Winter Plunge

We're still technically in winter for sure, still January. I was sharing a .csv file of Roller Coaster data with my night shift crew, shared with me by Alexia one evening, when we got to chatting on Facebook. Let me pull some up...

Roller coasters have been a theme here. The picture at right shows me on one, Dawn to my right cropped out. In that American Adventure park across from Disneyland, Anaheim, LA.

Regarding the Youtube below, which I listened to in its entirety, I find I differed with the provided profile as someone "liberal" in my defense of the Mormon compound against a heavy-handed, abusive intervention.

That was like Charles Dickens in a blender, where the tyrant bully saves the young girl from the other tyrant bully. Most of you won't know what I'm talking about (follow links if curious).

How fun, right?  Getting your reality smashed by an iron fist like that?  No wonder we're all walking PTSD cases, in one way or another (not meaning to trivialize by generalizing, just expressing compassion). Yes, I'm thinking of those Russian (and Scottish) mystics again.

Also, I was tracking Scott Ritter's and Hans Blix reports closely, still believing rationality would make a difference, and was highly skeptical that neocons had the evidence they claimed (in Syria either). I was all over alt.politics.cia or whatever that was, questioning the aluminum tubes story, in the lead-up to the post 9-11 invasion and following years of sanctions. pdx4d was my handle, right?

I'm  talking about the usenet group, on which I used to be active.

Carol is seeing herself as strong enough to venture out tomorrow. She has the energy, a good sign. I'm staying in close touch.

I too am still ambulatory, though with a changed sleep cycle? I'm invited to a party tonight. I'd use public transportation.  Happy Birthday (belated) to Wanderer Trisha Buckland, a brave heart.  Someday I'll get back to Pub 181 I'm sure.

I'm no Sam Harris expert, not having read any of his books. Some Google Brain decided I oughta watch it. Who am I to disobey a bot, right? Just kidding (some bots I'll just kick).

Waging Peace

Carol Urner, my mom, rebooted her life in the year 2000, after the car crash that was fatal to my dad.

She recovered under the care of Bloemfontein physicians, myself and my sister, and continued her work as an international WILPF activist.

She is very grateful for her body and how it has kept her physically with us all this time, through thick and thin. At 87, she knows most of the sand is in the bottom part. I'm treasuring every grain.

Carol works on the Ban Treaty a lot. That's an international movement to outright criminalize nuclear WMDs, which psychologically has already happened. It'd be good to get it in writing of course.

Carol's cheerful courage over a lifetime of risk taking has been an example to the world, and of course to me.

Blurb

Works in the humanities are designed to resonate on many levels, using metaphor and metonymy to give expression to a mix of conscious and unconscious meanings. 

We sometimes consider scientific and technical writing to be at the other end of the spectrum, with a literal factual truthful meaning only, and no intentions towards resonance. 

The postmodernists wanted to show the notion of absolute objectivity flips to subjective (opposites meet). Kierkegaard made the same point in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). However the idea of a spectrum remains useful.

Synergetics is a work in the humanities, is philosophy more specifically, because it's written to resonate. It's polymorphic without being perverse would be Fuller's claim, taking "perversion" in the Lacanian sense. See also: Love's Body by Norman O. Brown.

Fortunately, philosophy leads to science through natural philosophy, with scientists often becoming philosophical and willing to indulge in the humanities. What literal truths we might glean from "explorations in the geometry of thinking" are by definition potentially applicable in "real world" situations.

Poe is a bridge writer in that he introduces the cryptographic. Stories about secret codes may intimate that they themselves are a secret language. The rediscovery of Egypt and the idea of Indiana Jones type adventures coincided. Here's a PDF about that.

Wittgenstein took this to an extreme, suggesting a secret one cannot divulge even in principle (some private "beetle") is not really a secret at all nor private. If I suppose "my world is my language" then "my secret world" is simply "the world" (secret from whom? -- "everyone but me").  The solipsist has no way to mean what is grammatically out of bounds (Tractatus).

The attitude one takes to reading an enciphered work was thereby further popularized by Poe.  One need not take a Freudian approach to dreams to find "hidden meaning". Indeed, the humanities have always harbored the esoteric and the occult.

Those wondering how to line up Synergetics with STEM might want to bridge through psychology, an approach E.J. Applewhite somewhat favored (not surprisingly given his CIA background), though he never eschewed direct links to crystollography.  

Wittgenstein talks about our sense of something crystalline, something logical, at the heart of our language. Philosophers hunger to bottle and sell its eternal flavor in their cryptic notations.

Synergetics is more Alchemy than Chemistry, true, but only because the human psyche works that way too, reaching into the physical and special case to express the metaphysical, the mathematical, the eternal verities. 

The Gibbs Phase Rule relating solid, liquid, gas states to temperature / pressure applies to thinking itself, with "solid" meaning the more crystalline, and "gas" the more nebulous.

Critical Path, Grunch of Giants and Tetrascroll have the appearance of "code books" in their layered use of symbols. "How much of this are we to take literally?" becomes a real question.  Given the two Synergetics volumes behind them (earlier in time), I'd keep that question open ended, more like what Quakers call "a query".

Harvest of Empire (movie review)

I joined a small group at the Stark Street meetinghouse this evening for a showing of Harvest of Empire, a fairly recent documentary looking at the fruits of recent social engineering.

We've all heard the term "Banana Republic", these days a chain of fashionable clothing stores, but originally having to do with literal bananas.

United Fruit, with large plantations in Central America (Guatemala especially) needed local governments to remain friendly to its resource acquisition and labor practices.

Indeed, many large multinationals would incubate in Latin America with help from local elites and the USG. The Dulles brothers, one a Secretary of State, the other heading the CIA, both came from the law firm representing United Fruit.

The USG gets elected on the basis of wanting to help the US economy, which translates into helping  its paying customers expand overseas. These companies then use the repatriated profits to finance the political ambitions of their candidates.

The USG in turn then helps its customers by providing military training for those serving in dictatorships.

Actual US troops also may become involved, as in the Dominican Republic. Assassinations and/or coups may also be undertaken.

Any populist leader, intent upon improving living standards for the indigenous majorities, would become an enemy of the established state. Social engineering moving in that direction, including clergy, get branded communist subversives.

Marine Corps veteran Smedley Butler wrote some thoughts about this dynamic late in life, after exposing the Business Plot to assassinate FDR. Many of these same patterns continue operating today.

The core thesis of this movie is that this practice of land-grabbing and forced labor, visited upon  indigenous Americans since the 1600s, has created a flood of economic refugees willing to risk great hardship and death to reach a state of greater freedom and opportunity.

Ordinary people tend to flee untenable situations wherever they occur, be that in El Salvador, Syria, Libya or Europe.

The first waves of immigration leading to the creating of the first thirteen United States were also a result of persecution and/or dead end economic circumstances.

Social Engineering

I was doing more job training on that Thursday morning, not at Multnomah County Library, but for the same code school.  Today is Friday, and Inauguration Day on the US federal calendar.

Then I treated myself to Voodoo Donuts, which I rarely do. I'd been Facebooking about a Voodoo Donuts in Tehran (I don't think there is one yet) and in Japan, and decided to take advantage of already having access.

That evening, I was self-indulgent again, enjoying a shrimp cocktail during happy hour, along with two pints at the Melting Pot at the downtown terminus of the 14 bus line. Then on to the lecture, on the South Park Blocks, across from the Portland Art Museum.

