To Be Continued

:: narrating my Google slides (February 2025) ::

Many of my readers know about the Google slide decks, which I tend to make public and encourage others to use, because they share what I consider to be vital content, coming from a background as a high school math teacher at St. Dominic Academy, and later contributing editor and educational software evaluator, for McGraw-Hill.

One of those decks (the focus of the embedded YouTube) is more of a personal nature in that I feature my own visage among others in a narrative aimed at fitting puzzle pieces together, pieces of a large size, such as American Transcendentalism versus German Idealism. 

I say "versus" to distinguish them, not to posit some polarizing dialectic. In large degree, these were on the same page. My slides trace a vector from Kant through Coleridge to Emerson and Fuller (both Margaret and her great nephew, Richard Buckminster).

Where I fit in is as a Princeton student learning about all of the above, although being a scholar is a lifelong endeavor and, truth to tell, I'm still putting the puzzle together and some of the above is post Princeton for me. I've simply continued to take an interest in following the action. 

I was Class of 1980, and much of the action I wanted to track would come after that. In my slides, I use the est Training as a bridge, as I started with that at Princeton but was still volunteering after moving closer to New York.

Although said Google deck about me 'n people shows a picture of my dad, whom I credit for feeding my interest in GST a lot, Kenneth Boulding also (both Quakers), the last slide says To Be Continued and I haven't gotten around to my mom yet, but that's where I'm focusing in my latest studies. 

DAF suggested, through prompts to Obsidian, that Jane Addams be reckoned among the pragmatists, along with Rorty, Dewey and William James. She's a co-founder of WILPF, in which both my mom, and Ava Helen Pauling were active members.

Since I've already invoked memories of Margaret Fuller, Loïe Fuller (no relation), Ada Byron (Countess Lovelace), Queen Marie of Romania, and Zelda Fitzgerald, the women of WILPF will fit right in, as an influential intelligencia helping to guide world affairs. 

Strong players of "world game" in other words (my jargon for engaging in Earthian participation, as human or otherwise). 

Mom's bio (Carol Urner's), will then open doorways to other narratives: Jacoba Settisoli, Abdul Ghaffar Khan (عبدالغفار خان), MLK and why not Cub Scouts of America, for which she served as a den mother, in Rome?

Ava Helen is memorialized at Lake Oswego Cemetery, whereas PSU's Walk of the Heroines, provides reminders of Carol Urner and Mary Bolton. 

Ava's partner Linus Pauling was the famous 2x Nobel Prize winning chemist, with one of those prizes for Peace, and credited to her in large degree, the WILPF activist. Terry Bristol, ISEPP president, in collaboration with former Pauling student Doug Strain, a Silicon Forest industrialist, salvaged the boyhood Pauling residence and made it a Center for Science, Peace and Health.

Domestic Matters

We really lucked out with this house in a lotta ways. I've been here since the mid 1990s, and the house was built in 1905. Yet so far I haven't had to replace the roof. There's like a double layer.

I do have critters in the rafters and have used a ladder and like chicken wire to block the one ingress and/or egress I could find, northwest corner, near where we used to have that TV aerial. The dish is unused. The house gets 99% of its TV from optical fiber, with digital broadcast receiving another option, used less often.

Mostly those critters are squirrels. Do the neighbor's chickens attract rats? They'd be around anyway. More exotic: racoons.

The property has a detached garage, which I don't use for my car, a 1997 Nissan, highly weathered, with a still healthy powertrain and new tires. I've got some boxes of C6XTY components in said garage and no, that's nothing dangerous, inert shaped plastic, designed in Oregon, manufactured in China. The components assemble into the sculptures at the front and to the rear of the main building.

The previous house we just rented (own this one) was only a block or so away, around the corner, and it would flood really badly if the sump pump had problems. It was also much more permeable to the elements. We had it checked, as a student thesis project. The wind throughput was considerable. In contrast, this "new" place (since mid 90s) has a leaky basement, true, but that's Portland. The furnace is not endangered. With palettes, stuff stays dry. The space is pretty high humidity though, and low ceilinged except in the washer-dryer area.

After we moved in here, we replaced all the doors and windows with highly insulated hardware, and sprayed insulation into the wall spaces. Yes, the furnace burns fossil fuel, which comes in a tank truck. The fuel tank is under the driveway and when I want to know how much fuel is left, I lower a wooden stick and read the height. Very National Geographic.

My upstairs office was space for successive daughters, who painted it aquamarine and bright red respectively. It's still bright red, with yellowish trim. That sounds kinda loud for an office but the lighting is muted, sometimes is no more than computer screens. There's no bed. This is not a guest room. 

Some years I let my agent fill out the IRS schedule whatever to declare my home office, and its portion of household expenses. The guest room, was Carol's room, sleeps one, although I do have a spare bedroom upstairs that's only habitable outside peak summer, as we don't do upstairs air-conditioning. The office gets hot too but is fine with the deck door open, and a fan.

Yesterday I was out front on my hands and knees repairing the bottom northwest corner of the C6XTY tetrahedron. The stuff gets brittle in sunlight and parts will pretty easily snap off. Solutions were within reach when the prototype run ended, and the product got shelved and time capsuled. My sculpture garden showcases how far Sam got with this spatiotemporal rendering of a scale-independent lattice concept.

This blog is full of information on Flextegrity, as are some of my Github repos.

USAID Family

:: natasha being satirical ::

Given what's in the news, about DOGE going after USAID, among other agencies, I've taken to bringing up here in my blogs, and conversationally, that we were a USAID family in the Philippines for some years. Of course that identity has entirely to do with my dad's work, which paid the bills. My mom played her counterpoint to dad-the-technocrat (lowercase): she was a pretty serious human rights advocate, standing up for the rights of indigenous peoples vs the colonizing Christian lowlanders. I was proud of them both.

