Border Café (movie review)

:: visitor center; Asylum City ::

I just saw Border Café, originally Cafe Transit, you can see why I'd be into it: Trucker Exchange Program. The movie is set around a little roadside cafe in the hinterlands bordering Turkey, Syria and Iran. We have a Russian homeless teen hoping to reach Italy, and a lonely Greek seeking his missing wife.

I could see screening this for the elite early birds wanting to get those initial anthropology requirements out of the way. The movie is all aboard borders and social customs and the ethics around women working, but with few compunctions about child labor.

We should remember that not long before the Roaring 20s, women in the North American states had few opportunities outside the home. Jealous men kept them "protected" as prize possessions, as trophies. Then came the two world wars and an ongoing labor shortage. 

Not only did women come into the office, they started operating heavy equipment, more like Sigourney Weaver in the Aliens movies.

The Trucker Exchange Program is not about "in your face" challenging everyone's cultural norms in a disruptive manner.  That's happening anyway, through TV, radio, and streaming. 

Some parts of the globe are already comfortable with female drivers. Others might accept a long hauler married couple. 

The movie is about the thermodynamics of gossip, and what spreads. If there's nothing scandalous happening, how is it clickbait?  Ordinary news tends to be relatively dry, an acquired taste.

The movie is also about cuisine. 

The female principal is obviously a genius cook and what brings in the truckers in droves is her excellent homemade food. She has a profession, a calling. The males around her have a hard time handling the idea that a woman could have any profession outside of homemaker. Somehow someone's honor is at stake.

My point is: it wasn't that long ago before only "loose women" (of the kind you'd meet in bars) could have any profession and then they all seemed to have the same one. Margaret Fuller helped women break into journalism, starting with cultural columns, then branching out into hard news.

Traveling to far off lands may be like going back in time, which in turn means that, coming the other way, is like going forward in time. 

But let's not forget about going sideways. 

Sometimes culture shock doesn't come in the form of a time shift, as what alters is not the time but the space, the vibe, the atmospherics. Said vibes tend to be timeless a lot of the time, archetypal.

Speculative Prehistory: the Naga Story

I understand how a reader might pick up Critical Path and experience some disillusionment upon encountering the Naga Story. Even if the Genesis Story has little basis in science, perhaps with the exception of the flood (talking about the Black Sea filling up suddenly), how are we to take a migration story that begins in the South Pacific and comes westward to Europe and beyond? Why replace one incredible story with another one?

A lot depends on how we define “humanity” as one could say we’re still on a Planet of the Apes with simple reclassification. The “homo” branch of the ape family exemplifies tool use, and we already have ape and monkey branches that don’t and/or can’t interbreed, so let’s make the so-called sapiens more of those, another breed of ape, why not? It seems like a demotion of sorts as we're saying "humanity is yet to come".

Then comes the paradisiacal Eden-like experience of growing up in Polynesia, with just the right mix of stimuli, and at last, true humanity is upon the scene. A new ideal is achieved. Where this new spirit comes from is only tunable metaphorically: from the stars, as a transmission. That's in keeping with intelligence being metaphysical (weightless).

This humanity is spread by both land- and sea-based branching vectors, and provides actual human (pueblo) status to the sapien branch of the apes. We get the rice paddy economies following river beds towards higher mountains. We get the discovering of metals and their alloys. We get our planetary species civilization, spreading from Southeast Asia to India, Africa, Europe, the Americas, or directly to the Americas going around the other way.

In other words, we imbue the circumnavigating Polynesians with our identity as actual humans, in the process of becoming even more humane, while mixing it up with other animal stock in some cases, harnessing and riding them and/or domesticating and husbanding them. A third class of human took to the sea, depending on wind power more than animal power.

With industrialization came more “energy slaves” per capita, meaning humans were served by more and more horsepower not expressed through living animals but through mechanical devices.

A hint about this reading comes from those passages wherein Bucky warns us about boxing and/or overspecialization. When we bash one another in brutish fashion, de-geniusing ourselves, we regress (revert) to our more ape-like substrate. Our humanity evaporates from the Zeitgeist when we march towards oblivion.

This may all sound well and good but what about Polynesians having affinity with dolphins and whales more than apes? Why say humanity has more in common with these indigenous ocean goers than with the landlubber tool users? And yes, some apes are more aquatic than others.

