More Bizmotica

Bible Studies

One of the many benefits of practicing Quakerism is one is not beholden to a chain of command when it comes to beliefs handed down from "on high" (snicker).

I classify unprogrammed Qs (as distinct from the evangelicals) as one of those practices not that into what we call "head beliefs" i.e. some credo one should be prepared to stand and recite, like a loyalty oath. 

Per Karen Armstrong, Some Protestants are really into that; they think religion is about "what's in your head" in terms of whether you've absorbed Calvinist eugenics or some other Genesis-based racism (anything invoking "Noah's sons").

However, we do recognize everyone is entitled to a private "bag of beliefs", much like a spleen, a personal organ, and one engaged in filtering out the old while training for the new. 

T-cells and B-cells (antidote beliefs, the immune system) get a workout, as the macrophage dogs force-retire the red blood cell imposters, no longer able to perform their role. Everybody needs a healthy counterintelligence system.

Whether one wants one's private bag audited by others is a different matter. What others might be available? We have Clearness Committees for those wishing to enter a peer review process.

If you plan to go out into the world advertising your Quaker status, while meanwhile unfurling some elaborate ministry, you're expected to gain clearness and support from your local meeting, or else be prepared to explicitly state that you've bypassed that route. 

Thanks to this workflow, established over the centuries, other Quakers will know that, if you're out there sounding crazy, you might be doing so on your own recognizance, with no meeting expected to back you up.

We have a lot of Quakers exercising this freedom, well-complemented by the Bill of Rights, should the happen to be US-American or akin to same. These Qs not officially "released" -- meaning freed from committee work -- so as to speak their truth to whatever powers.

In my own case, I wanted to protect local Qs from having to vouch for my ministry in any way and so laid down my membership without lowering my level of participation. 

As far as my ministry goes, according to my version of Quakerism, all meeting positions are open to non-members, including clerk, as to be a member mostly means to be openly publicly a Quaker, not afraid to journal and/or list oneself in the public domain. In terms of workflow, unprogrammed Friends pride themselves on transparency and inherently have no secret rituals, even if they deal in confidential information.

As a non-member, I was cleared by Oversight (so-named back then) to clear members for membership. I saw nothing the matter with performing this role, as an "experienced Friend" as Friends called me. However other meeting-goers did express their reservations about my faith and practice, as would be expected. 

That's back when I joined QuakerQuaker, a discussion board devoted to hashing out (threshing about) such issues. Said board seems these days moribund, probably because the attempt to upgrade the underlying framework failed.

From my angle, many non-members are more courageous than members in this respect.  Some are just shallow status seekers.

Curriculum On-ramps

Many of us come to Cascadian Synergetics through Media Studies, featuring such authors as Marshall McLuhan, and readings such as EST: The Steersman Handbook. The verb "to steer" relates to the Greek "cyber" as in "cybernetics". "Call me TrimTab" -- Bucky Fuller.

Another on-ramp is First Person Physics combined with Anatomy, adjacent to "sports medicine". The topic of "energy expenditures" in terms of joules (or calories), and in terms of rate, gets us to such energetic terms such as "frequency" and "amplitude". Energy Slaves. Anatomy provides valuable experience becoming fluent in a dense namespace. Cytology and virology sit close by.

Market Metrics: Robotics

We can gauge the progress of humanoid robot technology in proportion to how much war game simulations factor in these robot armies when scheming and dreaming about futuristic wartime scenarios.  If the generals aren't expressing worry about the displacement of human soldiers, and/or the boots on the ground soldiers aren't organizing to keep their roles, then likely the state of the art is pretty far from replacing actual GIs. You'll need GIs with different skills. What's really happening is the "dronification" of various vehicles, such that they might be piloted remotely.

To what extent is DARPA funding "drone tanks" would be a question for some chatbot. I'm not planning to ask because I don't really care that much about what DARPA is or isn't funding these days. CP4E was enough to get the ball rolling in my bailiwick.

CP4E was Guido's proposal to develop a world-changing computer language, starting with a campaign to make it work equally well (via a GUI IDE) on all major platforms. This he accomplished, with masterful success, and the rest is history.

I expect Wall Streeters are already inundated with humanoid robot portfolios, glossy presentations about future product lines, an extension of the Kitchen Debate struck up by Nixon vs Khrushchev, in the shadow of the Moscow Dome. 

The state of "kitchen technology" is indicative of civilian quality of life overall. If the average household has all the requisite appliances, it gets to be rated "first world" (using an obsolete jargon). Will Japanese households have humanoid helpers in the kitchen? What tasks will they perform? 

In the meantime, the consumers control the marketplace in large degree. When it comes to AI, a lot of the GenZers are less interested in humanoid robots than in pet feeders employing facial recognition to dole out requisite portions and meds. In a cafeteria plan, individuals get handed a completed tray based on their dialed in dietary profile, much as on an airplane, but with meds meted out.

