in electrostatics & electrodynamics (E&E). Phasing in his Martian vs Earthling "war of the worlds" memes isn't that difficult, given all the accomplished trailblazing. The Russians could do it sooner, is what I was suggesting in my concluding remarks. Given the open source, not secret, nature of these projects, the usual community dynamics are in play.

Boosting bus numbers around Quadrays is a priority in any case. If you're not familiar with "bus numbers" as a term, it has to do with how many people would need to get hit by a bus before torch-passing a specific knowledge and/or practice became untenable. A computer project with "low bus numbers" is in danger of fizzling, but why succumb to this fate if the content has intrinsic interest.  Sometimes you just need the right recruiter, advertiser, promoter, to boost the bus number. To that end, I've been actively filing posts to Synergeo, an online public archive, detailing how the system all works.

Sacred Geometry and Synergetics

I don't see it as "selling out" to work with the Sacred Geometry crowd on upgrading their computer graphics and animations to incorporate more themes from our Cascadian Synergetics ala the posters by Casey House of Syn-U. 

The SG community already has an abiding interest in geometry, both 2D and 3D, and occasionally nD (n = "any"), as if there's one place where the standard normie paradigm is open to spirituality, it's in the realm of "higher dimensional beings" ala Abbott's Flatland. Indeed, expectant waiting for AGI to emerge from AI deep learning (some say it has) is arguably a spiritist cult if not a full-fledged religion.

Yet despite my letting myself off the hook in allowing myself to dive in to SG, I'm more fishing for SG veterans who want to avail of concentric hierarchy themes, primarily these alternative models of combining dimensions and making height-width-depth a tetrahedral affair, with two "snakes" making complementary zig-zags, or call them "cobras".

Once snakes start intertwining we're in Caduceus country, the realm of Hermes, and from there it's easy to access mercurial texts and symbolic meanings, going back to Toth and before. We start sounding more like Theosophists in reaching back to ancient Polynesia for an alternative creation story, tracing humanity to idyllic beginnings. From Eden to Zion, could be the arc, with Zion the planetary system, including satellites, both natural (the moon) and artificial (Hubble space telescope).

I've been going back to Marshall McLuhan a lot lately. The way he got dropped from the syllabus suddenly had to do with his having to peers to carry the torch forward. I'd argue Synergetics is McLuhanesque and Fuller's fascination with Phoenician finds its echo in McLuhan. The Phoenician helped readers develop a mind's eye TV per Marshall, which Fuller associates with Euler in his more psychological passages. Gibbs is more gut-level for Fuller, visceral, tactile. The two combine, synergize, to make our sense.

Marshall manages to squeeze more meaning from Finnegans Wake then most I'd say, in how he sees it alluding to the movement from movies (films, cinema) to a yet more immersive television. Television leaves more to the imagination in some ways, drawing viewers in as a participating partners than leaving them to speculate more objectively and independently. At the same time, TV was distilling us into a Global Village, by which McLuhan did not mean some smoothly operational form of global governance. He meant something messier and more claustrophobic. I doubt he'd be surprise by our term "doom scrolling".

I've also been revisiting Synergetics against the backdrop of William Blake, thanks to Daniel, and the latter's "marriage of Heaven and Hell." Blake counterposes Energy, desire in action, with a countervailing Reason that keeps Energy in harness, systematized. Imbalances either way lead to pathologies, harmful disequilibria. With Fuller, it's Radiation versus Gravity, always complementary, and therefore a unity of opposites in the SG sense (more Jungian).

:: two cobra zigzag ::

Easter Eggs

I'm joining the small throng today who like to play up the geek meaning of "Easter Egg", namely a buried or hidden treasure, accessed via some secret key combination most likely, in a computer game. That might be the most literal rendering of the geek meaning, but by ripple effect, it can mean a lot more.

In Python World, we have two Easter Eggs that play off the keyword import, what in C they call use. If you enter import this at a Python prompt, you'll get the famous Zen of Python poem by Tim Peters. Just about every Pythonista knows this. I'd say a tad more obscure is import antigravity, which will get your browser to pop up with a famous XKCD comic (about Python of course).

I'll identify as Christian through my Quaker heritage, even though my wife, Dawn Wicca, got special clearance from her membership committee to stay non-Xtian in her identity, meaning being Quaker yet not Christian is not an oxymoron in the eyes of our Meeting. Identity is like clay: yours to shape. Different ages or eras manifest different types (back to Python, sorta). Dawn was raised Catholic and was escaping Patriarchy, yet she loved to read about Jesus and admired how good the Patriarchy was at ritual, around Easter especially.

I'll plan to join our Meeting today, on Easter Sunday, or First Day as old timey Quakers called it, wanting to decouple day names from celestial phenomena and the pagan overtones in planet-based nomenclature. Most Friends don't share those hangups today, or even think about the Moon as having anything to do with Monday. We have other Pythonistas besides me in our Meeting. I make jokes about the Snake Church sometimes and have pictures of Glenn Stockton, the late shaman, holding rubber snakes. I also promote beer drinking among Friends, and the concept of Quaker breweries, even though I've dialed way back on drinking alcohol myself. I've had my share.

Spring has sprung, big time in Portland, Garden City. Flower petals cover the sidewalks. Every couple weeks its a new bloom, with tulips and cherry blossoms withering, only to be replaced by lavender and apple blossoms, and a lot of stuff I don't know the names for. I'm weak on nomenclature when it comes to flora, a little better with fauna. Like I know what a faun is, thanks to Narnia (C.S. Lewis). I'm just another big dummy in a lotta ways, a sinner with limited access to Easter Eggs, and yet grateful for what I get.

Back in the Saddle

I was "away from my desk" as they say, over the weekend, celebrating my Uncle Bill's 100th birthday. We filled a big room with friends and relatives, and all sang sea shanties, with a group hired to lead us in doing that. Bill sang along, knowing many of them by heart.

Bill lived a life at sea in the merchant marine and later returned to matters maritime after retiring as a mining engineer. He morphed into an historian, as I've recounted elsewhere, researching submarine R&D and production in the Pacific Northwest in the pre WW1 chapter.

I took Sydney the dog on this trip. Elise arranged for her to have an annual vet appointment with her original vet. Syd used to live with Elise and family. Her husband Les and his brother Stafford were there, working on their boat, out of the water and on its trailer on the farm. We're talking a pretty big boat here.

I came home via the Edmonds-Kingston ferry, Hwy 104 to Center Road, to the unincorporated township of Quilcene, where I got to visit with old friends. The ferry is always a blast. I could have taken Sydney to an upper deck but she's usually a happy napper in the back seat. Maybe next time.

XREF:

Go By Train
TG 2016
Lost in Oregon
Lightfoots Visit
Touring the Silicon Forest
Remembering a Person

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.

Truman, Eisenhower, 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.