Touring the Borderlands

I know no one is looking forward to some kind of DMZ situation, ala Korea, in Ukraine, along the border with New Russia. Or maybe not no one, as that'd be a lot of job opportunities, manning those stations, not letting people cross, but with that many miles, there'd be a dramatic defection, one way or the other, at least daily. That'd make for a lot of television and commercial revenue.

We might get some guided tours though, I'm hoping, with some high ranking feeling safe enough to risk it, like when CDI hosted retired brass on trips to Cuba. Castro wasn't about to have anyone gunned down. He wanted to talk, after the visitors had some fun in the sun and some beer. The scene was copacetic. 

We're getting some of those tours from YouTubers even today. I've been surveying Mariupol, wondering if a city that size might build back better. What does one do with partially damaged apartment buildings? We've seen cities rubblized before. The WW2 generation rubblized their cities, why shouldn't we rubblize ours, is that the thinking? Then they'd rebuild.

The tour guides with tell different stories, and tourists will sample them both, kind of like how the same tourist is free to show up at the Korean DMZ on either side, one might hope both sides over time, more than once. Get each point of view. Don't make a run for it, providing target practice; just leave to a neutral liminal space of air travel (Pyongyang to Beijing?), and return on the opposite side (Beijing to Seoul?), through the looking glass.

We're not going to ignore all the death and destruction that happened (is still happening as of this writing), meaning we're touring a space of cemeteries, well kept and full of ceremony.

Dieters' Corner

bowl of soup, 2017

What's the diff twixt "dieting" and "fasting" in the religious sense? That's a "thumb on the scales" question, as already tilted towards the "religious" meaning of fasting, whereas plenty of dieters fast to tone up and lose weight. 

That being buff can't likewise be a religious undertaking was dispelled in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Many religions have preached this same dogma in so many words: to fight the devil, you need your physical health, literally. Work it from either end. Strong body ⋈ strong mind.

So, on the advisory side: don't feed into the melodrama, as dieting (fasting etc.) especially is characterized by mania and depression in successive bouts, as one loses but then gains it all back, Apollo versus Dionysus or something along those lines (to get Greek about it).

In practical terms, what this means is you don't have to forswear this or that forever more. Think like a scientist, not a moralist. You're interested to see what Guinea Pig [your initials] does when deprived of milk, not for forever, but for the purposes of this experiment. 

You're exploring the plasticity of the homunculus, the avatar, with some degree of medical aloofness, not because you hate yourself, but because you find yourself plenty interesting as is (your own "self" is the one you get to treat as yours).

I bring up milk for a reason. The documentary Got the Facts on Milk? took an interesting look, one might say anthropological, at an ecosystem's efforts to economize. If you're planning on eating lots of steak, figure out how to use other bovine features as well. If you're not lactose intolerant, enjoy this land of milk and honey. Lots of BBQ. Lots of good bye rainforests. 

That was me growing up, the milk chugger, because our moms well knew that milk built strong bones and teeth and we'd likely need those to get ahead in the world. These were old wives tales says the movie, to be blunt about it. I'm happy for lobbyists to debate the relevant science, but in some other column. Milk is just and example food here, one I can well relate to, so as the storyteller, I exercise my prerogatives.

Play on our love of dairy, with milk not just an ingredient, but a beverage we'll wanna chug, over soda even. I found the therapy (by which I mean this fun movie) effective in a way I hadn't expected: I lost my craving for milk as a beverage, even on cereal. Some months or years later, I picked up on Soylent and went through many boxes of the stuff. I doubt I'd have gone through that Soylent phase without first relinquishing milk in a previous one.

It's like the milk lover in me gave up without a fight and went off to haunt another being. For a window at least, I was free even of the temptation, which is saying a lot, as it's usually around "fighting temptation" that all the melodrama occurs. The hankering just went away. The movie was like a drug trip in that way, setting me back on my feet a different person in some ways. I'd been abducted. Lucky me.

