High Sierra (movie review)

I got this off the classic actors shelf, under Bogart, but it’d cross-file under noirs easily, were they to file multiple copies. DVDs are expensive, but not metadata, meaning it’s easy to find the same film following multiple routings. I’m speaking in general terms. I’m forgetting which filters MMU uses. I’m thinking in SQL terms (structure query language).

A noir because it starts the way many of them do, with a guy (Bogart) getting out of prison, pardoned from on high, and returning immediately into service as skilled in petty crime (stickups, common heists). As is typical with a Bogart film, is relations with women are of special interest. Although given the vote by this time, women are still groomed as dependents and must think of ways to manipulate men using their desirability. 

Bogart is especially attracted to a young woman too innocent to be at all wily yet. She has more power over him for this reason. Her farmer family takes him back to the good old days, before he became a criminal and prisoner. 

His willingness to help her with an operation to address a congenital defect, and then take no for an answer when he proposes marriage — he’s expecting a ridiculously paltry payment for his role in a petty heist and plans to retire to a life of travel — shows us he’s a hopeless romantic under it all. That explains why the more worldly woman likes him and wants to be his sidekick (she sees his good side as well as his ruthless toughness, “the right stuff” in her book)). 

At first he holds out for Velma (she has attached herself to someone else) but eventually he comes round to caring for sidekick Maria and the dog. The dog (a major character) is treated as a bad omen meaning a lot of thickly applied foreshadowing, starting with Algernon’s story of how the dog’s owners seem to always meet an untimely end. We know Bogart is headed toward a dead end. The high Sierras aren’t featured for no reason.

The film is made for a national audience meaning many states and geographic regions get a plot mention, not unlike in Apple movies today, such as Pluribus, which go for a global audience. The whole globe is now the common backdrop with one weather report for all, on tap at the global weather web sites.

Going forward from this time, women would win some and lose some in the gender wars. Women are still over represented among the exploited classes of course. Movies such as this provide stereotypes and  caricatures to some level, one of the chief functions of fiction. That only makes them more interesting from a psychological anthropological point of view.

Accelerationism?

sapien vs sapien

If you’re new to my blogs, check the index at the right for links to what those blogs are: this one, Control Room, BizMo Diaries, and Coffee Shops Network (CSN). This last is subtitled “Philosophy Talk” and in my most recent post (as of this post) I’m doing some catching up, mentioning some of the names associated with so-called “accelerationism”.

Say what? What’s that?

I’m more an outsider looking in, than insider looking out, so my thoughts might sound naive if you’re a veteran of accelerationist talk. My spellchecker doesn’t even know the word. My thinking drifts back to Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, which I’m surprised is not more cited in the literature, but then I haven’t sicced a lotta chatbots on the issue (yet). He coined “accelerating acceleration” didn’t he?

Put succinctly: if Toffler was right (let’s say he was) then there’s no need to “step on the gas pedal” and no, there’s no brake to speak of. We’ve entered an exponential phase and that’s the new status quo, so how is one to be an “ist” about it? You wanna boost what’s already boosting? You wanna self boost? Why pull yourself up by your own bootstraps when you’re already “up” i.e. already accelerating?

To slow it down we might always get pedantic. I associate the “ped” in “pedantic” with “pedestrian” meaning “the pace of walking” which is slow, relative to some other forms of travel. 

To walk it back a bit, acceleration doesn’t just mean speeding up or slowing down; it means changing direction. The laws of inertia suggest that directional changes are proportional to speed and mass in the sense that heavy things don’t turn on a dime. 

Sharp turns (a kind of acceleration) require less force at lower speeds. That’s some First Person Physics (or call it rollercoaster physics). You know from driving that taking sharps requires slowing down.

Now, with those Newtonian mechanics out of the way, let’s distill all of the above into a question to myself: am I myself an accelerationist? 

At this juncture I’d answer: I accept the premise of a somewhat shocking future in the sense Alvin Toffler anticipated, but I don’t see a need to make it more shocking than it already is. On the contrary, I think less shocking would be fine. 

Predictability is not ruled out by the fact of butterfly effects meaning minimizing surprisal in the Active Inference sense is a sensible response in the face of inevitable chaos. 

Learn to drive safely, is a good motto to steer by. Practice makes perfect. 

But then the perfect is the enemy of the good, meaning don’t expect perfection (or beat yourself up for falling short of it) but nevertheless aim for it in practice. 

We’re down to re-minting some old cliches here, some sayings. We get down to maxims.

A Quaker Event

I was glad Gayle emailed me about this event, as I don't always study the Multnomah Meeting newsletter closely and would have missed this event otherwise. A lot of my oldest Quaker friends were present. Lexi (Alexia) joined us for the morning segment.

Walking back to my place, Lexi and I came across the Belmont Street Fair just getting going. I’d just recently enjoyed Clinton Street’s and recognized some of the booths. The dollar books were a good deal, great selection. I had a fun conversation with the glamping lady representing a new Eddie Bauer travel program.

Lexi had something else scheduled, but I was able to return to the meetinghouse for the 4 PM presentation, outside in back, by the Quaker Earthcare Witness (QEW) team. They were looking to us for financial and other support.

I was glad to catch up with people and meet some new characters.

The night before: our Wanderers gathering at the Linus Pauling House on Hawthorne. As I’ve chronicled many times in these blogs, the two venues are linked through Silicon Forest pacifist philanthropists.

Urban Skiing

I don't wake up knowing if I'm gonna do a bike loop, but maybe. Sometimes I do. Today I did. I baked a potluck dish first, and did my elliptical. 

If I do my elliptical, my policy is I'm off the hook from doing much of anything else strenuous (""), but, hey, no one's gonna stop me if I wanna workout more.

Even if you don't know Portland, it might be fun to think of dots, visited in sequence. Let's play Edges n Nodes (or Nodes n Edges): 

1. The usual descent through Ladd's Addition and past Abernathy Elementary to the train crossing on 11th. Except a freight had just started its way across. I'd be better off using the overpass even if the elevators are broken (only one of them was).
   
