Touring the Borderlands

I know no one is looking forward to some kind of DMZ situation, ala Korea, in Ukraine, along the border with New Russia. Or maybe not no one, as that'd be a lot of job opportunities, manning those stations, not letting people cross, but with that many miles, there'd be a dramatic defection, one way or the other, at least daily. That'd make for a lot of television and commercial revenue.

We might get some guided tours though, I'm hoping, with some high ranking feeling safe enough to risk it, like when CDI hosted retired brass on trips to Cuba. Castro wasn't about to have anyone gunned down. He wanted to talk, after the visitors had some fun in the sun and some beer. The scene was copacetic. 

We're getting some of those tours from YouTubers even today. I've been surveying Mariupol, wondering if a city that size might build back better. What does one do with partially damaged apartment buildings? We've seen cities rubblized before. The WW2 generation rubblized their cities, why shouldn't we rubblize ours, is that the thinking? Then they'd rebuild.

The tour guides with tell different stories, and tourists will sample them both, kind of like how the same tourist is free to show up at the Korean DMZ on either side, one might hope both sides over time, more than once. Get each point of view. Don't make a run for it, providing target practice; just leave to a neutral liminal space of air travel (Pyongyang to Beijing?), and return on the opposite side (Beijing to Seoul?), through the looking glass.

We're not going to ignore all the death and destruction that happened (is still happening as of this writing), meaning we're touring a space of cemeteries, well kept and full of ceremony.

Dieters' Corner

bowl of soup, 2017

What's the diff twixt "dieting" and "fasting" in the religious sense? That's a "thumb on the scales" question, as already tilted towards the "religious" meaning of fasting, whereas plenty of dieters fast to tone up and lose weight. 

That being buff can't likewise be a religious undertaking was dispelled in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Many religions have preached this same dogma in so many words: to fight the devil, you need your physical health, literally. Work it from either end. Strong body ⋈ strong mind.

So, on the advisory side: don't feed into the melodrama, as dieting (fasting etc.) especially is characterized by mania and depression in successive bouts, as one loses but then gains it all back, Apollo versus Dionysus or something along those lines (to get Greek about it).

In practical terms, what this means is you don't have to forswear this or that forever more. Think like a scientist, not a moralist. You're interested to see what Guinea Pig [your initials] does when deprived of milk, not for forever, but for the purposes of this experiment. 

You're exploring the plasticity of the homunculus, the avatar, with some degree of medical aloofness, not because you hate yourself, but because you find yourself plenty interesting as is (your own "self" is the one you get to treat as yours).

I bring up milk for a reason. The documentary Got the Facts on Milk? took an interesting look, one might say anthropological, at an ecosystem's efforts to economize. If you're planning on eating lots of steak, figure out how to use other bovine features as well. If you're not lactose intolerant, enjoy this land of milk and honey. Lots of BBQ. Lots of good bye rainforests. 

That was me growing up, the milk chugger, because our moms well knew that milk built strong bones and teeth and we'd likely need those to get ahead in the world. These were old wives tales says the movie, to be blunt about it. I'm happy for lobbyists to debate the relevant science, but in some other column. Milk is just and example food here, one I can well relate to, so as the storyteller, I exercise my prerogatives.

Play on our love of dairy, with milk not just an ingredient, but a beverage we'll wanna chug, over soda even. I found the therapy (by which I mean this fun movie) effective in a way I hadn't expected: I lost my craving for milk as a beverage, even on cereal. Some months or years later, I picked up on Soylent and went through many boxes of the stuff. I doubt I'd have gone through that Soylent phase without first relinquishing milk in a previous one.

It's like the milk lover in me gave up without a fight and went off to haunt another being. For a window at least, I was free even of the temptation, which is saying a lot, as it's usually around "fighting temptation" that all the melodrama occurs. The hankering just went away. The movie was like a drug trip in that way, setting me back on my feet a different person in some ways. I'd been abducted. Lucky me.

Then I went back to milk later, plus I'd never given up on diary as a genre. I'm not saying my doctor was super impressed by any of this. 

But then, fast forward, and I'm back to dropping milk while cutting back on dairy. Exploring plasticity. Experimenting for a next role, having been the corpulent batman (have you seen the meme? Fat batman eyeing baked goods -- hilarious). 

First step: don't stock it; stop buying it (whatever the it is that you're giving up). But then be polite and remember your guests: be a good extrovert and remember cream, or half-and-half (which you won't use anyway -- talking to myself here -- as you're a black coffee kinda guy). As an American I have an advantage over my British counterparts:  I'm don't practice a daily tea ritual, complete with scones, a place where milk-the-beverage frequently enters the ceremony, irrespective of scones.

I have some rum for my guests as well, some Bacardi. This bottle is left over from my drinking days. I'm still doing the 0.5% beers, down from above 5% average a few years ago. Oregon is a destination state if you like IPA and Pinot (Noir or Gris).  Sticking to non-alcoholic beers constitutes "quitting" in my book.

