Philosophy Talk

Bluetooth Bat

Chronicling a Trajectory

A Coastal Loop (Spring Term)

Gaining Altitude

I oughta blog on my birthday before the midnight hour.

I received many happy returns and celebrated vicariously with my high school class of 76, where some of my cohort are enjoying an Alaska cruise.

Festivities on my end included enjoying Meeting with Bridge City Friends, shopping at Trader Joe’s, and doing a dog walk with Patrick and Quinn. 

Dave joined us in the park and ended up driving me n Sydney to Movie Madness where I rented Secondhand Lions and Big Fish, on Rosalie’s recommendation.

All this while (from before Patrick came over) I had a duck in the oven, from about 1:30 PM to 5 PM. 

I’d picked it up at WinCo and thawed it out, with the vague expectation of having it on my birthday, and so it came to pass. 

David and I ate some of the duck, which came with orange sauce, plus Patrick had brought over real oranges (I grated some of the peel into the sauce, which went straight to plates after heating), with Cesar salad (kit) and the lentil dish (my favorite), before watching Secondhand Lions, and after my fam call at 6:30 PM.

So, a good day for me.

Earlier this morning, I posted my deal with the decks (slide decks) meaning I spelled out in more detail my vision regarding how my slide decks might be shared by osmosis, via the community commons.

More Storyboarding

I'm thinking a knight (right), kinda Monty Python, could be our XYZer, the Earthling. 

He’s faced with this wholesome plate apparition (left), which the Jungians might call “a projection”. So be it. 

Our hero Earthling is being challenged to experience a more ET-like perspective. That’s often how math works, when you let it.  Insights come to one.

These are just mockups on my desk, in the instairs office. 

I have an instairs and outstairs office, just to spite my spellchecker. 

A lower floor is more inward, vs-a-vs the planet center, was the point, when first made, and some people never let go of it (or anything clever-sounding).

As I’ve said many times, Sesame Street was both a revelation and an inspiration. 

I’m talking about the workflow, of clips from all manner of artists coming in to fill the database, per a topical index, a pretty simple one (this was for little kids after all, so alphabet and basic numbers, hardly even grammar or arithmetic operations). Grammar is more by osmosis anyway, at that level.

Our database could be similar, with topics like Jitterbugs One and Two. 

Jitterbug One: the classic one we learn about early, wherein a 24 stick unstable network, of 8 triangles and 6 squares, is stabilized by adding struts across the squares, causing them to fold and crease. 14 faces (windows) becomes 20.

Jitterbug Two: similar in that a cubocta-to-icosa transformation is involved, but the better visualization is the 12 vertexes of the 2.5-volumed cubocta are “riding the rails” on an octahedron, such that the triangles enlarge by rotation, as the now 20 edges elongate. 

You wanna see an animation right? Exactly. Various scaling constants are involved, including the “S-factor” the volume of S/E.

Along those same lines: the icosahedron is used to generate its 31 great circles, with poles through opposite corners (6), faces (10), and mid-edges respectively (15). Each pole takes two opposing features.

The cuboctahedron gets the same treatment. Starting with fewer faces (14) and edges (24), we get only 25 great circles. 

Just as Jitterbug One turns one polyhedron into the other, so may we animate a dance of great circle networks. The 31 twists through the 25 and lands as an alternate set of 31, twisted the other way.

You wanna see an animation again, right?

Domestic Bliss (continued)

From 2011 (same Nissan)

I don’t expect a huge number have been waiting with bated breath to find out more about my kitchen downspout we could call it. “I’m a little teapot…” never mind, just a song. However, hate to break it to ya, this is already a Part 2 (link to Part 1) of said saga. Yes I know, tedious as hell.

But the generalizations are what matter. Say you’re a realtor. What’s it like to enter the homeowner market in this area? You have a well-developed skillset but you know what they say (“location location location”) so you need to choose carefully, about where you’ll live yourself. 

They’ve got a “garden city” for sure, those Portlanders, but the housing stock is old. Let’s look at this old guy in 97214, typical, has one of those English lab dogs… 

Demographer: “ooo, ooo, lemme guess, lemme guess… he owns a Subaru.” 

Good guess, he owns a Nissan right now, but two Subs (pronounced “soobs”) in the past. Your second guess would prolly have been a Prius. 

Exactly, you know your 97214. There’s one almost exactly like it in Austin.

So from that point of view, what happens to a guy like that when he finally realizes time has run out and his drain is clogged for good, unless he wants to spend K dollars? 

Well, in some cases he’ll make the clog go away somehow, but it’ll come back. This time we got pictures. There’s a hand-patched segment. He gave us the history. Who knows how long that’ll last or even if it could withstand a hydro-jet treatment. Count us among the skeptics.

If you guessed “that guy” was me, yep, you guessed it. 

So for now we’ll leave it alone (the downpipe). Let me keep fighting with it. Long story. He gave me some good advice for when and if I decide to snake it again — circumstances have changed since I last snaked it, which he confirmed I’d done. The plumbing company for sure does snaking (not just hydro-jetting and other stuff) but the homeowner has a role to play in these circumstances.

I’m pretty sure I blogged about that hand-patched segment earlier. You might wanna go looking. I’ll give a clue to use the search word “basement” at least. 

It’s like a fortress down there, with walls many feet thick, except on a side they might’ve built out back in the day. I don’t myself have complete records regarding the history of this building. I speculate about what it used to look like. Wasn’t it a single floor there for a while? If you work with the Oregon Historical Society and want something to do… or maybe just city public records. I’m not a realtor myself.

We used to rent around the corner up around Stephenson. A darling place, beautifully appointed but structurally weak in terms of insulation and susceptibility to basement flooding. 

This has been a dream house in many ways, after that experience, even though, yes, like many a Portland basement it gets more than damp in the rainy season (i.e. a big part of the year). I use pallets. It’s tidy enough down there, if a little dense. My plumber guy had no problem looking at my kitchen down pipe up close, snapping a picture or two for the database.  

He found it interesting that I had two mains to the sewer, one for like this drain, and another for the starboard head.

Living in a 1904 or 5 house is really worth it, from my viewpoint. It’s walking distance to Fred Meyer (a Kroger chain supermarket), is packed with trees and exotic plants, sleepy streets, dog walkers pick up their dog’s poop, lots of Subarus and Priuses and like that. Wood everywhere. 

People from China are often freaked out because it looks more like Old China than like Shanghai today. 

