Quadrays History

This account will be neither exhaustive nor objective in that I’m only able to define a puzzle piece within the limitations of my scope. I’ll say up front, though, that I cop to “running with them” in that US American football sense of heading for a touchdown, once in possession.

Here’s the gist of it: when Synergetics came out in two volumes, Macmillan the publisher, a lot of intrigued readers flocked to it, as many do to this day. They’d pick up on the critique of XYZ i.e. overly rectilinear thinking, but those already steeped in XYZ lore were seeing nothing number crunchy enough to take its place. Any computer graphics involving the so-called IVM (octet-truss or CCP by other accounts) would have to use XYZ coordinates to specify it. QED. Case closed. Synergetics is bunk.

Enter Clifford Nelson. He’d served in the US military and could program in ADA, the US DoD language named for Ada Byron (aka Countess Lovelace), who I introduce in my Graph Theory slide deck. She’s considered the first computer programmer, a title I defend. She lived in the first half of the 1800s, as a contemporary of another high caliber intellectual: Margaret Fuller. Margaret’s grand nephew was the author of those Synergetics books I’ve mentioned.

In my estimation, Clifford was a huge Bucky fan, as am I, and he wanted to fill this gap in Synergetics by retroactively retrofitting it with a non-XYZ alternative apparatus. He came up with something, coded it in ADA, and promulgated it as Synergetics Coordinates, almost as if Fuller himself had designed this new gizmo.

When I encountered Nelson’s work, I was already steeped in yet another alternative: Quadray Coordinates. This is back in the 1990s. Instead of ADA, Gerald was using Pascal, I was using Python and Visual FoxPro, and we were following along with David Chako, who had introduced us to Quadrays on what we called Syn-L, a listserv. I’m not sure to what extent the archives would be recoverable. John Brawley (different from John Braley) was on the list as well. David Koski joined us briefly.

I believe I was using Eudora on Windows as my email client back in those days. 

Somewhere in there, Darrel Jarmusch made himself known to us as the true inventor of the Quadrays and he had the web pages to prove it.

We weren’t really focused on any priority struggles regarding Quadrays though. Seeing their utility vs-a-vs Synergetics, I was doing essentially the same thing Clifford Nelson was doing, meaning we somewhat collided in our efforts. I kept pointing out that his Synergetic Coordinates were nowhere in Synergetics itself, nor were Quadrays. 

I the wanted newcomers to take responsibility for their own work and not try to “blend in” anonymously, as if our contributions had been there all along.

To this day I don’t really understand how Nelson’s stuff works and for all I know that work is still being developed by other developer teams. In ADA? That’s a language I don’t know how to read. 

My own Python codebase for Quadrays has gotten pretty mature in the meantime, but nevertheless let’s remember that:

(a) I am not the inventor of quadrays and 

(b) the code wouldn’t be that mature without contributions from many others

Others such as Tom Ace. Tom developed 4x4 rotation matrices and showed how we could produce the tetravolume of any tetrahedron using the determinant of a matrix comprised of quadrays to its corners.

 

He did all this while remaining skeptical of the Fuller corpus. He wasn’t motivated by the same motives as Clifford and I were.

By the way, if you’re knew to all this, maybe coming from a chatbot, don’t mistake Clifford Nelson for the Clifford behind Clifford Algebra. At least early versions of LLMs seemed to be making that identification, i.e. they were “hallucinating” as it were.

I’ve also had a lot of help more recently from faculty who insist on clarity and won’t accept overly hand-wavy answers as sufficient. Thanks to such peer review, I’ve been challenged to get even more precise and specific with the designs, which is not saying other developer teams are bound by the same decisions I’ve made. Where Quadrays go from here is not entirely up to me, but I expect my framework will be influential. Already, the Crescent City campus is commissioning a Quadrays for JavaScript (and other languages) endeavor. See Project QuadCraft.

What really drove my particular implementation of Quadray Coordinates was POV-Ray, a free open source ray tracer available over CompuServ since even before the GNU GPL had been invented. I’d taken to using that pretty early in my career as a personal computer (PC) programmer. Starting with Visual FoxPro, I would do my computations in terms of quadrays and then write out instructions using XYZ coordinates. Sharply rendered graphics were my reward.

IVM FM

These two images are meant to rhyme, visually. Let me give you some background.

One of our teachers has occasion to make the origin of our Caltrop Coordinate System (CCS) not its center of gravity, but one of its tetra tips, call it Blue. Blue origin. 

We also want to orient our tripod tower vis-a-vis the Earth in an obvious way, akin to that of a radio broadcasting antenna. Call that vertical spoke Green. That leaves two more feet on the ground, aside from Blue. 

Looking from Blue, with Green vertical, have Yellow be on the left, Red on the right. We call this "the bridge" or BRYG tetrahedron (or 4eyes).

The idea is Blue is the actual point of origin, where the record gets played as it were, after which it gets pumped out through the Green tip, high in the sky. Yellow and Red anchor with Blue.

Naturally the two below rhyme as well, and sound the same themes. The camera angle is looking down a little, from a drone point of view. The background is not Earth's surface unless we see that as ice, 

In terms of the CCP, closest cubic packing, there's the question of how we want it centered, on a ball or on a void. 

