Quadrays History

This account will be neither exhaustive nor objective in that I’m only able to define a puzzle piece within the limitations of my scope. I’ll say up front, though, that I cop to “running with them” in that US American football sense of heading for a touchdown, once in possession.

Here’s the gist of it: when Synergetics came out in two volumes, Macmillan the publisher, a lot of intrigued readers flocked to it, as many do to this day. They’d pick up on the critique of XYZ i.e. overly rectilinear thinking, but those already steeped in XYZ lore were seeing nothing number crunchy enough to take its place. Any computer graphics involving the so-called IVM (octet-truss or CCP by other accounts) would have to use XYZ coordinates to specify it. QED. Case closed. Synergetics is bunk.

Enter Clifford Nelson. He’d served in the US military and could program in ADA, the US DoD language named for Ada Byron (aka Countess Lovelace), who I introduce in my Graph Theory slide deck. She’s considered the first computer programmer, a title I defend. She lived in the first half of the 1800s, as a contemporary of another high caliber intellectual: Margaret Fuller. Margaret’s grand nephew was the author of those Synergetics books I’ve mentioned.

In my estimation, Clifford was a huge Bucky fan, as am I, and he wanted to fill this gap in Synergetics by retroactively retrofitting it with a non-XYZ alternative apparatus. He came up with something, coded it in ADA, and promulgated it as Synergetics Coordinates, almost as if Fuller himself had designed this new gizmo.

When I encountered Nelson’s work, I was already steeped in yet another alternative: Quadray Coordinates. This is back in the 1990s. Instead of ADA, Gerald was using Pascal, I was using Python and Visual FoxPro, and we were following along with David Chako, who had introduced us to Quadrays on what we called Syn-L, a listserv. I’m not sure to what extent the archives would be recoverable. John Brawley (different from John Braley) was on the list as well. David Koski joined us briefly.

I believe I was using Eudora on Windows as my email client back in those days. 

Somewhere in there, Darrel Jarmusch made himself known to us as the true inventor of the Quadrays and he had the web pages to prove it.

We weren’t really focused on any priority struggles regarding Quadrays though. Seeing their utility vs-a-vs Synergetics, I was doing essentially the same thing Clifford Nelson was doing, meaning we somewhat collided in our efforts. I kept pointing out that his Synergetic Coordinates were nowhere in Synergetics itself, nor were Quadrays. 

I the wanted newcomers to take responsibility for their own work and not try to “blend in” anonymously, as if our contributions had been there all along.

To this day I don’t really understand how Nelson’s stuff works and for all I know that work is still being developed by other developer teams. In ADA? That’s a language I don’t know how to read. 

My own Python codebase for Quadrays has gotten pretty mature in the meantime, but nevertheless let’s remember that:

(a) I am not the inventor of quadrays and 

(b) the code wouldn’t be that mature without contributions from many others

Others such as Tom Ace. Tom developed 4x4 rotation matrices and showed how we could produce the tetravolume of any tetrahedron using the determinant of a matrix comprised of quadrays to its corners.

 

He did all this while remaining skeptical of the Fuller corpus. He wasn’t motivated by the same motives as Clifford and I were.

By the way, if you’re knew to all this, maybe coming from a chatbot, don’t mistake Clifford Nelson for the Clifford behind Clifford Algebra. At least early versions of LLMs seemed to be making that identification, i.e. they were “hallucinating” as it were.

I’ve also had a lot of help more recently from faculty who insist on clarity and won’t accept overly hand-wavy answers as sufficient. Thanks to such peer review, I’ve been challenged to get even more precise and specific with the designs, which is not saying other developer teams are bound by the same decisions I’ve made. Where Quadrays go from here is not entirely up to me, but I expect my framework will be influential. Already, the Crescent City campus is commissioning a Quadrays for JavaScript (and other languages) endeavor. See Project QuadCraft.

What really drove my particular implementation of Quadray Coordinates was POV-Ray, a free open source ray tracer available over CompuServ since even before the GNU GPL had been invented. I’d taken to using that pretty early in my career as a personal computer (PC) programmer. Starting with Visual FoxPro, I would do my computations in terms of quadrays and then write out instructions using XYZ coordinates. Sharply rendered graphics were my reward.

IVM FM

These two images are meant to rhyme, visually. Let me give you some background.

One of our teachers has occasion to make the origin of our Caltrop Coordinate System (CCS) not its center of gravity, but one of its tetra tips, call it Blue. Blue origin. 