Parks nearby. Lots of mom and pop shops. Still mostly single and double story, some three or four. Still more like SE Foster than like SE Division in some ways. Similar street calming measures with frequent bus service?

Chinese labor helped create the northwest as we know it. The Oregon Rail Museum near OSMI (I missed Train Day this year, and heard the Tough Guy train wasn’t rail-worthy enough to exit the building on its own, at this time) devotes exhibit space to some of that history. 

More people know about the trains than about the role of Chinese in clearing area around Mt. Tabor, in what we call Asylum District today. Elementary through high school rarely covers local history in any detail in my experience. YMMV. In Rome we learned more about what’d been happening, but OSR was in no way a typical school, praise Allah.

So, to wind up, I’m a happy home owner with all these geek decals around my door as I’m stereotypical in that sense too: a remote worker with a head full of code and such geeky things. Silicon Forest is full of people like me, many even more so. I actually missed growing up here and came back in adulthood, so as geeky as I am, it’s in a different way than average and no, I’m not complaining. We’re a diverse lot in this zip code, I’m not claiming uniformity throughout Sunnyside-Richmond (another name we go by).

Since I brought up “geek topics” earlier, I’ll end with a segue to some story from Cascadia, about one of our main companies. I worked with Visual FoxPro for many years and served clients who used the Windows desktop environment all the time. I didn’t get deep into NT the way some did. My layer was more platform agnostic so when I jumped on the Python bandwagon, I found that my ticket to a more Nix-like environment. I stopped worrying about Windows a long time ago.

Story Arcs

Curriculum Exhibit A

Curriculum Exhibit B

Science Art by Lynne Taylor

:: Flickr album: click to view ::

The story here is I visited with Bradford on my way to Cornelius for Lynne's art opening. Lynne did the cover art for the ISEPP lectures for many years. Her opening at the library was well-attended. The pictures will remain on display until July. Collectors take note. 

And on that topic, Bradford has a 10-foot-tall carved door he made that he'd be willing to sell.  I'll ask him if he wants to show any pictures of it in this album.

:: The Bradford Door ::

Egyptian Arithmetic

I’m looking into building some real Egyptian-style arithmetic into our School of Tomorrow curriculum, perhaps transliterated into Python. I explain more of my rationale on Synergeo and places. 

From my outbox (fixed a typo):

Anyway, where your scholarship might come in 

handy is: while we're exploring an Egyptian 

aesthetic, we don't neglect some actual Egyptian 

maths. Let's take the opportunity to explore their

civilization.

You probably know of Ralph Abraham, UCSB, whom 

I met at a workshop in the 1990s, here in Oregon, at 

a Math Summit at Oregon State. Sir Roger Penrose, 

Ian Stewart... other big names were there. Ralph's 

keynote was about a curriculum wherein students 

take history seriously and study maths along an 

abbreviated timeline, as if in a natural history 

museum, only coming to our own maths and civ 

through this lengthy, twisty turny tunnel we 

call "the story of humans in Universe" (I remember

such a timeline exhibit at the Parliament of World 

Religions I attended, with my family, in Cape Town, 

1999, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard if I'm not 

mistaken).

Remember, we often study Midhat Gazale’s Number and Gnomon.

In the meantime, the technical literature feels pretty opaque to me so far. 

Here’s a sample from this morning’s inbox:

Longer rconstructions are suggested to reconnect aspects of Egyptian fraction division from 1202 CE to 1925 BCE as inverted to proposed 3,100-year older multiplication origins. Intermediate 300 BCE Greek (Archimedes) quotient and remainder square root approximations of the upper and lower limits of pi, decoded from a Byzantine text, were exposed by a three step inverse proportion method in 2012. The method was adopted by Arabs, Fibonacci and Galileo. The older second step apparently was used by Babylonians and/or Egyptians inverted division to multiplication. An implied third step, accuracy level, may have been trivial, and therefore was not required by Greeks, Arabs, Fibonacci and Galileo in scribal shorthand data. 

Surrealist Cabaret

A false impression that might develop when reading my “movie reviews” (more like recalls, mixed with reverie) is that once I’ve posted a synopsis, I never look back. Another movie in the bag, no longer worth thinking about. That’d be wrong of course. I continue to data mine for treasures, and keep finding them, as I retrospectively rearrange the facts of my experience.

Like take the Bee TV movie, which I’ve only recently seen: what is it about bees the gets our attention, beyond simply being stung? I’d say it’s that they dance to show the way. 

What if humans are like that too; in many wisdom traditions that’s how they’re portrayed. Where did we ever get the idea that “truth” is something one scribes on parchment, articulates in print? Why not learn a lesson from the bees and talk about communicating truth through dance, through performance? 

Timing matters in that case.

In terms of parchment though, I use it a lot, meaning I’ll keyboard these blog posts (electronic parchment) and doodle with sharpies in my bus binders. When I ride public transit, I’ll sometimes take a binder along in my briefcase. I might read while we’re lurching along, and then stop at a coffee shop to do a recall and add my two cents. That’s my model of the PWS in GST really: input (reading), value added (edit/recombine), output (posts and doodles… performance art).

I might be pondering performance art and dancing bees for another reason: the surrealist cabaret I took in last night at Clinton Street Theater. 

Was I the oldest one present? No matter, at least I was in costume, and could hob knob in line (a couple blocks) with another geek, who once worked in the Silicon Hills, a lesser used moniker for a sister city in some dimensions (talking demographics): Austin, TX. 

He / him is a long time friend of visiting faculty (they / she). He talked NSA, FBI, Carnivore… a well-known shoptalk in geek circles. I talked nonprofits (NGOs).

I learned more about how this cabaret was likely organized: a call goes out, acts get submitted, and the selected eight acts get sequenced with an intermission. 

The clowns with their collection boxes, wandering the aisles during showtime, reminded me of the clowns in Bhutan, who performed the same function, especially focusing on us tourists, there for the experience.

I’m thinking of a car trip we took to a famous festival, I wonder if I’ll recognize the name of the town from Google Earth… Wangdue Phodrang. I remember it pretty well.

English Lit

I have events queued, and then there’s my scheduler. It’d be fun to write science fiction where the so-called mental faculties were invented after computer science. We might say that’s how it was: the abacus came first. Somewhere anyway. 

What comes first in locale A is sometimes very late to show up in B’s storyline.  And that’s not saying B is deficient in some way. The existence of spatiotemporal permutations need not imply some moral gradient. Some ethnicities worry way too much about goodies vs baddies, when we’re just doing the math.