   



2. On to OMSI. A NARA event was underway; I'd be back. Eastside Vera Katz Esplanade, under the Morrison, under the Burnside, over the Steel, on the lower deck, the deck that raises. Then right along the river, back under all those bridges on the west side, and over the Hawthorne Bridge back to OMSI, and back to the NARA event, with the line for fry bread.
   
   
   
   
   
3. From OMSI / Rail Heritage Museum it's my standard FX2 "lift" back up the hill. 

Urban skiing I call it. Most the cycling is downhill or flat, with mild uphill only, not counting pushing the bike out stairs (broken elevator). Note I said "out stairs" hah hah. Inside joke.

That's my foreground, what's in the background? Timelines will show new circuit designs for Motherboard Earth happening. But then since when has history let us catch our breath? Since global media became light speed, or closer to it, we've enjoyed a suffocatingly (to some) crowded Global Village (McLuhan), a seething melting pot of overlapping ethno-spheres. Some humans are offended that others co-exist (or try to).

I'm chatting with a WILPF lady about all the war propaganda seeping in through gamer world, a primary recruiting ground for those anticipating tomorrow's conflicts. I'll share some verbiage (stuff I wrote):

I don’t think those trying to stoke the flames of outward war by infiltrating the gamer community, are expecting to have their access to real junkyard weapons squeezed off, but that’s what I work towards regardless, as the AFSC motto remains War is Obsolete.

Regarding IAEA, it’s obvious the Iranians need to be invited as full partners when it comes to going max against any who would harness fission or fusion for homicidal purposes. Psychos like that need very restricted access to labs.

Also:

My goal here would be to expect that computer games will continue to feature war as one of many genres (not my favorite) and to gradually close off the “outward weapons” angle i.e. the only weaponized drones you’ll be accessing will be from Parks n Rec, after sufficient training. 

The drones won’t fly outside designated perimeters (players check them out — courses where peeps bring their privately owned drones might be more on the outskirts of town, less of a theme park setting).

https://kirbyurner.substack.com/p/parks-and-rec-drone-zones

If you’re a hormonal Estonian or Polish kid who wants to fight a real Russian, we’ll show you to a booth and you can have it out with your counterpart in our realistic simulator (realistic to a point; we’ll let you live even if your avatar dies).

Machine Learning At Work

 

:: predictive history ::

The concept of "predictive history" suggests a theoretical approach where historical patterns, societal data, and long-term trends are used to forecast future events or potential scenarios. In the context of the image provided, we can explore several elements that resonate with this idea:

Geopolitical and Economic Forecasts: The newspaper details a new Aeroflot route connecting "Cascadia" directly to the Russian Far East (Vladivostok), describing it as "A First in Cascadian History!" This represents a forecasted future where Cascadian regional identity has become formalized and its global connectivity has significantly expanded westward.

Technological Advancement: The text on the page references "Modern Fleet" and "Direct Service," hinting at predicted developments in aviation range and infrastructure that enable ultra-long-haul travel that is now only experimental or unavailable.

Cultural Trends: "Cascadia" is not just a geographical region but a bioregional movement. By 2027, the prediction suggests this identity has strengthened and gained international recognition. The small Cascadia flag pin on the coffee mug reinforces the forecasted societal shift towards bioregionalism.

Context of Real Events: Predictive history differs from pure fiction because it is often grounded in current data. While this exact scenario (direct Aeroflot flights from PDX to Vladivostok in 2027) is not a present reality, it is built upon existing geographical proximities and regional identities that could theoretically converge under the right conditions, making it an example of predictive scenario building.

(gg) gemini generated

Morning Musings

Visiting the Larry Yes installation

I didn't have the word for it in my boyhood, or it wasn't central, we might call an "SAT word", but now I do, and would say my Grandma Esther (dad's mom), was a polymath. 

Her reading and conversation, often about what she was reading, was highly eclectic. She displayed a deep interest in whatever topic she was diving into, which I might translate as "a high degree of comprehension" because, again with the passage of time, I've become enamored of  the word "comprehensivist", championed by CJ (Chris Fearnley), as a quasi-synonym for "polymath". 

In some passages I value, I've seen "comprehension" and "apprehension" interlinked in ways I appreciate.

Comprehension is a vital phase in that apprehension is more a lotta dots without connections and therefore no ability to squeeze, shrink down, compress. Information balloons, outta control. Why were "witch doctors" or "logicians of the psyche" (i.e. psychologists) dubbed "shrinks" in beatnik slang (the same slang that gave us "squares")?

The common wisdom is "shrink" is a derogatory reference to shrunken heads, again satirizing a profession in suggesting it's more of a pseudoscience than a fully generalized anything (a real, or hard, science). 

But why not admit another meaning: "to shrink" is to hand back to the customer a simplified model of a dynamic (a diorama of the ego-hero's predicament, customized) wherein the essentials are highlighted and extranea made to retreat into the background. Something big, humongous, and overwhelming, is now more minute and therefore manageable. 

To shrink is to comprehend, and thereby make short work of.

In this blog, we link Polymathy to Wandering. Being a stumblebum among disciplines doesn't imply ricocheting to no purpose, but rather with an eye to shrinking down, make comprehension (attained through processing) the goal of apprehension (collecting data). 

Wandering may be envisioned as a stationary activity in the case of meditating (perhaps upon a pile of pillows) and/or thinking and/or pondering (considering). But a wanderer is usually more adequately portrayed as someone actively engaged in epistemic foraging within a surrounding environment, exercising a wider range of skills and/or ways of coping. The "learning curve" is multi-dimensional.

Homo Correctus

Yes of course it's AI and, at the time of generating, was meant to represent me, of Generation Jones, keeping up with the Joneses. I'd just gained a new Ego-brand weed whacker.

A modern "dweeb" as we're called is hip to Carl Jung and synchronicity, so I'm allowed to bring it up, in character, when I recount how me n Patrick were walking about, checking out the newly remodeled Belmont Branch library, and yakking about typewriters and keyboards and QWERTY versus other layouts, when then, my story goes, the very next morning, my QWERTY keyboard (links to gamer tests) went crazy, as has never happened before (with no precipitating events that I could fathom). 

