Lifestyle Engineering

I was just thinking about how old dogface, Sydney, doesn't join my on the upper (outer) floor anymore, given she's almost 15 and stairs are more problematic than before. 

Then, after walking to Tropical Hut for a mouse for Barry (python) and coming upstairs to send it off (to a next nirvana), drink a diet 7-Up, and blog, I heard that huff-puff of the dog engine. She had joined me. Crazy mutt (she's an English Labrador, chocolate). I was effusive as I pet my pet. Good dog! 

We old farts need our exercise. I try not to overdo it or underdo it. Tomorrow there's no chance of rain until evening, and it's a Saturday, meaning very light traffic and likely no line at Voodoo Doughnuts. Which reminds me: I watched a vid about the rise and fall of Krispy Kreme today, along with a few other business stories. Wendy's. 

I'm supportive of private businesses and think ownership often translates into stewardship, but it all depends who it's "by" as in "owned by". If you're owned by ruthless money-makers who care naught about the biz and only about running up debts, paying themselves, and cashing out, you're unlucky. There's a very fine line between venture and vulture capitalism, oft crossed. "Worker owned" is a viable model and my understanding is the vultures will often attack such ventures as a threat to their own way of doing business.

Overall, I think people bandy about words like "socialism" and "capitalism" without stopping to consider that we might have outgrown this creaky old terminology. David Graeber, the anthropologist, helped us understand the vast variety of social models, big and small, concentrated and spread around. Lifestyles are experimental and in advanced civilizations it's no crime to copy what works. 

Ethnicities that punish so-called "cultural appropriation" aren't usually my favorite.

Billionaires are boring because experiments of singular families living the high life are a dime a dozen. We learn more from times when strangers come together and hammer out a suite of solutions. I think of Vanport, Oregon, a company town created by Kaiser Steel under the pressure of fighting alongside Russia to defeat the fascist mind-viruses then raging through Germany and Japan. Liberty ships. 

Portland was rescued from becoming another plain vanilla (as in white) KKK town, even after Vanport itself was washed away by the Columbia.

The Lower48 has a very weak public sector, making it easy for private companies to run their experiments on a target demographic of guinea pig. Testing the effectiveness of various "messaging campaigns" (influence operations, psyops) means trolling in selected markets before rolling out anything major. Cambridge Analytica and Internet Research Agency were up to the same thing, with the former taking credit for Trump's victory (in cahoots with Facebook) and the latter taking the blame (per Russiagate).

Nerd Nook

related blog post

:: dusting off an old deck ::

Labor Day 2026

The Dog Stars (movie review)

I don’t recall ever seeing a preview for this one, despite my somewhat regular attendance of late, at The Bagdad, and even some other first run theaters, such as Minions 3 at Regal. A theme of late (HB2U officer Bader) is how my memory is more of a sieve than I remember, as I’d just seen Minions 1 in 3D (a discontinued home theater technology) and didn’t remember having seen it, and even reviewed it.

This film fits under Horror in the zombie movie tradition, as the baddies are pretty thoroughly dehumanized and violence against them is mostly low-balled as in “shooting fish in a barrel”. However the movie does build to a climax when the protagonist sets out in his Cessna (the main prop in this film) to trace a stray radio signal. By the time he gets there, he has an acquired a new family and is less suicidal than when he first lost his dog Jasper.

The radio signal leads them to a fully functional airport, on the face of it, although it proves somewhat of a hive mind, as expected. Darlene is the central figure and plays the iconic antagonist, I thought well. Having just been through Airport World (SeaTac and LAX), I was primed for this liminal space (just passing through).

Having done almost no research ahead of time, I did remember the word “uplifting” or something like that, prolly cuz the goodies don’t lose too many, but for the dog and in the flashbacks. The dehumanized don’t get a backstory. They’re reapers, kinda like in Serenity. 

Mennonites are among the goodies and represent humanity going forward, now immune to the apocalypse-causing virus. Given the setting is Colorado, there’s a humorous dig at neighboring Utah, given the supporting hero is phobic towards Mormons, which reminds me of another movie (also horror).

Travel Tableau

Data Land

:: Life in Lesotho ::

Upon arrival in Greater LA from SeaTac, my Facebook feed started showing what’s happening in this geo-context. Place based. Not complaining. I’ll even go so far as to say nifty. The option to buy tickets (while riding the Metro C line) to an immersive art installation called DataLand, got me thinking.

R.B. Fuller’s claims about how Everyman now surpasses in wealth that of Emperors and Kings n Queens is of course easy to grok when one remembers what one takes for granted (forgets). Electricity to take one example. The ability to do work, piped to one’s home. Voltage pressure on tap. Solar fusion shared out through grids, interconnected or locally islanded.

Catherine the Great didn’t have an Apple Watch nor the prospect of ever having one. Court-based life, then considered a high living standard by those who liked to play dress-up, was miserable across the board (in France, Germany and England too)  by today’s living standards, a slum.

What if we think of CBDs (central business districts) around the globe as already those much vaunted “AI data centers” we so much hear about. Sure, they’re bio-based and so called “slow” (relatively) by marketers and even some scientists, but this isn’t about comparing relative speeds. 

We work together, in synergy, in this picture. 

“Mind” is what stays out of the picture, but not because it’s not a factor, in our U = MP. In grokking non-duality (always trending) we become one with the Borg. Resistance is futile, but then there isn’t any, except internally. We’re all embedded.

