Avatar 2 (movie review)

Bagdad Theater, 2009

The rumor I heard, on the lengthy delay between movies, is the director, James Cameron, was waiting for technology to catch up.  The first movie, a 3D as well as 2D work, constructed a state of the art, highly intricate world that would have to be topped.

As a visual feast (I saw it in 2D this time), Avatar 2 certainly delivers.  I hadn't gone back to watch the earlier one, so was maybe a little confused on who'd descended from whom, but blue people hybridized with sky people have only four fingers and a thumb, which singles them out for ridicule by kids in the other tribe (the water people, more green than blue).

The main plot element to get is: the main villain (a sky person, white) has arranged to reincarnate, and/or have his memories transferred, to one of "them" (a blue) if his current avatar (piece on the board, US Marine type) gets destroyed, and that apparently happened, as he wakes up in a blue body, but with the same gung-ho personality. 

The bad guy's white son, in the meantime, left behind because they can't freeze babies for cryogenic travel, grew up native, as a blue.  The blues are the Native Americans if you haven't figured it out yet, albeit mythically portrayed through Hollywood movie tropes.  They're also all-American and highly relatable.

The film is a lot about the "strong father" archetype.  The dads keep expressing disappointment in their kids, especially the boys, for their foolish misjudgements, and the boys hate being dissed by the man they most admire and aspire to be like.  They just want to be brave. The greens have a strong father chief too, with offspring.  The whites have their reincarnated guy with his left-behind "monkey boy" son.

The blue family seems very like The Incredibles family (also Disney), especially the teen girl, who feels marginalized as a four finger, and who is developing psychic powers beyond her peers (see Beetlejuice for another take on this character).  She saves the day on numerous occasions.  The younger boy does too, in bonding with the four eyed whale, the outcast one who had tried to fight the sky people earlier.

The plot is complicated but basically goes like this:  the bad guy Marine and his ilk (the sky people) have returned in their spaceships (buckyballs!) with a special grudge against the blue family dad.  

The blue family, to protect their own people, decide to hide out amongst the greens, which is controversial as the blues are forest people with underdeveloped lung power for undersea activities.  The greens agree to take in these Incredibles and teach them their watery ways, but it isn't long before the whites figure out where they are, and a fight ensues.

Cameron did both Aliens and Titanic and really knows how to put together a believable Machine World, an extrapolation of our own.  He also knows how to tilt the decks, as the ship is sinking, making the  passengers slide and/or climb what had been horizontal surfaces.  

Sigourney Weaver plays her cameo role, as the human mother of the blue teen with psychic abilities.  This mother and daughter don't meet directly in person, but on a psychic plane, in a dream state.

On the whole, I was glad to revisit this world and continue processing the machine versus natural technology rift.  The technology of the Native Americans is higher in many ways, if we include nature herself as a kind of Mech 'n Tech (which she is).  Whales are higher tech than any aircraft carrier, and so on.  

The brutish sky people are the Euro whites, the neo-Romans, the US Army more specifically.  A lot of what this subculture is most proud of comes in for criticism, in part simply for being so hackneyed, but also in the tradition of great westerns such as Little Big Man, and Dances with Wolves.  Europe is the dying world.  America, already inhabited, is the new world.

I saw the film by myself at The Bagdad and although the film was long, I didn't take any pee breaks.  Nor did I have my customary IPA or other drink (which probably helped) as I've given up beer (but not wine or gin).

After Princeton

These were my digs in Jersey City, post Princeton, a shared group house, more Platonic than polyamorous, though we certainly loved each other as schoolmates do.  We somewhat continued our lifestyle from 2 Dickinson Street.

My cohort was mostly using JCNJ as a springboard, to promising careers in the Big Apple, and they'd find a new place pretty soon. I found work within walking distance, as a high school teacher, and continued on in this space, renting from Mr. Chang, through other chapters of housemates.

Which house again? Immediately adjacent to the apartment building.  No solar panels.  Two cars.

Above, you'll see that same apartment building with the house behind it (red balloon). You're looking at Loews Theater on Journal Square, courtesy of Google Earth. The alley to the left of Loews, connecting JSQ to Magnolia, our old street, was used for a scene in The Joker. Newark was also used for that movie.

Nearby: The Stanley, used in a movie directed by Woody Allen.

This all happened in the early 1980s.  By 1984, I was living on the opposite side of Manhattan, in Queens, sharing digs with Ray Simon, along with a job at McGraw-Hill courtesy of Nola Hague.  

By then, I was also on the other side of a gig with Project VOTE!, aka Americans for Civic Participation, headed by Sandy Newman.  That was a rooming situation in Washington, DC (thanks Brenda), during the Reagan versus Mondale presidential contest.

Below:  Journal Square, across from Loews, back in the day.

Some Psycho Analysis

I don't see "the USA" as fighting Russia so much as an arrogant self-aggrandizing group we call neocons, which rose to power under Reagan during the Contra War against Nicaragua, and sees itself as being in charge. Many Americans have no beef with the Russians and are in fact of Russian heritage. Washington DC may see itself as representing "the USA" but some of us just see a silly City of Morons (one of my blog posts). Clearly I have my own deviant rhetoric.

I also tend to shy away from historical accounts that make "nations" the principal actors. I don't have any great belief in nations except as ideological / psychological constructs we use to organize our human affairs, akin to a corporation or religious bodies / institutions. 

The English language allows us to construct stories wherein Europe does this and London does that and Nicaragua does something else. I know how to talk this way too, and do (when in Rome...), but under the hood I'm a skeptic. Only humans have agency. These inanimate actors are at best a kind of journalistic shorthand. 

A faction of Ukrainian ideology wants "Ukraine for Ukrainians" and has a very definite idea of what that means. Ethnic Russians fall outside the definition. It's like if we had a faction here saying "real USAers" have to be white and of European heritage, anyone else is tolerated but is not as real. 

Given my upbringing as a liberal, I was taught that "ethnic uniformity" was a primitive older idea of "a nation" that had been superseded by the modern conception, one which accommodates a mix of cultures and religions and doesn't put any one of them in charge. I call that "secularism". 

Secular nations (which accommodate religions) are the ones I'm snobby about and think more highly of. "Ukraine for Ukrainians" sounds old fashioned and immature to my ears. I'm sorry this faction has gained an upper hand in Ukrainian politics and that they have their proud boy types to enforce their racist views.

Translating to Americanese I might say that in my view 2014 was a January 6 moment, except the Trumpies won, the ultra nationalist Bandero Ukraine for Ukrainian proud boy types forcefully took charge. The decent Ukrainians, especially out east, were shocked by this violent uprising and wanted out of this nascent nation-gone-bad. Russia is blue, fighting Maga Reds in Kiev. NATO is fascist to the core, we know from what it did to Libya, where my family worked for six years. 

One of the Angels

On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:37 PM EST, Christopher John “CJ” Fearnley, passed away from a very aggressive, still undiagnosed cancer. CJ was 55 years young. He is survived by his partner Jeannie, two sister’s Michele and Brenda, his mother Marilyn, father Jack and stepmother Edyta, and two nephews Ryan and Nick. CJ was born in NY. CJ was a Comprehensivist and Explorer in Universe.

In my own experience, CJ was a great inspiration and collaborator, whether it was a deep exploration into Bucky Fuller, synergetic geometry, philosophy, Dante, Dostoevsky, Saramago or Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, our last deep read. He had a reading plan that extended years into the future. In recent months, as he refined his ideas about the need for comprehensivity, he encouraged all to be macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive.

CJ was one of the angles.

