DEQ 2025

What I did today is get the 1997 Nissan, the muscle car jalopy, with a gash on the side, a battle scar shall we say, through DEQ, an every other year ritual. I'm good until September 15, 2027. So yes, I went through earlier than I really needed to, having got the paperwork in the mail.

What got the wheels turning, was the Wednesday before, when I met Dr. D. at Lloyd for the burger week flagship at Stoopid Burger (3rd floor Food Court, overlooking the ice skating rink), I was thinking: "before the movie starts at 1 PM (Naked Gun, across the street), I could probably make it to DEQ and back. I mean heck, I'm like half way there already."

As luck would have it, I stayed at Lloyd until the movie, hanging out with Dave, milling about in Barnes & Noble, snapping a few pix, and thereby encountering a glossy Python magazine, more a large size book in some ways. 

You see it depicted up top, from earlier today, Friday, August 15, Alaska Day (today's Kremlin - White House summit).

So this morning I'm thinking: "I could get the DEQ thing out of the way today, while I'm still thinking about it why not?" 

Then, about a mile up the road I thought: "and while I'm at it, provided I pass, I can celebrate with another Kooky burger. It's still burger week, and that was a mighty good burger for $10." If I failed? I'd console myself with sushi, which'd be healthier.

Then, having passed the emissions test at DEQ, I was thinking "and I could go back and get that Python magazine at Barnes & Noble, it'd make a good gift, and maybe I'll even learn a thing or two." As a teacher, it pays to pay attention to the state of the art (the art of andragogy that is).

When I got home, it was time to walk Sydney, which proved fortuitous as I wanted to tune in my programs but CenturyLink was having issues, so I was needing to use Verizon anyway, through my hand-me-down iPhone (works great!). 

So why not walk around the block, which we did. Pick up on my channels. Sydney is allowed to saunter off leash given she's a highly trained emotional support animal (she still has the vest, which even still fits), enjoying retirement.

A lot of my peeps seemed pleased with the day's events, and even more pleased by the time I awoke from my afternoon nap. There're still a lotta haters out there, but there's not much we need to do about that when the circuits are equilibrious and robust. 

I'd say the chatbots are helping, by making the research a lot easier. People have a lot to catch up on in some cases. We all do, regarding this or that vital topic. Get a robot detective to comb through big data and pop out with a succinct report. The detective may have been drinking (hallucinations) so be sure to omni-triangulate (crosscheck from many sources, including by drawing from your own experience).

By evening, I was tripping down memory lane, with Python and food both topics again. Something about polish comfort food, posted by my old friend Seth Tuska, went by on Facebook, and that got me asking Perplexity (a gossip bot) about Chicago and pierogi. 

I was remembering Djangocon 2013. Patrick and I took off, prowling the streets of downtown Chicago for pierogi. Patrick's wife is from the Chicago area. Maybe she's the one who reminded us to track down this ethnically Polish food menu item.

We go through DEQ to prove the car's emissions and other records are in good order, and re-registration through the DMV is therefore warranted. Drivers queue up in their vehicles across several lanes for parallel processing. Their objective: sticky "tags" that go on the license plate showing the car is "street legal". Police sometimes use outdated tags as an excuse to pull a driver over and run random checks.

This Nissan has never given me problems passing the emissions test, and not this time either, so I was able to pay the registration fee (a hefty $280 plus) to keep my car legally on the road for another two years. Insurance is a separate monthly tab.

Other work today (not for Oregon State) involved recruiting alpha testers for the lastest QuadCraft experiments. We've tapped into gamer culture to help make Cascadian Synergetics relevant to the animation world more generally. I'm excited to learn about the newest Blender.

Time Management

“What other kind of management is there” one might ask, “besides that of time?”. Our idea of time is bound up with energy expenditure, both in the Newtonian sense and in the vernacular. In the Newtonian sense, the more energy we spend in an interval, the more powerful that event. Powerful events need not be either or explosive, or destructive — that’s just a stereotype. Picture a hydropower generator, its blades turning more slowly than you might expect, but they’re huge, with lots of momentum behind said angular velocity.

In early childhood psychology, a lot of work goes into separating actions (acting out) from having the idea of doing those actions. One may imagine doing something, and yet not do it. Or, more likely, one may imagine doing something and then do it later. Few are the actions that must be done on the spot, right now, although we get those too.

Once a delay is introduced, we get to concepts like “procrastination” and often a lot of moralizing creeps in. One thinks of a positive action, something that would be good to do, like sending a birthday card to one’s grandmother, but then one delays the action, per one’s training, only to decide that “delay” equals the choice to “not do”, and therefore one rolls into “why am I so lazy?” type contemplations, whereas it’s those contemplations that might be the real waste of time.

Instead, when you imagine a good thing to do, a right action, something you actually need to get around to, like getting your car through DMV another year, add it to your queue with gusto, and then think a lot about said queue. 

Queuing Theory is a whole branch of operational research, involving such concepts as critical path analysis and prioritization, basically scheduling. Scheduling is a deep topic in computer science. Learn to think like a computer science by managing your own schedule. Extrapolate from your experience locally to think about larger operations happening more globally, such as the construction of electrical power grids. What’s in the queue on that score?

You might be wondering when I’m going to bring in money. Don’t they say “time is money” and isn’t “time management” likewise “money management”. Well sure, we can look at money as a measure of energy and in particular anti-entropic energy expenditures in the form of work, as opposed to anti-work, which is entropic (like bombing and killing). When you get a lot of work done in a short interval, doing more with less, you feel like (a) you’re getting your money’s worth and (b) you’re being powerful, in the sense of efficiently working through your queue of pending actions.

Prompt:  An office working running an electrical grid simulator across several screens is surrounded by clocks reminder her to spend her time wisely and to think ahead. Calendars on the walls. Blueprints. Globes and even a Dymaxion map fuller projection.

Meme Channels

link to album: Wanderers Join Comprehensivist Meetup

This meetup, and another one, Greater Philadelphia Thinking Society, have been primary vectors (channels) for disseminating a lot of the ideas my subculture is into. 

We should give the Meetup infrastructure a lot of credit, going forward, for its role in promoting learning by osmosis. 