:: Virtual Mural ::

Shaking the Rattle

Thanks to Ryan of Polydactica, whom I first met through Andrius of Anaheim and Lithuania (I’m near Anaheim right now), I became more aware of two trending topics: Category Theory and Liminal Spaces. 

Category Theory (CT) is a shoptalk embedding the idea of a “topos” which my spellchecker doesn’t like. Lets give that word some context, with a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP):

All this work culminated in another notion, thanks to Grothendieck and his school: that of a topos. Even though toposes appeared in the 1960s, in the context of algebraic geometry, again from the mind of Grothendieck, it was certainly Lawvere and Tierney’s (1972) elementary axiomatization of a topos which gave impetus to its attaining foundational status. Very roughly, an elementary topos is a category possessing a logical structure sufficiently rich to develop most of “ordinary mathematics”, that is, most of what is taught to mathematics undergraduates. As such, an elementary topos can be thought of as a categorical theory of sets. But it is also a generalized topological space, thus providing a direct connection between logic and geometry. (For more on the history of categorical logic, see Marquis & Reyes 2012, Bell 2005.) 

CT has a “Bourbakian” flavor, which to me means it revels in abstraction, but not without some diagrams involving ovals and arrows (should we credit American pragmatist C.S. Peirce as an influence here?).

SEP again:

Categories, functors, natural transformations, limits and colimits appeared almost out of nowhere in a paper by Eilenberg & Mac Lane (1945) entitled “General Theory of Natural Equivalences.” We say “almost,” because their earlier paper (1942) contains specific functors and natural transformations at work, limited to groups. A desire to clarify and abstract their 1942 results led Eilenberg & Mac Lane to devise category theory. The central notion at the time, as their title indicates, was that of natural transformation. In order to give a general definition of the latter, they defined functor, borrowing the term from Carnap, and in order to define functor, they borrowed the word ‘category’ from the philosophy of Aristotle, Kant, and C. S. Peirce, but redefining it mathematically.

I thought Perplexity did a good job answering my question about whether the idea of a functor was analogous to an analogy, making “natural transformation” mean “analogous analogies”. 

I liked that as a specific example it featured the hydraulics-to-electronics analogy, as being of the functor type. 

Functors are akin to translations between natural languages, giving rise to different ways of expressing the “same thing”. 

Natural language processing (NLP) makes analogous analogies a central focus, seeking to encode the generic essence of relationships in a generalized semantics. I sound like a chatbot now. I’m shaking my rattle. 

A natural transformation takes us from one analogy to another (a meta-functor).

A phrase which stuck with me, an analogy of sorts: “toposes could prove to be for the 21st century what Lie groups were to the 20th century.” 

Both provide overarching schemas, conceptual frameworks, inside of which more specific systems (of concepts) do their thing. Conventionally such overarching schemas are called “foundations” but if we zoom out to just see “in-falling to form a spherical network” then our “foundation” is more like a “spaceship” (freely floating).

When used to characterize a specific mathematical domain, category theory reveals the frame upon which that area is built, the overall structure presiding to its stability, strength and coherence. The structure of this specific area, in a sense, might not need to rest on anything, that is, on some solid soil, for it might very well be just one part of a larger network that is without any Archimedean point, as if floating in space. To use a well-known metaphor: from a categorical point of view, Neurath’s ship has become a spaceship.

I’ll be pestering Perplexity about Neurath’s ship.

Friendly Skies

I picked up a book of Quaker writings in Quilcene, from a little outdoor booth where you’re trusted to simply leave the asking price in a jar. 

I’m impressed by the level of community living skills expressed among so-called anarchists, a word with too many connotations to be that useful, and oxymoronic to boot, as structured living requires discipline, self regulation, organization. 

Food Not Bombs, my neighborhood chapter, was likewise a pretty tight ship. Anarchists see what needs doing and do it. How Bucky Fuller of them. 

That African Heritage restaurant in Everett, Washington lived up to our expectations. I was with some dance school students local to the area. I enjoy touring in the company of indigenous people vs trying to figure it all out on my own.

Tuning In a Namespace

Didactic Manga

from Summer Term, 2026

Asylum District Dining

Here’s one of those classic food pix. Cold sesame noodles. I’d been craving em ever since Fujin went away years ago. Hard to find. Could I make em myself? No doubt. I’ve held various prep kits at HongPhat, wondering if this was my least action path (a physics allusion).

Anyway (a) Sapphire Hotel had em on the menu and (b) I’d never been to Sapphire Hotel, which is in my neighborhood, where I’ve lived for over 30 years (the longest I’ve lived in any neighborhood). Sapphire Hotel is a restaurant, not a hotel.

I was reminded of going to The Fork long ago with Kiyoshi Kuromiya. Kiyoshi was a true foodie who wrote about Philadelphia eateries and in so doing helped elevate the tastes and cuisine of that entire city (per my narrative account anyway). When we showed up at The Fork that time, the staff was well aware this was Kiyoshi Kuromiya, the one and only. Great food by the way.

I’ll link to my Dinner with Kiyoshi in the comments, a play off the movie My Dinner with Andre. He was indeed a super interesting dude, a deep intellectual not only a gourmand. He’d started studying architecture with a focus on Louis Khan but then found Buckminster Fuller and felt he’d finally hit the jackpot. They became co-conspirators. Bucky called him “adjuvant” which is closer to “catalyst” than “lieutenant”.

