The Apprentice (movie review)

Just to set the stage, I took the bus (one transfer) on a beautiful fall day, to a 1 pm matinee at Eastport Plaza, out on SE 82nd, a major thoroughfare and home to big Asian supermarkets. Such a store was my first destination: Hong Phat, a remodeled WalMart, to eat some no-frills salad rolls and a little sushi, while chatting with my distant daughter on the iPhone.

I texted some other friends on the way, as bus riding is conducive to phone chatting. My peer group is quite anti Trump and they worried this was maybe a propaganda movie. 

So what if it was, right? I'm a big consumer of propaganda, a primary or raw material for the kind of anthropology I'm into. I study cults, left and right. Plus I'm in one, one could say, producing propaganda of my own (or call it advertising).

But it wasn't really a propaganda film, or at least not of the shallow type, all hype and puffery. I already knew from the NPR interview with the director that I caught in the car, coming back from the Seattle area recently, that this would be an empathetic view without constituting an endorsement. I would assess the film will have approximately zero impact on the final outcome of the 2024 presidential race. Most people will catch it later.

Dr. D. (PhD) joined me, arriving by EV, just as the previews got going. The smallish theater had only two others besides ourselves. This 1 pm matinee was the latest showtime available, on a Sunday anyway.

These were lounge style seats. I don't usually make it to this particular theater and didn't figure out how to operate the recliner controls until after the movie was over, although the seat did seem to kick back a bit on its own (I must've rubbed up against the button).

Anyway, those details out of the way, what was this? 

A fictionalized not-documentary that reminds us of the timeline. When Donald was doing this, Nixon was doing that. When DT was onto building Trump Tower, we were up to Mayor Koch already. 

Mayor Koch... so I would've been in Jersey City, close to penniless, a Catholic school teacher, but writing to Koch anyway (not that often), about various city plans I had: train to plane; high def illuminated billboard near Journal Square; IMAX in the Stanley; something about navy submarines (for tourists).

But I had no Roy Cohn to take me under his wing. I had Ray and Bonnie Simon, who took me under theirs, and I learned a lot from them, not to mention a small income for taking care of their baby daughter. Ray and Bonnie both had work in the Big Apple. We'd sit around their living room table after hours, getting deep in to philosophy and pop culture. 

Ray and Bonnie were both closer to the show biz world and that whole chapter in my life was about tuning in show business (its centrality).

Then, after Trump Tower, came the Atlantic City chapter, and then Trump buys Mar-a-lago, and the movie draws to a close. He's still married to Ivana. His mentor Roy has died. The Art of the Deal, the book, is just getting underway. 

No Miss Universe, no Apprentice on TV, no running for president, except for foreshadowing. It's all about his family matrix (mom and dad, brother Frank) right when he's becoming a "self made" man. It's a coming of age story.

I found the Roy Cohn character captivating, a star performance, which in the movie, Trump did too (he found Roy fascinating). 

So as the director says: it's a movie with empathy for its protagonist. The camera rarely gets far from the Donald. We're always finding stuff out when he does. The camera never drifts off to follow others, making us privy to what they're saying about Trump behind his back. We simply don't go behind Trump's back. He's the center around which the world turns, an entirely valid point of view obviously, for either a novel or a fictional film.

The Trump character doesn't seem that much like him at first, but it's a good performance and he seems to gradually adopt the mannerisms, gestures and phraseology we've come to expect. I don't have any strong issue with anyone's acting. Or the directing. The script paints in broad, bold brush strokes, serving a didactic function, educating its audience about the thermodynamics of it all.

Roy is tough, a "killer" (he doesn't shoot anyone), some say vicious, but the movie wants to humanize him as well, and in my book succeeds. 

He considers himself a true American patriot, and regards his winning the death penalty for the Rosenbergs one of his greatest achievements. He admires Trump because he's a privileged golden boy aristocrat who has chosen an uphill battle. Roy perceives that Trump needs a true bully in his corner, to fight the bullies. His friendship is authentic, but becomes strained in the end. 

Whatever the real Roy was like, this one was believable, and consistently rendered. Bravo.

The last time I was at this theater, I forget which movie, I emerged to find then president Trump had approved the martyring of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, thereby adding to the lawless mayhem that is otherwise described as the rules based order. 

Friends (Quakers) don't celebrate outward violence, nor do I recall a lot of flag-waving at the time. More just worry and concern. Portland is not as into Murder Inc. as some cities I could name. Trump had by then become another swamp creature, a kind of political dinosaur, a living fossil. We still have quite a few of those around, still thrashing about, making waves while going under.

Trucking Algorithms

I don't think long haul truckers have much to fear from AI in the short term, in terms of job loss. However that doesn't mean that lifestyle is immune from overhaul in other dimensions. 

EV trucking might be a thing (Tesla testing) but probably only if cabs decouple from payloads more, i.e. it's super easy to drop a trailer and head to charging, while another cab takes the payload onward with very little downtime. 

Cabs queue and charge at a slower rate but there's always enough of them.

Trucking companies might choose a "driver stays with the payload" policy and have the driver hop from cab to cab, or the driver could stay with the cab and get hitched to different trailers going from A to B all day, not much rhyme or reason from the driver viewpoint but expertly routed by Mother (the company computers).

DS US

US track, Data Science

Tonight I was engaged in torch passing. No, not PyTorch (you know of it?) but moving in that direction. I told my students they were on like the Trans-Siberian railroad, from London to Beijing. I would be their tour guide from London to Berlin. Then I’d hand them off to a next instructor. They’re wending their way towards ML (Machine Learning) the domain of PyTorch, although from the slides I see it’s TensorFlow they get into, which makes sense too. Keras…

The part of the ML pipeline I have them look at is analogous to what I did in outcomes research, when David Lansky and company (MDRC to be precise) were harvesting data from heart procedures, diagnostic and interventional, and getting it statistically analyzed. David and Gary knew statistics. I was the computer guy who knew how to harvest on the front end, design a GUI for data entry and cleaning, while feeding a growing repository on the backend, what would, over time, become Big Data — provided PATS could handle the load.

Harvesting, merging and cleaning data: that was my bread and butter in that this hospital system became my biggest client. That I wasn’t an employee was to their advantage but also put limits on how long this particular configuration could last. Microsoft would end up pulling the plug on Visual FoxPro in 2015. Bigger players would be moving in, replacing my applications. We managed to launch a few careers. Outcomes research took off.

Merging is often overlooked but that’s where pandas in a Jupyter Notebook may prove its metal, pure gold for some company. Do you know about pandas? That’s like Excel in terms of providing tabular frameworks. Tabular data has to be as old as data gets. Rows and columns. Arrays. In the Python world, we have a stack for that, a suite of 3rd party packages. Download and import and you’re in business.

I’d get data from here and there (scannable forms played a role — forms I got to design) and it all needed to get neatly shuffled and interpolated, and placed in relational tables. You only want a specific patient detailed once, but then with multiple episodes, admits and discharges, with procedures in between. That’s one to many. 

Every patient has their own arteries (one to many), but they each have the same coronary suite, so many to one. Which of these arteries have become occluded if any? What cath and what stent were used, or was this a graft, a bypass? 

I had CLAIR for the cath labs and CORIS for the ORs. The doctor practice supporting my efforts, in addition to the hospital system itself, thought my applications were prototypical enough to be worth sharing with bigger companies. "See this stuff Kirby is doing? That's what we need. Why not learn something?" They learned, to a degree anyway. I was in a position to assess.

But I wasn’t using pandas or Jupyter Notebooks or any of that stuff back then. We were a Microsoft shop and I was using FoxPro for the intermediary holding tanks and the GUI. 

I’d learned to parse through cath lab text files coming from time-stamped chronologs made by Quintons, the cath lab machines, where techs chronicled all the details of a procedure. Patient goes under, doctor arrives… procedure over, another success (the success rate was high). Parse the logs, populate tables, let a data pro audit and revise.

