Riddle of Peace

Another Fuller Schooler, one of my fellow fish in the think tank, suggested I check out Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H.G. Wells.  I've been checking it out.  I've been letting Kindle read it to me.

This morning, I did a circuit check with my guy in Chicago, before going live next Friday.  That's Python business, not for pay.

Tomorrow is my usual gig with the middle schoolers.

Yesterday, an interview with a Princeton candidate.  Alums get tapped for that from time to time.

A bigger for pay gig is around the corner.

In the meantime, as I prepare for a next round, I'm making sure Digital Math gets more of a chance going forward.  I've made Youtubes recently about:

Digital Math:

Casino Math
Supermarket Math
Neolithic Math
Martian Math

These are garden variety "guy with a camera on Youtube" videos, added to the shuffle.  They're about average in length.  No multi-hour documentaries.

The spread (range) of these clips depends on many factors regarding search terms and "word of mouth" -- a misleading phrase as much text is unspoken, spreads by Facebook and so on.

I don't pretend to know what happens with these "note in a bottle" experiments in most cases.

OK, time to walk up to the Linus Pauling House.  Our think tank doesn't have a specific headquarters (a specific building) but if it did, the LPH fits the bill.  Maybe we're a network, with campus facilities around the world.

Mom is on the phone talking to someone about "the Urner effect" meaning to include my dad's work as well.  I'd say it's pretty subtle.

Nickel and Dime Fundraising

Glenn and I met with some hot shot B Corp guy, a producer of fundraisers, or so we were told.  I'm something of a fundraiser myself, for the Coffee Shops Network, not unlike Avalon and/or Quarterworld, both within walking distance.  But then Oregon Lottery is even more prevalent, so if you're willing to limit your horizons...

Asking for a refill on something may trigger a requirement to see a doctor first.  Insurance will stipulate these kinds of hoops.  At some point, if you're hanging on with high age numbers, on some drug, you'll make their numbers look better if you hang on even longer.  There's nothing like a 102 year old smoker to sell cigarettes.

I mention matters Oregon Health related because I'm a go between on some prescriptions. That's why having an Oregon ID, like a driver's license, is important.  Does your state not provide ID and do motor-voter?

That means if you're authenticated enough to have Oregon ID, you can likely vote.  Actually, voter registration is another process, it's just that your status as a valid voter or not is established with the DMV, so that your rights won't be challenged at the ballot box.  Long lines often have to do with thinking a piece of mail to some address proves something.  Even a utility bill may not be enough.

CRU has Oregon ID, so I'll be able to see if it's between now and a next refill that she needs to see a doctor, or the refill after that.  I left voicemail on a non-urgent line with her clinic, in case I need to get involved parties talking.

Oregonians do a lot of research around diet and treat the "medicine is food" mantra pretty seriously, even if that changes the meaning of both "medicine" and "food" to some degree.  The legal profession has its conventions, however folk subcultures cannot always afford to abide by the standards of a court, when deciding what's junk food and what's not.  And so on for "STEM education" and all the rest of it.  When we talk about standards, we want to speak with a standard bearer.

My work with Food not Bombs is high up on my resume, because of the camp settings that might want to recruit my ilk, Friends with cooking experience.  A sense of good nutrition is implied.  However I'm not a French chef and don't expect to be Food Coordinator every year.  I recall doing that one year, for Gathering of Western Young Friends, however I recall having help.  When people have high expectations, they won't leave it to a noob to get everything right the first time.  I felt like I was on an episode of The Apprentice or something.

In the Coffee Shops Network business model, the "scone company" (selling scones over the counter, with coffee or other beverage) is allocating some Good Will money to charity, through each purchase, a well-known set of line items on charts of accounting. 

However here the buyers of the scones get to use their chits (crypto-credits) towards winning at Z, and depending on score (I skipped the step of game selection), will be able to commit Y combinations of crypto-whatevers from their game winnings, and commit these to charitable causes the coffee shop supports.  One's reputation (profile) develops as a consequence. 

If you later feel ashamed you supported Q, go back and delete or annotate.  We all recognize the fact that characters evolve over time.

Hey, what if you don't approve of CSN outlet 1234 supporting causes ('A12', 'B40', 'Z14') as causes (think of a juke box, options to play)? 

Then don't go there, and if you're the scone company, withhold your scones and sell them through someone else instead.  We call that a free market.  We're not refusing counter service on the basis of ethnicity.  We're like a bar in that sense.  Whom one has to 86 is handled by the local community. 

There's no CSN "supreme court" beyond various standards bodies I'm not discussing here.  Founders have input.  Philosophers weigh in ("weighty Friend" model).

Perhaps another CSN outlet is more the right look and feel for this scone maker? 

The proprietors have a lot of discretion as to how they tilt their portfolios.

Remember:  an end goal of all this is to get customers in the mood to play philanthropist, with small amounts (we can talk about big amounts through other channels -- small amounts add up, so to the recipients may not be trivial), and without needing to set aside much personal budget. 

If you do coffee and scones anyway, but didn't get to fund Scouting, or the Big Parade, now you might get to, because computer circuitry and databases have made "nickel and dime" fundraising a reality at last.

Producer Mode

Consumer Mode

OK guys, you can be honest.  Should I retire the Android?  This HTC has served me well but is a pain in the butt to recharge.  I have an iPhone 6 ready to spring into action as the replacement device.  You might want more details.  I'll let you off the hook; they don't matter.

Carol and I finally got out, after the snow day yesterday, her wheely walker and chair both in tow. Last time we started out:  battery dead.  Call AAA.  This time:  success in the full mission (the bank, the bookstore, the supermarket).

Speaking of supermarkets, I had no idea Fred Meyer was a Rosicrucian.  That came up in this article (screen shot above), which I'm still digesting, about hippies long before anyone had heard of the word.  Quakers are prone to experimentalism, I'll admit that's baked in to the jargon.

I didn't fill a whole shopping cart or anything.  I wheel Carol around while she keeps the basket in her lap, limiting us to how much we can carry.  She had letters to mail as well.  The walker stayed in the back seat of the car the whole time.  While she sat in Powell's (on Hawthorne) I moved the car from near the bank (also on Hawthorne) to Fred Meyer's (the supermarket).

Carol turns 90 in a few weeks.  She's in her 90th year she tells everyone, as when you're 90, you've already done 90 years.  We look back on our age.

I'm still in the traffic jam occasioned by the government shutdown, but then a lot of infrastructure is creaky slow, even with offices reopened.  We're back to gridlock and things not working, on many floors.  I'm not "an overseer" (as Quakers say) who gets privileged access to report on what it's like everywhere.  I'm very much in a specific zip code.  I do have a restart date.

In the meantime, I have lots to do.  I'm experimenting more with Youtube, trying out different variations on a theme, fiddling with hyperparameters.  People who go to school to be on camera get feedback from their peers and faculty.  Youtube is a different kind of school, but then the first thing is to get noticed.  Fortunately, I have a lot of math teacher connections.

Carol wants pretty much the same dinner every night, though I'm not saying without exceptions.  There's a default meal plan that's pretty simple, let's put it that way.  Simple habits, no frills, that's all encouraged in Quakerism, so I'm not complaining about "too plain".  On the contrary, simplicity has many merits.

Public Knowledge

Pythonic Andragogy

"Pythonic Andragogy" is a title I used a lot, as a tag line too.  I like it.  "Andragogy" is in contrast to "pedagogy" and is the study of how to best foster learning processes in adults.

