Where's the Magic?

Could it be that we intuitively understand, after decades of immersion in special effects science fiction, that we're ready for a next level? 

We see whole cities built and left largely empty in China, in part because skilled people need something to do. That's why we have militaries too, to stay occupied and in shape. But in shape for what? Are we talking about livingry or killingry?

Are we in any shape to build new EPCOTs? 

That's an arcane way of asking the question, but not off target, as the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow had a modicum of LAWCAP support, meaning lawyer-capitalism seemed it might be ready to take the "theme park" concept to the next level, and indeed that's what started to happen. But then the effort bogged down.

Who picked up the Disney baton, if WDC itself, post Walt, had to drop it?

We've heard talk of Google's plans for mini-cities. But big tech comes across as pretty hard edged and predatory compared even to The Mouse. 

Big tech is always scheming to prove essential workers are not really needed. Where's the magic in that?

The A in AI is for Artificial, which means Phony, Simulated, Unreal. 

AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a weak opening, conceptually, as it's oxymoronic, as we're to understand AGI, when and if, is no longer Phony, but the real deal. "Humans, not really understanding their own capabilities, have now developed these abilities in their machines" -- that seems to be the plot. But how coherent is that whole screenplay?

It could be that humans are ready to implement more of what the design science revolution was promising, having faced up to their lack of integrity in so far failing to do so. 

Given the ubiquitous nature of media-making equipment (for staging, for recording, for sharing), the implementation phase will in fact be televised. So let's work on the scripts. Let's start with location scouting.

We will always need emergency shelter for people transitioning back to a more normal lifestyle, and one model is to bring the refugee camp to them. 

Depending on geography, these could take the form of hospital ships, after a hurricane or tsunami for example. A smattering of hospital ships amidst a circulating convoy might be used to move millions over a period of some months. The system activates as needed.

But why not build an Asylum City for the express purpose of providing what military bases provide today: shelter for economic (and/or other) refugees, with opportunities for R&R. 

Guantanamo comes to mind. Should Cubans build an EPCOT where Gitmo used to be? Or should Gitmo be preserved as a museum?

Simulators

We all know about simulators from Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, and maybe from Sims and SimCity if we have broader experience with the genre. 

In these blogs, I’ve tended to harp on truck driving simulators, owing to the Trucker Exchange program I introduce under the heading of citizen diplomacy. However, these days I’m exposed to farm life more, and tonight after dinner, the conversation turned to Farm Simulator software. Lots of people play FarmVille and its many variants.

That’s what some will call the game pods then, those “more than just cubicles” we’re using for School of Tomorrow centers, multi-generational, co-ed, mono-generational, single sex i.e. they come in many shapes and sizes. 

Some feature dormitories, which in military terms might be barracks. 

I’m hoping, in my simulations, to give people more privacy than mere barracks provide. Bucky Fuller was into that to (providing privacy, protection). But then pods aren’t the same as dorms. You could have a pod in your private dorm, or your pod could be on a floor or a concourse somewhere.

What “game pods” am I talking about?  These go back to my mixed use campus buildings, with dorms, cafeterias, gyms, and game floors. Simulators. You’re learning about your world through simulations designed to teach about infrastructure, institutions, chemistry, other natural phenomena. 

Here is where all that “gamification” comes in, in tandem with the Coffee Shops Network idea of raising funds through game heroics. Score high and benefit your causes. 

We’ve been working in this world for awhile now, if you see through the right lenses. I’m just taking stock and helping to organize what’s already in inventory.

I’m not saying we always postpone venturing into the field and actually doing the farm work that needs doing. I did some today in fact. 

This particular farm is about making long term investments in the ecosystem, friendly to wild species, whether or not those life forms literally pay the bills. Conservation does not mean demanding tuition from those given sanctuary.

Curriculum Queries

 

I do not boast lots of boots on the ground, inventing tests and tallying data. I might welcome such an army, using Python and Jupyter Notebooks perhaps. I share about pyplot and plotly.

I'm speaking with reference to such queries as where best to introduce figurate numbers, such as triangular and square, if we do, and when to make those polyhedral (icosahedral, cuboctahedral, tetrahedral...). I'm eyeing alternative vocabs. Sometimes it's the animation that matters, more than the script rendering language, a namespace.

What am I talking about pray tell? Like the numbers that go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... then keep accumulating: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15... it's like scooping up the snow: all the layers of balls (if we think in balls) make us a growing triangle.  The triangular numbers: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15... Then we have the squares: 1, 4, 9, 16, 25... You know the ones, right?

We've got that going on, and then we layer-pack around a nuclear ball, per a cuboctahedral shape (cube of sawed-off corners), thereby getting our famous "successive layers" sequence: 1, 12, 42, 92, 162... I say "famous" because it literally is in the center of our neighborhood (along with the cumulative Crystal Ball sequence). "We have statues dedicated to it" one could claim, especially if coining an idiom. So where does all that fit in?

"Nowhere!" comes the resounding (highly opinionated) voice from some quarters. Curriculum developers don't just accept these queries lying down, without some furious debate. 

I point to The Book of Numbers by Conway and Guy and maybe that mollifies some (ah, mainstream). I reassure teachers that we're connecting right brained shapes with left brain numbers even earlier than by means of coordinate framework addressing ala XYZ. 

We haven't even come to XYZ coordinates yet and we're already getting rhombic dodecahedra in their space-filling role. "Are we to expect IVM coordinates then?" sounds sardonic but yes, we have those for you, why not be curious?

Then finally comes this question whether we want to not only disclose the ratios here, but harp on them, taking sphere packing as a home base worth fighting for. We shift our balance from the XYZ to IVM framework for a change. What change? That remains to be beholden, for the most part, but as someone shifting my balance, I'm suggesting it's not that hard, nor some kind of one way street.  You're free to switch back and forth. I do, routinely.

What am I talking about again, am I making any kind of sense? That depends to some degree on what archeological layer you're reading from. 

Those in the immediate radius of Buckminster Fuller (not me, I came later), in his role as academic, would recognize "isotropic vector matrix" in many cases, especially in the late 1970s after Synergetics was published. I became aware of Fuller's philosophical language in the early 1980s, as I switched gears from being a philosophy major at Princeton (Rorty, Kaufmann... other stars), to being a high school teacher in a private school in Jersey City (not that far from Princeton actually, by dinky, Amtrak and PATH).

The idea is one of scaffolding or tiling in space. The all-cubes way of filling space is well known and isn't going anywhere. The next step, if starting there is to supplement. XYZ and IVM co-exist in a healthy manner. Imagine filling every other box with a growing sphere, a 3D checkerboard. Each ball, fully expanded, touches 12 neighbors as 12 mid-edges.

"All fine and good" you're thinking, "but the hypnotic brainwashing animations described here sounds a lot more like rave party projections, too hallucinogenic for a math-minded audience."  

I'd say fair enough to speculate in that direction, but you really don't have to carry it that far. Surely you too know what it means to daydream in a classroom. 

That's a form of right brain engagement. 

To encourage this faculty is to constructively entrain the imagination, as we do when teaching the value reading in fiction (which is not to "push drugs" (as if any talk of "the imagination" were dangerous witchcraft)) i.e. "you get to watch movies in your head" as a grownup might put it, promising payoff (I understand why watching adults just staring at print, with no pictures, is a turn off until experienced in the first person).

The ratios of which I speak have to do with the so-called voronoi cell encasings around each IVM ball. Every IVM center has its "domain" is another way to but it. These are not Platonics in the strict sense of meeting the "all corners identical" criterion; the faces are diamonds and meet in threes and fours around two sets of corners: those at the corners of a cube (shallow, 3 facets) and those at the corners of an octahedron (sharp, 4 facets). Volume ratios: RD (rhombic dodeca) : Octahedron : Cube :: 6 : 4 : 3.

Why don't those ratios seem as familiar as rain already? Maybe to some of us they do, but the answer is the cube of volume 3, not its canonical most regal volume in the orthodox hierarchy. What dares take its place? A tetrahedron? Heresy!