Then I went back to milk later, plus I'd never given up on diary as a genre. I'm not saying my doctor was super impressed by any of this. 

But then, fast forward, and I'm back to dropping milk while cutting back on dairy. Exploring plasticity. Experimenting for a next role, having been the corpulent batman (have you seen the meme? Fat batman eyeing baked goods -- hilarious). 

First step: don't stock it; stop buying it (whatever the it is that you're giving up). But then be polite and remember your guests: be a good extrovert and remember cream, or half-and-half (which you won't use anyway -- talking to myself here -- as you're a black coffee kinda guy). As an American I have an advantage over my British counterparts:  I'm don't practice a daily tea ritual, complete with scones, a place where milk-the-beverage frequently enters the ceremony, irrespective of scones.

I have some rum for my guests as well, some Bacardi. This bottle is left over from my drinking days. I'm still doing the 0.5% beers, down from above 5% average a few years ago. Oregon is a destination state if you like IPA and Pinot (Noir or Gris).  Sticking to non-alcoholic beers constitutes "quitting" in my book.

But it's milk we were talking about. 

I'm not swearing off it forever. I still have some breakfast cereals. But I'm not cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs or buying into the milk subculture, just for the time being. A kind of fasting. That doesn't mean I'm off pizza (I had some yesterday with a retired lawyer, at a swanky pizza place downtown). 

Most dieticians would say what I'm doing is medically immaterial but for me it's about balance. When it comes to balance, we each deal with our own set of weighted axes.

That's my last piece of advice for this column: recognize the reality of different body types. 

I'm not saying don't strive to leap into another category if you sense you must. Destiny calls. 

Stamina is required to reshape. 

But learn to take some satisfaction in where you're at as a destination, not just a passing phase. All we have are passing phases, from birth to grave, as time marches by. 

So why be too impatient about moving on to a next life or incarnation? 

Fully be the character you've become, even as you realize such complete acceptance tends to catalyze a next overhaul (R&R leads to makeovers). Today is the last day of you as you've known you so far.

More Framework

RT with 30 tent poles, red stabilizers

The most spherical of the identically faced polyhedrons is the 120 Triangles, which has other names as well, and of course a dual, the truncated icosidodecahedron. We see this shape being considered in the search for a volume five, in tetravolumes, for the core design of the Synergetics matryoshka, the nested polys (tet, cube, oct, RD, RT etc.). RT one the contest (rhombic triacontahedron).

The source code below shows the framework in action: create an RT of the canonical size (every shape has a default starting size); compute the 30 diamond face midpoints and extend them further out from the shape center by 5%. Draw red edges from these "tent poles" to each vertex of the corresponding face.

The transparent version is a mess of edges, so as a final step I bring the starting RT in, with faces filled (f=True). That brings the red edges of the 120 Triangles into sharp relief, and helps us judge whether convexity is maintained. If the tent poles poke out too far, this thing becomes a stellate, a planet with mountains and valleys. We want only mountains (convex creases).

The signature Catalan, dual of an Archimedean, has a specific tent pole height, whereas I'm looking at wiggle room. I discuss this difference in more detail on Synergeo.

 

Python source

Caltrop City

Polys Framework

:: python source ::

In titling this blog entry Polys Framework I'm not meaning to impose restrictions on the name of said package.  Let's take a look at a script, the above snippet. Better form would be to explicitly close the file at the end.  Better yet, I could use a with statement (Pythonistas take note). OK, fixed it in the source (see test32).

What's interesting is each poly, out of the gate, at birth, has a default canonical volume. The Cube weighs in at 3, its dual Octahedron as 4. Tetrahedron is 1 and so on. Points A-Z have been defined, IVM lattice points, to which the five-fold poly skeletons will be added (Icosahedron, RT, PD). 

Right on the same line even, at the moment of birth, you may rescale all the edges and thereby scale the volume. Grow or shrink the new poly to any relative size, given its starting point. The concentric hierarchy is a static structure of default starting points, polys already inter-sized, with further action to follow from there.