However we got to the Philippines care of UNDP, an agency of the United Nations. We even had UN passports at that point, which as I recall gave us special privileges going through airline security checks. In any case, I was proud of that identity as well.

However, I believe dad was somewhat uncomfortable being a part of a high end serve the wealthy kind of project involving filling in Manila Bay even more, to add room for fancy hotels and / or that Cultural Center of the Philippines they built while we were there. 

He was more into teaching the techniques of grassroots planning, like he'd developed in Libya, wherein local administrations and ministries are empowered to develop their own land use plans, armed with their own locally undertaken demographic and other statistical studies. He knew about how you put a cable-like sensor across a road, to count vehicles, get a sense of the traffic. It's not like I followed him around work all that often, just that I'd pick up dribs and drabs.

So I think his arranging to switch to a USAID job was in line with his wanting to practice planning in a more decentralized, advisory-only capacity. He got to fly around the islands a lot and meet with counterparts. He loved doing stuff like that. I think the USAID job really suited him, probably because he helped design it. Certainly it outlasted my own stay, as I was off to Princeton a year or two before they left Makati.

As an expat 3rd culture kid, I do have empathy for families suddenly finding their future plans canceled because of tumultuous changes back in the imperial capital. I checked a few websites in the Philippines to see what might be going on with some of the families there.

Dad was a freelancer, meaning he was not career USG by a long shot. He'd work for whatever governments, for whatever private firms, and he'd work for the UN. I'm pretty sure his work with Libya followed a similar trajectory to the one he followed vs-a-vs the Philippines: he got started with that EUR-based job (EUR is outside of Rome, Italy) but then shifted over to Whiting and Associates, a Nebraska-based planning firm, and it's with them that he had an office in the Paroli area, right near the South Korean ambassador's residence (I was good friends with the ambassador's youngest son).

Dad spent many years helping Libyans plan for a bright future, looking at least 50 years ahead. He didn't live long enough to see NATO ganging up on Gaddafi and bombing the place, with operatives moving Libyan weapons stashes to Syria as Seymour Hersh would later write about.

I never had much respect for US foreign policy towards Libya. It seemed mostly based on revenge for his having shut down Wheelus AFB and nationalized the oil. Who is sucking up Libya's oil reserves today I wonder?  I'll ask a chatbot.  BP and Shell, among others. Figures. When does NATO plan on bombing Venezuela on behalf of BP?

My Facebook comment on Natasha's Youtube says this, somewhat summarizing the above:

Natasha is one of my favorite YouTubers. Don't be misled by the thumbnail, she's being sarcastic, sassing her critics.

People who dislike her anti-Z messages (Z being code for special military operation) think she must be secretly getting money under the table from the USG. She reassures us she's just another everyday YouTuber of the type that depends on the channel itself for revenue, and on Patreon.

I've been following Natasha since she started her channel, already back from the USA student exchange program, which she has always been open about and proud of. Not a secret.

By the way, my own family was USAID for awhile. I could claim USAID put me through high school (although it was the UNDP that got us there -- to the Philippines -- in the first place). Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya put me through 4th - 8th grade in Italy, if you wanna drum up even more scandal.

The Biology of Fasting

I'm back on the wagon, as they say, predictably with regard to alcohol abstention but in my case I'm forswearing food in general, just for a day or two. While we're on the subject though: yes, I've continued to bill myself as having given up alcohol, whereas in reality the "non-alcoholic" beers I permit myself, in moderation, weigh in at 0.5%, and therefore require proof of age at the checkout.

A primitive calculus goes on, to which kids can relate, regarding whether the alimentary canal is yet empty or not i.e. have recent meals all gone through, leaving an essentially empty gut, but for water or whatever liquids? That's what a typical fast is aiming for: a period wherein the body gets to run on empty, and therefore has to break into its fat supply.

Modern biology has learned a lot about our dual mode digestive cycle, the main one predicated on continuous glucose burning, the backup consisting of fat cell break down and a whole different set of chemical reaction pathways leading to the all important ATP molecule, the spark in our metabolic cycle, providing fast energy in quantities sufficient to power muscle. 

Prompt:

what is the role of the chemical ATP in the neocortex? Is what we call "the thinking process" a big consumer of ATP?

Chatbot (Perplexity): 

ATP (adenosine triphosphate) plays a crucial role in the neocortex and the overall thinking process, serving as the primary energy currency for various neuronal functions. The thinking process is indeed a significant consumer of ATP, as the brain uses about 20% of the body's total energy despite constituting only 2% of its weight.

... followed by many more paragraphs of yada yada, such as:

Neurotransmitter synthesis and release: ATP provides the energy needed for the production and release of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and acetylcholine, which are crucial for cognitive functions such as mood regulation, attention, and memory.

Let's assume a body benefits from having its secondary digestive cycle started up from time to time. Use it or lose it, right? But then who in their right mind would willingly forgo nutrition? Well, many would of course. But so-called "cravings" or "temptations" were the business of religions to fight, to which end they could enlist the angels and devils, making one's heart the center of a cosmic drama. Lose weight before Judgement Day or else.

However in a secularized society, meaning potentially religion-free in many dimensions, the battle for better health must take other forms, with psychological archetypes perhaps replacing the supernatural. The ego still has its work as an heroic performer, all the more so given the preponderance of institutions planning to cash in on overusing the main glucose cycle. Insulin insensitivity sets in, according to many a compelling narrative.

The miraculous ability to store energy in the form of fat, for a rainy day, or even for a week of hunting, is there if we need it, but what defines "need"? A religion may provide sufficient impetus to a would-be disciple. What other frameworks might likewise serve, and prove sufficiently motivational? What do we mean by "a religion" exactly?  

