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.