A Synopsis

Europe was headed in the direction of relative utopia with Nord Stream 2 about to come online, but Social Darwinists in The District wouldn't have it. 

What if the French working class were actually able to stabilize around that much vacation time, with Club Med level leisure class facilities, and what if socialized health care actually worked over the long haul?  The American public would become dissatisfied with their lot.

Condoleezza Rice could see the writing on the wall. The rapacious license to exploit, called the American Way, would fall into disfavor and the accompanying grotesque lifestyles might become a thing of the past.

So Europe's ruling cast quislings consented to have their own workers' jugular sliced so they could more effectively concentrate power in the hands of the few with less of a threat to their "system". 

Military Socialism (e.g. NATO) would continue to rule, with its veneer of Cowardly Capitalism. 

Their consent would be in exchange for making Russia weak again, so that their future energy imports might be controlled by Wall Streeters and post WW2 financial institutions created by the military-entertainment complex.

Europe would share in the glory of the American Empire.

Fuller predicted in the 1980s in Critical Path, that LAWCAP's greed would eventually lead it to attack the Russians. 

Perhaps the honesty of his financially and engineeringly informed poetics helped open a window of optimism that such a scenario might be avoided, and giving the USSR a chance to reform. 

However, in the aftermath of Grunch of Giants we got the message: LAWCAP would not morph into something spanking new without a fight. 

Fuller's writings would be relegated to the "subversive" pile (his reputation would be smeared) and good doobie apprentice capitalists would be insulated from such futurism going forward. That was the plan anyway. I'm not suggesting it was ever realistic.

The Business Plot

Although it’s not a no brainer, it’s almost that, to recognize Major General Smedley “Fighting Quaker” Butler for his bravery not only in the company of his men, but later in life, as more of a loner, when he published War is a Racket and had to expose the creeping private sector, anxious to keep devouring the public space.

What public space? In some ideologies there’s no such thing. The world inherently belongs to this or that people, championed by this or that cult, and if not the whole world, then at least a part of it, with the intention to expand. That’s to claim the land on behalf of a people as private to them, which becomes the rallying cry of citizens once they have it. But do they have it?

We know about public spaces and public services, which happen when private interests collaborate to achieve something no one could afford to undertake solo. That would be the space program for example, in its more writ large aspects, and certainly that would be war.

However these days the wars are privatized, not declared, and run irrespective on any meaningful oversight. Weapons and funding is easy to come by. All one needs are ideologues with a willingness to die for some cause. If not that, at least they can eat presuming the militia is able to support itself logistically, which is not always the case.

Do we have any public space left in education? I would say some. Without authorization from some private company, or better, with the authorization of only my own company, I have the right and ability to purchase public facing screen estate. Prospectors are able to scroll through my material. 

Smedley Butler was approached with a scheme to finally privatize the remaining public institutions that had survived thanks to FDR. The ruling elite wanted their country back. Smedley would have nothing of it and blew the whistle. After all he’d done to be loyal, he wasn’t about to go down in history as a traitor. Probably the business perps who tried to persuade him said they were doing it for the peoples’ benefit.

Fast forward and the push to privatize would reach an apex under president Reagan, coincident with a similar high water mark under Margaret Thatcher in England. The private sector would attempt to establish control without its takeover destroying the underlying legitimacy of their platform. One might call this Business Plot 2.0 and without a Smedley in the picture, it mostly worked, except that people were sensitive to the hollowness and lack of statesmen.

Fast forward some more and we have a eugenics-minded Social Darwinist private sector acting like we’re in the early 1900s again. The public sector is all but gone and a private mercenary army supports the highest bidders with WMDs. The USA to some extent still fights back, in part by keeping Smedley Butler relevant to the narrative.

More Curriculum Notes

:: photo by DBK ::

We have an army of geeks with M4 Mac Minis this Xmas, extrapolating from YouTubes, and a goodly number of them are running Blender. Some would like to break into Python teaching. I have some recommendations.

If you're a new kid on the block and want a ground floor entrance to an express freight elevator to the top, figuratively speaking, you might want to visit my latest Lesson Plan featuring S3, a number I was promoting to Epistemologists recently, at least to their admins.  S3 = 1.06066...

Polyhedrons may be related to one another versus studied only as individuals. For example, how the cube (3) and its dual (4) both nest, as short and long diagonals respectively, within the twelve diamond faces of the rhombic dodecahedron (6), should not come across as ungraspable mumbo-jumbo known only to esoteric clerics.

V + F == E + 2

We're talking common knowledge on the level of ABCs. The dual of the cube being the octahedron.

However just reading such stuff isn't to get the visualization necessarily and for that we could use Blender. I date myself with my POV-Ray based approach, but the final rendering step isn't as critical as the guts, which is where S3 comes in, in our computations of volume.

1, 12, 42, 92, 162...

Since Piero della Francesca at least, in the 1400s, we've had a way to derive a tetrahedron's volume from its edges. Other such algorithms, starting from the six edges, have come along since. 

These formulae need to make a come back, as short computer programs, as we present an alternative to the XYZ approach vs-a-vs the tetrahedron's volume in our new paradigm, the one with the unit edge D, the unit volume tetrahedron. 

We may use the "from edges" approach instead, with S3 as a modifier, and/or use Gerald de Jong's method, which had no XYZ version in the first place.

We have two principal targets after establishing the new volumes table: great circle networks and sphere packing. Of course the two interrelate and of course both have multiplicitous applications within geography, computer games, and crystallography, even psychology.

We spin our cuboctahedron and icosahedron, for example, to net great circle networks of 25 and 31 great circle networks respectively, and we juxtapose them. 

The sphere packing starts with our D-edged tetrahedron itself (D = ball diameter). The CCP, with D-edged tetrahedral and octahedral voids, is our Matrix home base.

How we got here though, was over the S3 bridge, and in Silicon Forest Martian Math, in the context of Sapiens coming to better understand an ET intelligence.

The Mac Mini army has the compute to bring this literature into the foreground, perhaps in the form of anime. 

Sapiens and ETs meet on some Mesa and learn to collaborate on hydropower projects. The relationship is non-adversarial.

The lesson here is for those succumbing to phobias.

Humans have a track record of working together, and the global grids are what we're working on now, much to the chagrin of the phobia-ridden politicians who can't envision a world they don't control.

The attack on Nord Stream was an expression of the fearful reflex-conditioning of the more robotic lower half of the Bell Curve (less mindful), pampered juveniles groomed to feel entitled to management positions.

Tooting My Own Horn

I corrected myself later in a follow-up message. Margaret Fuller died at sea, with her new baby and Roman soldier husband (he'd fought for Roman independence against the Vatican), so clearly Fuller was not a physical descendent. She was his great aunt. Intellectually speaking, however, he was shaped by her writings and she was among the three women to whom he dedicated his Grunch of Giants.

 

T4P Caravan

search: t4p

conjured from Hilbert Space

Python Teaching Ideas

Friendly Art

prompted from Hilbert Space, praise the King

Church and State

:: six fingers jammin Sam ::

You may have seen in the movies where certain underground cults have gone ga ga for an iconography, such as that of a nation. In torch-lit ceremonies, whatever logo gets used, some motivational symbol, such as the Olympic Games deploys, or Nike. Not that either of these are “cults” in popular parlance. The spin on key terms here is colored by its ballpark.

