On The Road

cl CogSci CC

Pet Peeve

What good is a blog if the blogger can't use it to vent from time to time? We use our journals for psychotherapy, some of us, some of us Quakers, who journal as a matter of religious practice. I always encourage Quakers to journal i.e. blog, as a part of their faith and practice. Most don't though. They never get over their paranoia about being semi-public with their thoughts.

The customer return lady was understably "I'm not a computer and can't recall all our changing policies, so you'll forgive me if I pick up the phone." And I did, immediately. What I was there for was to see about getting my money back (like $29.99) on a pair of Dataproducts print cartridges meant to emulate HP's 61s, black and tricolor. But does Fred Meyer except print cartridge returns anymore? She made the call. Answer: if the customer has opened it, then no, no refund, tell them to contact the vendor.

Walking home, none the richer, I was reminded of Walter Kaufmann for some reason, one of my teachers at Princeton. He was a firebrand, maybe making up for being short, and I recall a lecture where he criticized Kant for being petty about some chocolate he'd not be getting, because the ship had gone down with all hands. 

I know not to what event he was referring to, only that the message was Kant might not be deep, more like petty and blind to his own ethical blindness (aren't we all). He was an asshole basically (my words, not Kaufmann's, the latter's "Kantsipation" jokes notwithstanding). 

WK went on to say he wouldn't blame us if we thought Heidegger's stuff was pure puke. He never assigned us such vomit in any classes I took. I think he'd waded through Heidegger's stuff himself, poor guy.

So yeah... venting. Where was I?

Rewinding (flash back): I unclipped the plastic shields on each cartridge, which was all I was supposed to do, and put them in their Envy 4500 series ink jet printer cradles. No dice. I was informed these cartridges were non-performant.

"Did you remove the tape?" the printer asked (paraphrase), not in a human voice but on its tiny screen. 

"What tape?" I was thinking, "you mean the plastic clips? Yeah, I did that already" (the printer wasn't listening, I was just thinking out loud).

So what "tape" was the printer talking about? 

The cartridges have some tape on them, and a signature "do not remove this chip" warning. So is the chip behind the tape? I'll be sure not to remove any chip, but I will remove this tape, obeying the printer.

Wrong! The tape is the chip in question, or rather a chip is integral with the tape, which is also a little circuit board. 

But then it wasn't working anyway, before my faux pas. Your honor, I draw the court's attention to my having followed instructions correctly, at least until I didn't, and started trusting my printer.

So Fred Meyer should take the remanufactured inkjet cartridges back right? 

No, it's really my job to complain to Dataproducts -- which is what I'm doing, indirectly. Actually I'm complaining to the whole printer ink industry, which smells as rotten as the Kingdom of Denmark did, to Hamlet that time.

I then found authentic HP 61s, a pair of XLs, for only a few dollars more, but like for much more ink. "Free" delivery (I pay for Prime). Duh. That's the way to get my ink from now on, right?

I also got an extra long shoehorn, good for seniors who don't always have as easy access to their feet as they once did.

People need to stick up for themselves. 

Remember the emperor with no clothes story? What is the moral of that story anyway? It's that people are cowards and won't speak up in a crowd, out of fear of what peers might say or do in retaliation. Only an innocent child, semi-clueless, daring to be naive, manages to blurt out what's on everyone's mind e.g. what was so great about German Idealism anyway?

Noticing England

In addition to the hot war conflagrations that are going on in the eastern hemisphere, aided and abetted by remote cheerleading on our side (western hemisphere), I'm tracking the British scene to some level. 

At this time, right before a meetup at top of the hour, I'm aware of judicial branch action to oust a gangster class, the lawyers around the world starting to realize they're not in control and really, have probably never been in control if we get right down to it, to the pirate layer (see OMSE).

So someone high up in the powdered wig class (what was that movie -- Divergent), told the PM to step down, given all the forensics going on, all the pickling and displaying in museums of the future. Nope, gangsters aren't managed by the powdered wig class, never have been. Gangsters have control of the armies, after all. The White House was eager to show it could set Marines against popular uprisings.

When I say "gangsters" I'm quoting Jeffrey Sachs in a YouTube I was taking in while in the kitchen about an hour back. Yesterday I met with some visiting faculty, and before that David and I were doing our usual BBQ with Fred Meyer burger and Franz kaiser buns. Lots of raspberries. Good weather.

The consequence of privatizing everything and taking government behind the scenes, out of sight of the people, is that you lose the perception that those in charge have anything to do with who's elected. There's taxation, lots of that, but no representation. 

