Cartographic Studies

The documentation around the H3 global grid system is explicit about the Dymaxion Projection being an influence, on the placement of the 12 pentagons most specifically. I'd say hexapent tilings have been a contemporary standard for some time now. Even ESRI has had a Dymaxion Projection option, even if it's rarely touted.

The projection method underlying H3 is not identical with the algorithm Shoji Sadao used, is my understanding. The Dymaxion is not orthognomic. Bob Gray did a paper comparing the Fuller team's projection method with the others.

One would think though, that having the Dymaxion as a dashboard starting point, with H3 superimposed, would be typical of any world game setup. So far though, I haven't found this implemented anywhere. I've used Perplexity to do an initial sweep.

Including a Fuller (Dymaxion) Projection in the classroom, as one of the exhibited artifacts, would tend to brand a school as Fuller-friendly, which most are not these days. 

There's likely some concern that displaying the map would foster student curiosity regarding the alternative geometry for which Fuller is most famous and for which he received a Medal of Freedom. This American heritage has been effectively marginalized by LAWCAP, which controls the so-called "public" schools in this post-USA chapter.

Visiting Faculty

A theme in these blogs of mine is me hosting visiting faculty, which doesn't necessarily mean I put them up at Blue House. Sometimes that's how it works out, but I have limited accommodations. In this case we have a party of four and an AirBnB is involved. I was not expected to do any airport pickup at PDX this time either.

Given our shared background in computer stuff, our talk turned to FoxPro's having asynchronous event loop handling long before Python, as well as superior GUI design tools, more like Microsoft's other "Visual" products, especially Visual Basic (VB) and the full Office suite which eventually included Access. 

Microsoft Access was an ambitious project to make VB the de facto cube farm standard in the corporate Windows-colonized sector. FoxPro, originally design outside of Microsoft, as a competitor to dBase (where I come into the picture, as humble dBase programmer at Project Vote). 

dBase was bought by Borland as Microsoft thought xBase (the generic name for the dBase language) probably had a bright future, hence the strategic move to bring FoxPro inhouse and turn it into Visual FoxPro (VFP), of which I became a master (given pre-existing dBase fluency).

Project Vote, in case you're wondering, was a 501(c)(3) that carefully stayed nonpartisan even as it did outreach to specific demographic groups, mainly those disenfranchised by the pay-to-play pseudo-democracy kept alive by GRUNCH engineers. The legitimacy of the District's rule to some extent depended on people buying in, so even billionaires might see a reason to help us get more eligible voters, first through registration, and then through voter turnout (registering and exercising one's right are separate acts).

That Project Vote chapter was way back during the Reagan-Mondale race, with president Reagan winning a second term. I left the District after that, my housing having been work-related, and took up a position in a major publishing house, again leveraging my skill set as computer science savvy, and curriculum aware, having been a high school teacher since finishing my BA at Princeton (philosophy focused).

My involvement with Python came later, after years working with VFP around Greater Portland, both for state and regional governments and for NGOs, as a consultant. I was at first fielded (to clients) by the Center for Urban Education (CUE), then by Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon (EMO), then by Dawn Wicca and Associates (DWA), the partnership my future wife and I set up. Dawn was a skill bookkeeper and knew how to run our business, as well as take on fund accounting clients (nonprofits mostly). I took out the DBA of 4D Solutions and continued with the xBase programming.

Through CUE, I got into working for a vast enterprise, Sisters of Providence, or the Providence System however it currently brands. My boss, David Lansky, with a data science skill set, got me helping out with the Medical Data Research Corporation (MDRC) coding FORTRAN at first, and then Visual FoxPro, as I gradually introduced them to its benefits, and advantages over tools like Access. But Providence had a difficult hybrid environment where my applications (CLAIR and CORIS) had elaborate interfaces to other products. Yet I was merely a consultant, not a Providence employee. The ecosystem was therefore fragile even before Microsoft pulled the plug on Visual FoxPro in 2015, I was starting to see the writing on the wall.

Anyway, enough about me and my somewhat boring career compared to a lot of other people's careers that I know about. The visiting professor works with very high voltages, amps too, with a whole team of graduate students. We'll probably further engage in grid talk during the visit, although this visit is not just about talking shop. 