One of those as yet unscheduled events is my birthday (May 17), the celebratory lunch, which could be within a wide range of dates. Another event involves an art show opening, not my first rodeo on that score, and related to Wanderers.

I still hang out with various Wanderers and Thirsters, although not always during official meetups. Portland is still a “small town” in some respects, meaning our many networks are somewhat aware of one another, because they overlap. Somewhat. Small but not that small.

My film studies kick took me back into English lit for a spell, into William Blake in particular. Those studies have taken me to various YouTube channels, such as Esoterica by Dr. Justin Sledge. 

No one calls Blake’s Albion saga a work of science fiction, but they could. He’s using myth, like we do in Martian Math, and psychology. Urizenites might complain it “lacks rigor” (don’t they always?).

I’m seeing Blake somewhat in the Romantic lineage, the conventional wisdom, but yes, he’s something of a singularity, more like a Tolkien or C.S. Lewis in how he engages in world creation, populating his vista with  allegorical archetypes, or Egregores, the four Zoas, and their fallen forms and emanations. Definitely a namespace.

Not only does he write about these agentic players, he engraves them for our viewing pleasure. The guy was a multi-media genius, foreshadowing Tomorrowland’s animations.

Perplexity wasn’t that impressed when I tried to prompt up some ties twixt Blake and Bayes, as in Bayes’ Theorem. 

In data science lore, we talk about the pushback the Bayesians got from the Frequentists. The latter complained of “subjectivism” which got me thinking about what I’d learned from Rorty, and from Kierkegaard himself, about Kierkegaard.

Another queued event: taking in a movie about discovering bees watching television (another allegory by the sound of it). I’ve been reading some of the buzz (it’s not new). After that, I’ve queued posting a review.

Martian Math Update

Yay to Quadray Coordinates taking off. We’ve come a long way from Wikipedia’s special badge, affixed to the article, saying this stuff might be right, but it’s not important to know. Something to that effect. Weird editorializing — what people get away with around the Bucky stuff all the time, right?

Now we’ve entered an era when LLMs have incorporated “the small but growing body of research” into Hilbert Space, at the same time the new quadray implementations work to embed them in Hilbert Space as indigenous, as isn’t that where any coordinate system belongs? It’ll need an inner product to play well  with the others therefore.

On my end, I’m happy to feed the LLMs but don’t feel any inclination to make my implementation of “simplicial coordinates” (as some call them) a creature within Hilbert Space. I’m curious how the OED will define them. Will the Wikipedia article get flooded with slop as the XYZers mount a hostile takeover (it wouldn’t be the first time).

We’re doing fine without an inner product, even as we define a distance formula. 

We enjoy life outside of Linear Algebra. There’s enough “family resemblance” (Wittgenstein) with Linear Algebra to get by.

My intent, all along, has been the exposition of Synergetics the namespace, so it’s important that any IVM-to-XYZ conversion give primacy to a unit edged tetrahedron, and that this be the diagonal of our volume 3 cube, relative to which the XYZ unit cube will have an irrational volume of 1.06066…, i.e. the Synergetics Constant (S3) will jump into the foreground. 

A lot of developers in the quadrays space betray no awareness of S3.

Topics in Architecture

Here I’m journaling some misconceptions of mine that I may continue to indulge even if they’re “my babies” i.e. I made them up. Actually, in both cases, I think I’m not alone in holding them.

Firstly: somewhere I picked up the notion that the Oval Office in the White House was shaped that way because that’s the cross-section of the human skull: an oval. The office of the chief executive is figuratively the brains of the USG, or is at least the seat of an important gland. 

“Not so” says Gemini:

George Washington had other memes in mind when he elected to go for that oval shape. Though the "brains of the operation" idea is an interesting metaphor, the architectural intent was focused on the democratization of social space rather than biological resemblance.

Secondly: the dome at Auroville, called the Matrimandi, is reminiscent of a geodesic sphere, like Spaceship Earth at EPCOT, 

But on closer inspection I think we need to put the Matrimandi outside the category of “geodesic sphere” to keep our concepts more precise. EPCOT’s is one, Auroville’s isn’t. No big deal. They’re both meant to inspire a global sense of kinship.

A Set of Polys

gift from Tom Ace

Wanderers At Large

I might confess to being a tad self-indulgent in getting the tiramisu French toast, more of a desert, but then breakfast-desert is a thing, per any Waffle House. Petite Patissierie is a tad more upscale. 

We had planned to rendezvous at Landmark across the street, but as the new owner informed Dave, who go there first, it’d be a couple more weeks at least before it opened. 

The new owner is a former owner of Float On, the floatation tank boutique at one time managed from the top floor of the Pauling House, the website talking about John C. Lilly, a floatation tank pioneer. 

Dr. Lilly  used his flotation tank time attempting telepathy with the dolphin species. The tanks themselves were further east on Hawthorne Boulevard, at street level, and remain in use to this day, the business having reconfigured.

Don Wardwell brought along a book by Stephen Hawking he was borrowing, for us to skim while we awaiting our orders. We boasted to the wait staff how Don had been in tight orbit around Stephen at times when Dr. Hawking was working with ISEPP, Terry’s NGO. Stephen came to Cascadia a few times.

That’s how Wanderers arose, in conjunction with the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series that ISEPP organized. 

The Linus Pauling House itself was not a main venue for these lectures, although occasionally we’d get lucky, and a visiting MVP would join our group for a more intimate talk. Dr, Susan Haak for example, talked to us about Pragmatism. 

These around-the-table discussions were in contrast to the large public lectures they’d be giving to ticket holders in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall (“The Schnitz”) and in the nearby stone church, likewise on the South Park Blocks (shared with PSU and Portland Art Museum). 

Sometimes we would take our guest to lunch at Than Thao, a few doors down. Mario Livio comes to mind.

Terry, ISEPP president, would also drive his guests around Oregon to visit schools, such as high schools, community colleges and universities. Some of these schools were also donors to the lecture program. We also had corporate donors, such as Mentor Graphics.

Special ticket holders for the lectures, many of which are written up in these journals (Sir Roger Penrose, Jane Goodall…), got another perk: a catered dinner at the Heathman, after the lecture, during which the invited guest could be plied with more questions, over wine, coffee and dessert. 

