Recalling est

From the Twilight Zone... (School of Tomorrow)

Tip for Teachers (School of Tomorrow)

Doing Homework

Cutting and pasting from Facebook:

My morning homework. I'm only an hour into it. I like to start my day with some geopolitics and coffee. I fed the dog at 3:30 AM, finished my dreams, then put on my study hat, figuratively (I can't find my main Stetson BTW, all beat up and worn out) and hit the "books" (except usually that means YouTubes).

I often watch the Neutrality Studies channel in particular, to help me keep up with the WILPF ladies (men allowed, I'm a member) on their listserv.

Lots of collective memories over there (these ladies go back, although not all the way back to Hull House at this point). I'm learning a lot about ethnicities that derive from countries no longer on the map, and they're a lot of them.

[ Nietzsche wasn't even German and wrote critically of the German psyche in Will to Power etc., most people don't know that.. He was born in Prussia. More about N in my blog post linked in the comments).]

Chicago is home to a lot of descendants from Bohemia and Yugoslavia as well. Nations come and go we should remember. I think of Tom Hanks in that movie The Terminal. Many live in a twilight zone transit lounge liminal space, as they've fallen through the very wide cracks in our geopolitical vista.

Many people don't possess any paperwork to prove their citizenship anywhere and therefore they're treated as entitled to no human rights (who would protect them?). For a while, the Americas were a kind of asylum for the undocumented, mainly because many of these undocumented were actually born here (they're native Americans).

More Historical Data

Jack F. Matlock, Jr, was the U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1987–1991, and had a key role in negotiating an end to the Cold War. 

Ambassador Matlock argues that Western leaders have been captured by ideology, forgotten about diplomacy, and "become war criminals".

Pep Talk

Debate Culture

From my outbox (to a team listserv earlier today): 

I bring this up [debate culture] because where I put my focus is on debates, versus gunplay or smear attack propaganda. For some time, the policy in the State Department, during Nuland's tenure, was to cut off all communication with the Russian diplomatic community and to ban their television in the USA. This was consistent with the Ukraine policy of demonizing Russia and outlawing Russian as a means of official or even informal communication.

However, nowadays the prospect of televised debates between US and Russian journalists is far more likely, or even high school debate teams.

A US team, if debating something about current affairs, say whether Portland should indeed become a sister city with Mariupol, would want to train on a lot of materials, as is standard. The team will have to master and argue both sides at different events.

Does anyone else watch Rick Sanchez ever? He was in a booth on Red Square with Scott Ritter during the Alaska Accords summit (what some of us Ruscadians call it); I watched him co-star with Manila Chan on RT America for years.

I was always an RT America fan, which I came to, as I explain in my journals, via Air America, the FM radio network that I'd tune in on the car radio while waiting for that same daughter to get out of middle school. When Air America broke up, a lot of the talent moved to either MSNBC or RT America. The latter had Abby Martin, Chris Hedges... folks I follow to this day.

Now that NATO has lost its proxy war (the way I see it), I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot more US high schoolers, debaters especially, put on the spot to bone up on what's been happening, and that's not going to mean mindlessly reciting gospel / dogma emanating from Washington, DC and it's Great Decisions program (or maybe the Methodists still get programmed that way?), it's going to mean finding the right YouTubes and starting from scratch in a lotta ways.

Pythonica from the School of Tomorrow

School of Tomorrow: A Summer of Activism

An Active Inference Project

The Ant Stack: A Blueprint for AI

The ant: a masterclass in doing more with less.

Synergetics: A Geometry of Thinking

This vid is a curated snapshot of the state of the art in 2025, in terms of having an LLM grok Synergetics and come back with radio voice + slides. 

I call it "radio voice" because NotebookML, the Google tool in question, at first would come back with a dialog between a male-sounding and female-sounding voice, with no video component. The dialog was in the style of a radio broadcast, or a podcast, with cadance and intonations of people used to being on the radio.

 
Now, a few months later, we're getting some primitive video, and a single voice, male or female sounding.

This development is somewhat of a breakthrough for our ethnicity, as our subculture's memes tend to not get much time in social media. Confidant radio voice broadcasts of our material haven't happened much, in the forty years it might've. 

However, since I'm talking about a subculture, the implication is these memes were being shared somehow, among however few, and that's true. Museum exhibits. Documentaries. Lots of books. Collaborative communities. Institutes... the whole nine yards. 