Today I was working with the banks I transact through to get a payment ready to the City of Portland. It's that time of year, when we're expected to give back. I still do work as a consultant but since switching to Python teaching from VFP custom applications design, I've been mostly teaching people out-of-area. I was doing this well before Covid. Right before covid though, or as the pandemic came on, I was working with a startup focused on new curriculum implementation, reminding me of work at the publishing house in New York, after the Project Vote experience. 

I consider myself a curriculum designer, and have lots of experience to back that up, including as a code school faculty member with O'Reilly for some years. I go into all that in more detail in these blogs and in my photostream on Flickr.

A Friend

Fortunately for Sydney's longevity, I'm supposing (I'm not a vet), she suffers from LDS (Lonely Dog Syndrome) meaning when I'm working out on the elliptical, a present from Betty Boop's grandson, she sees fit to struggle up the stairs to join me, even though she's an octogenarian in dog years. 

Actually, if we go by 1 human year = 7 dog years, she's 105 years of age. Yet still climbing stairs to my 2nd floor. I'm almost 10 in dog years. Sydney is a role model. I hope to be as fit as she is in five (dog) years. Actually it's my pet ball python that may outlive me, provided he gets good healthcare.

Climate Change

The huboons continue blasting apart their own infrastructure, frustrated by the impasse they've reached with their perimeter zone nation-state-based jurisdictional narratives. 

World Game is chaotic. The cost of still thinking inside the box is high. Still clinging to old ways, the oldsters hang on tightly. Skeptical youngsters wonder if there’s a better way to play.

Friendly Skies

Synergetics People

One of the Synergetics People in our Coda had the honor of meeting Arthur Young, who helped give this younger guy a challenge and some direction: decipher Synergetics. Young had Fuller’s opus on his shelf. Like many operating in the absence of much secondary literature, he was hoping he could help us make some.

Fast foward and we’re doing a lot better where secondary literature is concerned, but we’re still weak in the animation department. Having just seen some state of the art claymation, I’m even more acutely aware of how we missed the boat with the A and B modules, the T and E modules, and the S. But like in the Pudget Sound ferry system, there’s always a next boat.

The A module is such a simple dimple concept, and has everything to do with how I implement my quadray coordinates. The 2nd root of 6 over 4 appears in Synergetics, as do a lot of mathematical expressions. 

One might suppose that a guru of the positivist futurist variety would be inspiring to would be geeks, and you’d be right. But when does anyone hear about A and B modules in elementary, middle or high school. After that, it’s prolly too late. 

One might conclude that “positive futurism” is inconsistent with a major brand of “I told you so” economics, with its self-fulfilling prophecies. Hyperstitiion they call it: the craft of making things be so. Economics is called the dismal science for a reason. To stay dismal, one needs gravitas. Short of that, one becomes merely an Eeyore, the moody donkey in Winnie the Pooh books, a burdened White Man.

Searching up Arthur Young with the gossip bot got me to thinking: could his Theory of Process connect to Arnold Mindell’s Process Work? 

I also found along the way, researching Arthur Young, that Igor Sikorsky (1889–1972), another helicopter designer, had likewise wandered off into Christo-spiritual ruminations. Could it be that smart engineers gravitate to metaphysics? Who woulda thunk it. And then there’s Wittgenstein. His first sense of a calling took him into engineering.

Quoting the bot;

Engineering to logic

The historical sequence is especially striking: while still at Manchester, the foundational issues raised by mathematics began to take hold of him. He then sought out Gottlob Frege, who directed him to Cambridge and Bertrand Russell; by 1911 he had effectively left engineering for logic and philosophy.ww1.manchester+1

It is sensible to see a continuity, not merely a biographical accident: early aeronautical research required using models, formal constraints, and relations between a physical system and its representation. Scholars have argued that this supplied an intellectual background for the Tractatus’s “picture theory,” according to which propositions model possible states of affairs—although that claimed causal connection remains an interpretation, not an established fact.direct.mit+1

The important distinction is therefore: Arthur Young designed an actual Bell helicopter; Wittgenstein investigated a propeller-tip-jet aircraft engine, a principle later reused in some rotorcraft. How do you think Wittgenstein’s engineering concern with a model representing a real mechanism might have predisposed him to make logic about propositions “picturing” reality?

Road Trip

More About Cooking

I was talking about Home Economics (microeconomics) and expanding that to Community Economics or call it Campus or Base Economics if you prefer. There’s a base kitchen supplied from base inventory and we make cooking shows while making recipes (following algorithms) for base personnel.