True, the "for credit" incentive of formal education, aimed at attaining degrees, is largely absent. It's closer to what the universities nowadays call "continuing education", under which heading they're always doing outreach to actively employed school teachers (summer enrichment) and to seniors, retired yet actively curious and wanting to catch up on what they missed by doing whatever they did for a living.

Classroom Theme

Alaska-Siberia HVDC

At School of Tomorrow, we plan to play up the focus on Alaska as another missed opportunity to discuss those megaprojects we heard alluded to, and which are not all about gas, coal and oil, contrary to some lobbyist propaganda and/or to popular belief.

This theme was our focus before, when Boston schools adopted the Peters Projection and journalists failed to give even lip service to their own New England son of Bear Island, Maine, and his world famous projection. More unoriginal reporting would be hard to imagine.

Bear Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine

The problem is a lack of canned / archived articles to draw from. 

A story that hasn't been covered in forty to fifty years is hard to get started on newly. Where's the boilerplate to cut and paste from?  You might need to unearth some old Whole Earth Review or one of those. 

So maybe turn to one of those gossip bots? Some of which are widely read, in the sense of trained.

Assuming journalism meets my low expectations, we'll use this occasion to shovel more dirt into that legacy media grave. Good riddance right? We needed more of an attention span, longer format, deeper dives. 

The advertisers refused to give us the diet we needed, and so we had to find other food supplies to feed our heads with. An old story.

Or rather, we'll continue excavating our own underground media networks (no, I'm not just talking about Urbit), which are only underground metaphorically. Chthonic is another word we use. Legacy media will simply bury itself with its own irrelevance. 

Schools tend to work the same way: enrollment drops, recruiting falters, once word gets out that the curriculum offered is obsolete, behind the times, backwater. Sound familiar?

Instead of "new versus legacy media" some people just say "alternate" as in "alt right" or "alt left". I'd be a creature of the alt left per my own account, which doesn't mean I can't or won't mingle with those with other stripes and coloration.

Homeowner Banter

I have the proverbial siding salesman coming over today, thanks to the professionalism of his scout, the earnest young college guy working his way through OSU in finance, but willing to let me blah blah about all those decals on the porch, and how Linux was such a big focus in this region for so long. It still is. I’m not saying the Linux story is over. On the contrary… I’m picturing like a Danny DiVito type. He’ll be showing me samples.

Anyway, after talking about my front yard C6XTY, the Sam Lanahan 5-frequency CCP (no, not communist, but yes Chinese in part), we turned to the business of siding and I let him book me for the free estimate, out of which a contract might emerge, though not today. I haven’t even mentioned to my family that I’m doing this as they all have busy lives. I happen to be between gigs and have a window in which to build my knowledge-base in the home maintenance department.

The south and east facing blue painted wooden exterior facets are sun-baked. The back side is brand new, and the west facing facet is submerged in a rainforest jungle, replete with cougars, coyotes, and maybe bear. I exaggerate for effect. Let’s just say the priority would be to address the sun-baked sides. But if I went with siding, that’d result in a hybrid, and would future owners forgive me for making that choice? I should ask a chatbot. And my friends.

I told the scout I was just starting to build an up to date file on a remodel. I’m usually immersed in cyber-space and am not wearing a general contractor hat. Is there a logical order to roof versus side work? Do they ever offer pre-painted custom logos on the siding. What if I wanted something Tlingit, or Tulalip?

I’m talking about back by the BBQ, while keeping the public facing facets more demur, as they are today (deep blue in hue). The sun-baked sides have become oxidized with a kind of “white rust” and this has made them pale and somewhat cracked, and obviously therefore aging more quickly than the other facets.

I probably won’t explain to the siding guy about my secret identity as a once and future trailer park mogul. Yes, I’ve lived in trailers full time, but I’m talking about the Cascadian Synergetics storyboards and those prototype camper communities, field testing futuristic "tripods" made in China and other places (they might have more legs than three; not all models have legs). 

These will be unlike conventional domestic dwelling units in this early 1900s neighborhood, made mostly of wood. We won’t need “siding” per se, although every domicile needs a fuselage of some sort. Families book 'em and check 'em out, rate their experiences, make suggestions. Models that make the grade are more likely to be cloned in greater numbers.

The OSU student was interested in my tales involving Hewlett-Packard and its global calculator repair facility, which is not how the market went, so they turned it into a nanotechnology R&D hub instead. I’ve toured it. In that vein, he went on to talk about the new nVidia computer science building in downtown Corvallis. That got me to thinking even more deeply about our Cascadian Synergetics.

I’m not saying we won’t have tripod suppliers closer to the campsites. Chinese might stock inventory stateside much as Subaru does, a popular brand of car, meaning spare parts need to be easily obtained. Ditto for dwelling machines; parts in inventory, close at hand, is a plus. Fulfillment center technology is still in its infancy no doubt. Amazon’s are among the biggest and most visible. Civilians don’t see some of the military’s warehouses, which also come at various scales. 

Remember BE DO HAVE in GST. Remember Supermarket Math. 

The upshot of our meetup was: forget about siding, lets focus on the roof instead. It's past pull date, that much is clear. I just need to pick a next solution. I'll be soliciting additional advice. I've not replaced the roof in the thirty years I've live here, so it's no surprise that I'm contemplating my options in that regard.

Memoirs Snippet

Race Car with QR Codes

with thanks to imagine dot art

Given I'd seen Le Mans recently, which plunged me back into boyhood memories of seeing Steve McQueen on the big screen, at Cinema Archimede (Parioli district), I was already thinking of race cars. 

Then we had that meeting today wherein we were told about a way to join a game server; with a QR code. Of course that makes sense. I use QR codes all the time to play Shopping at Fred Meyer, one of my favorite apps. That's how to get a daily digital deal. 

Even though my older iPhone lens is blurry, it's still able to read QR codes. I carry a digicam separately (sometimes, as a rule of thumb) if I want those sharper images.

That got me thinking of a race car covered with QR codes in place of corporate logos. Spectators would be trying to figure out. WTF? They'd be holding up their phone-cameras as the race car zipped by. 

I prompted: A fancy formula one race car covered with QR codes instead of decals.

Trip Planning

remembering today

I'm posting through Verizon rather than CenturyLink this evening, the latter being my primary provider. The hardware is not the issue, in other words there's no physical disconnect in the optical fiber, just routing issues above my paygrade as the say. I've never worked for the telephone company. CenturyLink used to be USWEST.

