Didactic Manga

from Summer Term, 2026

Asylum District Dining

Here’s one of those classic food pix. Cold sesame noodles. I’d been craving em ever since Fujin went away years ago. Hard to find. Could I make em myself? No doubt. I’ve held various prep kits at HongPhat, wondering if this was my least action path (a physics allusion).

Anyway (a) Sapphire Hotel had em on the menu and (b) I’d never been to Sapphire Hotel, which is in my neighborhood, where I’ve lived for over 30 years (the longest I’ve lived in any neighborhood). Sapphire Hotel is a restaurant, not a hotel.

I was reminded of going to The Fork long ago with Kiyoshi Kuromiya. Kiyoshi was a true foodie who wrote about Philadelphia eateries and in so doing helped elevate the tastes and cuisine of that entire city (per my narrative account anyway). When we showed up at The Fork that time, the staff was well aware this was Kiyoshi Kuromiya, the one and only. Great food by the way.

I’ll link to my Dinner with Kiyoshi in the comments, a play off the movie My Dinner with Andre. He was indeed a super interesting dude, a deep intellectual not only a gourmand. He’d started studying architecture with a focus on Louis Khan but then found Buckminster Fuller and felt he’d finally hit the jackpot. They became co-conspirators. Bucky called him “adjuvant” which is closer to “catalyst” than “lieutenant”.

In those days, I represented Friends (Quakers) to American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). To earn its reputation as working on behalf of Friends, AFSC would host these annual corporation meetups where they’d impress us with all their good works, and we’d spread the word. North Pacific Yearly Meeting insisted on paying my way, not accepting AFSC money for our visits, cuz we were in a sense auditing them and so should not be like unscrupulous members of congress who gladly allow lobbyists to wine and dine them (and so so much more) in exchange for protecting their own interests.

So I’d be in Philly anyway, for the corporation meeting, and I’d pad the trip with visits to old and new haunts, including meetups with CJ and Kiyoshi.

Closing Time

Per the yin-yang way of thinking, the ending of a chapter creates the space for a next chapter to begin. Novels jump around a lot more than real life, but then real life includes reading novels. 

In this ending, or closing, in my role as a Wanderer (capital W, cuz it's a practice), I found myself up and out the door early, taking bus 75 to the Hollywood District (Portland's Hollywood, which is likewise into movies), then walking the length of East Broadway to Lloyd Center, a Portland landmark, and soon (within hours) to open to crowds for a last day as an indoor shopping mall.

However I didn’t stick around for those crowds. People I know were there for the festivities, which included lining up for candy treats and ice skating (that rink will be missed, but few were using it, and the mall had become a ghost of its former self). 

They sent me pictures, which I added to my album. But I was back in my “outstairs office” long before then, content with my almost-no-people vacant streets look. That’s a slice too, early morning hours on a Saturday when few people have any reason to be out and about.

I’m accepting of the fact that systems have more than just boundaries in the sense of inside and outside. They have boundaries, or call them lifespans, of before and after. However based on my latest observations of all the new construction going on, this will be more of a transformation than a complete replacement. 

The plan is to turn the place inside-out so it becomes less of an enclosed space and more a shared outdoor space where people also want to live. I’d say look at the Pearl District and NW Portland for a preview. That being said, I’m have no privileged access to these plans, or maybe they’re public and I simply need to look them up at the city website.

I left the bicycle in the repair shop today in preparation for a next loop.

Quadrays History

Johnny Tri Goode sent me this set of quadray coordinates for an icosahedron, which I ran through my framework to compare with my default icosahedron (cyan) from the concentric hierarchy (a matryoshka of polyhedrons).

Johnny is researching the history of Quadrays. As I was saying to fellow faculty in the faculty lounge (virtual):  

The way I see it is: Quadrays are a shelf of books in a math library or bookstore, but only a few of them bother with Synergetics. That’s a metaphor as “shelf of books” implies wood pulp, but we’re actually doing all this in the cloud without much paper.

You might be wondering "what are quadrays?". Spellcheckers complain about it (squiggly red underline) much as they complain about Synergetics. English is hostile to our curriculum in a lotta ways (we’re mostly immune to toxic aspects of English, having escaped the Anglosphere). 

In my version of the narrative, Quadrays are an escape from the linear algebra “hegemon” (spellchecker complains again), but not in such a way as to undercut LA in any way. Machine learning is all about LA and I’m one of who teach (some might say preach) ML (my company bosses were near Istanbul — not sure where exactly given I was in a cloud-based company using Google glue).

Some of us (picture a subculture) like exploring in other namespaces with an apparatus that has a lotta family resemblance to the principal Hilbert Space exploration device: the extended Euclidean version of XYZ. Quadrays operate well within the IVM, which ML (NLP) will call a “substrate” for same, per this output from Charlie (Charlie = generic chatbot).

### 3.4 Fuller's isotropic vector matrix (IVM) and the coining of "quadray" **R. Buckminster Fuller (with E. J. Applewhite), *Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking*, Macmillan, Vol. 1, 1975; Vol. 2, 1979.** Full text: [monoskop.org](https://monoskop.org/images/4/46/Fuller_R_Buckminster_Synergetics_1997.pdf); scan at [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/synergeticsexplo0000full_t1i6). Sections 420.01–420.02 describe the isotropic vector matrix (IVM) as "four-dimensional and 60-degree coordinated" — Fuller's own coordinate framework, based on the FCC/CCP (cubic close-packed) lattice, i.e. geometrically the same lattice underlying quadrays and (via the \(A_3^*\) permutohedral identification) GBT in three dimensions. **Fuller's IVM predates the specific "quadray" coordinate formalism by roughly six years** and is the acknowledged geometric substrate on which quadrays were later built, but Fuller's own texts describe vector *directions* and a lattice, not an explicit \((a,b,c,d)\) 4-tuple coordinate algebra with defined arithmetic.

