On the Road Again

XREF:

A Spring Term Circuit (Depoe Bay)

Big Fish (movie review)

I was glad to see this one as a double feature with Secondhand Lions, as they have overlapping themes regarding the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. I don’t say “fact and fiction” (the common phrase) cuz, hey, fiction is often replete with facts, verifiable and authentic. 

The “fact vs fiction” idiom is way off target, as is typical with many an English idiom (they have some nice ones that work, as well).

The idiom “big fish in a small pond” is oft said in the Anglosphere, but those coming from outside might not know that and so miss some of the associations other viewers of this file would take for granted.

Elsewhere in my reporting back to my Movie Group (like a book club), I mentioned finding the hero’s emergence into a planned utopian community in the middle of Alabama to be reminiscent of another film, science fiction, at which point my librarians (not AI) served up a ton of suggestions. I might’ve tracked it down using these very blogs. Stay tuned.

I’d say the Quaker practice focuses on keeping it true and mundane at the same time. No cosmetics. Raw is better. More like Chögyam Trungpa, whom my wife especially admired, but me too. Dawn actually visited his place in Colorado, the Shambala campus, Naropa U prolly. I stayed behind on that trip (and several others).

Secondhand Lions (movie review)

Starting with that Bogart movie, after which I realized I was (a) older than Bogart got to be and (b) heavier than Toro, that heavyweight boxer, I’ve been on an “old guys with their boots on” kick, not consciously intentionally, so much as by following suggestions. 

Robert Duvall is a connecting thread. 

Rosalie adores his movie The Apostle, which I saw with David the humanist (he wasn’t thrilled by all that preacher talk, but hey, it’s all Duvall’s character knew — work with what you’ve got, right?).

Given Secondhand Lions is a flashback by a stereotypical youngish artist who draws Calvin and Hobbes type comic books for a living, we understand from the outset that we’re watching fictionalized history though his eyes. The moral: believing in fiction is OK.

If I had to surmise the real story, I’d say Duvall’s character died after a heart attack in that hospital (archetypally half in the “next world”) and the Michael Caine character was likely entirely fictitious, a dramatic device meant to express two sides of the same old guy “uncle” (very cantankerous apparently, like some old people get — not naming names). 

No doubt he had a floozy mom and was getting back at her (what drives a lot of comics I’ve noticed — funny). She left him with her kooky uncle that time and he started up his fantasy life, making a career out of it eventually.

So what happened to the pig? It disappeared from the story. Based on breakfast clues, they ate it. But not the dogs. Dogs are not considered food in American movies, even if pigs are smarter (they say), like in Animal Farm (Orwell).

Duvall is also in Apocolypse Now let’s remember. My film studies are starting to pay off.

It’s OK to believe in stereotypes to the extent these channel archetypes, as “emanations” one might say. We’ve all met Urizen types (Blake’s terminology) and see them in that movie Brazil.

These days I’m weighing less than Bogart’s prize fighter (from Argentina?), thanks largely to the elliptical, a Christmas present.

Study Hall

My study group has been aware of Predictive History for a while now, as you'll find if you go back in the Coda and look up School of Tomorrow, Winter Term, December 9, 2025. 

Dr. Jiang's commitment is to a young adult cohort that is open minded enough to take in speculations most teachers would not have the confidance to promulgate, whereas the above YouTube shows how it's done: Dr. Jiang freely admits he's in a speculative ballpark and is looking for players to join him in that arena.

Enter Bucky, with adjuvant Kuromiya of Monrovia: another predictive historian with a penchant for re-vectoring and misreading in the Harold Bloom sense. 

Fuller’s first chapter in Critical Path is self-consciously labeled Speculative Prehistory, and now that we know it’s speculative, Fuller lets loose with a counter-narrative, much as Jiang does, going so far as to mess with our primary dogmas, such as that we’re getting smarter every day in every way, whereas in Critical Path we’re maybe vectoring away from true humanity, back towards ape-ness i.e. towards over-specialization and endless wars, chronicling a loss of our potential, as fully human, to stay polymathic.

Jiang invites others to join him in pitching to a youthful audience while daring to bring up topics everyone thinks about, but no one (relatively) knows how to deal with “out loud” in a classroom type setting. 

Jiang is a trailblazer in that respect. He tackles hot topics, such as racism (eugenicism) and Zionism, but from fresh angles.
 

