Downtown Meetup

One of my better decisions, in retrospect, and assuming this is something for which I might take credit (should I chalk everything up to fate?), was to get involved with the network of people friendly to Bucky Fuller's enterprise, including with Bucky himself (we exchanged communications).

I wouldn't stop there though.  

Getting mixed up with the Pythonistas was also a positive move, and so was mixing it up with the Centers Network (est), which gave me a boost, not financially so much as psychologically.  Going to Princeton and studying philosophy there:  also a good move.  

However it's up to me to turn all these developments into assets i.e. it's my own powers of transformation that turn shit into gold and gold into shit, both of which substances should be taken as metaphoric in this rendering of deeper alchemy.

Fuller's role as a steersman (cybernetician, trimtabber) involved getting people into networking.  Grunch of Giants is all about networks and networking, nowadays more structured thanks to social media, but still not in the mold of the LAWCAP corporation (LAWCAP being Fuller's coin, for "lawyer-capitalism").

Today I got to meet in person with another trimtabber, a member of the TrimTab Book Club no less, as I am.  Richard Ramsay was in Portland for an annual conference he's been attending for decades.  This time, he got an award from the chair for lifetime achievement, like an Academy Award in that discipline, of suicidology.

Richard was already an admirer of Bucky's, having heard him speak, and early on started phasing in some design science at the meme level e.g. by introducing the tetrahedron as a conceptual diagram.  He's well known in his social circles, and appreciated by many, for being quirky and innovative in this way.  

When Richard later found out how Fuller himself had been suicidal, and continued weaving that theme into his own autobiographical storytelling, the puzzle pieces fell into place.

I've been apprenticing in the field myself (informally, as someone with a longstanding interest in sociology and anthropology, and without seeking certification or credentials), since getting to know Richard and realizing its up to me to make the most of this opportunity.  

Social mores (customs) around suicide vary by ethnicity and continue to morph.  Richard has worked for decades with LivingWorks to help shape a consistent and constructive institutional response, at the global level, to this dire need for a social service.

In the fifty states the 988 help line has been inaugurated.  Canada hopes to someday follow suit.  The idea of a lifeline, a way to restart, is archetypal, embedded in lore, but how does it all work in practice?

We met in the hotel lobby and went out for pizza downtown.  Richard had kindly assembled some conference materials (program, decals, even a pen) on my request, so that I might continue to study this emergent subculture.  I learned a lot over our couple hours together.

Curriculum Extensions

We want Pascal's Triangle to show up in Casino Math as an anchor point, both for figurate and polyhedral numbers, and for the binomial distribution, approaching, in the limit (in the direction of infinity), the normal bell curve.  

Setting the area under said curve at one, and talking about probability distributions, along with pseudo-random number generation, is a part of it.

Something like:

 For a more complete rendering, click here.

Institutional Wealth

Let's start our GST analysis with the economics of an individual.  

Are babies born into property?  I'm thinking they'd have to reach their majority before their inheritance kicked in.  Some call it law, others call it anthropology (me more in the latter camp).  Some babies show up inside wealthy families and are slated to own the farm, if lucky enough live that long.

OK, but to what extent does a civilization provide high living standards to its hobos and vagabonds?  The question is designed to give one pause, as, given stereotypes, the nomad has a hard life, that of a drifter. Nomadic tribes, such as gypsies, show up in fairy tales as shunned.  Rock bands, with their roadies, like traveling circuses and carnivals, are sometimes romanticized, but just as often derided by the genres. 

What I'm suggesting, however, is that the lifestyle of the wandering pilgrim could be a new normal. Not owning much property could become a satisfactory option for many. 

The issue now though is that, if you drift, you'll probably have no mailing address for snail mail and probably can't interest a local bank in your business, or subscribe to healthcare programs. A smartphone and/or a laptop are not enough, to plug in to most infrastructure.  Even if you have a room at the Hilton.  

You'll be on a tourist visa or maybe a student visa.  Somewhere, there needs to be a home where you're rooted.  That's the expectation.  But need it be?  Snail mail could be delivered to your box through hotel services.

There's no reason in principle that an individual would have to own a lot of stuff, in order to get around, staying groomed and clean, well dressed and well fed, attending meetings, classes, sometimes teaching or instructing, other times learning or taking instruction.  

Life in a global university need not entail amassing a garage full of stuff, shelves full of books, knickknacks and souvenirs.  Or even if such cubby holes do exist, filled with items of personal value, their contents are appropriately storable and/or recyclable.

A fallacy associated with such speculations is the knee-jerk fear that a proposal is being floated that "everyone would have to live this way".  The alarm goes out, warning that "private property" has been targeted for abolition.

Clearly, some lifestyles are all about serving in custodial capacities, vs-a-vs specific buildings, ships, other infrastructure.  That's one kind of ownership, connected with stewardship.  Mostly though, "owning" implies "an ability to sell". Yet many properties have value-adding capabilities unrelated to their salability or transferability.

In suggesting a life without title to real estate, need not be a life bereft of entitlements, we're simply stating the obvious:  that having one's health and freedom, along with the means to stay out of harm's way, is in principle sufficiently satisfying to many people.  

Consider those in religious orders who feel welcome to partake of the order's shared assets and facilities.  

Are such people living in poverty necessarily?  

Of course not, although their wealth might be more institutional than personal, one might say.

But is the mere existence of such a lifestyle option a threat to those enjoying home ownership?  The implication oft seems to be those of high net worth, as conventionally accounted, are inevitably subsidizing those "of no means" (again, as conventionally assessed).  

But we're saying a global student-teacher nomad could have work-study access privileges vs-a-vs luxurious apartments and/or rustic situations without any specific ownership relationship to these programs and/or  accommodations.

How might we crew a business mobile, an exploratory vehicle for the Trucker Exchange (T4P), without having extravagant wealth?  

The vehicle is an institutional property, one in a fleet, and is enjoyed and operated by its crew without being owned by it.  

Some crew members might be holders of properties, here and there in the world.  Others might not be engaged in those language games, and yet they still have access to healthcare.

Pipeline Politics

Substack is letting me access the Seymour Hersh archive from two separate devices.  As it should.  I'm not cheating.  I paid my yearly subscription just now.  I'm also paying my $4 a month or whatever it is to the New York Times, which still runs articles I care about.

I'm reading Sy's The Nord Stream Ghost Ship published less than 24 hours ago.  The concluding paragraph reads:

The expert had one final thought: “In the world of professional analysts and operators everyone will universally and correctly conclude from your story that the devilish CIA concocted a counter-op that is on its face so ridiculous and childish that the real purpose was to reinforce the truth.”

Exactly.  As a trained scuba diver, NAUI certified (no doubt an expired credential), I was exposed to a lot of the lore.  Gill Gilleland, my exMarine diving instructor, told us about the special gas mixtures some professional divers would use, to avoid getting the bends while bypassing lengthy stays in hyperbaric chambers.  

I thought the more common protocol is to hang tanks on the line, such that ascending divers can stay at various depths, waiting for the pressurized nitrogen to slowly bleed out (boring).  But why use nitrogen in the first place?  From Sy's earlier article:

The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers.

Actually, adding helium in place of some of the nitrogen may increase rather than decrease the need for decompression.  The narcotic effects of nitrogen under pressure is what to avoid.  I've been reading the Wikipedia article.  

