PDX Python

 

Our first presentation, by Rey Abolofia, was on how to speed up Amazon Lambda processing by sending it compiled Python (pyc) instead of source (py). The time-to-load on a large package, such as numpy or matplotlib, may be drastically decreased (by some 45% in the demo data). 

The Lambda service only charges when a lambda is processing, based on memory and duration (size and time). 

Rob Bednark presented about CHOP, Chat Oriented Programming, which is what a lot of geeks are experimenting with this days, for a low entry cost of about $10 per month. CHOP only became a viable reality this year. 

Through a process of refining prompts, a generative LLM may be coaxed into doing a lot of the grunt work around programming. It's like having an apprentice, or, if you're new to the ecosystem, a mentor. I predict AI will free a lot of grad students from slaving for their supervising faculty quite as much.

During the discussion, I mentioned experiments with AI performed by Daniel vis-a-vis Quadrays and ivm-xyz conversion. Daniel fed my Python repo to Perplexity, asking for a clearer more documented version of the code. The results were not up to par, but helped motivate me to improve my original.

I came with Dr. DiNucci, a computer scientist who observes Python culture from a distance. His area of expertise is parallel and concurrent processing, around which he has been designing an orchestration language named Scalpel.

Fall Semester 2024

from my Martian Math stash on Flickr

I’m not averse to this term “pipeline” with respect to education, even if some of the pipelines I view with disfavor, such as the so-called “school to prison” pipeline, whereby “school” becomes little more than an encounter with authority and a first chance to taste the limiting of options that goes with becoming powerless, pretty much by definition. 

That’s not the pipeline I’m working on.

Having worked on this particular railroad a long time, you could say my “dark ride” is complete, or at least finished enough for one to avail oneself of. 

Find an entry point and hop on. Ride this love boat through a tunnel of love. 

By “dark ride” I don’t necessarily mean anything creepy; I’m using theme park jargon for the kind of ride that takes you through a sequence of experiences, usually indoors, usually riding in some kind of “gondola” or “car”, typically rail-guided. 

Disney’s Wild Ride of Mr. Toad, and Pirates of the Caribbean come to mind. 

Disney is famous for its highly engineered dark rides.

Treating a sequence of readings, YouTubes, web pages, hands on coding sessions, model making, maker spaces, 3D printing, playing with VR goggles, and so on, as a “ride” or even “work-study scenario” takes some ability to think metaphorically, and that we encourage. 

Use that imagination of yours and let freedom ring.

Cropping a Hilbert Space

I'm back to goofing off with DALL-E, what I believe to be the back end image generator. However, again my belief, there's a lot of "cropping" going on, whereby children, say, are not allowed to look truly terrified. 

My prompt uses "Frightened" as its first word, to characterize these would-be pilots trying to replace the more experienced ones, who've all died. That's all the context we get, this was one of four results, all of which showed children apparently enjoying themselves.

How I picture this working is some really long and detailed prompts on the back end, take in whatever an end user like me writes, and melds them into a single prompt. My prompt:  "Frightened child pilots in the cockpit are trying to steer Python Airlines to a safe landing in stormy weather, like in some horror movie by Stephen King. All the adults are dead."

Beyond that, maybe some directions and distances are strictly limited and by that I mean, in a Hilbert Space, one eigen-dimension might be "how scared". 

It'd be like an n-space vector, and the further long it, the more scared we'd be (we being whoever is in the picture). But in this sanitized public facing free tier API, the goal is not to produce offending output. No nudity, no lots of things. 

Embedded X tweet:

Alludes to inside baseball, Python Community politics, in passing, but really continuing my AI investigations (scroll in my timeline for more experiments, DreamTeam etc.):https://t.co/yOfMXE2NTG

— Kirby Urner (@thekirbster) September 19, 2024

One the other hand, "scary" in the conventional sense of Halloweeny is allowed, and somehow the machine knows how to tell them apart, praise Allah for so many axes.

For example, these below, related to GENI work (adding more of a Portland flavor, Voodoo Donuts an influence), popped out no problem. There's a difference between being scary (frightening) and being scared (frightened), a grammatical nuance the AI might have been trained to exploit.

By the way, regarding the political cartoonery involved, I don't play Discourse when it comes to flying Python Airlines, but I do follow from a distance, all the current chicanery. 

The PSF bylaws don't say anything about Discourse mattering, so I'm just thinking some people have a lot of time on their hands.

Debate Teams

Per Facebook, I’m collaborating on with other schools regarding how we might ramp up the debate team scene. If you’re not on Facebook, maybe Medium?

Excerpt:

Remember the rules of debate: as a team, you’ll be expected to be prepared to argue either side of the resolution. The US team could well get the job of trashing the resolution, vs upholding it.

So if you’re on the US team, my advice is you learn to think like a Russian and vice versa. People who only know how to think on one side are just morons when it comes to Lincoln-Douglas face-offs of this type.

Micro Economics

The workhorse Mac Pro likely bit it last weekend, halting mid-sentence, as I was crafting some nuclear energy policy (just kidding: I was yakking with an informed lobbyist on Facebook). Had to hard reboot, but she never came back.

Fortunately, I was surrounded by acres of wildflowers and getting tractor skills, plus had an iPad for telecoms, so no time for a self pity party. My plan is to take my time casting about for solutions, without feeling overly pressured. Laptops die. I have backups. Maybe I should write a grant proposal, and or try to get by on a Pi.

Regarding social media (telecoms), I’ve picked up the pace on X a bit, looking back on 2024 and imagining a DreamTeam. I parodied the Russiagate genre by having free tier AI do a wonderful Bernie and Tulsi meme, as Superman and Wonder Woman. As hackneyed as it gets, and also so nostalgic, as neither is even running for president this year.

I also mocked State dot gov for trying to make RT sound more sinister than it is. Unable to compete on a level playing field, Cowardly Capitalism (scan blogs) is trying to re-enact the Hua Wei model and simply ban the competition. Pretty wimpy, but that’s President Blinken for ya, now out of favor in Poland they tell me (the list keeps growing).

I cleaned out some of my old FSI posts, which I can always refresh when the time comes. FSI is one of the Mighty Networks (that’s the hosting platform — very iPhone compatible). Then I use Synergeo a lot, for promotional materials. Example 1. Example 2.

I alerted the FSI via forum posting (vs in a group) that the most up to date summary of my thinkings and doings, with respect to the Bucky stuff at least, was archived at TTBC. This is where I overlap with BFI members a lot (I was made a lifelong member with the Synergetics Explorer Award, amidst ceremony).

If you’re not familiar with all these acronyms, I suggest a blog search, from the box upper left. Use the right margin navigation widget to jump to my other blogs.  Field Structure Institute and TrimTab Book Club are both entangled with BFI, for which I was webmaster in the 1990s, in cahoots with Kiyoshi.

Having archived my thoughts on working with Disney / Pixar, and summarized the Lithuania chapter, I retired from TTBC as the protocol there is to keep it apolitical, and in this particular season that’s not in the cards for me. I’m called to grapple with various political powers that be, were, or are still in the pipeline. That means I’m back to small group comms. I use Telegram a lot.

Some might wonder if I stay in contact with Princeton alums and is there anything to the idea that Ivy Leaguers have a rule the world complex? Yes, I stay in touch with some classmates, including at a recent picnic in the park (local Princeton Club chapter). But I wouldn’t say there’s any world domination tone to it. We’re all over the map.

