What is Neoplatonism?

:: succinct summary ::

Featured Artist

Conversation Corner

Lionel Wolberger was kind enough to take me up on my offer, to share my Google slides.  

Perhaps some teacher in Vilnius (Lithuania) wants to present about Synergetics, or a civic organizer in Berlin or Singapore. 

I may never meet these people, nor learn of their activities, even though they've undertaken to share with my slides.  

Lionel, on the other hand, has visited me in Portland, and is addressing me directly, taking advantage of our partially overlapping scenarios. I appreciate that a lot, but  keep in mind that's not a requirement or expectation on my end, i.e. you need not include me your audience.

Let's look at one of Lionel's observations, that Bucky was not that much of an institution builder.  I'm going to consider some of his other points too, in a next Youtube video.  For example I like his distinction between a folk or pop (popular) culture, and something more organized.  Tensegrity is a happening movement in pop culture, with or without academia.

At the apex of Bucky's career (as seen from many an angle) he was the public face of an American futurism, as expressed in the World's Fairs.  As such, he emanated a semi-governmental vibe, as if he worked with NASA or one of those.  But then he was a self made man besides, the holder of patents.  He dressed like a capitalist and rubbed shoulders same.  He was avuncular, not unlike Disney.  To some, he was the friendly, happy face, of the military industrial complex, a cold warrior.

As time went on, though, we see more of the arc in his trajectory. He did not expect our contemporary ideas about nation states to withstand the crush, or crunch (or "grunch") of giants, meaning the global supranational entities operating using global strategies.  He became another Nietzsche in prophesying a twilight of the idols, a transformation beyond the everyday soap opera of "good versus bad people" (see the Critical Path introduction). This wasn't the politics of winners and losers.

He's pretty up front about his long term views from the start, but his speculations seem far fetched and unrealistically long term in the 1940s and earlier.  He was projecting into that mythical distant future, that no man's land.  Did humans really need to think and plan that far ahead in their lifetimes?  For what purpose?  

Now that we're actually here in the future, in late 2020, it feels more like he could have been right in his predictions.

In short, he started sounding less like an establishment figure and more like a subversive as time went on. By the 1970s he was butting heads with LAWCAP ("lawyer-capitalism" the next phase after FINCAP), while anticipating GRUNCH (the next synergy).  What would be left in his wake, institution wise?  Would humanity be here at all, in a form worthy of the moniker?

In today's terms, we might say he took the tack of self branding and/or building his own brand.  He became a Youtube personality.  He'd always been into showbiz.  

Both "Dymaxion" and "4D" were among his trademarks.  He wanted to build an individual's portfolio, not so much that of a team, company or tribe, in order to hammer home his chief contention: that the individual human was the integral unit of consciousness and inventiveness aboard Spaceship Earth, not our social constructs, not universities or corporations.

That sense of the worth of an individual could sound imbalanced, and indeed many considered Fuller to be on an egomaniacal journey, a lost soul.  The balancing perspective, if there is one, enters the picture with intuition. Individual free agency is within the context of a transcendental gravity, which provides a compass.  This Emersonian or Quaker thesis, that each individual human has a sense of the whole (that of God) internally, is experiential and experimentally known, through testing, through trial and error.

Bucky considered himself in a game of 4D chess aiming to maximize humanity's chances. That's a hero's journey for sure, but he didn't consider himself out of synch with the cosmos either.  He was working with nature, in service of mega-trends.  He saw the Apollo Project as not about conquering the Moon but coming to better understand her role in our story. With reductionism (the search for "a bottom") now off the table in Synergetics, intuitionism is what remains.  

The major shifts he expected, heralded, catalyzed, would be attributed to the workings of the human spirit (or zeitgeist) working to fulfill its cosmic destiny. He thought humans had a purpose in Universe, having to do with its eternal regeneration.  The pilot waves he'd ridden would continue on. He retained his hopeful and combative posture. Might we say now that he succeeded?  Some would say it's too early, while others already see the signs.

Welcome to Chaos High

Look for me on Academia.edu?

Advice to Synergetics Teachers (slide show)

Kirby addresses Wanderers @ Pauling House

From many years ago. 

 You can sync it to the timeline w/r to the James Bond movie I yak about.