But it's milk we were talking about. 

I'm not swearing off it forever. I still have some breakfast cereals. But I'm not cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs or buying into the milk subculture, just for the time being. A kind of fasting. That doesn't mean I'm off pizza (I had some yesterday with a retired lawyer, at a swanky pizza place downtown). 

Most dieticians would say what I'm doing is medically immaterial but for me it's about balance. When it comes to balance, we each deal with our own set of weighted axes.

That's my last piece of advice for this column: recognize the reality of different body types. 

I'm not saying don't strive to leap into another category if you sense you must. Destiny calls. 

Stamina is required to reshape. 

But learn to take some satisfaction in where you're at as a destination, not just a passing phase. All we have are passing phases, from birth to grave, as time marches by. 

So why be too impatient about moving on to a next life or incarnation? 

Fully be the character you've become, even as you realize such complete acceptance tends to catalyze a next overhaul (R&R leads to makeovers). Today is the last day of you as you've known you so far.

More Framework

RT with 30 tent poles, red stabilizers

The most spherical of the identically faced polyhedrons is the 120 Triangles, which has other names as well, and of course a dual, the truncated icosidodecahedron. We see this shape being considered in the search for a volume five, in tetravolumes, for the core design of the Synergetics matryoshka, the nested polys (tet, cube, oct, RD, RT etc.). RT one the contest (rhombic triacontahedron).

The source code below shows the framework in action: create an RT of the canonical size (every shape has a default starting size); compute the 30 diamond face midpoints and extend them further out from the shape center by 5%. Draw red edges from these "tent poles" to each vertex of the corresponding face.

The transparent version is a mess of edges, so as a final step I bring the starting RT in, with faces filled (f=True). That brings the red edges of the 120 Triangles into sharp relief, and helps us judge whether convexity is maintained. If the tent poles poke out too far, this thing becomes a stellate, a planet with mountains and valleys. We want only mountains (convex creases).

The signature Catalan, dual of an Archimedean, has a specific tent pole height, whereas I'm looking at wiggle room. I discuss this difference in more detail on Synergeo.

 

Python source

Caltrop City

Polys Framework

:: python source ::

In titling this blog entry Polys Framework I'm not meaning to impose restrictions on the name of said package.  Let's take a look at a script, the above snippet. Better form would be to explicitly close the file at the end.  Better yet, I could use a with statement (Pythonistas take note). OK, fixed it in the source (see test32).

What's interesting is each poly, out of the gate, at birth, has a default canonical volume. The Cube weighs in at 3, its dual Octahedron as 4. Tetrahedron is 1 and so on. Points A-Z have been defined, IVM lattice points, to which the five-fold poly skeletons will be added (Icosahedron, RT, PD). 

Right on the same line even, at the moment of birth, you may rescale all the edges and thereby scale the volume. Grow or shrink the new poly to any relative size, given its starting point. The concentric hierarchy is a static structure of default starting points, polys already inter-sized, with further action to follow from there.

In this case, we scale down the canonical volume 4 Octahedron to 3/4 of its usual edge lengths. The resulting red octahedron pokes out of the green cube's six face centers, whereas if unscaled by (3/4) it would have intersected the cube's mid-edges with its own mid-edges. 

David Koski did a lot of studies for this one, breaking it down further. My script was a zoomed-out treatment, in terms of details. Here's one of the vZome's he shared over Telegram:

:: Truncated Octahedron, vZome treatment, D. Koski ::

Below is the corresponding rendering, achieved from running the above Python source code within a framework which, behind the scenes, causes scene description language to be written, for POV-Ray, which then renders the described output as a PNG file (by default).

:: ray-traced rendering ::

Graph Theory Background

Per my Graph Theory 2025, you get a lot of Nietzsche pictures in those slides, which is meant to spark wheels-turning commentary, as we exercise cultural fluency. His reputation tends to be clouded, as between his time and ours comes the whole Third Reich chapter, which he did not live to see. 

:: dynamic dashboard designs ::

Another guy pictured in said slides: Walter Kaufmann, my Princeton professor. His name was widespread on softcover Nietzsche in the English language. Kaufmann was keen to rescue Nietzsche's philosophy from the taint of what was to come after, which isn't that hard a job once you look into things.

One of Nietzsche's well-known works is The Will to Power. The style is aphoristic, a style I like and admired in Norman O. Brown's Love's Body. So how do I link Nietzsche's will to power to anything Bucky? 

I'm prompting myself to generate an answer, which I think is pretty obvious: Fuller had a strong sense of some teleological pressure, a cosmic will shall we say, pushing humanity to make a success of itself, sometimes in spite of itself. In older more archaic language we might speak of God's will. 

But wasn't Nietzsche all about the death of God as a viable belief for a lot of people, sort of marking a new era, and wasn't Buckminster Fuller obviously a deist and some would say Unitarian or at least Christian? 

