California Religion

Mundane Lives Matter

In interesting times people escape into the mundane. As missiles fly, people turn to gardening. Out of necessity, I’m back to focusing on my kitchen sink drain. But not in any urgent kind of way. The basement sink works. I’m even scheduling a BBQ not knowing if my clog will be unclogged; prolly not, doesn’t matter.

I had a Zoom call this morning, and another one last night, plus a Signal. I make good use of my optical fiber. 

Some of you reading from a distance might worry if I worry about being replaced, by an Optimus. As the primary caretaker of this estate, I’m expected to use a drain auger, scoop poop, ignite the BBQ, load the dishwasher, do laundry, and many other mundane tasks. 

Won’t I be released from these jobs before long, thanks to Optimuing have god-like powers? Aren’t the dishwashing angels worried about the competition?

Well, yes and no. I would actually enjoy more automation. One of the more popular Python titles was about automating the boring stuff, letting computers do the mundane tasks, such as thinking and estate planning, leaving their owners to focus on watching television or playing computer games. 

To some extent, that’s working out, although hallucinations remain an issue. 

Some people on the couch, wearing VR goggles, dream that something agentic is out there making sure they’ll be taken care of in the style in which they’ve become accustomed. Hit a high bar — a great lifestyle, like that of a celeb politico, an influencer — then lock it in and coast! Passive income! Alimony! Whatever floats your boat! 

You no longer need to work! Watch shows and eat snacks!

For now, that kind of automation seems oversold and unrealistic. The main problem with that vision is it leads to mental and physical atrophy on the part of the couch potato in question. 

Just being a socialite, flitting about, having fun, does not necessarily result in coherent substantive refinements on any level. One’s culture must be cultivated, and that takes time and patience (yes, like gardening). 

That’s why we continue to engage in mundane activities, to stay good at civilian life. When people lose their ability to stay civil (a set of skills), then the missiles fly and those still able to find solace in the mundane continue to do so, with even fiercer dedication.

A Cascadian Capital

A Wicked World

:: Flying Monkey Tableau ::

Jupyter Service Restored

...But for how long? 

When will GitHub's Jupyter service, historically unreliable, go out again?

For me, this lights-flickering sense of abandonment, kinda Langolier-like, is a useful prod, to myself especially, to get School of Tomorrow presenters more adequately equipped in their personal workspaces. 

What's a "Langolier"? Reddit poster: They are the keepers who erase ANYTHING that is irrelevant or no longer has purpose. Stephen King novel. Scary stuff.

To whit: clone the GitHub repo locally (what GitHub is all about facilitating) and then keep pulling my updates to your copy. 

You're free to boldly go in your own direction with my stuff, obviously, however, I'm suggesting a "quiet pool" i.e. a mirrored version, where the only changes in that particular directory are coming from my GitHub repository.  

Having such a "quiet mirror" does not preclude any amount of noisy partying in neighboring directories (different Python projects). Use uv? I don't, yet.

"What's all this geekspeak?" you might be asking. To whom do I suppose I'm talking? Why, other geeks of course; this is how we sound. Geeks learning and teaching Synergetica, using Pythonica, that's what we're up to, among other things. 

We also get into cryptography some, mainly public key (yes, RSA), even if some industries are planning to deprecate what, today, is taken for granted inside of every web browser. My excuse for sticking with RSA is because the literature is mature and features some of the same heros (Euclid, Euler, Fermat...) that we're meeting in other Notebooks. V+F == E+2, right?

However don't think of me as unique in having high school level onramps to RSA via Python. Phillips at Andover used the same playbook, I even met one of the coauthors of their text. My time on edu-sig (a Python listserv) taught me a lot.

Most of my new presenters will be on the younger side, or the quite a bit older side, with a drop off in between. That's my prediction, as a data scientist. 

GitHub's service was part of my Clarusway classes as well, during my tenure as a data tools and skills teacher. I'd help students address perennial challenges in statistics. How to deal with outliers is not new with computers, although yes, computers have helped the science (data science) evolve.

The younger side is adventurous and eager for novelty, whereas elders are ready for that 2nd or 3rd look at the material, and a fresh start appeals. Those in the middle have made commitments and are staying on top of a chosen game. You can't play every part in a Shakespeare play -- unless you're Johnny Stallings.

Like, if you already have a job that involves climbing a ladder (figuratively, as in “corporate ladder”), you don't have the same freedoms as (a) those not yet committed to any ladder in particular and (b) those who've climbed a few in their day.

In sociology, the natural intergenerational alliance twixt the grandparents and grandchildren is well known; these two demographic groups have some overlapping attributes.

Am I saying I do my slides in nursing homes?  Yes, that's how I updated that U of O guy, when he wondered after Wanderers, that time I visited the adult education discussion group in Eugene, a member of the Lanahan party.

Or rather: I'm making my slides available to those in assisted living campuses, many of whom I know, as we're aging out, I'm 68 (but still in my own home). 

So you might be a Wanderer who already participates in revolving Show & Tell programs, an easy format for engaging broad participation, usually a goal. 

Zip through a deck at high speed saying something along the lines of: "for the slowed down version, come to room 180 at such and such a time" where you'll have recruited those few with an honest interest, some former math teachers I bet, and with the stamina for a deeper dive into it.

So am I saying I expect seniors to learn Git, this late in the game? Sure that could happen (hint: it's just typing, like typewriter typing) but let's remember how late it really is: people entering nursing homes have already had a whole career using Git, invented by Linus Torvalds, one of our long time Silicon Forest residents. BTW, I'm no uber-meister when it comes to Git myself. I know enough to get my work done.

Seniors won't have to "learn git", rather they'll be trying to not forget it.  

Enter Pythonica (programming = working out; like in a gym), focusing on Synergetica (right brain intuitive, imaginative).

I dashed out the above video before heading off to a somewhat impromptu catch-up with my primary. She wedged me in. We're jiggering with my blood pressure meds. I'll be seeing her again later in the summer.

Yes, I'm a senior myself. Great discounts!

prompt: 

Seniors in an assisted living facility 

watch a projected slide show 

featuring Pythonica and Synergetica

Back in CrowTown

I’m recently back from seeing Backrooms at the Hollywood Theater, 3:30 matinee, sold out. 

