To Be Continued

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domestic Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

USAID Family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Biology of Fasting

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

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

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

Prompt:

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

Chatbot (Perplexity): 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Owning Gaza

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matryoshka Dolls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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