Dr. Guru Madhaven tells a tragic story I'll not repeat here. I recommend getting his book. I can't think of a more appropriate topic and speaker for anything calling itself the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy, as his focus was precisely the impact, of engineering especially, on public policy.

The tragedy of not being able to help someone in an emergency, because not knowing their precise location, even though we had the technology to triangulate, required a solution that would connect GPS with 911. That we have a system that now links them is owing to a collaboration and synergy between political movements, and technology.

Later during the dinner I asked our speaker directly if he thought replacing the term "politician" with "social engineer" might be worth doing. I'd been saying something similar on a Quaker discussion site. Let me find a quote:

I get this push back, as a geek, that what I do might be nefarious, and it's called "social engineering" (say I work for Facebook, which I don't, just have a profile and play a Hexagons-based game).

I'm fine with what politicians do being "social engineering" the way they do it, with their technology, tips and tricks. I'll even say they're pretty good at it.

However, they don't wanna play, and keep excluding me as an "engineer" (some kind of Morlock by the sound of it -- H.G. Wells).

What I've come to is we have plenty good enough reasons to use "social engineer" as a synonym for "politician". Think how software engines such as Facebook and Twitter have changed the political landscape.  The new US President (as of today) is a tweeter, as was the outgoing one.

In my youth, the notion of "social engineering" was always somewhat sneered at as something fascist totalitarians might indulge in.  I'm sure that they might; they'd have to. But then so does everybody else. Television and radio, then telephony, also transformed politics. We can't tease out the engineering from the rest of it.

Dr. Madhaven said as much in describing how we all do systems analysis whether we call it that or not. We all have to think and act like engineers on a daily basis, with or without any formal schooling in some discipline called "engineering".  The same is true with politics.  Whether you're a professional politician or not, you're still a political animal.  And that means you're a social engineer.

That's the thing about truisms.  Even though they're not provably false and therefore appear to do no work in the realm of establishing new facts of the matter, they may change how we look at things.  Spin may be orthogonal to truth value.

Also around the table, I brought up my Kerala story, how anthropology had discovered the relatively high living standards of this state within India has everything to do with a culture of endless debate and discussion as a means of negotiation.

Optimization comes not from brute force or "throwing money" at a problem.  Better to think things through, by having whole populations engaged in that thinking. Doesn't that sound close to what we mean by "democratic" on many levels?  Feedback loops. Cybernetics. USA OS.

Wanderers 2017.1.18

We've taken to calling our open forums (no set presentation) "improv" which I remarked sounded Scientology-friendly. What I learned from Ray Simon, back in Jersey City days, was that those looking for acting work need opportunities to work out, and "improv" is one of those ways. A way an aspiring thespian might test if progress towards "clearness" was being made, might be through participation in improv.

Improv is a kind of theater, not just an exercise for those practicing to be on stage. Steve Holden and I used to attend a comedy house (a nonprofit) on MLK.  The audience could suggest themes, or at least appear to do so. The spontaneity of the ensuing performance somewhat depends on the assumption we're not seeing the results of hours of rehearsal.  But then improv techniques may be rehearsed. I'm not the expert.

Lest I give the wrong impression I'm trying to come off like some authority on Scientology, that's not my intent. I've not risen through the ranks on the inside, as a paying customer, and although I've done considerable homework from an anthropology angle (one of my favorite subjects at Princeton), I don't go around billing myself as an expert.  Ray Simon was far more the L. Ron Hubbard fan.

Let me say more about Ray. He was really into synchronicity, a topic with respectability, but also practical applications. He believed various techniques might be employed to deliberately create "synchronicity fields" wherein serendipitous events would be more likely to happen. He told a number of stories wherein he appeared to employ these techniques with great success.

I met Ray and Bonnie as a young couple, Bonnie a nurse, Ray doing office work, a series of temp jobs in the Big Apple (Manhattan and Jersey City are but a PATH ride apart). I forget the precise circumstances however Ray and Bonnie were into est, often associated or confused with Scientology and indeed their histories swirl around each other in stormy tales.

Anyway, stormy tales aside, Ray was a staunch admirer of both Hubbard and Erhard. Ray was also paranoid that Hubbard might be dead.  He was really tickled one day when he got a convincingly authentic letter from Hubbard saying "I'm not sure what it is you want to know." He probably did know though: Ray wanted to know if his hero was still alive.

Ray is not still alive. He moved to Las Vegas at some point and wrote a book, not about synchronicity, but about the bold and audacious ways now well-known people had jump-started their careers: Mischief Marketing: How the Rich, Famous, & Successful Really Got Their Careers and Businesses Going (2000).

We didn't talk about Ray at the Wanderers meeting at all.  However a theme at Pepinos later was people who had left us, died, in some cases recently.  Ray died some years ago, Bonnie having been taken by the same influenza epidemic that claimed Jim Henson, the Muppets master.  I got to babysit for their daughter quite a bit, having stopped being the high school math teacher, my first job after Princeton.  I'd jumped into an est Training while still an undergrad living at 2 Dickinson Street.

Scientology comes with an elaborate schema supporting ideation, which I'd say is fine to call "science fiction" (not a put down) or lets say teachings encrypted in the language of such. Those seeking literal truths (scientific ones) in such movements may encounter the purely ridiculous in the many fairy tales that swirl in any religion, a dreamy concoction of narrative potions usually. The "clown" archetype is metaphysically real.

Subgenius derives energy from "clown energy", a need to spoof all these crazy-cult beliefs.  est, for its part, shared the goal of imparting empowering language to the trainees (who became graduates), but did not bother with much mythology. Even P.D. Ouspensky offered more in the way of a belief system, as one may study in Psychological Commentaries of Maurice Nicoll.

est's relative minimalism gave it more the stamp of a philosophy than a religion, although Erhard himself circled Zen as influential. Remember Erhard's enlightenment is set in San Francisco, in the time of Alan Watts.

More Theology

I'm continuing to yak with Friends (as in Quakers) on QuakerQuaker, about terminology. Given the Tower of Babel as a premise, we're not really in a position to agree in spoken or written language, so how is it we get across our most important spiritual insights, right?  If we're condemned to speak Scramble to one another, when and how do we "unscramble"?

St. Augustine had words to say on this question, saying something reminiscent of Socrates, which is "all knowledge is recollection" meaning inwardly recognized and comprehended, owned, taken in, believed. There's a kind of digestion which occurs, whereby another's language is taken into one's own.

My brand of Friend is not expected to focus on the study of theology as a divine calling, as we're somewhat the "ordinary language" branch, as Wittgenstein was to philosophy (Rorty: "linguistic turn"). Some peg the beginning of that change to Nietzsche's writings, not that saying so is much help to those unused to navigating in these esoteric waters.  People might see his name go by in TIME, but what has any of that to do with the price of eggs, right?

However, I don't eschew giving theology a spin, thanks perhaps to my Subgenius background. Although the ideology is self-spoofing, the actual practitioners work on "devival" skills, meaning oratory, preaching, public speaking, with cadence. I need to do that to, in front of some choir or another.

Were you looking for some of my most abstruse writings, right off the bat?  Sometimes when I dive into reading someone new, I want to sample their whole repertoire.  You'll get some condensed writings in the Invisible Landscape Series linked from here.