-- D.W. Jacobs 

Adventures in Quakerism

Everyone has a different experience (of life) of Quakerism, in terms of vantage points assumed and/or achieved. I did a lot of the small meetup stuff, in part because my parents found sitting in silence a great way to get to know strangers, who then become Friends in one's own eyes.  The proverbial beholder's.

The above YouTube continues an earlier one that should just was well be entitled "experiments in" (versus "adventures in") Quakerism, which is not meant to sound cynical, as if Quakers were my guinea pigs.  I'm the guinea pig, and I'm encouraged to explore my religion "experimentally".

What's "my religion"?  Again, that's whatever pass for priors in terms of one's own dogmatism.  Not all beliefs can be under the microscope at every moment.  

One has to believe Google Maps or just trust intuition, unless one knows one's way about.  My friend Steve had a cul-de-sac dead end loop for an address, but the mapping software showed the street went through.  The procession of lost vehicles was endless.

What's critical is your religion have an update or upgrade process, whereby "waste beliefs" get dealt with and excreted. Nostalgically curating "bad beliefs" (as in "no longer useful") results in a level of metaphysical constipation that may become uncomfortable, not only personally, but institutionally, depending on one's role in society.

Quakerism, in focusing on silent worship, interrupted with ministry (aka ranting), does not get hung up on a bunch of "credos" wherein people give themselves the self indulgent benefit of being able to debate the trivial stuff quasi-endlessly.  You know you're dealing with the over-entitled when their predilection is to fiddle as Rome burns.

My hope for Quakerism, in a nutshell, is silent worship, as a central practice, as a catalyst, akin to various forms of meditation, will keep some of the least beneficial viral memeplexes from taking root.  Too many religions prove vulnerable to satanic "mind thetans" or whatever we wanna call 'em.

Elevator Pitch

The elevator pitch for the giant dome is survivalist, which immediately gets funny, because of Yes Men and their Survivaball.  Not that domes are the equivalent of space suits.  

But when it comes to heating and cooling a big volume, the logistics of powering a single space comes with an economy of scale, at least in theory.

Inside, you have your sound stage and audience,  a perimeter of concessions.  In neighboring domes, people pitch their tents.  

In some, you stage a quaint village, Medievalish but with amenities, built more with movie set theater prop technology, than with old fashioned brick and mortar, as you're more in a studio than protecting against the elements. 

The dome or other universal studio building is already taking care of wind, rain, cold and heat.

Benefits of rapidly deployed and emergency assembled and disassembled heating and cooling domes include practicing the world game disciplines we've come to take for granted.  People have to choreograph and to some extent improvise.  The moves become smooth to the extent practiced.  

Movie-making comes closest, as a design science, with military logistics providing a complementary theater.  Both center around simulation and planning with models and maps.

The domes in Cornwall provide a good example of what we all expect from the UK.  If British Aerospace can't deploy emergency heating domes, who can?  Raytheon?  

The engineering sector is shifting our attention from "Big Tech" and/or "Big Pharma" in the sense of social media and biochemistry advertisers respectively, as these are small fry compared to the aerospace sector.  We have conventionally allocated aerospace to civilian versus military but there's little to keep this namespace anchored.

Besides, it's not either / or.  Health care is just as big a consumer of computer science warez as the military and weapons vendors.  The arrival of mass casualties during wartime, begot triage and triage tents and all manner of medical practice I know more about from watching movies than from nursing school.  WW1 saw the beginning of many new kinds of war science.

Speaking of nursing, I do appreciate the cram course YouTubes I've been plowing through.  As we all get older, we encounter more issues in health care, for ourselves and for others.  In my case, I also had a professional track running through heart procedure territory, being a chief data harvester for a research hospital system.  

I was not in patient care, unless we count long term outcomes research, a kind of feedback doctors treasure.  I knew heart anatomy pretty well.  Lately I've focused more on lungs and liver.

Could a giant dome be an emergency hospital, like a MASH unit?  People may spontaneously associate such setups with war zones, but disaster scenes more generally feature both the wounded and the infected.  Lately, the world has been dealing with infection and overdose.  That was until they decided to plug and play this retro Euro-war.  Now war wounds are what's climbing again, along with thermal issues.

So we're back to MIT having done its homework, and private firms having their catalog of emergency shelters at the ready, whether or not they'e actually free span.  The more likely shape of anything American is a box, with sliding doors, more like a giant garage, farmhouse or big box shopping center store, like a Costco or Home Depot.

The floor plan of a "camp in" dome is more suburban street mode, with curvilinear walkways (synthetic pavements) and marked out camping sites, like when car camping.  A few golf cart type vehicles offer fixed route services whereas delivery forklifts carry palettes to and fro, complete with kitchen units and entertainment (education) modules.  

Some properties have tents, but a lot of those are outside.  Property holders stack the various units, which need not be equipped with individual heating or cooling units, given the context, of a larger system.  You may have personal devices, such as fans or baseboard units.  There might be a sauna and/or hot tub module, depending on amps available.

The Cornwall Domes use like a Tefzel pillow, I've never toured the place.  J. Baldwin was my source of pillow dome savvy.  I got to interview the guy on camera even, when staying with Rick and company in San Jose.

What do the power stations look like?  That's another whole side of the business.  No doubt NATO, like FEMA, has a large number of plans for such units, with other regional bodies likewise sharing blueprints.  Given the dire needs of the populace, and funding already allocated, it's time to spring into action, right?  Right!

Soap Operas

I just got off the phone with Maureen of Lake Oswego, having gotten all melodramatic, getting stentorian, while telling her melodrama was not my style, enough with the goodies and baddies already!  My impatience comes in waves, as I think is true with many of us, nor am I saying impatience is always a bad thing, on the contrary.

Speaking of soap operas, Don Wardwell was by today, in the wake of Glenn's stuff reshuffling in an orderly fashion (hi Barbara), and he told me the story of a guy he knew who was hoping to get a friend of his to move in with him.  He'd stormed out of the Pauling House when Don suggested his desire to discuss this move publicly might be inappropriate.  That guy was supposedly me.  You say she'd been a Jehovah's Witness, that I was smitten somehow?

One reason I doubt the story is it so closely matches what actually did happen:  at the height of my Food Not Bombs activity, around Occupy, I shared my house with three women (how I think of them, fairly), all of whom I still know and keep track of.  They're blog characters, you can go back and look.  We were in synergy in some ways, and no, it wasn't a harem situation, gosh darn.  More Charlie's Angels?  We're talking soaps after all.

Anyway, I'll go back and check the timeline.  A don't doubt this new angel actually existed, I just don't remember Glenn talking me out of it, or the Pauling House episode (back to Don's recollection).  Apparently my erratic behavior had no consequences this time, as no such creature moved in.

Here's what I think:  especially older people, but really young people too, are prone to develop "like I was there" memories, vivid, sharp, of contrary-to-fact scenarios.  Day care centers get shut down over this kind of stuff, and probably nursing homes too for that matter (I'm in neither business).

Sorry everyone, if I'm the one turning into a leaky bucket, letting important memories fade away.  I pride myself on having a good memory, as Suzanne might remember.  These blogs (Quaker journals) help a lot.

Asylum City Project

Sanitation has to be at the heart of any human settlement design. 

This includes dealing with waste of all types, including sewage.

Bucky Fuller was one of the pioneers in this arena.

Prototyping is key.

Looney Tunes

I'll say up front I'm skeptical of those who assert the "US + UK + EU = The West" in some way.  Like I know that's a common trope among storytellers, I just don't consider it a stable memeplex.  "The West" is the western hemisphere (North, South, Central America) and "The East = Eurasia + Africa + Australia" to just focus on the continents.  Greenland could go either way.  In sum, shop talks that map to the realities of geography likely have more staying power.

