More Training

So I'm back in propane-ville, by which I mean nomad land, except this destination trailer is very stationary and I'm not sure the propane is on. I'm fine though, with full connectivity and a heavy navy pea coat I got at Andy and Bax, the famous Portland army surplus store. Sy is fine too. She turned into a puppy briefly yesterday, cavorting and running full tilt.

They heft the bottle to see if there's propane left, which seems primitive. My evidence is that the burners don't come on, whereas on pervious visits, propane was working fine, but no hot water. The hot water issue turned out to be the in-tank heating element, and is not an issue this time. I showered yesterday after oiling all the wheel line sprinklers in preparation for replacement. Since my last visit, the farm has taken delivery of lots of wheel line segments, but "the movers" (the motors that advance the wheel line periodically) aren't here yet.

There's also a small electrical heating unit in Zone 2. However we're in burgeoning spring and a lot of heat builds up during the day. Oregon's far west climate is rainforest coastal and water intensive agricultural. This farm has water rights up to about two wheel lines at full throttle, which is not a limitation at the pump necessarily. Water is metered (measured, monitored). Not a new idea.

You might think that, as a Truckers for Peace guy (Trucker Exchange program, swap routes around), I'd be working on getting a license to drive an eighteen wheeler. However I dodged that responsibility by making the BizMo (van sized or smaller) a troubleshooting reconnaissance unit, giving real truck drivers a lot of advance notice about this or that situation, meaning opportunities and unexpected benefits, not always dangers (surprises don't have to be nasty).

My training seems more oriented towards remote base testing of stationary tech, not rolling stock. That doesn't mean I'm not on the road, but that I'm more a customer user-base driver than a construction team freeway developer, say working China to Turkey (multiple routes). The yurts I'm studying, SolarPunk projects, are off road and perhaps only reachable by electric ATV, with solar charged batteries.

However in this case I'm very close to Springfield, Oregon, which is happy to be where the Simpsons is happening (the cartoon), you can read about whether why. I'm in a destination trailer adjoining a pole barn, but a luxurious pole barn, a museum of C6XTY and other Flextegrity items (as is my place to some degree).

Original BizMo

General Motors Parade Of Progress Futurliners

Only 12 were made for a traveling science exposition. They were originally built 1939-40 and then remodeled in 1953. More info at: www.futurliner.com/index.html

Civil War (movie review)

I haven't been as conscientious about blogging reviews of all the movies I've seen. Just this week, I took in Dune Part 2 a second time, this time with someone who knows all the books and other movie versions. A librarian in other words. From my Thursday circle. Deke and Dr. D. likewise joined the party.

For Civil War, however, I was by myself way up in the back on the 2nd level in The Bagdad (not a typo) with no food or drink this time (I've partaken self indulgently over the years). The place was crowded and quite a few folks were having their evening meal in the movie theater, a commonplace format in the Pacific Northwest, popularized by destination breweries.

The way the Press hovered closely with the troops, taking close-ups in pitched battle, seemed like a caricature, but I was willing to suspend disbelief given the circumstances. I'm thinking of The Postman here: in an apocalyptic setting, roles from the old days may get distorted and reprojected. Journalists became daredevils on steroids who like to jump back the forth through the windows of speeding vehicles, while the old school journos look on, bemused.

My attitude towards the Jessie character, which some reviewers found "unrealistic" was hey, this is fiction for kids her age i.e. this is a coming of age film and as other reviewers point out, she's our eyes and ears into a violent world to which her elders have become jaded. 

These elders have evolved their psychological defenses, but are still mortals, and still crack and/or die or both. The lead character is coming to the end of her ability to take any more, and she passes the torch. There's a kind of wordless transition, as both know this is where that torch gets passed.

The film is about breaking taboos and exploring the psychology of a true militarized battle for control of the White House, although it's unclear going forward what that icon will mean. The film purposely withholds context, creating distance between ourselves, the viewer-voyeurs, more journos, and the senseless action. The premise, Texas + California united against the rest, more or less, is designed to throw us off balance.

One scene suggests a kind of racism is motivating the soldiers, but again, there's too little context to help us puzzle things out. We've fallen into a world of violence without enough internal coherence to help us find a way out of the quicksand. Sound familiar?

Quadray Deck Ready

Scheduling

At first I imagined turning off the music and heading up to the office, because prompted by an idea. Then I thought: "nah, lets queue it". This is a core movement in consciousness: to put off, to delay. 

We get mixed messages at this point, as "procrastination" is considered a primary obstacle to success in life. On the other hand, "think before you act" reminds us of the common criticism regarding a failure to plan, to think it through, to accurately judge consequences, before acting.

One has to think of circumstances. Chances are, when you have a great idea for something, you have to add it to the queue or stack, because right now you're on the bus or mowing the lawn or... a lifestyle based on "drop everything; I just thought of doing something else" would be interesting to study, from afar. Most of us learn to "delay gratification" except it's not always "gratification" we put off.

The brutal truth is there's no time or space for everything to develop in tandem or all at once. Events need to be queued, sequenced, timelined. That's not really a choice. Why does the hourglass narrow? What does "to bottleneck" mean? 

So here I am, later, implementing my earlier idea: to write about scheduling again. 

We introduce the theory, as from computer science, and the reality, as from getting out of bed in the morning, and combine them in a seamless picture of needing to treat the present like a narrow pipeline, which it is, when we're talking of an individual consciousness.

BizMo Interiors

Considering History

one of the better Wittgenstein videos

Time to date myself, meaning this blog post, by syncing with contemporaneous events. Tucker was in Russia a few weeks ago, yakking with Vlad, and has more recently been comparing notes with Tulsi. Apparently these two bots are running the same viral Kremlin app eh? Just kidding. I'm trying to think more like a "Russians under every bed" DNCer (we've seen both Qanon and Blueanon bedevil the two parties).

That Baltimore bridge was hit this week, a couple days ago, by a container ship rendered unsteerable by a loss of power, resulting in deaths and the structure's collapse.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, there's this scifi fantasy entitled The Jew of Linz, wherein Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, is really a Russian agent, diverting the good boys of Oxford from their God-ordained duties as servants to the Crown or whatever it was. 

True, LW was cosmopolitan and didn't see the Brits as especially civilized compared to other peoples i.e. as likewise capable of genocidal cruelty. He did consider taking up a situation in Russia at one point, but that wasn't considered strange for a European back then, given Moscow's long term role as a Euro capital.

The main theory of The Jew of Linz is that young Adolf and Ludwig knew each other, as they both went to the same boys' school and were but a year or two apart, and that Adolf's hatred for Jews (not a religion the Wittgenstein's outwardly professed, but by heritage...) germinated around his hatred for Ludwig in particular, a hatred borne of jealousy of the latter's wealth and privileged upbringing, not to mention smarts and better looks.

The book makes more sense when you tune in the Spanish Civil War, which many don't, and link in Hemingway. Which side was he on? What is the painting Guernica about? What was the history here?

