More Pipeline Adventures

The dog and I retired for the night amidst first reports of another salvo in a tit for tat that’s been mostly tat, talking about Mesopotamia again. We got up early and came to Sam’s farm. Sam has been studying the history of Mesopotamia, which apparently hosted a culture that, for some three thousand years, got by with no discernible government, at least in terms of royalty, lineage and like that. I’ll have to ask him the name of this civilization at dinner.

The field work today was unloading lots of three inch pipe segments from the irrigation pipe trailer, pulled by the all purpose Gator, so we could fill it again, from pipes still amidst the flowers. Acres and acres of beautiful flowers. We took a couple breaks, one for me to go get my boots on. We may do some more pipe line dismantling tomorrow, depending on weather. Josh came by and he and Sam spoke casually but in earnest regarding the rest of this year and next year’s first growing season.

University of Oregon was playing Illinois today, here in Eugene. I say “here” because the farm is near the adjacent community of Springfield, home of Homer Simpson per local lore.

My cohort, the group I’m guiding through the foothills of Python, switched over to studying Git for a couple days, letting me off the hook.I packed the car and took off. By the time the sun was coming into view, lighting up the sky, we were already south of Salem on I-5. The rest stop was all about me, not Sydney. I wanted a thermos cup of coffee and a couple plain donuts. The drive is about two hours.

The meetup hosted by BFI, featuring D.W. Jacobs, was still giving me some ideas about how we might take it from here with the BEAST modules, now BASKET. David Koski is tackling the icosidodecahedron (ID), the RT’s dual, sizing it in a specific way vis-a-vis the 2F Cube of volume 24. I’m behind having an ID to play with in my flextegrity.py sandbox. For outputting to POV-Ray. 

For those of y’all new to these blogs, Flextegrity is a trademark given by this farm’s owner to his lattice-based inventions, within which branded category one has sub-brands, such as C6XTY. We did a whole museum on C6XTY in December of 2019, in downtown Portland. Lattice Gallery we called it. As a contracted 3D graphics guy, I developed my Python around this same lattice, hence the module name is no coincidence. My GIFs and PNGs have featured prominently in the Flextegrity corpus.

In terms of overlapping scenarios, Sam knew Bucky Fuller through the Applewhites from back in the DC metro area. He went with Bucky to the Philippines as a guest of the Marcos family, around the same time my dad was there working for UNDP, UP, USAID and maybe some others. I was in high school at the time, at ISM, which just had a reunion in Dallas, which I attended vicariously through Facebook.

Sam’s grandparents were the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald of Great Gatsby fame (an American novelist), and Zelda, a southern belle from Alabama or something along those lines. However it’s not like having famous grandparents entitles one to a farm in the Willamette Valley, some of the best farming country in the world. Sam’s entrepreneurial ventures encompass way more than just the Flextegrity chapter. I’m not the expert, more just a beneficiary with a shared interest in Lattice Graphics and other matters lattice related.

I’m sure that sounds cryptic to outsiders (the lattice stuff) so it helps to know that Bucky Fuller, the American inventor and futurist mentioned above, had a fondness for a uniform distribution of points in space known to science by several names, and to architects as the octet truss. NASA uses it a lot, for space frames, but so do ordinary Earth-focused construction companies. Alexander Graham Bell famously dove into the same scaffolding. If your high school failed to connect the dots for you here, that might be symptomatic of the dark ages we’ve been enjoying. Keep bouncing around in these journals if you wish to bone up on what you’ve been missing.

Hate Watching

In the world of TV criticism, we have this concept of “hate watching”. I heard one of the talking heads in a YouTube use that just now, and I was reminded of an old train of thought that rattles through my head from time to time, to wit that not paying for what you’re viewing is not always this unprincipled thing one does on the sly, while maybe feeling guilty if caught doing it. 

No, sometimes a censor watches videos by an adversary, looking for a good excuse to take it down. We’re free to make up a model here: let’s have the censor really hate that X is going out to viewers, such that the last thing the censor wants to do is support X financially. 

