Travelogue Entry

When working on a skillset, one may apply different spins: 

• This is a rehearsal in a low risk secure environment for a future time when I'll be encountering more unknowns.
  
  
• I'm just staying in shape, maintaining my skills at a certain level per the use it or lose it philosophy (just use it)

Having just encountered the unknowns of LAX / LA and Uptown Whittier, I could see myself in rehearsal mode. Whereas without specific plans, I'm really just being a stumblebum, per usual, or Wanderer as we like to call ourselves.

Either way, I practice being a smooth operator, like no tripping on my own shoelaces, no leaving stuff behind (I messed up on that one, see below). 

I posit a lot of us hate feeling micromanaged, like by those especially busy-body parents who think parenting means finding fault in not doing everything precisely per their specifications (I'm not saying my own parents were like this; they were not). What's more, they self-righteously believe their interventionary commentary (or worse) is helpful, making them seem even more insufferable.

Well, my antidote for that is to enjoy the benefit of your own personal bicameral mind, or I guess I should say "brain", as "bicameral" is with reference to a brain's physiological structure. 

However "bicameral mind" (Julian Jaynes) suggests something more like an internal dialog, like when the proverbial angel and devil sit on alternate shoulders and whisper persuasive arguments to some in-between Ego (an egg or "I" -- an I-egg).

Along those lines, create an observer-monitor-coach who does micro-manage, but in a way the other half (of your bicameral mind) accepts. Such an expert coach knows when to offer praise, not just criticism. 

Treat yourself right (lovingly). Create the ideal "parent" (supervisor, superego) with the goal of sharpening up your performance. Imagine a voice that offers up the right advice at the right time, reliably, and without sucking off your credit or debit card to do so. Tap into that inner wisdom, why not?

My lunch loop today started on the FX2, with a visual update on my way to the bus stop of the progress being made on the SE 38th and Division food pod. The shared interior, which these pods tend to have, is very close to completion. 

I took the bus eastward, bringing a 3-ring binder of bus reading, and a book purchased at the Clinton Street Fair. I also had along a photocopy of some handwritten notes by Gurdjieff.

I alighted from the bus at SE 113th and backtracked to Roman Market for lunch. The young woman behind the counter was patient with me, and with herself (good coaching) when she couldn't find an English description of the second soup (the first being cream of mushroom). I opted for it anyway (I'd call it potato vegetable) and consumed it along with rice pilaf and chicken schnitzel, all in all quite a large meal, something I wanna walk off. 

Roman Market is Russo-Uke-Baltic and like that, what around here we call Eastern European, but more like before NATO's divisive politics.

I retraced the route along Division, this time on foot, back under the I-205 bridge to the Max stop, Green Line, first checking out a bar I was curious about (not to drink, just to take a couple pix). 

Taking pix was on my mind the whole time, per the embedded album above.

I alighted in Hollywood, in the new Movie Madness neighborhood (it'll open there in 2027), this time to check out The Q. Dr. D. had heard from friends that The Q was worth visiting and upon looking it up I discovered the Chiyo Sushi place I already frequent is an integral part of it. Amazing. More pix.

Coming home on the 75, after briefly ducking into Trader Joe's (dried mangos, cranberry juice, cheese puffs, mints), I sat next to Paul, the owner of some of the gardening tools in my garage and on my patio, from previous enterprising. Paul and I talked about the late Glenn Stockton, our good friend in common.

Two random acts of kindness towards me:

1. A woman at the Gateway Max stop saw me standing there waiting, and to her eye I looked distressed and she asked if I was OK, and could she do anything. She was on the older side but younger than myself, and looked athletic, with her helmet and bicycle (more like me on other days). I guess I wasn't such a smooth operator after all if just laying eyes upon me inspired concern on the part of strangers. Upon assuring her I was OK, saying "actually I'm fine, but thanks for asking" I looked up and reminded myself this was a major clinic stop and a lotta people here were suffering from medical conditions. In her professional life, this lady was maybe a doctor or nurse, trained to be concerned for possibly undiagnosed or inadequately addressed conditions.
   
   
2. A much younger young woman ran out of Trader Joe's after me, after I'd packed my shoulder bag myself (the clerk had offered to) with the purchased items, but I inadvertently left the dried mangos behind. She (not the clerk) ran out of the store calling after me, and brought them to me. I believe she was a TJ employe. "Oh thank you, that's very kind of you" I said.

