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.

Business Affairs

I’ll continue my “instairs vs outstairs office” narrative from my previous post to this blog, noting the cleverness: Upstairs Downstairs was some successful Britboxy soap, and Instairs Outstairs is how Bucky enjoined us to escape the Anglosphere.

So further in towards the planet’s center, in the basement, said pipe from our last episode just sits there, as pipes do, still dribbling with toxins and ruptured from the inside. An aneurysm. I keep going back to heart metaphors I realize. This isn’t just cuz I’m an aging Boomer, or Joneser they’re calling us now, but because I spent much of my computer programming career hanging around cardiologists and cardiac surgeons professionally, not just as an old guy patient.

I’m referring to my Visual FoxPro days, having jumped on the dBase bandwagon way back in dBase II days (the first one: Ashton-Tate was good at marketing). The Starr-Wood-Chapman practice, with offices at St. Vincent, was on board with Outcomes Research as how else were we supposed to know what works in the long term. Which procedures, which valves, which factors in general, correlate with what else? The bread and butter of statistical analysis. 

My bread and butter was to harvest field data in amounts never before seen and funnel it to the back office, appropriately anonymized to conform with HIPPA. We took that seriously. It’s aggregate numbers we needed, not anecdotes about Mr. and Mrs. Smith although we did need to keep a pseudo-identity in the picture, to tie records together. Medical records lose significance when you mix people’s records across procedures and visits. Adding to the challenge is hospitals used different MRNs for the same people.

Anyway, we’re gonna let the pros deal with that pipe. “Repair or replace?” as we’d say in the heart biz, maybe talking about a prosthetic valve. This pipe instairs (in the basement) is no longer worth repairing, nor even able to be repaired (it’s not a question of cost or “worth”, it’s a matter of brute physics). 

Outstairs, on the 2nd floor, I’ve been using Spyder (a Python IDE included in the Anaconda distro) to better summarize the volume ratios we’re encountering and computing using sympy and Synergetics (our reference text). I’ve added a new slide to the BEAST / BASKET desk for my army of OCN presenters.

This is not a new business for the Oregon Curriculum Network. 4D Solutions, a for profit DBA of Dawn Wicca and Associates, has since its inception (and naming) long term invested in branded curriculum development. Now that I’m not teaching data cleaning nor harvesting heart-related big data from the field, I have more time to devote to my “asynchronous andragogy” as I call it, which has synchronous aspects, nor have I forsaken pedagogy entirely. I’m just not at the level I was when working with Saturday Academy, or Coding with Kids, or teaching 8th graders at Sunshine Elite Education.

Proof of Work

I'm calling this Proof of Work while thinking of the blockchain idea of weaving some momento or token into a collective memory that won't easily dissolve. Some might say "won't dissolve period" coming from understanding the maths involved, but of course blockchains may be fragile for other reasons, as real infrastructure is always involved (even here, where the "blockchain element" is simply a blog post).

This one was collaborative in that I was going for a visual representation of another Koski Identity.Our friend of the show Piero della Francesca, Renaissance polymath, is credit as one of the first to chronicle, on the blockchain of his day, the finding that an icosahedron nestles, faces flush, within an octahedron, colored cyan and red respectively in the picture above.

My School of Tomorrow headquarters is pretty old, structurally speaking, so in between working upstairs on these computer graphics, I was downstairs lying on my back in the kitchen, still nursing the illusion that I could ream out my down pipe with something like a heart clot removing catheter: I bought a 100 feet of coiled wire and poked it down a length of tubing I’d likewise purchased for this project, at the nearby Ace Hardware store on SE Division. After intubation, I hoped to restore water flow by prodding the clot loose.

“Why not just use a rooter, an auger, a snake?” one might ask. For sure I’d tried that conventional solution and also indulged in high potency solvents, the drips of which singed by toes. 

Clearly I was losing my uphill battle downstairs, but winning upstairs, in pressing my Python framework into service, resizing concentric hierarchy (матрёшка) polys (dolls) from default relative size (how they appear at birth) to showcase (exhibit) Koski’s algebraic relationship: the RT begotten from said cyan icosahedron has volume 60 S + 60 s3, which cryptic notation is pretty readable once you get the hang of it. 

My little army of presenters is out there spreading reading knowledge of this particular shoptalk. I’m right with them, on the front lines, charging my $70 per hour or whatever it is (I’m thinking back to the data science gig, which was more about learning various Pythonic workflows — such as I’m using upstairs, which is where I’d teach from).

Or rather, my uphill battle downstairs is really a process, a psychological process first and foremost, wherein I reach the same logical conclusion a professional would: that this basement down pipe to the sewer has reached end of life status and needs to be replaced. 

I made the call, and a couple hours later had my bid. I’ll make another call on Monday, maybe get another bid, and then seal the deal.

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.