As a sports diver, I was familiar with the navy dive tables and kept to relatively shallow waters.  That was easy in the Philippines, with great coral reefs beginning just beneath the surface.

That last paragraph though, jibes with my own analysis:

In my story line the USA is (a) innocent of wrongdoing and (b) actively pursuing the perpetrators, in part by making their cover stories ever less believable, ever more paper thin, to the point of transparent. 

Sometimes when doing medical research, you use colored or even radioactive dyes to trace a system or condition.  

Analogously, it's sometimes interesting to see which media outlets will repeat an obviously phony cover story, one deliberately designed to have gaping holes, if one has an operating hole detector.  These media outlets are catering to an audience that doesn't necessarily want the truth.  They -- the owners, editors, readers and so on -- want to be remembered for their loyalties, their obedience to specific powers.  They're placing bets on which factions will still have the upper hand at the end of the day.

This needle in a haystack blog is itself a media outlet, one could say.  Knowing something about the difficulties in diving to over 200 feet, for long enough periods to pack explosives around a pipeline, I'm not like your average clueless German journalist.  Nor am I an obsequious American, eager to show off my loyalty to the King or Emperor.  

I'm closer to Garland Nixon in thinking the conspirators behind the pipeline sabotage have no inherent right to represent themselves as avatars of a constitutional democracy.  They're closer to British imperialists.

From my own email outbox:

My own bias, when wearing a nationalist pro-USA hat (not necessarily red), is to finger the Brits as our primary adversary. The Revolutionary War was fought against Brits. The Brits attempted to destroy the USA in 1812 as well. There's some evidence the assassination of Lincoln was the result of a plot by British intel. British Petroleum (BP) did damage to the Gulf of Mexico that's still beyond the scope of settled science to fully assess.

If I were asked to rank "enemies of the USA" from high to low, I'd definitely rank the Brits higher than the Russians or certainly the Chinese. A great fear the Brits seem to have is better relations between the USA and Russia.

Totally quirky, I realize.  That's why I tend to save it for my blogs.  I should add here that it's British reflex-conditioning I'm up against, i.e. bots (like soulless corporations, e.g. Pearson), and not thinking people.  I'd like to save a next generation of British school kids from succumbing to inferior brainwashing.

Beltway Mafia

We're used to "Beltway Bandits" as a journalistic cliche, referring to the ring road around Washington, DC, which is lined with DC's favorite contractors, such as Unisys, Honeywell, and Booz Allen Hamilton.  However "bandits" may not be obvious enough in some circles.  Too cartoony.  How about the "Beltway Mafia" instead?

The Beltway Mafia is heavily into matters military and needs to keep the flow of weaponry going.  The front keeps shifting, from Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Ukraine.  The goal is not to fight these countries, but to arm them against their foreign enemies and their internal insurgents.  That's called the protection racket, which the Mafia is good at playing.  Accept our protection, or else.

Ukraine is especially dependent on the Beltway Mafia for operational support, while the BM is in turn dependent on the US (Uncle Sam).  The defense of Ukraine against its internal and external enemies is a high priority of these subcultural icons.

Some Ukrainians at first may have wanted peace with mother Russia, another homeland for many of them.  The Beltway Mafia put an end to those pipe dreams early on. A new raison d'être had been found.  A goldmine.  The new big business inside the beltway would be to "fight to the last Ukrainian".

Old World Order

People like to talk about some New World Order, as if we know what that means.  It means we're invited to take a Rorschach Test and to project an imaginary dystopian or relatively utopian future for ourselves.

There's some disagreement on whether we're already in the NWO or if it's still on ahead.  

Assuming it's still on ahead, that would mean we're in the OWO (Old World Order) right now.  

How shall we characterize such a thing.  Is it "rules based" in some way?

Before giving vent to your inner cynic, lets be clear:  rules exist.  Some people like to write about "laws" as in "natural laws" but I'm more into "rules" myself, as a matter of taste.

Some rules we follow come from an exceptionless side of things we don't have much control over.  We haven't the luxury of not obeying eternal principles, whatever those may be. We sense their applicability, whether or not we know how to codify them into words.

Sometimes we might acknowledge "miracles" wherein events seem to go against what we considered possible.  The reason we consider them "exceptional" in nature is that they're "the exceptions that prove the rule" (an idiom worthy of focus, if you get the time).  By updating our sense of the rules, we may need less room for these "impossibilities".

Last night, Everything Everywhere All at Once won a bunch of Oscars. I was too busy studying the Blood Simple special features to feel like breaking off, knowing I could get it in the dailies the next day (or later -- I mean in the reviews, say on YouTube).  

This movie (EEAAO, winning sevens statues), not unlike The Dawn of Everything, reminds us to stay away from false dichotomies, such as Manichean polarities, or such as "democratic" versus "authoritarian" or "globalist" versus "nationalist".  Why fall for an either/or mindset?  Remember neither.  Remember both.

My idea of a NWO is somewhat typified by EPCOT (all caps version), wherein a global Refugee Services keeps rescuing people from dead end circumstances.  We have two sides of the same coin (symbolized by the lake) with Tomorrow Land on one side, and Remember Land on the other.  

Then there's Fantasy Land, somewhat independent of any specific past-to-future axis (= scenario = narrative).  Tomorrow Land needs to be actively dreamed up, not treated like a place we stumble into.

So is all that Remember-Imagine-Tomorrow stuff the NWO or the OWO?  

Haven't we been dreaming ourselves into the future for some time now?  Of course we have.  

But in some complexes, or mindsets, the old seems at war with the new.  These "two sides of the same coin" fight one another.  People get locked into those mindsets pretty squarely sometimes, and even lose the key.  

Sometimes the best strategy is to show them the fire escape.

I'm indulgent of the nation-states model, and encourage more virtual versions of same, offering dual and triple citizenship or more, and having few restrictions on where you actually live.  

I could be a citizen of a virtual nation (VN) even if I live in Peru per this order.  Lasting VNs would actually take more work to create and maintain than blowing bubbles in the quantum foam.  I'm just sketching on the back of a napkin here at this moment.

Although it might sound like I'm talking to myself in a vacuum, regarding ideas that will never see the light of day, from my angle I see myself more as descriptive, keeping pace, updating my language to keep it synchronized with real world developments.  

Whether that makes me an advocate for the old or the new, in terms of what world order I favor, I'd say that's indeterminate.  I am always between what has been (the old) and what is to be (the new).  

That's what we mean by "living emergently" am I right?  And it's not just me who is doing it.

Quaker Doings

:: stark street meetinghouse ::

I've been out of the loop on a lot of activities, including memorial services, as I was busy care taking for my own mom.  

I haven't exactly been a hermit, but lets just say my inner circle has been tiny, but that's interpreting "inner" strictly, as in "could get covid from".  No one wanted to hear that Kirby had transmitted covid to his 90+ year old mother, least of all me.  She died of other things, such as we used to call old age.

I'm still not frequenting the meetinghouse, although I'm in compliance with their covid policies.  A Quaker Meetinghouse in the 2020s is quite frequently an eldercare facility, meaning the majority of attenders, including members, are of relatively advanced age.  Most would not have comorbidities, but some would, and that's enough to suggest a fairly stringent "lock down" protocol.