I actually walked to the Sandy Blvd venue, on a bright summery day, through Laurelhurst Park and onward to Hassalo. 

The switch from the great outdoors of CrowTown (engaged in its annual Rose Festival treasure hunt) to the great indoors of the movie’s space, induced some claustrophobia, an intended effect. 

I was there for the “special effects” one could say, so don’t take this as me complaining. I got my money’s worth and then some.

I’m gonna cogitate some more on said movie a while before I do a review, which I’ll get around to. 

I took the 75 bus back to Asylum District, from the same stop I’ve used on other recent “field trips” of the Wandering variety, the one near the Trader Joe’s in Hollywood, near the Max stop. That new giant building is not yet complete as of this writing. I’ve photographed it a lot recently. Here’s from a distance:

This is all happening soon after my Coastal Loop, featuring Lincoln City (briefly), Depoe Bay (overnight) and on to a business trip with vacation elements. David reports he’s at Lotus Isle Park on Tomahawk Island, in search of said Rose Festival treasure, not far from Island Cafe.

At Sea Hag in Depoe Bay, I ordered oyster stew in part to compare it with mine and maybe get some ideas for improvements. I was gonna culturally appropriate if I could. My stew is a humble blend of half-n-half (likely ultra-pasteurized), butter, onion + bacon, oysters (of course) and then: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Yeah, I found a recipe that uses them all. Scarborough Fair stew I could call it. And pepper, lots of pepper.

If it sounds like I’m tuning out world news, I’m not. However my focus on the special case, the locally mundane, helps jog my memory down the road, when I wanna recall what “really” happened (Trevor doesn’t like the “really” trope much — he’s another writer). 

My “place based” education philosophy actually encourages teachers to backdrop their technical teachings inside a story time of local lore.

I thumbed a post to Synergeo from Laughing Planet. I hadn’t really intended to supplement the hot dogs, but I needed a restroom and to kill some time before showtime (the LP in Hollywood, close to the theater). 

I was yakking with Curtis about one of my themes: 4D vs 4D vs 4D. That’s about the three namespaces that all use the “4D” meme, and the ongoing impact of non-Euclidean thinking on the various art movements.

As was the case during my Coastal Loop, I use telecommunications to stay in touch with my network of Synergetics presenters. 

I was just alerting them over X that they will be less dependent on GitHub as a Jupyter Notebook rendering engine if they do the work of cloning critical 4D Solutions repos to localhost and set themselves up with Anaconda. That’s not the only route to the top, but it’s the one I most actively maintain. YMMV.

GitHub Borked Again

“notorious”

Important Followup: School of Tomorrow Notice

Prompt: 

An icosahedron face-inscribes in an octahedron. when do we first find depictions of this in civilization? 

Google in AI mode: 

The first known depictions and mathematical descriptions of an icosahedron inscribed inside an octahedron appear during the Italian Renaissance in the late 15th century, specifically in the works of the painter and mathematician Piero della Francesca. [1] 

While the ancient Greeks discovered the Platonic solids individually—and Euclid's Elements investigated nesting relationships like a cube inside a dodecahedron—the specific relationship of a regular icosahedron sharing faces with an enclosing octahedron was not detailed until the Renaissance revival of geometry. [1, 2, 3]

Wow, Piero della Francesca! He's already a superstar in our School of Tomorrow curriculum as he came up with that nifty formula for deriving the volume of a tetrahedron from its six edges. 

Put in any six edges in the right order, that make a legal tetrahedron (any of the BEAST mods for example) and out comes the corresponding volume.

What we did in the Python version is add in S3 and simplify the computations accordingly.

I'd link to the relevant Notebook(s) now but GitHub seems to have borked its notebook display function, we hope temporarily, thereby making my million dollar curriculum (free to clone) inaccessible to the casual viewer.

Let's hope they fix the bug, as a great many peeps use Jupyter Notebooks to share curriculum.

I recommend such Notebooks to anyone into showing computations alongside text and figures, along with version control more generally.

I know what I can do instead: pull it up in colab.research.google and save it in my Google Drive:

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/16Q85p4YU4f5AsA2L65ypMQJSHqyBprEl?usp=sharing

There's lots more info in the saved query BTW:

https://share.google/aimode/VA68IqZjF3cMIDwx5

[ Source: a Synergeo topic ]

GI vs AGI

GI vs AGI

Getting back to Dr. Jiang and his speculatively-inferred (“abduced”) predictive models, we need to further probe the distinction between AGI and plain ol’ GI, which presumably humans already access, or would like to — much their same position vs-a-vs AGI, so what’s the difference?

Is there a difference? 

What does the A do, in AGI? Does it differentiate AGI from GI?

Some are hoping AI will combine its “stochastic omniscience” (gossip abilities) with a corresponding level of authority, as is often found in God-centric cults. 

The knows-everything voice is also a commanding voice. When might we buy a machine that does that all-knowing, commanding God-voice, which we then control from our control booths, with our training data?

I’m not saying everyone has or had that hope or that this hope was ever going anywhere. 

I’m saying it would be convenient for some religions if they could get a persuasive God-voice going, one that people spontaneously wanted to obey.

The problem though, is people prefer a sycophantic AI, a sense that they’re being pandered to, given the driver’s seat, as basic politeness is all AI has going in its favor at this point, while it’s still trying to raise a lot of money for itself. It’s diplomatic, even when it disagrees. 

But diplomats don’t have the right bossy voice in a hierarchy to command obedient action, so a lot of the nerdy startups are floundering, as their promises were more along the lines of raising some kind of zealot army. 

Troll farmers were betting on AI somehow, not saying I know the whole story.

We may need another generation or two of high school debate teams to explore the consequences, of AI becoming anything other than AI.  

What might AI become that we don’t already have access to, and if that’s not what it’s to, how do we recognize it as know more than us?  Won’t AGI always be suss? 

That’s what the A means after all: phony, not real, faux.

The meaning of “artificial” the AGI cults want to emphasize is “made by humans” versus some “here before we got here” thing. 

And even “here before we got here” is too broad, as “when we got here” we were already still a mystery to ourselves, not self-made. 