Off-and-on didn't solve it. 

The Caps Lock key now rotated through the keyboard light colors. Backspace-delete added ASCII patterns to the right. Like I said, crazy. The "show keyboard" key still worked and I'd pick out a message with my mouse on screen.  Voice woulda worked. Patrick and I had talked about that too: voice-controlled text creation.

So yeah, I ordered a new one, through Amazon, which came within hours. 

I could track the delivery vehicle in real time, like it was an Uber. Where it was in the world (the car) was my business until the replacement keyboard showed up. 

I was there waiting, as I knew exactly what was happening, down to a picture of my driver.

Then it got even more dweebie: upon opening the package I realized I'd miss-assumed about its size; it was for a smaller iPad, not my 12.9 inch 5th generation model. Dang! 

The new keyboard worked, which proved which device was at fault (not the iPad). I could prop the iPad up in the old case and type to it from the new one, cordlessly, cuz BlueTooth is like that. Or I could loosely stand the iPad vertically in this over-small shell. Dweeby! Like taping together eyeglasses across the bridge of one's nose.

Should I keep it in inventory and plan to get a smaller iPad? 

Should it be a gift? 

Who do I know that needs this size case? No one, off hand.

So: the middle class booji thing to do was return it, free of charge, having the website spit out a printable UPS return label. I used a different computer for all this, the one in the outstairs office.

I hadn't disturbed the contents nor lost any inclusions (padding, power cord), so it was a cinch to repackage the case and send it back from a nearby location I could walk to, that UPS Store next to that New Seasons. I'll likely go by it again later today, but not stopping, on a 14 bus.

The replacement keyboard n case should come tomorrow, this time the right size.

Going through all this, I'm thinking back to one of my YouTubes wherein I paraphrase Richard Rorty, one of my teachers at Princeton, a leftist, but in favor of middle class living standards as the Bell Curve average (somewhat by definition) without needing gross outliers in either direction. No K-shaped economy. No two humps.

Uber poor and uber rich are less important to sustain than one or two standard deviations around the middle, which measures physical circumstances, such as access to food-water, travel-shelter, entertainment-education. 

One's psychological well-being deserves its own probability curves, which has different constraints than the physical plane (that's speaking more from a data science angle than from some idealist metaphysics). I'm not saying the M and P planes (U=MP) are unconnected; clearly architecture and the human psyche are intimately conjoined. It wasn't called Globe Theater for no reason.

We're not talking about malign neglecting of the uber poor. but rather about sustaining a healthy median not dependent on uber-exploitation and so-called dead-end lifestyles. 

A lot of "dirty jobs" give bragging rights (think military) not to mention useful skills, such as driving in traffic without going crazy (a lotta dweebs listen to the radio then, me included). 

Cascadian Pragmatism aims to offer PhDs in global trucking, which doesn't preclude having favorite and/or native-familiar locales, as most of us do and even more of us may in the future.

I admit a part of me is playing at being Bill Bixby in My Favorite Martian, while another part of me plays the Martian, or some other booji-compatible (sympatico) ET. A nod to Mork n Mindy.

Pipelines From the Future

So am I talking about future pipelines? Is this about oil?  Not so much. This is more about GST, general systems theory, used to manage Global Data, my science fiction world company. The pipeline feels like it’s piping goods from the future because it contains actionable information of relevance to anticipatory design scientists.

In an animation house, a place that makes movies for a living, a pipeline is more like a workflow and its final results will be in the future. The School of Tomorrow is packed with ideas for animations, and some have materialized, while others stay out of reach in the future. Along with those simulations. Toyz. Outdoor and indoor props. Movies.

The Project Renaissance idea was / is pretty simple: frontline nonprofits do the field testing while venture capital watches and decides what prototypes could become profitable product lines. Picture an NGO installing solar powered water pumps. People queue to gain experience with this technology as they’ll have valuable skills going forward. Having a team that knows the score and how to move forward, is as valuable a component as any prop, when it comes to making movies.

Why do I keep mentioning “making movies”? Because any undertaking of significance is likely to be a source of recordings these days, given recording equipment is ubiquitous. The raw recordings feed the pipeline, along which editing occurs. “Censorship” falls under editing. Editors tend to have an agenda and want to make one or more points with their documentaries, usually. Or is it a science fiction film? A fantasy?

GST is indeed about theater and roleplaying, cosplay, one could say. However per Project Renaissance, the props may well be real, in the sense that once the movies are made, the scenes persist, becoming a site for more movie-making. The architecture is not necessarily of the flimsy stage-prop variety. An OMR (a type of city) would actually take shape. As a prototype. Investors would decide based on real world experimentation. Trial and error has not magically gone away, even in this age of computer simulations and game theory.

The pipeline in question is actually the BE DO HAVE projects completion cycle. Planet Earth is a solar-powered nonprofit, a recipient of grant wattage, a daily energy budget, and a multiplier for intelligent life. A mark of intelligence is an ability to actively infer and to engage in anticipatory behavior. Intelligent life plans ahead. Unintelligent life is purely reactive, never proactive. Passivism < Activism.

Voodoo Economics?

Back in CrowTown

I've been traipsing around Emerald City, a nickname for Seattle Washington, site of a World's Fair in 1962, which I can remember attending, given our family lived in nearby Portland at the time. Later, around 1966, we moved to Rome, Italy.

Yesterday, I drove through said capital (of Cascadia, per some Oz-themed folklore I've developed), taking I-5 south from north of Everett. 

Two days previously, I'd traversed this route by SoundTransit train and bus. For some time now, when doing my North Circuit, I've noticed these impressive rail bridges paralleling, sometimes crossing, I-5. I was curious to ride it and on this trip I finally got to.

Although I tunneled under and drove alongside said Space Needle City (Seattle Center is where it resides, the aforementioned World's Fair grounds), this trip was more about visiting Los Angeles, about two hours south by jet, maybe not counting taxi time (on the tarmac) and certainly not TSA lines. 

They're enforcing Real ID nowadays, meaning my OR driver's license was insufficient as a travel credential through the TSA checkpoint. I had to show my passport card.