My own bias is to think of n8v tribes that went bigly for the Stars and Stripes as a motif in their beadwork. I also think of Grateful Dead, the band, on the road, and its merging with Uncle Sam imagery. That’s a goldmine we’ve been mining to this day, exploring what the new AI dream machines might do.

From a more legal code angle, the picture is not one of a government foisting itself upon others, so much as a subculture partaking of the same mythic sources. The same George Washington under the same elm tree waves the new flag, but some of the troops complain about the miniature Union Jack in the upper left, and Betsy Ross makes sure it’s replaced. That’s straight outta Critical Path (St. Martins Press) check archive dot org.

So say a subculture, like the Masons, is into a lot of the same pyramid eye stuff as the Union of States, the Federation. Good icons are hard to find, let alone great ones. Some of these cults predate the USA obviously. So it’s not so much like government encroaching on the church as the church asserting its intellectual property rights in the realm of the Zeitgeist.

The story need not be adversarial at all, as in the case of George Washington, who had no problem with Masonic rituals. The Quakers might be cast as synergyzing with n8vs per the early days in Sylvania (William Penn’s), comparing notes on governance and community building, only to bring their newly won insights to their new circuit designs, the ones that started up in Philadelphia but eventually moved to that former swamp called DC (District of Columbia).

I live in “DC West” meaning the Columbia River has its watershed, a district. I’m in that district, near the confluence of said great river and one of its tribs, known as the Willamette.

So lets say here in DC West, a tribe of Quakers get very into Uncle Sam iconography, along with some brewpub already promoting the Grateful Dead. Would George Washington seem out of place? Certainly the Masons have been embraced (by the McMenamins brewpubs, talking about Oregon and Washington). I’d say “Deja vu”.

Headless Nations

Excuse me? Who are you calling “headless” in this picture?

Today’s YouTube thumbnails are saying “Joe Biden” and or “the US” is giving the green light to this or that, through the New York Times. Clearly someone is feeling authorized to make stuff happen, as the Davos crowd seems to be surging in a particular direction. 

Yet public attention has been elsewhere, possibly making this feel like a window of opportunity to these political actors.

How all this lashing out is supposed to advance US interests is hard to decipher. One presumes some last grasper is hoping to express manhood or otherwise address a perceived failing. Everyone knows there’s no “commander in chief” at the helm and that we’re running on reflexes. 

We’re back to the usual fun game of headless chicken.

How is the world to deal with zombie juggernauts? 

My Silicon Forest is far away from The District and has its own circuitry. We do microchip fab a lot, with Intel here, in Hanoi, in New Mexico. We’re not “Atlanticists” here on the Pacific Rim, somewhat by definition. 

We haven’t green lighted anything from here. 

The Empire attacked us with storm troopers ala Star Wars not that long ago. We continue to flaunt federal restrictions on controlled substances and sometimes break the human trafficking laws, by providing asylum.

Anyway, there’s no danger of me saying “we” when it comes to whoever is doing the signaling with those green lights. We’ve known since Reagan that the deep state is all about working around Congress and carrying out business plots regardless of whatever “oversight” the so-called government attempts to exercise. Evidence: the Nord Stream extrajudicial special military operation.

People still talk about the Constitution a lot and brand themselves as defenders thereof, but I don’t see where Congress gets to seriously debate anything anymore. We see orchestrated symbolic votes but not actual discussion. The whole debate process has been privatized. 

The executive branch simply executes, disconnected from any legislative controls. And yet they claim we have a system governed by laws, not egos. In these circumstances, some see it as their duty to disobey.

The Science of Infinity

A friend is leaving Portland, and is letting me get some mileage out of his book collection until he arranges for them to join a library. He’ll likely outlive me so he imagines this will be his karma. I’ve already been enjoying earlier portions of his collection, including the extensive set of titles about or by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a corpus we’ve both studied.

I spent much of yesterday extracting two bookcases that had been squeezed between the wall and Carol’s bed, to give them more breathing room in what used to be the back office. Now I have the 2nd floor office to claim if H&R Block suggests filling out such a schedule:  a home office may not double as sleeping quarters, a tough rule for folks in those tiny apartments.

Lots of these books are about maths, Such as Philosophical Introduction to Set Theory by Stephen Pollard, the 2015 Dover edition of the original 1990 Notre Dame Press copy. Back in the day, I’d debate math ideas with other math heads, such as Dr. Wayne Bishop at California University. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics eradicated this archive however. The Math Forum, as we called it, started at Swarthmore, then moved to Drexel.

The book starts out drawing attention to the proliferation of mutually unintelligible subspecialties within maths, and the dangers this poses to a unificationist agenda. Pollard argues that only Set Theory has what it takes to keep Humpty Dumpty recognizably an egg (a whole), whereas Category Theory, an upstart grand unifier, hasn't yet proved itself more effective, in part because, as a relative new kid on the block, it's less established. But let's remember these words were penned in the 1980s sometime.

A core idea in Cantorian set theory is this idea that you cannot pair natural numbers with the reals because too many reals fall through the cracks as it were, per the "diagonal argument" and so on (pages 8-9). 

The targeted reals are allowed to have infinitely many digits after the decimal point whereas that way is barred to the left side: natural numbers with infinity digits are not actually natural numbers, by definition. 

Suppose one assigns a random number to any real number produced. Does the pairing process ever fail in that case? A rule to not break is that of uniqueness: one does not get to assign the same natural number to more than one real, for an operation to count as perpetual pairing.

Once a natural number is spoken for, it retires.  So what’s the problem?

Is the pool of eligible brides thereby diminished such that I’ll run out of Ns for my grooms in R? If I need more digits (given how many Rs you give me) I’ll add them. I’ll never repeat. Pairing works no?

The reason you can’t pair N and R simply by removing the decimal point is precisely because members of N are not allowed to have infinitely many digits. We wouldn’t be able to sequence them all if they did, even if subsets could still be ordered.

Even if N were to include infinity-digit members, like the reals do, we could still use them for counting sheep, as the finite digit Ns would still be in the N set as well.  

But then allowing infinity-digit Ns into contemporary maths would turn it into a wasteland (teenage or otherwise) set theoretically speaking, so lets us just keep things the way they are shall we?

The computer science mindset has made long digit sequences into strings, meaning we don't suffer headaches or vertigo in thinking how divergent (vs convergent) a number like ...3804951234... (random forever in both directions) must be. Digits are digits, with or without a decimal point. What impossibility are we talking about?

Random infinite strings of digits needn't "stand for" anything, e.g. we're not forced into picturing astronomically huge collections corresponding to the output of these noisy, chaotic, digit generators. Whereas these same random digits to the right of a decimal connotes ever more microscopic fine tuning and precision (convergence), which seems a lot more "believable" (the mental picture is more obvious).

Raining Pumpkins

In line with my keeping my curriculum quirky and idiosyncratic (weird), words used by detractors as well as friends, I'm allowing more autobiography, which is to personalize, to "icosahedronize" (add to dictionary). There's nothing amiss in being special case unique and indeed any other way is missing something.