First of all, that’s not actually the claim. Interest in dolphins and whales was developing over Fuller’s lifetime, with a strong emphasis on their safekeeping and preservation. Dr. Lilly even tried to open a communication channel with the dolphins, with a little help from his three-letter friend LSD. 

Critical Path was reflective of its own period in history in speculating about a humanity-dolphin hybrid (so-called mermaids). This might have happened on other worlds.

Seeing a shared humanity in these ocean-going mammals is probably more predictive of the future than a key to past evolutionary biology on Spaceship Earth. 

Humans have the capacity to build out under water, as well as over water. Given the percent of the planetary surface that’s oceanic, humans will likely colonize a lot more of the oceanic ecosystem before they ever get to Mars, perhaps modifying themselves genetically in the process.

Detachment

If you prompt me to talk about Buddhism vs Christianity, I might bring up that much misunderstood word, used by translators, "detachment", and link it that to that troublesome Jesus meme "hate the world".

The depth psychology here is "the world" is indistinguishable from one's experience of it, except that "one's experience" is objectively subject to change more adeptly ("on a dime") than "the world" is, given the latter is macrocosmic and therefore suffers from more inertia.

"Hate the world" means leaning to cultivate dispassion and what in science we call "a sense of objectivity" to where you're less invested in your current ego beliefs. You're potentially more open minded, which is where God's grace comes in, with the epiphanies and revelations.

The anthropologist, plunked down in some setting, is a trained observer, including of her or his own thoughts and reactions. We learn about cultures from their interactions. But the observer is not so in love with her or his own culture to want to step in and intervene, as some kind of missionary. The anthropologist is there to live and learn, not to judge, not to be a jerk (as in "knee-jerk reflex machine").

To cultivate dispassion, to become more open, is to become less bot-like, less programmed, less predictable in one's reactions. Which doesn't mean a personality is morphing on every front. On the contrary, as Bucky would put it (paraphrase): the metaphysical aspect settles down, even as one's appreciation for the complexity of it all continues to skyrocket.

Planet Palestine

I've been pretty consistent in coming down on the side of freedom of movement, probably because my school of thought sees the individual-to-planet relationship as initially, by default, open, in the sense of unconstrained. 

Institutions may clamp down on your freedoms as a tourist and/or planetary explorer, however we struggle to keep tourism a reality, without depending so much on the militaries for this purpose.

As a USA citizen with a passport, I've enjoyed relatively unfettered access to many parts of the globe, a freedom I'm well aware not so many enjoy, because they're not carrying the right travel credentials and have no clear path towards getting such credentials.

Cascadian Synergetics

ChatBot Chatting

King N-dimeus of Hilbert Space

Prompt:  Explain AI image generation in terms of moving through Hilbert space to a particular position.

Answer:

Explaining AI image generation in terms of moving through Hilbert space involves understanding how these models navigate complex mathematical spaces to create images. Here's a simplified explanation:

Introduction to Hilbert Space

A Hilbert space is a mathematical concept that extends the idea of Euclidean space to infinite dimensions, allowing for the representation of complex data structures like images. It is equipped with an inner product operation, enabling the definition of lengths and angles, which is crucial for analyzing and manipulating data within this space[8].

AI Image Generation Basics

AI image generators, such as those using **diffusion models**, create images by iteratively refining a noise signal until it converges to a desired image. This process involves moving through a latent space, which can be thought of as a subset of a Hilbert space, where each point corresponds to a specific image representation[1][4].

Moving Through Hilbert Space

In the context of AI image generation, moving through Hilbert space can be metaphorically understood as navigating through this vast, multidimensional space to reach a specific point that corresponds to the desired image. Here’s how it works:

1. Initialization: The process starts with a random noise vector in the latent space, which is analogous to a point in Hilbert space. This noise vector represents the initial state of the image generation process[1].

2. Guidance Signal: A guidance signal, such as a text prompt, is used to condition the generation process. This signal acts as a direction or a target in the Hilbert space, guiding the model towards the desired image characteristics[1].

3. Diffusion Process: The model iteratively refines the noise vector through a diffusion process, which involves a series of transformations that progressively move the vector closer to the target point in the latent space. Each step in the diffusion process can be seen as a movement in the Hilbert space towards the desired image representation[1][3].

