Old Friends

Yesterday I took the FX2 over Tilikum Crossing to downtown Portland, on the other side of the Willamette River from my neighborhood. 

My objective: to celebrate an old friend's birthday at Karam, a centrally situated Lebanese restaurant. 

My interim goal: to arrive early enough to take some digital photographs on a sunny spring day, of whatever. 

On my return from Karam, I took a street car, right outside the door, down to the Waterfront, one stop past where I’d rejoin the FX2, but first I got some spectacular views of the OHSU cable car.

Upon arriving home, after walking north from SE 34th and Division, I found two recently-ordered books in my mailbox, both from the Trevor Blake collection. I'm looking forward to diving in.

Close Enough for Folk Music

I'm far from a veteran, in the sense of expert, when it comes to the local folk music theme. However, another family, the Pinneys, pivotal in transforming Stark Street facility into a real Quaker meetinghouse, knows the folk music scene inside-out, and Sonya, the matriarch Pinney, personally invited me to this elite gathering at Reedwood Friends Church. I was more than happy to accept her extra ticket and perform as chauffeur, a preferred role.

Bobby Jenkins, far different from me, is indeed an expert, both in the lore surrounding, and in the playing, of folk music using authentic folk instruments, in the string family especially I gather, including the Theremin (a "stringless" violin). Tonight he featured the banjo and the classical guitar. He would retune both instruments adroitly as a part of the performance, as the range of tunes he was covering were by no means all designed for the same scales. If that sounds like I know music theory, trust me, I'm faking it.

Jenkins leverages the fact that he doesn't need to masquerade in blackface and come off like a phony white person pretending to be otherwise (whites are good at that, like parrots or minah birds, just witness their stand up comics). He knows Portland really well and had QuarterWorld in mind for his destination after the show, as he's a connoisseur of pop culture and knows what Portland is known for. The guy is originally from Brooklyn NYC, with those famous STEM schools, but with a lot of North Carolina background.

The narrative he delivered, which I found no reason to contradict, was that what we call the banjo was primarily a slave class instrument, and its vocabulary, in terms of native tunes, turns towards the defiant, as well as the encrypted. African cultures needed to find a way to self perpetuate, despite the imposition of a Christian framework, which they learned to adapt towards their own purposes, all of which accounts for the vitality of the all-Americas music scene to this day (Bobby knows a lot about the evolution of Reggae).

The audience, unlike me, were indeed veterans of the folk music scene, many like my friend Sonya with season tickets and a long track record of getting educated along these lines, by a variety of accomplished shows on the road. I'm reminded of the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series, produced by ISEPP, where I was a veteran, in terms of how a certain "trans-episodic shoptalk" bleeds through. That's a fancy way of saying insiders seem to know what they're talking about, whereas as outsiders within hearing distance (like children peripheral to the council of elders) pick up on what they glean and formulate their own conjectures and speculations.

Now that slavery and apartheid have ended, although we'll continue paying karmic costs, it pays to go back and do what the Civil Rights Institute in Bellingham does: revisit the past in meticulous detail. Overcoming a chapter does not mean turning one's back on the content, but rather diving in with gusto, without the polarizations of the past. Novel perspectives, low hanging fruit, is easy to come by, another way of saying such scholarship is rewarding. Jenkins, highly skilled, even brings some of the higher hanging fruit within the comprehension range of a noob such as myself.

I was surprised to learn from Sonya about the death of one of my peers in Quaker-verse, Laura Martin. The Martins, along with the Pinneys, Jumps, Urners, and Hazel Hephill, were among the original families of our nascent Quaker meeting on Stark Street. As we awaited the show starting, sitting in those Reedwood pews (I don't access this space very often), I shared with Sonya our saga as I'd come to learn it, about the heroic exploits of one Doug Strain, the conscientious objector who helped our Quakers get their show on the road back in the mid 1900s. The Urners had recently moved from 57th Street Meeting in Chicago, their new son (me) in tow.

Bobby's performance reminded me of Dan Ryan's. Dan would specialize in offbeat blues bordering on what never made it on the record, again inheriting bigly from slave subcultures in the north American southeast, around the Mississippi Delta and so on.

