A Last Straw

:: before ::

In some ways, Working Out would make more sense here, in BizMo Diaries, as it's about physical body stuff, and the "business mobile" (peripatetic action studio) works for a stand-in, metaphor-wise. 

Likewise, this post, about Cybernetics, would make more sense in Control Room, just going by the relevant memes i.e. a "control room" is like a "bridge" or place to make things happen. Another type of "action studio" really (what isn't?), but relatively stationary.

Let's now turn to this meme of "last straw", which is also, presumably, the one which broke that poor camel's back. The camel was already laden with straw, one imagines, and was holding up. But that one last straw proved the tipping point and, snap, the camel's back lost structural integrity.

We tend to empathize with the camel, or in any case, if a beast of burden, now we have no animal to bear our load. Like a car broken down by the side of the road, the connotations are mostly negative, in the direction of increasing entropy. May the tow truck make it all better.

But what about critical "last straws" that, when added, open doors or otherwise lead to positive developments. What's the English language opposite of "catastrophe" and if none comes to mind, isn't that a symptom of something, about English. I've heard "benestrophe" suggested. I must've already added it to my dictionary, as so far my spell checker hasn't complained.

"To cyber" means "to steer" i.e. "cybering" is a matter of rotating a rudder, thereby repointing the craft. That may sound like a simple process but sometimes so much inertia is involved that even the rudder needs a rudder, which reminds us which principle (leverage) is involved.

Let's say you turn hard to starboard or port, and manage to miss the iceberg this time, because you had better intelligence ahead of time. You had more time to react. 

Optimal responses may require cool headed thinking, and lots of it, however if that time is not now, then the usual strategy is to substitute a reflex as a next best reaction, a proxy action, an approximation, perhaps not well-thought out, but at least in the repertoire.

If you escape catastrophe, that in itself is a benestrophe. In ages past, the king or queen might have a monument, perhaps an entire church or temple, in gratitude to whatever generalized principles allowed for a freakishly and unexpectedly positive outcome, what we call "a miracle" in the vernacular.

However, we need to remain open minded with regard to even more positive positives, which are not about surmounting the relatively low bar of narrowly avoiding tragedy. These high bar events may be likewise triggered by feather-light tiny deltas, fourth derivative actions, as it were, as insignificant as the fluttering wings of a butterfly.

SimCity Thinking

I have to admit my admiration for Uber's clever follow-up offer after my finally getting around to using their app and service:  free meal delivered on us, $45 value; then a week later: $25 if you use it now. The sight of a shrinking asset provokes action, although in my case I'm resistant, and it helps that if I follow their offer I'm back in Atlanta (which I'm not, at the moment). 

I think a lot about the delivery economy but maybe not with enough inputs, as I'm not a business consultant so much as a skills trainer in a working class ecosystem. I'll show you how pandas will give your data visualizations that professional zing that makes your cubicle a hub in whatever network you're in. I've never worked for Amazon directly, although my code school was subsidized by its outreach programs that summer, as I recall.

Anyway, the idea of fleets of flexibly routed vans delivering in high volume, versus browsers showing up in parking lots in private cars, leaves me thinking we're likely economizing in shrinking the mall culture. Yes, the web took the place of storefronts in large degree. That's ephemeralization at work, meaning as a species we're under pressure to economize, even when we'd prefer to make a lifestyle more permanent.

Derek and I were in agreement, in recent living room conversation, that better infrastructure, extending camping, for a nomadic lifestyle, perhaps on wheels, as a multimodal adventurer or whatever, would answer a need in some of our subcultures to "live outdoors" in some essential way. Dense urban living is too claustrophobic for them, or too stationary. 

A nomadic lifestyle doesn't have to mean in a tent. A yurt with ample floor space in some hexagonal grid pattern (random lake shaped) would be an improvement over a phone booth shaped tiny house in my view. Electric ATVs come to mind. You might book a yurt for some months or weeks and move on to a next one, with variations in make and model.

A lot of boomers hope to retire to a mildly active lifestyle, recreational in nature, like in Florida. 

I had the privilege of retiring in my teens, while going to high school while based in a mobile home park for retirees. The homeowner association might've frowned on our extended stay (me and my sister) which is why mom flew back to Bradenton and moved us into a roach motel (not that the trailer -- er mobile home -- didn't have "palmetto bugs"). 

Indeed, absent Yurt Villages (high tech), the Florida option still seems a good deal, not that I'm the expert or share that plan for myself. Like I said: been there done that. I'm not dissing that lifestyle, which is pretty comfortable I admit, but I'd use my stays in that trailer (I'd be back) to reinvent myself, perhaps into an airport manager (that book was interesting but I wasn't sure how to break in).