My wife Dawn Wicca was the bookkeeper for this operation (I’d help out with the mailing database), getting us on the list for this special Heathman dinner privilege. The Pauling House itself is only a few blocks away from my domicile. 

These days, with the lecture series in the rear view mirror, Wanderers still find ways to meet, and of course to wander solo, perhaps as hikers. Or to wander in packs, like Brenda the biker (although she drove her car into town this time).

Speaking of Brenda, see ordered a fancy beet juice drink, which she let us sip, which got use talking about Jitterbug Perfume, the book by Tom Robbins. She was able to find the forward online, and read it allowed to our party.

A Quaker Rant (School of Tomorrow)

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (movie review)

The backstory here (hey, it’s my journal) is I’d hoped to return the five DVD set of Orson Welles content to MMU on SE Belmont, and maybe score something else (F for Fake maybe? They didn’t have that — or maybe I searched wrong? I’ll double-check later). 

However, after I’d plunked the vids case through the return slot, a sharp clerk fished them up and cued me to the fact that I’d only returned four of the five disc (despite the printed reminder message on the case, and despite my having glanced at the multi-DVD container before heading out and persuading myself I had all five). 

Nope. Number five was still at home in the player, I realized at that point. My bad. So I’d need to come back later on a second try. 

But in the meantime, on the way home (I was walking), why not see this 3:45 matinee, a cartoon (animation), at The Bagdad? End of backstory.

OK, now let’s cut to a central scene in the movie, one I considered most relevant to a subject I study, namely Synergetic Geometry as pioneered by the late, great, one-and-only, R. Buckminster Fuller (RBF). 

I’m talking about the geodesic sphere we found ourselves within as a point of view, the concave inner surface omni-triangulated (I was looking for pentagon patterns)). At the center of this sphere is like a Marvin the Martian and/or Darth Vader gun, set to destroy a whole civilization or planet — the backdrop for this story is the whole galaxy of many planets, reminiscent Little Prince.

Surrounding the giant gun, which is drawing power from the imprisoned princess (a mommy to minions), are concentric gyroscopic wheels (not unlike in Lawnmower Man, the B-movie). 

I could see why the baddies felt powerful in controlling such a precessional gizmo. All they needed was some girl-boss-turned-slave energy to make their evil and destructive dreams come true.

But then the other girl boss, the older sister, appeared with the Mario Brothers and a friend, and, deus ex machina, convexity met concavity (their two hands) through the glass, eliciting an even more primal energy, and the evil design was exploded. 

Precession favors the regenerative. I could see kids might be getting the message. 

The domineering male archetype (symbolized a father-son pair of death cult dinosaurs) takes a back seat to a more nurturing civilization-building female energy.

By the time I got home and had all five DVDs ready, it had started raining, so I accomplished the return (successful this time (I cued the guy: “all there this time”) by car, while steaming an artichoke in the Instant Pot pressure cooker.

Marvin the Martian in AI Art

Of Meetups and Queries

Per these recent movie reviews, I’ve been continuing my Film Studies with MMU, thinking ahead to where “a production” produces more lasting results than mere movie lot props, as our props will be made for the real world. 

Tough Guys links me to trains and thereby to steel (I think of that Amtrak on the Steel bridge — a digital picture I took during No Kings 3.0) whereas the five disc set on Orson Welles takes me back into Martian Math, as well as the noir genre.

Picture one of those yurt-n-dome-based windmill-powered communities I’ve been positing for Mongolia or Siberia, with Alaska-Cascadia-based campground prototypes. Such installations would naturally attract documentary makers, as well as inspire science fiction (such as about a train tunnel under the Bering Strait perhaps).

On the Wanderers front, Terry passed me his latest thinking at the Spring Equinox, which I triple-hole punched and added to my “bus reading” binder, to which same binder I today added a hardcopy of Daniel’s paper on Blake vs Newton and Bimetallism i.e. Gold vs Silver (so also Economics in flavor). 

We had a follow-up breakfast at Bread and Ink, as Tom’s (our customary venue) was still closed owing to that kitchen fire.  

Speaking of Tom’s, the new food pod is almost complete: the food carts are open and operating, it’s just the indoor commons that’s still under construction.

Terry’s paper traces what he considers to be two flavors of thermodynamics, one tracing through the Carnots and the other through Boltzmann and others. Did Newton really recant infinitesimals?  Lots to track down. Terry’s thinking inspires me to see in terms grand polarities, with equatorial geodesics tracing a tightrope walk between the two, a dialectic hybrid or unity-of-opposites.

As usual, I left the meeting with a lot to think about, and while my queries were fresh in my mind, I ran a Deep Research prompt through Perplexity and got back what I consider to be worthy Philosophy of Engineering, which I file under Cascadian Pragmatism (a useful categorization more than some textbook definition).

That’s the second time in about a week that the LLM’s (“gossip-bot’s”) output as come across as worthy of memorializing on GitHub, directly pasting the Markdown copy into Markdown cells in a Jupyter Notebook. The earlier prompt, regarding namespaces using the 4D meme, was likewise “perfecto” (picture an Italian chef, making that perfecto gesture).

Refreshing a Teaching App

I didn't expect I'd be spending my morning wrestling with the Periodic Table. Talk about back to basics. The back story is I was visiting my PythonAnywhere application, a teaching stack, Flask atop Python with SQLite on the side, and noticed my half-assed demo wasn't actually bullet-proof. I'd only disable any editing later, before the hack. A couple lines in my Glossary had been defaced.

In the process of refreshing the Glossary (geek terms, wrote it myself), I noticed the Periodic Table was far from complete, with less than half the 118 elements I knew were out there. That's when I fired up a new Jupyter Notebook, to document the process, top to bottom, of taking two CSV sources, merging them, and extracting just what I needed to fit a pre-existing mold.

That's all in the foreground. In the background, an out-of-control city-state known as The District (aka City of Morons in these journals) is threatening to attack Persia and destroy it, in retaliation for its own psychotic war of aggression. If this were a farm animal, we'd put it down, quick and easy, but given we're dealing with the Pentagon (now private sector), we have to factor in the criminal element (organized crime runs that shop, we all know).

I'm far away in Portland, Oregon and don't engage in any message traffic with any official DCers, except on Facebook maybe, where I'll write comments like "too late" if it's someone posing as “from the USA" (snicker). Sorry Charlie, you're not persuading me any more with that flavor of BS; we haven't had a real USA in some decades, per our Medal of Freedom winning hero.

