Regeniusing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Word Weights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

from Synergetics: an volume 4 Octahedron containing 

the ~2.92 Icosahedron and 2.5 Cuboctahedron

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

We're saying they could be. 

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

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

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

Freedom Fighters Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Memorial Day Meander (School of Tomorrow)

Related journal entries: 

• Memory Lane
• Wild Wild Country
  

The District

Although my friend who prompted me to give Marianne Williamson another look, has since moved on, to the newest Kennedy, I'm not making any public noise about any switch in loyalty, since I'm not empowered to vote in the DNC primary anyway, and I don't want DNC on my political resume enough to want to surrender my Pirate Party status.  Yes, I'm seeing it as either/or these days, and yet at the same time as statistically insignificant.

I'm reminded of my support for Tulsi for prez.  My line the whole time is she's too straight an arrow for a crooked office, we need a crime boss, and that we got.  I should know better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.  I voted for the guy.  I wanted to try a different Mafia, other than say Kushner and Ivanka's.

But what did I know, right?  We all should have realized from the first Trump impeachment, that standing in the way of NATO was going to be a treasonous offense.  A lot of citizens had never given NATO much thought, but now it was going to make sure Raytheon-Halliburton stayed prosperous, so we'd better get used to it or else.  

Once Trump was out of the way, and the old crew back at the helm, we could get on with the showdown, in some "us versus the world" (a tired play).

I like Marianne because she's into psychology and matters of public mental health.  Clearly the schools are in trouble.  I'm watching the YouTubes from teachers on why they had to quit.  

As a geek heading into teaching, I was always aware of the steady stream coming the other way.  I was like that lone vehicle driving into the city where the oncoming lanes are packed with fleeing refugees.  Was I some kind of hero?

Actually, I don't think it's wrong for some jobs to be primarily taken by young people, who then move on. From the point of view of a prep school middle schooler, somebody who just went through college, and therefore knows what it's like from recent experience, is going to be implicitly more up to date on many wavelengths.  More than a geezer would be.

When I taught at St. Dom's in the 1980s, I was fresh from the university and not that different in age.  I don't begrudge those willing to stay and be Gandalf or Sister Joan.  I'm just saying it's not an automatic diss to say a job is skew-bulge-occupied by a younger crowd.  

Besides, I've gone back to teaching gigs with younger cohorts off and on into my sixties.  Coding with Kids for example.  Many times before that, and on many campuses.  Meaning I've had the best of both worlds:  full time immersion in my youth, as faculty, then pilot programs, field testing some new ideas, in my wizard years.

Speaking of wizard years, yes, I think I'm saying I support Marianne because she's a witch, and not a wicked one.  My wife took the name Wicca as a reminder to seek wisdom, not to tie herself to any subculture.  Marianne has a kind of aristocratic flare that actually comes off as presidential.  I find it easy to imagine her relishing ceremony.

The present could use more of Williamson's piping up on the Wurlitzer.  Ditto Andrew "UBI" Yang.  Ditto many of those who've obtruded into public discourse for having run for top office.  Or held one in the past.  These are not voices to gleefully block simply because the press (and/or cable) has the power to do so (or once had).

So does that mean I'm watching Williamson on TikTok and/or Zoom?  Not currently.  

I'll pig out on TikToks only rarely and pretty much leave it to the algorithm versus seeking out specific content.  

That's all raw intel in my book, whereas I'm relying on several layers of sifter-editor to come up with some choice pieces.  I only have so much time for The District (one of the popular soap operas) after all.

Wild Wild Country (movie review)

This six episode documentary (not "docu-drama") revisits the culture clash, the story of worlds in collision, that was the Rajneeshpuram experiment in Oregon.  The filmmakers find a sweet spot between a lot of rear view mirror distance, from events in the 1980s, yet with many of the principals still able to be forthcoming about their personal experiences.  

We get it from the mouths of the horses involved.  Except not from Osho directly (the Baghwan himself).

Teachers will advise you to look within for your teacher and follow that still, small voice (or whatever shoptalk blah blah), however the truth of the matter is if a lot of us agree on a teacher, other than ourselves, and if we all plunge into service mode, great accomplishments of collaboration might be achieved.  

Rajneeshpuram was in that sense a monument to what humans of like mind and sufficient skill are able to achieve in short order.  They built a dam, shaped the lakes, provided both power and pumps, and turned a desolate ranch into fertile farmland.  They built structures and instituted a form of self governance, based on the model of Master and top drawer Secretary.

However, the rate of change was too bewildering for the slow-moving, deliberately backwater surroundings of rural Oregon.  Making Wasco County the site for an annual festival (like a Burning Man) for a global network of centers, was not making Wasco correspondingly wealthy.  On the contrary, the locals were being bought out and/or were fleeing, as the aliens invaded.  Some decided to stay and fight, only to be called out as ignorant bigots (i.e. "deplorables").  

The chemistry wasn't clicking.  Curiosity turned to dread and mutual demonization.

Given time, making Rajneeshpuram a tourist experience, and a gateway to Oregon travels more generally (Crater Lake, High Desert Museum...) would have benefited a broader base.  A whole boomer generation has already embraced so-called Eastern Religions.  The cultural DNA is all there.  However, embedding more seamlessly with the surroundings would have required a longer period of mutual adaptation and gestation, more diplomacy, better PR.  