That's the crack in the pavement a lot of storytellers keep tripping over, in wanting to make believe it's not there. Those of us in the curriculum design business can't deny that tetravolumes are tempting, in some contexts, especially knowing we're not admitting anything. We never have to say "XYZ was wrong" or anything like that. So what's the issue? Descartes is still a hero. We also study his Deficit (720 degrees).

I'm anticipating comments (perhaps by email) that I'm wrestling with ghosts, as none of the MineCraft literature ever talks about "another paradigm" i.e. a space-filling pattern of tetrahedrons and octahedrons. What would that world look like? Now we're talking (and maybe even imagining).

Metabolics

I'm headed to the fat farm tomorrow, my internal name for it. I don't have the budget for any health club getaway at this time. The shift is more from low energy to low energy in a different shape.

Today, for example, my shape was "sports bar" i.e. Tom's on the corner of SE Chavez and SE Division. Deke the Geek as I've called him, is a U of O grad and dedicated athlete, at one time a track star, so he was aware that today was a big game: U of O versus Huskies at University of Washington. Not so many weekends ago, I'd watched this same Oregon team against another (winning that time, not this time).

As I probably mentioned in some other entry, I've bought in to the new dietary model focusing on insulin and insulin resistance. I've tended to be medically minded since at least the 8th grade, and this theory has the right level of complexity to match my expectations.

On Math 4 Wisdom, we've been discussing "what's a sweet spot?" in the sense the Complex numbers seem to be. The more rigid Real numbers are a tad under powered, give less prominence to rotation but through a more cumbersome trig. Or so it seems to Andrius and John Harlan. I have to say I see what they're talking about.

You'll have noticed the above lifestyle sounds a tad sedentary and you'd be right. With the games come some drinks. I'm not the one driving. We're within walking distance. None of that really matters when it comes to adding weight I don't need. The fat farm will help me fast. I'll still be thinking online using WiFi.

I've embedded my other work of the morning, and extension of my blogging into some vlogging (video blogging). I should add that watching a steady stream of YouTubes is another reason I'm so soft. Thanks to the Bluetooth brick, I'm at least able to move about and do chores when the screen does not require my undivided attention.

I invoked Kierkegaard's name recently, on M4W, thinking mainly of his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, but then it's been a long time since I actually raked my eyes through that. 

People would love to have an algorithm to follow that makes their actions above reproach. They won't be facing inquiries later, because "doing what the machine says" is a safe course of action. The existential predicament is we don't get to closure in that way i.e. our science is not up to the task of proving we did the right thing looking back. Yet we must act anyway. Thinking in terms of justifications is not atypical. One imagines oneself before some board of inquiry, as in Oppenheimer.

Whether that's a good interpretation or not, of Soren's philo, I wanted to jot down his other focus: that of the undivided Will. Since the will was ultimately for the good, or of God, it's a good bet having an undivided will (whatever that means operationally) would be blissful. Ties to Taoism go here, clearly.

I'll be cutting out the alcohol at the fat farm. I've gone over a year without beer, not counting the alcohol free kind (which I've sampled). Again, it's more about calories. If I allow myself beer, I over allocate and/or exceed my quota.

Technical Topics

Not surprisingly, my science fiction turned to creating an Asylum City, in a hurry, especially for the Gazans who wanted to move here, at least temporarily. The city would be designed for mass evacuations, more a way station than a destination, and not the last of its kind.

While I’m doodling in my head along those lines, I’m showcasing the bread and butter stack and content. Everyone in my business has a stack. I’m wearing a Supermarket Math hat now, thinking in terms of what’s in inventory. Does anyone remember LAMP? Linux Apache MySQL P-language (e.g. Perl, Python, PHP). That’s a good example of a classic stack, and a doorway into cloud-based architecture.

I told Paul I thought we were in some National Geographic article, about Oregonians in October, harvesting something like beer hops, but with crazier names for strains.  Paul and I have a collaborative relationship based on a practice Glenn established.  

I’ve been thinking about Glenn a lot today, and of my mother, two people I lost in the last year. Paul is a retired chef with a luxury hotel background, specializing in Anglo-French cuisine. He reminds us of our buddy Steve Holden who used to live in the same apartment complex. Yes, a past chairman of the Python Software Foundation and conference organizer who helped get the Pycons going.

You may find more about Steve by searching these journals. I tended to accompany him to these conferences he would organize, as one of the people on hand to keep things on track. Djangocon, Apachecon… some even more obscure ones, always excellent in their own way, as Steve knew a thing or two and relied on Nancy and her team, out of Orlando.

Regarding the showcasing I’m doing, the embedded screen shot above is one you can click on to gain access to its original context, where a much bigger and higher resolution view is available. Here’s a direct link. You’ll find I’m going on about a certain “NCLB Polyhedron” where NCLB = No Child Left Behind, a meme from the Obama years. I was trying to get Phi (the golden ratio) a more exalted place in the curriculum. 

The meme was somewhat tongue in cheek, more like something a MAD magazine might run with, versus a sober upstanding mass-published mathematics textbook devoid of social commentary. I was engaged in the andragogical practice of preserving a level of comic edginess that helps me retain the attention of certain readers (mainly fans of mine).

Any number of secular mathematicians will testify that Phi is harmless and is easily shared in a curriculum context that has nothing to do with demons or devils (we’re coming up on Halloween here). I hope I’m not being too cryptic. The golden mean crops up in connection with five-fold symmetry geometric gizmos long associated with various cults (or call them subcultures) savvy about this specific aesthetic.

This version of the Notebook does not yet contain much in the way of graphics. I’m focused on sympy, the Python library, and its equation-solving capabilities.

Asylum City would provide more opportunities for denizens to watch shows and start catching up on their own situation as seen from different angles. The Gazans, like the Ukrainians, would get that the world cares about them and in turn is eager to develop its generic ability to manage refugees in a humane way. If climate change hits the way some think it will, we’ll be glad for the practice.  However the need is real even today.

We have the need for skillful rehabilitation programs on a large scale almost everywhere, as people seek a better life in another set of circumstances.

Fractal Universe (Mandelbulb 3D fractals)

Fractal Universe (Mandelbulb 3D fractals)

Another TrimTab Meetup (Sept 30, 2023)

Zoomers (mostly Boomers in this case) seemed somewhat scandalized by Bucky's polemics versus Bauhaus, circa the early 1960s, by which time his fame had grown. 

I remarked that these polemics all sounded professional, in the same sense a movie critic, or literary critic, might be blunt or negative on some points. 

The chapter opens with a question he gets a lot: "in what way is Bauhaus an influence on your work?" (paraphrase).

He replies (paraphrasing again): "I love these guys, but I came to my position independently and have some criticisms to share of their approach".  See Ideas and Integrities, A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (Prentice-Hall, 1963 or later edition).

09:46:53 From Kirby Urner To Everyone:
	In being closer to American factory industrialization, Fuller considered 
    himself upstream from Bauhaus i.e. Europe was getting the new “no nonsense” 
    aesthetics 2nd hand. That’s what I got from the reading.

...

09:57:58 From Kirby Urner To Everyone:
	This word “teleological” and how Bucky uses it: Synergetics Dictionary
    worth a consult. Connects to his Bow-Tie symbol.

That was TrimTab Book Club. We read books by and about Bucky. Mark Wigley's book.

10:24:26 From Kirby Urner To Everyone:
	Mark Wigley: Buckminster Fuller Inc. Architecture in the Age of Radio
10:24:42 From Stephen Bau To Everyone:
	Reacted to "Mark Wigley: Buckmin..." with ❤️

I think Lionel (today mostly muted and on another phone, conducting business) has been asking an interesting empirical question recently: if we make a Bucky Chatbot, will responses to promptings result in something less enigmatic than his seemingly-exclusionary home-brewed style of quasi-impenetrable prose? 

Some might say the whole point is his language i.e. a prompting for "a snippet of a play by Shakespeare but in the style of business English" might be a recipe for making garbage. "Why not just run the experiment and wait for results?" is my attitude. And that seems to be what people (then on the call) are up to doing.

Sam has been keen to run similar experiments based on writings by his grandad, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Perhaps test-developing this chatbot, around a challenging American Lit corpus will iron out some kinks in the workflow, paving the way for more author-reflective chatbots down the road, drawn from American Lit and elsewhere.

