Gifts from Japan

Sydney and I visited with our friend newly back from Japan, accepting gifts to pass on to our circle, pictures also. 

Sydney is a chocolate English Labrador.  Her main hobbies are eating, sleeping, and grazing like a cow, smelling things. She’s so well-behaved she’s earned her right to walk around the block leash free.

In the news, the Lower48, part of the post USA diaspora, is being subjected to tyrannical rule by a Monster U (aka USSA) engaging in reckless out-of-control warring with no popular mandate. 

Post USA indeed. Pretty obvious, if there’s some awareness.

We look to the Global U to help us with teach ins, about how we got here and how we might make it to a next chapter.

Scapegoating one man is relatively easy. The people hiding behind the scapegoat enjoy having their human shield.  Wealth creation (adding life support) takes more planning.

Our syllabus uses technical shoptalk like LAWCAP and GRUNCH, a lot of which got amplified in the Occupy chapter (which we’ve been revisiting this Summer Term at School of Tomorrow).

For lunch I had Korean BBQ, from a food truck in one of the pods I frequent.

Pattern Language: the Alcove

:: annotated mother goose atop global matrix ::

Sheep Detectives (movie review)

I caught this one on Prime, my curiosity piqued by a positive review from Beth, who has years of experience raising sheep in rural Oregon, and is also a retired librarian who consumes media at an amazing rate, like Rosalie does. 

This so-called Mercado Group (where our book club got started) has been meeting for years and is a steady source of guidance when it comes to my studies, especially when it comes to fiction.

Sheep Detectives is a clever movie, weaving the whodunnit genre, the murder mystery, with more existential explorations of mortality. The sheep do not have an adult human’s view of death, except the older wise ones who remember stuff. Usually, sheep just want to forget.

However what keeps sheep wanting to remember are unsolved puzzles, such as who killed George, their good-hearted shepherd who has been hoping to reunite with his two kids, whom he had put up for adoption (I’ve forgotten why already, baa!). 

A good memory is a prerequisite for detective work. Lilly, a loyal and intelligent sheep, teams up with the elder sheep to bring the killer(s) to justice. She fights off the temptation to go unconscious, prizing self awareness which is likewise awareness of otherness (Synergetics for Sheep could be a slide deck).

The most singular trope in this move is that of the “winter sheep”, a divergent introvert that wants to belong as a youngster but over time learns to accept its loner status, with a more distant relationship to the herd.

We have both a noob (a lamb) and a senior (older sheep) of the winter type, helping us plot the trajectory, the arc, of such an archetype, portrayed unpromising at first (an ugly duckling) but as noble and helpful to the herd’s long term survival in the end (swan). 

Sheep dynamics are a kind of mind dynamics, which includes being super forgetful.

The integration of live action actors with animated talking sheep is quite impressive. These two forms of mammal intelligence, four legged and biped, seamlessly share the same sense of humanity, including a sense of loss when dear ones depart, and a wish to avenge victims of foul play by detecting the perps.

The dynamics in question map to individuals for sure, but also to more Machiavellian entities, such as states, which likewise engage in subterfuge (e.g. false flag attacks) as well as bumbling, clueless behavior. What inspires the bumbling police guy to snap out of it, finally, are the off camera (from his point of view) antics of the sheep, whom we might map to other fairy tales with invisible spirit worlds (e.g. ghosts). 

X-Day Again

I’m not gonna devote this blog post to church (of the Subgenius) arcana. Per my Fun Homework YouTube you might know that I don’t have anywhere close to the encyclopedic knowledge of church lore to the extent some do, whether ordained or not (I never had reverend status).

Instead, I’m gonna continue with my account of July 4, the day before (X-Day is celebrated on July 5, and is like a family event, never in competition with Burning Man. There’s a documentary you could view.

So I got off to an active start with the bike loop, like old times (S2P). Then what? Well, I got into Wandering mode meaning I had all kinds of fantasies about where I was going, with some pegged objectives (catch the fireworks at least), so I didn’t set out to see Minions 3 at the Fox Tower Regal. Again, I had the theater mostly to myself. I enjoyed the movie a lot and will get back to it later.

After that, I circled back to the waterfront having come downtown by FX2, and whaddya know I got a perfect direct line of sight to one of the main Blues Festival stages, just north of the bridge, on which I was standing. Great sound. Great bands. Great crowd, with many pouring across the bridge in both directions, which had to get raised soon after I arrived: two, not one, two fireworks barges were ready to take their places for the after dark show.