As noted elsewhere in these journals, I can see where the would-be disciple would feel divinely and/or supernaturally rewarded for righteous fasting, given what we know now about the underlying biology i.e. the switchover from glucose burning to ketosis.

Owning Gaza

I understand the protective impulse. Many in the Pentagon would love to get orders to defend the Palestinians and help them to safety. Forcing them to stay in a demolition zone, with their affairs administered by their destroyer, still trying to starve them, does seem inhumane in the extreme.

Step one towards making Palestine a true Diaspora State is to grant its citizens their human rights as free agents, able to bounce around the world the way many USers do, or did in their jet set youth, before new economic realities, such as retirement, made such travel less affordable. 

Expressions of the US taking ownership, while hard to interpret into international law, conveyed at least some sense of taking responsibility and wanting to do right by the surviving Gazans. Of course not all Pentagoners are so charitably disposed, which is why I've long placed its icon on both corners of the GST diagram.

The Virtual States model is about any and every state seeing itself as a planetary agency, however spread about and/or concentrated in specific cities and campuses, port facilities, museums and so on. 

My convoy of cruise ships, Disney's among them, poised to evacuate victims of a monstrous attack, was science fiction when first proposed, with branding added for realism. The discussion then turned to where were these rescue ships going? I had some ideas. 

Given the White House rhetoric, one might think "to the Americas" in many cases. But with what sense of permanence? Clearly the evacuation should not be coerced, with more campus facilities being constructed locally for those electing to remain at the demolition and construction sites. Many would welcome a temporary leave of absence.

My Asylum City drawing boards have been about serving refugees more generally, and creating meaningful work in the process, especially for those in the health care, shelter, and transportation businesses, in addition to everyday support logistics (food, water, clean air). 

The NGOs have their prototyping functions, per Project Renaissance. The cities all learn from each other.

The goal of a refugee family is not to get lost in some bureaucracy as nameless numbers, but to get itself well documented and wired up to support services. Having such a goal would require trust on the part of the family vs-a-vs the bureaucracy in question. 

Obviously no one is eager to aid and abet their hunter-attackers, which is why a kind of firewall has been proposed, providing refugees with a degree of privacy as well as protection.

How the process of extending documentation and protection to all humans aboard Spaceship Earth actually pans out depends a lot on how aware of the challenges the various systems architects have become, thanks to their training and previous experience. 

Many systems architects have been seeing through the lens of the United Nations. Putting on USG glasses just makes the world seem crazy-distorted when coming from such a place. The Tower of Babel is still a reality, especially where Abrahamic religions, and their spinoffs, are concerned.

Matryoshka Dolls

:: Simple Tensegrity by Kenneth Snelson (for Tara) ::

Koski and I have developed a conversational habit of sometimes referring to a polyhedron as a "guy" e.g. "smallguy" is shorthand for a certain cuboctahedron in the hierarchy. By "hierarchy" I mean "set of nested polyhedra" and not just any set, but a specific one. 

I don't really expect the "guy" parlance to spread, but it does get me to "dolls" and Chicago, the musical. How do the "dolls" in "Al Capone" world overlap with "flapper" (anthropology hat on)? Perplexity.ai has an answer. 

My cartoon bio of Bucky would have him hanging out with Al Capone during Prohibition, and with rich controller oligarchs who still enjoyed their alcohol. That'd be circa 1927.

The lunge towards Canada provoked a backlash that's great for School of Tomorrow, as our story has centered on parts of the Anglophone world feeling colonized and oppressed by other parts. The UK feels somewhat haunted by those Menwith Hill monsters (giant domes) whereas Canada is always sensitive to its imperial-minded neighbor. 

I remember hanging out with WUSC volunteers, and picking up the vibe way back then. WUSC was in Bhutan, but not the Peace Corps, as the Network of Unaligned Nations (NUN lets call it) was suspicious of siding with any polarizing "superpowers" -- with good reason.

In our curriculum, the University of Toronto types were feeling oppressed because the Defense Early Warning system, while Canada-based, was claiming exclusive use of classified US IP (intellectual property) and was therefore closed off to alien intelligence, even allied. 

Likewise much of the IP wrapped up inside of AI (aka "pseudo-intelligence") is of Canadian origin, yet egomaniac pundits in the USA will blithely take credit, meanwhile accusing others, such as Chinese, of theft (as if it were somehow theirs to begin with).

The fun science fiction around DeepSeek is it trained on Chinese characters, a bigger data set, and the vectorizers were just that much tighter already, accounting for the decreased training energy costs. When you start out Anglophone, you pay for overhead and a lot of GIGO, hence the orders of magnitude bigger training farms with brute force chips.

You may recall (if you fish in my pond) that I draw from the Siobhan Roberts Donald Coxeter bio, The King of Infinite Space, when telling the story of the H.S.M Coxeter - R.B. Fuller relationship, most obviously memorialized with Bucky's dedication in Synergetics. They were employing entirely different disciplines I'd argue, but with overlap. 

Bucky was more running a business, with himself shopped out as faculty to contracting universities and teams of architects wanting unfettered access to his IP. That's more where I've been coming from as well, keeping it a self employment proposition, with School of Technology a welcome exception on many levels, and a resume perk when it comes to teaching Python.

My network has brought me back into LinkedIn thanks to tightening my curriculum a little more in the K-7 arena, whereas I usually pick up around eighth grade and roll forward, building out with more coordinate system experience, continuing Portland's practice of using MIT Logo in the elementary years. Along those lines, I'm studying to what extent artists have already anthropomorphized the polyhedra. Sure "hedron" means face, but how often does our iconic cube (emblem of Neo-Rome) come with facial expressions?

You might think I'm trying to sneak in Quadrays at the 8th grade level, and you'd be right, although I might quibble with "sneak" as the right word, as there's nothing especially sneaky about pointing to one's own research, when in a teacher role. I'd argue it's expected. Quadrays are an XYZ lookalike in some respects and therefore reinforce what we typically teach anyway.