Next Projects

Vintage Blender 2.5

You might’ve come across me talking about Blender here and there, meaning the animation and spatial design environment, in the same ballpark as Maya and Rhino.

I keep reimplementing a core framework of polyhedrons, arranged in accordance with the Synergetics Hierarchy (a concentric arrangement of a familiar cast), having it backend in different file formats: vrml, pov, stl, or directly into animation tanks (cartoon vistas): Visual Python’s, Blender’s and Rhino’s.

Ideally, the same scripts I use to develop POV-Ray stills (.pov files) could be used to drive Blender, with the result being a real time interactive vista, suitable for VR. I’ve accomplished this goal to partial degree but don’t really have the energy slaves (inanimate machinery) to commit to running the newest Blender.

To that end, a next Linux box is on my wish list. Or a Mac with similar rendering capabilities. As of this time, Windows is too unstable to take seriously.

However I’m not wanting to be a bottleneck and prefer accelerating the spread of the existing knowledge base over doing cutting edge R&D. Andragogy and pedagogy, curriculum development, testing, improving, have been core concerns, over coming up with something splashy, not that our content isn’t naturally splashy.

Bizmotica

Espied on Hawthorne Upon Descending from Mt. Tabor

Madam I’m Adam

Yes the title is a palindrome, letting the comma go where it needs to, but that’s not the topic here. Rather I’m hearkening back to my senior thesis at Princeton, on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, wherein I posited a thought experiment.

The thought experiment: I wanted my reader to posit a single Adam, like an LLM (not a term in 1979), that spoke through everybody. Think of language like that, and you’ll maybe DuckRabbit into the Wittgensteinian view, of a vast machinery without interiority, which isn’t to say we don’t have private lives, only that “we” belongs to it, as part of its machinery.  See?

I also talked about chunks of text (mega-tokens) getting organized like railroad cars in a switching yard to make sense. Trains of thought. When you read enough, you start to find a lot of the same trains (of thought) in peoples’ writing, which again lends itself to the “One LLM Behind It All” thought experiment.

Nothing changes, actually, when you look at it this way, except one’s “sensibilities” perhaps one could put it. The temptation to lunge at internal ephemera in order to capture “the meaning of” by means of introspection, is lessened, as Wittgenstein suggested would be the case. He’s operating in an aesthetic dimension, not sharing empirical findings from anthropology, except “investigations” do require attention to details, the actual patterns. 

Once you give up the easy picture of meaning, representation, name pointing to object, then what do you replace it with? A more detective like attitude. Discovering meanings takes research, field study. Wittgenstein used the field of mathematics for a lot of his “entomological” studies (or call it “ant work”). Namespaces do tend to colonize one another, which is to say blend, to varying effect.

Turning to one of those “psychological” verbs, is “sulking” a sensation? Does one close one’s eyes and savor that sulking feeling? Is it the same for everyone? 

Or is it a mistake to identify such a complex storyteller verb with some physiologically enmeshed endocrine talk? 

I make fun of the overly literal interpretation of “interiority” in this spoofy prompt to Perplexity:

Help me with a satirical piece poking fun at neurobiologists who over-literalize English verbs to where they imagine chemical processes corresponding to every novelist’s invention, such as “sulking”. These scientists have suddenly discovered the “sulking hormone” and know which part of the brain is involved. Parody prose.

And here’s what Perplexity came back with, some very apropos trains of thought, wending their way through Hilbert Space:

Clever premise — the satire practically writes itself once you imagine a research team describing “sulking” with the seriousness of a Nature Neuroscience paper. Here’s a short parody take you could expand or stylize further:
________________________________

The Sulk Cortex and Its Endocrine Pathways

After decades of neglect, neurobiology has finally caught up with the novelists. In a paper preprinted last week, researchers at the Institute for Limbic Literalism announced discovery of the long-theorized sulking hormone, endosulkine. “It’s what happens,” explained lead author Dr. Primrose Gland, “when an organism receives insufficient validation but refuses both confrontation and forgiveness.”