Another workflow that gets overlooked, in addition to merging, is anonymizing. Creating these amazing data sets is only allowed if there’s HIPAA compliance. 

We were eager to amass heart procedure and long term outcomes data and to pool it with other hospitals, but not in such a way as to violate confidentiality in medical record keeping. 

My institution (a client) was pretty meticulous along those lines and a big part of my job was to help my coworkers keep all the sensitive identifying fields behind a security wall within the hospital. We suffered no data breaches on my watch, that I know of.

I make it sound like I was doing all this by myself, however the final repository of all this data was PATS, owned by a different company. Once the data my systems harvested was merged and cleaned through my FoxPro GUIs, it got batch imported into PATS, by people trained in that work especially, along with their other tasks.

As I was telling students tonight over Zoom, I had a long career before Python popped up on my radar and even then, it wasn’t as a replacement for the FoxPro applications development toolset. All seems more clear with hindsight.

What drew me to Python was computer graphics and my curriculum development work, more an outgrowth of the McGraw-Hill chapter, which had come before my moving back to Portland and diving in with the FoxPro. 

Graphics and animation. VPython. Hypertoons. 

But then I could backfill by leveraging the data science work just described, and become a guru of data pipelining the way that’s taught now. FoxPro was very SQL-savvy. Learning the Python DB API was not that big a deal. I could use SQL for my Polyhedrons.

Sculpting with Marble

 

Indian Gaming

Prompt: 

A Quaker who looks like the Quaker Oats guy is strolling through a huge room where native Americans in traditional dress are hunched over gaming consoles in an Indian Gaming context. Casino decor. War room. Psyops? Troll farm? Kind of mysterious.

X-REF:

Touring Facilities

Let Us Debate

Posting to the Facebook Epistemology group:

It’s not “factually true” in any epistemological sense that political ideologies span a one dimensional spectrum from far right to far left.

 
These directions (relative to whom?) are arbitrary to begin with, and come with a built in bias. “Right” also means “correct” whereas “Left” inherits the historical stigma of “sinister”, from the Latin “sinistra”. So there’s a thumb on the scale right from the outset. Bad design from the get go.

Tangential aside: It’s like “positive” and “negative” in mathematics, hardly neutral terms. Only the positive three vectors in the XYZ system get to be “basis vectors” whereas the negatives are always secondary, even if you can’t tell them apart in terms of the work that they do.

Biased labeling aside, the idea that a simple linear spectrum is adequate for modeling political ideologies should be met with well-founded suspicion, especially in this golden age of data science (apparently). Who knew statistics would be overnight transformed into the sexiest of professions by the brilliant success machine learning?

In data science we have something called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) which adjudges, by mathematical techniques, what we might call the “rgb colors” or “fundamental properties” of any space. To each component corresponds a dimension, in some n-dimensional Hilbert Space.

PCA involves not necessarily knowing in advance how many dimensions we might really need. To specify in advance: only one dimension, is to prevent the PCA algorithm from optimizing.

 
In other words, “left versus right” is not only poor terminology (because biased), it’s bad science (data science). Too few dimensions to not a cogent model make. Even astrology had more dimensions, not forgetting the superseding Myers-Briggs.

And yet political scientists put up with it, do not fight back. That’s akin to the situation in anthropology, where the pros know we don’t have “five races of man” (black, white, red, yellow, brown), that’s so much bogus BS, and yet corporate sponsored pop culture is allowed to stay uncorrected. A great dumbing down is allowed to persist.

So what’s my ultimate conclusion, in light of this rant?

 
Resolved: that English, without major modifications, is a garbage language, not suited to logical or rational thought. Let’s debate.

So many of core English concepts are so obviously poorly conceived and corrupt (computer science: buggy). Should “good philosophy in English” be considered an oxymoron then?

 
I wouldn’t go that far. I think English in the right hands is still capable, as a language.

 
But by default, English left to its own devices, is not suitable for scientific communications. That’s why education in professional grade English is so important, right?

Looking Back

A popular exercise in high school history could be to have students write a narrative they imagine in a future history book, about the recent past. Try to emulate the style of academic writing to some extent, but with an audience of people at their same reading level, which is high school to adult.

But of course that’s a broad assignment, which is part of the challenge. How does one pitch it at the right level of overview. The main thing is to emulate hindsight and tell the story differently, to signify the future perspective. What does the current time look like, from after the Singularity? We’re writing science fiction in that case. Martian Math.

Drawing from my own recent corpus and generating from that, a lot of us geeks were turned on by the global electrification trend, which president Johnson made his name in connection with, being a point man when it came to electrifying Texas, still with its own grid. We picked up on the HVDC trend and bought into the World Game plan to link up the hemispheres. On the other hand, a slower business-minded mindset could not conceive of such infrastructure minus its own ownership and control of it, and these delinquents sidetracked the project in order to prove who was calling the shots.

Something about “taking credit” is amiss in today’s cybersphere, where a lot of the content creeping in is recycled bot talk, but not flagged as such. Teen zeens, fan literature, vehicles for advertising, have found ways to amp up content using only half human-authored texts. Text generators abetted by editors, allowed to editorialize, compete with naked thinkers to using AI. The more phony stuff tends to come with telltale signs if one knows what to look for.

Martian Math opted for hydropower in conjoining the physics of power generation with synergetic volumetric accounting, a minor wrinkle, experimental, and a door-opener for curriculum developers, as now we’d have a stronger geometric vocabulary and concept set. Students from our academies would rocket ahead, not being burdened with the kinds of ethnocentrism that lead others to spin out of control, sometimes right out of the gate.

Am I a Racist? (movie review)

As y'all might know, I'm a YouTube junkie. I've got it playing from when I feed the dog breakfast, before sunup, until sundown, off and on. 

And as YouTubers know, to tug on a video is to yank on a long chain of recommendations. "If you liked that one, what about this one?" And so on. I don't resent said algorithms; I use them as mirrors. I'm able to see how my interests change over time.

Anyway, a lot of my peeps have started reviewing that Matt Walsh movie, which broadcasts from the right on the political spectrum, which in snapshot, in today's lingo, means it's prone to pick on a lot of the more juvenile elements within the professoriate (e.g. the ones who haven't gone back, in later life, for those high school refresher courses per my School of Tomorrow).

The meme of "race" (not genetically based really, and yes, we all have a skin color, what's your rgb?) still besets American discourse, whereas most of the time what they really want to talk about is "ethnicity" but that word is hardly made available to them, given the weakness of the anthropology department. 

Teasing apart "race" from "ethnicity" is more where my training would go. There's not color blindness, but there might be some acknowledgment that "race" is more important in apartheid cultures than others.

I prefer the word "apartheid" to "systemic racism" and think it's useful, even essential, to speak freely about the US apartheid system that we succeeded in stamping out for the most part, starting with the anti-slavery movement and leading through a civil war to the civil rights movement.  People are still working hard on their phobias. Islamophobia and Russophobia are still prevalent as mental illnesses.

Those human rights gains were all hard won and we should thank our lucky stars we're not in the pit of hell like Israel is, for choosing apartheid as its moral compass (nothing to do with Judaism in my view, which is here to stay, by continuing to morph, as they all do, these world religions). Too bad women never got an Equal Rights Amendment though. Patriarchy triumphed, at least in the lagging political sphere.

Anthropology, the discipline, always had a hard time escaping ethnocentrism, but it least it had a name for it, and could therefore set up a program whereby individual students of anthropology could start to deprogram, to whatever extent they wished or could. 

Deprogramming means discovering one's own birth culture to be sufficiently alien as to no longer come across as the one obvious choice, even for oneself or one's family, going forward. Roll your own, from the wealth of great lineages made available.

You have to work on transcending your own ethnicity to have empathy and understanding of the others, and that work eventually becomes more about solo psycho-philosophy or "soulmaking" in the James Hillman tradition. You don't necessarily die with the ethnicity you're born with. That's partly what makes it less attractive to bureaucrats, who want to check a box that never changes.