Also, geopolitically speaking, I think too many Anglo-Saxons (to use the Kremlin term) fail to appreciate how different the Americans are, from the whites who stayed home in the various homelands, if we might call them that.  

Many Anglo-Euros right here in the Americas may not appreciate that either.  I'm talking about the influence of original peoples, their thought patterns.  As The Dawn of Everything makes clear: the anthropology and psychoanalysis was a two way street, and still is.  It was never a question of which were the savages:  those would be the Brits.

Fast forward and we get those Halloween images of a horror film Truss, still wiping blood off her lips after biting hard into Germany's jugular.  Now the latter has fallen to the floor, shivering, with few prospects.  "It is done my lord" she whispers on her phone, to a vamped up Darth Vader type.  Very cinematic you have to admit.

All joking aside, I think "US + UK = Looney Tunes" is what we're seeing today, with John Bolton as Yosemite Sam, minus the charm.  I would not think it possible for Anglo-Saxons to be genetically berserk, so it boils down to something in the water maybe?  The District = Flint = Jackson, Mississippi?

Yes, I've recently been to a comedy club (actually, a main line theater, that happens to feature comedy from time to time).

So given I'm so remote with my vocabulary to begin with, even questioning the Louisiana Purchase as a truly done deal, you can see where I'm not making the rounds as an interviewee.  No, I'm just a deeply buried Quaker blogger with some political views.

From another point of view, I see the US Congress and the old USSR (the ghost of) on the same side, collaborating to extinguish a kind of ethnic nationalism that doesn't rise to the level of nation state.  These political bodies cannot effectively turn away from their own destinies, as two sides of the same coin.  

You could say I'm being cynical but I think that would require positing a high level of conscious awareness on the part of the perpetrators.  I'm suggesting we're running on automatic, as bots.  That's not a new phenomenon.

Camera Story

I've been hobbling around a bit, and actually took a cane, no, almost did, to that comedy show at The Aladdin.  The reason is I swerved out into the street, as a pedestrian, out of social distancing habits, but forgot, when re-merging with the sidewalk, that I'd be walking over rough terrain, some decorative boulders.  I went sprawling, but was proud how I landed and didn't bang my head or anything.

The upshot of all that, was I immediately forgot about it and continued onward to the supermarket, getting some provisions for a friend.  Only later, walking home, did I pat myself, my hoodie pouch especially, and realize I was cameraless.  Walking out the door, I was sure I'd had it.

To make a long story short, I woke up at 5 AM the next morning with lots of leg pains, which jogged my memory, and I thought "Ah, I bet the camera fell out when I took a spill".  It had been getting dark, which is partly why I'd missed seeing the boulders I now believe.  I hobbled out into the darkness of the early morning, iPhone flashlight in hand, to look for it.  I'd been to the supermarket Lost & Found the night before.

Given how much I loved that Lumix L-7, a point and shooter that starts to crossover into higher end, very fast, very trusty, I went on the internet and used all my skills to find a good deal on a used one.  I could afford it.  I took the plunge.  We're talking $250.  That includes a spiffy case, another charger plus battery, and a protective pouch, along with the second camera.

Yes, second camera, because in the meantime, I found the first, not smashed on the sidewalk, but safely next to my hat and McMenamins face mask (which I consider stylish, pandemic or no pandemic), at my friends house.  Starting with the fall itself, and on through some hours after, I was at a low point in my awareness of my devices and peripherals (accessories).  I get this way sometimes.

I'm glad to have two copies of the same camera and do not regret the purchase.  The main consequence of all this action is I'm still working on renormalizing around that knee.  The day after, I'd gone on a test walk with Dr. D., to make sure I could still do a few miles.  That was probably not the best therapy however, and I've been paying the price ever since.  Derek has confirmed my propensity to keep stretching and claiming my range of motion.

Speaking of claiming, I claimed by first Urbit planet today.  You might have thought, judging from writings, that I'd already invested in such a ship, but in fact, I've been practicing on comets and more recently a moon.  Stepping up to a real planet is somewhat a rite of passage in this universe (semantic space) and I was sure to mark it accordingly, both privately and publicly.

Urbit Food Pod

:: asylum food pod ::

One could do the prototype simulation without any hardware, so to speak, meaning no real food need be cooked for real animals.  Maybe there's a Planet "bank" (a conversion point, intra-currency), and each "cart" or "truck" is but a Moon of that Planet.  Good design?  I'm still learning.

Getting that shopping cart app up and running in Urbit may be a solved problem.  What's more interesting is not the app per se, but the task of educating the public, and what more could a Food Pod be?

Those following my blogs know I tried to interest the Methodists in converting an abandoned church into a community center focused on experimenting with exactly such simulations, with a microwave tower aligned to OMSI's.  That was Project Ghost Church.  Like a lot of my projects, it's more science fiction than real science at this point, more like Dark Matter or one of those.

You're probably thinking I must be backed by a bunch of wild and crazy libertarians, the Web 3.0 crypto warriors and so on.  I'm aware too that Swiss cantons were hoping to cash in on the crypto craze by leveraging their pre-existing savvy around financial services.  

I have to confess I'm not really up to date on what either of these groups is up to.  All I know is I'm still looking forward to visiting one of these newfangled Food Pods some day.  It wouldn't have to be implemented in Urbit, although that seems like a natural fit.

When testing, players need some "funny money" like in Monopoly, a currency accepted within the game. Spend funny money to get your virtual burritos.  Playing the "board game" (pun intended) is how one develops expertise in advance of actually implementing such a facility.  "Simulate with software and players before you build" as a way to work out some kinks.

What is Work?

One of the memeplexes I revisit, and seek to untangle, at least in my own mind, is where a Protestant idea of "work" meets a Physics one.  We have the work ethic, versus the idea of wasted energy, i.e. leakage away from the real work getting done.  But to what extent is "work" in the eye of the beholder observer?

For example they say a steam engine leaks energy away in the form of heat and noise, but what if your main purpose, as a steam engine, is to entertain with your noises, while heating the room?  As a side benefit, you also power the whole museum.  That's not your paid work though; you do that for free.  Yes, I'm addressing a steam engine here.

Maybe there's nothing deep here.  I'm drowning in the shallows, where many drownings happen.  Yet it seems the idea of a work vector, along which no waste is happening, is really in a multi-dimensional space higher than the eye can see.  

Invisible means complicated.  Side effects may be main effects.  

This was the charm of the honey-maker moneymaker bumblebee concept:  that cross-pollination is precessional to what the "bees" (moneymakers) are about.  The flowers use them to exchange genetic information (get the real work done).

I find it hard to get away from the idea of a taskmaster, the Protestant, very puritanical about what "work" means and quick to call anything "entropy" that is not strictly to his liking.  

The fragility of his mindset in the face of even minimal chaos, as he sees it, is not a mental condition we would welcome or wish to nurture in ourselves.  We want our physics meaning of "work" to stay pure of such an influence, unaffected by the religious mores of some random republican farmer, newly emigrated to North America from some homestead in Eurasia.

I take comfort in how many humans are in retirement or "at the ready" but not really doing anything in terms of directly constructing infrastructure.  We already have a huge carrying capacity with respect to people needing food, shelter and healthcare, and from whom little is asked.  They've performed their service already.  We either call them "veterans" or "retired".

We only need so much infrastructure.  Cities for the sake of cities are not really a social good.  From a movie-making point of view, we need a balance between plot-advancing box office action, and locating sites to build sets.  Sometimes the movie is about the making of the movie, which is what we think of as real life.

Choreography, script writing, is the name of the game i.e. what will the lifestyles be like?  

Saying they contain "a lot of leisure time" might be a moral judgment, like when the honest work of a homemaker, caring for kids, is somehow really "leisure time" because "unpaid".  