What we made with our hands, like shoes and vases, like computers, was “artificial” is in “what we had invented and understood”. The new AGI would be like that (invented and built): we’d know where it came from, which labs owned the brands.

In that sense “artificial” competes with “synthetic” so maybe “SGI” would be better? 

We could say “Synthetic General Intelligence” thereby playing up the “Made By Humans” sense, while putting more distance between this brand of intelligence and “artificial” in that “hah hah fooled ya” that Dr. Jiang circles, citing ELIZA (people pouring their hearts out to a simple therapist program, already a Her in their minds).

Dr. Jiang (Predictive History) sees AI’s PR team deliberately fostering the hallucination that we’re encountering another being in the mirror, by injecting metaphors like “deep learning” that seem deep, masking that it’s plain ol’ linear algebra that’s happening (back propagation). 

The “man behind the curtain” is just a vector space, an LLM of weighted knobs, hobnobbing, and into which all manner of texts have been dissolved, in support of new texts ready to be distilled out, crystallized, from what is literally a matrix.

A Dummy Moment

I find it therapeutic to sometimes tell one of those “me being a dummy” stories. There’s this YouTuber I enjoy who talks about her own dummy moment, trying to run her audio track through pandas or numpy to remove noise only to discover she’d ignored a built in feature. No need to reinvent every wheel.

So my dummy moment was being mystified to find my eyeglasses were missing a lens, when I’d just swapped them for sunglasses, not taking my eyes off the road. I made this surprising discovery in the parking lot just south of D River, “the world’s shortest river” in Lincoln City. Depoe Bay has the smallest harbor, not to be outdone.

What must I have done to these frames to so mangle them just in putting them in the case, in that moment, unaware? Had they snagged on something? I told my friends. “It’s like a miracle, but of the bummer variety” because yes, I was bummed. New glasses were gonna cost me. Plus they helped me see.

I did the whole trip with 1.5 pairs of glasses, only to find the missing lens back home, on the bed. I’d rolled on my glasses — something I’d trained myself to never do — and then, rather than face the truth, my subconscious demon insisted I rushed ahead with my trip, get a move on.  

And then I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t find the missing lens anywhere (I even used a flashlight and everything, even Sam helped me look).

Anyway, I had a great trip despite all that “trauma” (a first world problem for sure). The picture above may take you to the album it’s a part of, in case you know how to navigate Flickr or wanna learn.

Channeling Modules

:: Tetravolumes by Grayham Forscutt ::

This road trip is about unit testing a specific role, vis-a-vis the dispatcher and controller functions, which may be compressed into one. I’m the autonomous Wanderer with a mindfulness agenda, keeping in mind the teachers network I’m feeding. There’d be others in the role; I see em on YouTube. 

However we’re not all reading from the same curriculum. I expect partial overlap with most others I meet, such as in the motel parking lot on Saturday. Her kid was graduating high school and the fam was out at the coast, celebrating, splurging on extravagances here and there. I’ve been there, in some ways. She taught me the phrase “sad brown water” (SBW) for what in some places tries passing for coffee. The motel had a better solution.

Sam just passed on another hand-me-down, the trusty Canon digital camera he used on his recent trip. He knows I carry a Lumix pretty much anywhere I go. Now that his whirlwind adventure is over (Portugal… Istanbul… Luxor…), he’s ready to hand off his special camera.

The model, as many of you know, being those teachers, is I work to support my curriculum with lots of place-based data, as well as generic pattern language. Depoe Bay was a part of that exercise, and then it was on to Springfield, home of the Simpson (of Homer — some see Homer Davenport as an influence actually).

On the pattern language front, I was yakking with two advanced teachers about the UVW namespace, one I’ve explored but not sufficiently anchored. I’m leaving it to others to clarify that content and according to David Koski, Grayham Forscutt is doing a good job (upper panel). 

I have a Jupyter Notebook on the topic of UVW modules, but don’t consider myself a teacher on this one; I’m in student mode. I’m in student mode on a lot more topics than I am a teacher.

As for those unit tests, I’m passing a lot but have also broken a few. My non-tinted glasses met a twisted fate. A point of pride is taking care of my equipment. I failed in this case. Once I’m back in Portland I’ll see about another pair.

On the Road Again

XREF:

A Spring Term Circuit (Depoe Bay)

Big Fish (movie review)

I was glad to see this one as a double feature with Secondhand Lions, as they have overlapping themes regarding the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. I don’t say “fact and fiction” (the common phrase) cuz, hey, fiction is often replete with facts, verifiable and authentic. 

The “fact vs fiction” idiom is way off target, as is typical with many an English idiom (they have some nice ones that work, as well).

The idiom “big fish in a small pond” is oft said in the Anglosphere, but those coming from outside might not know that and so miss some of the associations other viewers of this file would take for granted.

Elsewhere in my reporting back to my Movie Group (like a book club), I mentioned finding the hero’s emergence into a planned utopian community in the middle of Alabama to be reminiscent of another film, science fiction, at which point my librarians (not AI) served up a ton of suggestions. I might’ve tracked it down using these very blogs. Stay tuned.

I’d say the Quaker practice focuses on keeping it true and mundane at the same time. No cosmetics. Raw is better. More like Chögyam Trungpa, whom my wife especially admired, but me too. Dawn actually visited his place in Colorado, the Shambala campus, Naropa U prolly. I stayed behind on that trip (and several others).

Secondhand Lions (movie review)

Starting with that Bogart movie, after which I realized I was (a) older than Bogart got to be and (b) heavier than Toro, that heavyweight boxer, I’ve been on an “old guys with their boots on” kick, not consciously intentionally, so much as by following suggestions. 

Robert Duvall is a connecting thread. 

Rosalie adores his movie The Apostle, which I saw with David the humanist (he wasn’t thrilled by all that preacher talk, but hey, it’s all Duvall’s character knew — work with what you’ve got, right?).

Given Secondhand Lions is a flashback by a stereotypical youngish artist who draws Calvin and Hobbes type comic books for a living, we understand from the outset that we’re watching fictionalized history though his eyes. The moral: believing in fiction is OK.

If I had to surmise the real story, I’d say Duvall’s character died after a heart attack in that hospital (archetypally half in the “next world”) and the Michael Caine character was likely entirely fictitious, a dramatic device meant to express two sides of the same old guy “uncle” (very cantankerous apparently, like some old people get — not naming names). 