The racists, on the other hand, that dwindling number who actually still believe the pseudo-science, find it convenient to corner a market they call "whites" (scoff scoff), who have no choice but to need endless deprogramming, given how deeply programmed (so-called "privileged") these buggy bots have become. 

"Ethnic whites" (invented for the purposes of this blog post) delude themselves into thinking it's all about them and their racist identity (ethnicity), and then they're supposed to suffer guilt about that, followed by transformative rebirth. As an ethnic Asian (self identified), I consider such "whiteness" rather callow and I'm glad to not be an ethnic white in that sense, although I won't deny my skin has a pale rgb value.

DEI trainers are or were a type of deprogrammer. 

Matt goes undercover, in the manner of a Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) to infiltrate the DEI trainer universe, and mock it thoroughly. 

He concludes with his own over-the-top version of a training, which likely DiAngelo would call "weird", just as was her own lucrative interaction with the guy pretty "weird" (the $30 race reparations incident).

I'm on board with mockumentaries as a genre, however if I wanted to mock racism (and I do), I'd take a different tack. I'd bring up all those websites about Noah and his spreading family after the flood, and how encoded the racial talk becomes in Bible studies.

These different races really became more pronounced after the Tower of Babel incident though (we're still in Genesis here), when a lack of mutual understanding proved a godsend: peeps were no longer working lockstep on a fruitless, morally bankrupt project to "reach god" through the vertical dimension (the so-called 3rd dimension, i.e. depth). 

Humans have continued confusing themselves with the word "dimension" ever since.

God loves His little morons though, and wanted them to survive, and so confused their tongues this time (vs sending a flood). That started a clumping process whereby humans distilled into the five races we have today: black, white, red, yellow and brown. Everyone else is a mixture of these five. 

That's in the sapien branch of the hominid family. The Neanderthal and Denisovans were presumably racialized in different ways (we don't have all the data yet -- I'm looking forward to the AI art).

Perhaps I just don't sound mocking enough? 

The literal Genesis story has been a dead horse for centuries, such that its skeleton was long ago back to sand. Only the symbolic meanings, as hinted at above, have any ongoing ethical or aesthetic value. 

If we want literal history regarding a Great Flood, we should study Ballard et al and steer clear of theologically-minded spin doctors such as myself. 

I'm interested in the dharmas, but when I want science, the Bible is not the first book I think of.

Another Journal Entry

I was sorry to learn of Lowen's passing; this was the first I'd heard. Now I see the announcement in the newsletter.

I've been somewhat peripheral to the life of the Meeting, as was driven home today during Peace and Justice committee meeting, in which I felt clueless about much of what was talked about. 

Which didn't keep me from opening my fat mouth a few times (I tried out another joke: one thumbs up one down). The joke: my pronouns are in the possessive tense: his and theirs. Hah hah?

Joking aside, the most insidious of all pronouns is "we" but people rarely talk about that one, especially "we white people" (guffaw... barf). What "we" whiteman, right?

Kepper, Lowen's partner, made a telling point when talking about filling out Lowen's death certificate info and having to specify race. The clerk just assumed "white" but Kepper added "he wasn't white until his twenties" which of course the clerk couldn't process. 

What she meant was: Lowen was born into the Jewish tradition and wasn't allowed even to caddy golf games except in Jewish clubs. The country club WASPs were that anti-semitic, even that recently. A good reminder.

Did we want an anti-racist trainer to come into the Meeting and catalyze a transformative experience for the attenders present? Friends have fallen a long way away from being leaders in the anti-racism campaign I gather. Now they need help, like any corporation (we are a corporation, not for profit). Color us IBM? 

I'm saddened to see booji well-off people spending money on themselves to deprogram. Yes, racism is insidious. But isn't our faith and practice all about self deprogramming, to make more room for God's will (to use the archaic language)? Sad that we have so little faith in our faith that we need to heavily rely on outsiders, is how I was taking it.

Speaking of my take on racism (old hat by now, with so much already here in my journals), here's the gist of my view, that a racist is someone who believes in races:

An Apple Story

Did I mention my Mac Pro died? I was typing mid-sentence when the whole computer froze, nothing I could do but hard reboot, at which point it went to a rectangular icon, not the Apple, and told me to contact Apple support. 

I tried the recovery utility options, downloading a RAM boot drive. It saw nothing to fix, meaning no storage. I was looking at a total loss of access, with no viable boot process. 

I was pretty demur (that word is going around) about it, not nonplussed, calm. 

After all, I was on a beautiful Oregon farm in a luxury trailer with a loyal and happy dog. I was learning tractor skills. 

And back home in Portland, I had the external drive TimeMachine on my desk. I didn't think it would help at all with the dead Mac, but if/when I got a new one, I'd have access to the old files. I was proud of myself for taking it in stride, although I did reach out to friends and family with snippets of what was happening.

One of the more positive results, and I need to tell Terry about this at the Equinox gathering, since he gave it to me, was the Apple iPad turned out to be more capable than I'd thought. No, I wouldn't use it to do my Python work, but in terms of telecommunications and staying organized, it held up under pressure. My skills improved. 

Secret: when the GUI seems bonkers, rotate the screen 90 degrees as in "long tall mode" the GUI improves, even if the keyboard is then at the wrong angle (relatively).

Once back in Portland, I resolved I'd need to visit the Apple Genius Bar downtown and get a read on whether the Mac was repairable. But I took my time, pondering my options. What if I could get by without a powerful Mac. I have older computers, including an older slow joe Mac Pro. I wouldn't wanna teach my Python classes on the slow ones, but what if I wasn't gonna be teaching any Python classes soon?

That was the question: was the course in question (Python + Data Analysis + Data Visualization), for Clarusway, still a go? We hadn't touched base in awhile. 

From the beginning, it was considered contingent, based on getting the peeps, the students. 

I have the workflow sketched out in a generic fashion in my Code School Blueprints album, developed after some years working for a startup code school (within a bigger company). I'll embed those slides here, why not?  

Faculty hangs out in a holding pattern, learning new skills, prepping, until a course is chartered (like a charter flight, instructor = pilot). I'm in a holding pattern with respect to that particular course, while working on other projects.

I've nudged the company with some queries and will likely hear back shortly, but then this happened: the dead Mac Pro sprang to life. 

I'd plugged it in upstairs, in my office (a real office, declared on taxes some years, not a bedroom, except for the snake), and walked away, knowing it'd get as far as the "contact Apple support" screen. 

I didn't check on it for at least two days. 

But then it was time to feed Barry (the python) a mouse, so I walked to and from Tropical Hut on Divsion, across Chavez, around noon, and at some point decided to hit the spacebar. The Mac sprang to life, at the usual login screen. It had booted! It lived!

The first thing I did was do another TimeMachine backup as the best I had was not entirely up to date. 

Ever since, I've been enjoying poking around in familiar territory, my working environment for the last two to three years. I feel like I'm reunited with a country I'd steeled myself to maybe never see again. She's been working ever since. 

I'm hoping she won't go into a coma again, of course. Probably next time I visit that farm, I'll leave her here and just use the iPad. It does Zoom. I still had my meetups. Coding in Python can wait, when tractors become the priority.

Soap Opera Summary (satire)

The news says NATO is about to give itself permission to amp up its invasion of the Russian homeland. The idea is to keep Ukraine out of NATO on technicalities but “for all intents and purposes” to use it as a military base, as had been happening under President Blinken and Vice President Nuland for some time now. 

Wait, did I get the narrative wrong? Anyway, it’s time for NATO to get the show on the road.

Back in knee jerk legacy media land, there’s probably some sense that people are following the action and are ready to jump into their roles as nationalist loyalist troopers, happy to march march march like the old people tell ‘em is necessary. 

The NATO geezers expect the allegiance of a younger generation not necessarily cut out to play hero in such a tawdry low class drama. Who wants to die for the knuckle draggers? “Why let those dinos live through me?” your average coder is thinking. “They don’t even know Python, most of ‘em (OK, Ada maybe).”