High end computer science is merging with mathematics through topology, wherein scenarios or paths between proofs might be nudged into each other, irrespective of implementation. In place of Bertrand Russell's propositions, we have "types", each with its own morphology.

Lower end computer science is merging with desktop publishing in various ways, most notably in the form of Unicode.  Learning about the Python string type, meaning characters, like you're reading now, means understanding how the many world languages are encoded.

A language or namespace or world provides an environment wherein functions secretly "do" whatever this world allows them, in terms of powers.

Happily, 👽👽👽 {EXTRATERRESTRIAL ALIEN} and other such Emoji have been folded into Unicode as well.  These feature in my beginner curriculum materials (and never completely go away).

My Pycon workshop for teachers in Chicago spelled out the game plan:  we spin lore into tech both as memory glue and as a "lessons learned" medium.  The Story of Unicode is upbeat in my treatment, whereas Tabulation, leading to SQL, takes us into the sad business of tagging people for the purpose of abusing them.

They Shall Not Grow Old (movie review)

The film's title has an ironic double meaning:  we won't forget them, they stay fresh in our minds, and... they were cut down as youth, sacrificed to the war gods.

This movie is not about the big egos who used wars to enshrine their place in history.  These were the working people, abducted from civilian life, commanded by the wartime economy, to grab a uniform and hop a ship to the front, to be executed, wounded, or returned home.

The film achieves its effect as a storytelling project by letting the people who were there share their memories.  These were BBC recordings spliced together.  Then was the magic of doctoring the film, mainly to overcome the ravages of time.  Some of the most under and over exposed film was in the best condition, as no one had bothered to make copies (the originals were available).

Those who've done homework understand this telling was orchestrated by Peter Jackson, the director of all those Lord of the Rings films in New Zealand.  NZ was indeed the HQS for this project.

I'd always wondered, since childhood, why older films were always played on fast forward.  Yes, I understood they used fewer frames per second back then, so why not project at a lower rate?  For some reason, variable speed playback was beyond the abilities of Hollywood and TV land for many decades.  In this movie, that problem is overcome.

The version I saw was an encore performance in a busy commercial multiplex.  The projectionist forgot to use the 3D lens or something, so although we were all wearing our glasses, the first ten minutes or so were just blurry.  Probably someone from the audience went out to complain, as then the screen went black and came back in 3D.  Color would come later.

Jackson, the director, both introduces the film and then reappears after the credits for thirty minutes, to explain the project in more detail.  He establishes his credentials as someone who has always cared a lot about WW1, his grandfather having been a career soldier.

Although the archives Jackson was given to explore is full of a huge amount of footage, the end goal was a feature film with a sane pace.  He decided to focus on the experience of an average British soldier in the trenches in France.  He collages together many episodes to tell a generic tale of mounting a tank-led assault on the enemy line.

The German side is not demonized.  The pervasive sense, in the absence of a lot of media, is no one knows what's going on, least of all the soldiers.  Soldiers have a blend of stoicism and fatalism to choose from.

Whereas there's no glamorizing of the war, the film is honest in letting the men speak for themselves.  Many express gratitude they were able to experience this great tragedy close up, for all the pain it caused them.  The most bitter voices don't get as much say.

Mini Confab (Fuller Friends)

We didn't organize any formal event this time.  An unveiling of Tetrascroll might merit the term "formal" but that's also work, in the sense of logistics and heavy lifting.  This was more a "breezing through" i.e. D.W. Jacobs on his way south in a rental car (Nissan Altima) having landed in PDX one brilliantly sunny (and cold) afternoon.

Trevor Blake joined us, my having shared with Doug the viewpoint on my back "flextegrity garden" where numerous specimens of the various versions, especially C6XTY, decorate the space.  Sam Lanahan, the inventor, was much in our conversation.

In front:  the C6XTY pyramid, with the colored lights.  Makes my place easy to find, or at least recognize.

We're not zoned as a storefront type of business, but managing supranational networks from home offices is perfectly fine, and is what goes on in many a neighborhood.  Even working from coffee shops is fine if you make sure you're encrypting everything to the proper level so as not to jeopardize confidentiality.

After lunch at the Bagdad, we adjourned to Synchronofile headquarters, cram packed with specimens, mostly articles, books, things of that nature.  I resolved to finally get my own copy of American Dreamer: Bucky Fuller & the Sacred Geometry of Nature.

One of my practices these days is to sweep my radar picking up on sacred geometry teachings that consciously employ Fuller's signature terminology, now that his shop talk is world readable.  I'm finding a few, such as Grayham Forscutt.  Scott Eastham will help me find more.

Doug and I then later adjourned to Back Stage for a night repast.  We hadn't seen each other for about ten years, so I had a lot to catch up on, especially with regard to his travels in Eastern Europe.  He left me a copy of his play, which play Eastham recommends in his book as a wonderful first exposure to Bucky's thought, in both English and Polish.

I talked about Ed Applewhite a lot, his suspicions around est, and my involvement in same.  We talked about a lot of movements and surges, political parties, cults, religions, you name it.  As contemporaries living through a lot of the same history, it makes perfect sense that we'd be comparing notes on our respective experiential scenarios, partially overlapping, as Fuller used to describe the "time tunnels" or "world lines" or "worm holes" we make through the various dimensions, as "pattern integrities".

Real Humans (movie review)

Technically speaking, Real Humans is a TV serial, not a movie, however my umbrella tag "(movie review)" makes a useful search string, so I'll keep to it. What adds a layer is the production is natively Swedish with subtitles hacked on by some mysterious process VLC could decode.

Having one's culture mirrored back through another's is something I got used to, living in the Philippines.  Sweden is a parallel universe.

The setting is more or less the present, in terms of USB ports, laptops, computer viruses, cell phones. There are no cloud AI personalities selling train tickets (hi Julie), or if there are, they're not front and center, because in this parallel universe they've figured out some stuff ours hasn't (yet).

It's our world with the small, added, some might say world-breaking, feature of conscious robots, called hubots in this world.

A very movie-literate person might be flashing on Kubrick's AI and the TV series (movie-launched) Westworld. When great care is taken to have the hubots seem real, the cinematic problem of creating robots goes away, as you need a way of acting like a robot.  Same in Walking Dead:  you don't need crazy fancy computer effects.  Just cast ordinary people and teach them a few tricks.

I say the above without in any way intending to trivialize the brilliant work these performances embody.  Real Humans does a wonderful job of inventing how humans would act, if artificial.  Of course they get grumpy about their 2nd class status, wouldn't we?

They take their cues from us after all.

Civil rights for robots is where things logically go, once you have them established as "matching humans as closely as technologically possible".

Real Humans explores implications, no matter how absurd from our world's viewpoint, with empathy and humor.  The teen boy develops the syndrome of having a crush on an android and beyond that, really having more sense of attraction to this non-human species.  A hubot gets religion and can't get enough church.  The killer blond (no the other one) wants to adopt.

Speaking of which, the hubots don't age except in the sense of wear out.  Odi's battery goes bad and he has to stay plugged in, exactly like my Mac Air (except I don't think it's the battery necessarily).

We do not see any children nor baby hubots, nor pets (rather amazingly).

I'm not saying that's a flaw in terms of keeping the plots manageable and a core story in focus.  Who is the evil genius who figured out a way to make hubots self aware?