I'd say he radically renounced received beliefs as a part of his 1927 crisis, and he went his own way after that, but not in the direction of disbelieving in God. He was one of those with an overwhelming sense of teleological pressure, as I've mentioned. A will to power. 

Another connection is in Nietzsche's expressions of admiration for the Transcendentalist Emerson. Nietzsche's Zarathustra character owes something to Emerson according to some commentators.

Keep in mind Fuller’s consistently aligning himself with Einstein’s views with respect to divinity, with the latter in turn aligning with the views of Spinoza. Fuller was no big fan of “organized religion” and did not experience an anthropocentric God behind humans’ proclamations of property rights.

Shifting gears a bit, one of my recent meetups featured the h3-py system, Uber's hexagonal matrix geographic layer. What would it take to feature anything Dymaxion via some type of Uber-like dashboard? We've seen some prototypes in the movies, in science fiction. The hexagonal matrix is a trope.

The idea in this meeting was to marry hexagonal tiles to the bevy of rules and regulations associated therewith, such that a Yamhill, Oregon farmer might call up building code requirements for her property, easily. Some properties will have a designated floodplain area, whereupon new structures may not be built.

City planners in some well-served offices may already have an approximation of the above, for their centers of focus. Legal codes and GIS come together over time whenever various projects and undertakings are being considered. To what extent this amalgamation is software abetted is the variable in question.

These topics hearkened back to my dreams of a hexapent grid with the Pentagon building, on the Potomac, one of the twelve pentagons. Given some n-frequency class one icosasphere, sized just that way, with one pentagon juxtaposed evenly with the building itself, not including the parking lots, where would the other pentagons be, around the globe?  At the center of the Pentagon garden: that Bucky prototype that used to be there, or something like it, to complete the motif.

Remembering Reptilians

Y'all might remember my dad served as a regional planner for Libya for many years, both before and after Col. Gaddafi came to power. 

He saw first hand how living standards in Libya improved once the oil, other resources, had been nationalized. 

But these soulless NATO zombies are ever vengeful (a chemical process vaguely associated with consciousness) even if they have only mindless brains. 

Speaking of which, I'm bemused I was so cheerfully diplomatic about this other cold blooded swamp monster back in the day, accepting of her presence in my Asylum District (shudder). Not like it's up to me.

Toy Stories

AI clip art from Facebook

Social Media Messages

I’m for rebuilding west Ukraine and for the return of refugees who wanna rebuild it. This war didn’t start with the Russian invasion though, but with a civil war. I also support east Ukraine in its efforts to rebuild. This is the side that, rather than submit to the will of Kiev, decided to revert to the Federation. Given all the shelling in Donetsk, many other grievances, they get my empathy as well. Too bad outsiders on both sides each felt the need to escalate to the brink of a world war. That was unnecessary.

Commenting on Keith McHenry's post (March 2, 2025):

I'm for a neutral Ukraine, which was and still is a popular position outside of a more extremist inner circle. NATO dangled the carrot of membership and one political faction (what I'd call the far right) fell for it, betting all its chips. That faction lost.

Rebuilding Ukraine is what's up now. The oblasts who asked Russia to come to their defense are already rebuilding. Mariupol is looking a lot better.

Some still call that city part of "occupied Ukraine". I don't. When Ukraine has elections sometime soon (we hope, for their sake), these eastern folks won't be voting (part of the reason for putting off elections is no one wants to face the new limits to Kiev's jurisdiction). They'll have their own elections.

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2025/01/5/7492071/

Replying to David Cassandra Mertz's post (March 1, 2025):

I see these events through a different lens. Trump is correct in his diagnosis: anyone who hates Putin that much is going to have a hard time negotiating the future. I’m for a neutral Ukraine, like most Ukrainians (last we knew).

The Circle (movie review)

I’ve been enjoying a mini Iranian film fest here at home, thanks to Movie Madness, with more titles than Netflix, especially Iranian I bet. And thanks to Deke the Geek for the loan of this HDTV, which I connect to the old stereo stack (still VHS-capable) via AV/2.

The Circle is brilliant, but at first it made me mad. I felt abandoned by the director. I’d followed the birth seen, the highly annoying sounds of live birth signaling this movie will be mind expanding. That little framed window, between the medical world and this world outside. We would come full circle and end on that frame as well.

So the birth is a disappointment and that suffering woman, giving birth to the unwanted girl, fades in the rear view mirror as we follow the flowers down the stairwell only to end up with these other women who clearly don’t know anything about a baby. They have their own melodrama going, and now we have to follow them. That’s what made me mad at first.

But really, I can the camera follow everyone and be everywhere, to isn’t god. This is more like real life, where you switch from track to track, like a child does, if placed in foster care, or if picked up by police and taken off to some cell. What if you don’t have the right travel papers?

