A Wanderer’s Way

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, if not open with, the therapeutic value of wandering, which is my translation of what a flaneur was up to, observing Paris (say), as it underwent metamorphosis. Or as London underwent industrialization in the age of steam, and then electrification. Or as the Global Village experienced illumination, by means of spectral social media, beginning with radio.

Not that morphing per se is the only phenomenon worth marveling at, awesome though turnover undoubtedly is. Details matter.

In the case, details of my trip were as follows: 

I began with a quick trip down memory lane (figuratively speaking) delving into the courtyard and parking lot area for Cedarhurst Apartments. I used to come here often, for years, as Glenn Stockton (Global Matrix) and Steve Holden (Open Bastion) used to have their respective corner apartments on different floors, each near a respective staircase. Open Bastion also had its own apartment offices for a spell.

I hadn’t planned to make the detour, but a principle of wandering is to keep it semi-unplanned. Have objectives but give yourself permission to change these objectives rather fluidly. Focus on each one as it arises. Some of them will likely be accomplished. Others will prove fleeting.

For example, I started out expecting to make a loop, which I did. Likewise, I started with a strong expectation I’d have lunch at that Hollywood sushi conveyor belt place on my return from St. John’s yet that’s not what happened. I changed my mind. Nor did I make it to St. John’s. Not this time, as it turned out (and that’s fine).

Right at the outset, the 75 passed me by, and just seconds before I’d’ve made it to the stop, but that was all unplanned as I wasn’t trying for a specific bus. I’d consulted no schedule.

So, having just missed a bus, I had some time before the next one. So I ventured into Glenn’s and Steve’s old place. I believe Paul is still there. 

I left by that tunnel I used to frequent, while making a mental note to query about the Hawthorne Theater later, to get more clear on its Masonic past. 

Here’s where I made another impromptu decision: with 8 or so minutes before the next 75 was to arrive, per the bus stop display, I chose to leave the stop and venture into Fred Meyer in search of gum or something, I didn’t even know what. I ended up with some nuts n stuff. 

Half way back to the bus stop, I realize I was sans my binder. No, it wasn’t at the bus stop bench. I must’ve left it at Fred’s after our interesting conversation. Yep. Some running was involved in this segment, to both recover the binder and to not miss the 75. 

Running is good for me, just not too much. Walking is also therapeutic. 

I recommend exploring your environs as a pass time, an activity you’re more likely to have time for if facing old codger-hood, or likewise if enjoying being a teen and cultivating a skillset, such as navigating around town using a mix of public transportation and exercising one’s skills as a pedestrian. 

You may mix in important errands, along with study (bus and train reading). You may reap rewards.

I boarded with the objective of visiting St. John’s, it’s own place north of Portland. But then why not explore NE Alberta instead. I got off at NE 42nd around NE Alberta and walked along it, due west, towards its business section. For a lotta blocks, it’s still residential along both sides.

Alberta starts getting busy around 30th and I enjoyed walking along it, imagining eating here and there, before boarding a 72, and skipping ahead to MLK but while making mental notes of places I’d like to return to, and photograph (I’m taking pictures the whole time). 

Later, waiting for the 6 along MLK is when I noticed The Portland Observer seemed to have gone out of business. But as Gemini later clarified, it had not. That business had simply moved but left some old signage behind. 

Again, upon boarding the 6 I had what proved a fleeting objective: to head to Goose Hollow, maybe catch the Max back to the sushi place in Hollywood. 

But then it didn’t take long for me to realize that if riding the Max train were my objective, then I should get off at the Oregon Convention Center, saving a lot of time. A green line Max was just arriving. 

I was back in Hollywood in short order, yet found myself deciding against grabbing sushi as the 75 stop was right there, next to the Trader Joe’s (which I imagined entering, but then did not). I was enjoying studying and drawing diagrams.

OK, that’s a lot of detail, and yet I’m skipping over many objectives (many around eating) that I entertained but then dropped. I think of this process as “being tickled by temptations” (possibilities) but then usually not getting sidetracked. 

But then what’s the main track vs a side track? I keep deciding that, remaining open to cues, to intuitions..