But isn't that a necessary component of biomimicry in this instance?  Would we suspend disbelief if seen by others to be talking to our dolls (short answer:  sure, happens every day).

Integral Design Institute

I'm not sure that's exactly the name, which is reminiscent of Ken Wilber's thing, but then we have only so many ways of permuting academy names with "integral" and "design" in them.  I think of an architecture firm, but the goal is outreach and skill sharing, in a way Oregon says it would like: make vocational work great again.

Glenn is the principal in that he has the most capital, in terms of knowledge and tools.  He's set up an entire factory in an old mining town, after most had moved away.  He knows about the issues around unreinforced masonry buildings in earthquake subduction zones -- the kind of thing we talk about at Wanderers all the time.

The one he has his eye on today is in a good place and would be ready for business tomorrow were his backers to make a successful bid.  These plans are completely distinct from Linus Pauling House scenarios, which are ISEPP business, a different institute with a long track record of educating Oregonians.  Terry has brought a lot of the heavyweights through here, not just to speak in auditoriums but to visit the schools.

Speaking of schools, I'm interested in alternatives to driving to other counties (sometimes) when delivering after school content.  A lot of the costs are borne by the instructor, in terms of both time and mileage.  An alternative model is where students come to the venue.  Yet another model brings another principal into the loop via closed circuit TOIP (television over IP), i.e. using Zoom or one of those.

Nirel and Glenn are having a meeting about the property in question.  But does Portland as a city have an existing plan to assist creatives.  In the face of high rent, finding studio space just to work on projects has become difficult, especially if you need to sleep somewhere else.  Boathouses have some serious drawbacks.  A lot of apparently vacant commercial space has issues.

The thriving business in Portland is storage units.  As creatives get pushed into downsizing, they fill the units, but aren't able to work in them.  ActiveSpace was to be a solution.  We couldn't sleep there.  Portland Knowledge Lab rented digs, but then the promising WiFi solution fell through (Metro chapter).

Glenn and I went through a chapter looking for a kid-friendly training space when we thought AFSC was trying to expand (quite the opposite).  The commercial space on Hawthorne, near the School of Rock, would have been much higher profile than most Quakers could handle I think.  AFSC isn't built to be that front and center, except in Philadelphia perhaps.  Or am I wrong?

FEMA Testing Mode

"FEMA Testing Mode" is local code for practicing emergency routines, which are not routine by definition. Carol is operating in the kitchen, feeding herself, as if there's no one home, even though I'm here and closely supervising.  "What if I get called away to Seattle?" is the name of the game.

At a higher level, we have an entire Co-op near Movie Madness (rental videos) devoted to practicing disaster relief routines in its spare time. A lot of them are seniors, and such exercises count as exercise, even if the theme is the nervewracking suspense of their not being an earthquake yet.

By the way, the online dictionary I checked was fine with either "nervewracking" or "nerveracking" and never stopped to talk about how that "w" snuck in (or got dropped, as the case may be). I've got comments turned off to model an old-style Quaker journal, but I bet some of you know more than I do about these fine points in English.

I've got Spirited Away frozen in time to my left, where Carol left it before dinner last night.  Glenn hasn't seen this film and I grabbed it yesterday as we discussed both the live action and animated versions of Seven Samurai (Samurai 7).  There's a good segue here.

Having kept my vow of abstinence from August to 2019, as committed to the blockchain or whatever, I've had a few ceremonial cold ones.

I don't have the every morning routine of climbing Mt. Tabor at the moment.  That reminds me, time to send Patrick some proposals for some Jupyter Notebook workouts.

Bed Fight

My heart thumper tonight was about holding up the top half of a bed enough to click a replacement hand controller into the box.  Next time I'll ask someone to help hold that up, as if that would do any good.  It did this time, but will it again?

I'm talking about our one remote controlled bed in the assisted care room.  The Blue House is not wheel chair accessible, however Carol has proved she's able to do the stairs it takes to stay mobile.  We're planning an outing this week.

Anyway, she has this bed she can set in position, but I'm sure it must be wearing out, like a lot of stuff around here.  The fossil fuel furnace was great in its age.  That guy's golden age was past even before we got here.  Amazingly, it's still usable.

I dove into the history of Kashmir this evening on Youtube, a long story and I'm not even half way into it.  I've been in the area on foot, my family migrating, one could say as tourists.  Do people still tour in a civilian capacity?  I'm sure they must.  I've been touring in North America, with two loops from St. Louis to St. Louis by way of Richmond (Indiana).  See previous blog posts.

Like I wrote about in a recent Medium article, if you're into doing research, the tools are great, but then it's hard to afford all R&D.

Speaking of which, regarding the Human Calculator proposal and all that (talking about a calendar invented by a TV personality), I'm looking at more of that on Facebook these days, and not a lot.  The indig stuff is great for learning Python i.e. adding digits of an int means turning it into a string, then a list, converting, summing.  All doable in one line of code basically but still a lot to think about.

I should put some hyperlinks in here.

Followup:  the HTC was my flashlight under there and I left it there when I crawled out.  Google is much better at knowing where my phone is, and how to alert me.  We can talk about the Matrix later.

Xmas 2018

The internet is slow today, given everyone using it.  I'm able to squeeze one picture at a time up to Flickr, which may have timed out by the time you read this.  I wrote this at the close of 2018.

Last year around this time, I had recently returned from Georgia and Alabama, where I was visiting family.  This year, family came to see me.  We phoned my sister in California.

Last night some of us went to Multnomah Meeting and sang Christmas carols, did Bible readings, telling the Christian story.  This included a short Meeting for Worship during which I'm told I snored lightly, whereas from my point of view I was awake for the whole thing.

There's a partial USG shutdown going on and the Wall Streeters have taken a beating or at least suffered a bear market.  USG prefigures USA OS (operating system) in my book i.e. is the prequel.

Lindsey watched all episodes of Star Wars on her flight from China, minus Episode 4, the original.

I'm not too worried about the dip in the stock market as I've always been a bear in some ways, even though the Urner emblem is an ox (a bovine).

Last night I was back to brain anatomy, but from the point of view of wanting to build a graph database about it using Cypher.  A graph database does not aim to simulate the brain, only to record what we suppose we know about it.

I've been working on a graph of dead poets, with fellow travelers.

Given the living room, recently redecorated and rearranged, thanks in part to a heat budget, contains Flextegrity, there's some discussion of futuristic businesses and their prospects.

I'm planning some more networking around T4P and GST before 2018 closes out.  Year of the Pig starts in February, which has other connotations than "pigging out" some places in the world.  "Legally piggily" is a principal association around here (parietal lobe).

Coffee Shop Meetup

I hopped the 14 downtown, using a 2.5 hour ticket, another one coming back, this time on the 2.  TriMet has cut the 4's route in half.  I used to go all the way to St. John's on the 4, from blocks away. But the 75 heads that way too.  Why not have the 2 head into town along Division, and let the 4 take it onward?  That's what they've done.

I got to meet the founder of Coding with Kids, which has been expanding rapidly.  I've been teaching 2D / 3D animation this term, with concepts such as key frames and in betweening, with each object of interest getting its own timeline.  I know about cuts and dissolves, but we're middle school and younger and might not have a lot of patience for film school at the moment.

How to merge the new literacies with the old ones is an ongoing challenge which I think, write and talk about a lot, as do many of my peers.  Educators tend to talk about education, as a process, as a set of practices, in terms of feedback loops and so on.  Our meetup today was a first opportunity for a lot of us to meet one another, even though we're all working in the same city.  Actually, technically, we're not in the same city.  Beaverton and Portland have their own school districts.