At first I found myself cursing at that other woman who was boarding a bus for paradise, only to see her wander off on some misbegotten shopping spree. “You’ll miss your bus you stupid lady” — but of course it was I who was incautious. The police were at the bus when she got back, checking everyone’s papers. Had she not wandered off, she’d be on her way back to jail already, as a woman alone, trying to travel without ID. That’s illegal.

That whole bus chapter comes after we’ve already forked off, choosing one of a duo, which had started out as a threesome after the unwanted girl baby scene. Then we jump to the other fork and start following the protagonist, I think we might call her. Her predicament is only now being fully revealed. She’s in a pickle too. 

And that’s when we come back around to a final forlorn female, or actually second to last. One sad story leads to a next in a male dominated police state, with hope only for rich people. No fun. Gotham has a dark side. Iran is not alone in this.

I admit to getting confused about timelines. Their identities all start to get shmooed together, just as the bureaucracy loses track of the people it hunts down. Society maybe run out of options for someone in a serious predicament, well before the life clock runs out. I still have the DVD checked out and plan to watch the special features. Then I’ll do some homework and see more of what I’ve missed.

Next in the queue: The Cycle, also Iranian.

No Bears (movie review)

I rented No Bears and Border Café together, from Movie Madness, and have a plan to continue drawing DVDs from the Iranian shelf. That section of the video rental store is indeed sorted by nationality, and alphabetically within that. Other sections of the store sort by Hollywood Director, or categorize into Horror vs. British vs. legacy television. 

We're lucky to have such a facility, with over 80K titles, as a part of our neighborhood.

I watched No Bears second, and didn't realize until viewing the special features that the director was also the protagonist, and his predicament in the film is similar to his predicament in real life: he's in trouble with the government and not supposed to escape to a foreign country.

The film has an ingenious twist, which I'm suggesting you can know about without spoiling the viewing experience, as the paradox, if we might call it that, never fully resolves. The split between reality and filmed reality is the issue. When we posit what we're viewing is reality, as if the camera wasn't there, then by that very same token it's not reality, because we're viewing it, so there's a camera.

The documentary genre will sometimes up the honesty by bringing the crew and camera into the filming, whereas those feature films suggesting we suspend disbelief will offer a "making of" as a feature, acknowledging the artistry behind the projected illusion. A "making of" is akin to going backstage to meet with actors out of character, resuming their native personae.

What this film does is lull the viewer into thinking we're in "omniscient camera" mode, only to have that assumption pushed aside when the opening scene turns out to be a take in a movie, which our protagonist is attempting to direct remotely, from the other side of the Iran-Turkey border. 

But then in another twist we find out the acting couple is indeed attempting to obtain black market passports for a one way trip to Europe, but that going together is problematic.

At this point, with the camera's loss of omniscience and invisibility, our sense of the director's innocence decreases as his participation in his own film's drama brings out the manipulative character of film directing. He might be getting people in trouble, making their lives worse? 

As a man from the city, educated, with money, and with a fancy car, he is treated with respect and politeness. He gets people to do things on his behalf that might be more in his self interest than theirs.

The director is addicted to making movies, even if that means turning his own life into film. Is this passion constructive or destructive? Would we in the audience have such a useful and penetrating view of traditional Iranian village life, without his guidance?  We know the film is ultimately fictional and therefore harmless. Why would the Iranian government persecute a guy who is making Iranian filmmaking famous? A deep question.

I see why the movie won awards and plan to see some others by this same director, Jafa Panahi.

Border Café (movie review)

:: visitor center; Asylum City ::

I just saw Border Café, originally Cafe Transit, you can see why I'd be into it: Trucker Exchange Program. The movie is set around a little roadside cafe in the hinterlands bordering Turkey, Syria and Iran. We have a Russian homeless teen hoping to reach Italy, and a lonely Greek seeking his missing wife.

I could see screening this for the elite early birds wanting to get those initial anthropology requirements out of the way. The movie is all aboard borders and social customs and the ethics around women working, but with few compunctions about child labor.

We should remember that not long before the Roaring 20s, women in the North American states had few opportunities outside the home. Jealous men kept them "protected" as prize possessions, as trophies. Then came the two world wars and an ongoing labor shortage. 

Not only did women come into the office, they started operating heavy equipment, more like Sigourney Weaver in the Aliens movies.

The Trucker Exchange Program is not about "in your face" challenging everyone's cultural norms in a disruptive manner.  That's happening anyway, through TV, radio, and streaming. 

Some parts of the globe are already comfortable with female drivers. Others might accept a long hauler married couple. 

The movie is about the thermodynamics of gossip, and what spreads. If there's nothing scandalous happening, how is it clickbait?  Ordinary news tends to be relatively dry, an acquired taste.

The movie is also about cuisine. 

The female principal is obviously a genius cook and what brings in the truckers in droves is her excellent homemade food. She has a profession, a calling. The males around her have a hard time handling the idea that a woman could have any profession outside of homemaker. Somehow someone's honor is at stake.