Ever since Citizens United (nonperson personhood citizens), the system has been run by literally soulless creatures: the bots put out by a Dr. Frankenstein legal system, per the Thom Hartmann tome, Unequal Protection.

The same invisible hands keep control of the steering wheel, no matter what the passengers want. That sense of being hijacked runs pretty deep with people, leaving presidents as so much window dressing, and Congress a set of weighted nodes in some DL trained to recognize... 

I dunno, Congress seems in a rush to embrace bad ideas with gusto so I can't really figure out what it's for. I'm sure a lot of you would be able to provide some lectures on the topic. I remember the old theories, from when we followed a constitution. But today? You tell me.

No Kings

I’m ignoring the “tinky tank parade” in the District, other low quality melodrama, and heading out to a hacky sack tournament. That’s my idea of a real summer.

On the way, though, I’ll check out one of the more far flung No Kings rallies, a franchised operation conducting itself nationally, a reminder from the populace that we recognize no monarchy.  

Kings of old could embroil their serfs in wars as cannon fodder no problem, in feuds by proxy. We came to a New World to get away from those guys.

Since I’m on a tight itinerary, I have to avoid the larger No Kings rallies downtown and along MLK, and pick one more aligned with my route and goals. The hacky sack tournament is actually also a chance to rendezvous with one of the faculty I keep blogging about.

I’ll likely be seeing him again later in the week, along with Casey, and later Ryan, as we’re engaging in a kind of mini-summit around the Summer Solstice.

The three of us, me, Don and Dave, attended the final meetup this term of the Dead Mathematician Society at MHCC, for a brilliant talk on Group Theory, Burnside's Lemma, complete with table top game like activities.

I’ve been communicating with the organizers about doing my Quadrays talk or something like it, and did some brainstorming on what we’d do for a tabletop game. I was thinking BRYG and “how would you, if the designer, bridge XYZ and the IVM.” In a way, that’s not a new problem, but the Quadrays aspect makes it more number crunchy.

If you’re new to my blogs, here’s fair warning I’m one of those Americans who mocks The District as a soap opera capital far less talented than LA when it comes to screenwriting. West Wing melodramas really suck. I’m so glad I don’t waste a lot of time with its products, not that the ripple effects can always be avoided.

Bioregionally, we’re Cascadians out here with our Pacific Rim identity. We’re not “Atlanticists” as they’re called, mostly a lotta prep school prima donnas with east coast breeding. Like what we used to call Yankees. I mostly just call ‘em Anglos. They’re still living in the eastern hemisphere in their own heads, thinking the whole world revolves around their Old World fantasies.

Post Travel Debriefing

Yes I got to reconnect with Russell Chu, and see Deb's new place for the first time, in South Seattle. 

Being in that neighborhood with the both of them (Liana at work) brought back memories of our many visits when the kids were young, and of our mini-summit of geometricians and mathematicians, whatever you wanna call us, cultists, back around the time of Java One in the Bay Area. 

Java the computer language was just being kicked off and Gerald de Jong came all the way from the Netherlands to help celebrate is new freedoms, as a former C++ programmer.

Depicted: some of Deb's glass work and, that blue ball on the right: that's the fishing float from Lincoln City gifted to Deb during the fishing float finding festival. They're made locally and finders should remember to register their findings using the number. 

They're called fishing floats because at one time actual Made in Japan glass fishing net floats, a technology no longer favored by the fishing industry, used to wash up this side of the Pacific Rim. Nowadays it's up to glass-working artists to make them and Deb Kasman is a glass-working artist, explaining why she was there.

Regarding the driving experience: in the week prior to departure, my car failed to start after a private screening of The Great Gatsby (DiCaprio interpretation) some miles from my digs. AAA had only a skeletal crew that night so rather than wait, I bussed home, and got the new battery the next day.

Having a new battery has solved all my short term problems, but in the longer term we know said battery will have a shorter life if we don't diagnose why it's losing juice even when turned off. That's not an uncommon issue with older cars and people not driving often will disconnect the battery to prevent draining. Driving the car is a way of recharging it.

Maxi Taxi sat idle for over 24 hours as we took the Mustang EV to and from the birthday party.

Russ and I reminisced about folks we'd both overlapped with, such as Robert Orenstein, a contemporary of Koski's and Bonnie's and me, during the chapter when BFI (Buckminster Fuller Institute) was based in Los Angeles, where D. W. Jacobs lives to this day, and Victor Acevedo. J. Baldwin loved LA. My sis lives in Whittier and I plan to visit her later this summer.  Robert died in the SARS2 epidemic, in Uganda.

Birthdays

Alice and Mary

I’m on my north circuit as another relative’s odometer flips. 