However, what I'm really thinking about more is this thread on Q2.  In the background I'm looking at some Franklin Merrell-Wolff writings. He's another in the tradition of using '4D' as a kind of branding icon, to help seekers steer in his direction. P.D. Ouspensky shows up in the background.

Speaking of "Dr. O", I think it'd pay off to compensate scholars for taking "knowledge work" seriously. If we want to learn about the Russians, lets get $15 an hour and let us do some serious reading, and viewing, of important works.  Superficial sound-bite knowledge is not going to get us there, and when people pay for college, they're as likely learning how to do their nails.  Even tackling "being a medical doctor" doesn't mean learning much world history.

Paying for work-study, not just work, is not about wanting people to be lazy, it's about needing people to use their minds enough to stay sane enough to have the planet stay fun and habitable.  Fortunately, we have a star nearby that continues to make an energy investment, pretty much grant income for our species and fellow travelers.  General Systems Theory (GST) suggests we do our best to make the most of it.

Expectant Waiting

"Expectant waiting" is a religious practice used within the Religious Society of Friends to test their leadings, or expectations, regarding the will of God.  "Expectorate" is a different English verb and means "to spit".  Some "Indians" [sic] maybe have been confused, as according to my catechism as an English (as in British) kid:  A Red Indian Thought He Might Eat Tobacco in Church.  That's the mnemonic we used at the Junior English School of Rome, to remember how to spell "arithmetic".

I want to relate "expectant waiting" to "unit testing" and also just to pausing a moment at the command line, and reflecting on what you intend to make happen, so that you'll be somewhat clear from the feedback, whether you achieved your goals or not.  More simply:  imagine the output you'd expect in response to 2 + 2, pause a moment to expect, then hit the Enter key and confirm the outcome or note discrepancies.

In doctest, we do that too.  At the code school the other night, a different instructor was showing how

$ python -m doctest script_with_tests.py

will run the doctests on the target script, passed as an argument to the doctest module.  Brilliant.

Ben and I discussed our different testing framework preferences over chips at that point.  The reason I like unittest (aka Pyunit) is precisely because it's somewhat clunky, shows a lot of apparatus, making the point that testing is no joke sometimes.  However Ben's choice was more practical.

For those of you who just lost me (too much POSIX?) , think of humming along to a tune, then the tune suddenly stops. You expected it to continue and may already know the next several bars. In other circumstances, you're hearing a tune for the first time and have a sense of where it's going, and then you're surprised. Perhaps the composer was intending to spark interest. In music appreciation courses and/or Youtube videos (Vimeo...) we learn about such things.

I bring up humming along to a tune (think of God's will) in connection with Thomas Paine and his writings about what it means "to prophesize" (from whence "to profess" right?).

Paine's thesis was we don't hear much about "singing" in the Bible because foretelling was in itself a musical activity akin to singing. As people picked up on what was to happen, the prophecy might gather steam and come true, what we call a "self fulfilling" prophecy.

However pointing out that some prophesies "snowball" or "gather steam" is not to suggest that everything expectantly awaited then happens, or that what happens is somehow always a result of what's expected. Neither proposition follows, as a matter of logic.

On the contrary, surprising events and developments continue to occur, whether we choose to call them miracles, cataclysms, or whatever acts of God. That everything would always go as expected is not our experience as human beings. Our fondest wishes are not necessarily any genie's command and some prayers go unanswered.

Tests set up our expectations, keep us aware of what we were intending in the first place.  Wittgenstein documents this grammar, this "tensegrity glue" (invisible) between our islanded concepts, such as "understanding" vis-a-vis "expecting".  These words "fly in formation" as it were, leaving inter-twining trajectories.

When all unit tests pass, that's a sign our project is responding as expected and that we do indeed "understand" what we're doing, at some level. When we're better able to "hum along" than previously, that may indicate a stronger sense of God's will, which is somewhat the point of this exercise, not surprisingly.

In Synergetics, a transcendentalist work, we have this term "precession" which in that namespace suggests "developments not predicted by [physical] laws considered separately".

The sum or product achieves results the list of ingredients did not foretell.  Alchemy, not just chemistry, is full of unforeseen reactions, even when they appear to pencil out in retrospect.  That's why we continue to experiment in science.  Arm chair speculation will only take one so far in life.

13th (movie review)

Friends gathered at the Stark Street meetinghouse for this public-invited showing of 13th, a widely distributed, award-winning documentary about the ongoing cultural and civil war in North America.

Although Lincoln declared the slaves free, an opening shot in his war to preserve the Union, the South was not on board with providing them with full human rights overnight.  Women couldn't vote yet either.  A system of apartheid was instituted that continues to this day.

The Civil Rights movement won some semblance of equality before the law, but then social engineers in the White House realized a "get tough on crime" approach might be used to stimulate mass incarceration of mostly black people. Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton pursued this agenda to the tune of billions of borrowed dollars.

The War on Drugs became a war of oppression against black US Americans, a continuation of Prohibition, which had earlier criminalized most whites as well.

Once in prison, people could be made to work as slaves again, according to the terms of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

Mass incarceration is currently falling out of favor, as even ALEC admits, but in the meantime has been useful for maintaining the privileges of the non-criminal population.

Nowadays, white people are finding themselves addicted to drugs as well, especially opiates such as Oxycontin, and want medical treatment, not prison.  They've also found marijuana congenial and have started legalizing it for both medical and recreational use.  The huge prison population of over two million, earning the US its reputation as a Prison State, will need to come down in light of these changes.

The movie does not touch on the 14th Amendment, originally designed to acknowledge that blacks were fully human.  This amendment was used by another caste of less protected person, the corporate being with artificial personhood, to gain more privileges under US law.

Based on this loophole in the Constitution, corporations were enabled to attain full personhood and continue their strategy of masked domination. Anonymous shareholders were protected from personal bankruptcy and stood to lose (or gain) only to the extent of their investment. Corporations that do not run afoul of the law eventually gain superpowers relative to ordinary humans, thanks to their relative size and immortality. They become giants, a part of "the Grunch" per Medal of Freedom winner R. B. Fuller in Grunch of Giants.

Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann (which quotes Fuller) traces this connected story.  The two stories overlap in that corporate persons now manage much of the US prison system for profit.  Social engineers have developed school systems based around standardized testing, that are guaranteed to feed these hungry corporations with future inmates.  At AFSC (Quaker) this design is called the "school to prison pipeline". The US continues to feed its appetite for free labor, undercutting wages for those still on the outside not living on investment income.

Lew Frederick, to be sworn in on Monday as an Oregon state senator, was with us to watch the movie and discuss it afterwards.  He's an Earlham grad, black, and comes to meeting quite often.  He'd not seen the film before and found it moving and educational.

[ first published on QuakerQuaker ]

New Year's Day

A standard thing to say about the USA, along the lines of "war and Christmas", is that Americans (USers) are war-prone because, in their experience, the war with fascism shocked them out of their depression and put people to work.

Life had meaning again and the spoils of victory, mostly side-effects of gearing for war, proved life could be sweet in the 1950s.  Unlike most peoples, Americans still harbor some nostalgia for war, as long as they're winning and reap their reward.

However I'm thinking any telling that begins with either World War is too Euro-centric to explain Americans and their militant streak.  The polarizing experience of a Civil War has far more to do with the US psyche having a schizoid flavor.