The tie-in is to First Person Physics which means doing chemistry n stuff, and cooking is nothing if not chemistry in action. We pay special attention to phase changes between the solid, liquid and gaseous forms of substances, with words for those transitions: freeze, melt, boil, condense. Bake. We have appliances to help us with all of these.

Then of course, in addition to the thermodynamics involved, we the obvious tie-in with metabolism. Food and drink is for eating and imbibing. We also inhale. Lets and hearing and smelling while we’re at it. And presentation.

In metabolic science, the chemistry gets intense, as we learn about the acids, the enzymes, the sequence of steps involved in processing whatever inputs. Cooking takes us in every direction, from micro to macro. Electricity powers the appliances, plus is generated biologically within tissues. Chemistry is electronics after all, given the role electrons play.

A next bridge is to food pods and the food trucks industry. All those skills get this new context of the food pod, which may come with some form of crypto or token for currency. Various technologies for recording transactions means “home ec” meets fintech. Simulations, as in computer games or training / rehearsal setups go here. The cast needs opportunities to practice roleplaying. Cooking is theater with a lotta props, some of them edible.

Cooking Class

Let’s get back to some older themes in these blogs, from years ago. 

The action of following a recipe, or improvising while being influenced, relates to our computer science idea of an algorithm, a step by step procedure which, if spelled out in enough detail (whatever that means) in a translatable language (to ones and zeros prolly), will then run on a computer or other hardware.

I wasn’t just bringing forward the original Home Economics though. We’ve all grown up seeing cooking shows, meaning a cooking class is an opportunity to learn about camera work, editing, scripting, scene design. 

Schools share their best shows with a public, with raw material saved to school servers, perhaps on a temporary basis. 

Given the computer science, we’re also looking at queues, workflows, parallel processing (or asynchronous as the case may be).

Finally, we’re not just learning to cook for a nuclear family necessarily. The amounts and equipment involved may be on a more institutional scale, with a cafeteria style aspect, even of short order cooking is also supported. This course is not just for grooming stay-at-home moms, as may have been once envisioned by curriculum developers in bygone years.

Once cooking has become a focus, as well as ordering and provisioning, keeping track of costs and inventory, it’s a small step to exploring cuisines. Students learn to cook across ethnic spectra, exploring fusions, synergetic combos. Cooking is not just about imitating one’s ancestors, but nor is it about forgetting what’s known to work.

My work with Food Not Bombs was influential on my thinking here. We’d have to improvise based on what the warehouses had in excess that day, mixed with staples (dry goods we almost always had on hand). Cooks from fancy restaurants might sometimes volunteer, because they liked the challenge, of making up yummy meals for larger groups, namely those who knew which city park to visit when.

Another influence: The Gathering of Western Young Friends, which was frequented by foodies who’d truck stuff in and take over the camp’s kitchen. They’d seek out camps where such arrangements could be made, to serve ourselves versus buying into some meal plan. Camp Myrtlewood allowed this.

Musk (movie review)

Since I’ve been a student of the Mark Fisher corpus to some degree, I saw this film in terms of competing futurisms, inside of which futurisms the actual artifacts (the inventions) are more like glacier-borne boulders. The glaciers are more currents in the zeitgeist than physical. We encounter these currents through the boulders and the trajectories of these inertial bodies (picture a Tesla car in orbit, and how it got there).

The film focuses on how life imitates art and vice versa: the interplay of fiction, in the form of manga, comics, and the roles we assume. The North Americans are greatly into the business tycoon role model, going back to railroad days and before. The ideology of privatization, and crediting individuals over any collective unconscious and/or sprawling bureaucracy (cube farm network) is likewise ingrained, with Khans and Kings, a few Queens, getting the lion’s share of the credit for what happens in history (“the” consensus story, of which we have many).

No hyperloop in this film. And yet hyperloop evolved from the Boring company, and the idea of fixing traffic congestion by taking the maze ways underground. The subsequent Vegas tunnel loop also fell to the cutting room floor, along with the many academic competitions around making a pneumatic tunneling system (ala hyperloop) designed to carry biological payloads (humans and their entourage of fellow traveler animals). 

