Tips for Roving Teachers

by StruPPi Δ Pohl

If you're in a bizmo fleet charged with spreading our open free culture, complete with open source lore, you might want so tips regarding those slide decks I always talk about.

In my next school, my plan is to move through the Quadrays deck fairly quickly, explaining its significance to game development in terms of the squares to hexagons to rhombic dodecahedral space-filling. Consider 2D tank games. Some use a checkerboard, more like lat-long. Some encompass the planet in a hexapent much, more like Uber does. 

The 3D analog of a hexagon is the dual of the four-hexagons cuboctahedron, Kepler's favorite space-filler (per Arthur Koestler I think it was).

Then, with relevance to gaming established, I'll switch of to the Dimension deck and go straight to the slide about the three namespaces: 4D ala Einstein; 4D ala Hilbert; 4D ala Fuller. 

Quadrays help as gestalt switch between all three (picture a triangle), providing continuity with what we already know about XYZ (which is a lot). In other words, whereas the machinery of computer gaming was our showcase application (I'll have some version of QuadCraft at the ready), in philosophy of mathematics, it's more about transitioning among namespaces (picture changing TV channels with a remote).

That's already plenty for one talk. This will be a rehearsal for a second talk at the same school, a familiar pattern, and then maybe a third and so on. As a roving teacher for Coding with Kids, I'd use different formats, as their the goal was hands on and skills building. I performed that role having already worked with Saturday Academy as a middle to high school teacher, sharing Python and Martian Math.

Although an experienced coder, with some years of classroom teaching, this demographic was new to me. At CUE, my focus was andragogy more than pedagogy. With experience, I improved, and would continue to improve if working with kids again. However my next stop is a college.

Back to the decks, I'd emphasize that Quadrays post date the publication of the two Synergetics volumes by Macmillan (see Cosmic Fishing) and arose posthumously vs-a-vs Dr. Fuller's 1900s corpus. Also stress that the principals involved, creatives we look to, may not be aware of Synergetics at all, or, if they are, may regard it was some suspicion. 

Our work is augmented by many skeptics, as we further clarify what we're clear on. Our goals are in many cases orthogonal to that of making Synergetics a popular reading. There's no forcing such a thing. However there is playing a role where there's demand.

So yes, of course, there's a lot to weave in outside my decks. 

I'm focusing on my decks because I'm their provider and producer and want to offer advice to those in the field making use of same. 

My intent is not to narrow the focus to just my relatively tiny inventory of goodies, but to give a sense of where said goodies might fit in to a bigger picture (i.e. yours).

Home Home on the Range

I had itchy fingers today, or was it the mouse that was itchy? Philosophy R Us. Either way, I was poised at my workstation to order a new stove, an electric freestanding range. But then (a) I realized my ancient Magic Chef, avocado, is a lot wider than 30 inches and (b) the burner I’d convinced myself would not turn off, became cool to the touch. My hypothesis had been invalidated.

My stove seems to be 36 inches wide, in an even wider space. OK, now I’m seeing some 36ers are out there and they’re not cheap (not inexpensive, and one would hope of high quality), not the ones I just browsed. “Cheap” is one of those overdetermined words in English. One can be cheap to a fault.

I don’t think I’m cheap in keeping my vintage kitchen as it was, so long as it remains functional enough to meet my average needs. The chrome (I should say stainless steel) countertop (on both sides) sets the tone, whereas the pastel vinyl wall panels cast the spell of a 1950s diner. In the driveway: a car with fins (just kidding, but she is shinier since the wash).

The folks who occupied this abode before we did had different tastes, but I’ll say this: they made some high quality purchases. I’m still using the original furnace, garbage disposal and stove. The fridge, washer and dryer have long since been replaced. I’m happy to get by on such hand me downs. These are goodies we paid for when buying the place in the mid 1990s.

Back in my Jersey City days, I was brainstorming what I called The Housing Project, mirroring the Hunger Project. Essentially AirBnb and/or timeshare but different. More like club housing, if you know what that is (I don’t, but I’m thinking it up here). You join this club with places to stay all over, and you book access to these places. Maybe you need to be invited by the club I don’t know.