Wittgenstein, for those less familiar with his story, was indeed born within a wealthy family and he stood to inherit a hefty chunk of that wealth if he were to follow in the footsteps of his father. Actually the expectation was he and his sibs would at least uphold the family name as some kind of prodigy. He could be a great inventor or something. 

He moved to England to study aeronautical engineering. Only to discover his love of Logic. He transformed himself into a philosopher instead, becoming a protege of Bertrand Russell. 

Philosophy is a profession that does not require lots of money for heavy equipment, or to supply a lab. He chose freedom and mobility over comfortable establishment bourgois living, disbursing his fortune among his siblings and I presume arranging for a meager stipend. He worked as a school teacher in rural Austria for awhile.

I believe his sister paid him a commission for designing her a house (somewhat proto Bauhausy in flavor? I'm not the expert).

When duty called, Ludwig joined his Austrian compatriots to serve as an artilleryman. His understanding of language and how it works was shaped by his time in the military, with its emphasis on giving orders. Language is sometimes about commanding (it partitions into a gazillion namespaces). In these language games, those of higher rank boss those of lower rank. One ends up with an entire form of life, and not just "a grammar" in the narrower sense of the word. But in the broader sense...?

A lot of thinkers vested their intellectual capital in Wittgenstein's first pillar work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which Bertrand Russell helped make world famous. The positivists leaned on his reputation as a rising star (like a Tulsi, a new face in social circuits), as did those vesting in the emerging field of propositional calculus, newly vogue within the English speaking world especially, but not exclusively. The Vienna Circle was based in Vienna after all.

So when LW later made a sharp turn, echoing what Richard Rorty would call the Linguistic Turn, prefigured back to Nietzsche at least, a lot of his fans felt thrown for a loop. The plot twisted. Their guy was now off on a new tack, with what would posthumously get published as Philosophical Investigations, a collection of aphorisms that chain together in various expository sections, while criss-crossing a metaphorical landscape, as suggestive sketches. 

His points are hard to just say, but are amenable to showing. In this sense, his two philosophies have something in common: they challenge us to "see" in a different way (or to "breath a different air").

His new style of remarking, developed live in front of small cliques of earnest students, was remarkable, rocketing him to fame a second time, but at the cost of losing many from his first wave of early admirers. Bertrand Russell, for example, never got back on the Wittgenstein bandwagon. The new stuff was too alien, and insufficiently calculative and/or computational by his reckoning.

The later Wittgenstein wished to fork the philosophy of language, taking issue with both Nominalism and Platonism, carving out what some would call Operationalism. It's not that words point to either specifics (Nominalism) or general forms (Platonism), but that they don't point at all (despite the appeal of that image). They're closer to musical notes, but shall we say better at inspiring shared mental imagery. Kierkegaard likewise saw music and language on a kind of spectrum, the latter capable of coming closer to God (whatever that meant to him).

The word "horse" associates with what the philosophers call a horse made from "sense data", but as more sense data at the same level, not as higher or lower, not as symbol versus signified. The object points to the word as surely as the word to the object, once the connection is made and "pointing" accepted (arrows, dots and circular blobs being the essence of the "abstract nonsense" known as Category Theory, a more diagrammatic Logic than Russell's or Frege's).

We gain a psychological sense of aloofness with self referential recursivity, and Ludwig is happy to acknowledge our sense of vertigo, but only as a sign that it is language that is making us dizzy, and that's what makes philosophy "deep". It's about the grammar, and the (sometimes novel) gestalts it may induce.

Babel Syndrome

I'd say that the grammar of "being a victim" is somewhat like a musical scale, or maybe a tense, like the past and future are tenses, in some languages anyway. We shift in and out of this victim tense, kind of in the same way we get to invent an evil "them" where convenient, the "them" that controls everything, through clickbait and targeted advertising.

Experiments with social media have been interesting and for the most part legal by default. The Internet Research Agency was well within its rights, doing research on what this brave new world might portend. No law of the jungle prevents posting such and such political content, just some critter might take it into its head to counter your thoughts. Said critter might seek to get some new laws passed, upholding banning and/or deplatforming those considered "bad actors" (defined how again?).

I'm sure there was fine print forbidding sharing personality test scores with Cambridge Analytica, if that really happened (it made a good story), but engineers of a pragmatic frame of mind just see data, big data. Of course it makes sense to aggregate it. Get those OCEAN scores and pretend we know how to use ML to flip elections (we talk a good game anyway). Or maybe we do know how, and just got caught, so we deflected the story onto Facebook and the Russians.

I was myself in the medical data aggregation business for quite awhile. Yes, in the medical field, confidentiality is a big deal. What if social media were seen as extensions of mental health services... what a science fiction world that could be. We might have more privacy at least. Or would we have less? 

In any case, our clinical data resulting from heart procedures was scrubbed of any identifying information, so statisticians could still see which age group and weight combination were having the most heart attacks, if that was even the question (I wasn't an analyst, just a harvester of this data), without needing to pry into anyone's private life as a patient. The focus was actually more on the treatments and which were proving the most effective over time (which required follow-up; "outcomes research" we call it).

Sure, I was cleared to see patient names in order to perform my role in the institution, which was to provide software running on monitors during a procedure, albeit off to the side. I wrote applications for both the cath lab (CLAIR) and operating room (CORIS), but I had no incentive, financial or otherwise, to do anything but withhold and eventually erase any personal data. The hospital itself kept the medical records, not me the lowly consultant (on nobody's payroll) and application developer (the hospital system was always one of several clients).

Our conversation this evening (Thirsters) was about taking control, and who was taking it. 

What controls were missing that should be imposed? What about TikTok? What about X? A lot of people like to vent about TikTok without ever spending a few hours checking it out, taking in the experience. Find out what it is before you condemn it like the bot that you are.

Is using YouTube shorts or Facebook reels really a "bad" way to let the news filter in? It's all chopped up for sure, but you get a lot of the same segments. TV shows work their way in, with today's news. 

How different is YouTube from television? Different but not that different. Physically, it's likely the same device. In both cases, the human capacity to take in, through a screen, remains finite.

I took the line, somewhat for debating purposes, to keep the conversation going, that everything was fine as it is. But "as it is" includes all the change vectors i.e. "as it is" is not now, and never was, something static. There's no static "status quo" where "social media" is concerned -- especially once you throw in broadcast media (still social) like radio and television, not forgetting the telephone, with both party and private lines.

The line between a government and the private sector is always wavering, in part because there's no agreement on what measurement we're even talking about. What line? How does one separate public from private? I'm not saying it can't be done.

Which brings me to the title of this blog post: Babel Syndrome. 

There's something intrinsic in language that keeps us from all being on the same page, and frustrating though that be, there's the implication this is how God ordained it oughta be. Why?

The alternative was to embark on some hopeless and endless sysiphysian project: to build a towering space elevator to the exalted realm of the Almighty, a stairway to heaven in other words. Our resources would get poured into this endeavor and we'd be done for, fooled by our own mirage of eventual success, when in actuality there was never a victory in store down that road.