My point is: it wasn't that long ago before only "loose women" (of the kind you'd meet in bars) could have any profession and then they all seemed to have the same one. Margaret Fuller helped women break into journalism, starting with cultural columns, then branching out into hard news.

Traveling to far off lands may be like going back in time, which in turn means that, coming the other way, is like going forward in time. 

But let's not forget about going sideways. 

Sometimes culture shock doesn't come in the form of a time shift, as what alters is not the time but the space, the vibe, the atmospherics. Said vibes tend to be timeless a lot of the time, archetypal.

Speculative Prehistory: the Naga Story

I understand how a reader might pick up Critical Path and experience some disillusionment upon encountering the Naga Story. Even if the Genesis Story has little basis in science, perhaps with the exception of the flood (talking about the Black Sea filling up suddenly), how are we to take a migration story that begins in the South Pacific and comes westward to Europe and beyond? Why replace one incredible story with another one?

A lot depends on how we define “humanity” as one could say we’re still on a Planet of the Apes with simple reclassification. The “homo” branch of the ape family exemplifies tool use, and we already have ape and monkey branches that don’t and/or can’t interbreed, so let’s make the so-called sapiens more of those, another breed of ape, why not? It seems like a demotion of sorts as we're saying "humanity is yet to come".

Then comes the paradisiacal Eden-like experience of growing up in Polynesia, with just the right mix of stimuli, and at last, true humanity is upon the scene. A new ideal is achieved. Where this new spirit comes from is only tunable metaphorically: from the stars, as a transmission. That's in keeping with intelligence being metaphysical (weightless).

This humanity is spread by both land- and sea-based branching vectors, and provides actual human (pueblo) status to the sapien branch of the apes. We get the rice paddy economies following river beds towards higher mountains. We get the discovering of metals and their alloys. We get our planetary species civilization, spreading from Southeast Asia to India, Africa, Europe, the Americas, or directly to the Americas going around the other way.

In other words, we imbue the circumnavigating Polynesians with our identity as actual humans, in the process of becoming even more humane, while mixing it up with other animal stock in some cases, harnessing and riding them and/or domesticating and husbanding them. A third class of human took to the sea, depending on wind power more than animal power.

With industrialization came more “energy slaves” per capita, meaning humans were served by more and more horsepower not expressed through living animals but through mechanical devices.

A hint about this reading comes from those passages wherein Bucky warns us about boxing and/or overspecialization. When we bash one another in brutish fashion, de-geniusing ourselves, we regress (revert) to our more ape-like substrate. Our humanity evaporates from the Zeitgeist when we march towards oblivion.

This may all sound well and good but what about Polynesians having affinity with dolphins and whales more than apes? Why say humanity has more in common with these indigenous ocean goers than with the landlubber tool users? And yes, some apes are more aquatic than others.

First of all, that’s not actually the claim. Interest in dolphins and whales was developing over Fuller’s lifetime, with a strong emphasis on their safekeeping and preservation. Dr. Lilly even tried to open a communication channel with the dolphins, with a little help from his three-letter friend LSD. 

Critical Path was reflective of its own period in history in speculating about a humanity-dolphin hybrid (so-called mermaids). This might have happened on other worlds.

Seeing a shared humanity in these ocean-going mammals is probably more predictive of the future than a key to past evolutionary biology on Spaceship Earth. 

Humans have the capacity to build out under water, as well as over water. Given the percent of the planetary surface that’s oceanic, humans will likely colonize a lot more of the oceanic ecosystem before they ever get to Mars, perhaps modifying themselves genetically in the process.

Detachment

If you prompt me to talk about Buddhism vs Christianity, I might bring up that much misunderstood word, used by translators, "detachment", and link it that to that troublesome Jesus meme "hate the world".

The depth psychology here is "the world" is indistinguishable from one's experience of it, except that "one's experience" is objectively subject to change more adeptly ("on a dime") than "the world" is, given the latter is macrocosmic and therefore suffers from more inertia.

"Hate the world" means leaning to cultivate dispassion and what in science we call "a sense of objectivity" to where you're less invested in your current ego beliefs. You're potentially more open minded, which is where God's grace comes in, with the epiphanies and revelations.

The anthropologist, plunked down in some setting, is a trained observer, including of her or his own thoughts and reactions. We learn about cultures from their interactions. But the observer is not so in love with her or his own culture to want to step in and intervene, as some kind of missionary. The anthropologist is there to live and learn, not to judge, not to be a jerk (as in "knee-jerk reflex machine").

To cultivate dispassion, to become more open, is to become less bot-like, less programmed, less predictable in one's reactions. Which doesn't mean a personality is morphing on every front. On the contrary, as Bucky would put it (paraphrase): the metaphysical aspect settles down, even as one's appreciation for the complexity of it all continues to skyrocket.