Where you might still encounter “world domination” talk is in the world of free and open source engineering, where copyleft commies still reign supreme. If you go back in time quite a ways you’ll find a bemused mass media discovering geekdom’s memes, “global dom” being one of them. 

The full meme comes with a lot of penguin pictures (March of the Penguins had been big) i.e. Linux iconography. That was the David and Goliath myth of the day: Linux and open source were gonna rule the world, displacing the slower, dumber giants, not agile enough to keep up.

So how did that go?

Well, it’s a long story. The short version is the giants swallowed a lot of the open source philosophy (PayPal: “InnerSource”), not to mention source code, making Big Tech more dot commie. But the language of capitalism is still what’s macho among tech bros. They see the business sense in copyleft, which is padding the bottom line. Imagine paying IBM prices for all that stuff.

The equilibrium we’ve achieved might be imagined as a skyscraper or any tall office tower. As you rise or descend in the elevator, you find some floors are public and open, whereas others are authorized personnel only, with not all personnel authorized on closed off floors. Developers tend to get authorized access to a smattering of proprietary floors, work there and in the public spaces, contributing to both.

Most economists speak of “the commons” thinking of an old fashioned grazing area near a town, where anyone could park their sheep or whatever. Not closed off, not like BLM land, not proprietary. In geekdom, the gold has a different character in being infinitely copiable so long as electricity and storage is made available. My School of Tomorrow repo goes out over the wire to any point on earth, firewalls notwithstanding.

That being said, my curriculum writing is needle in a haystack stuff, spread by word of mouth vs by high pressure advertising. Pressurizing the content is more a job for downline repackagers and resellers of our open source content, MIT license a lot of it. We use Python a lot and you know how liberal that license is. I’m a copyleft king in my kingdom, practicing Potlatch Economics (tagline: “there’s more where that came from”).

The copyleft movement is more an outgrowth of academic protocols than any flavor of Marxism. We already had those concepts of “fair use” and “public domain” whereby scholars are allowed to excerpt and cite X, without financially supporting X. Why would I want to pay a school to which I’m philosophically opposed? If they’re pumping out memes, affecting change in the public spaces, then as a member of the public, I have a right to investigate. Greg Palast is one of my heroes.

Thursday Think Tank

I was testing some of my comedy lines last night at the Think Tank (what we’re calling it now, after Thirsters). Better to have jokes bomb in a small group, then fine tune or abandon the ones that don’t work. A lot of the feedback is high bandwidth. Mostly it’s others talking anyway. I fired off some one liners.

We had a former IDF tank driver from Israel at the table, but he was hardly pro what’s going on there. I was somewhat the odd man out in not being Jewish, with Barbara the odd woman. Actually, no, that education expert (3rd grade reading scores are the key indicator — but just in the one language) seemed to be, like me, on a different spectrum. I’ll study Judaism but wouldn’t claim to be Jewish.

Mostly we talked about the upcoming citywide elections, which will mark the debut of a new voting protocol Portland has never tried, involving ranked choice and four districts, newly drawn. We’ll get a new mayor, as distinct from a city manager. 

The new plan addresses perceived weaknesses with the old system, but some of our group saw an overcorrection and still no clear pathway to getting competence into government.

My jokes had to do with my snobbish elitism. It’s easier to fall into that vs fight it, given the oddball trajectory through Chicago, Portland, Italy, Florida, Philippines, Princeton, Jersey City, DC, New York, back to Portland. 

Such programming turned me into a globalist also, but not of the Soros kind (whatever that means). There’s gotta be room for a vast variety of globalist, just as nationalists come in all flavors (more than 31 at last count).

For one thing, although a globalist, I encourage talk of virtual nations, network nations, diaspora nations. Contiguous borders are for the birds. Citizenship is about creating your public service resume and turning your life support benefits into more life support. Coffee Shops Network has lots of ideas for channeling funds that would flood the starving motherboard with alternative power (yes, crypto might be involved).

I didn’t bring up NPU or any of my writing on an evacuation plan, one of many I hope others are storyboarding too. Am I the only one looking for ways to rescue the Gazans from this onslaught? The nationalists seem to think Gaza is more of a prison than anything else. I’d have had a lot of them out by now, transitioning through way stations, and many of them eager to return someday, when the real estate has some value. At the moment, no one should be forced to live in such conditions.

So would my NPU blueprints result in another diaspora nation? Palestine is already a diaspora nation, that’s my point. To the extent the conventional UN system of nations fails to offer a conventional solution, our backup idea gets more energy. Picture city skyscrapers with a Palestinian logo and mixed use dorms, classrooms, gyms, shopping centers, not exclusively for a specific citizenry. These assets could pop up anywhere, and the neon outdoor logo might be subtle, which isn’t to preclude blanket sized flags in many of the apartments.

Regarding the mayoral position, I said I was open to the Portland mayor flying around the world a lot as our civic ambassador, with a small entourage of course, of rotating “minions” (Mayor Gru?). I haven’t been following closely meaning I hadn’t heard much about the candidates. Now I know one of them is a professional stripper. Should she be our ambassador abroad, and to other cities in North America? Maybe. We like keeping it weird here in Portland. Good for business.

Movie Shoot?

I’m back on the farm serving in my apprentice role. The last two days have been all about the reel line, and how the Italians went the opposite way with clockwise and counter-clockwise, when it comes to jacking up this rig. 

Once firmly stationary, the hose is pulled out across the field, in this case in a lane mowed between wild flowers. But are they wild, if grown as a crop?  The more hose off the reel, the heavier, and we’re talking too heavy for humans from every angle. 

Just moving the rig requires motorized towing. Getting the towing pin to insert into the gator’s towing hole is especially tedious in the current setup. Extending the hose takes a bonafied tractor. The gator runs out of oomph after so many hundred feet. Hose is heavy, especially when full of water.

Is that a tremor I’m feeling? The destination trailer is wobbling slightly. That might be wind catching the awning, but I mostly retracted that. Time: 5:20 pm PDF. The Pacific Northwest is on the Ring of Fire and, like Japan, is prone to seismic events.

Sam discussed his evolving landscaping dreams, which include a raised and leveled dirt platform for a dome, which he’d design. Adding structures requires permitting. The place has come a long way already, what with all the new irrigation piping and the informal Flextegrity Museum, which only a tiny elite get to see.

The Flextegrity Museum inherits from Lattice Gallery in downtown Portland, a popup Sam financed in 2019. I was one of the several volunteers on tap to give tours. I’m up for playing that same role today, and in the meantime serve as location scout, looking for places to make our movies.

I talked about a movie shoot where we’d show off a high tech yurt, advertising our Global U tech of tomorrow. We’d have all the shots in the can within days and the director and crew could either stay in this trailer, and / or in town (Springfield and Eugene are but minutes away).

The high tech yurt idea goes way back and I know some folks live in them already. By high tech I mean they’re wired for internet and the people inside are able to tune in the whole world. Yet it’s a remote rural setting with no real need for yellow school buses. Teachers appear online. The occasional van might swing by to take kids to their martial arts training or other team sport.

I don’t have this movie funded yet. Old Man River City either (they’re related). The Refugee Biz is big, maybe the biggest, but for now is back burner as armed thugs storm our precious agricultural lands and play Risk or My Kingdom with live ammo. We hope this wasteful form of cosplay will be ended shortly. These Global U resources, human especially, are needed for more adult purposes.