"Allowing more autobiography" where? In this specific case I was thinking of my Github repo, School of Tomorrow, where I engage students with a variety of topics, from Python to Occupy Portland (OPDX) to our Mazeway of Polyhedrons. I just coined that here: "mazeway" thumbs up, sounds theme parky.

I link Occupy to Dr. Graeber and the N8V critique of Anglo-Euro-speak: that it's way too unimaginative when it comes to (a) pictureing lifestyles and (b) assuming one size ("way of life") must eventually fit all. Is the Earth a backdrop for some epic Capitalism versus Socialism extravaganza? Not exclusively. Live that melodrama if you like but don't pretend the rest of us don't have other core concerns. Like, we don't see the world in those terms, so sorry,  did you think we should?

We might wanna bring back Ancient Egypt with contemporary characteristics. In Egypt. Who is "we"? Not me specifically as my Sands of Time clock is running low and we haven't even done a WestWorld yet, except on TV.

I also link OPDX and the Elk Statue (undergoing renovation) specifically to the Bonus Army demonstration between the wars. Penny pinchers in Congress wanted the budget for pet projects whereas no one saw a way to deal with bitter veterans. Smedley "fighting Quaker" Butler was one of them, looking back on a life as a war racketeer, and realizing,  as Eisenhower warned us later, that war is an end in itself, not a merely a means, to supply chainers.

Smedley was in DC to see the Bonus Army, camped out in Hoovervilles, getting smacked down by General MacArthur, of whom he took a dim view. The war mad Manifest Destiny types ruined the American Dream for most of us, while trashing the smashing their way through the Philippines, Indochina, Central America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East. 

The pressure to spray out weapons is intense, with shareholder-backed pensions depending on it. Some boomer doomers fear dying off in droves if they're any less grim with their Genocide R Us grim reaper policies. Not that they won't die off in droves anyway, as it's getting to be That Time for them, given the Bell Curve.

Speaking of the Bell Curve, last night I demonstrated a basic Galton Board to my data science students, along with a simple Python program for simulating balls falling left or right, through rows of pegs. Most random falls will end up in the middle, but randomness allows for outliers and the pseudorandom integer generator I was using is certified to be that normal kind of random.

Bell Curve Dynamics

So what's up with the bacteriophage? That's our icosahedral and cuboctahedral numbers entry point, talking nucleocapsid and Jitterbug, as well as our War of the Worlds and Wells meets Welles, YouTube link in the Codacombs.

Keeping it Quirky

What's becoming more clear to me is I'm not on the hook to author some veridical textbook standard that nails it. Nails what? 

Speaking of nails, cosmetics, Max Factor, I am welcoming the view that polymathy, a commitment to comprehensivity, does not entail a commitment to omniscience. The "know it all" as a personality type is already off-putting vs-a-vs my type, whatever that is (I've not done Myers-Briggs, or if I have, for joining with temp agencies, they didn't tell me my sign).

Insofar as School of Tomorrow is concerned, this means I'm free to continue exploring off the ends of the roads I've already achieved. That'll lead to new connections, such as I discovered yesterday, H.G. Wells and Orson Welles in the same room with a journalist, on radio methinks. 

They discussed the similarity in their names, as I've pointed out, and Wells asks Orson about the upcoming movie (Orson: thanks for the plug, citizen Kane). 

Wells has an especially kind spin on the Halloween Panic, when Orson persuaded some listeners there'd been an attack of the UAPs. Wells: oh we knew from across the pond how you Americans like to dress up in a bed sheet on Halloween and pretend you've seen a ghost and start screaming, hah hah. Orson: you're very kind -- he was up to his neck in hot water after that stunt -- which he knew better than to ever live down.

I free to stay with Mark Fisher and his nostalgia for pre-Thatcher English brutalism in architecture, echoing Sovietism, because it reflected a for-the-ages commitment to public works. So Tucker was impressed by those subway stations, why fight it? 

Privatization has come at a cost, and it makes sense for a Portland-based open source freelancer type guy to say that, if not for Pearson to make a textbook out of it. Not that I thoroughly understand the British Ingsoc. What's the BBC again? A private company you say? Not really?

I'm able to stay with David Graeber and fellow travelers, who to my mind were pointing out that it's not a grand struggle between two or three mega-designs, where we all end up on the same page at the end of the day. Why? Why even make that a goal. I'm fine that you and your campuses look and feel different and feature different course offerings. That's how I succeed in recruiting, by emphasizing how we're different.

Think of all the board games there are. I've been to houses where every shelf was pile high with game boxes, because that's what this household chose to specialize in and there we certainly enough offerings out there, to fill a house worth. No problemo. 

And that's how to think of human communities and their internal arrangements: highly variegated. 

Graeber likes to recount how one tribe he came across was all hippie dippie loosey goosey communal anarchist in the summer, but went for hierarchical fascism with lockstep minions in the winter (I paraphrase). Phase changes: a single substance will have gas, liquid and solid phases, quite different. Now multiply by a lot of substances and divide by 137 (just kidding, I mean 42).

A BFI Event

A PATH-STEM Meetup

(after the C.P. Snow Bridge)

Today was a special event in the BFI (bfi.org) network, as we gathered around the figurative campfire to both hear and tell stories. D.W. Jacobs is a playwright but also director, which means he's by definition a skilled acting coach, as what a director does, more than run cameras or wrangle lighting, is give the cast guidance with regard to their roles.

Doug structured our Zoom meetup like a workshop in that everyone was given an opportunity to construct a story, like a fairytale, meaning following a formula but not too mechanically. Keep it from the heart, tell an authentic story of what brings you to this campfire, here in the shadow of one Buckminster Fuller. 

A story has a beginning, middle and end. 

There's an event, a skeletal plot. 

The story itself has mnemonic value in that it self coheres by dint of its own protein-folding chemistry.

That in itself was a great beginning, but Doug backed it up by (a) enforcing a time limit, albeit in a friendly manner and by (b) offering criticisms, as one would after a performance, by an actor on stage, trying out for (auditioning) or maybe learning the nuances of (already cast) an important role.

"I notice you used a whole minute introducing and explaining why you were telling the story, when a context had already been handed to you" (I'm paraphrasing). "That's a great billboard or advertisement for your being about Bucky, but what's the micro event you hope we will remember?" and "Those doing this later are going to benefit from the feedback I'm giving the first few". 

Towards the end, he'd stopped coaching. He figured we'd gotten the exercise by then and everyone said their piece. I was glad to catch Chad's.

Autobiography lends itself to scene construction and plot design so I'd say everyone followed the instruction insofar as they recounted a first person narrative i.e. with one's self the protagonist. I think we all did that.

My story featured Fred Craden, my middle school sociology teacher (amazing, right?) at the Overseas School of Rome, and how he'd had my dad address our class during "what's your parent's job day?" and Dr. Urner, the city planner, unrolled some impressive maps of some city (probably in Libya but I don't remember that detail). 

Dad directed our attention to a color code, a shade of green, appearing all around this city map, although not right in the downtown or CBD (not in this one) and asked if we could decipher the color's meaning. "Parks?" Nope. "Zoos?" Nope. "Golf courses?" Nope. Turns out they were cemeteries. Forehead slap. Of course, those are ubiquitous.