By the time the fireworks started, I was back on the east side (of the river) where a custom DJ booth took advantage of the echo under I-5, and they did an excellent job of it. Their music made a perfect soundtrack for the visuals, the fireworks. And yes, I did notice all those people having dinner on the bridge in that cordoned off area. Very imaginative.

I walked from my viewpoint through OMSI parking lots to Tilikum Crossing, the same stop where I often hop on the FX2 with my bicycle. This time though, given the emptying out of the downtown, the FX2s were hopelessly full, so I decided to walk to Powell and grab a 9, transferring to a 75 at Chavez, with enough layover time to shop at Safeway for all American cheese puffs and Diet Dr. P. 

There’s a corny carnivalesque aspect to July 4 ceremonies. People are serious about not being too serious. I overheard some people singing the theme song of Team America, World Police, which is satirical. 

A sense of pride emanates from a cosmopolitan city like Portland cuz, for all the negative spin doctoring, it’s that proverbial “melting pot” people keep registering their skepticism about, as too pie-in-the-sky. 

But it’s the on-the-ground reality, this wealth of diversity sharing in the festivities. We’re not talking about speculative eventualities. We’re melting in a melting pot whether we like it or not. The Portland vibe is we like it, as we already melted long ago and just wanna stay what we already are: weird. 

We wear that word “weird” as a badge of pride, all kidding aside, and with the support (not opposition) of the commercial sector. Visitors have come to expect said weirdness just like when you’re in Gotham you expect there might be a Joker lurking in there somewhere. Ditto: weirdness lurks. Think “incommensurability” maybe.

Blues Festival on KBOO

Toy Story 5 (movie review)

One might wonder at my choice of time tunnels. The avatar: a white haired senior, clearly an old guy, riding alone on the bus in a tie and Python-branded sweater, because today it’s chilly enough for such garb, even in summer, when Europeans are experiencing record heat. I’d been to Quakers earlier (Bridge City Friends) and didn’t bother to change before heading out again. I often wear a tie when riding the bus.

The choice of time tube (as in program): bus and walk to and from Pioneer Place Regal Cinemas and take in Toy Story 5, 1:20 Sunday matinee. The senior price: somewhere between $12 and $13. 

I had the auditorium all to myself but for what I assumed were a parent and young child in the row ahead of me. The child seemed about the age of the two star kids in this movie.

Toy Story 5 is for sure made for children, and for parents of children, who have that shared concern about sociality, meaning not only finding friends, but the right friends. With whom is it OK, in the sense of beneficial, to hang out? 

Families tend to feel their way forward in America, more than they’re handed a list of pre-approved playmates, although it’s also the case that some communities are very ingrown and isolated, even in the 21st Century. That may be by choice. Diversity is the name of the game, which doesn’t mean “without boundaries”. Not every community has a sense of a shared public space. This movie recreates single family wooden homes in both a suburban and rural (as in horse-owning) setting.

Toy Story movies always harp on the same theme: the kids who own and actively play with these toys are growing up fast and the dolls therefore have a sense of their own mortality (sense of doom), an approaching death of relevance. They’ll end up on a box in the garage, or they’ll be donated, passed along. At best. The dolls in Toy Story 5 have been through several owners. They’re jaded, Woody has a shiny bald spot, and, as toys qua toys, they're losing ground to screen devices.

I have nothing negative I want to say about this movie. On the contrary, I felt witness to a serious yet humorous investigation into childhood issues around belonging. Inside Out 2 was another one in this genre. These movies (I’m talking about the “for kids” genre) serve a real purpose, both reflecting and refracting.

It’s not like I’m not moody. I’ve got the AirPods and Verizon and have my various antennae, for times when I’m walking or on the bus. Today I waited until I got home to walk the dog, before tuning in about the dirty wars (a redundant characterization in a lotta ways). Kids just wanna have a childhood and watch some cartoons, but so-called Adult World, or Machine World -- kids with guns in a lotta cases -- comes at them fast. Many get born into some nightmare scenario, whereas the stars in Toy Story are just coasting through the usual ups and downs.

My favorite aspect of this movie was the whole shipwrecked shipment of Buzz Lightyears, all groupthinking together, a mini hive mind on the move. There’s a satirical flavor to the Buzz legion that transfers over to Rambo movies and the wider genre. Males in packs. Team players. A fun ethnicity.

