CrowTown Art

Urban Adventures

I’m gonna need to get the brakes tightened on this Cannondale. It’s a hand-me-down, a nice one, and I’ve been using it a lot, adding wear and tear. There’s a bike shop quite nearby so rather than go down rabbit holes on YouTube, I’m gonna get some training, and maybe buy a tool or two, directly from the pros.

Before this morning’s bike adventure, was the meetup with raccoons, a family, migrating willy-nilly across property lines, like a band of roaming gypsies that never bought in to the property lines game. I had them staring into my flashlight, half way up the tree. Would I be able to take some flash pictures? No dice.

My route this morning took me north from OMSI, along the Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade and over the Steel, south along the west side to Tilikum Crossing and the FX2. I didn’t leave my helmet behind this time, even though I took it off to insert my earbuds (I’ve got an off-brand pair with ear hooks and don’t use them when riding). Some of my slowings were taking too long. First Person Physics.

Last night was a last ceremonial outdoor BBQ. It’s still crazy warm in October, in the 70s, or it least that seems above average to me. All in all, it was a mild summer but for the forest fires. That’s speaking as a Portlander. 

Now it seems like a mild Fall, but with the winds starting to kick up, blowing the leaves around. The crows’ migration path may have shifted from overhead. We’d see lots of em, directly over the backyard. Maybe that season is still ahead.

Yesterday my multi-modal Wanderers path took me along NE Alberta, from where the 75 dropped me, to where the 6 picked me up, on MLK. I took the Red Line (headed to the airport) back to Hollywood and might’ve gone in Trader Joe’s if the return 75 weren’t arriving so soon. That was all walking activity, no bicycle in the picture. I closed my green Exercise ring per Apple Watch, which is one of my goals.

Company Towns (EPCOTs)

I am sympathetic to the concept that if companies wanna test stuff they should pool with other testers to build EPCOT like company towns, where the people who live there do so on an opt in basis, and the reason they’re there is they wanna be testers.

Already populated cities are not an appropriate testing ground for experimental prototypes. EPCOT = experimental prototype community of tomorrow, remember? The lawyers changed it to Epcot (meaningless) cuz they wanted you to forget the original vision (which was smart).

Invite peeps to select from a catalog what prototype towns and/or cities they wanna go live in. Maybe they dress like in Space 1999 (BBC) and everyone has a robo-slave. You want that for yourself? Apply.

Blue Line Blues

:: from the Blue Line going over the Steel ::

I did not award myself a smooth operator badge (stored mentally) for the most recent bicycle loop, although I did give myself an honorary E for Effort i.e. Energy (E/acc). 

I went for longer than usual: instead of boarding the Orange Line at the Sellwood station (my usual routine), I kept going along Springwater Corridor along Johnson Creek to the Flavel station next to I-205, where I caught the Green Line to Gateway, where I transferred to Blue.

Shades of training for S2P (Seattle to Portland) — that was my old cycling route, or at least half of it (I’d continue north and return home across the base of Mt. Tabor — more recently I stay on Division, newly paved and with a bike lane added).

So why not a smooth operator badge? Because after I caught the Blue Line to downtown (going over the Steel), I switched to the Orange (southbound) at Pioneer Square, and left my bike helmet in the seat next to mine. That’s why.

I could visualize said helmet continuing without me, all the way to Hillsboro. Would it end up in Lost and Found? I’ve had good luck with that at least once before. 

This time I had the presence of mind to proactively phone the L&F number, to explain about my helmet, leaving my name (they already had my number, using caller ID). Maybe someone at the end of the line checks all the cars? Probably not routinely.

And now, a day later, I’m even questioning if I left the helmet on the Blue Line or the Green. I only discovered it was missing while awaiting the Orange. Did I take it off after Flavel and leave it at Gateway? Memory fades. Sometimes too fast.

On the brighter side, I have a second, backup helmet just like this one I’ve lost, with a “Bob” Dobbs sticker on the back. The straps may need some adjustment, but I’m confident it’ll work fine. I plan to continue doing loops without investing in a new helmet. I’m trying to save my pennies. Property tax is coming up.

On my way through Sellwood on Linn, I stopped at the substation to take a selfie and show off my new Esoterica T-shirt. I’ve learned quite a bit from Professor Sledge, the channel’s anchor, and still hope to learn more. I’m into esoterica. He’s pretty generous with his scholarship. I’m happy to tag myself his fan.

Graphing the Network

I just completed another circuit, one I've navigated before: Smith Rock area, Santiam Pass, Hwy 126 down the mountains into the Springfield area. This was neither camping nor glamping. I stayed with peeps I know, may even be related to. Sydney, my old dog, came along.