School of Tomorrow Project

As a wandering pilgrim from Python World, I'm not a JavaScript master, yet I'm admiring of all the toolery. 

In this video, I fantasize about Projects I'd be working on if I already had the skills.  The emphasis is on 3D geometry (or "4D" if familiar with the current namespace).

Positive Developments (School of Tomorrow)

The 52 Living Ideas channel, anchored by Shrikant, is NYC-based.  In the video, I link it to Philadelphia, which it is through CJ, one of the Philadelphians co-appearing with Shrikant on overlapping channels.

Quoting CJ: 

Shrikant operates out of New York City. I've only met him via telephone and video conference. His 52 Living Ideas group has world around participation. During COVID, there is no local: it's a global pandemic: we're all in it together.

Featured Artist: Dave Blair

Youtube Channel

Countering Overspecialization

Aldous Huxley takes a speculative tone, thinking aloud about how we might maximize our potential. He's not interested in physical breeding, so much as in creating learning environments optimized for human subjects. "Increasing awareness" is an ethical goal for Huxley, a matter of faith for him, and shared with Bucky Fuller.

He recommends training the body however, especially its senses.  I can see him advising students to take some mind enhancing substance and diving in to educational computer games.  Have fun.  Enjoy.

Hanging By a Thread

The "hypertoons" we yak about in this blog have their roots in reveries around the Concentric Hierarchy of Polyhedrons, which includes:

• nesting them
• spinning them
• folding and unfolding them
• Jitterbug Transformation
• turning inside-out
• chirality

... and so on.

Happy Halloween (it's getting close).

American Philosophy (School of Tomorrow)

Ongoing Heuristics for Teachers (Fall Term). Emerson influenced Nietzsche regarding the idea of Friendship. The idea of Friends anchors Quakerism and relates to the doctrine of equality (that of God within each individual). Echoes of Mithraism? 

Americans begin to distinguish themselves, still (of course) drawing on their Anglo and Euro heritage. 

Features the Tetravolumes with Python minicourse (@thekirbster). This philo curriculum goes with computer languages more than with any propositional calculus or modal logic. We also read Synergetics to limber up our brains in anticipation of new intuitions.

Great Rhombicosidodecahedron

a David Koski original

Heuristics for Teachers (Fall 2020)

Orientation

Chirality: Left Versus Right (Fall Term, 2020)

Orientation

Electrical Power Generation (Martian Math)

The Oregon Curriculum Network is offering place based history for Oregonians, and for anyone else who might want to lurk in.

Fat & Thin Golden Rhombohedra composed of UVW tetrahedra

Kirby and Steffan on Infinite Patterns, Blender and C6XTY

Some Media Analysis

Three-Frequency Cubocta (Russian Dolls series)

X-Day at Blue House

The Silver Ratio - Numberphile

The Golden Ratio will appear in this blog in connection with the so called Quanta Modules (possible name collision with quantum -- disambiguation required), of which the most published about are A, B, S, T, E. The Koski Identities use Phi-Scaled S, E modules especially, to express some common, canonical volumes.

Flora

click through to Youtube for more artist details

hypertoon: playheads wandering randomly through spaghetti balls of smoothly segued scenarios

From Facebook

In my "win games for charity" model, we channel computer game competitiveness to philanthropy. Score big in some first person shooter, and choose to donate winnings to the local church fundraiser. Like video lottery but player takes responsibility, including by building a giving history profile. Know me by the causes I've supported, by playing games. I call it Coffee Shops Network and make the business plan open source so no one can patent it out from under me.

 [ June 25, 2020, 1:47 PM PDT ]

Studying Mithraism

Exploring Mithraic roots in Quakerism: what I'm doing (Friends not mentioned in the video).

Mithraism also got the attention of one MLK.

Dr. Jorjani, the interviewee, sees ethnicity as more genetic than epigenetic and therefore embraces a more eugenicist way of thinking than I would, when it comes to cultivating and curating an ethnicity.

Studying American Heritage

American Transcendentalism Meets Russian Mysticism

:: a short philosophy talk ::

Infinite Patterns

Very close to being a hypertoon.

Definitely a reverie.

