Cascadian TriHearts

Catching Up

Which reporters have the Maduro beat, surely some of them? How’re they doing, Mr. and Mrs.? We seem to hear a lot more about… well anyway, you catch my drift. 

“Where have you been?” might be the relevant question, like I should do more homework before I ask dumb questions right?

I was saying yesterday I think a lotta people are doing more reading thanks to AI, as the prompted answers seem more to the point than mere searches. They say boomers are using AI all wrong if they think it’s just search. How about Generation Jones, same way? That’s my pigeon-hole.

For lunch today I had my Blue House Burrito: fresh Instant Pot pinto beans, Picante (hot), fresh spinach, nutritional yeast (like a powder), shredded Tillamook cheddar cheese and onion, melted on the spinach-tinged (as in green) wrap (we call them tillers). 

Not that you have to use Tillamook, that’s just an excuse for a link (Cascadian history is topical around here).

Maybe it sounds like I’m ignoring the serious warring that’s going on around the planet but as Marshall McLuhan could tell us, the Global Village is not a “nice town” by a long shot. Arnold Toynbee: same message. 

We’re in a pressure cooker, where the ethnicities more likely to make it are the ones less likely to be piling on. Neutrality Studies is big at Wilmington College I bet (Ohio, a hog capital), under a Peace Studies umbrella (Quaker school, you can predict the subjects from the brand).

My focus is my School of Tomorrow curriculum, and like everyone else it seems, I’ve been data mining with AI, pulling up what’s relevant to my network or graph. Typically for a knowledge engineer, I was just recently cutting and pasting the markdown output from an LLM to a Jupyter Notebook on GitHub. 

So what else is new, right?

Anthropology Exercise

As an exercise, write about a culture with a different relationship with alcohol. Here’s an idea: sure go ahead and drink when you’re young, but it’s considered normal and part of the life arc that after fifty or so one weans off, if not sooner. The culture comes with rituals around all that, and no one thinks they’re being innovative for having things be this way, as this is how things have always been and just are (going for realism, in other words, given this is often the native outlook, whatever we mean by “native”).

Going through my mind is the burgeoning supply of NA (non-alcoholic) beers we’re seeing, combined with that guy at the beer dealership telling me the NA market was booming relative the standard lines, which are down. Obviously public tastes are shifting, and I’m not saying in alignment with any particular program I’m aware of, other than maybe awareness itself, of the alternative lifestyles one might create.

The motto, or slogan, if that’s what we wanna call it, “the best religions are yet to come” sounds provocative if not downright offensive, as a religion is something people get defensive about, whereas the same phrase (almost) — “the best lifestyles are yet to come” — will meet with broad agreement, because we intuit “lifestyles” to come in infinite permutations, whereas “religions” are supposed to remain small in number, if expecting a world stage at least, and the few we have already are causing at least as many problems as they solve, or so many would judge.

All of which is to say, anthropology has a job to do, which includes teasing apart these various meanings, based on connotation as much as denotation, and that means exploring the connotations — which is anthropology again, so full circle. What’s the difference between “ethnicity and “race”? I’d say the distance is great, and that the former has a bright future, whereas “race” is being retired to pocket ethnicities that remain as holdovers from the Social Darwinist era (same era as the Marxist era in thumbnail), marketed later as Eugenics, and getting confused with being pedigreed (having an ancestry).

Does making up a culture mean committing to live it through? Why would we have fiction then? The whole point of fiction is to be able to speculate and imagine without acting out, if the latter were even possible (fiction often breaks laws, the laws that “keep it real” to use an idiom).

However people will commit to finite / definite experiences, such as a cruise or tour of duty, including when lots of random happenings are involved, stuff no one controls. People opt for such scenarios knowing it’s not a life-time commitment. That’s a tendency to work with, not against. A lifestyle park, like a theme park, with no alcohol or only NA substitutes (< 0.5%) could be a part of a permutation for a few months. Where one goes from there will depend on many factors, on future decisions. So kick back and enjoy.

Old Friends

Yesterday I took the FX2 over Tilikum Crossing to downtown Portland, on the other side of the Willamette River from my neighborhood. 

My objective: to celebrate an old friend's birthday at Karam, a centrally situated Lebanese restaurant. 

My interim goal: to arrive early enough to take some digital photographs on a sunny spring day, of whatever. 