The boulders (artifacts) the four hour movie manages to keep: X (public speech mixing valves; also X part 2: the Department of Government Efficiency), SpaceX (rockets and satellites), xAI (Grok: the collective unconscious again), and Tesla (cars and trucks), and “the wives” (aka “the harem” or “the breeders”). The Khans had a lotta wives too.

Back to Mark Fisher, the Anglo philosopher: he focuses on our longing (desire) and its frustration (leading to fear). How our dreams for the future get frustrated is a source of fear and fascination. How do they do that? How do they manage to subvert our visions?

Our genius for projection (model making) has us conjuring enemies we might tune in and address, the face of capitalism chief among them, but faceless socialism likewise for some. 

Seeing evil and being the hero up against it, is the human condition, Joesph Campbell might agree. 

Being pro-Musk (a fan) or anti-Musk (a critic) both qualify as heroic roles against the backdrop of wanting to make this (the world or worlds) a better place.

Is history best understood through personalities and their psychoanalysis? 

In my own thinking, I’ve somewhat shifted away from reducing anything to the one person, which isn’t to diss individuality, only to expand it to include a sense of a bigger or smaller (transcendent) self. Does one’s sense of an ego increase or decrease by that process of identification? Is one steering or steered?

Individuals motivated by a sense of destiny and/or fate are themselves more boulders (tangible personalities) in the zeitgeist, or maybe “bulls in the china shop” as many of us (me included) see business tyrant-tycoons more generally.

The director’s storyline hints at some dark plot lines we never fully see fleshed out, because they’re not fleshed out in the real world (at least not yet). Like what’s this coming civil war exactly? Our party of moviegoers (there were five of us) were all asking that question, a question the movie asks us to ask.

The movie hints darkly that at least from Grok’s Pentagon-embedded point of view (as “Mecha-Hitler”) the coming civil war is likely to be a race war of some kind, a war wherein “race” (a eugenicist concept) and “ethnicity” (a term from cultural anthropology) remain hopelessly confused, as these tend to be by many ethnicities, including by many ethno-racist types in South Africa. 

And like what exactly is the role of Starlink when it comes to the war in the borderlands, the Ukraine? Is Elon secretly or even openly a Putinist? We’ve all been warned of Trump’s proclivities in that regard. Don’t billionaires tend to see Putin was one of them; a fellow business tycoon authoritarian, a Bill Browder type? Isn’t Silicon Valley part of this neofascist post USA, this USSA?

I’m probably more of an Adam Curtis fan when it comes to sweep-of-history documentary political commentaries. This is the first Alex Gibney film I’ve taken in, I’m pretty sure [sic]. I’d like to see his one on Scientology, Going Clear. Oh wait, I’ve seen that, and blogged a review.

Curtis tends to focus more on the currents and less on the boulders, leading to a more cerebral experience and avoiding the demonization of singular neurodivergent individuals (outliers, outlaws, autists). What happens to us as a species does not all fall on the shoulders of specific Atlas types who bear the burden and responsibility. Spectators, the viewer-voyeurs, make the world go around, by lending their momentum-adding attention. I like to spread the blame (the credit) a lot more, vs lionizing this or that alpha-beta.

I was with my group of Wanderers, including a jovial visiting astronomer from Idaho, wearing my colorful J. Garcia tie, a Python sweater, and toting a burlap tote bag. I started out in the Egyptian coffee shop (double shot Americano) kitty-corner from The Bagdad, then took the 14 bus to lunch at the Barley Mill (meeting Richard), the first McMenamins brewpub (by now a major chain) and still center of Grateful Dead iconography.

We went from there (SE 17th and Hawthorne) on foot through the Asylum food cart area in sightseer mode (no further purchases this time), checking out the Lucky Lab (same mode) and an artist Steve Dehlinger’s open house, and over the Hawthorne Bridge, and through the No Kings throng (inflated frog costumes). I’d been to a satellite honk ‘n wave protest  earlier in the shadow of the Hawthorne Theater, after the Egyptian coffee shop. 

After the movie, our group found its way to The Flock, an indoor Asian-themed foodery, which is likewise very Portland (a first city in Asia, culturally speaking, going west), with no pun intended regarding face-recognizing cameras.

During times alone on this circuit (like when at the Egyptian coffee shop or on the FX2 bus back), I’d continue reading Meat Puppets by Hannah Smart (which I’m much enjoying).