The PTSD of a brutal war, followed by a crack down on self medication through alcohol (Prohibition) turned us into a gangland, from which we've hardly recovered.

As I was pointing out on Facebook, when looking for commonalities in US presidents, don't overlook ties to organized crime.  But don't respond with shocked moral indignation, a favorite mask of pure ignorance.  Innocence is an annoyance sometimes.

The crowds are looking for specimens, be that in a pants suit, and/or in orange.  They're looking for a quality called "worldly" which Obama has, Michelle too.  They were big city slickers more than hillbilly hicks.  Of course Bill was a Rhodes Scholar.

My thoughts on the Civil War were inspired by the black eyed peas stories I was getting.  The troops were eating all the food, not unlike in Aleppo. Fighters need to eat to fight. Civilians get to be extras, like in Hollywood movies, except the blood isn't ketchup.

Southern Belles found themselves eating black eyed peas, the food of slaves and other livestock. They turned this intolerable sign of oppression into a badge of honor and now cook the same peas voluntarily, and in a way that's really tasty.

More Evangelism

What I got out of Wittgenstein: a smooth way to gear shift away from fundamentalist qyoobism a viral ideology leading to lockjaw & paralysis

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) December 30, 2016

A fundamentalist qyoobist extremist closes eyes and ears and shouts "nyah nyah I can't hear you" if you question Holy Qyoob's all-greatness.

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) December 30, 2016

"Holy Qyoob" pronounced "kewb" and more commonly spelled "Cube" sometimes poses as a "simplest shape" then suffers acute imposter syndrome.

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) December 30, 2016

Children are forced to bow down to Holy Cube ("qyoob") by quisling numberphiles. "Kiss the feet of our unit of volume" they insist. Resist!

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) December 30, 2016

Once liberated from Qyoobism and its fundamentalist orthodoxies, you will seem anti-normal, a threat. Church of Subgenius offers sanctuary.

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) December 30, 2016

Quaternions

Turned out after my tweet storm my more in-depth web-published paper on Quaternions, featuring my own Java, is here: https://t.co/fwKmn81KNu

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) December 29, 2016

A segue from Kenneth's atoms' rotations, patterns no doubt studied in Group Theory (not a physical science), would be to Quaternions, a mathematical device used to drive spatial transformations by iteration, much as rotation matrices get used.

A rotation matrix, recall, is an XY array of numbers set to "multiply" (__matmul__ in Python) with another matrix after it.  They don't necessarily commute (switched around, you get a different answer).  That "other matrix" may also be a target vector, where the rotation matrix is "pre-loaded" with just the right numbers to re-point it in a different direction.

A quaternion is a vector on steroids with more moving parts.  They'll multiply, much as complex numbers do in a plane (a flat surface), and thereby "spin" or "rotate" all the ways an avatar would need to, in a computer game.  They'll get the same work done as rotation matrices, but perhaps in a more elegant manner, using fewer lines of code?

These were the early days of the World Wide Web (1990s) and I'm chugging along reading about how game engines get built, and I find out some game-makers are using Quaternions to power their physics engines, and claiming to get faster frame rates, smoother performance, as a consequence.  "That's cool", I'm thinking, "as now I'll have running source code versions."

I like to "make math" not just read about it, and coding languages let me do that. Scott Gray, my future boss, had come to a similar conclusion using Mathematica (or Wolfram Language): some people learn better when they get to "make" or do "hands-on".

The rotating cube in this primitive applet gives off strong "Necker Effects" meaning your mind's eye may flip perspective. Pops in & out.

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) December 29, 2016

In this chapter, when the Web was young, the Java applet, embedded in your browser, run by the Java engine you'd have downloaded, was expected to be the king of the hill on the client side.  JavaScript, in contrast, was hardly taken seriously.  People would monkey around with it waiting for Java to assume its throne, but it never did.  JavaScript ended up taking a lot more responsibility.

The technology is still out there and serviceable though.  Java remains very important, even if the applet genre didn't take off.  Ahead of its time?  Remember a "headless browser" is just another thick client on your platform, and many of your smartphones are JVM devices, the ARM architecture having a native mode for its bytecodes.  I'm glad we have lots of talented coders ready to embrace those skills with open arms.  Python and Java are more synergetic than pitted against one another.

This other essay, which I'd tweeted about earlier, embeds the same Java applet, the quaternions cube, but is really more about the Python code I was then developing, to get on with my work in curriculum writing.  I ended up with a four-part series.

https://t.co/SorwMoeuV7 chronicles my "enlightenment" regarding Hamilton's work. He partnered with Tait am I wrong? https://t.co/aHHwwHokq2

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) December 29, 2016

Now remember not to confuse "quaternions" with "quadrays" (same "qua" or "kwah" sound). The "quadays" are the four vectors from (0, 0, 0, 0) with the topology of a methane molecule (a central Carbon and four Hydrogens).  Linear combinations of these four vectors reach (span) all surrounding space with unique, canonical, non-negative four-tuple addresses. Rotation matrices apply. A variant addressing scheme balances negatives with positives in "sum to zero" format.

Design Science

from the mind of Kenneth Snelson

Rogue One (movie review)

Spoiler alert:  no spoilers.  I'm not even going to talk about the film, much beyond agreeing with Alexia, who confirmed at the Hanukkah party, that it's certainly worth seeing, especially if already invested, time-wise.  Why not, right?

Instead of talking about the film, a great on-ramp if you're just coming into the series, its intent really, in addition to pleasing die-hard fans, I'm going to mount a soap box and make a point.

The point being:  if you want that ostensibly zero-gravity city you keep making movies about, with all these autonomous vehicles moving in every dimension, please reconsider beneath the ocean surface as the more readily accessible habitat for such cities to happen, versus the empty vacuum of space.

Yes, I know the pressures get high and we would worry about catastrophic ruptures, yet outer space, with its space junk and other mishaps, is likewise hostile.  Implosion and explosion are both violent.

With buoyancy compensating weights, moving around under the ocean as an affordable option to orbiting space-stations.  I'm not saying it's either / or, either, just I think humans have a lot more ahead of them on this planet than these landlubber civilizations of today.  Or could have, if they stick around, don't wimp out.

Library Science

My title is partly owing to where I'm posting this from: the Multnomah County Library.  Multnomahns are proud of their library system, much as Muscovites are proud of their subway (not that New Yorkers are not also, and Londoners of their tube).

These centrally located, downtown library facilities border on being grand without going over the line to grandiose.

Portland is a Pacific Rim capital at least (taking "capital" to mean "important terminus" or "destination"), so having carvings and sculptures going on is not "over the top".

Just checking the shelves under Computers (in the same room as Military, Social Issues, Crime, Law and Economics) I notice only a few Python titles, many more on PHP.  However that's not a good test of the extent of the collection.  For that information, one would consult the card catalog.

Finding only a few Python books on the shelves could be a sign that most are checked out, by people learning to code.  That's a good sign, not a cause for concern.

I was here yesterday as well, as the company I'm working for knows booking rooms in a public library facility, for meetings, is accepted use.

I checked out three books then:  two on statistics and probability, and one a history of Russians spying in America, given that's a hot topic in the headlines these days. However it focuses on a different, non-21st Century time frame.