Cowgirl Sheriff (the star) is pointed and direct in her manner, goal driven, a born leader (if toys are born). Woody shows up, also somehow high ranking and already with a partner, allowing for an uncomplicated romantic subplot involving Buzz (he has a crush on Cowgirl). 

The movie opens with some kitchen utensils getting married, within a girl’s imagination, with the other toys playing along. We’re clearly in a space where “getting married” is imagined often. That’s not unique to Disney movies, obviously. 

This story keeps the married couples heterogenous in that parent couples are conventionally nuclear. No isotopes. Nothing molecular. 

It’s not meant to be a soap so much as a coming of age action thriller involving favorite toys getting lost and found. Again, The Inside Outs are somewhat similar. Science fiction? OK, it’s a soap, but deliberately easy to follow. Keeping track of who’s who is a learned skill.

I agree with this message also: letting the screens do all the work and not exercising one’s own powers of imagination through creative improv dollhouse style play, including with others (thereby making friends), is likely to come at a cost. Many parents would approve of that message.

So don’t let them shame you for diving into fairytales, anime and manga, where useful info lies encoded. Have a real inner life, in the first person, vs trying to outsource your emotions. 

A rich fantasy life is something to protect, vs bargain away for high pay. When they pay you to deliberately impoverish yourself, maybe its time to change the job description, or even switch careers. 

Parenthetically speaking, I’ll add that I don’t find STEM subjects to be inherently unimaginative, especially when we make it STEAM, by adding Anthropology.

Screen-based Sims and SimCity showed how the dollhouse simply re-emerges in the digital realm. We get a play within a play almost no matter what we do. 

Some of these screen based simulations might be more focused on the engineering. The Buzz Lightyears might even be into that, if sober. 

I was intrigued by some of the previews. One in particular, the claymation one by Laika, features Portland (before the portal is entered). WildWood I think it’s called.

Podcast on Substack

Polydactica: Interview with Kirby Urner

A Wanderer Interviews another Wanderer

Listen on Substack

Wanderers Meetup

Flickr Album: Summer Solstice Gathering 2026

Book Club Meetup

Our conversation circle touched on some of my Pirate Party planks today, not that I raised them as such, only that boarding school naturally arises once we have our planning hats on. We talked about the ongoing experiment with the dorm, in Mitchell School District #55 in Oregon. Different mixes of gender and subculture have been tried.

Sometimes I try out what will eventually become segments in more formal presentations, about Nietzsche for example, and how his sick and twisted sister helped shape his legacy into a form suitable for Third Reich exploitation. We learned that whole story from Walter Kaufmann. You may have heard me on YouTube covering that segment already.

After the conversation circle, I drove to WinCo, streaming Candace’s Ep 352, which is about how the private sector has replaced the public one in the military. 

In this post nation-state world, it’s private mercenaries all the way down, although some inherited the decals of their ancestral states and still flaunt them. Some people dress up like Romans or re-enact the Civil War. 

We see a lot of creative anachronists using live ammo, and starring in tawdry melodramas written by Urizen’s slaves. You can probably tell I’m not a big fan of today’s military-minded scenario programming, for use “in theater” as they say.

We saw our Republic fading with that Ollie North crowd and it only got worse: “never mind about the constitution and civilian control, we have our own agendas”. But then we had the 1960s assassinations before that. The fragile Union had been on a bumpy road ever since it had become an empire, having been birthed to fight one. Some would say the Philippine-American war was the beginning of the end.

Fictional television played a big role in helping folks jailbreak out of their narrow so-called “thinking caps” which no longer fit. Shows like Breaking Bad for example. Financial fluency also increased thanks to the crypto chapter (another soap). Fictional TV continues to be informative.

Anyway, those of us keen to regenerate a public sector are still allowed to brainstorm about what that might look like. 

It’s not like everyone will be on the same page, nor do they need to be. A common mistake in social engineering is to suppose too large a scope. At the other extreme, an experiment might be too minuscule to really matter. The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears has an obvious interpretation; there’s too hot, and too cold, with a sweet spot in the middle.

The days of “too big” publishing, which takes a “one size fits all” approach to schooling, are ostensibly over. It’s no longer about what they’ll need in Texas and California and let the others accept their choice as a consensus. We no longer need consensus on that level. The technology allows us to localize, even as we import from the various curricula, on tap around the world. 