In our neck of the woods "lock down" was always a misnomer.  We had protocols, and businesses were forced to close.  I'm not saying it wasn't intense.  But we didn't weld people into their homes, the way we were seeing on social media, closer to ground zero (i.e. Wuhan in most narratives).  The Trump & Fauci policy that fit us best was: "no central government should be telling you what to do, ask your local governor for guidance".  Put another way:  it's a very varied country and no one size fits all.  Duh, right?

So was I scandalized that Florida stayed relatively open?  As an Oregonian, I was free to walk the dog outside, go to the beach, visit public parks...  I didn't get to Florida in that period, but I'm not about to throw stones.  Again, because I'm an aging Boomer and mom was even older, I went the Instacart route and holed up.  We got our boosters.  But I was never one to shout in any megaphone about how everyone should do as I do.  On the contrary, I'm accepting of my minority status, of full time care taker.

So, George Lakey, author of Dancing with History is passing through.  Our activists bestirred themselves without needing to be cued.  The Peace and Social Concerns Committee went through a crisis period, especially when our meeting turned into a battlefield in the Gender Wars.  

I was one of those diehards who did not want to see said committee "shelved" or "put on ice".  The key was to clarify the committee's role:  it's a place where activists come together to compare notes and tactics, but is not about "expressing the conscience of the meeting" i.e. it does not presume to represent "Quakers", nor even "Multnomah Friends" to the world.  We each have a calling to do that, individually.

My mother was at a nexus between AFSC (American Friends Service Committee), FCNL (Friends Committee on National Legislation), WILPF (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom) and RSoF (the Religious Society of Friends itself, i.e. bare bones Quakers).  That's not the full extent of her network, but it's enough to keep the switchboards busy.

Pythonic Andragogy

I am in the process of developing some Python warm-up notebooks, for a cohort coming my way.  My role as their instructor, is to dive right away into 3rd party libraries numpy and pandas.  That's very doable, this is a logical on-ramp or doorway in.

However, there's another part of me that knows you're joining the comic strip late in the game, as some say. There's a lot more to Python than we know. Does that matter?  How much Python coding should a student have, when starting in on a first Jupyter Notebook?  I have no dogma or catechism on the matter.

What I'm playing with though, are these warm-up notebooks, but with an eye to introducing what's to follow.  Python is big in server side development, and with PyScript to Webassembly a thing, may soon coexist on the front end somehow.  I'm not counting my chickens.  The point is that Python forks into many walks of life, as the primitive drawing (above) hopes to illustrate.

I put SQL and SQLAlchemy towards the trunk for a reason.  True, Guido is not an SQL hound, that's not his bag.  His focus was elegance and simplicity of syntax, if you think that's possible in an object oriented language.  Is English object oriented?  Sure.  It's oriented around objects (or call them things), which come in types.

Speaking of types, what I'm thinking is a little groundbreaking, is I throw the function type into the mix, as another type, a callable type.  Then we have instances of the function type.  No, we don't get to them with keyword class, but keyword def instead.  That fits our brains.

FSI Roundtable

A Roundtable about Rope Twisting:

What it reminded me of:

Zoom Games:

A Western Friend

Carol Urner 

(April 21, 1929 - January 30, 2023)

Peace Activist

Her bio as told by me is currently scattered among these many blog posts, however I'm preparing a more gathered telling.  

Carol lived all around the world, accompanying her late husband, Jack Urner whom she met at the University of Washington (Seattle).

I wrote Peace Activist as her line of work, with the Quakers (Religious Society of Friends) her industry, on the online form, for transcribing to the official death certificate.

She worked a lot with women, helping them start their own small handicrafts businesses, especially in the Philippines and Bangladesh.  She taught school, wrote textbooks, and participated in democratization and indigenous peoples rights projects.  When living in Cairo, she worked with the famously named Zabbaleen ("garbage people" -- they collect garbage from Cairo).

When in the USA, she worked on various issues with Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).  

She wrote articles for a number of Quaker journals, including at least two Pendle Hill pamphlets.

Border Patrol

In this science fiction drama, the Canadians have turned sufficiently into an extension of District groupthink to be counted on to round up and return the "defectors" who try to draft dodge.  

In the meantime, those Mexican countries (wink) with their leftist governments, provide a haven south of the border for those wishing to avoid being sent to the front, as pawns for NATO.  

In that case, the border wall was a good investment.  It was always about keeping the prey hemmed in, in our game park.  We've been here before, in screenplays and dramas.

A sealed border is an affront to the freedom of movement for everyone, whereas most borders are semi-permeable -- meaning permeable.  Some of the right stuff, and right people, still gets through.  

Who are the right people with the right stuff?  That's up to the ones controlling customs.  

These read like grammatical truisms.  The fabled Hermetic Seal is more myth than physics, akin to a "perfect vacuum".  

Most membranes are at least permeable to light, meaning any electromagnetic frequency on the spectrum.

The question of citizenship or ships is not always a question of geographic locale.  You'll find citizens of country B inside country A and vice versa.  People mix it up like that, all the time.  

When an ideology puts people first, such complicated arrangements pose less of a threat.  From the viewpoint of the individual, it's rarely that complicated.  One cultivates one's loyalties as events unfold. Each step of the way makes sense, like a blockchain.

The idea that a person born anywhere on the planet has some inherent right of access to the whole planet, is not accepted even in principle as a part of the UN Declaration on Human Rights.  

The rights of citizenship, if one has citizenship, are not the same as access rights.  Thanks to private property rights, no one alive has unrestricted access in practice.  Even if "some inherent right" pertains, we see countervailing principles.  Then there's simply the inaccessibility of much of the planet.  No roads...

I'll be the first to admit I have no privileged access to most places.  Given my expired passport (I need to work on that), I'm pretty well penned in, but within a rather large area.  

What's oppressive is when the borders you must not cross keep you within a single campus or less.  Such arrangements are usually considered punitive, although if you're washed ashore at sea, on a deserted yet life supportive environment, then you may consider yourself lucky to be alive.  Hello Tom Hanks.

One hopes for at least an airport or dock, with appropriate boardable vessels coming and going.

Social Media Regarding Social Media

Random Gossip

From some Facebook timeline somewhere:

I'm still trying to figure out the IRA game (Internet Research Agency) as research seemed what it was up to: stage events, gain followers, sell stuff, promote memes... but to what end? Twas Bannon of Cambridge Analytica who overtly copped to trying to win elections, with that whole scary backstory about the secret Facebook quiz. Facebook took the heat and learned to kowtow.

I bet IRA was more "oligarchs playing with the west's new toys" trying to get in on the ground floor playing the new social media capitalist game. Swinging the election was likely not a motive, not at all. My hypothesis. Facebook and Google are global goliaths and the Russians assume (as I do) that they're just as entitled to their troll farms as any lobby group. IRA actually stood up to Mueller saying it had every right to play the game and Mueller backed down, seeing this as a footnote in history he'd like us to forget.

On the other hand, the whole Guccifer 2 business and Crowdstrike is a separate narrative and there we're told the GRU itself has its hands in everything, and working on Trump's behalf was definitely the goal in that case. The Mueller report goes into great detail, showing the Russians snapping to attention when Trump called for them to find those missing Hill-Billary emails. The only weakness in the narrative there is CrowdStrike wrote it under contract, with the FBI in no position to audit, only coach and cajole to get the narrative it wanted. It's not what I'd call highly credible, even if it's in the Congressional Record (so is a lot of other garbage).