The allegations in the news after the 2016 US presidential election are not so much that Russian spies had to come to the homeland to try tipping the election, meeting surreptitiously in parking lots or anything so surreal.  That kind of operation would have been more characteristic of the Reagan Era, per the popular TV show with that premise.  Rather, given Cyberia, the Russians might have given a green light to some mole within the DNC to release secrets to Wikileaks.

However disaffected party insiders might not need any prompting from a foreign power to serve as whistle blowers, so the accusations impress many as circumstantial to say the least.  Then we had those incidents of phishing, which spread well beyond the DNC.

The book I checked out was about spies a long time ago, though published in 2009. I don't have the title in front of me because I was concerned the library detection equipment might not distinguish between checked in and checked out, but of course it does, as I confirmed with the info desk.

One of the co-authors wrote The Haunted Wood, that much I know.  OK, that's enough info to figure it out:  Spies, the Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (ISBN-13: 978-0300123906).

Over the years, I've spent a lot of time browsing tomes in this Dewey Decimal section, reading books by or about spies.  I wouldn't say it's an obsession, as it maybe gets to be for some people.  One learns a lot from others' experience, understanding in advance these authors often have an agenda and spin their stories to the advantage of this or that team.  Same with movies.

Speaking of Python, a literal python bit me this morning, though it was entirely my fault.  I was handling the python's food and my finger got between me and it.  When there's no confusion, the python lets me handle it without a fight.  I'm way out of its league as potential prey, it's smart enough to know the difference.  My finger however, appears mouse-like.

Given the DNC is not officially part of the US government, extending any government protections to its servers, extreme vetting its personnel etc., would not be a job for the USG.  The USG needs to stay focused on what's properly its purview.  CBS News says the Pentagon needed to upgrade its secondary communications systems recently, and we learned earlier the CIA director might have been using AOL for something. These deficiencies are of the kind most appropriately addressed.

I don't see off hand why the the FBI needs to protect the DNC and/or GOP in some particular way, any more than it protects the Rotary Club or Boy Scouts of America.  In other words, the FBI should focus on protecting the vital organs of government, and then extend advice and training to the general public as a whole.

Neighborhood Coffee Shop

Technicalia

I poured a lot of hours into my free on-line Oregon Curriculum Network resources over the years.

I learned how to configure CGI scripts to run, meaning an URL like:

http://4dsolutions.net/cgi-bin/py2html.cgi?script=/ocn/python/x3dtoyz.py

...actually runs Python on the server.

In this case, py2html.cgi is something I grabbed for free, on-line, authored by Marc-Andre Lemberg of eGenix.com (Public License) and making use of Just van Rossum's PyFontify (Just is GvR's bro).

All this stopped working awhile back.  I wasn't too worried about it, as anyone wanting to see the source code in whatever target file still could.  py2html.cgi simply colorizes Python code while creating HTML, making it pretty to look at, but not what you'd cut and paste.

However it finally got to me that this feature was broken.  I wanted to fix it!

I think I must've tried fixing it before.  The permissions were off, too liberal.  I needed to chmod 711 *.cgi within the ssh shell.  That fixed some other simpler scripts right away, telling me I was on the right track.

But I'd still get a 500 error code from py2html.cgi.  Why?

Fortunately I could run this script directly, on the server, no CGI mode required and from doing that learned I had some Windows line endings corrupting the code -- plus another typo revealed in vim, a wayward backslash. The Linux shell complained of a python^M in the #! (shebang) line.

After the necessary dos2unix repair, which my provider has on tap, everything worked, I'm happy to say.

I pay money to keep these websites alive.  I was hoping to get more traction with the core essentials of Bucky Fuller's Synergetics as I understood them.  I've been on this track for a long time.

Unfortunately for me (and I'd argue for many others besides me), the ambient culture has not expressed much interest in such projects and the Fuller stuff has mostly fallen by the wayside.

A niche subculture keeps it going.

I mostly leave Synergetics on the Web unchanged (I added to the list of dome vendors last night, another adventure in oiling some rusty joints, dusting off old skills).  I think of it as part of the World Game Museum.

ToonTown Revisited

By "ToonTown" I mean Portland, Oregon. That's a meme in these blogs, many times visited.

In my futuristic mode, more utopian, the American Transcendentalists scattered about town storyboard their technical animations, around such as A & B, T & E and S modules, drawing from work more like my Heuristics for Teachers on Wikieducator.

However yesterday was past-ward looking.

Glenn and I hopped a 14 to the Oregon Historical Society building.  Admission to the three story museum is currently free to Multnomahns, just show some ID. That's to thank us for voting in a special tax to keep them funded, I forget which measure (not 97 obviously, which was defeated).

Gus Frederick has a full time job, however he's been pouring research hours into studying the life and times of Homer Davenport, as well as curating and republishing many of his cartoons, in annotated form.  In 2016, readers won't remember the contextualizing stories, so Gus provides a narrative.

Homer was a native of Silverton, Oregon, where Gus currently resides; he's from Waldo Hills originally, just four miles away. He's currently on the Silverton planning commission, and has a long track record of civic service.

Gus knows me through Wanderers, a group that's been meeting in Linus Pauling's boyhood home. We've taken in earlier versions of his talk, however an OHS presentation, complete with a splendid Comic Book City exhibit, has got to be the peak in some arc.

We enjoyed Dead Guy (the beer) at Rogue Nation (the brewery) afterwards. Gus introduce Mr. Stockton and I to his friend Jim Whitty (a Celtic name).  There's even an apocryphal story suggesting why Homer might actually be the dead guy referenced.

Homer was a darling of Hearst's, eventually, a media mogul with presidential aspirations whom Gus compared to Steve Jobs for his dynamism and ambition.  Homer came to draw for Hearst's papers by a circuitous route which Gus knows in detail.

He'd started out on the left coast, with San Francisco based papers.  In his old age he'd return to the San Diego area for a more retired life amidst theosophists. He brought the horses with him, over his wife's objections at the time (they had separated, she was contesting title).

Prior to retirement, having made a name for himself, a big one, he was able to travel about in the lecture circuit, a peer of Mark Twain's (they shared the same producer).  People avidly consumed lectures in those days, pre-television, pre-movies. Homer would draw as he lectured.

William McKinley was becoming president in an earlier chapter, and Homer, now based in New York City, satirized him as the smaller of two men in an ongoing melodrama. "Dollar Signs Hanna" represented the Trusts (corporations) in the face of the little guy, a polarizing axis around which US politics still turns to this day. Teddy Roosevelt was McKinley's veep.

However the popularity of those mocking cartoons was short lived as McKinley was assassinated in office.  From whitehouse.gov:

"Uncle Joe" Cannon, later Speaker of the House, once said that McKinley kept his ear so close to the ground that it was full of grasshoppers. When McKinley was undecided what to do about Spanish possessions other than Cuba, he toured the country and detected an imperialist sentiment. Thus the United States annexed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico.

Teddy Roosevelt took over, and although Homer had somewhat ridiculed him early on, for bringing some hunting trophies into the White House (Hearst was an animal lover and didn't like Teddy's ethics on that score), Homer and Teddy ended up getting along famously.  Both were extremely adventurous, which probably helps account for their affinity.

Homer Davenport was a horse fanatic or at least decided to become one when he finally had the acreage, in Morris Plain, New Jersey, and the means plus connections. He asked his friend Teddy for a favor, an introduction to Syrians who might hook him up with Arabian stallions (Syria was then part of the Ottoman Empire).