That’s what I mean by “unplanned”. My friend Ray Simon from Jersey City days is an influence on my practice. His book: In Search of Happenstance. I’m not finding it, but I have his other one, on mischievous marketing.

The overall objective, to have an adventure, is pretty much a given. 

To have an adventure and to study. The point of the binder was to do bus reading of Terry’s and DAF’s papers (an excellent combo) and to draw diagrams on blank white sheets already 3-hole-punched for that purpose. 

I might have other journal entries focusing more on these more metaphysical cogitations — or not.

Rear View Mirror

I was just updating a fellow Wanderer about my adventures diving into the W-Lambert function, too boring for words to a lotta people. 

I admitted to fighting old battles. 

What used to be uphill was my “everyone deserves a nerd cave” standard, as a responsibility of the education system. 

“What system?” you may ask. 

“Exactly” say I. 

However, not having the means to get there doesn’t mean disagreeing on the ends. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is old news by this time, yet was a previous obsession of these blogs. Not that every kid has easy access to a laptop by now. We just know that’s a goal.

I’ll quote from my outbox for the rest of this blog post:

"Using Python as a Calculator" I believe is the title of Guido's early tutorial (Guido being Python's inventor, Dutch guy) and it may still be embedded in the documentation somewhere. Yeah, it's still there.

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/introduction.html#using-python-as-a-calculator

But he never really meant a graphing calculator, as Python is not indigenously about producing graphical output; that's the job of 3rd party packages for the most part (still a part of Greater Python, but not "core" Python exactly, which is what Guido was wanting to teach at that juncture).

But my emphasis is a little different: actually replacing the scientific calculator as the classroom device of choice, or should we even have a classroom, when a personal workspace is the better choice? Like a nerd cave. 

[ Why "go to class"? Well, lectures in person still have a point I guess. But crowding a lot of desktop or even laptop computers into a rank and file arrangement... really? I know the corporate types like the bullpen architecture for supervisory reasons... I say everyone deserves a nerd cave minimum, with plenty of compute, as they say today. ]

So I do go 3rd party and dig into scipy, numpy, matplotlib... all that 3rd party stuff that makes Python popular because powerful. It's not so much the language out of the box that people dig, but the ecosystem that has grown up around it.

https://github.com/4dsolutions/m4w/blob/main/ProductLog.ipynb

The details of this so-called W function, inverse of x * e**x, may be too boring to contemplate (true for most people), however if you scroll down about half way you'll see the graphical calculator-like output I'm talking about; really better than a calculator might do.

I don't really even know to what extent the scientific calculator maintains its grip on contemporary high schoolers. I'm in many ways the product of my past, still fighting yesterday's battles (but hey, I'm learning new stuff in the process, so I wouldn't say I've stagnated entirely, no way jose!).

Another Milestone

:: on my Meta timeline ::

:: random comment, consistent viewpoint ::

:: reassurance ::

Steel Stories

Cascadian TriHearts

Catching Up

Which reporters have the Maduro beat, surely some of them? How’re they doing, Mr. and Mrs.? We seem to hear a lot more about… well anyway, you catch my drift. 

“Where have you been?” might be the relevant question, like I should do more homework before I ask dumb questions right?

I was saying yesterday I think a lotta people are doing more reading thanks to AI, as the prompted answers seem more to the point than mere searches. They say boomers are using AI all wrong if they think it’s just search. How about Generation Jones, same way? That’s my pigeon-hole.

For lunch today I had my Blue House Burrito: fresh Instant Pot pinto beans, Picante (hot), fresh spinach, nutritional yeast (like a powder), shredded Tillamook cheddar cheese and onion, melted on the spinach-tinged (as in green) wrap (we call them tillers). 

Not that you have to use Tillamook, that’s just an excuse for a link (Cascadian history is topical around here).

Maybe it sounds like I’m ignoring the serious warring that’s going on around the planet but as Marshall McLuhan could tell us, the Global Village is not a “nice town” by a long shot. Arnold Toynbee: same message. 

