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.