4. Convergence: As the diffusion process continues, the vector converges to a specific point in the latent space, which corresponds to the final generated image. This point represents the culmination of the journey through Hilbert space, where the model has successfully mapped the input prompt to a visual representation[1].

Challenges and Opportunities

Navigating Hilbert space for image generation poses challenges such as managing high-dimensional data and ensuring interpretability of the learned representations. However, it also offers opportunities for creating diverse and realistic images by leveraging the vast potential of these mathematical spaces[5][9].

In summary, AI image generation can be viewed as a process of moving through a complex Hilbert space to reach a specific point that represents the desired image. This involves navigating through a multidimensional space guided by a conditioning signal until convergence to the target image representation.

Citations:

[1] https://sii.pl/blog/en/a-brief-history-of-ai-powered-image-generation/

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/faster-image-classification-generation-using-hilbert-curves-n-

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFztPP9qPRc

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1ae55p0/technical_ai_image_generators_draw_from_an/

[5] https://www.easiio.com/neural-network-hilbert-space/

[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666675821001041

[7] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/file/76c6f9f2475b275b92d03a83ea270af4-Paper-Conference.pdf

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space

[9] https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/ai-image-generation/

A Canadian Connection

Michael Accera of Lux Blox sent me this “geometer guy”, AI generated, awhile back in a DM. We were talking C9 (Cloud Nine) as I recall, one of our tribal memes.

In retrospect I have to say the image kinda reminds me of Joe Truss, now that we’ve finally met on Zoom. I say “finally” because Joe is a contemporary who worked with Stafford Beer, the Team Syntegrity guy. I’d been aware of their work but only to a strictly limited degree.

Asylum City

:: from my dad's archive: layout plan for Hoon, Libya ::

When'd I'd tell folks what I was into at Princeton, like if sitting next to a stranger on Amtrak, and getting to talking, they'd say "what ya gonna do with that?" meaning my background reading Philosophy. 

Sometimes the tone was dismissive, other times more pensive, as the culture sends a mixed message. We're told it's (philosophy is) great prep for CS (computer science) and a career in IT (information technology), which is more or less what happened to me, but also for future CEOs and startup founders. 

Although "a founder" (per LinkedIn), I've been in the ball game too long to call my sole proprietorship, previously a partnership, a "startup". I've been DBA 4D Solutions and before that InfoTech, for a long time. DIADEM Center for Creative Networking before that (starting in JCNJ -- Jersey City, near where Bruce Wayne's parents got shot), after I quit my fun and challenging high school teaching job (private academy), believing I heard Destiny calling (or Fate as the case may be and depending on the namespace / vocab).

So what I've discovered, in retrospect, is sticking to a philosophy track, even if a worker bee, entitles one to some Brit aristocracy airs, in the sense that one is allowed, even expected, to be "eccentric". That quality flies brilliantly here in Portland, aka Weirdo City. To top it all off, I like in Asylum District, truly named for a mental hospital (pastoral setting) that used to take up quite a bit of space here on the east side.

As an "out there" type person, I'm allowed to be more like those comedians, those jokers, who push the envelope as we say, regarding what's OK to have a sense of humor about, and what's not. Philosophers as a class sometimes go over the line, are beyond the pale, get lost in some twilight zone, and yet society may nevertheless reward them, as this is their role. It all depends. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

In my case, I look to my American heritage and see refugees as far as the eye can see, coming from all manner of other places, but mainly from the Atlantic side, only to meet up with the peoples already here and to close circuits with Asia. 

My dad was a city planner, with many branching specialties. Had he stayed in Portland, he'd probably have ended up with Metro, as he had a more regional perspective. Reading over his shoulder, I encountered Doxiadis (Ekistics), Solari (Arcosanti),  and other luminaries. On my out, out of Princeton, I dove into the Buckminster Fuller corpus, fresh from reading Nietzsche under Walter Kaufmann, Wittgenstein under Richard Rorty.

Dad didn't stay in Portland though, as his dream since boyhood was to see the world and find a line of work, other than military (he decided around college), that would take him places (literally). He might've been a travel agent if people decided they didn't need planners anymore. But it turned out they needed planners, so that's what he did, for several governments and ministries over the decades.

Given all those data points, you could say it's predictable that I'd take in the stadium shaped city meme and picture it as one of many dotting the globe, forming a high tech, well run Refugee Cities Network. To an extent, it's a juxtaposition over the realities of today. Cities take in refugees a lot. Some cities were built pretty much entirely by immigrants, new to the New World.  Old Man River City, for Bucky, was for East Saint Louis. But he wasn't about to waste his career on it, meaning he knew he was working for future generations and needed to time capsule as much as possible.