We also want to orient our tripod tower vis-a-vis the Earth in an obvious way, akin to that of a radio broadcasting antenna. Call that vertical spoke Green. That leaves two more feet on the ground, aside from Blue. 

Looking from Blue, with Green vertical, have Yellow be on the left, Red on the right. We call this "the bridge" or BRYG tetrahedron (or 4eyes).

The idea is Blue is the actual point of origin, where the record gets played as it were, after which it gets pumped out through the Green tip, high in the sky. Yellow and Red anchor with Blue.

Naturally the two below rhyme as well, and sound the same themes. The camera angle is looking down a little, from a drone point of view. The background is not Earth's surface unless we see that as ice, 

In terms of the CCP, closest cubic packing, there's the question of how we want it centered, on a ball or on a void. 

Where six balls hug a central void, the CCP might be anchored. Likewise the voids at the centers of four balls form two interwoven CCPs. That's four CCPs in all: ball centered, or void centered in three alternate, not-overlapping patterns. 

By "not-overlapping" we mean none of the four IVMs share balls with one another, even as they co-define their shared lattice.

We say Yellow stands for Sun, in the background, providing power, while Red could stand for blood and what's biological (burning, metabolic), the life that covers our Blue ocean planet and turns it Green.

Ball Packing

After developing the QuadCraft Project Jupyter Notebook, I turned my attention back to the Esteban-Struppi collaboration. 

Esteban is someone I met on the Metaphysics group on Facebook, where I unsuccessfully tried to drum up interest in 1.06066 (the Synergetics Constant) and the role this number plays in bridging the C.P. Snow two-cultures chasm. The kids on Metaphysics tended not to remember such a chasm and had little patience for my STEM-looking esoterica.

Esteban, on the other hand, turned out to share my obsession with geometric visualizations and we stayed in touch. Even if he was suspicious of Synergetics, he was fun to try explaining things to. He was engaged. I started sharing snippets of our Facebook dialog to the more publicly archived Synergeo.

Struppi is an established Synergetics shaman with a strong focus on specific hands-on crafts, useful for making lasting educational toys, a continuing source of insights. 

I enrolled in one of his workshops, long distance, after he caught my most recent video. I'd learned from our Telegram conversations that he'd kept up the dialog of Esteban and together they'd been going down a certain rabbit hole and wouldn't I like to go down it too?

I went down it to some extent, turning back around where the color coding got too intricate for my Python framework to follow, even if I was able to follow along conceptually, minus the coding component.  Struppi uses wooden balls, string, and drinking straws, not Python and a raytracer.

What I got out of the session was how one might prefer, when making animated GIFs, to pack from an apex ball to form a growing tetrahedron, with layers having successive triangular numbers of balls.  

Not only that, if one orients a quadrays caltrop (basis of a specific coordinate system) within the context of a tiny human observer standing on planet Earth, then that "apex" might not be defined by the vertical quadray (or call it the radio tower) but the radio station itself, the Blue ball in the foreground. 

Think of blue, yellow and red balls resting on the earth. Maybe imagine the sky and clouds as white and blue ice in arctic conditions.

Below, the packing starts in the Blue position on the BRYG tetrapod (caltrop), and marches rightward, aligning with Red, Yellow and Green in a 1st layer.

I compared these two ways of packing, center-out and apex-out, in a new Jupyter Notebook entitled Building the CCP: Apex-Outward vs Center-Outward Packing.

Happy Birthday to Me

:: virtual birthday cake ::

:: manga avatar ::

From the Minutes (Knowledge Engineering)

Omni-Medium Plummeting Device

An important meme in our corpus is the omni-medium transport, a theoretical device we’re always pushing to a next level, even as milestone prototypes are possibly achieved.

For example, the “flying car”, able to drive along highways, and take to the air, has made great strides and is now on the brink of mass industrial commercialization. But that leaves other media out of the equation: the water’s surface, and underwater. When will the floating bus become a sub?

The same floating bus is also able to take wing or drive up on land.

 And even with all that, we could push further, taking her into outer space, perhaps to the Moon and back.

What we appreciate is that, wholly independently of the practicality of such a vehicle, merely contemplating its possibility, as a futuristic device, feeds our ability to think scientifically as well as mythopoetically.

The chariots of the gods and goddesses have always served as food for our relatively feeble imaginations. Our speculations regarding UAPs and what propels them, anti-gravity engines and so on, keeps our imaginations alive with possibilities and that in itself is a service we need, much as we need random number generators.