These are humans on the go who don't just wanna drink Soylent before heading back out to the playing fields. They do wanna be facially recognized, although fingerprint readers might be doable. Swipe cards will likewise work in some clubs (for food, gym locker, sailboat, scuba gear and so on).

The pet facial reader and feeder, like the floorplan-learning vacuum cleaner, are both examples of specialized appliances that don't need a humanoid appearance so much as a voice-controlled API.  

Many Gen X-, Y- and Z-ers are already passing on to Gen Alpha the joys of using inhouse voice-activation to control lighting, heating, meal planning, online shopping and so on. 

Instead of driving to the store, conveyor belt driven fulfillment centers assemble orders and push them out.

However, when it comes to the rough-and-tumble world of real-world driving, fantasy fiction meets reality in a big way. The Amazon delivery fleet, with private car armada, is not robotized, nor has drone delivery yet taken off (that'll be more relevant when we set up our more remote Earthala-type campuses).

Wall Street as a whole, on average, is not necessarily tech-savvy enough to not fall for empty promises. Once parted from their money, investors have little choice but to ride the rollercoaster in some cases. Their money was skimmed from their borrowing accounts (by prior agreement) and invested on their behalf, with the promise of more back than put in. 

The promise of the LLC is you won't lose more than you put in, not that you won't lose. Benefits from risks cannot be locked in, by law of nature. But by law, they may be mitigated.

SpyVille

So what I’m I learning from all this noir watching, thanks to MMU (Movie Madness University — but I repeat myself)?

I’m glad I caught up to The Girl Hunters (1963). Even though I’m older than Bogart (physically if not psychically, whatever that means), that doesn’t mean ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (as goes the tired cliche). I didn’t grow up on those Mickey Spillane novels featuring private eye Mike Hammer (thank you Genesis, not Mark). 

What I got was Spillane was up against Ian Flemming, the competition, as the Cold War was giving rise to a new set of stereotypes around good versus villainy. How to get the new spy lingo into Hammerese? The Girl Hunters marks a stab in that direction, with its fem fatale star the lucky girl to get painted gold in Goldfinger (which I also just rewatched thanks to MMU).

Trevor had earlier taught me about the Ian Flemming versus Patrick McGoohan school of thought, which could be summarized I suppose as “do the goodie spies have to be good with guns?” The question is akin to the age-old: “must the hero engage in swordplay?”. That depends on whom the script is written for. Speaking of which, Dick Van Dyke was offered the possibility of being a Bond after Connery, but he didn’t think the audience would buy it. True, it’s hard to imagine Dick sounding British.

As a child of the Cold War, I got to spys’ ville (a city of shadows) via such as Spy vs Spy in Mad Magazine, and yes through the Bond films, more than the novels, which nudged me into John le Carré, one of who’s novels I was privileged to read actually traveling through Victoria Station or one of those, on a rare visit closer to his setting.

Then of course I met some real spies in person, like Ralph McGehee that time, and later Ed Applewhite. Mostly I’d just read their books, like with Colby, Turner and that Spy for All Seasons guy (Duane “Dewey” Clarridge). Of course Casey (we might’ve met). Etcetera. More recently, I’ve been picking up some clues on stuff to read through Candace’s show (she’s eclectic).

Anyway, all that later stuff I’ve written up in previous posts, other media. It’s the out-of-sequence noir stuff that’s new (with thanks to MMU). Hey, I didn’t get to Sesame Street until high school, given Manila screened more USA telly than Rome. Or maybe that was more a case of getting it contemporaneously, versus catching up through reruns?

Political Awareness Through Toys

Vintage Silicon Forest

Python for Math Teachers:  Introducing Cryptography

VintageTEK Museum

Google Street View

Energetics

You might be patiently enqueued waiting for the doors to open, the curtain to raise, on the Martian Math vista. Or you might be already on stage, putting on a show & tell.

The ETs were not interested in our contiguous landmass huge perimeter states except as addressing units in various memory (data management) grids, zip codes and postal area codes being good examples. The nesting is regionally specific with neither "county" nor "state" in the US Federation precisely matching "canton" in the sense the Swiss use it.

Matching their approach might be our "virtual nation" economies, which often get some support from a business class interested in promoting tourism. Outside the business associations you'll have random boosters in the journo- or even blogo- spheres. The long-running Jefferson State campaign is a good example.

In the shadow of a Civil War, the threat was one of "secession", but now that we have virtual states, and Disney World (global), the threat is existential in a different sense: the theater (cosplay) of nations becomes virtualized across the board, as we become aware of our social programming (where "become aware of" does not have to mean in some "rebellious" sense; we're social creatures).