The team identified a walnut-sized region of the brain near the anterior insula, now dubbed the Sulk Cortex, whose metabolic activity spikes when subjects are asked to “feel misunderstood but also a bit superior.” Functional imaging revealed synchronized pouting waves across hemispheres, particularly when observing others being comforted first.

Administration of synthetic endosulkine to lab mice produced telltale behavioral changes: hunched posture, slow tail swishes, and refusal to run the maze even after being told it “wasn’t their fault.” In humans, microdoses led participants to stare at unwashed dishes while whispering “whatever.”

“We now suspect that sulking may serve an adaptive purpose,” said Dr. Gland. “It allows the brain to conserve energy previously wasted on rational communication.” The team is already investigating adjacent regions potentially responsible for brooding, moping, and the dignified flounce. Funding applications are pending, though reviewers have complained of long delays and pointed silences.

Pretty good for an LLM. Thank you Adam.

Learning Through Playing

The Cat in the Bottle

World Game Museum: Exhibit

Ed Applewhite to Kirby (pdx4d), 13 May 1998

Night and the City (movie review)

I got the Criterion Collection version of this one, and as of this posting I've only been through disc one, but that already means watching the movie twice, the second time with a very knowledgeable overvoice giving all kinds of backstory. That's what I love about the Movie Madness collection: how much behind the scenes stuff is stored. This latest borrowing extends my noirs kick.

The director of the film was a little like the anti-hero, a guy on the run, in the director's case from the fascists using "anti-communism" as a rallying cry for the mob. The mob controlled Hollywood and people like the director, into more American values, had to leave the country to find work. Unlike the movie’s loser dreamer schemer, Jules Dassin managed to have a pretty successful career in the rear view mirror, despite those ax-grinding Nixonians.

People in 1950 didn't really like the movie when it first came out because it painted too raw of a picture. Instead of capitalism meaning "a few bad apples" (the justice force will protect us) it seemed to mean "bad apples all the way down" (everyone purely selfish and desperate). 

Of course no one talks about "capitalism" in the movie, just they make London the backdrop, and we're supposed to make the connection to "a rotten system" on our own. By whatever name, right?

There’s a lot more to the backstories and I haven’t even watched disc two yet. If you’re into film studies, see if you can find a source as good as Movie Madness. What podcasters talk noirs?  Anything on NPR?

Movie Madness is moving to Sandy Boulevard by the way. The new storefront advertises that’s what’s happening. It’ll be across the street from its parent, the Hollywood Theater. For me, it’ll be a little further to drive, or I’ll do what I did today and take the 75. I was headed to the nearby sushi train.

Filing Taxes

Preparing Taxes

Another Monday rolls around, a first one in March, and suddenly everyone is thinking the same thing: next month I have to pay taxes.

As I’ve blogged about several times over the years, I get interviewed by a tax professional after I’ve retrieved and summarized the year’s documents. This year is no different, other than I have developed more of a system. My wife was a professional bookkeeper so I used to leave the accounting all to her, but twenty years later, I’m not that helpless.

What I do is what everyone who has bank accounts or stuff like PayPal or crypto wallets does: 

• generate statements for the entire year, showing all transactions, both in and out; 
• iterate over all such accounts (we think of iterators in Python, an umbrella type). 
• Then I filter out the business expenses and 
• offset those against business income to keep my taxes that of a small business (which it is).

What do I do for a living? You may have attended some of my lectures, online, asynchronously, or even in person over the years at a Pycon or OSCON or one of these (even a Djangocon in Chicago). 

I put myself down as a teacher and writer (what kind of writing? A lot of it is curriculum development — echoes of my job at McGraw-Hill back in the 1980s). 

I do both with or without income deriving therefrom (gig economy). For example, last year around this same time I was working for bosses based closer to Eastern Europe than to Japan, just to make a Where in the World Carmen Sandiego clue out of it.

Speaking of kid games (computer games for kids), I dusted off an old Codesters account from my Coding with Kids chapter, and was gratified to find my curated projects (not all by me I don’t think) still working. I wonder if any of my students have anything curated. I had a teacher account. 

Codesters came after MIT Scratch in our sequence. All our curriculum stations were cloud based, even if the classes were in person, until the virus hit, the pandemic, at which point we started summer camps over Zoom.