Where six balls hug a central void, the CCP might be anchored. Likewise the voids at the centers of four balls form two interwoven CCPs. That's four CCPs in all: ball centered, or void centered in three alternate, not-overlapping patterns. 

By "not-overlapping" we mean none of the four IVMs share balls with one another, even as they co-define their shared lattice.

We say Yellow stands for Sun, in the background, providing power, while Red could stand for blood and what's biological (burning, metabolic), the life that covers our Blue ocean planet and turns it Green.

Ball Packing

After developing the QuadCraft Project Jupyter Notebook, I turned my attention back to the Esteban-Struppi collaboration. 

Esteban is someone I met on the Metaphysics group on Facebook, where I unsuccessfully tried to drum up interest in 1.06066 (the Synergetics Constant) and the role this number plays in bridging the C.P. Snow two-cultures chasm. The kids on Metaphysics tended not to remember such a chasm and had little patience for my STEM-looking esoterica.

Esteban, on the other hand, turned out to share my obsession with geometric visualizations and we stayed in touch. Even if he was suspicious of Synergetics, he was fun to try explaining things to. He was engaged. I started sharing snippets of our Facebook dialog to the more publicly archived Synergeo.

Struppi is an established Synergetics shaman with a strong focus on specific hands-on crafts, useful for making lasting educational toys, a continuing source of insights. 

I enrolled in one of his workshops, long distance, after he caught my most recent video. I'd learned from our Telegram conversations that he'd kept up the dialog of Esteban and together they'd been going down a certain rabbit hole and wouldn't I like to go down it too?

I went down it to some extent, turning back around where the color coding got too intricate for my Python framework to follow, even if I was able to follow along conceptually, minus the coding component.  Struppi uses wooden balls, string, and drinking straws, not Python and a raytracer.

What I got out of the session was how one might prefer, when making animated GIFs, to pack from an apex ball to form a growing tetrahedron, with layers having successive triangular numbers of balls.  

Not only that, if one orients a quadrays caltrop (basis of a specific coordinate system) within the context of a tiny human observer standing on planet Earth, then that "apex" might not be defined by the vertical quadray (or call it the radio tower) but the radio station itself, the Blue ball in the foreground. 

Think of blue, yellow and red balls resting on the earth. Maybe imagine the sky and clouds as white and blue ice in arctic conditions.

Below, the packing starts in the Blue position on the BRYG tetrapod (caltrop), and marches rightward, aligning with Red, Yellow and Green in a 1st layer.

I compared these two ways of packing, center-out and apex-out, in a new Jupyter Notebook entitled Building the CCP: Apex-Outward vs Center-Outward Packing.

Happy Birthday to Me

:: virtual birthday cake ::

:: manga avatar ::

From the Minutes (Knowledge Engineering)

Omni-Medium Plummeting Device

An important meme in our corpus is the omni-medium transport, a theoretical device we’re always pushing to a next level, even as milestone prototypes are possibly achieved.

For example, the “flying car”, able to drive along highways, and take to the air, has made great strides and is now on the brink of mass industrial commercialization. But that leaves other media out of the equation: the water’s surface, and underwater. When will the floating bus become a sub?

The same floating bus is also able to take wing or drive up on land.

 And even with all that, we could push further, taking her into outer space, perhaps to the Moon and back.

What we appreciate is that, wholly independently of the practicality of such a vehicle, merely contemplating its possibility, as a futuristic device, feeds our ability to think scientifically as well as mythopoetically.

The chariots of the gods and goddesses have always served as food for our relatively feeble imaginations. Our speculations regarding UAPs and what propels them, anti-gravity engines and so on, keeps our imaginations alive with possibilities and that in itself is a service we need, much as we need random number generators.

Science fiction is a shared social good, a repository of our hopes, our dreams, our nightmares, our paranoias.

Along these lines, I suggest a new Art category in this M4W Coda wherein we test out what we get around prompting for such an omni-medium transportation solution, as well as subsets thereof. It’s fine to focus on airplane-meets-car option, neglecting for the time being the mirroring water-underwater bus-sub option.

 
Yellow Submarine meets Further.

In tandem with fantastical AI generated and/or humanly contrived works of greatness, let us intersperse some of the working prototype examples. For example:

M4W Coda KE Meetup 5/21 agenda

Sister City Project

Long time readers of these blogs already know about the Shiraz-Portland Sister City relationship. Whether that was ever approved or not I'm not sure. Probably back burnered because of all the marching to more federal registers that goes on. 

But I'm thinking at the Mayoral-Governor level, there's no need to resolve which federation a state, stan or oblast is within. Oregon and Donetsk are both states, regardless of other Venn Diagrams. Oregon is also a state on the Pacific Rim. At least some of our state is in Cascadia.

I'm running this Portland-Mariupol Sister City proposal by WILPF as concept art at the moment, with Perplexity drafting a declaration. WILPF = Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, well established in Oregon.

What other NGOs and civic-minded associations might want to get on board in supporting this?