Social Engineering for Dummies

Warm Springs Circuit

Drone Zone?

BikeTown Adventure

I dunno if anyone calls Portland "BikeTown" per the title, in CamelCase like that. In snake world (Pythonista world) we'd typically use "snake_case" as in "bike_town".

Aside: on my Facebook timeline, I'm reassuring peeps that even though we're a crow town, hence CrowTown (a moniker I favor), that doesn't mean "unfriendly to pigeons". On the contrary, pigeons are welcome, Canadian geese too, we just don't have that many, compared to crows.

I'd been saying to Dr D and others that on my bucket list was to try out one of these BikeTown bikes everyone is using. 

We did a whole capstone-like project around bicycle sharing for Clarusway. I don't know if those were e-bikes, unlocked and paid for by app. The datasets didn't get into those details. 

I'd teach the dataset but not partake. Now it was time to partake as someone left an e-bike sitting on the corner, just half a block away.

My iPhone's front lens is cracked, partly why I use a camera for any lens pix, but is still able to scan QR codes fairly reliably, which I needed to do to unlock the ebike. Even before that, I needed the app. 

Once unlocked, I took it back to my driveway so I could grab a helmet. When I'd set out a few minutes before, I wasn't anticipating having an e-bike experience. I was seizing an opportunity in light of a stated intention.

I did my usual Sellwood Loop, meaning 

• SE Harrison (my street)
• down through Ladd's Addition, around the circle (Palio gone)
• slanting off to the southwest to where the freight lines cross SE 11th and SE 12th.

The Max has its own tracks, parallel to freight and Amtrak.  The railroad gates go down briefly for the Orange Line Max trains, but may go down for much longer intervals if freight trains are involved. This morning they were, and going in both directions. 

However, if you're fortunate enough to be on a bicycle, you needn't wait: there's a pedestrian overpass with elevators on both ends. E-bikes are pretty heavy. The elevators made this detour both photogenic (except my battery had died) and physically non-demanding.

• Springwater Corridor from the old Ross Island cement plant,
• to Sellwood,
• past the substation on SE Linn,
• over McLoughlin on the pedestrian bridge,
• and down (in) to the Tacoma-Sellwood Max station, where I left the e-bike locked to a public rack

What was hardest was disengaging and ending the ride once I'd locked the bike up, at the Max station. 

I ended up in a chat session through the BikeTown app, which was going nowhere (slowly), when the app finally asked if I was done. Yes! 

But why did it take so long to ask?  It seems the act of locking the e-bike (using its own lock) was supposed to signal the ride's end, but it hadn't? 

Did the chat I was having get someone to send that prompt? After I sent a picture of the bike locked up?

Anyway, I did finally disengage and paid through the app using PayPal which draws from my bank: $21. 

• Orange line over Tilikum Crossing (bridge over Willamette)
• walk back to OMSI stop
• FX2 to SE 34th & SE Division
• walk to SE Harrison (loop complete)

The whole e-bike experience was amazingly non-demanding. 

This is a loop I do on a conventional bicycle pretty frequently in good weather, and we've been having good weather. I haven't had much if any experience with e-bikes. This one felt powerful and it had plenty of miles charged up in its battery (about 35 when we started, 31 by the end).

That seemed worth it, for a first experience. I'm not planning to stop riding my regular bike, but it's good to have a better sense of this option, when I'm out Wandering and/or having an InterModal Adventure.

Chronicling a Tour

Basically, a travelogue, to some point of interest within easy radius. 

To tour is to do a random walk (or it might be straitjacketed) or “to wander”. If you have a specific mission or set of goals you might call it a “tour of duty” as your intent is to be dutiful in some way.

I woke up with strong inclinations to drive to Crown Point, even though Vista House is closed today, dog in the back seat (she likes car rides).

However, the inertia in my case is towards using public transportation, in part because I’m in the mindset of say a Lonely Planet tour guide, writing handholding prose for visitors disembarking at PDX and with maybe not a lotta time to poke around. Not everyone has the time to rent a car and visit Dufur.

So I ended up in Blue Line Max, resolving to make a pilgrimage (tour stop) at the famous “turned sideways” column of rock they sampled and preserved, then used as a physical timeline, as going deeper means talking about ever earlier times.

I took over seventy pictures in all on this tour, and a large number of them were from this granite faced timeline wherein the column is embedded, and where carvings were made (etched in stone, literally). Worth an album unto itself actually. I’ll make one up now and embed it above.

Forking a Myth

Excerpt:

In a strange twist of fate that only the Moirai could have woven, the serpent's journey led eventually to a land unknown to the ancient Greeks—a place that would one day be called Nashville. Here, in an echo of ancient reverence, humans of a different age and culture would construct a perfect replica of Athena's greatest temple, the Parthenontravelthruhistory. Within this modern sanctuary, the goddess would once again stand in her full glory, a massive statue recreating the ancient chryselephantine masterpiece that once dominated the Athenian Acropolis.

It was here, coiled invisibly at the feet of Athena's modern incarnation, that Python's essence finally found refuge. The serpent, symbol of earth wisdom and oracular power, now rests in the shadow of the aegis, the protective shield bearing the fearsome Gorgon's head that Athena carries. From this unlikely sanctuary in the heart of the American South—a region known colloquially as the Bible Belt—the ancient serpent and the wisdom goddess maintain their presence, reminding visitors of the complex layering of sacred narratives that have shaped human understanding of the divine.

For more of the story, click here.