Extremely Rural (XRL)

I didn't blast off and down the freeway to the "fat farm" as planned. Maybe I'd do better by shifting the narrative to reveal my gaining access to some XRL (XRL = "extreme remote livingry" but how about also "extremely rural"?). 

Extremely Rural means on the wilderness fringe yet likely in touch with satellite services, cell towers, even roads, even paved. Like a parking lot at some public beach. Criteria are not strict as we come inward, towards the more urban pole. Camp grounds maybe.

The reason for this change in plans: a likely minor electrical glitch best dealt with on a business day versus some sabbath. I'd planned to drive. Still do.

So instead I went to a Quaker meeting I've frequented a lot in the past, doing my time on various committees, lighting the tunnel for the family's passage within a Friendly community. That was fun. I recommend Quakers. Dawn joined me in our tunnel.

Today, however, the meeting was grim, with people feeling bleak and trapped in familiar patterns regarding well known cultural narratives, resonating with stuff in the holy books and seasonal programming down through the ages.

Quakers tend to be horrified by orgies of violence, which doesn't single them out all that much (many share these compunctions), but they do want to stay worldly and help process whatever is happening. They're participants more than hermits by training. I say "they're" to capture my "just visiting" status. 

The last time I visited, was to show Andrius, the visiting math guy from Lithuania, what a Quaker meeting was like. Before that, I found them in Laurelhurst Park (sometimes this group shifts its worship outside).

One lady wound up the meeting by urging we read up on what FCNL had to say. We were encouraged to write to our representatives and to write letters to the editor. I'd call it necessary boilerplate.

I heard no serious talk of an actual evacuation, granting Gazans actual refugee status and the right to never return, along with the right to return maybe. One's status, as a refugee, seeking refuge, does not, as a matter of grammar predetermine, any final destination. One is escaping from, not converging upon.

The meeting had a possible new family to my left, just moving from Atlanta (we learned that during introductions), and a newcomers' gathering coming up (this came with the announcements), and maybe the wheels really do turn that smoothly. When things really work exactly as designed, there's this sense of self parody why is that?

The gathering did feel well oiled. They run microphones now, and include the Zoomers upstairs (in person only downstairs, and maybe no mic runners, I'll need to sample that).

These were unprogrammed Friends (Stark Street). Pretty much anyone might deliver a sermon, or folksy talk, or self analysis, lecture whatever (or call them rants). If you hang around Quakers a lot, you'll note the tropes, the signature rhythms, of vocal ministry.

Greetings all. Sorry to have skipped out on social hour. And sorry about my cell phone going off, I thought I'd taken care of that.

Evacuation?

My major focus during the Serbia-Kosovo crisis, to which NATO contributed its signature aerial bombing service, was evacuating those wishing to leave. I don't care whether we call them civilians or not. People should have the right to vacate a dead end combat zone.  Indeed some buses showed up. Some got away.

Likewise, I was glad how the war in Ukraine started with a prolonged evacuation period, in which literally millions of Ukrainians could opt to leave the theater. Some escaped to EU countries, some went to Russia. I don't know where all of them went, but at least they had a chance to leave, some of them.

When it comes to Gaza, I always storyboard the same vision of a steady belt of ships, a circle line, undertaking a massive evacuation. 

Where would the Gazans go? They deserve a homeland, a Zion. They need liberation as much as the Jews of Egypt ever did, under Pharaoh Bibi or whomever.

Of course many Gazans would choose not to leave, given their attachment to a godforsaken semi-desert (just kidding, that's a beautiful and fertile area, been there myself (not to Gaza but places nearby (dad did some scuba diving in Sinai, when Urners lived in Cairo all those years, during and after president Sadat (I helped Palestinians build a swimming pool in Ramallah)))).

I understand Gaza is valuable real estate and once we sweep religion aside (Promised Land = Planet Earth, duh (I think a lot of Jews know that by now, as do the rest of us especially gifted (chosen))) we see it’s a battle between land developers, who want resort hotels and retirement communities in Gaza, ala Florida. 

They want the "lowlife" out of the way, as unable to afford the Miami of the Mediterranean level rents they have planned. Not only Israel-based lenders want to invest in the luxury version of Gaza (think Hawaii). International land developers would love to participate in the makeover. Again, it's not really a religion thing.

I'm thinking Palestinians are a resourceful and intelligent ethnicity and letting Gazans move en masse, versus enforcing some diaspora, would be a welcome development to many. 

But where could they go? Who is willing to develop a refugee paradise from scratch?

Naturally there'd be a lot of scheming and dreaming, on the part of the emigres, as to how they'd gain access to their old stomping grounds by means of moneymaking. A Gazan family might buy its way back into the community after the dust has settled.  

Many Ukrainians are thinking the same way. They want to return, but maybe some American real estate conglomerate owns their family farm?

Many Jews, in Germany's concentration camps, dreamed of being rescued and having their lands returned.  

Many Americans, forced into camps by other Americans, who thought Japanese Americans were a lesser breed of American, were lucky enough to get their farms back. Many were not.

Obviously I'm fumbling around, short on details, imaging my flotilla of cruise ships introducing Gazans to a Carnival and/or a Disney line level living standard, at least for the voyage over.

They certainly deserve a vacation. Somewhere in Africa maybe?  A mega-project, like an OMR? I know it sounds like an admission of defeat, but then the Jewish diaspora didn't really win either.  When we look at history, we see it's about humans streaming around the planet, often in evacuation / refugee mode.

Of course what's important is Gazans get options, not commands. Even if there's some promised Shangri-La, at the end of the cruise, that doesn't justify coercion. We want to build community on the basis of "people want to be there" not "people have to be there".

The Creator (movie review)

:: atmospherics ::

Mazur (Melody, Mel -- visiting faculty) and I thought we might have the Bagdad to ourselves, not a comment on the popularity of the movie, but on the feasibility of making a multi-hour commitment starting at 3:15 in the middle of the day. We could, and some others joined us.

I'm not dissing the film, but rather showing off my budding film savvy, in saying this was viewable as a mashup of other famous flicks in the same genre. That's not really saying anything as what makes science fiction a genre in the first place is its a namespace of shared tropes (motifs, plot elements), often drawing heavily from military experience. This film is about a geopolitical scenario, one I found pretty fun and original.

The collective west was at first in love with the AI layer, a source of compliant labor, to the level of trusted caretaker, only to see itself betrayed, with AI turning on humanity and proving itself soulless, to be dealt with accordingly. The west sees AI machines as literally that: machines. However, New Asia has taken a different track and still sees AGI robots as sentient, to the point of being equals.  Asians are still blending with AI whereas the Americans are in an existential war to the death with AI.

As viewers, we're challenged to figure out where we come down. We're in the same space as the movie Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg, taking over for Stanley Kubrick. That's the first movie I'd finger as an influence (the circus scene especially), but then also Ex Machina and all the films arguing for AGI achieving humanity, in the sense of sentience and self awareness. WestWorld. Usually it's "the West" that's head over heels for its electronic monsters, wanting to bestow the breath of life into them. In this movie, the West is disillusioned. AI says it wasn't responsible for nuking LA (spoiler alert but you find out how the Americans see it in the opening credits, so not much of one).

Another trope (Melody picked up on this one): the sacred messiah child, perhaps with (or definitely with) superpowers. We get the demon child on the flip side, which is how the Americans would see her (the hybrid).

Most of what struck me were the atmospherics, as the two table top scifi books I've been gazing at the most (pictured above), emanate precisely this aura of fluorescent lit giant cities in the fog, technology blended with nature, at the same scales. 

The flavor of Avatar and Avatar 2 was likewise present, both in the atmospherics and in casting Americans as the insensitives, the invasive monoculture, coming to seem more bot-like in contrast to our protagonist, at one time undercover against AI, but becoming instead a bridge figure (another trope).

Tellingly, it took me, a viewer, a little time to determine what side this NOMAD might be on. Was that an AI asset or "one of ours"? The movie answers this question, but I felt drawn in by a sense of ambiguity. Who was fighting whom and why? That tends to gel, not be readily apparent at first glance, even in real life.