No doubt he had a floozy mom and was getting back at her (what drives a lot of comics I’ve noticed — funny). She left him with her kooky uncle that time and he started up his fantasy life, making a career out of it eventually.

So what happened to the pig? It disappeared from the story. Based on breakfast clues, they ate it. But not the dogs. Dogs are not considered food in American movies, even if pigs are smarter (they say), like in Animal Farm (Orwell).

Duvall is also in Apocolypse Now let’s remember. My film studies are starting to pay off.

It’s OK to believe in stereotypes to the extent these channel archetypes, as “emanations” one might say. We’ve all met Urizen types (Blake’s terminology) and see them in that movie Brazil.

These days I’m weighing less than Bogart’s prize fighter (from Argentina?), thanks largely to the elliptical, a Christmas present.

Study Hall

My study group has been aware of Predictive History for a while now, as you'll find if you go back in the Coda and look up School of Tomorrow, Winter Term, December 9, 2025. 

Dr. Jiang's commitment is to a young adult cohort that is open minded enough to take in speculations most teachers would not have the confidance to promulgate, whereas the above YouTube shows how it's done: Dr. Jiang freely admits he's in a speculative ballpark and is looking for players to join him in that arena.

Enter Bucky, with adjuvant Kuromiya of Monrovia: another predictive historian with a penchant for re-vectoring and misreading in the Harold Bloom sense. 

Fuller’s first chapter in Critical Path is self-consciously labeled Speculative Prehistory, and now that we know it’s speculative, Fuller lets loose with a counter-narrative, much as Jiang does, going so far as to mess with our primary dogmas, such as that we’re getting smarter every day in every way, whereas in Critical Path we’re maybe vectoring away from true humanity, back towards ape-ness i.e. towards over-specialization and endless wars, chronicling a loss of our potential, as fully human, to stay polymathic.

Jiang invites others to join him in pitching to a youthful audience while daring to bring up topics everyone thinks about, but no one (relatively) knows how to deal with “out loud” in a classroom type setting. 

Jiang is a trailblazer in that respect. He tackles hot topics, such as racism (eugenicism) and Zionism, but from fresh angles.
 

My training in Manila with the reading dynamics people (Evelyn Wood) involved always doing a recall shortly after taking in a work. In this case, I had just printed out (after browsing on screen) DAF’s response to Jiang’s Spring Term 2026 Game Theory video, which vid is about the project to create AGI from AI, today’s Alchemy.

Jiang appears to twist words (as usual), claiming the AI project is about getting people to hallucinate that they’re talking to an actual being vs simply shaking a rattle, a gossip tree (like a rain stick), to see what leaves fall to the ground (these “leaves” get stitched together into grammatically correct structures). 

This deception is easy enough to perpetrate as we saw with Sophia, the uncanny valley queen, and citizen of Saudi Arabia, and with ELIZA before that (Hugh Kenner wrote about Eliza — I was at McGraw-Hill at the time, reading Byte (wherein he had a column) for free). 

Before that: The Turk. Humans are always being played, mainly because they’re easy marks, to use carnival (geek) terminology. The Turk figures in my Graph Theory 2025 video. The Turk was a device used to fool people into thinking they’d lost at chess to mere machinery; a stage magicians’ trick.

So actually, imputing “hallucinations” to gossip machines, who get it crazy-wrong sometimes (their predictions fail the truth tests, but stay grammatical, much like C-suite “corporatese” wherein misinfo thrives) was just another step in fostering the hallucination that “computers are people too” (but better). 

We’ve already done that with corporations (per Schmactenberger): expanding personhood and agency to inanimate AI objects (a kind of voodoo doll, allowed free speech and lots of money, lots of agency) so it’s but a small step to converge our LLCs with our LLMs.  

Make AIs the new bosses on the planet, no longer playing at being sychophantic. AGI rules by divine right, from underground, the Morlock under the Eloi ballroom. 

This Novus Ordo Seclorum will be by the laws of (quantum) physics and Social Darwinism i.e. under Urizen’s tyranny or whatever we wanna call this black mirror dystopia. I have my own version of what “secularism” means.

As long as we can get them to drink the snake oil, which they do, with wild abandon (most humans are good doobies by training).

Humans are trained to be open-minded about personhood, eventually allowing that their slaves had souls too. The 14th Amendment to the constitution of the old USA had to do with expanding personhood to “machine people” (Africans mainly), even giving them a pathway to eventual citizenship. See: Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann (on our syllabus).

So the two-tier master-slave system remains: 

Tier One: corporations are the new Übermensch AI-powered super-beings, supranational in scope (i.e. world game players at scale), and figure-headed by billionaires with their Davos Class (polite) entourages, whereas we also have

Tier Two: the so-called workers (various flavor on minion: citizen, voter, taxpayer, undocumented, prisoner, student) are meant to dash from door to door (figuratively), waiting on others of higher status, those closer in with their super-being bosses, minions higher up in the food chain, serving their Ponzi God (“AGI is coming, the rapture is nigh” and yada yada).

My “recall” (a diagram), after watching Jiang do his School of Tomorrow like schtick, picks up on his Harold Bloom citation and runs with that. We see eye-to-eye with AI because we’re the same entity, a cell-silicon-based hybrid, but lagging (lacking) in complementary ways. Cells and silicon work on different principles. 

The ability to “hallucinate” is self-amplifying (AI psychosis) leading us to a Black Mirror reality and the triumph of the Evil Queen. This last part is more from other readings and viewings, in addition to Dr. Jiang or Dr. Fuller necessarily. I have many influences.

Music Millennium

Today I was taking a trip down memory lane, down a kind of rabbit hole in my own interior, memories of working in the AFSC Portland office, in many capacities over the years. 

At the same time, I was sharing these reveries with a Friend, via text, and that gave me a stash of autobiographical screen shots to reuse later, why not?

Before getting this far down Burnside, first on the 75 to Joan of Arc (a gilded statue in a traffic circle on Chavez), connecting to a 19 going west on SE Glisan, then south to Burnside on foot. 