When you consider programming destructive and want to counter it, you do not, in the same moment, fish for your Visa card. You want to monitor, maybe frustrate, not support.

Without meaning to become a Bible thumper, I will point to the famous dictum of Jesus that one should “love not the world” (John 3:16). You’re free to “hate watch” all the ignorance and cruelty in a way that focuses your mind and gives you more powers as a monitor and supervisor.

Out of “hate watching” comes distance, disavowal, non-complicity, one might say innocence, but not apathetic aloofness. To “hate X” is to have some stake in X and its outcome. The divided mind is a divided will. Rather than be of two minds about something, be clear what your ethical duty is: to disrupt, obstruct and derail.

Returning to the theme of jihad, said world you disown may include your own sorry psyche, meaning you’re actively inferring your new psyche into existence. Self hate in this sense is more like preparing to jettison a booster, or to break free of an eggshell. You hate being stuck in a form you’re clearly growing beyond. There’s not much victimhood nor even fear, only fury. The Biblically minded speak of righteous wrath, but there’s no need to be loud about it.

Ghost Nations

:: gentrification ::

The world is replete with peoples who believe they would benefit from nationhood if only the nation in question existed, but it's not on the list. But already it's not that simple: maybe it does exist, but as a sub-nation within another nation: the Navajo nation comes to mind. It's defined within US law. But what is the US defined within? A community of nations, which tries to achieve some form of stability and rules based order, but fails in many dimensions.

What's to keep a Ghost Nation from recruiting citizens without upsetting pre-existing citizenships? A Ghost Nation has no existence in the eyes of the United Nations, or maybe quasi-existence. Take Palestine for example. Some states recognize it as a state, but there's not enough gravitas in the picture to rescue its would-be citizens from extermination programs undertaken by some UN members.

That the UN is unable to keep its own members from cross-border incursions by military forces is a fact of life. Indeed, frustration with international law has led to a general breakdown in the whole structure, leaving the question open as to whether this current configuration was more transitory than many at first believed. Is anyone working on restoring its integrity?

When people hear other people say "race is a social construct" they have no idea what that means. Aren't nations social constructs too then? Yet we take them seriously. Just because a concept is a "social construct" doesn't mean it comes with a strong opt out option. Racist states insist on labeling by race, which is how we know they're racist. You can't have apartheid if people won't play the game in the first place.

Those hoping to keep the idea of nation-states intact may not see time running out the way I do. They see nothing to be concerned about. But then I'm not seeing anything all that melodramatic about calling out melodrama. 

We all know what programming means. We're programmed to act in our various roles as social creatures. I'm not seeing that changing or needing to change. What's always changing are the programs themselves, not our ability to self-reprogram.

In the newer programs, perhaps one gains citizenship in a ghost nation without moving anywhere. There's no specific place you need to be to be a citizen of X. On the other hand, you may be expected to fulfill  duties of citizenship in some way, let's say not by joining a military necessarily, but maybe that too. Citizens work to serve their fellow citizens. Service to others is what gives rise to a sense of nationhood.

Existing UN member nations may feel their sovereignty is threatened by ghost nations, but given they've  learned to co-exist with various global entities already, such as banks, shipping companies, airlines, oil companies... it's not a stretch to see ghost nations as akin to universities, with spread-around campus facilities. 

That's how I'm seeing Palestine these days. 

Not all its facilities are in West Asia by a long shot. Nor is its citizenship clearly defined. People of any religion might choose to "dualize" and identify as Palestinian in addition. I could be a Palestinian. So could you. We could have another million Palestinians by the end of the month, which sounds pretty meaningless and empty. So what? I'm not saying I know exactly. I'm exploring the space of possibilities.

Doing Philosophy in 2024

I'm not using chatbots myself yet much, not directly, but I'll share prompts with collaborators and get results back, plus I do hands on text-to-image almost daily. Ergo, if asked whether I use AI on the job, I'll definitely cop to it.

Case in point: I was doing text-to-image drawing from one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous memes: beetle in a box. LW was a 20th century luminary around whom a huge volume of secondary literature has been generated, about the man, about his philosophies. Ergo the LLM had a lot to train on.