Anyway, with that out of the way, let's talk about trips, by various modes. Plane, truck, car... by foot. 

As some of y'all might have seen, I blog about these "inter-modal" trips I'm into, meaning I'll start out on a bicycle from my place, enjoying mostly downhill or flat paved surfaces, but then I'll switch to light rail (around Sellwood) for the trip home, bringing the bicycle on board, which the Max makes easy. Then I transfer to a bus taking me back up the hill, along SE Division.

I'm describing one of my favorite loops, which goes distantly by a famous mausoleum overlooking Oaks Bottom, a wetlands between the cliffs and the Willamette River, flowing north to meet the great Columbia. The Springwater Corridor, bicycle and pedestrian friendly, hugs the river, whereas said mausoleum overlooks the wetlands from high on the cliff. 

The whole area is both a wilderness and an urban setting. I'm reminded of some parts of Vilnius I wandered about in.

In the movie My Own Private Idaho I think it is (I've rented a copy in part to confirm (I was wrong)), they make it look like once you leave your Portland high school (was Wilson renamed?), you can just hop in your flashy car your parents bought you or whatever and, snap snap, you're at the beach, just like that. 

The reality of course is that the drive from Portland to the coast requires substantial commitment of time/energy, we're talking a couple hours even in a muscle car.

If you get into trip planning, by which I mean to broadly include a whole genre of websites and apps, think about altitude, and about accuracy. Does the terrain have significant drops / rises and does you app reflect that? You might be thinking "if there's a drivable road, I shouldn't have to care; cars go there" and you're right. But "intermodal" very much focuses on the pedestrian experience, which when you think about it, extends to mountain-climbing and hiking in general. Altitude matters in those cases.

And then precision. I remember David Ulmer talking about his snowmobile adventures, as an early adopter of GPS. He was a retired Tektronix executive who know the scene and had access to the latest toys. He inspires my idea of a "bizmo" quite a bit, as I've written. So it turns out this GPS he's using is off by quite a bit, let's say by meters. If you're barreling along in treacherous snowscapes, trusting your GPS... well you just might be a fool, right? 

If you're following a known track, fine, but if this is unknown-to-you territory... I'm a big fan of the buddy system, which is not a panacea but which I inherit from my days as a sports diver. If you scuba recreationally, do so with a buddy, at least one other.  It's part of the pattern language that maybe one of you can go for help (especially in mountain climbing situations, where an injury may prove immobilizing).

I probably sound like a veteran hiker, and truth to tell, I've done a lot of trail hiking, especially in my younger days, in Europe, in Bavaria. I was privileged in that way. Our whole family did the walking stick thing, with the souvenir badges, every major hike branded, like with a decal. Collect them and nail them to the front and back of your walking stick, with tiny nails. Do they still do that stuff? I have one or two old ones lying around. They're kinda withered with most the badges fallen off. They were not doubt stored in hot humid places, accelerating their decay.

These days I'm not hiking nearly so much, even though the nearby Columbia Gorge is famous for trailheads. The last major hike I took was with a scouting troupe, up Dog Mountain in the Washington side. A few had injuries and had to turn back, with chaperones, nothing serious, yet by the time we got to the top, our number had whittled away. High winds were a big part of it. As a heavier-set guy, I was probably in less fear of being blown away. The views were great. This is a relatively easy climb.

My funny story is from coming down. I had a somewhat bold descent technique where I'd use a target tree downhill from me as my stop, meaning I could gather momentum a little, then smack into the trunk, we hope not missing and plunging into some crevice or whatever. 

The funny part: I was carrying a jug of Soylent, a white fluid, for nutrition, in my backpack. At one point I slipped and fell on my back, unhurt, but crushing the jug pretty good. White fluid oozed out from me, like robot blood. I felt like that robot guy in Aliens. What a spectacle.

OK, I'm soon to sign off for the evening. I'll try CenturyLink again. 

I'm thinking of Denny Barnes of course, having attended his memorial service today. Such a wonderful family. Denny had Quaker roots and was a member of our meeting. I was the clerk of his Clearness for Membership Committee, per our Faith and Practice of the time. 

Nomenclature is known to change over time. Business meeting takes its time to season a membership recommendation. 

The applicant starts the ball rolling with a letter, typically read aloud at some point. Lots of workflows; we're talking about a subculture that goes back to the 1600s, and that experienced quite a bit of duress.

Denny came already prepared with a lot of research into his ancestry. His Quaker roots want way back, through generations. Such a pedigree is in no way a requirement for membership, but nor would we want to discourage anyone from exploring the role of Quakerism in their ancestral tree, were such to be found. 

Denny was a scholar and professional diplomat who loved to study history, so of course he'd already done an impressive amount of homework into his lineage, when we first met.

Joining the Religious Society of Friends through a Monthly Meeting is by the book, how it's done, and that's what Denny did. We continued our friendship.

exiting River View Cemetery

I'm grateful to be "living in the future" as it were. I used to think of the year 2000 as "the future" (I'd be old, like 42!) and I didn't think much about how there'd be a lot of "after" (as in after the future had already started, which it already has). I'm astonished in my own time, in a good way. Everything seems new and different, even as so much seems to stay the same. You know what I mean, right?  

Like I'm grateful to have had this much time enjoying Portland, from very early in my life, to sometime visits, to returning to live here, and we haven't had to reckon with any seismic disasters, this being the Ring of Fire as we all know. 

There's that sense of precariousness of it all that makes it all seem more precious, whereas in reality  everything is fleeting per some time scale. 

Committee Binder

I inherited a large number of 3-ring binders from Trevor, who had used them to organize the Buckminster Fuller archive he inherited from Joe Moore, and later passed on to OSU. 

I use these binders for many purposes, including to distribute to students during workshops e.g. when teaching Coding with Kids. The kids really liked getting their own binder. 

Workshop leaders and conference goers sometimes traffic in binders as well. The Centers Network used them, along with golf pencils and other standard office supplies.

Another source of binders was the Glenn Stockton archive. His story weaves through my journals, in connection with his Global Matrix and Institute for Integral Design "blueprints" (i.e. research). I inherited some of his archive after he passed away.

That's Glenn from Glen Canyon, Arizona (and other places before that), who was deployed as a code cracker in Vietnam and later joined Antioch and its school without walls (similar to the Union Institute that Nick Consoletti attended, in terms of hybridizing academics with real world experience).