Naming it Rajneesh University from the get go, and encouraging outsider tuition paying visitors to sample the lifestyle, saying "campus" instead of "puram" might've been one way to go.  Osho could have been the prez, a more recognized title, or CSO (chief spiritual officer).

I should be clear that although I am currently a resident in Portland, I didn't return to this city of my early boyhood until around 1985, when the Rajneeshpuram experiment was unwinding.  I was aware this melodrama was unfolding around me, but not until now, in 2023, do I feel like I have a handle on what all went on, thanks to this documentary.

Arming themselves with assault rifles after the bombing of the Portland hotel was a missed opportunity to get Oregon's existing law enforcement agencies more on their side.  

Their willingness to reinvent every wheel (including chemical warfare) was actually a barrier to better intercultural understanding and integration.

I'm not saying it ever could have worked out well.  Some experiments teach a lot more because they failed.  We all have much to learn from this chapter.  I have a lot more to think about.  The experiment contained so many potentially volatile ingredients we still juggle, such as homeless disenfranchised veterans with no existing governments able to realistically address their situation.  At least this group gave it their best college try.

I thank everyone who agreed to be interviewed for this film and for the thoughtful job of splicing it together the editors did.  Top notch.

Debt Ceiling

As regular readers of this blog likely know already, American literature already foreshadows the demise of a special case financial system floating an earlier version of the United States.  

I'm talking about Grunch of Giants, by a Medal of Freedom winner and celebrated poet, associated with the Aquarian Conspiracy, in turn inheriting from the New England Transcendentalist movement:  R. Buckminster Fuller.

In that book, Fuller forecasts how the mumbo jumbo might go from there, were the USA to retire its debt payment responsibilities in favor of a fresh start, as some kind of post nationalist nation, an oxymoron for sure, but perhaps with more staying power vs-a-vs the imposter state that would otherwise persist.  

I called this post nationalist design USA OS in my own writings, OS for Operating System.  Others worked on a complementary OS Earth as a meme.  We were anticipating the continued rise of computer science, with "operating system" a next metaphor for governance.

After Grunch of Giants, Fuller forecast that the post-USA imposter state would try to bury his work in an Orwellian memory hole, by smudging history.  He passed this anticipatory narrative on to Patricia Ravasio, who later wrote a book about their meetings.  His premonitions were on target as usual.

Fuller was an evolutionary more than a revolutionary in that he wasn't a Robin Hood hoping to steal from the rich and redistribute all that cash to his cronies, in exchange for blind loyalty.  

On the contrary, his "gross universal cash heist" (aka GRUNCH) was about voodoo people (e.g. J.P. Morgan types, masters of the soulless corporate personhood zombies) continuing to undermine the ultimate authority of national sovereignties (descended from "divine right" dogmas) by becoming their underwriter sponsors.  The East India Company runs through all his writings as the boilerplate prototype of the limited liability operation, of privatized profits and socialized loss.

Fuller spells out a similar pattern in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, wherein landlubber royalty received their principal backing from offshore and not solely from internal revenue.  Ocean-savvy pirate networks shored up the city-states.  A monarch would have tools and trinkets no one could produce only locally, adding to their "divine right" aura.  Who wants to be beholden to the people, after all?

Flag waving tin horn patriotism was another form of organized religion in Fuller's accounts, semi-transparently designed and field tested by his much anticipated World Livingry Service Industry (WLSI).  Supranational giants, corporate personhoods, now run the show, at least on paper.  Their cash heist is complete.

The UN, in contrast, pays the corporations as contractors (as do the state-funded militaries), effectively returning any money paid to states, and then some, in the form of profits.  The Grunch is self-irrigating, although it's not a closed system, as neither is Spaceship Earth (its principal theater of operations).

Most readers probably understood this outcome as dystopian, but in Fuller's case we need to remember he had long projected a nation-free world in the form of his Dymaxion Projection.  The political data layer might still persist on Google Earth, but in seeming even a little less diminished, it would lose persuasive power.  People would find themselves increasingly unable to suspend their sense of disbelief.

That's about where we are today.  Phony Intelligence (so-called AI) is always in danger of ringing hollow, popping its own bubble, and leaving its followers to wander off in search of something more secure.  Keeping the show on the road takes work, including the manufacture of consent.  Real intelligence (RI) is still needed.

The propped up legalistic framework known as the Federation (in my scifi: the FSNA or Federated States of North America, or USSA for mocking purposes), continues to teeter on the brink of fiscal meltdown in a kind of ritualistic political theater.  It leans on the EU and UK, and to some extent the UN, for continued credibility and legitimacy.  These bureaucracies prop up each other.  Lets not forget NATO either.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Grunch continues to wrestle with its new responsibilities as the defacto experimental prototype community maker (military bases get much of their attention).  Refugees, both documented and undocumented, pour across borders here and there, sometimes as invaders in uniform, other times as medical tourists seeking affordable healthcare.