Silicon Forest digital (as in discrete) Synergetics sets the contest for a synergy among our loosely defined, not to mention overlapping, four categories: Supermarket, Casino, Martian, Neolithic. The ETs, fictive visitors to Earthling Planet, mingle with our own, if not physio-genetically (science fiction writers take it in different directions), at least by means of memes (psycho-epigenetically) such as through educational programs.

The back and forth horizontal sweep of an X beam (CRT talk) is combined with a Y beam bearing signal. X is the ticktock of a reference frequency whereas Y is from a pulsing voltage input. At the neck of the tube, a cathode ray gun is thermally excited to radiate charged leptons with spin. 

Rastering the X beam back and forth reveals a waveform or, if it's a TV signal, such as NTSB, a full grayscale or color picture. Here we'd maybe reference Tractor Graphics using Python.

Once we have our magnetic field controlled beams and currents, we're ready to dive in. We have impedance, inductive and resistive. We have transmission lines and three-phase. Trigonometry (the so-called circular functions) are now front and center. 

So where's the Synergetics, outside the geometry of great circle spheres and their spin-poly networks? The VE and Icosa generate 25 and 31 great circles respectively, defining LCD triangles and secondary axes of spin.

I'm thinking at first in terms of visualizing energy amounts, in the sense of saved potential, battery power, in terms of growing and shrinking tetrahedrons, volume amounts. 

The water behind a dam and the pressure it exerts is compressive in nature, energy to be released at a specific rate relating to both volume of current and voltage. 

What's the pressure? One may have ridiculously high voltage pressures with only the tiniest of current flows, such as across the surface of a scope where the X-Y directed cathode ray will cause phosphorescence, thereby providing a visualization of what’s happening along some spectrum.

Gender Politics

I don’t advertise myself (“hang out a shingle”) as some expert on gender politics. I imagine the male-female polarity (a spectrum) shows up differently per subculture. As a geek, I had a front row seat on OSCONs, Pycons and like that, so I saw a sub sub section of a culture grappling with the issues, whether gender-related or not or, more likely, somewhat.

My thought this morning is that a female newly inducted into a hitherto male sanctum might feel singled out and teased, because female, and therefore at an unfair disadvantage. That may well be the case in some cases. In other scenarios, what the female hadn’t realized is how these males tease each other, as a part of their discipline around healing and thickening one another’s skins. 

Friends sometimes inflict insults on one another to harden and desensitize in ways that add to (shape) ones version of professionalism. Nothing personal, one might add (after what sounds to be some personal attack). Think of a martial arts dojo. What else is there to do besides play fight all day, on a good day. On bad days, one fights (slays whatever dragons) for real. I’m pro dragon by the way; a figure of speech.

Why am I thinking about such matters on a Thanksgiving morning? 

A pat answer might be that around holidays especially we tend to gravitate towards ritual roles, which in nuclear family terms in North America might mean it’s the dad that cuts the turkey while the mom probably did much of the preparation. Case in point: I’m planning to dress up in an Eurasian suit and tie, reflecting my breeding as an English gentleman at the Junior English School of Rome (just the one year there though — other times I was learning to be a savage).

Deviations from these stereotypes are not uncommon either though. Some dads really like cooking and do it all, with the mom having a signature dish responsibility. More recently, the nuclear family itself has permuted, permitting couples to be same-sex. Extended more molecular families are likewise hardly unknown.

However, I think a truer answer is I’ve been looking back on my own trajectory within the aforementioned geek culture, remembering Guido’s PyLadies campaign for example, and how we brushed with sexism many times in the conference world. 

My own focus was to fork off Greek mythology with the Python escaping to Nashville narrative, something I talk more about in my Cultagory Theory: Revectoring Psyons.

Also: just this morning I watched a YouTube narrating the life of Felix Klein, a German mathematician who married the granddaughter of Friedrich Hegel. Although the pictures are largely AI-generated, what stands out, in the old techie movies too, is how few women there are, as in none. Klein saw this as a problem and devoted energy to altering this status quo.

Peace on Earth

By Eric Ton

Fall Term Homework

PDX HQS, Asylum District

Seasonal Themes

The stores switch to Mithraic themes after Halloween, focusing on Saturnalia mixed with Biblical themes, and by Biblical I mean to include the BC parts. I'm thinking to focus on 

• "ornaments" (polyhedra), roping in the New Years Ball (which I presume will be the usual n-frequency icosa-sphere, but I should double check), and 
  
  
• Peace on Earth with ample use of the peace sign decal.

One of the torches I carry, meaning content I consider worth passing on to coming Gs, is that of Waterman Polyhedra. 

Steve Waterman and I were early collaborators on his conception of a sequence of polyhedrons of growing complexity, meaning of increasing numbers of verts and edges, as one goes more and more outward, increasing the radius. All the verts are IVM (CCP) balls, let's assume a nucleated packing. 