The lunge towards Canada was also a new Golden Age in US history, which connotes / connects to the Roaring 20s, already a focus on my end, given the ladies farm and Great Gatsby connection, back to flapper, back to doll, as in Guys and Dolls and the "djangsta pony".

G4C 2025

G4C: a Gathering for Carol. 

One of Carol’s TRC associates in Lesotho reached out some time ago for some links. Maseru folks have been processing her passing, two years ago yesterday, on January 30 of 2023. 

She (mom) was born in 1929 and lived to be 93. Husband: Jack Urner (dad); Kids: Julie (my sister) and me.

We were of course aware of the date here, with Tara visiting. Sheila Goldberg called, well-knowing the date, and sending a well-meaning heads up regarding the active volcano some 300 miles off the Oregon Coast.

The day before, we celebrated Chinese New Year. Dr. DiNucci joined us. He played a big role in Carol’s care, especially when it came to those blood tests, home administered after awhile.

Fortunately, said submarine volcano, while quite likely to blow, even this year is, not of the kind likely to beget either an earthquake or a tsunami, Oregon being vulnerable to both.

TRC: Transformation Resource Center.

Playing with Patches

Whether to "chalk it up to coincidence" means anything, or not, I found it interesting to come across a ping, someone pinging me, with what looked to be a matplotlib figure. 

That prolly doesn't make much sense; lemme explain: getting good-looking plots, like bar graphs, histograms, pie charts, more exotic yet expected other statistician-invented forms (KDE plot, HeatMap), and having them be data-driven i.e. painted by numbers you're studying, is the job of a few open source tools such as matplotlib.

But then matplotlib can do so much more, providing general purpose geometric objects and control over their attributes and relative placement. A subpackage even gets into 3D (rotatable) 3-way renderings. One may enjoy hours exploring the ins and outs of this fascinating free package. Most users learn just enough to get by, as is true in my case, so I was letting Gemini shoulder the burden and boost the coding proficiency, which it did, dutifully.

The guy pinging me was on Facebook, Esteban again, regarding a narrative he has, regarding a point and/or ball and it's Flatlandesque transitions through some stairway to heaven dimensional ladder, only to start back at the beginning, somehow transformed. I'm referring to Flatland by Edwin Abbott, a satirical work about the varying degrees of awareness enjoyed by strictly dimensionally-defined beings.

Geometry in other words; we're comparing notes about circles 'n stuff. I take Abbott to be taking us through Hilbert Spaces, each rung of higher D. 

Esteban shares this graphic of mechanically perfect circles, shaded by color, semi-transparent, while meanwhile, on other nights, I'm leading a class in precisely this area: a how-to vs-a-vs matplotlib and related packages within the Python ecosystem.

I should digress and remind readers how each computer language is like "of a tribe" in that an ecosystem of users and developers emerges to staff positions and administer tribal governance. Maybe it's an inhouse language that belongs to an academic department. If you make friends there, they let you use it. Circumstances vary.

My trajectory was to see a Perl culture somewhat suffused with Python, and then with Ruby. Then Java took off. We've enjoyed a design science Renaissance, with a plague and everything! 

My portal into these undercurrents was via O'Reilly's open source conventions in Portland, Oregon. In some of those years, I was even helping staff an O'Reilly School booth, long story. Nowadays we're up to Rust and Zig. Which isn't to say some of the old die-hards aren't still around.

Open source is an umbrella term for a lot of such languages, and accounts for how they've become widely spread. Right now "open source" is in the buzz because of DeepSeek's splash debut, causing another "Sputnik moment" in the 'Murican Psyche. 

When Python takes off in Brazil and South Africa and no one is confused about why: smart language, smart peoples. The language was a product of Dutch brains in the first place. EuroPythons predate Pycons. 

Many representatives come to Pycons, which I'd also go to (in addition to OSCON). 

In the course of doing all this, I'm passing out some of the latest AI write-ups about me and what I've been up to. I know of cases where individuals have been displeased by stochastic gaffs. In my case however, with Perplexity at the helm, I wasn't disturbed by the results. Predictable. As the doctor ordered. I'm interested in curriculum and education, and have worked on some examples, such as on what I've called Martian Math.

Anyway, to continue with my story, I went onto colab.research.google.com, like I do in the class I'm leading, and asked Gemini to write me a matplotlib-using Python program that'd blend together shaded semi-transparent circles and thick black dotted lines. I prompted for that in the Gemini prompt box and got back a complete program, that ran correctly unmodified.

The result was not diagrammatically significant, given how much it depends on random numbers, but then I wasn't aiming to produce something significant, so much as in the style of, a similarity in one dimension, we could say a tenuously narrow one.

So here's the resulting Gemini-generated graphic, in response to my prompt:

 And what was that prompt again? 

Use matplotlib to draw a figure containing several partially overlapping circles of different colors and partial transparency, along with assorted dotted thick black lines at various angles.

Of course if I wanted it even more perfect, I could omit the spines, labels, tick marks, and take manual control of Circle placement. 

On class the night previously, we were not considering Circles at all, but Rectangles, which were used to construct the data-driven count and bar plots, even histograms, of our dreams. 

I'm harkening back to the coincidental juxtaposition of this content, with the schematics of another Facebook artist, Esteban Trev.

By the way, Circles and Rectangles are both in a taxonomy with a more umbrella term: Patches.

 

Pilot Study

MLK Day 2025

Did DT mention MLK anywhere in his inaugural speech today? Follow-up: he did. Did many, if any, commentators mention his taking advantage, or not, of this coincidental convergence or church and state? 