The guy with the job, the breadwinner, was the only "worker" in the family, whereas caring for other animals only counted as work where animal husbandry was concerned, as when raising sheep or other livestock.  

Then both parents "got jobs" in the nuclear family model, leaving the suburban home mostly empty during the day (the kids were in daycare), with the urban office space mostly empty at night, and jammed freeways in between.

And then all these ideas about "net worth" seem rather morally perverse, as if dropped from the sky by some giant egg laying monster.  The moneymaker game seems to casually assume ownership of the public's good words, as if entitled.

In the physics world, just breathing is work.  It's work to pump air in and out of the lungs.  It takes joules, and a minimum amount of muscle power.  

Given breathing is necessary to life, no puritan is in a position to argue that no useful work is being done.  Ergo, why not pay this person on a per breath basis?  

That proposition takes the breath away, in some circles, because isn't the whole point to make life support hard to afford?  That's an old school belief with its hands on the steering wheel to this day, according to lore.

The gymnast does a "workout" which we call "work" whether or not she or he is paid as a professional gymnast.  Many professions put a premium on looking one's best.  

So that's spending energy to better one's physique.  

Sure, much energy is lost to heat and sometimes noises, but a gym wouldn't be a gym without all those vibes.  In that sense, nothing is wasted, as entropy is factored in as a necessary feature, not as a cosmic defect or original sin.

The Asylum Project

What I tell people regarding Bitcoin is that I'll never be interested in having any myself unless it's easy to charge my wallet, from my bank account say, and spend the bits on burritos and other sundries, at a Food Pod that makes that easy.

A Food Pod is like a Food Court, made more international by the World's Fair franchise.  However the Pod consists of carts or trucks, which may be trundled away, leaving spots for new mobile restaurant kitchens.  

One of Portland's more famous Pods is Hawthorne Asylum Food Truck Pod, at the intersection of SE Madison and SE 11th.  Hawthorne Asylum is named in honor of the mental asylum, run by one Dr. Hawthorne, for whom the nearby Hawthorne Boulevard is named. 

However, the trucks are not equipped to accept Bitcoin easily.  I think the business model should be an experimental Pod that only takes crypto, but with an easy way to pay for some with your phone, much as Club Med used to exclusively take plastic beads for its optional purchases internally.

I know that refugee camps have been experimenting with crypto currencies, which brings me to the refugee camps the State of Oregon is considering.  I'm not saying my Vortex 1 + Country Fair + Rainbow Gathering + Occupy template has been accepted.  Calling it "a template" is a bit of a stretch, but we do know the State of Oregon has experience with at least a one of those models.

The reason life in a refugee camp might be interesting is it's a place to test prototypes, as well as therapies. Journalists are always welcome, and many will take cheap shots, as the faculty learns the ropes.  

Much needs to be invented.  Experimental community building (aka "nation building" on a smaller scale) is a job for social engineers with a secular background, not just for religious wonks.

Car Talk

There she was, waiting for me.

One develops attachments to things, not just people.  Sometimes the things are stand-ins for people.  Other times, they're just favorite objects, and/or, in the case of a car, something needed to get around, to enjoy a specific lifestyle. 

K&M Auto Service knew exactly what to do, as I did (see previous blog post).  But I didn't have the right size, shape or skills.  Only $118, with a full diagnostic.  They say I should replace the brake fluid.

Small Time Stuff

I dunno if it was Synchronicity or what, but that guy in the junkyard, on YouTube, had my exact car, same color and everything.  A Nissan Maxima.  The brake pedal, when relaxed, does not hold the circuit closed, such that charge leaks out of the battery through the brake lights.  They won't go off, even with no key in the ignition, in park.

So that YouTube showed precisely the problem and the fix.  However a big guy like me isn't cut out to be up under the steering wheel.  Dave got some paper in there, to save charge, but that won't last.  I emailed my mechanic this morning, but I have no idea how busy they are.  I'll have them look for other problems.  Yes she's a junker but I don't believe in throwing away serviceable equipment unnecessarily.

I bought a new phone-based HOP card recently, so I can hop a bus any time.  I'm likely going to refrain from driving for awhile, until I get a clear lane so to speak.

Wanderers: Fall Equinox Gathering

We were small in number, yet with interesting new people, invited guests. I took fewer pictures than I usually do, if present, at one of these Equinox or Solstice get-togethers. 

We often meet at the boyhood home of Linus Pauling, where we used to hold weekly meetings, however sometimes we meet elsewhere, in retreat mode. 

We had an iPad going for those wishing to drop in by house WiFi.

Making Tensegrity

 
[cutting and pasting a Facebook comment]

FB friend:

There seems to have been a dearth of beautiful and innovative tensegrity artwork for decades. Between his new biotensegrity models and these lighting models, Gerald has single handedly advanced tensegrity artwork into the 21st Century. [Facebook link] are photos from the first in-person rehearsal for a dance presentation at the Fascia Research Congress. Gerald shipped all those models in a single piece of checked luggage. I call his design architecture "turnbuckle tensegrity" -- except that all the threads in those struts are right-handed. Turnbuckles would be more elegant, but nobody makes cheap hardware with turnbuckle threading.

Kirby, do you know any good candidates for pitching a feature for Make: Magazine on how to design a geometry, acquire the parts, and assemble "tough tensegrity" models? This would really light the fuse to a massive number of load-bearing tensegrity models in the wild.

Me:

When I joined O'Reilly, Make: Magazine was still sharing the same Sebastopol building (we got the tour) but was morphing into its own standalone business. 

The principal there at Maker had purchased a startup named Useractive of Champaign-Urbana (run by Trish and Scott Gray (Making Math), University of Illinois and Wolfram connections) when still a part of O'Reilly management. However by the time the merger happened, and Useractive became O'Reilly School of Technology (which is where I came in, as faculty), he'd opted out of the chain of command. 

I therefore interfaced through OST to O'Reilly bosses without ever getting to make solid connections with Make: Magazine and its team. I've gone to Maker Fairs here in Portland, hosted by OMSI (industrial science museum) and friends, and finally got to 3D print an S module and a phi-down version, at a public library, with help from Sam Lanahan's chief CAD designer.

Regarding Tensegrity, I don't know if Maker Mag does write-ups or profiles of individual makers, but if it does, an article on Gerald De Jong, which includes his software contributions (critical to EIG), would most definitely be in order. Let Gerald share his process with readers. 

Postscript: O'Reilly wanted to turn OST from a dot com into a dot edu, but that meant getting certified as an academic institution, which process is replete with bureaucracy ($$). The uphill battle to become a legit university in California proved a budget breaker and we dissolved, after a rather fun / wild ride. I met and stay in touch with some astounding people.

Social Darwinism

My impression is the meme of "races" (how many again?) is a top drawer tool for recruiters working to swell the ranks of the Social Darwinists.  

One may be a fan of Darwin and his theorizing, without switching into "genetic Calvinism" i.e. some doctrine of preordained "fitness" based in having the better DNA.  That ideology worked well for Royals too, as it perpetuated the myth of "blood" i.e. some coveted genetic plasma, divinely conferring special rights and special powers.

The race theory depends heavily on their being a "mixed race" category.  People must be allowed to fall through the cracks so to speak.  Without cracks, the categorization system would be too brittle and break down.  One's racial makeup is allowed to be "fuzzy" and the prospect of entirely new races emerging is not actively contemplated in most racist science fiction ("super race" mythologies usually revolve around refining some prior race, even while pushing for its "world dominance" or "supremacy").

Were a race detectable in pure form, even in a mixed race person (thinking of superstitions around blood again, and powers-of-2 subdivision e.g. 1/32nd race X), we would have found it by now, but there's no reduction of "race" to canonical strings of chromosomal encoding.  