Then, the story goes, Fred Craden and fellow teachers all came back from some off-camera event, and were jabbering excitedly in some cultish jargon, about how squares were unstable and tetrahedra were where it's at. 

I only figured out later what had happened: they'd been to some Bucky talk obviously. I still haven't figured out which one exactly. Late 1960s or very early 1970s -- by 1972 we'd left Rome behind and were in the Philippines, where Bucky would also appear (I'd only find out later).

My other story (these were short): when Doug and I first met, and he was doing the play in Portland, in 2008, the Scrooge play (Christmas Story) had to closed, for election day. They wouldn't sell nearly enough tickets to make it profitable, with everyone home glued to the TV, watching Obama's triumph. 

But Doug's play was in "the crypt" in the Portland Armory (by now remodeled into theaters), and the company hatched a brilliant plan: entice engineers and their families from the IEEE mailing list, give them a special free lecture, before the play, by Kirby Urner. Just in general be solicitous and kowtowing. 

It worked: the place was packed, and during half times we could double check how the election was going. A fun evening. I enjoyed the play too.

OK, then Doug did something brilliant (again).

He asked us to speak up if anything in another's story had in turn sparked our storytelling impulses. Like when that one guy talked about Barbara Marx Hubbard as inspirational, I was taken back, in my thinking, to dad's volunteering for her campaign. I got to join him, in her house, and hear her speak.

She was running for Vice President, as a free standing candidate available to whatever president would have her. I think she was hoping John Glenn given they were both spacey space buffs. 

In going around the figurative Zoom room, it become clear that our stories were branching and interweaving and in no time, it seems, would encompass the world. A collective "scenarios basket" would be hugely encompassing, in any case, not that we had time to weave it then. Doug still had his main presentation to give.

Another of the guys present (Bonnie was there too -- not all the guys were guys) was in fact a descendent of a Great Pirate, literally. Bucky's prose poetry was redolent with pirate imagery, in connection with his maritime-anchored historical narrative, stretching back to Venetian times and before. 

I mention Venetian in part to justify including my AI graphic above, from my Project Renaissance collection.

Urner Connects

The Apprentice (movie review)

Just to set the stage, I took the bus (one transfer) on a beautiful fall day, to a 1 pm matinee at Eastport Plaza, out on SE 82nd, a major thoroughfare and home to big Asian supermarkets. Such a store was my first destination: Hong Phat, a remodeled WalMart, to eat some no-frills salad rolls and a little sushi, while chatting with my distant daughter on the iPhone.

I texted some other friends on the way, as bus riding is conducive to phone chatting. My peer group is quite anti Trump and they worried this was maybe a propaganda movie. 

So what if it was, right? I'm a big consumer of propaganda, a primary or raw material for the kind of anthropology I'm into. I study cults, left and right. Plus I'm in one, one could say, producing propaganda of my own (or call it advertising).

But it wasn't really a propaganda film, or at least not of the shallow type, all hype and puffery. I already knew from the NPR interview with the director that I caught in the car, coming back from the Seattle area recently, that this would be an empathetic view without constituting an endorsement. I would assess the film will have approximately zero impact on the final outcome of the 2024 presidential race. Most people will catch it later.

Dr. D. (PhD) joined me, arriving by EV, just as the previews got going. The smallish theater had only two others besides ourselves. This 1 pm matinee was the latest showtime available, on a Sunday anyway.

These were lounge style seats. I don't usually make it to this particular theater and didn't figure out how to operate the recliner controls until after the movie was over, although the seat did seem to kick back a bit on its own (I must've rubbed up against the button).

Anyway, those details out of the way, what was this? 

A fictionalized not-documentary that reminds us of the timeline. When Donald was doing this, Nixon was doing that. When DT was onto building Trump Tower, we were up to Mayor Koch already. 

Mayor Koch... so I would've been in Jersey City, close to penniless, a Catholic school teacher, but writing to Koch anyway (not that often), about various city plans I had: train to plane; high def illuminated billboard near Journal Square; IMAX in the Stanley; something about navy submarines (for tourists).

But I had no Roy Cohn to take me under his wing. I had Ray and Bonnie Simon, who took me under theirs, and I learned a lot from them, not to mention a small income for taking care of their baby daughter. Ray and Bonnie both had work in the Big Apple. We'd sit around their living room table after hours, getting deep in to philosophy and pop culture. 

Ray and Bonnie were both closer to the show biz world and that whole chapter in my life was about tuning in show business (its centrality).

Then, after Trump Tower, came the Atlantic City chapter, and then Trump buys Mar-a-lago, and the movie draws to a close. He's still married to Ivana. His mentor Roy has died. The Art of the Deal, the book, is just getting underway. 

No Miss Universe, no Apprentice on TV, no running for president, except for foreshadowing. It's all about his family matrix (mom and dad, brother Frank) right when he's becoming a "self made" man. It's a coming of age story.

I found the Roy Cohn character captivating, a star performance, which in the movie, Trump did too (he found Roy fascinating). 

So as the director says: it's a movie with empathy for its protagonist. The camera rarely gets far from the Donald. We're always finding stuff out when he does. The camera never drifts off to follow others, making us privy to what they're saying about Trump behind his back. We simply don't go behind Trump's back. He's the center around which the world turns, an entirely valid point of view obviously, for either a novel or a fictional film.

The Trump character doesn't seem that much like him at first, but it's a good performance and he seems to gradually adopt the mannerisms, gestures and phraseology we've come to expect. I don't have any strong issue with anyone's acting. Or the directing. The script paints in broad, bold brush strokes, serving a didactic function, educating its audience about the thermodynamics of it all.

Roy is tough, a "killer" (he doesn't shoot anyone), some say vicious, but the movie wants to humanize him as well, and in my book succeeds. 

He considers himself a true American patriot, and regards his winning the death penalty for the Rosenbergs one of his greatest achievements. He admires Trump because he's a privileged golden boy aristocrat who has chosen an uphill battle. Roy perceives that Trump needs a true bully in his corner, to fight the bullies. His friendship is authentic, but becomes strained in the end. 

Whatever the real Roy was like, this one was believable, and consistently rendered. Bravo.

The last time I was at this theater, I forget which movie, I emerged to find then president Trump had approved the martyring of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, thereby adding to the lawless mayhem that is otherwise described as the rules based order. 

Friends (Quakers) don't celebrate outward violence, nor do I recall a lot of flag-waving at the time. More just worry and concern. Portland is not as into Murder Inc. as some cities I could name. Trump had by then become another swamp creature, a kind of political dinosaur, a living fossil. We still have quite a few of those around, still thrashing about, making waves while going under.

Trucking Algorithms

I don't think long haul truckers have much to fear from AI in the short term, in terms of job loss. However that doesn't mean that lifestyle is immune from overhaul in other dimensions. 

EV trucking might be a thing (Tesla testing) but probably only if cabs decouple from payloads more, i.e. it's super easy to drop a trailer and head to charging, while another cab takes the payload onward with very little downtime. 

Cabs queue and charge at a slower rate but there's always enough of them.

Trucking companies might choose a "driver stays with the payload" policy and have the driver hop from cab to cab, or the driver could stay with the cab and get hitched to different trailers going from A to B all day, not much rhyme or reason from the driver viewpoint but expertly routed by Mother (the company computers).