Political Propaganda

Refugee Channel

My Refugee Channel (I call it "my" as one who proposed it awhile back) is still gelling, and has to overcome objections from Survivor genre "reality TV" producers, who fear overshadowing by true survivors (bad for ratings).

We know many refugees will be endearing and achieve stardom, plus they're doing the technologically speaking "sexy" work of prototyping, like test pilots, but of entire "campus" (from "camp") solutions, including experiments with crypto-currencies. Kids watching will wonder how to break in to the refugee business. Good news: the floodgates are open.

The issue of "open versus closed borders" is a general one. We might go back to Prouty and Iran-Contra and talk more about the small planes. Drug traffickers are not trying to climb over Trump Wall. They fly in to Mena, Arkansas, or used to, per old books in Dollar Store bins. If we're talking about substance control, let's say so. Human trafficking is something else.

In this blog, we take a strong interest in the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing. Both sound wrong and objectionable, but there's a difference between murdering and pushing out. Many apartheid-oriented neighborhood associations have been successful in keeping various neighborhoods ethnically cleansed, i.e. free of some fill-in-the-blank ethnicity, but without resorting to lynchings.

I mention all that because a Refugee Channel needs to not be too sloppily scripted, such that the storytelling anchors slip up all the time, the way we allow on ordinary civilian TV. The Refugee Channel has to interview lots of military and paramilitary about what's going on on the ground, to manage an evacuation after an earthquake for example. A lot of refugees are fleeing natural disasters. The personnel need a lot of training and self-discipline and may have prior military and/or paramilitary experience themselves.

But what about the high technology part I always write about? Isn't it the case that electric ATVs, yurts with RV-like hookups, shared sound stages and festivals (yes, like Burning Man) all belong to science fiction? Where in the world does the United Nations actually have its act together? We'd already have a Refugee Channel if the curriculum were even a little bit better. The UN acts within severe constraints, obviously, and has historically become a target.

That's where the scripting comes in. Storyboard artists need to plan out where the next Asylum City will be, and how it will connect within the existing network. Managing a circulation system for relocating humans, sometimes at the whole family or whole village level, or even regional level, takes a lot of logistical support from existing campus facilities.

The Asylum City matrix is designed with a living standard floor in mind, namely that of a college campus. Each freestanding yurt, tent, bizmo, or apartment dorm may not have a full kitchen, of the kind used in mess tents and company cafeterias, but they'll have enough to nuke ramen, brew coffees and teas, and refrigerate leftover desserts brought back from the "snack-topias" (picture food pods). 

We call them campuses because that's a lot of what goes on: learning, experimenting, making tomorrow happen. Some tribes use a different, yet intelligible, namespace and that's fine.

Active Inference

"Active inference" is not far distant from "activist inference" in that to "actively infer" is to adopt the posture and mode of an experimentalist. 

We don't sit around waiting for the environment to hand us faits accompli, from which we're to abstract a worldview. Rather, we know what our worldview entails, in terms of actionable testing routines, and therefore have ways to provoke model failure faster than if we'd waited for it to fail anyway, of its own accord.

In other words, to actively infer is to stress test your model at every opportunity, which needn't mean you yourself feel lots of stress. When you strongly and justifiably believe your model to be correct, and it appears to fail, you get to find your mistake and debug it, one of the most valuable exercises when it comes to keeping in shape and doing activism. Mostly, if it's a good model, it will appear to succeed.

The more one debugs oneself in training, in the staging area, the less one is likely to be forced into doing live re-coding on the fly, in production. Not that rewriting on the fly is forbidden (on the contrary), but it gets to be a hassle sometimes -- why not work out the most obvious kinks ahead of time? That's called being prepared, a first motto of scouting.

"Do I know how to set up a tent and hunt for food?" The couch potato read-all-about-it type might infer an affirmative answer, having followed the hero this far. 

But what if we wish a life beyond that of a couch potato? In that case, practice setting up that tent yourself, in your backyard, and see if you're able to scrounge any provisions from your environment, without resorting to shoplifting or other types of theft.

In the Active Inference namespace, we have Free Energy in proportion to our need for it, in terms of reconciling discrepancies, between our simulated, imaginary worlds, and the real one. 

When the simulation matches the reality seamlessly, there's zero friction, no chaos, all is smooth, with no energy unaccounted for. 

Free Energy is like noise, error in the signal, or at minimum unused, still-available bandwidth. 

The "activist inferer" is not going to sit around waiting for what's too big to fail, to fail. Better to stress test and prompt failure in controlled anticipatory circumstances, when it's not all about reacting in ways unplanned.

So is our activist in this sense an accelerationist? 

Sometimes the billionaires especially get accused of wanting to put events on fast forward to make houses of cards topple, and ponzi schemes explode, not in years, but in hours. That's a stereotype, and has the connotation of "irresponsible change agent" given the implied more haphazard approach.

To that I'd say I'm more humble than that, thinking the wheels of evolution have a more inexorable pace, not subject to my own druthers. 

The most I might do is catalyze, which is where experimentation comes in. 

I'm using that term loosely by the way, but with emphasis on "replicable" as I'm thinking "by imitation" is the most serious form of propagation. Check for yourself whether what I say works, actually does work. YMMV.

Food Pod Simulators

I know from my own career that many math teachers rightly take a cynical view when it comes to the commercialization of their classroom (real or virtual) content. The equivalent of what Edward Tufte calls "chart junk" sometimes threatens to take over with garish irrelevancies, obnoxious clutter, calling attention to fast foods and or fizzy drinks. Story problems may be among the worst offenders.

All that being said, there's a place for realism, even in a fictional setting. Portland is home to many a "food pod" as we call them, meaning organized spaces geared for food trucks to come in and out of. A "food truck" is more accurately described as a trailer in many cases, not designed to supply its own mobility. Other food trucks are indeed trucks, and in that case open on one or both sides to serve customers. The trailers tend to open in the back, providing a deeper kitchen.

The game we imagine, for the classroom, might use the names of actual food trucks, with permission, or at least closely mirror the usually multi-ethnic character of these food courts, which inherit from the World's Fair aesthetic. People came to expect yakisoba noodles in close proximity to hot dogs, pizza near Pandas Express -- one of the major chains, usually mall-anchored but food court versions might exist someday.

The game predictably focuses on workflows within each cart, as well as on crowd modeling, especially queuing theory. We might follow sim families, studying their expenditures. The Food Pod is a lot like a Theme Park (hello Disney), just turn some of the food pods into rides.

If you know your food cart culture, then you know the radio activated buzzer is commonplace. The customer places and order, pays up front, then gets a hand-held device with a blinking light. When the light blinks faster, and the device vibrates and or dings, that means it's time to retrieve one's order. In the meantime, one might've been having a beer at the bar (put a coaster over it, and bring your meal back). A similar practice is used for seating at Spaghetti Factory.

Internally to each food cart, we get the "short order cook" model. Oft times a cart will have two crewing, one taking orders and accepting money, the other multitasking on the backlog, with orders fulfilled not in first come first serve order, but in "whenever ready" mode. Some menu items take a lot longer to prepare. These facts of life are familiar to any restaurant owner, any chef, but for some students, playing Food Pod, with realistic commercial graphics, will be an eye-opener.

So is this more of that much-vaunted Supermarket Math you may have heard that I push? How much SQL is in this picture? Are the carts using crypto? Clearly we anticipate spiraling, with Fisher-Price level Food Pod at the low end, entry level, leading up to MIT Food Pod (thinking of MIT Scratch) at a pinnacle of sophistication. Linear programming will enter into it (mini-max and all that).