Uncle Bill’s flipped to 100 a few weeks ago. Yesterday, cousin Alice’s flipped to 70, the same day as Tara’s flipped to 31. We’re celebrating today. Catered tacos. Homemade cake. Tara joined us on FaceTime.

While we’re talking family, I’ll chronicle my dog’s adventure. She’s on her farm not far from here, where she lived before joining my household, a gift to Carol, my mom, who missed having a dog, as did I.

Tomorrow, I’ll retrieve her from her farm and take her home. Syd has mostly recovered from “old dog vestibular disease” about which YouTube has any number of videos.

The plan, let’s hope it works, is to stop south of Seattle on my way home to visit with old friends. 

There’s a high probability I’ll reconnect with Russ Chu, my best man at my wedding to my wife Dawn Wicca, at Rhododendron Garden near Reed College, some 32 years ago. I haven’t seen him in a long time.

We used to talk for hours about “the four IVMs” and other Synergetics-related topics. His name is in the literature here and there, and in my YouTubes (see my Graph Theory 2025).

I’m staying these two nights with cousin Mary, Alice’s sister. Their mother, Evelyn, was a sibling of Uncles Bill, Eddy, Howard and Bo Lightfoot. 

Howard’s son Lee is here, and his wife Julie. I’m the grandson of Evelyn’s mother, Elsie’s sister, Esther Urner, wife of Carl mother of Jack.

Quadrays History

This account will be neither exhaustive nor objective in that I’m only able to define a puzzle piece within the limitations of my scope. I’ll say up front, though, that I cop to “running with them” in that US American football sense of heading for a touchdown, once in possession.

Here’s the gist of it: when Synergetics came out in two volumes, Macmillan the publisher, a lot of intrigued readers flocked to it, as many do to this day. They’d pick up on the critique of XYZ i.e. overly rectilinear thinking, but those already steeped in XYZ lore were seeing nothing number crunchy enough to take its place. Any computer graphics involving the so-called IVM (octet-truss or CCP by other accounts) would have to use XYZ coordinates to specify it. QED. Case closed. Synergetics is bunk.

Enter Clifford Nelson. He’d served in the US military and could program in ADA, the US DoD language named for Ada Byron (aka Countess Lovelace), who I introduce in my Graph Theory slide deck. She’s considered the first computer programmer, a title I defend. She lived in the first half of the 1800s, as a contemporary of another high caliber intellectual: Margaret Fuller. Margaret’s grand nephew was the author of those Synergetics books I’ve mentioned.

In my estimation, Clifford was a huge Bucky fan, as am I, and he wanted to fill this gap in Synergetics by retroactively retrofitting it with a non-XYZ alternative apparatus. He came up with something, coded it in ADA, and promulgated it as Synergetics Coordinates, almost as if Fuller himself had designed this new gizmo.

When I encountered Nelson’s work, I was already steeped in yet another alternative: Quadray Coordinates. This is back in the 1990s. Instead of ADA, Gerald was using Pascal, I was using Python and Visual FoxPro, and we were following along with David Chako, who had introduced us to Quadrays on what we called Syn-L, a listserv. I’m not sure to what extent the archives would be recoverable. John Brawley (different from John Braley) was on the list as well. David Koski joined us briefly.

I believe I was using Eudora on Windows as my email client back in those days. 

Somewhere in there, Darrel Jarmusch made himself known to us as the true inventor of the Quadrays and he had the web pages to prove it.

We weren’t really focused on any priority struggles regarding Quadrays though. Seeing their utility vs-a-vs Synergetics, I was doing essentially the same thing Clifford Nelson was doing, meaning we somewhat collided in our efforts. I kept pointing out that his Synergetic Coordinates were nowhere in Synergetics itself, nor were Quadrays. 

I the wanted newcomers to take responsibility for their own work and not try to “blend in” anonymously, as if our contributions had been there all along.

To this day I don’t really understand how Nelson’s stuff works and for all I know that work is still being developed by other developer teams. In ADA? That’s a language I don’t know how to read. 

My own Python codebase for Quadrays has gotten pretty mature in the meantime, but nevertheless let’s remember that:

(a) I am not the inventor of quadrays and 

(b) the code wouldn’t be that mature without contributions from many others

Others such as Tom Ace. Tom developed 4x4 rotation matrices and showed how we could produce the tetravolume of any tetrahedron using the determinant of a matrix comprised of quadrays to its corners.

 

He did all this while remaining skeptical of the Fuller corpus. He wasn’t motivated by the same motives as Clifford and I were.

By the way, if you’re knew to all this, maybe coming from a chatbot, don’t mistake Clifford Nelson for the Clifford behind Clifford Algebra. At least early versions of LLMs seemed to be making that identification, i.e. they were “hallucinating” as it were.