Having come highly recommended by the White House, Davenport was well received in Aleppo, and his seriousness about the horses ascertained to be sincere.  A caretaker came along with the deal, another story line.

The Davenport breed is still husbanded to this day, and the part of Mr. Ed, the talking horse of TV fame, was played by Bamboo Harvester, who traces directly back to the Arabians on one side.  Yes, like Steve Jobs, Mr. Ed was part Syrian.

I'm just scratching the surface of all of what Gus covered.  Studying history through the lens of political cartoons is informative.

Gus helped organize a whole floor of the museum in order to feature comic talents from this State.  Matt Groening's material (Simpsons etc.) is conspicuous by its absence -- too busy in this iteration.  Bill Plympton, Callahan, Basil Wolveton, Arthur Craven, Carl Barks and others, fill the vista with their works.  I hope this exhibit sparks many like it.  Lots for kids.  Interactive.

In the gift shop I found the Boilerplate literature, which reminds me of the animated fantasy Code Guardian, except that Boilerplate is retroactively placed in the time of Teddy Roosevelt. He's a robot, and a relatively recently invented character.

I'd like to have see Gus's talk on Youtube sometime.  He deserves a grant to pull together a full-fledged documentary.  I've left so much out of this hyper-abbreviated retelling.  Gus's actual talk was two hours worth of material, and richly insightful into what we today call the Gilded Age.

Sampling Python Tutorials

We're not exactly snowed in here, but it's nevertheless a slow day, with lots of melting ice.  Lots of Portlanders are on Facebook today.

I'm on that, and Youtube as well, plus I'm watching a DVD movie, Varian's War, in the living room in segments.  I'm letting that room run cold, and cocooning in other places.

Given my work as a Python teacher, I like to see what other teachers do when covering the same topics I do.  The collections.namedtuple type for example, I use that a lot, for Elements (as in atoms), within vectors (XYZ and quadray).

I also create Dog and Cat subclasses of Mammal, and use Unicode chess and playing card codepoints. I'm only just now getting around to Emoji. The overloading operators video gave me some clues.

Provided you're not struggling to read small type, neither of these are as uphill as say a David Beazely video.  We want a varied diet, sometimes peanuts, sometimes camel curry (just kidding, never tried it).

At Berkeley (movie review)

I wasn't sure what to expect when grabbing this DVD, along with the Okinawa one, at Movie Madness. I thought maybe I'd get a trip down memory lane to scenes of student protests in the face of shows of state authority.  There's little if any archival footage of that variety.  The film is tightly focused on the present.

The central theme is the university's mission, to nurture California's public, which includes people from all walks of life, in the face of where the money is coming from to sustain operations.  The State of California has not kept up with Berkeley's explosive growth and no longer provides upwards of 40% of the funds.  The research side of the business has been fueling more of the budget, but comes with its own set of priorities.

The filmmaker's approach is to have students share directly, to each other, in class, and for the camera, regarding public policy, while having administrators do the same, in meetings.  Lets hear the voices of Berkeley as it figures out, as an institution, how best to roll forward.

From the student point of view, tuition has become an increasing chunk of change, with financial aid yielding student loans and scholarships.  Tuition is no longer free to qualified residents, as it is in some developing countries.

In fairness to the State of California, other outlets exist for spreading opportunity outside of funding a state university system.  Professional development, on the job training, as well as re-training, give people a boost, sometimes in a more focused way than do giant universities.

Students do stage a protest / walkout in this film, taking over the library.  This is one of the ways people make change happen, by staging events showcasing the passion and energy behind some cause or demand.  The general public understands "ceding to demands" and so the narrative moves forward.

Watching this back-to-back with Okinawa: The Afterburn was interesting, as a segment of the film focused on vets coming into the university system from the base system.  They come in with higher rank, further ahead than freshmen, and like some other ethnic minorities find themselves under the gun to perform in ways they've not had to before.  The challenge comes down more to the individual than to one's company or battalion.  Some sense an existential threat, others discover community in other vets.

How to make learning life-long, as well as on-line is the challenge of the 21st Century.  We need to see the base system (the military) as an educational endeavor, competing for public funding and attention with public universities, if we wish to see the greater public policy picture.  None of the discourse in this film is that zoomed out.  Base network military socialism, governed by a top-down command structure, is not intended to be democratic, though may coexist with democracies at least in theory (the USA was such an experiment).

Radical Islam

Many Islamaphobic types (not what they call themselves necessarily) insist we use the word "radical" to describe the unabomber type terrorism-minded, not understanding our wish to keep the positive spin on "radical" we've always had ("wow, that's rad").

Radical Islam, or  √Islam for short, is more connected with Al Jabr (algebra - الجبر) and mosque design, wherein various roots of things express themselves in geometrical patterns.  √Christianity is also a positive.

Fundamentalist Islam is the type that clings to the false (phony) promises of various Imams regarding their own legitimacy and authority.  Christianity has its fundies too.  They tend to take a violent, extremist line, often involving some kind of End Times.

"Radical" is used by "the middle" (as in Middle Way) not just by extreme polarizers.  Accepting a positive spin on "radical" may seem politically incorrect to some ears.  Get used to it?  Do some homework, even a few math problems maybe?

Wonky Wall Street

The Wall Street Journal got a hold of this ancient Dymaxion Car prototype, and panned it.  So much for all that dymaxion crap right?  Don't forget the map.

Norman Foster, on the other hand, is less a cheapskate and built a brand new one from scratch, according to the original conception.  Believe it or not, it handles much better.

We talked about Dymaxion Cars at Wanderers on Tuesday.  I noticed some at the table had no clue what they were talking about -- not unusual in that setting.

Wall Street / LAWCAP has long disparaged Bucky by various memes, as chronicled in these blogs.  These infantile rants tend to postpone a day of reckoning another day our two.

Shareholders carry the burden of their own misguided ignorance.

TG 2016

Our Scandinavian branch of the family, which forks back to the Hancocks, historic hosts of our Fourth of July gatherings, wisely switched the main meal for this holiday season to Friday, versus the traditional Thursday, meaning no battling of major traffic, such as we've experienced on previous Thanksgivings.

The Hancocks don't host TG, doing heavy lifting on the 4th. They have a fifth wheel (trailer) and the freedom to visit others, and came down by train with Bill Lightfoot shortly before Carol's shift to southern latitudes. The descendants of my great aunt Elsie tend to run this show, the torch having passed to Elsie's grand daughters through Eveyln: Mary and Alice.

On Thanksgiving itself, I got to see Fantastic Beasts..., the newest JK Rowling movie, with Alexia, already Dawn's daughter when we met.  Carol (mom) and I joined Alexia for Mongolian Grill in Beaverton some days before.  I ended up at Patrick's, per my movie review.

Maybe I just lucked out, but the I-5 / Hwy-302 lane to Port Orchard and back was really easy and smooth, about 150 miles each way. Given I was running early going north, I pulled over and sat in a parking lot, the perfect time to get a call from Maureen.

I was privilege to tour Howard and Wilma's equipment museum, and reconnect with my extended family. Lee was down from Alaska, joining his sister Carol and husband Ken.  Howard is one of Evelyn's boys, now the family patriarch. 

Howard's brother Bill is the historian who wrote about the pre WWI submarine industry that grew up here in the Pacific Northwest. Boeing is big around here too, as I've often mentioned.