As people were recovering from the pandemic, I found myself back in the classroom, this time with just the one school, not a school-serving company. 

Working with various concepts on up the ladder, starting high, going low (to beginner), back up to a summit and so on, repeatedly, is a great way to get a mature picture of the landscape, so to speak. Which landscape is always changing. 

One can’t help but be out of date on various topics. We get our updates asynchronously, that’s just how it is. There’s an entry under Doppler Effect that’s reminiscent.

Breakfast of Champions

This was a bleak day in world history, so what better way to start than with a good, healthy breakfast of champions? Shades of Vonnegut, right?

I made it to H-Mart yesterday. That’s an Asian (Korean-owned they say) food mart on nearby Belmont, where there used to be a Zupan’s. What was I seeking? Kimchi. I also got a cold sesame noodles I wanna try (missing our favorite Chinese restaurant’s version, closed long ago). And some dried peas I thought were wasabi but were plain, yet still good (I ate the whole bag).

I haven’t found kimchi at Winco, and whereas Fubonn is quite close by there on SE 82nd (as is Hong Phat), a brisk walk from the Steeplejack (was Bank of America) on Hawthorne was in the cards. We had just had our curry stew.

Kimchi and an NA Guinness at around 10 AM gets me going this Saturday. Very Pacific Rim if you ask me.

I’ve been busy printing out bank statements and PayPal logs, getting ready for an appointment with H&R Block. This time last year, I was winding up with Clarusway as a data science teacher and shifting gears into full time Python development in service of my own School of Tomorrow curriculum. That work is paying off in some dimensions.

You could think of me as a writer / teacher who eschewed wood pulp dead trees as a medium (i.e. print) because my dream had always been hypertext, as in hyperlinks, so once the internet came along, it was duck to water time.

State of the Swamp

 [adapted from the WILPF listserv version ]

The military mindset is all about shirking responsibility by saying "I was just following orders" -- a syndrome which goes all the way to the top, where you put an irresponsible moron scapegoat, thereby making the unthinkable more likely, as the obedient minions scurry to carry out stupid illegal orders.

AI is the ultimate scapegoat boondoggle in that one can always point to AI and say "I didn't come up with this plan, Claude did, or Grok" or whomever is the dummy dujour.

What we need to do is disallow the scapegoating of AI.  I'm sure AI is telling RAND to nuke Russia now and be done with it.  It's the humans who listen to AI who are dumber than dumb.

Washington DC think tanks are notoriously lazy, full of over-privileged primate school [sic] chumps like Victoria Nuland, the "brain" behind the Nuland Nazis, the ones who tried to make an ethno-state outta Ukraine (dumb dumb dumb).

Let's call out the think tanks for what they are:  worthless at best, a source of great human misery on average.

Acting Locally

The scandal sheets will suggest I perform animal sacrifice, which is true, as in our neck of the woods it's legal to keep a pet python, which I do. I buy live mice for it about every nine days on average.

However scandal sheets are all about twisting words, which is what some breeds of wordsmith pride themselves for doing. I get it, I do it too sometimes. Like when I dare to say "four basis vectors" for the quadrays when clearly the one is the linear combination of the other three, allowing for a negation operator (I take it away).

As I head to the mouse store, whenever the weather next looks propitious, I'm gonna pick one of the new food carts next to Tom's for a sample transaction. I know I won't get to use crypto, but I always pretend that's what I'm using, when I pass over bills or use bank accounts. Electrical impulses signal an increment over here with an offsetting decrement over there. That's transactions for ya, call it money if you want to (there's no guarantee others will agree with your assessment).

Tom's if you don't know is a local neighborhood diner, classically of Greek heritage as many diners are, a stereotype that resonates for a reason. I've been to Tom's countless times and hope to keep going. Closer to the mouse store (pet shop, lotsa herps (i.e. reptiles)) is Sckavones, reminiscent of Tom's but its own thing. So that's how to spell Sckavones... I might've goofed up in some earlier blog posts. I permit myself typo fixes of that kind, usually with an uptick in the time signature (as if we had omni-version control).