We know people have mixed feelings about AI, given all that's sometimes weirdly hallucinatory and downright uncanny about its performances.  What's the genre? Spoof? Horror? Museum Diorama? '

Certainly there's something oxymoronic about the notion of a "robot sage" if ya'll know what I'm sayin'. AI as a discipline inherits the carnival-style tone of illusion-making deceptions (ala the "magic show"). I think of Zoltar. I think of The Turk.

When I say "chatbot" I'm referring to an active (attentive) inference engine, meaning one of these generative algorithms that returns polished, structured, grammatically correct text, in the ballpark of some prompt or sequence of prompts, some predictable response thereto, based on maybe billions of use cases. 

GPTs these were (and are) called: Generative Pretrained Transformers.  Pretraining does not preclude further training on the job. Start with an already vectorized large language model (LLM), but then shape it more.

I volunteered during check-in that I was currently in touch with David Koski over the topic of great circles, surface and central angles project. I posted a link.  David (not on the call today) joined us (for the first time) on the most recent Zoom session, two weeks back, when Victor Acevedo was our guest, talking about his own influences; Bucky for sure, but also the surrealists, while taking advantage of computerization.

Field Testing School Products

Mites Cubes

I’m not currently positioned to buy the preschool near Whittier, keeping it going but doing more school supply research and teaming up with schools above the preschool level, in Greater LA. Maybe you are. My sister works there. I’m basing my brand of science fiction in the real world, per usual.

People know I’m of the mixed use office tower school of thought, promoting gamer pods in place of cubicles on some floors, with dorms, not necessarily apartments, on other floors.

What distinguishes a dorm from an apartment?  

A dorm is more like a hotel room in having a microwave and a few supplies, but the cafeterias are elsewhere in the building. Kitchens may be supplied at the floor level, with floors organizing group meals, per the curriculum we’re developing. 

You may have seen about my Food Not Bombs background, and Gathering of Western Young Friends before that.

I think of my sister’s school because of her work in an educational supplies store, which in turn has me thinking of Math ‘n Stuff, Northgate, Seattle. A specialty curriculum store stocks the kinds of toys and kits I’ve been curating a few samples of, such as the Mites Cube, Zome, Lux, Tensegritoy, other Design Science Toys products.

DST is defunct, but the ideas, and its collected products, live on.  Full disclosure: I worked with DST on Strange Attractors, the toy that was going to save the bacon. Yes, a real Toy Story.

The point of field testing new products, in the context of new lesson plans, is to get it down to a replicable format and segments, easily transmitted to other classrooms. We have the Lux Blox example. I’ve been tracking Accera and testing his company’s product, in the context of Martian Math. However my gigs have been infrequent, unable to keep up through the iterations. 

C6XTY sits idle, much of it in landfills by now. As a one many show, I’m able to juggle only so many balls. Sam keeps a small exhibit space at the farm.

We may be overdue for a next math, as distinct from the New Math of the 1960s, and the New New Math that LAUSD has been revamping and/or fighting over. Remember what sparked New Math in the first place: a sense of falling behind in the aerospace sector.

The preschool I’m brainstorming about is private. The private sector has more freedom to innovate sometimes, depending on its management hierarchy. 

I’ve been a critic of the “charter school” namespace as it can’t seem to make up its “mind” about too many key issues (is a charter school really public or really private?).  We don’t have infinite time in which to our resolve our issues. Time to remap to new namespaces.  I go back to my Pirate Party planks.

Debates

:: National Forensic League ::

Presumably the model NATO debaters will be well prepped when we have Gen Alpha growing old enough to debate itself regarding whether Russia's absorption of Ukrainian oblasts was undertaken in an effective manner. 

The key point in determining whether territory A was invaded and occupied by B is the degree to which the denizens of A requested and welcomed B's presence.  Those arguing for the resolution (that the absorption was effective) will say the Donbass was like Crimea in officially requesting annexation. Those arguing against will say the requests were from illegitimate non-representative factions with no authority to speak for Ukrainians.

I've seen model NATO booths at the national debate clubs festivals. Probably these debates are already going on at the high school level, in elite private schools at least.  

Those above a certain threshold of political awareness have realized these debates are inevitable going forward, so it's best to rehearse now, and with fresh minds who don't depend on parroting over the hill people who got their PhDs decades ago. A lot of Cold Warriors spout illogical sounding arguments and don't stand much of a chance without more coaching about present realities.

What are those present realities?  

All those decades investing in shared infrastructure have resulted in European ports accepting Russian LNG in place of piped supplies, at higher per unit costs. There was never a good case for going cold turkey vs a vs Russian oil. Tankers also switched crude through the Greek shipping networks. "Oil laundering" became the name of the game (not unlike circumventing Prohibition). 

Lots of books are in the pipeline, about the effect of sanctions on countering global energy interdependence.

Some of the more advanced planners, in China especially, grew up reading such tomes as Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (popular in China) and understood about the option to grow electrical grids thanks to improving technology. Their integration in connection with the One Band One Road project, at least in storyboard, continues to get attention. 

The more esoteric Bering Strait linkup, inter-hemispheric, described in Critical Path, has worked its way into the imaginations of these more apolitical IEEE types.  The detour into a proxy war at the Boomer level may not change the thinking even of Gen Z all that much.  On the contrary, the Boomers are inviting backlash by delaying torch passing.

From my angle, as a curriculum developer, I measure the delay in torch passing by sampling the curricula of various high schools at the current archeological level. Do we see a lot of crackling and crumbling?  For sure we do. The institution we call "public school" is especially in a shambles. 

The idea that a central government has responsibilities to citizens, in terms of education and health care, may be fading at least where the District is concerned.  As some city on a hill, WDC is a fading beacon, no longer a source of much hope for future Americans.  Individual states have some ability to set their own track records.

I'm a product of the international schools curriculum, meaning that as a young Boomer, I learned what elite Americans, living as expats, were supposed to learn, in tandem with an international cohort i.e. we were raised in a kind of model UN setting.  

I'll be curious whether the model UN or the model NATO students will fare better as global issue debaters.  It's not really an either/or proposition as some schools host both clubs.

Notes About Neighborhoods

A popular building style around the world is the inward facing apartments surrounding a courtyard. The facade is that of a fortification, a fort, whereas the interior is a kind of atrium oasis. 

Cruise ships have been going for this aesthetic, as well as hotels, the kind with the exposed elevators starting inside the very high- ceilinged interior. 

Some skyscrapers also play with the atrium motif, if only to take advantage of the soaring view, looking up, a view many designs block.

On the smaller end of the spectrum, the courtyard- and/or atrium-equipped fort might contain an extended family, with exogamous components e.g. families that have married in or otherwise allied. This mosaic or tiling structure, of interconnected families, grows to several buildings or may take on the aspect of a whole village. 

These villages may be semi-invisible at first, as they blend within the context of a New York City. We get barrios, or neighborhoods (sometimes ghettos or slums), sometimes with harmonious synergies, popular fusions, other times with interstitial inflammation, from feuding to gang warfare. We've all seen the movies right?

An economics textbook might try to boil it all down to some landlords (owners) versus renters situation, then get into all the borrowing that needs to go on, as some people see their capital appreciate, meaning they can afford to borrow, and pay back with interest. Banks see their money grow in this way, as deposits swell, and so start lending to each other, seeing one another as credit worthy, able to make good on debts.  

Not all of them manage to stay out of trouble though.  Banks may become riddled with scammers, indirectly perhaps, through depositors. Some get into laundering for suspect clients, which becomes self implicating. Banking is an inherently risky business, especially in a VUCA world (I'm thinking of Greg Hutchins here). 

Sometimes speculators bet wrong, such as when imagining driverless cars or AGI just around the next corner. After the hoped for products don't materialize, it becomes easier to cheat on definitions, but what if the public just stops buying the PR?  New investors won't stream in to relieve current owners of their stocks.

Then you get the disruptors coming along, such as Bucky Fuller, who wanted to cut out the middleman mortgage moneylenders, thereby putting less financial stress on the moms especially. 