I ended up finishing high school in Manila, dad having scored a gig with UNDP. We had UN passports for the whole family. I proudly display a UN flag as part of my living room decor to this day. I also keep flags of Bhutan, Lesotho, and Republic of South Africa, right here on my desk; places I've come to feel some allegiance to and fondness for, in addition to these various states in North America (Oregon being my home base nowadays -- I'd like to explore them more, Birmingham, Alabama was fun).

Another city older folks retire to is Las Vegas, which markets itself as a destination for recreational living in general. The new MSG Sphere is open, and showing Grateful Dead, a live performance with giant screen backup. I talk about that in this blog post (in my philosophy blog), which is actually a YouTube.

Sharing in Meeting

I remember standing up in Meeting once, a big Meeting in Philadelphia, where AFSC corporation members and directors had convened, and sharing something philosophical-sounding, and also arguably dualistic. "The bodies" I was saying "are innocent of any wrongdoing, yet it's them that we punish".

My point was that of George Fox when he said you can't kill the devil with a gun or a sword or something to that effect. Ideologies circulate like viruses, independently of the animal bodies they haunt (infect, control). To counter an ideology effectively should not involve torturing the animals (the human animals) that express this ideology. 

My view is somewhat that of medical science and its practitioners who take the Hippocratic Oath (do they do that anymore?). Treating human bodies is distinct from psychotherapy although they're intertwined. An anxious psyche is more likely to run a body into the ground by overdosing it with stress hormones. How mind and body interweave is the kind of problem Oliver Sacks liked to study.

The use of physical torture, such as by bombing and/or deliberately starving, is an expression of our weakness in the psychological realm. We have less success than we would like countering an ideology, and so take up arms against it, and attack its adherents (the infected, the blessed). Outward war, according to Quakerism, is somewhat beside the point, as what we're really trying to accomplish is metaphysical (psychological), not physical (physiological).

"Don't blame the meat puppets for crazy beliefs and the strings they pull" might be another way of saying it, "but do work on curing craziness by inward means". In Quaker jargon, "inward" is versus "outward". "Inward" is the world of psychological modeling and processing. "Outward" is the world of sticks and stones and broken bones.

Outward wars are misplaced (in the sense of inept) attempts to avoid dealing more directly with inward wars.

Bat Cave

Does Radio Octopus only play tracks of creature noises? I just tuned in for the first time. Now we're on to bird sounds with piano. Somewhere in France.

I found myself explaining, to a newcomer at our Solstice Gathering, how Wanderers, in my book, includes the nonhumans. I'm not saying all of them. I circled Keiko in particular, better known as Willy.

After a morning "about town" I'm in my "bat cave" for the most part, occasionally bouncing upstairs to use the office. The outside temperature is down to 92 degrees Fahrenheit, was 98 earlier.

I just heard from Kerry Butson, after so many years since our co-worker days. She's in Illinois. We were both employees of a code school in California, she before me. I was brought in by Steve Holden, author of their Python course.

Since those days, I've continued to work in Python. Just today I was hacking on my Google slides about Quadrays, an XYZ-like coordinate system. I've been introducing them to UC Davis.

Dr. DiNucci gifted me with an air conditioner last year, when the original customer discovered she was disallowed such equipment by her Homeowner Association. She surrendered the unit in disgust and gave it to David to give away. It ended up in my living room.

A lot of Portlanders have traditionally gone without air conditioning, preferring to tough it out through the few truly hot days every summer. I was in that category until life made it really easy to add this perk.  Central air for the whole house would make the upstairs more habitable. The ball python doesn't seem to mind the status quo.

From my bat cave, I monitor local and global conditions. I also network and telecommute. The "bat mobile" in the driveway has proved serviceable lately.

Independence Day 2024

We (me 'n my dog) left Portland pretty early, like at 5:30 AM, as I was scheduled to pick up Uncle Bill (age 99) and remembered nightmarish traffic on I-5 on Thanksgivings. 

This drive was a breeze, both going and returning the next day. 

Since I arrived in Seattle plenty early, with time to kill, I drove down the steep streets to Pike Street Market and walked Sydney around amidst other tourists. The place was hopping. The waterfront now hosts a Ferris wheel. Is that permanent?

I really enjoyed my time with the relatives, even if Urners are an obscure branch of the Hancock family by now, so it's not like I was recognized by all or vice versa. That's part of the fun of large family gatherings.

Barb's dad was one of my grandmother Esther's brothers, Esther Person being my dad's mom. Barbara has a beautiful family, and modest, well-appointed lakeside home.

I got to overnight with Elise and Les, some of my oldest friends and Sydney's previous caretakers.