I can’t think of anything more uncool than living in Virginia with parents slaved to Beltway Mafia politics. What an ugly childhood for so many. Shades of Laurel Canyon right? It’s the kids of privilege, like Washington and Jefferson, who are more likely to rebel against the parent company (East India in their case). The Doors.

The frenzied media, MSNBC especially, need to do way more to whip up Russophobia (aka dementia russogenica). Rachel Maddow, help us out here. The needle hasn’t really budged in a while, as attention turns to the “states are no solution” drama in the so-called “Middle East” (snicker). Is it time for another novychok bedtime story? What airplane is parked next to what airplane?

President Blinken needs to deliver some great oratory, before people forget the plot again. Help us remember how democracy is at stake. Tell us how authoritarians will never get a toehold in the USA at least. These people are just not psychologically ready yet. Not for Mafia brand theater. More snake oil kool-aid is needed. Pass the numbskull sauce.

Let me help y’all out. Um.. um.. “My fellow Americans…”. Something like that. And knock it off with the Zionista thing, that’s too radical for our middle of the roaders (pet lovers, cat ladies) by several orders of magnitude. No one thinks that’s cool anymore. Let the Brits take over that whole show. You know, the guys who started it. Lawrence of Arabia and all that.

America: The Exceptional Nation

Decrying "exceptionalist" as in "spoiled brat" is not the same as claiming someone or something is exceptional. Maybe it is, we don't know yet. Exceptionally bad smelling? Exceptionally expensive? So many dimensions exist.

So for a segment here, if only to be contrarian (we have that right), I would argue for other reasons, let's yak about in what ways "America" (so much to say) is indeed "exceptional" (which it is). 

One thing that's easy to observe is: a lot of the people who came here were underdogs, fighting some establishment back home and ending up with the short end of the stick, as some say. They then had to risk everything to start over here in the New World. And once they got here, they wanted one thing: revenge.

A lot of new Americans came here with a chip on their shoulder.

OK, I'm being a little facetious, but America's shores do harbor a lot of ethnicities within which "getting back" at whomever, is high on the agenda. 

Given how America is a mighty place, and its control rooms appear open to anyone able to pay to play, why not seize those amazing military assets and extract from those enemies back home the price they deserve to pay (something high, obviously)? I mean, it's an obvious agenda to pursue.

Examples come piling in: refugee Gulenists wanted by Turkish authorities; refugee Falun Gongists seeking revenge against Xi, Ukes who hate Russkies, Russkies who hate Ukes, back and forth like that a million times. 

They each want to rule the world, or at least get Americans to rally around their cause. Obviously I skipped over more obvious examples. The list goes on and on.

I think in that sense America is indeed exceptional. A huge number of its citizens came here with axes to grind, scores to settle, plans to get even. 

For many, it was a maybe simple story of succeeding at the personal level, in spite of all odds, and having news get back home that so-and-so was no small town idiot after all. These stories are often heartwarming. For others, the story is more civilizational, about "the people" (or "pueblo") more generally.

Critics who want to play counterpoint will insist we remember all the people already here, before the floodgates were opened to colonization, by the invention of mass ocean going vessels. 

The Mayflower was no Carnival cruise ship, we know that, but it was at least a step in that direction. People indulging in "religious convictions" could finally afford to book passage, and not have to help with crewing the ship or memorizing constellations (considered a pagan fixation by many).

True, Turtle Island was already festooned with stellar cultures, spread out and not forced into interpersonal violence on the scale of say Napoleon's people. Europe was far more densely populated, had more lethal weaponry, and exploited horses. The "Indians" had a lot to learn.

Napoleon decided to sell much of America to those Washington, DC people (a revolutionary avantgard), because he needed his troops to stay in the fight for the long haul. He needed to pay their salaries. 

The Louisiana Purchase helped keep his struggling Empire going against England's. Not so long before, the USA had fought the same foe. The USA kept expanding west, fighting over slavery as it did so, with the industrial revolution more on the side of the Quakers in the long run.

Nothing regarding America's exceptional nature, as a platform for diaspora nations to consolidate and pass on culture, is contradicted by its original network nations, going back to Inca, Mayan, and Aztec to name a few -- the people we tend to call "Hispanic" today, for lack of a more intelligent word.

My narrative is more designed to switch attention from "melting pot" shibboleths (which I also use) and point out how "preserving ethnicity" was never an "unAmerican" goal. 

You're allowed to keep practicing those rituals and rites, whatever they may be, and public schooling is not about countermanding your family's values on that score, as long as you don't interfere with the rights of others to perform otherwise, ritualistically and/or costume-wise (cosmetics, jewelry... we don't all share the same tastes, all right?  Welcome to Walmart). 

Explaining my Workflow: from 2D to 3D

:: reintroducing myself on X... ::

:: ... as a political cartoonist ::

Late August Weekend

So what was my weekend like? As you know, I like to study, and that includes adventures into the environment, such as taking Springwater Corridor to Sellwood and over the bicycle bridge to the Sellwood-Tacoma Max station. Ride Orange Line back to OMSI stop, transfer to FX2 to within blocks from home. That's work-study time.

On Sunday it was walk by Terry (ISEPP prez) and a consultant working on finding homes for left behind office furniture and supplies. I gather the John C. Lilly group has moved to other digs. Onward to Stark Street Meetinghouse (formerly ESI, before that Jantzen) where the testimony was about "sangha" (community) -- although no one actually used that Buddhist word (but many were maybe thinking it, given our demographics (I know I was)).

That night I watched Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, believe it or not for the first time, although having seen clips over the years, it felt familiar in places. I'd checked Movie Madness for it before, and imagined it was rented out, not realizing their Kubrick shelf wrapped around and down. I'm illiterate in so many dimensions I've lost count. Talked with fam through Verizon on my iPhone.

At Quakers, I met up with Dr. Carl Abbott over snacks and thanked him for his excellent presentation on Portland history for Humanists of Greater Portland (HGP), to which I'd been party over Zoom (not the first time I'd caught one of his talks). Urban Studies, PSU. I caught up with Leslie, back from California. 

Also, Megge suggested I join up with Peace & Justice (as it's now called -- did I get that right?). Quakers revolve through a finite set of management committees, learning to see a shared business from the inside, from many angles. Good experience building social and supervisory skills.

I'm just hitting some of the highlights. Weekends don't stand out that much at the moment. I do have a work schedule in the queue, with Clarusway again, but that's always contingent on other outcomes, per some cosmic Gantt chart I'm not privy to.

Speaking of Clarusway, this morning (Monday) I posted to edu-sig, a Python org Mailman group of longstanding, regarding digital roots (or "indigs" as some've called them).

Hawthorne Street Fair!  Slides above.

Posting From Cyberia

We'd like to get it to the point where arsonists in their bunkers, trying to start conflagrations, get treated more as psychiatric patients than as so-called "world leaders". This has to do with my Spaceship Earth imagery (inherited) morphing into Global University (GU) imagery, meaning "teaching hospital" and a lot of  psy-stuff. 

Faculty is working on curricula that turn out students with higher quotients in whatever respects higher quotients are needed. Perhaps we're sufficiently intelligent but insufficiently developed in other directions. What's our consistency score? 

Yes, I'm back to trucking and dirty jobs. The path to a PhD is through extensive practice with toolsets and skillsets. The medical doctor shares a lot of these same "I can learn anything" traits, which leads to some percentage crashing their single or even twin engine planes ("Too Gung Ho" on the tombstone).

Think of it though: to swap long haul driving work with a counterpart, to ride as a sidekick, to take in the language and customs and bring that back. Then study more if you want to and join that same fleet as a driver next time, and repeat. 

Airline pilots know what I mean. There's that inner circle that flies in and out of Hong Kong, or Rangoon or whatever (I had a bouncy ride into Rangoon once, as a passenger, on a DC3 or one of those).