As a philosophy track choo choo, I'm allowed to chugga chugga through this science fiction vista, visiting these giant stadium cities of the mind, picturing the movies, the backdrops, the decades that might fly by as humans contemplated their various options. Decades have already flown by. The passage of time is not "theoretical". "Time is the only dimension" says Synergetics, I forget where. We meet up with counterweights on that word ("dimension") given Synergetics is richly textured with the "4D" meme. That's where my 4D Solutions is coming from, in my own mind.

Also predictable was I'd be enamored with One Laptop Per Child and the XO line of computers stemming from that project. The internet more generally was a big source of hope, especially with open source, and the police agreed with me. I'm referring to that Hillsboro West Precinct story. The cops were tired of being used by schools to scare the kids about "software piracy" (music and games mostly) whereas here was this free and open world, with copyleft and unbridled sharing, that the schools were refusing to teach about, given corporate capture. West Precinct even set up a Linux school at the station, which me and another guy staffed that one summer.

My activism in the area of education reform matched Guido's to some level (Python's inventor) and I was recruited to join that Mark Shuttleworth summit in Kensington, Greater London. Seymour Papert had sent his regrets, but Alan Kay, a friend of Seymour's, made the meeting. We're talking about Logo and Smalltalk respectively. The Scheme community was represented. 

How could South Africa leverage open source to better serve its schools? How might students of all ethnic backgrounds avail of these metaphysical (informational) goodies? Mark set up his Freedom Toasters, these kiosks that burned CDs on demand, complete with Linux, Python, and whatever else (music and games) of the copyleft variety.

Having retired from applications development, mostly for nonprofits, including some big ones (especially if governments count), I'm devoting a lot of hours to curriculum development and teaching gigs, while also doing various kinds of homework, availing myself of all that hypertext I used to pray for, in the lineage of Vannevar Bush (MEMEX) and Ted Nelson (Project Xanadu). The World Wide Web came along, thanks to Tim at CERN, and the global U has taken off. U as in University.

Speaking of hypertext, I'm still focused on hypertoons, doing keyframing, imagining the inbetweening a lot of the time. My topics: the scenarios in Synergetics involving polyhedrons and their transformations, but not only those. I'm seeing hypertoons, the concept, as informing my YouTube channel and how I weave YouTube scenarios together, about Couplers, about BASKET, about Asylum City, and so on.

Pacwest

 

TikTok Goes the Clock

I had my comment on this vid:  

I’m glad Linus went public with his sentiments. Not all Finns are sucking up to NATO so contrary to his statement, it’s far from obvious what his attitude would be based simply on nationality. Part of open source is getting these dirty secrets out in the open.

He'd likely take exception to my phrasing, however we do have Finns who take a skeptical attitude towards that state's recent suckering for specific genres of propaganda.

As an Oregonian, I feel I should say this Linus guy isn't speaking for all of us, those of us proudly of Russian heritage included (I'm more Swiss if we go by memes, Swedish if by genes). 

Many Russian Oregonians with sympathy for those caught up in WW2 era reflexing (i.e. knee-jerk dino thought patterns) were nevertheless hoping the software engineering world was on a plane above such politicized robotics. 

That was an element in the early idealism of free software more generally, if not of Linux in particular. 

Linux certainly benefited from the "cyberpunk" movement, bringing us PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and the like. RSA is built in to the HTTPS protocol, since even before Elliptic Curve crypto.

But that was then and this is now. 

Linux is by now the new Microsoft, the behemoth, more button-down and corporate than ever, and more at home simply running things, as the ubiquitous operating system, versus going back to playing the role of youthful idealistic outsider.

My own preference is these sanctions (including the Magnitsky ones) be rescinded amidst a return to sanity, such that politicians stop doing harm to our shared infrastructure, around which they have very little management competence. Their schools are to blame.

Wait, wasn't this supposed to be a post about TikTok?  As of this posting, a nationwide ban is about to occur.

Like I said, politicians are poking their knuckles into machinery they were not the ones to either plan or design. They bring their own set of unbalanced biases to the table. I don't wonder that they wipeout often, or that their plans frequently backfire.