Featured Artist

There's something about phi - Chapter 7 - Phi, the enneagram and the platonic solids

Javier Romañach

Chapter 7 of the series "There's something About phi". Video on the number phi, golden number, divine proportion or golden ratio and its relationship with the golden segments. Dedicated to the enneagram, its relation with the platonic solids, and the construction of an unknown figure for me tha I've named as the divertahedron.

Navigating the Lattice

You have no doubt played a 2D game on a grid of squares, chess or checkers for example. Not every piece moves the same way perhaps, however in principle each square has four neighbors over the edge, and four more along the diagonals.

Bishops know those diagonals...

...whereas Knights move over one and then two, at ninety degrees.  The horse-mounted cavalry has surprising moves.

Fewer casual gamers, but most ardent players, know the hexagonal grid just as well. A lot of tank games, drawing from our dark ages history, take place on a board of hexagons.

With the advent of computer games, the job of moving and tracking position, went from piece on the board, to avatar.  The games themselves went from 2D to 3D, with ever more elaborate floor plans.

However, consider the humble 2D chess board and tank wargame terrain.

What would be the 3D correlates?

The chess board suggests a 3D world of cubes, hexahedrons.

The tank game suggests a 3D world of dodecahedrons, diamond faced.  From every position in space, twelve possibilities suggest themselves.

What keyboard keys should we use?  One possibility: ERT for three "above", ASDFGH for six on the "same plane", and XCV for "three below".

When R. Buckminster Fuller took up the topic of "the will" in Synergetics, he stayed in his own namespace and shared his input in game playing terms.

Game Theory was already an accepted academic area of focus by that time, with World Game branching off as Fuller's innovation, and inheriting from War Games as well (logistics savvy and operations research).

"I always have twelve directions to choose from" Fuller explained (paraphrasing).  He imagined himself as a chess piece, an avatar in the IVM.

It is clear to me that most humans tend to think in a linear, Go-or No-go, greenlight-redlight manner. To me, will is an optionally exercisable control by mind over brain^__by wisdom over conditioned reflex-that becomes realizable when mind is adequately convinced regarding which of the 12 alternatives will produce the most comprehensively considerate vital advantage for all. (Synergetics 537.52)

In the Flextegrity system, both the 3D cubes and dodecahedrons feature together.  The cube domains encase the compression islands, interconnected by springs or struts.

Given every move from Icosahedron X may be represented by a single vector, perhaps represented in Quadray Coordinates, the game engine should allow multiple frequencies to interpenetrate, multiple webs, each with its avatar spider.

via GIPHY

Koski's Kiosk

Koski's Kiosk is great alliteration and will go forward in the literature, website or no.

Perhaps a synonym for "module" in the "tetrahedral wedge" sense, could be "kiosk". A tetrahedral voxel within a family consisting of family members E&T, S, A&B. Or these could be subway lines.

At the stations, the Kiosks appear as actual newstands with "read all about it" headlines regarding the Koski Identities. 

Picturing like Japanese anime, hypertoons with chill beats.

Zonohedron Zone

hollowed out

Another classic from Koski, an ongoing dissection of an interesting combo:  the greens are in the six IVM directions, whereas the reds come from five-fold world. You can see the reds in action, building the rhombic triacontahedron (bottom left).  The overall shape (transparent) is all reds and greens.

The colors refer to Zome, the construction kit, and the screenshot above is from vZome or the virtual Zome builder.  It's a standalone Java application.  Feel free to grab.

One of David's fascinations has been breaking down all these tetravolumes into sums of phi-scaled modules, the S and E modules in particular.  You'll find out more about these tetrahedrons in this blog and elsewhere.

filled in

Hypertoons on 3DTV

I've usually shared hypertoon reveries as a flat screen experience, as if on an HDTV.  You'll find an earlier blog post on LCD aesthetics.  However we need not confine our imaginations to such prosaic devices.  Won't 3DTV be here soon?

When you imagine a pixelated surface, do you think of squares or hexagons?  We can tell a lot about your personality based on that, just kidding.  As when tiling a bathroom floor, we have our reasons for going with one or another tiling pattern.

Space comes with "tiling" patterns too.  Instead of pixels, we have voxels?

When you imagine a voxelated volume, do you think of cubes or rhombic dodecahedrons?  I'd say a majority will think of cubes and don't know much about that other thingamajiggy.