The camps many of them get herded into tend to be more like prisons than like transitional prototypical housing (ala Burning Man), with no free journalists permitted.  Even members of the congress in DC don't get to see much of what goes on, when it comes to the TexMex region for example, the province of narco-terrorism.  

For-profit prisons answer to the actual stakeholders, not so much to the taxpayers.  Gitmo defies any attempts by any White House to close it.  AI has a lot of autonomy.  The feared takeover seems a lot in the rear view mirror already.  Planet of the Apes Я Us.

Conventionally, the Grunch has used its PЯ shield of tax-funded nation states to conceal its activities.  The state is the responsible actor whereas the private sector merely does what is asked of it, patriotically of course.  

With the shrinkage of the public sector comes the loss of this veneer.  Again, the outcome sounds dystopian, whereas Fuller continued to insist we could do better than choose oblivion.

Grunch of Giants points back to Critical Path, which does more to take up the war in Vietnam and even anticipates Afghanistan.  Both were written in the 1980s.  

In that thicker book, Fuller does more to make his case, that our transition to a post nationalist era need not spell an end to our awareness of either history or ethnicity ("race" might have to go).  On the contrary, he expected many more museums to return their stolen loot to the indigenous.  Hegemony and imperialism were falling by the wayside.

Synergetics in Schools

I get to present to the 52 Living Ideas folks, an online study group, about Synergetics in Schools this evening.  Once the recording appears, I'll embed it up top.

My plan is to start where Casey House left off last time, on April 30th, embedded below.  He took us on a tour of his Synergetics University website, showing as a link to my website from his Resources section.  

I'll start from there and jump to Synergetics on the Web, my site from the 1990s which I preserve "as is" while continuing to develop curriculum in other venues.  I'll talk about my chronology, prototyping here in the Silicon Forest, right up to the present day.

Thanks to Saturday Academy, I've had several opportunities to teach Python programming in conjunction with various kinds of mathematics.  I've always been a "math through programming" kind of guy, i.e. lets blend the two topics already, given high school is more about overview than getting specialized.  Ever since Guido van Rossum's Computer Programming for Everybody (CP4E), the idea that learning to program could be as common as learning to drive, has been mainstream.

However, given another passion of mine is Bucky Fuller's approach to geometry, embedded in philosophy, yet not theosophy per se, yet metaphysical, and definitely Americana, I'd molded the Python component to be about polyhedrons.  

How would you mix Python and polyhedrons?

Most obviously, there's the ray tracing angle, i.e. actually rendering 3D spaces as stills, or as animated GIFs with successive frames.  I also experimented with Visual Python, also known as VPython, which led me to hypertoons.   

Hypertoons consist of morphic "time tunnels" (scenarios) running between keyframes, in directed graphs through which the playheads wander.  I did a dual playhead prototype with Fuller's concentric hierarchy of polyhedrons my central focus.  I also furnish my Coffee Shops Network bars (in the planning phase) with hypertoon reveries on the screens.

With my middle and high school aged students, though, I developed a different blend of maths and science fiction I've dubbed Martian Math.  I like the alliteration there, but ET Math might do as well.  There's a storyline in the background of humans (Earthlings) and ETs making contact and choosing to collaborate on some project.  

One might imagine on a space program, however these ETs want to focus on hydroelectric power generation, because this is the Pacific Northwest and Silicon Forest is all about affordable hydro-power.

I think I'll weave in at least three Silicon Forest based personalities to further regionalize my presentation.  I'm thinking of Doug Strain and Linus Pauling and how those two did a lot to create an ambient culture, one running counter to reckless militarism.  Then I'm thinking of Sam Lanahan, a personal assistant to Buckminster Fuller and the inventor of Flextegrity.

Pauling helped Americans learn the truth about nuclear weapons testing, the environmental and health effects, even short of testing them in an actual war time scenario.  

Strain, himself a pacifist, founded one of the big companies in our region, and funneled funds towards keeping Pauling's legacy alive.  I was a beneficiary of his largess, in getting to attend the Linus Pauling Memorial Lectures which Silicon Forest industries supported, via ISEPP (Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy).

How about autobiography?  Will I have enough time to squeeze some of that in?  Yes, I intend to emphasize my trajectory from Princeton through Jersey City, around the east coast (including the District), and back to the west coast (Portland) to have a programming career and raise a family.

Mostly I'll tour my Martian Math websites, and then show my School of Tomorrow and Elite School repositories.  We'll also look at what I developed for Winterhaven (a Portland public school) when my daughter was going there, although she wasn't in this class.

I fully realize, through years of Math Forum debates (mostly on the math-teach forum) that my views are to this day considered exotic and esoteric.  Neither one of those attributes is in itself a turn-off however, and tomorrow is another day.

No mathematics faculty that I know of has embraced Fuller's treatment of the polyhedrons, which starts with a different model of 3rd powering and a unit volume unit edge tetrahedron.  

I've been pressing the American Literature angle, suggesting that if you have not heard of Grunch of Giants, you have not encountered one of the critical works in that syllabus.  We might find book clubs based outside the Lower48 that do more to propagate American culture than those in the censorious inside.