The live mice do not experience worry or terror as they have no experience with predatory animals. Pythons are pros and constrict their prey very quickly, leaving just enough time for a short flash-through, one might imagine, of what has been a brief life. Onward! If you think in those terms.

The python is named Barry and has been of net benefit to our family. In my Python teaching days (meaning the computer language), especially if my audience was kids, I might get Barry out of his terrarium and share him over Zoom. As it is, I rarely handle him these days. Maybe I should more often. He's a ball python, meaning he likes to ball up and sleep his life away, not uncharacteristic of reptiles, especially if bred to expect room service.

As for what I've been up to with School of Tomorrow, you may remember (if you try to follow) a recent confession about my lack of camera-control savvy. We're talking "virtual camera" inside a "virtual world" made with ray tracing. I've been pressing forward in my trainings to get more experience working out with that feature, as "orientation" (in the OODA sense) is one of my themes. It'd pay off to be less dorky maybe?

We study General Systems Theory a lot (Systematics some call it -- I tend to say GST) which is about patterns, such as the dwindling supply of experienced studio sound engineers in LA owing to wannabe and even successful artists gravitating to the home studio model. No one needs to spend big bucks to cut a record anymore, which means giving up a level of quality control developed over time by people with taste and skills. The LA music scene wasn't primo for no reason.

I mentioned seeing a similar pattern around esoteric forms of Buddhism, such as we find represented here in the "Buddhist Ghetto" (a term of endearment for our eclectic neighborhood). Not to be specific to any one temple, we can all relate to going from crowds in a break-the-door-down frenzy to join up, be a member, to a situation of almost no wannabe converts, a total dry-up of "minions" (not to be disrespectful; any in-group needs noobs, beginners, apprentices, people in the pipeline).

In other words: torch-passing. The Olympics gives us the relay race. A great metaphor. Then there's "dropping the baton" which is akin to torch-dropping (stereotypically a no-no, as it'd go out, and the whole point is to maintain at least the illusion of continuity). 

But let's zoom out even more and further apply our Buddhist mindset: it's not necessarily a great tragedy that we have such a thing as "fads" during which people all try something out, experiment, and then move on, lessons learned. "Fads are great!" I can hear Tony the Tiger telling us on TV.

Breakdown in PR

Reflecting on POVs

Alternative Closeup Vistas

(click through to Flickr for magnified view options)

One might imagine I’m some kind of super-nerd when it comes to POV-Ray, which I take credit for compiling on my Raspberry Pi long ago, and for getting to run well on a Mac, whereas its most-developed-for platform was Windows.

However when it comes to scene description language, used internally to that ray-tracer, I don’t consider myself an uber-master by a long shot. I might have benefitted from some patient teachers but having these tools at home made self-study an easy prospect to realize.

So it sort of came to me recently, that I’ve been too rigid in how I place the camera. I’ve been struggling with showing BRYG the way we want to: Blue to my left, Red to my right, Yellow behind those two, in the middle, but in the distance, and Green up above, at the apex, the eye in the sky so to speak. Like the BRY triangle on the ground is the base, the tripod, and they come together at a center (I make it Orange for origin) to support a mast, a flagpole pointing up, to the green orb glowing at the apex.

To be more specific, I was using rotation parameters over simply taking control of initial positioning. Rotating the camera involves orbiting around the origin on a great circle defined by the existing radius. But why mess with that so exclusively, just look from a different angle and rotate from there.

Why worry about all this stuff and what does it have to do with POV-Ray?  Well, put on a computer game developer hat and you will see right away that some in-common orientation makes sense if a team plans to play by some set of rules, usually necessary for a real game. Call them conventions. Call them axioms. Call them definitions. The terminology varies.

Again, my “insight” was I can render my scene with the camera looking at the origin from any location, and I have control over that location by means of XYZ coordinates, in the world coordinate system that comes with POV-Ray, the one native to its arena (or vista if you prefer). 

I’ll call my insight a “duh moment” as even putting it into words makes it sound so obvious, so how could it possibly be a breakthrough? Some breakthroughs are like that: you see the obvious (unobvious to you, hitherto).