However rhombic dodecahedrons are more neighborly in the sense of sharing more faces.  Cubes share six faces with neighbors (why we call them hexahedra).  Dodecahedrons (of this space-filling voxel kind) share twelve.

As soon as you start filling space with some repeated shape, you're likely to think "honeycomb" or even "lattice" whereas an engineer might think "space frame".  Different professions teach different words, but we all know what it means to "brick a volume" with some shape, even if said shape has all diamond faces.

The sculptors at Flextegrity Labs, the informal name for your builders' skunkworks, know all about modeling sculptures in 3D, given C6XTY and its progenitors came from a 3D imagination in the first place, via CAD and industrial processing.

Having the CCP (another name for our lattice, not a political party) pre-implemented in software, with each icosahedron or ball position selectively illumined, is a kind of 3DTV in its own right.

The sculpture supports its own weight.

We don't need to wait, to experiment with sound and light shows.  Our gallery was in the nightclub district, after all.

Who knows, perhaps 3D hypertoons could be in our future?

Or shall we say 4D, switching to the Bucky brand, wherein the Tetrahedron anchors our sense of "dimension" in a four directional volume, our "space"?  We've learned that "namespaces" coexist and that an either/or mindset may be unnecessary in the long run.

So sure, 4D it is.  Too.

Ramanujan Rocks!

You know me, I'm back to harping on some abstract stuff, wanting to make aesthetics matter.  Today I was talking about Ramanujan saying, in response to a Medium story:

Good one, got me thinking of the ballads, plays, sagas and epics that have mathematics in them. I favor bringing in some Ramanujan because now we have arbitrary precision software available (beyond calculators), so why not check out some of his wild convergences to thousands of places?

There's a lot of history (storytelling) behind just how far we can push our algorithms, to how many digits of accuracy. From Al Khwarizmi to Wolfram. 

We may not have proved why a given convergence works (some of Ramanujan's were famously opaque to proof) yet we're free to test them in empirical reality... 

https://archive.org/details/Ramanujan (actual ballad about the guy)

You probably know what I'm thinking of right?

Self Booting Startup

Everyone believes in the dream of booting, as we somewhat do that through being born, and we hope making it to adulthood.  All from a couple of cells.  We intuit that organizations work somewhat the same way, to develop critical mass and then take off somehow.  We explore for the right business model designs, the right chemistry.

Philanthropy for Everyone

The Coffee Shops Network is a philosophy based in the idea of Philanthropy for Everyone, meaning no matter how meager your means, you deserve opportunities to commit to projects that express your values in some way.  That your contribution might be amplified through higher scores, within some exciting game playing experience, is an added bonus, one could say thrill, giving you that added "chance to win big" possibility.

For those used to a Video Lottery, perhaps state permitted and used to raise funds for the state, winning the lottery is akin to having a fortune to divvy up among your lucky recipients. Their job, as a partial consequence, is to live up to their potential and prove their worth to investors.  However charitable ventures are not designed to reward with interest.  They're aiming to achieve specific results.  Successful projects tend to come with metrics:  ways to evaluate their success.

Gambling for Charity

Say I walk into a Coffee Shop and buy a bagel.  The purchases feed my gaming account, which I may pay into outright.  Once I've chosen a game, I have some ability to amplify more gift in accordance with performance, and some games help build skills I need anyway, such as typing faster, or recognizing rare birds.  I buy more coffee and play some more.  I rack up winnings for beneficiaries.  I am literally a hero.  The psychological benefits of giving to charity are well known.

You might object that I'm actually describing a lot of church operations here, in giving opportunities to amplify prayers with the right add-ons.  Philosophy has always been a close neighbor of the religions, given its focus on ethics and aesthetics.  Believing your contributions are actually doing some good requires some trust in the framework.  Do you actually see the crypto-currency going over the wire?  What assurances do you have that the transaction has gone through?

Clearly for a Coffee Shops Network to build out, it has to partake of solutions pioneered by FinTech, giving organizations ways to channel some token of value in ways that make sense to the power brokers.  If you're thinking "someone, somewhere is making money" you're probably thinking in terms of whether your generosity is being exploited or taken advantage of.  Possibly so.  In other words, we're back to whether you have trust in the organization. Those organizations that fall apart over time seem too much like pyramids.