We’re in a pressure cooker, where the ethnicities more likely to make it are the ones less likely to be piling on. Neutrality Studies is big at Wilmington College I bet (Ohio, a hog capital), under a Peace Studies umbrella (Quaker school, you can predict the subjects from the brand).

My focus is my School of Tomorrow curriculum, and like everyone else it seems, I’ve been data mining with AI, pulling up what’s relevant to my network or graph. Typically for a knowledge engineer, I was just recently cutting and pasting the markdown output from an LLM to a Jupyter Notebook on GitHub. 

So what else is new, right?

Anthropology Exercise

As an exercise, write about a culture with a different relationship with alcohol. Here’s an idea: sure go ahead and drink when you’re young, but it’s considered normal and part of the life arc that after fifty or so one weans off, if not sooner. The culture comes with rituals around all that, and no one thinks they’re being innovative for having things be this way, as this is how things have always been and just are (going for realism, in other words, given this is often the native outlook, whatever we mean by “native”).

Going through my mind is the burgeoning supply of NA (non-alcoholic) beers we’re seeing, combined with that guy at the beer dealership telling me the NA market was booming relative the standard lines, which are down. Obviously public tastes are shifting, and I’m not saying in alignment with any particular program I’m aware of, other than maybe awareness itself, of the alternative lifestyles one might create.

The motto, or slogan, if that’s what we wanna call it, “the best religions are yet to come” sounds provocative if not downright offensive, as a religion is something people get defensive about, whereas the same phrase (almost) — “the best lifestyles are yet to come” — will meet with broad agreement, because we intuit “lifestyles” to come in infinite permutations, whereas “religions” are supposed to remain small in number, if expecting a world stage at least, and the few we have already are causing at least as many problems as they solve, or so many would judge.

All of which is to say, anthropology has a job to do, which includes teasing apart these various meanings, based on connotation as much as denotation, and that means exploring the connotations — which is anthropology again, so full circle. What’s the difference between “ethnicity and “race”? I’d say the distance is great, and that the former has a bright future, whereas “race” is being retired to pocket ethnicities that remain as holdovers from the Social Darwinist era (same era as the Marxist era in thumbnail), marketed later as Eugenics, and getting confused with being pedigreed (having an ancestry).

Does making up a culture mean committing to live it through? Why would we have fiction then? The whole point of fiction is to be able to speculate and imagine without acting out, if the latter were even possible (fiction often breaks laws, the laws that “keep it real” to use an idiom).

However people will commit to finite / definite experiences, such as a cruise or tour of duty, including when lots of random happenings are involved, stuff no one controls. People opt for such scenarios knowing it’s not a life-time commitment. That’s a tendency to work with, not against. A lifestyle park, like a theme park, with no alcohol or only NA substitutes (< 0.5%) could be a part of a permutation for a few months. Where one goes from there will depend on many factors, on future decisions. So kick back and enjoy.

Old Friends

Yesterday I took the FX2 over Tilikum Crossing to downtown Portland, on the other side of the Willamette River from my neighborhood. 

My objective: to celebrate an old friend's birthday at Karam, a centrally situated Lebanese restaurant. 

My interim goal: to arrive early enough to take some digital photographs on a sunny spring day, of whatever. 

On my return from Karam, I took a street car, right outside the door, down to the Waterfront, one stop past where I’d rejoin the FX2, but first I got some spectacular views of the OHSU cable car.

Upon arriving home, after walking north from SE 34th and Division, I found two recently-ordered books in my mailbox, both from the Trevor Blake collection. I'm looking forward to diving in.

Close Enough for Folk Music

I'm far from a veteran, in the sense of expert, when it comes to the local folk music theme. However, another family, the Pinneys, pivotal in transforming Stark Street facility into a real Quaker meetinghouse, knows the folk music scene inside-out, and Sonya, the matriarch Pinney, personally invited me to this elite gathering at Reedwood Friends Church. I was more than happy to accept her extra ticket and perform as chauffeur, a preferred role.