Upon getting home I found Carol wanted to watch a documentary about Ruth Ginsberg, which she could in theory watch on her computer, but we opted for the living room player, as that gave her more of an opportunity to practice walking.  She's making a come back.  However, with headphones, on her laptop, might actually work better and we could try that for some next DVD.

Deke the Geek came over and we talked about some of the truckology I've been learning, regarding ELDs (electronic logging devices) and so on.  You'll see these blogs reflecting my surges in this or that direction.  We're not a trucking family, however the data science business and World Game have helped me leverage what little background I've had.  Traveling the twisty turny roads of the high Himalayas should count for something, whether or not I was at the wheel.

At Bridge City

"Bridge City" is a nickname for Portland, our several bridges being what the Blue Meanies would bomb, in case Planet Earth wishes to go Yellow Submarine (again). However in this context (my blog) "Bridge City" also designates "the other Monthly Meeting" in Portland, "Multnomah" being the other Other (rhymes with "brother").

Today was business meeting for BCFM, however Tara and I, not frequent attenders, didn't stay for that, and instead hit the nearby Andy & Bax.  I needed new pants and a belt.  Alexia joined us there and took off with her sis whereas I buzzed home in the Maxi Taxi to make lunch for Carol.

Ron B. and I got talking, about the public television archives he's helping to build, in terms of protocol (something already out there). I asked him if it were "XMLy" and he said yes, but also "JAY-son" (we were speaking geek).  I caught up with Chris and Larry re Amanda and Greg.  I'd been bouncing back and forth with Greg and Nick H., the stats guru, in my Machine Learning phase (for now behind me).

That gets me thinking about CUE's weekly cable TV show by, and for, seniors (CUE = Center for Urban Education, deceased but ressurrectable). I was not directly involved in this production. I went through the cable TV training more on my own, working both sides of the camera in various roles, but with primitive technology compared with today's.

One cable TV show I was on got us talking about the Icosahedron and I realized the show's host imagined the radii were equal in length to the outer edges.  He was probably remembering how that was an important attribute of another related shape, the so-called "vector equilibrium", and juxtaposing that with this better known Platonic.  I was being interviewed I think with Trevor and Walter Alter.

Speaking of Trevor, I mean to ask him, having archived the Joe Moore archives (BFVI), which other ads Bucky might have starred in.  Did he participate in the Think Different campaign staged by Apple?  The one getting this thread started was for Honda. I wonder if Synchronofile has a file on that.

"Captain Bucky" was ahead of his time in doing a "Facebook profile" (this was well before FB was invented), into which he'd dump a lot of souvenirs from his life, such as parking tickets, awards. He called it his chronofile, reminiscent of the "ship's log" like on Star Trek.

As Trevor points out, things Bucky innovated, like self-profiling, jogging, paleo diet, were later imitated or we could say were in the Zeitgeist.  Some catch a whiff sooner, of this or that trend.

At Linus Pauling House

I've not had a Tuesday night off in awhile, one of my Python nights.  However my course wound up last week and I'm free to join Wanderers.  Steve Mastin is doing Blood Pressure a second time, and I missed the Wednesday morning event, so this is a fine opportunity to learn from a scientist.

I'll not be staying to the end though, as I'm trying to supervise Carol's recovery.  It's a cold wet night, with a furnace repairman coming in the morning.  Not a night for partying.  I'll do my homework and drive back (no, I don't usually drive, unless bringing props).

Speaking of props, I finished up at Glencoe today, where I face whether to hammer down as their best ever animation teacher, when that's not what I know, but am learning.  I've got a new Medium story on that.

I won't blog during Steve's talk.  You might find out what I learned about blood pressure by reading elsewhere.  I recently had an echo of my chest in followup to the year-ago PE.  They've got me on a stable regime so at the moment future doc visits are spaced wide apart.  That's a measure of current health I suppose.

Actually, now that the night is over, let me do a recall of Steve's talk from memory without even looking at the slides I photographed (still in the camera, not uploaded yet).

He took us through the various ways the body naturally self regulates, and what it self regulates. The rate at which the kidneys clean the blood governs glandular hormonal responses which medications may inhibit or block, should medical science consider that a prudent move.  The adrenal glands, as well as various cells in the heart, take their signals from chemical pathways.

The body takes blood pressure seriously, as should we.  He talked about how it fluctuates throughout the day and how it's important to replicate measuring conditions, down to the equipment, if wanting to get an accurate sense of change over time.  This is not super easy.

The talk dove pretty deeply into the structure and function of many organs, and provided some history as to the concept's evolution.  By convention we measure at the arm, though other body parts may be used.  Use a scale factor.  Newer devices are getting continuous readings from less bulky devices.

Intergenerational Cyberia

Traditional societies, such as commuter cultures in big cities, put children in the care of people other than parents, as the latter need to go foraging for berries, or pick fruit in the fields.

Professional caregivers, such as teachers, may pick up the slack, but then you have grandparents also.  Those who have become more frail and perhaps scattered, perhaps not, stay behind in the camps and share skills with the next generation to assume a parental role.

This pattern repeats in Cyberia, where retired people finally get the time to reflect on their lives, including the history they lived through.  Many boomers today are consuming hours of conspiracy theory documentaries, trying to make sense of what happened.  Who else has that kind of time?  The grandchildren, momentarily spared the need to earn a living, retired young people.

I'm not saying there's anything particularly wrong with this pattern in principle.  You want the wise elders, who've seen it all, who've raised kids, held a job, to pass on what they know to the younger ones.  Mom and dad need a break to get out there and forage, to commute, to spend time on freeways listening to radio.  A different caste of adults gets to work with the younger people.

Of course this pattern I'm sketching grossly oversimplifies.  Some folks in that middle generation, young parents for example, do work with little kids for a living.  A lot of job descriptions involve kids as a target audience, even if you don't interact with them personally on a daily basis.  Getting the toy stores properly stocked and decorated is kid-oriented work.

However, the fact remains, that many don't get the time to reflect on history much, even at the university, if lucky enough to attend.  Depending on one's area of focus, the demands on one's time may be such that no academic credit accrues in exchange for spending time studying the custody of the Zapruder film (to take the highlighted example).

Dietary Equivalents

You may suppose I'm proposing to talk about actual foods, but no, I'm being metaphoric again.

In the early days of eCommerce, per Supermarket Math, we had our LAMP stacks, with Linux at the foundation and a "P-language" at the top astride a database, although many just said P stood for PHP and were done with it.

Others said PHP, Perl and Python.  Then Ruby came along.  Then Node.

Now we have many more stacks these days.  Saying you're a "full stack engineer" leads to the logical next question: "of which stack or stacks are we speaking?"

By analogy, what might I swap out of curriculum XYZ to insert new topics, just as nutritious, maybe more so.

For example, we want to share Regular Expressions.  They were invented by a mathematician and they're used a lot in the real world.  They get used in bash, in vim, and in Django's URLs dispatcher.

We need to keep primes versus composite and really build on those more.  Euclid's Method for the GCD needs to appear in many languages.  Computer languages, that is.

The absence of most modulo arithmetic in the lower grades (we might still do something with "clocks") has more to do with anti-German sentiments in 1900s New England, than with its everyday relevance to cryptography and the blockchain.

