Tetrahelix Toons

 

by Gary Doskas

Sharing a Deck

A Technology in Snapshot (CSN)

You might be wondering about the embedded YouTube, assuming it's still there (assuming too much?), which is about using a Python computer language framework named Flask as a front end to some back end defined by its API.  This would model a Food Cart in a Pod (or out by its lonesome).  Flask shows the menu and talks to a back end to complete the transaction.  Crypto-currencies might be involved (that was the thinking anyway).

This architecture was somewhat my focus as __CMO__ (chief marketing officer) as I tried to wrap my head around how front and back ends got along, in a language in which I was fluent (Python, and to some extent Flask).

CSN (Coffee Shops Network), some of you will recall, is a Philosophy wrapping a Business Model that involves building your profile as both a player risk taker and charitable giver, a philanthropist.  

Coffee Shops are a science fictional cross between an arcade game parlor and a coffee shop.  My locale had both Avalon and Quarter World within walking distance (for reference), and lots of coffee shops.  To say they're science fictional doesn't mean you can't create them for real, just that the imaginary component stays relevant, going forward.

A Coffee Shop is expected to serve various goodies along with the beverages, as we've all ("all") experienced at a StarBucks by now (not that this chain invented the combo -- Dunkin Donuts is a parallel implementation of the vision).  

Portland features many coffee shop bakery combos, with fresh made from scratch baked goods to accompany professionally brewed blends.  

Extrapolating along those lines, we get the more "science fictiony" versions (more speculative), encompassing the idea of "study drugs" or whatever local universities experiment with.  The hypertoons with optionally tunable soundtracks, review a lot of topics in high bandwidth, including medical stuff.  Not every "study hall" is themed the same way.

The focus might be the games themselves, or the meta-game of having the games net usable income streams for actual players in the field.  This isn't all funny money.  Work gets done.  

Supportive players that direct funds through arcades may later (or before) have a role at the other end, so to speak, e.g. where the orangutans are getting protected.

Possibility Meets Affordability (School of Tomorrow)

FNB and OPDX (looking back)

Commemorating Occupy Portland, 2011

BFI Event: A Meeting of Minds

 BFI event: Lionel Wolberger interviews Alec Nevala-Lee

Archival:  from the TrimTab Book Club Google Group 

Date: Sunday, September 25, 2022 at 3:20:21 PM UTC-7
Subject: Re: Inventor of the Future Interview @ BFI: Lionel Interviewing Alec

Many thank yous Lionel; I just finished a first listen-through, on my iPad, sometimes changing rooms. I'll take a picture... in my kitchen.[1]

 

Hey, great stuff.

Now that this meetup is archived online on YouTube, I won't put myself under artificial pressure by thinking I have to give all my follow-on thoughts in one go. It's a lasting resource to go back to. I'm not gonna touch that "glowing ball of light" story in this one (except right there, I just did).

I've already posted lots about Alec's book and was most recently showcasing it to my audience in Lithuania (m4w thread).[2]

I agree with Alec that Fuller constructs a rather private sky of mytho-poetic signifiers, per what Alec terms "the Naga story" and this is indeed influenced by lots and lots of world travel (42 times around the globe was it? -- like I've only done it twice). A lot of it comes across as unbelievable, the kind of tall tale expected from veteran seafarers (those who've ventured beyond the horizon a few times). Note his tribute to poets in the opening pages of Critical Path, e.e. cummings in particular.

I'd say it's not a character flaw to construct and/or inherit some saga-raga cosmic-epic background, in the foreground of which one plays a protagonist of some sort. I think the Jungians would agree: this is an archetypal, and potentially healthy, metaphysical (psychological) configuration, provided one is aware of one's doing so. Or did Fuller degenerate into paranoia and megalomania? [3]

A useful way to recast "poetry" -- if that sounds uncomfortably "romantic" or whatever (to some it does, especially Stemites) -- is to think of it as a code language, an alien tongue, like those comic book men in black have to decipher. Critical Path does appear to contain or talk about military secrets, akin to Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) which followed later. To "scan" is to "climb" (scale).[4] Universe is eternally aconceptual (adding to spellchecker), non-unitarily scannable (unitarily unscannable), in Synergetics.

Most interesting were Alec's thoughts about decentralization and how OMR (Old Man River city) and other such marvelous Wakanda-style mega-projects maybe ran contrary to Fuller's own deeper values, and that maybe he was selling out in some sense, going for sensationalism.