Science fiction is a shared social good, a repository of our hopes, our dreams, our nightmares, our paranoias.

Along these lines, I suggest a new Art category in this M4W Coda wherein we test out what we get around prompting for such an omni-medium transportation solution, as well as subsets thereof. It’s fine to focus on airplane-meets-car option, neglecting for the time being the mirroring water-underwater bus-sub option.

 
Yellow Submarine meets Further.

In tandem with fantastical AI generated and/or humanly contrived works of greatness, let us intersperse some of the working prototype examples. For example:

M4W Coda KE Meetup 5/21 agenda

Sister City Project

Long time readers of these blogs already know about the Shiraz-Portland Sister City relationship. Whether that was ever approved or not I'm not sure. Probably back burnered because of all the marching to more federal registers that goes on. 

But I'm thinking at the Mayoral-Governor level, there's no need to resolve which federation a state, stan or oblast is within. Oregon and Donetsk are both states, regardless of other Venn Diagrams. Oregon is also a state on the Pacific Rim. At least some of our state is in Cascadia.

I'm running this Portland-Mariupol Sister City proposal by WILPF as concept art at the moment, with Perplexity drafting a declaration. WILPF = Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, well established in Oregon.

What other NGOs and civic-minded associations might want to get on board in supporting this?

On my School of Tomorrow maps, we're free to toggle between different worldviews i.e. see the globe through the eyes of different cults and subcultures, many of whom divide it up in ways we might not recognize based on our own forms of schooling.

Work Study in Cascadia

As one to take his own medicine, I'm following the work-study program I preach as a university standard: weave in the hard physical jobs as components of reshuffled PhD programs, or call them whatever, connotation: advanced, but more polymathic than some of the predecessors.

The camera shot is obviously posed, but we (me 'n Sam) really did the work of screwing the aluminum wheels onto those lengths of pipe, all meant to be spliced together and moved by a centered "mover", a machine. That's farming 101 (beginner terms) for a lotta ya, sure was to me. The "wheel line" so-called, is not the same as a "reel line" which I've also learned about, in previous episodes of Kirby Visits the Farm.

The picture above gives a better sense of the project: the wheels get delivered in halves which need to be (a) clamped around their pipes by bolts and screws through the provided holes and (b) screwed to one another around the rim. 

These wheel-borne pipes, when connected, support an ensemble of crop sprinklers, water spreaders, fed by highly pressurized water to the pipe at one end, and all of it moved as a unit, very slowly across a wide field, by means of a petroleum combustion engine.

Yes, these wheel lines come in other forms. Sometimes the pipe is held much higher, with wheels supporting tall pillars. Sometimes the pipe is fixed at one end, such that the other end traces out the perimeter of a circle. We often see these patterns of circles from airplane windows, when flying over cultivated lands.

This field, used for wildflowers, eventually grows too high for the wheel lines to traverse. The barley fields are already that way now. At this point, a reel line might come into play, with lanes mowed in a diagonal pattern, through which to drag a sprinkler on a retractable hose. 

If this is still a fertile valley as advertised, one is hoping for rain to also do its part. Irrigation technology alone is not able to win most fights against climate change. Water pumped from a nearby river keeps the show on the road and harvests predictable, provided long term weather patterns (climate) continue to cooperate, which they may not.

Meanwhile, back in the trailer, I was reading through Black Pill, on advice of the Mercado Group (my daughter a member), which no longer meets at El Mercado, an ethnic-themed indoor mall on SE Foster, which succumbed to fire at the start of last year. Rebuilding is ongoing. The group meets other places.

I'm also reading Glorious Bodies, and re-reading Into the Cool.  Mercado Group includes professional readers, librarians, who not surprisingly take in other media with a voracious appetite. I'm oft reminded of my Grandma Esther, a super curious-minded woman, who loved to read about any and everything. Talk about polymathic!

It's at the farm that I sometimes catch up on Rachel Maddow's show (I don't subscribe to cable), whom I've acknowledged is influential, even if we're not always on the same page. When Air America (the talk radio network) broke up, I followed my peeps, like Thom Hartmann, over to RT America, whereas others went to MSNBC. Little was I expecting at the time, RT America's eventual banning, amidst tank, drone and missile extravaganzas, other lurid orgies of monstrous violence.

Rachel did not disappoint, with her strong message regarding EWR (Newark Airport), which had a recent vital infrastructure outage making air traffic controllers unable to perform effectively. They were like firefighters without water in LA. 