Mnemonics

From way back when, I've been interested in mnemonics. I've been developing what we geeks like to call "in opinionated framework" meaning it comes with an initial set of defaults such as a practiced developer might have implemented over time.  

In my case, given my druthers, that means diagrams more than lists, and so on.  Spatially geometric structures are made manifest, but then dollhouses and castles (memory palaces of old) are likewise spatio-geometric.  My preferences and biases need not be foregrounded as somehow contrarian, when it comes to the ancient disciplines of memory management.  My aesthetics are consistent in many dimensions (I would claim).

Those who dump on "reflex conditioning" must not play a musical instrument, or be creative in any skilled way. Why they say (whether correctly or not) that it takes ten thousand hours to master a discipline, is because it takes that long to hard wire the brain, and yes, I'm fine with reading brain stuff metaphorically, even when there's a literal truth component.

There's a slower, more tentative mode, called learning, that even great maestros partake of.  When I shared Python programming with a tiny team of Hubble savants (as in space telescope), I had people of enormous gifts who seemed all thumbs when it came to keyboarding.  That's how it is.  

Specialization has not been the problem.  However over-specialization means losing a center, having only extremists, only freaks.  Without a glue of polymathy, a kind of semi-paralysis sets in.  Such was the critique in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, one of Buckminster Fuller's best known books.

Suppose you're in the humanities, a reader of Borges, you've tackled Infinite Jest a few times, and love Love's Body.  You want to preserve some level of fluency when it comes to reading the sciences and the maths.  You want an illumined right brain (remember, metaphoric OK) when doing so.  You have a good imagination and don't want it to stumble in what, in principle, is highly visual territory.

Your obstacle is likely the machinery of whatever coordinate system and all the differential equations used to show the next tock tik.  Given now, what's next?  This depends on rates of change.  There's a perpetual "falling" going on, called the conservation of energy with momentum a big part of that, i.e. inertia.  Nothing turns on a dime unless it's small and nimble, and nothing just stops, period.  Not without its cause. Not without so-called "forces" and/or "influences" and/or "contributing factors" (the vectors of change).

So one aspect of mnemonics is harnessing this momentum and using it to one's advantage, which might mean taking aspects of one's immediate environment and imbuing them with memory palace type attributes.  

Start with your own locale.

Weave your memories and sensibilities into where you live.  

Why that maybe sounds like strange advice is we do this unconsciously anyway and don't need anyone telling us to do this.  However the memory palace discipline is about extending our unconscious abilities into consciousness, itself a teaching in harnessing momentum.  Do what you do anyway, just more consciously.  Awaken your inner interested observer.

What staves off taking this more concerted "place based" weaving exercise are fears and superstitions about interacting with a private text to the point of deviating too significantly from established dogmas, faiths, practices.  If you read too much into your local private experience, don't you run the serious risk of becoming a weirdo, which comes at a price, such as (maybe) being ostracized or even confined?

However, the psychological sciences, designed for conscious application, are precisely the controls we have in place to keep the show on the road, meaning operable and functional (well adjusted).  

We as dream weavers (practitioners of the pragmatic art of memory management) remain collaborative and cooperative by nature, without much coaxing or cajoling.  We're spontaneously contributing members of society.  We want to build worlds together, and understand that it takes a village.

Lets take an example.  I want you, as a Borges reader, a James Joyce friend, cognizant of Ezra Pound cantos and so on, to have access to my hypertoons, featuring fast and slow dissolves among geometrical (i.e. spatial) topics, many involving spheres.  

We might have spheres in an astronomical context, as in cosmology (e.g. Hubble),  or we might have spheres integrated within a coordinate system, such as XYZ or the CCP, a grid, a lattice.  

We in the humanities embrace the lattice concept, without relinquishing it to STEM.  We might call it a Matrix (emphasizing its pro-generative nature).

To that end, towards the ball-packing lattice, I introduce triangular and tetrahedral numbers, meaning stackings of idealized fruits in the market, pyramiding in two ways:  with a square base, and with a triangular base.  

We will discuss these features, and then point out how these options unify, as both square based and triangular based are patterns within the same CCP or FCC.  Through the Buckminster Fuller vocabulary, we also get the IVM, which he patented briefly.

Once we've made it over the C.P. Snow chasm, from the humanities (PATH) into the sciences (STEAM), via the ball packing bridge, we're ready to reintroduce the polyhedrons, which resonate throughout the arts.  We accomplish this with another mnemonic construct, the concentric nesting of a primitive set, which includes the Platonics, taking the dual (a unary operation) and their first generation "begets".  

Combine a polyhedron with its own dual by criss-crossing edges, to beget a beget.

Those of you who've been our students or share the same lineage, are already high familiar with these well-trodden paths.  I'm preaching to the mainstream, once we narrow that to mean "the choir".  We also slap on some volume numbers, associated with relative size.  

But in so doing, we're diverging from some mnemonic systems already in place.  Which need not be a problem.  Bifurcation, or forking, is not inherently a threat to anyone, but a smart investment.  We have the old ways of remembering, in addition.  No either / or calculus need step in.  We're fine with co-existence.