Your Profile

Don't forget your profile matters.  Your record as a donor of winnings, a contributing player, may come back to haunt you, and take you into "deleted tweet" territory.  The social media aspect of backing effective projects is worthy of much exploration.  You may well develop imitators, but then some designs may give you backers.  In committing their winnings to your kitty, you get all that much more to forge ahead with.

Geometry of the Virus

Hypertoons Again (Autobio)

Hypertoon treatment would be ideal for communicating Synergetics, because of the partially overlapping scenarios configuration.

A hypertoon is like a spaghetti ball of short cartoons (animations) terminating in switch points where smooth segues (transitions) may occur.

Synergetics suggests lots of animated sequences, such as an octahedron turing into a "boat" and spiralling forward or backward ("arcing").  Does this scenario serve any useful scientific purpose?  As a Platonist, I'm just following the tetrahelix thread.

Another transformation is of course the Jitterbug, at the center of the Concentric Hierarchy as a unifying "bow tie Universe" pulsation device (one could say).  Telling the story of the Jitterbug and its "station stops" is traversing a kind of backbone, from which many side stories branch out.

In more recent autobiographical videos I talk about a Pycon in Washington, DC where I was scheduled to talk more about hypertoons. I actually did get to give such a talk, at a different Pycon in DC, if memory serves. Dawn joined me on that trip. When was that?

From LinkedIn (replying to an inquiry)

Kirby Urner  Today, 11:41 AM  [one typo fixed]

I have an open source business plan that investors technically don't need me to implement, however I offer consulting around these plans nevertheless. I'm referring to a "gambling for charity" model akin to church bingo or state lottery except the beneficiary is picked from a list supported by the house, a cause or charity. The player has nothing to lose and gains by keeping a public profile (= reputation). You'll see models approximating this one out there already. I brand around a specific decor (a look and feel). Anyway, it's all out there. Thanks for asking. Kirby Urner
4dsolutions.net Oregon Curriculum Network (OCN) Coffee Shops Network (CSN)

Flextegrity Instead of Rebar?

The art of mixing and pouring concrete is not the whole story, as rebar is integral to the design. Without rigid reinforcement, the hardened sludge has little value as a load-bearing material, but is conventional rebar the only option?

With Flextegrity, based on the CCP matrix, the designer has more control over both rigidity and volumetric displacement.  As cinder blocks prove, there's plenty of space, for space, in many an over-built design.

Consider C6XTY, made of rigidly interconnected hollow balls.  The total displacement is less than 74% of the total space (the pure CCP figure) but how much less?  A lot more than what rebar would occupy. 

A savings of 50% in concrete, while adding strength, might be just the ticket, given the right truss.

What schools of engineering are studying the combination of concrete and lattice trussworks? 

Is your construction company in the loop?

Here at Coffee Shops Network (CSN), we specialize in hypertoon reveries (spaghetti balls of connected scenarios) and the CCP (= FCC) is a kind of homebase for our explorations.

Of course we follow C6XTY, a set of stories, and Flextegrity, given our specialty.

Thanks to Lattice Gallery in Portland, Oregon for popping up during the holidays and showing Portlanders some of the possibilities.

Urban Exploration: A Necessary Ruin

A beautifully made documentary.

Flannerism, Ecotourism, Psychogeography

As a Wanderer, a group based at the Linus Pauling House in Portland, Oregon, I'm hip to these quotes from Benoit Mandelbrot:

Early on, I became a wanderer-by-choice between the disciplines, and between theory and applications. Electing to live as a constant maverick, I allowed my interests to move in and out of mathematics, in and out of physics, of economics, or diverse other fields of physical and social sciences, and even music and art.

Science would be ruined if it were to withdraw entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are wanderers-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

The links to urban exploration make sense of you think of the psychogeography of the mind, a territory mapped by mnemonics, memetics and the Hermetic tradition.

The "ecotourist" of the 21st Century is often on "tours of duty" meaning there's work involved, and academic credit. The site will have organized around a steady flow of part time volunteers (you choose you duties in a competitive environment).

Where does the charity come from i.e. the funding? That's what Coffee Shops Network is all about: giving Everyman the tools to practice philanthropy. Your reputation as a savvy grant giver, based on winnings, is worth cultivating. You'll become a role model for imitators.