Before all this bus and train stuff, I'd done an earlier breakfast loop bike ride to Sellwood, coming back by Max and FX2, a loop I do rather frequently, weather permitting. 

I snapped a couple pictures of the miniature train at Oaks Park. And even before that, a routine Zoom meetup. I mention these details in part to explain what all is in the embedded Flickr album.

Another detail: while sitting at Roman Market, I was challenged by my "coach" (see above) to upload some just-taken pix to Facebook. 

Sounds easy right? But the pix were on a different device, the Canon PowerShot SX 740. That camera has the ability to talk by WiFi and Bluetooth to neighboring devices, such as my smartphone. 

Whereas I'd connected it with my iPad over WiFi, a task which requires downloading a Canon app, I'd never done it with my iPhone. It took awhile, but I eventually succeeded. I'd later reupload the same pictures, in full resolution vs shrunk down JPEGs, when back in my personal workspace.

Random Notes

Gemini generated

As a first approximation a First Person Physics would wanna overlap with Newtonian mechanics big time, meaning notions of power, energy, momentum, force, velocity and action would need to be defined and distinguished in much the same ways, while adding voltage, current and resistance as post-Newtonian concepts nevertheless connectable to same, bridging through energy, which may be stored, as potential.

Adding electrical concepts adds water, so to speak, meaning the hydrodynamical metaphors.

Force for a distance is work (W = E), reminding us of Sisyphus (a mnemonic), with s for distance and our laboring rock pusher both. He pushes (accelerates) a rock against gravity, up a hill, for a distance, spending energy. doing work. 

How fast he accomplishes this work relates to horsepower but let's think in "energy slave" terms. How many robots would it take to push the rock to the top in just under five minutes? In under two?

Power through a transformer is a constant. It's not like in boosting the pressure behind each marching charge-bearer (marching back and forth in AC) that we're gaining energy from nowhere. Energy is conserved. What we lose or gain in voltage pressure, we gain or lose in current. 

Less current at high voltage is better for long distance transmission via conductors, whereas lower voltage with more juice flowing is what end-user loads will require, with a transformer in between primary and secondary networks.

Force through a time will alter a thing's momentum, and a delta in momentum is in units of momentum. The more the force the more the change. 

Sisyphus is likewise working through time and at the end of the day both time and distance apply, taking us in both cases to action. Lights, camera, action (said the director god).

Energy is action (S) with a frequency (E = Sf or S/t) or mvs per t. Sisyphus belongs here too, as an agent or actor, one who acts. Little-s represents the difference he's making, in the rock's position in space.

Think of a frame of exposed film. Action happened in a time requiring an energy expenditure. Speed up the film: more power. Power (P) is Energy per time (E/t).

So now we have big-S action and little-s distance. The big S might stand for "swerve" as in "swervy curve" and represents "least action" in the sense of a Lagrangian, wherein the difference between  potential and kinetic energy is optimized along the resulting pathway. 

Nature is not into unnecessarily wasting energy when it comes to balancing all the tradeoffs. She has to take everything into account, by definition.

from a Perplexity query

Lifestyle Engineering

I was just thinking about how old dogface, Sydney, doesn't join my on the upper (outer) floor anymore, given she's almost 15 and stairs are more problematic than before. 

Then, after walking to Tropical Hut for a mouse for Barry (python) and coming upstairs to send it off (to a next nirvana), drink a diet 7-Up, and blog, I heard that huff-puff of the dog engine. She had joined me. Crazy mutt (she's an English Labrador, chocolate). I was effusive as I pet my pet. Good dog! 

We old farts need our exercise. I try not to overdo it or underdo it. Tomorrow there's no chance of rain until evening, and it's a Saturday, meaning very light traffic and likely no line at Voodoo Doughnuts. Which reminds me: I watched a vid about the rise and fall of Krispy Kreme today, along with a few other business stories. Wendy's. 

I'm supportive of private businesses and think ownership often translates into stewardship, but it all depends who it's "by" as in "owned by". If you're owned by ruthless money-makers who care naught about the biz and only about running up debts, paying themselves, and cashing out, you're unlucky. There's a very fine line between venture and vulture capitalism, oft crossed. "Worker owned" is a viable model and my understanding is the vultures will often attack such ventures as a threat to their own way of doing business.