Now we're finding AI is providing new levers, and so we use them.

I'm not giving the last word however. Check out my YouTubes, those of others, for more advance content, when it comes to Synergetics. Don't wait for AI to do your homeword for you.

College Prep Synergetics

 

If you're a long time reader of this blog, which features Philosophy Talk, then you'll likely be familiar with:

(a) hypertoons and
(b) 4D vs 4D vs 4D

The former has to do with computer animation, or actually any kind of moving picture, where the "playhead" is free to wander around amidst a network of scenarios, with seamless segues at keyframes.

The latter has to do with natural language, our awareness of "language games" within semantic space, either invented for investigatory purposes, or teased out of ordinary language itself. Wittgenstein. What language games involve "4D" as a meme?

These themes add together in our genre of science fiction, labeled Martian Math for marketing reasons, but not necessarily all that oriented towards Martian lore. ETs and science fiction more generally enter the picture, as we unfold our specific 4D mathematics.

Another Syllabus Video

David Graeber on Debt, Service, and the Origins of Capitalism 

Faculty Lounge Chatter

I'm assembling this posting from my contributions to one of the Telegram faculty lounge channels.

Cultagory Studies

Required viewing in my neck of the woods, if you're studying Cultagory Theory the way I do. We study the meaning of the word "spin doctor" (which is open to all genders by the way).

For example, we study "mad men" (Madison Avenue advertising gurus) in connection with The Hunger Project, the 1980s attempt to break through crufty programming. As I wrote in an email recently (earlier today):

What few understood about Erhard's Hunger Project, B. Fuller on the advisory board, was that it was all about using Mad Man brainwashing techniques (aka commercial advertising) to put on ads (like NFL ads, big TV) talking about how we had it within our means, physically and logistically, to end world hunger by the year 2000, and all that we lacked was the political will.

In other words, we were gonna hire the best and the brightest advertising firms to turn the brainwashing cannons in a different direction, to "pivot" if you will.

I thought that sounded bold and innovative and it appealed to my spin doctor side. "Yeah, that could work" I was thinking. This was around the early 1980s.

But lets not imagine all the pro advertiser pioneers were New York based. On the contrary, some argue that the real headquarters for this art (and science?) was (and is?) in Chicago.

Quakernomics

Radio Voice Synergetics

AI-generated; Made with NotebookLM

Geek Lore

:: TempleOS in 100 Seconds ::

more with less

home of open source software

:: ASCII art ::

Big Brains

excerpt and link to Substack

Silicon Forest != Silicon Valley

Python Teaching Ideas

Cascadian Synergetics: Executive Summary (June 2025)

Viewers with some background in philosophy might pick up on the allusions to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (“beetle in a box”) whereas to others such cryptic motifs will come across as a private language (all insider jokes).

Making Sense of Quadrays

Pound Era Mathematics (School of Tomorrow)

More Analysis (Five Wars)

:: re "five wars" ::

Inter-modal Vehicles

Roaring 20s

From the Archive: Secret Knowledge

Cultagory Theory: Revectoring Psyons

This presentation continues to elaborate on themes here in my blogs. As early as the 1990s, I was emailing E. J. Applewhite, Fuller's sidekick on Synergetics, regarding my "word-meaning trajectories" lingo, which, as I point out starting from my first slide, is by now a more mathematically established concept given word2vec and natural language processing (NLP).

I'm wondering if my metaphor of "trains" as in "trains of thought" (but also literal trains), taking most predictable tracks through a Hilbert space, will catch on more, with respect to LLMs (large language models). The caboose, way in the back, represents "attention span" meaning one way to steer the train through its many locutions is "from the rear" in the sense one needs to revisit to sound cogent. A long train is more determinate in nature.

NLP more generally is serving high end culture as a kind of bridge over the C. P. Snow chasm, twixt the sciences (STEM) and the humanities (PATH). Only a tiny subcultural minority sees a tetrahedral crystal, a grain of sand, sparking the "solidification" of such bridging infrastructure. The activation of a "right brained" test pattern (we might call it), within the mind's eye of literature majors, is preparing the ground for more multi-media literacy, provided the osmosis process continues.

The "test pattern" of which I speak is of course the "concentric hierarchy" of Synergetics, and its BEAST or BASKET modules. STEM meets PATH in this purely geometric construction, with applications everywhere, including in humanities readings.