Making Sockets More Secure

An issue CJ and I would argue about, was whether browsers were amiss in relegating unencrypted websites to second class status.  Chrome seemed especially heavy-handed.

I'd taken up the position that sticking with HTTP was no sin, any more than not wearing a mask, or wearing one.  In principle, we don't have enough info to talk about who's being "too unforgiving".  The bare fact of using HTTP does not warrant any kind of moral or aesthetic judgement.

I had a dog in the fight: through 2022, my Grunch.net, host of Synergetics on the Web, and hosted at GoDaddy, was serving plain old HTTP, with no encryption, no security certificate.  Perhaps for this reason, although I'm not clear on the mechanics, my ability to connect to my own website was degrading.

I cannot quite imagine what whitelist or blacklist would be frustrating traffic through my two routers, one behind the other, when neither registered any explicit blocking.  Was CenturyLink getting involved up line from me?  I'd reboot the routers, and at least temporarily regain access to the site -- or not (even that stopped fixing the issue). 

We could still ping and traceroute the grunch.net domain, just not get through to the server, netting a timeout instead.  Yet that very same website, viewed through Verizon, on a phone, was still quite responsive.  "What's up with that?" was the thinking.

Anyway, in the midst of all this confusion I decided it was time to bite the bullet and tackle the HTTP issue more directly, by upgrading Grunch.net to an HTTPS site.  

GoDaddy had a solution waiting.  I was able to follow the steps myself, although not without some confusing chat sessions (by voice and by text) with disgruntled tech support humans.

I'd point out to CJ that many of our treasured websites no longer had active administrators behind them.  Webmasters pass away.  Getting them converted over to HTTPS would require someone taking active measures and assuming administrative responsibility.  Is that even possible in all cases?  Given our rough and tumble Global U reality, we have no right to assume such faculty will be available.

Avatar 2 (movie review)

Bagdad Theater, 2009

The rumor I heard, on the lengthy delay between movies, is the director, James Cameron, was waiting for technology to catch up.  The first movie, a 3D as well as 2D work, constructed a state of the art, highly intricate world that would have to be topped.

As a visual feast (I saw it in 2D this time), Avatar 2 certainly delivers.  I hadn't gone back to watch the earlier one, so was maybe a little confused on who'd descended from whom, but blue people hybridized with sky people have only four fingers and a thumb, which singles them out for ridicule by kids in the other tribe (the water people, more green than blue).

The main plot element to get is: the main villain (a sky person, white) has arranged to reincarnate, and/or have his memories transferred, to one of "them" (a blue) if his current avatar (piece on the board, US Marine type) gets destroyed, and that apparently happened, as he wakes up in a blue body, but with the same gung-ho personality. 

The bad guy's white son, in the meantime, left behind because they can't freeze babies for cryogenic travel, grew up native, as a blue.  The blues are the Native Americans if you haven't figured it out yet, albeit mythically portrayed through Hollywood movie tropes.  They're also all-American and highly relatable.

The film is a lot about the "strong father" archetype.  The dads keep expressing disappointment in their kids, especially the boys, for their foolish misjudgements, and the boys hate being dissed by the man they most admire and aspire to be like.  They just want to be brave. The greens have a strong father chief too, with offspring.  The whites have their reincarnated guy with his left-behind "monkey boy" son.

The blue family seems very like The Incredibles family (also Disney), especially the teen girl, who feels marginalized as a four finger, and who is developing psychic powers beyond her peers (see Beetlejuice for another take on this character).  She saves the day on numerous occasions.  The younger boy does too, in bonding with the four eyed whale, the outcast one who had tried to fight the sky people earlier.

The plot is complicated but basically goes like this:  the bad guy Marine and his ilk (the sky people) have returned in their spaceships (buckyballs!) with a special grudge against the blue family dad.  

The blue family, to protect their own people, decide to hide out amongst the greens, which is controversial as the blues are forest people with underdeveloped lung power for undersea activities.  The greens agree to take in these Incredibles and teach them their watery ways, but it isn't long before the whites figure out where they are, and a fight ensues.

Cameron did both Aliens and Titanic and really knows how to put together a believable Machine World, an extrapolation of our own.  He also knows how to tilt the decks, as the ship is sinking, making the  passengers slide and/or climb what had been horizontal surfaces.  

Sigourney Weaver plays her cameo role, as the human mother of the blue teen with psychic abilities.  This mother and daughter don't meet directly in person, but on a psychic plane, in a dream state.

On the whole, I was glad to revisit this world and continue processing the machine versus natural technology rift.  The technology of the Native Americans is higher in many ways, if we include nature herself as a kind of Mech 'n Tech (which she is).  Whales are higher tech than any aircraft carrier, and so on.  

The brutish sky people are the Euro whites, the neo-Romans, the US Army more specifically.  A lot of what this subculture is most proud of comes in for criticism, in part simply for being so hackneyed, but also in the tradition of great westerns such as Little Big Man, and Dances with Wolves.  Europe is the dying world.  America, already inhabited, is the new world.

I saw the film by myself at The Bagdad and although the film was long, I didn't take any pee breaks.  Nor did I have my customary IPA or other drink (which probably helped) as I've given up beer (but not wine or gin).

After Princeton

These were my digs in Jersey City, post Princeton, a shared group house, more Platonic than polyamorous, though we certainly loved each other as schoolmates do.  We somewhat continued our lifestyle from 2 Dickinson Street.

My cohort was mostly using JCNJ as a springboard, to promising careers in the Big Apple, and they'd find a new place pretty soon. I found work within walking distance, as a high school teacher, and continued on in this space, renting from Mr. Chang, through other chapters of housemates.

Which house again? Immediately adjacent to the apartment building.  No solar panels.  Two cars.

Above, you'll see that same apartment building with the house behind it (red balloon). You're looking at Loews Theater on Journal Square, courtesy of Google Earth. The alley to the left of Loews, connecting JSQ to Magnolia, our old street, was used for a scene in The Joker. Newark was also used for that movie.

Nearby: The Stanley, used in a movie directed by Woody Allen.

This all happened in the early 1980s.  By 1984, I was living on the opposite side of Manhattan, in Queens, sharing digs with Ray Simon, along with a job at McGraw-Hill courtesy of Nola Hague.  

By then, I was also on the other side of a gig with Project VOTE!, aka Americans for Civic Participation, headed by Sandy Newman.  That was a rooming situation in Washington, DC (thanks Brenda), during the Reagan versus Mondale presidential contest.

Below:  Journal Square, across from Loews, back in the day.

Some Psycho Analysis

I don't see "the USA" as fighting Russia so much as an arrogant self-aggrandizing group we call neocons, which rose to power under Reagan during the Contra War against Nicaragua, and sees itself as being in charge. Many Americans have no beef with the Russians and are in fact of Russian heritage. Washington DC may see itself as representing "the USA" but some of us just see a silly City of Morons (one of my blog posts). Clearly I have my own deviant rhetoric.

I also tend to shy away from historical accounts that make "nations" the principal actors. I don't have any great belief in nations except as ideological / psychological constructs we use to organize our human affairs, akin to a corporation or religious bodies / institutions. 