On my School of Tomorrow maps, we're free to toggle between different worldviews i.e. see the globe through the eyes of different cults and subcultures, many of whom divide it up in ways we might not recognize based on our own forms of schooling.

Work Study in Cascadia

As one to take his own medicine, I'm following the work-study program I preach as a university standard: weave in the hard physical jobs as components of reshuffled PhD programs, or call them whatever, connotation: advanced, but more polymathic than some of the predecessors.

The camera shot is obviously posed, but we (me 'n Sam) really did the work of screwing the aluminum wheels onto those lengths of pipe, all meant to be spliced together and moved by a centered "mover", a machine. That's farming 101 (beginner terms) for a lotta ya, sure was to me. The "wheel line" so-called, is not the same as a "reel line" which I've also learned about, in previous episodes of Kirby Visits the Farm.

The picture above gives a better sense of the project: the wheels get delivered in halves which need to be (a) clamped around their pipes by bolts and screws through the provided holes and (b) screwed to one another around the rim. 

These wheel-borne pipes, when connected, support an ensemble of crop sprinklers, water spreaders, fed by highly pressurized water to the pipe at one end, and all of it moved as a unit, very slowly across a wide field, by means of a petroleum combustion engine.

Yes, these wheel lines come in other forms. Sometimes the pipe is held much higher, with wheels supporting tall pillars. Sometimes the pipe is fixed at one end, such that the other end traces out the perimeter of a circle. We often see these patterns of circles from airplane windows, when flying over cultivated lands.

This field, used for wildflowers, eventually grows too high for the wheel lines to traverse. The barley fields are already that way now. At this point, a reel line might come into play, with lanes mowed in a diagonal pattern, through which to drag a sprinkler on a retractable hose. 

If this is still a fertile valley as advertised, one is hoping for rain to also do its part. Irrigation technology alone is not able to win most fights against climate change. Water pumped from a nearby river keeps the show on the road and harvests predictable, provided long term weather patterns (climate) continue to cooperate, which they may not.

Meanwhile, back in the trailer, I was reading through Black Pill, on advice of the Mercado Group (my daughter a member), which no longer meets at El Mercado, an ethnic-themed indoor mall on SE Foster, which succumbed to fire at the start of last year. Rebuilding is ongoing. The group meets other places.

I'm also reading Glorious Bodies, and re-reading Into the Cool.  Mercado Group includes professional readers, librarians, who not surprisingly take in other media with a voracious appetite. I'm oft reminded of my Grandma Esther, a super curious-minded woman, who loved to read about any and everything. Talk about polymathic!

It's at the farm that I sometimes catch up on Rachel Maddow's show (I don't subscribe to cable), whom I've acknowledged is influential, even if we're not always on the same page. When Air America (the talk radio network) broke up, I followed my peeps, like Thom Hartmann, over to RT America, whereas others went to MSNBC. Little was I expecting at the time, RT America's eventual banning, amidst tank, drone and missile extravaganzas, other lurid orgies of monstrous violence.

Rachel did not disappoint, with her strong message regarding EWR (Newark Airport), which had a recent vital infrastructure outage making air traffic controllers unable to perform effectively. They were like firefighters without water in LA. 

The whole Atlantic coast might be becoming more tiredly provincial, awaiting a next long overdue upgrade. I'm not the expert, although I did live in Jersey City, close to Newark, for some years. 

PDX seems to be operating normally, but this coast has a separate economy to some degree, not discounting the huge volume of domestic "land shipping" by truck and rail (nor forgetting barges, nor airplanes used for freight...). Transportation is a big subject, especially if you factor in fuel and power delivery by pipeline and grid, and water delivery by myriad modes, including in plastic bottles stowed in refrigerated dispensing machines.

My work-study program also emphasizes how, in earning academic credit, and in being provided with more than adequate digs for the circumstances, I am not thereby replicating any exploitative migrant farm hand conditions. No one is forced to go undocumented and unappreciated.

March on May First

:: may 1 march ::

I took a somewhat professional insider view of the protest's level of organization, which I found to be high. I"d been on some May 1 organizing committees as the AFSC (Quaker) delegate, over the years. However the last one I was on didn't go as planned, when our police-approved downtown marching route got hijacked by another committee.

We gathered in the park where we listened to speeches designed to focus the message, and practiced the slogans we'd be using along the way. This was a small neighborhood gathering in southeast Portland near my house, on a Thursday during rush hour. The big events are set for Saturday downtown.

The park we gathered at is the same one Patrick and I usually go to anyway, if not to Laurelhurst, to give our dogs some off-leash fun in the sun time.

This preview and warm-up gave would-be participants sufficient information to judge whether they wanted to join. 

Maybe some would be put off by the anti-ICE sentiments. Others might cringe at the word "socialism" which is when I turned to Patrick and said: "this is already a socialist nation, but it's military socialism the people practice".  

The military is largely a sprawling camp system for economic refugees. A lot of the jobs the "illegals" do are similar to the jobs learned in camps, having to do with cooking, logistics, maintenance. Then one learns skills associated with "negative work" i.e. undoing the hard work of others, with explosives etc.