Fuller wanted happy sane campers living in sanitary circumstances, and so invented his low cost appliance homes, metal tents, dymaxion yurts (circling a utility pole), thereby making RV-mobile-home quality living affordable, at least in principle, to a newly emergent middle class.  

The new lightweight yet durably aerospace designs would spark a revolution in sheltering.  Airstream was another trailblazer, in bringing aeronautical tech to the landlubbers.

However the LAWCAP oligarchs were not necessarily ready for any kind of switchover from everyday mortgage lending (a surefire moneymaker) to dwelling appliance vending; they wanted to keep riding the old FinTech rollercoasters at all costs. 

Their banking games depend a lot on building ticky-tacky box housing, but also drives improvements to the existing housing stock, such as when enterprising remodelers borrow, buy, upgrade, and flip these homes, swimming upstream towards the ever more upscale, like salmon to spawning grounds.  Banks see their portfolios grow in value.

Suburbs clone themselves to produce endless square miles of monoculture, complete with commuter based lifestyles. The need to amp up electricity to these regions is paramount these days, as suburban homeowners increasingly resort to home charging the family vehicles. 

The existing natural gas or coal fired power plants may not be prepared to undertake the load. 

To what extent will solar and wind, combined with storage batteries, take up the burden of providing transport?  That's what any college or university involved in modeling and simulation, is going to be looking at. Even just looking in the rear view mirror we can learn lessons, about what works and what doesn't.

Per David Graeber's work, we needn't box ourselves in with unimaginative cliches about capitalism versus communism. Is it "communist" for a bunch of model railroad aficionados to co-own a model train set in a church basement? That's kind of a nonsense question. It's communal, if that's what you mean, but there's no escaping "community" even in a society run according to capitalist business logic (whatever that is).

We do want to instill a love of trains, of railroads, at a visceral level, in some Global U students. Such a love may be innate, and just need a chance to express itself. We're looking for personnel to take the train system forward.  Physically and literally working on a railroad would be a logical pathway into planning and management. 

However, with the rampant financialization of ownership, people with no special love of trains, not even in a commuter role, get to squeeze the rail works for purely financial gain, at the expense of having a high quality railroad system. Future generations will need to compensate, by implementing new ways of breeding ownership institutions.

In addition to those museum floors I was imagining, the mixed use campus building needs a communal model train system, perhaps more than one, with established roles for governance, probably rotational. Students with a model train in the basement, and ample opportunities to tour existing infrastructure, are more likely to become engineers in the traditional sense, in the form of people who love engines (not a gender specific role).

If Quakerism plays a role in building governance (in some buildings it might), then the nominating, supervisory committee, business meeting structure might help keep the model train committee going.

Museum Floors

I'm back to my mixed use architectures, cruise ships a model, where living quarters need not be redundantly outfitted with kitchens in every unit. Kitchenettes maybe, like in some hotels, but the norm is to seek sustenance outside one's dorm and study space. This building is more like living on board a ship or even submarine, perhaps because it's literally floating or underwater, though neither aquatic environment need be presumed. An ordinary cityscape will do for context.

The Museum Floors contain exhibits, and one may find borrow and return opportunities, like tool libraries, where these tools might be vintage. A number of 386 PCs might be kept in working order, and people come through for some training on WordPerfect, and Lotus 1-2-3, just to experience an office environment their grandparents might have known. Watch some old black and white TV in other spaces, with vintage programming, perhaps assigned. I'm thinking of the Birmingham Civil Rights museum at the moment.

Part of the point is to pass on the disciplines of curation, and also representation, as when building dioramas. I recall how the Henry Ford Museum contained a recreation of a teenager's room from like the 1970s. This was archeology already. Museum goers would marvel at the differences, but also the similarities.  Let's look at a model nerd cave from the early 2000s next.

It sounds like I'm only intending to feature the recent past, the memories of people living in the building. True, I'm thinking recent history is the easiest to curate, and then, depending on what subjects people study in this building, more special case exhibits might develop, about specific time periods and places, perhaps far away geographically, and a basis for student exchange.  For example if your Colorado campus studies Sumurai Era Japan, then you would expect to find a collection of tools, wearables, weapons, dioramas and re-enactment ceremonies (the Society for Creative Anachronism comes to mind).

These floors certainly don't have to be basement level, however it's sometimes fun to imagine them as such, as the past metaphorically provides a basis and support system upon which to build going forward. Our collective memory is our heritage, which is something we extend, adapting, and adopting, as we go.

A lot of museum going may be accomplished virtually, no question. However there's much to be said for keeping some working versions of old appliances, even old telephones.  We need to be able to study their internals, for example, in order to better grasp the analogous technologies of our day.  What was telephony like in the days of switchboards?  Let's see what switchboards were like in the old days, not forgetting how a lot of these roles went to women.

Barbenheimer

Friend:

I haven't seen either Barbie or Oppenheimer.

The linking of the two of them strikes me as strange but much about showbiz is strange.

Me:

Yes, their linking is odd, I agree, even after seeing both.

It might be that Barbie World is clearly about having Kens be ancillary and the plot of the movie is Ken discovers the possibility of a more central role through visiting the "real world" (a fantasy Los Angeles). A new equilibrium is thereby explored (Barbies deal with more awakened Kens) -- but I'd say still not achieved, still immature -- reflecting the "real world" more for real in that way.

Oppenheimer, in contrast, is clearly a Ken World from the start, with Barbies ancillary. What Kens do left to their own devices is stratify into strict hierarchies with labeled ranks, organizational charts galore, regarding who should CC whom, what remains "eyes only" to the more top ranking Kens, what's above a Ken's pay grade. The noob Kens graduating from Barbie World are still miles away from hatching a truly he-man bureaucracy. 

Mindfulness

My blog posts often spiral, sticking to a theme while doing a round robin among the three or four blogs. I'm thinking "time tunnels" (scenarios) in general have a spiraling aspect. The theme I'm sticking to here being "study habits".

Recall I'm one of those using "Global U" as a swap-in for "Spaceship Earth" i.e. I have a cradle-to-grave work-study model going, wherein we're always gear shifting into "scholar mode" i.e. "learning mode" if only to figure out where's the light switch. 

It's not "student mode for the first half of life" followed by "teacher mode for second half of life" with "retirement mode" the final Elysium Fields. We're always jumping back and forth between student and teacher mode our whole lives ("learning a living"), the percentage of time spent in each mode having to do with lifestyle choices and/or demands quite a bit.

When some hear the word "mindfulness" it's a "bolt for the door" kind of experience because they're assuming it's yet another dharma talk about confronting one's own mindlessness, especially around relationships. Another "I'm a bad person" lecture (yawn). 

But that's not what this is about. 

We're talking here about cooking again, engaging in some project wherein cleanup is involved, such that what's left in the wake of said activity is not considered "a mess" by community standards. Loose ends get tied off. Puzzles get solved. Making way for new content, a fresh opening.

The Hanford campus, for example, referred to in the movie Oppenheimer, played a big role in the Manhattan Project, but in the big rush to "get it done" (i.e. build the atomic bomb), and not much planning and engineering was devoted to cleanup. The real price tag for this project was to be paid down the road, by we the as yet unborn. The subsequent commitment to pump up groundwater and to measure for leaks of radio-toxins, patching where possible, came after that first chapter.

However, being mindful may involve simply playing with your data structures, especially your queues and prioritizing scheduler, to keep cleanup happening all throughout preparation and serving of the meal, such that there's no big pile of pots and pans, scads of prep stuff strewn about, when it's over. 

You were taking a relaxed, "clean as I go" approach, shifting modes.  While the beans nuke, I put the cheese away. I'm always loading the dishwasher. Multi-tasking is not a sin, even if one is giving full attention to what's at hand. There's an interplay of focused and zoomed back, devoting micro and macro types of attention to a situation.

Wait, am I holding myself out as some mindfulness master, without having even been to chef school? 

I'll be the first to admit I'm often more minion than leader when it comes to serving on a cooking crew. I do as I'm told a lot of the time. I might offer input or take more responsibility if they're looking to me as the experienced FNBer (that's Food Not Bombs) but, chances are, people more experienced than I are in the picture. Ditto at a Friends Gathering, thinking back to Camp Myrtlewood all those times.