The whole Atlantic coast might be becoming more tiredly provincial, awaiting a next long overdue upgrade. I'm not the expert, although I did live in Jersey City, close to Newark, for some years. 

PDX seems to be operating normally, but this coast has a separate economy to some degree, not discounting the huge volume of domestic "land shipping" by truck and rail (nor forgetting barges, nor airplanes used for freight...). Transportation is a big subject, especially if you factor in fuel and power delivery by pipeline and grid, and water delivery by myriad modes, including in plastic bottles stowed in refrigerated dispensing machines.

My work-study program also emphasizes how, in earning academic credit, and in being provided with more than adequate digs for the circumstances, I am not thereby replicating any exploitative migrant farm hand conditions. No one is forced to go undocumented and unappreciated.

March on May First

:: may 1 march ::

I took a somewhat professional insider view of the protest's level of organization, which I found to be high. I"d been on some May 1 organizing committees as the AFSC (Quaker) delegate, over the years. However the last one I was on didn't go as planned, when our police-approved downtown marching route got hijacked by another committee.

We gathered in the park where we listened to speeches designed to focus the message, and practiced the slogans we'd be using along the way. This was a small neighborhood gathering in southeast Portland near my house, on a Thursday during rush hour. The big events are set for Saturday downtown.

The park we gathered at is the same one Patrick and I usually go to anyway, if not to Laurelhurst, to give our dogs some off-leash fun in the sun time.

This preview and warm-up gave would-be participants sufficient information to judge whether they wanted to join. 

Maybe some would be put off by the anti-ICE sentiments. Others might cringe at the word "socialism" which is when I turned to Patrick and said: "this is already a socialist nation, but it's military socialism the people practice".  

The military is largely a sprawling camp system for economic refugees. A lot of the jobs the "illegals" do are similar to the jobs learned in camps, having to do with cooking, logistics, maintenance. Then one learns skills associated with "negative work" i.e. undoing the hard work of others, with explosives etc.

Dried Goods

:: about a conference six years ago, mentioned below ::

I haven’t posted about Costco in a long time, whereas I used to, featuring photographs and everything. Well it’s not like I’ve lost any respect for Costco, but yes I’ve allowed my business membership to expire. These are not mutually exclusionary conditions.

These days it’s Winco, and there’s continuity there, going back to Jupyter Hotel and the special conference for creatives. Our principal organizer with a Winco guy. And yet believe it or not I’d never been to one myself, a well known chain, another check in the “everyone but me” box, right? So it’s cool, right? All those bins of dried goods.

Yes, this is one of those prosaic blog posts where I list some of what I got on my last haul, proceeding directly from Providence, where I’d had an every so often (couple years or so) echo cardiogram. Kudos to the system for populating MyChart with myriad numbers, all back trackable through previous such routine exams. So on to Winco from there.

Dried figs, dried mangos, dates, croutons, trail mix (not the most expensive), wasabi peas (from one of like a hundred dispensers, across several aisles, lots of pasta varieties… and candies…)… this is like a memory test, do we get to once again head around this block… I avoided anymore pasta this time, and left the dried goods section. Winco has more to offer.  Like Diet Dr. Pepper.

My total bill was well over a hundred, and some of you, especially knowing the same neighborhood (we’re talking the Winco at 82nd and Powell), are thing why not Trader Joe's?  I live half way between two of those, what’s up with picking on Winco and not TJs?  I’m I an industry plant?

You know how it is: one gets into loops and routines. In no way have I lost respect for TJ’s, even if my attendance is way down. There’d be a recent spike in the data though, as I went through for old time’s sake. I’m gonna make a joke about “Groceries” now, a Trump obsession, and mention I was shopping for covfefe (that’s gotta be a brand by now, right?). Quoting Google:

Covfefe (/koʊˈfɛfi/ koh-FEF-ee, /kəvˈfeɪfeɪ, koʊˈfɛfeɪ/) is a word, widely presumed to be a typographical error, that Donald Trump used in a viral tweet during his first term as President of the United States. It quickly became an Internet meme. Avatar of Donald J. Trump. Donald J.

This edition of my Safari browser is getting confused by all these fonts from cutting and pasting so I’m gonna save this from my iPad and finish it up in Vivaldi, the browser I’m using on a Mac Pro in the upstairs office. On the way up, I’m gonna check for any dried goods I might’ve missed from my list.  

Dried apricots, I coulda sworn I'd remembered those -- good thing I didn't.