We employ a convex hull finding algorithm to maximize its roundedness (minimize convexity) to pick up all verts less than or max radius from the nuclear ball.

The Peace on Earth = Promised Land meme will be familiar to some of my readers as it pops up in these blogs pretty consistently.

I'm starting to look back on 2025 already, grateful for friends and fellow faculty I've crossed paths with.

Time Slice

Making Models

I've been reviewing my Cultural Engineering notebook, featuring Zoltar the homunculus, the potentially any-gender, genderless, dude or guy, with the worldly models and/or ways of thinking realistically about stuff. 

I link to my Cultagory Theory video towards the end of that Jupyter Notebook (not playable through Github however) something to dive into next, if exploring my specific tunnel system. 

You'll find Zoltar playing his actively inferring role (observing, responding) vs-a-vs Operation Popup also, the art gallery Flextegrity manifested around this time (October) six years ago.

We link Zoltar's plastic spherical enclosure to the OmniDirectional Halo of Synergetics, likewise spherical and meant to model the modeling process itself, as one of brain-transceiving mind, a metaphor based in the experience of ideas coming to us, fully formed sometimes, perhaps in a dream (perhaps in a daydream).

When imagining a spherical shell, one is likewise conceptualizing the "two sides of the same surface" convex outer side, vs concave inner side. Convexity mirrors a wider world out there (outer space), whereas concavity concentrates inward towards a central focus (perhaps an atom, perhaps a self).

Bracketing one's sphere-of-relevance (one's shell) are the adjacent Twilight Zones (Bucky sometimes uses that term) of the "tantalizingly relevant" (just out of reach), and what in retrospect we might call "low hanging fruit" once they're grasped and incorporated -- it's an ongoing process.

A Driving Adventure in Cascadia

This Google Earth screenshot is of the high desert rolling hills eastern side of Wy’East (Mt. Hood), seen upper left as a white spot.

My route was from Terrebonne (lower center) north to The Dalles, by way of Smith Rock, Lone Pine Road, OR 26 W, Madras, Maupin, and Dufur, along OR 97 N then OR 197 N.

From The Dalles, the dog and I turned left and took US 84 W directly home to Harrison Street, Portland.

The small town of Dufur, with its own main road set off from OR 197, is an eddy of peace amidst the majestic swirl of steep hills, nevertheless farmed in many cases, with the tracks of farm equipment visible amidst the tall grasses.

I left Sydney in the Nissan while having delicious fresh-made cranberry bread slices, in a bakery with high capacity bread making going on. I sat at a large indoor wooden table looking through a view window across the street at the Dufur Market, with its own tables and hot food menu, amidst well-stocked grocery shelves.

The drive itself is a destination and a joy as long as you don’t mind a double yellow line amidst twisting climbs and drops, along with lengthy straight hauls on wide open plains. 

Season matters: I saw lots of signage about snow and chain up areas, which didn’t pertain in late October.

I enjoyed plenty of lonely open road with scarcely another vehicle visible, little need for passing, and with long intervals of natural silence at highway pull offs, where we’d stretch and take these pictures. The descent into Maupin, before Dufur coming north (or south I’m sure) is spectacular.

Sydney, just turned 14, was my back seat companion, mostly snoozing in old dog style. We started in Terrebonne that morning, making a stop at Smith Rock.

Multnomah Falls along the Oregon bank of the Columbia Gorge, is favorite stop for tourists, including day hikers and cyclers, but also short stopover people like me this time, eager for a great view amidst light refreshments, a souvenir merch gift.

We were coming west from The Dalles on US 84 W. I’ve since learned that during the height of the visiting season there might be some need to schedule in advance for valved access to available parking (?).

The above Google Earth picture shows the parking island design, with US 84 E and W parting widely to accommodate it. I can well imagine all the slots filling.

We had no problem slipping in and out. My camera battery was dead and my cellphone has a bum lens cover, so instead. I took the classic shot with my iPad from the parking island. Then we shoved on, with Portland less than an hour away.

Practicing Democracy

Although I'm in a rural area, internet coverage is provided, by wire (not satellites), so I'm in what amounts to my home office, in terms of devices. I even have the same Samsung monitor, which fits in the trunk of maxi taxi (changed her oil), not exactly a bizmo, but certainly at home on the freeway.

The weather: stormy rainy. My dwelling machine has been wobbling in the wind. But with breaks and sudden sunlight. Oregon is like that. Bhutan too: you get the whole range of weathers in like a 24 hour period. High variability in other words.

I tend to use the word "clique" a lot, you may have noticed. I find it a refreshing alternative to "cabal" and/or "conspiracy". Also, in listening to Quakers (Friends) I hear complaints about their cliquishness, but then I'd imagine that's a common pattern in any temple, meeting or church. Synagogue, mosque or whatever. The oldsters seem to all know each other whereas the newcomers may feel left out, even exploited at the end of the day.