DS US

US track, Data Science

Tonight I was engaged in torch passing. No, not PyTorch (you know of it?) but moving in that direction. I told my students they were on like the Trans-Siberian railroad, from London to Beijing. I would be their tour guide from London to Berlin. Then I’d hand them off to a next instructor. They’re wending their way towards ML (Machine Learning) the domain of PyTorch, although from the slides I see it’s TensorFlow they get into, which makes sense too. Keras…

The part of the ML pipeline I have them look at is analogous to what I did in outcomes research, when David Lansky and company (MDRC to be precise) were harvesting data from heart procedures, diagnostic and interventional, and getting it statistically analyzed. David and Gary knew statistics. I was the computer guy who knew how to harvest on the front end, design a GUI for data entry and cleaning, while feeding a growing repository on the backend, what would, over time, become Big Data — provided PATS could handle the load.

Harvesting, merging and cleaning data: that was my bread and butter in that this hospital system became my biggest client. That I wasn’t an employee was to their advantage but also put limits on how long this particular configuration could last. Microsoft would end up pulling the plug on Visual FoxPro in 2015. Bigger players would be moving in, replacing my applications. We managed to launch a few careers. Outcomes research took off.

Merging is often overlooked but that’s where pandas in a Jupyter Notebook may prove its metal, pure gold for some company. Do you know about pandas? That’s like Excel in terms of providing tabular frameworks. Tabular data has to be as old as data gets. Rows and columns. Arrays. In the Python world, we have a stack for that, a suite of 3rd party packages. Download and import and you’re in business.

I’d get data from here and there (scannable forms played a role — forms I got to design) and it all needed to get neatly shuffled and interpolated, and placed in relational tables. You only want a specific patient detailed once, but then with multiple episodes, admits and discharges, with procedures in between. That’s one to many. 

Every patient has their own arteries (one to many), but they each have the same coronary suite, so many to one. Which of these arteries have become occluded if any? What cath and what stent were used, or was this a graft, a bypass? 

I had CLAIR for the cath labs and CORIS for the ORs. The doctor practice supporting my efforts, in addition to the hospital system itself, thought my applications were prototypical enough to be worth sharing with bigger companies. "See this stuff Kirby is doing? That's what we need. Why not learn something?" They learned, to a degree anyway. I was in a position to assess.

But I wasn’t using pandas or Jupyter Notebooks or any of that stuff back then. We were a Microsoft shop and I was using FoxPro for the intermediary holding tanks and the GUI. 

I’d learned to parse through cath lab text files coming from time-stamped chronologs made by Quintons, the cath lab machines, where techs chronicled all the details of a procedure. Patient goes under, doctor arrives… procedure over, another success (the success rate was high). Parse the logs, populate tables, let a data pro audit and revise.

Another workflow that gets overlooked, in addition to merging, is anonymizing. Creating these amazing data sets is only allowed if there’s HIPAA compliance. 

We were eager to amass heart procedure and long term outcomes data and to pool it with other hospitals, but not in such a way as to violate confidentiality in medical record keeping. 

My institution (a client) was pretty meticulous along those lines and a big part of my job was to help my coworkers keep all the sensitive identifying fields behind a security wall within the hospital. We suffered no data breaches on my watch, that I know of.

I make it sound like I was doing all this by myself, however the final repository of all this data was PATS, owned by a different company. Once the data my systems harvested was merged and cleaned through my FoxPro GUIs, it got batch imported into PATS, by people trained in that work especially, along with their other tasks.

As I was telling students tonight over Zoom, I had a long career before Python popped up on my radar and even then, it wasn’t as a replacement for the FoxPro applications development toolset. All seems more clear with hindsight.

What drew me to Python was computer graphics and my curriculum development work, more an outgrowth of the McGraw-Hill chapter, which had come before my moving back to Portland and diving in with the FoxPro. 

Graphics and animation. VPython. Hypertoons. 

But then I could backfill by leveraging the data science work just described, and become a guru of data pipelining the way that’s taught now. FoxPro was very SQL-savvy. Learning the Python DB API was not that big a deal. I could use SQL for my Polyhedrons.

Sculpting with Marble

 

Indian Gaming

Prompt: 

A Quaker who looks like the Quaker Oats guy is strolling through a huge room where native Americans in traditional dress are hunched over gaming consoles in an Indian Gaming context. Casino decor. War room. Psyops? Troll farm? Kind of mysterious.

X-REF:

Touring Facilities

Let Us Debate

Posting to the Facebook Epistemology group:

It’s not “factually true” in any epistemological sense that political ideologies span a one dimensional spectrum from far right to far left.

 
These directions (relative to whom?) are arbitrary to begin with, and come with a built in bias. “Right” also means “correct” whereas “Left” inherits the historical stigma of “sinister”, from the Latin “sinistra”. So there’s a thumb on the scale right from the outset. Bad design from the get go.

Tangential aside: It’s like “positive” and “negative” in mathematics, hardly neutral terms. Only the positive three vectors in the XYZ system get to be “basis vectors” whereas the negatives are always secondary, even if you can’t tell them apart in terms of the work that they do.

Biased labeling aside, the idea that a simple linear spectrum is adequate for modeling political ideologies should be met with well-founded suspicion, especially in this golden age of data science (apparently). Who knew statistics would be overnight transformed into the sexiest of professions by the brilliant success machine learning?

In data science we have something called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) which adjudges, by mathematical techniques, what we might call the “rgb colors” or “fundamental properties” of any space. To each component corresponds a dimension, in some n-dimensional Hilbert Space.

PCA involves not necessarily knowing in advance how many dimensions we might really need. To specify in advance: only one dimension, is to prevent the PCA algorithm from optimizing.

 
In other words, “left versus right” is not only poor terminology (because biased), it’s bad science (data science). Too few dimensions to not a cogent model make. Even astrology had more dimensions, not forgetting the superseding Myers-Briggs.

And yet political scientists put up with it, do not fight back. That’s akin to the situation in anthropology, where the pros know we don’t have “five races of man” (black, white, red, yellow, brown), that’s so much bogus BS, and yet corporate sponsored pop culture is allowed to stay uncorrected. A great dumbing down is allowed to persist.

So what’s my ultimate conclusion, in light of this rant?

 
Resolved: that English, without major modifications, is a garbage language, not suited to logical or rational thought. Let’s debate.

So many of core English concepts are so obviously poorly conceived and corrupt (computer science: buggy). Should “good philosophy in English” be considered an oxymoron then?

 
I wouldn’t go that far. I think English in the right hands is still capable, as a language.

 
But by default, English left to its own devices, is not suitable for scientific communications. That’s why education in professional grade English is so important, right?

Looking Back

A popular exercise in high school history could be to have students write a narrative they imagine in a future history book, about the recent past. Try to emulate the style of academic writing to some extent, but with an audience of people at their same reading level, which is high school to adult.

But of course that’s a broad assignment, which is part of the challenge. How does one pitch it at the right level of overview. The main thing is to emulate hindsight and tell the story differently, to signify the future perspective. What does the current time look like, from after the Singularity? We’re writing science fiction in that case. Martian Math.