Possible prompt: Write a few pithy paragraphs about the point Ludwig Wittgenstein was trying to make in his Philosophical Investigations when he wrote about the beetle in the box that only he could see into. He was doing philosophy of language, we know that much. Say a few things about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in the context of contemporary philosophy more generally.

In the Facebook Epistemology chatter (General - anything goes), Isaiah posted two audios voicing his concerns about abusing AI: in sum, using it to off-load practicing thinking and thereby rendering oneself dumb minus continuous propping up by AI. 

Fallon circled Perplexity as the best chatbot to use and shared what Perplexity came back with when prompted as shown above (possible prompt).

Perplexity:  

In his later work, particularly in "Philosophical Investigations," Ludwig Wittgenstein uses the "beetle in the box" analogy to illustrate the private language argument. He suggests that if everyone had a box with something called a "beetle" inside, but no one could see into anyone else's box, the term "beetle" would have no public meaning. This demonstrates that language derives its meaning from public use, not private experiences.

Wittgenstein's later philosophy marked a shift from his earlier views in the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," where he saw language as a logical structure mirroring reality. In contrast, his later work emphasizes language as a social activity, where meaning is determined by use within specific contexts or "language games"25. This perspective has influenced contemporary philosophy by challenging the idea of fixed meanings and highlighting the fluidity and context-dependence of language.

KU: the above two paragraphs are quite acceptable. The secondary literature is vast.

KU (copypasta from chat window): 

I appreciate Isaiah's voiced qualms re chatbot abuse. In this particular case I'm in the role of human expert who knows the Wittgenstein stuff really well and wants to see if the chatbot has anything well-informed to offer. 

My friend Daniel whom I conspire with on Math4Wisdom (that Coda I mentioned) has access to Perplexity and I agree it seems one of the best. 

There's another topic "Quadray Coordinates" (see Wikipedia) which hardly anyone but me and a few others know about, meaning there's precious little secondary literature [typo fixed] to train on, and not surprisingly, even Perplexity gave back a lot of crap when Daniel prompted it about quadrays. But I bet down the road, when more training data exists, the quality of chatbot chatter will much improve.

Morning Meditation

I invite more YouTube essayists to join me in talking about the varieties of speech and what if anything to do about them. Not that I get into any of that in my latest YouTube (above).

We talk about love a lot in Christianity and in that way sound a lot like garden variety mystics of the type people celebrate, because love has a feel good hallmarky quality, that goes with scented candles and memento gift shops. But what about hate?

What the psychologists understood pretty quickly, in making "soul studies" a science (bypassing the quantum mechanics behind it all), was that hypocrisy and projection are interlinked. 

Hatred directed towards the self is considered unhealthy (warning to the reader: I'll be taking issue with that), whereas hatred towards others might even be OK if they deserve it.  So a first move of the psyche (soul) is to take a quality or trait one would hate to find in oneself (such as homophobia) and puts it out there in those others (those homophobes). Hate is thereby transmuted, in the sense of redirected.

What I'd say from my pulpit is love and hatred aren't that far apart, certainly they're close in Hilbert Space in that talk of one is oft in close proximity to talk of the other. They co-define, as concepts do. We don't really hate our little brother, we love him, but he drives us crazy. Others "make us" (the victim tense) jealous and we may hate them too. Or is it that others hate and we must do penance for our jealousy by defending its target? That sounds twisted.

A more Buddhist approach is simply to focus on the bare phenomenon of hate, if that's feasible. Distill a pure sample if you have the hormones for it, the calzones (hah hah), and now ask yourself where does fear come into play. But even before that: doesn't hate entail commitment? "At least you cared" is what the newly bulletholed newlywed says to the camera.

I've many times resurfaced Maurice Nicoll in these blog posts. That's the Jungian Scot who admired and relayed Ouspensky's teachings, in turn acquired from rubbing shoulders with (sometimes fighting with) Gurdjieff. His work was to gather successful adults together and have them go through some group therapy process, we could call it, wherein management of the psyche would be a core focus. Where do "negative emotions" as he called them, come from?

