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).

The Falcon and the Snowman (movie review)

This one reminded me of the far more obscure Iron Curtain, which I’d picked out at random from MMU stacks. Both feature the spy novel trope of a Russian embassy, trying to make its way in the world (this time in Mexico), as it’s beset by weirdos who can’t resist roping them in to some spooky melodrama, pushing secrets and other adult material.

The Snowman is the pusher. He’s very pushy. And why not? He gets rewarded for it. He’s like guinea pig S (thinking of B). He burns through a lifetime of luxury living in a brief snort of time. 

The Falcon (another young white-n-nerdy guy, about the same age) has a literal pet falcon, which also symbolizes his freedom, which he has to give up (let go of) as the price of defending Australians from the machinations in the backrooms. That comes as a climax in the film, when he’s a man on the run.

The USSR embassy in question is in Mexico, and we’re thinking L.H. Oswald likely went there much like this Snowman character. Falcon and Snowman are friends going back (both altar boys), although the former’s parents try hard to extract their son from the latter’s drug dealing (pushing) reality (lifestyle). 

The Falcon’s dad is retired FBI and he’s able to provide a cushy make-me-proud path for his son, if only his son shapes himself accordingly, in the image of the dad (or call it patriarchy, pretty standard).

I liked how the novelist and screenwriters collage the satellites, the communications rooms, the excessive drinking, with the intel world. 

Having been in such communications rooms myself (I’m thinking of a specific embassy) I can confirm there’s some realism swirled in. I also liked that our young protagonist is bombarded with strong views and attitudes by his coworkers, all of whom feel free to speak their minds, especially when under the influence.

The funniest part was the inspection by the NSA agent. The CIA is known to be sloppy and full of rogue ne’er-do-wells,  whereas the NSA is the adult in the room. The suspense is high as the guy probes the shredded papers. Does he miss the hidden alcohol or does he predict and expect that it’s there (?), cuz every communications room is a carbon copy, ad infinitum in the backrooms. 

The Falcon, on the other hand, has more to lose, should the NSA guy discover he’s a spy for the Soviets. But every comm room has its Soviet spy, par for the course. 

That’s why Project Pyramid is always being photographed and sent to them (the Russian baddies, Boris and Natasha); they likely get a thousand scans a day from the thousand Falcons defending a someplace (an erehwon), if not Australia.

I did wonder why were labor unions, the target for CIA infiltration (the Falcon intercepts a misdirected communication sent by a more advanced drinker in another comm room), were what this middle-class-with-well-off-parents guy felt especially protective towards. Not that he’d be anti-union necessarily, but why choose that particular hill to die on? And who, on average, cares that much about Australia? The Aussies would get their revenge in a future chapter (thinking Rupert). 

The screenplay endeavors to answer that question: he’s in friendly competition with the Snowman to show off who is more the good Catholic kid, under it all, in the eyes of God. Meaning they both wanna be heroes, but with so much at stake, other challenges obtrude, such as paranoia. Pretty soon, even the stuffed owl is listening to your conversations.

Speaking of Eve listening in on Bob and Alice (a pattern): I enjoyed the flashback to dial phones and needing to leave the one receiver off the hook (to not hang up) then picking up in another room. If the first phone is left off the hook, there’s an opportunity for Eve to listen in. This pattern also repeats across households; families living together in intimate circumstances usually have trouble keeping secrets from one another, although full disclosure is not what usually happens either (much is left to the imagination). 

“Everything coming out in the wash” usually mostly happens, and melodramatically at that, in the movies.

The Falcon character reminded me of another middle class Catholic Republican, Brian S. Willson who believed everything his subculture believed was true, then experienced profound disillusionment. Brian is a Viet Vet who also paid a high price and now lives in Nicaragua. That guy didn’t have the same access to state secrets though, and had resorted to more ordinary labor-union-like protests and civil disobedience.

Electronic Tunneling

:: the alleyway ::

This Fall Term I’ve been diving into stuff I might’ve read had I stayed on the philosophy track outta Princeton, vs switching to a life in the “real world” in Jersey City, where The Joker was later made (they shot Bruce Wayne’s parents getting shot in an alleyway I’d frequent, next to the Loew’s theater on Journal Square).