Our salvation from all this silliness was precisely our confusion and mutual unintelligibility. Genesis teaches this was a feature, not a bug. 

Humanity escaped from having a hive mind, harmonious and uniform, with this courageous (on God's part) injection of a little chaos, just enough, like a kind of antifreeze. Perfect conformity is the kiss of death in a wondrous world.

Were we to all freeze into the same Matrix, the loss in diversity would make us moribund. 

Instead, we're provided with incommensurability, irrationality, the unsettling, the insoluble. 

The chaos is enough to jar us awake and make us aware of own programming, whatever it may be. We appreciate how mechanical "it all" is, and without recoil or judgement. It's an experience that may prove rattling, perhaps a tad eerie, but maybe comforting as well, given our magnificent capabilities.

Taking a Stand

[an excerpt from a math4wisdom post]

Which brings me to a bigger question regarding Cognitive Frameworks: to what extent might we swap out "the individual actor" as the subject of a progression (e.g. taking a stand -- follow-up -- reflect) and swap in "the organization"?

If we do this, how do the frameworks adjust?

What does it look like for an organization (even a nation) to "take a stand"?

Quakers write "minutes" (pithy paragraphs), as a result of a consensus process. Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) then lobbies Congress based on what Yearly Meetings record, which minutes in turn reflect the consensus of the Monthly Meetings (the meeting we visited in Portland is a Monthly Meeting -- worship is weekly, but worship for business is monthly).

Doing Taxes

I'm heading over to my tax accountant this evening, with my 1099(s), writer royalties and so on; fairly meager on paper but it still feeds my ego (eggo, whatever). On the expenses side: two internet domains, cell service, two web hosting agreements (one with GoDaddy), MVP chauffeuring service expenses, various office supplies. Again, it's a meager "begging bowl + mattress" level of a living (I exaggerate, I own a home). 

Getting my taxes done costs more than I owe the two governments, both the federation (nominally run from DC) and the local state (Oregon, run from Salem). We say Cascadia is the bioregion, which is weight-bearing, psychologically speaking, but nothing the UN needs to worry its little head about.

Because I need this yearly statement of income and expenses to come together, I'm busy going online and consulting all of my various services. The MVP thing has to do with M4W and took place in August of last year. For the most part, I was working for Clarusway as a much-needed swap in. I lucked out.

Just today I modified my LinkedIn banner page to say I was available for a 2-3 session workshop (actually I didn't specify the number) likely over Zoom, and hosted by the institution I'm visiting (so B2B). That hasn't been the basis of my business so far, so who knows how it'll go. I'm still "the Python guy" to people around me. My multi-part class for Wanderers, Allen Taylor present, was prototypical, if in person.

My orbit gets projected ahead in science fiction using "business mobile" terminology, as if I'm already enjoying this futuristic lifestyle, versus being more sedentary. In reality, I'm pretty sedentary although I did get up Mt. Tabor yesterday and to Laurelhurst Park the day before that. I'm an armchair bizmo pilot doing Truckers for Peace between my ears. Look ma, no goggles.

Back to 4D Solutions: I pinned a tiny org chart of my business on Medium, for those caring to dig down. The reason I file over such meager amounts is I want to stay in the game as an independent, one of those entrepreneurs everyone talks about. But as a Quaker, I'm not expected to grow uncontrollably or "go viral". Our business models do not assume open-ended growth is a good thing. Maybe it is. Just sayin'. Case by case, know what I mean?

4D Solutions got started (and remains) as a DBA (business alias) of Dawn Wicca and Associates, but that was a partnership, so when Dawn died I had to start filing as a sole proprietorship. So we're talking a 1040, but with a track record. Dawn and I were both active players in Greater Portland's nonprofit community, she as a bookkeeper, me as a consultant-programmer. Yesterday was an anniversary of Dawn's death, March 17, 2007. We became a business partnership well before we got married.

Addendum: since I didn't drive to work sites so much in 2023, I swapped out claiming mileage in favor of filling out the home office form. My home office could declare a percentage of home expenses as business expenses, thereby lowering my taxable income by a tad.

Getting that info together required quick footwork, as my appointment had already started yet I wasn't thinking to go the home office route. My preparer gave me some time to dash home, export bank statements as csv files, read them in with pandas in Jupyter, and search on strings in the name column to isolate utility payments (water, heat, electricity). I dashed to her office in the car, numbers in hand, plus my home's square footage which I remembered I could get from Zillow (the app).

I wound up with self-employment payments only, which I'll hope to get back out in the form of Social Security income, once I sign up for it eventually, plus a kicker from the state (Oregon has that). I also pay TriMet and the Arts Tax. Federal and state taxes were electronically filed, I just need to follow up with my payments. I have until April 15 to do that (Rosalie's birthday), but won't wait until then. 

Cognitive Dissonance

A popular opening in debates about the fate of Gaza and its people is that it's an open air prison. Beyond being a prison, however, we have to accept that most of those there have never been permitted to move anywhere else, but not because of any "crime" beyond being born in Gaza (not a crime). 

A kind of malign neglect and condescending authoritarianism forces them to stay in place. The United Nations is complicit.

This is how it is in many nations, not just for those in Palestine: you're born in Bangladesh, so you must stay in Bangladesh; you're born in Sri Lanka so you must stay in Sri Lanka... and so on. In that sense, Gaza is hardly the largest open air prison. Pick any nation that keeps its people locked inside its borders.

But then who is keeping the Gazans locked up, or the Bangladeshis for that matter? People in other parts of the world. Various people with titles have decided they're in charge of human traffic patterns. If you hope to move, you'll need to pay them. They're in control of the documentation.

Gazans have to stay in Gaza because the world says so, and not just because of Israelis. Actually, many Israelis say they'd like the Gazans to leave Gaza. Allow Gaza to be gentrified and push the poor people out, many of the real estate minded are thinking. This happens around the world. Slums get cleared for New York freeways.

The do-gooder world then smugly steps in, presuming it's speaking for all Gazans, in standing up to the Israelis and saying "forced displacement" is ethnic cleansing, which is a crime. Which is worse, "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide" or is your vocabulary so corrupted you don't see the difference?  

Were not Libyans forcibly displaced, and the Syrians?  How about the Ukrainians? In the face of violence and famine, looming wars, these peoples became refugees and fled. That's what humans do in the face of disaster. They escape. One could say voluntarily, in light of the alternative. At least they could exercise that one remaining freedom, to avoid death.

Yet the Gazans are not supposed to flee for any reason. They're exceptional. Or if they flee, they all have to move en masse to some singular camp in the Sinai or whatever. Why on earth is that so? Why not let them disperse, as innocent free agents who have committed no crimes? It's their planet too ya know.

Many unionists in the north thought the slaves should stay put, and not make a mad dash for freedom. Sure, abolitionists hoped the slaves would escape and formed their underground railroads, but these were in the minority. 