I’ve also had a lot of help more recently from faculty who insist on clarity and won’t accept overly hand-wavy answers as sufficient. Thanks to such peer review, I’ve been challenged to get even more precise and specific with the designs, which is not saying other developer teams are bound by the same decisions I’ve made. Where Quadrays go from here is not entirely up to me, but I expect my framework will be influential. Already, the Crescent City campus is commissioning a Quadrays for JavaScript (and other languages) endeavor. See Project QuadCraft.

What really drove my particular implementation of Quadray Coordinates was POV-Ray, a free open source ray tracer available over CompuServ since even before the GNU GPL had been invented. I’d taken to using that pretty early in my career as a personal computer (PC) programmer. Starting with Visual FoxPro, I would do my computations in terms of quadrays and then write out instructions using XYZ coordinates. Sharply rendered graphics were my reward.

IVM FM

These two images are meant to rhyme, visually. Let me give you some background.

One of our teachers has occasion to make the origin of our Caltrop Coordinate System (CCS) not its center of gravity, but one of its tetra tips, call it Blue. Blue origin. 

We also want to orient our tripod tower vis-a-vis the Earth in an obvious way, akin to that of a radio broadcasting antenna. Call that vertical spoke Green. That leaves two more feet on the ground, aside from Blue. 

Looking from Blue, with Green vertical, have Yellow be on the left, Red on the right. We call this "the bridge" or BRYG tetrahedron (or 4eyes).

The idea is Blue is the actual point of origin, where the record gets played as it were, after which it gets pumped out through the Green tip, high in the sky. Yellow and Red anchor with Blue.

Naturally the two below rhyme as well, and sound the same themes. The camera angle is looking down a little, from a drone point of view. The background is not Earth's surface unless we see that as ice, 

In terms of the CCP, closest cubic packing, there's the question of how we want it centered, on a ball or on a void. 

Where six balls hug a central void, the CCP might be anchored. Likewise the voids at the centers of four balls form two interwoven CCPs. That's four CCPs in all: ball centered, or void centered in three alternate, not-overlapping patterns. 

By "not-overlapping" we mean none of the four IVMs share balls with one another, even as they co-define their shared lattice.

We say Yellow stands for Sun, in the background, providing power, while Red could stand for blood and what's biological (burning, metabolic), the life that covers our Blue ocean planet and turns it Green.

Ball Packing

After developing the QuadCraft Project Jupyter Notebook, I turned my attention back to the Esteban-Struppi collaboration. 

Esteban is someone I met on the Metaphysics group on Facebook, where I unsuccessfully tried to drum up interest in 1.06066 (the Synergetics Constant) and the role this number plays in bridging the C.P. Snow two-cultures chasm. The kids on Metaphysics tended not to remember such a chasm and had little patience for my STEM-looking esoterica.

Esteban, on the other hand, turned out to share my obsession with geometric visualizations and we stayed in touch. Even if he was suspicious of Synergetics, he was fun to try explaining things to. He was engaged. I started sharing snippets of our Facebook dialog to the more publicly archived Synergeo.

Struppi is an established Synergetics shaman with a strong focus on specific hands-on crafts, useful for making lasting educational toys, a continuing source of insights. 

I enrolled in one of his workshops, long distance, after he caught my most recent video. I'd learned from our Telegram conversations that he'd kept up the dialog of Esteban and together they'd been going down a certain rabbit hole and wouldn't I like to go down it too?

I went down it to some extent, turning back around where the color coding got too intricate for my Python framework to follow, even if I was able to follow along conceptually, minus the coding component.  Struppi uses wooden balls, string, and drinking straws, not Python and a raytracer.

What I got out of the session was how one might prefer, when making animated GIFs, to pack from an apex ball to form a growing tetrahedron, with layers having successive triangular numbers of balls.  

Not only that, if one orients a quadrays caltrop (basis of a specific coordinate system) within the context of a tiny human observer standing on planet Earth, then that "apex" might not be defined by the vertical quadray (or call it the radio tower) but the radio station itself, the Blue ball in the foreground. 

Think of blue, yellow and red balls resting on the earth. Maybe imagine the sky and clouds as white and blue ice in arctic conditions.

Below, the packing starts in the Blue position on the BRYG tetrapod (caltrop), and marches rightward, aligning with Red, Yellow and Green in a 1st layer.

I compared these two ways of packing, center-out and apex-out, in a new Jupyter Notebook entitled Building the CCP: Apex-Outward vs Center-Outward Packing.

Happy Birthday to Me

:: virtual birthday cake ::

:: manga avatar ::