These days, I’m more into helping colleges and universities build out the group home idea, such as I enjoyed at 2D (2 Dickinson Street, Princeton) and later in Jersey City (we perpetuated the model). If only my Jersey City home had been faculty housing for St. Peter’s College faculty, I might still be there, ya never know. Or maybe I’d be with NJIT, or both.  Housing would be owned by universities and students and faculty and admin would get their spaces.  

When I say admin I don’t mean to distinguish from janitorial, as I regard these as two sides of the same coin. What admin does includes physical property management, not just making sure people get fed and sheltered.

By the way, I’m not claiming I was ever on St. Peter’s College faculty and would have stayed if provided with campus housing. I was taking grad school level courses there when I was offered the position at St. Dominic Academy. Both institutions were along Kennedy Boulevard. I was new in town, knew I wanted to try high school teaching, and here was how it worked out. I’ve told this story in more detail elsewhere and it wasn’t idyllic (the need for a new teacher at high school in the first place was tragic).

These days I’d probably look at Earlham or, closer, Reed, for admin, making Blue House a hub in several programs, including Food Not Bombs coordination (just like old times). Students and faculty would come and go in various scenarios. The kitchen could stay vintage. Superfluous remodeling should take a back seat to the deep changes we’ll be making at the curriculum level.

If the stove had some kind of circuit fault keeping a burner on no matter what (I had that happen to a taillight on my car), my friend and neighbor Patrick is the kind of guy who could probably diagnose and fix the wiring fault. Les too but he’s far away. However this appliance has been on the chopping block so to speak for over a decade, with my mom always offering to get us a new one.  But why?  It works great. I just replaced one of the heating elements, and got three burners working out of four. The stove cooks pizza.

Fall Term Album (2025)

One Battle After Another (movie review)

I didn’t find the characters or the plot especially believable, but the backdrop, immigrants caging natives, that was “muy interesante” and of course sad. What a mess this nation state system. Maybe it’s the best we can do, but it’s nothing to be proud of I tell ya, no matter how much lipstick is applied.

I watched it on the big screen during its debut week, having seen the trailer several times, as I’ve been enjoying the Bagdad quite a lot in recent months.

The whole point is to suspend disbelief and enter the screenwriters’ dream, that’s what fiction is all about, so kibitzing the film is not believable is throwing a tomato from out of bounds. It’s a comic book, a cartoon, a graphic novel, not a documentary, sheesh.

I’ll salute some of my favorite movie critics on YouTube, whom I consulted upon coming home, and agree with them that the filmmaking and acting are both high quality. I didn’t recognize Sean Penn. 

OK, I’ll admit to finding it funny in places (as intended — there’s a lot of comedy), once past the incredulity part, And again, it’s not like a don’t believe the stupid wall is real. Like I said: nothing to be proud of.

What was funniest? Those St. Nick geezers and their little club.  

The priorities (obsessions) and motivations of the characters just seemed so 1900s (they cared so much about eugenics).  Were people like this even real?  It really felt like a pseudo-period piece, a parallel universe, and again, that’s the point, what movies are good at.

Speaking of which, I checked out Dark City: the Lost World of Film Noir, by Eddie Muller, from Movie Madness University. I like the spunky writing style. 

That’s right, they have a book-lending scene going at MMU, not just DVDs. 

If I’m smart, I’ll write down a few of the movies I’m reading about in the book, and rent them out. I’ve got more Burt Lancaster movies in my future I have a feeling. The other book I checked out is about Wes Anderson movies, several of which I review right here in these blogs.

I’m still going through Christian Bale movies at a fairly slow pace. Coming home from Quaker meeting last First Day, on foot (I’m so lucky to live so close), I snagged The Secret Agent, and Metroland. I’ve seen the former, whereas the latter is queued. 

In The Secret Agent, set in the 1800s (lots of horses, rain and mud) Bale plays a most aware person (he’s empathic) whereas everyone else is deep into their own retarded dream (time tunnel) yet think the Bale character is the dummy (“fool on the hill” archetype).

Visiting BizMo

 I may have this story wrong, so feel free to correct me, but not in the comments, which are turned off, but in such a way that I eventually see the light and do a correction down the road, likely with a link back to here. 