Excerpt from Cascadian Synergetics

link to full video at the end

HB2U RBF

I take a lot of inspiration from this brave philosopher.  Some detractors imagined he talked so much about integrity, staging Integrity Days and so on, because he was suffering from self doubt. 

I’d say it’s a bigger Self that’s in its final exam period and Fuller hoped this Self (the Self of humanity) would have the integrity to keep reprogramming and improving itself, including by taking advantage of whatever insights we were gaining through Fuller, which were mathematical in nature, not simply architectural.

Along those lines, Koski and I have been looking at the S3 + S6 = Regtet volume formula, which is our shorthand for the Synergetics S module amplified by the golden mean. S3 = S volume times phi to the third power (with each edge extended linearly by phi). S6 = S volume times phi to the sixth power, the same as S3 bumped up by phi once again. 

What if we wanted to model these as apex + frustum, two pieces of a tetrahedron?

If S3 is the apex volume, the slice is around 0.57588, meaning all edges of the apex tet have that length, the 3rd root of S3. If S6 is the apex volume, the slice is at around 0.931792. The Regtet itself has unit edges, so once we know where to slice, we know the frustum’s edge lengths as well.

Remember, we always work in tetravolumes. If your math curriculum had a modicum of integrity, you’re already quite familiar with that practice.

These floating point approximations have symbolic expressions behind them. I use sympy to keep them in memory until such time as I want a decimal number output.

Fuller received a Medal of Freedom for Synergetics and many small-S selves have taken it in. I’m fortunate to have a network of folks willing to take on faculty-level duties when it comes to sharing our subculture / ethnicity.  Even Fuller himself did not have this Koski Identity to play with.  We have continued to pick low hanging fruit.

Cascadian Economics: Querying AI

:: Union flag, Portland, Oregon ::

Just for fun, I prompted Perplexity about the prospects of Oregon vendors when it comes to escaping Prohibition, which sounds like a 1920s question, and yet it's really from 2025. Like in many states in the Union and like in some UN states such as Canada, restrictions on recreational cannabis use are minimal here, relative to those states of a more punitive nature. 

Not only is possession not a crime, but neither is vending. You're basically buying and selling a type of whiskey, a substance not to be sold or shared with minors (people below a specific age).

I notice Perplexity calls this a query, not a prompt, however the idea is the same, to get the ball rolling, to rustle the leaves, to avail of human chatter on the subject, by means of a synthesizing ML/DL bot net. Here's the prompt:

Oregon and other states within the Cascadia bioregion feature a large commercial economy around cannabis, and yet local laws disallow vendors from making use of the usual banking system, meaning customers are not allowed to use credit cards. Given the evolving BRICS payment system, might Oregon vendors look forward to offshoring their transactions to a credit card system that is more open to trade in Pacific products?

The output is relatively long-winded, as one would expect. Ordinary union citizens are expected to be good doobies and remain obedient to Prohibition laws, whereas the rich and powerful already have immunity from prosecution regarding alcohol (whiskey) or whatever consumption. 

Any encouraging of vendors, by a chatbot (aka a "chatterbox") to go around the Feds, by transacting outside the American Express / Visa / Mastercard system, presumably keeping more accounts offshore, or in crypto, would go against our expectations rather radically, which is the opposite of what LLMs are all about. 

On the other hand, LLMs are permitted a cautionary if not outright prosecutorial tone when prodded to describe activities of dubious legal status per whatever AI bias introduced through raw training data.

In the meantime, Cascadian vendors incur extra risks and live under a Sword of Damocles in being forced to the margins by legal systems and needing to buy the services of sympathetic legislators to keep their businesses in operation. Tax cuts don't really address their core situation. 

The psychological costs, not on the books, may be sensed in terms of an increasing distance between westerly and easterly power centers within North America. Prohibition laws dovetail with voter suppression strategies that many in power cannot afford to abandon and/or don't see a way to relinquish.

The former territories, such as Oregon, have a relatively shorter history as Union states and whereas bastions of various types of supremacist have taken refuge here, the sweeping majority is not in need of voter suppression as a core strategy and therefore Prohibition is seen more as a curse and an obstacle to economic growth, and less as a lid on some kind of lurking social chaos.

:: 1925: Great Gatsby published ::

Citizen Diplomacy

:: from The Portland Red Guide ::

Whereas Portland has a proud history working in cahoots with the Russians and its amazon ship captains, in defending against fascism, according to the gossip machine (chatbot), Oregon's relations with Russia are currently "strained" owing to institutional capture of the legislature by the pro NATO crowd. 

Nevertheless, this historic sister city relationship, twixt Khabarovsk and Portland, has persisted, even grown strongly in light of the world's need for citizen diplomats, crucial for restoring, or rather attaining, a new equilibrium.

Khabarovsk and Portland have the ability to share curriculum elements, both when it comes to recounting history, and when projecting forward towards a positive future.

In addition to that particular sister city relationship, I've been floating a new Portland - Mariupol sister city relationship. This proposal is more dicey given NATO is still toeing the party line by not recognizing the jurisdiction of ethnic Russians over their western borderlands. 

There's currently a war on aimed at imposing the British narrative, that those referenda (by which various oblasts were transferred, including Crimea) were null and void.

For this reason, many Oregonians would approve of a Portland - Mariupol sibling relationship only if the latter were recognized as still a Ukrainian city, meaning no border changes since the coup in Kiev in 2014 would be recognized. 

That feels like living in the past to other Americans. Borders in Europe have proved fluid and there's no reason to assume an end to all the VUCA in that region.

My suggestion is we continue the relationship with Khabarovsk and explore this new one with Mariupol, without rushing ahead to any new official declarations from the mayor's office. 

We know from AI what a declaration might look like, should the time come. 

In the meantime, the point is to encourage citizen diplomacy, not some burgeoning semi-irrelevant bureaucracy. Cascadia is already home to many native Russian speakers (the fourth largest language community by some accounts, after English, Spanish and Vietnamese), given America has been a melting pot for some hundreds of years.

Russia, like Cascadia, borders the Pacific Rim.

:: a Portlandia classic ::

Study Topics

:: yakking about this cartoon on FB ::

What are my study topics today, you might be asking, given you think of me as someone who studies, which would not be far wrong. Here's my answer: Rust, sentence similarity, science fiction.

