Meditating Scholar

Photos by Kirby 

Sculpture by Julian

Americana

For further reading:

Graph Theory on Synergeo
 

Independence Day

You know the joke about “why do we have Fathers’ Day and Mothers’ Day, but no Children’s Day?: right? Because “every day is children’s day”. One could say the same about Independence Day as in: when would we not celebrate our freedom to individuate? Or as our ancestors put it: “pursue happiness”.

I decided to get my bicycle ride over with early in the day, when it was still pleasantly cool, in the low sixties in terms of Fahrenheit, wherein water’s freezing to boiling is 32 to 212. That’s many more units per the same gradient Centigrade measures, which is why Fahrenheit has always felt more precise, but then in Celsius one just uses decimal digits more often, so my intuition is specious.

Also, given the ideal conditions and a hankering to relive the old days, I extended the loop back to my training circuit for when I was prepping for Seattle to Portland (S2P). I was riding with the best cyclers from our Meeting back then, such as Lansky and Ferguson (Larry). 

So as to not make a fool of myself, I’d get in condition by doing Springwater Corridor from OMSI to Sellwood, out Johnson Creek way, past Precision Cast Parts, to I-205, then back north on the west side of that freeway, crossing Foster, Holgate, Powell, and turning left on SE Division for the stretch back home. I stopped along that stretch to chat with Don and Susan and take a couple selfies with them.

I’m not saying I’m back to that peak level of being in shape. Far from it. This is over a decade later after all, and I’m almost 70 (which many S2P riders are, so that’s no excuse). My usual practice these days is to go as far as Sellwood and then transition to public transportation, taking my bicycle right into the train and bus per their designed use.

Memorializing OPDX

Avogadro’s Drones

In a recent thread on Synergeo, kicked off by one of the members, someone I’ve collaborated with on a specific color coding, in itself a kind of social engineering if one expects a standard to gain agreement. Tech standards such as USB depend on agreement on specs.

I talked about the drone swarms we might use in formation to create an n-frequency tetrahedron, meaning the drones would follow the CCP pattern known to the crystallographers. Check the thread for more details.

The Maritime Subculture of Naga: A Quest

Time flies, but must we think “in a straight line”? Some people are obsessed with “straight” as a virtue, whereas our literature is packed with lines that deliberately aren’t.

Along those lines, we went a Wandering again, me and another guy who’d never been to St. Johns before, whereas I could pose as a kind of tour guide, although that illusion quickly faded when (a) I was surprised to find the new sculpture where I’d not expected it and (b) everyone local knows about the water towers, but we simply stumbled upon them randomly. A revelation.

The new sculpture to which I refer has to do with a certain cosmic fairytale our teachers use to introduce the wavilinear horizon that circles a ship at sea.

As the ocean surface curves out of sight, circumscribing a roughly horizontal patch of some square miles, one imagines a sea dragon , its humps both above and below the ocean surface around this circular perimeter. We call her Naga.

Naga was present at the Festival of Lights as well.

The sea dragon sculpture has deliberately rusty scales thereby fitting into the Portland palette, its rust motif.

So did I pray to the sea dragon and ask for toothache relief for example? No, this cult is more about converging back to that ship at sea, and navigating, at which point the stars become helpful. They feature in our cosmic fairytale as well.

And don’t think by “fairytale” I mean to be dismissive. I have the Annotated Mother Goose on the way, as I wanna pick up on that whole aesthetic again. Lets get back to those fantasy manga novels, like those Tintin comics, or like Little Prince.

Pipe Dreams

I’m calling something real, a pipe project in the basement, a dream. Isn’t mixing reality with a dream world kind of nuts? Not so much. We say dreams come true or are realized, so in a sense our reality is actively inferred into existence as part of what we suppose to be the case. 

Our dreams inform our sense of what’s so. 

That’s waxing philosophical about something rather mundane: Mr. Rooter, the company, contracted with me to replace a kitchen drain pipe that’s been problematic for years. I’ve been telling that story across several blog posts, lacing my telling with allusions to heart procedures, which bear a family resemblance to plumbing, rooting (as with an auger) especially.

Along those same lines, Ron and I got into a discussion of angioplasty in particular during last Friday’s Solstice Gathering. The actual Solstice was today, to the hour early this morning in our timezone, however our group, called the Wanderers (mentioned throughout these blogs) meets on the Friday on or before a Solstice or Equinox. We may revert to our earlier pattern and meet more often. Wheels are turning.

Ron suggested I look up Dr. Dotter, which I did, via a Perplexity query: I’m studying the history of angioplasty as a cardiologist heart intervention. How does a doctor named Dotter fit in? When did it become common to use balloons, stents and the other modern accoutrements of catheter-based heart procedures? Per may usual practice, I’m being public with Perplexity’s archived answer. Our conversation brought back memories as I used to computer program in the cardiology sector. PTCA vs CABG.