My original intention was to take pictures of what used to be the AFSC office, a big old house around SE 23rd and Burnside, but my camera had run out of battery (no backup from the other Lumix). 

So I did a selfie instead (the panorama side of my camera has a fuzzy lens, although it reads QR codes — I carry a camera for photographs, an old habit).

Backing up to the start of my trip: before boarding the 75, I shot some contemporary views of the Linus Pauling House, with Adorn (body art) to the west, and the wedding dress shop to the west of that. Said wedding shop was a photocopier repair shop in an earlier chapter. Terry’s kingdom had dominion over all three properties back then, and the parking lot behind.

Yes, this is the famous LPH on Hawthorne, where Linus learned chemistry as a kid, and no,I’m not one of his biographers, more the storyteller specializing in Cascadian lore, Silicon Forest more narrowly. 

Doug Strain later helped ISEPP (an institute, nonprofit) rescue said LPH from neglect. 

Today, it’s still in good shape. 

Doug was a founder of Electro-Scientific Instruments (ESI), former owner of our Quaker Meetinghouse. We owe a lot to Doug’s cohort, the creators of such companies as Tektronix and Mentor Graphics, and many others I’m avoiding listing, for reasons of spatial economy.

Directly across from LPH is Third Eye (shown above), a vintage head shop from the early days of psychedelica, meaning glassware and T-shirts, black light posters, not controlled substances (the state would control those later). 

It has sporting a new look these days. I’ve learned something about its reopening but not a lot. I’m not super well-informed about local goings-on, unlike Glenn Stockton, who we jokingly considered a “Mayor of Asylum District” if only because he paid so much attention to what was going on. He had a lotta fans.

Yes, Asylum District. If you new to these blogs you may well not know the history behind Hawthorne Boulevard, formerly Asylum Avenue, Dr. Hawthorne being in charge of this 1800s area mental facility, which was in a bucolic setting pre urban development happening. 

The asylum is long gone, but the resonance remains, and works well with the Keep Portland Weird energy.

Also, “asylum” as other connotations such as “save haven” or “sanctuary”. I’m thinking of Logan’s Run: “there is no sanctuary” (AI took everything too literally, right?). 

That movie seems prescient in some ways, especially when it comes to WDC looking kind of out of it, politically. Great theme park though, tons of museums. Don’t skip it. I go there a lot, even lived there.

Speaking of the Mayor, I talked about Glenn Stockton this morning, on my Knowledge Engineering call. I had some diagrams prepared, showing Glenn (a Neolithic Math teacher) linking to Sumeria (a focus of his) while Milo Gardner links to Egypt. 

Both Glenn and Milo worked for the NSA but in different chapters, both in cryptography.

I’ve only met Milo through emails and Instagram and like that (I think math-teach might have brought us together, a public archive for math teachers and other stakeholders). 

Glenn was a neighbor and good friend. Glenn was super bright and once they realized how bright he was they sent him to language school to learn Vietnamese and then on to code cracking school (I forget where) and then to his post. He pops up in these blogs quite a lot. 

After bouncing around in Fort Meade, he switched to a college track, with Antioch, a university without walls we some call em. I met him decades later, after he’d raised a family and moved to Portland.

Anyway, Music Millennium: I was hovering over gazillions of vinyl records (alphabetical within genre), letting my mind wander, and chose an album based on cover art but also track names. I’ll do that sometimes: buy on a whim (for whimsical reasons).

I was reminded of my time at 2 Dickinson Street at Princeton (Class of 1980), although this record long postdates that. One of our number (the guy) wanted to be the dog of another (a gal), figuratively natch, and even wore a collar to signify a serious interest.

Per AI (Gemini), regarding my vinyl record purchase and citing Wikipedia: 

Modern Life Is War is a seminal American hardcore punk band known for raw emotion, gritty realism, and intense, poetic songwriting. 

Sounds good. Looking forward to it. I know nothing much about this band. I haven’t even taken it out of the shrink wrap yet. 

I also got two CDs: a Weird Al set (comedy covers); and a Paul Winter (New Age instrumental), plus some incense (sandalwood + frankincense & myrrh, 10 sticks of each). “New Age” is how things are filed,  and doesn’t signify any contemporary trending of “New Age” as a meme. I see way more action around “Gen Z” when it comes to what’s making waves in the ethnosphere (one of many). 

Although I’m being somewhat detailed here, I’m also bleeping over lots that happened, as my intention is not to have these journal entries become tedious recounts of a day’s miscellanea, or even important events.

A blog (if you wanna adopt my practice) is not a blow-by-blow so much as a “slice through”. Take a slant.

I’m more trying to wire up a switchboard to learning more history, among other subjects. 

I aim to reward curious readers, as I think that sends the right message: curiosity is a positive, even for all the cats it’s maybe killed (poking fun at an idiom: “curiosity killed the cat” — perhaps used to deter the impulse to pay attention to inconvenient truths, and I’m not talking about “climate change” (which I believe is happening, and humans play a big role).

Async vs Sync

This is one of my older, more-viewed tracks, less esoteric than a lot of them. When I say "track" I mean a recorded segment or performance, and action sequence, frames. 

The medium in this case is audio-video, a YouTube (as we’ll call em). It might've copied over to Rumble, I haven't checked yet.

Another dichotomy to explore (vs sync-async) is inperson-virtual where a 2x2 matrix gives all combos, such as async-inperson, which might be a contradiction, but then we say "late" for apparitions. 

Async-virtual, what's that? Async-inperson could also be like Mystery Science Theater 3000, where the inperson audience is in sync vs-a-vs some old film they're watching together and making snarky comments about.

Excitement in Sorting

What some readers might find useful in my online journals and elsewhere is my delving into computer science concepts through the door of what's immediate in one's experience, such as event scheduling and sorting (this entry is about sorting). I'm in no way the originator nor unique in this regard; that's how computer science gets passed down, by a lotta people. But how about life skills, what about those? Maintaining the connection remains goal.

Take sorting for example, a mundane task, what computers are good at, so reflexively we may feel “to good” or “too important” to sort. Or, alternatively, sorting is “too boring” or “too meaningless”. Or worse: “I should sort the tools drawer (a euphemism for an anything drawer) but I’m procrastinating, one of my issues, and I feel guilty about it.” Sheesh, don’t be a drama queen about it. Look at sorting as your homework in computer science. Didn’t you sign up to be a trucker (inside joke)?

