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

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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, a 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 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 how.

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.

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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.