But that’s just an example of how below the bell, to the left of the peak I mean, I am, when it comes to my POV-Ray (Persistence of Vision is what POV means, but also Point of View in the art world) skill set. I’m not confessing some great weakness. My French sucks even worse than my Arabic, which is saying something. I’m not a master of every skill set I’ve acquired. That’s really par for the course, nothing to exude shame over.

I’ve also played around with spawning a process from Python and running POV-Ray within that. However most of my experiments were of a different sort. Since the pipeline begins in Pylandia, and outputs in POV-Ray scene description language, why not output in something else? 

VRML was a first realized prospect, but browsers moved away from VRML (remember VRML? Virtual Reality Markup Language). 

What else? Why Visual Python of course, an API to 3D World mere mortals (like me) could master. I swapped out POV-Ray output for real time control of OpenGL (3D rendering). In Python that might mean talking to a different module. I did my original Hypertoons by this means.

The computer game I imagine we were working on (there’s a Made in Mexico angle) features a POV (point of view) that starts out looking at what I’ll call the TV Tower. 

A tetrahedron defines it. In some versions, three taut cables tether it tightly in its vertical state, pillar vertical, no matter high winds. In other versions, it looks more like a camera tripod with legs Red, Blue and Yellow. Yellow is in the back from our home position angle, staring at said tripod, and looking up the mast it supports, to the Green ball, which might be programmed. They all could be programmed. 

The lights at the corners could maybe exchange information (flora, fauna…) through the six edges defining the home base tetrahedron (HBT or HB4). This could be the premise of many a game.

Games conventionally come in levels and the game of “levels” comes in categories. 

Most commonly, the pyramid, narrowing towards the top and usually presented as 2D-flat, so we don’t have to worry whether its a half-octahedron or true 4eyes (a shoptalk) in this picture (3D-sculpture talk would take us there, is what we use here in QuadCraft). 

Alternatively: concentric circles, with “more inward” levels usually the more desirable direction. Percolating to a surface and breaking free, escaping, in any direction, is less commonly the story-driver meme, but “uncommon” is no put-down. Bell curves are what they are.

As readers here know, I think it’s low-IQ to think in terms of “races” in the first place, so asking how the races rank IQ-wise kind of puts one in a subculture, simply from asking. My subculture wouldn’t pose the question using obsolete eugenics concepts. We’re not kooks.

Pride: An Investigation

Let’s investigate the word “pride” (brief seance to conjure Wittgenstein’s ghost) and how it works in our language. Starting at the level of moral judgment (considered low), the word “stinks” in the sense of giving off a negative vibe. 

“Pride goeth before the fall” as the saying goes. Pride is close to (adjacent to) “vanity”, one of the original seven sins (mnemonic).

However “pride” is also adjacent to “esteem” which is in turn close to “self respect”. To be proud of oneself may be a sign of mental health according to many codifications. Certainly self pride in the sense of self respect has got to be better than self loathing. 

Then come the parades: like gay pride, like black pride, like whatever pride. Wholesome pride in one’s group, be that family, town or country, is “a thing” (as we say, in this day and age).

In other words, we’re not saddled with either a negative or positive spin, when in comes to how pride plays out, in the sea (some say swamp) of “morality”.

At a higher level, the religious teaching is about “giving glory to god (or God)” which entails giving credit to a higher power for one’s sense of selfhood, of whatever dimensions. Selfhood rests in a more comprehensive Self in this model, and the conscious self in the moment, the now-moment I, is largely unaware of its larger context, almost by definition.

Ultimately, in “giving glory to God” one is admitting it’s really the other way around: whatever we feel prideful of, is owing to that greater Self of which we’re largely unaware, and blissfully so. We go with the flow. That’s Taoist in essence.

The action toward regaining, restoring or rehabilitating a lost preferred state is likewise a heading away from a state of lost pride, deteriorated performance. Over a long arc of someone’s career, this may be called a comeback. However comebacks may be from one moment to the next, in some balancing act.

Equilibrium marks a state of no pausing, through which we overshoot time and again.

Pride in one’s work, in one’s craft, in one’s performance, is nothing to sneeze at or cut down out of reflex, when it arises in oneself, or in another. Opening windows to what’s glorious to behold, is innately beneficial. Why mock what would be easier to simply respect?  Insincere mockery is merely a callow form of cynicism.