The English language allows us to construct stories wherein Europe does this and London does that and Nicaragua does something else. I know how to talk this way too, and do (when in Rome...), but under the hood I'm a skeptic. Only humans have agency. These inanimate actors are at best a kind of journalistic shorthand. 

A faction of Ukrainian ideology wants "Ukraine for Ukrainians" and has a very definite idea of what that means. Ethnic Russians fall outside the definition. It's like if we had a faction here saying "real USAers" have to be white and of European heritage, anyone else is tolerated but is not as real. 

Given my upbringing as a liberal, I was taught that "ethnic uniformity" was a primitive older idea of "a nation" that had been superseded by the modern conception, one which accommodates a mix of cultures and religions and doesn't put any one of them in charge. I call that "secularism". 

Secular nations (which accommodate religions) are the ones I'm snobby about and think more highly of. "Ukraine for Ukrainians" sounds old fashioned and immature to my ears. I'm sorry this faction has gained an upper hand in Ukrainian politics and that they have their proud boy types to enforce their racist views.

Translating to Americanese I might say that in my view 2014 was a January 6 moment, except the Trumpies won, the ultra nationalist Bandero Ukraine for Ukrainian proud boy types forcefully took charge. The decent Ukrainians, especially out east, were shocked by this violent uprising and wanted out of this nascent nation-gone-bad. Russia is blue, fighting Maga Reds in Kiev. NATO is fascist to the core, we know from what it did to Libya, where my family worked for six years. 

One of the Angels

On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:37 PM EST, Christopher John “CJ” Fearnley, passed away from a very aggressive, still undiagnosed cancer. CJ was 55 years young. He is survived by his partner Jeannie, two sister’s Michele and Brenda, his mother Marilyn, father Jack and stepmother Edyta, and two nephews Ryan and Nick. CJ was born in NY. CJ was a Comprehensivist and Explorer in Universe.

In my own experience, CJ was a great inspiration and collaborator, whether it was a deep exploration into Bucky Fuller, synergetic geometry, philosophy, Dante, Dostoevsky, Saramago or Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, our last deep read. He had a reading plan that extended years into the future. In recent months, as he refined his ideas about the need for comprehensivity, he encouraged all to be macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive.

CJ was one of the angles.

-- D.W. Jacobs 

Adventures in Quakerism

Everyone has a different experience (of life) of Quakerism, in terms of vantage points assumed and/or achieved. I did a lot of the small meetup stuff, in part because my parents found sitting in silence a great way to get to know strangers, who then become Friends in one's own eyes.  The proverbial beholder's.

The above YouTube continues an earlier one that should just was well be entitled "experiments in" (versus "adventures in") Quakerism, which is not meant to sound cynical, as if Quakers were my guinea pigs.  I'm the guinea pig, and I'm encouraged to explore my religion "experimentally".

What's "my religion"?  Again, that's whatever pass for priors in terms of one's own dogmatism.  Not all beliefs can be under the microscope at every moment.  

One has to believe Google Maps or just trust intuition, unless one knows one's way about.  My friend Steve had a cul-de-sac dead end loop for an address, but the mapping software showed the street went through.  The procession of lost vehicles was endless.

What's critical is your religion have an update or upgrade process, whereby "waste beliefs" get dealt with and excreted. Nostalgically curating "bad beliefs" (as in "no longer useful") results in a level of metaphysical constipation that may become uncomfortable, not only personally, but institutionally, depending on one's role in society.

Quakerism, in focusing on silent worship, interrupted with ministry (aka ranting), does not get hung up on a bunch of "credos" wherein people give themselves the self indulgent benefit of being able to debate the trivial stuff quasi-endlessly.  You know you're dealing with the over-entitled when their predilection is to fiddle as Rome burns.

My hope for Quakerism, in a nutshell, is silent worship, as a central practice, as a catalyst, akin to various forms of meditation, will keep some of the least beneficial viral memeplexes from taking root.  Too many religions prove vulnerable to satanic "mind thetans" or whatever we wanna call 'em.

Elevator Pitch

The elevator pitch for the giant dome is survivalist, which immediately gets funny, because of Yes Men and their Survivaball.  Not that domes are the equivalent of space suits.  

But when it comes to heating and cooling a big volume, the logistics of powering a single space comes with an economy of scale, at least in theory.

Inside, you have your sound stage and audience,  a perimeter of concessions.  In neighboring domes, people pitch their tents.  

In some, you stage a quaint village, Medievalish but with amenities, built more with movie set theater prop technology, than with old fashioned brick and mortar, as you're more in a studio than protecting against the elements. 

The dome or other universal studio building is already taking care of wind, rain, cold and heat.

Benefits of rapidly deployed and emergency assembled and disassembled heating and cooling domes include practicing the world game disciplines we've come to take for granted.  People have to choreograph and to some extent improvise.  The moves become smooth to the extent practiced.  

Movie-making comes closest, as a design science, with military logistics providing a complementary theater.  Both center around simulation and planning with models and maps.

The domes in Cornwall provide a good example of what we all expect from the UK.  If British Aerospace can't deploy emergency heating domes, who can?  Raytheon?  

The engineering sector is shifting our attention from "Big Tech" and/or "Big Pharma" in the sense of social media and biochemistry advertisers respectively, as these are small fry compared to the aerospace sector.  We have conventionally allocated aerospace to civilian versus military but there's little to keep this namespace anchored.

Besides, it's not either / or.  Health care is just as big a consumer of computer science warez as the military and weapons vendors.  The arrival of mass casualties during wartime, begot triage and triage tents and all manner of medical practice I know more about from watching movies than from nursing school.  WW1 saw the beginning of many new kinds of war science.

Speaking of nursing, I do appreciate the cram course YouTubes I've been plowing through.  As we all get older, we encounter more issues in health care, for ourselves and for others.  In my case, I also had a professional track running through heart procedure territory, being a chief data harvester for a research hospital system.  

I was not in patient care, unless we count long term outcomes research, a kind of feedback doctors treasure.  I knew heart anatomy pretty well.  Lately I've focused more on lungs and liver.

Could a giant dome be an emergency hospital, like a MASH unit?  People may spontaneously associate such setups with war zones, but disaster scenes more generally feature both the wounded and the infected.  Lately, the world has been dealing with infection and overdose.  That was until they decided to plug and play this retro Euro-war.  Now war wounds are what's climbing again, along with thermal issues.

So we're back to MIT having done its homework, and private firms having their catalog of emergency shelters at the ready, whether or not they'e actually free span.  The more likely shape of anything American is a box, with sliding doors, more like a giant garage, farmhouse or big box shopping center store, like a Costco or Home Depot.

The floor plan of a "camp in" dome is more suburban street mode, with curvilinear walkways (synthetic pavements) and marked out camping sites, like when car camping.  A few golf cart type vehicles offer fixed route services whereas delivery forklifts carry palettes to and fro, complete with kitchen units and entertainment (education) modules.  

Some properties have tents, but a lot of those are outside.  Property holders stack the various units, which need not be equipped with individual heating or cooling units, given the context, of a larger system.  You may have personal devices, such as fans or baseboard units.  There might be a sauna and/or hot tub module, depending on amps available.

The Cornwall Domes use like a Tefzel pillow, I've never toured the place.  J. Baldwin was my source of pillow dome savvy.  I got to interview the guy on camera even, when staying with Rick and company in San Jose.