BTW, I recommend not contacting the defacer sticking an email address in my database. I never did. But I wanted to show what enterprising hackers might accomplish. Actually, in this case, nothing all that special had to happen as the code's weaknesses were all mine. Fortunately, it's a learning application, designed to be hacked on. I'm learning. 

Also, I'm not gonna try Manus through Meta. If I try Manus, it won't be in a way Meta knows anything about.

Oregon Rail Heritage

School of Tomorrow: Spring Term Update

No Kings Day

The No Kings 3.0 uprising (demonstration, protest) has not happened yet in Portland, and exactly what my day will be like is unclear given I'm coordinating with others and their plans are only starting to gel as well. Likely public transportation will be involved. Left to my own devices, I'd likely head into town on the Max from the Hollywood station, looking to join the throng near the Steel, as I did recently (one week ago) for the cherry blossom experience.

However, having arisen early, as is my custom, I did spend a couple hours doing some deep cleaning, in the bathroom and kitchen. My meditation was along the lines of: No Kings means a lifestyle with no servants, no court, no sycophants. One might contract with assistants for sure, as when needing an appliance repaired or installed, or even housecleaning by professionals, but there’s no sense in which these companies are necessarily socially lower on the totem pole. No ranking is required. No proof is social station is involved. More like Food Not Bombs.

The American Dream does not involve “winning the lottery” and retiring to some tasteless McMansion with lots of servants, for a life of partying and superficial pursuits. That’s more the antithesis of the American Dream of you ask me. Americans would like to live in a world where none are oppressed on their behalf. On the contrary, Americans would love to be of net benefit to this world. That’s the dream anyway. The reality is a lot of people feel they represent the Americans and set up in offices pretending as much. At least they’re not kings or queens (or other royalty), except on floats or in the theater.

I shared this same picture (above) on my Meta timeline, and in the comments section went somewhat deeper into the Jesse Jackson story. I was involved with his campaign in 1984 as well, especially after he dropped out after the primaries, and we could use his picture to help motivate people to vote from whomever remained. 

As usual, Dems did their bait and switch, to make sure only middle of the roaders would enter the final contest — leading to my Vote for Nobody pin, popular during the Occupy movement, in which I was active (and no, I was not and am not connected to “Antifa” the nebulous organization — Portland has a more imaginative resistance scene than most stereotypes allow for).

Project Hail Mary (movie review)

As I do somewhat often, I deliberately avoided any opinion pieces (aka reviews) regarding this movie, but had seen the previews. However I’d stereotyped the type of film somewhat inaccurately. The film proved somewhat surprising in other words, such as by including a song number, a female vocalist (and main character) hearkening back to those noirs of the 1930s-1950s I’ve been sampling.

I’d expected more of a special effects high action movie, with a lot of kinetics, and this film had that, but its axis of emotional depth as well as intellectual depth was more than that of many comic book derivatives I associate with this genre. I haven’t read the novel behind it, which explains a lot of my cluelessness, which I was fine with (I’m clueless about a lotta stuff).

The smart part is its juxtaposition of high school biology with phenomena of an astrophysical scale, condensing solar systems to Petri dish ecosystems model-able in the lab. Suns are dying because of an infection, and antibodies must be sought. The humans push their technology, leveraging the very biohazard they’re fighting, and the one guy at the tip of the human spear encounters a counterpart with the same objective, so they form an alliance.

As we were leaving the theater I overhead one viewer saying “I didn’t expect it would be that funny” which well-encapsulates my own sense of surprise as well. 

A Hamlet Rendering

For some readers, "rendering" may have a negative connotation, perhaps associated with something a butcher might do vs-a-vs meat. In my namespace, it's a softer meaning: ray-tracings, renderings into visible vistas of mathematical objects ("making the invisible visible"), as in "render farms". 

However, as an English speaker and as someone into Shakespeare, as well as Norman O. Brown, I can't claim to control all the connotations. Misreadings are ever possible, and are not even discouraged.

With that opening for context, let me say Johnny Stallings knows how to render Hamlet effectively, as a read performance, presented at a podium, but with props, a mini-play. He actually dons hand-puppets when he gets to the play-within-a-play (a big part of Hamlet is the play staged in its interior), and when we get to the Alas Poor Yorick part, he pulls out Budget Skull from its box.

The Yorick part got me off on a tangent later as I associate that scene with a performance by one Andrius Kulikauskas in my backyard, with a bubble-head named Zoltar, an homunculus. Hence the selfie (one of the embedded slides), as even though Andrius was the principal actor, we're talking about my memories.

The setting for this rendering was also a big part of the experience: a maze of rooms in a gigantic space, a Presbyterian Church that has creatively morphed into a dual-purpose community center named Taborspace (it's on the northwest slope of Mt. Tabor). 

Until one of the other invitees pointed it out, I hadn't realized there was a literal labyrinth just outside our Artspace window.

Speaking of the other invitees, this was a very hip-to-Hamlet crowd. One guy immediately noticed Johnny's version omitted some famous concluding lines. However Johnny's pithy densification of a four-hour plus marathon is told from Hamlet's viewpoint, and since he's dead by this scene, it makes no sense to include it.

You'll find Johnny appearing throughout these blogs over the years, not only in association with Shakespeare, but Walt Whitman as well. I have Nick Consoletti to thank for cluing me into the Stallings namespace lo these many years ago, when I saw him do King Lear as a one man show.

Spring Equinox

Today is officially (per Google search) the Spring Equinox. My wife had a small business called Turning the Wheel that was about passing on Celtic (mostly) traditions around the eight holidays, the four solstice-equinox orbit points, marking seasonal changes, and the four additional points between those four points. You might picture two squares, superimposed, at 45 degrees to one another, resulting in eight equally spaced points around a circle. 360//8 == 45 (per Python).

Depicted above: a scalable recipe I usually use because it’s nutritious and vegan. It goes under savory versus sweet and is basically lentils with nuanced flavors added by molasses and soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, some flavor of oil. Spices (cloves, ginger, and what we call allspice, which is not a curry).

This recipe came to me through a couple, Joe and Teresina, who moved to Portland in their senior years and who started overlapping study groups my wife and I would attend, Teresina’s on Buddhism and Joe’s on Economics. They were a vital component of our Quaker Meetings (Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly) in North Pacific Yearly Meeting (NPYM).