Will Self, a British novelist and sometime TV personality speaks about psychogeography in some of his Youtubes. He's also a big fan of the Russian science fiction movie Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Avogadro's Number and the CCP

copyleft Wikimedia commons

I'm going to take you to an old blog post (archival) in case you have an interest in this topic: Avogadro's Number.

American Literature replaced the BCC and SCP with the CCP in Transcendentalism, when representing "the holodeck" (archetype: land before time, firmament, matrix) before some schools of engineering even knew what that meant (not being crystallographers by training).

In review (OCN stuff):

• BCC: body centered cubic
• SCP:  simple cubic
• CCP:  cubic close packing

At CSN, we're into providing the best in "STEM reveries" meaning as you cram for that exam, over coffee, just staring into space, at one of our LCDs, may get you remembering Organic Chemistry.

We're not limited to "STEM reveries" by legal contract or deal, just that's an area of weakness in some Coffee Shops, which may tend to cater more to idle tourists or flaneurs as some prefer.

Hard-working eco-tourists are a different category entirely (not idle, for one thing).

4D Solutions: Less Smoke, More Mirrors

If you've been following the Oregon Curriculum Network Youtube channel, one of mine, you'll see where I break into the dot RU domain via ok.ru -- think "Russian Facebook".  I'm not using bitcoin to send those flowers quite yet, but if you're in Moscow and somebody rings your doorbell...  that might mean I'm learning.

The 2020 retrospective goes back through some show and tell recaps, hoping to trigger at least some memories out there.  If you're a student, you know that "cramming" may just mean it all falls out of your head a lot faster.  What is it we get to keep?  Mnemonics is your friend.

The new word at Wanderers (a local meetup, Linus Pauling House based) is

FLÂNEUR

an art term. It means "wanderer with no purpose" (or "with a purpose to be purposeless"). "Not All Who Wander Are Lost" may be a slogan familiar to you. Think "tourist". Visit Portland "Keeping It Weird" Oregon someday?

Undersea Scans with C6XTY

With the close of Lattice Gallery, right behind Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), came the end of Phase I:  public awareness.  The press release to the Sculptors Conference net us a key audience, and a footprint in Art World at last.

However, Phase II is likely to focus on marine biology in some dimension, with neutral buoyancy sensors held in stasis by slender "stalks" per the famous Lanahan Flextegrity design -- what Lattice Gallery was all about.  Marine Habitats.  Ecotourism.  What's down there?

How do we address CCP lattice balls uniquely?  Why not use coordinate addresses.  The stalks have sufficient diameter to carry insulated cable.  We don't have to use 5G or even 4G, thereby interfering with signal.  We'll have an underwater matrix able to sense schools of fish, unaffected by the cabling, and render them in 3D in real time.

Some of you may be imagining a much more spaced-out matrix with room for larger objects, pre-programmed to dodge nodes (hubs) and stalks (connectors).

Better yet, we're free to communicate on public frequencies, i.e. use WiFi so 5G or 4G might be just the ticket.

The underwater buoy matrix, in CCP conformation, will depend on C6XTY-like buckyballs (macro-sized) holding their own positions.  This might require battery power only for the duration of the tournament or other sporting event.  Think of drones, but underwater.

Have you seen our technical journaling about (a,b,c,0) addressing for these pods?  Popular mechanical engineering themes weave through this (x,y,z) fabric of lattice elements.  Do we call it Cartesian?  Our high schoolers start to study these topics well before students in most states (of mind). Would you like to accelerate along a learning curve?

I'm looking to India and other ancient cultures for some feedback on this question, regarding the IVM as an archetype.  What's the etymology of "isotropic" in ancient Greek?  Do we find the IVM in the Vedas in some precursor form?  Some Buddhist have said it means Void (in translation).  That sounds fine, but let's not wait for someone in California to figure it all out, OK?  Oregon Curriculum Network has more direct sources.

IVM has many meanings of course, as my PhD friend Dr. Potkin reminds me.  Of course this being CSN, home of those synergetics hypertoons, I'm using the namespace of Dr. Fuller:  isotropic vector matrix.

That's the CCP (or FCC) to you chem heads (Linus Pauling's preferred stomping ground).  Check OCN's stash of Jupyter Notebooks for more info (School of Tomorrow meme).