TrimTabbers Meet

Today our "est person" is Peter Meisen, GENI's founder. He was a co-organizer of the San Diego Bucky Fuller Centennial, which I also attended, with my wife Dawn Wicca and newly born Tara. Here's a link to my write-up on Grunch dot net.

We got to stay in a luxurious hotel.  Anecdote: I failed to bring Dawn some Thai food, getting lost in conversation with Jim Morrissett. Another time though, we had delicious Thai food, in Thailand, in route to Bhutan.

Peter is reminding us about renewable energy.  Remember demand side management?  Amory Lovins?

Those projecting the future sometimes simply multiply the current consumption per capita by a growth factor, whereas the "more with less" aesthetic suggests a smaller per capita carbon footprint, without sacrificing lifestyle.  

More care free traveling, good health care, work-study programs galore, is not beyond our daily energy budget.  Think "global university" (= Spaceship Earth).

Movie Talk

You've probably noticed the steep drop off in movie reviews, in my blogs, over the years.  That's not because I no longer see movies, or stopped writing.  I'm just switching it up some.  "Maybe I'll do the movie stuff on Facebook" might be the thought.

Search on "(movie review)" in all three of these, to see what's here up to now.  My writing style is impressionistic because I'm not in a commercial business mode when I journal.  I'm more in a reverie, mixing movie content with personal circumstances, in a stream of consciousness.  However, that's not an unusual genre really.  It's what one might expect from some blogger.

That period when we had total access to the Laughing Horse Books collection is especially prized. I saw so many obscure documentaries. LHB was what passed for a radical left (meaning interesting) bookstore here in Portland, helping put us on the map.  This store had more than one location over the years, including right nearby my place here on SE Division.

My house guest was using LHB has a hub, hoping to break into the music circuit, and succeeding in the context of Belmont Street.  I was in roadie mode (using her car), gaining experience with the nightclub scene (she was already a veteran, from Savannah).  In this chapter, the store was just north of East Burnside.  She'd do these sleeping bag fundraisers where the price of admission was an old sleeping bag donation, which pile she'd then donate to a houseless supply center (camping inventory).

Because my housemate (basement digs) was part of the LHB anarcho-organizational management structure, we were able to borrow from the VHS library pretty much at will.  We'd return them.  This wasn't about taking over curation, more simply benefiting from having access to a stellar collection.  You'd do the same, right?  VHS was a golden age of affordable and unrestricted recording technology.

A topic to delve into:  the Spanish "civil war" which, as usual, was interfered in by all the other powers seeking to find something advantageous in the altercation.  Check out Ernest Hemingway's role. Germany was eager to try things like carpet bombings, to the envy of many bomb-happy Americans.  

Which side the Yanks would intervene on was not always that clear.  Ford Sr. was leaning strongly towards the Reich idea.  As shown in that Amazon Prime show (The Man in the High Castle), the USA had some amenable (as in capitulating) elements.  Ford later changed his mind, good capitalist that he was (i.e. able to mess with his own head, adept at self reprogramming).

They say Netflix is about to end its mail order DVD service (a way I've been a past customer).  But wasn't that collection much bigger than what's available through streaming?  What level of dumbing down are we talking about here?  I'll be scanning the internet for some clues, and not bothering Chat GPT 3 or 4 about it, as they're not really up to date on any of the latest gossip.

Anyway, here's something I posted to Facebook recently, along with the above picture, and followed with some animated GIFs.

I've seen a lot of YouTubers dumping on Disney for supposedly vacuous remakes with no point other than "race swapping". My response, having just seen the new Little Mermaid preview (before Super Mario Bros):

* remaking perennial fairytales is not an issue. Every generation gets a chance to remake the oldies and pass them on. If we live long enough, we'll see remake after remake of childrens favorites. We might get cynical and grumpy about it, but Disney knows better. Keep on keepin' on.

* having seen only the preview, this remake looks just fine. The little mermaid is great. I don't see any reason mermaids should be nordic characters as nordic seas are too cold and you have all these nasty humans doing their war game crap. Much better the warmer climes, where people aren't uber-pale. In the mythology I grew up with, merpeople were going back to the sea, as mammals, having decided landlubber lifestyles (and their practitioners) suck to high heaven, except maybe in Polynesia.

Pascal's Triangle and GST (School of Tomorrow)

Thinking Out Loud

I'm waiting for the term "fun house mirror" to make more inroads into AI-speak.  Those who angst about phony intelligence (PI) chat machines aren't using the "mirror" image much, yet that's one way to see all this monkey screeching.  Upon seeing our own groupthink mirrored, in a phony way, we go ape.  

OMG, we won't be called upon to think in the near future!  Yet if groupthink is your thing, how much thinking are you doing anyway?  If your idea of thinking is to retweet and repost what grips you in the moment, then consider the notion you've yet to think much at all.

That PI (phony intelligence) is able to reflect our thinking back at us, and synthesize believable-sounding chatter on the fly, grammatically correct, structured, is what brings out the inferiority complex lurking since our great dumbing down, however that happened, usually through schooling and mindless television.  Poet Gene Fowler called it "de-geniusing" hence his "re-geniusing" project.  He was a graduate of San Quentin at the far end of the school-to-prison pipeline.