What I'm suggesting is the practice of mindfulness need to go straight to old thought patterns you've been having, about this and that. 

Leave the thought patterns to spiral along their lonely path and do something more productive than thinking, heaven forbid right? 

I'm not dissing thinking, but if it's the same old same old, why not bake cupcakes at least?  

Allow cooking to be your metaphor for whatever constructive hobbyist activity.  

Develop mindfulness around something you're not doing just to better yourself i.e. because you imagine you have to or society expects it of you. 

Start with an activity you would voluntarily engage in even without minding about mindfulness.

Astrology

I've been revisiting Grail mythology with a long time collaborator, which got me back to reading Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols. I picked up a free copy at the new Theosophy Library digs out on Beaverton-Hillsdale highway that time. I mean to go back the lifetime register for library privileges.

Lets start out by mocking the idea that celestial [sic] bodies program human behavior and/or thinking, in the sense of influence or affect, noting there's no evidence of encrypted information in moon beams (bounced sun beams). There's no evidence for an encodable region in the brain that would be especially sensitive to coded starlight.

Now lets say that was a straw man cosmology, and that the way cosmic bodies influence our daily lives is right before our eyes: through astrology. 

The very language, of typifying personality traits (e.g. stubbornness, control freaky...) by birth chart, and/or putting world events against a backdrop of this or that cosmological state, has been uber-influential in human affairs, self evidently, without any appeal to "secret" physics.

Now that we've settled on this shallow truism, that astrology is influential, lets also remember that people have used it to encode some reliable astronomical information. 

Astronomy would not be where it is today without astrology as a runway long enough to launch its bulk, as an instrumentally endowed discipline, able to theorize about and detect the likes of neutron stars.

A neutron star forms when the atoms are no longer able to put up a fight, as protons with a defensive shield of electrons, a perimeter, a fence. 

The crushing force of gravity overcomes the compressive push of electromagnetism at these extremes, whereas at most frequencies gravity is as diaphanous and evanescent as light pressure, relative to magnetically charged electrochemistry. 

The end result is a ball of neutrons, one could say a giant atom of a kind, and its radial broadcast impact on the environment is not negligible. We detect them as pulsars and see them as rapidly spinning, perhaps at over 42K RPM.

Current cosmology suggests that neutron stars, if sufficiently massive, further collapse into quark stars and then black holes, potentially in a kind of Jitterbug transformation (a squeezing inward).

The link I'll make here is to "epigenetics" in the context of the Synergetics Dictionary in particular. Astrology would be part of the epigenetic feedback loop whereby genetically encoded biological patterns get channeled forward in time by mental processes associated with civilizations.  Humans self program such that their more slowly evolving biological avatars get involved in space travel and/or scuba, with aerospace in between.

Brinkmanship

brinkmanship

brĭngk′mən-shĭp″
noun

The practice, especially in international politics, of seeking advantage by creating the impression that one is willing and able to push a highly dangerous situation to the limit rather than concede.

-- Wordnik

We're seeing a lot of talking heads suggesting that a psychotic breakdown leading to a nuclear exchange is looking ever more likely, as mostly old people in various social circles start to throw up their hands regarding the current situation.

In my counter narrative, citizen diplomacy is in high voltage mode and has lots of bandwidth. The younger crowd is engaged in mutual study and is not finding those irreconcilable differences the old farts insist on preserving. We're not seeing any impasses, in Europe, Asia or anywhere else.

However, the veteran pundits don't want to pass the torch to a happier generation that's less likely to destroy civilization. They cling to power, despite their obsolete educations.

Meaning the young will have to pry the torch away from them? 

One way to do that is to let them keep their torch while lighting another one. Let them think they're still the torch bearers.

Along similar lines, I've got an alternative to that infamous clock put out by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. What do they know right? Are they aware of and/or working on a Trucker Exchange? Asylum Cities? Martian Math? 

We shouldn't allow their laziness to govern our perceptions. Let them keep to their clock, but when it comes to asking the time of day, we have other sources, such as our Clock of the Long Now.

Project Renaissance

I hear a lot of analysts dissing public-private partnerships as unholy. I think back to my early days, as a think tanky type, working for CUE (an NGO, in partnership with the USG), and even including NATO in my Project Renaissance paper.

I suppose I was more of the golden boy in those days, courted by the intel community, wined and dined, living in DC off and on. No wonder I considered myself some kind of "NATO professor". Pretty nutty right?

In my defense, I had the childhood and young adulthood of an expat, i.e. I was Third Culture, living my identity as a USAer from the outside, one could say from various "alien" perspectives.  No wonder I'd write about the ET point of view (ETPV I called it).  I was seeing Earth as a whole.  

I was (and still am) a globalist, meaning I can't help but think I live on a planet (is it different for you?).

I'd like to have longer conversations with these analysts, as I'm sure they have a lot of special case instances to go through, of when and how NGOs, funded by governments and other donors, were used for evil ends. CUE was working on refugee resettlement, in the aftermath of the American War in Indochina.

However, the whole pattern, of players in the public and private sectors, getting along and even coordinating to some degree, doesn't seem by definition wrong-headed.

I'll leave the door open, in other words, to people who want me to stop with the Project Renaissance talk already, which has evolved, but still has some of the same elements. 

I still throw around GST as competitive with the more LAWCAP-oriented thinking most think tanks still traffic in (yawn).  I still keep the Bucky stuff on the table and play the game of XYZ vs IVM (insider jargon).

But as a globalist, and a believer in various kinds of inter-sector (public and private) coordination, I'm not thereby turned into a clone of "the globalist" as if we're talking about some single mentality. Do we think nationalism is one, and only one, school of thought?  That'd be ridiculous right? I rest my case.

Back to School

As we resume our studies towards the end of August, Portland's grade schools just starting to open, we're still all thinking about ergonomics, i.e. how to configure the personal workspace, or "bubble" as the case may be (different schools, different lingos).

My school was using distance education tech in the 1980s, branching off from New Jersey Institute of Technology circuits I'd joined when at St. Peter's doing grad school stuff. I got switched to a front line position, as a full time faculty member, before I completed the degree. They could tell I was qualified. So I was getting classroom experience as well.

Fast forward and that combination has continued. Prior to the pandemic, I was driving around town dropping in on many schools, both public and private, for Coding with Kids, a company based near Seattle. I helped the word spread in Portland and did a combo of in-person and Zoom-based content, as we entered into the "lockdown" period. 

But I was doing Zoom content anyway, as Amazon (the company), for example, would pay for kids on the other end to take our classes. I had students in Compton, part of Greater LA. I had students in Ohio. We did Codesters a lot, which is Python in a browser sandbox, with enhanced graphics capabilities.

The Multnomah Friends (Quakers) are still doing Zoom too, and wearing masks, but I'd say not entirely because of concerns about contagions. Fuel prices, commuting, having to get all the way across town, or into town, is a real burden for many.  Having closed circuit ways of dropping in means more Quakers are able to attend more Meetings all around.

In other words, WFH (working from home) is tantamount to WRP (work in remote places) i.e. you're able to show up at offices all over, not just at the one building downtown or along the beltway someplace. The WFH person might have hours in Dubai, Beijing, Omaha, all in a 48 hour period. In my case, I've been syncing with places in Greater Europe e.g. to offices in Turkey. That was for my data science class.

Civil War

Tucker Carlson recently asked former US president Trump if he thought the country was headed for civil war. Mr. Trump said he didn't know.

I think (a) "civil war" is an oxymoron and (b) that old fashioned idea of "entirely localized to within a nation" no longer obtains in a world with no insulation twixt nations. Even the US civil war had its external trackers and backers. The revolutionary war was civil, until it was won. As is so often the case, the very point of contention is whether we're talking two nations or one.

Take the case of Ukraine: when was it ever a "civil war" in the sense of "not also a proxy war"? Never. External interests were weighing in on both sides, upping the ante. Plus as I said "civil war" is an oxymoron. War is the very opposite of civil.