I admit I've always seen the "dome over Manhattan" project as somewhat tongue-in-cheekily audacious, attached to a more sober discourse regarding surface:volume ratios and the economics of space heating (a city is like an old fashioned radiator, in terms of surface:volume heating efficiency, whereas a heated dome could leak less). As Alec and Lionel point out: he employs techniques familiar to science fiction publishers who want to sell movies, books and magazines, sparking our imaginations with visions of possible (and impossible) worlds.

I think Fuller always had his mega-projects side, with Planet Earth his backdrop. He didn't dream of other planets all that much, staying focused on his own lifetime goals, although he did use the civilian space program's Apollo Project as his example of critical path planning and management on a vast scale. He didn't wait for UFOs to solve our problems with their mysterious free energy.

From the 4D towers, planted by helicopter, onward, and to his navy years before: I see a through line of mega-projects. Decentralization coexists as a countering (balancing) pattern. Ultimately it's all one ecosystem, and so we're free to blame nature, not some nebulous "world government" for our immediate need to collectively cooperate and centrally plan in (sometimes competitive) scenarios. That's thermodynamics for ya (ala Into the Cool). How anti-entropic do we wanna be, given our daily energy budget? It takes work, including the work of the intellect (cogitation), to stay human (not a given, don't take it for granted -- per existentialism).

As a species, like ants, we're into terraforming (witness cities, roads, pipelines, grids), for better and/or for worse.

In many ways Alec and I dovetail in terms of sources: Alec talks a lot about Stewart Brand, whereas I talk more about -- and at one point interview [5] -- J. Baldwin; Alec interviews someone on one of the two trips to the Philippines (where I was in high school), whereas I'm friends with someone on the other trip to visit Malacanang Palace, i.e. Sam Lanahan (who knew the Applewhites in DC); Alec accesses the Stanford Archive, whereas I've mostly accessed Trevor Blake's (now at OSU) and Ed's stuff (the stuff he'd share) -- plus Kenneth Snelson and I were buddies, and Kiyoshi.

Alec does tell some of Baldwin's story of course (he's a key player), including the part about smuggling Joe Clinton's chord factors out of NASA before Joe was comfortable his program had been debugged. But did Alec pick up on Baldwin's punch line to this story?: that's why so many domes leaked (i.e. we can blame Jay for declassifying the buggy chord factors too soon).

I'm familiar with the virtual amphitheater and such experiments from earlier BFI Regenera events, as well as from my days working with Bonnie DeVarco on 2nd-life type virtual high school etc, i.e. early Meta type stuff. No, I don't have any goggles yet, but I do brainstorm about virtual realities (polyhedrons prominent) with my Silicon Forest friends.

Speaking of social media and "the computer" (another Fuller meme), I think Bucky was taking note of the term's evolving meaning over his lifetime (including in science fiction), and how (some) people seemed to take computer output as more objectively authoritative.

Then came Jay Forrester and world modeling (Club of Rome), so close to world game in both implementation and intent. Dr. Vannevar Bush anticipated the search engine front end to a vast archive, in 1945. Fuller rubbed shoulders with such visionary "est people" (Doxiadis...) [6]. A lot of "his" futurism was indeed synthesized from his conversations with others, Grunch of Giants included, by which time said "computer" (the one we can't fool) is "cosmic" and hardly distinguishable from "mind" itself.
 

I'll have more to say about Walt Disney down the road maybe, vis-a-vis his grander dreams (i.e. EPCOT, before Epcot) and whether he wanted to be remembered as "just another theme park pioneer". I love the YouTube channel DefunctLand, check it out!

One more thing: Fuller in Moscow, moseying over to the Russians, and introducing himself not only as the man behind the dome, but emphasizing this was not some corporation's or government's project, that it was his, and he was just some guy acting on his own initiative, taking responsibility.[7] And: all great ideas come from guys like him or her (they or them), not from political parties etc.. That was his point: governments and corporations are fictitious entities (in legal fiction, a subtype of screenwriting) and have no agency, no powers of thought. To think otherwise is to hold on to some baseless superstitions.

Lots more to say. Great interview.

Congratulations to Gary Doskas for a really excellent FSI presentation yesterday on tetrahelices (adding to spellchecker) -- Gary uses "tetrahelix" for the plural as well.