Planet Palestine

I've been pretty consistent in coming down on the side of freedom of movement, probably because my school of thought sees the individual-to-planet relationship as initially, by default, open, in the sense of unconstrained. 

Institutions may clamp down on your freedoms as a tourist and/or planetary explorer, however we struggle to keep tourism a reality, without depending so much on the militaries for this purpose.

As a USA citizen with a passport, I've enjoyed relatively unfettered access to many parts of the globe, a freedom I'm well aware not so many enjoy, because they're not carrying the right travel credentials and have no clear path towards getting such credentials.

Cascadian Synergetics

ChatBot Chatting

King N-dimeus of Hilbert Space

Prompt:  Explain AI image generation in terms of moving through Hilbert space to a particular position.

Answer:

Explaining AI image generation in terms of moving through Hilbert space involves understanding how these models navigate complex mathematical spaces to create images. Here's a simplified explanation:

Introduction to Hilbert Space

A Hilbert space is a mathematical concept that extends the idea of Euclidean space to infinite dimensions, allowing for the representation of complex data structures like images. It is equipped with an inner product operation, enabling the definition of lengths and angles, which is crucial for analyzing and manipulating data within this space[8].

AI Image Generation Basics

AI image generators, such as those using **diffusion models**, create images by iteratively refining a noise signal until it converges to a desired image. This process involves moving through a latent space, which can be thought of as a subset of a Hilbert space, where each point corresponds to a specific image representation[1][4].

Moving Through Hilbert Space

In the context of AI image generation, moving through Hilbert space can be metaphorically understood as navigating through this vast, multidimensional space to reach a specific point that corresponds to the desired image. Here’s how it works:

1. Initialization: The process starts with a random noise vector in the latent space, which is analogous to a point in Hilbert space. This noise vector represents the initial state of the image generation process[1].

2. Guidance Signal: A guidance signal, such as a text prompt, is used to condition the generation process. This signal acts as a direction or a target in the Hilbert space, guiding the model towards the desired image characteristics[1].

3. Diffusion Process: The model iteratively refines the noise vector through a diffusion process, which involves a series of transformations that progressively move the vector closer to the target point in the latent space. Each step in the diffusion process can be seen as a movement in the Hilbert space towards the desired image representation[1][3].

4. Convergence: As the diffusion process continues, the vector converges to a specific point in the latent space, which corresponds to the final generated image. This point represents the culmination of the journey through Hilbert space, where the model has successfully mapped the input prompt to a visual representation[1].

Challenges and Opportunities

Navigating Hilbert space for image generation poses challenges such as managing high-dimensional data and ensuring interpretability of the learned representations. However, it also offers opportunities for creating diverse and realistic images by leveraging the vast potential of these mathematical spaces[5][9].

In summary, AI image generation can be viewed as a process of moving through a complex Hilbert space to reach a specific point that represents the desired image. This involves navigating through a multidimensional space guided by a conditioning signal until convergence to the target image representation.

Citations:

[1] https://sii.pl/blog/en/a-brief-history-of-ai-powered-image-generation/

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/faster-image-classification-generation-using-hilbert-curves-n-

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFztPP9qPRc

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1ae55p0/technical_ai_image_generators_draw_from_an/

[5] https://www.easiio.com/neural-network-hilbert-space/

[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666675821001041

[7] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/file/76c6f9f2475b275b92d03a83ea270af4-Paper-Conference.pdf

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space

[9] https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/ai-image-generation/

A Canadian Connection

Michael Accera of Lux Blox sent me this “geometer guy”, AI generated, awhile back in a DM. We were talking C9 (Cloud Nine) as I recall, one of our tribal memes.

In retrospect I have to say the image kinda reminds me of Joe Truss, now that we’ve finally met on Zoom. I say “finally” because Joe is a contemporary who worked with Stafford Beer, the Team Syntegrity guy. I’d been aware of their work but only to a strictly limited degree.

Asylum City

:: from my dad's archive: layout plan for Hoon, Libya ::

When'd I'd tell folks what I was into at Princeton, like if sitting next to a stranger on Amtrak, and getting to talking, they'd say "what ya gonna do with that?" meaning my background reading Philosophy. 

Sometimes the tone was dismissive, other times more pensive, as the culture sends a mixed message. We're told it's (philosophy is) great prep for CS (computer science) and a career in IT (information technology), which is more or less what happened to me, but also for future CEOs and startup founders. 

Although "a founder" (per LinkedIn), I've been in the ball game too long to call my sole proprietorship, previously a partnership, a "startup". I've been DBA 4D Solutions and before that InfoTech, for a long time. DIADEM Center for Creative Networking before that (starting in JCNJ -- Jersey City, near where Bruce Wayne's parents got shot), after I quit my fun and challenging high school teaching job (private academy), believing I heard Destiny calling (or Fate as the case may be and depending on the namespace / vocab).