My schedule had me working through the speech, walking the dog Sy etc. but I’m taking in the postmortems. Yes, I think of MLK as standing for “the church” side of the culture. He was martyred. But then the church has been an agent of secular apartheid as well, in other chapters.

I’ve been somewhat focused on the TikTok USA story as it has a lot to teach about network dynamics, what with the short Sunday ban and the migration of many TT USA refugees to RedNote (more Yelp like than TT), to try it out, and to raise a finger to those with a “war with China” agenda. 

Those who wanna use the game board for juvenile Superpower Wars oughta settle for simulations, complete with retro skins. I’ve already got my Planet of the Apes sims going, modeling present reality (wave to Bibi).

Beyond that, I was back to rendering around Matryoshka Dolls, the polys, which I’ll sometimes call guys as well. 4guy rhymes with 4eye, the latter being a term Struppi (German connection, Telegram) uses. For tetrahedron if you need some decoding. I’m part of an inbred cliquey elite that does “tetra-volumes” or — tvs, complete with old fashioned “rabbit ears” (that’s a pun on the Quadrays apparatus).

In IVM world (vs XYZ world), we have a couple diamond faced dolls, the RT and RD, R for rhombic. The polys show up in Casino Math as dice, blending into the decor as more bling. Crazy Diamond combinatorics: those Coupler builds, of As and Bs.

I’m picking up on “Golden Age” (a meme) as echoing “gilded” i.e. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s world of high income inequality but with giddy hopes, pre the 1929 Wall Street crash (another ponzi pop) and the rise of Military Socialism as a means of defeating a Reich, and depression bailout. Social Darwinism took on new forms, given its strong roots in Angloterra. 

Military style base-centric development has its perks, as the Russians are experiencing today. But it’s a myopic strategy over the long haul, to focus on killingry (decay) over livingry (cay). Uncle Sam became a decadent addict and passed away, after prescient warnings. USA OS survives in the underworld, still a figment of the  collective unconscious.

:: curated usa os iconography by daf w/ ai ::

Oregon Fever

Prompting Perplexity: Sometimes the word "fever" has a positive connotation. What can you tell me about that?

Response:

While fever is typically associated with illness, the word "fever" can indeed have positive connotations in certain contexts:

1. Excitement and enthusiasm: "Fever" can describe a state of intense excitement or enthusiasm, as in "football fever" or "election fever"[3]. This usage conveys a sense of heightened energy and passion.

2. Creative intensity: In artistic or creative contexts, a "fever dream" can refer to something wildly imaginative, surreal, or bizarrely captivating[7]. This usage suggests a positively intense or mesmerizing quality.

3. Intense focus or dedication: Phrases like "gold fever" or "spring fever" imply a strong, often positive obsession or desire for something[3].

4. Cultural phenomena: "Fever" can describe widespread, enthusiastic interest in a trend, event, or cultural phenomenon, as in "Beatlemania fever"[3].

5. Beneficial bodily response: From a medical perspective, fever can be seen as a positive defensive mechanism. It stimulates the immune system, potentially preventing the proliferation of pathogens[2].

In these contexts, "fever" metaphorically represents intensity, passion, and a heightened state of being, often with positive associations despite its primary medical meaning.

Citations:

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7717216/
[2] https://straightbamboo.com/purpose-meaning-fever/
[3] https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/fever
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Febrile
[5] https://healthmatters.wphospital.org/blogs/got-a-fever-find-out-what-it-may-mean/
[6] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2367118/
[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/p5w9kc/what_does_the_phrase_fever_dream_mean/
[8] https://www.dictionary.com/e/denotation-vs-connotation/

Hiker Paradise

That's the PR anyway ("hikers' paradise"). I've been sampling the YouTube genre of "hikes gone wrong", a lore passed along by hikers themselves as a set of cautionary tales. Sometimes they're just reminders: you can do everything right and still lose out. Taking along a device with the new "rescue me" button, which sends an sos signal over cell, is often recommended, but even one of those won't save the day in all circumstances. I think we all know this, but the details still matter.

From such cautionary tales, I'm able to feel reminded of life's lessons, which merit going over, even if one is not doing any neck-risking mountain climbing or even skiing. My Seattleite side of the family has the skiers, both on water and on snow. I managed to get somewhere with downhill skiing but haven't tried it since the 1980s after a successful run in New Jersey (I forget which mountain, maybe Eddie knows). That was back when I was a math and history teacher for a small elite academy for young ladies, and in my 20s.

One of the best hiking trips I did was backpacking into Lake Bertha with Tom Connolly. We elected to forge ahead even though hikers coming the other way said the weather was against us. What's a little rain storm? This sounds like the beginning of a cautionary tale, but we made it fine, if drenched. 

My main memory of that sojourn was the little deer eating my T-shirt off the line, like a goat might do. Damn. But it let me walk right up to it (no fear) and yank the T-shirt back out, as a little bit of it was dangling out of its mouth. I hung it up to dry without rinsing it and it turned stiff as a board thanks to deer saliva.

Lake Bertha is in Glacier Park and this was part of a longer trip involving Gutless, my Honda Civic, and our road trip to Montana. The late Tom Connally and his family (whom I'm still in touch with) hailed from Missoula. He wanted to show me his roots. We had a blast.

Yakking on Facebook (continued)

Another tie-in with Wittgenstein is that Part 2 of his posthumous Philosophical Investigations focuses on "aspect shifts" and their importance to "getting the meaning of". Like "gestalt shifts" -- with the easy example of the duckrabbit. 

It's when one is able to shift one's perceptions somehow, that it all clicks into place, and one might even say "ah hah!" or "eureka!"  

Going from "5+5=12 is nonsense" to "5+5=12 makes perfect sense -- in base 8" might be like a light going on. 

That's more likely to happen if you're already primed to know about bases and just need a little reminder from your post-Sputnik 2nd grade New Math or whatever. Or you went into computers and learned octal and hex.