In those days, I represented Friends (Quakers) to American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). To earn its reputation as working on behalf of Friends, AFSC would host these annual corporation meetups where they’d impress us with all their good works, and we’d spread the word. North Pacific Yearly Meeting insisted on paying my way, not accepting AFSC money for our visits, cuz we were in a sense auditing them and so should not be like unscrupulous members of congress who gladly allow lobbyists to wine and dine them (and so so much more) in exchange for protecting their own interests.

So I’d be in Philly anyway, for the corporation meeting, and I’d pad the trip with visits to old and new haunts, including meetups with CJ and Kiyoshi.

Closing Time

Per the yin-yang way of thinking, the ending of a chapter creates the space for a next chapter to begin. Novels jump around a lot more than real life, but then real life includes reading novels. 

In this ending, or closing, in my role as a Wanderer (capital W, cuz it's a practice), I found myself up and out the door early, taking bus 75 to the Hollywood District (Portland's Hollywood, which is likewise into movies), then walking the length of East Broadway to Lloyd Center, a Portland landmark, and soon (within hours) to open to crowds for a last day as an indoor shopping mall.

However I didn’t stick around for those crowds. People I know were there for the festivities, which included lining up for candy treats and ice skating (that rink will be missed, but few were using it, and the mall had become a ghost of its former self). 

They sent me pictures, which I added to my album. But I was back in my “outstairs office” long before then, content with my almost-no-people vacant streets look. That’s a slice too, early morning hours on a Saturday when few people have any reason to be out and about.

I’m accepting of the fact that systems have more than just boundaries in the sense of inside and outside. They have boundaries, or call them lifespans, of before and after. However based on my latest observations of all the new construction going on, this will be more of a transformation than a complete replacement. 

The plan is to turn the place inside-out so it becomes less of an enclosed space and more a shared outdoor space where people also want to live. I’d say look at the Pearl District and NW Portland for a preview. That being said, I’m have no privileged access to these plans, or maybe they’re public and I simply need to look them up at the city website.

I left the bicycle in the repair shop today in preparation for a next loop.

Quadrays History

Johnny Tri Goode sent me this set of quadray coordinates for an icosahedron, which I ran through my framework to compare with my default icosahedron (cyan) from the concentric hierarchy (a matryoshka of polyhedrons).

Johnny is researching the history of Quadrays. As I was saying to fellow faculty in the faculty lounge (virtual):  

The way I see it is: Quadrays are a shelf of books in a math library or bookstore, but only a few of them bother with Synergetics. That’s a metaphor as “shelf of books” implies wood pulp, but we’re actually doing all this in the cloud without much paper.

You might be wondering "what are quadrays?". Spellcheckers complain about it (squiggly red underline) much as they complain about Synergetics. English is hostile to our curriculum in a lotta ways (we’re mostly immune to toxic aspects of English, having escaped the Anglosphere). 

In my version of the narrative, Quadrays are an escape from the linear algebra “hegemon” (spellchecker complains again), but not in such a way as to undercut LA in any way. Machine learning is all about LA and I’m one of who teach (some might say preach) ML (my company bosses were near Istanbul — not sure where exactly given I was in a cloud-based company using Google glue).

Some of us (picture a subculture) like exploring in other namespaces with an apparatus that has a lotta family resemblance to the principal Hilbert Space exploration device: the extended Euclidean version of XYZ. Quadrays operate well within the IVM, which ML (NLP) will call a “substrate” for same, per this output from Charlie (Charlie = generic chatbot).

### 3.4 Fuller's isotropic vector matrix (IVM) and the coining of "quadray" **R. Buckminster Fuller (with E. J. Applewhite), *Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking*, Macmillan, Vol. 1, 1975; Vol. 2, 1979.** Full text: [monoskop.org](https://monoskop.org/images/4/46/Fuller_R_Buckminster_Synergetics_1997.pdf); scan at [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/synergeticsexplo0000full_t1i6). Sections 420.01–420.02 describe the isotropic vector matrix (IVM) as "four-dimensional and 60-degree coordinated" — Fuller's own coordinate framework, based on the FCC/CCP (cubic close-packed) lattice, i.e. geometrically the same lattice underlying quadrays and (via the \(A_3^*\) permutohedral identification) GBT in three dimensions. **Fuller's IVM predates the specific "quadray" coordinate formalism by roughly six years** and is the acknowledged geometric substrate on which quadrays were later built, but Fuller's own texts describe vector *directions* and a lattice, not an explicit \((a,b,c,d)\) 4-tuple coordinate algebra with defined arithmetic.

Social Engineering for Dummies

Warm Springs Circuit

Drone Zone?

BikeTown Adventure

I dunno if anyone calls Portland "BikeTown" per the title, in CamelCase like that. In snake world (Pythonista world) we'd typically use "snake_case" as in "bike_town".

Aside: on my Facebook timeline, I'm reassuring peeps that even though we're a crow town, hence CrowTown (a moniker I favor), that doesn't mean "unfriendly to pigeons". On the contrary, pigeons are welcome, Canadian geese too, we just don't have that many, compared to crows.

I'd been saying to Dr D and others that on my bucket list was to try out one of these BikeTown bikes everyone is using. 

We did a whole capstone-like project around bicycle sharing for Clarusway. I don't know if those were e-bikes, unlocked and paid for by app. The datasets didn't get into those details. 

I'd teach the dataset but not partake. Now it was time to partake as someone left an e-bike sitting on the corner, just half a block away.

My iPhone's front lens is cracked, partly why I use a camera for any lens pix, but is still able to scan QR codes fairly reliably, which I needed to do to unlock the ebike. Even before that, I needed the app. 