Portland has two main unprogrammed Meetings (not called churches, nor temples). I’m much more proximal to one of them, within walking distance, whereas the other is adjacent to Reed College. Fittingly because College Park, a place in California, is a name from our Beanite past, referring to a family that went west from Iowa or someplace in the Midwest. We don’t usually get into the details. Quakers are full of schisms going back to the Hicksites and such, and only a few of us bother to memorize a lotta details about these developments. In geek world, branching and forking are taken for granted.

In Asylum District, a business moniker for our neighborhood, the Friends on Stark Street, the closer-to-me meeting (I can drive to Reedwood in a few minutes, where Bridge City Friends just had a newcomers gathering), have a shared history with Linus and Ava Helen Pauling through a mutual benefactor: Electro-Scientific Instruments, the owner of the Quakers’ meetinghouse after acquiring it from Jantzen, the swimming suit company. ESI used the Stark Street factory to make electronic instruments and later moved to bigger digs (which burned in a fire on Macadam, necessitating yet bigger digs).

ESI’s founder, Doug Strain, had studied under Linus Pauling at CalTech, plus shared the regional pacifism for which Cascadia has long been known. He helped the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy restore the Linus Pauling boyhood home on Hawthorne Boulevard and make it a center, a hub, of Portland’s cultural vitality. A group calling itself the Wanderers still meets there, thanks to ISEPP (for which my wife had been bookkeeper (she had a lotta nonprofit clients; her Turning the Wheel was a side business)).

Puzzle Pieces

Our family uses the jigsaw puzzle as a source of memes, which I don't suppose is unusual. Many families gather around such a puzzle at family gatherings, ours no exception, even if we’re exceptional in other ways.

The memorial service for Phil Wikelund at Reed College was a well-attended who’s who of a now mature cohort who went through life with Phil, a hub figure in the Pacific Northwest, through his sharp intellect and devotion to helping people pursue their own interests. One podium speaker suggested “edgy but kind” and guessed he typified a specific Scandinavian temperament bespeaking hardship getting to the far west.

Phil owned Great Northwest Books, where Trevor Blake once worked, then near Powells, and getting started on his combined career of bookseller publisher and appraiser. Trevor does the whole pipeline. I just bought his newest book, Does Not Equal. 

I’ve linked to a Perplexity prompt for more of the story regarding Phil. My focus here is to pass along puzzle pieces I’m in a position to provide, not to assemble the whole picture in one blog post.

In driving Don Wardwell to and from his Mt. Tabor campus, and from talking with the other guests at the reception, I was prompted to reminisce about Anthology Books which had been adjacent to the Linus Pauling House on Hawthorne, in that same building, set further back from the street, wherein Adorn, the body art studio, is installed today. 

Gary Wilkie owned and ran Anthology Books and had one of the most interesting privately owned for-sale book collections I’d ever seen, which is saying a lot given the competition (Portland is a bookstore town). I bought some obscure Quaker books, like the published journal of a Quaker opera singer around Philadelphia.  

Gary later redesigned his business making it almost purely online. I got invited to a party at Gary’s place once, quite the fun crowd.

Patrick Barton, whom I talked with later, in Fred Meyer (we crossed paths by chance), mentioned he’d helped out with cleanup in the aftermath of the fire, which consumed Great Northwest Books once it had moved into what used to be called Area One, an urban renewal zone in an earlier chapter, wherein Portland was being pulled in a more Robert Moses like direction.

The fire that took Great Northwest Books reminds me of the one which consumed the photography store and studio in the Bay Area, in which a first collection of Columbia Gorge photographs had been collected by their creator.

Phil’s closest friends and family gave us great insights into Phil’s character. As one of about four Wanderers present, counting Lew Frederick, who spoke from the podium, myself, Ron and Don, we know Phil and Gloria from retreats and a few meetups. 

Ron, from the Reed College matrix, knew Phil way better than the rest of us. I was not in close orbit around Phil, but that just means I have a more zoomed out view, now much clarified thanks to a life well-lived. I’ll hope to see Ron and Don again soon as Wanderers will be gathering per our usual schedule.

Reed College was being its usual peaceful self amidst the horrors of our time. This was when the nation-state minded seemed to snap, or however we tell it (I’m self-admittedly esoteric) and all hell broke out in one of the messiest areas (messiest as in “into messiahs n stuff like that” if I may be allowed a pun).

Happy Pi Day while I’m thinking about it, just past. I did my part to celebrate, which doesn’t mean I can’t do Tau Day as well (what some wish to call two pi). Happy St. Patrick’s Day today. I’m also remembering Dawn Wicca, my late wife and life adventure companion.

Geometry for GenZers

https://groups.io/g/synergeo/topic/118308284

Cascadian Synergetica: The Early Days

On Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 10:09 AM 4D Solutions wrote:

Hi Jim --

I hope you and/or rybo will post summaries of your findings from Lehmanville per your new geometry group. Adderley also has a group with overlapping membership; I've not heard from him lately (he's in Australia, well remembers the heyday when we started up a Synergetics subculture in Cascadia, in Seattle, distinct from the SNEC operation, with its own funding / sponsors).

While on this topic, of booting our Synergetica subculture in Cascadia, the theme of our meetup was Elastic Interval Geometry for the most part, as both Gerald de Jong and Alan Ferguson were present, coders of Struck and Springdance respectively.

Tim Tyler also did an EIG implementation named Springie (he wasn't at this meeting though).

Russ Chu was the main organizer, the same dude who organized the founding of SNEC at that rented house in Washington DC I was mentioning, where Bob Gray, Ed Applewhite, Joe Clinton, CJ, and Yasushi Kajikawa were among those present.

For this earlier meetup, we met at Russ's Seattle house (he would move to DC temporarily in a future chapter, a move having to do with Deb's career). He was by then married to Deb Kasman and they had two kids: Liana and Daniel.

The time frame of our Seattle meetup is pretty easy to triangulate in that Gerald was in the Bay Area for a JavaOne, a kickoff of the new Java language, after which he came by train to Cascadia, and also: the cult named Heaven's Gate had just drunk the kool-aid, the appearance of the comet Hale-Bopp being their X-Day type event (some kind of abduction).

I recall Ed Applewhite phoning me while our meeting was ongoing and joking "they got the wrong Applewhite" or something funny like that (he was a bit of a joker). So this was 1997 I'm thinking.

Gerald went on after coding Struck in Java to developing Darwin@Home and then Pretenst, eventually abandoning Java in favor of Rust, which compiles to WebAssembly or something along those lines.

