Perambulating

One root meaning of Wanderer is "flaneur", let’s say the random idle gentleman, perhaps a lady in disguise, out with a sketch pad and an eye for what’s happening. Recreational curating. Tourism. 

That’s one reading, and for me, it well fits. 

I wander with my trusty camera, and today also an iPad, around town. In my youth, middle school era, my parents allowed me to roam about Rome. I’d spend some days exploring, hopping one bus, then another. No phone.

Nowadays I’m with phone, although I’m not really using its camera. I have a separate device, somewhat bulky, but it’s my habit. I’ve gone through a series of such cameras, the kind you can just point and shoot, letting it take care of most variables except framing. That’s a typical tool of the flaneur.

Today’s route retraced last week’s trek at the start, so I could pick up where I’d left off on the theme of Rust as a motif. From there I explored the Lloyd Center, with one skater, with another doing floor exercises. They had a coach as I recall.

I roamed over to the Lloyd Center Max station, heading west, to the last stop on the east side, at Moda Center, the swoopy enclosed stadium that replaced the old Memorial Coliseum as a primary venue, although the later still stands and does service, such as hosting high school graduation ceremonies. 

I used the Memorial Coliseum as a skating rink, in an earlier chapter, having taken to inline skates as a curious hobby, encouraged by Tom Connolly. I’d circle on smooth concrete, wearing helmet and knee pads, Wrist pads maybe? Memory fades. I remember falling a few times but not getting hurt.

From Moda Center I made my way along well-marked walkways to the East Side Esplanade, a well-thought-out lane for pedestrians and bicyclists mainly. Runners. I think I saw one mono-board or whatever those are called. The bicycles may be mechanically enhanced i.e. battery power assisted.

My walk took me south from the Steel Bridge, east entrance in view, to the Hawthorne Bridge, along a path that’s partly floating and includes bridges. I’ve gone through these same paths as a cyclist many times, but today was about being a ped, and using TriMet, more like my middle school days when I’d roam in Rome.

I mistook a bus 6 for a 14, so ended up adding another walking segment from the eastern shoreline of the Willamette, to Asylum central, meaning the food court by that name, named for the Oregon State mental hospital that had a large property here, a campus with running streams, not some dreary urban structure you might have been imagining. 

This side of the river was all very bucolic back then. I’m drawing from well researched accounts, not sharing personal experience, as I was as yet unborn in this chapter.

The 14 got me back to The Bagdad from which its a short and familiar jaunt home. I had my shoulder bag leather briefcase in which I stored the iPad, camera, brush, kombucha bottle, a random reading from my shelves.

Silicon Forest (not Valley)

Yesterday I went dog walking with a peer engineer, as in software engineer, a loosely used term as there were so many routes to get here, me through applications development for nonprofits and data science types, him through psychometrics and government lab work (Sandia I think it was). We'd both been on the same code school's faculty. He helped me find my way to Clarusway, a source of recent teaching gigs.

Anyway, we were chatting about the difference between NaN and None in Python, walking Sydney and Quinn, enjoying the perfect weather, when I realized various new things, meaning I had some insights, sparked by what we were talking about, a free ranging conversation.

Towards evening, I tackled the task of rounding out my online profile a little more, as the requests or queries need their data to hit against. Lots about me out there, but maybe not always as helpfully cross-indexed as it could be, and I'm in a catalytic position when it comes to connecting loose ends.

For example, I cross-posted my reddit account to DobbsTown, a Mastodon server. I also wired my right side main access panel, on the right margin of World Game (Grain of Sand), to include said reddit and tiktok connections. The content dates back but the links are brand new.

Speaking of branding, it's hardly lost on the market researchers and PR types, that Silicon Forest and Silicon Valley have remained quite distinct in Geek Lore. The former is gravitating into Cascadia, the bioregion (not really a political entity) whereas Valley boys and girls are seeing dollar signs in more military contracting. Washington State gets a lot of that, whereas Oregon's role is more subtle (think field testing), to the point where Oregon actually advertises as a "peace state" in some circles (hint: WILPF). We also have better land use planning than you'll find in many states (another source of pride).