So what I've discovered, in retrospect, is sticking to a philosophy track, even if a worker bee, entitles one to some Brit aristocracy airs, in the sense that one is allowed, even expected, to be "eccentric". That quality flies brilliantly here in Portland, aka Weirdo City. To top it all off, I like in Asylum District, truly named for a mental hospital (pastoral setting) that used to take up quite a bit of space here on the east side.

As an "out there" type person, I'm allowed to be more like those comedians, those jokers, who push the envelope as we say, regarding what's OK to have a sense of humor about, and what's not. Philosophers as a class sometimes go over the line, are beyond the pale, get lost in some twilight zone, and yet society may nevertheless reward them, as this is their role. It all depends. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

In my case, I look to my American heritage and see refugees as far as the eye can see, coming from all manner of other places, but mainly from the Atlantic side, only to meet up with the peoples already here and to close circuits with Asia. 

My dad was a city planner, with many branching specialties. Had he stayed in Portland, he'd probably have ended up with Metro, as he had a more regional perspective. Reading over his shoulder, I encountered Doxiadis (Ekistics), Solari (Arcosanti),  and other luminaries. On my out, out of Princeton, I dove into the Buckminster Fuller corpus, fresh from reading Nietzsche under Walter Kaufmann, Wittgenstein under Richard Rorty.

Dad didn't stay in Portland though, as his dream since boyhood was to see the world and find a line of work, other than military (he decided around college), that would take him places (literally). He might've been a travel agent if people decided they didn't need planners anymore. But it turned out they needed planners, so that's what he did, for several governments and ministries over the decades.

Given all those data points, you could say it's predictable that I'd take in the stadium shaped city meme and picture it as one of many dotting the globe, forming a high tech, well run Refugee Cities Network. To an extent, it's a juxtaposition over the realities of today. Cities take in refugees a lot. Some cities were built pretty much entirely by immigrants, new to the New World.  Old Man River City, for Bucky, was for East Saint Louis. But he wasn't about to waste his career on it, meaning he knew he was working for future generations and needed to time capsule as much as possible.

As a philosophy track choo choo, I'm allowed to chugga chugga through this science fiction vista, visiting these giant stadium cities of the mind, picturing the movies, the backdrops, the decades that might fly by as humans contemplated their various options. Decades have already flown by. The passage of time is not "theoretical". "Time is the only dimension" says Synergetics, I forget where. We meet up with counterweights on that word ("dimension") given Synergetics is richly textured with the "4D" meme. That's where my 4D Solutions is coming from, in my own mind.

Also predictable was I'd be enamored with One Laptop Per Child and the XO line of computers stemming from that project. The internet more generally was a big source of hope, especially with open source, and the police agreed with me. I'm referring to that Hillsboro West Precinct story. The cops were tired of being used by schools to scare the kids about "software piracy" (music and games mostly) whereas here was this free and open world, with copyleft and unbridled sharing, that the schools were refusing to teach about, given corporate capture. West Precinct even set up a Linux school at the station, which me and another guy staffed that one summer.

My activism in the area of education reform matched Guido's to some level (Python's inventor) and I was recruited to join that Mark Shuttleworth summit in Kensington, Greater London. Seymour Papert had sent his regrets, but Alan Kay, a friend of Seymour's, made the meeting. We're talking about Logo and Smalltalk respectively. The Scheme community was represented. 

How could South Africa leverage open source to better serve its schools? How might students of all ethnic backgrounds avail of these metaphysical (informational) goodies? Mark set up his Freedom Toasters, these kiosks that burned CDs on demand, complete with Linux, Python, and whatever else (music and games) of the copyleft variety.

Having retired from applications development, mostly for nonprofits, including some big ones (especially if governments count), I'm devoting a lot of hours to curriculum development and teaching gigs, while also doing various kinds of homework, availing myself of all that hypertext I used to pray for, in the lineage of Vannevar Bush (MEMEX) and Ted Nelson (Project Xanadu). The World Wide Web came along, thanks to Tim at CERN, and the global U has taken off. U as in University.

Speaking of hypertext, I'm still focused on hypertoons, doing keyframing, imagining the inbetweening a lot of the time. My topics: the scenarios in Synergetics involving polyhedrons and their transformations, but not only those. I'm seeing hypertoons, the concept, as informing my YouTube channel and how I weave YouTube scenarios together, about Couplers, about BASKET, about Asylum City, and so on.

Pacwest

 

TikTok Goes the Clock

I had my comment on this vid:  

I’m glad Linus went public with his sentiments. Not all Finns are sucking up to NATO so contrary to his statement, it’s far from obvious what his attitude would be based simply on nationality. Part of open source is getting these dirty secrets out in the open.

He'd likely take exception to my phrasing, however we do have Finns who take a skeptical attitude towards that state's recent suckering for specific genres of propaganda.