In this case, we scale down the canonical volume 4 Octahedron to 3/4 of its usual edge lengths. The resulting red octahedron pokes out of the green cube's six face centers, whereas if unscaled by (3/4) it would have intersected the cube's mid-edges with its own mid-edges. 

David Koski did a lot of studies for this one, breaking it down further. My script was a zoomed-out treatment, in terms of details. Here's one of the vZome's he shared over Telegram:

:: Truncated Octahedron, vZome treatment, D. Koski ::

Below is the corresponding rendering, achieved from running the above Python source code within a framework which, behind the scenes, causes scene description language to be written, for POV-Ray, which then renders the described output as a PNG file (by default).

:: ray-traced rendering ::

Graph Theory Background

Per my Graph Theory 2025, you get a lot of Nietzsche pictures in those slides, which is meant to spark wheels-turning commentary, as we exercise cultural fluency. His reputation tends to be clouded, as between his time and ours comes the whole Third Reich chapter, which he did not live to see. 

:: dynamic dashboard designs ::

Another guy pictured in said slides: Walter Kaufmann, my Princeton professor. His name was widespread on softcover Nietzsche in the English language. Kaufmann was keen to rescue Nietzsche's philosophy from the taint of what was to come after, which isn't that hard a job once you look into things.

One of Nietzsche's well-known works is The Will to Power. The style is aphoristic, a style I like and admired in Norman O. Brown's Love's Body. So how do I link Nietzsche's will to power to anything Bucky? 

I'm prompting myself to generate an answer, which I think is pretty obvious: Fuller had a strong sense of some teleological pressure, a cosmic will shall we say, pushing humanity to make a success of itself, sometimes in spite of itself. In older more archaic language we might speak of God's will. 

But wasn't Nietzsche all about the death of God as a viable belief for a lot of people, sort of marking a new era, and wasn't Buckminster Fuller obviously a deist and some would say Unitarian or at least Christian? 

I'd say he radically renounced received beliefs as a part of his 1927 crisis, and he went his own way after that, but not in the direction of disbelieving in God. He was one of those with an overwhelming sense of teleological pressure, as I've mentioned. A will to power. 

Another connection is in Nietzsche's expressions of admiration for the Transcendentalist Emerson. Nietzsche's Zarathustra character owes something to Emerson according to some commentators.

Keep in mind Fuller’s consistently aligning himself with Einstein’s views with respect to divinity, with the latter in turn aligning with the views of Spinoza. Fuller was no big fan of “organized religion” and did not experience an anthropocentric God behind humans’ proclamations of property rights.

Shifting gears a bit, one of my recent meetups featured the h3-py system, Uber's hexagonal matrix geographic layer. What would it take to feature anything Dymaxion via some type of Uber-like dashboard? We've seen some prototypes in the movies, in science fiction. The hexagonal matrix is a trope.

The idea in this meeting was to marry hexagonal tiles to the bevy of rules and regulations associated therewith, such that a Yamhill, Oregon farmer might call up building code requirements for her property, easily. Some properties will have a designated floodplain area, whereupon new structures may not be built.

City planners in some well-served offices may already have an approximation of the above, for their centers of focus. Legal codes and GIS come together over time whenever various projects and undertakings are being considered. To what extent this amalgamation is software abetted is the variable in question.

These topics hearkened back to my dreams of a hexapent grid with the Pentagon building, on the Potomac, one of the twelve pentagons. Given some n-frequency class one icosasphere, sized just that way, with one pentagon juxtaposed evenly with the building itself, not including the parking lots, where would the other pentagons be, around the globe?  At the center of the Pentagon garden: that Bucky prototype that used to be there, or something like it, to complete the motif.

Remembering Reptilians

Y'all might remember my dad served as a regional planner for Libya for many years, both before and after Col. Gaddafi came to power. 

He saw first hand how living standards in Libya improved once the oil, other resources, had been nationalized. 