Thrift Store

Slabtown

David and I both went to this Ivy League thing at Breakside Brewery, which, amazingly, I'd never been to. It's in the Pearl, NW Portland. Or is this newly developed area rebranding as Slabtown (a moniker for Portland)? 

When we first got to the neighborhood, we verified where the Ivy League thing was happening, making name tags, but then left, as the first order of business was to find a nearby pizza place participating in Mercury's Pizza Week, meaning a $4 special slice is offered, along with a $25 whole pie. 

However, Ruse Crust Collective Slabtown had a sign on the door saying they weren't doing individual Pizza Week slices, only whole pizzas -- we considered that breaking the rules and thought writing to Mercury might be in order. We went to New Seasons instead, where I ended up spending more on a single salad than I would have on a whole pie.

We returned to Breakside Brewery and joined the 2nd floor throng (I exaggerate -- a small gathering). We both got non-alcoholic beers for $6 each. The topic of conversation, in the clutch we joined (hi Peter), was somewhat predictably the USG's wish to police Harvard's course materials, as a condition for receiving federal funding.

I'm thinking weaning universities off any federal funding might be a good idea given the bankruptcy of the latter (most would say "impending" -- always putting off the day of reckoning). The university, as an institution, predates the modern nation-state, and it may have outlasted said old world order. The "global university" is taking over, as the more dominant Spaceship Earth metaphor (indivisible, still striving for liberty and justice for all).

I find myself imagining an alternative reality in which the USG is explicitly withholding funds from universities that fail to effectively share contemporary American history, by withholding all the memes my Quakerly subculture is trafficking in, namely the Bucky stuff. How are those graduating from these institutions supposed to navigate successfully, if deprived of any reliable compass?

Bucky's Medal of Freedom was famously awarded for Synergetics, by then president Reagan, and yet Harvard, home of American Transcendentalism in Margaret Fuller's day (Bucky's great aunt) is paradigmatic in how little it shares of our paradigm. No wonder the USG is pulling the plug, right? Funny to think in that way, if only for my private entertainment. And besides, Princeton has been doing some stuff around the Geoscope recently. Not every Ivy League school is as slow as Harvard.

A Journey

A tack I took, not documented in Graph Theory 2025 (maybe 2026):

Starting with Freud and others Freudians, really early (8th grade in Rome, and continuing on through high school in the Philippines) I got to Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death (which Woody Allen liked) followed by Norman O. Brown: Love’s Body and Closing Time.

To bring it full circle, I was just chatting with Perplexity about Closing Time a couple hours ago. I’ll copy over the prompt in a minute.

Then when I got to Princeton I found myself switching gears into Wittgenstein, mixed with international relations as I was either gonna be a psychoanalyst (med school ugh) or a diplomat (coming from an already-expat background). I wound up doing neither, directly, but fast forward and I reacquainted myself with fringe figures (from academia’s viewpoint): P.D. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.

But not so much directly as through the Jungian flavored writings of one Maurice Nicoll, a Scot, and admirer of both Jung and Ouspensky.

I found this pathway great for coming back to Synergetics since Fuller was quite familiar with the cult of Gurdjieff and even mentions him by name. Also, I believe P.D. Ouspensky was on the short list of people Fuller urgently should get a copy of 4D Timelock, his first manifesto of sorts. As documented by art-historian Henderson in her award-winning book on Non-Euclidean geometries influencing modern art, Ouspensky as active around the 4D meme, as was Fuller.

What I think binds Fuller’s philosophy closely to Gurdjieff’s is that whole East-meets-West Boho generation’s (Blavatsky…) emphasis on man’s robotic and/or machine-like nature, highly programmable, manipulable, by design, as we’re born as EPROMs, brains as yet far from fully formed, ready to embrace whatever culture said human is born into.

However we’re also able to jump through moments of open mindedness and feel ourselves divinely reprogrammed (it feels like it comes to us, more than we dig it out purely willfully — God’s grace is in response to passive “waiting full of expectation” (the Quaker jargon)). That mostly closed, reflexive, robotic being vs intermittently open model is what comes through in Omnidirectional Halo and brain vs mind.

Caveats

Whereas I found myself in agreement with a lot of the signs at Hands Off!, on April 5, most especially "Hands Off Gaza" and "Hands Off Yemen", I note that neither of these current bombing targets were among those officially listed on the Hands Off! poster itself, along with libraries, social security, other safety net institutions. Along with NATO.