I treasure Quakerism as a thinking persons religion less because it encourages the recitation of theological dogmas in Meeting (it doesn't) and more because it encourages journaling, in this day and age blogging.  Making your thinking world readable, in principle, helps provide traction by raising the stakes.  

Quakers who don't blog are maybe not that interested in the thinking side of things.  They don't want to rock the boat or endanger future job prospects.  That's why a lot of people quit thinking, out of fearfulness.  I found out when working with Friends that a great many are reluctant to make their religious affiliation public.

Spring Sprint

I'm using the word "sprint" in the title, in a geekish sense, meaning: "a concentrated spurt of effort regarding a task or challenge at hand". Running fast (sprinting) is the operative metaphor.  However in geekdom a sprint might involve sitting with one's laptop and typing furiously.  

I'm repurposing it to refer to something athletic that is yet not running: my Saturday bike ride, the first of this spring.  I plumped up my tires and took off.

I headed out intending to circle around in Laurelhurst Park a few times, a "gear check" I told myself, remembering how the chain had slipped off that time.  

However a pedestrian whom I mistook for Barbara Stross was approaching the corner of SE 38th and Harrison, and my mistaking her identity threw me off course.  I continued west on Harrison.

I could have easily corrected my trajectory by turning right, but I realized I'd been of two minds from the start:  the cherry blossoms were calling (if indeed they had weathered the rains) and I wanted seeing them in person to be the goal of my sprint.  

I'd heard through the grapevine that they were being splendid this year, along the waterfront, near the Steel Bridge, at the Japan America Friendship Park, where we celebrate an end to nuke warfare every year.

So I cycled pell-mell down the hill towards OMSI, by way of Ladd's Addition and all that new infrastructure around SE 12th, put in with the Max Orange Line and the newly built Tilikum Crossing. 

I circled up the 270 degree ramp onto the deck of the Hawthorne Bridge, then headed north along the waterfront towards the blossoms.  

Saturday Market was in full swing.  

The blossoms were in full bloom.

Coming back, passing OMSI again, I bicycled parallel to a long freight train heading southeast, and  temporarily blocking streets, as trains in Portland are wont to do.  

Then it stopped, seemingly indefinitely (I didn't wait around).

Fortunately, I remembered the pedestrian and bicycle bridge over the tracks, the Bob Stacey Crossing, with working elevators.  I could take more train pix from that vantage.  Another train was queued up to go the other way.

The rust patina is intentional, and thematic all along the waterfront (e.g. those trademark esplanade pylons), right up to the Oregon Convention Center, with its deliberately rusty sculptures.

Planet of Ghosts

I have to admit I find it uncanny, in the sense of eerie, to the point of creepy, that we're having dark ages tank wars in the eastern hemisphere ("the east") these days.  I'll even call it "the Orient" because it sounds so quaint, even though I'm using it differently, to include Europe in Eurasia.  I live in "the Occident" (accident?).  OK, maybe not.  Just a thought (trial balloon?). Too much of a mouthful.  East and West.

To me, it's like:  lots of psychological processing never completed during the WWs (world wars) so now we're up from the grave, back on our feet, doing the same ideological battles.  It's like Season Four already.  The names may have changed.  It's still that steady stream of corpses, back to the graveyard, to fight again another day.

In one corner, the NeoRomans (NATO star), proud descendants of an imperial mindset, filtered through the UK, and now bubbling over with pomp and circumstance in their capital city, one Washington, DC.  In the other corner (letter Z), their arch foe:  the Mongols.  Genghis Khan's vast armies, slanty-eyed behind a Slavic Caucasian visage, must be stopped with "high mars" (some kind of rocket system?).

My conceit (literary trope) from my YouTube channel is I'm like "coming from the future".  All this happened long ago, on a planet far far away, and I'm visiting.  I turn on the news and remember how people walked and talked way back then.  So many dead languages.  So cryptic, or so sepulchral as E.J. Applewhite (spook) used to put it (mocking himself in some ways).

I guess the segue to AI is Language, in the sense of "dead already".  Caught in the web are the sentients, the empaths, the beings. I feel compassion for them (for us) somewhat the deaf-mutes (blind too) of Machine World.  The channels of communication are taken up with ghostly chatter, as usual, as humanity (the program, a tale told by an idiot) stumbles forward, the eternal retard. 

Wisdom is from the sentient side (I'm not talking about compulsive outrage, or fits of righteous fury, temper tantrums, puppet shows), and still helps shape the debate (using leverage), always hoping to channel all this vibrant energy towards more compassionate, less horrific, world game playing.  Something fresher and more innovative than digging out the decaying weapons and staging fight club with them.

Vector Spaces

 

I haven't made a YouTube in awhile, relative to my recent frequency of production.  These are non-monetized with a low number of viewers (but climbing with time -- older YouTubes have had more time to garner viewers and so on).  My reasoning:  I'm in a "teaching tunnel" (we meet for class every week day, me the instructor), so why not aggregate developments in the background?

Among those developments would a be a next dive into Quadrays as a topic, an approach to vectors (like XYZ vectors) that's a little different and that I treat as a "language game" in the philosophical tradition i.e. as a basis for an investigation in to what we mean by such concepts as "linear independence", "dimension" and so on.  Here's an opportunity to use preexisting terms in new ways, thereby imparting new spin.