On my return from Karam, I took a street car, right outside the door, down to the Waterfront, one stop past where I’d rejoin the FX2, but first I got some spectacular views of the OHSU cable car.

Upon arriving home, after walking north from SE 34th and Division, I found two recently-ordered books in my mailbox, both from the Trevor Blake collection. I'm looking forward to diving in.

Close Enough for Folk Music

I'm far from a veteran, in the sense of expert, when it comes to the local folk music theme. However, another family, the Pinneys, pivotal in transforming Stark Street facility into a real Quaker meetinghouse, knows the folk music scene inside-out, and Sonya, the matriarch Pinney, personally invited me to this elite gathering at Reedwood Friends Church. I was more than happy to accept her extra ticket and perform as chauffeur, a preferred role.

Bobby Jenkins, far different from me, is indeed an expert, both in the lore surrounding, and in the playing, of folk music using authentic folk instruments, in the string family especially I gather, including the Theremin (a "stringless" violin). Tonight he featured the banjo and the classical guitar. He would retune both instruments adroitly as a part of the performance, as the range of tunes he was covering were by no means all designed for the same scales. If that sounds like I know music theory, trust me, I'm faking it.

Jenkins leverages the fact that he doesn't need to masquerade in blackface and come off like a phony white person pretending to be otherwise (whites are good at that, like parrots or minah birds, just witness their stand up comics). He knows Portland really well and had QuarterWorld in mind for his destination after the show, as he's a connoisseur of pop culture and knows what Portland is known for. The guy is originally from Brooklyn NYC, with those famous STEM schools, but with a lot of North Carolina background.

The narrative he delivered, which I found no reason to contradict, was that what we call the banjo was primarily a slave class instrument, and its vocabulary, in terms of native tunes, turns towards the defiant, as well as the encrypted. African cultures needed to find a way to self perpetuate, despite the imposition of a Christian framework, which they learned to adapt towards their own purposes, all of which accounts for the vitality of the all-Americas music scene to this day (Bobby knows a lot about the evolution of Reggae).

The audience, unlike me, were indeed veterans of the folk music scene, many like my friend Sonya with season tickets and a long track record of getting educated along these lines, by a variety of accomplished shows on the road. I'm reminded of the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series, produced by ISEPP, where I was a veteran, in terms of how a certain "trans-episodic shoptalk" bleeds through. That's a fancy way of saying insiders seem to know what they're talking about, whereas as outsiders within hearing distance (like children peripheral to the council of elders) pick up on what they glean and formulate their own conjectures and speculations.

Now that slavery and apartheid have ended, although we'll continue paying karmic costs, it pays to go back and do what the Civil Rights Institute in Bellingham does: revisit the past in meticulous detail. Overcoming a chapter does not mean turning one's back on the content, but rather diving in with gusto, without the polarizations of the past. Novel perspectives, low hanging fruit, is easy to come by, another way of saying such scholarship is rewarding. Jenkins, highly skilled, even brings some of the higher hanging fruit within the comprehension range of a noob such as myself.

I was surprised to learn from Sonya about the death of one of my peers in Quaker-verse, Laura Martin. The Martins, along with the Pinneys, Jumps, Urners, and Hazel Hephill, were among the original families of our nascent Quaker meeting on Stark Street. As we awaited the show starting, sitting in those Reedwood pews (I don't access this space very often), I shared with Sonya our saga as I'd come to learn it, about the heroic exploits of one Doug Strain, the conscientious objector who helped our Quakers get their show on the road back in the mid 1900s. The Urners had recently moved from 57th Street Meeting in Chicago, their new son (me) in tow.

Bobby's performance reminded me of Dan Ryan's. Dan would specialize in offbeat blues bordering on what never made it on the record, again inheriting bigly from slave subcultures in the north American southeast, around the Mississippi Delta and so on.

Next Projects

Vintage Blender 2.5

You might’ve come across me talking about Blender here and there, meaning the animation and spatial design environment, in the same ballpark as Maya and Rhino.

I keep reimplementing a core framework of polyhedrons, arranged in accordance with the Synergetics Hierarchy (a concentric arrangement of a familiar cast), having it backend in different file formats: vrml, pov, stl, or directly into animation tanks (cartoon vistas): Visual Python’s, Blender’s and Rhino’s.

Ideally, the same scripts I use to develop POV-Ray stills (.pov files) could be used to drive Blender, with the result being a real time interactive vista, suitable for VR. I’ve accomplished this goal to partial degree but don’t really have the energy slaves (inanimate machinery) to commit to running the newest Blender.