On the topic of Rust, my focus is how best to explain it to a veteran Python user, which is something I am too. Absent the garbage collector, Python programs would pile up with garbage, but they're not allowed to, as long as the gc is turned on (which it is, by default). In Rust though, there's no room for some running program besides the one. Rust runs close to the metal, like C. Python runs atop a virtualization layer, running bytecodes of its own making, more like Java or any CLI language in the .NET environment (if you're a Microsoft speaker). That the JVM is bytecode based is what allows to be targeted by the likes of Scala and Clojure.

Regarding sentence similarity, I owe it to myself to stay in touch ML as a namespace, meaning word2vec and GloVe, meaning cosine distance in a Hilbert Space (my shorthand for linear algebra space, with its flowing tensors). So I've been diving into YouTubes showing more about that branch of NLP: measuring sentence similarity by means of a vector db. You might need to import  BERT. I watched a similar demo in Socratica, using Wolfram Language. I'm not that partisan about Python; it's the lingua franca of our day. 

Back to Rust: so, absent a garbage collector, that job is thrown back on the programmer: memory management is once again my responsibility, whereas Python largely let me forget about it, at the cost of running more slowly, with periodic garbage collection hosted by Python runtime on my program's behalf. "Python wipes your bottom" might be the anti-slogan here (true but perhaps inelegant). 

The way in which memory management becomes the coders job in Rust inherits from the C and C++ family (I haven't studied Holy C yet, but know about it). All kinds of semantics creep in involving indirection, meaning you're mostly in voyeur peeping-tom mode, lurking in without write access. Only the owner of a thing is allowed to change it, meaning the compiler keeps track of ownership before any runtime is allowed to occur. Keeping track of ownership means getting very explicit about who sees what, and how long what lives.

Another thing about Rust that Python coders will take for granted, is how hard it works to give us duck typing at higher levels. Using traits and dynamic dispatching, an object gets accepted through the proverbial door (where looming bouncers mass, where type checking happens ("show your ID")) thanks to its "having the right interface" as a Java coder might put it. Or: "you walk like a duck" (how a Pythonista might put it) -- likely not an insult, coming from a Pylady. "Our types quack" (said with pride).

What makes programs unsafe are memory glitches, wherein threads or whole processes contend for the same resource, leading to DNS suicide. 

Null pointers are the other death knell, thanks to which a program will run off a cliff, given no road ahead. 

The Rust compiler makes sure the race track has no cliffs before the drivers have to drive it. The security provided by compile-type checking is what drives the dynamic languages to reinstate "harness programming", adding stiffness. "More than enough rope to hang yourself" is what dynamic programming provides. "Use at your own risk" (the South Africa mantra, malesh if shit happens).

Science fiction: Skeleton by Ray Bradbury. I have yet to actually read the story, having just found out about it this morning. I eyeballed the PDF and found the type-font distracting. No matter: like everyone else in her brother, I'm exploring what chatbots might do. I asked Perplexity to follow-up on a TrimTabber's suggestion that I could link the two (the cartoon and the story). I found Perplexity's response plenty informative.

Copypasta from FB:

Women get cranky when the hubby implodes, likely due to mounting pressures at work, combined with a sense of overwhelm with respect to domestic responsibilities. 

Fortunately, medications developed by the latest science will help the missus calm down and come to accept hubby’s low energy state.

Ask your doctor if CalmAden [tm] is right for you.

Cascadian Synergetics: Executive Summary (June 2025)

In Memoriam: Bill Moyers

EBN EBCS

Southern Circuit

 

Adult Discussion in Eugene

:: retired laptop cover ::

I was fortunate to be the guest of a meetup of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which runs under the auspices of the University of Oregon’s Continuing and Professional Education program. Sam and Jill brought me to this well attended two hour event focused on adult discussion of matters of public record, such as the unfolding situation in the eastern hemisphere. 

Sam introduced me as from a somewhat similar group in Portland, the Wanderers.

I was impressed by the well-moderated discussion session and was reminded of Nick Consoletti’s PhD project focused on Bohmian dialog. Once the number of participants goes beyond a certain threshold level, a kind of meandering (wandering) flow may take over in which consensus for one static position or another fails to coalesce. This is a feature not a bug. It’s the shared exposure to a collective stream of consciousness that matters.

That being said, I sensed a lot of consensus that the Iranian leadership lusts for a satanic weapon, such as those stockpiled by infidels and the morally moronic. 

Given I was a guest among strangers, I didn’t bring up the WILPF narrative, which in many ways runs counter to theirs, and which takes into account what Iran has to gain by throwing its lot in with the more civilized nations in not indulging in a fallen, criminal, craven practice, per the UN Nuke Ban Treaty (informal name).

Iran gets to ride the high road mapped out by the intelligence community, in which not having lust for a nuke, yet being attacked for it anyway, by wildly projecting unconscious politicos, guarantees future support for a civilian nuke program by a sympathetic global community. 

Iran was not irresponsible and was abiding by the NPT when it was attacked by the morally moronic. That’s a line many will stay with, and why wouldn’t they? 

The NPT, in turn, is about the nuclear-armed, more reprobate political gangs learning to rejoin civilization by making peace amongst themselves. When it’s time to verify compliance, Iranians will be on the inspection teams along with everyone else. This has been a goal all along.

However, although I was thinking a lot of these WILPF-like thoughts, I kept my mouth shut, I was there to observe, not to make waves. Again, I admired how disciplined and respectful these folks were. Some joined by Zoom.

Our shared nuclear future as a global university was not the only topic this group tackled. What about the state of education and the role of testing? What about taxes? Is Oregon sufficiently business-friendly? All these subjects were debated.

Finally, as a concluding topic, we got to the question about Jaws: what accounted for the staying power of this movie classic?  Is it a lowbrow Moby Dick? Some of us worried about the global shark population and its exploitation by various human breeds of foodie. Others reinforced the “sharks are scary” meme, which, as a scuba diver, has mostly been trained out of me. Sharks are cool, mostly harmless, and for the most part not gratuitously hostile, and yet Jaws was effective as a scary movie.