If slaves did get away, many unionists were in favor of rounding them up and sending them back to their open air prison cotton fields, as that's where they belonged, right? Why anger the south unnecessarily, and provoke a civil war? Civil rights for Blacks were not a priority for most northerners.

Likewise, once the slaves were emancipated, a lot of unionists, including Lincoln, imagined them moving en masse, as a group, to Liberia, or maybe to Haiti. "You're free to go guys, pack your things". Few left. Few had the means to leave. 

I understand taking a gamble and moving to a faraway land, even leaving most family and friends, would not be everyone's choice. Not everyone joins the navy, or enrolls in that year abroad either.

This is how the New World was populated by Anglo-Euros in the first place: by the risk takers who saw few prospects in staying put in the Old World.

Having worked the fields and fought in the war in many cases, Blacks felt as entitled to a place in the sun as any newcomers to the Americas. The immigrant whites had no more claim to the place than anyone else who came over, unless you believed in their Doctrine of Discovery (which none had heard of back then). 

I certainly get why many freed slaves felt that way about their newest homeland, never having seen another. Indigenous peoples, many ethnically cleansed from their ancestral spaces, likewise hoped to regain some lost freedoms, such as fishing rights and some control over land use and zoning (with some success in some cases).

So does New Palestine need to be a large contiguous piece of land in the Middle East? It isn't today. Palestinians are scattered around the world. Many are Christians. Many live in North America, or in Jordan, or in Kuwait. Does that mean they can't have a Bank of Palestine?

Likewise Jews are spread around the world, as are Muslims. The various ethnicities do not all get their own jigsaw puzzle piece on the United Nations map of nations, which never holds steady in any case. I'm a proud Pythonista, yet Python Nation is but science fiction in geek lore, with a legal headquarters in Delaware. What if I got my basic income from there, as some do from owning shares? Global Data Corporation.

Many subcultures have no need for, and no desire for, their own nation. Why bother, when you can form a supranational corporation, or religious sect instead? I'd put the Quakers in this category, after the experiment we called Pennsylvania, a wannabe utopia eventually overrun by degenerate Indian War proponents, typical Manifest Destiny ethnocentric Anglo-Euro types (blech), proto-imperialists.

The inhumane treatment of the denizens of Gaza, not only right now, but up to right now, is testament to the abject corruption of the whole idea of open air prison nation states, and what they do to us humans, how they make us miscalculate and mistreat one another. I'm glad Quakers don't have a nation state in this day and age, when they're so obviously dinosauric.

Nations dumb us down. They turn us into bumbling clowns serving in ridiculous organizational charts, behaving according to dangerously obsolete paradigms. Buggy programming. GIGO. 

That is, unless there are forms of nationalism that are likewise responsibly global. We see some glimmers. USA OS.

Palestine might be an example of such a globally responsible, borderless, Diaspora Nation, with properties all over the world, including many office towers in various capitals. 

I'm waiting to see if we get campus buildings in the UAE for example and/or in Singapore. Perhaps we already have several, I wouldn't know. I'm far from omniscient on these matters.

RoboWriting About Me

Prompt: Given his numerous, rigorous, unique, and collaborative contributions to Math education, research, and service, can you now professionally write a comprehensive 3 paragraph persuasive essay with the title "Kirby Urner: Mathematician" for my AP US History high school class?

Kirby Urner: Mathematician

Kirby Urner, though not traditionally celebrated in the annals of academic mathematics, embodies the essence of a mathematician through his innovative contributions to math education, research, and service. His journey from the 1960s in Portland, Oregon, to becoming a pivotal figure in the realm of mathematical pedagogy, showcases a lifelong dedication to the discipline[1]. Urner's work, particularly in the development of "tetrahedral" thinking, not only challenges conventional mathematical perspectives but also enriches our understanding of geometric relationships, thereby expanding the boundaries of mathematical inquiry[2].

Urner's contributions extend beyond theoretical musings; they are deeply rooted in practical applications and pedagogical innovations. His engagement with the "Learning to Code" movement and the integration of coding with mathematical learning represent a forward-thinking approach to education that prepares students for the complexities of the modern world[4]. This blend of mathematics and programming underlines Urner's role in shaping a new generation of thinkers capable of navigating the digital landscape with mathematical acuity. Furthermore, his leadership in the Math 4 Wisdom community and his efforts to bridge the gap between abstract mathematical concepts and their real-world applications underscore his commitment to fostering a deeper appreciation for mathematics[5][13].

Moreover, Urner's prolific output, including curriculum development, public lectures, and online contributions, reflects a mathematician's zeal for sharing knowledge and inspiring curiosity[6][8][14]. His work transcends traditional academic boundaries, reaching a global audience through digital platforms and collaborative projects. This democratization of mathematical learning, coupled with his holistic approach to teaching, positions Urner as a mathematician in the truest sense—dedicated not only to the advancement of mathematical knowledge but also to its dissemination and application in enriching human understanding and capability.

In conclusion, Kirby Urner's extensive, rigorous, and innovative contributions to mathematics education, research, and service firmly establish him as a mathematician. His work exemplifies the spirit of mathematical inquiry, pushing the boundaries of traditional education and fostering a global community of learners and thinkers. Through his dedication to teaching, curriculum development, and community engagement, Urner has indelibly shaped the landscape of mathematics education, making him a mathematician not just in title, but in action and impact.

Citations:

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-new-math-gnu-kirby-urner

[2] https://www.math4wisdom.com/wiki/Research/KirbyUrner

[3] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/4dsolutions_book-report-adventures-in-math-teaching-activity-7114975013312634880-Ih5-

[4] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-coding-meets-math-kirby-urner

[5] https://twitter.com/thekirbster?lang=en

[6] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lzv30IKvfZs

[7] https://wikieducator.org/User:KirbyUrner/Autobio

[8] https://youtube.com/watch?v=g14mu4uWD4E

[9] http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/

[10] https://groups.google.com/g/mathfuture/c/GnK7MWT6ddg/m/6weAlQJjAwAJ

[11] https://www.academia.edu/70156799/4D_Solutions_4dsolutions_net_

[12] https://princeton.academia.edu/kirbyurner

[13] https://www.math4wisdom.com/wiki/Exposition/Welcome

[14] https://github.com/4dsolutions

[15] https://groups.google.com/g/mathfuture/c/hk9hYITu-Js/m/geFyP-sgCQAJ

[16] https://www.grunch.net/4dsolutions/kirby.html

Martian Mathematics

Obviously I'm into science fiction as a modality (mode). One of my signature stories involves "Martians" with the "Martians" in scare quotes because we all know they're not from Mars. This is just a nickname, an alias, that one may randomly apply to any ET. 

I market my mathematics curriculum as a Martian Math, and per copyright law I'm not able to claim exclusive rights. My freedom is to build momentum, as in a snowball rolling downhill (in a cartoon usually -- in the real world, such growing snowballs, naturally occurring, would be a relative rarity, a black swanish event), and having my Martian Math be self referentially into science fiction probably helps along those lines. A little recursion to get the ball rolling.