Synergetic Arcana

In the backroom faculty lounge area, where Synergetics folks hang out, Syn-U folks for example, we're yakking about our lesson plans, curriculum segments, syllabus readings. I've been hammering out new ways to connect to BASKET from Quadrays, such as via this term "vane". The "vane" comes from windmill terminology; wind-driven surfaces, like propellor blades.

In this namespace, a vane is an isosceles triangle; six of them appear in our home base tetrahedron (HBT), our D-edged unit volume. Each is comprised by two caltrop spokes of length sqrt(6)/4 and an opposite edge of D. The Synergetics A module has a half-vane face, a right triangle. We have our segue.

As we start seeing more implementations of Quadrays, in alignment with our QuadCraft Project, how they're calibrated vs-a-vs XYZ becomes a topic, as do volume computations. My computer language encoded framework is one possible solution, already field-tested. 

I'm continuing to propagate it, by just using it.

just use it

Another isosceles triangle we want to promote, in the sense of analyze, is somewhat similarly shaped in having a wide angle, 108 degrees versus ~109.47 degrees. The two sides may be set to unit this time, or use the letter D, to remind of both IVM ball diameter, and of cube face diagonal (our volume 3). The opposite edge length is now phi.

The Hidden Room (movie review)

This was 2 of 2 of the two “The” movies I picked out at MMU: The Glass Key and The Hidden Room.

Jealousy and triangles are the stuff of novels and real life melodrama more generally, so I’m hardly making a deep point if I point out the relevance of triangles to Noirs as a genre. It’s just noirs are adjacent to murder mysteries, or more colloquially “who done its” although who committed the murder is not always the point.

As omniscient viewer-voyeurs, the Hollywood norm, we knew all along that the Brit guy was holding the American guy in a hidden room because the latter had been cavorting with his flirtatious wife, who liked to flirt with guys and who thinks her hubby is a jerk. 

The jerk (he is a jerk) decides to seek revenge and devises this plot to off the next dandy boyfriend type to come along, and he happens to be this unlucky American dude, with a wrong-side-of-the-tracks (other side of Atlantic) accent and everything (crude manners).

I like how the movie starts out with the older gentleman set, boomers by today’s standards, although that’s all wrong, sitting around smoking and drinking and carrying on about relative values of currencies, the way older male grownups tends to yak when running in packs (clubs) like this. 

Humans often like to segregate by gender; males like their pyramid hierarchies (called soldiering). These were the old United Kingdom imperialists watching their empire go on in but fragments, in breakup mode.

One could argue the beginning of the end was the American Revolution itself, but this isn’t a history movie, it’s a detective movie, a noir.

The other main hero, aside from the captured American (which American puts up a good front even though his would-be murderer is hellbent) is the Scotland Yard detective, the quintessential “mind like a steel trap” dude, the Columbo of this story, a British Peter Falk. 

Our culprit boomer feels hounded from their first meeting, which of course clues our detective to the man’s guilt: his sense of smell (the odor of fear) leads him by the nose to the hidden holding chamber, just in time to frustrate the murderer’s objective.  

Another monkey wrench: his Breaking Bad style bathtub had been drained of its body-dissolving acids, meticulously transported from another secret room back at headquarters — a dog trick, literally. This story is clever in that way, by getting a cute dog into the action.

So the jerk culprit boomer doesn’t even get the satisfaction of killing his victim and yet he’s caught with murderous intent, and, plot twist, even though we think that means the American gets the girl (the flirtatious wife), all he really wants is her dog (and vice versa), whom he’s bonded with in captivity, and she’s gracious enough to let that happen. 

Another triangle is solved.

Two Frame Animation

2-frame GIF: IVM ball coming and going

Spyder IDE; Python source for GIF

Believing in Universe (School of Tomorrow)

LOL 1900s

For Pythonistas

 

BACKGROUND READING ON SYNERGEO

Drifting Apart

The Roaring 20s

Like many in my senior cohort, kicked back in a McMansion maybe, in Beverly Hills, what I like to do with my time is check out the long arc of history as seen through the filmmaker's lense. That includes, but is not limited to, the Hollywood movie makers. They didn't used to have so much competition as they have today. 