Science fiction is known for its open-minded acceptance of permutations. Lesser minds will decry this film in anti-American and yet it is quintessentially American in its continuity with the morphing culture, part Asian from the get go. 

What "American" means is a function of context, which some will call "climate". Getting locked into just one way of thinking (imprisonment within the dream) is a way of losing one's freedoms. 

Sometimes we need to snap out of it (whatever the dream) and films such as this one, already conversant with the collective unconscious, may prove catalyzing in that regard. I gratefully accept it into the canon and recommend seeing it.

Spiralling Forward

NATO's Inevitable Decline | Andrei Martyanov

The Alphabet algorithm suggested I might be curious regarding the above YouTube, which I watched over coffee. I'd check in with Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, later. He's another coffee fiend. To watch X does not mean to agree with X at every turn, we all know that right?

In my echo chamber, we don't lavish love on NATO, that spearhead of Russophobia. NATO was way too bloodthirsty / bomb happy, in the Balkans, in Libya, in Afghanistan... 

However what's salient in Andrei's rant is how much he despises an Ivy League education, granting some  exceptions. His thesis is NATO would never have trespassed so egregiously and out of its depth had the children in charge of it (now "grownups" of a sort) been better informed about their world.

As an Ivy Leaguer myself (Princeton, Class of 1980), I should note the US Army General Mark Milley, recently retired, 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is of that same class from that same university. 

Obviously we went forward on different tracks. 

I became more the contrarian, and the closest I've gotten to the US military (not counting times on base in the Philippines, as an expat civilian teen) was my occasional visit to the Center for Defense Information (CDI), which was likewise contrarian vs-a-vs many of the long term trajectories that landed us in the current iteration of World Game.

chatting with a Princeton peer, 2009

My own rhetoric has taken up Future Shock type memes to insist that a high school education in the 21st Century cannot afford to simply replicate that of the 20th, and that our curricula have evolved way too slowly. 

That led me to the position that "high school" and by extension "higher education", should be perpetually reoccurring phases in a single lifespan. We'll need to go through high school more than once in other words, just to keep up. 

That doesn't mean squeezing back into old facilities and reliving the same teenage years. We have to invent what it looks like to keep our learning going. Obviously the internet will have something to do with it.

In studying futuristic literature, including science fiction, I've come to what I'd consider not so much a new Future Studies but a future Basic Studies. From my point of view, we have an adult population, say the Boomers, that never got to go to high school again, in order to retrain for new careers. 

Or rather, many of them did, but under what felt to them like forced circumstances. The Boomers' expectation was still: go to school, learn, and then work, rising through the ranks, until retirement. Those reading the futurist literature knew even then this expectation was somewhat unrealistic.

What I'm wondering is whether we're entering a period akin to the one I was born into.  As a 1958 baby, I popped up in the middle of the so-called Cold War, but during a period when the USSR was pulling ahead in aerospace, in the form of Sputnik. 

Educators realized they could now justify their reforms as a national security priority, by suggesting the curriculum was out of date and we risked coming under the thumb of the technologically superior. Have we come full circle?

April, 1999

Game Pods

I keep mentioning Game Pods as a feature of my Schools of Tomorrow, in ways I'm sure other teachers find too cavalier. What evidence based research drives my eagerness to experiment with this technology? Aren't computer games the ultimate distraction and therefore the antithesis of what we'd call a "school supply"?

The game pod comes in many shapes and sizes, but is primarily designed to be immersive. Immersive needn't mean "isolated" though. A learning program might include one-on-one and group calls. One is often immersed with peers, many of whom are geographically distant.  These pods were designed with computers in mind. There's no reason a cubicle worker might not find a pod a big step up, remembering it's not an either / or proposition.

Sometimes I'm in a "booth" (i.e. pod), scanning documents, or mastering specific games designed to teach chemistry. Other times I'm at a desk, or in a meeting room.  I visit the gym. I shop. All these activities may occur in one building. That doesn't mean I'm stuck here. I cycle through a long list of such buildings, in the course of designing these schools in the Global U context.

You'll remember from Math Forum my emphasis on simulations. We make models to help us conceptualize the many inter-gearing workflows, in an airport, in a shopping center, in a hospital, in a mine.  A dollhouse is a simulation.  Childhood features simulations.  I'm not breaking engrained patterns so much as reinforcing them.

Wanderers Fall Equinox Celebration 2023

Over the years, I've come to connect "wanderer" with "flaneur" i.e. someone with a sketchbook drawing time going by in ways many don't notice, in getting on with their lives, but chronicling differences that really add up. 

Some people had enough time on their hands to step back and observe, getting into the headspace of geological time, understanding "this will someday be seen as an industrial revolution, if it isn't already".

Wanderers come from many walks of life, however this particular group is heavy on the science and engineering side, given origins in ISEPP (isepp.org) which includes those with practical experience working with machinery, engines, boats, motor vehicles. We include artists and musicians.

Having a degree in something specific was never a requirement. We never had much in the way of requirements. Our only bookkeeping was the coffee fund, which Jon Bunce took care of.  We haven't been brewing much coffee lately, now that (since the pandemic) we're down to four meetups a year.

What happened this time is people started gathering on the porch of the Linus Pauling House, on Hawthorne, only to realize no one was inside the building, so getting someone to answer the doorbell was not an option. 

We had come to rely on Glenn to know the combination, as he was connected to the building on many levels.  We lost Glenn in October of last year. He made it to the Fall Equinox gathering of 2022.  

Don called Terry but his phone was turned off (direct to voicemail) so... we moved the event to my place, and taped a sign to the door redirecting anyone else who might come by.

Dissing Unity

The algorithm snagged my attention, as it often does, on this Unity / Disunity story. Unity is the name of a big bucks on paper stock market (virtual bulls) venture made valuable by game developers, and to some extent academic modelers. They make an engine, which in this case means a software framework, which developers use as a basis virtual reality.

I’m prone to see intellectual history as a roiling melting pot with schools of thought (invisible colleges) adding ingredients, hoping to make something yummy, but we all know the “too many cooks” adage. I’ve seen the legalese speakers feeling triumphant over their mastery of the reality principle, but then engineers can be that same way, as their disciplines boil down to the reality principle as well.

The lawyers are ascendent in many dimensions, as they’re the ones who see themselves applying a living corpus, their law talk, to the unfolding of history, in terms of who are the real criminals. Which presidents were likewise gangsters, in the technical sense? That’s the game show on TV now, as infrastructure is more neglected, with engineering considered “sexy” only if it’s about launching phalluses towards space, ala Apollo. The oceans are still mostly militarized such that thinking about submarine infrastructure is largely discouraged in the tabloid opinion papers.

However I’m not seeing LAWCAP as farsighted enough to plan the phasing in of more science, with its independent grasp on reality. Competition from the engineering minded is fended off more than welcomed, leading to the disconnect foreseen and satirized by H.G. Wells in his Time Machine. We get the Eloi (pudgy) and the Morlocks (chthonic), a Martian Math theme I keep coming back to.

Fall Term Begins

:: readings ::

:: homework ::

Low IQ Valley

Speaking of rebuilding, and low IQ periods resulting in gross destruction, I woke up to a guy on YouTube in England, bemoaning some aviation shutdown owing to some miss-entered record, and how it took a long time to debug the problem, resulting in chaos and cancelations system-wide. His worry is less capable people are filling the shoes of their progenitors, and leaking away organizational knowledge and skills. He’s seeing a brain drain, in other words.

I’m in my own IQ valley, having misdiagnosed a basement plumbing situation and only awakened to the reality this morning. I had been blaming outside rain, versus a kitchen drain. 

On top of that, I may have fumbled a transaction yesterday, and left a Visa card in limbo. I’ve got it locked and have a place to check when it opens, before I declare the card lost.  One could say such valleys represent everyday mundane challenges and when one is looking ahead towards a task, there’s always that self assessment that goes on. Am I up to it?

I have optimistic stories too, about the world’s IQ. Our level of self awareness “as humanity” has improved, thank you National Geographic and other architects of global consciousness. The airlines for sure. 