Just having the self monitoring skills to detect and label what's arising is going to help with the self training. Is what I'm experiencing "negative" or not? The other question being: "who is this 'I' that does the judging"?

Still at my pulpit, I'd look for times when hatred felt pure and not like some hot potato that others must feel, poor sinners, bless their hearts. Own the hate, maybe by calling it something else. It's so hard to not prejudge where love versus hate is concerned. How about "fury"? You're furious. Own your fury. That's a good bumper sticker. Now replace "fury" with "voltage pressure" and look up "teleology" in the Synergetics Dictionary (a real thing, you can find it online).

In Gnostic terms, I might say hatred is a measure of God's commitment, and maybe a lesser god, say an angel is channeling it, say a demon, a type of angel in our cult's taxonomy (I'm making up a cult as we go). A demon is hate inspired, we could say relatively purely, which accounts for the immortality, meaning the eternal validity, of what moves them, ultimately love. God's, not yours, not to worry if you're in fury mode.

RoboTown

:: eerie dude ::

I think we're mostly in agreement that a driverless cab system such as Tesla's, would be a no brainer in a managed environment, say a theme park. We're in people mover territory, sans rails, because wireless provides the rails. We also potentially don't need all the redundantly duplicated lidar, because the system knows where all the cabs are. It's just a matter of that bouncing ball some tourist lost, or tossed.

Regarding the RoboVan or whatever we call it, and the fantasy of no windows: I'd say the fantasy there is to republish the outside windows vista via camera and adding layers of info ala tour guide in Rome. I don't know if this'd work nor to what extent it's lab tested. I'm not the geek in charge. I'm just speculating based on what comes my way from the demo shots.

The unveiling of Tesla RoboCab and RoboVan concept cars was in the context of a constructed studio environment, a made-for-TV town. That's what I'm thinking too: a TV town turned into a livable 24/7 town. But we'd have spectators from the beginning. You don't build an OMR "under cover". 

Any substantial construction needs breathing room, which means partial discovery. Hard secrecy is a strategic burden. When you make a film, the locals know. Later, when they see it on the big screen, they remember, with some locals maybe joining the cast (or comprising it).

When I say theme park, I mean highly managed and engineered, a planned community. Florida has a lot of those, consisting of boxy prototype units, replaceable in case of hurricane, each with an allotted slot in a grassy park, perhaps with golf links. 

Golf Lakes Estates is a good example, in Bradenton. I used to live there. No complaints. Not a bad lifestyle for this cohort of retirees. My grandparents invested money saved, by not buying a "real house" (hand-me-down monster), on trips to Europe, which, as a stylish trend, helped heal some of the war wounds and boosted the German car industry.

The challenge to the driverless car vision has always been: actual drivers. Positing autonomy to every vehicle, versus centrally routing, is the expensive step. Or am I wrong? The only way to conquer an existing city, a Cincinnati, in the hybrid model (driven and driverless), is to make the robotic system intelligently aware of what the "uncontrollables" are doing, and that's what you don't want.

Vehicles in a mobile home park are by definition slow moving. We don't need any robocab Ferraris unless we devote dedicated lanes, entire freeways, to automation. That could happen along some routes. The most common fallacy is either/or is it not? So often we're presented with the false dichotomy. It's either everywhere or nowhere. Really? Not always.

So why doesn't Florida already have robocab oases? Why is the future on that score always around the corner? Doesn't even a single golf course offer automated golf carts, just for grins? Perhaps golfers would feel insulted? Is there something about golfer culture that means you can't press a button for which hole you want, and the cart takes you there? 

How about a zoo then? How do we mix with pedestrians? How do we do that at airports, with their long concourses and beeping vehicles transporting the elderly and disabled, or tired kids?  They have human drivers. 

So how about we segregate the two streams?  Paths for humans and vehicles.  But isn't the whole point of a taxi that you can wave one down?  True, but we still have streets vs sidewalks.  We've already learned to segregate from traffic. The humans are already trained on that score.