The story goes like this: the Oregon Trail, coming west from the Great East (lots of peeps seeking a better life, refugees from Euro-think), came to a fork somewhere in Montana or one of those. Keep going along a northern latitude, and reach Oregon, with its lush and secure agricultural lifestyle, or turn south and wager your future against the likelihood of striking it rich, laying your claim to fame and fortune. The former sounds relatively prosaic and vaguely communist, whereas the latter is Ayn Rand, bold, heroic, venture capitalist.

Feeding my story (above) is an example: a true life story featuring a young, dashing CEO, looking to base a startup here in Portland, but finding the venture capital culture close to non-existent relative to what he was used to in strike-it-rich California. His idea was to use AI to provide a look ahead feature in any browser that could steer junior away from pornography, a see-no-evil genre product. 

The only problem: he was twenty years ahead of his time (this all happened a long time ago). 

VCs tend to live in the future. Portlanders, given all the rain, and Powell's Books, tend to be bookworms, as likely to live in the past as anywhere. Getting Portlanders to march towards the future is difficult when so many of them still believe they're in Nirvana already (even in the wake of the Joker Riots). 

When PDXers do get around to futurism, it looks like socialism, given half of them are latent Swedes and Finns and see society more as a design problem begging for elegant solutions, than as a source of melodrama and outrage and Protestant moralizing about who deserves what they get.

Memories & History

The Google Earth close up view is not the same as Street View. The structures look a bit cartoony given a computer doing its best to data structure the surfaces. I’m not the expert (never had a job with Google Earth). This is a classic Portland food pod, named Asylum in honor of the facility run by Dr. Hawthorne when this whole area was still more park like, all green with running streams. Oregon State contracted to have its first state mental hospital between SE 12th & Hawthorne and the river. We tend to call the whole area Asylum District, commercially if not officially.

 

Now I’ve switched to actual Street View to capture this facade further north a few blocks from the Asylum food pod. I used to work in the basement of this building when its top floor served as CUE headquarters, CUE being Center for Urban Education. We had a Mac lab in the basement, with LaserWriters, state of the art at the time and a grant from Apple to the nonprofit community in Portland. We shared the tech with a wide variety of NGOs and provided training in its use. That was Steve Johnson’s responsibility more than mine. My job was to train still-working or job-seeking seniors in office-relevant computer skills. We mostly used PCs (IBMs or clones thereof) and left the desktop publishing skills to the others. I’d use the Mac publishing equipment myself for various fun projects e.g. Project Renaissance.

 

Further north along the same street: Revolution Hall, formerly Washington High School (where the young Linus Pauling was enrolled, if oft absent from) and in my own writings HQS (Ministry of Education) for OPDX (Occupy Portland) during a time when said building as spooky-ghostly-abandoned. That served my purposes just fine, as I was simply including it in my curriculum writing to help anchor it geographically.

    

This Google Earth view marks all three locations: Asylum food pod, CUE building, Revolution Hall, with blue balloons, against the backdrop of much of Portland, Willamette River running south to north (bottom to top).

28 Years Later (movie review)

The title had been on the Bagdad marquee for a while, but I hadn’t bothered to search it up. When I finally did some homework, I realized it was in the ballpark of horror sci-fi. That genre interests me, notwithstanding so much slop (nothing new with AI), so I headed out for the matinee. On a hot summer day.

I’ll say up front that I watched it with English subtitles. Not that I need subtitles (English is my first and pretty much only language, unless we say American is something else) but on the first Tuesday of every month or something like that, Bagdad screens the film with captions on. Hearing impaired and/or non-English speakers wanting to learn English, might come to such shows. As it is, I probably picked up on a few lines I might’ve missed, given the accents and everything.

The movie is set in a future England where the virus has ravaged the population and the mainland (Europe and Scandinavia) have quarantined the place. However, a tiny island off the big one, connected only by a tenuous land bridge, has allowed a small English-speaking tribe to keep themselves uninfected. At low tide, the land bridge appears and in principle one of the infected could come storming in their direction. They have defensive fortifications, and bows and arrows. No guns in this universe. No wait, the Swedish have them (we meet up with a Swedish patrol on the mainland, Erik et al).