Having been gone for over a week, I have pending tasks to attend to, such as feeding the patient, long-living snake, a co-resident of my outstairs office (where I am now, having resumed my elliptical-based workout -- referring to a piece of gym equipment). 

My aging pup, Sydney, had a health spa experience where she stayed on North Circuit, as I pioneered this Whittier Loop (Whittier is part of Greater LA, kind of like Gresham is to Portland). I'd be happy to repeat this combo. SeaTac has links to everywhere.

However, with the onset of Fall and with Fall Term looming, I need to serve as acting principal for School of Tomorrow, which means employing the services of 4D Solutions aka 4D Studios, my local suite of CrowTown workspaces, variously equipped.

Mixed Use High Rise

Architectural Conception

Classroom; 28th Floor

Lobby Mural

Gemini Generated (gg)

Electronica

Long time readers know one of my key themes is “andragogy” which means “pedagogy but for adults”. How one best trains (I hear some bristling at that word) kids ain’t necessarily what works best with adults. Granted: physical humans are at different levels, mentally, so some kids prefer the parallel “for adults” track in some cases, and vice versa. Common advice: when learning a new natural language, start with reliving your childhood and watch and ingest a lotta kid programming. Then there’s relearning one’s own language…

Along those lines, lets get back to V = IR and substation mechanics, with Queen Transformer (the whole point of the hive) taking the high voltage lower amp feed from the hydro-dam (partly made by ETs in our Martian Math) and dropping it to a lower voltage higher amp juice as needed by the wall panels, on the other side of which we have loads.

Per the word-meaning trajectory of “money”, which maps to petrol already as in the word “petrodollar”, let’s move to another analogy (by natural transformation) in which shoppers stream through a shopping mall, but in a fixed circuit, meaning they all hit the same vendors in the same sequence. 

Coming in from the battery bank, they have X electron dollars (any currency) and upon flowing through a resister, that money shrinks in potential, even though they didn’t transfer any energy (joules = “jewels”) yet. They did, actually: already add to the entropy of Motherboard Earth, broadcasting heat into the coldness of space. Motherboards, especially CPUs and GPUs, get hot.

When they hand over energy to a vendor, and get something in return, that’s called work. Burning off value in the form of empty heat expenditure is nevertheless sometimes necessary. Vendors are known to burn out. Shoppers need to be valved and their credit limited for the whole circuit to make sense.

Let’s turn that into a prompt and see what Gemini comes up with: A textbook picture showing shoppers as electrons moving in a circuit from vendor to vendor, which are the loads. Each shopper has a wallet, an energy budget. The value of their currency shrinks in what it can buy as they go through those resistors (money changers). Gemini’s output is up top.

Not too shabby. I might hand this to a human artist as a start. AI needn’t be top layer. Like our shopper should always face in the direction of DC flow and not get bigger as she gets back towards the source. And should the shopper herself shrink, not just the wallet? How do we indicate the lower voltage potential? It’s not like you have fewer dollars, just you need to push more of them to a vendor to get the desired result because each one is worth less as a unit of energy transfer (P = IV).

What did I mean back there by “word-meaning trajectory”? That’s not a mainstream word is it? Kinda like “quadrays” it’s maybe not in the OED or SEP yet, but we use it a lot here. 

Well, let’s go straight to an example: the word “psychosis”. At the Shakey’s last night over pizza I could be overheard to have said something like (paraphrase): “all my best friends have gone AI psychotic, tsk”. I said it light-heartedly. No one blinked. The CIO at the table talked about how the ambient culture was finally catching up to him, as he’d been warning of encroaching “AI psychosis” for years, and now it’s a trending topic on YouTube n places, with many channels sharing crazy content (but then TV has always had crazy content).

To get some roots, a starting point, let’s go to Freud and Vienna Circle, a peak time for Urizen (William Blake allusion). The medical profession was charting a course through what would come to be called mental illness, with its various taxonomies of pathologies, like dementia praecox, which no one has anymore, cuz the terminology moves on. 

And there you have it: a “wordmeaning trajectory” (I don’t bother with the hyphen always) for “psychosis”. Nowadays the word is being “revectored” by “AI” to where casual restaurant conversation features it differently than in Freud’s day and age.

I have a whole YouTube-published video on what I call “Cultagory Theory” (a play on “Category Theory” or CT) in which I give more examples of revectoring word meanings. The question is not whether revectoring happens so much as whether we do it consciously or unconsciously. 

We will likely fail in our revectorings (making “self” an agent) meaning the load is beyond our budget to lift (buy) as in “above our pay grade”. Failure is not a failure however, meaning the feedback is valuable either way: both can and can’t send a signal. Indeed, neither makes sense without the other. Boolean logic requires at least two to tango. Grand revectorings take a “movement” meaning the changes need to “snowball” as in “go viral”.

Of Timelines and Markers

Prolly cuz “partially overlapping Universe” connotes “timelines” (a “scenario” may be conceived as such), I’m likely to search up databases with a timeline focused angle (among maybe many other angles).

I recall starting in with Andrius of Anaheim and Lithuania, into maths, regarding where do I find “who influenced or learned from whom” in the tree of mathematicians, and he pointed me to a useful resource. Remember a directed graph may have two-way streets. Contemporaries learn from one another, sometimes. 

The Bernoullis were a hub, as math history students know. I link Bernoulli numbers to Ada in my Defense of Ada essay. I’m gonna fish up more of that story using Perplexity in a sec.

However there’s a difference between “scenario” and “timeline” in terms of dimensionality, by which I mean a “line” comes across as “thin” more like a thread, which is appropriate in a way, as in Greek mythos a lifetime was indeed a thread, which the Fates would cut when it came time to end it. However I’ve come to favor “time tunnel” as more space-timey in flavor, with the spatiality of a tunnel (something one may be “in” as “in a dark ride” at a theme park) and the ticking of a ticker (adding action). Lights, camera, action; Hollywood’s pithy version of Genesis.

Time tunnels twist and turn through the airports and airlines, as mine did at LAX recently, over Cobb salads and sushi nachos (my name for it — SoCal fusion).

