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. 

Thinking About Deb

I’m thinking about my friend Deb, going into hospice. She’s a medical doctor and has done her best to treat her cancer with peer professionals. She’s been getting the most out of living. 

I got to join her at the Oregon coast this April on Earth Day, where she and her dog Shelby were enjoying the scene. For me and my dog Sydney, it was a day trip, action-packed. 

She later came through Portland and we attended the Amy Goodman film (with Amy herself on stage).

Mortality has always been a big topic for me, something I ponder, as part of the life experience. I’m far from unique in this regard, hah hah. It’s the human condition.

I first met Deb through my friend Russell Chu, who was to become her husband. Our respective families developed in parallel, our kids growing into adulthood. Lots of adventures.

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 Sushi Chiyo 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 me 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 ::