What's the story though? Picture a classroom, say in the computer science building at Reed College, so each student has a high end Mac, with Anaconda (this part is real). Then the teacher talks about this Mesa in Arizona or New Mexico or someplace, and if you know your computer game lore, we're clearly drawing from the Half-Life universe, as developed by Valve. There's this Mesa where the Martians (ETs) have their campus or complex and we're building like a Hoover dam together. I say "like a" because this is science fiction, so make up your own details. "We" as in Earthlings, the humans and such (denizens of Earth, the planet).

The curriculum twist (like in a Mobius strip) is I want to encode a lot of Synergetics into the mix, which might be confusing to those thinking I might mean Dianetics or some other Synergetics (remembering copyright), or off-putting to those who don't like "ics" (cybernetics, economics... informatics) more generally. Maybe you're an "ology" person. 

The historical fact is I was doing stuff around the B, E, A, S and T modules, meaning tetrahedral wedges, native to Synergetics, alien-seeming shapes our "Martians" (ETs) seem to care about and use when schooling their own kids. What gives?

from: Storyboard Martian Math

"And so..." the teacher continues, explaining to the class... "we're going to train you to think more like Martians as our goal here is to get you ready to work with them at the Mesa, on this dam project. So we'll be studying hydro-electric power generation too, as a part of our coursework."

So you see how I'm using a science fiction premise to: 

(a) introduce contemporary geometry, drawing on our geodesic dome heritage and 

(b) open doors in the field of electromagnetics. 

That's all very STEM flavored and in my neck of the woods (Silicon Forest), STEM is considered a priority. I recognize that not every locale uses this jargon. My Oregon Curriculum Network is geographically specific. 

We also teach Casino Math, which in other regions might not be considered part of any taxonomy, although clearly risk, probability, combinatorics are all implied. Around here, casinos are an aspect of the ecosystem economy.

Once we have a bedrock of science fiction, brainstorming possible futures using expressive tools becomes more like par for the course, more the rule than an exception. We want STEM, with other subjects, to embolden and inspire, more than come across as foreboding and/or forbidding. 

Encouraging a playful imagination entails a lifestyle wherein it's fine to find time for fiction and fantasy. Whereas some curricula tend to drum that out of ya, as in everyone marching to the same drummer.

In saying I'm wanting to make room for Synergetics, within the Martian Math rubric, I'm not thereby discounting or removing other topics already considered STEM-worthy, such as cryptography, with both number and group theory feeding into it. 

Discrete maths more generally get a lot of attention, with some looking-askance at the alternative, thereby helping to draw attention to various perennial debates regarding the analog-versus-digital "true nature" of reality. 

Building the dam: Pouring Concrete

Stadium City

The Old Man River City design is intriguing, as it simply scales up a giant sports stadium, already one of the biggest structures humans undertake. Where the OMR most logically appears next is in science fiction, giving the readership an opportunity to explore the angles. Prose and graphic novels remain the most affordable and accessible, with television and theater a close second if low budget enough, followed by the blockbuster genres.

I've got my OMRs dotting the landscape in what we call "reservations" that feature lots of untamed wilderness, bird estuary, swamp lands. A lot of biodiversity. This landscape also provides for bioengineering involving fish, sewage treatment, organic substance harvesting. 

Not every OMR has the same contextualizing ecosystem, yet there'd be a family resemblance when it comes to supporting infrastructure.

Between novels and the screen come magazine covers and printed page art. We look for 2D and 3D renderings of our visions, hand drawn, computer generated, anywhere in between. The 3D renderings may involve computer aided design (CAD) skills, 3D printing, claymation, stop motion animation.

The temptation is to go straight for a military moonbase presentation, with armed forces decals everywhere, and many authors will take this route. Sovereign nation iconography adds realism in multiplies the number and flavor of gift shop and restaurant options. 

A cosmopolitan armed force might get by less with outward weaponry than with a gift of the gab, PR chops. This seems to be the fantasy already.

My focus has been to cater to refugee populations already penned in to squalid living situations. An OMR, to such folks, could be one of lowering population density, and raising living standards, rather than overcrowding to claustrophobic levels. The floorspace devoted each family in an OMR might be considerably greater than previously experienced in some refugee tent or apartment block, and yet the use of space is efficient.

Must an OMR be a complete stadium shape, must it be domed over as in the original models? 

Why not make it more of an amphitheater? Where does the airport go?  

Airplanes tend to be loud and airports are expensive, so a few OMRs might share the same one, along with more conventional cities and suburbs? Smaller airports serve the bigger ones. Trains might serve the smaller ones, such that OMR residents rarely have to contend with airplane or helicopter noise.

A Topic of Conversation

And the ratio of the volumes is easy as 1:2:3https://t.co/CNtaGf1H4F pic.twitter.com/pzbblkYody

— Vincent Pantaloni (@VPantaloni) October 27, 2023

Power vs Work

One of the themes in this and its sibling blogs is "the meaning of work", which already connotes we could swap in "job" for "work" and the meaning would stay similar. However, I mean to include the physics meaning, which puts "work" and "energy expenditure" on par with one another, as potentially synonymous.

The physics "work" meme relates to "power" rather straightforwardly, at least in the Newtonian lexicon: Power = Work per Time (W/t or Wf where f=1/t). 

Contrast this meaning of power with the one that "corrupts absolutely" when overdone. 

In the namespace of good and bad (language games taking up the morality of X), we're at best ambivalent about power, in that it's likely to be abused. But then one way to counter abusive wielders of power is to empower those they oppress. So "to empower" is a good thing? But by growing into your power (becoming empowered), you've joined the dark side? By definition?

The physicists do have a moral bad guy however: entropy and/or noise, otherwise known as heat and calculated as a form of disorder. Given this much potential energy (funding) one should be able to accomplish these tasks (work to be performed), but then devil entropy always seems to take his toll, as half the energy (we hope less) is wasted.

Any action may be profiled as accomplishing so much work (getting results) at the cost of some amount of waste (off task energy expenditure). Action, in the Newtonian sense, is momentum for a distance traveled or mvd. Action per frame of time = energy. 

Some amount of action per a given time frame expresses an energy amount. That amount of energy may store up in the bookkeeping sense as "energy potential" (potential energy) i.e. as "pent up kinetics", as in a loaded firearm, primed explosive, or charged battery.

Is an empowered person a productive one? If the power is really getting work done and not just adding to the ambient noise level, then maybe so. But then who gets to judge what work is on or off task? Perspective matters.

Year of the Dragon

Of course what we call "Chinese New Years" in this neck of the woods did not go unnoticed. 

We don't go overboard with fireworks or anything, here in Portland. 

The lunar calendar is more subtle, vs-a-vs the comparatively loud (some might say garish) solar one. 

It's like the difference between night and day.