The story I know is: Ford had a touring model of their Transit brand, van made in Turkey, for a Euro-based clientele, but only manufactured the cargo model in North America. Ergo a cottage industry sprang up in Cascadia and places to do aftermarket conversions on the cargo model, turning it into a touring model per various kits and guidebooks. DIY types took to this project like ducks to water.

My memory is a couple of my OST friends had the Turkish model, imported from Europe somehow, and they were tooling around in Sonoma County with that thing, likely helping inspire the whole wanderlust industry with their cutting edge example. 

Is it time to enlist a gossip bot's aid yet?  Placeholder for Perplexity.

Blue House was privileged to host a converted van of the Ford brand in its driveway recently. The vehicle was on a southbound vector. The crew well-understands my "bizmo" concept, which connects with "control room" in a dispatcher "AAA" model (repair and/or tow trucks get dispatched to roadside or other breakdown situations). 

Said crew included a canine (dog), which is also baked into my model (nonhuman trafficking). My bizmo to Terrebonne scenario has Sydney (dog) scripted into it.

Most of my bizmo scenarios are storyboard phase, geared for One Band One Road situations in broad brush stroke accounts, fine tuning a job for those actually undertaking pilot journeys (tours of duty). I expect they'll use the Turkish Fords out of the box, versus converted ones, but again, that's not a decision bottlenecking on my desk. I'm not a bottleneck. I'm in an observation box, like the ones at the stadium where you get to watch with your friends.

What I actually expect is that the bizmo fleets will spread through nomadland by an organic process no one in particular is in control of. The same is true with the spread of new curriculum content, from Cascadia and elsewhere. The motherboard circuitry is already in place, but its future modes of operation are not directly inferable from its present state, per a new kind of science (chaos math). 

Exaptations (cite Stuart Kaufman, Santa Fe Institute, ISEPP speaker) figure in: morphing maneuvers unanticipated by current affairs.

However, the unpredictability of details doesn't stop us from modeling in broad brush stroke. We expect faculty members here are there to venture down rabbit holes, or call them trailheads, that lead into our subcultural networks. This is already what's happening. Exchanges occur. They learn from us, we learn from them. A relationship emerges from the noise by reveruse diffusion, as anti-entropic computations kick in.

The bizmo fleets are oft tasked with paving the way (not literally necessarily, as the pavement may be in place already) for future trucking routes, much as small airplane routes are sometimes precursors of "higher bandwidth" versions, with wider body aircraft. 

For example, I flew from Calcutta (Kolkata airport, Dum Dum, West Bengal) to Paro (Drukyul) on a propellor plane, and later, when the route had plumped up, along the same route in a BAE jet operated by Bhutan's royal government.

We also took a Toyota hilux from Thimphu to Samdrup Jongkhar (and back), through Mongar etcetera, thereby previewing what futuristic bizmo might accomplish in some future chapter. Filipino-style jeepney networks likewise suggest where a future bus route might emerge.

Sometimes rivulets beget streams which may in turn beget rivers. Other times, the process goes in reverse, as when a once great river, with a wide delta, dries up completely, perhaps owing to heavy use upstream (I'm thinking of the Colorado) meaning it's supporting a maxed-out workload (Hoover Dam, drinking and irrigation water). Complementary patterning. Climatic change. Biospheric equilibration. You know the score.

Demon Slayer Infinity Castle (movie review)

I always check the marquee of The Bagdad when I walk by, and then when I’m home (usually) I’ll quick check out what the movie is about, the genre, the gist, to decide whether I wanna see it or not. My decisions tend to be whimsical in this case and have as much to do with my mood as with the movie itself. 

Last night I was in the mood for a Bagdad movie, and a quick check told me this was Japanese anime, with subtitles. Fans were raving, but that’s what fans do.

The endless fractal city, the infinity castle we could call it, is the backdrop through which many plots intertwine, with an overall elite demon slayer team pitted against the demons, which come in ranks and with various powers. Ditto the slayers have their own hierarchy, and sometimes a slayer will switch to the demon side, because reasons.

The backdrop infinity city anchors the flashbacks, as much of the movie comes through as backstory, as we explore a character’s past while, at present, they’re in a life or death battle in the Matrix (if we wanna call it that). The many flashback scenarios are archetypal stories involving family expectations, loyalties, the divvying of a lineage and so on. 