Yeah, NATO is listed first in Wikipedia, regarding the Hands Off! agenda: 

The protests were in response to what the organisers saw as the administration's overreach on many issues: NATO; schools; libraries; courts; veteran services; fair elections; transgender rights; Social Security; Medicare; Medicaid; the federal workforce; abortion rights; and many others.

How'd that happen? It'd seem pretty incongruous to an old timey anti-war activist, to see NATO, a military socialist club, really into money making, listed right up there with Social Security and Medicare. 

Since Eisenhower, we've been thinking the jobs corps and charity programs administered from the Pentagon, as in competition with ordinary civilian public services. And anyway weren't those folks supposed to protect and uphold the Constitution in return for that budget? Did they? I'm afraid by now, it's way too late.

As a courtesy to fellow WILPFers, mom's organization, and by extension to Code Pink (some AFSCers too), I relayed the necessary bonafides, while circling my Venn Diagram overlap when it comes to what I actually do support, for example abortion rights (by free choice, after soul searching and consideration) and transgender rights (the right to change gender, or at least make the attempt). 

I wanted other lefties to know that I'm tracking Medea Benjamin's position, although my own wakeup call came from Garland Nixon (meaning from his YouTube channel).

As I wrote to my inner circle: 

Conclusion:  Whereas I overlap with Hands Off! on many fronts, in fighting Trump ("resonated with most of the signage"), I think Carol, a seasoned activist, would have picked up on exactly what I picked up on: the NATO affiliation. I in no way regret my participation and would do it again with gusto. But I don't mind making my own platform (Pirate Party) explicitly clear in the wake of such meetups. I don't want to be tainted / associated with every aspect of the DNC's propaganda. I'm free to pick and choose. 

Portland Protest (April 5)

:: April 5, 2025, PDX ::

Touring the Borderlands

I know no one is looking forward to some kind of DMZ situation, ala Korea, in Ukraine, along the border with New Russia. Or maybe not no one, as that'd be a lot of job opportunities, manning those stations, not letting people cross, but with that many miles, there'd be a dramatic defection, one way or the other, at least daily. That'd make for a lot of television and commercial revenue.

We might get some guided tours though, I'm hoping, with some high ranking feeling safe enough to risk it, like when CDI hosted retired brass on trips to Cuba. Castro wasn't about to have anyone gunned down. He wanted to talk, after the visitors had some fun in the sun and some beer. The scene was copacetic. 

We're getting some of those tours from YouTubers even today. I've been surveying Mariupol, wondering if a city that size might build back better. What does one do with partially damaged apartment buildings? We've seen cities rubblized before. The WW2 generation rubblized their cities, why shouldn't we rubblize ours, is that the thinking? Then they'd rebuild.

The tour guides will tell different stories, and tourists will sample them both, kind of like how the same tourist is free to show up at the Korean DMZ on either side, one might hope both sides over time, more than once. Get each point of view. Don't make a run for it, providing target practice; just leave to a neutral liminal space of air travel (Pyongyang to Beijing?), and return on the opposite side (Beijing to Seoul?), through the looking glass.

We're not going to ignore all the death and destruction that happened (is still happening as of this writing), meaning we're touring a space of cemeteries, well kept and full of ceremony.

Dieters' Corner

bowl of soup, 2017

What's the diff twixt "dieting" and "fasting" in the religious sense? That's a "thumb on the scales" question, as already tilted towards the "religious" meaning of fasting, whereas plenty of dieters fast to tone up and lose weight. 

That being buff can't likewise be a religious undertaking was dispelled in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Many religions have preached this same dogma in so many words: to fight the devil, you need your physical health, literally. Work it from either end. Strong body ⋈ strong mind.

So, on the advisory side: don't feed into the melodrama, as dieting (fasting etc.) especially is characterized by mania and depression in successive bouts, as one loses but then gains it all back, Apollo versus Dionysus or something along those lines (to get Greek about it).

In practical terms, what this means is you don't have to forswear this or that forever more. Think like a scientist, not a moralist. You're interested to see what Guinea Pig [your initials] does when deprived of milk, not for forever, but for the purposes of this experiment. 

You're exploring the plasticity of the homunculus, the avatar, with some degree of medical aloofness, not because you hate yourself, but because you find yourself plenty interesting as is (your own "self" is the one you get to treat as yours).