Slinging Jargon

RBF, Synergetics, Fig. 988.00 Polyhedral Evolution: 

S Quanta Module: 

Comparisons of skew polyhedra

I get flak sometimes for being such a Platonist, meaning what exactly? I'm OK with contemplating pure patterns of no obvious significance in terms of paying bills or putting food on the table. I'm simply pleased they exist. This is one way I pursue (and sometimes attain) a level of happiness.

For example, I'm assured by reasonable math-oriented folks that it's perfectly meaningless that the following ratios hold true:

• S Factor: S : E :: CO(D) : Icosa(D)
• S3: SuperRT : CO(D) :: Cube(R) : Tetra(D)

First: what does it all mean? and second: who cares?

S and E are two of the Synergetics BEAST modules, irregular tetrahedrons defined in terms of the concentric hierarchy (CH). 

The CH is the geometric centerpiece of Synergetics, R. Buckminster Fuller's transcendentalist geometry (i.e. philosophy).

The S modules, 12 left and 12 right handed, brick in the difference twixt an Icosahedron of edges S Factor (about 1.08), and its faces-flush nest, an Octahedron of edges D (2R) and volume 4. 

Here's a poster showing an S mod from Syn-U by Casey House:

The phi cut is along an edge of 2R (D). The IcosaWithin -- as David Koski and I call it -- with eight faces flush to those of the Octahedron, has edges S Factor, and a volume of about 2.92. 

$$S Factor = 2\sqrt{7 - 3\sqrt{5}}$$ (using MathJax)

All volumes are in tetravolumes i.e. the volume of the D-edged tetrahedron is our unit.

D is for diameter, R is for radius (1/2 the diameter). Icosa(D) is an icosahedron with edges D or 2R. Its volume is about 18.51.

Cube(R)/Tetra(D) is known as S3, or "Synergetics Constant", and it relates the respective unit volumes within the XYZ and IVM contexts (namespaces) respectively. In the XYZ context, we take the R-edged cube for a unit, whereas in the IVM context, a corresponding unit of volume is a D-edged tetrahedron, a little less. S3 is about 1.06066.

The SuperRT is a Rhombic Triacontahedron, a triac, with long face diagonals equal to the edges of Icosa(D). Its short diagonals form a pentagonal dodecahedron (PD). The two combined give the SuperRT, which is phi-up from the RT of 120 E modules. S:E is our S Factor.

The SuperRT : CO(D) ratio is the same as the Cube(R) : Tetra(D) ratio.

Who cares? Those of us wanting to get our heads around the Concentric Hierarchy, the centerpiece of (backbone of) Synergetics.

See: Polyhedron Play section of this Jupyter Notebook Polyhedrons Я Objects

Thirsters Concludes

Thirsters ended a chapter in its long and winding way yesterday, with a final announced meetup at the E Broadway McMenamins. The group got started in a different McMenamins across the river, when Bob Textor and his friends would get together and yak it up, about world affairs, about politics, about trending topics and the talk about town.

Our emails would usually come with the following verbiage:

Thirsters: Originally organized by Robert B. Textor (Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Stanford) as a worldwide network in about 1997, Thirsters is an informal gathering of Peace Corps graduates, academics, public servants, business leaders, and other questioning individuals who discuss issues of peace, freedom, creativity, development, ethics, fairness, sustainability and respect for cultural differences. Most often examining topics through a social science lens, Thirster meetings have been described as "a learned salon that comes together for camaraderie, beer, and to discuss issues of common interest." "Intercultural understanding" has often been identified as a primary concern of Thirsters.

I've been phasing all alcoholic drinks out of my intake, starting with beer a couple years ago. I'm assured by the example of others that I won't be disqualified from joining Thirsters in its next chapter, simply on that basis. We're switching to a private home to reboot and continue talking.

We reminisced about some of the high points in our gatherings. I've been attending Thirsters meetings for a long time and could match my memories to much of what was said. Several of us mentioned that Pashtun Khan guy who helped educate us about Afghanistan, a meetup I blogged about.

BizMo Fleet Personnel

As some of you know, I've been advocating for socialized ownership of my bizmo fleet, meaning it's more like a Hertz or Avis: the individual crew checks a van out of inventory, but doesn't necessarily have the title or responsibility for maintenance. There's a control room in the background, a dispatcher. The template is well established, even in capitalist societies.

Currently, I'd say Derek and Mazur are the furthest along in my network, when it comes to living the bizmo lifestyle. Both are familiar with the Honda Odyssey as a template. Derek is educating himself about generators, solar panels and such. Today we talked about a solar-wind village of about fifteen yurts (semi-permanent) where the bizmos could plug in.

However, my network is relatively tiny, and if one ventures into Nomad Land, either virtually or for real, the ideas worthy of copying come flooding in. Companies are working on more integrated solutions all the time. The van itself might be an EV. Opportunities for experimentation are endless.

Will Oregon host a Makersville where all these puzzle pieces come together? Am I talking about EPCOT West again?

One might think the community colleges and universities would already be pretty far along in making Nomad Life a degree based program. However there's a lot of inertia and propaganda steering students away from anything other than a suburban home in a bedroom community with a commute to some city job in an office tower.  

The corporate nanny state is trying to clone the past, given it depends on AI to discern the future. Clearly AI is not up to the task and our higher education systems flounder.

Thirsters Debate

Thirsters are meeting tonight, for a final moderated debate in the current format, after which we'll have a celebratory page turning event, a new format having been selected.

I'll be one of many on the call. As we started to find out last week, my camp is in favor of giving the Legal Eagles their chance at bat, and if they're able to win against the Trump organization so be it.  The powdered wig subculture cannot afford to be overruled by some angry mob that threatens violence if not given the "right to vote" for its figurehead.

However, I'm not seeing this camp in partisan terms, if by "partisan" we mean taking sides in the duopoly, and thinking this is Biden versus his political opponent. No, this is a Constitutional design pressure test, where a 3rd branch (the Judiciary) is challenging the Executive, Congress (the Legislative branch) having passed the buck on impeachment.

To review what happened: the January 6, 2021 riot led to a second impeachment hearing regarding the US president's fitness to continue in office, but by then he was already on the way out, so what would be the point of kicking him out?

I take this view in part because "new circuit designs for Motherboard Earth" includes more thinking about USA OS, i.e. seeing the government as an operating system and thinking more in those terms. Dividing government into these three branches -- judiciary, executive, legislative -- was very forward thinking on the part of these design science revolutionaries.

If the judiciary is so weak that it'll cave to threats about Civil War or whatever, then we're already well past pull date on the Constitution, and should admit we abandoned it long ago. On the other hand, if we're still truly concerned with democracy, then we have to learn from being tested, and iteratively improve our designs based on what we've learned. 

The core issue at his time is the level of immunity from prosecution a US president has. This is important because of all the war crimes that presidents have been committing, in contravention to what's considered normal behavior in civilian circles. Should we apply medical language and deem the State Department a madhouse (asylum for the insane)? Or should we take a more mocking tone?

I'll find out more, tonight, about what schools of thought I might be up against. My impression is most others on these calls are schooled to think in terms of two parties, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, and from my angle somewhat irrelevant to USA OS designs.