Lots of Euclidean geometry moved in to push out anything Gaussian.

Some top down imposition of the "one size" that "fits all" is very likely going to fail, next to a system allowing schools to compete and distinguish themselves.  Biodiversity trumps monoculture over the long haul.

Those getting in to Martian Math early, will have that clearness of foresight as a bragging point, should the Digital Mathematics of the Silicon Forest, continue to prove itself a standard in some way.

My ideal Polytechnic features GST and Digital Mathematics in competition with more conventional fare, such as Economics and a less literary approach to core STEM.

Our bridge from PATH to STEAM keeps us anchored in our values,which we're not afraid to have.

We look at ethics / aesthetics quite a bit, comparing lifestyles.  That's what engineers do.

Occupy University I'm calling it, continuing my experience from OPDX days.

From the Pi

I'm physically in the living room, Mac Air on my lap, connected by VNC to the Raspberry Pi in the basement.

Getting this far has been a struggle, as my former password, AFAIK, had stopped working.  Had I forgotten resetting it?  But then why did passwd reset seem to work, yet not work.  Something about /etc/shadow?

Anyway, I followed instructions to change cmdline.txt on the Micro SD card, an hour-long project given my best card reader adaptor was not the one that ended up working.  Then came other issues, requiring a remount and so on.

Now, at last, I'm able to do what I used to do:  use VNC from a remote laptop to get the Raspberry Pi desktop.  Yay.

In celebration, I opened Blogger from the Pi and am writing this blog post virtually, from 192.168.1.5 behind the router, not from the Mac Air.

Secret Knowledge

Time Flies

:: Carol and Celeste ::

A cliche we've all heard is the older one gets, the faster time flies.  Then follows the standard explanation:  well duh, each year is proportionally less and less, of one's entire life.  We also learn from the patterns.  The seasons spin by, marked by holidays in succession.

We're coming up on Thanksgiving here in Oregon.  In earlier chapters, I've been in the HOV lane heading to north of Seattle, to be with family friends.  Other times I've been north to meet with actual relatives, dad's side of the family.

This year, however, given mom is not ambulatory (a recent turn of events), I'm likely to stay in Portland, which has its own charms.  We might do something fancy-electronic to hookup with the relatives.  We're also looking forward to a rendezvous with other friends.  That's what this season is about, when it's hardest to travel thanks to weather.

:: teacher accessories ::

More Movie Making

Youtube has a wealth of conspiracy theory videos, I think we all know that. Were I a big time think tank I might have a catalog with at least a hundred pointers (links) per entry.  As it is, as a low budget dude, I have Robert Anton Wilson's encyclopedia of conspiracies, I'm sure by this time dated.  It's pre 9-11.

Actually, Robert (Bob?) overlapped the emergence of the Web, and he looked for links when writing that book, and found my website talking about the Grunch, a Bucky Fuller invention, in terms of terms, one of his neologisms, his successor to LAWCAP (in turn his successor to FINCAP).  So yeah, my website at Teleport is there in print.  Look it up.  This book is not hard to find.

I think in terms of graph databases sometimes, having played with Python + Neo4j some years ago. I'm not the expert.  We've all seen the movie wherein the hero or anti-hero has a wall covered with pictures, with yarn or string going this way and that.  This is called "connecting the dots".  You'll see professionals doing it, but also people spinning out of control, losing their grip.  It's called thinking, as depicted in the semiotics of film.

The semiotics of film is actually where to find the tropes I want to talk about, the dots I want to connect, or not.  A graph is uninteresting if everything is connected to everything else.

I remember having a faxed transcript of testimony by Clair George, some CIA guy, and using one of those yellow highlighter pens.  I ended up highlighting just about all of it, which is goofy, because if everything stands out, then nothing does. I made the mistake of sharing it with The Oregonian, which was doing some articles on me at the time.

Which reminds me: I was amused by how Valerie Plame included so much redacted text in her book.  The joke book would be all redacted, with one or two prepositions (whole propositions?) peeking out.

A dot to connect is the Gambles' Thrive operation to a "zero point energy" discourse, which of course is a link to civilizations off-world.  The GST horizon of opportunity, which Fuller believed crossed a threshold in the 1970s, has to do with whether military operations are a sign of mental illness.

If species success is just around the corner, if we behave in a rational manner, and we behave irrationally instead, then in what sense is our language making any sense?  We've become nonsense creatures, which is interesting to contemplate.  Would the comic books seem any different.  Would superheros go away?  Why use the subjunctive, if we're there already?

Those pushing futurisms are in science fiction ville, making magazine covers for Popular Mechanics, about the anti-gravity machines and flying cars and so on.  Many of those futurisms do seem to promise higher living standards, as they did in the 50s and 60s.  Those were decades of high optimism.  Then came Blade Runner and dystopian science fiction ala Grunch (Grunch of Giants is at once hopeful and dark, very 1980s).

So I've connected to Thrive from the study of exoplanets and their past and/or future interaction with Earthians.  I've made a "big deal" in a low key way out of how my brand of GST doesn't promise zero point energy, nor feature it as necessary to a higher living standard, a better world wherein outward war is obsolete.

On the other hand I explore the panic ensuing from the Orson Welles Halloween Hoax.  My Martian Math dives into that.  I played excerpts of the broadcast during the recent course at Reed College.  The kids understood this is was science fiction.  None were terrified.

Perhaps I'm a mover and shaker in that I've got a tractor hooked up to Synergetics (the Fuller version) and am pulling it from STEM towards PATH, making it a work in the humanities bridging to STEM, coming from the Philosophy side.

Once a bridge is established, the traffic is two way, so maybe it didn't matter which side initiated the bridge.  I'm talking about the C.P. Snow chasm of course.  I've written stories about that elsewhere, as did Dr. Fuller.

If you're not familiar with Martian Math or Synergetics, let me summarize in a nutshell.  A different way of modeling multiplication brings in more triangles and tetrahedrons than we're used to, which suggests a different approach to spatial geometry and relative volume valuation.

A different approach does not mean a replacement approach.  There's emphasis on a conversion constant, as if we're inventing another way to calibrate pressure or temperature.  Perhaps we're introducing a currency.

These polyhedrons inflate to a spherical version, with the spherical icosahedron especially stable, and associated with the geodesic sphere and dome.  Fuller was famous for his work in that area, but behind the scenes, this volumes re-evaluation was going on.

As a way of packaging what might come across as boring and dry, I have my science fiction ETs use the Bucky stuff, which turns my math course into a broader spectrum anthropology course.  We're also thinking about theater:  what would the movie look like?  Think of more than one.

Fancy Bear

Happy Halloween

Today's News

Today was tightly timed.  This was a first run with Carol incapacitated to this degree, though with dress rehearsal the day before.

We had to run a short gauntlet at the clinic, all necessary, and then I needed to get to Bowling Class.  That's code.  Crack it later maybe.

The CBS News was about the horror show crime boss stuff that makes this Ghetto Planet, followed by a scary story about a dangerous place, where people die in the process of taking selfies.

Typhoon Yutu hit Northern Mariana Islands.  Get checked for breast cancer.  I get to have another colonoscopy soon.

I'm engaged with Quakers in some long range planning again, which process does not involve voting.  There's plenty of room within Quakerism for many experimental forms.

I may be experimenting with the mixed use skyscraper concept, perhaps in Asia somewhere.  Speaking of which, I see in Asian Reporter that the Pope is eyeing a visit to North Korea.