Rather, we find ourselves defining "ancestry" which relates to "geography" based on the presence (or absence) of "genetic markers".  Tracing a family tree means following world lines against the backdrop of Planet Earth, with its partially overlapping scenarios.

Animal husbandry has the same degree of precision (imprecision).  In animal husbandry, one speaks of breeds, which one may consciously design and refine over the generations.  

A Darwinist is able to see "breeds" within in the human family in that sense, a kind of family resemblance, but maybe through several filters, as there's no universal agreement on what any of these breeds really are.  We just know we keep re-encountering the same types.  Supermodels?  Midgets?  Midget supermodels?

Men and women create this first idea of a divide, orthogonal to Darwinistic evolution through speciation.  

Homo Sapien is the current species, a Cro-Magnon with some Neanderthal mixed in.

An alternative view is of a very expressive human genome, able to manifest features in various ways, without distilling into an essential palette of racial archetypes.  We don't need to discern "races" as the compass points for categorization, even if we're tracking ancestry.  The ideology of racial purity and of a genetic competition amongst genetic "teams" (the races) is a layer of dogma that doesn't logically follow from biology.  It's more an extended metaphor, with memes replacing genes in ways that pander to a sense of tribe and belonging.  We like to rally around genetic features sometimes, e.g. a convention for gingers.

Burger Week

I haven't been that big of a meat eater, by western standards.  Yes I eat meat, including bison or buffalo on occasion, but I'm not like a steak every month or week guy.  My diet isn't paleo.

I've spent probably thousands on McMenamins Dungeon Burgers over the years.  That's the one with mushrooms and Swiss cheese.  I wonder if their database would show that.  

select count(item), sum(item_price) where customer = [me] and item = "dungeon_burger";

Those would be aggregating columns. That's in pseudo-sql against a database I've never met in person. A mind game.

Originally I'd titled this post "Summer BBQ" because I had this metaphor in mind:  I've stoked the briquettes with all the newspaper needed, and lit the pyre (if I might call it that); lets see if the briquettes catch, which means they'll generate their own heat, long after all the newspaper is consumed.

That metaphor in turn was about my approach to andragogy.  If I keep fawning over the flames, fanning them, I won't know if they would go out without me.  Given I could use such feedback, I'll aim to stand back.  I've worked on the ignition phase plenty, it seems to me.

I'm still being rather abstract, but that's OK.  Lets get back to burgers.  Portland has a whole week celebrating the genre and recommends retailers offer an $8 burger week special, their choice of what to try.  At least that's my understanding of the challenge.  I don't know what syndicate is behind it exactly, only that this is not a new institution.

Almost in anticipation of said burger week, Glenn and I sampled the offerings at the Yes Please Smashburger shack, a certified food cart right across from the Linus Pauling House.  I took quite a few pictures and have left them interspersed.

New Bucky Bio

I just got the book yesterday and have been doing my nonlinear Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics thing, i.e. I've been browsing it.

I've always contended studying Bucky's bio is worthwhile because he was so, shall we say, gregarious.  He got around.  He was a mover-shaker type.

He also lived a long time and was a compulsive self chronicler, by design.  Guinea Pig B wanted to be studied.  Alec is paying him that courtesy.

Alec's bio also proves my point.  Every page is connecting us to a recognizable vista of big name architects, poets, professors and so on.  Military types...

Great story.  It's like a Michelin guide to the 1900s, of course to specific circles, an intelligentsia that still persists in some form.

Given how thick it is, I understand Alec's not trying to be another Amy Edmondson and recap Synergetics. 

He gives readers enough to whet their appetites, and then it's all online.

I didn't participate in creating this book.  I see Trevor mentioned, and CJ. 

That means I still have my stories to tell, as Kenneth Snelson's first webmaster (BFI's too) and so on.

[first posted to TrimTab BookClub GoogleGroup]

Uncle Bill Stranded

I'm pretty sure Uncle Bill, age 97, is still stuck at Union Station.  I got a surprise call from the guy at 4:15, right before I was to start teaching class.  He was in Portland, here for the day, to see a different relative.  The only thing was:  he hadn't been able to reach said relative on the phone, yet he came anyway.  

I couldn't help.  My Python for High School was to start in 15 minutes.

The good news was that even if he was missing his 4 PM train, he'd get the next one back to Seattle around 6 PM.  He'd make it to Union Station by taxi.  Good plan.  I encouraged him to high tail it down there.

As it turned out, however, the Steel Bridge was "having issues" (due to the heat we think) and Amtrak trains were stranded on both sides, going nowhere.  

Or was the one in Tacoma having other issues?  Bill's ticket was (is) for the Coast Starlight, coming north.  I'm watching for updates on Twitter.

As for me, I need to get up early (alarm set for 5 AM) and start a next teaching gig.  I have a pretty full calendar this coming month.

We're in the middle of a heat wave in Portland.  Fortunately, I'll have completed my first session before it really heats up.  The course is mapped to the New York clock.  The headquarters are in Turkey.

High School in the Silicon Forest

Campus Recruiting and Logistics

I've got my fishing pole in this lake, but don't expect many nibbles.  I consider it free advertising for my company, which has a footprint in education.  What about American Transcendentalism as a literary tradition?  How about as a philosophical one?  

Transcendentalism is not usually acknowledged within any taxonomy of philosophies, although some of its leading lights get a tacit nod, in the case of Emerson, from Nietzsche.  As a literary phase, it fits between Romantic / Dark Romantic (Gothic) and Realistic, on the way to Modernist and Postmodernist.

I'm looking to do business with education institutions.  

Perhaps we'll devise a standard practice, based around bizmo fleets, where they travel from campus to campus, because they're outfitted to perform scholarly research. 

Some do bug counts (insect populations), some focus on testing soils.  The universities and other bases need both the data, and the science trained personnel.  

An active bizmo fleet keeps ideas in circulation, literally.

For those just joining us, I've been planning around truck stops and the lifestyle of truckers, both long and short distance haulers.  I'm not an expert.  I'm not a trucker.  

I'm interested in these truck stop hubs for various reasons.  I have prototype dwelling machine villages in mind, designed for transport by shipping container, meaning trucks along the way, trains also.  

Some truckers are in like PhD programs where they stay awhile in these remote lands, allowing the payloads to go on without them.  Learn the history, some of the language, become more familiar with the local ways.  

Live in some yurt-like pod on a utility pole, surrounded by yak herds or peacocks.  Then move on.  In this global university model, students and faculty are not necessarily shy about operating heavy equipment, including long haul rigs.

A bizmo (business mobile) is a smaller more agile vehicle that scouts the routes and tends to business, without hauling a big load.  

One might say these bizmos gather and relay intelligence about an area, but that sounds like a suspect activity, unwelcome spying perhaps.  However your average bizmo is most welcome in most cases, wherever it goes, because there's nothing especially clandestine about how or why it operates.  

There's nothing necessarily wrong with monitoring local conditions, especially by locals themselves, perhaps as mentors with apprentices, themselves on tour.  Keep the databases up to date.  Think of Google Street View or one of those.

Think of tour guides too.  We want and expect them to guide us through, especially in tricky situations. 

The work comes under the heading of citizen diplomacy in many ways.

Tracking a Vlogger

I thought she totally caught the train experience, in her low key way. Nervousness about missing one's stop.  Trains delayed.  Trains being right on time.  Scenes out the window.  The car interior.  Reflections.

The trope of getting ready to leave one's country, and saying good bye to cities in past videos, contains instant and seemingly infinite nostalgia for what now is, not the future.  I find her fascination with the mundane matches my own.

Freedom is to exult in nothing special, which is ever special, not to mention ubiquitous.