But if they've not self-consciously studied "number bases" as a topic (as the Common Core recommended dropping, making Americans dummies again) then explaining the punchline is like explaining a joke. If they don't smile and chuckle right away then you face the ordeal of explaining about position notation, carrying, powering and all that (yawn). Not worth the effort maybe. Save your jokes for those who might get them (hard to know in advance).

Cubes may fill space, but if we wanna start by closest packing same-size marbles, and filling in space that way (with gaps), then the cubes lattice might not be where we want to end up. 

In going for maximum ball-to-space density (~0.74) and omni-symmetry, we end up with one ball to start, 12 around it (6 squares, 8 triangles), then bump up the frequency (between ball intervals) to 42, then again (92), then again (162) and so on: 10 * F * F + 2 where F = 1, 2, 3, 4... See HSM Coxeter's remarks to that New Yorker fact checker, verifying Bucky got it right.

Anyway, that's where we get our skeletal frame, our iconic ghost ship (cuboctahedron) adrift in the IVM ocean. Always 12 balls around 1. 42 around that... 

Said lattice is all tetrahedrons and octahedrons, of relative volume 1 to 4 (no matter how long each edge, just keep them the same) and relatively twice as many 4eyes as Richard Katrinho Rasteirinho Haileisela shows in his video, with the omni-triangulated space-filling rhombohedron of volume 1+4+1 = 6, same as the space-filling RD.

I suppose there's a chance Bucky invented "allspace" as a term, however the practice of filling space with uniform and/or complementary space-fillers, the volumetric analog of tiling a surface (without gaps), is a game played since ancient times (since Archimedes at least). Within that scope, there's the game of finding shapes that do so all by themselves, like cubes and RDs do, without need of left and right handed versions. 

Some tetrahedra do that, if not the regular ones, and Synergetics does a lot to map this territory, overlapping work by mathematicians such as Sommerville and Goldberg. 

Fuller's A & B make an AAB (left and right A plus a left or right B ) the so-called MITE (MInimum TEtrahedron), an important space-filler that ends up with no outward handedness.

Sure we can throw the door open to other iconic representations of surface and volume, beyond the square and cube. There's the hexagon. There's the sphere. 

What's true about the triangle and tetrahedron though, is they're each more minimal than their respective counterparts, nor is it clear that either might be undercut. 

In that sense, the tetrahedron makes a strong case for being primary: the simplest cage, the fewest edges to carve inside from outside (the sphere being a complex membrane relatively speaking). The tetrahedron beats the cube at its own game so to speak, with only six edges instead of twelve. Now that it's finally had a chance to strut its stuff, as unit volume, the cube feels a bit on the ropes these days. Some qyoobists are circling the wagons already.

The cube-minded orthogonalists are very much not accustomed to having their authority challenged and I enjoy seeing them get so annoyed, as they don't have a leg to stand on, if their goal is to make us go away. 

Even if I have more tolerance for imaginary "fictional" structures (prefrequency) that do no load-bearing, I'm still able to appreciate the many advantages this new brand of 4D talk brings to the table. 

It's a privilege to question the authority of the hypercross dogmatists, even from the perspective of another ghost ship captain.

Yakking on Facebook

Esteban Trev HNY ET. I studied philosophy in university with everyone saying “whaddya gonna do with that?”. They predicted I’d end up in IT, which is fairly correct, but I also kept doing philosophy as a hobby, and that ended up adding to my net worth.

Anyway, the philo guy I zoomed in on most was Ludwig Wittgenstein, wondering if you’ve grokked him. I live until the 1950s. He came out with essentially two famous philosophies with an interim in between. From a very rich Vienna based family, fought for Austria as an artilleryman, made a prisoner of war.

But he skipped out on being rich, ironically because his family put pressure on the siblings to really succeed, make a name for themselves, and since he was born into a rich family, becoming rich was not an option, as he was rich already. No fame and glory down that road for sure.

So he lived like a hermit so he could pal around with other philo guys, like Bertrand Russell, and investigate the meaning of language to its logical (or illogical as the case may be) core.

When it comes to your example of 5 + 5 = 12, his later talk was of “language games” and he’d give examples of simple games in his posthumous Philosophical Investigations (book) which overlapped his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Some guy says “slab” and another guy brings him a slab. He sketches these actions, sometimes involving color coding and lookup tables.

It’s branching off the latter philosophy that I’d bring up the game of Quadrays and the Alternative Volumes Table (AVT) that goes with.

Games as a concept come with rules, fouls, but also innovation, and maybe episodes of ambiguity, when people just aren’t in agreement on how the rules should extend in some special case situation.

Speaking of which, this will seem tangential: I’m interested in sports wherein someone does an amazing move that’s not explicitly against the rules, but then it’s banned right away after.

I learned of two such examples recently on YouTube. (1) A figure skater does an actual flip on the ice, heals over head. She lands gracefully but the sport’s judges don’t relish all the neck-breaking and cleanup that’d stem from many imitators failing, on and off camera. Similarly: (2) a long jumper dude set a record by including a flip in mid air. Wow. Banned. Same reasons I imagine.

A lot of people aren’t familiar with what a contrarian Cantor was. I’ve read some of his original stuff and found out he took on our notion that “space is three dimensional” big time. If you ever allow your space to be both finite and discrete for some reason, i.e. let infinity drain away, then Cantor will say: hey, I can visit all your points in sequence, like we do in computer memory, so why do we say your space is “3D” even if XYZ works for ya?

At which point the mathematicians get defensive and say “yadda yadda” and innovation occurs.

A lotta layfolks will answer “space is 3D because I only need 3 coordinates, x, y, and z” (Cantor: you sure you don’t need less?). But then an athlete stunt man comes along and says “space is 4D because 4 coordinates works just as well and the minimum inside-outside made of edges faces four ways when enclosing a center”.