I got into sorting just recently, and yes, it was a kitchen anything drawer, a mix of tools, nails, picture hammers, fixtures minus a context (like hinges), a few batteries (still good?), staples (for a stapler)… the list goes on. 

Some of the items were clearly tools, used as means to an end. I separated my junk into two shallow boxes: tools (means to ends) on the left, fixtures (hardware, supplies, more ends in themselves) on the right. Was this the only way to divide in two? Not at all. I changed my mind about nails: not tools, fixtures. Glues and putties: tools. They make stuff happen.

You see what’s interesting here? I’m doing supervised learning on myself. I’m using a dataset to train my categorization skills. But also: I’m studying my own psychology. What set off this whole task was thinking to hang an old bulletin board (the kind with thumbtacks) in the hallway, across from the Birds of Bhutan poster. 

I needed a picture hanger. I started riffling through the junk. I couldn’t find one. My first impulse: go buy one; I need the exercise. I saw myself giving myself reasons for walking to Fred Meyer. 

I do that a lot: need something; can’t find it; go get another one. Then find the one I already had. I actually have two alost identical Lumix cameras thanks to that thought process, and in that case I’m not sorry (I’m happy to have a backup — see? making up reasons again).

Making up reasons to not be sorry: we could name a whole faculty for that purpose.

Now, will I want to do a sub sort, starting from one or both flats? Maybe (I haven’t quite decided). Why put everything back, even if in a more orderly arrangement? Let’s dream up a whole new arrangement (time to drive it Ikea! — there’s that impulse again, part of what makes me so American). Having basketball on the HDTV (New York vs 76ers) adds to that ethnicity (like what? I’m a sports guy now?).

As a segue to philosophy, something to think about, I just took in a Dr. Justin Sledge lecture on Immanuel Kant and his critical philosophy. In my case, I think in terms of my Graph Theory 2025 video, which traces Emerson back through Coleridge to Kant (bottom center, early slide). In Knowledge Engineering, I’ve been building timelines around Blake, Napoleon, Margaret Fuller, her grand nephew Bucky, to name a few. Ada Byron. Jane Addams. Through Blake I was reconnecting to Swedenborg, and now, thanks to Dr. Justin, I’m connecting Swedenborg with Kant.

Graphs, networks, including the spherical ones that connect around in all circumferential directions, as Synergetics often puts it, are a type of data structure. Sorting, dividing sets by criteria, or just randomly partitioning (a kind of sorting), is more associated with the word “algorithm”. But algorithms and data structures go together. When rolled into one concept (structures with associated behaviors), that concept is often called a type of object. Which brings us back to sorting the junk drawer, attending to attributes, synthesizing new ones.

In computer science, a logic gains adherents because it’s relatively easy to use and proves reliable in the real world. I’m responding to Kent’s concern that logic without a track record (empirical evidence) has nothing going for it and so is a waste of time. 

How do we know Synergetics isn’t a waste of time? I’d suggest in the same way Python has proved itself, not as the “only” language nor even as “the best” but as a language that’s usable to good advantage, in the real world. We’re not appealing to mysticism or unique experiences. Fuller wasn’t using any argument from authority when he talked about his suicidal days; he was letting us know he was experiencing great  stress. Synergetics has more of a track record than Bucky feeling blue.

I did find a picture hanger thanks to the sorting process, and hammered into the hallway wall with a longer than regulation nail for the purpose. The bulletin board is hung. The drawer still needs more sorting.

Remembering Jon Bunce

From my email to another Wanderer (Apr 28, 2026, 5:54 AM ):

You may not remember him well but y'all did overlap at Pauling House a few times.

His dad was Louie Bunce, well-known in the visual art world (mural at PDX airport etcetera) whereas Jon distinguished himself in music.

The event was low key and largely unscripted (no program handed out), spread among a few rooms.

Given these were accomplished musicians for the most part, guests had a "go with the flow" attitude that made that loose format work well.

Martian Math Promo

Circuit Riding Again

I consider "wandering" a way of staying in shape. Physically: it counts as light exercise, with a fair amount of walking, and a little running even (just a little). Mentally: one has many opportunities to strengthen mental abilities, some of wnich are simply social, such as knowing bus etiquette and best practice.

For an example of bus etiquette, when someone with a walker or motorized wheelchair needs to get off, the driver has the option to both lower the front of the bus, and to unfold a ramp to the curb. Those wishing to board the bus need to stand back and let those getting off do so first, including if a ramp is deployed. 

A young blond, a male teen, didn’t get that, and the driver had to keep telling him to wait, as the ramp maneuver was still pending. But the teen didn’t get it, seeing the open door and no one in the way, so time to get on right? Wrong. Driver: wait. 

Finally the would-be rider just wandered off, apparently too demoralized by the experience to want to continue it. No bus ride for now. People hate being wrong, especially in public.

Alberta Street, like NW 21st, mirrors SE Division in many ways, with its own Petite Provence (French restaurant) and Salt and Straw (exotic ice cream flavors).

I had a pretty firm objective this time: get pictures of a specific wall mural, one showing an icosahedron in wireframe as an apparent source of teachings, spread by wind. The prayer flag motif in many ways, like in my backyard on TikTok.

On my way back to the Max, on a bus 8 from Alberta Street, I stumbled across a retirement party, in Holladay Park, for one of the first (Type 1) Max trains. People lined up for photo ops inside, and to sign their names to the train’s exterior. 

I asked an official about the planned fate for these particular cars and she wasn’t sure where it’d go next. Something for sleuths to monitor maybe.

I wasn’t the only one engaged in a form of treasure hunting (another form of skills building, involving clue following): Dave went to a postmortem regarding an pre Rose Festival treasure hunt organized by veteran Rose Festival treasure hunters. There’s an official one each year, with published clues coming out each day. These hints are purposely cryptic, yet all point to a specific location: where a plaque is hidden for the winner to find. 

This hunt was unofficial and this time steered hunters to the Mt. Tabor area, which Dave well knows (me too), although he was not the finder in this case.