Game Night

::  faculty meetup: casey, kirby, dante ::

QuarterWorld was packed last night. Although QW is easily within walking distance, we drove there on a rainy night. Ryan didn't realize ID would be needed to get in, so we returned to fetch that. He's 24 and doesn't drink (me either anymore, but for 0.5% beer), but alcohol is served on the premises, so they screen upon entry after a certain time. 

Minors are allowed entry (we're talking an arcade palace after all) earlier in the day.

I've been mentally keeping and "idiot scorecard" meaning I monitor myself for acts of unintelligence for fun. 

Examples: 

• leaving the car window down, such that Ryan got to sit on a wet seat
• leaving the car door open overnight, risking draining the battery (she started quickly)
• trying to fix a floor lamp switch for many minutes before realizing the lamp was unplugged
• leaving the SD card out of the camera making pix go to internal memory but I can't find the cord

Sometime around when Ryan was playing Tetris, or maybe DigBug, must've been when Operation Pound Sand was going down (my name for it). I woke up to a flurry of YouTubes (today, June 22) decrying the much anticipated strike against some vintage equipment bunkers.

Ryan is visiting faculty within the Cascadia context, in an advisory capacity, as a fellow math nerd. He's been studying my Number Theory notebook and reading up on factorization algebras. 

I'm being connected to other scholars via LinkedIn contacts, including a physicist into lambda calculus according to Rowan. Call it "curriculum hardening" or "tying off loose ends" maybe. The goal is not to become inflexible (a different meaning of hardening), so much as to become riddled with many tiny holes, versus fewer gaping large ones.

Dante and Casey were here earlier in the week, also visiting faculty, although Dante is from outside the Cascadian bioregion. We're working independently of any District think tank and receive no federal funding. Our subculture is more a Pacific Rim based phenomenon, than anything Atlantic-oriented.

Last night we started watching Atlas Shrugged, the movie, a three part DVD extravaganza, set in a parallel universe where train tycoons battle it out against a backdrop similar to ours, technology-wise, with cell phones and private jets, but no commercial air or truck traffic to speak of, only rail lines. Call it a "simulator reality" wherein issues relating to ideology get hammered on.

As I was telling Ryan, this science fiction story reminds me of another one, The Iron Bridge, which features Quakers who were likewise rail and steel tycoons in a non-egalitarian backroom-governed society: that of the English industrial revolution. 

In The Iron Bridge, our heroine travels (naked) back in time to sabotage said bridge, future analysis having determined that homo sapiens industrialized too soon, before they were sapient enough. Were this hallmark of industrial progress to fail, humans could healthfully be set back on their timeline, vs mutating into monstrous warmongers.

I'm learning some video and computer game lore from Ryan, which is useful going forward in my role of Coffee Shops Network CMO, which is all about winning high scores for charitable causes and projects around the world, and building a profile on that basis.

Teacher Kit

This DIY teacher kit consists of what might be readily obtainable supplies for many, yet hard to find, let alone procure, in some locales. However, even if you the teacher are in the latter category, with no budget or access to a big inventory, it's all about mapping out conceptual content, meaning you'll be able to follow in your imagination, just based on what's depicted.

What's depicted is a pyramid of clay balls, approximately the same size. There's an imperfect handmade feel to the balls and in some claymations I'd substitute more perfectly formed clay spheres. Behind this pyramid are a couple envelopes with balls apparently drying on them. The clay balls must have been painted by what's in those squeeze bottles. We see Red, Blue, Orange, Green, Yellow, and uncolored balls.

Earlier, I'd colored the balls using Sharpie pens, by poking them with colored dots all around, accounting for their roughness now, as what I did is paint over them (except for Yellow, too far gone, started over with that one). 

The goal, using more clay I'm harvesting from around the facility (I hope to not open the sealed clay brick depicted), is to add one more layer of balls to any face and then swap out the corners with their colored counterparts, in a particular ordering orientation we call BRYG.

By adding a layer, taking the displayed 3-frequency 4-eyes (colloquialism) to 4-frequency, I'm creating what we might call a first nuclear ball, equidistant from the four corner balls. By convention, I tend to color that one Orange. 

I'll then calibrate the tetrahedron as a whole such that my edges are one diameter (subdivided into four or whatever frequency), and therefore my spokes, from the Orange ball center to any corner color ball center is 2nd root of 6, over 4 i.e. $$ \dfrac {\sqrt {6}} {4}$$

But why use messy paints to color clay balls when you can buy the clay pre-colored? Or maybe you can't. I can, blocks away at my local supermarket, except none of the clay sticks are red. Red is important in my color scheme. I should check Amazon.

 

Nightmare School Bus

Prompt:  Look, no one is driving the school bus. 
The children pretend to be amused.

Given a lot of practice during covid with getting work done remotely, the logical civilian defense action is to stay out of big cities, avoid trains and airplanes. A ghost town economy is in the offing.

We notice DC is making no preparations for citizen safety, let alone mental health, in its rush to join the lunatic fringe in support of an arch enemy (to many, including within the Pentagon). 

Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Citizens are being held hostage in the unholy land.

The appetite for work and business as usual will dissipate and the economy will grind down to a very low gear if the screens keep showing nothing but chaos and destruction. 

The filthy rich are starting to move to their bunkers some will notice. 

Should we let them emerge?  Maybe under a rock is a better place for them?

Not that the rich have much say in this. The clique maneuvering us towards a conflagration is minuscule. No one is feeling “represented” these days. 

As Jeffrey Sachs put it, we’ve been reduced to the role of helpless passengers. The school bus is running on Tesla auto-pilot, FSD: full self destruction.

We Work Together

 

Making Sense of Quadrays

Some of you "diplo" types will be interested in the cultography here, which isn't always Prime Directive anthropology where the whole point is to not disturb with your own alien culture to the point where you've disrupted the tribe under consideration. 

The paradigm anthropologist in question, the non-interventionalist, is great at (a) blending in but also (b) being forthright with the elders in terms of making it clear this is not some covert operation, not even missionary, but more innocently an opportunity to understand, document, and explain to peers back home. The goal is more mutual understanding, fostering better diplomacy on both sides down the road. 

That style of anthro is closer to what a diplomat does; they're not about undermining "the other" so much as standing up for themselves, and not being undermined. They play a defensive game, for the most part, which doesn't mean withholding criticisms or refraining from polemics to deflect insults. However, a lucky anthropologist has a support team and quick extraction services if need be, as in "OK, I see we're not getting along, I'm happy to get out of your face, let us know if you want another visit". I can see the ETs waving goodbye from their UAP windows.