Drawing from my own recent corpus and generating from that, a lot of us geeks were turned on by the global electrification trend, which president Johnson made his name in connection with, being a point man when it came to electrifying Texas, still with its own grid. We picked up on the HVDC trend and bought into the World Game plan to link up the hemispheres. On the other hand, a slower business-minded mindset could not conceive of such infrastructure minus its own ownership and control of it, and these delinquents sidetracked the project in order to prove who was calling the shots.

Something about “taking credit” is amiss in today’s cybersphere, where a lot of the content creeping in is recycled bot talk, but not flagged as such. Teen zeens, fan literature, vehicles for advertising, have found ways to amp up content using only half human-authored texts. Text generators abetted by editors, allowed to editorialize, compete with naked thinkers to using AI. The more phony stuff tends to come with telltale signs if one knows what to look for.

Martian Math opted for hydropower in conjoining the physics of power generation with synergetic volumetric accounting, a minor wrinkle, experimental, and a door-opener for curriculum developers, as now we’d have a stronger geometric vocabulary and concept set. Students from our academies would rocket ahead, not being burdened with the kinds of ethnocentrism that lead others to spin out of control, sometimes right out of the gate.

Am I a Racist? (movie review)

As y'all might know, I'm a YouTube junkie. I've got it playing from when I feed the dog breakfast, before sunup, until sundown, off and on. 

And as YouTubers know, to tug on a video is to yank on a long chain of recommendations. "If you liked that one, what about this one?" And so on. I don't resent said algorithms; I use them as mirrors. I'm able to see how my interests change over time.

Anyway, a lot of my peeps have started reviewing that Matt Walsh movie, which broadcasts from the right on the political spectrum, which in snapshot, in today's lingo, means it's prone to pick on a lot of the more juvenile elements within the professoriate (e.g. the ones who haven't gone back, in later life, for those high school refresher courses per my School of Tomorrow).

The meme of "race" (not genetically based really, and yes, we all have a skin color, what's your rgb?) still besets American discourse, whereas most of the time what they really want to talk about is "ethnicity" but that word is hardly made available to them, given the weakness of the anthropology department. 

Teasing apart "race" from "ethnicity" is more where my training would go. There's not color blindness, but there might be some acknowledgment that "race" is more important in apartheid cultures than others.

I prefer the word "apartheid" to "systemic racism" and think it's useful, even essential, to speak freely about the US apartheid system that we succeeded in stamping out for the most part, starting with the anti-slavery movement and leading through a civil war to the civil rights movement.  People are still working hard on their phobias. Islamophobia and Russophobia are still prevalent as mental illnesses.

Those human rights gains were all hard won and we should thank our lucky stars we're not in the pit of hell like Israel is, for choosing apartheid as its moral compass (nothing to do with Judaism in my view, which is here to stay, by continuing to morph, as they all do, these world religions). Too bad women never got an Equal Rights Amendment though. Patriarchy triumphed, at least in the lagging political sphere.

Anthropology, the discipline, always had a hard time escaping ethnocentrism, but it least it had a name for it, and could therefore set up a program whereby individual students of anthropology could start to deprogram, to whatever extent they wished or could. 

Deprogramming means discovering one's own birth culture to be sufficiently alien as to no longer come across as the one obvious choice, even for oneself or one's family, going forward. Roll your own, from the wealth of great lineages made available.

You have to work on transcending your own ethnicity to have empathy and understanding of the others, and that work eventually becomes more about solo psycho-philosophy or "soulmaking" in the James Hillman tradition. You don't necessarily die with the ethnicity you're born with. That's partly what makes it less attractive to bureaucrats, who want to check a box that never changes.

The racists, on the other hand, that dwindling number who actually still believe the pseudo-science, find it convenient to corner a market they call "whites" (scoff scoff), who have no choice but to need endless deprogramming, given how deeply programmed (so-called "privileged") these buggy bots have become. 

"Ethnic whites" (invented for the purposes of this blog post) delude themselves into thinking it's all about them and their racist identity (ethnicity), and then they're supposed to suffer guilt about that, followed by transformative rebirth. As an ethnic Asian (self identified), I consider such "whiteness" rather callow and I'm glad to not be an ethnic white in that sense, although I won't deny my skin has a pale rgb value.

DEI trainers are or were a type of deprogrammer. 

Matt goes undercover, in the manner of a Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) to infiltrate the DEI trainer universe, and mock it thoroughly. 

He concludes with his own over-the-top version of a training, which likely DiAngelo would call "weird", just as was her own lucrative interaction with the guy pretty "weird" (the $30 race reparations incident).

I'm on board with mockumentaries as a genre, however if I wanted to mock racism (and I do), I'd take a different tack. I'd bring up all those websites about Noah and his spreading family after the flood, and how encoded the racial talk becomes in Bible studies.

These different races really became more pronounced after the Tower of Babel incident though (we're still in Genesis here), when a lack of mutual understanding proved a godsend: peeps were no longer working lockstep on a fruitless, morally bankrupt project to "reach god" through the vertical dimension (the so-called 3rd dimension, i.e. depth). 

Humans have continued confusing themselves with the word "dimension" ever since.

God loves His little morons though, and wanted them to survive, and so confused their tongues this time (vs sending a flood). That started a clumping process whereby humans distilled into the five races we have today: black, white, red, yellow and brown. Everyone else is a mixture of these five. 

That's in the sapien branch of the hominid family. The Neanderthal and Denisovans were presumably racialized in different ways (we don't have all the data yet -- I'm looking forward to the AI art).

Perhaps I just don't sound mocking enough? 

The literal Genesis story has been a dead horse for centuries, such that its skeleton was long ago back to sand. Only the symbolic meanings, as hinted at above, have any ongoing ethical or aesthetic value. 

If we want literal history regarding a Great Flood, we should study Ballard et al and steer clear of theologically-minded spin doctors such as myself. 

I'm interested in the dharmas, but when I want science, the Bible is not the first book I think of.

Another Journal Entry

I was sorry to learn of Lowen's passing; this was the first I'd heard. Now I see the announcement in the newsletter.

I've been somewhat peripheral to the life of the Meeting, as was driven home today during Peace and Justice committee meeting, in which I felt clueless about much of what was talked about. 

Which didn't keep me from opening my fat mouth a few times (I tried out another joke: one thumbs up one down). The joke: my pronouns are in the possessive tense: his and theirs. Hah hah?

Joking aside, the most insidious of all pronouns is "we" but people rarely talk about that one, especially "we white people" (guffaw... barf). What "we" whiteman, right?

Kepper, Lowen's partner, made a telling point when talking about filling out Lowen's death certificate info and having to specify race. The clerk just assumed "white" but Kepper added "he wasn't white until his twenties" which of course the clerk couldn't process. 

What she meant was: Lowen was born into the Jewish tradition and wasn't allowed even to caddy golf games except in Jewish clubs. The country club WASPs were that anti-semitic, even that recently. A good reminder.

Did we want an anti-racist trainer to come into the Meeting and catalyze a transformative experience for the attenders present? Friends have fallen a long way away from being leaders in the anti-racism campaign I gather. Now they need help, like any corporation (we are a corporation, not for profit). Color us IBM? 