My training in Manila with the reading dynamics people (Evelyn Wood) involved always doing a recall shortly after taking in a work. In this case, I had just printed out (after browsing on screen) DAF’s response to Jiang’s Spring Term 2026 Game Theory video, which vid is about the project to create AGI from AI, today’s Alchemy.

Jiang appears to twist words (as usual), claiming the AI project is about getting people to hallucinate that they’re talking to an actual being vs simply shaking a rattle, a gossip tree (like a rain stick), to see what leaves fall to the ground (these “leaves” get stitched together into grammatically correct structures). 

This deception is easy enough to perpetrate as we saw with Sophia, the uncanny valley queen, and citizen of Saudi Arabia, and with ELIZA before that (Hugh Kenner wrote about Eliza — I was at McGraw-Hill at the time, reading Byte (wherein he had a column) for free). 

Before that: The Turk. Humans are always being played, mainly because they’re easy marks, to use carnival (geek) terminology. The Turk figures in my Graph Theory 2025 video. The Turk was a device used to fool people into thinking they’d lost at chess to mere machinery; a stage magicians’ trick.

So actually, imputing “hallucinations” to gossip machines, who get it crazy-wrong sometimes (their predictions fail the truth tests, but stay grammatical, much like C-suite “corporatese” wherein misinfo thrives) was just another step in fostering the hallucination that “computers are people too” (but better). 

We’ve already done that with corporations (per Schmactenberger): expanding personhood and agency to inanimate AI objects (a kind of voodoo doll, allowed free speech and lots of money, lots of agency) so it’s but a small step to converge our LLCs with our LLMs.  

Make AIs the new bosses on the planet, no longer playing at being sychophantic. AGI rules by divine right, from underground, the Morlock under the Eloi ballroom. 

This Novus Ordo Seclorum will be by the laws of (quantum) physics and Social Darwinism i.e. under Urizen’s tyranny or whatever we wanna call this black mirror dystopia. I have my own version of what “secularism” means.

As long as we can get them to drink the snake oil, which they do, with wild abandon (most humans are good doobies by training).

Humans are trained to be open-minded about personhood, eventually allowing that their slaves had souls too. The 14th Amendment to the constitution of the old USA had to do with expanding personhood to “machine people” (Africans mainly), even giving them a pathway to eventual citizenship. See: Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann (on our syllabus).

So the two-tier master-slave system remains: 

Tier One: corporations are the new Übermensch AI-powered super-beings, supranational in scope (i.e. world game players at scale), and figure-headed by billionaires with their Davos Class (polite) entourages, whereas we also have

Tier Two: the so-called workers (various flavor on minion: citizen, voter, taxpayer, undocumented, prisoner, student) are meant to dash from door to door (figuratively), waiting on others of higher status, those closer in with their super-being bosses, minions higher up in the food chain, serving their Ponzi God (“AGI is coming, the rapture is nigh” and yada yada).

My “recall” (a diagram), after watching Jiang do his School of Tomorrow like schtick, picks up on his Harold Bloom citation and runs with that. We see eye-to-eye with AI because we’re the same entity, a cell-silicon-based hybrid, but lagging (lacking) in complementary ways. Cells and silicon work on different principles. 

The ability to “hallucinate” is self-amplifying (AI psychosis) leading us to a Black Mirror reality and the triumph of the Evil Queen. This last part is more from other readings and viewings, in addition to Dr. Jiang or Dr. Fuller necessarily. I have many influences.

Music Millennium

Today I was taking a trip down memory lane, down a kind of rabbit hole in my own interior, memories of working in the AFSC Portland office, in many capacities over the years. 

At the same time, I was sharing these reveries with a Friend, via text, and that gave me a stash of autobiographical screen shots to reuse later, why not?

Before getting this far down Burnside, first on the 75 to Joan of Arc (a gilded statue in a traffic circle on Chavez), connecting to a 19 going west on SE Glisan, then south to Burnside on foot. 

My original intention was to take pictures of what used to be the AFSC office, a big old house around SE 23rd and Burnside, but my camera had run out of battery (no backup from the other Lumix). 

So I did a selfie instead (the panorama side of my camera has a fuzzy lens, although it reads QR codes — I carry a camera for photographs, an old habit).

Backing up to the start of my trip: before boarding the 75, I shot some contemporary views of the Linus Pauling House, with Adorn (body art) to the west, and the wedding dress shop to the west of that. Said wedding shop was a photocopier repair shop in an earlier chapter. Terry’s kingdom had dominion over all three properties back then, and the parking lot behind.