Alan and Karl Erickson were "lost to followup" eventually (shoptalk from my outcomes research days at CUE / CORE), meaning I lost touch with both of them. Jon Braley passed away.

These were long distance friends of Peter Adderley and he hoped I could help him re-establish contact, but I wasn't able to. I have maintained contact with Russell Chu over the years as well as his ex, Deb, and saw them both not so long ago (they're on amicable terms even though they've gone their separate ways). Russ was my best man at my wedding, September 11, 1993 (near Reed College).

In terms of sponsors and donors, special mention to Sam Lanahan, inventor of Flextegrity and former collaborator with Joe Clinton. Sam also was a sidekick for Bucky himself on a trip to the Philippines. He's currently traveling abroad.

Sam helped organize another summit later, in Portland, which included Nick Consoletti, the wandering bard, steeped in lore, and in contacts, and also Trevor Blake, at that point still a Portland resident and inheritor of the Joe Moore archive, the Buckminster Fuller Virtual Institute I think he called it.

That Joe Moore archive, after being sorted and upgraded by Trevor (a professional archivist), ended up at OSU in Salem, where Linus and Ava Helen Pauling's papers are also housed.

Friday in Hillsdale

I got to hang out with Bradford again yesterday, and return the L. Gordon Plummer book mentioned in the above video, to the Theosophical Society Library. I made sure they knew about this video, as they're included therein, as is Bradford.

Bradford gave me more of a picture of his network. Given we've both been receptive to the Bucky stuff (many if not most are not) we unsurprisingly know or knew many of the same people. 

I told him about the one time I met Bob Gray in person, in Washington DC, at the founding of SNEC (later renamed to Synergetics Collaborative). Yes, Bradford knew who CJ Fearnley was (another friend of Bob's, and mine). Applewhite was there at the SNEC summit, as was Yasushi Kajikawa of Scientific American fame (Japan edition).

Given the pre-emptive attack by President Rubio, of the District, against the Middle East, I was naturally effusive in my distrust and dislike for the Beltway Mafia, entangled with the Las Vegas Mafia historically and contemporaneously. 

DC and LV have a lot of shared personnel and similar mindsets. I understand why Canadians are leery of both (tourism is way down). DC has a bright future as a tourist town, even if we no longer take it seriously as a seat of government, outside being an important part of the Northeast Corridor (Cosmopolis or Gotham). The DC-NYC line, with Princeton in the middle, has long been a part of my consciousness. 

I'd visit CJ in Philly, by train when I lived on the east coast, but also by plane, when NPYM (a west coast Yearly Meeting, RSF) was paying my way to AFSC corporation meetings.

Fortunately for our collective sanity, PDX in Cascadia is not a co-belligerent with the District (or LV) and has its own way of coping with the post-USA neoRoman fascists trying to dominate the world these days i.e. we have the Portland Frogs etcetera (meaning we use a lot of satire and ridicule, other forms of propaganda).

As a veteran of Portland Occupy and Food Not Bombs, I've never been an allie of the neoRomans and their rackets (as Smedley Butler called 'em). I think both Dulles brothers were imperialist fools, as was General MacArthur. These men are not heroes in my version of history.

The Scarlett Pimpernel (movie review)

This was the 1982 version; I hear there’s another one. I’d have to say it’s an early spy story, set after the American Revolution set off the one in France (per some tellings), and wherein the “Bond” character is quite effete, a dancer-prancer type, a flaneur, a fop. But it’s all an affectation (a disguise) as in reality he’s fighting bravely for the crown, against depraved terrorists.

The terrorists in this case are the scary hoi polloi, a Pol Pot style mob some might say, chopping the heads off anyone with eyeglasses or who otherwise looks like they can read or, worse (code): dance the minuet and other courtly numbers. People of culture in other words, not riffraff.

“Chop chop” goes the guillotine, and the crowd roars its approval, “Off with their heads!”.

Our movie audience (the spectators, those for whom this spectacle was made) should be feeling revulsion and disgust by now, mixed with righteous outrage. How is this “Enlightenment” in any meaningful sense? It all seems so cheap and tawdry.

Countering all this madness is the Scarlett Pimpernel, who / which understands the necessity of a strong monarchy to prevent just these kinds of mental illness from spreading virally. 

The SP is somewhat a Society, a peer group (think Three Musketeers) but also is lead by our hero, the faux dandy, so “fake n gay” to sound like Candace.

It’s obviously a spy movie because it’s all about betrayal, defections, switching sides, or at least appearing to, or… unless you’re quite dedicated to puzzling it all out (cut to snoring on the couch) there’s no way to be much besides confused. 

And the disguises, let’s not forget the disguises.

We’re always wondering if SP is sincere in his love for his lady love, as in the first chapter of their relationship he uses their romantic picnic together as another occasion to smuggle another aristocrat out of the looney bin (where the patients now run the show). So he’s using her as a human shield of some kind?

No, he sees her as fighting the same oppressor. At first that is. Then he has reason to doubt. Then he has reason to have faith again. See what I mean? He has his ups and downs. She, meanwhile, is trying to fathom his calculus and is likewise doubtful of his integrity.

Anyway, there’s a superhero superpower coloring to the whole thing, which is of course intentional as that’s what fiction is all about doing, usually:  creating larger-than-life characters who swashbuckle their way through all kinds of obstacle courses in unlikely, sometimes oddball, ways.

Spring Term

I started pitching my Spring Term, given it's March 1 already, the Equinox coming on the 20th.

For those new here, we're talking School of Tomorrow, an umbrella term for a buncha sigs (special interest groups; like edu-sig), study groups, asynchronous threads, Github pages and so on. They criss-cross every which way ala that "Spherical Pinball Machine" I like to go on about.

The right margin here has a lotta links to related social media, where I commit some of my writings. I was always cut out for hypertext, which is why I'm not as popular among print only bookstore types, although you'll find me in acknowledgments (a Historical Dictionary of Wittgenstein's Philosophy by Duncan Richter; Bucky Works by J. Baldwin, which front matter typically nobody reads).

Monster U Strikes Out

We woke up to the dreaded news of Monster U outta control again. 

I’m seeing Biden and Trump were human shields, too senile to really take the heat for the dummy beginner mistakes made by presidents Blinken and Rubio respectively. I’ll do more satire some other time.  

Grok completely rewrote my prompt.