What “stuff” is that, that I might’ve read? A well-trodden philo path is Kant → Hegel → Marx, but then the French swapped out Hegel for Nietzsche and injected psychoanalysis into the mix, replacing Freud with Lacan and then going off the deep end with Deleuze-Guattari. That’s the rabbit hole I’ve been going down, with tools I didn’t have in the 1980s: YouTube and LLMs.

What actually happened is upon leaving Princeton I got swept up in the est stuff, Centers Network, NYC, which Dr. Kaufmann had said was interesting (he mentions est in one of his books), and it turned out Werner Erhard was following Buckminster Fuller, so I decided to look into that corpus more. As a math teacher (high school level), I found much in Synergetics (two volumes) to be valuable and useful to me (and the philosophy was pragmatic — the EPCOT buckyball, Spaceship Earth, was being built at the time).

Fast forward and I’m co-developing Cascadian Pragmatism, from Blake to Bucky, meaning we’ve absorbed William Blake’s own mythopoetic type of psychoanalysis (Swedenborg-informed) into the picture as an alternative to say Lacan’s. Kant → Swedenborg → Blake is an alternative lineage.

Bucky respected the difference Freud made in opening our minds to the invisible (the unconscious), outside the five sense, and admitted to a “subconscious demon” derailing / delaying his own holy grail quest in Synergetics, for a volume five in his pantheon.

The main benefit I’m getting from the recent epistemic foraging is I’m getting to map more “tunnels” (rabbit holes become tunnels) twixt Mark Fisher (Anglophone philo guy) and the continental stuff (postmodernism). I’m also getting more of a handle on David Foster Wallace, although admittedly that’s slow going. I just got Hannah Smart’s novel in the mail, Meat Puppets. She’s gonna be one of my guides on that score, as another YouTube influencer.

Fall Term Wandering

My mission today: visit the Lost and Found window in the foyer of TriMet headquarters on SE 17th and Holgate. I took FX2 and Orange Line, following some fare checkers into the building. 

No dice on the helmet. I’d taken my clone helmet with me to show what to look for. I also took a Wanderers’ bag with a hair brush and Chinese wisdom (I’ll shoot the cover for my thumbnail).

Back in the control tower, as one might characterize any office, I was providing a runway / landing strip for a next guest (yes, metaphorically), while also coordinating with an AirBnB family expected in November. Not my AirBnB — my wife and I were not in that line of work, although we did check out time share, briefly, when in Orlando that time (how we got into EPCOT). No WiFi (those units) so we didn’t opt in.

I returned by the same two train and bus routes, with my active point and shoot camera, this time the Lumix, which I’ve been giving a rest, as I favor the Canon with it’s 40x zoom and flip screen. 

I have a backup Lumix from that time I thought I’d lost my only one (when tripping on some stones, in the dark). I procured it over eBay, then found I’d left the original one at Glenn’s, so now I had two. Then the Canon came along, a veteran of a whirlwind trip to Turkey and Egypt and places.

Are we still allowed to say “Turkey” or is is that like saying “Peking”: an antiquated spelling? I recall in high school, correcting our expat (USA) geography teacher, or was she an English teacher, when she said “Ceylon” instead of “Sri Lanka” (she gave me those dagger eyes). 

Now here I am, in my dotage, sounding all antiquarian about stuff. Next thing you know, I’ll be talking about Yugoslavia. 

Fall Term is chugging along. We kicked it off with the customary Wanderer’s gathering, me newly back from LA, and then I took off for a Cascadian tour, visiting the Smith Rock area and then Springfield, of Homer Simpson fame. We came back along I-5 (“we” being me n the dog). Had I more time, I could envision reversing my most recent coastal loop and heading up the Newport and Lincoln City that way.

Speaking of Lincoln City, last I checked in on Lincoln County, they were waiting to hear in writing from the hated Feds that they’d not be sending the ICE gestapo again for any reason. 