I'm saddened to see booji well-off people spending money on themselves to deprogram. Yes, racism is insidious. But isn't our faith and practice all about self deprogramming, to make more room for God's will (to use the archaic language)? Sad that we have so little faith in our faith that we need to heavily rely on outsiders, is how I was taking it.

Speaking of my take on racism (old hat by now, with so much already here in my journals), here's the gist of my view, that a racist is someone who believes in races:

An Apple Story

Did I mention my Mac Pro died? I was typing mid-sentence when the whole computer froze, nothing I could do but hard reboot, at which point it went to a rectangular icon, not the Apple, and told me to contact Apple support. 

I tried the recovery utility options, downloading a RAM boot drive. It saw nothing to fix, meaning no storage. I was looking at a total loss of access, with no viable boot process. 

I was pretty demur (that word is going around) about it, not nonplussed, calm. 

After all, I was on a beautiful Oregon farm in a luxury trailer with a loyal and happy dog. I was learning tractor skills. 

And back home in Portland, I had the external drive TimeMachine on my desk. I didn't think it would help at all with the dead Mac, but if/when I got a new one, I'd have access to the old files. I was proud of myself for taking it in stride, although I did reach out to friends and family with snippets of what was happening.

One of the more positive results, and I need to tell Terry about this at the Equinox gathering, since he gave it to me, was the Apple iPad turned out to be more capable than I'd thought. No, I wouldn't use it to do my Python work, but in terms of telecommunications and staying organized, it held up under pressure. My skills improved. 

Secret: when the GUI seems bonkers, rotate the screen 90 degrees as in "long tall mode" the GUI improves, even if the keyboard is then at the wrong angle (relatively).

Once back in Portland, I resolved I'd need to visit the Apple Genius Bar downtown and get a read on whether the Mac was repairable. But I took my time, pondering my options. What if I could get by without a powerful Mac. I have older computers, including an older slow joe Mac Pro. I wouldn't wanna teach my Python classes on the slow ones, but what if I wasn't gonna be teaching any Python classes soon?

That was the question: was the course in question (Python + Data Analysis + Data Visualization), for Clarusway, still a go? We hadn't touched base in awhile. 

From the beginning, it was considered contingent, based on getting the peeps, the students. 

I have the workflow sketched out in a generic fashion in my Code School Blueprints album, developed after some years working for a startup code school (within a bigger company). I'll embed those slides here, why not?  

Faculty hangs out in a holding pattern, learning new skills, prepping, until a course is chartered (like a charter flight, instructor = pilot). I'm in a holding pattern with respect to that particular course, while working on other projects.

I've nudged the company with some queries and will likely hear back shortly, but then this happened: the dead Mac Pro sprang to life. 

I'd plugged it in upstairs, in my office (a real office, declared on taxes some years, not a bedroom, except for the snake), and walked away, knowing it'd get as far as the "contact Apple support" screen. 

I didn't check on it for at least two days. 

But then it was time to feed Barry (the python) a mouse, so I walked to and from Tropical Hut on Divsion, across Chavez, around noon, and at some point decided to hit the spacebar. The Mac sprang to life, at the usual login screen. It had booted! It lived!

The first thing I did was do another TimeMachine backup as the best I had was not entirely up to date. 

Ever since, I've been enjoying poking around in familiar territory, my working environment for the last two to three years. I feel like I'm reunited with a country I'd steeled myself to maybe never see again. She's been working ever since. 

I'm hoping she won't go into a coma again, of course. Probably next time I visit that farm, I'll leave her here and just use the iPad. It does Zoom. I still had my meetups. Coding in Python can wait, when tractors become the priority.

Soap Opera Summary (satire)

The news says NATO is about to give itself permission to amp up its invasion of the Russian homeland. The idea is to keep Ukraine out of NATO on technicalities but “for all intents and purposes” to use it as a military base, as had been happening under President Blinken and Vice President Nuland for some time now. 

Wait, did I get the narrative wrong? Anyway, it’s time for NATO to get the show on the road.

Back in knee jerk legacy media land, there’s probably some sense that people are following the action and are ready to jump into their roles as nationalist loyalist troopers, happy to march march march like the old people tell ‘em is necessary. 

The NATO geezers expect the allegiance of a younger generation not necessarily cut out to play hero in such a tawdry low class drama. Who wants to die for the knuckle draggers? “Why let those dinos live through me?” your average coder is thinking. “They don’t even know Python, most of ‘em (OK, Ada maybe).”

I can’t think of anything more uncool than living in Virginia with parents slaved to Beltway Mafia politics. What an ugly childhood for so many. Shades of Laurel Canyon right? It’s the kids of privilege, like Washington and Jefferson, who are more likely to rebel against the parent company (East India in their case). The Doors.

The frenzied media, MSNBC especially, need to do way more to whip up Russophobia (aka dementia russogenica). Rachel Maddow, help us out here. The needle hasn’t really budged in a while, as attention turns to the “states are no solution” drama in the so-called “Middle East” (snicker). Is it time for another novychok bedtime story? What airplane is parked next to what airplane?

President Blinken needs to deliver some great oratory, before people forget the plot again. Help us remember how democracy is at stake. Tell us how authoritarians will never get a toehold in the USA at least. These people are just not psychologically ready yet. Not for Mafia brand theater. More snake oil kool-aid is needed. Pass the numbskull sauce.

Let me help y’all out. Um.. um.. “My fellow Americans…”. Something like that. And knock it off with the Zionista thing, that’s too radical for our middle of the roaders (pet lovers, cat ladies) by several orders of magnitude. No one thinks that’s cool anymore. Let the Brits take over that whole show. You know, the guys who started it. Lawrence of Arabia and all that.

America: The Exceptional Nation

Decrying "exceptionalist" as in "spoiled brat" is not the same as claiming someone or something is exceptional. Maybe it is, we don't know yet. Exceptionally bad smelling? Exceptionally expensive? So many dimensions exist.

So for a segment here, if only to be contrarian (we have that right), I would argue for other reasons, let's yak about in what ways "America" (so much to say) is indeed "exceptional" (which it is). 

One thing that's easy to observe is: a lot of the people who came here were underdogs, fighting some establishment back home and ending up with the short end of the stick, as some say. They then had to risk everything to start over here in the New World. And once they got here, they wanted one thing: revenge.

A lot of new Americans came here with a chip on their shoulder.

OK, I'm being a little facetious, but America's shores do harbor a lot of ethnicities within which "getting back" at whomever, is high on the agenda. 

Given how America is a mighty place, and its control rooms appear open to anyone able to pay to play, why not seize those amazing military assets and extract from those enemies back home the price they deserve to pay (something high, obviously)? I mean, it's an obvious agenda to pursue.

Examples come piling in: refugee Gulenists wanted by Turkish authorities; refugee Falun Gongists seeking revenge against Xi, Ukes who hate Russkies, Russkies who hate Ukes, back and forth like that a million times. 

They each want to rule the world, or at least get Americans to rally around their cause. Obviously I skipped over more obvious examples. The list goes on and on.

I think in that sense America is indeed exceptional. A huge number of its citizens came here with axes to grind, scores to settle, plans to get even. 

For many, it was a maybe simple story of succeeding at the personal level, in spite of all odds, and having news get back home that so-and-so was no small town idiot after all. These stories are often heartwarming. For others, the story is more civilizational, about "the people" (or "pueblo") more generally.