 

Kirby 

PS: if my Turkey-based company, Clarusway, recruits enough students for a next US-based cohort, I'll be again drafted and mobilized on Saturdays (among other days), through to the end of 2022. No more TrimTab meetups for me in that case, sigh (we meet at the same time). It's not a sure thing I gather, i.e. that we'll have a full enough load. I'll know more by early October. I should be able to make it to the next meetup at least.

[1] https://flic.kr/p/2nNZRa5
[2] https://controlroom.blogspot.com/2022/09/m4w.html
[3] http://grunch.net/snelson/
[4] https://www.etymonline.com/word/scan
[5] https://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2009/01/about-habitats.html
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Est:_The_Steersman_Handbook
[7] https://pacificdomes.com/american-innovators-icons-buckminster-fuller-george-nelson-and-charles-ray-eames/ (I'm still digging for the precise article I'm remembering)

Random souvenirs:

 

From VectorVille

Synergetics Constant

working S3 into the hypertoons

Shepard Tone

Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

A philosopher friend once told me that Alfred North Whitehead had intended to do for geometry what Bertrand Russell was doing for logic: distill everything to a primitive most-minimal vocabulary. With operations. An operational mathematics, perhaps more right brained (graphical) than left (lexical).

If we start with the most-minimal idea of "container" i.e. that which occupies and contains space, by dividing inner space from outer space, by what we might call a "membrane" (why not? -- synonyms proliferate quickly because we're talking core grammar) then what other ideas follow naturally (organically), given ordinary language?

From container come not just "inside" and "outside" but connecting around, in order to divide (contain) i.e. concave and convex.

The rods and spheres used to make your first triangle are already containers on their own i.e. stretched out 4eyes if we wanna systematize it. Container = 4eyes = minimal sphere (least fingers) = the container's anchoring concept.

milk containers

Making the 4eyes the core beginning of containment is not at all weird. The arrowhead (four directional) marks a beginning (an origin) at the center of our 12-directional compass (gyro).

Then come the proper names we might want to wire in to this structured vocabulary, the formatted memory zone. 

Such as Descartes for his famous Deficit, Euler for his V+F=E+2 (which Descartes likely knew too but made secret), and Gibbs for getting the chemical components involved in a more tactile dimension.

That's what Fuller does, contrary to false rumors that he doesn't reference other thinkers. He wires the 4eyes itself to Plato in one passage, suggesting why the triangle is always predictive of that fourth eye we don't see, because it's the one seeing the triangle (the observer aka camera is oft forgotten, a logical error -- per G, remember thyself). 

Then Fuller wires in Avogadro for the ideal uni-density diffusion that is the IVM as a gas; the ball centers suggest average centers of mass in a statistically uniform stochastic pattern, regardless of the actual kinetics.

I'm happy that humanities teachers have all this raw material to work with independently of STEM, which seems hellbent on wiring Fuller out more than in, because of NIHS (not invented here syndrome). 

That's true: Synergetics is an experimental language in the humanities, with the powers of prose, right in there with Finnegans Wake (Joyce) and Ezra's Cantos, David Wallace's Infinite Jest and Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle -- all experiments in hammering out new (even useful) ways of using language. 

The Stemites (tribes of STEM) tend to fuss about Dr. Fuller's use of language, complaining he should operate with words the same way they do if he expects flattering treatment. We call them Philistines (some of them): i.e. "[people] hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who [have] no understanding of them." (to quote the dictionary).

STEM becomes STEAM (A = Anthropology, not Art, sorry), and intersects with PATH: Philosophy Anthropology Theater -- including politics -- and History. A new drop-in for all that trivium-quadrivium jazz.

A is their intersection (dance and music fit here too): the study of humans in Universe. Their "universe of discourse" one might put it; i.e. their "space" (logical, semantic), their cultures (semantic spaces).

I agree that Universe need not fit in (be captured by) any special case System (sorry Hegel, if that's a problem). This Universe is less a culminating climax (a big bang), and more an insignificant, eternally aconceptual (lost) footnote in some concluding unscientific postscript.   

A system is always missing at least one marble (720 degrees), leaks sense, is entropic, has a half life.

I'm thinking Synergetics has a bright future in PATH-side literacy and movie-making classes, and that these liberal arts graduates will be much better informed about STEM topics than those who squeaked by with just "physics for poets" i.e. without much university-level Synergetics. 

Like Fuller's biographies, Synergetics itself is a great switchboard for connecting to all manner of readings, an unlocker of new fluencies, a great gymnasium for exercising one's prose-reading and prose-writing muscles, and with a lot of computer stuff (and crystallography) filtering in between the lines.