The treasure hunting game resembles geocaching in large degree. The term “geocaching” was invented by Dave Ulmer, a Tektronix engineer who, in his next chapter, acquired an RV tricked out with bells and whistles I associate with the BizMo (business mobile) design. 

He parked behind the Pauling House that time (soon after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans) and gave us a tour.  Don stayed in touch, subscribing to Ulmer’s “daily picture” (usually of some deserted wilderness he was parked in) shared by satellite. This was all well before Starlink.

Although I had my 3-ring binder of “bus reading” with me, I found I was more into churning through my own thoughts on this trip. I did some thinking about the public sector and public spaces. There’s a public-private as well as private-public flow, with public metrics suggesting a kind of ambience or groupthink. To some extent, the groupthink varies by city.

Just as radio and TV resulted in the spread of new standards, in terms of accent and the look of one’s kitchen (ideally), so is AI spreading new speech and thought patterns. 

The construction I call “not but” is on the rise. “This was not just a spur-of-the-moment decision, not a random act, but a pre-meditated, carefully planned exercise.” That’s a not-but.  You’ll hear a lot more of this construction on YouTube, as AI continues to take over, not just thumbnails, but audio tracks as well.

Without myself being an AI, I’m nevertheless a natural language processor and somewhat LLM-like in how I continually reweigh my various marbles (presuming I have any; we know we have marbles because they say it’s possible to lose them, or to have too few as in “he didn’t have all his marbles”), so naturally my own speech and thought patterns are being influenced, as I absorb the new vernacular and update my worldviews.

A Wanderer’s Way

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, if not open with, the therapeutic value of wandering, which is my translation of what a flaneur was up to, observing Paris (say), as it underwent metamorphosis. Or as London underwent industrialization in the age of steam, and then electrification. Or as the Global Village experienced illumination, by means of spectral social media, beginning with radio.

Not that morphing per se is the only phenomenon worth marveling at, awesome though turnover undoubtedly is. Details matter.

In this case, details of my trip were as follows: 

I began with a quick trip down memory lane (figuratively speaking) delving into the courtyard and parking lot area for Cedarhurst Apartments. I used to come here often, for years, as Glenn Stockton (Global Matrix) and Steve Holden (Open Bastion) used to have their respective corner apartments on different floors, each near a respective staircase. Open Bastion also had its own apartment offices for a spell.

I hadn’t planned to make the detour, but a principle of wandering is to keep it semi-unplanned. Have objectives but give yourself permission to change these objectives rather fluidly. Focus on each one as it arises. Some of them will likely be accomplished. Others will prove fleeting.

For example, I started out expecting to make a loop, which I did. Likewise, I started with a strong expectation I’d have lunch at that Hollywood sushi conveyor belt place on my return from St. John’s yet that’s not what happened. I changed my mind. Nor did I make it to St. John’s. Not this time, as it turned out (and that’s fine).

Right at the outset, the 75 passed me by, and just seconds before I’d’ve made it to the stop, but that was all unplanned as I wasn’t trying for a specific bus. I’d consulted no schedule.

So, having just missed a bus, I had some time before the next one. So I ventured into Glenn’s and Steve’s old place. I believe Paul is still there. 

I left by that tunnel I used to frequent, while making a mental note to query about the Hawthorne Theater later, to get more clear on its Masonic past. 

Here’s where I made another impromptu decision: with 8 or so minutes before the next 75 was to arrive, per the bus stop display, I chose to leave the stop and venture into Fred Meyer in search of gum or something, I didn’t even know what. I ended up with some nuts n stuff. 

Half way back to the bus stop, I realize I was sans my binder. No, it wasn’t at the bus stop bench. I must’ve left it at Fred’s after our interesting conversation. Yep. Some running was involved in this segment, to both recover the binder and to not miss the 75. 

Running is good for me, just not too much. Walking is also therapeutic. 

I recommend exploring your environs as a pass time, an activity you’re more likely to have time for if facing old codger-hood, or likewise if enjoying being a teen and cultivating a skillset, such as navigating around town using a mix of public transportation and exercising one’s skills as a pedestrian. 

You may mix in important errands, along with study (bus and train reading). You may reap rewards.

I boarded with the objective of visiting St. John’s, it’s own place north of Portland. But then why not explore NE Alberta instead. I got off at NE 42nd around NE Alberta and walked along it, due west, towards its business section. For a lotta blocks, it’s still residential along both sides.

Alberta starts getting busy around 30th and I enjoyed walking along it, imagining eating here and there, before boarding a 72, and skipping ahead to MLK but while making mental notes of places I’d like to return to, and photograph (I’m taking pictures the whole time). 

Later, waiting for the 6 along MLK is when I noticed The Portland Observer seemed to have gone out of business. But as Gemini later clarified, it had not. That business had simply moved but left some old signage behind. 

Again, upon boarding the 6 I had what proved a fleeting objective: to head to Goose Hollow, maybe catch the Max back to the sushi place in Hollywood. 

But then it didn’t take long for me to realize that if riding the Max train were my objective, then I should get off at the Oregon Convention Center, saving a lot of time. A green line Max was just arriving. 

I was back in Hollywood in short order, yet found myself deciding against grabbing sushi as the 75 stop was right there, next to the Trader Joe’s (which I imagined entering, but then did not). I was enjoying studying and drawing diagrams.

OK, that’s a lot of detail, and yet I’m skipping over many objectives (many around eating) that I entertained but then dropped. I think of this process as “being tickled by temptations” (possibilities) but then usually not getting sidetracked. 

But then what’s the main track vs a side track? I keep deciding that, remaining open to cues, to intuitions..

That’s what I mean by “unplanned”. My friend Ray Simon from Jersey City days is an influence on my practice. His book: In Search of Happenstance. I’m not finding it, but I have his other one, on mischievous marketing.

The overall objective, to have an adventure, is pretty much a given. 

To have an adventure and to study. The point of the binder was to do bus reading of Terry’s and DAF’s papers (an excellent combo) and to draw diagrams on blank white sheets already 3-hole-punched for that purpose. 

I might have other journal entries focusing more on these more metaphysical cogitations — or not.

Rear View Mirror

I was just updating a fellow Wanderer about my adventures diving into the W-Lambert function, too boring for words to a lotta people. 