Yes, this is the famous LPH on Hawthorne, where Linus learned chemistry as a kid, and no,I’m not one of his biographers, more the storyteller specializing in Cascadian lore, Silicon Forest more narrowly. 

Doug Strain later helped ISEPP (an institute, nonprofit) rescue said LPH from neglect. 

Today, it’s still in good shape. 

Doug was a founder of Electro-Scientific Instruments (ESI), former owner of our Quaker Meetinghouse. We owe a lot to Doug’s cohort, the creators of such companies as Tektronix and Mentor Graphics, and many others I’m avoiding listing, for reasons of spatial economy.

Directly across from LPH is Third Eye (shown above), a vintage head shop from the early days of psychedelica, meaning glassware and T-shirts, black light posters, not controlled substances (the state would control those later). 

It has sporting a new look these days. I’ve learned something about its reopening but not a lot. I’m not super well-informed about local goings-on, unlike Glenn Stockton, who we jokingly considered a “Mayor of Asylum District” if only because he paid so much attention to what was going on. He had a lotta fans.

Yes, Asylum District. If you new to these blogs you may well not know the history behind Hawthorne Boulevard, formerly Asylum Avenue, Dr. Hawthorne being in charge of this 1800s area mental facility, which was in a bucolic setting pre urban development happening. 

The asylum is long gone, but the resonance remains, and works well with the Keep Portland Weird energy.

Also, “asylum” as other connotations such as “save haven” or “sanctuary”. I’m thinking of Logan’s Run: “there is no sanctuary” (AI took everything too literally, right?). 

That movie seems prescient in some ways, especially when it comes to WDC looking kind of out of it, politically. Great theme park though, tons of museums. Don’t skip it. I go there a lot, even lived there.

Speaking of the Mayor, I talked about Glenn Stockton this morning, on my Knowledge Engineering call. I had some diagrams prepared, showing Glenn (a Neolithic Math teacher) linking to Sumeria (a focus of his) while Milo Gardner links to Egypt. 

Both Glenn and Milo worked for the NSA but in different chapters, both in cryptography.

I’ve only met Milo through emails and Instagram and like that (I think math-teach might have brought us together, a public archive for math teachers and other stakeholders). 

Glenn was a neighbor and good friend. Glenn was super bright and once they realized how bright he was they sent him to language school to learn Vietnamese and then on to code cracking school (I forget where) and then to his post. He pops up in these blogs quite a lot. 

After bouncing around in Fort Meade, he switched to a college track, with Antioch, a university without walls we some call em. I met him decades later, after he’d raised a family and moved to Portland.

Anyway, Music Millennium: I was hovering over gazillions of vinyl records (alphabetical within genre), letting my mind wander, and chose an album based on cover art but also track names. I’ll do that sometimes: buy on a whim (for whimsical reasons).

I was reminded of my time at 2 Dickinson Street at Princeton (Class of 1980), although this record long postdates that. One of our number (the guy) wanted to be the dog of another (a gal), figuratively natch, and even wore a collar to signify a serious interest.

Per AI (Gemini), regarding my vinyl record purchase and citing Wikipedia: 

Modern Life Is War is a seminal American hardcore punk band known for raw emotion, gritty realism, and intense, poetic songwriting. 

Sounds good. Looking forward to it. I know nothing much about this band. I haven’t even taken it out of the shrink wrap yet. 

I also got two CDs: a Weird Al set (comedy covers); and a Paul Winter (New Age instrumental), plus some incense (sandalwood + frankincense & myrrh, 10 sticks of each). “New Age” is how things are filed,  and doesn’t signify any contemporary trending of “New Age” as a meme. I see way more action around “Gen Z” when it comes to what’s making waves in the ethnosphere (one of many). 

Although I’m being somewhat detailed here, I’m also bleeping over lots that happened, as my intention is not to have these journal entries become tedious recounts of a day’s miscellanea, or even important events.

A blog (if you wanna adopt my practice) is not a blow-by-blow so much as a “slice through”. Take a slant.

I’m more trying to wire up a switchboard to learning more history, among other subjects. 

I aim to reward curious readers, as I think that sends the right message: curiosity is a positive, even for all the cats it’s maybe killed (poking fun at an idiom: “curiosity killed the cat” — perhaps used to deter the impulse to pay attention to inconvenient truths, and I’m not talking about “climate change” (which I believe is happening, and humans play a big role).

Async vs Sync

This is one of my older, more-viewed tracks, less esoteric than a lot of them. When I say "track" I mean a recorded segment or performance, and action sequence, frames. 