What do the power stations look like?  That's another whole side of the business.  No doubt NATO, like FEMA, has a large number of plans for such units, with other regional bodies likewise sharing blueprints.  Given the dire needs of the populace, and funding already allocated, it's time to spring into action, right?  Right!

Soap Operas

I just got off the phone with Maureen of Lake Oswego, having gotten all melodramatic, getting stentorian, while telling her melodrama was not my style, enough with the goodies and baddies already!  My impatience comes in waves, as I think is true with many of us, nor am I saying impatience is always a bad thing, on the contrary.

Speaking of soap operas, Don Wardwell was by today, in the wake of Glenn's stuff reshuffling in an orderly fashion (hi Barbara), and he told me the story of a guy he knew who was hoping to get a friend of his to move in with him.  He'd stormed out of the Pauling House when Don suggested his desire to discuss this move publicly might be inappropriate.  That guy was supposedly me.  You say she'd been a Jehovah's Witness, that I was smitten somehow?

One reason I doubt the story is it so closely matches what actually did happen:  at the height of my Food Not Bombs activity, around Occupy, I shared my house with three women (how I think of them, fairly), all of whom I still know and keep track of.  They're blog characters, you can go back and look.  We were in synergy in some ways, and no, it wasn't a harem situation, gosh darn.  More Charlie's Angels?  We're talking soaps after all.

Anyway, I'll go back and check the timeline.  A don't doubt this new angel actually existed, I just don't remember Glenn talking me out of it, or the Pauling House episode (back to Don's recollection).  Apparently my erratic behavior had no consequences this time, as no such creature moved in.

Here's what I think:  especially older people, but really young people too, are prone to develop "like I was there" memories, vivid, sharp, of contrary-to-fact scenarios.  Day care centers get shut down over this kind of stuff, and probably nursing homes too for that matter (I'm in neither business).

Sorry everyone, if I'm the one turning into a leaky bucket, letting important memories fade away.  I pride myself on having a good memory, as Suzanne might remember.  These blogs (Quaker journals) help a lot.

Asylum City Project

Sanitation has to be at the heart of any human settlement design. 

This includes dealing with waste of all types, including sewage.

Bucky Fuller was one of the pioneers in this arena.

Prototyping is key.

Looney Tunes

I'll say up front I'm skeptical of those who assert the "US + UK + EU = The West" in some way.  Like I know that's a common trope among storytellers, I just don't consider it a stable memeplex.  "The West" is the western hemisphere (North, South, Central America) and "The East = Eurasia + Africa + Australia" to just focus on the continents.  Greenland could go either way.  In sum, shop talks that map to the realities of geography likely have more staying power.

Also, geopolitically speaking, I think too many Anglo-Saxons (to use the Kremlin term) fail to appreciate how different the Americans are, from the whites who stayed home in the various homelands, if we might call them that.  

Many Anglo-Euros right here in the Americas may not appreciate that either.  I'm talking about the influence of original peoples, their thought patterns.  As The Dawn of Everything makes clear: the anthropology and psychoanalysis was a two way street, and still is.  It was never a question of which were the savages:  those would be the Brits.

Fast forward and we get those Halloween images of a horror film Truss, still wiping blood off her lips after biting hard into Germany's jugular.  Now the latter has fallen to the floor, shivering, with few prospects.  "It is done my lord" she whispers on her phone, to a vamped up Darth Vader type.  Very cinematic you have to admit.

All joking aside, I think "US + UK = Looney Tunes" is what we're seeing today, with John Bolton as Yosemite Sam, minus the charm.  I would not think it possible for Anglo-Saxons to be genetically berserk, so it boils down to something in the water maybe?  The District = Flint = Jackson, Mississippi?

Yes, I've recently been to a comedy club (actually, a main line theater, that happens to feature comedy from time to time).

So given I'm so remote with my vocabulary to begin with, even questioning the Louisiana Purchase as a truly done deal, you can see where I'm not making the rounds as an interviewee.  No, I'm just a deeply buried Quaker blogger with some political views.

From another point of view, I see the US Congress and the old USSR (the ghost of) on the same side, collaborating to extinguish a kind of ethnic nationalism that doesn't rise to the level of nation state.  These political bodies cannot effectively turn away from their own destinies, as two sides of the same coin.  

You could say I'm being cynical but I think that would require positing a high level of conscious awareness on the part of the perpetrators.  I'm suggesting we're running on automatic, as bots.  That's not a new phenomenon.

Camera Story

I've been hobbling around a bit, and actually took a cane, no, almost did, to that comedy show at The Aladdin.  The reason is I swerved out into the street, as a pedestrian, out of social distancing habits, but forgot, when re-merging with the sidewalk, that I'd be walking over rough terrain, some decorative boulders.  I went sprawling, but was proud how I landed and didn't bang my head or anything.

The upshot of all that, was I immediately forgot about it and continued onward to the supermarket, getting some provisions for a friend.  Only later, walking home, did I pat myself, my hoodie pouch especially, and realize I was cameraless.  Walking out the door, I was sure I'd had it.

To make a long story short, I woke up at 5 AM the next morning with lots of leg pains, which jogged my memory, and I thought "Ah, I bet the camera fell out when I took a spill".  It had been getting dark, which is partly why I'd missed seeing the boulders I now believe.  I hobbled out into the darkness of the early morning, iPhone flashlight in hand, to look for it.  I'd been to the supermarket Lost & Found the night before.

Given how much I loved that Lumix L-7, a point and shooter that starts to crossover into higher end, very fast, very trusty, I went on the internet and used all my skills to find a good deal on a used one.  I could afford it.  I took the plunge.  We're talking $250.  That includes a spiffy case, another charger plus battery, and a protective pouch, along with the second camera.

Yes, second camera, because in the meantime, I found the first, not smashed on the sidewalk, but safely next to my hat and McMenamins face mask (which I consider stylish, pandemic or no pandemic), at my friends house.  Starting with the fall itself, and on through some hours after, I was at a low point in my awareness of my devices and peripherals (accessories).  I get this way sometimes.

I'm glad to have two copies of the same camera and do not regret the purchase.  The main consequence of all this action is I'm still working on renormalizing around that knee.  The day after, I'd gone on a test walk with Dr. D., to make sure I could still do a few miles.  That was probably not the best therapy however, and I've been paying the price ever since.  Derek has confirmed my propensity to keep stretching and claiming my range of motion.

Speaking of claiming, I claimed by first Urbit planet today.  You might have thought, judging from writings, that I'd already invested in such a ship, but in fact, I've been practicing on comets and more recently a moon.  Stepping up to a real planet is somewhat a rite of passage in this universe (semantic space) and I was sure to mark it accordingly, both privately and publicly.

Urbit Food Pod

:: asylum food pod ::

One could do the prototype simulation without any hardware, so to speak, meaning no real food need be cooked for real animals.  Maybe there's a Planet "bank" (a conversion point, intra-currency), and each "cart" or "truck" is but a Moon of that Planet.  Good design?  I'm still learning.

Getting that shopping cart app up and running in Urbit may be a solved problem.  What's more interesting is not the app per se, but the task of educating the public, and what more could a Food Pod be?

Those following my blogs know I tried to interest the Methodists in converting an abandoned church into a community center focused on experimenting with exactly such simulations, with a microwave tower aligned to OMSI's.  That was Project Ghost Church.  Like a lot of my projects, it's more science fiction than real science at this point, more like Dark Matter or one of those.