I've been sharing DPRK memes on Facebook as a part of the ongoing redesign, so this news was apropos.  I read it in the parking lot, as we had coffee, having arrived early for the appointment.

Griff sent me some homework.  I'll be getting an RT and RD in Rhino after all, looks like.  That's a CAD program I'm using.  I'm not the headwaters when it comes to the slick stuff going out through the schools, but I do contribute some mnemonics.

A lot of what I do is reorganize, repackage, value add.  That's what GST envisions the PWS as doing, an "edit / recombine" studio.  PWS = personal workspace.  Lots on Medium by me on that.

Greetings to Gulenists

In follow-up to some recent writings mentioning the Hizmet (service) movement, in connection with Quakers.

Circuit Riding

I'm sure I'm engaged in misprision in my use of the "circuit riding" meme, but lets picture me as this electron that takes a path through a circuit.  My wave-like qualities are less important in this context, but we know I broadcast information when called upon.  I'm on my way to a CPU or GPU someplace, we could surmise, in Google Brain.

In practice, Carol and I both vector about in Portland.  I still use a fossil fuel powered car.  If we're serious about care-taking Peak Oil, we'll acknowledge the fun we had with all that "starter fluid" in our attempts to boot something more sustainable.

I've been listening to an Israeli historian with a big Youtube following.  He speculates our sudden awakening was maybe more shocking and therefore absurd in some ways.  Are we too early to the party?  I don't know his views on ETs, but maybe 13 billion years is way too early for intelligent life and we're a blip on the screen many trillions of years before most planets get woke.

But then some humans are persuaded there's busy commerce with ETs already.  Speculations on the platform of a consensus reality (CR, cite Mindell, A.) are one thing, whereas once you're already left the realm of consensus (about what's so now, about the past), then speculation is closer to ranting in a House of Nonsense, such as we might have in Asylum District.

"Asylum District" does enjoy a somewhat fragile consensus among business owners, historians, those who appreciate the charming Dr. Hawthorne story.  He ran a first mental asylum for Oregonians, when this was a fledgling state, dreaming of infrastructure for itself.

The nearby Ladd's Addition had lots of room.  Housing in the area was still fairly sparse.

Salem, the future capital, replacing Oregon City from Hudson's Bay Company days, allowed Dr. Hawthorne to develop his facility while Oregon worked on a newer one, closer to home.  One day, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest would be filmed there.

I'm teaching 2D and 3D animation these days.  I'm not the expert.  I'm taking a "learning together" approach while I herd cats i.e. 2nd through 5th graders.  The topics are new, but not the work.

That's not all of what I do.  I also get sick sometimes, which is work in itself.  For those of you know know physics, work is whatever you do, whereas if you're a Protestant, it has something to do with "earning a living" even though we know there's no way to earn such a thing (it's a gift).

In talking about "what is work?", we've left consensus reality as far as I'm concerned.

I'll share more about my work in other blog posts.  Right now, it's time to enter said CPU or GPU as some wandering circuit riding electron.  Wish me luck.

Welcome to "Sesame Street"

As a way of embedding a cultural icon, influential on me among many, I've oft referred to a certain "concentric hierarchy" as "the Sesame Street of Synergetics".

I'm of course talking about a "stack" of concentrically arranged (one could say layered) topological frameworks, Eulerian networks.

You may think in terms of great circles and how we used to imagine electrons flying along geodesics, in those ancient movies about "the atom".  That's the kind of mental imagery we encourage, even if we're not literally talking about an atom.

The great circles remain, absent any specific frequency or special case interpretation.

However, the strobe light may reveal a shape at a "stand still" that's more what we might have grown up calling "Platonic".  When spinning around any pair of poles, we get a readout.

A lot of schools left those out (the Five Platonics), so if you don't know what a tetrahedron is, you're in good company.

After a few Sesame Street level videos, some time with puppets, some hands-on time exploring tactile senses (Gibbs-ish ala solid, liquid and gas), you'll be clear not only on what a tetrahedron is, but several other such hedrons (or hedra) as well.

You'll be ready for kindergarten in no time!

Not that your vocabulary needs to get that big right away.  Keep watching, stay tuned.

Recap:

Two tetrahedrons intersecting, give a cube, its dual the octahedron, their pairing a dodecahedron of diamond faces, space-filling (and not Platonic).

Said RD has volume 6 with respect to said cube (3) and tetrahedron (1), octahedron (4).

The dual of the RD, the VE (cuboctahedron), scales to bridge the twelve centers of closest packed unit-radius spheres to:

(A) their nearest neighbors and
(B) to a shared nucleus.

1, 12, 42, 92... a lot of you know this already.  The tetrahedron connects four of such spheres and serves as unit.

Python in the News

I quizzed my class tonight:  "Why is Python in the news again?"

The hint:  someone famous, as in prize-worthy, is a fan thereof.

I talked about ISEPP (Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy) and the big name lecture series (Goodall, Leakey, Sagan...), suggesting someone of stature.

Answer (revealed after suitable time):  Paul Romer, just awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (shared).

He's a big promoter of the Jupyter Notebook ecosystem, of which Python is a big part (explains the "py").

Actually, the ties to ISEPP are closer in that Terry, the ringleader, is a Romer fan and cites him in his slides and videos.  That's probably why Wanderers were tracking from the get go.

Columbus Day

I had a good meetup with the family physician, in their new facility.  So the theme was already medical, including pharmacy.  Then it turned out Carol had lost the med I'd just fetched for her on immediate notice, from a somewhat far away pharmacy.

Our local one is all out.  I got that done, but that was over 24 hours ago.  Since then, she's lost the whole vial.  Yikes.  We've looked high and low.  [Followup:  pills found, atop under-desk files, October 10].

She's on the horn now, with another pharmacy, hoping to get a another refill.  I'm not going to take away her starring role on the phone.  I'm a blogger.  She's got her own iPhone account.

I'm likely to be sent out to refill the refill.  I can overhear the conversation.

... OK, back from that errand.  This time we'll keep a backup of ten pills or so.

I took the camera, and was glad of an opportunity to zap a few in a Petco, as well as in the Glisan, Fred Meyer.  The pharmacy was busy, yet friendly and already had Carol's order in the queue.  That's what gave me the time for a photo shoot.  Around Halloween, that's special.

The Playa

I'm lifting this term Playa from its Burning Man context.  That's an annual EPCOT-like experience wherein teams experiment with prototypes for tomorrow.

However, we don't see big engineering firms representing at Burning Man.  Maybe some of their people join a crew, but you won't see pavilions from Boeing, Siemens or Google.  That's a bit worrisome.

Sure, humans learned how to build geodesic spheres and domes in the 1900s, but did they ever attempt a really big one after Montreal, way back in 1967?  Was any bigger?

We expect the sea levels to rise, and even if they don't, we might need to build whole cities from scratch for other reasons.  What about that OMR design?

Old Man River was like a super-sized stadium in design, with or without the mile wide dome.  That means terraced, like rice paddies, around the interior.  The circular city could be built in sections, using giant A-shaped sections.

Were these ideas practical?  One needs to experiment, and scale models don't always tell the whole story.  Engineers need to try stuff, not just to get the physics right, but to learn the workflows and building techniques.

We're leaving all that to Burning Man apparently.  Or research into large scale structures might be happening in places I don't know about.  Does Google Earth block them out?