The deep dive began on an archive belonging to the Math 4 Wisdom (M4W listserv).  That 4 was especially attractive, given the 4 in 4D Solutions (my company) might overlap.  My 4D overlaps the Bucky Fuller 4D.  This isn't numerology or mysticism about words.  It's mnemonics and branding, or call it advertising.  I'm doing business when I work on Quadrays.  I consider it part of my job description.

However, the whole topic of Synergetics and the Bucky stuff is mighty alien to your run o' the mill mathematics PhD.  Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics got shelved awhile back, because LW seems insufficiently impressed or respectful vs-a-vs the amazing breakthroughs that've been made around infinity, thanks to Cantor and company.  He just never jumped on the right bandwagons.  Mathematics is to some extent a political process, as Bourbaki well knew.

I ended up continuing a thread, started on the M4W listserv, on Synergeo, more appropriately a home for it in retrospect.  M4W is also about establishing a new equilibrium in Europe however, which includes much of Russia (geographically and culturally speaking), giving voice to mathematicians who care to weigh in on matters bureaucratic and academic.  Citizen diplomacy is not verboten in other words, even on TikTok.

Tying Knots

In today's meditation, we're thinking about life as a process of tying and untying knots, which metaphor is deliberately left wide open to interpretation.

A standby English idiom, to help us focus, is "tying the knot" in the sense of "getting married".  A commitment is formed between two individuals (or more in some subcultures) in the presence of witnesses.  Witnesses add weight.  A community commitment, a contract known to a large public, is less likely to be taken lightly.

The absence of any ties or knots might be described as "completely unfettered" which can sound liberating for sure, but then where's the structure?  How would we get anything done, minus commitments?  We need knots to have events.

OK, now with all that philosophizing out of the way, I can turn to my special case scenario, wherein a wedding indeed occurred, and I got to be one of the witnesses, which I was happy to do.  The event was the reception the day after the wedding, at a facility rented from the working port of Bellingham, a busy place.

Bellingham is a port city in northern Washington State, not far south from the border with Victoria, a state in Canada.

I had the option to consider going by train, but given my job, with fixed hours, the connection was dicey.  And besides, I've been eager to give my car a real workout, given so many moons just sitting in the driveway or driving to Bethany Village for my teaching job (accelerated computer stuff).

Ergo, Sydney the dog and I embarked on our adventure on a Saturday morning at 4 AM.  We were back by 3 PM the next day.

Phony Intelligence (PI)

Lots going on as usual.  I was telling an old friend over lunch at Sckavone's that I've somewhat psyched myself into seeing major cities and their districts (e.g. The District, with its Beltway Bandits), as the power centers.  At the level of nation-states, I'm seeing the theater, but have suspended my disbelief by and large, meaning I don't take narratives at this level too seriously in my global modeling.  

I'm talking about the scripts, the fake news.  Of course I take real suffering seriously, and as a symptom of stuff not working.  

One reason the United Nations didn't work out is it left the refugee problem for future generations.  Too many people fell through the cracks, and got no statehood.  It's still that way today.  The solution is not more walls and fences everywhere.

If you're new to this blog, you know there's some cosmology or cosmography or mythology at work behind the scenes, informing my vista.  It's relatively easy for me to self-brainwash in certain ways.  

Isn't that a truism for everybody?  What's different from one to another are these "certain ways" i.e. some trains of thought will run on tracks I never even suspected existed, or could exist.  

Some readers encounter the railroad I'm running and think the same thing:  what planet is this guy from?  Mars?

So what's in the news these days?  Well, again, lots of stuff.  

The war twixt the House of Saud and the Yemenis might be coming to a close, given tensions with Tehran are starting to slack off, with mediation from China.  All sides are realizing there's enough oil extracting, refining and shipping for everyone who wants to play, Caracas included.  

Also:  Silicon Valley Bank just went under.

From my angle, the financialists, not being engineers, have a hard time getting back to the fundamentals when explaining these developments, such as the whole driverless car scenario, a huge consumer of investment capital.  Investors were ready for their returns, and patience ran thin.  "Running on hype" is akin to "running on empty" (on fumes).

Silicon Valley banked heavily on driverless vehicle science fiction, believing tales spun by Elon Musk and so on.  

But then Musk later came around to the view that for truly driverless functioning, we'd need to solve the problem of making AI (Artificial Intelligence) into RI (Real Intelligence)  -- Pinocchio would have to become a real boy after all.  

That's equivalent to throwing in the cards, instead of continuing to bluff.  We have RI, but in the form of real humans, who still have an edge over the competition.

ChatGPT3 is a wonderful imposter, a fun house mirror, a hallmark of what's to come:  more PI (Phony Intelligence), posing as RI.  Sometimes PI is plenty, but not while driving.

Speaking of PI, the lingering excuse for a State Department is doing its best to explain to the Pentagon how everything is still under control on the international scene (the "theater").  "Everything is going according to plan" say the hapless neocons, as their Nord Stream fork in the road proves to be a dead end. 