The yahoos in their bunkers, trying to start wars, are already in rubber room approximators, so we shift attention to curbing enthusiasm for short term fireworks. Crushing obsolete institutions is actually a more rewarding exercise, and outward war as we know it has been seeing sunset for quite awhile now. 

We still fight psychologically. That's actually a more even playing field, and we can get back to Victorian values like "fairness" as we talk about it in sports. You know: honor. 

Just blasting zoomorphic creatures from an Apache helicopter is better shifted to simulator, to computer game. Acted out, it's schizo nutso, by horror film Poindexters, except not confined to film.

I've always been a fan of the global network at the city mayor level. Mayors meet and discuss issues. I'm told Portland has gotten better an learning from others, versus letting its earlier fame and glory go to its head. Then came a fall. 

But saying the fall of Portland was independent of seismic shifts shaking up the collective psyche more generally would be like wearing blinders, perhaps intentionally (confining attention to the "Markov blanket" is a systems technique). 

Portland might be talking to Shiraz for all I know (I don't claim to be privy to all that mayoral type chatter).

Denizens of Cyberia, enjoying more overview than ever before in history, have an angle on the arsonists now that everything's out in the open. 

Transparency in government was given lip service as an ideal, but now that we approach a bar that leaves behind legacy media, showing it from the back side (in the rear view mirror), the political process snaps into clearer focus. 

Those who would profit from more slaughter on the battlefield are filmed hyping slaughter to their stakeholders, in pure Hunger Games fashion. Doctors without borders see how capitalism can make you cuckoo, in addition to highly paid. 

However shooting mental patients was never considered much of a cure outside of quack circles, wherein the sickly witch hunters seek scapegoats for bounty (or merely mob approval). The first step is to disconnect psychopaths from their agentic dashboards, such as by unplugging the latter.

There's nothing cowardly about not jumping in the cage with the rabid dog and having it out. For what purpose would one do that? 

Let the dog rage at the cage itself, and think about euthanasia as a kind of putting to rest some core concerns, such as where do we have to draw the borders ultimately. Virtual states have boundaries too, if not contiguous.  

The reputed ignorance, of Americans, of political geography, might turn out to be a good thing, as we go soft focus on these older maps. The global university comes with new floorplans.

Contra Insanity

A Last Straw

:: before ::

In some ways, Working Out would make more sense here, in BizMo Diaries, as it's about physical body stuff, and the "business mobile" (peripatetic action studio) works for a stand-in, metaphor-wise. 

Likewise, this post, about Cybernetics, would make more sense in Control Room, just going by the relevant memes i.e. a "control room" is like a "bridge" or place to make things happen. Another type of "action studio" really (what isn't?), but relatively stationary.

Let's now turn to this meme of "last straw", which is also, presumably, the one which broke that poor camel's back. The camel was already laden with straw, one imagines, and was holding up. But that one last straw proved the tipping point and, snap, the camel's back lost structural integrity.

We tend to empathize with the camel, or in any case, if a beast of burden, now we have no animal to bear our load. Like a car broken down by the side of the road, the connotations are mostly negative, in the direction of increasing entropy. May the tow truck make it all better.

But what about critical "last straws" that, when added, open doors or otherwise lead to positive developments. What's the English language opposite of "catastrophe" and if none comes to mind, isn't that a symptom of something, about English. I've heard "benestrophe" suggested. I must've already added it to my dictionary, as so far my spell checker hasn't complained.

"To cyber" means "to steer" i.e. "cybering" is a matter of rotating a rudder, thereby repointing the craft. That may sound like a simple process but sometimes so much inertia is involved that even the rudder needs a rudder, which reminds us which principle (leverage) is involved.

Let's say you turn hard to starboard or port, and manage to miss the iceberg this time, because you had better intelligence ahead of time. You had more time to react. 

Optimal responses may require cool headed thinking, and lots of it, however if that time is not now, then the usual strategy is to substitute a reflex as a next best reaction, a proxy action, an approximation, perhaps not well-thought out, but at least in the repertoire.

If you escape catastrophe, that in itself is a benestrophe. In ages past, the king or queen might have a monument, perhaps an entire church or temple, in gratitude to whatever generalized principles allowed for a freakishly and unexpectedly positive outcome, what we call "a miracle" in the vernacular.

However, we need to remain open minded with regard to even more positive positives, which are not about surmounting the relatively low bar of narrowly avoiding tragedy. These high bar events may be likewise triggered by feather-light tiny deltas, fourth derivative actions, as it were, as insignificant as the fluttering wings of a butterfly.

SimCity Thinking

I have to admit my admiration for Uber's clever follow-up offer after my finally getting around to using their app and service:  free meal delivered on us, $45 value; then a week later: $25 if you use it now. The sight of a shrinking asset provokes action, although in my case I'm resistant, and it helps that if I follow their offer I'm back in Atlanta (which I'm not, at the moment). 

I think a lot about the delivery economy but maybe not with enough inputs, as I'm not a business consultant so much as a skills trainer in a working class ecosystem. I'll show you how pandas will give your data visualizations that professional zing that makes your cubicle a hub in whatever network you're in. I've never worked for Amazon directly, although my code school was subsidized by its outreach programs that summer, as I recall.

Anyway, the idea of fleets of flexibly routed vans delivering in high volume, versus browsers showing up in parking lots in private cars, leaves me thinking we're likely economizing in shrinking the mall culture. Yes, the web took the place of storefronts in large degree. That's ephemeralization at work, meaning as a species we're under pressure to economize, even when we'd prefer to make a lifestyle more permanent.

Derek and I were in agreement, in recent living room conversation, that better infrastructure, extending camping, for a nomadic lifestyle, perhaps on wheels, as a multimodal adventurer or whatever, would answer a need in some of our subcultures to "live outdoors" in some essential way. Dense urban living is too claustrophobic for them, or too stationary. 

A nomadic lifestyle doesn't have to mean in a tent. A yurt with ample floor space in some hexagonal grid pattern (random lake shaped) would be an improvement over a phone booth shaped tiny house in my view. Electric ATVs come to mind. You might book a yurt for some months or weeks and move on to a next one, with variations in make and model.

A lot of boomers hope to retire to a mildly active lifestyle, recreational in nature, like in Florida. 

I had the privilege of retiring in my teens, while going to high school while based in a mobile home park for retirees. The homeowner association might've frowned on our extended stay (me and my sister) which is why mom flew back to Bradenton and moved us into a roach motel (not that the trailer -- er mobile home -- didn't have "palmetto bugs"). 

Indeed, absent Yurt Villages (high tech), the Florida option still seems a good deal, not that I'm the expert or share that plan for myself. Like I said: been there done that. I'm not dissing that lifestyle, which is pretty comfortable I admit, but I'd use my stays in that trailer (I'd be back) to reinvent myself, perhaps into an airport manager (that book was interesting but I wasn't sure how to break in).

I ended up finishing high school in Manila, dad having scored a gig with UNDP. We had UN passports for the whole family. I proudly display a UN flag as part of my living room decor to this day. I also keep flags of Bhutan, Lesotho, and Republic of South Africa, right here on my desk; places I've come to feel some allegiance to and fondness for, in addition to these various states in North America (Oregon being my home base nowadays -- I'd like to explore them more, Birmingham, Alabama was fun).

Another city older folks retire to is Las Vegas, which markets itself as a destination for recreational living in general. The new MSG Sphere is open, and showing Grateful Dead, a live performance with giant screen backup. I talk about that in this blog post (in my philosophy blog), which is actually a YouTube.

Sharing in Meeting

I remember standing up in Meeting once, a big Meeting in Philadelphia, where AFSC corporation members and directors had convened, and sharing something philosophical-sounding, and also arguably dualistic. "The bodies" I was saying "are innocent of any wrongdoing, yet it's them that we punish".

My point was that of George Fox when he said you can't kill the devil with a gun or a sword or something to that effect. Ideologies circulate like viruses, independently of the animal bodies they haunt (infect, control). To counter an ideology effectively should not involve torturing the animals (the human animals) that express this ideology. 