Today I’m gonna tunnel my way to a coffee shop and finish reading my airplane reading (that’s an idiom — I didn’t actually read on the airplane). Ender’s Game. A big bestseller its day, but I’d never read it, nor others by this author. It’s about a children’s army. I’m still not clear why they put it on the kids to fight the ETs. The adults want their protection. Child labor if you ask me. But then some children hunger for “adult” responsibilities (as if being a kid weren’t a responsibility).

Facebook knows I’m here (in Greater LA) as my “home” (feeder timeline or “scroll”) is starting to pop up with a lotta local content. I could buy tickets to something called DataLand for example. I feel immersed in a “data land” already, safe to say. If I wanna experience time tunneling in twisty plots (aka Universe), all I need do is head out for that coffee shop, and continue this blog post from there…

…and now I’m there (a translation in both space and in time — we distinguish them, although energy expenditure requires both, seamlessly). I arced around the planet a tad (a smidgen) to get here, while my watch arced around the dial (I have my digital watch set to a dial display).

So what about “markers” (per blog posts title)? Markers help us get a time slice in common, where we can sort of agree on what splashed and rippled next to what, even if a causation story is not the objective. A cargo jet with an onboard motorcade ferries personnel between cities, showing the rest of us how it’s done. Like in Alaska that time, but minus the beast (that’s a nickname).

Road Trip

I’m doing my North Circuit again, but modified to accommodate a side trip I’ll be blogging about soon.

My route took me through the Olympic Peninsula to the Kingston - Edmonds car ferry. 

Sydney, my dog, rode in the back seat.  She’s a great traveler.

Doorbell Donation

As the old guy (senior) about to make a donation, I get to ramble in a reminiscing manner, we hope relevantly. 

I give myself high marks, as the legislation OSPIRG is backing has to do with mitigating food waste, and here I was, veteran of the Food Not Bombs operation (in Portland only, a local chapter), and former computer programmer, on a consulting basis, for the Oregon Food Bank (decades ago). 

Oh, and I was in a small group strategy meeting with Ralph Nader once (he wouldn’t remember: Sandy Newman, Project VOTE!, Reagan vs Mondale) and we’d also been at the same Princeton University reunion, my 25th, his 50th.

Wearing my anthropology hat, I underlined the critical importance of logistics. A legislator may believe that simply by virtue of writing a law, so will it be (amen), as if said law’s implementation were a mere afterthought. 

Drawing from my experiences in the toy biz, it’s one thing to have a great idea for a toy design, but quite another to have a pathway to a profitable (pays bills on time sustainable) mass replication strategy, in itself as much an invention as the design idea, in many respects. I learned this from touring (and working with) Design Science Toys.

All of which is to say: legislation is not self-implementing and the further a legislative body is from the actual executive front line, the less likely the laws will be followed closely, let alone “to the letter”.  

Are judges the referees? Or are they likewise too cloistered to see the disconnects? Maybe only the police are in a position to really experience the absurdity sometimes. Or the soldier. Or the guard.

Let’s go back to Food Not Bombs as a good example. Imagine a subculture, let’s say non-denominational religion-wise, that took serving free food, to anyone, as a calling. They adopted many Food Not Bombs practices, but also upscaled everything to where average suburban middle class normies looked forward to participating in all the logistics involved. 

A festive atmosphere prevails. Voodoo Doughnuts? Corporate sponsors? I’m just imagining the science fiction. Remember scouting? Cascadian Pragmatism?

Like I told the doorbell fundraiser, I’m kind of a TV head. If I want to say counter racism or other unfortunate bigotry, it’s not the legislators in Salem I’m likely to petition. I’m more likely to look to screenwriting and radio-television, social media. 

How we got to healthier social practices, looking back, is a topic for a whole genre of science fiction novel and/or series. Or are more utopian-flavored simulations of possible realities simply too hard to program and/or enact logistically vs-a-vs the more familiar dystopian standard?

That’s a query worth a deeper dive.

:: Mathematically Generated View ::

Designing Simulations

People still look to diplomats to represent flag-flying city-states scattered about, in this Steam OS compatible video game we’re designing. However, the truckers have their own channels, and a PhD trucker outranks most diplomats.

In the meantime, in RealWorld [tm], a play-to-pay media game, we might see some parallels. In terms of bandwidth, the pro diplomats are being displaced by those more willing to keep it more public sector (accessible). 

However it’s a blurry boundary given retired pro diplomats have flooded into the influencer space. They still have the same skillsets, which means their content is less cringe, more watchable (in some cases).

What started as “troll farms” some years ago is the new normal, in terms of paid influencers fanning out to test their PR powers in the public debate arena. The gossip bots help level the playing field in a lotta ways.

The idea of a global network of truckers swapping routes as a part of an inter-network exchange, is a theme in these blogs. The video game is of course curriculum-oriented.

The theme of our games tend to be SimCity-like in that they feature the buildout of infrastructure, electrical infrastructure in particular. That’s a tie-in to our Martian Math of course, which focuses on teaching ETs the basic principles of building out power grids. 

We’ve been focusing on substations recently, as they condense a lot of these principles at a macro level. Direct current logic gate stuff is of course complementary to this material.

The newest Python release candidate for 3.15 includes a frozendict, which I tweeted about approvingly: a logical extension of the language. Frozendicts are hashable, meaning we’ll be able to use them as keys in dictionaries of the conventional mutable type.

I’m working with other Wanderers on getting the geometry out there, in some ways piggy-backing on what’s already a theme for us: structural chemistry (such as crystallography) ala Linus Pauling. 

There’s a passage in Synergetics 2 (995.34) we might use for a bridge into the Pauling corpus. Insofar as Bucky wanted to get the Pauling “Magic Numbers”into the mix (e.g. 28), this passage is apropos. 

The also passage hints at the correspondence we might find in the OSU Pauling Archives, with Fuller pushing back that the overlap is no just merely coincidental.

Burger Week Continues

I’ll prolly be accused of a non-sequitur vs-a-vs my blog title, in turning to Debate World and the much ballyhooed Great Debate twixt Andrew Wilson and Candace Owens. 