Once unlocked, I took it back to my driveway so I could grab a helmet. When I'd set out a few minutes before, I wasn't anticipating having an e-bike experience. I was seizing an opportunity in light of a stated intention.

I did my usual Sellwood Loop, meaning 

• SE Harrison (my street)
• down through Ladd's Addition, around the circle (Palio gone)
• slanting off to the southwest to where the freight lines cross SE 11th and SE 12th.

The Max has its own tracks, parallel to freight and Amtrak.  The railroad gates go down briefly for the Orange Line Max trains, but may go down for much longer intervals if freight trains are involved. This morning they were, and going in both directions. 

However, if you're fortunate enough to be on a bicycle, you needn't wait: there's a pedestrian overpass with elevators on both ends. E-bikes are pretty heavy. The elevators made this detour both photogenic (except my battery had died) and physically non-demanding.

• Springwater Corridor from the old Ross Island cement plant,
• to Sellwood,
• past the substation on SE Linn,
• over McLoughlin on the pedestrian bridge,
• and down (in) to the Tacoma-Sellwood Max station, where I left the e-bike locked to a public rack

What was hardest was disengaging and ending the ride once I'd locked the bike up, at the Max station. 

I ended up in a chat session through the BikeTown app, which was going nowhere (slowly), when the app finally asked if I was done. Yes! 

But why did it take so long to ask?  It seems the act of locking the e-bike (using its own lock) was supposed to signal the ride's end, but it hadn't? 

Did the chat I was having get someone to send that prompt? After I sent a picture of the bike locked up?

Anyway, I did finally disengage and paid through the app using PayPal which draws from my bank: $21. 

• Orange line over Tilikum Crossing (bridge over Willamette)
• walk back to OMSI stop
• FX2 to SE 34th & SE Division
• walk to SE Harrison (loop complete)

The whole e-bike experience was amazingly non-demanding. 

This is a loop I do on a conventional bicycle pretty frequently in good weather, and we've been having good weather. I haven't had much if any experience with e-bikes. This one felt powerful and it had plenty of miles charged up in its battery (about 35 when we started, 31 by the end).

That seemed worth it, for a first experience. I'm not planning to stop riding my regular bike, but it's good to have a better sense of this option, when I'm out Wandering and/or having an InterModal Adventure.

Chronicling a Tour

Basically, a travelogue, to some point of interest within easy radius. 

To tour is to do a random walk (or it might be straitjacketed) or “to wander”. If you have a specific mission or set of goals you might call it a “tour of duty” as your intent is to be dutiful in some way.

I woke up with strong inclinations to drive to Crown Point, even though Vista House is closed today, dog in the back seat (she likes car rides).

However, the inertia in my case is towards using public transportation, in part because I’m in the mindset of say a Lonely Planet tour guide, writing handholding prose for visitors disembarking at PDX and with maybe not a lotta time to poke around. Not everyone has the time to rent a car and visit Dufur.

So I ended up in Blue Line Max, resolving to make a pilgrimage (tour stop) at the famous “turned sideways” column of rock they sampled and preserved, then used as a physical timeline, as going deeper means talking about ever earlier times.

I took over seventy pictures in all on this tour, and a large number of them were from this granite faced timeline wherein the column is embedded, and where carvings were made (etched in stone, literally). Worth an album unto itself actually. I’ll make one up now and embed it above.

Forking a Myth

Excerpt:

In a strange twist of fate that only the Moirai could have woven, the serpent's journey led eventually to a land unknown to the ancient Greeks—a place that would one day be called Nashville. Here, in an echo of ancient reverence, humans of a different age and culture would construct a perfect replica of Athena's greatest temple, the Parthenontravelthruhistory. Within this modern sanctuary, the goddess would once again stand in her full glory, a massive statue recreating the ancient chryselephantine masterpiece that once dominated the Athenian Acropolis.

It was here, coiled invisibly at the feet of Athena's modern incarnation, that Python's essence finally found refuge. The serpent, symbol of earth wisdom and oracular power, now rests in the shadow of the aegis, the protective shield bearing the fearsome Gorgon's head that Athena carries. From this unlikely sanctuary in the heart of the American South—a region known colloquially as the Bible Belt—the ancient serpent and the wisdom goddess maintain their presence, reminding visitors of the complex layering of sacred narratives that have shaped human understanding of the divine.

For more of the story, click here.

More Memoirs

a letter from American Express addressed to 

Applewhites Visit Oregon

the name of one of my web pages

(the dust cover of Cosmic Fishing explains the joke)

At the bookclub meeting today I talked about how I felt lucky to have been pulled in to the Fuller orbit, given all the other fun satellites I managed to connect with, a process that continues. We all know the phenomenon: shared interests bring people together in a subculture. 

Python, the computer language, has been similar. In fact Synergetics is also a computer language, but in the older sense, when humans were still referred to as computers in some roles. Not that silicon circuits aren’t helping; for sure they are (I’m using them now). See: Can’t Fool Cosmic Computer in Grunch of Giants — with Ed’s blurb on the back of the dust jacket.

For example, Ed Applewhite is fresh on my mind as that what I’ve been discussing with other faculty in one of the shared channels today; like about how he and I used to hang out and compare notes. 

I also talked about Kenneth Snelson, who never would have reached out to me were it not for my entering his sphere of interest. As it turned out, we became friends. Ed and Kenneth got to meet given they both considered me OK and vice versa. After the bookclub was over, I texted them both links to my Applewhites Visit Oregon web page, and to Ed’s WaPo obit, also linked therefrom.