Likewise I believe my Lazy-boy chair peers are glad for the Criterion Collection, which in the rabbinical tradition glosses the films with lots of behind the scenes peeks, along with scholarly commentary, to provide more context. Context matters.

I grabbed The Roaring 20s off the Noir shelf at MMU, along with I. The Jury which I needed to swap for a regular DVD version as I don't have a 4K player yet. The film was well timed given I've been thinking retrospectively about my Uncle Bill Lightfoot, who was born the year The Great Gatsby was published. Bill lived through a pretty long arc.

The theme of the evolving roles for good guys and bad guys, star heroes and villains, with supporting characters, is especially pronounced when the film is self consciously doing a "great sweep of history" angle. 

They were all good guys in WW1, sharing the same foxhole. But in returning to civilian life, they'd gravitate to different scenarios based on luck and character. Bogart plays an especially villainous dude. Cagney is the more likable, but too full of himself to realize how clueless he is with respect to women.

I learned a lot listening to the followup analysis, including from the director himself from the 1970s. I'll be weaving what I've learned into my own internalized tapestry of world history; something we should all be working on. If you need an excuse to pay people (so they don't starve or turn to criminal activities), pay them to improve their internalized world models. 

Don't let them turn out like those RAND Corporation or Brookings people: pathetic when it comes to understanding how the world moves on (the original title for this film).

Consciousness Studies

When doing philosophy in the Wittgensteinian vein, we like to take inventory, of the many ways in which a given word, the one under study, gets used in actual practice. 

We cultivate our ability to conjure up all the ways in which we use “consciousness” for example, or just “conscious” versus “not conscious” versus “unconscious” and so on.

The EMT (emergency responder) wants to know of  X is conscious, meaning aware of X’s surroundings, responsive to stimuli. 

But then you’ll get a guru stepping in to talk about “levels” of consciousness, with “higher” and “lower” as possibilities.  People talk about “raising consciousness” which would seem to have not much to do with the EMT’s meaning.

Sometimes “conscious” means “sentient” i.e. we think sensations must be happening. But other times we might say “this sentient being has no consciousness” meaning in some sense “no sense of self”. 

But what does it mean to sense a self? We have to keep taking inventory, multiplying the number of special case examples. 

To sense a self has to mean knowing a difference between sense of self and sense of other. This is what Wittgenstein would call a grammatical remark vs some deep truth or empirical finding. It’s “deep” in the same way “grammar” is deep, he’d famously put it.

Clearly, when we stop to really think about it, the number of language games in which “consciousness” figures is quite large, and then comes the game of explaining the “essence” of consciousness. 

Per Wittgenstein, that’s just another game, typically philosophical in nature, with the connotation (in his writing) of empty wheel spinning. 

Who says there needs to be some “essence” to which all these usage patterns must distill at the end of the day? Bad philosophers? Weak thinkers?

We might want to shift away from “consciousness” in some contexts, giving preference to the word “awareness” and emphasizing its “of otherness” focus, as in defining otherness we likewise define not-otherness, meaning self. 

Awareness is a of a self-otherness dichotomy. 

Do we need “self awareness” on top of simply “awareness”? Judging from common English, we need that nuance, yes.

So is awareness the same thing as consciousness then? 

If your mental model is there’s this Thing, call it C for Consciousness (what it is, in itself) and Awareness and Consciousness are both labels for that Thing, then yes, “same thing” is apropos. 

However, those following in Wittgenstein’s footsteps have learned to question the questionable dogma that there’s this Thing, this spooky essence. 

We have the operational utility of these words, and get our work done with them. 

Who says these terms are actually “labels of” or “pointers to” some Object (i.e. the “true meaning” per this particular superstition)? Weak thinkers? Dogmatists? 

What does a pawn on the chessboard point to, as its meaning? Not the right question, right? Pawns don’t “point”. So now consider “consciousness” to be your pawn, your tool, your artifact. Use it however. And good luck making it point to some Thing. We all suffer from fevered dreams from time to time.