Speaking of Quakers: their patterns are influential on my thinking more generally when I think of those experimental prototype communities, such as we'd briefly stage over the New Year days (Dec 28 - Jan 2 mas o meno) in a remote yet well-appointed retreat space, owned by Church of the Brethren. Quakers, Brethren, Mennonites have a lot in common and seem to exchange memes a lot.

By "their patterns" I'm referring to the Faith & Practice of unprogrammed friends, pastorless, who rotate through job descriptions / positions, as recruited by nominating committee, and overseen by oversight committee. However that's just a snapshot in time and using already dated terminology by some  reckonings. These were unpaid positions, volunteer, but also personal growth opportunities as it takes what they call "people skills" to operate a shared business.

"Wait", you might be thinking "why do you say business, I thought we were talking about a church?". One of the quaint things about Quakers is their religion is couched in the phraseology of the industrial revolutionists of Merry England, meaning their form of worship is cloaked in a vocabulary of running a business. Meeting for Business, run by clerk and minuted by the recording clerk, but not according to Robert's Rules, is what replaces the "board room" and/or "shareholders meeting" in a lot of ways.

I go into all this in my critique of USA-style democracy, to which much lip service is given, but which is not the practice of your everyday pleeb, who goes to work in some rat race hierarchical oligarchy most likely, be that civilian or military. Opportunities to practice democracy might come on weekends, through one's bridge club or pet walking shared event, a naked bike ride in Portland maybe, or golf on the links. I'm not forgetting the corner bar (or maybe it's mid-block, or in the sticks...).

In other words, why do we expect Americans to be any good at democracy when they get so little practice using it to run big business. Am I saying the American Quakers are any different?  Not really.  Their meetings (not called churches) are tiny nonprofits in the grand scheme of things, not at the center of any sprawling industrial base like in the science fiction novel The Iron Bridge, or in Quakernomics.

My brand of Quakers put a lot of emphasis on transparency, which partially accounts for my experiment: I abdicated my membership in favor of attender status, as newcomers also have (gaining membership is a process), but then upped my level of participation including by undertaking such "insider" roles as clearing others for membership.  

"Wait, you're saying a non-member might be part of, or even in charge of, a non-member's clearness process?" In principle, yes, although at the time I was simply nominated within Oversight to form a clearness committee per usual; I was not clerk of Oversight itself. My point though, was membership includes the willingness to publicly identify as a Friend, to be out there as a booster and advocate for the Religious Society (of Friends), with the understanding some Monthly Meeting has said member's membership on record. Members will be vouched for, in other words. But from this special status it needn't follow that members have secrets from nonmembers, process-wise. It's not like members are the most entitled.

Consider a case wherein a surrounding state or city is somewhat hostile towards and/or suspicious of Quakerism and it's a liability to claim membership in said Society, except maybe in exceptional cases. This was more how the religion got started, as an underground, as a network of religious people unwilling to accept the authority of a state religion and its mandates and edicts. Those stepping forward and claiming to be leaders in this movement risked jail time. Those days are long gone, but gives a sense of where the institution of membership arose, among those most willing to stick their necks out, as it were.

However, when it comes to recruiting practitioners to the Faith & Practice, it's better that they check it out top to bottom, serve on all committees, take part in all the processes a meeting requires, with the optional process of becoming a member being one of being "convinced" (that's the jargon) as in persuaded, that this organization has nothing up its sleeve, and how would you know that if you hadn't had the opportunity to witness its inner workings at the core level?  Quakerism is open source in the sense of transparent but also in the sense that branching and forking is always feasible (not that every mutation pans out).

Tron Ares (movie review)

Dreaming of a Civil War

:: sleepers and dreamers ::

Looking Back Two Months Later

Naturally my cohort, peers and faculty, took note of this concept further propagating, since two months ago at this time, around August 18th (15th to be exact), where the meetup happened in Alaska, an event with mnemonic value.

Chris Norland here (Portland his hometown) is skeptical that any such project could be anything other than a boondoggle. 

I'd already been sharing with the WILPF ladies (and a few men; like I'm a member, following in my mom's footsteps) regarding the GENI legacy, and coming from my World Game aware background.  

I'm continuing to fill in the picture for them, along those lines. The School of Tomorrow has long included all this in its ongoing, seasonally sectioned curriculum.

Today I'll be adding to my No Kings album, more in the role of photographer (with extra battery) than sign carrier (a sign would bog me down). I'll be curating others' signage though, per my usual practice, with an emphasis on "frogtifa" related paraphernalia.

We could always do with another No Kings Day, on into the future, a national day of remembrance that we're not planning to fall victim to lawless adhocracy and/or arbitrary rule by royal edict. Democracy is our game here, however badly played.