For example, one brother is insanely jealous of another whom gramps seems to love equally whereas this one brother is clearly better and more worthy in every dimension. His getting locked into this one way of seeing matters leads to his monstering out and developing demon qualities.

In another backstory we follow the history of a young hellion, deemed worthy by a dojo master and his sickly daughter, but right when everything was going well, the jealousy of others kicked in and ruined everything. The hellion felt furious about his powerlessness at this critical juncture and resolved to gain strength at all costs. Flash forward and he’s in a pitched battle, even minus his head.

The foreground life and death fights involve defending against mortal thrusts and blows, also poisons, while invoking aggressive modalities (actions) aimed at achieving domination. All these characters, slayer and demon alike, demonstrate more propensity to fight than to escape the scene. They actively seek encounters. They’re warriors.

I’m not a consistent student of the Japanese anime genre (with all its sub-genres), of manga either, but I did appreciate the consistent language, as in semiotic code, for sharing character thoughts as well as backstories. We get a lot of insights. As viewers, we’re nigh omniscient, a familiar viewpoint assumed by English novelists with similar confidence. 

Within the movie itself, overview is provided by a mapping room and a murder of spy crows who also share news.

The film was only lightly attended. Cartoons still enjoy an edge in matinee world I’d hazard, when a lot of the younger crowd is out of school for the afternoon. This was the late show, on a school night. 

I was there in senior citizen mode (I get the discount) even if I’d be up past my bed time. Now it’s 7 am the next morning and I’ve been up for hours. I could always take a nap.

Great Pirate Narrative

Aksing Perplexity

("to aks" means "to prompt")

Soft Statehood

State of Jefferson (Full Documentary) 2014 | Oregon Experience

I hope this OPB channel sticks around on YouTube i.e. these links keep working. Those who scan through my online journals (blogs) through searches or random prowls will find many a broken link, with this or that video made private, or the channel has been removed. Maybe these blogs are gone too by now, and you found this fragment in some refracting medium. Related post on Flickr, screenshot from Facebook.

Philosophical Discourse

I've just been listening to retired diplomats from so-called "western" (I'd say "Eurasian") countries bemoan the lack of collective memory and the resulting rudderlessness of the average diplomat today. The ones representing the EU are especially undiplomatic, in their outlook. Diplomacy has been corrupted by a lower form of intelligence: that of a dominant power expecting the capitulation of weaker ones, coercian and bullying in other words.

I wouldn't dispute their critique, but then memory is more than diplomatic history and the relations between "powers" in a geographic sense, as when we speak of Hittites and Egyptians as Potemkin did in his multi-volume history of diplomacy. There's the dynamic of "ideas" which are more freely floating, more like the "meme virus" of contemporary parlance, of which the "military industrial complex" would be a good example. It's a "complex" of a psychological sort, and anything else secondarily.

In the realm of ideas, you have a lot of subcultures investing in their narratives in order to propagate their story forward, diplomats being a good example of a subculture. The story of the diplomats might be one of their being undermined, by so-called "security services" meaning by institutions designed to outsmart and trick, deceive, distract. A security agent is closer to a stage magician, a prestidigitator, than to someone wishing to be forthright and honest, to the point, clear, and yet without guile.

Here we might tap into philosophy. Contemporary curricula don't do this (I'm way ahead of my time) but the continuity from Nietzsche to Buckminster Fuller is very evident in that "beyond good and evil" (beyond a punishing and/or guilty mindset), as a concept, connects to "precession" in Fuller's lexicon. What diplomats might miss is that an absence of guile may not preclude use of what look to be "magic methods" from the standpoint of a moralizer. 

When you've fallen in love with a planet your sense of commitment may lead to a partisan sense of who the goodies and baddies might be, whereas if you yet to beam down (you're still in orbit), your orientation will be less polarized and you'll be more on the verge of just wandering off versus inclined to take sides in a local battle of good versus evil. You might just change channels. Precessional space is a higher dimensional space not in the thrall of (not predicted by) any one of its component axes.