Critics who want to play counterpoint will insist we remember all the people already here, before the floodgates were opened to colonization, by the invention of mass ocean going vessels. 

The Mayflower was no Carnival cruise ship, we know that, but it was at least a step in that direction. People indulging in "religious convictions" could finally afford to book passage, and not have to help with crewing the ship or memorizing constellations (considered a pagan fixation by many).

True, Turtle Island was already festooned with stellar cultures, spread out and not forced into interpersonal violence on the scale of say Napoleon's people. Europe was far more densely populated, had more lethal weaponry, and exploited horses. The "Indians" had a lot to learn.

Napoleon decided to sell much of America to those Washington, DC people (a revolutionary avantgard), because he needed his troops to stay in the fight for the long haul. He needed to pay their salaries. 

The Louisiana Purchase helped keep his struggling Empire going against England's. Not so long before, the USA had fought the same foe. The USA kept expanding west, fighting over slavery as it did so, with the industrial revolution more on the side of the Quakers in the long run.

Nothing regarding America's exceptional nature, as a platform for diaspora nations to consolidate and pass on culture, is contradicted by its original network nations, going back to Inca, Mayan, and Aztec to name a few -- the people we tend to call "Hispanic" today, for lack of a more intelligent word.

My narrative is more designed to switch attention from "melting pot" shibboleths (which I also use) and point out how "preserving ethnicity" was never an "unAmerican" goal. 

You're allowed to keep practicing those rituals and rites, whatever they may be, and public schooling is not about countermanding your family's values on that score, as long as you don't interfere with the rights of others to perform otherwise, ritualistically and/or costume-wise (cosmetics, jewelry... we don't all share the same tastes, all right?  Welcome to Walmart). 

Explaining my Workflow: from 2D to 3D

:: reintroducing myself on X... ::

:: ... as a political cartoonist ::

Late August Weekend

So what was my weekend like? As you know, I like to study, and that includes adventures into the environment, such as taking Springwater Corridor to Sellwood and over the bicycle bridge to the Sellwood-Tacoma Max station. Ride Orange Line back to OMSI stop, transfer to FX2 to within blocks from home. That's work-study time.

On Sunday it was walk by Terry (ISEPP prez) and a consultant working on finding homes for left behind office furniture and supplies. I gather the John C. Lilly group has moved to other digs. Onward to Stark Street Meetinghouse (formerly ESI, before that Jantzen) where the testimony was about "sangha" (community) -- although no one actually used that Buddhist word (but many were maybe thinking it, given our demographics (I know I was)).

That night I watched Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, believe it or not for the first time, although having seen clips over the years, it felt familiar in places. I'd checked Movie Madness for it before, and imagined it was rented out, not realizing their Kubrick shelf wrapped around and down. I'm illiterate in so many dimensions I've lost count. Talked with fam through Verizon on my iPhone.

At Quakers, I met up with Dr. Carl Abbott over snacks and thanked him for his excellent presentation on Portland history for Humanists of Greater Portland (HGP), to which I'd been party over Zoom (not the first time I'd caught one of his talks). Urban Studies, PSU. I caught up with Leslie, back from California. 

Also, Megge suggested I join up with Peace & Justice (as it's now called -- did I get that right?). Quakers revolve through a finite set of management committees, learning to see a shared business from the inside, from many angles. Good experience building social and supervisory skills.

I'm just hitting some of the highlights. Weekends don't stand out that much at the moment. I do have a work schedule in the queue, with Clarusway again, but that's always contingent on other outcomes, per some cosmic Gantt chart I'm not privy to.

Speaking of Clarusway, this morning (Monday) I posted to edu-sig, a Python org Mailman group of longstanding, regarding digital roots (or "indigs" as some've called them).

Hawthorne Street Fair!  Slides above.

Posting From Cyberia

We'd like to get it to the point where arsonists in their bunkers, trying to start conflagrations, get treated more as psychiatric patients than as so-called "world leaders". This has to do with my Spaceship Earth imagery (inherited) morphing into Global University (GU) imagery, meaning "teaching hospital" and a lot of  psy-stuff. 

Faculty is working on curricula that turn out students with higher quotients in whatever respects higher quotients are needed. Perhaps we're sufficiently intelligent but insufficiently developed in other directions. What's our consistency score? 

Yes, I'm back to trucking and dirty jobs. The path to a PhD is through extensive practice with toolsets and skillsets. The medical doctor shares a lot of these same "I can learn anything" traits, which leads to some percentage crashing their single or even twin engine planes ("Too Gung Ho" on the tombstone).

Think of it though: to swap long haul driving work with a counterpart, to ride as a sidekick, to take in the language and customs and bring that back. Then study more if you want to and join that same fleet as a driver next time, and repeat. 

Airline pilots know what I mean. There's that inner circle that flies in and out of Hong Kong, or Rangoon or whatever (I had a bouncy ride into Rangoon once, as a passenger, on a DC3 or one of those).

The yahoos in their bunkers, trying to start wars, are already in rubber room approximators, so we shift attention to curbing enthusiasm for short term fireworks. Crushing obsolete institutions is actually a more rewarding exercise, and outward war as we know it has been seeing sunset for quite awhile now. 

We still fight psychologically. That's actually a more even playing field, and we can get back to Victorian values like "fairness" as we talk about it in sports. You know: honor. 

Just blasting zoomorphic creatures from an Apache helicopter is better shifted to simulator, to computer game. Acted out, it's schizo nutso, by horror film Poindexters, except not confined to film.

I've always been a fan of the global network at the city mayor level. Mayors meet and discuss issues. I'm told Portland has gotten better an learning from others, versus letting its earlier fame and glory go to its head. Then came a fall. 

But saying the fall of Portland was independent of seismic shifts shaking up the collective psyche more generally would be like wearing blinders, perhaps intentionally (confining attention to the "Markov blanket" is a systems technique). 

Portland might be talking to Shiraz for all I know (I don't claim to be privy to all that mayoral type chatter).

Denizens of Cyberia, enjoying more overview than ever before in history, have an angle on the arsonists now that everything's out in the open. 

Transparency in government was given lip service as an ideal, but now that we approach a bar that leaves behind legacy media, showing it from the back side (in the rear view mirror), the political process snaps into clearer focus. 

Those who would profit from more slaughter on the battlefield are filmed hyping slaughter to their stakeholders, in pure Hunger Games fashion. Doctors without borders see how capitalism can make you cuckoo, in addition to highly paid. 

However shooting mental patients was never considered much of a cure outside of quack circles, wherein the sickly witch hunters seek scapegoats for bounty (or merely mob approval). The first step is to disconnect psychopaths from their agentic dashboards, such as by unplugging the latter.

There's nothing cowardly about not jumping in the cage with the rabid dog and having it out. For what purpose would one do that? 

Let the dog rage at the cage itself, and think about euthanasia as a kind of putting to rest some core concerns, such as where do we have to draw the borders ultimately. Virtual states have boundaries too, if not contiguous.  

The reputed ignorance, of Americans, of political geography, might turn out to be a good thing, as we go soft focus on these older maps. The global university comes with new floorplans.