Ever since the demise of Uncle Sam as we knew him, per Grunch of Giants, and as civil rights got rolled back in the name of "fighting terrorism" the question of what would constitute "legality" going forward would become more acute, especially for US voters, citizens, denizens. What would "government" mean?

Double Meanings

Without solving the ontological mysteries of the Freudian unconscious (e.g. "where is it in the brain?") we might admit this new namespace solved a lot of issues. Finally, the medical class had figured out a way to break into "soul engineering" i.e. psychology in an amped up form. Taboo topics (i.e. repressed) could now be introduced in polite society, in the company of a certified guide. Why should mesmerists have all the fun?

In other words, by opening the namespace of the Unconscious, the Victorian consciousness was able to confront taboo topics in good conscience, as a medical matter. The idea that we are driven, behaviorally, by phenomena we don't see (by definition: they're unconscious) is likely a grammatical requirement of densely packed urban lifestyles. We need ways to override what people tell us is true about themselves, a way to "analyze" that bypasses so-called normal narratives, if need be.

One of our big discoveries of 2023 over on TrimTab was Bucky Fuller's attitude towards Freud, for precisely these reasons. A rabbi asked him to name the most influential figure in our era, fully expecting him to say Einstein, but he said Freud instead, giving the reason that quantum physics would not have had a powerful role in our collective consciousness if we did not already believe in the invisible determining and/or manifesting the visible. 

Freud had paved the way. We were already conditioned to accept "the unseen" even minus the usual suspects inside of what now appeared as superstitious belief systems of a bygone era: demons and angels and whatnot.

The metaphor Fuller went with came from electromagnetism and the fact that our naked senses give us access to only a narrow band, and yet with instrumentation we're able to augment our experience by taking in more of the invisible frequencies. 

Egoic consciousness would now become like that narrow band, the everyday / ordinary, sandwiched between twilight zone quasi-luminous content and fading into an adjacent  unconsciousness we could nevertheless manifestly access (tune in), by fiddling with the radio dial.

Is it allowed to use science language and concepts to create resonant literary agglomerations that invite "reading between the lines"? Many escape to STEM subjects to avoid what seem to them to be impossibly subjective readings, leading to imaginary interpretations no better than superstitious beliefs. 

Truth, for these refugees, is in what's literally the case in egoic consciousness, the unconscious be damned. But are the metaphorically minded thereby banned from STEM world, or might this constituency find ways to fit in also, perhaps as cryptanalysts with an ear for double meanings? 

A good example of "double meanings" taken literally was the hypothesis hatched around "pizzagate". The more or less taboo topic of minor sex workers, many impressed (in the sense of enslaved), became a central focus as internet-savvy junior detectives claimed to have detected a secret code in the namespace of pizza party organizing. 

These adult party-goer politicos were really engaging in pedophilia, went the theory, a theory widely ridiculed and with good reason. Pizzagate itself was an eruption of the collective unconscious into popular discourse. Its momentum has not abated, in the sense that the topic of sexually exploited minors is no longer taboo. Breakthroughs were achieved.

The Germanic attitude towards both psychoanalysis and quantum physics was colored by Germanic anti-semitism. Freud and Einstein were the respective founders of these “Jewish sciences” (nuclear physics and psychoanalysis) which many scholars (not only German) considered socially corrosive and/or intellectually decadent. 

Egoic consciousness suddenly felt under siege in some circles, as now these new voices of authority were anchoring themselves in phenomena invisible to the naked senses, and thereby challenging the conscious consensus. Emotions that politicians had always counted on (fears and phobias) to help steer mob psychology, would now become matters of introspection and second guessing, thereby undermining or diluting their effectiveness. A new kind of folk rationality was taking hold, the evolution of new literacies.

The "military-industrial complex" was fated to become a "complex" in the psychological sense. Believing oneself to be acting on behalf of an indomitable superpower became more of a treatable disorder, a kind of lingering egomania or narcissism encouraged by the ambient culture. Even dime store psychologists, let alone pricey consultants, could now question the Pentagon's postures in terms of "body language" e.g. the uncomfortable squirming associated with having no handle on one's budget and expenses. 

That sense of an out of control machine, running blindly, is the very personification of AI. But the term "artificial" is so close to "phony". People in charge of a superpower suffer from repressed and/or expressed imposter syndrome, and we all pay a high price for these pathologies when unaddressed i.e. not dealt with or treated (countered).

Snow Storm

"tarp girl"

Portland, Oregon is experiencing its first legit snow storm this winter of 2023-24. Lexi was planning an early birthday party, but decided to postpone it. I'd planned to bus it, but there'd be some driving on her end.

Derek (@dekebridges) has been out checking on his peeps. He's been doing social work since before covid, living on and off the street himself, always at least with his own vehicle. His half bro, Darren, passed away unexpectedly and Deke, the only next of kin, moved in to tie off loose ends.

One girl he tracks was trying to tough it out under a tarp. He knew where she could find shelter and advised her accordingly. Upon swinging by later, she was gone, he hoped to said shelter. A lot of street people know him and he's trusted as a safe chaperone and chauffeur. He has his beat. He's been delivering food out of his trusty pickup for some years now, in collaboration with various churches and nonprofits. Yesterday he was part of the tented soup kitchen put together by Portland Saints Love.

Last night, as the storm was brewing, Dr D. and I went to see Poor Things at the The Laurelhurst, another take on the Frankenstein story, except this time the doctor (Willem DaFoe) is more monster-like, whereas his resurrected corpse, a grown woman, is more pleasant to look at. She has the mind of an infant however, when the movie opens, and needs to mature through experience. 

The screenplay reminds us of how the original work by Mary Shelley pushed the envelope of what Victorian polite society would tolerate in a novel, by continuing to push the envelope in the context of contemporary culture, this time within the R-rated comedy-tinged-with-horror genre.

Given we both didn't want to walk very far in the windy cold, we convinced ourselves, as had others, that this "trucks only, all hours" rule was not enforced. Wishful thinking, duh. We'd fallen into a trap, likely one of the city's more profitable cash cows. I recall getting ticketed before in connection with movie watching.

Homeless Americans tend to be demonized as criminals, and left to fend for themselves, now that poor farms and mental hospitals have been closed to the indigent. 

At one point during the Cold War, the USA seemed prepared to compete on the world stage on the basis of its higher living standards. Nowadays, the post-USA (or pseudo-USA) is content to compete on the basis of its mythical military superiority. Planet of the Apes Я us.

Thoughts on Diet

We learn early on about the calories and exercise equation. Calories in, energy out, but if calories > energy out, we gain weight. Simple. Too simple.

If one takes up diet as a conscious topic, versus simply rooting around, eating whatever's available, then it pays to mentally construct a more elaborate picture of what's going on. Why? Because monitoring diet is a way of self monitoring health, which in turn is one's golden door into medical knowledge. Why pass that up? It'd be like a form of self starvation: too little protein, in the form of mentally challenging content.