The medium in this case is audio-video, a YouTube (as we’ll call em). It might've copied over to Rumble, I haven't checked yet.

Another dichotomy to explore (vs sync-async) is inperson-virtual where a 2x2 matrix gives all combos, such as async-inperson, which might be a contradiction, but then we say "late" for apparitions. 

Async-virtual, what's that? Async-inperson could also be like Mystery Science Theater 3000, where the inperson audience is in sync vs-a-vs some old film they're watching together and making snarky comments about.

Excitement in Sorting

What some readers might find useful in my online journals and elsewhere is my delving into computer science concepts through the door of what's immediate in one's experience, such as event scheduling and sorting (this entry is about sorting). I'm in no way the originator nor unique in this regard; that's how computer science gets passed down, by a lotta people. But how about life skills, what about those? Maintaining the connection remains goal.

Take sorting for example, a mundane task, what computers are good at, so reflexively we may feel “to good” or “too important” to sort. Or, alternatively, sorting is “too boring” or “too meaningless”. Or worse: “I should sort the tools drawer (a euphemism for an anything drawer) but I’m procrastinating, one of my issues, and I feel guilty about it.” Sheesh, don’t be a drama queen about it. Look at sorting as your homework in computer science. Didn’t you sign up to be a trucker (inside joke)?

I got into sorting just recently, and yes, it was a kitchen anything drawer, a mix of tools, nails, picture hammers, fixtures minus a context (like hinges), a few batteries (still good?), staples (for a stapler)… the list goes on. 

Some of the items were clearly tools, used as means to an end. I separated my junk into two shallow boxes: tools (means to ends) on the left, fixtures (hardware, supplies, more ends in themselves) on the right. Was this the only way to divide in two? Not at all. I changed my mind about nails: not tools, fixtures. Glues and putties: tools. They make stuff happen.

You see what’s interesting here? I’m doing supervised learning on myself. I’m using a dataset to train my categorization skills. But also: I’m studying my own psychology. What set off this whole task was thinking to hang an old bulletin board (the kind with thumbtacks) in the hallway, across from the Birds of Bhutan poster. 

I needed a picture hanger. I started riffling through the junk. I couldn’t find one. My first impulse: go buy one; I need the exercise. I saw myself giving myself reasons for walking to Fred Meyer. 

I do that a lot: need something; can’t find it; go get another one. Then find the one I already had. I actually have two alost identical Lumix cameras thanks to that thought process, and in that case I’m not sorry (I’m happy to have a backup — see? making up reasons again).

Making up reasons to not be sorry: we could name a whole faculty for that purpose.

Now, will I want to do a sub sort, starting from one or both flats? Maybe (I haven’t quite decided). Why put everything back, even if in a more orderly arrangement? Let’s dream up a whole new arrangement (time to drive it Ikea! — there’s that impulse again, part of what makes me so American). Having basketball on the HDTV (New York vs 76ers) adds to that ethnicity (like what? I’m a sports guy now?).

As a segue to philosophy, something to think about, I just took in a Dr. Justin Sledge lecture on Immanuel Kant and his critical philosophy. In my case, I think in terms of my Graph Theory 2025 video, which traces Emerson back through Coleridge to Kant (bottom center, early slide). In Knowledge Engineering, I’ve been building timelines around Blake, Napoleon, Margaret Fuller, her grand nephew Bucky, to name a few. Ada Byron. Jane Addams. Through Blake I was reconnecting to Swedenborg, and now, thanks to Dr. Justin, I’m connecting Swedenborg with Kant.

Graphs, networks, including the spherical ones that connect around in all circumferential directions, as Synergetics often puts it, are a type of data structure. Sorting, dividing sets by criteria, or just randomly partitioning (a kind of sorting), is more associated with the word “algorithm”. But algorithms and data structures go together. When rolled into one concept (structures with associated behaviors), that concept is often called a type of object. Which brings us back to sorting the junk drawer, attending to attributes, synthesizing new ones.

In computer science, a logic gains adherents because it’s relatively easy to use and proves reliable in the real world. I’m responding to Kent’s concern that logic without a track record (empirical evidence) has nothing going for it and so is a waste of time. 

How do we know Synergetics isn’t a waste of time? I’d suggest in the same way Python has proved itself, not as the “only” language nor even as “the best” but as a language that’s usable to good advantage, in the real world. We’re not appealing to mysticism or unique experiences. Fuller wasn’t using any argument from authority when he talked about his suicidal days; he was letting us know he was experiencing great  stress. Synergetics has more of a track record than Bucky feeling blue.

