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.

Back to the Races

We were talking in my backyard about curriculum matters, once again.  I'm against making authoritative textbooks be of paper, i.e. I'm publishing in electronic formats that store as energy, but not as wood or as heavy objects in need of boxing and trucking.  

That doesn't mean I disrespect the collectibles, the classics, in their original non-electronic form.  It's just that textbooks in particular need to be current in their fields and some fields (more than others) are especially volatile.

What to include about "races"?  The dice get loaded as soon as I substitute "pseudo genetics" as that's a finger on the scales, a put down.  

Lets establish there's no need for any "color blindness" in terms of peoples' skins having literal RGB values, a range of tones.  The technicalities of screen rendering, as with POV-Ray (a ray tracing program) mean attention to detail is rewarded, when it comes to designing screen avatars.

A lot of Sunday School posters go with a Genesis version wherein God is looking for ways to guide His humans in a less punishing, more effective manner.  There's a learning curve, a feedback loop.  Lizard brain acquiring knowledge of good and evil was a real curve ball but the fun and games hadn't ended.  Noah and family took the signs seriously and made the necessary investments in a great ark, leading to their making it through a bottleneck almost as strict as in the Garden of Eden.  Creation Part 2, we could call it.

The issue, God learned, is groupthink.  Small numbers (say a couple or more) all thinking the same way aren't necessarily sufficiently balanced by those with different experience.  The average of all experiences would be great, but too strong a bias makes for groupthink, a whole school gone down some rabbit hole, a cult, a quagmire (negative terminology).  Who sees all that from the inside though?  Usually it takes the benefit of hindsight to see the dead end, and by then it's too late.

You see where this is going:  the Tower of Babel.  

Thanks to humans starting over with a very low diversity quotient, they immediately started off on a wrongheaded track again:  building some tower to the sky to be closer to God.  

What could be more insane, right?

This time God came back with a far less punishing solution than in earlier testimony, and applied a psychologically healing technique (we can see it this way in retrospect, along with the other course corrections, such as expulsion from the Garden in the first place). 

What we call "the confusion of tongues" was more like "putting tongues in their place" i.e. a demotion of so-called "rational thought" (everyone assumes they're rationality personified).  Shoptalk alone, bureaucratese of any flavor, was not going to cut the mustard.  

The Tower of Babel was having funding problems as the engineers increasingly realized the limitations of physics. How that translated was as increasing entropy in the bureaucracy.  The impossible doesn't happen just because the memos will that it must.

Why have I digressed into that whole Babel story again?  

Because this is when the so-called "races" dispersed around the globe, no longer held, spellbound, by their glorious plan of action.  That all seemed so meaningless in the rear view mirror.  

However, what replaced that doomed project was the growing realization of something rather more miraculous:  that the spaceship was already built and we were already its not so passive passengers (ecosystem co-designers -- with physics still a limitation).  

Our perspective is now more like God needs it to be, for our own sakes.  It's not just "thinking globally" but "thinking cosmically" (we've long heard from universalists and universities) that's expected of us.

Expected of us by whom though?  Exactly.  No other human that any of us knows.  

The democratizing aspect of thanking God for one's assets, including one's intelligence, is that one is not thereby compelled to accredit to some human authority or bureaucracy as the source of all one's wealth.  

"Not of human origin" is what's written invisibly all over nature, meaning we're free to enjoy it without necessarily giving our peers all the credit.  To some extent, the world happens without the benefit of human management, at least at the superficial level.  Praise Allah.

You will notice I did not go down the rabbit hole of what exactly are those "races" that Noah's family (i.e. wife) begat. 

That whole family tree and the book containing it need not be the anchor for our story, if what we're doing is genetic science.  Humans have not been animal husbanded into certified breeds except by the self appointed.  We're free to ignore their taxonomy.  But that doesn't mean dropping skin color as an adjective.  Pronouns may continue as before. 

My point is more anthropological:  if you sincerely wish to know where many Texans and/or Floridians got their ideas about race, don't look to anything in the public school curriculum.  

The private religious academies have been telling the most compelling myths in that department for centuries.  

The "races" are more likely courtesy of your neighborhood religion.  We call that folklore, with no disrespect. The race of giants accepts the right of hobbits to think as they do about supposed subspecies. I'll hazard geeks are less likely than nerds to indulge their concerns about racial taxonomy (as if the patriarchy's latest taxonomy were of great interest).

One Wonders...

One wonders at how alike are Elon and Donald (Musk and Trump respectively).  Neither comes across as brilliant in any conventional sense.  They're both intuitive weirdos, channeling the Zeitgeist, telling powerful echo chambers what those chambers most want to hear echoed.  They're like sonar.

One wonders how far the Hillary camp was planning to push Russia as a scapegoat, even if she had won the election.  Ukraine has been seen as a top prize by New American Century types for awhile. 

The FBI, having helped their queen win, would have proved unaccountable and could have smeared Trump with Russiagate lies ala British intelligence indefinitely, either way, just to make an example out of what happens to upstarts.  The CIA, in the meantime, was quick to inform the Russians what was going on (according to some officers, not necessarily chief ones).

I got the sense at a pre-covid OSCON that Cal Tech California engineers were lining up to blame Russia somehow, for any grid problems, including fires.  We were supposed to forever buy a brand of science fiction, based around CrowdStrike type narratives, wherein hidden actors performed as gremlins, worse then elves.

I think the public sees through these shams faster than supposedly clever people can concoct their new prevarications.   Bottom line: we're getting the point where if lying and fooling the public is a big part of your long term strategy, your people will start to bail, because other gigs won't ask that of them, even if the payoff is less in the short term.

Pacific Summit

We had our own little Bilderberg style summit, with high security, an exclusive guest list. 

Having my face on the HDTV, yakking away about RSA, reminded me of that Chomsky movie, where his face shows up in stadia, on billboards and so on, telling us about the exigencies of capitalism.

Of course the real Bilderbergs were meeting in DC recently, guests of the Hong Kong government or one of those. A lot of the guests are those Easterners I talk about, the transplant transatlantics, with their EU/UK mindset.  Yukes turned Yanks.

Out here on the Pacific Rim, we might be a tad less Atlantic-minded.  We spin it differently.

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