It won't be news to many readers that the model evolved to be more like a Prius, meaning the popular hybrid gasoline + battery powered car. Of course a battery is not ultimately a source of power; it all comes from gas (food, fuel). However gas and electricity may be used in combination.  Actually, braking (deceleration) may power a battery also, not just fuel.

The two "power chains" we're talking about are the carbs 'n glucose cycle, versus the ketone cycle. In both cases, the goal is to make ATP to keep cells healthy and active, in muscles, in the brain. In tissues generally. The usual fuel (more like gasoline) is glucose. Glucose powers the Krebs Cycle which generates a lot of essential byproducts, including ATP.

But if glucose is less readily available, the body has a secondary fuel system, more like the battery system. Actually, it has two secondary systems: one based on burning fat directly, and one based on creating ketone bodies, molecules that may be bussed from the liver through the bloodstream, to target tissues, which have their own ways to reverse the chemistry to get a Krebs cycle.

What about this Krebs Cycle? That's where we find bioengineering (the naturally occurring kind) at its finest. We've even learned it may run in reverse, especially when oxygen is more iffy.

Learning about ketones and ketosis has inspired a lot of folks to take up intermittent fasting, including me. I talk about the "ketone briquettes" that get thrown on my "brain fire" to make a slightly different color of flame. Metabolizing ketones is at some level the opposite of being "fat and happy" i.e. secure and comfortable with one's metabolic surroundings. The brain gets that nutrition might be an issue and is stimulated to think harder, about where a next meal might be coming from.

Optimally, no enforced starvation is going on and one is intellectually satisfied that finding a next meal is not the issue. Nevertheless, the heightened mental acuity may be used to address other less literal forms of hunger. Fasting begets flashes of genius is the theory. I've been trying it out occasionally, whereas I'm mostly content to stay at the subgenius level.

Grateful for Gifts

I got some really excellent gifts this year, and am grateful.

Every day as she goes.

That's more like a traditional journal entry, more succinct in many ways.

On Retreat

Am I in training to become an RV guy? One might think that, but more accurately, any RV training I get is a stepping stone towards when I operate a business mobile. This isn't about retiring and buying a luxury vehicle to use recreationally, much as that stuff goes on. More specifically, I'm on retreat, like a novelist at the coast, in a destination trailer, a 40CFK2 Cedar Creek Cottage, a "tiny house" by some measures.

One of those "be here now" teachings was to share a cautionary tale about always thinking ahead to the next thing. The meal you're about to have was the highlight of the day, from the standpoint of people preparing it, but you're on ahead wondering if the movie after will be good. You can't stop to enjoy anything because you mind a focused on the "not yet present". You've found a way to skip out on living your life, and heaven knows you might regret it.

All of which is to say, I'm being mindful of what a privilege it is to be a Friend in Residence in this particular club, if I dare call it that. I actually had to miss a club meeting this morning, a book club meetup, because I'm too busy making history buying snax (we went to a Walmart). 

Of course being a Friend in Residence comes with duties, ordinary and/or extraordinary chores, as required by Property Management. My assignment (this time) was to transplant three infant rhododendron bushes to a more shady location. Pick ax, shovel, wheelbarrow, gloves, potting soil, were among the tools I used. But I get plenty of study time too, and am blessed with more than adequate wifi. I'm free to pursue projects related to Peace and Social Concerns, partially overlapping with planning a Gathering for Carol (G4C) in collaboration with Portland Friends.

What do my "business mobiles" do, in the realm of business? They're recruiting vehicles in a lot of ways, traveling the country, showing up at schools. The Model UN might field a few, and Model NATO. I'm not bucking for a role with either of those operations, but you get the idea. I brought up the recruiter idea a lot around the time of Occupy Portland, given I was out talent scouting at the time, one among several. My peeps were mostly with Food Not Bombs. We used bicycles more than destination trailers for our work.

Journaling on Jan 3

I just learned about the two alarm fire at El Mercado early this morning. @FirePDX had some details, but I'm at this point unsure of the damage level. Assessments will be coming in.

I'm on a rather chaotic sleep schedule, which is fine with me, as long as the option to nap keeps presenting itself, meaning not when I'm operating heavy equipment. So far, I haven't touched the car since returning from Atlanta. I've been using Trimet more. Part of it is not having Sydney, who is vacationing up north.

However said Nissan is still muscular enough to make it to various places I'd like to visit I'm thinking, so dreams of trips are taking on their own reality. 

I'm also contemplating a Gathering for Carol (G4C), now a blip on the radar of a few Friends. I'm patterning G4C after G4G in the sense that we don't have to imagine just one of them. I'd like to hold a G4C for at least a couple years in a row, giving more folks an opportunity to celebrate Carol.

In Georgia, I got used to walking at least a mile for exercise. The new terrain was interesting. One day I walked over four miles. I'll be interested in continuing that pattern, even if the terrain around here is better known to me. For example I like walking to Movie Madness.

In addition to researching the Github situation, I felt motivated to write about Clifford Algebra, which has a way of feeding into the Quadray literature, not forgetting Clifford Nelson, a different Clifford, who also wanted to equip Synergetics with a more XYZ-like vector mechanics, ala Willard Gibbs. 

My impression is ChatGPT gets all this word salad mixed up like a spaghetti ball (mixed metaphor) and relays ballpark plausible shoptalk.

The New Year Begins

I woke up to discover my Github repos, the Jupyter Notebooks, are no longer  communicating embedded graphics to the viewer. I changed nothing. Something changed in the machinery. The very same Notebooks viewed through nbviewer or colab are still showing all the images as before. I filed a post about my issue in the community discussion area. Presumably I'm not the only one affected and maybe they'll find a fix.

I've been posting publicly somewhat more often, making comments on YouTube. I also tried to post a review of Alec's Bucky bio to Amazon. The first attempt was rejected, probably because I mentioned it was first published elsewhere. On this second attempt, I went with new prose.

Now I'll upload an example YouTube comment or two, both from today:

link to YouTube

My comment:

I agree with Brie that the core of the insurrection was the fake electors scheme. A. Dershowitz says no, there has to be violence for it to have been an insurrection. That’s where the mob violence of Jan 6 comes in, which could have been so much worse. The brains did the dirty work with the faux legal maneuvers, the brawn came from known thugs summoned to the Capitol to scare lawmakers into following the subversive scheme.

link to YouTube

My comment:

The CrowdStrike narrative (not FBI’s) that Guccifer 2 got emails from Russia is in the Congressional Record, but was never proved. CrowdStrike was notably weak on producing forensics to back up their story, and in fact confessed to not having any per VIPS (Veteran Intel Pros for Sanity). The story that Russia was behind phishing the Podesta emails (not the missing ones Trump alluded to) seems primarily aimed at shaping public opinion (they played the same card with the Biden laptop story). My own opinion was not thereby shaped, but I guess it worked on MeidasTouch folks. Always trying to associate Trump with Russians is BlueAnon nonsense.