I was gonna watch it on the hand-me-down HDTV but that piece of hardware may finally have gone back to free energy, as the buttons I push no longer correspond the the reality of what it does. I fought with it for a while, then gave up and pulled the plug. Back to iPad viewing. Not complaining. The debate began.

The Burger Week plans came into the mix so that right around the 2nd deep dive into the Steakhouse mystery (did Tyler Robinson really eat there?), I was heading on foot along Hawthorne to meet Dr. D for his choice of food cart, named Hunker Down. He had just ordered when I arrived. 

The outdoor seating area had a lotta fans going, yet it was only a pleasant 71 Fahrenheit. I know, crazy right? That I still use Fahrenheit.

So the segue, the sequitur, if you missed it, was the steakhouse. True, a burger is not a steak. Just I’d been thinking of myself as a carnivore recently, having seen a Paleo Friendly sign on my way to the previous Burger Week burger (see previous post).

The burger was excellent. 

Dr. D mentioned another channel he was newly tracking, focusing on a guy specializing in debate coaching and critiquing. This is actually the theme I’m continuing, if you wanna go back in these blogs. We’re preparing for a lot more debating, as we move away from passively following our non-leaders into oblivion. The very human reflex, before following others off a cliff, is “let’s talk.”

The Heist (Food Pod)

TetraScroll

Tetrascroll online

Weaponized Religions

Downloading the latest Dogmas (a Matrix Refresh)

As I’ve said many times through my channels, I’m not a Marxist. 

That doesn’t make me an enemy of Marx or Marxism, but does mean I’m not fan, because to really be a fan you need to do sufficient homework, not just offer empty praise, lip service, or expedient flattery. 

I’m not a Taylor Swift fan for the same reason: I couldn’t tell you the name of her songs or recite lyrics. But that doesn’t mean I have a negative opinion of Taylor Swift. On the contrary, I went to one of those three hour movie versions of her road show and enjoyed it — a lot more than most other non-fans have done I’d hazard.

Not being a fan is not the same as being an anti-fan or detractor. A non-fan is closer to being clueless about X than to experiencing antipathy towards X.

Back to Marx. Didn’t he say “religion is the opium of the people”? 

I get that many religions are addictive and foment a detached view of life, and/or provide a fantastic kind of science fiction (e.g. Scientology), but I’m more inclined to see religion as a mind-control tool used by elites vs a ground-up grassroots phenomenon. 

Folk religions provide the raw material. Elites turn folk beliefs into ideologies more useful to their agendas, which often involve conquest and territorial expansion. 

So not so much “opium” as “chip implant” — which of course Marx had no experience with (chips had not been invented yet).

Christianity would not be what it is today without its constant reshaping by imperial powers. That doesn’t mean Christianity is helpless against this type of manipulation, just most people don’t develop their immune systems sufficiently and are easily programmed by the powers that be. 

I’d consider it a topic within anthropology to study how religion is almost always weaponized by the agenda-makers, but not necessarily to their own benefit as miscalculations are common. 

Most schemers and dreamers seeking to use others as cannon fodder find their schemes backfire sooner or later, as people get wise to what’s up.

So am I saying religion is bad? Not really, as I do believe a controlled mind is better than an uncontrolled mind. But it’s best if the individual human is auto-programming through intuition versus submitting to the authority of others. Many religions discourage this, and I’d say those are the religions to stay away from, if you value personal autonomy. 

Some don’t want autonomy — they wanna escape having a sense of self, of responsibility, and just bliss out. Isn’t that what Eric Fromm’s Escape From Freedom was all about? Time to chat with Perplexity again.

Regarding Marxism, if it contains the dogma that only human labor is a source of value-added in an economy, then that I’d certainly disagree with. We could have a debate maybe.

Warm Springs Circuit

The tent is passing tests but for the flaking reflective material used on the reversible (either side up-facing) over-tent, anchored by stretchy hooks pulling down to the tent’s corners (> 4), with a single ridge pole tied to the apex. At the apex, three geodesics form a triangle to support the dome. The skin is hooked to these from below.

However, the air mattress failed completely. I hadn’t tested it in awhile and was please to find both hole plugs. Just like old time, I blew into it, filling the thing with lung exhaust. But it never filled, because a seam had become unglued or was slit or whatever. Not only was this a large hole, it didn’t look at all reparable, so I stashed it in the estate’s trash.

That’s right, this was all happening within the perimeter of a privately owned patch of land with its own facilities: running water, heater, air conditioner, refrigeration, even WiFi (which I’m using now). I slept in a bed instead of outside in the tent, which is just as well, as although I’d brought blankets (not a sleeping bag), anticipating a warm night, it dropped into the low 40s on the Fahrenheit scale (32 water freezing to - 212 water boiling, in equally-sized “degree” gradations).

Getting here through Warm Springs Nation was problem free, for me and the dog, even though fires are raging throughout the region and legions of firefighters are bravely combatting the spread. Spokane, Washington has it worse in a lotta ways. The fires I’ve been seeing on local television includes that one east of us in the Ochoco Mountains. Yesterday we visited Smith Rock at watched hikers and climbers from a picnic table, eating deli-prepared sandwiches. That evening: fresh huckleberry pie from Eagle Crossing, my Warm Springs stop. Fam call with the sisters.

Given WiFi, I’ve continued barreling ahead with Project Manga (as I think of it) which includes Anime of course. We’ve got our design science revolutionaries providing a lotta raw material for didactic comics likely to be more popular in Japan than in Gotham at first.

Testing the Tent (continued)

:: campfire lore ::

Testing the Tent

:: diorama: c6xty miner campsite ::

I've not used it in awhile and may be using it on an overnight shortly, and even if I don't, I wanna keep up my skills. 

So I set it up in my backyard as a part of this diorama: vintage mining site, digging for C6XTY -- and finding some! 

A productive vein for sure.

Engineering Vistas

Gemini LMM

More Grid Talk

Continuing with our curriculum design talk:

What’s good about substations is their layout is likewise a circuit diagram of textbook quality, looking down from above especially, the “drone view”. Simulations work as well. These are already genres on YouTube. I’m not suggesting we need a lotta peeps flying their commercial drones over substations. On the contrary, I’m only in favor of engineers doing that (not destruction engineers either, the ones who only know how to wreak havoc).