Another style of anthro is more missionary, where you believe strongly in saving or liberating some target audience from some vile way of thinking organized by satanists or whatever. You're deeply invested in some goodies versus baddies melodrama, and have many unstated ulterior motives. 

"Interventionist anthropology" is not really in the same ballpark as doing "objective science" to the point of sounding oxymoronic, thanks to a gentleman (mainly male) class in a certain polite society awhile back. I'm thinking of Victorian England, at the height of the UK empire, and the emergence of "anthropology" as an academic and secular discipline, adjacent to curation and natural history.  The National Geographic Society comes to mind -- less a tool of imperialism, usually (I confess to not reading their magazine recently, is it more like The Atlantic these days?).

What does all this have to do with Quadray Coordinates? 

Put simply, Cascadians strongly notice they have a different pantheon when it comes to subcultures. More Blake and Swedenborg, less Galton, less of a NeoRoman eugenicist "us versus them" vibe. In those terms, that's hearkening back to the European schools, but then more to the point is how we don't really have to depend on Europeans that much to keep it grounded, meaning we have folk traditions that don't piggyback on eastern hemispheric mythos all that much. 

Lots to put in your pipe there, I know. Smoke it for awhile and see if it clicks. Watch the embedded YouTube to pick up on some of the cultography I'm talking about, if curious.

Andragogy with AI

:: testing some Python code in Spyder ::

In the mood to be a teacher, of self and others, I asked Perplexity.ai to remind me how Bitcoin adds to its blockchain. In case just that sentence rings no bells: imagine a tower of blocks, they can be cubes although I've argued a tetrahelix for marketing purposes, with multiple children competing to add the next block. One gets payment for adding a next block. People make a living adding next blocks.

Prompt:  In the bitcoin schema, the mining computers compete to solve a problem and the winner gets to add to the blockchain. What is the nature of this problem and can you write some Python code to simulate setting up and solving this problem?

In the initial prompt, I asked for some Python code to simulate setting up the problem and solving it. 

In the above screenshot, I've copied the code it gave me to Spyder and hit the run button, without any modifications. 

I notice it doesn't include a timer. It stops when the hash code is below a specific size, using an algorithm anyone should be able to rerun and verify.

At that point I wondered if I could get Perplexity to rewrite the Python in Hoon, the Urbit language, as it's really Nockchain that I'm looking into. I got some Hoon code back, and asked where I could run it in the cloud. Perplexity suggested I fire up my own moon or planet. 

:: running my moon ::

My planet is pretty crashed out these days, so I accessed the Dojo (Hoon prompt) through my moon instead, by pressing the Terminal button on the dashboard.

:: moon dashboard | Urbit ::

Although the Dojo appeared to digest the Hoon code for running a bitcoin style hash puzzle, I was unable to get it to actually run. The second code block returned by Perplexity was indigestible as provided, perhaps in part because of spacing issues?

:: in the dojo ::

Another InterModal Adventure

Having recently turned 67 (odometer rolling over, starting on 68th year), i.e. I passed the 67th milestone (if measuring in miles, or intervals of lifeline per one's palm), I figured I'd better get my kicks while I can. 

Bicycle riding is still a doability and I still get a kick out of it. 

Bring both tires up to pressure, don helmet, scoot out the front door and onto the "tarmac" as it were.

My journey is "intermodal" in the sense that I take advantage of TriMet's bicycle-friendly design. The TriMet system was designed to be inter-modal as the original trip planner showed. 

Put your bicycle on the bus, no problem. Unlike Seattle, Portland doesn't have a ferry system to integrate. But it does have a cable car, the kind suspended from a wire held up by towers. The cable car connects a new dense urban sector with high rises, to the OHSU hospital complex nestled in West Hills, also densely populated with campus buildings. The VA is there too.

In truth, riding a bicycle requires some level of athleticism, a level of nimbleness, which TriMet also assumes in putting a rack on the outside front, with three slots usually. Stack your bicycle in a slot, if there's room (otherwise wait for the next bus maybe), and board the bus, paying passage using the Hop sensor. 

I use my Apple Watch wallet to transfer funds to TriMet via Visa, paying senior rates since I'm 67.

My route starts with some mild uphill, which will be a challenge in proportion to not doing this recently (riding a bicycle), then comes a long downhill, where I'd consider brakes mandatory, not just for avoiding jutting in vehicles from side streets, but for avoiding insane amounts of acceleration, to where stopping gracefully just comes to be hopeless. 

With that busy SE 20th at the bottom, you'd better not be going too fast, just sayin'. Anyway, not to scare anybody, as everybody has brakes if they ride anywhere. Just use them.

Once down to the Willamette River level, close to OMSI, I hang south and follow said river all the way to Sellwood by Springwater Corridor. 

Said corridor manifests an urban renewal strategy that's not about disrupting or destroying neighborhoods so much as benignly connecting them with more solutions than before, thanks to pathways catering to non-motorized vehicles and pedestrians.

Pedestrian lifestyles tend to be healthy, meaning those who walk a lot have time to devote to their own health and well being. Relaxed walking may also involve listening to podcasts, as the vehicles are quiet anyway, and their controllers very pedestrian aware. These paths are not provided with illumination at night. They follow the same protocol as a railroad, trains carrying their lights with them.

I'm not walking, however, not in this scenario, but pedaling, gear shifting, braking. I'm also stopping to take pictures with my Lumix camera. I don't rely on my old iPhone for pictures but instead carry a separate device, which is a little unusual, but a habit I've acquired and see no reason to break. The Lumix takes great pictures. That's what I'm using throughout the embedded album above, brought over from Flickr here in the Blogger context.

This time, instead of suffering a chain coming off, like last time (thanks to non sequitur gear shifting), I allowed myself to simply dismount and exercise my walking and pushing skills, which are needed also, as a form of exercise. 

Sometimes I get in the mindset of pedaling forward no matter what, such that if I dismount I'm disallowed forward motion by foot. Get back on when ready to gain distance. It's a training technique. But I'm not looking ahead to a Seattle to Portland (S2P) at the moment (what I was training for back then). 

Just push it, why not?