Travelogue

:: Road Trip ::

I've been on the road again, enjoying my 1997 Nissan. Barry suggested we patch up the right exterior with some heavy cosmetics, and I'm open to it. In the meantime, she certainly doesn't look worth stealing, unless for a museum about the DSR ("Kirby's Maxi Taxi"), given the car's starring role in these journals of mine. She was also "Torture Taxi" in a couple chapters, having come from a Gulfstream heritage. I'm alluding to one of those books on my "spy books" shelf.

Back in Portland, I'm moving ahead on the hypothesis that I'll be strapped in and teaching Python from my PWS (that's GST talk) here in Slabtown, starting the day after IPD (Indigenous People's Day). I'm getting a new landing page ready. I've been using this for Monty Python named language since around version 1.3 and here we are up to 3.13 or whatever, with the big jump being from 2.x to 3.x, per the lore I'll be sharing.

Per my teacher workshop near O'Hare (airport, Chicago) years ago, my andragogical style involves oscillating twixt the technicalia of a shoptalk, and timeline context, i.e. history. As you dive into Python, start tuning in the key players (Tim Peters, Guido, Alex Martelli... Steve Holden) and their on-stage roles. Guido is the inventor, Tim a chief contributor and booster, Alex a genius teacher of, and Steve an instigator of the conference circuits latter formalized under the PSF banner.

I've met all of the above, both online and in person. Indeed, Steve lived here in Portland for several years and I played assistant and sidekick at numerous conferences. He liked my calming influence, kind of how Sydney (my dog) is a comfort to me I'm thinking. I took Syd on this recent 530 miles car journey, though I parked her with friends when changing cars to a Mustang Mach-E. One of my relatives shared his fantasy of having a vanity license plate "avelli" as in Mach-E-avelli. Syd stayed on the farm with other dogs for that part.

If you wanna be in my basic Python class it's probably not too late to enroll, although I'm pretty sure the recruiters are wanting you to join a cohort that doesn't stop with the basics. We climb "data science mountain" (easier than "calculus mountain" -- I've been a tour guide there too) to a fairly high base camp, were we look over the crater rim into the volcanic cauldron of Machine Learning. Another instructor takes over at that point, now that the cohort is well prepped and ready for the Pythonic approach (I believe using TensorFlow more than Pytorch -- I use scikit-learn during our preamble).

I've been batting AI-generated art back and forth with a toy company CEO who shares my interest in cartoon animation. I've been focused on the Burbank pipeline, but I understand his wish to avoid unnecessary entanglements, now that animation generation is a thing. We're talking kid characters doing team explorations in the geometry of thinking, our revectoring of American Transcendentalism into such as my School of Tomorrow curriculum. We're both into science fiction, and Cloud Nine or C9 has been a focus. That's the floating city meme, with a focus on everyday physics (relevant right now).

I've filed chronicles of this planning in the TrimTab archive, which is members only. A subset of the membership meets every two weeks to check in and talk about different "wings" of "the business" (let's call it the show and tell business) such as Zome and Zometool, vZome and so on. These toys are somewhat in the erector set tinkertoy lineage. I originally joined the thread on two fronts: through Design Science Toys (DST -- no longer in business) and through Koski's BASKET weaving (adding K to BEAST). Then came the Reed College gigs and I started sprinkling in Lux and C6XTY. You could call it product placement I suppose, but I didn't do any sales talks. C6XTY was never really for sale and vZome is free online.

For all my talk at Multnomah Quakers about supporting NavAm casinos, such as by booking events if not playing the slots or tables, I didn't visit my old haunts or venture into the Tulalip facility, which I still haven't visited (talking about the casino, not the museum, which I visited on my last trip). 

I bought some cheaper gas at Angel of the Winds filling station is all, for the trek home. Anyone who follows my curriculum writing (this is some of it) eventually discovers my Casino Math meme and how I used that to carve up Silicon Forest digital maths: Casino, Supermarket, Martian and Neolithic. These are simply shorthand monikers, one might say for: risking and developing; harvesting and distributing; looking forward; looking back.