My view is somewhat that of medical science and its practitioners who take the Hippocratic Oath (do they do that anymore?). Treating human bodies is distinct from psychotherapy although they're intertwined. An anxious psyche is more likely to run a body into the ground by overdosing it with stress hormones. How mind and body interweave is the kind of problem Oliver Sacks liked to study.

The use of physical torture, such as by bombing and/or deliberately starving, is an expression of our weakness in the psychological realm. We have less success than we would like countering an ideology, and so take up arms against it, and attack its adherents (the infected, the blessed). Outward war, according to Quakerism, is somewhat beside the point, as what we're really trying to accomplish is metaphysical (psychological), not physical (physiological).

"Don't blame the meat puppets for crazy beliefs and the strings they pull" might be another way of saying it, "but do work on curing craziness by inward means". In Quaker jargon, "inward" is versus "outward". "Inward" is the world of psychological modeling and processing. "Outward" is the world of sticks and stones and broken bones.

Outward wars are misplaced (in the sense of inept) attempts to avoid dealing more directly with inward wars.

Bat Cave

Does Radio Octopus only play tracks of creature noises? I just tuned in for the first time. Now we're on to bird sounds with piano. Somewhere in France.

I found myself explaining, to a newcomer at our Solstice Gathering, how Wanderers, in my book, includes the nonhumans. I'm not saying all of them. I circled Keiko in particular, better known as Willy.

After a morning "about town" I'm in my "bat cave" for the most part, occasionally bouncing upstairs to use the office. The outside temperature is down to 92 degrees Fahrenheit, was 98 earlier.

I just heard from Kerry Butson, after so many years since our co-worker days. She's in Illinois. We were both employees of a code school in California, she before me. I was brought in by Steve Holden, author of their Python course.

Since those days, I've continued to work in Python. Just today I was hacking on my Google slides about Quadrays, an XYZ-like coordinate system. I've been introducing them to UC Davis.

Dr. DiNucci gifted me with an air conditioner last year, when the original customer discovered she was disallowed such equipment by her Homeowner Association. She surrendered the unit in disgust and gave it to David to give away. It ended up in my living room.

A lot of Portlanders have traditionally gone without air conditioning, preferring to tough it out through the few truly hot days every summer. I was in that category until life made it really easy to add this perk.  Central air for the whole house would make the upstairs more habitable. The ball python doesn't seem to mind the status quo.

From my bat cave, I monitor local and global conditions. I also network and telecommute. The "bat mobile" in the driveway has proved serviceable lately.

Independence Day 2024

We (me 'n my dog) left Portland pretty early, like at 5:30 AM, as I was scheduled to pick up Uncle Bill (age 99) and remembered nightmarish traffic on I-5 on Thanksgivings. 

This drive was a breeze, both going and returning the next day. 

Since I arrived in Seattle plenty early, with time to kill, I drove down the steep streets to Pike Street Market and walked Sydney around amidst other tourists. The place was hopping. The waterfront now hosts a Ferris wheel. Is that permanent?

I really enjoyed my time with the relatives, even if Urners are an obscure branch of the Hancock family by now, so it's not like I was recognized by all or vice versa. That's part of the fun of large family gatherings.

Barb's dad was one of my grandmother Esther's brothers, Esther Person being my dad's mom. Barbara has a beautiful family, and modest, well-appointed lakeside home.

I got to overnight with Elise and Les, some of my oldest friends and Sydney's previous caretakers.

Alano House

Brand loyalty is what to encourage between times of buying and/or upgrading. You're just using, and thinking ahead. Advertising to this group involves confirmation and affirmation for making the right choice. You're already the proud owner of brand X and appreciating its benefits. 

Your neighbors eye you with jealousy, that productive capitalist form of jealousy that lets you go out and buy, upgrade to keep up, keep up with club membership, where "club" is but shorthand for whatever "inner circle".

A club I've broken into lately is that of the given up drinking, meaning alcohol of course. A meandering path to this topic, in my living room recently, was via the musician Jimmy Lott, who used to live two doors down from me. He sang at the Alano House that time, and I wanted to know if "Alano" was a person or what. Just a lowkey way of referring to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), an abbreviation one could say, and other towns have 'em.

The Alano House I was thinking of is a specific mansion, huge, in NW Portland. We got it located on Google Street Views and so on. I could study the website and research my questions, looking for answers.

Back to affirmation as a genre: once you're off the stuff awhile and want free reinforcement, YouTube has any number of motivational tapes (I'll call 'em tapes sometimes, meaning recordings, no tape in sight) outlining the temptations, slippery slopes and so on, regarding life in general.  That's the best time to take in Jordan Peterson, when you've already made your bed so to speak.

Portland's Alano House features in that movie about Callahan by Gus Van Sant and starring Joaquin Phoenix.

My own path was not through AA, but from throttling back on beer and then seeing the future through medical imaging, long a component in my profession of computer programming around hospitals a lot. I took a look in the mirror and decided I could turn off that spigot. That doesn't make me a drug free specimen however. I'm still pretty heavily into caffeine for example. 

I'm not preachy unto others for the most part, as I'm not on the motivational speaker circuit, at least not in that sense. I'm fine with being around drinking and smoking (cigs, pipes, cigars) and still have a partially stocked bar. Help yourself to any cold beers you find. They're all for my guests. I don't regret my past addiction to Oregon IPAs and great Chard and Pinot wines.

All American

What many Russians are officially proposing is a narrative wherein Ukraine's eastern-most provinces (oblasts) voted themselves out of the Ukrainian federation, joining Crimea in affiliating with the Russian Federation instead. 

It's as if eastern Oregon decided to join Idaho. We have some Oregonians advocating for that to happen.

Some ethnicities, including many with legal backgrounds, did not recognize these referenda as legit and so never bought into the idea that Russia then moved to defend its new territories and their denizens against aggressive Ukrainians in charge of the Pentagon and other WDC circuitry. 

Israelis and Ukes vie over the cadaver of Uncle Sam, feeding off his former legitimacy. Kinda gross, let's admit. Their nations are as dead as all of them. The United Nations is by now a corpse show.

Uncle Sam was already bankrupt and extinct in the 1980s but was needed by the Grunch money makers for bailout and legitimizing purposes, so they used clever funeral parlor tactics to prop him up. We've since enjoyed a series of impotus figureheads and a general dumbing down of the public to a more Planet of the Apes level status quo (an idiocracy, some called it).

The Russkies feel they have no one legit to talk with, about bringing an end to the carnage. They need counterparts but the Grunch doesn't have any diplomats to speak of, just (a) spin doctors (like me), (b) posers in fancy pant suits with lapel flags, and (c) chatbots repeating talking points.

Peter Sloterdijk, the German language philosopher, has identified "foaming" as the breakup of broad consensus echo chambers into much tinier bubbles. Broadcasting became narrowcasting. Yet we still need a consensus reality (CR) to gain traction within. A reliable physics engine (P) may not be enough, absent coherent programming (M). U ⋈ MP.

My Americans don't necessarily buy that "space is 3D" either, just to show y'all how much fragmentation has occurred. If you're in one of those mythical top schools, you probably know what I mean. You've been doing some homework maybe.

But then don't we value diversity? 

Wasn't North America originally seen as humanity's best hope for a shared "live and let live" zone?  Indeed. 

That's why we feel safe here, even with the deep state engulfing us and tracking our twisty turns. We're one of those elites, the kind with privileges. We're quite comfortable rubbing shoulders with the so-called powerful.

And no, that doesn't make us "Caucasians" (snicker) or Ivy League (even if I personally went to Princeton, Class of 1980 -- my classmates were diversely divergent).  We're just another literate group that does its homework and values debate. We're very American in our values, maybe more so than you are? Let's argue about it why not?

Random Thoughts

I bought a copy of Trevor's newest, Great Man Theory. I like his punchy style and his willingness to treat myth and history more or less on an equal footing. He's noting the skeptics along the way, tracing the history of the idea itself. 