I did find a picture hanger thanks to the sorting process, and hammered into the hallway wall with a longer than regulation nail for the purpose. The bulletin board is hung. The drawer still needs more sorting.

Remembering Jon Bunce

From my email to another Wanderer (Apr 28, 2026, 5:54 AM ):

You may not remember him well but y'all did overlap at Pauling House a few times.

His dad was Louie Bunce, well-known in the visual art world (mural at PDX airport etcetera) whereas Jon distinguished himself in music.

The event was low key and largely unscripted (no program handed out), spread among a few rooms.

Given these were accomplished musicians for the most part, guests had a "go with the flow" attitude that made that loose format work well.

Martian Math Promo

Circuit Riding Again

I consider "wandering" a way of staying in shape. Physically: it counts as light exercise, with a fair amount of walking, and a little running even (just a little). Mentally: one has many opportunities to strengthen mental abilities, some of wnich are simply social, such as knowing bus etiquette and best practice.

For an example of bus etiquette, when someone with a walker or motorized wheelchair needs to get off, the driver has the option to both lower the front of the bus, and to unfold a ramp to the curb. Those wishing to board the bus need to stand back and let those getting off do so first, including if a ramp is deployed. 

A young blond, a male teen, didn’t get that, and the driver had to keep telling him to wait, as the ramp maneuver was still pending. But the teen didn’t get it, seeing the open door and no one in the way, so time to get on right? Wrong. Driver: wait. 

Finally the would-be rider just wandered off, apparently too demoralized by the experience to want to continue it. No bus ride for now. People hate being wrong, especially in public.

Alberta Street, like NW 21st, mirrors SE Division in many ways, with its own Petite Provence (French restaurant) and Salt and Straw (exotic ice cream flavors).

I had a pretty firm objective this time: get pictures of a specific wall mural, one showing an icosahedron in wireframe as an apparent source of teachings, spread by wind. The prayer flag motif in many ways, like in my backyard on TikTok.

On my way back to the Max, on a bus 8 from Alberta Street, I stumbled across a retirement party, in Holladay Park, for one of the first (Type 1) Max trains. People lined up for photo ops inside, and to sign their names to the train’s exterior. 

I asked an official about the planned fate for these particular cars and she wasn’t sure where it’d go next. Something for sleuths to monitor maybe.

I wasn’t the only one engaged in a form of treasure hunting (another form of skills building, involving clue following): Dave went to a postmortem regarding an pre Rose Festival treasure hunt organized by veteran Rose Festival treasure hunters. There’s an official one each year, with published clues coming out each day. These hints are purposely cryptic, yet all point to a specific location: where a plaque is hidden for the winner to find. 

This hunt was unofficial and this time steered hunters to the Mt. Tabor area, which Dave well knows (me too), although he was not the finder in this case.

The treasure hunting game resembles geocaching in large degree. The term “geocaching” was invented by Dave Ulmer, a Tektronix engineer who, in his next chapter, acquired an RV tricked out with bells and whistles I associate with the BizMo (business mobile) design. 

He parked behind the Pauling House that time (soon after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans) and gave us a tour.  Don stayed in touch, subscribing to Ulmer’s “daily picture” (usually of some deserted wilderness he was parked in) shared by satellite. This was all well before Starlink.

Although I had my 3-ring binder of “bus reading” with me, I found I was more into churning through my own thoughts on this trip. I did some thinking about the public sector and public spaces. There’s a public-private as well as private-public flow, with public metrics suggesting a kind of ambience or groupthink. To some extent, the groupthink varies by city.

Just as radio and TV resulted in the spread of new standards, in terms of accent and the look of one’s kitchen (ideally), so is AI spreading new speech and thought patterns. 

The construction I call “not but” is on the rise. “This was not just a spur-of-the-moment decision, not a random act, but a pre-meditated, carefully planned exercise.” That’s a not-but.  You’ll hear a lot more of this construction on YouTube, as AI continues to take over, not just thumbnails, but audio tracks as well.

Without myself being an AI, I’m nevertheless a natural language processor and somewhat LLM-like in how I continually reweigh my various marbles (presuming I have any; we know we have marbles because they say it’s possible to lose them, or to have too few as in “he didn’t have all his marbles”), so naturally my own speech and thought patterns are being influenced, as I absorb the new vernacular and update my worldviews.