I'm saying "yes" to the Supermarket Math question but want to suggest we always mingle our four directions in this "future vs past vs reap vs sow" environment. That's "martian vs neolithic vs supermarket vs casino". 

To sow is to take a gamble, but then not to sow is usually to take an even greater risk. To reap is to then face distribution and allocation issues, which is where all the supermarket stuff comes in, transportation most especially, from field to table to sanitation facility -- garbage pickup is part of any FoodVille.

The supermarket-casino anchors an ever-present, whereas the martian-neolithic axis suggests a trajectory, the and freedom to rewire the ever-present circuits. Invest in AC generators, and enjoy a surplus of kilowatt hours. This presumes harnessing the Columbia. Our Food Pod will posit hydropower generation in the background. We're always free to simulate natural gas and or coal, even geothermal, in our various versions. We're looking to OSU for the virtual mini-nuke plants.  Around here, with existing options, they might not be that economical.

You might be think this all sounds fine and good but what about matters of diet? When do we talk about health? Obviously, there's a seamless link between recipes used inside the carts, and the food available to students, although likely requiring preparation. By performing a systems analysis of parallel workflows, the students develop an appetite and move on to food prep as a next pre-lunch activity.  Student teams learn to prep for larger groups. Others clean. Roles rotate. Sounds Quaker.

Tell Us More

Hey "Mayor Pete", tell us more about digital license plates. Are license number-letter combos allowed to repeat? Ever? Can I pay to have a movie plate only a few people might recognize?  

All the best vanity plates will be gone soon. I wanted FOMO.

DLPs: not his problem!

We don't bother the old and infirm with brain twisty questions about Digital License Plates, but you're Transportation Secretary and they promised us progress. 

We don't have to wait for Optimus to get a driver's license (and insurance) before we get to work on the license plate upgrades plan, including at the District level.

DLPs: his problem!

What is happening with the DMV? Let's hear from Mayor Pete, the DMV Czar. 

Remember, we're still car crazy. America hasn't changed that much.  And truck crazy.  

Added to bucket list: joining the inner circle of Texan and other long haul truckers who drive the OBOR network in Eurasia.

Pirate Party Politics (School of Tomorrow)

Alien: Romulus (movie review)

:: ET 🖤 OJ ::

I could see from some distance that the Bagdad marquee had changed. Deadpool & Wolverine had moved on. Carrying my full shopping bags, I took the longer route home so I could read the sign up close: Alien: Romulus had arrived. 

I resolved to drop off the groceries and walk right back for the 7 pm show. Neighbors were already converging, in the mood for a summer movie.

I'm just going to capture a few impressions here, having to do with Romulus and Remus looking like two halves of the same brain, an organ haunted by its own icky sticky fears. Life is gross.

Wow, deep huh? 

I happen to be reading An Illustrated History of the Horror Films by Carlos Clarens, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1967. I appreciate the Alien franchise for planting itself firmly in two genres: science fiction and horror. These genres only partially overlap, and when their tropes and motifs combine, one gets new synergies.

We have the climactic Golum at the end, and the uneasy Dr. Frankenstein question: what characterizes the line between living and not living? The androids, still cogent when disemboweled, bring up the question in Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence (inherited from Kubrick). I see the overlap with Jeepers Creepers, and the Half Life computer game series from Valve through Steam. I see Solaris.

The protagonist, and her relationship with her Black android, hearkens back to Huckleberry Finn, transposing slavery and racism to the robot realm. Andy is an energy slave, with a prime directive (re-programmable). But then what are we then? Some of us certainly seem to put the company first, even if that means betraying crew and family.

The Aliens movies have generated their own aesthetic, down to minute detail. The ships are ponderous, heavy, and present their own laws of physics around gravity, which may be switched on and off. We switch it on, but not before the director proves this movie is fine with tackling zero g. We're among professionals. The effects are masterful.

The claustrophobia of a mining planet where the sun never shines, and where indentured servant workers might as well be slaves: we've all been their many times in science fiction, and likely for real in our least favorite roles. 

Our heroic crew seeks liberty and we can hardly begrudge them that. But how does one escape one's own brain? Such a separation is usually considered catastrophic, in terms of keeping it together as a coherently animated team player.

The homunculus, a mutated version of what would have been a human baby, reflects the biology of ambivalence that mothers may express. It's not far fetched to cast the aliens' aggression in terms of rape, a serious violation of personal space, which violent act may literally result in progeny, but of a parasitical nature. 

Horror, when serving a therapeutic role, helps us process in a different register, in a galaxy safely removed from what's darkly private and personal, unmapped to the perennial and archetypal. Not all horror films have an ability to inspire higher consciousness. Besides, it's the viewer, the spectator, who provides the ultimate projection booth. Given the right critical mood, even bad films may prove instructive.

I'm not saying Alien: Romulus is a bad film however. I think it upheld its side of the bargain, and since I was in a mood to be erudite, I found it cathartic to "pen" this review.

I'll be thinking more about the Roman or NeoRoman aspects of this movie. My seeing the preview for Gladiator 2 (again) in the lead-up to the feature, only primed the pump in that respect.

You might be wondering what's up with me studying horror as a film genre in the first place. That has to do with my tuning in the "liminal spaces" meme thanks to Ryan B. 

The liminal spaces include these ostensibly empty backrooms and hallways (a trope, a motif), that may turn out to be haunted, by an apparently inhuman or nonhuman intelligence, giving to lie to our "control room" labs, not always so capable in retrospect, given how mother nature is so wild.

The mapping of these memes to our movie is pretty obvious then. We're both haunted and hunted by this sense of a predatory "other". Welcome to Planet Earth my hominid friend, a dangerous place, but certainly not without its upsides. No aliens. No Godzilla. We make up for it though, by scaring and abusing each other. How NeoRoman.

Code of Conduct

I took in the Rachel Maddow show last night, something I normally do not do, as I don't subscribe to any cable television; the internet is more than sufficient in terms of offering me various viewpoints.

She used her time to plug a book by her friend and producer, about the Republican plot to rewrite recent history, history we all lived through and have personal knowledge of. So how do they get away with it? 

When it turned out the GOP had been hacked such that emails and dossiers had come spilling out to Politico, the idea was to blame Iran, much as Russia was blamed for the successful phishing attack against Podesta.

Was it ever proved, as Rachel implies, that the Russians were actually behind that hack of the DNC? Skeptics such as myself never bought the Guccifer 2 story. The FBI outsourced that investigation to CrowdStrike, which came up with a colorful narrative, but not necessarily an especially credible one.

We never saw proof that Assange got his Wikileaks files from Russian sources, and even if he did, those files were fair game for journalists once Wikileaks had them, according to the old rule book.

Not so anymore, according to Maddow from her pulpit. She would prefer that when a foreign power is named, with respect to some leak, that the leaked info, whatever it is, not be spread around, as clearly that's to serve the interests of a foreign power, an adversary, which borders on treason. 

This is always the line taken by a national security state:  if we signal the intelligence has an adversarial source (e.g. the Hunter Biden laptop story) then your job, as loyal Americans is to (a) believe us unconditionally, we're the government, and to (b) shut up about whatever it is, or appear disloyal.