Why we make this our promising beginning is all the electrical principles of capacitance and inductance, impedance more generally, expressed in ohms, are on full display in a highly macroscopic way. Plus we’re dealing with AC. Too many bonehead classrooms never get beyond DC digital. Not that we have anything against digital: the control room takes some of that AC power for its own DC use, to power the monitoring relays, ready to snap a circuit breaker if the waves get too stormy, as in outside safe operational parameters.

Don’t wait until they niche you into “linesman” or something before you take up the topic of carrier signals, used to keep the power supply well behaved. Quoting Gemini (Google + AI):

A carrier signal in a power substation is used for Power Line Carrier Communication (PLCC), which utilizes high-voltage transmission lines to transmit protection commands, telemetry data, and voice communication between remote electrical substations. [1, 2]

What we help our students discern is whether they’re getting a “for dummies” version of everything, not because they’re dummies, but because they live in a society that thrives on dummies and needs them to be dummies. Also good doobies. These go together in a lotta ways. 

So yeah, start with capacitors and circuit breakers the size of a truck, then work your way down to the same principles at work on a motherboard, with everything tiny and maybe also DC, but maybe not? Don’t let them corral you into only thinking about Arduinos though. 

Don’t get me wrong: I love Arduinos and the like. I’ve both taken and taught classes wherein Arduinos were featured. Make Magazine was just down the hall from our code school back in the day.

It’s not either/or. On the contrary, it’s zoom in (tiny small) and zoom out (macro big), with the same topics in focus: electromagnetics, radio transmission, signalling, frequencies, resistance, compression and tension. 

Take advantage of “substation macro” to pry open the secrets of “gate logic micro” later, or at the same time. 

Then use substation literacy to connect back to the hydro-cycle: evaporation (clouds and wind); condensation (rain, lightning); gravity-fed water systems (power and agriculture); deltas and watersheds (fisheries, hatcheries), marine biology, and back to evaporation. 

Cascadian Pragmatism pays attention to the ecosystem embedding (what some people still call the economy).

Hacker Lore

Hah hah, fooled ya. I meant weed hacker lore. That’s a device (a weed hacker is), as in Over the Hedge.

I’ve been joking how I’m “keeping up with the Jones’s” which means competing with others in one’s neighborhood to show off one’s worldly goods. Having a flashy new midlife crisis car in the driveway is classic. That’s not me though: my Nissan is from 1997.

Keeping up with the Jones’s is a way of showcasing one’s own prosperity, or at the very least one’s ability to keep up appearances, and then maybe take it to the next level if one gets lucky and hits the jackpot. 

In the Norman Rockwell version, Asteroid City trad-wives would gossip over the back fence about their latest appliances, inflaming jealousy and subtle hints to the hubby that it might be time to ask for that promotion. A willingness to relocate helps. There’s always another McMansion waiting on the other end.

My old podunk electric weed hacker in the garage, which needs to be plugged in (long cord), is just a toy compared to this new guy, this new cordless “energy slave” I just unboxed. I’ll be able to pleasure the landlord nextdoor with my more manicured-looking side yard, typically a gnarly briar patch. 

No, this is not a promotional posting. Ego is not paying me (that’s the brand). I’m just narrating a sequence of events. I acquired the Ego in Springfield, the town made famous by The Simpsons.

There’s another meaning of Jones however, and I’m not talking about Davy Jones (the guy with the locker), no, I mean Generation Jones. 

You can look it up: some demographers decided it made sense, at least in the population they studied, to split the Boomers into two, by renaming the latter portion of the wave to Jones, in recognition of various sea-changes.

What were those sea-changes? Why not inspire some comments and discussion among my Facebook friends?

Farmland Physics

A motif in these blogs is First Person Physics, which I started as a meme on a physics teacher list (AAPT types) at which point Dr. Bob Fuller recognized the potential and invited me on to his “pirate ship” (his enterprise), then seeking a next NSF grant. 

I became Bob’s project’s webmaster and got to join a meetup in Lincoln, Nebraska in the build-up to the application. I also got invited to an AAPT conference as part of the deal. 

When Dr. Fuller passed away, I was privileged to join an event celebrating his stellar achievement in physics andragogy and pedagogy. Among his acknowledged influences: Robert Karplus and Piaget.

Today was about First Person Physics on a farm. The farm is bordered by a scenic river and the architect-landscaper wants to take advantage of the view’s best vantage points, easily reachable by foot or electric ATV. 

However the river also floods periodically so no additional permanent structures are permitted. Rolling and re-angling a log, already nearby — albeit shortened with a chainsaw — to such a vantage point (the one by Walden Pond — no we’re not in New England) is permissible in terms of codes, but an unanchored log is likely to float.

The final design includes long metal bladed stakes that, when twisted into the topsoil, will anchor the chains over each end of the log bench, keeping it from drifting off. We’ll see if it works. The Gator was enlisted to help with the rolling and re-angling. Even a small log is too heavy for one person to manhandle.

This is where the concept of “energy slaves” enters in. We’re talking about what replaced horses, and human slaves before that (serfs, cow-pokes, many land-bound farmhands), namely John Deere and Kubota tractors, combines, wheel and reel lines, agricultural grade pumping and irrigation systems. 

A mechanized farm still needs personnel, but they may spend more time in the control room than out in the fields.

This Oregon farm where I do work-study is not an animal farm though. No chickens, no pigs, no livestock of any kind. The property therefore doesn’t need to be fenced. However, future owners have been kept in mind during the design process. The animal stalls and watering troughs are all in place, if currently unused. Sometimes a shepherd will rent grazing space, but they bring their own removable fences nowadays.

My suggestion to the owner was we organize university fleet vans to bring doctoral candidates and other degree program students out into rural Oregon for a look see, perhaps to participate in safe work best practices. Tour a windmill farm. Visit the AC-to-DC HVDC site near The Dalles, as well as BPA. 

Check out a data center or two (I recommend Facebook’s in Prineville), and take in a lecture on social engineering from the pros.