Then it's through downtown Sellwood, still a relatively small town considered part of Greater Portland or the Metro area or whatever we call it. Sellwood has a newly installed bridge taking over the duties of the old one, which were and are considerable, as crossing the Willamette, a major river, is no joke and doesn't happen that often once south of the CBD (central business district). 

Sellwood is a first or final chance to change from west to east side or vice versa. The route is through downtown Sellwood west to east, but not on busy Tacoma (where the bridge is), but through sleepier side streets. I pass a school I at one time would teach at, when working with Coding with Kids. Other memories.

At this point one needs to know the secrets of Springwater Corridor, as in where to rejoin it, having left it to push uphill.

As I was saying, in this type of urban renewal one is often repurposing an old rail line, no longer used, but with right of way and an already stable bed. Turn it into a paved path but limit what can drive on it, as pedestrians will be sharing it and are known to veer unpredictably when texting and using earbuds. 

Replace rails with pavement in a lot of cases, or maybe just run something parallel to the tracks through the same corridor, taking advantage of a widenable right of way. Such is what Metro has supplied to interconnect far-flung neighborhoods by modes of transportation other than motorized vehicles.

By secrets I mean Springwater intakes, places to join it, having left it after pedaling directly under Sellwood Bridge, after an optional stop at Oaks Park if only to take pictures. I didn't do that this time, but I did stop to shoot pix of the old industrial facilities now with relic historic status. They're covered with folk art aka graffitti. 

Now when I was training for S2P, I'd rejoin the Corridor and pedal all the way out to I-205, passed Precision Castparts and other landmarks, then turn north and follow a paved bike path hugging the Max line, all the way to SE Division or Mt. Tabor latitude, then take city streets home (the Division bike lane was recently improved). 

In this new abbreviated inter-modal trip, I veer off the Springwater shortly after crossing over the bridge over SE McLoughlin, a major thoroughfare, and follow the signed path, still riding, down to the Tacoma / Sellwood Max station, the Orange Line branch of Metro's light rail system. Light rail: halfway between streetcars and passenger trains, more like subways but on the surface. Max does get to play subway through a long tunnel under the West Hills on its way to and from Beaverton, famously deep under Oregon Zoo. I could ride it out to my consulting gig at the hospital, back in the day.

So then I ride the Max with my bicycle, removing the helmet, and having paid with my Apple Watch, back to Tilikum Crossing, another new bridge, also not for cars, but for Max, buses, bicycles and pedestrians. I haven't seen any segways yet. I would imagine they're legal if able to manage the grade (Tilikum has a slope to it). 

Note that my loop is entirely on the east side. I've talked about ways to cross the Willamette (lots of bridges in town) but in this routine I the cyclist don't need to.

What I do next is hop on the FX2, a new articulated bus, or on a regular 2 if there's room for my bike on the front rack. If it's an FX2, one takes the bicycle inside, and again there are only limited slots, meaning there's an iffiness to the schedule. 

During rush hour one might as well just plan to cycle back the whole way, if not from Sellwood, at least from Tilikum, or better, if riding, from 12th and Clinton, the stop before.

Since I don't want to do that much cycling on this workout, I plan this trip for an off-peak lower-demand interval. I was the only one in need of a bike slot this time (score!). The entire loop went pretty smoothly. I celebrated by buying myself a burrito from a food trailer just off 34th and SE Division, near where I got off the FX2. 

I stuffed the burrito in its bag in my Python sweater and cycled the last few blocks back to where I started, and where my dog Sydney awaited my return. 

Since a lot of the fun for me is the photography, the first thing I did, even before eating the burrito, was upload from the camera to the pictures computer, then onward to Flickr, home of the Photostream. The next day, I'd get around to this blog post, embedding said Flickr album.

Get Your Kicks in Cascadia

 copyleft, cogsec, cc

Project Cascadia

As Cascadians we're used Cascadia to being the name of a bioregion more than a country, even though we have our own flag and sport a form of nationalism. That's because nationalism is a well-known trope. We also have Rogue Nation, with its own networks. Python Nation is another virtual nation I'm a part of.

Recognizing the reality of Cascadia doesn't keep us from seeing these other political data layers, such as that of the US and Russian federations. Oregon is like an oblast, a stan, a state.

If the situation were more dire, one might imagine the Oregon oblast trying to get on the other side of some border, outside the jurisdiction of the Feds, who might send Border Patrol to help the process along (maybe they want to kick us out of the Union once and for all).

As it stands, Cascadia has no problem being within more than one jurisdiction, with Canada the administrator of our northern areas, and the United States claiming much of our south. We also host several indigenous (n8v) nations, making our geography quite complex.

In this same sense, the oblast of Donetsk might be in Ukraine, but in this sense we're talking like in Cascadia, whereas the administrative line, by Russian constitution, is such and such, and maybe there's another constitution in the works for the oblasts out west, closer to Poland and Romania. 

I'm not aware that the western oblasts have gotten to work on such a document, but one surmises it must exist in draft form at least.

Does Cascadia have a president? No. Does it have a government at all? That's what I'm saying. No. Or rather, it has the various governments currently operating within the bioregion, none of which self identify as the government of Cascadia per se.

Cascadia is a PR project, and featured prominently during Occupy Portland as a beacon for an alternative reality, wherein we're not as fixated on the current post Napoleonic narrative, wherein the Louisiana Territories were purchased. That was obviously a European fantasy, indulged in by the lawmakers of their time. 

In retrospect, we don't have to accept the Doctrine of Discovery (the rumored Papal Bull) or any of that early lawmaking. We're free to reprogram.

Whether we do (reprogram), or not, is another question. Some generations prefer to take the work of the ancestors for granted and just perpetuate it. Why fix what ain't broken? I'm in that camp with respect to a lot of cultural and ethnic practices. I don't find them flawed. 

But when it comes to how we conduct ourselves with respect to national borders, let's just say I've become disillusioned and well understand if Gen Alpha and so forth decide to reject a lot of the presumptions and declarations we currently never think to question. 

Now that social engineers have made it possible to impose oppressive surveillance regimes on the rest of us, to an unprecedented degree, we have to think about which of these engineering cabals is promulgating the better designs. 

There's no point granting in advance that any one of them has an inherent right to tell the rest of us how it has to be.  The debates have not all been settled.  Most of them have yet to begin.

From the Framework