Smart Conversation

I came across this Youtube recently, which some of you may already know about. I've linked straight to where Bucky Fuller was mentioned, as he was given a copy of The Animate and the Inanimate to review, a little known work by one William James Sidis.

William and Bucky were both Harvard men, and the 18 year old Fuller had actually been aware of Siddis, who'd been admitted some years earlier at the tender age of 11. You'll find that story on page 42 in Alec's book.

Alec credits the Siddis lectures to Harvard's Mathematical Club for getting Fuller going on his own "4D" arc and worldline (i.e. meme). Indeed, when Fuller reads the Siddis manuscript, he sees the approximate face of Synergetics (just going to press at that time).

https://youtu.be/zNYK7rnXi9g?t=960

Tibees, the Youtuber, is a serious intellectual scholar, taking the time and trouble to unearth and read the early writings of the later famous. I watched her review of Neil deGrasse Tyson's PhD thesis this morning as well. 

[originally posted to TrimTab Book Club, a listserv moderated by Curt McNamara]

A Virtual Life

LORN - ANVIL [Official Music Video]

ET Math (Adapt to Suit)

Building with vZome

School of Tomorrow: Our Lineage

Phi Scale Modules

Featured artist:  Grayham Forscutt

CSN Circuit Diagram

 

Coffee Shops Network

 

A behind the scenes peek at a Casino for Charity. Many of the games take skill, but there's always luck involved too.  This circuit is one component.  A credit wheel has to do with resource allocation.

Between income and outflow wheels comes "value added" i.e. "work performed".  GST.

More About Hypertoons

Love & Theft

Building a Unit XYZ Cube within the IVM (School of Tomorrow)

Coffee Shop Music

Acid Drops from Jeffrey Ventrella on Vimeo.

Lighting Talk: Planet Urbit Discovered

from my Youtube channel

Pharma Talk

Dimension in Synergetics: A Quest

Divining the Tri Tetrahelix

by Bonnie DeVarco

Design for a Fair: The United States Pavilion at Expo '67 Montreal

FSI Presentation (January 29, 2022)

My induction lecture, Doing My Slides Again, with Intros and Q&A.  The Youtube description has a breakout of the presentation portion by time signature.  These slides are available in the commons in case you want to master and deliver the content.  No purchases nor licenses required.

The Day After MLK Day 2022

A Writing Exercise

I like the exercise / workout involved.

"What is it that we could be sharing from the Fuller syllabus that would accelerate humanity in a direction most would consider positive, relative to our direction today?"

For example, since 1983 I've been fascinated by the fact that an American who wrote that "the USA we have known is now bankrupt and extinct" (giving his rationale, including on Constitutional grounds), also was awarded a Medal of Freedom from a president of the USA, right around the same time. What a hoot!

That fact alone is too exotic and fun to not share, but no one does, which to me proves Bucky was right, as a real USA wouldn't be so dweeby-phony as to suppress this interesting historic fact that every high schooler should know.

I also find it entertaining that we had years of "Q anon" talking about Mockingbird as a CIA project, without anyone doing enough research to connect our own Edgar with said Mockingbird, and to further connect him (a former Deputy Inspector General of the CIA it says on the dust cover of Synergetics 2) to the so-called "deep state" (which we could also say is very shallow, as in superficial) or to Synergetics (what's that, duh?).

That our Medal of Freedom winning OSS-affiliated cold warrior also came up with a new way to model 3rd powering, after literally millennia of casting only cubes for that job, but that universities are afraid to take this topic with anything like the seriousness it deserves, thanks to politics, is further proof that overspecialization just leaves even the most intelligent people feeling helpless and not in a role where it could ever be up to them to make a real difference. The professoriate deserves to be called out. More than canceling student debt, I say they all deserve a refund. Remember, "lack of money" is not the issue.

I watched Chris Hedges again last night, and although he's good at sounding the death knell for American democracy, he's not willing to acknowledge that Bucky was circling the idea of "corporate personhood" contemporaneously with Ralph Nader in pointing out that the soulless non-humans were now running the show.

In short, Fuller's story has all the elements we need to create those interesting and disruptive narratives that shift us onto new tracks. It's not at all Bucky's fault that we're too phony-dweeby to take advantage of this legacy. We sit around like deaf-mute idiots instead. That's our legacy.

Keep on Trucking (GST)