This side of my family is very practical and handy with equipment.  These are what we today call "Makers" in a broad sense.  Lots of mining experience.  Rock and gravel.

We were able to summon Tara by "spirit phone" (smartphone) from her faraway digs.

Next I get to meet with Les and Elise again, before they head north.

A Work Day

I'm in studio tonight, broadcasting closed circuit.  No this is not OTT with Kaltura, though I am talking about that with a Guild guy (PDX Code Guild, for those just tuning in).

I'm a teacher by night, in a night school, of the Python computer language. Students hussle home, or connect by Bluetooth from their cars, meaning no texting, no staring at the screen.  The audio channel is better than no channel, if I do say so myself.

I've been working all day however, doing marketing for the DSR (design science revolution) as I've been doing for decades, all through the GNU / EFF years, up through OST and USDLA.  Sometimes I tweet, other times I add to Facebook.

Then I served as a chauffeur. Back when I used to write custom computer applications, I designed a county-wide system of ride dispatching, pre-uber, likewise with centralized reimbursement to the drivers, on a mileage basis.

We did a brisk business, Clackamas County and I, with cigarette tax support.  My server-side code faced the dispatchers in their cubicles as no smartphones were yet on the market.  Riders mostly booked routine rides going out a few weeks, adding the occasional doctor trip.

Nowadays I still drive, dispatching myself when I have to.  We did a hospital today, one in the Providence system.  I used to write code for their St. Vincent's operating room theaters, under the supervision of their world class cardiology team.  We served the cath labs too.  CORIS and CLAIR (those were two of the applications I wrote).  Memories...

Tonight in my pep talk portion, I'm going to remind students that programming is hard, meaning it's not something one learns once and for all really quickly, so much as one gains in proficiency.

Computer programming is more like composing music than playing it however, in that real time coordination only need be extended so far, to the clerical level one might say.  Guitar playing, like figure skating and hockey playing, take a different form of concentration, and those take time to learn too.

Indian Point (movie review)

The Indian Point reactor issue is really heating up again in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, still unfolding.  Do the good folks in Iran have evacuation plans also?  I'm as interested in plants outside North America, when it comes to making the planet unlivable for some, if not all.  The US has no realistic evacuation plans in many cases.

There's a lot of reducing to soap opera, where the NRC is concerned (NRC = Nuclear Regulatory Commission).  The opening says we're going to need a lot of energy, but little analysis is shared regarding how exactly closing these plants would affect the price and supply of electrical power.  Saying "the price would go up" isn't saying much.

In other words, as viewers, we're not privy to the relevant computations measuring risk versus loss versus benefits.  Would thousands die in the cold of winter owing to lack of heat?  What is the load of space heaters, AC powered?  Where is the SimCity for policy-minded adults?  Not available?  I didn't think so.  Who has the mandate to develop such a thing?  Not the NRC.

The relicensing system is designed to encourage the power plants to keep running.  The public, for its part, is lectured it has no reasonable alternatives.  Is that true?  Who knows.  We're too busy with soap operas and witch hunts to really do much serious engineering.  WDC is about politics, not science, but we knew that.

The filmmakers have really good access, to people and to internals.  The nuclear industry says it's on the side of reducing greenhouse gases.  Solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear all go together as contributing less to global warming than combustion.  What about new designs and why do we never discuss nuclear submarines?

The conversation in the mass media is too dumbed down to really mean much.  Documentaries such as this one certainly help.  We need to go a lot deeper, since as a species we seem committed to this technology, at all costs.  The backup of spent toxic fuels around the country is considerable.  The plan to dispose of same is somewhat broken.  Remember the kitty litter.

The point that these plants were conceived of sixty years ago, and so are far from state of the art, or what the state of the art could be, is more shareable around Oregon, at OSU in particular.  People on that campus freely explore the idea of closing all the plants we have now, without saying no to better designs in the future, when greater intelligence is available.

Protest Street (the game)

Protest Street provides an on-line virtual environment, cloud based, where protestors are free to design their avatars, give them signs, enroll them in teach-ins, and have them chant slogans.

Other players, or those with multiple accounts, will control city functions to accommodate the protestors, and to flag violations, according to whatever rules of the road.  If you want to add tear gas, rubber bullets etc., you may have to pay extra.  The jail module might be outsourced as a whole other game.

Protest Street is vaporware at the moment.  If you get it Kickstarted, you'll likely find yourself reading this as background, and maybe even starting a protest regarding how I was not officially credited sufficiently -- wouldn't be the first time my good ideas fueled a success story.

That the action be authentically crowd-sourced is important, yet the hardest part to verify unless people, celebrities even, come forward with their testimony.  "Yes, that was me at that protest last Friday" -- you can boast to your friends.

For protests to be newsworthy, we won't just want the cartoon, but some of the names and identities behind them.  If everyone plays anonymously, that will to some extent defeat the purpose.

Having a track record, like an athlete has, is what enables you to rise on various totem poles, in various narrative and computed accounts.  Keep at it, and you'll get to be a protest organizer someday.

The difference between an actual Second Life like virtual space and an ordinary ranters list, is the bandwidth and the ability to stage a protest in a choice of Gothams.

The difference between a virtual protest and a real one, in the street, are numerous but boil down to cost, convenience and safety.

Realism may not always be a goal.  Protests may be organized for esoteric reasons, with signs like "Aristotle was right, remember the MITE!" -- what's that all about?

The VR version will be the most immersive of course. Mapping your own gestures to those of your avatar makes your whole body more of a mouse.  Not everyone prefers to puppet their avatar in that mode.

Made in the USA

Memorandum:  advice to importers of Made in the USA goods and services.

I predict a growth in USA studies in schools abroad, following the surprise election of Donald Trump to the presidency.

Children might see something about ISS (the International Space Station) and conclude the US, like Russia and China, is living in some Space Age, with the best minds in aerospace pioneering our lifestyles of tomorrow (ala EPCOT).

That's only partly true.

Children are also facing a young nation that narrowly avoided fragmentation in a bloody Civil War that has continued to have repercussions.

Talk about the Shia and Sunni all you like, in the US you'll find any number of ethnic clashes, as well as synergies, some of which have all but ended the Federation, for better or for worse.

Ongoing Prohibition aka the Drug Wars have gone global as well.  The US fights itself on many levels.  As children find themselves caught up in all this karma, they'll naturally want to know more.

Carol asked me to screen the above award-winning movie, Freedom Riders as a part of the Blue House documentary viewing program, an institution of longstanding.  We screened a bio of Oppenheimer, chief architect of the Manhattan Project, before this.

Does your house, camp ground, or military base offer much history?  What kind of documentaries are you able to access, and from what devices?

I walked in and out of the living room, hearing more than I saw as I cleaned up in the kitchen.  This wasn't my first or last documentary on the topic of seeking a new equilibrium in lifestyles and workflows. Students of GST tend to focus on such struggles, learning from the past, not ignoring it.

I'm not saying the US is the only nation that cannot contain its warring to within its own borders.  Many nations carry out proxy battles overseas, far away from a domestic audience, at least geographically.

However, as the world turns, it gets smaller, with cell phones now penetrating to every corner. The Art of War (ala Sun Tzu) is likewise changing, becoming less outward for those most able to follow the action, on Twitter and so on.

Although I didn't make it to the downtown library today, I was close and thought hard about going, checking my wallet for my card.  I value the access I get from my information sources.