As an Oregonian, I feel I should say this Linus guy isn't speaking for all of us, those of us proudly of Russian heritage included (I'm more Swiss if we go by memes, Swedish if by genes). 

Many Russian Oregonians with sympathy for those caught up in WW2 era reflexing (i.e. knee-jerk dino thought patterns) were nevertheless hoping the software engineering world was on a plane above such politicized robotics. 

That was an element in the early idealism of free software more generally, if not of Linux in particular. 

Linux certainly benefited from the "cyberpunk" movement, bringing us PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and the like. RSA is built in to the HTTPS protocol, since even before Elliptic Curve crypto.

But that was then and this is now. 

Linux is by now the new Microsoft, the behemoth, more button-down and corporate than ever, and more at home simply running things, as the ubiquitous operating system, versus going back to playing the role of youthful idealistic outsider.

My own preference is these sanctions (including the Magnitsky ones) be rescinded amidst a return to sanity, such that politicians stop doing harm to our shared infrastructure, around which they have very little management competence. Their schools are to blame.

Wait, wasn't this supposed to be a post about TikTok?  As of this posting, a nationwide ban is about to occur.

Like I said, politicians are poking their knuckles into machinery they were not the ones to either plan or design. They bring their own set of unbalanced biases to the table. I don't wonder that they wipeout often, or that their plans frequently backfire. 

Surely You're Joking Mr. Fuller

In culty backwaters, or call it a swamp, where the sausage gets made, we have our little niche controversies. 

Perhaps goaded by Braingate, the controversy swirling around the two elderly gangsta presidents (were their faculties still intact? Not really, at least in Biden's case), and the subsequent coverup, some latecomers to our party have decided to retell the story around Bucky. 

According to them, our guy was too Alzheimery by the 1970s to really know what he meant in Synergetics, which means the rest of us have been engaged in a coverup, trying to make Synergetics seem more coherent than it really is.

This new "Bucky was senile" faction wants to purge S3 (an important constant) from the future curriculum, to spare people the need to understand what it's all about. 

They say because Bucky was close to senile by the time those two volumes were published, he was able to confuse himself about this nonsensical number (~1.06066... or 2nd root of 9/8).

But was he really that confused? We're talking about two conceptions of unit volume and comparing them. Both the cube and the tetrahedron will need to be sized, when the other is unit. We'll need a conversion constant in other words, like a currency conversion constant, between Tetrahedron Dollars and Cube Dollars.

If a tetrahedron's six edges are all twice that of a cube, then that difference in volume, one of proportion between them, is S3. The difference is only about 6%.

I think what makes readers doubt the sense of Synergetics is that what it does to the cube seems too drastic: a cube of edges 1 no longer has a whole number volume of 1, but of 1.06066...

That can't seem right to anyone already brainwashed to think "right angles rule" and "cube is king", the predominant orthodoxy. 

Surely you're joking Mr. Fuller!

Quick Response

It's but minutes before class, me the teacher, however I thought I'd update with this vlog from Natasha. You'll find others of hers scattered through my journals. 

I've watched her editing skills evolve, in tandem with her many adventures. My comment on this one (I don't usually comment): 

@kirbyurner 53 minutes ago 

I’ve watched a lot of Lex interviews over the years. I know this one was a major achievement for him. Congrats Lex. Some DC think tanks have for many decades promoted Ukraine-involving designs to challenge Russian influence in the region. British too. I don’t believe Putin could have prompted this war simply as a self-serving popularity stunt. He needed to tap into the deeply engrained paranoia of the populace. His opponents made that easy. There’s lots of momentum behind these unfortunate developments going back to WW2.

Back to Work

I’ve enjoyed the break in the workflow and didn’t travel anywhere further than Eugene, and that for a day trip only, at the beginning. Today the break is over and we pick up where we left off. Not wanting to get out of shape in the interim, as the instructor, I did some workouts with tabulations and multi-indexing in my School of Tomorrow PWS (personal workspace in GST).

In the comics and in myths, we encounter those endowed with superpowers, by dint of ingenuity or by inheritance, and the literature gets into lots of detail regarding these awesome capabilities. Some become invisible, whereas others fly. Many have multiple abilities. 

But let’s bring it back to the mundane. Just being able to read and write is something of a miracle, as is the ability to drive safely. A lot of our skills are collective, but get rusty if we don’t rehearse them. More people are shopping in pajamas, losing the ability of keep up a full spectrum wardrobe. A lot of powers are mental. Simply pondering and coming up with results of contemplation is as close to supernatural or paranormal as it gets, without being either, because these are such normal, everyday, taken for granted abilities.

Another highlight: visiting faculty from out of town dropped by for an evening. They introduced me to the Sri Lankan place on Belmont. After which we elected not to see Nosferatu at Bagdad, choosing to yak some more in NPU mode (comparing notes). I caught Nosferatu later, assuming Lexi and I will be able to find another fun movie, perhaps the new fictional rendering of Bob Dylan.