However, we now have the notion of "culture wars", a kind of psywar that has the ability, at least on paper, to stay a war of words and memes, forms of name-calling. As to the question of whether the US is headed for a culture war, that's a no brainer: the US is a motherboard for culture wars, and computing through them. That's what a "melting pot nation" (not all of them are) is all about.

Meaty Math

I wouldn't say this video is freely associative in a rambling, wandering sense, like one of mine. However  I would say it connects a lot of dots nevertheless, especially when it comes to wiring in some CT (Category Theory). 

We have the generic sense of "coordinate system" to play with, i.e. making a hard problem solvable may involve using a different coordinate system, with a path to and from. 

Convert to, solve, convert from. 

However we might also think in terms of "namespaces". 

Translate into, solve, translate out of. 

But then what's lost in translation and do the analogies hold?

A good example from the high school level is the basis for the slide rule: turn a multiplication problem into an addition problem by adding the exponents instead, using lookup tables (in the old days) to go both ways.

Take the logs of the two numbers you want to multiply, add those, and get the anti-log of the sum to find the corresponding product. We sometimes draw that as a rectangle, like in the video.

 

Genius Bar

I'm using the better of my two MacPros on battery. Upon clicking on the battery icon, upper right, I'm informed said battery has degraded capacity and I'd do well to schedule a maintenance visit. So I did. I'm into being compliant these days, almost a good doobie.

However I'm not considering myself a genius as I tend to surround myself with sources of genius, such that I feel relatively low on the totem pole, and that's a good thing, as complacency about one's intelligence is clearly a pitfall when hoping to stay sharp.

People have different strategies for staying sharp. I know YouTube knows my demographic info and therefore the targeted commercials tend to guess at what might be concerning me these days, health wise. No doubt said commercials pay attention to my search history as well. Even if I'm searching on Alzheimer's "for a friend" (or relative) the fact that I searched means the topic is topical.

However, I'm not signing up for all the brain teaser programs that want to charge me for playing around in their obstacle course. Rather, I just need to keep using O'Reilly's Safari service to (a) get my money's worth from that subscription and (b) to tackle skills building in some way, shape or form. Today, that meant unplugging from power and enjoying the new aircon Dr. D installed, in the living room (where I could plug in, but why bother), and tackling Haskell.

I've tackled Haskell before, but not with a Jupyter Notebook open in Binder i.e. in the cloud. I don't need to install the program locally to get some mileage, some practice. I need practice at what I'm preaching in my YouTube:  developing the cuboctahedral (icosahedral) number series in a number of computer languages, not just Python.

Tackling Haskell does not require me to venture far outside my comfort zone, as rock climbing might require me to do. I've been a programmer for decades and am used to thinking in terms of types. So I'm exercising within a familiar gym.

The next task after getting battery service from Apple, is to take my car through DEQ, which is closed tomorrow. I've customarily used my blogs to chronicle car stuff, so look for a subsequent entry soon.

Momenta

We know the word "memento" meaning more like "souvenir" or "reminder" whereas I mean "momenta" in the sense of "momentum" yet pluralized. Mass in motion, basically, a phenomenon with some conservation properties. Momentum likes to be conserved, one could put it.  Sometimes, however, we say it's not, because "heat doesn't count" i.e. the ability to do any more work goes away after the explosion.

Then we have the more subtle momenta of what I've called "word meaning trajectories", which in a rather concrete sense characterize the many commercial brands that experience boom and bust economies. A brand will veer, sometimes based on advertising. Did we read the market wrong? Or maybe we got it really right this time. And so on.

From commercial brands we get to nation-states, the so-called sovereignties. Individuals seek out agents in any narrative, in hopes of moving said narrative forwards in a way that alleviates and/or avoids suffering by these individuals. "Make the story be me-friendly" is a prayer with which most will empathize.

A keyword here is "identification" which comes up a lot in "identity politics". Who or what does one identify with and with what level of agreement? Anyone might step forward and claim to be a spokesperson for X, but that's why we have titles and credentials, to keep control over who gets to speak for whom. Words like "legal" get their momentum, their trajectory, from real special cases involving this principle of representation and identification, as in "she is my legal representative".

In coining a term like "dymaxion" like Bucky did, with a little help from his friends, one is throwing one's hat in the ring as an influencer. However coining neologisms is but one of many tools. More commonly one seeks, in media campaigns, to wire in associations, such that if one thinks about A, one is likely to move on to B, whereas B might not have been an oft chosen option, previous to a campaign.

A lot of companies, starting with Cambridge Analytica around the time of the 2016 US presidential election, claim to be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in coming up with strategies for swaying votes or repositioning political leaders. However, in this subtle world of spin doctoring, Real Intelligence (RI) is still regarded as more likely to succeed in coming up with winning spins. Using "AI" for marketing advantages is itself a case in point. I'm using AI too then (in addition), in not planning to be left behind in RetroLand.

Speaking of RetroLand: I hadn't been to Seattle Center in a long time and my narratives have become unsynchronized with various new realities. For example, the Experience the Music Project, and the Museum of Science Fiction, have been amalgamated into the newer Museum of Popular Culture. The institution has rebranded itself in a longer term form, with an easier to grok meme and mission. Pop culture encompasses anticipatory design science (future studies) as well as music mnemonics (where we've been, the way we were). The museum's momentum is largely preserved.

M4W Pow Wow

Ryan's bus from Roseburg was running early, so Andrius and I were able to pick him up downtown, not far from Union Station, and return to headquarters in time for the broadcast.  Math 4 Wisdom (M4W) was hosting a talk on Pascal's Triangle and the Binomial Theorem, but from a novel viewpoint.  

I was the "warmup band" doing something Pythonic. I introduced the idea of a Python generator. We had five participants on the two part call (with 10 minutes intermission), with three of us (Ryan, myself, Andrius) all here in the one node (house), with Bill and Jerre in widely separated locations.

Next, after 80 minutes of program (40 + 40), we were ready for breakfast. I treated my guests to a house tour first, only to have the door lock behind us on the second floor deck. I could call Derek, who was on his way anyway with the Monday haul, but my cell was inside and I hadn't memorized his number. 

Would I have to slice the screen or risk climbing down?  Neither prospect was enticing. Then I realized I had my keys. Duh. Sigh of relief. It's just not a door I usually close behind me.

Breakfast at Tom's was great, a business expense for Oregon Curriculum Network for sure, as I was having really high level discussions with these guys. 

Ryan is quite young (in his early 20s) and is as yet unspoiled by academia, unlike Andrius and I, thoroughly spoiled by some in-depth brainwashing, though not the same brainwashing. 

My claim: none of us gets but a dumbed-down version of the others, given how this world is put together. I'm not saying without exceptions.  Sometimes another seems more comprehensible than one's self, at least with regard to some specific topics.

Our foray into Category Theory was experimental. I was using the language of Supermarket Math, considering what sounded like special case workflows (e.g. adding to a shopping cart, checking out), unique to supermarkets, but I was using them metaphorically, more operationally. 

Like the idea of "paying for it at checkout" had corresponding actions in both worlds (our local Fred Meyer's and a supermarket in Vilnius), such that a Functor between them would carry the weight of translating and/or mapping between the two. In ordinary reality, CT tends to be about sets, vector spaces, real numbers, and like that -- not supermarkets per se.

Oregon Curriculum Network has a four-fold approach to maths in its inventory, the four aspects being:

* Supermarket Math: transportation, logistics, databases, pricing, marketing (how shall we live?)
* Casino Math: probability and permutations, risk taking and avoidance (what's worth trying?)
* Neolithic Math: maths from the present day looking backwards (where have we been?)
* Martian Math: casting maths predicatively forward, as in science fiction (what's coming up?)

From a posting to TrimTab Book Club this morning:

How about, as an experiment we (some workshop group) don't credit humans for any of our concepts for a change? In this "new" way of thinking, humans only "channel" ideas but never "create" them. I put "new" in quotes because this model is more like in the old days, in ancient times, when divine beings (e.g. Athena) did all the thinking and humans were mere mouthpieces, spokespeople. Lets say Athena coined the word "radio" which a number of humans then picked up on and shared. "Credit the gods and only the gods" might be the language game in this WestWorld. Most so-called westerners learned to stop crediting the Holy Spirit in the so-called Enlightenment Period, a time of many colorful revolutions e.g. the American and French ones.