At this point, I could add: 5 + 5 =12 i.e. if you make your base different, a tetrahedron instead of a cube (different base shape), or 12 instead of 10 (arithmetic base), you get new moves, new rules, and therefore new truths. You get new truths for new games. Language games. And sometimes there’s confusion about which game we’re playing.

A Last Quaker Meeting in 2024

I made it to Multnomah Quakers today. I finally figured out how to donate using PayPal. Dawn would always write checks from our business account as I recall: Dawn Wicca and Associates (DWA), not publicly traded. Our last meeting of the year. Donations usually go up in December, as we close out our financial year.

Last weekend I visited Bridge City Monthly Meeting in the architecture museum on Grand Avenue, devoted to old Portland. My standing joke is when Quakers sit still, all quiet like that, on the museum's 2nd floor, they turn into a diorama. The way it was. Like a wax museum. Uncanny valley right?  

Kitty-corner is what used to be the two-story US Bank building, with CubeSpace likewise on the 2nd floor. CubeSpace was prototypical of WeWork, a place for geeks to set up offices, and for user groups to hold meetups. I attended a lot of meetings there.

I crossed paths with Lew Scholl at the top over Mt. Tabor the other morning. I'd decided to take the summit relatively early (say compared to yesterday), using the stairs from lower to mid reservoir on the west facing slope. I have lots of pictures of those stairs (see above) as my habit is to carry a camera, in addition to the cell phone being a camera. 

Lew is like the logistics supervisor for the Meeting in a lot of ways, doing property management. He's an engineer by training. Thanks to his efforts, the Meeting, a nonprofit, enjoys rather state of the art equipment, including when it comes to heating and cooling. The building itself has come a long way since the early days, when I first started going there as a kid. 

My friend Dr. DiNucci, long time president of Humanists of Greater Portland, is these days serving in a capacity not unlike Lew's in that he orchestrates these hybrid live action Zoom events that people are into these days. A contingent wants to join from home, whereas the more public in person venue is what others might prefer. The same individual might attend over the internet one Sunday, and in person the next. Quakers have Meeting for Worship by Zoom, although maybe only on set Sundays.

I met Sonya today, one of the Friends I've known for the longest time, since the Urners, Martins and Pinneys would all pool their kids and let us play together. Some of my earliest memories involve the Pinney family. I also recall crashing on their couch briefly, upon returning to Portland that time. Memories fade. 

Everyone in that family is beautiful and vivacious. Phil, the dad, was a master gardener, the kind of guy who could keep whole estates going, and his own on the side.

Sonya was catching up about our way of memorializing Carol Urner, my mom, with the Gatherings for Carol (C4Gs). There's one in the planning for Lesotho this year. Carol and Jack were key players in Maseru for some years, part of the social scene. 

Apartheid was ending and embassies wanting to make a show of keeping their distance, by camping out in Lesotho, were now moving back to the Republic of South Africa. The population of foreigners was shrinking. On the other hand, a gigantic dam was under construction at the center of the country, which dad took me to have a look at.

My French Connection reminded me that if the Roaring 20s are a topic (School of Tomorrow) then I should be watching Betty Boop cartoons. That's what I've been doing today in fact, to help with fasting. I'm kicking my system back into ketosis for a spell. I don't get grumpy when I do it right. I get inspired.

Global Trucker Exchange

by DAF

Winter Solstice: Another Wandering Narrative

:: Meliptus on a random sunny day ::

Our little Wanderers group has gotten very good at this gathering, repeated four times a year, so last night's, on December 20, just seemed to happen. Someone thanked me later for putting it together, but I only played my usual role, bringing lentils.

I didn't even expect to be among one of the first to arrive. The building's main business was only just closing for the evening so as it turned out we were able to smoothly transition to potluck mode when I showed up a few minutes early. I'd just been teaching my data analysis with Python class through 6:45 PDT and wasn't thinking to be the opener, nor to coincidentally meet up with Dr. D.

We're a thinning group. Bob Bornemann had a jazz gig that evening in Camus, and let me know he was thinking of us by texted invite. Trisha Buckland had been expected but, like Lynne Taylor, she lives some distance away and isn't driving these days. A lot of us aren't, for various reasons. 

I'm still gadding about in "maxi taxi" which I used to ferry Don to the farm pretty recently. Don being our captain Wanderer, owner of Meliptus, still in the water in good shape, but Don starting to show it off (a wife to a prospective buyer: "no, you can't have a boat"). Lots about said boat in these logs (blogs, journals). I'll put its picture up top.

Some of our celebrants were new so more than the usual amount of explaining went on: Linus Pauling had lived here, an Oregon son and times two winner of the Nobel Prize, in both chemistry and peace. 

We're a kind of Peace Studies think tank, or have been, under the auspices of the nonprofit ISEPP, for which my late wife's bookkeeping partnership had been the bookkeeper. I tagged along as a database guru, meaning I knew my small timer dBase 'n stuff. I could help grow the ISEPP mail list, which list helped recruit Greater Portland's cognoscenti to some excellent science and culture lectures, the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series, with Mentor Graphics one of our leading sponsors, amidst many others.

Our lecturers included Cousteau (Jacques' son), Leakey (another son), Jane Goodall, the Black Sea and Titanic guy, Ballard, and of course Stephen Hawking, whom Terry (president of ISEPP) wrote a book about, Give Space My Love: little anecdotes about his times with Stephen, amidst his own musings on matters thermodynamic (Terry is a specialist in that Carnot family, father Lazare and son Sadi). 

These lectures were almost monthly, although not all year and ran for over a decade, keeping Portland very much in the loop in terms of the state of the art in various fields, at least from a layman's perspective. We took over some of the biggest venues downtown, in the heart of Portland's theater district.