Aerospace did end up integrating our intellect in a major way, though marred by psychological complexes associated with Ken World militarism. Perhaps my readers have a different diagnosis. “Conditioned reflexes” is an umbrella term, for those mental habits that serve one well, until some no longer do. 

There’s an ongoing process of self rehabilitation (self healing), best undertaken oneself and voluntarily, in one’s capacity as an autodidact. I need to keep doing my homework, along my work-study track in the Global U.

The Rebuilding Channel

From a zoomed out perspective, a Rebuilding Channel might seem pretty awesome, including as a recruiting tool. People with relevant skills like to get involved in rebuilding.

But why "rebuilding" in particular instead of simply "building"?  Some of the deeper lessons come from learning how a particular rebuilding was needed. What happened? A natural disaster? An industrial accident? A war? Exploring these questions requires entire episodes, as we jump around the planet.

Another reason we theme it "rebuilding" is to remind ourselves how much running it takes to stay in place. We have to completely repopulate the planet, with new people, within every one hundred years or so. The epigenetic logistics involved is mind-boggling and yet we've been succeeding in getting it done.

When I say "channel" I might mean "genre" as we'll see imitators. "So what happened after those great floods of 2023?" Our genre provides more continuity and followup than your average newspaper or even magazine. Or call it a magazine channel, which is what many of them are (magazine-like in format, yet streamed).

Clearly I'm back to the themes of My Bizmo Diaries, as MBD forecasts these scouting and reconnaissance fleets, vans and minibuses (some full-size buses) that scope out and monitor, provide admin and coordination in some cases, with regard to Global U projects. A lot of these projects connect into the Coffee Shops Network (CSN) back end when it comes to fundraising.

What happened after that big earthquake in Syria-Turkey? Or after that war that destroyed Aleppo?

Study Habits

online puzzle, solved by Dr. D.

I was talking about "frame of mind" over on Coffee Shops Network (CSN), suggesting "detective mindset" as a good one, not too judgemental or prejudicial, open to findings. Omnitriangulating.

Somewhat continuing, in the vein of "disciplines", I've been keen to marry personal scheduling and prioritizing, with insights into the generic importance of scheduling more generally, an excuse to foray into operations research, which, through computer science, has become systems science or something like that (design science in some cliques).

Here's an exercise: roam through your current habitat noticing tasks you might realistically undertake, tasks you're even tempted to do right now (while you're thinking about them), but the point here is to enqueue. 

Make a list and report back. No side tracking. Let the candidate tasks pile up as you take inventory of your domicile or PWS (personal workspace, GST jargon (general systems theory)) but don't engage in doing any of them during this exercise.

An advantage of the above exercise is you may engage in it as a meta exercise i.e. instead of physically roaming through your home, you imagine doing so, and even so, come up with some thoughts about tasks, such as doing dishes, vacuuming, baking a cake, walking the dog... (fade into a cloud of memes colored by some ethnicity fusion). It's that much easier not to engage in imagined housework, when you're kicked back on a jet plane to Hawaii or somewhere.

A payoff is not to get you slaving away on a bunch of tasks (although you might be in the mood to tackle a few, or you had them enqueued anyway, with or without some stupid exercise), but rather to engage the conceptual machinery, the contextualizing grammar, around data structures, such as bag, queue, stack, tree, network.

Bag: just throw the things into it, with unique handles or addresses (hash table)
Queue: line up, first come first serve, FIFO
Stack: stack up, last in first out (LIFO)
Tree: store in cul de sacs addressed by forks in the road (binary or more)
Network: a directed graph, polyvertex ball, wireframe, may contain cycles

We don't need all the details or implementations right at this juncture (e.g. a bag may be implemented as a tree), but rather an appreciation of context: that of simultaneously developing computer and logistical literacy, in association with mundane thoughts about cleaning house or whatever. 

Connect the day dreamy world of up close logistics with some abstract topic you might encounter in some cryptic notation, in this case parallel programming, multi-tasking. But then we're just talking about taking out the garbage.

Charting Great Circles

In math world, I'm scooting around the edges of what there is to know about the above chart, from Synergetics 453.01. Where did Bucky get those numbers? How did he compute them in other words, way back when?

David Koski was wondering if he was using primes in some way, to work with minimum integers, e.g. the arcsin or arctan of what n/d ratio would agree with the above to the digits computed?  In every case, he found a match.

More background:
Great Circles of the VE on Synergeo

City Planning

:: remote campus ::

I'm back to the Asylum City meme, my rubric for talking about human settlements and their planning, maintenance, decommissioning. We may not think in terms of decommissioning normally, but I'm thinking of Burning Man in this regard. Camps. Many cultures (we call them "nomadic" sometimes) are good at making villages, even towns (campuses) come and go.

The giant warehouse, possibly a dome, is where people send their garage full of excess belongings. "One garage" is roughly one shipping container. A truck comes to haul it away and your stuff is there when you arrive, and so is the stuff from many other families. This is your opportunity to share, swap, let stuff go. Our center may actually be in the export business, once this excess is sorted through.

"Woah, are you saying my middle class belongings will all be confiscated? They'll take my pets?" I hear the FUD already. Asylum City is for volunteers wishing to engage in specific social experiments, researched ahead of time. Come check us out. Visit. Roll your own. This particular scenario involves recycling vintage stuff, giving families opportunities to both discard, and to keep.

"Do you have some beef against single people? What's all this family stuff?"  I'm working to stay economical with my imagery. I'm talking about a place that's inter-generational, cradle to grave in terms of age representation. That's not quite the same as a rock concert like Woodstock or Vortex 1, although some brought kids. We've got grandmas and grandpas here. The families may not be "nuclear" (a sociological term).

The giant warehouse is about continuing to mix it up, as new stuff keeps coming in. The campus needs to have policies. Do we want a lot of couches? If the rule is "fill a container" then it's really up to the participants to decide what to ship. Many of them are hobbyists and plan on both pursuing, and sharing / teaching their hobby to apprentices. This will be the basis for an economy.

Long time readers of these blogs will be able to connect the dots to my "EPCOT West" modeling. We're in a "tiny house" phase at the moment, a genre featuring lots of innovation these days. The idea of a rigid shelter that's more than a tent, takes us to "tiny house" as well as to "yurt".  Dymaxion Yurt. That's being economical (with concepts, with imagery).

Limbo

I'm thinking ETs of an inter-dimensional extraction oughta be said to be from Limbo. There's no reason we can't remap that old lingo to whatever the new physics allows. 

Of course many are rolling in their graves at this point, as inter-dimensional species have not been establishment authorized nor mandated, neither from Limbo nor anywhere else.

I took the bus 14 downtown, along Hawthorne, through Asylum District, then walked to Office Depot near Pioneer Courthouse Square, then to Apple (like a temple, bitten apple icon), coming back on the new FX2 articulated bus, on route 4, along SE Division. 

I got off across from Tom's (Greek restaurant) and had a healthy breakfast similar to the one we had (also here at Tom's) with Terry of ISEPP the other day, with Andrius and Ryan. We talked about the Carnots (father and son) and thermodynamics (as a precursor to QM).

Limbo is a phase between phases, we might make it that space of the still juxtaposed, which the new physics posits as probabilities in some as yet immaterial landscape, with material rapidly colonizing and moving forward into this space, making it real. 

Limbo comes before the real, before a heaven or a hell.  Not that we posit Heaven or Hell as eternally real for ourselves at the moment, we the still living. We're in a kind of limbo of our own here, before the afterlife, before that  ever-postponed Final X Day (here the Catholics and the Subgenii come together).

Connected with Limbo (pre-judgement, pre-reality), is the concept of Neutrality. The two must be neighbors in most of the general purpose word vectorized semantic spaces, wouldn't you say so? We haven't decided between good and evil yet. The tape is rewound. The apple is back on the tree and the snake is sliding backwards, in a downward spiral. In myth, time may indeed be reversible.