Overall, I think people bandy about words like "socialism" and "capitalism" without stopping to consider that we might have outgrown this creaky old terminology. David Graeber, the anthropologist, helped us understand the vast variety of social models, big and small, concentrated and spread around. Lifestyles are experimental and in advanced civilizations it's no crime to copy what works. 

Ethnicities that punish so-called "cultural appropriation" aren't usually my favorite.

Billionaires are boring because experiments of singular families living the high life are a dime a dozen. We learn more from times when strangers come together and hammer out a suite of solutions. I think of Vanport, Oregon, a company town created by Kaiser Steel under the pressure of fighting alongside Russia to defeat the fascist mind-viruses then raging through Germany and Japan. Liberty ships. 

Portland was rescued from becoming another plain vanilla (as in white) KKK town, even after Vanport itself was washed away by the Columbia.

The Lower48 has a very weak public sector, making it easy for private companies to run their experiments on a target demographic of guinea pig. Testing the effectiveness of various "messaging campaigns" (influence operations, psyops) means trolling in selected markets before rolling out anything major. Cambridge Analytica and Internet Research Agency were up to the same thing, with the former taking credit for Trump's victory (in cahoots with Facebook) and the latter taking the blame (per Russiagate).

Nerd Nook

related blog post

:: dusting off an old deck ::

Labor Day 2026

The Dog Stars (movie review)

I don’t recall ever seeing a preview for this one, despite my somewhat regular attendance of late, at The Bagdad, and even some other first run theaters, such as Minions 3 at Regal. A theme of late (HB2U officer Bader) is how my memory is more of a sieve than I remember, as I’d just seen Minions 1 in 3D (a discontinued home theater technology) and didn’t remember having seen it, and even reviewed it.

This film fits under Horror in the zombie movie tradition, as the baddies are pretty thoroughly dehumanized and violence against them is mostly low-balled as in “shooting fish in a barrel”. However the movie does build to a climax when the protagonist sets out in his Cessna (the main prop in this film) to trace a stray radio signal. By the time he gets there, he has acquired a new family and is less suicidal than when he first lost his dog Jasper.

The radio signal leads them to a fully functional airport, on the face of it, although it proves somewhat of a hive mind, as expected. Darlene is the central figure and plays the iconic antagonist, I thought well. Having just been through Airport World (SeaTac and LAX), I was primed for this liminal space (just passing through).

Having done almost no research ahead of time, I did remember the word “uplifting” or something like that in some reviews, prolly cuz the goodies don’t lose too many, but for the dog and in the flashbacks. The dehumanized don’t get a backstory. They’re reapers, kinda like in Serenity. 

Mennonites are among the goodies and represent humanity going forward, now immune to the apocalypse-causing virus. Given the setting is Colorado, there’s a humorous dig at neighboring Utah, given the supporting hero is phobic towards Mormons, which reminds me of another movie (also horror).

Travel Tableau

Data Land

:: Life in Lesotho ::

Upon arrival in Greater LA from SeaTac, my Facebook feed started showing what’s happening in this geo-context. Place based. Not complaining. I’ll even go so far as to say nifty. The option to buy tickets (while riding the Metro C line) to an immersive art installation called DataLand, got me thinking.

R.B. Fuller’s claims about how Everyman now surpasses in wealth that of Emperors and Kings n Queens is of course easy to grok when one remembers what one takes for granted (forgets). Electricity to take one example. The ability to do work, piped to one’s home. Voltage pressure on tap. Solar fusion shared out through grids, interconnected or locally islanded.

Catherine the Great didn’t have an Apple Watch nor the prospect of ever having one. Court-based life, then considered a high living standard by those who liked to play dress-up, was miserable across the board (in France, Germany and England too)  by today’s living standards, a slum.

What if we think of CBDs (central business districts) around the globe as already those much vaunted “AI data centers” we so much hear about. Sure, they’re bio-based and so called “slow” (relatively) by marketers and even some scientists, but this isn’t about comparing relative speeds. 

We work together, in synergy, in this picture. 