We were not zealously devoted to researching Linus Pauling's legacy so much as thinking about engineering and public policy, however we'd done enough homework to visit, as a group, the Oregon State University Pauling archives. We went on that field trip to the reading room, which Doug Strain helped endow. 

Ava Helen's WILPF connections lived on in my mom and Dr. Linda Richards, both of whom gave presentations at the Pauling House itself.

The big name guests Terry would invite to Portland sometimes joined us in the Pauling House for get togethers. Mario Livio was among these roamers. We'd often take our guest to Tanh Thao next door, a favorite Thai-Vietnamese restaurant in our neighborhood (I live pretty close by to this location, on the more westward side of Chavez).

If you take some of the words above such as ISEPP and Wanderers, as search terms, and scan these blogs, you'll fish up a lot of what these lectures featured, often with notes from the dinners after. All those lectures and dinners helped knit a rather closely networking social group, meaning the Wanderers, this being another Winter Solstice gathering thereof. 

Barry Redd brought ribs, which are excellent. Don has continued networking from his new location. I brought my dog as we have a policy of welcoming animals (I expressed animal pride at the event), nonhumans included. Lynn usually brings her dog, as did David Feinstein his English mastiff, Shomar. Cats aren't as easy to haul around and haven't been so dominant but we nevertheless talk about them and other animals that weave through our lives, both living and dear departed. Oregonians think about Keiko sometimes, or at least the older ones do, and the historians.

Dr. Steve Mastin joined us by Zoom. I used the ISEPP account (it still exists). Given it's a place of business, and has very limited kitchen facilities (we have theories about a dumb waiter, from when it was a boarding house, but maybe that's all wrong I forget). I'm referring to when this was Linus Pauling's mother's place, Linus's dad having died. 

How much do I know of this history? Not a whole lot. I know Doug Strain, ESI president (by the time I knew him), had been a student of Pauling's at CalTech and had helped rescue this place, with Terry's assistance. So the original house still stands, across from the old Third Eye here on SE Hawthorne, adjacent Adorn and the new weddings outfitter, previously a photocopier repair place. We share the block with a Newar Buddhist temple and the district New Seasons, and with Movie Madness, now owned by Hollywood Theater. Those were the days.

Derek was missed. Dr. Ronald Sato was present, one of our regulars in this chapter, with our four-times a year gatherings. We used to meet weekly. Our dear departed would come up in conversation. "I think about Glenn Stockton every day" I recall saying to Dr. D., as he took the serving table back down to its basement storage place (a space Glenn would frequent).

The S Factor

:: more martian math ::

XREF:

• Hypertoon Scenario (on Medium)
• All Aboard the S-Train! (Jupyter Notebook)
• Sfactor and IcosaWithin (Synergeo)

Demystifying S3

Testing Grok

You'd think with this allusion to Mars ("grok" is from Stranger in a Strange Land), I'd be showing the version I made earlier, with UFOs overhead. I'll add that below. UFOs were not a part of the prompt this time, using Grok.

For context, we triangulate with Maryhill, the palace and museum built by Sam Hill and Friends on the north bank of the Columbia, before the hydro-dams went in. 

There's a Jewish element there too in that my prequel to the Sam Hill story, we join the intrepid Alan Potkin, ecologist and East Asian studies guy, war in Vietnam vet, in Burma (or Myanmar). 

From one great river we hop to another great river and pick up on the Queen of Romania's story, her visit, with entourage, by train, to help stock Sam's museum with many European treasures, that the culture might be transplanted to this fledgling democratic Republic.

The ET point of view (symbolized by UFOs) is that "from the outside" view we sometimes call "meta" as in "metaphysics", and is sometimes translated as "above" as in "aloof" but more in the sense of "overview" or "supervisory". 

When a controller of a controller enters the picture, like an underwriter of underwriters: that's sometimes Twilight Zone in flavor and potentially UFO in the somewhat X-Files sense.

Students of Martian Math (one of four zones of interest, like a "world" or "land" in a theme park) know it as a playground for the imagination, where AI text to graphics and video is certainly appropriate and cleared for takeoff. 

But then our computational geometry is not that stochastic when it comes to the so-called "cosmic hierarchy" (a terminological turn-off for many, I realize). For "our central iconic and canonical sculpture" one might call it, where "sculpture" connotes spatially geometric, not flat against a canvas.

When we get to Renaissance perspective and rendering "3D objects in 2D" (King Hilbert talk), that's a time to wire in Memory Palace ideas (from public spaces, guiding rhetoric, ala speeches in the Roman Senate) and Jesuit delegations to China. 

Two things west Eurasia was proud of: perspectival painting and memory management, these days the province of VR goggles and glasses. 

The Chinese were initially skeptical, goes the story, which is a wise response in the face of anything seriously novel, as there's always an unanticipated downside, witness opium. 

However, in the process of working through skepticism, one makes it one's own, whatever "it" is in this case. Euro culture has dispersed everywhere by this time. The old ideas, of East vs West, have less and less traction by the day. We still have diversity, but it's not so neatly compartmentalized.

Here's a UFOs version:

using imagine.art front end

Martian Math features humans and ETs working together on a hydropower project. 

Yes, science fiction. 

Once you buy the premise, you'll accept that sapiens sent some of their theologically minded, if we can call them that, to meet with these extra-terrestrials. The Sapien-ET API (two way street) is where we focus in conveying some of our geometric concepts. 

The encounter might be patterned after the aforementioned Jesuit-Chinese encounters, likewise somewhat mythologized. I'm not saying which way the analogy has to go i.e. are Jesuits more the ETs? 

I'm not trying to nail down all the hyperparameters, and I'm thankful to CJ for helping me work on this segment in the first place.