As I remarked to a friend over iced green tea this morning, having taken the bus, I see movies “guided mediations” in a lot of ways (I used the word "tantric"), and in the hands of a skilled writer and director, the process may serve a given viewer’s mental healing, even if the content is highly traumatic, as it tends to be in this genre (“alas poor Erik” says the doctor at one point). 

In this case, I’d say that was the case: the writing was conscious and well informed by the human condition. Theater students will immediately appreciate the Oedipal triangle, a three body problem we always only explore, never really get to the bottom of, except in a love and death sense.

The protagonist is a twelve year old boy and it’s a coming of age story, the kind my late wife treasured, but probably would not have in this case, as not everyone is in a mood for movie therapy. I’m reminded of Poor Thing. 

I’m also reminded a new Wes Anderson movie was slated to come out this summer, have I missed it already?

Upon arrival at The Bagdad I queried the ticket seller whether this was part of a series and he replied very intelligibly about there being previous movies in this same universe but I wouldn’t need to see them all in order. I pass that on to those wondering the same thing. And yes, the way the film ended left said universe wide open to another rendering, not unlike the worlds of Mad Max or Planet of the Apes.

Saladified Wordings

Prompt: 

A Caesar salad word scramble cryptographic 

scrabble game night at a local diner greasy spoon. 

People still smoked in restaurants back then.

A typical intro to cryptography might be through Caesar Codes, which might be just offsets, mapping the alphabet to itself shifted left or right by some number of letters, going around a wheel. 

This is like a dance, with the drone looking down on two consecutive circles, say women facing out, men facing in. You start with your partner, home position, then the music begins and the men and women go into opposite rotational movements, clockwise and counter-clockwise. 

When the music stops, your new partner represents a letter-to-letter mapping, and so forth around the doubled circle. You’ve got yourself a Caesar Code.

The segue here to “word salad” coming from Caesar salad is tempting, given a next stop: a word scramble. Here we map letters to counterparts more arbitrarily than if circles were involved.  Start with your partner and now run around wildly until the music stops, and form a new pair. No dancers get added or subtracted so the male-female ratio stays 1:1.  

What if we don’t want to divide along gender lines? Who are we asking? It’s up to us. The point is to show off permutations in a group theoretical sense. Every letter and punctuation symbol, including the space character, gets remapped or stays the same. Permutations underlie group theory as the most general operation. To morph is to permute. From morphing arise isomorphisms, homomorphisms, and homeomorphisms… all manner of morphing.

From these examples, we might jump into cryptographic algorithms more generally, and also into hashing, i.e. creating cryptographic signatures from an object. The School of Tomorrow follows the many in going for RSA given its reliance on number theory concepts we want to hit anyway: Fermat’s Little Theorem, Euler’s Theorem, totient, totative, prime and composite. Strangers (relatively prime).

Crypto currency and version control infrastructure follow. Hashes zip blocks together, into chains. Cryptographic impenetrability may not be the point, simply A fits into B seamlessly, and so now we move on. Handshake complete.

What I’d bring into the meme pool at this point are mnemonic systems designed to hang together owing to cleverly optimized links. Memory palaces and like that.

Caesar and Scramble codes are about making the intelligible unintelligible, the visible invisible (in the sense of meaningless) until deciphered on the other end. But memory codes may have the opposite purpose: to render the invisible more amenable to conceptualization. 

The optimizations are not about concealing secrets so much as bringing them to light, but then the reader has to learn the language to bring that light to the equations. Flip the switch, and the tunnels become illuminated.

I think in some of these Indiana Jones type movies and/or narratives, what the explorers stumble upon was never about concealment in the conventional sense, any more than the dashboard of a car is attempting to be cagey or coy about what it displays. Yet the driver still needs to know how to read a dashboard, and that doesn’t happen overnight. Learning a language takes time.

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.