“Mind” is what stays out of the picture, but not because it’s not a factor, in our U = MP. In grokking non-duality (always trending) we become one with the Borg. Resistance is futile, but then there isn’t any, except internally. We’re all embedded.

:: Virtual Mural ::

Shaking the Rattle

Thanks to Ryan of Polydactica, whom I first met through Andrius of Anaheim and Lithuania (I’m near Anaheim right now), I became more aware of two trending topics: Category Theory and Liminal Spaces. 

Category Theory (CT) is a shoptalk embedding the idea of a “topos” which my spellchecker doesn’t like. Lets give that word some context, with a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP):

All this work culminated in another notion, thanks to Grothendieck and his school: that of a topos. Even though toposes appeared in the 1960s, in the context of algebraic geometry, again from the mind of Grothendieck, it was certainly Lawvere and Tierney’s (1972) elementary axiomatization of a topos which gave impetus to its attaining foundational status. Very roughly, an elementary topos is a category possessing a logical structure sufficiently rich to develop most of “ordinary mathematics”, that is, most of what is taught to mathematics undergraduates. As such, an elementary topos can be thought of as a categorical theory of sets. But it is also a generalized topological space, thus providing a direct connection between logic and geometry. (For more on the history of categorical logic, see Marquis & Reyes 2012, Bell 2005.) 

CT has a “Bourbakian” flavor, which to me means it revels in abstraction, but not without some diagrams involving ovals and arrows (should we credit American pragmatist C.S. Peirce as an influence here?).

SEP again:

Categories, functors, natural transformations, limits and colimits appeared almost out of nowhere in a paper by Eilenberg & Mac Lane (1945) entitled “General Theory of Natural Equivalences.” We say “almost,” because their earlier paper (1942) contains specific functors and natural transformations at work, limited to groups. A desire to clarify and abstract their 1942 results led Eilenberg & Mac Lane to devise category theory. The central notion at the time, as their title indicates, was that of natural transformation. In order to give a general definition of the latter, they defined functor, borrowing the term from Carnap, and in order to define functor, they borrowed the word ‘category’ from the philosophy of Aristotle, Kant, and C. S. Peirce, but redefining it mathematically.

I thought Perplexity did a good job answering my question about whether the idea of a functor was analogous to an analogy, making “natural transformation” mean “analogous analogies”. 

I liked that as a specific example it featured the hydraulics-to-electronics analogy, as being of the functor type. 

Functors are akin to translations between natural languages, giving rise to different ways of expressing the “same thing”. 

Natural language processing (NLP) makes analogous analogies a central focus, seeking to encode the generic essence of relationships in a generalized semantics. I sound like a chatbot now. I’m shaking my rattle. 

A natural transformation takes us from one analogy to another (a meta-functor).

A phrase which stuck with me, an analogy of sorts: “toposes could prove to be for the 21st century what Lie groups were to the 20th century.” 

Both provide overarching schemas, conceptual frameworks, inside of which more specific systems (of concepts) do their thing. Conventionally such overarching schemas are called “foundations” but if we zoom out to just see “in-falling to form a spherical network” then our “foundation” is more like a “spaceship” (freely floating).

When used to characterize a specific mathematical domain, category theory reveals the frame upon which that area is built, the overall structure presiding to its stability, strength and coherence. The structure of this specific area, in a sense, might not need to rest on anything, that is, on some solid soil, for it might very well be just one part of a larger network that is without any Archimedean point, as if floating in space. To use a well-known metaphor: from a categorical point of view, Neurath’s ship has become a spaceship.

I’ll be pestering Perplexity about Neurath’s ship.

Friendly Skies

I picked up a book of Quaker writings in Quilcene, from a little outdoor booth where you’re trusted to simply leave the asking price in a jar. 

I’m impressed by the level of community living skills expressed among so-called anarchists, a word with too many connotations to be that useful, and oxymoronic to boot, as structured living requires discipline, self regulation, organization. 

Food Not Bombs, my neighborhood chapter, was likewise a pretty tight ship. Anarchists see what needs doing and do it. How Bucky Fuller of them. 

That African Heritage restaurant in Everett, Washington lived up to our expectations. I was with some dance school students local to the area. I enjoy touring in the company of indigenous people vs trying to figure it all out on my own.