The personal workspace, or “nerd cave”, has taken over as the place where education primarily happens, punctuated by field trips, more likely by smaller van than big school bus. Their scheduling might eventually be seen as a county level responsibility. In the meantime: it’s private sector. 

These workspaces might be in office buildings, repurposed. You might be learning algebra on some 28th floor of a mixed-use high rise, and getting paid in some form (catalog options?) for your self improvement work. Society benefits from improved selves, which is why it pays to pay the self-improving.

Diamonds (movie review)

I’m talking about an older flick from Movie Madness, selected from the Classic Actors Kirk Douglas shelf, that provides another puzzle piece in our Film Studies. 

We’ve already seen Kirk Douglas playing the old geezer opposite Burt Lancaster in Tough Guys, that train robber movie (they steal the train itself). 

We’ve also seen Secondhand Lions, with the coming of age angle: a young male learns from a different pair of grumpy geezers (his ancestor predecessors). 

What a young person learns: old guys often make stuff up in the name of storytelling, and to glorify their own exploits (thereby winning admiration), and yet sometimes what seems an unbelievably fantastic story might turn out to be true. 

More often though, having such stories turn out to be true is what turns the movie itself into fiction. All these aforementioned movies are completely made up, we shouldn’t forget that. They don’t even claim to be “based on a true story” which doesn’t mean a whole lot anyway.

But then I’m forgetting one of the most important puzzle pieces, The Harder They Fall, featuring the corrupt world of boxing from which Kirk Douglas now hails, post stroke, and so with a speech impediment. But still he’s the Polish Prince, committed to overcoming all obstacles. In getting his brains knocked about a lot, he’s living the American Dream. 

From that other boxing movie, he gets Bogart’s old flame, Lauren Bacall. Not that she’s opposite Bogart in that movie (his last, she outlived him), where he’s paired with Jan Sterling. The woman is usually the positive influence, as the man, Bogart, faces money problems.

Those ill-gotten diamonds (back to Kirk Douglas) were real after all (after the head fake with the fake ones), so, happy ending, he gets to stay out of the old folks home and live gracefully on a farm with Bogart’s ex. Given this film is a Kirk Douglas vehicle, we understand why it goes there.

Kirk’s two sons are struggling with their own mid-life issues, which include having healthy relationships with their own offspring. Dan Akroyd plays the boomer dad, Lance, divorced and sharing custody of the 15 year old for whom this movie is mostly made (his demographic that is).

What makes this film more edgy is how transparently it’s an ad for Reno. Can you spell it? R-E-N-O (I’m quoting dialog). Not Vegas. Repeat not Vegas. The hotels are nice, kid friendly, great food, and you’ll win both at cards and at the slots in ways that are supremely satisfying. 

You’ll even be a hero and prevent gramps from getting mugged (you’ll chase down the mugger and get the money back — how often does that happen?), but do stay out of the back alleys if you’re a tourist. Go back into the casino where it’s safe and where you’ll be appreciated. Or maybe visit a really fun brothel (tip the waitress for a referral). Reno has it all.

Come to Reno for your midlife crisis and maybe strike it rich! Nevada put a lot of energy into helping out with this film, that much is obvious both from the content, and the credits. It was filmed on location.

USA OS

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Async vs Sync

:: innocent whimsy from the negative left ::

The catalogs need to keep their offerings sounding contemporary for the most part, to meet prospects where they are, in terms of the current street talk amongst the vulgate. Not that everyone speaks the same vulgate. Marketing must be tailored to be effective, unless appealing to universals, which of course most commercials do at some level.

Once enrolled in say Systems Design, one encounters the syllabus around which other experiences, such as meetups and lectures might be built. Typically a cafeteria style catalog based system, such as a university, will give a try-before-you-buy grace period. 

Dive in, get a good sense of it, and then decide; feel free to bail. I’m accustomed to such a system. A further nuance: sticking around to audit but not committing oneself to time/energy requirements, either in terms of tuition (although audit fees may pertain, as at a rock concert) or in terms of meeting deadlines and having a recorded grade.

Typically, a prospect will have ways to survey a course without taking the probationary step as even just that step may look like an unnecessary detour in the rear view mirror. “Can’t I just read ahead myself, as an autodidact, like I’m used to doing, and not submit to your no doubt tiresome lectures?” Yes, of course, that’s where async comes in. 

A perennial problem with a bell curve classroom is the presenter is expected to accommodate whatever dimensions the real time attenders bring to the space. I call that a “problem” more from the standpoint of an attender with high aptitude who feels the presenter is slowing it all down for the benefit of other attenders. 