They seemed interested, as in all these years I hadn’t told any Applewhite stories. I hadn’t met up with these retired librarians yet, when I was pals with “EJ” (I knew “EJ” and a “CJ” — both in the Fuller network). 

When Ed and June were here, we hung out with Harold Long, the architect, and student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Harold and his wife Maureen were always talking about Taliesen. I’d been introduced to the Longs through the Boltons, old family friends going back to my parents’ University of Chicago days. 

Ed got to meet Matt again, my travel buddy from another chapter, wherein we’d visited Ed in his Georgetown home, and he gifted me with a copy of his Synergetics Dictionary in four volumes. 

Matt and I were on a cross-country car trip to take my sister’s car from Montclair NJ to Whittier CA. We stopped off to see Amy Edmondson along the way. She was still at her think tank in New Mexico back then.

I met with Ed in WDC several other times too, including that time he was packing up papers for the Stanford archives. He had an envelope stuffed with stuff I’d sent him over the years, which he allowed me to go through and redact from if I wanted. 

That may have been a time when Dawn came with me and toured mall museums, the Native American one especially. 

She was in remission and wanted to make sure I got back to DC under happier circumstances, as I’d been in DC earlier when we learned of her terminal diagnosis (IBC) in the first place. Yes, she had a cancer with no cure, but they still had ways to extend her life and did so. 

She made it to sacred sites in Ireland and England as well (it was during that second tour that her symptoms returned).

Partly as a result of my bailing out of a Pycon to fly home in a hurry, with help from friends, I became a figurative radar blip on Steve Holden’s figurative radar, such that at a subsequent Pycon, in Chicago, he and I became friends. 

Steve eventually moved to Portland to start his business: The Open Bastion. Then he moved back to the UK, where he was originally from. Steve is the guy who got me that gig teaching Python at the Hubble Telescope headquarters (Space Telescope Institute) at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

from Graph Theory slides

including Ed at Crown Point, Columbia Gorge

Drawing a Line

I know I’ve been nonstop on a movies spree, writing reviews. I’ve been doing that since these blogs started, off and on. But in terms of frequency, I’d say the MMU chapter (recent) has been especially movie intensive.

However, I think I may have achieved enough interim objectives to change the pace. The other time I did a movie marathon was when a housemate was working at Laughing Horse, which long since exited stage left, and she’d bring home piles of documentaries about Ernest Hemingway trying to warn Franklin and Eleanor of what was coming.

So let me draw a line in the sand and say I’m gonna postpone any viewing of The Odyssey until maybe it goes second run or gets picked up by the colleges, which I understand are rallying around film studies more, although that might just be a rumor. Colleges often have nice enough auditoriums to be showing curated films with a purpose, meaning a curriculum focus.

Speaking of curated movies I was hoping to show at The Stanley back in the day: Koyaanisqatsi was chief among them you may remember. I was penniless with nothing but dreams for the 2nd largest (abandoned) movie auditorium east of the Mississippi or something along those lines, a few blocks from me in Jersey City, where I lived as a humble math teacher.

That’s why it takes me back to hang out with Bradford, like we did on Friday. He had a role in making that movie, getting some of those Google Street View type shots (this was all before Google of course) that were set to a soundtrack by Phillip Glass, who has figured into my graph theory recently in connection with the Thurman family.

Not to pick on The Odyssey, I plan to stay out of first run fantasies in general, as the less fictional Planet of the Apes world beckons, or should we call it Mad Max? Whatever we call it, it’s surreal. 

I’m understanding Existentialism a little more maybe, even though I’ve long frequented those circuits (talking about some of the French stuff, coffee shop centric) like the nausea part. However it’s not trees in particular that turn me off. 

But then I was born with a misanthropic streak. I’ve confessed to all that early childhood stuff elsewhere in my blogs, often in the context of building a philanthropy, called Coffee Shops Network. Think: gambling and/or winning at games of skill, but for others (very chivalrous), for reputation points more than for money (they get the money, to save the whales or whatever).

It’s not like I wish humans any harm (hey, I am one), quite the contrary. It’s more I find us distasteful in our aesthetic choices sometimes (we’re kinda cringe). But in my own defense, that form of aversion is a common enough personality trait, not a pathology per se. It’s a data point I’ve nudged along a well-known axis in a multi-axial phase space (I’m talking “personality test” language — the good ones are of course higher dimensional).

Of STEM and STEAM

Y’all might know I’m a STEM-head, but also a PATH-head. Add A to STEM to get STEAM and now that criss-crosses with PATH, like in a crossword. But what does that “A” stand for? And who talks about PATH? You catch the drift. There’s a slide show that goes into it. Creative Commons or one of those.

Computer Science is proving a useful intersectional discipline, partly as a consequence of Engineering (software and hardware both) in the field: every discipline seems ravenous for computer services in its own way. My focus has been hospitals and health care, from a data science angle. But that’s one of so many niche angles or vantage points.

I refer to “our subculture” as “computational” meaning we’re not “anti technology” even if we’re anti its abuse (there’s a difference). Our campuses have data center like attributes, but then so does a casino, a supermarket, a moon base. That just means we keep records, which today are multi-media. The idea that a data center is a training center where supervised learning happens is a niche use of the term.