I was disappointed to hear Rachel, an effective demagogue, railing against journalists who, like whistle blowers, may feel it's their job to sometimes counter government narratives, no matter the sources and methods behind the info they're now privy to. 

As long as a journalist cannot be directly linked to criminal acts, it's fair game for them to share their news and views. Rachel apparently disagrees.

All this comes on the heels of the Python Software Foundation reprimanding Tim Peters, one of the community's most treasured members, for behaving like himself. I'm sure that move makes certain people feel more powerful and important.

Twisting Threads

Recently, I've been giving some more foreground treatment to my School of Tomorrow background context, in a section on Github in a Jupyter Notebook markdown cell, near code cells filled with runnable Python. 

I'm working in some of the newer threads such as the Mark Fisher thread, intertwining them with older threads, starting literally in Napoleonic times and before (hello William Blake). 

How should we counterpose Mark's philosophy with Peter Sloterdijk's? The equations, for both thinkers, involve consensus realities (CRs) versus non-consensus ones (NCRs) -- terms from Process Work. Both types may be pictured as bubbles, and therefore as both mass producible (as in AI foams), and poppable (as in theories of anything).

Who or what circumscribes my world, by means of language? "Circumscribe" has an ambiguous, and therefore ambivalent meaning. Constructive or constrictive? Protective or suffocating? Liberating or bewitching?

As another instance of such interweaving, let's recall that Hugh Kenner, author of a Bucky bio (Bucky), James Joyce scholar and author of The Pound Era, wrote a column for Byte Magazine. 

He also studied under Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, a base he shared with Drs. Geoffrey Hinton and Donald Coxeter, both practitioners of n-D Hilbert Space based mathematics. 

Bucky's magnum opus Synergetics (itself outside the Hilbert hypercross namespace) is dedicated to this same Donald Coxeter of Regular Polytopes fame. McLuhan and Fuller were outright co-conspirators in many dimensions.

In November, 1984, Hugh Kenner's column, entitled A Travesty Generator for Micros, co-authored with Joseph O'Rourke, hit the stands with immediate, and longer term, ripple effects within the field of natural language processing (NLP).

The English professor had teamed up with a computer science professor, both from Johns Hopkins, to feature a generative language algorithm, the output of which was based on conserving n-grams within the input, in terms of their statistical frequency. The listed computer program, called Travesty, was under 300 lines of Pascal.

Granted, Travesty is a far cry from the prediction-based generative language models of today, and yet is a milestone along the journey, much as MEMEX, imagined in the speculative 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, As We May Think, by Dr. Vannevar Bush, prefigured yesterday's hypertext and search engines, as well as the AI of today and tomorrow.

Donald Coxeter, we should remember, tested the waters of contemporary philosophy in England, encountering Ludwig Wittgenstein (LW), in the process of deciding his own path, which was geometry. LW would later prove influential within American Pragmatism, helping the leftist, yet non-Marxist Richard Rorty get free from traditional Anglo representationalism, an umbrella term for both nominalism and Platonic realism. Enter operationalism, within a philosophy of mathematics.

Back to the roots of contemporary AI, we have Emerson remarking in his journal that perhaps Babbage would be coming up with a novel-generating machine. I'm guessing this remark was tongue-in-cheek, yet expressing the same anxieties as were occasioned by The Turk, ostensibly a mechanical device that could win at chess against humans, including against Napoleon. 

The brave midget hiding within The Turk's mechanical exterior symbolizes the homunculus, the self we imagine must, pretty much by definition, awaken within, if ever our AI machines do attain general consciousness. We picture a soul as a smaller man, a 3rd eye viewer of an inner television, the ghost in the machine, a solipsistic cogito-spectator. These images may seem to force themselves upon us, once we choose to resist them that is.

Little Tehran

:: our representatives ::

Of course I'm referencing some previous potus calling us by that name, "we the city" that is, "Little Beirut". Of course that's an honor. Beirut, like Portland, is a great university town, and as such, is plugged into the whole world, not just into the regional motherboard.

We've had a lot of big name and not so well known Portlanders go to Iran for various reasons, over the years, me included, in the time of the Shah. I have memories of Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz. Portland hopes its sister city relationship with Shiraz will be acknowledged. Certainly it's been overt on our side, how we feel about another Rose City of such awesomeness.

I'm reposting my slides of a past Iranian Festival, celebrating our Farsi-speaking population, which is no recent newcomer, nor our Russians. What made America great, if it was, were Iranians and Russians, among others, and any politician who forgets that is simply broadcasting what's weak about our public education system: it breeds know-nothings, who run for office and, worse yet, win.

Oh so does that mean Portland is Judeophobic? Are you kidding me? You've never been here right? I can barely fathom the simple-mindedness of New Yorkers sometimes. They say you're sophisticated, but having taken the PATH over from Jersey City more than a few times, I have to say, you think in obsolete stereotypes and it shows.

Anyway, we're hotly contesting DC's rule as a city-state, how it overlords over the real states, the united fifty, and pretends to be sovereign somehow, above the law. I'm for driving the District out of the union. We won't lose any stars over it. We already don't have a real president; another impotus pretends to man the cockpit.

I've changed my mind about reposting the Iranian Festival slides and decided to enlist the help of AI in doing a more Logan's Run fantasy view of the City of Morons, suitably allowed to age in place.

Flowers for Algernon Diet

A fun thing about YouTube is how touchy its recommendations algorithm is. I look up a few YouTubes on fasting and bammo! I'm immersed in the keto fat blasting world, full of freakish exceptions to the rules (you too could be one of them).

I'm doing what I call my Flowers for Algernon diet. There's some unpacking there if you're new, but its about a miracle drug, el dopa (L-DOPA), that unfroze a bunch of catatonic people and made them move again. Eventually, however, this miracle effect wore off.

Although Charly is not catatonic, is more your average joe not-an-Einstein, he becomes an Einstein, briefly, thanks to his Algernon Diet. The parallels are there.

Anyway, today was the day to get back into glucose cycling. That's why I avoided those yummy snacks at Meeting: I was a man with a plan. Good to connect with y'all Quakers. 

I walked home by way of Movie Madness, renting two David Lynch movies. Why? I'm a student of Synergetics, as a kind of weirdology (explorations in thinking, the geometry of). Mark Fisher is a current focus, the British philosopher, and honorary subgenius (in my flight patterns).

Mark Fisher and David Graeber (anthropologist) both write eloquently about "BS jobs" i.e. looking busy as a profession in itself, even if you're really just pacing the hallways, like my friend Glenn did, when at NSA, post seeing action in Vietnam. 

Lets distinguish between "doing a meaningless job" and "making oneself useful to the world". These may well be orthogonal, but then orthogonal doesn't mean "at odds" or "in conflict" but rather "independently of" as in "still free to". 

You're free to make yourself useful to the world even where and when you consider the job in itself to be meaningless. 

For example, in taking in the human experience of being a bartender in Vegas, you're setting yourself up to be insightful and curious, as the best bartenders are. They're also multi-dextrous in the sense of able to multitask at the level of an experienced restaurant chef, in many cases.

Lots of jobs are changing though, not because of AI, but because of apps like TikTok (including TikTok itself) that allow a bartender or train engineer to hang a phone and live stream, sharing an over the shoulder view of what it's like to do the job. 

Not only that, the engineer is free to chat. 

No, I'm not saying "looking down into a device" and making the world unsafer thereby.  Engineers: keep your eyes riveted where they should be and all your attention on "the road" (whatever that means in your field). Pray that I do the same. But then let peripheral cues stay important too.