You're probably thinking I must be backed by a bunch of wild and crazy libertarians, the Web 3.0 crypto warriors and so on.  I'm aware too that Swiss cantons were hoping to cash in on the crypto craze by leveraging their pre-existing savvy around financial services.  

I have to confess I'm not really up to date on what either of these groups is up to.  All I know is I'm still looking forward to visiting one of these newfangled Food Pods some day.  It wouldn't have to be implemented in Urbit, although that seems like a natural fit.

When testing, players need some "funny money" like in Monopoly, a currency accepted within the game. Spend funny money to get your virtual burritos.  Playing the "board game" (pun intended) is how one develops expertise in advance of actually implementing such a facility.  "Simulate with software and players before you build" as a way to work out some kinks.

What is Work?

One of the memeplexes I revisit, and seek to untangle, at least in my own mind, is where a Protestant idea of "work" meets a Physics one.  We have the work ethic, versus the idea of wasted energy, i.e. leakage away from the real work getting done.  But to what extent is "work" in the eye of the beholder observer?

For example they say a steam engine leaks energy away in the form of heat and noise, but what if your main purpose, as a steam engine, is to entertain with your noises, while heating the room?  As a side benefit, you also power the whole museum.  That's not your paid work though; you do that for free.  Yes, I'm addressing a steam engine here.

Maybe there's nothing deep here.  I'm drowning in the shallows, where many drownings happen.  Yet it seems the idea of a work vector, along which no waste is happening, is really in a multi-dimensional space higher than the eye can see.  

Invisible means complicated.  Side effects may be main effects.  

This was the charm of the honey-maker moneymaker bumblebee concept:  that cross-pollination is precessional to what the "bees" (moneymakers) are about.  The flowers use them to exchange genetic information (get the real work done).

I find it hard to get away from the idea of a taskmaster, the Protestant, very puritanical about what "work" means and quick to call anything "entropy" that is not strictly to his liking.  

The fragility of his mindset in the face of even minimal chaos, as he sees it, is not a mental condition we would welcome or wish to nurture in ourselves.  We want our physics meaning of "work" to stay pure of such an influence, unaffected by the religious mores of some random republican farmer, newly emigrated to North America from some homestead in Eurasia.

I take comfort in how many humans are in retirement or "at the ready" but not really doing anything in terms of directly constructing infrastructure.  We already have a huge carrying capacity with respect to people needing food, shelter and healthcare, and from whom little is asked.  They've performed their service already.  We either call them "veterans" or "retired".

We only need so much infrastructure.  Cities for the sake of cities are not really a social good.  From a movie-making point of view, we need a balance between plot-advancing box office action, and locating sites to build sets.  Sometimes the movie is about the making of the movie, which is what we think of as real life.

Choreography, script writing, is the name of the game i.e. what will the lifestyles be like?  

Saying they contain "a lot of leisure time" might be a moral judgment, like when the honest work of a homemaker, caring for kids, is somehow really "leisure time" because "unpaid".  

The guy with the job, the breadwinner, was the only "worker" in the family, whereas caring for other animals only counted as work where animal husbandry was concerned, as when raising sheep or other livestock.  

Then both parents "got jobs" in the nuclear family model, leaving the suburban home mostly empty during the day (the kids were in daycare), with the urban office space mostly empty at night, and jammed freeways in between.

And then all these ideas about "net worth" seem rather morally perverse, as if dropped from the sky by some giant egg laying monster.  The moneymaker game seems to casually assume ownership of the public's good words, as if entitled.

In the physics world, just breathing is work.  It's work to pump air in and out of the lungs.  It takes joules, and a minimum amount of muscle power.  

Given breathing is necessary to life, no puritan is in a position to argue that no useful work is being done.  Ergo, why not pay this person on a per breath basis?  

That proposition takes the breath away, in some circles, because isn't the whole point to make life support hard to afford?  That's an old school belief with its hands on the steering wheel to this day, according to lore.

The gymnast does a "workout" which we call "work" whether or not she or he is paid as a professional gymnast.  Many professions put a premium on looking one's best.  

So that's spending energy to better one's physique.  

Sure, much energy is lost to heat and sometimes noises, but a gym wouldn't be a gym without all those vibes.  In that sense, nothing is wasted, as entropy is factored in as a necessary feature, not as a cosmic defect or original sin.

The Asylum Project

What I tell people regarding Bitcoin is that I'll never be interested in having any myself unless it's easy to charge my wallet, from my bank account say, and spend the bits on burritos and other sundries, at a Food Pod that makes that easy.

A Food Pod is like a Food Court, made more international by the World's Fair franchise.  However the Pod consists of carts or trucks, which may be trundled away, leaving spots for new mobile restaurant kitchens.  

One of Portland's more famous Pods is Hawthorne Asylum Food Truck Pod, at the intersection of SE Madison and SE 11th.  Hawthorne Asylum is named in honor of the mental asylum, run by one Dr. Hawthorne, for whom the nearby Hawthorne Boulevard is named. 

However, the trucks are not equipped to accept Bitcoin easily.  I think the business model should be an experimental Pod that only takes crypto, but with an easy way to pay for some with your phone, much as Club Med used to exclusively take plastic beads for its optional purchases internally.

I know that refugee camps have been experimenting with crypto currencies, which brings me to the refugee camps the State of Oregon is considering.  I'm not saying my Vortex 1 + Country Fair + Rainbow Gathering + Occupy template has been accepted.  Calling it "a template" is a bit of a stretch, but we do know the State of Oregon has experience with at least a one of those models.

The reason life in a refugee camp might be interesting is it's a place to test prototypes, as well as therapies. Journalists are always welcome, and many will take cheap shots, as the faculty learns the ropes.  

Much needs to be invented.  Experimental community building (aka "nation building" on a smaller scale) is a job for social engineers with a secular background, not just for religious wonks.

Car Talk

There she was, waiting for me.

One develops attachments to things, not just people.  Sometimes the things are stand-ins for people.  Other times, they're just favorite objects, and/or, in the case of a car, something needed to get around, to enjoy a specific lifestyle. 

K&M Auto Service knew exactly what to do, as I did (see previous blog post).  But I didn't have the right size, shape or skills.  Only $118, with a full diagnostic.  They say I should replace the brake fluid.

Small Time Stuff

I dunno if it was Synchronicity or what, but that guy in the junkyard, on YouTube, had my exact car, same color and everything.  A Nissan Maxima.  The brake pedal, when relaxed, does not hold the circuit closed, such that charge leaks out of the battery through the brake lights.  They won't go off, even with no key in the ignition, in park.

So that YouTube showed precisely the problem and the fix.  However a big guy like me isn't cut out to be up under the steering wheel.  Dave got some paper in there, to save charge, but that won't last.  I emailed my mechanic this morning, but I have no idea how busy they are.  I'll have them look for other problems.  Yes she's a junker but I don't believe in throwing away serviceable equipment unnecessarily.

I bought a new phone-based HOP card recently, so I can hop a bus any time.  I'm likely going to refrain from driving for awhile, until I get a clear lane so to speak.

Wanderers: Fall Equinox Gathering

We were small in number, yet with interesting new people, invited guests. I took fewer pictures than I usually do, if present, at one of these Equinox or Solstice get-togethers. 