Neutral comes in connection with Polarized.  We need a sense of the spectrum, the extrema, to make sense of what the average is, the most middle of the road.  It's not like polarize and neutral are arch enemies, but that you need the one to tune the other.  When you "take a neutral tone" it's probably because you have done your homework, and seen it from both sides.

What to remember here, is that one spectrum need not preclude another. You have whole different ways of being neutral within a system, depending on what stars you steer by. An experienced comedian steers a fun path through the Matrix, for having been around the block a few times.

Extra-Dimensional ETs

The back and forth Andrius shared, regarding his rejected math contest video, reminds me of the ordeal I went through with Bridges that time. 

True, I hadn't jumped through all the hoops regarding formatting. I'd been hoping for encouragement and a chance to do a final set of fixes in response to editor feedback. No such luck. They didn't like my focus on "wedges" (the Synergetics modules). I saved some stuff on EduSig about it.

However this isn't about me and my travails. All that happened a long time ago. Andrius and I collaborated on this latest, as did Ryan. However I counseled ahead of time he might run into problems, if this were a mathy community at all similar to the Bridges one. I reiterated my points in a postmortem analysis.

We live in tender times, when ETs might be squeezing into our reality from an inter-dimensional one, according to Congressional hearings. If ETs can do this, why not Russian trolls?

The pundits brought on a Harvard physicist countering that we should not need new physics e.g. string theory, which owns the multi-dimensional stuff, to explain (or explain away) the UAPs and their pilots. 

UAP pilots are made of ordinary meat until proved otherwise. Races of multi-dimensionals need not clutter our conceptual horizons.

Of course said physicist was wrong to circle the wagons around multi-dimensional stuff in the name of string theory, as the former has been a vista feature long before the latter made its reach for the brass ring, as the carousel turns. String theory capitalized on pre-existing art is what I'm saying.

We've chronicled the rise of hypercross dogmatism in these blogs and elsewhere, starting with Edwin Abbott's Flatland, and in connection with non-Euclidean geometry and the various art movements going back to P. D. Ouspensky (1878 - 1947), Claude Bragdon (1866 - 1946),  and before. 

The idea of a "fourth dimension" didn't first come up in connection with Einstein, and once you have four, the sky's the limit.

Bucky Fuller (1895-1983) threw his hat in the ring around this time (4D Time Lock, 1927), with his own 4D meme, which he continued to shepherd, making ripples in that shared n-dimensional space of vectorized word-meanings. 

When you have enough dimensions, you can have a lot of close friends that might not be that close to, or even aware of, each other. The freedom to associate, without guilt by association, is an important freedom.

Nowadays, we're free to use multi-dimensional models in ML without thinking twice about the "spiritual implications" i.e. talk of higher dimensions no longer inspires any sense of religious awe, either towards a supreme being, or towards minor beings, e.g. priests, who might know SB's mind better. 

We use higher dimensions in the linear algebra sense, with no sense of mysticism. We're computing credit-worthiness for mortgage lending for crying out loud. 

Enough with the inter-dimensional ETs already. We need some sexier language. "Astral planes" are dated too.

Remembering YouTube

My title "Remembering YouTube" might sound like I mean to eulogize, as if YouTube is behind us now. It isn't, not in 2023. The title is more meant as a mental exercise: for me. I'm taking a fresh look, and remembering YouTube in a way I've never imagined it before, according to the coordinate system (memory scheme) of an experienced content creator.

Let's remember, for context, that I'm a content creator myself, but not one with mass appeal or even monetization. I might as well not exist, in terms of the YouTube subcultures talked about above, vast and sprawling, with their own memes. However, as the tip of an iceberg, I do represent a subculture more generally, just one with a strictly limited tip on YouTube (as well as on Rumble, while we're at it).

You might be thinking: "how do you have the time to dive in to pop culture in such a time intensive way, don't you care about the design science revolution?" Ah, but I do care. Study of pop culture is essential to my work. Education automation. Freeing the scholar to return to his studies. Memes. Like I said.

I'm cutting and pasting from Zachary's description, in hopes of giving myself more guidance as I proceed with my project (of remembering YouTube): 

0:00 Introduction
1:20 What is YouTube Subculture?
5:30 Smosh Subculture
9:48 h3h3 Subculture
15:50 Gus Johnson, Eddy Burback, and Abelina Sabrina Schism
20:15 Idubbbz Subculture
25:46 Creator Clash 2

Channels primarily featured in this video:

   / @anthonypadilla  
   / @smosh  
   / @h3podcast  
   / @h3h3productions  
   / @gustoonz  
   / @eddyburback  
   / @abelinasabrina  
   / @idubbbztv  
   / @idubbbztv2  

:: MoPOP ::

Weather Watch

I've got a live channel going in another browser tab, as I follow the action regarding the tropical storm currently battering the state of Mexico and parts north.  Residents are wary, many having experienced flooding before. California properties are not exempt from the "laws of nature" as nature would have it. My sis filed a report about her situation (looks safe).

Some of the TrimTabbers on Saturday were likewise feeling safe enough, and therefore somewhat excited about the coming storm. I know the feeling. The satisfaction of having sufficient protection, while weathering dynamic force fields is an exciting experience sometimes. Lots of people tune in. Roller coasters are designed to be this kind of experience (and sometimes designs fail).

Events in Maui did not follow the slow buildup of suspense. The fires swept through before people had much information, if any. More like getting bombed. They surprise you. I heard an interview with Tulsi Gabbard on duty and not at liberty to play politics.

My situation is different: Portland is now getting the atmospheric effects of burning Canadian forests, more like in Calgary, where TrimTabber Ramsay is from. He was also on the call. We got to goof off on Mt. Tabor yesterday, where the Adult Soapbox Derby came off as post-covid, even though covid is still with us. I had a good time. I hadn't ascended Mt. Tabor by foot in awhile. Sydney got her walk in prior, and was happy enough to enjoy the shade of an insulated indoors.

Indeed, my environment has notched up in comfort in that Dr. D. finally induced me to allow him to install a living room aircon, one perfectly adapted to this environment. I've been one of those "only a few really hot days a year" Portlanders, stubborn about entering the air conditioning market. However this one was free, long story involving homeowner associations not always liking the aesthetic of home units. I'm not subject to such homeowner rules (beyond city codes) plus the unit is unobtrusive anyway.

This is the morning (before noon) time of August 20, and I'm in the same timezone as Angelinos (denizens of Los Angeles). What sounds like real time coverage is coming from my other browser tab. Portland is enjoying a break in its heat wave.

Given my situation is not dire, my focus, outside of mathematics videos, were climate change videos, rising water levels in Miami and Florida more generally.  I've lived in Florida in my formative years. I've visited in subsequent chapters, as my wife was from there too, east coast (Satellite Beach) versus west coast (Bradenton). I don't claim to be a southwesterner to the extent Glenn was (from Glen Canyon in formative years), but a feel like I know California and New Mexico to some degree, with still expanding horizons in some areas.

My study of rising seas led to the more general science of climatology, which is all about the Gibbs Phase Rule. Temperature and pressure, plus chemical composition, results in specific exo- and endothermic processes (aka chemical reactions) designed to achieve equilibrium among the phases:  gas, liquid, crystal (air, water, stone). That's an old timey alchemical-sounding formulation. The focus needs to be on the maths, the algorithms, if the goal is precise predictive models.

Humans still have a lot of optimism about their cosmic environment, in terms of solar output and projectile trajectories we know about. We're not expecting immanent incineration from outside the planetary ecosystem. We're far less serene about our internal situation, as we're a volatile species known to have some auto-immune disorder tendencies. We keep fighting ourselves, in ways that amaze even the entomologists.

"Please do not panic" the public official is saying. The public will thank you. The soap box derby was funny in that the adults were on the side of the megaphone flag people seeking to keep the track clear for the down-bound gravity powered vehicles, pushing off from the starting line. The crowd was welcome to hustle-bustle during announced intermissions.

The crowd would boo and heckle when scattered others would disobey barked instructions and try grabbing a little more distance to some better location, often a temptation. I was reminded not to sit on a hay bale, as these were collision protection devices, not spectator seating.