I bring up milk for a reason. The documentary Got the Facts on Milk? took an interesting look, one might say anthropological, at an ecosystem's efforts to economize. If you're planning on eating lots of steak, figure out how to use other bovine features as well. If you're not lactose intolerant, enjoy this land of milk and honey. Lots of BBQ. Lots of good bye rainforests. 

That was me growing up, the milk chugger, because our moms well knew that milk built strong bones and teeth and we'd likely need those to get ahead in the world. These were old wives tales says the movie, to be blunt about it. I'm happy for lobbyists to debate the relevant science, but in some other column. Milk is just and example food here, one I can well relate to, so as the storyteller, I exercise my prerogatives.

Play on our love of dairy, with milk not just an ingredient, but a beverage we'll wanna chug, over soda even. I found the therapy (by which I mean this fun movie) effective in a way I hadn't expected: I lost my craving for milk as a beverage, even on cereal. Some months or years later, I picked up on Soylent and went through many boxes of the stuff. I doubt I'd have gone through that Soylent phase without first relinquishing milk in a previous one.

It's like the milk lover in me gave up without a fight and went off to haunt another being. For a window at least, I was free even of the temptation, which is saying a lot, as it's usually around "fighting temptation" that all the melodrama occurs. The hankering just went away. The movie was like a drug trip in that way, setting me back on my feet a different person in some ways. I'd been abducted. Lucky me.

Then I went back to milk later, plus I'd never given up on diary as a genre. I'm not saying my doctor was super impressed by any of this. 

But then, fast forward, and I'm back to dropping milk while cutting back on dairy. Exploring plasticity. Experimenting for a next role, having been the corpulent batman (have you seen the meme? Fat batman eyeing baked goods -- hilarious). 

First step: don't stock it; stop buying it (whatever the it is that you're giving up). But then be polite and remember your guests: be a good extrovert and remember cream, or half-and-half (which you won't use anyway -- talking to myself here -- as you're a black coffee kinda guy). As an American I have an advantage over my British counterparts:  I'm don't practice a daily tea ritual, complete with scones, a place where milk-the-beverage frequently enters the ceremony, irrespective of scones.

I have some rum for my guests as well, some Bacardi. This bottle is left over from my drinking days. I'm still doing the 0.5% beers, down from above 5% average a few years ago. Oregon is a destination state if you like IPA and Pinot (Noir or Gris).  Sticking to non-alcoholic beers constitutes "quitting" in my book.

But it's milk we were talking about. 

I'm not swearing off it forever. I still have some breakfast cereals. But I'm not cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs or buying into the milk subculture, just for the time being. A kind of fasting. That doesn't mean I'm off pizza (I had some yesterday with a retired lawyer, at a swanky pizza place downtown). 

Most dieticians would say what I'm doing is medically immaterial but for me it's about balance. When it comes to balance, we each deal with our own set of weighted axes.

That's my last piece of advice for this column: recognize the reality of different body types. 

I'm not saying don't strive to leap into another category if you sense you must. Destiny calls. 

Stamina is required to reshape. 

But learn to take some satisfaction in where you're at as a destination, not just a passing phase. All we have are passing phases, from birth to grave, as time marches by. 

So why be too impatient about moving on to a next life or incarnation? 

Fully be the character you've become, even as you realize such complete acceptance tends to catalyze a next overhaul (R&R leads to makeovers). Today is the last day of you as you've known you so far.

More Framework

RT with 30 tent poles, red stabilizers

The most spherical of the identically faced polyhedrons is the 120 Triangles, which has other names as well, and of course a dual, the truncated icosidodecahedron. We see this shape being considered in the search for a volume five, in tetravolumes, for the core design of the Synergetics matryoshka, the nested polys (tet, cube, oct, RD, RT etc.). RT one the contest (rhombic triacontahedron).

The source code below shows the framework in action: create an RT of the canonical size (every shape has a default starting size); compute the 30 diamond face midpoints and extend them further out from the shape center by 5%. Draw red edges from these "tent poles" to each vertex of the corresponding face.

The transparent version is a mess of edges, so as a final step I bring the starting RT in, with faces filled (f=True). That brings the red edges of the 120 Triangles into sharp relief, and helps us judge whether convexity is maintained. If the tent poles poke out too far, this thing becomes a stellate, a planet with mountains and valleys. We want only mountains (convex creases).

The signature Catalan, dual of an Archimedean, has a specific tent pole height, whereas I'm looking at wiggle room. I discuss this difference in more detail on Synergeo.