It's actually easier, not harder, when you have others watching, to maintain a state of acute awareness (coffee also helps sometimes). Many religious have prayed for similar supervision from the angels, whereas now ordinary mortals are free to supervise (be the guardians of) one another.

So that was four days with no eats, only fluids. I had a hamburger Tuesday night. Today is Sunday. 

Those fluids were not exactly calorie-free, as the Spindrift grapefruit seltzers have other juices mixed in, and therefore sugars. I drank lots of coffee, in addition to water, but then I do that anyway.

I broke my fast after Quaker Meeting (I walked to and from) with an old favorite: fresh cooked pinto beans in an Instant Pot (a one hour process) added to melted cheese on a spinach-tinged burrito wrap, large size, with raw uncooked onion and spinach, nutritional yeast, Picante hot sauce (that's a brand). 

Just one will do for the time being. I don't wanna sink back into "catatonia" too quickly.

A first sign I was slipping was this afternoon, after eating, when I tested the new toaster, from an estate sale, but without toast. A dry run. 

It would have worked fine (the toaster was in mint condition) had I only remembered to remove something plastic I'd slipped in to one of the slots, during transport. I neglected to dump it out, and instead filled the kitchen with obnoxious fumes as whatever it was melted and fused to the internals. 

There's no way to rescue it; worth way more than the $5 I paid for it, but no more.

For those unfamiliar with "ketotonics", the theory is that our hominid ancestors developed the fat cycle in order to undertake prolonged hikes, from A to B, without any ready source of food. 

The promise of a feast at the far end, once Valhalla was attained, was sufficiently alluring, i.e. realistic, to propel the fat-burners to set about thoroughly exploring their globe. Chimpanzees, in contrast, according the YouTube authorities, don't really have a fat burning cycle i.e. they can't feed their brains with "calorie bricks" saved up as adipose tissues in various places. 

Humans know how to plump up and press on. Fat is money in the bank (saved calories) if you're planning on lean times, perhaps already scheduled per your religious and/or secular practice.

And so, the theory goes, when you get off the glucose treadmill (eating food) and experience lean living, your brain starts eating "keto bricks" and yowza wowza they "taste good" (metaphorically, brains having no taste buds, really). 

In subjective terms, many entering ketosis experience enlightenment or other forms of satori. What you get depends on you and your brain and how its all wired. Be OK with varying mileage.

The fact is, a male of my make and model is capable of going without food for many days on end. When that's imposed, as a cruel form of punishment, then other hormones kick in, not a pleasant experience. But if I'm voluntarily pursuing objectives, such as happiness, then the trip may be well worth my time, and worth repeating.

Homeowner Talk

Neighbor (texting): It’s amazing what you can do with the right tools. Thanks for the glamour photos.

Me (texting back): Yeah, today I learned that pressure washer fitted with rooter nozzles on the business end, will snake and “jet” a pipe i.e. scour it from the inside. Not cheap but might give up to five years of service. This is according to a pro who came by, free of charge. We also discussed the pipe replacement option. This is all in reference to my upstairs rusty downpipes, shared by sink and tub (we’ve worked on it). He informed me my mental model of the downpipes inside a protruding encasement was incorrect, it does something else. I was glad to have my thinking corrected.

A MultiModal Adventure

Although I gave up alcohol completely back in February, I've mostly retained the mostly sedentary lifestyle. I have a bicycle, a pretty nice one, sturdy enough to handle my frame (idiom for meaty skeleton), but I haven't been riding it much. 

True, I added a bike rack to the car, upside down at first, but that was to take Yarrow to and from his bike camp (in town). I have yet to mount my metal steed (the two wheeler) on the back of my four wheeler (maxi taxi). 

Sam diagnosed the upside down problem when I was visiting his farm. I specifically asked him to take a look at it. I got the frame from Steve Mastin, one of our Wanderers. Sam gave me the bike in the first place, some years ago when he was living closer by and working on Flextegrity.

But that's only to say I have no real excuse for not driving out the Columbia Gorge and taking advantage of some of the best bicycle-friendly routes ever.

Anyway, this weekend I had a realization: that I have access to multi-modal transportation, meaning I'm free to start my journey on the bicycle, but then roll it onto a light rail train, or clamp it to the front of a bus. 

In practice, I was looking forward to rolling the metal steed onto an FX2 articulated bus, as it was getting dark. I was coming back from Oaks Park on Springwater Corridor, having paid a visit to the business side of the mausoleum where Humphrey Bogart's 3rd wife's remains are kept, an historical fact about which Portland is proud. 

I'd take the FX2 from the OMSI stop to around 36th and Division, was my plan. Alas, the bus that came wasn't one of the articulated ones, and both bike slots were already full. So I got more exercise then, taking Orange Line to SE Clinton and cycling up the hill to SE 36th, home to Harrison, instead of bussing it.

The main event we attended (Beth and Derek by car), was free summertime music, Hank Sinatra in the parking lot.

I'd done a similar ride the day before, cycling to Sellwood and riding the Orange line coming back. This is a habit I could see getting more into: multimodal adventures. One of the perks of living in an urban area with bike-friendly infrastructure.

Bucky Birthday Lecture

MathArtStream 4 ~ Kirby Urner: “Dimension" in Synergetics

I'm pleased with this pithy synopsis of key elements within my signature Silicon Forest curriculum, namely Quadrays and how these integrate well with Synergetics (Bucky's).

July 12 would have been Fuller's 129th birthday. Active Inference Institute just happened to have an open slot. 

Thanks to Daniel for introducing me to this little bevy of math-artist enthusiasts, already on the topic of visualizing a 4th dimension, and giving me the floor for an hour.

I felt like I was finally able to give the talk I'd have given at Bridges (rejected), although since then, the content has only multiplied, while becoming increasingly incisive.

True, I somewhat flubbed my last answer, miss describing what the hypertetrahedron would look like in 3D. The pentatope or pentachoron (5-cell) looks like the quadrays apparatus itself. Thanks to Tom Ace for the correction.

Movies for Kids

I took in both Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 at the Bagdad this summer. Both times, I attended a matinee with plenty of kids and their parents in the audience. Although having food and drink with the movie is encouraged, I didn't indulge in either (I have plenty in the past) and so didn't need a countertop in front of me. I sat fairly close, probably in the same seat both times.

Inside Out 2 is about diving into the psyche of one child in particular, Riley, a female entering puberty and intensely anxious about her future popularity and acceptance levels while adapting to the high school scene. The fact that her best friends from middle school are headed to a different high school raises the spectre of loneliness and abandonment. She will end up sacrificing these old friendships at the risk of flubbing the more critical new ones.

The story focuses on Riley's constituent personalities: joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. With the onset of puberty, anxiety, embarrassment, envy and ennui (boredom) enter the picture. The newer emotions, anxiety especially, seize control of the "bridge" leaving the original team to recover and resurrect Riley's old self, a journey that eventually leads to a better-integrated, more adult, newer self, a more inclusive amalgam of internal empaths.

Illumination: Despicable Me 4 is more about family and sociopolitical dynamics and exploring the concepts of truth-telling, deception, blackmail, secrecy and villainy. One of Gru's arch enemies, Maxime Le Mal, is on the loose and out for vengeance with a plan to kidnap Gru's baby. So Gru and his whole family are put into the Anti-Villain League's protection program, which necessitates assuming phony identities, which for the adults means roleplaying in new professions. Felonius Gru becomes a solar panel salesman and his wife Lucy Wilde, a beautician. Neither has much of a clue what to do.