I've followed this channel for awhile now, and have said in the comments I appreciate the editing.  The story is bravely autobiographical, and offered with an open heart.  I know she has a ton of fans.  Count me one of them.

Regarding World Game

 [ from TrimTab Book Club listserv ]

We've had Model United Nations for some time now.  High schoolers join as an extracurricular activity.  When I joined my daughter's debate team going to Indianapolis for national championships, I learned about another activity high schoolers could sign up for:  Model NATO.

Would we consider these to be implementations of World Game?  Not in any trademarked sense. 

Will World Game, as developed so far, be able to give rise to multiple implementations, all different from one another?  We shall see.  In the open source world, it's quite common to fork a project and develop along a new branch.

As I mentioned earlier, I know at least one guy (related to Bucky himself he claimed -- different last name though) who was very put off by the fact that an earlier World Game version had it scripted right into the program, that no matter what participants did, those poker chips would come out andspill across that map, representing nuclear holocaust. 

That was supposed to be a sobering moment.  But it could just as well be interpreted as a teaching about the ultimate fruitlessness of any efforts to avoid Armageddon.

I'd at least be up for debating that point.  I don't take it for granted that this earlier design was a work of inspired genius. Bucky didn't go the poker chip route did he?  That came after he died on the timeline, am I right?

True, I'd like to see versions of World Game that aren't so ultimately predictable.  Given I think this is all world game right now, one can see why.

Magical Incantations

The rulers scour the landscape for whom the true believers are following.  Having zealots and fanatics on one's side is a double edge sword, but there's always postponing the day of reckoning.  No one is really ready for Judgement Day, when it comes.  

Wittgenstein was more of the "every day is judgement day" school, but you couldn't say that quiet part out loud a lot. I've followed Wittgenstein since first exposure in the 1970s (he died before I was born).

How do we ceremoniously and with gravitas create more autonomy for ourselves, whoever we are?  Many ethnicities would enjoy their own nation, or so they tell themselves, or at least one of the tribal kind from which the concept first emerged ( in conjunction with "race" in Social Darwinism).  

The "tolerant" nation of many tribes working together is more an adaptation of the Iroquois Federation and Roman Empire memes, with the UK on the template of the latter.  Arab empires also allowed for local folk religions and even stole (borrowed, appropriated) the best ideas (likewise the Catholics are known for this).  

Many who long for a nation are hearkening back to something tribal, not a federation of any kind.  A federation comes across as more abstract, more aloof, and more secular, in the sense of not being programmed exclusively by the locals, of any region where it occurs.  That's often what the independently minded are seeking to escape, just such an aloof and removed government.

When it comes to joining a Federation, topological questions of contiguity enter the picture.  The United States counts a smattering of non-state members, such as Puerto Rico and the military base at Guantanamo. What if another far flung island wants to join the federation, not as a state, but as another protectorate?  What if it's not an island?  What if the District agrees the new territory would be a welcome addition?  What is the process and are those wheels too rusted, in this day and age, to ever turn?

The anthropological question before us is one of invocation and declaration.  On the one hand, you have schools telling us the nation state heuristic is inevitably fading, given the only logical dimensions to this puzzle are planetary, whereas on the other you have elaborate mechanisms, steeped in ritual and ceremony, designed to do social engineering, as an official responsibility.  What is reinventing itself, and what is breaking down more permanently?  This is always the question at the institutional level.

We may be clearer on what it takes to "break away" versus "join" e.g. the two republics at the center of the current military fiasco.  When a central government is shelling your civilians on a daily basis, one may seek a diplomatic solution, or declare independence, find allies, and choose war.  Given the close proximity of an existing federation (the Russian one), the phenomenon of breakaway republics is no surprise.  The other side did not want diplomacy either, trusting in its military advantage.

We also talk about centrifugal forces within the North American federation, of Lower48 + the Canadian provinces + Belize & Baja, Mexico.  The sanctions imposed by the District, on its western states especially, has criminalized most of the population (think Prohibition) and forced the entire cannabis economy to short circuit the banking system.  

Various accommodations with the tax code were negotiated, as what rusty old machine is going to turn down more fuel (revenue)?  Obviously no one in "power" has the power to stop this particular runaway train.  People notice these things.

An effect of the Drug Wars has been to motivate a psychological breakup that has no real mirror in the paper trail.  The melodrama of everyday television hints at these chthonic tensions, but no narrative snowballs, gathering inertia.  

This has the effect of melting whatever snowballs are already out there, as the message internally is "how can those snowballs matter if mine never does?" i.e. "what makes their narrative so privileged?", typically a precursor question to some upsetting of the apple cart.  Viewers tune out whole networks, when the content producers never focus on the relevant stories.  They vote with their remotes.

If you check an atlas, you'll likely find that Oregon ranks highly in both Russian and Ukrainian speakers. Migration patterns are such that we have very old school in a mix with newcomers.  The same goes for ties to the tribal nations of Japan, Korea, China and so on.  

I think of Portland as a Pacific Rim city, a gateway to Eurasia (or just call it all Asia) if you're coming from the American side, where the American side includes all the Americans (from Canada, Mexico, Panama, Brazil and so on).  

What this means is a lot of de facto citizen diplomacy (aka university collaborations, businesses), not only between Oregon and the Americas, but between Oregon and Asia.  Like any world municipality, Portland is a switchboard, a router, even a CPU / GPU on Motherboard Earth.

Finally, for this blog post, let me remind readers of the focus on Virtual Nations in the 21st Century. These are nation-like self governing semi-autonomous, but without the contiguous borders that would make them United Nations style nation-states.  Some may have a Vatican-sized campus here and there, and may fly a flag, but they're not agitating to issue passports in most cases, or do so as a sales gimmick, without monkeying in international law.  

Will future VNs do more with ID?  Naturally.  Behind VNs are webs of blogs, logs, vlogs and databases, and maybe even a currency or two.

If you think this idea of VNs is unrealistic, consider Shell and Nestles, consider Disney (when it comes to Vatican-sized campuses or bigger).  Consider that VNs go way back by other nomenclature.  

Consider universities going forward, and the federations they may form.  

Supranational circuitry is nothing new. Global shipping companies have a similar sheen, in that their logos show up everywhere, yet few imagine them on a world map.

Given these many circuitry overlays, facilitated by more of a shared file system, the question becomes whether bureaucracy itself needs a new space in which to operate.  I'm not talking about global government (science fiction) so much as global infrastructure (a fact).  

What's chipping away at the power of the old guard, while empowering an avant-garde, is the unwillingness of the old ideologies to think globally, a limitation designed in on purpose.  The District refuses to consider the security concerns of rival federations as a foreign policy guide.  That's what "self interested" is supposed to mean (to them).  

But at what point does the bureaucracy itself discover it couldn't force itself to think that way even if it wanted to?  The bureaucracy has gone global even if the chief functionaries stick to obsolete rhetoric.

When I say "systems have a half life" I'm not saying "because other systems will destroy them". On the contrary, the model of radioactive decay is a "from within" phenomenon.  Alpha and beta particles leak away.  Atoms do in fact change species.  They "fall downhill" in a way that major stars counteract.  

Star cookers will fuse together atoms of very high atomic number.  But at a certain size, they're not really meant for this universe, and they start to break down.  

Ideological systems display similar limitations, in coming up against laws of physics, more than anything man made.

I make this distinction because it helps counter the "commie under every bed" boogeyman paranoias that seek to explain systemic degradation of one kind or another.  Circling a natural process prompts the realization that nature herself plays a role, and yes, humanity is a part of nature.  

The circuity in question encompasses the ecosystem, not just the human "value added".  