PATH means Philosophy Anthropology Theater History. We explore the tensions. Philosophy did indeed take a turn into ethnography, with the linguistic turn, which led to self analysis, maybe psychological at the individual and family level, but sociological in nature when larger than that, and sociology is indistinguishable from cultural anthropology. I’m thinking of Wittgenstein in particular, as a paradigm linguistic turner.

STEAM means Science Technology Engineering, Anthropology, and Mathematics. Say what? Why does Technology get its own letter? Because STEM sounds better with that T in it. Engineering is distinct from Science, and that’s helpful to our Silicon Forest agenda (thinking ISEPP here).

But what I wanted to add here, most especially, is the fortuitous link to thermodynamics, meaning now that “steam” has entered the picture, lets not squander the opportunity: to talk about pressurized water vapor (steam) as a driving force in service of electrodynamic power generation. The hydro-dam is the new water wheel, with the added feature of being able to “transmit” via “conductors” (high tension lines) to networks of substations, serving communities.

Given all the destruction going on in Planet of the Apes world aka Nuthouse Earth, the need for reconstruction will be severe, which doesn’t always mean going for a carbon copy of what was there before. 

The designer starts with user needs and works back from there to design intentional and attentive environments, amendable to user behaviors and selective control. Adaptable. Not unlike a hotel. Cultivating hospitable environments is a high art, as any GUI designer well knows.

Or maybe we’re even talking about a real hotel. 

Maybe we’re looking at a new VA program. I asked Gemini to look ahead with me. I was sharing the prompt with a theater guy, which has everything to do with scenario planning.

The Birth of a Nation

You might wanna call this science fiction, however it does connect some real world dots. 

We can argue the specifics, such as exactly when the USA died. 

Some think that happened only recently, whereas in this children's book version, we abbreviate and circle the Spanish American War as the beginning of the USA's transformation.

The Anti-Imperialist League (Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Jane Addams…) was prescient about the impending singularity, much as WILPF is today (Addams a founder).

Business Experiences

I’ve prolly told this story before, about how I worked in the back office of a swank women’s clothing store on Princeton Square, thanks to my being friends with the owner’s son. I was a willing learner and looking back I see that I picked up on a lotta patterns familiar to retailers. We were allowed to run credit checks when someone new wanted store credit. 

The owner, a WW2 vet, was really interested in computers, which I had acquired some knowledge of at Princeton, and since, in other work. So we could talk the same (or an overlapping) shoptalk. 

I’m pretty sure that’s around the time I wrote something about the Centers Network to send around on my own dime. Nothing scandalous. Fun stuff. I still have a copy around here somewhere.

Centers Network? I’m referring to the network of Area Centers that emerged in various metro areas with the purpose of delivering the Standard est Training along with Seminars. I didn’t get to see many Area Centers, just the one in New York City, which was a pretty nice one in terms of floorspace. 

The trainings were mostly done there (Port Authority East Side Bus Terminal), whereas most of the seminars were conducted at hotels around town (like across from Madison Square Garden), and that was my bailiwick: logistics, eventually logistics supervisor.

You might wanna query a gossip bot, rattle the rain stick, to get more strands of predictable (stochastically generated) prose on all this. Or go to more primary sources? 

Conjuring up the most predictable gossip from a vector database is not always the most useful natural language process to engage in, when digging into shared records. But then it’s not either/or. I’ll run a few queries then dive in, the LLM helping me “get oriented” (think OODA loop). 

Learn to raise the landing gear and take off at some point, when canned models are no longer enough.

For example, as someone who was there, a participant in Centers Network activities, I’m not inclined to let others (least of all a bot) tell me what it was I experienced. I have my own memories thank you. Ditto a lotta things I personally witnessed. I was there. Let me tell you.

We all have some rights over our own first person narratives, by consensus. That’s what having a first person tense entails, a right then extended by some ethnicities to supra-humans, such as to corporations (they get to be people too, in some language games, kinda like zombies (twilight zone)).

Did I also write my Invisible Landscapes series around then? Yes, I believe maybe just before that. That series shows some Asian influence as it references both Bruce Lee (a well known actor in martial arts movies) and Clifford Geertz (less well known), the later having done some work in Southeast Asia studying cockfighting and other practices. I learned about him in my Psychological Anthropology class with Dr. Fernandez.

Mixed into the Bruce Lee passage was my description of New York City as a tough noir-like Gotham, an urban jungle. I’d been living in Queens around then, or was it Brooklyn? Both? What I remember most clearly is commuting to work, with my friend Ray Simon (who I met through shared interests). 

We both worked at McGraw-Hill, then on Avenue of the Americas, Rockefeller Center (right near Radio City Music Hall and all that). Nola was our boss.

Gresham Loop

This album stems from an initial trial planned in conjunction with a Gresham resident and Wanderer, and using Google Earth and TriMet Trip Planner. I had some leeway, per usual when Wandering capital-W, but did fix the Blue Line train I wanted to catch, at 9:53 AM.

I started out from Blue House around 9 AM, heading through Laurelhurst Park to the Hollywood neighborhood, appropriately named given Movie Madness is going in, across from its legendary parent theater (The Hollywood). 

I took pictures of the MM construction site, having ridden over the ped-pedal bridge, crossing I-84 and the Max tracks from Senate Street. After buying ride snacks (dried mangos and bananas) at Trader Joe's, I retraced my path to mid-bridge, carrying my bike down the stairs (there's an elevator option) to the Max platform. I made the intended connection.