However, Poppy Prescott, about the same age as Riley, is a budding villain like Gru and uses blackmail, the threat of revealing Gru's identity, to get the latter's assistance on her risky prank: the theft of a school mascot, a crazed otter, from Gru's old alma mater. Chaos ensues, abetted by the famous Minions for which this franchise is best known. Yes, I caught the allusion to Ian Flemming.

Fast and Efficient

A lot of times people take to their blogs and / or to X, with the intent to register some complaint regarding some insult to their person. I'm not saying I'm not guilty of doing that. Negative feedback is a commodity in and of itself, like garbage, or rather its removal and recycling.

Especially in movie reviews and such, one is expected to be critical, even if "critical thinking" doesn't have to involve dissing. Seeing what might be called flaws and deficiencies need not involve excessive moralizing, such as is characteristic of righteous outrage.

However, for a change of pace, I have to say I received fast and efficient service on two fronts today, and some positive feedback is in order. I'm using my blog to log some figurative fist bumps and high fives.

Over the weekend, I complained on MyChart about a medical condition that I thought maybe shouldn't wait until my regularly scheduled  appointment in August. My own primary care doc was out of the office until the end of this month.

Likewise around July 4, when I was driving all over Seattle, my "service engine soon" light came on, just around when Maxi Taxi was due for an oil change anyway.

I had my own theories around both conditions and wasn't far off. However what I needed was help from professionals and that I got, for both conditions, and with practically zero waiting time. A doctor saw me the next business day, even though the expected wait time is more like five.

That "service engine soon" light will likely go off by itself, as the underlying condition was likely transitory. I blame my inexperience with Seattle's steep streets, and unnecessarily gunning the engine that one time.

We'll see how it goes with my medical treatment. The prognosis is quite positive, and I'll have the follow up visit with my regular doc soon enough. I expect to continue using these blogs to chronicle how things are going healthwise. I don't have any large public or fan base, but I do have my trackers and backers. I believe in transparency, to a point.

So thank you Jiffy Lube (Hawthorne and 39th) and Portland Clinic (NE 50th and Sandy).

A Gentle Genius

remembering Tom Connolly

Explorers of these blogs may find references to Transportation Reaching People, a "socialist" version of Uber, meaning run by the county (Clackamas at first) and involving mainly retirees, compensating their mileage, and providing a socially useful role, an opportunity for community service. Tom Connolly was a main reason it all happened.

Tom and his family hailed from Missoula. One of my big adventures was packing up Gutless, my first car, a Honda Civic, and driving back to Montana with Tom, so he could show me around. We backpacked in to Lake Bertha in Glacier Park along the way. He helped me relive some of his memories as a thespian, connected to some troupe in that university city.

Tom looked like a pirate and knew how to act like one if called upon. He had a comedic stage presence, mixed with a gentle intelligence, that endeared him to all the volunteer drivers who signed up to take mostly elders to various doctor appointments, and to shopping malls. Trimet's mandate is to get people from where they are to where they need to go, a challenge only partially solved with fixed route busses.

Tom played several other characters, including a goofy version of Zoltar.

What I learned from Tom is community organizing is a lot about entertainment. Providing a fun working atmosphere around projects with purpose is not just icing on the cake, it's substance. We're talking about volunteers. Only mileage was compensated. They would get to know their regulars. My role was to code a match-making scheduler, to pair up rider requests with drivers. This was in an age pre phone app. It wasn't precisely like Lyft or Uber. One needed a lot more advanced notice for one thing.

Tom was like an older brother and mentor for me in a lot of ways. Upon his retirement, we didn't manage to stay in touch. He passed away several years ago. Tomorrow, I will gather with his family, whom I'd come to know, and we will honor him with a more formal ceremony at a military cemetery.

Just Use It

Speaking of osmosis and diffusion, I summoned up this mnemonic of Athena (the goddess) with her Python. 

Exactly how Athena and the Python relate in Greek mythos is complicated and would take a long time to chronicle if going by what's already in the record. However our goal is not to scrape through all the layers of wallpaper so much as to apply yet another tomographic pattern, sensitive to the same grooves (archetypes).

Whereas the German Idealists and depth psychology groundbreakers liked to counterpose Apollo with Dionysus, symbolizing a sunny rationality versus a countervailing more emotive, more irrational panpsychism, our Athena springs directly from the mind of Zeus and is plenty rational. Yet her disciples at Delphi speak in a dreamy, oracular, white noise of a language, inspired by vapors wafting up from the chthonic Python's cavern under Mt. Parnassus.

So when Apollo moves in to take over the Delphi complex and, by Apollonian accounts, proves victorious against the snake, resistant counter-intelligence, from the prior paradigm, is not Dionysian but that combo of war and wisdom for which Athena was renowned. 

The snake escaped, in our fork off canon. Athena's guild had new business in the New World to attend to, even as Old Europe fell under the spell of an Apollonian hegemon battling anti-science Bacchanalians, the reasonable versus the unthinking.

The good people of Nashville accepted their new Parthenon with open arms, a fully restored version of the one at Athens itself. The other pavilions and monuments were allowed to fade away, but Athena stayed, standing tall, her penchant for music consistent with her mastery of fight songs (trumpet) and propaganda (flute).

Python the computer language diffused throughout STEAM, then crossed the A bridge, from STEAM to PATH, via Natural Language Processing (NLP). The humanities crowd, including later versions of German Idealists, are now able to follow more of the math, thanks to Athena's pythonic mind in this Aquarian Age. The infusion of smarts via Anthropology (or the Arts) is bidirectional. Apollonian brittle rigidity becomes more flexibly pneumatic, for a smoother, safer ride.

More Shop Talk

Around the time of Deep State Synergetics, I was reconnecting with talent I'd met through edu-sig, the vibrant Python community listserv (implemented in Mailman, itself a Python app), and getting some tutoring about French geography and MIDI.

I've always posed to myself those questions about where to spot-weld the maths to music. We're used to the frequencies approach, focusing on pitch, but how about MIDI itself, the entire protocol? Pitch is included, as data bytes following specific command bytes, but so is so much more, such as channel selection, emphasis (key pressure), attack (velocity) and so on.

MIDI is a code language, not in the sense of "encrypted" so much as "encoded". What's the diff? Encryption is about concealing a message from all but an intended receiver. Encoding is about sending payloads of information by means of discernable signals, which in our Digital Age means ones and zeroes.

Given I'm at the headwaters, where the salmon come to spawn and die, it's not for me to now downscript all the lesson plans, down to the minute or even to the specific devices.  I might do that for my own workshops naturally, but I'm not publicizing those plans. I do go down to the slide deck level, so it's not like I'll avoid a good demo, especially if it's my own value added.

I remember at Junior English School we had two instruments to choose from: recorder and melodica. I took the recorder fairly seriously and my parents indulged me, by buying me a bass (same shape, but bigger). But I never got any serious instruction on that instrument (I did on piano) and to this day can't read music at speed. I'm retarded in that respect (lag behind, don't keep up). 

So I'm grateful my own disabilities do not define the limitations of what I record as my curriculum.  

Let's do some stuff with MIDI is all I want to say.  Leave it to Faculty XYZ to decide what their focus will be. Some might mandate attention to some specific tune, such as Star Spangled Banner or some school anthem. For local faculty, mandating such specific content would go with the territory, whereas such mandates from me might constitute an abuse of power (serving only to make my performance seem awkward and out of step).