The first time, ICE had seized the helicopter base used to save lives at sea, for its own use, relegating the coast guard helicopter to some limbo. That angered people up and down the coast, who valued those lives being saved, more than anything ICE could do with the same resources, so they rose up and drove out the invaders. Now they’re hoping to sign a treaty of sorts, although local lawmen use different terminology. Whatever it takes to keep those bozos from coming back.

The plan here is to stay low income because I model the average World Game player who may nevertheless have access to public wealth, much as the military socialists have, when it comes to their weaponry junkyards (our shoptalk for em). You’re allowed to burn a lot of fuel in a day, flying one of those jets, without having to use your own bank account. 

Likewise with my bizmo fleet: they’re not mine, those nomadic camper-office vans, not purchased as a result of my supposedly vast income as a private sector bizmo mogul. That way, my faculty will consist mainly of ordinary joes like me, rich in what we share, in terms of access, which are more ends than means. 

Money is more a means to those ends, especially when sampling a lifestyle without wanting or being able to buy into it too completely. You want a taste.

In contrast, the navy sailors who crew those socially-owned ships (the ones “we the people” own, the one’s that the sail in the peoples’ name) are not oligarchs usually. They’re not limited liability shareholders with stock in their vessel. Indeed, their liability may be much higher than that, depending on the mission they’re sent on. If their ship goes down, they might too, although we’d expect those ships to have escape pods.

Is an astronaut a billionaire? Not likely, if a professional. A dilettante astronaut-for-a-day (or days) guy might be a billionaire, as that’s what it takes to buy the privilege, versus approaching it as an engineering practice. How do people with so little money get to play around with the LHC at CERN? By being atomic scientists, not by having fatso bank accounts.

Deterritorialization

re-readying a field

de- re- territorialization via the liminal space vestibule (line of flight)

Namespace Key:

CCRU

CR

Active Inference

Tractor Math

Y’all might not be familiar with my Tractors-based approach to learning Python, a portal to computer science more generally.

We start with an XY grid of addresses, called a Field, and the tractors traverse said field in a raster pattern, perhaps planting (storing) Unicode characters (or the ASCII subset) as they go. 

A real tractor wouldn’t drop off the end of a row and reappear at the start of the next, such as when reading horizontally and always starting at one end (or the other). 

In contrast, some examples of Etruscan writing show the letters marching in a zigzag pattern, reversing direction and coming back. Boustrophedon.

← ← ← ← ← ←   usual Etruscan direction

← ← ← ← ← ←

→ → → → → →   boustrophedon: alternate-line direction

Today and yesterday I was working with a real tractor, diesel powered, pulling a disc mower getting its torque, its high powered spin, from a rotating shaft designed into the tractor itself. 

The pull-behind spinning disc in a protective metal hull, is raised and lowered by a control lever at the driver’s right. I had it set to about level 3, pretty close to the ground. This John Deere tractor has cruise control. I’d set it and devote my attention to steering the thing.

I found myself doing neither a side-to-side reading pattern nor a boustrophedon pattern, but rather a surface spiral as I mowed a rectangular or other polygonal patch by shaving the outer edge, progressively reducing the surface area of the as yet un-mowed portion.

A tractor doesn’t turn on a dime, even though it has a tighter turning radius than most cars. A more experienced mower would likely avoid as many tight turns. I had several hours to contemplate the First Person Physics of it all and I believe gradually improved my performance. 

I got some tips from the owner of course. He was doing the same thing I was, but with a bigger tractor and mower combo.

I’ve been to this Willamette Valley farm, near the McKenzie (a feeder river) on previous occasions, and have engaged in a wide variety of activities as a “token” farmhand. Our joke this time was that if I do  enough hours I can take it to the next level and add the suffix “bob” to my name, as in Kirby-bob. 

Picture some guy in bib overalls with a straw hat maybe. I had sunglasses and suspenders, looking the part. The owner already goes by Jimmy-bob at Starbucks.

One might suspect I’m laying the groundwork for running for office, like by shaking hands or squeezing babies. Maybe I wanna endear myself to the voters. But that’s not it. I’m a curriculum developer not a politician. I want kids to learn Python, while learning something about farming.