ML Again

I'm back to attending to Siraj, meaning I'm falling asleep, sometimes intentionally, while getting back into the namespace of Machine Learning, wherein I visit new-to-me nooks and crannies.

Siraj is one of my Youtube teachers, one of a cast of celebs that have come to frequent the privileged homes.  In recordings of live chat sessions, I see a lot of kids from Bangalore and elsewhere, chiming in.  They're learning about TPUs as a feature offered by the Google Mind.

This renewed focus on ML is apropos for other reasons.  The Philosophy of Mind debates go well with Indian food.  Dwaraka rocks.  We yakked about such marvels as The Turk in the Age of Napoleon.  AI was in some dimensions self booting and retains some of its carnival ambience.  Sophia and so on.

The idea of an AI Brothel in Texas came up, which I think distills the memes in a wicked brew that maybe Texans are able to handle.  Shades of Westworld.

Speaking of Westworld, as a test of Google's picture matching I slid the picture below from file manager to Google image search.  I'd snipped it from a Youtube of the opening credits. Google search recognized right away where it came from.

Carol (89) and Celeste (94) are both at the symphony, is the current hope.  Supporting evidence would be no evidence to the contrary.  I just dropped Carol off in the Nissan, just a block from the venue.  Celeste was arriving by rail.

Long before I worry about a Singularity, I'm going to be studying the anthropology of what people believe.

Siraj is suffering from no serious delusions about robots about to be real humans, yet already many humans have been branded as "bots".  The need for a term other than "subhuman" has been filled.  The "Russian Bot" T-shirt has been popular in some eCommerce circles.

Long before we say AI has closed the gap, we'll see ourselves in the mirror as highly advanced AI.  We're entitled to some vanity, as we admire ourselves as machines, cyborgs, not because anything has changed, but because we've closed a lot of gaps in the narrative.  We see ourselves as learning much the same way machines learn, by perpetually re-weighing what marbles we're given, by God's grace.

What's changed?  In part it's that our machine models now converge without becoming clones of one another, because of differing initial conditions and sometimes randomness in the algorithms themselves.  Two strong classifiers need not always classify the same way, and that matches our experience of intelligent humans disagreeing.  AI becomes more believable in proportion to its not always seeing eye to eye with itself.  Intelligence means nothing if not contentiousness.

Intermittent Service

I'm finding the Jupyter Notebook rendering service, much appreciated on Github, to be hit or miss.  I'll promote one of my repos, only to find a Sorry, Reload? situation.

Sometimes I might take it personally, given my state of mind.

Speaking of which, I just got through both seasons of Real Humans, a Swedish series (so that's the title in translation).  All this after Westworld (season one only).

So much exposure to the machine-human conundrum all at once should probably be factored in as a likely bias going forward a few posts at least. 

Talk about brainwashing, though in exactly what way is the unknown.  That's what comes out in the wash, as they say.

I'm paying attention to the CoC business rippling the pond in Linux World.  That may sound neither here nor there, but then lets remember Vulcan Spock in Star Trek and give "coldly logical" a place at the table.

The machine-human conundrum embraces the "cold rationality" we sometimes project on machine intelligence.  Empathy or "warmth" is what's lacking in mere "Hubots" (a word from the Swedish series).

What I'm saying is, I acknowledge Github gets on my nerves sometimes, as do other aspects of our Wild World Web.  In that sense (nerves), cell and silicon unite.  We've become that cyber-creature.  We're still subject to intermittent breakdown.

Graphene with Quadrays

Continuing my meditation on "user-friendly", I tried to pump more life into Quadrays by using them to ray-trace graphene-like imagery.

Some thinkers project a coming Age of Carbon, given all the nano stuff we've learned since the discovery of buckminsterfullerene.  Graphene, surprisingly, is a relative latecomer.  We already knew "pencil lead" was really graphite that rubbed off in layers.  An individual sheet:  that wasn't so much the focus.  Diamond was another allotrope.

Then Bf came along (C60) and a sudden interest in soccer ball imagery, on which I later capitalized using hash tag HP4E ("hexapents for everyone").  Nanotubes would maybe turn out to be good for something.  Separating them into isomers was a technological challenge.  Then came graphene.

However, from another angle, we've been in an Age of Carbon for quite some time now, in that we understand polymer chemistry, oil refining, all manner of things carbon.  As a life form, we're all about hydrocarbons.

I chauffeured again today, driving my passenger to Portland Nursery.  On the way, we rescued an abandoned coffee maker, a Cuisinart model I've owned in the past.  The Coffeemaker went out the morning Melody (visiting guest) tried to use it.  So far, everything is looking promising.  I'll try making some real coffee in a minute.

Added to inventory:  two fire extinguishers, dry retardant, still under regulation pressure.

Pruned:  my tree in the margin.  The office doubles as a Portland looking house.

Benefactor: the New Board Game

In this science fiction, every baby gets a million dollars at birth.  That's right, you're a millionaire out of the "box". But that must by funny money, right?  Some loser crypto?

The ideology is simple:  we're born helpless but with entitlements, to care from guardians at first.

Whether we're talking nuclear families or the UN Declaration of Human Rights is negotiable before game play.  Benefactor comes with a wide array of settable parameters (see: configuration file).  Accept the defaults to begin immediately, and then adjust with the wisdom of hindsight.

Regardless of what our rights are precisely, ensuring them takes funding, and giving
everyone the same million dollar account seems unarguably a good design.  One deals people in.

You can't expect a baby to hold down a full time job.

Provide the money up front and gradually build towards a right of passage wherein adult level access to Benefactor is conferred.

However, to have a game one needs a plot.  Many squander their million through lack of discipline, or encounter tragic misfortune through no fault of their own.

Without specific skills or a life plan, and with no other such secure source of income, some players, of necessity, turn to preying upon others, including by looking for flaws in the Benefactor scheme's overall security.

Could there be a way to get a second million?  Superstitions and rumors abound.   Players are not promised a world free of fake news, scams, hoaxes, pyramid schemes.

The corporate side of Benefactor is pretty huge, with vast enough inventories to make good on the claims of their sponsored parties, namely everyone, from birth.

Now imagine the computer game, based on the board game.

You'll want to do more homework regarding Benefactor.

The aforementioned ideology has roots in Egyptian metaphysics, especially in this "22nd Century" (ahead of its time) interpretation of Pharaoh Ikhnaton's religion: the Sun provides enough wattage to justify the million dollar per child fund.

Think of charging batteries.  Money measures a potential to pay for work.

You might think everyone would just kick back in this scenario. No one works, because hey, everyone is thinking "I'm one of the idle rich, I'll just sip martinis by the pool".  Nothing gets done.  Civilization breaks down.  Not only do the trains not run on time, they don't run at all.  What millionaire wants to play with trains?

A lot of them, as it turns out. Both simulations and real life experiment shows most people prefer to do meaningful work, committing their energy in ways that makes a difference, to others not just to themselves.

In fact, with Benefactor encouraging education and skills training, and with ubiquitous "authorized access only" obstacle courses, most players feel an urge to compete, achieve, excel.

Humans come with an innate athleticism that inspires them to set new records.

They play lots of "Glass Bead Games" and tackle real world challenges, such as space travel, for amusement.

In sum, many players still choose medical school while others train to become astronauts.

In general, many humans commit a lot of their initial million towards skills building and cognitive training.

Not all players want serious or heavy responsibilities, however, instead opting for more fun in the sun, at least in some chapters, especially as children.