This type of frustration is standard in classrooms, but may not be a problem for a professional presenter as their job is to distribute the frustration load such that all payees (assuming a fee) get their share (frustration builds competence), or, if there’s no fee, people stand to gain according to their own level of investment i.e. the presenter isn’t there to “put a lid on it” in terms of value, and yet every session is capped in terms of meeting some average benchmarks. From the standpoint of the slower, the process may seem equally unfair as the presenter moves on to the next segment, unconcerned about some not getting it.

The async curriculum is less about presenter classrooms, although these remain important, and more about how a curriculum might be explored in between more formal synchronous meetups. The word “homework” comes with the lame connotation of “assigned” whereas “the freedom to wander” (more like “play”) is what a home sweet home should provide. It’s not for anyone else to dictate what a given PWS wants to dive into (PWS = personal workspace;  picture a work-study studio).

Do I ever get around to Martin Buber in my curriculum for example? In my own career as a browser with a browser history I’d likely reflect back on my time as a student under Walter Kaufmann at Princeton, as he talked about Buber quite a bit. Buber was definitely on the syllabus.

Kaufmann didn’t like “thou” as a pronoun anymore than he liked “superman” as a translation for “uber-mensch” or whatever Zarathustra was on about. He preferred a straight “you” so “I and You” (thinking Buber) and for “superman” he went with “overman” as “uber” goes with “over” quite frequently (overseer = supervisor).

OK so I had Walter Kaufmann as a professor, that might put me on some mental maps. Does that mean I also link to Kierkegaard in my syllabus? Questions like that. 

“What does the School of Tomorrow do for me, in terms of extending my sense of orientation within some vista?” 

That’s a question each prospect needs to ask as its own “me ball” i.e. as an avatar within said system (curriculum). The decision might be: not now, but I’ll come back later for a second look. That’s perfectly reasonable. 

“Incommensurability” is another hook.

Campus Outpost

Prompt: Make a picture: A forest child in Cascadia, a Native American from the Columbia Gorge region, is also an experience drone flyer. She keeps each of her drones inside a miniature geodesic dome of the kind hippies have used forever in that part of the country. That off grid lifestyle blended nicely with the high tech aesthetic associated with the tribal outposts in the Alaska-Siberia region, where the new electrical project is currently planned.

Hotel Colonial (movie review)

Exercising Wanderer Skills

Greetings from CrowTown

One of the themes in these logs is navigation (broad brush stroke), starting with School of Tomorrow hypertrails through Cyberia, but also getting into literal cityscape navigation skills such as bus and subway riding. In rural areas, we might switch to ATVs (I got to operate one of those last week in fact, on a farm, gas powered, not electric (not an EATV)).

Those of you perusing these logs may be thinking: yeah but isn't wandering around on the bus and subway all day kind of a lonely old man occupation. So you have your bus binder reading, and camera, bag of goodies, so what? That's not an appealing lifestyle or even with reach for me.

Got it. But you may have a relative you think should get out more... but as to the solo operator feature, that's not the only mode. You have multi-operator wandering to reconnoiter, and I'll be practicing that today again, scheduling a bus ride such that I'll be joined by another Wanderer (yes, he's been to Pauling House for a gathering) at a different stop from where I get on.

I think I've yakked about this before, but it bears repeating: when the Brazilians would show up for a Portland OSCON (at one point the Portland part was taken for granted, before the OS Bridge chapter), they'd already be using telecoms to the max, rendezvousing with one another as if they'd been practicing for years, which they had been in many cases. Not surprising really; Brazilians with an opportunity to come to an OSCON tended to be "genius class" in their niche geekdom.

So yes, your skills might mean you get to use the same skills in a different city, maybe Madison or Boston or one of those other "ending in on" places (London...), or maybe we're doing more than just playing word games. Portland is in the midst of its treasure hunting season, so my mindset might be tinged by the "leaving breadcrumbs" aspect of our CrowTown festival.

Joining another party on the same bus woulda been a real challenge back in my more youthful days in Rome, Italy, where bus and subway riding was my lifestyle as a teen. I'd go solo and/or with friends. So yes, I'm reliving my teen years to a degree, but actually today it's all much easier to get fancy, because of smartphones and real time texting, not to mention TriMet Trip Tools, which I access through my phone-based HOP app, the same one that I pay with (it's hooked to my Visa -- but would that work in Brazil?).

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