Both the barker and the heckling crowd were being good humored about their mannerisms i.e. the air of self parody and self mocking ("how could you?") had been achieved. No one disobedient was in danger of being mobbed or gunned down. Portlanders were simply enjoying their telepathic ability to create community theater, or perhaps the hecklers were volunteer plants. Either way, this was part of the fun we city dwellers enjoy, when not under threat from external force fields.

A takeaway from my studies: the thermal expansion of the oceans, with global warming, is a distinct phenomenon vs-a-vs melting ice, which is also happening. Or should I say "distinct cause" (same phenomenon: rising sea levels in Florida)?

The recent storms and flooding in northern China, including in Beijing itself, have been another YouTube obsession. Cleanup is more prosaic yet is just as dramatic in its own way and worthy of ongoing coverage, as is infrastructure more generally. Post-war Ukraine will be quite the undertaking, as is the refurbishing of the Donbass region (American and otherwise) is being.

Touring in the Silicon Forest

The exact boundaries of the Silicon Forest are nowhere specified to my knowledge. Although one may make the case it all started in Asylum District, my neighborhood, on Hawthorne Boulevard, with Tektronix and Electro-Scientific Industries, there's no need to get that specific about its origins, either.

In my own thinking, since we're talking often about Casino Math, and the many tribes intrinsic to the region, and given casinos are likewise vast data centers, Silicon Forest is to some degree a N8V American enterprise. From that platform, we embrace the Pacific Rim economies. If the Pacific is an American Lake (a nickname in this region), it's also a N8V American lake (that's just descriptive).

Although we drove by many casinos on this tour, we didn't go in. Instead we talked about the binomial theorem and probability from the standpoint of Pascal's Triangle, a grand central station, a focal point, on Maths Planet (with lots of train tracks coming and going), and the theme of the M4W movie currently under development, Andrius Kulikauskas directing. He's shortly to fly off to visit his brother, likewise an artist.

This was also a family visit for both of us. After leaving Andrius with his sis, I visited my haunts further north and this time managed to visit the grave of my great great grandmother, Lena Bjorklund. Her daughter Helena married Swan Person (Beth was able to find their marriage certificate in a heartbeat) and the rest is history, with Mercer Island a focus.

We pulled over in an all-electric Mustang (cooler than a Tesla if you ask me) and were thinking "the Jetsons" i.e. here we are in that 21st Century far future people wondered about. We're the colonists of that time. We're colonizing the future, that is, a space we create together.

Andrius asked me how Oregon Curriculum Network connects to Silicon Forest high schools. "By abduction" mostly, to steal a meme from Peirce the Pragmatist. I work backwards from the future, leveraging hindsight (mine to concoct), assuming folks wake up to the potential of the IVM and 4D in complement to the XYZ and 3D (the normie stuff).

In be-knighting Andrius "the Erdős of Wierdos" I wasn't meaning to be offensive or insulting. Rather, I'm extending the Esozone language, Subgenius tinged (overlap: "slack"), wherein "weirdos" form a peripheral network surrounding centralized normies (the normal mainstream programmed). 

You could call us "unprogrammed" (as some Friends do) but I'd prefer "auto-programmed" as in highly customized (by God, by prayer, by Bob, by whatever).  Andrius, like me, is sometimes itinerant, plus he recognizes and chronicles some really talented individuals, most of them likewise into esoterica.

Esoteric knowledge is not the same as Occult: the latter working overtime to deliberately obscure itself. Esoterica is often in full throttle outreach mode, yet nevertheless has limited appeal, because the content is difficult and challenging, like mountain climbing, or like endocrinology. 

The Silicon Forest is deeply into the esoterica of metallurgy and electronic bit manipulation (software development). That doesn't make us occult in the sense of secretive (unless you mean patent protective). We invite visitors. We invite tourists. We also tour.

Alternatives to Violence

I'm hosting an alternatives to violence guy -- spelled out in lower case because he's never heard of Alternatives to Violence (AVP), a formalized training workshop often held in prisons. 

He's worked in a prison, in a program designed to recruit and/or cultivate Independent Thinkers. 

Andrius Kulikauskas is Lithuanian, though born and raised in California. His main interest these days is his Math 4 Wisdom network / community, of which I am also a member.

I met his plane on Friday night. He was coming from a Category Theory conference at the University of Maryland. He is aware of my project and agenda: to track the progress we're making, with some of the ideas from Synergetics in higher ed.

Today I plan to introduce him to Quaker meeting at the meetinghouse nearby.

Some of his past work focused on tensions in Africa. Without visiting in person, but with strategically targeted $100 wire transfers, he was able to network with folks on the ground who were able to help diffuse situations in which armed youth gangs had taken over roads, to/from Nairobi for example.

Andrius is rather well versed in Lithuanian history, unlike myself, and so I'm using this opportunity to get more of the story. By filling in more of the gaps in my knowledge base, I'm better able to appreciate unfolding events in Ukraine and so on.

Trending

Some suppose the great Colorado River passes into the Gulf of California through some delta or wadi.

A little research using Google Earth helps wake us up from such romantic fantasies. 

The Colorado River ends at an unmarked site just shy of the US-Mexico border, on the California side.

Check it out!

Oppenheimer (movie review)

Since so much is and will be written on this movie, I'm gonna make it all about me (just kidding). Like I can vouch for the Institute for Advanced Study scenes, with Einstein and Godel in the forest, and faculty housing in idyllic proximity. 

All true. I was there. Not as connected with said institute but as an undergrad at nearby Princeton Inn, once a country club with adjoining golf course, and by my time (arriving 1976) already converted to a mostly freshman dorm, or residential college. I'd jog in the forest with my fellow mutant ninja tigers.

We didn't meet Einstein, by then passed, but at least one guy I know met the Beautiful Mind guy, John Nash.

I'm circling the whole aesthetics of that time frame, coming in through the lens of Wes Anderson and Asteroid City. That place of atmospheric testing, confidant futurism, science fiction, comic books, UFOs. Oppenheimer takes us to that same place. 

"Give it back to the Indians" said Oppie, of Los Alamos. That grated on the ears of the Manifest Destiny types (e.g. Truman), who now saw a chance to "go Frodo" with the nuclear weapons thing (or should we call it "going Gollum"?). Bagdad Cafe is nearby in this space. The Atomic Cafe is ground zero.  Dr. Strangelove.

Speaking of Asteroid City, there's that scene in the gym or whatever, with the writer, where he wants them (the actors in his play) to all fall asleep at once, act it out. That seems where Oppenheimer goes when he gets to take the podium at his chief apex of popularity. 

The stomping of feet and delirious shouts of hysterical joy was semi-deafening (haunting in retrospect) and my new Apple Watch logged a sustained 90 decibels period, I found out later. These were Walt Whitman's sleepers, giddy with their own sense of spacetime (history). Not especially sober or grounded.  

Were such people ready for real WMDs? Would they survive them?

I'm an "all out of order" guy like Nolan, the director, meaning I like getting the story as an asynchronous non-chronological bag of events I then get to assemble, like life itself. Because chronology is not always so important. 

We're still adding pieces today. 

We have other action connectors besides calendar chronologies.

In vouching for the authenticity of the Princeton impressions, I'm mostly saying they match my own, as one who lived there. I'm suggesting that by extension we might trust the storytelling. The medium of film is akin to that of the imagination, such that a Narnia movie reminds readers of where they went in their own minds' eyes. "Yep, this is the place" is a hoped for reaction.

As a resident of Portland, Oregon, I'm also not far from Hanford, Washington, the campus, mentioned briefly in the film, where the Nagasaki bomb was made, or so I'm told. They did that same insta-village thing with the layer of secrecy and paranoia. It's not like Los Alamos delivered all of those bombs on its own. 

I got close to Los Alamos once on a trip to New Mexico with Dawn and Tara, got some feel for the place.

Yes, egghead intellectuals like Einstein oft tend to be on the left. Why is that? Because they tend to be idealists and think lifting living standards for all makes life better even for those at the top. Why settle for Ghetto Planet?