The erosion of nation-state aesthetics need not trace to a tiny cadre of committed activists or anything like that.  No one has to lift a finger with that specific intent.  On the contrary, the predominant intent has been to foster and bolster nationhood, in the face of mounting odds.

A Parable

Some in DC must be tone deaf to how "fight to the last Ukrainian" is bringing the Bear and the Christian closer together.  

I'm talking about the NATO-Roman coliseum, with the assembled voyeur masses there for the show.  

The Emperor says:  "we must drag this out for as long as possible, to weaken the Bear, thereby to make its fight with the Lion more exciting (check your programs)".  

However the Bear has more empathy for the Christian than the Emperor does (they go back a long way), and it comes to seem, given how it's no longer a cliffhanger fight, that they have much in common in how both are being exploited. 

If the Bear and the Christian resolve their differences and focus on rebuilding, maybe they can finally end the rule of Rome.

Pronoun Puzzle

Philosophizing

Have empathy for the role of the nonfiction screen writer, where the stage in question supposedly mirrors reality in high degree, meaning the author is a somewhat of an authority, or has reliable sources at least, where reality is concerned. 

But then how does one allow for reality checks?   How does one pass along error corrections?

In cultures unable to admit error, the possibility of self correction is less probable, by definition. The narratives don't change, and one starts to hope reality is invented anyway, in high degree.  

Just keep making up new facts.  Isn't that how the other guy maintains traction?

Too much cynicism with regard to there being a real reality out there, may lead to many pathologies, mostly having to do with the malleability of said reality.  The screen writer learns that made up fiction works in place of reality to patch up obvious plot holes.  But maybe only imperfectly.

Once you've added to the pool of fiction, and seen it stick as true,  you may assess yourself to be powerful, and you are.  You're right to wonder how much history telling is bogus storytelling.

Lets remember that those with high regard for fiction may see it as encoding important principles with no hope of any literal expression.  Fiction is their only guise, and yet these principles guide reality as well. If we think fiction is the best we can do, then why not say so outright?

I've been inclined in this direction: "there's science fiction, and there's nothing" is a bumper sticker I've at least imagined.  "All realities are virtual" was another.  However I admit a ratio of science to fiction, and in saying they're all virtual I'm closer to talking about the limitations of language in the face of reality, than to reality being faceless.

Most of us are not at the point of surrendering the reality principle to that degree.  Stories tracing back to testing, experiment, lived experience, have an edge over those that were purely made up, precisely for that grist in the mill.  Fiction has a sub-genre called realism.  Back to square one.  What makes it realistic?

As time goes on, holes in a story start leaking juice and the narrative starts needing an infusion.  Maintaining the believability of a narrative is sometimes a tricky business, as the verb "to believe" applies to what in retrospect were dreams or fantasies.  Our own beliefs may likewise be qualified, by some degree of confidence.

One way a narrative gets tested is when its true believers decide to take it on a road test.  A good question is, will it hold up under stress?  Again, the mere fact of stresses and strains is not necessarily experienced as checks and balances for "reality" per se.  One suspects a little man behind the curtain maybe, if not a cabal.  But don't we agree there's a physics to this physics engine?

Yes, this is some kind of philosophizing.  One may not share these concerns, but most will.

The reality-minded will feel reassured that reality doesn't need to be believed in to work its course, meaning what we learn to be the facts of nature are not amenable to alteration by mere belief.  That's all tantamount to a belief in a reality "out there" which some have their doubts about.

I think most nonfiction screenwriters (historians?) will admit to encountering reality checks from time to time.  That goes with the territory.  Those who can't stand to be wrong would find the continual flow of corrections intolerable.  These reality checks may come across as chastisements from other people, with an independent sense of right and wrong.

Reality has a different way of letting us know we're misguided, than by speaking to us directly.  Humans may voice their concerns or offer deterring views, or they may simply frustrate.  Reality is closer to creating frustration i.e. plans simply do not work out.  Reality, like a god, may be more forgiving because of its overwhelming power.  Error is permitted and the consequences are not punishments.  Moralizing comes later, when humans make up their semi-fictitious narratives.

The Easy Way

Once gun violence is normalized as the Way of the West, by way of Spaghetti Westerns (cowboy movies made in Italy), then plot resolutions become easier.  You get to blow away certain characters, and you don't have a strong afterlife consensus, so the screen writer gets away with some not-haunted future.  Yet one lives every day with one's memories.

Chances are, I'm going to find a gun-centric plot line rather too boring to encourage, in the sense of produce. My audiences are hungering for scalable models (both up and down) wherein people get along without resorting to the Easy Way.  That's just too predictable, as in mechanical.  

We've already seen that scene in every detail. Murder mysteries help get the ball rolling.  Our deductive Sherlock Holmes powers get more of a workout that way.

This is not a screed about banning guns from movies.  I'd be more into reintroducing ballistics in other guises, as I've been enjoying on Youtube, with the pressure gun shot at giant jars of mayo. 

There's serious calibration going on, but then we have the opportunity for some throwaway special effects, especially with those slow motion cameras. 

We start to learn a lot about physics, as in First Person Physics.  The roller coaster teaches about kinetics, Newtonian mechanics. Imagine a world in which most physics majors were also skydivers.

Likewise the science of trajectories and explosive events is nowhere more developed than in the civilian fireworks industry. The colorful and highly designed bouquets, timed to music in many cases, teach as much about the generalized principles as some of that cruise missile stuff.  

Decouple the physics from weaponization and you're in a whole new world.  Physics is cool again, vs enslaved by the hotheads.

In geek circles, "learning X the hard way" became a thing, one could say in backlash to the "for dummies" books, although I'd argue it's plenty hard either way, i.e. "for dummies" took on the tough topics. However some object to the whole style of dumbing it down to make it accessible.  The point is to keep it as inaccessible as necessary to not be considered diluted or watered down at all.

"The hard way" was code for "undiluted" like when a tourist asks for a meal just like the locals are eating. They're doing anthropology more than trying to cater to or pamper their own personal tastes.  If personal taste had been a priority, then why not restaurant hop and write Yelp reviews?  Those with a similar palette will learn to follow you around.  No, the intrepid tourist is honest and sincere in wanting a clone, a carbon copy, of what the natives are getting.  "Don't dumb it down for me just because I'm an outsider" the pro might convey.

On the other hand, lets leave the door open for more defensive methodologies, as sometimes "going native" is a recipe for disaster.  As an outsider, untrained, not prepared, they'd be cruel to obey your directives and take you on their walk.  

They'd also hurt their own chances, in taking you on as their burden.  You being a sensitive anthropologist who understands there's a healthy balance between professional curiosity and taking foolish gambles.

We know from the movies that the reporter trying to "embed" in this or that police force or military, or lets say gang, is likely to encounter others not in the know and unsure of the agreements.  The tribe that encounters your tribe sees they have you as an ostensive member.  How does that impact inter-tribal calculations?  As an anthropologist, it's not your intent to spark new tensions.  The observer's role cannot honestly be erased in most cases, but it can be low profile.

Having spent time in Quarter World again recently (in walking radius), and thinking arcade games = language games (Wittgenstein's influence), while also keeping in mind the Coffee Shops Network charitable giving arcade palace (a place to see and be seen?), I'm back to designs for serious simulators, like pilots get, and maybe some truckers.  

You get a lot more time on a simulator before they hand you a real car.  But we're talking brainwashings of all types, and whom do you trust to brainwash your brain?  I'd use hypertoons in mine.  I'd be my own first subject, Guinea Pig K.

Time in a high bandwidth pod might prove mind altering but in a good way.  

These would take human subject experiments, which in some cases would mean tinkering with in-house prototypes and letting friends sign a waiver.  They're just arcade games, enhanced to teach organic chemistry or calculus or one of those.  