I learned a ton about Hercules, and of course Jesus figures in, how could he not.

One of those skeptics, I'd say, is Alexander Sokurov. His famous trilogy features Lenin, Hitler (Adi), and Hirohito. I just took in the last two this weekend. 

He feels the "greats" get projected onto the big (shared) screen by a collective semi-unconscious with a drive to externalize some representation of "the commander in chief" or "the emperor". 

The greats themselves are more ordinary people tasked with stepping into semi-publicly constructed roles. A lot of randomness enters in as they ad lib the part, says director Sokurov.

The hunters (as in treasure hunters) think the clues were pretty good this year, with their Oregon Trail theme. Barlow's route, over the shoulder of Mt. Hood, for which Barlow charged toll, featured a 60 degree grade in one section. Wagons had to be winched down the slope. 

Nowadays, a section of Hwy 26, more like six degrees steep (note the runaway truck ramp), shadows that infamous place of passage, and is where the treasure was hidden. 

The clues, one a day, aim to prompt human intelligence (HI), however I'm sure many hunters tried to enlist help from AI (do lowly search engines count?). The humans certainly put their heads together online, thinking out loud about the clues. My friend Dr. D. is an MVP contributor to this group process.

OK LLM people, here's my question: I really liked learning the literal meaning of "cliche", a typesetter's jargon for phrases used so often it saved time to just keep them in type. Templates. Swap in a few names to localize the more global. "Boilerplate" is another related word.

But how long might a cliche be? Don't we want to extract some of those longer strands we always re-encounter, such as how envisioning "four dimensional objects" is muy dificil. That's a cliche in our culture, that the "dimension ladder" likewise defines a state-approved meritocracy and even spirituality.

Only one or two people have ever attained the ability to visualize hyper-solids as simply and naturally as we ordinary mortals visualize solids; but a certain facility in that direction may be acquired by contemplating the analogy between one and two dimensions, then two and three, and so (by a kind of extrapolation) three to four. [H.S.M Coxeter, Regular Polytopes, Dover edition, pg. 119].

If you spend a lot of time in the library, you realize this phenomenon of "echo chambers" such as we encounter in social media, is likewise that of "lineages". Within a lineage, or school of thought, the same cliches (or call them dogmas in some cases) get recited over and over, with predictable segues to subsequent topics.

The whole of Abbott's Flatland deserves (and gets) a lot of weight in any corpus deemed to be about the LLM idea itself, because of Linear Algebra and its core apparatus: the hypercross (n mutual orthogonals). 

With word2vec and doc2vec, we're mapping out what follows what, in terms of cliches of varying scope, many of them containers for more cliches inside, in a fractal pattern created by The Corpus itself.

The mystical superpowers that go with opening one's inner eye and "seeing in 4D" (or higher) are legendary in hypercross circles, and a basis for some mathematicians' professional pride (some call it narcissism). 

Those inclined to join a priesthood first need to find a ladder, as upward progress towards Illumination that can't be objectively measured, much less recognized and respected, is unsatisfactory. The whole point is to be looked up to based on one's merits. Think of badges.

"The ability to think in higher dimensions" is a sought-after, time-tested scouting badge as it means you'll have that think tanker's sense of a shared "phase space" -- which might as well be a "phaser space" the way some play in it. The terrain is clearly more nuanced than XYZ or lat/long + altitude.

Lower dimensional = too coarse for comfort. 

I see hope for diplomacy yet. If you want fewer boors in the room, keep to the invisible frequencies (which may be "dimensions" in some model). We're at peace with one another in our own cliquey inner circles (partially overlapping). Don't lay these endless wars at our doors, unless, that is, you wish them extinguished.

Shifting focus:

What more "meta" -- in the sense of "abstract" -- word meaning have we, than that of experience?

Think about it: what is such a word meant not to cover?  

"Experience" is not a word you learn right away and despite almost everyone agreeing on the reality of prenatal experience, beyond such broad agreement, there's not much unpacking of that reality. 

Except, that is, in some rarified branch of speculative psychology or wisdom tradition.  

Or perhaps in meditation exercises for those seeking an experience of extreme regression -- or "rebirthing" as some call it.

Event is just as bad, in the sense of being so abstract and general as to have almost unlimited scope. 

The idea that experience consists of energy events, happenings inside scenarios, has some appeal in the cinematic sense. Frames of film, discrete deltas, register any action the camera sees. 

Frames of action. Action per time. Is this Hollywood style movie-making (lights, camera...) or simply physics (... action!)? E = mvv = mvd/t (Newtonian dimensional analysis).

You'll get a lot of people righteously claiming their cognitive frameworks are "experience-based" as if anything could sound less grounded, more full of fuzz and buzz. What irony.

For sure that's a tension, in terms of marketing, as the reality of an "experienced-based curriculum" (e.g. First Person Physics) may well be positively palpable vs-a-vs some subject-denying observer-erasing "god's eye view" or other form of unawareness.

Have your diplomats (truckers?) speak from personal experience, about events they participated in, versus always reciting "talking points" handed to them by handlers. A sensitive and nuanced intuition is not in need of ham-handed directives from the know-it-alls presumably in charge.

Schismatics

Schismatics: the (perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek?) study and description of the process of forming schism, and is often taken up in the course of religious studies.

Inevitably, as a school broadens to include a more diverse set of participants, among students, faculty, admin and crew, dividing lines begin to appear, logical groupings. In a healthy expected growth pattern, cell division, in terms of function, not just number, is no threat. Monoculture is closer to the antithesis of growth and form. However at the more metaphysical level, a split may be experienced as a schism and the school itself has to divide, which may feel painful on some level. The school was maybe not designed with mitosis in mind.

Along those lines, there’s a deus ex machina sect that preaches our ultimate rescue, or the possibility thereof, by ETs, off-worlders with the kinds of magic we could use. Within this sect, a subgroup believes the “ETs” aren’t from off planet, but have been indigenous since long before humanity emerged. 

For example, when UAPs dart to and fro across the screen, violating all known laws of physics assuming a mass anything like that size would connote, at that distance, some faculty are excited to realize that all our energy concerns as a species might be satisfied with new physics like theirs. The fork in the road then becomes: do we learn from them directly, or use them for inspiration (they’re not talking) and develop the new physics on our own, perhaps clandestinely?

A different sect considers it irresponsible to put any eggs in the UAP basket. If the ETs were planning to assist or attack in a big way, why haven’t they done it by now? Some would say they’re helping, others that such a war is underway. These are differences in cosmology. One sect’s Hollywood fantasy is another sect’s daily reality, actively inferred by their models.

Such a schism occurred amongst those tracking R. Buckminsterfullerene Fuller while alive. His Synergetics was open to interpretation, and with Bucky himself out of the picture, a more anything goes approach could be tested. The cannibalization of Synergetics could commence. I’m guilty of it too, in treating the concentric hierarchy, with jitterbug and other dynamism, like the beating heart of the matter, with the BEAST modules then making it hard core.

I’m one of those who thinking investing in UAP technology, in the sense of getting investors to pay research costs, is not alignment with Fuller’s core program, and that Synergetics is not the new physics for abundant free energy from a zero point, as some Bucky fans proclaim. They’re in a different school of thought from mine, and I often point out that the Synergetics Dictionary has no entry under “UFO” as “UAPs” were then called.

Glorious Gas Town

Yes, that's a reference to Mad Max. Our party just saw the Furiosa movie. I was glad to see both Alex (visiting Portland) and Alexia (back from her Alaska cruise). And of course Dr. D., bouncing back from his latest First Person Physics adventure.

We won't be saying "goodbye" to the whole idea of fossil fuels any time soon, but we do see a change in emphasis, towards the renewables. You don't say goodbye when the emotions in charge are resentment and anger. Fossil fuels will finally fade amidst a celebration of their golden ages, and even then it won't be gone. We'll be the new fossils.