Benefactor is non-judgemental.  The system was not put in place with the idea of "rewarding good behavior".  Other rewards systems run in parallel to Benefactor.  Benefactor is not the only game in town.

Advice to the Democrats

by anomalous

Fear & Loathing in Florida

I was in high school in Florida at the start of the 1970s.

I'm not surprised it's among the most Jim Crow of the fifty states.

People retire there to live out their racist utopia fantasies, no longer playing out in Michigan, paying top dollar for the privilege.

The state government does its best to oblige.

Among Friends

Carol wanted to be sure she got to Peace and Social Concerns, which started its meeting in the main room, same as for Meeting for Worship, at noon.

Amazingly enough, we made it by 10 AM and so were in time for the hour-long silent worship, sometimes anything but silent.  This time, however, we had only the one short message towards the end, a meditation on change and metaphors for what changes the least.

During social hour, I was befriended by a woman raised Catholic, and still very connected to the Grotto, a destination for visitors on the religious site loop, lots of Asians.  She's meticulous about extending her range and mobility, in the face of arthritis.  We agreed to meet at Laurelhurst Park after an interim.

My goal was to obtain a DVD copy of Eyes Wide Shut, by Kubrick.  I've recently seen a documentary about his life and film making process, which intersected other research. They had Clockwork Orange, which I saw a long time ago, but the former was only in Blu-Ray. I decided to get Westworld instead, the whole of season 1 for $5.  I've already seen a lot of it, but wondered about filling in some holes.

Upon returning home, on foot, having left the car at the meetinghouse, I checked on the remnants of a Facebook thread.  We'd been going at it about Alex Jones and whether it was a good idea for tech giants to do the bidding of political institutions which were themselves tasked with similar responsibilities.  Mark Zuckerberg had come under a lot of scrutiny during the Russiagate scandal.  Would Facebook have to arbitrate in every country where it found users?  That seems to be the direction.

"What if NATO pressured the Zucc to deplatform DPRK?" I queried.  "Should he pull the plug on Gulen just because he's ordered to do so by some tyrant?  I'd not want him to bow to such pressures that easily."  Paraphrasing from memory. I also plugged the new Gregory Brothers tune.

Anyway, the profile owner got nervous, apparently, and censored the whole thread, over a hundred comments from an assortment of political backgrounds, thereby making my point that adults would be seeking other venues besides Facebook.  We can't always keep it PG-13.  I left a few emoji behind and resolved to jot down a few notes in my blog.

After all this catching up on-line, and a shower, I was somewhat late back to Laurelhurst, but my new friend was still there, having met some new people, Asians I'm thinking, in the off-leash area.  We walked together back to her car. I got her business card, someone psychic.  That's Portland!

When I got back to the meetinghouse, the Peace and Social Concerns Meeting was still going on, in the tying off loose ends part.  Carol, mom, suggested some more action around the Ban Treaty (the shortened name), now in ratification phase.  About ten nation-states are on board, more expected.  Like Nike, they're trying to figure out the right side to be on, given history.

After the rise of meeting, when people were milling about and going downstairs, I buttonholed Barry, suggesting his campaign to lodge some specific 911 book in our library collection was too much of a short cut.  Chandler has put the most time into that concern, and has worked through the committee.  Barry comes somewhat infrequently and I don't think has that much insight into our reading patterns, or how we want to showcase them.  Some churches may get by without any library at all.

No Beer Diet

I probably have other blog entries with this exact same title, or at least theme, as I periodically swear off beer as a way of losing weight.  It usually works, but there's always that first time, when it doesn't. I need to give it some more weeks and months.

My lifestyle is too sedentary as my presence is not required in the hinterlands.  Sure, I write about Extreme Remote Livingry and all the gizmos this entails, but then I write about bizmos too.  The writer doesn't always get immediate entre into her or his subject matter, even when the genre is non-fiction, investment banking even.

Tonight I joined Wanderers for open discussion.  We discussed the Dominicans and the history of antisemitism in the Catholic Church, not that I'm any big authority.  I brought up the Gospel of Judas I'd been learning about, thanks to National Geographic.  I did grow up in Rome and work for Dominicans after Princeton, which is how the topic arose in the first place.  Then we turned to a discussion of the solar system, which lasted most the rest of my time there.

Were I to draw a histogram of what we talk about, boat engines would dwarf almost everything else, especially if more than one boat owner is present.  Astronomy is also a high bar.  We're not to be confused with Talking Liberally, another meetup I've posted about.  That was at Lucky Lab.  I've not been to that group in many years.  More recently, I've attended Thirsters, which is more likely to get into politics against a backdrop of political history.

We did talk about dynasties and which presidential last names had been repeated e.g. Adams, Roosevelt, Bush.  We almost had two Clintons.  That would have been a first:  a husband, then a wife.  I joked about a Chelsea-Ivanka co-queendom, wherein all Senators would be women, all Representatives men.  The possibilities seem endless once we've broken free of the Constitution. This conversation came after the main meeting had already concluded.  Not that we're plotting to suspend the Constitution. That part seems pretty well taken care of, starting well before 911.  Praise Allah for autopilot, right? Meaning I'm glad we know how to keep going through the motions, of keeping America great.

The No Beer Diet does not entail giving up alcohol, just the habit of swilling two or even three pints on more days than I don't, sampling new IPAs or sticking with old favorites.  The other drinks I imbibe instead don't add up to the same calories, by a long shot, is the theory.  So far, that theory has proved out in practice.

During the main meeting, when I was talking about teaching high school for the Dominicans, I brought up Father Divine, the short black shaman deity figure who organized multi-racial hotel living centered around banquets.  He always seemed to walk his talk.  By the time I showed up, interested in the breakfast menu, Father had moved on, but I believe Mother Divine was still active, as she was quite a bit younger.  The Fairmont Hotel was kitty corner to St. Dom's, and I'd go there with other faculty for breakfast sometimes.

Summer Rollercoaster

As we sail through August, mostly hot, today raining at last, I'm mindful of the ups and downs.  Time on the farm with Brenda and company was definitely up.  She's building the workshop.  We discussed Julian's success at getting his sculptures moved around, keeping the studio ready for more.  What a cornucopia.  Linus Pauling House was a first beneficiary, with Alpha Helix.

I've blogged about Brenda's farm before.  We took the picturesque route on the way out, towards Damascus, coming back through Boring on Hwy 26.

Today was Hawthorne Street Fair.  I always get steamed when Saturday Market vendors think they can impose "photos by request" values on a public street and filed a complaint about the one booth with such signage.  No, it's not one of the rules.  Steamed, but not doing much about it, and heading back to my charging cell phone, knowing Carol would be fine.

However, Carol was not fine.  She came back knowing someone had stolen her money, credit cards and cell phone.  What a disaster.  I canceled the lunch with Glenn and started dialing, thinking I would kill the cell phone and credit card first.  Just as I was making my choice to suspend with or without billing, I saw a red sack and knew intuitively she had prepacked these items with the intent to stow, but hadn't stowed, i.e. she'd left the house without 'em.

I reupped for the lunch with Glenn.  We also watched a National Geographic documentary on the Gospel of Judas, really well done, with professional reenactments, like the genre demands.

Apparently though, the phone robot got the message I wanted to suspend, so now it's up to me to restore service.  I'm in the middle of that process.

I'm active on Facebook these days, and on Medium.  I have a toehold in some alternative tech.