Buckaroo Bizmo

The meme of "truck stop" figures in these writings with strong echoes of "oasis" including a surround "oasis community". I'm thinking of Hoon and environs, where I've never been.  I have some maps from dads old shelves, as a regional planner.

I think of truckers as "citizen diplomats" with a polymath's skill set, on top of driving, involving algorithms and data structures one could call it.  Like airplane pilots, they follow a rule book in order to safely share the public skies and public roads.  You don't want your pilots or drivers asleep at the wheel, either figuratively or literally.

I've been test piloting a kind of truck or van, a somewhat Buckaroo Banzai bizmo, that gathers intelligence about a route for the benefit of trucker simulators, kind of a Google Street View.  However the anthropology trained personnel are scoping out more than road conditions and bottlenecks.  They're more like Michelin, in the sense of tour guides.  Their product tends to be software delivered and runs inside other trucks.

Since "man is the measure of all things" i.e. since we empathize with our own engineering, I'm fine with pretending to be my own bizmo, puttering about.  Bucky played similar mind games, being the phantom captain of his own meat puppet ship.  Through the power of metaphor and analogy, I'm able to combine my being human with other experiences to make some pretty detailed mind's eye science fiction about Trucker World of the future. Pause to make truck noise and operate my ghost steering wheel.

What's a "bizmo"?  Business Mobile, duh.  No one calls them that.  They could be double deckers, sure, but might only stay within North and South Dakota, per terms of the contract  You might have several workstations.  You might have a caravan, with sleeping quarter bizmos a different type.  Traveling circus.  We're talking gypsies here.  As always.

Rendering Unto Caeser

Tax time tends to be problematic for Quakers, especially the relatively well off ones, and these are numerous, given the conservative investment and savings strategies of their ancestors.  Paying lots of money into Empire coffers looks bad on one's resume.  

On the other hand, one wants to do social good, so one goes the route of the big money people:  earmark for charity, so that your own judgment stays a part of the picture.  Fund the NGOs you choose (many of whom get government contracts, so one ends up on the same side of the fence in many cases).

I'm a big believer in institutional wealth, and not sticking out like a sore thumb as one of the affluent.  On a battleship, or say a pirate ship, maybe everyone feels rich and that they're cooperatively sharing responsibility for a socially owned asset.  

Some would call that military socialism and indeed, many a career military office has never had to find a job in the private sector.

Indeed, unless one knows how to keep mobilizing wars, it's hard to stay employed as a full time soldier.  Job number one is to make wars seem not only necessary, but admirable.  Cheerleaders line the sidewalks and encourage those marching towards destiny with brave resolve.  We've seen it a million times, in the movies if not in real life.

I dutifully paid my taxes but realize I haven't tied up all the loose ends, such is by filing by business tax exemption with the city (a formality for small timers with no employees I think they told me). I go to H & R Block for tax advice.

So like this Bizmo idea, where we have this fleet of utility vehicles helping out with the Trucker Exchange Program, gathering intelligence on the routes and facilities.  They have other uses too, in terms of recruiting for universities or other academic programs that include bizmotica.  Ecologists in the field already have their mobile lab trucks.

Without being the personal owner of such a fleet, without being the Elon Musk of Global Data, I could see tooling around in an institutional shared asset.  Or call it non-military socialism. Think of the various port authorities and the airport and harbor facilities these maintain.  These are not private sector institutions with oligarchs at the top, unless we're discussing the case of Robert Moses or some other outlier.

Robert Moses, for those who don't know his story, figured prominently at the beginning of the freeway era, which was all about providing vast numbers of private cars, most of them suburbia based, with access to, and parking within, central business districts (CBDs).  In Robert's case, the CBD was NYC itself.

Shooting the Breeze

This book came by UPS today. 
You'd think I would have read this by now.

 

We're coming up on Carol's 93rd birthday.  She is the eye of one hurricane, I another.

Glenn was over.  He's our Chauncey Gardener if you've seen Being There.  But he's a lot more world savvy.  I give snippets of his biography throughout my blogs.

I'm going over the pandas and numpy syllabus yet again, not forgetting matplotlib.  These are in the toolkit of a high school student these days, at least in my curriculum writing.  Jupyter Notebooks?  Why wait until college.

Speaking of Jupyter Notebooks, there's some thought of linking to one of mine from the BFI / Synergetics page.  Although I was a first webmaster for this institute, working in cahoots with Kiyoshi Kuromiya to snag the domain name and create a cyber footprint, I haven't had anything like direct access for decades, and that's still the case today.

If that circuit closes, and I get the new web traffic to my Github site, I'll likely jump back onto Youtube and record that it happened.  Until then, I'll adopt a wait and see attitude.

Another focus:  those USA Olympiad training exercises and past solutions.  My students want more specific muscles in the puzzle-solving by program genre.  I did a couple for practice and others I've yet to code are haunting my brain.

Happy Birthday Matthew (belated, March 29 is the real date).  I took him to lunch at the Barley Mill, one of the original McMenamins.  I hadn't known about the new Ken Burns documentary series on Ben Franklin.  I brought him up several times in the conversation today.

Were the French foolish to take the USA's side in the war versus the United Kingdom?  One could argue they won that war.  On the other hand, ideas about democracy, equality and so on were proving infectious and would France itself be spared the fires of revolution?

The common wisdom is nation-states act in their own self interest.  I'd like to keep this truism filed under "debatable" instead.  "In the perceived self interest of the nation per some inner circle or cabal that considers itself in charge" would be closer to the truth.

One could say such an example is the quasi-state of Ukraine, too important to allow for the petty pace of democracy by the look of things.  The weak gravity that holds peoples together, by common ancestry, language, habits (in sum ethnicity), is often no match for the separating polarities that drive these same peoples apart.  

One seeks a balance, not the ultimate winner-take-all triumph of the will that the greedy are always going for.  The art, in statecraft and war alike, is to rest content with world domination without turning that into a mandate to vanquish one's foe, once and for all.

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April First

I don't have anything especially foolish or foolhardy to say on April Fools' Day.  I will acknowledge "clowning around" from time to time.

Today, on my way down from Mt. Tabor, I dropped by QuarterWorld, a local arcade game palace now for those aged 21 and older, or maybe it was always that way?  There's a bar.

Given the pandemic, I haven't stuck my head in that place for years.  

Dr. D. joined me, his first time in that place, and promptly scored top score for the day one of his old favorites:  Joust.

I didn't play any games this time, but I did have a couple beers, including this brand I'd never tried before: Game On! from Level Beer.