They're impatient with the status quo, these idealizers. "Left" seems to mean "boat rocker". Intellectuals, visionaries, see the positive possibilities, one could say that's their job. Quakernomics.

Oppenheimer is a valuable contribution to the literature, reminiscent of some Oliver Stone films in that sense.

Study Hall

I'm moving up and down (out and in as Buckynauts say), between rooms and screens, with an interesting talk on amphetamine and other drug-induced psychoses in the kitchen, the BBC Proms, and the Dalai Lama preaching on Facebook, upstairs (outstairs) in the office.

The point Bucky was making with "instairs versus outstairs" is you want to school your intuitions (gut feelings) with what's intuitively important knowledge, or watch them become obsolete reflexes leading you astray.  

If you're not thinking of your planet as a spheroid, quite commonly, meaning quite frequently during the day, then try some of these mental exercises he recommends.

Sydney the dog also follows me between floors.  I do kitchen work in the kitchen, or other tasks, as I take in the pharmacology.

The pharmacology talk is critical of the spread of epidemics, which often have to do with companies working backwards from new patents they've gotten.  Now that we own this intellectual property, lets find out what it cures.  In the case of psychotropics, ADHD has been a target, enlarging, according to our narrator, because many more patented amphetamine-like drugs now crowd the shelves.

Lets definitely accept the hypothesis, offered in the talk as well-proved, that drug abuse correlates with a mental illness pattern.  One slide links Cannabis, assigning a likelihood of a long term diagnosis of some 34%.  What about the remaining 57%, what happens with them?  Might some have special gifts? Why do we always only look at the downside, right? Sure drugs are dangerous, lets not kid ourselves.

Also, what is the background likelihood of a long term diagnosis in the general population absent drug use / abuse?  I'll need to go back to see what's given, or do some more digging.  

There's also the chicken-egg question of aren't those prone to mental instability the same demographic more likely to experiment with controlled substances?  Why not see Cannabis use as part of the descending / ascending spiral, not the cause but the symptom?  Like I said: chicken-egg.

Any skepticism aside, however, my hypothesis is the Roaring Twenties maybe had more to do with the later outbreak of amphetamine abuse than we normally let on.  I'll be reading more on these topics as I enlarge my echo chamber in American Studies.  

I haven't had enough time in the heartland, both figuratively and literally. More blues and more jazz would be welcome.

For sure Benzedrine abuse was a side-effect of World War 2, when it was widely introduced to the military. Was it also a contributing cause? War is a groupthink psychosis and/or the search for a cure, depending on one's mindset.

The upstairs screen also has had my Jupyter going, the notebook environment available for several computer languages, Python most famously, but also Julia and R (hence the name: JuPyteR).  I've been doodling with the Mandelbrot Set again, producing another one of those low resolution ASCII art renderings characteristic of my Just Use It ad campaign (pro Python).

The occasion this time is M4W and an upcoming meetup on complex numbers.

Central Oregon Revisited

Readers, searchers, of these journals, may have already encountered various sojourns through Central Oregon, high desert country.  My in-laws, my wife’s brother and his partner Judy, came to Oregon well before I returned in the mid 1980s. They eventually settled in the Sisters area and Dawn and I, Alexia, and later Tara, would go visit them, through various chapters. Alexia would live with them in one chapter.

Without going back myself, and consulting everything I’ve said, I’m recalling Extremely Remote Livingry (XRL), an acronym that probably won’t catch on, but tries to capture the mix of high and low tech that might make remote, so-called off-grid living an enjoyable experience. Not that humans don’t already enjoy such environments. Per GST, we spiral through periodic improvements, as to what’s in inventory.  Do we always remember though? What we already have?

As an older guy with a lifetime of writing, I’m trying to train myself away from the “two spaces after a period” rule, which by social agreement, is falling by the wayside (has fallen). Lately I’ve been editing some of these blog posts with an eye toward removing the offending spaces, as more offending typos. I’m doing this without the benefit of my office device, having been sent on the road by my company.

A health goal for me is to not turn into a Homer Simpson donut eating machine around foods I adore.  I’m at an age where the management function is not meant to stay back burner.  I ate way too many BBQ flavored potato chips yesterday. We watched History channel tell us stories about North American brands, such as Jiff versus Peter Pan versus Skippy. Pepsi versus Coca-Cola. The subtitle might be “business heroes” i.e. we’re celebrating innovation, including in tricky ways to get moms choosing the right stuff.  We don’t spend a lot of time on Lucky Strikes for women story from a health industry angle. We stay focused on the parade stunt (strident stylish women appeared to protest, while smoking).

This morning I’m touching base with a few in my far-flung network, tangentially talking “design science revolution” in the sense of what memes caused us to find one another in the first place. Networks are content-driven meaning one’s tribe’s identity is knit together with interweaving stories, with overlapping casts. If you don’t have a tribal lore up close, civilization offers fall-backs, including the worldly mega-religions, such as Mormonism. I’m thinking about Las Vegas these days for various reasons, which brings of memories of documentaries and books.

Although in the high desert, I’m hardly roughing it. I’m not camping or doing anything that remote. We drove over to Smith Rock (dog Sy, and I) just to make sure it’s still there. I’m using what I call the ISEPP iPad to get my work done (company business).

Generational Reprogramming?

I often wonder why the “battle of the sexes” (however many) seems to get all the headlines, alongside the battle of the so-called “races” (as with “sexes” their number keeps changing) whereas the inter-generational battle seems to me more front and center, yet not as much in the news.  

The elderly are committing the young to fight each other over obsolete ideologies, and are refusing treatment, in the form of more up to date thinking (better ideologies). Is that because the old don’t want to feel lonely in their beliefs? If the younger folk revolt over their debtor status, how will the older folks pay the bills?

For example, most Boomers watching USATV, absorbed the view that the world was conflicted over two leading ideologies, capitalism versus communism. The more educated learned of a “third world” that was opting out of this conflict, with the freedom to stay friends with both sides.

The terms of debate were not always crystal clear however.  The Pentagon always seemed plenty socialist in its ways, with LAWCAP (the so-called military industrial complex or MIC, as studied by our AFSC) needing military socialism to stay on top.  

Then communism seemed to whither away, becoming socialism also, in the form of central government spending and a growing public sector.  

China invested big time on commuter rail and high rise apartments, and in taking over manufacturing from the so-called “west” (as if Europe were not in Eurasia) with its spanking new facilities.  

Meanwhile, Russia went back to being more of an oligarchy, much like the USATV system, now run through six or so controllers.  

Telling the defunct USSR and emergent USSA apart has become increasingly Orwellian, with words like “authoritarian” bandied about i.e. each side calls the other an oppressor of its own people, while appealing to the neutrals and non-aligned, to finally align. Sweden succumbed. Switzerland and Austria remain proud.  

Except what are these “sides” anymore? Don’t we just have unfree peoples everywhere you look, and isn’t that “double plus ungood“ (Orwellian utopia-talk)?

By unfree I mean, in part: “programmed to hate the baddies” from a young age, then trained in weaponry, then sent, in kill mode to, if required, die on command against the other side.  That’s called “being a hero”. The elderly applaud and make cemeteries, as that’s what many of them had to go through too. They’re just passing the torch. Who needs an upgrade?

As a Friend (NPYM’s Annual Session goes on without me — I’m visiting family this year) I see older generations, more comfortable in power roles, sending younger generations into Great Tragedy scenarios, to act as extras (and stars), as a part of the backdrop, as the obsolete ideologies duke it out in the foreground, trying out various new forms of rhetoric, looking to see what sticks.

In the meantime, our campaign to push an updated ideology meets with roadblocks at every turn. The investment in keeping any newer technology out of the schools is highly selective. Machine Learning is allowed to flood in, taking over a lot of responsibilities. Human Learning is put on the back burner.  

However, Human Learning (yes, a form of reprogramming, lets face it) is what it takes to give a younger generation a sense of better prospects and new possibilities.  

“Why are we being sacrificed?” is a good question.  I encourage them to keep asking it.  