My science fiction, woven throughout the hypertext of Martian Math, features a long under-ocean chapter for the human species. I don't know what that will look like exactly. Will we bifurcate into a water-breathing species? Why bother, when we have scuba (my sport of choice)?  

I know that high and low pressures and temperatures shape both our maritime and aerospace technologies. They're related. Light is also an issue. But then we have a cave dwelling past, some of us, as humans. Piping in light, using shafts and mirrors, is not a new idea, plus now we have bulbs.

Some habitats require what we might call umbilical cords, however slender. Taking refuge down a mineshaft is not a solution when the enemy simply needs to close off the entrance, entrapping the defenders. Siege is easy. Likewise if one is deep in some ocean cavern, piping in sunlight, fresh water, fresh air. If one has reason to expect vandalism, ala NS2...

We're not yet in a chapter where long umbilical cords are practical. People just don't yet trust one another enough. A colony on Mars is impractical as long as the political scene is such that Earth might lose its ability to marshall sufficient resources, both physically and metaphysically. They might get a Mars colony going, but not have the wherewithal to keep it going. Ditto under ocean colonies, but these folks would likely have more opportunities to outlive these experiments.

Perhaps humans fear that if they get along with themselves too well, that the future will be insufficiently challenging. In my view there's no danger of that. It's more like humans will never tackle certain challenges until they get their house in better order. The species is currently too dysfunctional to attempt many of its one day likely gigs. That's OK. Doing everything all at once was never going to be practical. Humans live on a geological time scale.

Finding the Grooves

What have I contributed to the "great AI debates" thus far, and how to measure? 

Is "AI debates" catching on as a meme? 

I've stressed "mirroring" (as in "chatbots mirror an educated layman's prose"), and going forward I plan to use the word "groove" a lot more, a synonym for "rut" in a space of reduced dimensions.

In Active Inference, the quick rejoinder, that we're open to surprisingly beneficial developments in the field, is perhaps a subclass of "mistake mystique". 

We really want the shortcomings in our models to be pointed out, and by definition we have trouble seeing those from the inside. 

Those who claim to self-generate all these exotic perspectives on themselves are likely in the self-fooling business. You need others to be the others.

This defensive reflex has to do with our loss function, in the sense of backpropagation (ML jargon), being about measuring "free energy" as what to minimize, in favor of precision, accuracy, less surprise, less entropy. 

To dampen "freedom" and "surprise" as a matter of ontological bias, as what to minimize, results in predictable compensatory actions, per our dynamical equilibrium model. We mean to minimize the energy 

A pre-trained chatbot is looking to navigate the grooves in human discourse in a way that proves a next move is almost completely context determined. When we picture a tree of possibilities, we see how it gets out of hand unless vigilantly pruned, which means ruling out a lot more than we rule in. 

We seek a "straight and narrow" if only because we're called upon to exercise our executive functions. Horizons broaden when the pressure to "do something" is relatively less.

I've written before how in geekdom we relish languid relaxation mode over shouting instructions, because when everything is under control, shouted instructions are for the most part unnecessary. Players will have internalized what needs to be done and will have set about doing it, perhaps in tight collaboration, but without bottlenecking through some singularity. 

There's no single pipeline or narrative through the content, and where one critical path falls behind, the algorithm will find a new one, perhaps by changing the goals (hey, goals change). 

New grooves form, old ones fade. The valleys may become deeper, the ridges between them higher.

I've been a Sophia-basher in some ways, not buying her (its) pretensions to AGI-hood. Her performances are scripted and her getting citizenship in a country, before Palestinians could, speaks volumes regarding how the billionaire class hoodwinks the less well-educated.

Closing the Gap

One of my chief interests, starting early (elementary school), has been computer programming. 

After attending university as an undergrad, my first job out of college was that of high school teacher, of maths in particular although I taught some other subjects. 

This was a small, private Catholic school and faculty capable of teaching multiple subjects were given  opportunities to do so. Having just come through Princeton, and being one of the few males in a school for women, the nuns in charge could see my utility. I brought some of the latest thinking into the mix. My international upbringing was a plus also.

Much of that "latest thinking" with regard to my job as mathematics teacher, had to do with these programming languages. APL by Kenneth Iverson had taken the Princeton campus by storm, in the form of scattered terminals any student could use, regardless of what courses she or he was taking.

Within weeks of moving into Princeton Inn, I was programming battleship in APL and reading the code, character by character, to my friend Glenn Baker, from my cohort in the Philippines, then at Hampshire (later Brown).

If you've ever touched APL, you know how mathy it is. Wouldn't opening doors in computer world make maths all that much more relevant?  Students kept asking "why are we learning this?" whereas programming had its obvious applications. 

Also, the REPL (interactive command line) could give immediate feedback and invited simply playing around, chatting by sending math expressions to an interpreter. 

So yeah, dialing back to the early 1980s, it was very clear then, as it is now, that the curriculum would be changing. Seymour Papert introduced Logo and turtle graphics. Alan Kay introduced Squeak. Children and teachers of children had become the preferred audience for many genius innovations.

Fast forward and we're finding the merger is much further along. Programmers are very "type aware" whether object oriented or functional. They tolerate abstractions in coding languages, as a path towards generality and therefore code reusability. 

On the maths side: Category Theory. The mere existence of this bridge gets the zipper started, as it were, such that the two flaps (computer science and math world) come together as one.

However, CT is not for everyone and that's where more right brain bridges come in. We have our experiments with new kinds of prose in the 1900s, ala Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Writers discovered it was both OK and relevant to push the envelope, in terms of what language, the printed word especially (with embedded figures), might accomplish.

One of those prose experiments, RBF's Synergetics, opened geometrical information to experienced readers in the humanities. They wouldn't have to detour as much, into abstract linear algebra. The C.P. Snow chasm (the opening divide between different thinking styles) was countered within the realm of pattern languages.

Unfortunately, I don't think Princeton itself was able to keep up, and schools in general started falling by the wayside, as the most effective teachers came to the foreground in the University of Cyberia (a made up name signifying internet space), including from the ranks of pre-existing academies (e.g. from MIT) that contributed to the growing stash of open courseware.

We're still in this era, of Global U convergence, with CT and Synergetics both worthy entry points if you're of a comprehensivist (polymathic) bent. I recommend exploring some of the recent Codas I've been working on with the TrimTab group.

Citizen Diplomacy

The UN declaration on human rights is a bold piece of literature, however "citizenship" as a concept has failed to extend to a critical number, which explains why we keep looking for newer solutions. 

I keep hearing that diplomacy is not happening amongst the principals but that's begging the question of who the principals are. High profile celebs, other influencer talking heads, are galvanizing the public to track the issues, and the more the official diplomatic class refuses to engage, the less its influence, a tautology.

In global university terms, "diploma" and "diplomat" are closely related in that it takes rhetorical skills to stay in the ring without blowing one's top, losing one's cool or whatever the lingo. Judges take a dim view of undisciplined lollygagging. The well-trained debater is not so easily thrown off balance.

You'll have seen in these blog posts how teams could be fielded and convoyed without communicating tyrannical messages. A traveling circus is not a threat, except maybe unaware parents in sleepy towns don't know how strongly junior dreams of growing wings. The folklore around traveling circuses does tend to get ugly where abduction is concerned.

Yes, I'm talking about the trucker teams able to fly around the world and try out different road systems, sometimes always working for the same company, other times within a network of affiliates. The wrinkle is the academic credit that potentially goes with becoming a citizen diplomat. So many affordances!

The trucker, any attributes (such as pronouns) is modeled within a personal workspace (PWS) within GST. If you want a GST primer, I've got a few pithy pages at Grunch.net (a domain), or just Google it. Try "Kenneth Boulding" as a search term. It's a kind of updated Economics, a source of healthy competition for other econ models.

I'm not suggesting that only the trucker community is engaged in cross-border diplomacy, not to mention paperwork. These long haulers do have a natural edge though, when it comes to having access, by necessity, to the world's infrastructure.  We're not about to lose the trucking angle.