Express Your Patriotism

Fall Term 2025

Tips for Roving Teachers

by StruPPi Δ Pohl

If you're in a bizmo fleet charged with spreading our open free culture, complete with open source lore, you might want so tips regarding those slide decks I always talk about.

In my next school, my plan is to move through the Quadrays deck fairly quickly, explaining its significance to game development in terms of the squares to hexagons to rhombic dodecahedral space-filling. Consider 2D tank games. Some use a checkerboard, more like lat-long. Some encompass the planet in a hexapent much, more like Uber does. 

The 3D analog of a hexagon is the dual of the four-hexagons cuboctahedron, Kepler's favorite space-filler (per Arthur Koestler I think it was).

Then, with relevance to gaming established, I'll switch of to the Dimension deck and go straight to the slide about the three namespaces: 4D ala Einstein; 4D ala Hilbert; 4D ala Fuller. 

Quadrays help as gestalt switch between all three (picture a triangle), providing continuity with what we already know about XYZ (which is a lot). In other words, whereas the machinery of computer gaming was our showcase application (I'll have some version of QuadCraft at the ready), in philosophy of mathematics, it's more about transitioning among namespaces (picture changing TV channels with a remote).

That's already plenty for one talk. This will be a rehearsal for a second talk at the same school, a familiar pattern, and then maybe a third and so on. As a roving teacher for Coding with Kids, I'd use different formats, as their the goal was hands on and skills building. I performed that role having already worked with Saturday Academy as a middle to high school teacher, sharing Python and Martian Math.

Although an experienced coder, with some years of classroom teaching, this demographic was new to me. At CUE, my focus was andragogy more than pedagogy. With experience, I improved, and would continue to improve if working with kids again. However my next stop is a college.

Back to the decks, I'd emphasize that Quadrays post date the publication of the two Synergetics volumes by Macmillan (see Cosmic Fishing) and arose posthumously vs-a-vs Dr. Fuller's 1900s corpus. Also stress that the principals involved, creatives we look to, may not be aware of Synergetics at all, or, if they are, may regard it was some suspicion. 

Our work is augmented by many skeptics, as we further clarify what we're clear on. Our goals are in many cases orthogonal to that of making Synergetics a popular reading. There's no forcing such a thing. However there is playing a role where there's demand.

So yes, of course, there's a lot to weave in outside my decks. 

I'm focusing on my decks because I'm their provider and producer and want to offer advice to those in the field making use of same. 

My intent is not to narrow the focus to just my relatively tiny inventory of goodies, but to give a sense of where said goodies might fit in to a bigger picture (i.e. yours).

Home Home on the Range

I had itchy fingers today, or was it the mouse that was itchy? Philosophy R Us. Either way, I was poised at my workstation to order a new stove, an electric freestanding range. But then (a) I realized my ancient Magic Chef, avocado, is a lot wider than 30 inches and (b) the burner I’d convinced myself would not turn off, became cool to the touch. My hypothesis had been invalidated.

My stove seems to be 36 inches wide, in an even wider space. OK, now I’m seeing some 36ers are out there and they’re not cheap (not inexpensive, and one would hope of high quality), not the ones I just browsed. “Cheap” is one of those overdetermined words in English. One can be cheap to a fault.

I don’t think I’m cheap in keeping my vintage kitchen as it was, so long as it remains functional enough to meet my average needs. The chrome (I should say stainless steel) countertop (on both sides) sets the tone, whereas the pastel vinyl wall panels cast the spell of a 1950s diner. In the driveway: a car with fins (just kidding, but she is shinier since the wash).

The folks who occupied this abode before we did had different tastes, but I’ll say this: they made some high quality purchases. I’m still using the original furnace, garbage disposal and stove. The fridge, washer and dryer have long since been replaced. I’m happy to get by on such hand me downs. These are goodies we paid for when buying the place in the mid 1990s.

Back in my Jersey City days, I was brainstorming what I called The Housing Project, mirroring the Hunger Project. Essentially AirBnb and/or timeshare but different. More like club housing, if you know what that is (I don’t, but I’m thinking it up here). You join this club with places to stay all over, and you book access to these places. Maybe you need to be invited by the club I don’t know.

These days, I’m more into helping colleges and universities build out the group home idea, such as I enjoyed at 2D (2 Dickinson Street, Princeton) and later in Jersey City (we perpetuated the model). If only my Jersey City home had been faculty housing for St. Peter’s College faculty, I might still be there, ya never know. Or maybe I’d be with NJIT, or both.  Housing would be owned by universities and students and faculty and admin would get their spaces.  

When I say admin I don’t mean to distinguish from janitorial, as I regard these as two sides of the same coin. What admin does includes physical property management, not just making sure people get fed and sheltered.