I'd say the neocons have lost the battle for hearts and minds, but they'd given up on winning that one long ago.  They've been losers for decades, even while at the helm of their mock government, their fake USA.

Speaking of PI (phony intelligence), Pi Day is almost here.  Pi is "phony" in ways we should talk about.  There's some fun philosophy in this neighborhood.

Lab Leak

Let's help the journalists remember SARS1 (just called SARS) and other virus outbreaks we still strongly doubt came directly from a lab.  Some people think HIV was lab brewed.  Most don't think we had the science, let alone the motivation, to infect the world with AIDS for no good reason (Georgia Tablets?).

So then SARS2 comes along, and kills a lot of us, including lots of people in China.  Tucker Carlson is quick to tie the gain of function lab leak thesis to some nefarious plotting on the part of the Communists.  John Birchy stuff.  

Maybe true.  Every party has its share of severely retarded (mentally challenged) people.  "The Chinese wanted to hurt the western economy" -- what a dumb way to go about doing it, if so, and what a dumb goal in the first place, as it's all one planetary economy (ecosystem).  Most Chinese know that, no?

Much more likely, if we go with a lab leak narrative, is that it was accidental.  This wasn't anthrax mailed from a DC based biolab.  This wasn't some nerve agent from the USSR, used to go after Britons.  This was the kind of thing that happens in Andromeda Strain (science fiction by Michael Crichton, 1969) when someone gets sloppy, or some piece of equipment fails.  

Hollywood could make this movie easily.  A room depressurizes.  Sirens go off.  Lights flash.  Someone gets sick.  Then more people get sick...

So then do we say "the Chinese" accidentally released the "China virus"?  We could.  Many do.  

We could also say "the virologists" released an "artificial virus" (not occurring in nature) by mistake.  Virologists have shown themselves to be reckless in other instances.  That these virologists happened to be Chinese in China doesn't matter, or doesn't have to.  The funding was international, we already know that, as is the subculture of virology.

What looks so suspicious from Tucker's point of view is that a certain database went off line, after certain lab faculty disappeared from pubic view.  

Did the take down of the database seriously impede the world's response?  Was this all part of the plot?

Given an accidental spill would likely result in a coverup, to forestall possible retaliation or other unpredictable actions, removing all traces of the experiment might have been step one in the wake of the spread.  That's not a science minded response, but we do not live in a science minded world.  Pointing the finger at innocent animals, such as pangolins,  is always easier than owning up to a major error.

However, virologists have gotten good at sequencing.  Lots of labs were working with coronaviruses (one of the most common kind) including, we think, in Ukraine, with its share of big pharma biolabs and nearby human guinea pigs.  

Sequencing an isolated virus specimen is not hard.  The mRNA technology was ready to roll.  The virus RNA was easily reverse engineered.  Piece of cake.

So we might speculate that virologists added a little hook to a SARS coronavirus to make a version 2.0, which they then accidentally lost control of, in a lab in China.  

That makes Chinese the victims, who by and large did their best to contain the spread, and by extension the rest of the world.  

The new virus could have just as easily started in Ukraine, or in DC.  

So say it started in China.  Does that make it all a Communist plot?  Maybe it does, if you're Tucker minded.

Family Businesses

I recalling some article or radio story not so long ago, expressing outrage (what else) that "nepotism" was rampant, meaning a lot of people in companies had family members, including relatives, in the company.

What's so unusual about that?  Come on.  Put on your sociology hat.  People employ people they know and think they might have a chance of getting along with.  And also:  family loyalty is a real thing.

If you reach for the word "corruption" at the drop of an "I'd like a job for my brother" hat,  then yeah, you'll see corruption everywhere.  I see family looking out for family.  Mia famiglia.  Ma-fia.  Mafia.

Lets remember another common architectural pattern:  an entire complex, an apartment building, or maybe a suite of free-standing dwellings, all belonging to a single extended family, maybe with a few renters.  There's a shared courtyard in the center.

A family-owned company might well make use of some of that same building.  What if the family owns a high rise?  Maybe most of the apartments are rented out, but there's also lots of storefronts and schools, not to mention a gym, several museums, each with gift shops.  Mixed use.  A lot of the employees are also related.

Yes, there's the problem of choosing someone less capable or qualified, because of these other criteria, in the hopes of someone growing into the job.  Not everyone needs to be in top form to fit in.  Work does have a way of sculpting people, after they land the position.  Learning on the job is not a crime, usually (sometimes it might be).

People are often too quick to charge "corruption" when it's actually a matter of killing multiple virtual birds with one stone, i.e. efficiency is in more dimensions than just the one or two considered relevant by some onlooker.  Who made those onlookers the judge?  Some onlookers are too ready and willing to judge, as if that's their role in life.  Says who?

"Who made you the judge?" that ask in the est Training,  In one exercise, two lines of people would snake around, one walking in the opposite direction to the other (if memory serves).  The objective was to be aware of one's judgements, as various people passed by.

To be a higher judge, learn to judge your judge, and then judge that judge and so on.  Get up to the supreme court level in your own mind at least.  That way, you still get to judge.  But that doesn't mean you always wallow in outrage.  You might even have mostly positive judgements, without wearing rose colored glasses.