What Grok wrote (based on my initial input):

A cinematic movie theater screen displaying the iconic final scene from Thelma & Louise: a 1991 Ford Thunderbird convertible driven by Benjamin Netanyahu as Thelma and Marco Rubio as Louise, both in character as the heroic women, plunging off the edge of the Grand Canyon cliff into the abyss in a dramatic leap of defiance, dust and sunlight streaming dramatically, wide shot of the car mid-air against the vast canyon, the scene framed as a large movie screen in a dark theater with faint audience silhouettes, humorous and satirical political comedy style

Try it yourself?  I’m outta tokens.  Not everyone uses Grok, I realize, but at free tier I’ve found it generous with how many freebies it lets me choose from.

From my outbox:

From my angle both Biden and Trump were way too burned out to be key decision makers.  They're just human shields, these senile presidents.

What I see is Secretary Blinken, and now Secretary Rubio (doubling as NSC chief) arrogating "superpowers" (extraordinary authority, as in extra judicial) in the background, aggressing against Russia and Iran respectively, and losing big time because neither is the brainiac each supposes.  

Damn, vanity sure is rampant among the so-called "leadership" (snicker).

Printing Polys

See: Printing Polys (Jupyter Notebook)

Faculty Lounge Chatter

Where it looks to me Fuller was headed was towards a “geared trig” based on what he called Scheherazade numbers. With gear teeth that fine, would we ever need something finer for physics engines (models)? Instead of trailing off indefinitely, we could stay with definite terminating numbers — as we must anyway in the real world.

When it comes to visualizations on a computer screen, the threshold is pretty low i.e. there’s no way to register a difference of higher frequency than the resolution of the monitor. Under the hood though, we can carry the overhead needed to go higher precision if we need to, which is where computer algebra systems come into play.

In the world of frequencies (energy world), we come down to measurement. Even though physics formulae are redolent with pi (π), we learn in high school that the uncertainty in measurement trumps theoretical “infinite precision” i.e. no one in physics needs pi to a thousand places (unless working on a pi algorithm for some reason — I like Ramanujan’s). “Nature is not using π” is akin to saying: in a discrete quantized universe, “infinite precision” is a mirage.

When I introduce Synergetics to people, one of my first moves is to talk about “namespaces”, a concept with concrete literal meaning in the Python language, but also kind of a shorthand for “subculture” (Wittgenstein: way of life). We can identify three namespaces that use the meme “4D” as in “four dimensional”.

(1) n-D, n-dimensional linear algebra, home of E8, Leech Lattices, Machine Learning and all the rest of it, very established and highly productive.

(2) 4D as 3D + Time, owing to Einstein / Minkowski. Donald Coxeter (to whom Synergetics is dedicated) is at pains, in Regular Polytopes, to distinguish Einstein’s 4D from his own n-D 4D, the 4D of extended Euclideanism (i.e. the 4D in (1)).

(3) 4D as referring to the the four directions of the tetrahedron, the most primitive polyhedron, the “ab initio” beginning for conceptuality in prefrequency (Platonic) space (Fuller’s shoptalk).

There’s a tendency to confuse (sometimes deliberately) all these different meanings of 4D, on the assumption that math is some “universal language” whereas in reality it’s an amalgam of partially overlapping namespaces, or “language games” as Wittgenstein calls ‘em.

Assuming an IVM ball of radius R, diameter D, I think what Synergetics does that’s both easy to understand and revolutionary is we trade in the R-edged cube of unit volume (XYZ, unit cube) in favor of a D face-diagonalized cube of volume 3. The inscribed tets have volume 1. 

The payoff is the octa (same D edges) is now volume 4, and the rhombic dodeca (D long face diagonals) is volume 6. 

We get more whole numbers if we let the old R-edged cube be the “odd man out” with volume 1.06066… √(9/8). 

That’s heresy, meaning to fight against it is to merely uphold an established dogma, not to mount a rational thought-out defense (which the orthodoxy is not prepared to do). Fuller’s system has merit, there’s no way around that fact. Even if XYZ still works, as it does. 

The epithet Fuller applied to XYZ “Qyoobism” (I’m making it sound like a cult) is not “it’s wrong” but “it’s awkward” (relatively).

Blake Meets Bucky

More context

A Thirster in Cuba

slide show: hover mouse

Thirsters host Dr. Art Kohn, peppered his presentation with modest caveats, reminding us he was learning more than teaching about his topic. However, with memories of his visit to Havana still vivid, he was up for giving us his eye-witness account. The interest level was high with many attending, including Jonathan Potkin.

Cuba was in crisis around now because the District of Columbia had imprisoned the president and first lady of Venezuela, whom we don't hear about daily as one might expect, and Marco Rubio (the District president) is making sure VZ is no longer in control of where its oil goes. That oil now belongs to the District as far as the Beltway Mafia is concerned, and Cuba has long been on its enemies list.

However, US citizens are still permitted tourist visas and short hop airlines that don't need to refuel in Havana still serve its airport. 

Art is a big fan of AI and used it to help with the slideshow, which took us through a lot of history, albeit briefly as this was but a two-hour long meetup at best. 

I'd arrived with two guests, Don and Susan, having enjoyed their company, and Terri's, at their home base first. I was their driver / chauffeur for the evening. Don enjoyed the freeway twists and dips, which we took much faster coming home, in light traffic.

After the formal presentation, Thirsters (a pun on Thursday beer drinking, recalling our pub meetup years) asked questions and shared views.

Art's mental model is that a public-ownership-based framework equates to a top-heavy bureaucracy and a kind of egalitarianism that keeps the gap in living standards, between the best-off and worst-off, relatively narrow, but also keeps that living standard relatively low for everyone, on average. 

Private ownership, on the other hand, which encourages competition, and a leaner government, opens the door to a higher top level standard, thanks to greater efficiency, but at the cost of a wider disparity in living standards. One might picture the two bell curves.

I shared one of my Cuba stories, the one about my friend who organized trips to Cuba for retired Pentagon brass, for fun in the sun and meetups with Castro. I thought about getting into the whole Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory scenario, but decided that was too complicated a kind of science fiction to pass off as a quick anecdote.

In the car driving home I shared my view that the District is at the hub of a military-socialist empire, centered around the Pentagon as a central planner. Between corporate hierarchies, flock-n-shepherd temples, and military service, US citizens have little opportunity to practice boots-on-the-ground democracy except vs-a-vs the District melodrama, which turns "democracy" into a kind of reality TV show.

Note that USers are by now used to having the Secretary of State be president, as this was true under President Blinken as well.