I'll have more stories to share from this road trip, but in other journal entries as this one is sufficiently lengthy. I haven't pumped out any new YouTubes lately. My attention has turned to stills, key frames, and upgrading my Python source base on Github.

Martians Landing

Prompt: 

A red haired boy with his dog sit by a telescope and watch the Martian spaceships land in the distance, on a peaceful night in the desert. He knew they were coming.

Joker 2 (movie review)

I'd been seeing the previews for a long time, and was intrigued. The first Joker of this series, with Joaquin Phoenix, had punched me hard with its Gotham. I knew that place. Indeed I did. They'd filmed it in my old haunts around JCNJ and EWR, I found out later.

My YouTube dashboard started flickering some negative thumbnails even as the Bagdad marquee rolled over from Beetlejuice 2, which I'd also seen. Without much hesitation, I made a beeline for the theater.

What I was thinking during the film a lot was (a) wow, I hadn't expected a musical, with dance numbers, but with Lady Gaga I should have and (b) wow, what a canvas, what a work of art, like the Dutch masters.

However, in being so arty, I think it went over the line into David Lynch territory, which gets me thinking art cinemas (Bagdad is first run mainstream) but then I think of how Lynch movies are far from obscure; they're on a spectrum.

These Joker movies have become intensely psychological. The depiction of prison life and archetypes is priceless. The court scene is likewise every court scene, every trial. In terms of drama, this movie strives towards perfection, overshoots, compensates, and so on, perfection itself never attainable, by definition. 

The musical numbers are clearly "in the Joker's head" but then the Joker has a lot of time to fantasize, and as the movie gets more and more unruly and surreal, one begins to wonder if "the Joker's head" is all there is. He's living the dream as they say, and a nightmare it is, but for the bright light of a fellow soul.

So yes, it's a love story on top of all that. I might delve into what the critics didn't like about it. It's not really an action thriller. Watching it takes actual patience, as the claustrophobia of the Gotham world is oppressive. I wouldn't call it a comfortable movie. But entertaining? Absolutely.

Put a Bird In It

Aside from the obvious allusion to buckminsterfullerene, this campaign keeps it localized, more Asylum District, as "put a bird on it" (on not in it) was a signature episode of the Portlandia series.

Given we're branding around the Silicon Forest, Pacific Rim, it stands to reason that Portlandia would be a source of memes for us. Too bad that Portorando video went away -- by some Japanese travel agency.

But more technically, what am I getting at here? The Active Inference allusion is also present, where the cage protects potentially delicate internals (say a living bird) from external exigencies, such as a cat. The interface system, twixt outside and inside, involves "sensing" (in) and "acting" (out).

The "active" in Active Inference means the agent or activist is intentionally probing and experimenting to falsify or reinforce the mental model, always working to bring the two (model and modeled) closer together, minimizing the chaos of misalignment with what's so. There's enough intrinsic chaos, in reality, as it is, so why add gratuitous, extraneous noise, right?

We may think of the gilded cage as a prison for the bird, but perhaps it's likewise a protective dwelling machine. Perhaps the bird gets time off when not in a cartoon. A lot depends on the Yoneda Lemma here (just kidding).

In our model of "inside-system-outside" we're alluding to the four-triangle topology of the 4-eyes-in-the-sky minimum cage-enclosure. That's a Platonic root for our Genesis story, about that set of five polys and their begats, those rhomboids. Know what I'm talking about?

Five Platonics: Tet, Cube, Octa, Icosa, Pentagonal Dodeca (PD). To each poly there corresponds a dual poly and these may be added once inter-sized such that edges criss-cross at right angles.

Poly + Dual Combos:  Tet + Tet = Cube (a rhomboid); Cube + Octa = RD (another rhomboid); Icosa + PD = RT (rhomboid again). Volumes: (Tet, 1), (Cube, 3), (Octa, 4), (RD, 6), (Icosa, 18.51), (PD, 15.35), (RT, 21.21).

I know, I know, not everyone has been to high school recently, and even then, not to one of my elite academies, asynchronous, free online. "So what's your excuse?"

hs us lit

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.