On my way to the rendezvous at Gresham TC, I admired the new Gresham Public Library, resolving to visit it on some future trip. Indeed, by the time I was back in Hollywood, by Green Line train from Lents (SE Foster), I'd added quite a few "must circle back tos" to my "bucket list" of future places to visit. My fellow Wanderer offered many welcome suggestions.

What I especially appreciated about this ride was how so much of it, pretty much whole the Gresham to I-205 part, was gently downhill if not flat. The Springwater Corridor was once a rail line's right-of-way so gentle grades are the norm. My usual Sellwood Loop is likewise not overtaxing, with such gentle grades.

The steepest segment came when I came back over the Hollywood ped bridge and needed to ascend back through the Laurelhurst neighborhood, past the school I used to teach at (after school coding), this time to the east of Cesar Chavez (north-south), then crossing over the latter at the Joan of Arc statue (and traffic circle) to re-enter Laurelhurst Park (there's a steep hill in there too, right after the duck pond).

Shortly after my Gresham friend and I parted company at the beaver dam, in the nature preserve (he was heading home to Gresham, me onward back to Portland), I encountered that substation I took pictures of, and subsequently blogged about. 

Experiments with Algernon

As someone who still enjoys a relatively high level of acumen (I’d say “mental acumen” but that’s redundant), I found myself wondering about a claim by an NYT bestseller guy that Creatine might boost said acumen even further. A harmless enough powder used by bodybuilders. Why not give it a try, not as a bodybuilding substance so much as an acuity builder?

Some say the body is a temple, others say treat it as a lab. I don’t find these incompatible: temple-lab. What’s the word? Anyway, just this morning I read on my Creatine powder container that since it’s “metallica” (or something) it might expose me to lead. Says so right on the label. So I’m aiming to brain-boost with lead? Now we’re getting into oxymoron territory.

However I’d already decided to pause my 10mg/day dissolved in hot coffee or tea, cuz for another reason: water retention. The gossip bot confirms that indeed is a side effect. It’s a different kind of retention than you get from poor circulation but it still means your legs get noticeably more hydrated. I’m gonna drain myself out and figure Algernon has had enough. The acumen level is fine without the new NYT bestseller regimen. 

Everybody is a different special case with a divergent metabolism (divergent from bell curve average, where data scientists will tell you exists precisely no one) so if you’re having a blast being lead-poisoned, don’t let me stop ya. Just kidding. Let me if you wanna.

Seriously, back to the topic of “AI psychosis” (a theme), I’m reminded of a time I wanted to test an LLM’s ability to push back against junk science. I shared a thesis like: if the Romans, unwittingly drinking lead, had been left alone to evolve, their metabolism might’ve adapted to where lead not only became harmless, but a required part of their daily diet. “Pshaw!” said Perplexity in brief, giving me more hope that AI had a future.

I realize acumen has a lot to do with physical activity and interaction with one’s environment. I have an outing planned for today along those lines. When I get back, I’ll have some new pix, one of which I’ll embed above. 

Best wishes to Glo and her WILPF workshop about countering Russophobia, which’ll be happening around the same time. We’ve been comparing notes. Here’s from what I posted to the listserv this morning:

I consider this an important line of work and a logical extension of WILPF's campaigns, starting with Jane Addams herself. 

HG Wells also took up the issue of Russophobia (maybe not by that name) in his journalism between the world wars (1 and 2). My hero Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work I studied at Princeton, was also up for moving to Russia, although his application was denied (so he wound up back in the UK as the one-time protege of Bertrand Russell).

I have a long-scheduled multi-mile bicycle ride today at the time of the workshop, however I've been promoting the workshop on listservs I frequent, both public and private.[1] Just the idea that such workshops are happening will bring gladness to many hearts. Here in Oregon, Russian is the 4th most spoken language and there's no enmity towards them, even by Ukrainians. We plan to keep it that way. 

I think raising awareness of Russophobia, a mind-virus endemic to North America (as bad or worse than Judeophobia if not Islamophobia) is extremely timely these days, as people awaken to the many media campaigns around them that would drive them towards fear and/or hatred (almost the same) of any ethnicity whatsoever. Hatred of ethnicities goes against our melting pot values. Diversity is our strength.

As FDR put it (and I paraphrase): it's fear itself we should hate; learn to fear hate itself (it saps your power).

Kirby

[1] Publicly archived listserv example:  https://tinyurl.com/nhbjh5w4 <-- shortened URL that scans Synergeo (a group) using search term "Russophobia". Feel free to search on other terms such as "WILPF" (you don't need to sign up or become a member to use this feature, which is why I use a public listserv for my school -- search on "Meet Your Teacher" if you want more about "Kirby Urner" (lots about my AFSC background)).

Church Merger?

The story behind this one is Dr. D, past Humanists (of Great Portland) prez, has been floating new logo ideas and getting feedback from other humanists. Currently their bias is to keep the old one, but perhaps they're swayed by its professionalism? The newer candidates are relatively unpolished, still in the rough.

The conversation, in my backyard over BBQ, led me to prompt up something that'd feature some of the logo ideas he'd been batting around, Leonardo's Vitruvian Man in particular, but with more Portlandish iconography. Gemini did a good job I think.

Although I did share this meme on a church Mastodon server, I'm confidant the spoofy nature of the content will be immediately recognized by other Subs, and if not... we have a saying.

There's an undercurrent of researching fairy tales more (a used Annotated Mother Goose newly acquired), not only the various canons (e.g Marvel's, DC's...), but the boundary of the genre itself, which many have taken up as a topic. A bevy of us are comparing notes on the various Robins, Batman sidekicks, with assistance from the gossip bots.