Each one of us is an investigative journalist, not because we're paid to do that in most cases, but because it pays to do homework, research.  Find a diet you like and stick with it.  Fiction has its place for sure.

The conceptual entity known as "the US" does contain many seeds of a positive nature, worth protecting, nurturing, even planting and cultivating, as does the EU and UK, obviously.

Look for ways to escape "strings attached" that might be more than you bargained for.  Keep testing for quality, when it comes to selectively importing, from any vendor really.

Trolls (movie review)

Carol (mom, 87) and I (58) thought today was Armistice Day.  I'd already blogged a Vets memo, and knew the 11th was it, but was too lazy to second guess mom.  Pioneer Courthouse Square was getting ready to accept the annual Christmas tree.  No bell ringing today.

We ending up at Yard House for lunch.  We split a "trump tower" of onion rings, though neither of us had voted for the guy.  Onion soup.  Wisconsin cheese curds.  I had a couple IPAs (RPM by Boneyard).

Hey, the Election has been exhausting and I worked hard at my teaching job last night.  The school kids are getting a bunch of days off this week too.  Why not see Trolls?

The film was funnier than I expected it to be, mainly because of the brain-wipe we get as it overdubs old tracks with the new imagery.  Yellow Submarine mixes with Cinderella a bit.

The Blue Meanie Grinches (not what they're called) make the classic mistake of all literalists, especially cannibals, in thinking that literally eating those with the qualities you admire or crave, will endow you with those qualities.  I think some people call it "mass".

In any case, the trolls are like the angels, or the little people of the forest, all glittery and child-like, upbeat about life, whereas the grinches are like ordinary folk, down and miserable, more beaten, like muggles. They're jealous of the glitterati.

The chief cook for Trollstice, the annual partaking of trolls, is the arch villain whereas we develop more empathy for the spoiled Brat King.  The chief cook gets her fate with a traitor troll and minion, one of those slimy self-help guys.  Empathy only goes so far.

That's the plot, but the musical overlay is what gives these bones flesh, along with the subplots and strong characterizations.

Trolls dance, hug and sing in some endless loop anyway, so their breaking into song is hardly as contrived as when Buffy does it.

Sounds of Silence will never be the same.

True Stories

The Multnomah Meeting's Peace & Social Concerns Committee arranged for this event.

We had a potluck downstairs, then adjourned to the upstairs worship room for singing and stories told by Carol Urner, my mom, about her life.

Lew Scholl recorded the whole thing on his cell phone, picking up audio over the meetinghouse sound system.  Rhys sat to Carol's right to help keep her on track.  I took pictures.

Carol is currently preparing for her move south to Whittier where she lives with my sister Julie.  Last night she took me out to Japanese food at Maru.  We had the new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, a chief topic of conversation.

Cubs Win!

I don't want this momentous sporting milestone to whiz by completely without comment, especially in light of my authentic sports bar experience, at Claudia's, frequented by Cubs fans.

Indeed, Deke and I, at Hair of the Dog a few days earlier, had recommended this place to an out-of-towner, as a major destination sports bar in our neighborhood.

All that being said, I'd planned with my house guest David Koski to go to Tom's, another sports bar I like.  That was mainly to avoid what I expected would be hopelessly crowded conditions, and before I learned Patrick was heading to Claudia's uber-early to save seats.

We let him save us two, and propitiously met up with Diane, a true Chicagoan, heading the same way.

Patrick did a seriously good job saving all those seats as the place was indeed really packed.  I'm sure Tom's was packed too.  The waitress at breakfast that morning had advised us to get there early.

I won't recite the whole game blow by blow, just underline that I appreciated the spirit.

The guy right in front of me would shout for the Indians.  No harm came to him, despite the bar's bias.  This is sports for gosh sakes.  People root for both teams, obviously.  Having fans makes it fun.

Koski of Minnesota was originally lukewarm about either team but we decided to find the Cleveland mascot offensive just to have some more skin in the game.  Of course we knew it'd be momentous, for the Cubs to win, in the face of such a strong belief the team was fated to always lose.

Mark Twain was around to see their last victory (1908) and that seems more than one Haley's comet cycle back.

The game was amazing, with its ups and downs.  The crowd went wild.

Anyway, I said a lot more on Facebook, and even uploaded a short video from my phone, from the event as it happened.

From a Vet

[ from my inbox ]

Almost a hundred years ago, the world celebrated peace as a universal principle. The first World War had just ended and nations mourning their dead collectively called for an end to all wars. Armistice Day was born and was designated as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated."

After World War II, the U.S. Congress decided to rebrand November 11 as Veterans Day. Honoring the warrior quickly morphed into honoring the military and glorifying war. Armistice Day was flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.

Veterans For Peace has taken the lead in lifting up the original intention of November 11th as a day for peace. As veterans, we know that a day that celebrates peace, not war, is the best way to honor the sacrifices of veterans. We want generations after us to never know the destruction war has wrought on people and the earth.

Veterans For Peace is calling on everyone to stand up for peace this Armistice Day. More than ever, the world faces a critical moment. Tensions are heightened around the world and the U.S. is engaged militarily in multiple countries, without an end in sight. Here at home we have seen the increasing militarization of our police forces and brutal crackdowns on dissent and people’s uprisings against state power. This year, with a political arena fueled by hate and fear, the conversation of peace was missing from almost every interaction. It is as urgent as ever to ring the bells for peace. We must press our government to end reckless military interventions that endanger the entire world. We must build a culture of peace.

This Armistice Day, Veterans For Peace calls on the U.S. public to say no to more war and to demand justice and peace, at home and abroad. We know Peace is Possible and call for an end to all oppressive and violent policies, and for equality for all people.

S. Jenika
President
Veterans For Peace Chapter 72
"Promoting a Consciousness of Peace"

Wanderers 2016.11.1

David Koski is here in town so it makes sense he would be speaking at Wanderers.  We have an established affinity for geometry.  We did the Mt. Tabor thing this morning, ascending to its summit.  That sounds strenuous but remember it's a tall hill.  He's from Minneapolis, not often in Portland, so I'm in tour guide mode, which I enjoy.

Yesterday we visited Cargo, a retail outlet specializing in oriental goods.  There's a large down stairs with lots of floor space.  Then we circled round through the code school (PDX Code Guild) to say hello to the Monday night Flying Circus crowd.  I had Glenn and Deke the Geek in tow, in addition to David.

Speaking of code schools, this coming Monday I'll start teaching again, my course in Python in forty hours.  That's like a radio show in some ways, or closed circuit television.  Small class size.

Glenn and David compared respected mnemonics over lunch.  They both do minimalist diagrams capturing some basic ratios and relationships. I'm talking about pure geometry, extending from surface tiling to space-filling.

For example the golden cuboid or "phi brick" has a good many embedded relationships and serves as a factory for tetrahedrons each using six of the seven edge lengths.  A brick with a 2nd root of phi edge also figures in.  David assembles shapes from an elementary set of tetrahedrons which he scales up and down in size.

I mistakenly thought the Rite, so named by Fuller, was not MITE-composed, whereas it's the 1/4 Rite, a Sommerville space-filling tetrahedron, that is not Mite-composed.  "Aristotle was right, remember the Mite" -- the shoptalk of which all-the-same tetrahedrons fill space (with no gaps).  Check Math World for more information.