Without having read any of the above, Ryan spontaneously shared his sense, after breakfast, that mathematics was using him, pretty much as a puppet, to think out loud to himself. We then sat around the table, sharing concepts, more in the mode of channelers than as originators, of our concepts. The various math-informed viewpoints got to iteratively interoperate, whether we as individuals comprehended, was another matter. Sort of. To a degree.

I've been having a similar conversation with Richard Hawkins, regarding AI. 

Lets look at language as a non-sentient pattern or program of action, an evolving dance. We get carried along, perhaps away. ChatGPT (the generative large language model implementation) is not that different in principle, even if following different rules. ChatGPT aspires to be predictable, whereas some plans or stratagems discourage predictability.

The centerpiece of M4W is not the Bucky stuff, which I talked about some today anyway, but Wondrous Wisdom, a cognitive framework developed by Andrius Kulikauskas over several decades. 

He's looking to build a network of close collaborators. I'm doing what I can on a logistical level at least, and institutionally as well, as the Oregon Curriculum Network guy. I'm helping more people become aware of their option to work with Andrius, without insisting that they do so, as some kind of prerequisite for working with me. I'm independently accessible.

For example today's meetup dealt with the theme of a Bell Curve of combinations between extremes, all or nothing, as demonstrated by successive rows of Pascal's Triangle.  All and/or Nothing bracket a permutation space of alternative scenarios, sometimes characterized in a binary manner, as left versus right, or positive versus negative. Forks in the road. Roads not taken.

At the extremes though, we're getting more existential, talking about the difference between Being or not Being, versus the many distinctions inside of Being.  

Pretty abstract huh?  M4W is like that. An acquired taste.

The Role of USA President

I like that Shoe on Head did a Barbie movie review. I'm a fan of hers. She reminds me of New Jersey girls, whom I got to know as a high school faculty guy at an academy for young women.  And elsewhere.  A certain toughness and irreverence, with an accent...

However my rant today is not about Barbie, although one could argue it's about social roles, and the role of US president in particular.  I'm one of those who thinks a president should not go in with a fixed agenda of all the stuff she or he wants to change, some crusader reformer.  Rather, a president should simply preside, observing the machinery of government, and report back to the people what's going on, like an insider with outsiders for an audience.

Instead, voters think the president is some kind of monarch with overarching powers to make stuff happen. That stereotype helps effect wars, as presidents get to play commander in chief in a war situation. The USA likes to keep a war simmering, sometimes boiling over, just to give the president a semblance of power that voters understand. 

Outward war is a way of dumbing it down enough for everyone to follow.  That's my elitism showing. War is a cheap way to prop up a chief executive. "Cheap" in the sense of tacky.

Presidents are going to get educated and their views will change. More important than sticking to their guns, is explaining to voters what their transitions are all about. Why the shift? What did you learn?

Unfortunately, what a lot of careerists want to do with a president is use scare tactics. Frighten this elected leader into obeying the right cues. Presidents with a high degree of suspicion versus automatic trust, are more likely to create a conscious record of how they're being influenced...

In practical terms, it doesn't matter much to me exactly what RFK Jr. believes about vaccinations. I see that he believes in doing his homework and he's willing to take some unpopular positions. However the details don't matter much, because as president RFK Jr. would have very limited authority over future health policy. 

Presidents are not authority figures in my book, so much a witnesses to history. Of course they may see themselves differently.

Barbie (movie review)

I at first had problems relating to the target tween, the reputedly sharp-witted and worldly young woman whom I also consider the movie's core target demographic.  

I also saw Hollywood (a proxy funhouse mirror reflection of Corporate America aka USSA) turning itself inside out to meet this protagonist half way. 

"Young LA woman of hispanic heritage (meaning native American, Spanish-colonized) we love you and want to reach out to you, let us be your mother / father / friend" (big brother).

Then it turned out the Boomer dad in me was supposed to find the young woman's mom more relatable, as she is (a) closer in age and (b) more likely to have played with Barbie in the golden age of same.  

It turns out the mom has been playing with stereotypical Barbie while having dark thoughts, not the least of which stem from having an ostensibly unloving daughter (the one I started out having problems with).

I realized part of my issue with the daughter tween was she had the reputation among her peers for being the razor sharp class forensics champion i.e. she was the leader of the debating team, so to speak, and Barbie didn't have a chance against her. 

She was competition in other words. I wanted her to debate me. I'd show her I wasn't defenseless.

Barbie, on the other hand, walked right into a knife fight not knowing she was in way over her head, and was emotionally injured. The tween was able to identify her target complex and aim directly, by calling Barbie a fascist. That really hurt, causing ripples in the space-time continuum.  Even Mattel could feel it, like a punch in the gut.

Ken, in the meantime, has been deprived of fatherhood opportunities all this time. What critics don't remark on much is that Barbie World is devoid of children and babies, and of grandparents. That would entail a Pregnant Barbie, pointedly discontinued. 

Barbie Land is a world wherein inter-generational communication no longer has to take place.  Shades of Logan's Run. 

Stereotypical Barbie starts to get more of the culture's oral tradition at least, when encountering Weird Barbie. Her immersion in the real world is getting more edgy, more adult.

Ken discovers patriarchy in LA, which in this day and age is likewise gay culture, with what looks like a lot of Village People singing macho, macho man. Around the ticklish conundrum "it's gay to be manly" is where this movie most enjoys goofing off.

The movie is satirizing the glamorized Chippendales male figure that women might hope to find in strip clubs. Except these Barbies are not into that. Their lust switch is turned off (by design). 

They're into power and administration (ironically) and, up to the end of the film, we see Barbie has yet to be a fully adequate partner for Ken. She doesn't find Ken attractive hormonally. 

What's a guy to do, when the babes don't wanna be wowed or wooed?  

The all-Ken Kendom is still pent-up and gay, without a mature connection with the Barbies. She's not yet a real mom either. Barbie is a puppet Pinocchio at first, lying if she says she's fully human. She's a bot, a phony.

Later, a wiser Barbie gets a talking to by the Ruth Bader Ginsberg like character, but somewhat off camera.  From a spectator angle, we're not privy to any complete "working out" of life. There's no grand resolution, more just a framing of the problems (which is half the battle).

We learn more respect for elders, meaning empathy for them as earlier versions of ourselves. The daughter realizes her mother is on the same side, fighting the same fight, against the unrealistic expectations and demands associated with stereotypical beauty and unattainable cultural idealizations.  

An everyday human, trying too hard to be a perfect Barbie and/or Ken doll, might do some ego-damage, thereby subverting the very self-esteem objectives this product line seeks to achieve.  

Why not just do an "ordinary girl" Barbie, less statuesque? The movie plays with these options, reflecting its audience more directly, giving glimpses.

I know working class hero Krystal Ball hated this film (Saager found it more entertaining) for being little kid inappropriate. Maybe so. However tweens are very worldly these days, watching the adults fight over whether they should get to be around adult fairies (mostly harmless) or whatever. 

If Freud taught us anything, it's that children self-sexualize without much need of adult help i.e. the idea that adults are in charge of some on and off button is a bit self aggrandizing.

Many children develop an early aversion to being "treated like children" whereas others adore such treatment and hope it continues indefinitely. Our target tween is in the former category. She sees her mom as babying her, being condescending, versus having an adult need for friendship and affection.

Barbie is for mature PG-13 year olds in the same way the Joss Whedon stuff is, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and even more appropriately, Dollhouse on the family television.

I found Ken's journey into patriarchy ("I wasn't so into it once I found out it wasn't really about horses") truly hilarious. I had a good time with this film. I don't usually go for musicals, but I'll make this an exception.

The mother-daughter tension in this movie reminded me of what was going on in Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO).

Device Stories

Speaking of personal devices, e.g. guns, I think the qualities of high desert water, mineral rich, shampoo conditioner and whatever, conspired to send my Apple Watch to the graveyard this morning. It put up a good fight, sputtering on, showing logos, but ultimately the casement disengaged, revealing guts.