On the curriculum front, I'm following Dr. Rorty's model in bridging to the Eurasian continent, in terms of readings, taking Cascadian Pragmatism back to its sources, through William James to Wittgenstein's critique thereof. 

The phenomenology of spirituality aka psychological development, might be mapped in various ways, ala the M4W schemata. I tend to favor an Active Inference informed namespace, which has a thermodynamic flavor.

However, I don't need to exclusively follow the Logical Positivist thread back to the Vienna Circle of the early Wittgenstein (Schopenhauer et al). I've long embedded Mark Fisher in my School of Tomorrow matrix, and through him we get to an important node: the CCRU, a kind of think tank that interpreted developments in philosophy (e.g. Deleuze & Guattari) since Freud and Hegel to an anglophonic BBC-informed audience, around the same time the personal computer was taking off.

We might think of the CCRU as a particle accelerator sending entangled particles every which way. We're not talking about uniformity of thought so much as polarities, counter spins. Mark "liminal spaces" Fisher did not take the same party line as Nick "capitalism is AI" Land (admittedly an anachronistic telling, as AI was but a gleam in Alan Turing's eye back in those days).

As recently as last night I was lolling about taking in comparisons of Mark "weird and eerie" Fisher with David Foster "Infinite Jest" Wallace. I'm still very much in the process of assembling the puzzle pieces, from a curriculum developer's point of view. How might one connect the dots in an efficient synergetic manner?

Speaking of curriculum developers and family relationships, my Springfield stop brought me in proximity to the Fitzgeralds of Great Gatsby fame, leading me to prompt Perplexity this morning regarding some gender studies questions I have. 

I was happy to see Perplexity pushing back on what appeared to be my misconceptions: 

(a) the Gilded Age (late 1800s) was not the Golden Age (early 1900s), which latter Perplexity prefers to call the Jazz Age and 

(b) the Betty Boop stuff is only partially free of copyrights.

Why am I connecting to the CCRU in the first place? Recall Applewhite's tagline for Grunch of Giants: more subversive than anything since Karl Marx. He was clearly calling out the Marxists to check it out. 

One might suggest I'm seeking to answer the question: why are the Marxists so slow to pick up on our narratives? But that'd simply be to privilege my own coordinate system versus keeping it all more realistically relativistic. 

Subcultures abound (and partially overlap), and we each encounter the puzzle pieces in different orders and assemble different parts of the puzzle in our own good time. Rushed work tends to not hold up, has a shorter half life. 

Certainly Infinite Jest is hard to read (I've only sampled it) and yet Hannah Smart said she'd read it nine times, wow. Shades of Finnegans Wake (in the sense of "hard reading" that is).

Of Space n Time

:: roaming faculty ::

I have a drive of about three hours planned out, with my dog in the back seat. We’ll be both ascending and descending, with more of the latter than the former, given where we’ll end up, near the Mohawk River at a favorite campsite (well equipped).

Per the worldgame shoptalk, that’s what I’m playing, with my “avatar” or “piece on the board” so to speak, as they say in est, or said, back in the day. If you want more context, think Glass Bead Game from Magister Ludi, a Hermann Hesse novel. I used to bring that up over on math4wisdom (a Freelists listserv) when laying tracks nearer to Lithuania via M4W. 

Most Lower48ers (USSAers) won’t have heard of the GBG I’m thinking, unless they’ve heard of Martin Gardner as well, but that’s narrowing it down quite a bit.

Martin Gardner was a polymathic columnist for Scientific American, a role reminiscent of Hugh Kenner’s vs-a-vs Byte. I’d read both. I had free access to the latter when I worked for McGraw-Hill.

Gardner helped with the spread of cellular automata as a topic, per Wolfram et al. By “cell” we mean a partition or particle, like a box but not necessarily hexahedral. Often we just stack em in Tetris fashion and play a game of “trickle down” (i.e. of the “life substance” in terms of what next row — generation — begets). 

I’ve been personally invited to a G4G by someone close to Gardner when he was still alive, but I didn’t have any budget for it back then. I still don’t, but remain hopeful. Maybe someday. 

I recall something about heptagons one year. I’ll find my blog post about it. Heptagon means seven cornered, deriving from ἑπτάγωνον (that’s Greek). 

Sept also means seven and derives from Latin, so you’d think September would be the seventh month, but then wouldn’t December be the tenth? Safe to say, the Gregorian Calendar is a bit of a hodgepodge, having absorbed the Roman calendar which started in March and ran for ten months (not a full year).  

I’ll understand if various newcivs prefer another one besides the Gregorian, with computers around to do any necessary to/from conversions (assuming both are proleptic).

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 (structured 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, his 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.