I admitted to fighting old battles. 

What used to be uphill was my “everyone deserves a nerd cave” standard, as a responsibility of the education system. 

“What system?” you may ask. 

“Exactly” say I. 

However, not having the means to get there doesn’t mean disagreeing on the ends. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is old news by this time, yet was a previous obsession of these blogs. Not that every kid has easy access to a laptop by now. We just know that’s a goal.

I’ll quote from my outbox for the rest of this blog post:

"Using Python as a Calculator" I believe is the title of Guido's early tutorial (Guido being Python's inventor, Dutch guy) and it may still be embedded in the documentation somewhere. Yeah, it's still there.

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/introduction.html#using-python-as-a-calculator

But he never really meant a graphing calculator, as Python is not indigenously about producing graphical output; that's the job of 3rd party packages for the most part (still a part of Greater Python, but not "core" Python exactly, which is what Guido was wanting to teach at that juncture).

But my emphasis is a little different: actually replacing the scientific calculator as the classroom device of choice, or should we even have a classroom, when a personal workspace is the better choice? Like a nerd cave. 

[ Why "go to class"? Well, lectures in person still have a point I guess. But crowding a lot of desktop or even laptop computers into a rank and file arrangement... really? I know the corporate types like the bullpen architecture for supervisory reasons... I say everyone deserves a nerd cave minimum, with plenty of compute, as they say today. ]

So I do go 3rd party and dig into scipy, numpy, matplotlib... all that 3rd party stuff that makes Python popular because powerful. It's not so much the language out of the box that people dig, but the ecosystem that has grown up around it.

https://github.com/4dsolutions/m4w/blob/main/ProductLog.ipynb

The details of this so-called W function, inverse of x * e**x, may be too boring to contemplate (true for most people), however if you scroll down about half way you'll see the graphical calculator-like output I'm talking about; really better than a calculator might do.

I don't really even know to what extent the scientific calculator maintains its grip on contemporary high schoolers. I'm in many ways the product of my past, still fighting yesterday's battles (but hey, I'm learning new stuff in the process, so I wouldn't say I've stagnated entirely, no way jose!).

Another Milestone

:: on my Meta timeline ::

:: random comment, consistent viewpoint ::

:: reassurance ::

Steel Stories

Cascadian TriHearts

Catching Up

Which reporters have the Maduro beat, surely some of them? How’re they doing, Mr. and Mrs.? We seem to hear a lot more about… well anyway, you catch my drift. 

“Where have you been?” might be the relevant question, like I should do more homework before I ask dumb questions right?

I was saying yesterday I think a lotta people are doing more reading thanks to AI, as the prompted answers seem more to the point than mere searches. They say boomers are using AI all wrong if they think it’s just search. How about Generation Jones, same way? That’s my pigeon-hole.

For lunch today I had my Blue House Burrito: fresh Instant Pot pinto beans, Picante (hot), fresh spinach, nutritional yeast (like a powder), shredded Tillamook cheddar cheese and onion, melted on the spinach-tinged (as in green) wrap (we call them tillers). 

Not that you have to use Tillamook, that’s just an excuse for a link (Cascadian history is topical around here).

Maybe it sounds like I’m ignoring the serious warring that’s going on around the planet but as Marshall McLuhan could tell us, the Global Village is not a “nice town” by a long shot. Arnold Toynbee: same message. 

We’re in a pressure cooker, where the ethnicities more likely to make it are the ones less likely to be piling on. Neutrality Studies is big at Wilmington College I bet (Ohio, a hog capital), under a Peace Studies umbrella (Quaker school, you can predict the subjects from the brand).

My focus is my School of Tomorrow curriculum, and like everyone else it seems, I’ve been data mining with AI, pulling up what’s relevant to my network or graph. Typically for a knowledge engineer, I was just recently cutting and pasting the markdown output from an LLM to a Jupyter Notebook on GitHub. 

So what else is new, right?

Anthropology Exercise

As an exercise, write about a culture with a different relationship with alcohol. Here’s an idea: sure go ahead and drink when you’re young, but it’s considered normal and part of the life arc that after fifty or so one weans off, if not sooner. The culture comes with rituals around all that, and no one thinks they’re being innovative for having things be this way, as this is how things have always been and just are (going for realism, in other words, given this is often the native outlook, whatever we mean by “native”).

Going through my mind is the burgeoning supply of NA (non-alcoholic) beers we’re seeing, combined with that guy at the beer dealership telling me the NA market was booming relative the standard lines, which are down. Obviously public tastes are shifting, and I’m not saying in alignment with any particular program I’m aware of, other than maybe awareness itself, of the alternative lifestyles one might create.

The motto, or slogan, if that’s what we wanna call it, “the best religions are yet to come” sounds provocative if not downright offensive, as a religion is something people get defensive about, whereas the same phrase (almost) — “the best lifestyles are yet to come” — will meet with broad agreement, because we intuit “lifestyles” to come in infinite permutations, whereas “religions” are supposed to remain small in number, if expecting a world stage at least, and the few we have already are causing at least as many problems as they solve, or so many would judge.

All of which is to say, anthropology has a job to do, which includes teasing apart these various meanings, based on connotation as much as denotation, and that means exploring the connotations — which is anthropology again, so full circle. What’s the difference between “ethnicity and “race”? I’d say the distance is great, and that the former has a bright future, whereas “race” is being retired to pocket ethnicities that remain as holdovers from the Social Darwinist era (same era as the Marxist era in thumbnail), marketed later as Eugenics, and getting confused with being pedigreed (having an ancestry).

Does making up a culture mean committing to live it through? Why would we have fiction then? The whole point of fiction is to be able to speculate and imagine without acting out, if the latter were even possible (fiction often breaks laws, the laws that “keep it real” to use an idiom).

However people will commit to finite / definite experiences, such as a cruise or tour of duty, including when lots of random happenings are involved, stuff no one controls. People opt for such scenarios knowing it’s not a life-time commitment. That’s a tendency to work with, not against. A lifestyle park, like a theme park, with no alcohol or only NA substitutes (< 0.5%) could be a part of a permutation for a few months. Where one goes from there will depend on many factors, on future decisions. So kick back and enjoy.

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 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.