What guns come with apps I wonder?  I’m not even gonna bother to check right now. Telescopes and cameras do. Anywhere precision aiming, and recording, comes in…

Today Judy upgraded her phone, from an ancient flip model, to an entry level Samsung that’s none too shabby. They shrink the price of the phone while piling on with necessary add-ons, like a charger, technically not needed if you have USB in your power strip. The shock case. We opted for not using protective glass. They were out of the low end version. Maybe later?

Will I purchase and AW replacement, now that I’m accustomed to “closing my rings” (or not), or using the heartbeat app to track my bradycardia? My heart thumps along at a low rate but I’ve been adapting, and so present as asymptomatic for the most part. The blood thinner I get after the pulmonary embolism episode some years back, is also the accepted remedy for my kind of heart beat (with flutter not fib).

Probably I’ll get one, costing some weeks at work (part time gig), but counting as a health expense for my one employee, me. If you wanna find new ways to do tax cuts, get more people seeing professional development, including tourism through conferences etc., as business expenses. Everyone is by default a sole proprietor of whatever they own, starting with a body (check) and a few devices (check). Capitalize on that!

I’ve tended to crack jokes about butt cheeks containing ample room for implanted devices, provided they’re properly encased in squishy bio-safe materials. You’d have apps on your watch and phone for these butt apps, some of which could be health monitors. I leave it to science fiction writers with medical and/or bioengineering degrees to let their imaginations run wild. A bun-based Theranos…

Sydney the dog has been a pleasure to work with.  Another business expense if you ask me, if not a full partner and/or sidekick proprietor. Tomorrow we’ll take our business over the Cascades in the company car.

The AW was a family hand-me-down from my youngest, Dawn’s last, a Christmas present some years back. She’d already learned the lifestyle so coached me expertly in how to integrate it into my routines.  Judy, a musician, agrees learning to use her new smartphone has “learning an instrument” similarities (muscle memory plays a role).

Gun Talk

Given my programming, in Quakerism, you might assume I'm "anti-gun" right out of the gate, and you'd be right in a way, except that being "anti-gun" doesn't mean anything super obvious. The guns don't just disappear.  Quakers are against outward violence i.e. knives and maces, bombs and catapults, bows and arrows, all fall into the same category as guns, when used as anti-student / anti-faculty devices.

However, these same tools may have other uses, obvious in the case of dynamite and cutlery, the sports of archery and target practice. The devices themselves are less relevant than the mindset with which they're taken up.  What's the psychology? Are we hunting humans again?

George Fox talked more about swords as carrying firearms in his day and age was not as customary.  "Wear it as long as thou canst" is how it comes down to us, in archaic language.  He was betting that those convinced of Quakerism would eventually likely cease wearing weapons as a part of their costume. They would become persuaded that the real battles were more hidden (in the sense of occult), more invisible.  Outward weapons are of limited utility when what needs to be countered is more intelligent, a programmed pattern, a meme virus of some kind.

When President Eisenhower warned Americans about the MIC (military-industrial complex), a rather egghead thing to do (but generals are eggheads by and large, and presidents always), he was talking about a form of bureaucratic legalese, laced with whatever values.  Bucky came along and called it LAWCAP, which morphed into Grunch in his writings.  Everyone matures and distills their own lingo, paradoxically expressing meanings more clearly when idiosyncratic. Bucky's language is nothing if not idiosyncratic even while treating of the "generalized principles".

The MIC is a "complex" in the sense a psychology or mindset is a complex.  We can call it groupthink, i.e. these complexes are not confined to the brains of single individuals.  Which is why guns are ineffective in countering complexes. 

Shooting the patient, the one with symptoms, only feeds the paranoia of those targeted, which stimulates genetic searches for antidotes, ways of coping.  A system under attack learns to defend.  Telling all the gun owners that Big Brother has plans to take all their guns away, is a way of scaring up a reaction, such as more funding for the NRA.

I prefer a more anthropological approach.  How do guns play a role in coming of age narratives, and in rites of initiation?  How does one ascend the hierarchy in some gang, company, or priesthood?

I'm suggesting that Quakers tend to get snobby, thinking those resorting to outward war have yet to grapple with root causes.  But rampant malign neglect of one's duty, to deep think instead of group think, may result in atrophy within an intelligence community overall.  Lights grow dim at 1501 Cherry Street (Philadelphia), if / when the AFSC stops analyzing the MIC.

God Talk

Let’s talk about “God talk”, and here I picture a congregation, hats off, heads bent, eyes closed in some cases, giving thanks to God for a lot of important stuff in their lives, and asking for greater wisdom and attentiveness. What’s good about this attitude is that it’s in principle the opposite of authoritarian, a fact which many critics have a hard time seeing.  

“God talk” is often characterized as authoritarian by definition and usually highly patriarchal in practice, given the Roman experience (pervasive even today). Certainly subcultures (cults) may be heavy-handed, and sometimes escaping them and their influence is the best course.

However, in thanking God, one is pronouncedly not thanking the Emperor for one’s daily bread. It’s not the party, the company, the boss, leaders, visionaries, scientists, or my betters, to whom I am beholden.  

If we don’t have our daily bread, some humans are in the way from a systems point of view, maybe the very humans who decided to hike up this unforgiving mountain or dare whatever odds, given physics.  

God represents the idea that humans are not the be all end all and that sensibility is vital to keeping the humans-playing-God syndrome from becoming a pandemic.  

God represents synergy at a very high level, meaning intelligence flows “above our heads”, “among the angels” say, or “unconsciously” if you’re more a Freudian, or “in demonic realms” (the trope of an “underground,” the chthonic).  

There’s Ouija Inc. and its many board rooms. Monster U. Wisdom plumbs the deeper depths. It’s not anti-science to say so.

The prayer of thanks comes from a cybernetician who understands Nature is automated to provide, and humans are a part of that automation. Using the term “automation” comes across as derogatory perhaps, too mechanical.  But then humans exult about being in the flow, in the zone, where everything “just goes” without a lot of overthinking and ego involvement.  

That feels like God’s will (Thy will) being done, and it’s a Kingdom of Heaven type experience. The cybernetician is nodding along with all that, likewise prayerful and grateful.

The fork comes with “divine right”.  

Some revolutionaries talk as if we finally closed the door on “divine” period full stop, in depriving even kings of this status.

Others say our notion of “divine” was extended in Democracy, to all, from King to Beggar. That’s where the Quakers came down, around the 1600s.  

The idea is our equality, the sense in which we’re equals, is built in to our sense of God’s love.  When we apply the idea of unconditional love to all humans equally what viewpoint do we get back?  One that beacons away from putting peers on pedestals, as idols, as God’s competitors.

Enshrining other humans as the source of all that’s good in our lives, including life itself, is a first step down a wrong path.  Yes, thank your peeps, and be grateful for them.  But don’t confuse that thankfulness with a growing debt.  Think of the Sun’s energy.  Enough of that was meant for you, that you shouldn’t have gone wanting without a scholarship.  The Sun doesn’t charge a debt to its students.

Thank the Sun for your being adequately energized, as a teacher and student in the Global U, not other students or faculty.  The Sun and the plants impound carbon dioxide and other nutrients, providing the raw ingredients for your cafeteria plan.

“Oh so you’re justifying monarchism by using God in a purely political sense, irrespective of His existence”. First, I’m not “justifying monarchism” or at least not for free.  You’d need to pay me. Next, I don’t think the political sense would have such staying power if it weren’t also people’s experience that whom they owe for life itself is not the landlord, but the same Lord to whom the landlord owes his own life. That’s more democratic.  

There’s no King as Ultimate Landlord model. We each have our private “image i nation” (private sky). That of God in each of us. Quaker jargon.

The main debates hinge around laws or rules. Where do “rights” come from? Again, I see the reason behind having inalienable rights come from God, and then maybe affirmed or codified in some widely agreed upon document, such as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

There’s no problem enshrining these rights, just with thinking we owe specific people thanks for providing them in principle.  Defending them is again different.  However to what extent is one’s effectiveness, as a defender, dependent on having the right attitude?  When too much ego gets into the mix, effectiveness may be at risk. So we’re back to Transcendentalism, not as a hindrance to American democracy, but at its foundation.