Did I mention at least some versions of my Tractor type require refueling or they stop moving? Logo turtles (in the computer language Logo) don’t do that out of the box. Tractor graphics might take root in MIT Scratch first. We’d move from Scratch to Codesters at Coding with Kids. 

One of my Tractor types, a subclass of TractorWriter (the kind that plants Unicode characters), is programmed to plant a rough ASCII view of the Mandelbrot Set, kind of how Mandelbrot himself first started to see it, on a CRT at IBM.

Our Wanderer at the Etruscan dig on the Italian peninsula has returned to Cascadia.

Crazy Times

Monkey Face near Smith Rock, Oregon. Google Earth 3D View.

The DCers appear to be gearing up to send their mercenaries into Persia, even as their so-called war secretary (Peter Hegseth) faces impeachment in the so-called congress (Thomas Massie), and even while their scapegoat prez suffers from serious psycho-physiological medical conditions (exactly which ones depends on whom you ask). 

No one “in the know” sees the prez as the one calling the shots. He takes orders and/or follows cues, as a paid actor. The USA we had known was long gone by this time (see Grunch of Giants, St. Martins Press, 1983). The partisans still hope we believe in their brand of theater nonetheless (I don’t).

The Lower48ers do not support this illegal, post constitutional war by a large margin, but their vote ceased to matter when the USSA and its politburo of oligarchs was formed in its place. We live in a post USA chapter now.

“We the people” are mere spectators, trying to follow the action outside the propaganda channels, as DC’s morons force their sleazey programming down our throats via the satellite TV cables, exercising both soft and hard power against the American peoples.

I’m on vacation in the Monkey Face area. That’s a geographical feature in Central Oregon. I come here quite often and so know my way around, but that doesn’t mean I have exhaustive knowledge of the environs. On the contrary, I learn something new every time I visit. I’ll be pushing off in the morning.

The Iron Curtain (movie review)

I’m gonna recommend this one for helping us walk it back a few generations, to the 1940s, with “atomic secrets” the comic book focus, in Spy vs Spy. This one is about power dynamics among those in the know regarding fission (later fusion) as a power source, pre the whole Oppenheimer saga, or more accurately: concurrently.

I’m committing the sin of commenting before the movie is even finished, but on the other hand that’s a valid way to review a film: en progresso so to speak. I’m with the lady who just had the baby, and her wanting to blend in by being friendly with the neighbors. Doesn’t her guy know that being aloof and standoffish is a sure fire way to call attention to oneself?

I’m at the part where her guy has just come home from an emergency meeting or briefing or something, to find his wife, who has just given birth, on her feet and bustling around like nothing happened, while the nice neighbor lady cradles the newborn. The neighbor has just left and the guy is reprimanding his wife for fraternizing with the natives. He’s dumb dumb dumb. Hah hah.

Anyway, once I get this fully viewed and returned to Movie Madness I’m gonna check out what they have that’s Nepali. I have a reliable source telling me Nepali films of this era are well worth catching and I believe it. The question is: will MMU have anything that recent? Prolly not. I’m gonna have to look for a film festival for that kinda stuff.

I think what’s really confusing tongues today is the fact that the USSR is as no longer with us as MAGA isn’t. There’s this tendency to refight, or re-litigate as they say today, battles gone by. Capitalism versus Communism isn’t where the action is in this next epoch. We’re more focused on topics like climate change and global shipping. Pipelines. Grids. Satellite constellations. Global data.

Which reminds me, I haven’t seen much evidence of a United Nations in the plot so far. Not surprisingly, cuz the UN was still in the future back then, duh. 

That’s when a lot got formalized, when the UN did. People forget that Third World meant nonaligned, meaning not party to the bipolarism then gripping the bipolarites. The nonaligned intended to stay out of the whole Capitalism vs Communism drama as both were alien Euro ideologies being transplanted willy-nilly, as if no other shoptalks could possibly pertain. 

By now, most of that 1900s discourse is archival. It takes work to exhume the old mindsets and movies such as this one do an excellent job of prying open the tomb. I commend it to psychological anthropology syllabi.