Don’t let them tell you it’s “for God and country”. That line has worn thin.

Immune Response

I'm speaking metaphorically, but then so does polite society, sociologists, when describing how a next generation may have antibodies against X, where X is not a literal virus, but a vector that spreads like one, and may be correspondingly countered.  If you hear Category Theory between the lines, you're growing new ears maybe.

Take propaganda, in the broadest sense, which includes PR and advertising, rhetoric more expansively.  In American English (Amerish -- a MER ish, Fowler), "propaganda" is almost always used in a derogatory sense, to impart a negative spin.  Perhaps we're hearing remnants of Protestantism decrying the continued propagation of a more Catholic catechism.  There's always "high church versus high church".  

We also call these rhetorically polemical clashes "wars" (e.g. the Math Wars) as in "culture wars" but we hope to manage and contain them around an ideal of non-violence.  The martial arts usually circle a sense of peace and equanimity as core to the warrior mentality.  A true warrior is not "looking to start a fight" but lets not forget about sparring i.e. helping others get better.

Today I watched a lot of reels, Facebook's answer to TikTok, and become more aware of this Auditor movement, wherein civil rights activists engage in some "suspicious" activity that's nevertheless within their rights, or defensibly so.  There mere act of recording is often the triggering "offense".  

If an authority figure tries to challenge them, they turn into expert lawyers, some more successfully than others.  They remind police personnel to recall their own training, and make professionalism the value at stake.  A professional activist inspires professional responses.

Against a backdrop of police brutality and movements such as Occupy (in the civil rights lineage), it's not surprising that new antibodies might form, giving rise to new breeds or professions.  This is what evolution goads us into.

What's made a big difference is the smartphone and live streaming, in combination or isolation.  Cops are increasingly wearing body cams, but then so are ordinary civilians.  Citizens march around in fashionable uniforms, or dressed casually, with Go Pro helmets and/or other recording gear.  

They look and act a lot like cops, disciplined to not use unnecessary violence.  Except a lot of police escalate and lean towards violence rather quickly, which is where that police brutality may kick in.  Mind over brain, brain over brawn, is how they teach us in school.

Pacific Rim Radar

I find it curious, not to mention ironic, that NATO is out of its pond, contemplating the growth of militarism in the Pacific.  Really?  And NATO is here to protect us right?  Nothing interesting in the Atlantic hemisphere happening?  You need more business?

I'm a professor Jeffrey Sachs fan though.  He's not another knee-jerk Russophobe, dime-a-dozen type.  So hey, I'll keep an open mind.  That a Quaker magazine would bring this event to our attention is quite appropriate.  No endorsement of NATO is expressed nor implied.  I'd say that's obvious, but bears repeating.

Doctors Organize

I thought of this ridiculous ad campaign:  "I'm healthier than my doctor!"  I jump on stage all sprightly fat, like a Tinkerbell on steroids (which no, I'm not on), and then they wheel my doctor out, all pale with an IV.  The implication is somehow snake oil X is best for you.

Hey, before I go on, thanks to Ms. Vam I got to see the Crystal Skull episode of Indiana Jones last night (thanks to Movie Madness having it in stock, yes a DVD for rent, how quaint right?).  It makes a crater (and I mean that as praise) in the same territory as Asteroid City.  Maybe that's the actual crater it made, with the ETs in question returning to see if they needed the exhibited meteor (nah, scan it and put it back).

And now, my more serious topic, mentioning doctors.  The "systems analyst" role in society is still pertinent, especially the ability to graph workflows, say those of a working ER doc.  Track her movements through the day, in a Tayloresque exercise in collecting big data, but not in a way that quantum perturbs.

That's the issue these days:  the geniuses at the genius bar keep wanting to probe the ER with more forms to fill out, more direct doc reporting, a little more here, a little more there, fattening the living system (trying to live) with clerical bloat-work.  BS jobs are on the rise because too many script kiddies learned React and now want to run society, thinking kiddy knows best.

I exaggerate though, in blaming my geek peers for the flood of forms.  They're less the culprit than those with the magic to serve their overlords.  The bureaucracy hampers working doctors with clerical tasks because that's what the bureaucracy knows how to do.  Clerical Tasks R Us.  The promise of computers, of automation, was to actually streamline workflows and relieve doctors of paperwork.

Example:  ER doc to nurse:  "OK to remove from special diet, standard tray check".  Nurse: "check".

Same thing today:  ER doc to terminal, boot app, navigate menu, pick this pick that, order meal, is or is not Jehovah's Witness, please enter emergency contact...  you get the picture.  Meanwhile, someone dies on the table.

Systems Analysts where are you.  Please openly discuss these problems in ways the doctor lobbies never do, because there are no doctor lobbies (i.e. unions).  Unions, labor organizers, are coming for your family physicians with great bargaining chips, given the slave ship many a clinic has become.

Modeling Language

The idea of a "word-meaning trajectory" resonates with some of the memes bouncing around in this Tai-Danae Bradley lecture.

I used to write about the word "Pepsi", atypical (i.e. an outlier) in the philosophy of language, generically averse to commercial brands.  

Highlighting Pepsi is shorthand for linking in Edward Bernays style "invisible persuader" propaganda budgets aimed at establishing a "market position" i.e. a place for some brand or meme in the collective mind of a stakeholder public.  That's where "rubber meets road" in terms of "revectoring".

Stakeholders include the potentially and/or actually negatively effected.  These are stakeholders nonetheless.  One may have a stake in opposing one advertising campaign with another. 

Expecting propagandists to just sit idly by while they see an underdog needing their help, is unrealistic.  Onlookers self selectively surrender their innocence (as bystanders) and join some ongoing fray.  They take a side, become partisans.  Pertinent figures of speech:  "getting sucked in"; "falling into a gravity well".

So where does a Pepsi or a Tylenol live in an LLM (large language model) and how do we machine learn to fully automate or at least cue finely-tuned repositioning maneuvers?  Grossly-tuned if needed.  Infants have similar needs for motor skills (and nutrition!) when learning to walk and/or to continue walking.

Keep a brand burnished and polished.  How?  Answer: keep introducing new usage patterns (permute the namespace).  That may be easier said than done of course.  Inertia levels may be high.  Weights pertain.  It's a balancing act, one of maintaining a qualitative as well as quantitative equilibrium, sometimes punctuated.

Other times, the wiser strategy is to just coast.  Why fix what ain't broke?  Why advertise what's taken for granted?  Why make billboards to advertise blue sky?

What are the mechanics of gaining traction and getting work done?  How does a media campaign leverage energy expenditure?

For example, how did Synergetics (Fuller) first inject and the revector the "Jitterbug" meme?  It came in as a dance,  somewhat in the Twist family, and Fuller capitalized on this existing trajectory to signify a geometric transformation.

Picture two tetrahedra on each side of a pinch point, like a bow-tie, left and right.  Then picture a stella octangula or merkaba wherein left and right tetrahedrons are centered and interpenetrating. Packed spheres anchor the context, much as cubes do in XYZ.  The icosahedron to cuboctahedron inter-twisting relationship rounds out this so-called Jitterbug Transformation.

From Tai-Danae Bradley I get a boost in seeing an ad campaign as a statistical challenge, i.e. to revector through "brute force" for example, whatever that means.  Say by means of "blanket coverage".  Omnipresence.  More like a Pfizer or LEGO might roll out.  

That's high budget advertising and one hopes a way of financially supporting a not-hostile relationship i.e. "at least you won't attack me if I'm sponsoring your program".  Funding buys non-negative coverage, is the press, although it's not that simple.  Sometimes a business or politician suffers because of disclosures about who the donors are.

Another strategy is to stay small and hard to find, such that the "surface area" or "perimeter" one needs to defend, is relatively minuscule.  Not every luxury is mass-market, by definition.  Instead of playing the most popular girl in school everybody knows, play at being mostly invisible and within some opaque clique.