By the way, I’m not claiming I was ever on St. Peter’s College faculty and would have stayed if provided with campus housing. I was taking grad school level courses there when I was offered the position at St. Dominic Academy. Both institutions were along Kennedy Boulevard. I was new in town, knew I wanted to try high school teaching, and here was how it worked out. I’ve told this story in more detail elsewhere and it wasn’t idyllic (the need for a new teacher at high school in the first place was tragic).

These days I’d probably look at Earlham or, closer, Reed, for admin, making Blue House a hub in several programs, including Food Not Bombs coordination (just like old times). Students and faculty would come and go in various scenarios. The kitchen could stay vintage. Superfluous remodeling should take a back seat to the deep changes we’ll be making at the curriculum level.

If the stove had some kind of circuit fault keeping a burner on no matter what (I had that happen to a taillight on my car), my friend and neighbor Patrick is the kind of guy who could probably diagnose and fix the wiring fault. Les too but he’s far away. However this appliance has been on the chopping block so to speak for over a decade, with my mom always offering to get us a new one.  But why?  It works great. I just replaced one of the heating elements, and got three burners working out of four. The stove cooks pizza.

Fall Term Album (2025)

One Battle After Another (movie review)

I didn’t find the characters or the plot especially believable, but the backdrop, immigrants caging natives, that was “muy interesante” and of course sad. What a mess this nation state system. Maybe it’s the best we can do, but it’s nothing to be proud of I tell ya, no matter how much lipstick is applied.

I watched it on the big screen during its debut week, having seen the trailer several times, as I’ve been enjoying the Bagdad quite a lot in recent months.

The whole point is to suspend disbelief and enter the screenwriters’ dream, that’s what fiction is all about, so kibitzing the film is not believable is throwing a tomato from out of bounds. It’s a comic book, a cartoon, a graphic novel, not a documentary, sheesh.

I’ll salute some of my favorite movie critics on YouTube, whom I consulted upon coming home, and agree with them that the filmmaking and acting are both high quality. I didn’t recognize Sean Penn. 

OK, I’ll admit to finding it funny in places (as intended — there’s a lot of comedy), once past the incredulity part, And again, it’s not like a don’t believe the stupid wall is real. Like I said: nothing to be proud of.

What was funniest? Those St. Nick geezers and their little club.  

The priorities (obsessions) and motivations of the characters just seemed so 1900s (they cared so much about eugenics).  Were people like this even real?  It really felt like a pseudo-period piece, a parallel universe, and again, that’s the point, what movies are good at.

Speaking of which, I checked out Dark City: the Lost World of Film Noir, by Eddie Muller, from Movie Madness University. I like the spunky writing style. 

That’s right, they have a book-lending scene going at MMU, not just DVDs. 

If I’m smart, I’ll write down a few of the movies I’m reading about in the book, and rent them out. I’ve got more Burt Lancaster movies in my future I have a feeling. The other book I checked out is about Wes Anderson movies, several of which I review right here in these blogs.

I’m still going through Christian Bale movies at a fairly slow pace. Coming home from Quaker meeting last First Day, on foot (I’m so lucky to live so close), I snagged The Secret Agent, and Metroland. I’ve seen the former, whereas the latter is queued. 

In The Secret Agent, set in the 1800s (lots of horses, rain and mud) Bale plays a most aware person (he’s empathic) whereas everyone else is deep into their own retarded dream (time tunnel) yet think the Bale character is the dummy (“fool on the hill” archetype).

Visiting BizMo

 I may have this story wrong, so feel free to correct me, but not in the comments, which are turned off, but in such a way that I eventually see the light and do a correction down the road, likely with a link back to here. 

The story I know is: Ford had a touring model of their Transit brand, van made in Turkey, for a Euro-based clientele, but only manufactured the cargo model in North America. Ergo a cottage industry sprang up in Cascadia and places to do aftermarket conversions on the cargo model, turning it into a touring model per various kits and guidebooks. DIY types took to this project like ducks to water.

My memory is a couple of my OST friends had the Turkish model, imported from Europe somehow, and they were tooling around in Sonoma County with that thing, likely helping inspire the whole wanderlust industry with their cutting edge example. 

Is it time to enlist a gossip bot's aid yet?  Placeholder for Perplexity.

Blue House was privileged to host a converted van of the Ford brand in its driveway recently. The vehicle was on a southbound vector. The crew well-understands my "bizmo" concept, which connects with "control room" in a dispatcher "AAA" model (repair and/or tow trucks get dispatched to roadside or other breakdown situations). 

Said crew included a canine (dog), which is also baked into my model (nonhuman trafficking). My bizmo to Terrebonne scenario has Sydney (dog) scripted into it.