To that end, a next Linux box is on my wish list. Or a Mac with similar rendering capabilities. As of this time, Windows is too unstable to take seriously.

However I’m not wanting to be a bottleneck and prefer accelerating the spread of the existing knowledge base over doing cutting edge R&D. Andragogy and pedagogy, curriculum development, testing, improving, have been core concerns, over coming up with something splashy, not that our content isn’t naturally splashy.

Bizmotica

Espied on Hawthorne Upon Descending from Mt. Tabor

Madam I’m Adam

Yes the title is a palindrome, letting the comma go where it needs to, but that’s not the topic here. Rather I’m hearkening back to my senior thesis at Princeton, on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, wherein I posited a thought experiment.

The thought experiment: I wanted my reader to posit a single Adam, like an LLM (not a term in 1979), that spoke through everybody. Think of language like that, and you’ll maybe DuckRabbit into the Wittgensteinian view, of a vast machinery without interiority, which isn’t to say we don’t have private lives, only that “we” belongs to it, as part of its machinery.  See?

I also talked about chunks of text (mega-tokens) getting organized like railroad cars in a switching yard to make sense. Trains of thought. When you read enough, you start to find a lot of the same trains (of thought) in peoples’ writing, which again lends itself to the “One LLM Behind It All” thought experiment.

Nothing changes, actually, when you look at it this way, except one’s “sensibilities” perhaps one could put it. The temptation to lunge at internal ephemera in order to capture “the meaning of” by means of introspection, is lessened, as Wittgenstein suggested would be the case. He’s operating in an aesthetic dimension, not sharing empirical findings from anthropology, except “investigations” do require attention to details, the actual patterns. 

Once you give up the easy picture of meaning, representation, name pointing to object, then what do you replace it with? A more detective like attitude. Discovering meanings takes research, field study. Wittgenstein used the field of mathematics for a lot of his “entomological” studies (or call it “ant work”). Namespaces do tend to colonize one another, which is to say blend, to varying effect.

Turning to one of those “psychological” verbs, is “sulking” a sensation? Does one close one’s eyes and savor that sulking feeling? Is it the same for everyone? 

Or is it a mistake to identify such a complex storyteller verb with some physiologically enmeshed endocrine talk? 

I make fun of the overly literal interpretation of “interiority” in this spoofy prompt to Perplexity:

Help me with a satirical piece poking fun at neurobiologists who over-literalize English verbs to where they imagine chemical processes corresponding to every novelist’s invention, such as “sulking”. These scientists have suddenly discovered the “sulking hormone” and know which part of the brain is involved. Parody prose.

And here’s what Perplexity came back with, some very apropos trains of thought, wending their way through Hilbert Space:

Clever premise — the satire practically writes itself once you imagine a research team describing “sulking” with the seriousness of a Nature Neuroscience paper. Here’s a short parody take you could expand or stylize further:
________________________________

The Sulk Cortex and Its Endocrine Pathways

After decades of neglect, neurobiology has finally caught up with the novelists. In a paper preprinted last week, researchers at the Institute for Limbic Literalism announced discovery of the long-theorized sulking hormone, endosulkine. “It’s what happens,” explained lead author Dr. Primrose Gland, “when an organism receives insufficient validation but refuses both confrontation and forgiveness.”

The team identified a walnut-sized region of the brain near the anterior insula, now dubbed the Sulk Cortex, whose metabolic activity spikes when subjects are asked to “feel misunderstood but also a bit superior.” Functional imaging revealed synchronized pouting waves across hemispheres, particularly when observing others being comforted first.

Administration of synthetic endosulkine to lab mice produced telltale behavioral changes: hunched posture, slow tail swishes, and refusal to run the maze even after being told it “wasn’t their fault.” In humans, microdoses led participants to stare at unwashed dishes while whispering “whatever.”

“We now suspect that sulking may serve an adaptive purpose,” said Dr. Gland. “It allows the brain to conserve energy previously wasted on rational communication.” The team is already investigating adjacent regions potentially responsible for brooding, moping, and the dignified flounce. Funding applications are pending, though reviewers have complained of long delays and pointed silences.

Pretty good for an LLM. Thank you Adam.

Learning Through Playing

The Cat in the Bottle

World Game Museum: Exhibit

Ed Applewhite to Kirby (pdx4d), 13 May 1998