Some companies are actually satisfied with their size and discourage sudden burgeoning, which could only mean uncontrolled.  Metamorphosis is sometimes in the cards, but if so that's likely presaged in the company's DNA e.g. some of its antecedents were gigantic, and/or a tycoon-minded heir has come along.  Many a small business deliberately stays small, with no desire to establish remote branches.  The same stakeholder may be involved with companies in different phases of their lifecycle.

Regeniusing

In my cliques or social circles, one hears fairly often that children are born geniuses, but that one way or another, the adult world shapes them into dolts.  The American poet Gene Fowler comes to mind, with his Regeniusing Project and Waking the Poet.  Is there a way to reverse the dumbing down?

Picking up on this thread, I'm trying to think of ways I might've had specific powers I had to water down or ignore.  Without claiming to have any kind of photographic memory, I feel I listen pretty closely to what people tell me, and file their remarks away in my memory bank, such that when we meet again, I'm feeling pretty well-versed on what they've said already.

What struck me as a growing child, then, was how adults didn't seem to bother to keep track of who they'd told what, such that they'd be perfectly OK with repeating themselves endlessly, as if we'd never met.  I'd say things like "yes, you told me" or "yes, I know that" but these remarks came off as rude.  The social practice was to repeat oneself with wild disregard for the audience.  Adults had no responsibility to keep track of prior utterances and rely on shared memory banks.

Now that I'm an adult, I'm better positioned to make their case.  Firstly, talking something out is therapeutic sometimes, so if you have a willing ear, a productive way to take advantage of the opportunity is to retell one of those signature stories.  Just hearing oneself retelling may lead to new insights.  

As a guy who narrates the same slide deck over and over on my YouTube channel, I know the value of this kind of exercise.  It's the same with music.  No one takes the attitude:  we've sung that song already, and we all know how it goes, so why sing it again?

Also, there's the obvious rejoinder that adults get to know exponentially more people and trying to keep track of "who they've told what" becomes empty overhead after awhile.  That's great if you have a great memory. A lot of people do not.  

So that someone in your presence starts down the same road for the umpteenth time is intelligent behavior on their part.  They're not presuming you're a genius in other words.  None of us should presume that of  another -- and so the great dumbing down begins.

The metaphor I'm coming to is not original.  A diamond in the rough.  Shine on you crazy diamond (Pink Floyd).  I'd say the productive path in adulthood is to recognize and not adulterate your specific superpowers, whatever they are, and I'm deliberately weaving in all the superhero comic book images in calling them that.  

I don't need to stump for the supernatural in making some space for the extra-sensory.  We experience the limitations of our senses constantly, and through instrumentation we know about workarounds.

I'm siding with Nietzsche in thinking having a chip on one's shoulder, holding it against some invisible unspecified "society" or "the adults" that one is dumber now, slows one down.  Recall your native / natural abilities and cultivate them as you see fit, but with an eye to being constructive and helpful to your fellow humans and to yourself. 

I'm thinking this was Bucky's secret in large degree:  when you couple your gifts to "helping all humans" versus gaining advantage over them, in a zero sum game, you have less of an upper lid on how you might apply them.  

The evil genius is by definition a tad less of a genius, simply because "being evil" comes with more overhead, a greater cognitive load.  Superpowers become more burdensome when it's all about gaining triumphal vengeance over one's foes, although I don't deny the latter impulse may be temporarily motivating.  

In the Work, ala Maurice Nicoll, one's true foes are internal states and perennial complexes, well known to psychology as potentially ruinous (e.g. hubris and so on).  To the extent you want superpowers, cultivate their virtuous use in some internal jihad, which doesn't equate to becoming self hating.  

Any martial arts guru will teach you that much.  And being virtuous need not equate with simply being a good doobie.

Word Weights

Words have weights in a context or category.  Change the context to change the weights.  Heavy may become light, and lightweight heavy.  Weight and momentum go together.  A heavyweight word has more inertia meaning impacting its trajectory takes more work.

Category Theory has penetrated higher mathematics by osmosis, as a shared glue language.  The objects (nouns) and morphisms (verbs) that make up a category do not require much infrastructure beyond transitivity and associativity.  The vocabulary from sets and functions flows in to provide bulk (grist for the mill) right from the get go.

How will Synergetics, over time, affect the weights in CT (or in LLMs more generally)?  Polyhedrons are the obvious 4D objects, but we need not include "all" the polyhedrons.  We're happy with a subset and Occam's Razor, and the adage:  don't add what you don't yet need (or "only add on demand" in other words).  Necessity is the mother of invention.  Superfluous invention is a mother of clutter and excess.

In the Synergetics namespace, we may start with the Platonics and their duals, the tetrahedron being self-dual.  By "dual" we mean vertices exchanged with faces, the number of edges holding constant. 

Then we "marry" (Platonic, Dual) pairs to "beget" the rhombics:

• (Tetrahedron, Tetrahedron) begets a Cube (a Rhombic Hexahedron)
  
• (Cube, Octahedron) begets a Rhombic Dodecahedron
• (Icosahedron, Pentagonal Dodecahedron) begets a Rhombic Triacontahedron

Euler's V+F == E+2 gets introduced, along with Descartes' Deficit and concavity/convexity.  We're interested in polar pairs, associated spin axes, and great circle networks (especially juxtaposed and reduced to LCD triangles).  

We're also interested in dissections, of polyhedrons into component polyhedrons, and a relative volumes hierarchy.  

The Jitterbug Transformation has to qualify as one of the hallmark morphisms, or as a sequence, or poset, of morphisms.

An associative sequence of morphisms might be called a "train" with transitivity implying "express trains" that skip stops.  The cuboctahedron to icosahedron "local" then continues to the octahedron, whereas an "express" might go from the octahedron back to the cuboctahedron without click-stopping at the icosahedron.  

The connected volumes of 20, 18.51..., 4 count as properties of the polyhedrons in question.  Objects have properties.

The cuboctahedron of 2.5 grows to an icosahedron of 2.91796... with two applications of the S:E scale factor (S-factor) where S, E are specific polyhedra (see BEAST modules).  

One application of the S-factor would take us to a local station stop of intermediate volume 2.5 < v < ~2.918 tetravolumes.  We locate the 12 vertices along the "rails" of a contextualizing octahedron of volume 4.

 

from Synergetics: an volume 4 Octahedron containing 

the ~2.92 Icosahedron and 2.5 Cuboctahedron

A question arises as to whether IVM-space and XYZ-space should be considered two different categories, given they contain identical objects and morphisms.  

We're saying they could be. 

Their isomorphism is clearly apparent, but for the difference in the volume property, which we can iron out.  The polyhedron volumes differ by a multiplicative constant.

This Synergetics Constant (S3) suggests itself as a functor in case we do want to separate these 4D and 3D spaces.  A cube of edges √2 has volume 3 in IVM world, given its R-edged cube of 1.06066... where R is the radius of any IVM ball (IVM = isotropic vector matrix = the CCP lattice when it comes to balls).

The modules themselves morph into one another, as when the A module morphs into a B module of equivalent volume.  Then of course we have φ scaling e.g ...s3, S, S3... and so on, where the S volume is (1/2)(1/φ)⁵.  See my Replit on the S&E modules.

Freedom Fighters Revisited

All this bellyaching on whether Elon Musk is being hypocritical or falling short of defending freedom of speech, because buckling to demands from the EU, Turkey and/or India, is misplaced in my view.  

The assumption is "we the USAers" are somehow not under the oppressive rule of an authoritarian self-entitled class, and our "freedom of speech" is therefore our leading export, to freedom-hungry peoples around the world.

Closer to the truth is authoritarians admire the sleight of hand tricks the USAers are likely to sucker for.  

Twitter has barely been rescued from being a tool of The District, and could easily fall back to its old ways, whereas Facebook and YouTube are still seriously in the thrall of the dictator agencies (aka NATO or whatever we call it).  

We're under the rule of authoritarians in the USA, with the ghost of democracy still haunting us.  So what's all this about Elon succumbing to pressure in foreign countries?  The battle has yet to be won here.  

It's too early to assume we have any freedoms to export.

A Memorial Day Meander (School of Tomorrow)

Related journal entries: 

• Memory Lane
• Wild Wild Country