Most of my bizmo scenarios are storyboard phase, geared for One Band One Road situations in broad brush stroke accounts, fine tuning a job for those actually undertaking pilot journeys (tours of duty). I expect they'll use the Turkish Fords out of the box, versus converted ones, but again, that's not a decision bottlenecking on my desk. I'm not a bottleneck. I'm in an observation box, like the ones at the stadium where you get to watch with your friends.

What I actually expect is that the bizmo fleets will spread through nomadland by an organic process no one in particular is in control of. The same is true with the spread of new curriculum content, from Cascadia and elsewhere. The motherboard circuitry is already in place, but its future modes of operation are not directly inferable from its present state, per a new kind of science (chaos math). 

Exaptations (cite Stuart Kaufman, Santa Fe Institute, ISEPP speaker) figure in: morphing maneuvers unanticipated by current affairs.

However, the unpredictability of details doesn't stop us from modeling in broad brush stroke. We expect faculty members here are there to venture down rabbit holes, or call them trailheads, that lead into our subcultural networks. This is already what's happening. Exchanges occur. They learn from us, we learn from them. A relationship emerges from the noise by reveruse diffusion, as anti-entropic computations kick in.

The bizmo fleets are oft tasked with paving the way (not literally necessarily, as the pavement may be in place already) for future trucking routes, much as small airplane routes are sometimes precursors of "higher bandwidth" versions, with wider body aircraft. 

For example, I flew from Calcutta (Kolkata airport, Dum Dum, West Bengal) to Paro (Drukyul) on a propellor plane, and later, when the route had plumped up, along the same route in a BAE jet operated by Bhutan's royal government.

We also took a Toyota hilux from Thimphu to Samdrup Jongkhar (and back), through Mongar etcetera, thereby previewing what futuristic bizmo might accomplish in some future chapter. Filipino-style jeepney networks likewise suggest where a future bus route might emerge.

Sometimes rivulets beget streams which may in turn beget rivers. Other times, the process goes in reverse, as when a once great river, with a wide delta, dries up completely, perhaps owing to heavy use upstream (I'm thinking of the Colorado) meaning it's supporting a maxed-out workload (Hoover Dam, drinking and irrigation water). Complementary patterning. Climatic change. Biospheric equilibration. You know the score.

Demon Slayer Infinity Castle (movie review)

I always check the marquee of The Bagdad when I walk by, and then when I’m home (usually) I’ll quick check out what the movie is about, the genre, the gist, to decide whether I wanna see it or not. My decisions tend to be whimsical in this case and have as much to do with my mood as with the movie itself. 

Last night I was in the mood for a Bagdad movie, and a quick check told me this was Japanese anime, with subtitles. Fans were raving, but that’s what fans do.

The endless fractal city, the infinity castle we could call it, is the backdrop through which many plots intertwine, with an overall elite demon slayer team pitted against the demons, which come in ranks and with various powers. Ditto the slayers have their own hierarchy, and sometimes a slayer will switch to the demon side, because reasons.

The backdrop infinity city anchors the flashbacks, as much of the movie comes through as backstory, as we explore a character’s past while, at present, they’re in a life or death battle in the Matrix (if we wanna call it that). The many flashback scenarios are archetypal stories involving family expectations, loyalties, the divvying of a lineage and so on. 

For example, one brother is insanely jealous of another whom gramps seems to love equally whereas this one brother is clearly better and more worthy in every dimension. His getting locked into this one way of seeing matters leads to his monstering out and developing demon qualities.

In another backstory we follow the history of a young hellion, deemed worthy by a dojo master and his sickly daughter, but right when everything was going well, the jealousy of others kicked in and ruined everything. The hellion felt furious about his powerlessness at this critical juncture and resolved to gain strength at all costs. Flash forward and he’s in a pitched battle, even minus his head.

The foreground life and death fights involve defending against mortal thrusts and blows, also poisons, while invoking aggressive modalities (actions) aimed at achieving domination. All these characters, slayer and demon alike, demonstrate more propensity to fight than to escape the scene. They actively seek encounters. They’re warriors.

I’m not a consistent student of the Japanese anime genre (with all its sub-genres), of manga either, but I did appreciate the consistent language, as in semiotic code, for sharing character thoughts as well as backstories. We get a lot of insights. As viewers, we’re nigh omniscient, a familiar viewpoint assumed by English novelists with similar confidence. 

Within the movie itself, overview is provided by a mapping room and a murder of spy crows who also share news.

The film was only lightly attended. Cartoons still enjoy an edge in matinee world I’d hazard, when a lot of the younger crowd is out of school for the afternoon. This was the late show, on a school night. 

I was there in senior citizen mode (I get the discount) even if I’d be up past my bed time. Now it’s 7 am the next morning and I’ve been up for hours. I could always take a nap.

Great Pirate Narrative

Aksing Perplexity

("to aks" means "to prompt")