In Biblical terms (not my standard form of self expression), Jesus spends a lot of time drinking wine with tax collectors, Roman soldiers, and other characters who are clearly in the oppressor class from a Zealot's point of view. Or call it "consorting with the enemy" (what detractors might call it). Jesus: what enemy, you mean me? Ain't we all just collective humanity, God's creation? 

Christians, over the centuries after Jesus (A.D.) would often have have the right temperament for diplomacy, even if their programming was bipolar (good vs evil). They had sufficient empathy to develop professional business relationships (not just friendships), a prerequisite for "telepathy" (by which we mean simply "access to the Zeitgeist" which many celebrities and politicians clearly have -- we call them media-savvy).

Tying back to what these ex-dips were saying, about the prevalence of memory holes, let's not forget about World Game, in which Fuller would counsel his most ardent players to consult the Russians as well as their own government when seeking data. 

He was laying the groundwork for something more successful than German Idealism or Manifest Destiny Anglo-imperialism, which Nietzsche heralds, in marking a turn towards depth psychology (where are these notional "nations" anyway, if not in people's heads?) and existentialism. 

I tell more of that story in my Graph Theory 2025 (a YouTube).

Terminological Clarifications

:: from my visit to China with a USIA family ::

Our family was always getting queried, in the Philippines for example, as to whether we were embedded in the CIA in some way. I empathize. Like I understand why there'd be confusion. We definitely had US Embassy status, in terms of commissary, swimming pool, canteen and military base access. Mom even got an award from the ambassador at one point, and dad could be espied sitting not far from Imelda Marcos at this or that gala gathering. 

"The king and queen fled the land" was the text of that cryptic middle-of-the-night phone call, from a family friend it turned out later, who was feeling paranoid about our status and suggesting we skedaddle. Filipinos always treated us kindly, across the political spectrum.

However, as Quakers (Friends) we had our own "intelligence community" if you wanna call it that: the AFSC, FCNL, RSWR and other four-letter agencies. 

AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) in particular has had CIA ties going back to the Rufus Jones - Cord Meier relationship. FCNL (Friends Committee on National Legislation) is a District lobby, plugged in to the congressional matrix if not so much the executive branch, and is supposedly where oversight happens. RSWR (Right Sharing of World Resources) was like Grameen Bank, into right sharing, which meant pioneering the practice of making micro-loans, but without the exploitative interest rates and subsequent sharking.

The AFSC is oft jokingly referred to by veterans (like me) as "the Quaker KGB" with headquarters in Friends Center ("the Quaker Vatican") not far from Smedley Butler's grave (39°58'47.8" N, 75°37'12.5" W) as the crow flies. I worked for AFSC independently of my parents, taking up nuclear cleanup and risk around the Pacific Rim as a topic, as well as local ethnic strife (LAAP program). Later, I'd supervise the AFSC from on high, as an NPYMer (North Pacific Yearly Meeting, another four-letter entity I've served).

The better mental picture therefore is of a rivalrous yet, on occasion, friendly-enough relationship, as when I'd have gin and tonic (with extra gin) with that Mockingbird guy in Georgetown (you know the one), or here in Portland, or as when dad and I ventured over to Institute for Policy Research (WDC) that time, to hear Ralph McGehee tell his story, live in person.

Ralph (exCIA) was impressed with how inertial was the CIA's ballast of football player (team player) dummies, as when they couldn't get it through their thick heads that Vietnam was not just some backdrop for some global great game of dominoes. Why did it take so long to shift weight around? As Quakers might put it: why are "weighty Friends" (a real term) sometimes likewise the most stubborn stuck-in-the-muds? Put that way, it sounds like a question in basic physics.

I'd read Ed Lansdale later (thanks to Prouty, another Bucky fan), who was from an earlier cohort than my dad was.  For some of those years in Manila, we were a USAID family i.e. that's when we had those embassy privileges (which we didn't always have). But dad was with the UN before that, at least twice, and not with the USG at all in many chapters, and even in places with no US embassy.

Yes, I went to Vietnam with my family, on a trip to other places. Was that the same trip that took us to Kashmir and through the Khyber Pass by bus (Peshawar to Kabul), and to Tashkent and Moscow? No, probably not. Our Vietnam visit, where we met with Buddhist monks, was likely enroute to Thailand (again) and Malaysia, Indonesia and Borneo. 

We Urners got around.