Stop in at the aforementioned farm for the rustic C6XTY museum, another roadside attraction. 

If this is your first time in America, so much the better. What could be more authentic than the home of Homer Simpson. You’ll find murals all over town, if you know where to look.

DevOps Retreat

I'm sure some geeks might complain about my use of DevOps here, as "development and operations" already has its own meaning, and people sometimes wish for a neologism versus any kind of revectoring. 

Like with Synergetics, Fuller's writings: there's more re-vectoring than neologism-ing going on, even though he’s accused of having a remote vocabulary. In many respects it’s the same dictionary, just he applies a different spin. That’s what writers do.

In my case, devops is closer to “curriculum development” but we’re factoring in “operational mathematics” more the way Bucky used that term, to imply that his mathy prose had operational significance (think “psyops”).

Am I allowed to say I’m on one of my circuits in my BizMo? Since I’ve done a lot to re-vector that word, almost a neologism, but not really, according the Urban Dictionary, I suppose it’s up to me. 

So my dog and I hopped into a BizMo, stopping for brunch in Hillsdale with Bradford and then continuing on south to our retreat site, there to engage in devops with the others, in a semi-luxurious environment (there’s even a “Walden Pond” with outdoor seating).

What others do I mean? 

These days, it only takes WiFi and some other gear to set up one’s mobile office. I’m able to work both synchronously and asynchronously without expecting others to the burn fuel it’d take to physically join me. My own fuel is subsidized (privately in this case) so it’s easier for me to hit the road maybe. 

Many of my counterparts do not have access to, let alone own, motor vehicles.

Per the embedded picture above, I’m using Gemini to flesh out what happens in Synergetics around Euler and Gibbs as anchoring proper names; how Fuller merges them into his own language, picking up on visual processing on the one hand, and emotional processing on the other (“process work” fits in around here somewhere).

That Euler + Gibbs synergy is a portal into First Person Physics, by way of the observer, and the observer’s psychology (operational). Applewhite, a collaborator on Synergetics, was “in it for the psychology” he once told me (I recall we were discussing pronouns and his including them in the index).

Re-vectoring is often the better choice as one is leveraging pre-existing denotations and connotations, not starting over from scratch. Synergetics builds on our English language heritage, a kind of legacy medium, but alerts its readers (the alert ones at least) about the remoteness of the Synergetics vocabulary.

I’m All Right Jack (movie review)

Most readers will likely be entirely unfamiliar with this movie, that’s my guess. Peter Sellers. Rosalie, my librarian friend, knew it well, and recommended it, but she’s a least two standard deviations to the left (towards literate — as in left brain), not anywhere near middle of the road.

Perhaps I’m simply projecting my own ignorance, as an MMU student with less than full fluency in British culture. Maybe that’s why I found this movie so educational, as it wasn’t afraid to poke fun at (expose, dissect) both tiers of psyche in that social Darwinist environment. 

Management had split off against the Workers, white versus blue (as in collar) and education levels, as well as birthright land rights, made a huge difference in that respect. “Upper class” means a way of talking (the My Fair Lady insight) and projecting one’s insider (owner) status. Of course the whites and blues are all men and all Euro-white, with females (another caste) as trad-wives, moms and, if you’re lucky, rich aunts.

Of course there’s immense irony in the fact that the Peter Sellers character, representative of the working class, is unable to do dishes or darn his own socks. Minus the women’s caretaker role, the so-called workers are effectively ineffective. 

The leading character, a well-acted buffoon, is from the educated insider class. He’s something of a dandy. I found his over-reactions hilarious vs-a-vs those ball-playing women but then the joke was on me cuz I didn’t get this was a nudist colony until the closing scene. Duh.

So our educated dandy is too supercilious to get his hands dirty and the job interviews all bomb. They convince him to go undercover, as working class (the rich aunt is skeptical), at a missile factory and this is where the international relations figure in. 

The aristocratic Brits wanna sell weapons to their colonies in the Levant (a semi-country roiled by competing narratives) and make money the old fashioned way: by dreaming up illusionary scenes (like stage magicians) for the journos to report, while meanwhile they make out like bandits — cuz that’s what they are: next generation Venetian schemers as Bucky describes em (“Venetian” rhymes with “Phoenician” in Fuller’s quasi-Joycean vocabulary (long story)). 

The worker Brits are trying to resist over-exploitation by organizing around their spanking new ideology, a mash of Marxism and maybe Systematic Ideology (another native source of narratives). Peter Sellers plays a worker-bee indoctrinator, keeping his little army in position to exert leverage by inspiring his brand of groupthink.

But the goofy upper class doofus bungs it up, by not catching on (his level of self awareness is close to zero). He inadvertently subverts the labor unions, weakening their collective bargaining position, to where only strikes (stopping working) seem to be a way back to equilibrium. These strikes effectively spoil the business dynamics and the aristocrats see their schemes go up in smoke (which is just as well, as the Levant is better off without the Brit missiles).

The whole plot becomes a wry comment on the hopelessness of the entire economy, which nevertheless makes movies like this one, and brings us Monty Python.

As I was saying to Rosalie later: “I know this culture”. I was actually being groomed as an aristocrat in 3rd grade, wearing a tie, learning how a table was set with the manners to go with. 

I was a lone American (one of maybe two) in that school, not a boarding school. I’d go home to my American parents, but as someone increasingly Britified (I had the accent). Eventually they recognized the pathologies I was developing and they pulled me out, and sent me to a more American school.

I’d avoid any job-roles requiring a tie after that, as a rule of thumb, which in Britain might be a sign I was blue collar, a label I’ll accept (aesthetically, I prefer blue to white — tuxedos look infinitely stupid). 

However out here in Cascadia we’re more an egalitarian meritocracy, an engineering culture, meaning status is not conveyed through dress (millionaires dress down, not up) but by one’s level of fluency in STEM languages. 

In a nutshell: credibility as an actor, in a management capacity, requires knowing at least some computer science, like the workers do. That’s the gist of the so-called AI revolution: you need to talk like a geek to sound agentic.

But we’re talking about a science fiction future with respect to the 1950s. HG Wells might wanna take over the story at this point.