Indeed, my French connection is reminding me that MIDI doesn't need to be about music creation. As a protocol, we're free to map it, taking advantage of existing devices yet making them control geometric objects instead. 

Replace pitch with color, volume with size, and allow pitch bending to mean rotation around some axis why not?  

Again, the details are beneath me (i.e. above my paygrade) to have to specify.  Don't let me be the bottleneck for a great idea. I don't even have Python midi modules installed, yet.

The French Connection

My Zoom session was with Blender / Python talent in France today. 

The new studio sounds exciting and I look forward to resuming real time work after the remodel.

We talked about the Arabic language, among other topics.

A tetravolumes table:

20	مكعب السطوح	mukab al-sutuh
18.51	إيكوساهيدرون	icusahedron
6	المعينية دوديكاهيدرون	al-muiniya dudicahidron
4	ثماني السطوح	thamani al-sutuh
1	رباعي السطوح	rabai al-sutuh

How'm I doin'? 

The premise is we're over the hump in terms of showing relevance. 

The main barrier now is a language barrier, not so much a credibility gap.

We're not waiting for me to learn Arabic or develop masterclass Blender skills. I'm not the bottleneck.

We already have those skillsets covered.

Our main focus is the need for a Blender toolkit specifically engineered for teachers including memes from Synergetics e.g. 

• the concentric hierarchy in its IVM context
• the spin-generated 25 + 31 great circles
• the corresponding 48 and 120 LCD triangles

See the Figure Index, 900 section especially. The CH includes its BEAST beginnings.

Political Parties

student poster, Portland public school

I was tuning in this NYT opinion piece, a YouTube-archived recording of a conversation, which to my ears sounded very NPRish, from a production values standpoint (pretty good in other words, if too uber-slick in places, that's journalism), and musing further about the partisan role of political parties.

Discussing the role of parties, as in political parties, is of intrinsic interest. 

My rhetorical flourish was to create yet another Pirate Party, distinct from the others, with only planks, no candidates. Folks in the other camps should feel free to walk 'em. For example where are the "by application process only" Fed boarding schools that ain't militaristic? 

We need to breed diplomats, not just sore losers. We have West Point and... ?

Looking back, I'd say Uncle Sam's public offerings, since privatized (given his passing), insufficiently prepared young Americans for the debates of today. 

As a parent, I don't have that criticism, as our Portland debate team culture was well-developed, reaching  national championship level twice during our family's period of patronage. However I'm able to see my fortunate experience in contrast to the norm.

I'll admit I haven't recently sought out the YouTube channels where high school aged debaters are taking on serious resolutions reflecting today's events. I used to do that more.

What are the teams allowed to say, regarding the blowing up of gas pipe infrastructure, as in the case of Nord Stream? I'd have to go look. 

What I surmise, though, is most subcultures are too nervous about being politically correct to risk too much realism.

Not until I was chaperoning our Cleveland "we'll eat you alive" Cannibals did I tune in Model NATO as a thing. I met some recruiters in Indianapolis, at one booth among many (Reed College had a booth). 

Model UN we'd all heard of, but here the kids were trained to thinking more like NATO states first and foremost, or at least that's what I'd expect. I'm not curating comments here in my Quaker journals (blogs) but do feel free to be in touch or elsewhere record what Model NATO was really like. 

I didn't do much Model UN either, as a parent or high schooler. I've got my little story about all that.

Back to the NYT thing: so why just the two parties? 

Anytime I bring up my experience of moving to Italy, wherein the number of parties was more open ended, people tell me that's a "parliamentary" system and the US doesn't have a prime minister, ergo (the logic goes), so many parties, including Socialist and Communist parties, maybe several of each, a Christian Party if that's feasible (too many factions?), could never coexist within our US motherboard's design. 

Our OS is inherently duopolistic, is the thesis there.

Like in that NYT piece, they're talking about William Buckley's encouragement of anti-communism more as a witch-hunt FBI thing than as a big tent Congress thing with at least a seat or two for pinkos. 

With different, more up to date public school offerings, Uncle Sam might've prepared today's Feds for such as "zionetics" as well as "dianetics" i.e. leading "ics" of the last century. Cybernetics. General Semantics. Of course "zionetics" is usually cast as an "ism" not an "ics" but we needn't get lost in esoteric grammatica here.

Will today's high schoolers be familiar with talking points on all sides, or were the speeches of Lavrov not curriculum-included, only press conferences by WDC admin spox John Kirby? That'd be insufficient prep to score highly. Time to cram?

Will the forensic societies be so lackadaisical as to lose all debates at the global level? Losing a round of poker and resorting the one's pistol versus paying debts is an old timey sad story. The more honorable course is to cash out and settle.  

Of what worth is high school if no one is equipped to talk about the Minsk Agreements (for example) when debating the Ukraine debacle. They'll miss the thrust and parry that only realism in simulations might provide, if they don't know the history. 

Bone up in a gamepod why dontcha? Find some way to self brainwash that works for ya. No one else can do your own thinking quite so effectively, so take the helm.

So what's my solution, as a curriculum developer, to all debate team deficiencies? Do I have one? Not directly.

I trickle charge my 4D solutions through mathematical fantasies and science fiction, with my "synergetics" (another "ics"). I pipe in lots innocuously neutral content (see "hypertoons"), that's yet "outside the box" enough to get more teachers amused and in a mood to be open-minded. 

If the mathy mind (STEM) is so able to spring open so smoothly, then why can't debate culture in the humanities (PATH) be likewise infused by a painless osmotic process, resulting in more relevant models and imagery?  That the teachers feel thought-provoked is about all one might shoot for and expect positive results. Being too pushy only delays right action further.

About Name Collisions

"namepaces are one honking great idea"

In the early grades, for me 1st or 2nd, we learn the word "homonym" and what it means. "To mean" and "being mean" mean two different things. A "meany" is not someone good at being super meaningful.

This point (node) in the curriculum is a great branch point to come back to when learning about "name collisions". We know all about those in computer science and solve the problem with what we call "name spaces" or "namespaces" (without a space).

Every cool kid on the engineering block wants to code a Vector and not use some lesser term, like Schmector. Some upperclassmen (sexist) might wanna lord it over the underclassmen by reserving the coolest terms for their Vectors and Tensors only. For snobs like that, we have workarounds, e.g. namespaces.

Even a rank amateur tween is free to use her "Vector" and "Tensor" to name her two teddy bears. We don't always insist on "Pooh" or other prefabbed commercial label, authorized for stuffed toy animals. Stifling rigidity is the alternative to freely allowing diverse namespaces to coexist. Namespaces provide membranes between vector spaces.

What's an example of a name collision? Take any homonym as a potential example. "He leads with a head of lead" is only rescued by "led" for "lead" in the past tense. In my YouTube channel I take up "CCP" as another perfect example, since we're all about cubic closest packing to begin with. Two other CCPs help us tune in Southeast Asian politics. Up for a treasure hunt?  Hint: where I went to high school has one of them.

And don't forget, the cooler way to write USSR, back in the day, was CCCP. More Soyuz. More Sputnik.

CCP = IVM = FCC is not precisely the case, because the equal sign ain't apropos. Let's go with ⋈.

CCP ⋈ IVM ⋈ FCC

Namespace ⋈ Corpus