Bobby Jenkins, far different from me, is indeed an expert, both in the lore surrounding, and in the playing, of folk music using authentic folk instruments, in the string family especially I gather, including the Theremin (a "stringless" violin). Tonight he featured the banjo and the classical guitar. He would retune both instruments adroitly as a part of the performance, as the range of tunes he was covering were by no means all designed for the same scales. If that sounds like I know music theory, trust me, I'm faking it.

Jenkins leverages the fact that he doesn't need to masquerade in blackface and come off like a phony white person pretending to be otherwise (whites are good at that, like parrots or minah birds, just witness their stand up comics). He knows Portland really well and had QuarterWorld in mind for his destination after the show, as he's a connoisseur of pop culture and knows what Portland is known for. The guy is originally from Brooklyn NYC, with those famous STEM schools, but with a lot of North Carolina background.

The narrative he delivered, which I found no reason to contradict, was that what we call the banjo was primarily a slave class instrument, and its vocabulary, in terms of native tunes, turns towards the defiant, as well as the encrypted. African cultures needed to find a way to self perpetuate, despite the imposition of a Christian framework, which they learned to adapt towards their own purposes, all of which accounts for the vitality of the all-Americas music scene to this day (Bobby knows a lot about the evolution of Reggae).

The audience, unlike me, were indeed veterans of the folk music scene, many like my friend Sonya with season tickets and a long track record of getting educated along these lines, by a variety of accomplished shows on the road. I'm reminded of the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series, produced by ISEPP, where I was a veteran, in terms of how a certain "trans-episodic shoptalk" bleeds through. That's a fancy way of saying insiders seem to know what they're talking about, whereas as outsiders within hearing distance (like children peripheral to the council of elders) pick up on what they glean and formulate their own conjectures and speculations.

Now that slavery and apartheid have ended, although we'll continue paying karmic costs, it pays to go back and do what the Civil Rights Institute in Bellingham does: revisit the past in meticulous detail. Overcoming a chapter does not mean turning one's back on the content, but rather diving in with gusto, without the polarizations of the past. Novel perspectives, low hanging fruit, is easy to come by, another way of saying such scholarship is rewarding. Jenkins, highly skilled, even brings some of the higher hanging fruit within the comprehension range of a noob such as myself.

I was surprised to learn from Sonya about the death of one of my peers in Quaker-verse, Laura Martin. The Martins, along with the Pinneys, Jumps, Urners, and Hazel Hephill, were among the original families of our nascent Quaker meeting on Stark Street. As we awaited the show starting, sitting in those Reedwood pews (I don't access this space very often), I shared with Sonya our saga as I'd come to learn it, about the heroic exploits of one Doug Strain, the conscientious objector who helped our Quakers get their show on the road back in the mid 1900s. The Urners had recently moved from 57th Street Meeting in Chicago, their new son (me) in tow.

Bobby's performance reminded me of Dan Ryan's. Dan would specialize in offbeat blues bordering on what never made it on the record, again inheriting bigly from slave subcultures in the north American southeast, around the Mississippi Delta and so on.

Next Projects

Vintage Blender 2.5

You might’ve come across me talking about Blender here and there, meaning the animation and spatial design environment, in the same ballpark as Maya and Rhino.

I keep reimplementing a core framework of polyhedrons, arranged in accordance with the Synergetics Hierarchy (a concentric arrangement of a familiar cast), having it backend in different file formats: vrml, pov, stl, or directly into animation tanks (cartoon vistas): Visual Python’s, Blender’s and Rhino’s.

Ideally, the same scripts I use to develop POV-Ray stills (.pov files) could be used to drive Blender, with the result being a real time interactive vista, suitable for VR. I’ve accomplished this goal to partial degree but don’t really have the energy slaves (inanimate machinery) to commit to running the newest Blender.

To that end, a next Linux box is on my wish list. Or a Mac with similar rendering capabilities. As of this time, Windows is too unstable to take seriously.

However I’m not wanting to be a bottleneck and prefer accelerating the spread of the existing knowledge base over doing cutting edge R&D. Andragogy and pedagogy, curriculum development, testing, improving, have been core concerns, over coming up with something splashy, not that our content isn’t naturally splashy.