But these soulless NATO zombies are ever vengeful (a chemical process vaguely associated with consciousness) even if they have only mindless brains. 

Speaking of which, I'm bemused I was so cheerfully diplomatic about this other cold blooded swamp monster back in the day, accepting of her presence in my Asylum District (shudder). Not like it's up to me.

Toy Stories

AI clip art from Facebook

Social Media Messages

I’m for rebuilding west Ukraine and for the return of refugees who wanna rebuild it. This war didn’t start with the Russian invasion though, but with a civil war. I also support east Ukraine in its efforts to rebuild. This is the side that, rather than submit to the will of Kiev, decided to revert to the Federation. Given all the shelling in Donetsk, many other grievances, they get my empathy as well. Too bad outsiders on both sides each felt the need to escalate to the brink of a world war. That was unnecessary.

Commenting on Keith McHenry's post (March 2, 2025):

I'm for a neutral Ukraine, which was and still is a popular position outside of a more extremist inner circle. NATO dangled the carrot of membership and one political faction (what I'd call the far right) fell for it, betting all its chips. That faction lost.

Rebuilding Ukraine is what's up now. The oblasts who asked Russia to come to their defense are already rebuilding. Mariupol is looking a lot better.

Some still call that city part of "occupied Ukraine". I don't. When Ukraine has elections sometime soon (we hope, for their sake), these eastern folks won't be voting (part of the reason for putting off elections is no one wants to face the new limits to Kiev's jurisdiction). They'll have their own elections.

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2025/01/5/7492071/

Replying to David Cassandra Mertz's post (March 1, 2025):

I see these events through a different lens. Trump is correct in his diagnosis: anyone who hates Putin that much is going to have a hard time negotiating the future. I’m for a neutral Ukraine, like most Ukrainians (last we knew).

The Circle (movie review)

I’ve been enjoying a mini Iranian film fest here at home, thanks to Movie Madness, with more titles than Netflix, especially Iranian I bet. And thanks to Deke the Geek for the loan of this HDTV, which I connect to the old stereo stack (still VHS-capable) via AV/2.

The Circle is brilliant, but at first it made me mad. I felt abandoned by the director. I’d followed the birth seen, the highly annoying sounds of live birth signaling this movie will be mind expanding. That little framed window, between the medical world and this world outside. We would come full circle and end on that frame as well.

So the birth is a disappointment and that suffering woman, giving birth to the unwanted girl, fades in the rear view mirror as we follow the flowers down the stairwell only to end up with these other women who clearly don’t know anything about a baby. They have their own melodrama going, and now we have to follow them. That’s what made me mad at first.

But really, I can the camera follow everyone and be everywhere, to isn’t god. This is more like real life, where you switch from track to track, like a child does, if placed in foster care, or if picked up by police and taken off to some cell. What if you don’t have the right travel papers?

At first I found myself cursing at that other woman who was boarding a bus for paradise, only to see her wander off on some misbegotten shopping spree. “You’ll miss your bus you stupid lady” — but of course it was I who was incautious. The police were at the bus when she got back, checking everyone’s papers. Had she not wandered off, she’d be on her way back to jail already, as a woman alone, trying to travel without ID. That’s illegal.

That whole bus chapter comes after we’ve already forked off, choosing one of a duo, which had started out as a threesome after the unwanted girl baby scene. Then we jump to the other fork and start following the protagonist, I think we might call her. Her predicament is only now being fully revealed. She’s in a pickle too. 

And that’s when we come back around to a final forlorn female, or actually second to last. One sad story leads to a next in a male dominated police state, with hope only for rich people. No fun. Gotham has a dark side. Iran is not alone in this.

I admit to getting confused about timelines. Their identities all start to get shmooed together, just as the bureaucracy loses track of the people it hunts down. Society maybe run out of options for someone in a serious predicament, well before the life clock runs out. I still have the DVD checked out and plan to watch the special features. Then I’ll do some homework and see more of what I’ve missed.

Next in the queue: The Cycle, also Iranian.