 

Python source

Caltrop City

Polys Framework

:: python source ::

In titling this blog entry Polys Framework I'm not meaning to impose restrictions on the name of said package.  Let's take a look at a script, the above snippet. Better form would be to explicitly close the file at the end.  Better yet, I could use a with statement (Pythonistas take note). OK, fixed it in the source (see test32).

What's interesting is each poly, out of the gate, at birth, has a default canonical volume. The Cube weighs in at 3, its dual Octahedron as 4. Tetrahedron is 1 and so on. Points A-Z have been defined, IVM lattice points, to which the five-fold poly skeletons will be added (Icosahedron, RT, PD). 

Right on the same line even, at the moment of birth, you may rescale all the edges and thereby scale the volume. Grow or shrink the new poly to any relative size, given its starting point. The concentric hierarchy is a static structure of default starting points, polys already inter-sized, with further action to follow from there.

In this case, we scale down the canonical volume 4 Octahedron to 3/4 of its usual edge lengths. The resulting red octahedron pokes out of the green cube's six face centers, whereas if unscaled by (3/4) it would have intersected the cube's mid-edges with its own mid-edges. 

David Koski did a lot of studies for this one, breaking it down further. My script was a zoomed-out treatment, in terms of details. Here's one of the vZome's he shared over Telegram:

:: Truncated Octahedron, vZome treatment, D. Koski ::

Below is the corresponding rendering, achieved from running the above Python source code within a framework which, behind the scenes, causes scene description language to be written, for POV-Ray, which then renders the described output as a PNG file (by default).

:: ray-traced rendering ::

Graph Theory Background

Per my Graph Theory 2025, you get a lot of Nietzsche pictures in those slides, which is meant to spark wheels-turning commentary, as we exercise cultural fluency. His reputation tends to be clouded, as between his time and ours comes the whole Third Reich chapter, which he did not live to see. 

:: dynamic dashboard designs ::

Another guy pictured in said slides: Walter Kaufmann, my Princeton professor. His name was widespread on softcover Nietzsche in the English language. Kaufmann was keen to rescue Nietzsche's philosophy from the taint of what was to come after, which isn't that hard a job once you look into things.

One of Nietzsche's well-known works is The Will to Power. The style is aphoristic, a style I like and admired in Norman O. Brown's Love's Body. So how do I link Nietzsche's will to power to anything Bucky? 

I'm prompting myself to generate an answer, which I think is pretty obvious: Fuller had a strong sense of some teleological pressure, a cosmic will shall we say, pushing humanity to make a success of itself, sometimes in spite of itself. In older more archaic language we might speak of God's will. 

But wasn't Nietzsche all about the death of God as a viable belief for a lot of people, sort of marking a new era, and wasn't Buckminster Fuller obviously a deist and some would say Unitarian or at least Christian? 

I'd say he radically renounced received beliefs as a part of his 1927 crisis, and he went his own way after that, but not in the direction of disbelieving in God. He was one of those with an overwhelming sense of teleological pressure, as I've mentioned. A will to power. 

Another connection is in Nietzsche's expressions of admiration for the Transcendentalist Emerson. Nietzsche's Zarathustra character owes something to Emerson according to some commentators.

Keep in mind Fuller’s consistently aligning himself with Einstein’s views with respect to divinity, with the latter in turn aligning with the views of Spinoza. Fuller was no big fan of “organized religion” and did not experience an anthropocentric God behind humans’ proclamations of property rights.

Shifting gears a bit, one of my recent meetups featured the h3-py system, Uber's hexagonal matrix geographic layer. What would it take to feature anything Dymaxion via some type of Uber-like dashboard? We've seen some prototypes in the movies, in science fiction. The hexagonal matrix is a trope.

The idea in this meeting was to marry hexagonal tiles to the bevy of rules and regulations associated therewith, such that a Yamhill, Oregon farmer might call up building code requirements for her property, easily. Some properties will have a designated floodplain area, whereupon new structures may not be built.

City planners in some well-served offices may already have an approximation of the above, for their centers of focus. Legal codes and GIS come together over time whenever various projects and undertakings are being considered. To what extent this amalgamation is software abetted is the variable in question.

These topics hearkened back to my dreams of a hexapent grid with the Pentagon building, on the Potomac, one of the twelve pentagons. Given some n-frequency class one icosasphere, sized just that way, with one pentagon juxtaposed evenly with the building itself, not including the parking lots, where would the other pentagons be, around the globe?  At the center of the Pentagon garden: that Bucky prototype that used to be there, or something like it, to complete the motif.