They don't replace what we've already got going, but for some prove an invaluable (as in valuable) supplement.

Get more attention slices focused on risk-taking for charity, and practicing for professions, and you will have fewer attention slices left over for Easy Way screen writers.  

Compete for a slice of the attention pie and wedge it bigger, with quality programming that doesn't happen to hinge on firing projectiles at one another.  That's more TV-14 through R.  Imagine a new rated MN for Mature Nonviolent, very triggering to some viewers.  "What about deductive thinking, wouldn't it go out the window?"  As if great powers of deduction were on display today.  Guns Dumb Ya Down (or at least there's that risk).

Round Robin

I like the country bumpkin sound of "round robin" -- or perhaps this is a more genteel kids' book by an Englishwoman. What I'm thinking though, is "operating system" and time sliced attention.  The idea of slices or intervals in particular.  The scene:  it starts and stops.  On to the next frame (sequence).

For my part, part of my tour are my own pages on Github and how ship shape are they.  Today, I was looking at VolumeTalk.ipynb, one I've touted here and there, only to notice many unexecuted code cells.  When I dredge up the localhost original, and re-ran it, the code cells were inconsistent with expected results. I was stumped.

As I posted later to Synergeo, the issue was with the E module and my failure to input its six edge lengths in the right order, to any of the volume-from-edge computing algorithms.  Once I switched edges e and f, the volumes popped back into place, with the E mod's equal to 2nd root of 2 times (1/phi) to the 3rd, all over 8.  Yeah, funny.  About 0.041731316927773675 with the option to run it out further.

You may be thinking "no one in the world cares about what you call E modules, so this is all very Yellow Submarine, very Nowhere Man".  I get the sentiment, however "no one" is an exaggeration given I'm someone and I care.  Plus I know of a bigger fan base that appreciates my gold mining in Synergetics, or maybe minting, as D.B. Koski has been more the miner, of golden mean based relationships.

That I was able to afford enough attention, is not something I take for granted.  Earlier, I was taking an applied mathematics practice test, doing pretty well.  As a curriculum developer, I get saddled with doing assignments made in other shops.  Indeed, there will always be way more of them than I, so it should come as no wonder that I spend at least as much time learning as teaching.  Ideally, I'd be able to afford a lot of learning time.  That's something I look for in a job.

A real scheduler is sensitive to all sorts of priority cues, and no, I'm not the expert.  Operating System Design was not one of the courses I took at Princeton.  

However I get it about Operations Research (a context for PERT analysis) and how that fed the timeshare model.  How do we efficiently virtualize the experience of working with a mainframe, such that each user gets the experience of running a virtual mainframe?  You have cylinders, you have tapes, you have printers.  A round robin like process keeps each user in the loop with a responsive set of GUIs + APIs.

Turning back the clock by several orbits, I'd likely be in the basement of Princeton Inn, abutting the golf course, a short walk from the Dinky, the short electric train out to the mainline, the Northeast Corridor for Amtrak and Conrail, next stop Trenton, to the south (Princeton Junction is its own station).  

I'd be typing in APL, A Programming Language. This is the 1970s and IBM has gone gaga for APL, engaged in two way conversation. I'd later follow Kenneth Iverson onto J and even had the benefit of his corrections when I web-published Jiving in J.

Logo would be similar, and likewise my dBase (II, III and IV) and its signature "dot prompt".  

dBase II became Foxpro, and I became employed, as a Visual FoxPro (VFP) developer, for quite some time (many years).  I'd written some FORTRAN for my main client before that.  This was back at CUE (Center for Urban Education).

At OSCONs, I'd meet people from like HP and OpenStack who really did understand schedulers in the computer science sense.  

From there, it's but a short jump to an appreciation for news cycles and public attention, and managing the carnival or theme park or whatever.  Not that anyone really does manage the circus, just we have many partially overlapping circuses being managed, each one a Greatest Show on Earth.

The point of view of the OS designer is one of maximizing efficiency while giving each user a sense of privacy, as in security, and reliable performance.  

User processes are administrated by a combination of human judgement and automation, with each user process getting its allotment of storage and CPU time.  Let us pray admin is appropriately transparent, and breaches in security are both reported and rare. 

This was the UNIX architecture, but also that of OSes in general.

There's still room for human admins to mess it up.  However much is automated.  

The solo human operating a laptop is typical, even if, upon zooming out, we see that human + computer as a component within a much larger circuitry, which it is, as a node in a network.  The parallel computing that goes on daily is what keeps the world turning, so to speak.  

A world turning is another picture of an operating system getting work done, by turning slowly around its own axis. Or picture an IBM Selectric ball for your type head.  Something spherical leaves trails that seem linear, even if not exactly straight.

Ethnicity Theory

Since no one is using this ("Ethnicity Theory"), I'll just grab it for my necklace next to GST.  Maybe I boarded GST too much in pirate fashion and the others scattered?  General Systems Theory had had a following.

An Axiom of ET is: we're each, in theory, an Ethnicity of One.  There never was nor will ever again be, the unique ethnicity you embody. But like Wittgenstein's "private language" or Bucky Fuller's "one frequency", it makes no sense to have but one of something you need at least two of just to have a case for whatever label ("ethnicity", "language").  One record for training, a next for testing.  I'd be more comfortable with at least four.  Dot dot dot dot.

For example consider my ethnicity: born in Chicago to university types, transplanted to Portland, then Rome. Bradenton, Florida for a first half of 9th grade (i.e. the start of high school in K-12), then Manila for the balance.  "But that's just biography not ethnicity".  Precisely, as "ethnicity of one" is too full of contradiction and paradox.  Yet we posit it.

The child in a nuclear family observing the intra-adult behaviors between adults, is getting a database not of grins and grunts, but an imprint regarding coping strategies.  "Here are ways those whom you will become have managed to navigate and negotiate, pay attention"... and the infant does.

The main thing I want to emphasize about ethnicity is that an individual has a hand in making and defining it over the course of a lifetime.  It's not assigned by the state or even tracked by the state in the sense that ethnographers mean it.  Your psychology, in the sense of personality, has not been nor presently can be, saved, given the state of technology. But isn't that the whole point? To save it?  We have a jumping off point into Christianity at this juncture.

The anthropologists will not allow an individualized ethnicity (the private language one) to be the sole invention of a single human neurosystem or avatar.  Individuals in that sense do not reinvent entire cultures from scratch in the course of a lifetime. They need to be born into a culture, a going concern, at least a family or a parent, to have a chance.  That's reasonable to claim.  To say one is possessed by one's ethnicity, as if by ghosts, sounds too much like fiction, but by programs (televised, broadcast, retrieved) sure. We're each products of programming, what could be more true?  Sources too.

In contrast, the old dogma of "race" involved assigning some low bit number, like a brand, like a QR code. Admin needed these.  They were not allowed to change.  Immutable tokens.  Based in the Bible. "Ethnicity" was a nicer more polite way of talking about it.  There was no way to rescue this system intact.  We wake up in a museum of mementos yet are expected to operate it as a viable business.  The job at hand may seem uncanny.  "How are we expected to make this work?" is the complainants cry.  Like Prohibition.  What occurs under those conditions is of course "corruption" which tends to be a stop gap word.  "We won't get into details as then we'd start accusing people, giving examples, and that's not wise in a glass houses village, if you want to have a village".

Clearly I'm exploring the border between within and outside the law, the "what is legal" question.  That's a great entry point into the ruled by rules games, and ways of governing.  But then they show you the rule books and they be mountains high.  Abiding by rules is apparently a full time occupation.  Why didn't they say so in the first place?  We're talking about grammar, in the way Wittgenstein meant it, i.e. forms of life.