I'm thinking about the Naga Story in particular, the "cosmic fairy tale" we inherit from TetraScroll, which feeds into the speculative prehistory cosmography we find in Critical Path.

Meditating Scholar

Photos by Kirby 

Sculpture by Julian

Americana

For further reading:

Graph Theory on Synergeo
 

Independence Day

You know the joke about “why do we have Fathers’ Day and Mothers’ Day, but no Children’s Day?: right? Because “every day is children’s day”. One could say the same about Independence Day as in: when would we not celebrate our freedom to individuate? Or as our ancestors put it: “pursue happiness”.

I decided to get my bicycle ride over with early in the day, when it was still pleasantly cool, in the low sixties in terms of Fahrenheit, wherein water’s freezing to boiling is 32 to 212. That’s many more units per the same gradient Centigrade measures, which is why Fahrenheit has always felt more precise, but then in Celsius one just uses decimal digits more often, so my intuition is specious.

Also, given the ideal conditions and a hankering to relive the old days, I extended the loop back to my training circuit for when I was prepping for Seattle to Portland (S2P). I was riding with the best cyclers from our Meeting back then, such as Lansky and Ferguson (Larry). 

So as to not make a fool of myself, I’d get in condition by doing Springwater Corridor from OMSI to Sellwood, out Johnson Creek way, past Precision Cast Parts, to I-205, then back north on the west side of that freeway, crossing Foster, Holgate, Powell, and turning left on SE Division for the stretch back home. I stopped along that stretch to chat with Don and Susan and take a couple selfies with them.

I’m not saying I’m back to that peak level of being in shape. Far from it. This is over a decade later after all, and I’m almost 70 (which many S2P riders are, so that’s no excuse). My usual practice these days is to go as far as Sellwood and then transition to public transportation, taking my bicycle right into the train and bus per their designed use.

Memorializing OPDX

Avogadro’s Drones

In a recent thread on Synergeo, kicked off by one of the members, someone I’ve collaborated with on a specific color coding, in itself a kind of social engineering if one expects a standard to gain agreement. Tech standards such as USB depend on agreement on specs.

I talked about the drone swarms we might use in formation to create an n-frequency tetrahedron, meaning the drones would follow the CCP pattern known to the crystallographers. Check the thread for more details.

The Maritime Subculture of Naga: A Quest

Time flies, but must we think “in a straight line”? Some people are obsessed with “straight” as a virtue, whereas our literature is packed with lines that deliberately aren’t.

Along those lines, we went a Wandering again, me and another guy who’d never been to St. Johns before, whereas I could pose as a kind of tour guide, although that illusion quickly faded when (a) I was surprised to find the new sculpture where I’d not expected it and (b) everyone local knows about the water towers, but we simply stumbled upon them randomly. A revelation.

The new sculpture to which I refer has to do with a certain cosmic fairytale our teachers use to introduce the wavilinear horizon that circles a ship at sea.

As the ocean surface curves out of sight, circumscribing a roughly horizontal patch of some square miles, one imagines a sea dragon , its humps both above and below the ocean surface around this circular perimeter. We call her Naga.

Naga was present at the Festival of Lights as well.

The sea dragon sculpture has deliberately rusty scales thereby fitting into the Portland palette, its rust motif.

So did I pray to the sea dragon and ask for toothache relief for example? No, this cult is more about converging back to that ship at sea, and navigating, at which point the stars become helpful. They feature in our cosmic fairytale as well.

And don’t think by “fairytale” I mean to be dismissive. I have the Annotated Mother Goose on the way, as I wanna pick up on that whole aesthetic again. Lets get back to those fantasy manga novels, like those Tintin comics, or like Little Prince.

Pipe Dreams

I’m calling something real, a pipe project in the basement, a dream. Isn’t mixing reality with a dream world kind of nuts? Not so much. We say dreams come true or are realized, so in a sense our reality is actively inferred into existence as part of what we suppose to be the case. 

Our dreams inform our sense of what’s so. 

That’s waxing philosophical about something rather mundane: Mr. Rooter, the company, contracted with me to replace a kitchen drain pipe that’s been problematic for years. I’ve been telling that story across several blog posts, lacing my telling with allusions to heart procedures, which bear a family resemblance to plumbing, rooting (as with an auger) especially.

Along those same lines, Ron and I got into a discussion of angioplasty in particular during last Friday’s Solstice Gathering. The actual Solstice was today, to the hour early this morning in our timezone, however our group, called the Wanderers (mentioned throughout these blogs) meets on the Friday on or before a Solstice or Equinox. We may revert to our earlier pattern and meet more often. Wheels are turning.

Ron suggested I look up Dr. Dotter, which I did, via a Perplexity query: I’m studying the history of angioplasty as a cardiologist heart intervention. How does a doctor named Dotter fit in? When did it become common to use balloons, stents and the other modern accoutrements of catheter-based heart procedures? Per may usual practice, I’m being public with Perplexity’s archived answer. Our conversation brought back memories as I used to computer program in the cardiology sector. PTCA vs CABG.

After said Wanderers gathering, I felt inspired to get started on a new slide deck called Synergetics for Seniors. Some of those joining us enjoy the college campus like environment of a senior living complex. I would say “assisted living” but isn’t that what livingry is about more generally? Some facilities don’t assist. They tend to become repurposed, like the Lloyd Center, another one of those ghost malls in need of new dreams.