We often meet at the boyhood home of Linus Pauling, where we used to hold weekly meetings, however sometimes we meet elsewhere, in retreat mode. 

We had an iPad going for those wishing to drop in by house WiFi.

Making Tensegrity

 
[cutting and pasting a Facebook comment]

FB friend:

There seems to have been a dearth of beautiful and innovative tensegrity artwork for decades. Between his new biotensegrity models and these lighting models, Gerald has single handedly advanced tensegrity artwork into the 21st Century. [Facebook link] are photos from the first in-person rehearsal for a dance presentation at the Fascia Research Congress. Gerald shipped all those models in a single piece of checked luggage. I call his design architecture "turnbuckle tensegrity" -- except that all the threads in those struts are right-handed. Turnbuckles would be more elegant, but nobody makes cheap hardware with turnbuckle threading.

Kirby, do you know any good candidates for pitching a feature for Make: Magazine on how to design a geometry, acquire the parts, and assemble "tough tensegrity" models? This would really light the fuse to a massive number of load-bearing tensegrity models in the wild.

Me:

When I joined O'Reilly, Make: Magazine was still sharing the same Sebastopol building (we got the tour) but was morphing into its own standalone business. 

The principal there at Maker had purchased a startup named Useractive of Champaign-Urbana (run by Trish and Scott Gray (Making Math), University of Illinois and Wolfram connections) when still a part of O'Reilly management. However by the time the merger happened, and Useractive became O'Reilly School of Technology (which is where I came in, as faculty), he'd opted out of the chain of command. 

I therefore interfaced through OST to O'Reilly bosses without ever getting to make solid connections with Make: Magazine and its team. I've gone to Maker Fairs here in Portland, hosted by OMSI (industrial science museum) and friends, and finally got to 3D print an S module and a phi-down version, at a public library, with help from Sam Lanahan's chief CAD designer.

Regarding Tensegrity, I don't know if Maker Mag does write-ups or profiles of individual makers, but if it does, an article on Gerald De Jong, which includes his software contributions (critical to EIG), would most definitely be in order. Let Gerald share his process with readers. 

Postscript: O'Reilly wanted to turn OST from a dot com into a dot edu, but that meant getting certified as an academic institution, which process is replete with bureaucracy ($$). The uphill battle to become a legit university in California proved a budget breaker and we dissolved, after a rather fun / wild ride. I met and stay in touch with some astounding people.

Social Darwinism

My impression is the meme of "races" (how many again?) is a top drawer tool for recruiters working to swell the ranks of the Social Darwinists.  

One may be a fan of Darwin and his theorizing, without switching into "genetic Calvinism" i.e. some doctrine of preordained "fitness" based in having the better DNA.  That ideology worked well for Royals too, as it perpetuated the myth of "blood" i.e. some coveted genetic plasma, divinely conferring special rights and special powers.

The race theory depends heavily on their being a "mixed race" category.  People must be allowed to fall through the cracks so to speak.  Without cracks, the categorization system would be too brittle and break down.  One's racial makeup is allowed to be "fuzzy" and the prospect of entirely new races emerging is not actively contemplated in most racist science fiction ("super race" mythologies usually revolve around refining some prior race, even while pushing for its "world dominance" or "supremacy").

Were a race detectable in pure form, even in a mixed race person (thinking of superstitions around blood again, and powers-of-2 subdivision e.g. 1/32nd race X), we would have found it by now, but there's no reduction of "race" to canonical strings of chromosomal encoding.  

Rather, we find ourselves defining "ancestry" which relates to "geography" based on the presence (or absence) of "genetic markers".  Tracing a family tree means following world lines against the backdrop of Planet Earth, with its partially overlapping scenarios.

Animal husbandry has the same degree of precision (imprecision).  In animal husbandry, one speaks of breeds, which one may consciously design and refine over the generations.  

A Darwinist is able to see "breeds" within in the human family in that sense, a kind of family resemblance, but maybe through several filters, as there's no universal agreement on what any of these breeds really are.  We just know we keep re-encountering the same types.  Supermodels?  Midgets?  Midget supermodels?

Men and women create this first idea of a divide, orthogonal to Darwinistic evolution through speciation.  

Homo Sapien is the current species, a Cro-Magnon with some Neanderthal mixed in.

An alternative view is of a very expressive human genome, able to manifest features in various ways, without distilling into an essential palette of racial archetypes.  We don't need to discern "races" as the compass points for categorization, even if we're tracking ancestry.  The ideology of racial purity and of a genetic competition amongst genetic "teams" (the races) is a layer of dogma that doesn't logically follow from biology.  It's more an extended metaphor, with memes replacing genes in ways that pander to a sense of tribe and belonging.  We like to rally around genetic features sometimes, e.g. a convention for gingers.

Burger Week

I haven't been that big of a meat eater, by western standards.  Yes I eat meat, including bison or buffalo on occasion, but I'm not like a steak every month or week guy.  My diet isn't paleo.

I've spent probably thousands on McMenamins Dungeon Burgers over the years.  That's the one with mushrooms and Swiss cheese.  I wonder if their database would show that.  

select count(item), sum(item_price) where customer = [me] and item = "dungeon_burger";

Those would be aggregating columns. That's in pseudo-sql against a database I've never met in person. A mind game.

Originally I'd titled this post "Summer BBQ" because I had this metaphor in mind:  I've stoked the briquettes with all the newspaper needed, and lit the pyre (if I might call it that); lets see if the briquettes catch, which means they'll generate their own heat, long after all the newspaper is consumed.

That metaphor in turn was about my approach to andragogy.  If I keep fawning over the flames, fanning them, I won't know if they would go out without me.  Given I could use such feedback, I'll aim to stand back.  I've worked on the ignition phase plenty, it seems to me.

I'm still being rather abstract, but that's OK.  Lets get back to burgers.  Portland has a whole week celebrating the genre and recommends retailers offer an $8 burger week special, their choice of what to try.  At least that's my understanding of the challenge.  I don't know what syndicate is behind it exactly, only that this is not a new institution.

Almost in anticipation of said burger week, Glenn and I sampled the offerings at the Yes Please Smashburger shack, a certified food cart right across from the Linus Pauling House.  I took quite a few pictures and have left them interspersed.

New Bucky Bio

I just got the book yesterday and have been doing my nonlinear Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics thing, i.e. I've been browsing it.

I've always contended studying Bucky's bio is worthwhile because he was so, shall we say, gregarious.  He got around.  He was a mover-shaker type.

He also lived a long time and was a compulsive self chronicler, by design.  Guinea Pig B wanted to be studied.  Alec is paying him that courtesy.

Alec's bio also proves my point.  Every page is connecting us to a recognizable vista of big name architects, poets, professors and so on.  Military types...

Great story.  It's like a Michelin guide to the 1900s, of course to specific circles, an intelligentsia that still persists in some form.

Given how thick it is, I understand Alec's not trying to be another Amy Edmondson and recap Synergetics. 

He gives readers enough to whet their appetites, and then it's all online.

I didn't participate in creating this book.  I see Trevor mentioned, and CJ. 

That means I still have my stories to tell, as Kenneth Snelson's first webmaster (BFI's too) and so on.

[first posted to TrimTab BookClub GoogleGroup]