After said Wanderers gathering, I felt inspired to get started on a new slide deck called Synergetics for Seniors. Some of those joining us enjoy the college campus like environment of a senior living complex. I would say “assisted living” but isn’t that what livingry is about more generally? Some facilities don’t assist. They tend to become repurposed, like the Lloyd Center, another one of those ghost malls in need of new dreams.

Business Affairs

I’ll continue my “instairs vs outstairs office” narrative from my previous post to this blog, noting the cleverness: Upstairs Downstairs was some successful Britboxy soap, and Instairs Outstairs is how Bucky enjoined us to escape the Anglosphere.

So further in towards the planet’s center, in the basement, said pipe from our last episode just sits there, as pipes do, still dribbling with toxins and ruptured from the inside. An aneurysm. I keep going back to heart metaphors I realize. This isn’t just cuz I’m an aging Boomer, or Joneser they’re calling us now, but because I spent much of my computer programming career hanging around cardiologists and cardiac surgeons professionally, not just as an old guy patient.

I’m referring to my Visual FoxPro days, having jumped on the dBase bandwagon way back in dBase II days (the first one: Ashton-Tate was good at marketing). The Starr-Wood-Chapman practice, with offices at St. Vincent, was on board with Outcomes Research as how else were we supposed to know what works in the long term. Which procedures, which valves, which factors in general, correlate with what else? The bread and butter of statistical analysis. 

My bread and butter was to harvest field data in amounts never before seen and funnel it to the back office, appropriately anonymized to conform with HIPPA. We took that seriously. It’s aggregate numbers we needed, not anecdotes about Mr. and Mrs. Smith although we did need to keep a pseudo-identity in the picture, to tie records together. Medical records lose significance when you mix people’s records across procedures and visits. Adding to the challenge is hospitals used different MRNs for the same people.

Anyway, we’re gonna let the pros deal with that pipe. “Repair or replace?” as we’d say in the heart biz, maybe talking about a prosthetic valve. This pipe instairs (in the basement) is no longer worth repairing, nor even able to be repaired (it’s not a question of cost or “worth”, it’s a matter of brute physics). 

Outstairs, on the 2nd floor, I’ve been using Spyder (a Python IDE included in the Anaconda distro) to better summarize the volume ratios we’re encountering and computing using sympy and Synergetics (our reference text). I’ve added a new slide to the BEAST / BASKET desk for my army of OCN presenters.

This is not a new business for the Oregon Curriculum Network. 4D Solutions, a for profit DBA of Dawn Wicca and Associates, has since its inception (and naming) long term invested in branded curriculum development. Now that I’m not teaching data cleaning nor harvesting heart-related big data from the field, I have more time to devote to my “asynchronous andragogy” as I call it, which has synchronous aspects, nor have I forsaken pedagogy entirely. I’m just not at the level I was when working with Saturday Academy, or Coding with Kids, or teaching 8th graders at Sunshine Elite Education.

Proof of Work

I'm calling this Proof of Work while thinking of the blockchain idea of weaving some momento or token into a collective memory that won't easily dissolve. Some might say "won't dissolve period" coming from understanding the maths involved, but of course blockchains may be fragile for other reasons, as real infrastructure is always involved (even here, where the "blockchain element" is simply a blog post).

This one was collaborative in that I was going for a visual representation of another Koski Identity.Our friend of the show Piero della Francesca, Renaissance polymath, is credit as one of the first to chronicle, on the blockchain of his day, the finding that an icosahedron nestles, faces flush, within an octahedron, colored cyan and red respectively in the picture above.

My School of Tomorrow headquarters is pretty old, structurally speaking, so in between working upstairs on these computer graphics, I was downstairs lying on my back in the kitchen, still nursing the illusion that I could ream out my down pipe with something like a heart clot removing catheter: I bought a 100 feet of coiled wire and poked it down a length of tubing I’d likewise purchased for this project, at the nearby Ace Hardware store on SE Division. After intubation, I hoped to restore water flow by prodding the clot loose.

“Why not just use a rooter, an auger, a snake?” one might ask. For sure I’d tried that conventional solution and also indulged in high potency solvents, the drips of which singed by toes. 

Clearly I was losing my uphill battle downstairs, but winning upstairs, in pressing my Python framework into service, resizing concentric hierarchy (матрёшка) polys (dolls) from default relative size (how they appear at birth) to showcase (exhibit) Koski’s algebraic relationship: the RT begotten from said cyan icosahedron has volume 60 S + 60 s3, which cryptic notation is pretty readable once you get the hang of it. 

My little army of presenters is out there spreading reading knowledge of this particular shoptalk. I’m right with them, on the front lines, charging my $70 per hour or whatever it is (I’m thinking back to the data science gig, which was more about learning various Pythonic workflows — such as I’m using upstairs, which is where I’d teach from).

Or rather, my uphill battle downstairs is really a process, a psychological process first and foremost, wherein I reach the same logical conclusion a professional would: that this basement down pipe to the sewer has reached end of life status and needs to be replaced. 

I made the call, and a couple hours later had my bid. I’ll make another call on Monday, maybe get another bid, and then seal the deal.

California Religion