What gives us leverage on the humanities side is the window into what's weak in STEM, whereas STEM is rather used to intimidating its would-be detractors with a obfuscation. The track record is now open to view: inconvenient truths were bleeped over to keep us from backtracking to some wrong turns in our curriculum development efforts. We neglected to explore the Bucky stuff sufficiently, or some of us did. Some of us didn't, and we're enjoying our edge, our advantages. The normies are on the defensive. The challenge is to remain magnanimous in victory.

Flying to the Moon

:: Flying to the Moon by Russell Towle ::

Karl Marx: Rock Star

AI dashboard: 

Popular around the world, not just in UK/Europe! 

In my Graph Theory 2025, I admit to not being a Marxist, or even a fan, which simply means I haven't done enough homework to count myself within that inner circle. 

That doesn't make me unteachable, but on the other hand I'm pretty old (almost 67) so probably not really in need of yet another semantic framework, or dialectic or whatever we call it. 

I get by with these holes. I'm a fan of Wittgenstein's and Bucky's. Many more.  Storm Large...

Looping Through

I'm recycling a favorite recording, with permission from the original hosting channel, of a lecture-interview between myself and some math-savvy high dimension seekers and visualizers. A privilege. I'm using "hypertoon" lingo in "looping through" in the sense of revisiting one of the node-frames in our toon graph.

Operation Duckrabbit is about using Wittgenstein's later philo as a launching pad for another language, experientially based and informed by some of our greatest minds, such as Euler's. This language is somewhat meta to our knowledge base, metaphysics having somewhat given up the ghost by the time Fuller came along and breathed new meaning into that word. Ephemeralization is in the direction of the more metaphysical.

One of my themes is the peaceful coexistence of XYZ and IVM, two kingdoms never so conceived until recently, as no one had championed the IVM as a thing. XYZ defined the bottom rungs or steps of a ladder or stairway, toward a higher dimensional heaven, a game of ascension. The IVM arrowhead showed up proclaiming its 4Dness, which took attention, in the sense of limelight, away from the cube.

From the tetrahedron's point of view, or the 4eyes, the cube needed help anyway. This wasn't replacement theory, this was coming to the aid of an unstable fellow Platonic. This instability is usually not mentioned in polite company, where physical attributes, especially immutable ones, are unfair to use in any arguments. Bigotry has no place in Euclidean geometry.

The duo-tet cube, is still the cube, at which post most of the audience is relieved and moves on. However the die-hards want to examine the fineprint and they find a suggestion that their beloved cube, now stabilized, as an unseemly size, as anything other than unit would seem unseemly insofar as the cube is concerned. Dialing in a unit cube, volume-wise, takes the edges out of integer-ville and that's an unforgivable heresy in the die-hards' book.

I'd say the misapprehension of the blockhead group, the most cube-loyal, is our constant rejoinder that XYZ is one of Man's Wonders, using "Man" in that generic guy sense. Three basis vectors count as most elementary, with a secondary negative threesome comprising an omni-symmetrical beacon to any wayfaring spaceship. 

"Ahoy, XYZ octahedron ahead at 3 o'clock" meaning that familiar "jack" pattern has been detected, meaning an origin, a (0,0,0). We have the API for that, and can refuel in a jiffy.

Also floating in this same space: the occasional caltrop, a four basis vectors affair, with no twinning, not that negating is discouraged, just unneeded, to span all-space. These beacons will have a (0,0,0,0) origin, and we have the API for that too.

The story I'm telling here is meant to remind us of other readings we may have done, including in Python source code, wherein a Vector and Qvector contain (x, y, z) and (a, b, c, d) data structures respectively. Each has a way of turning into the other. A Vector turns into its corresponding Qvector and vice versa. The addressing flips back and forth between systems.

How much of all this decodes, and how much stays mumbo jumbo, as a lot to do with what the psychologists call gestalts, where literary critics might speak of heuristics. Wittgenstein talks a lot about aspect shifts, in the course of investigating the meaning of "meaning" (his core concern). That's where the duckrabbit in Operation Duckrabbit comes from.

Esoterica, Arcana, Americana (School of Tomorrow)

:: from two years ago ::

Uncanny Valley Productions

Synthetic Synergetics #001.1 ~ Welcome to Synergetics!

NotebookLM is an AI tool for generating NPR-like podcasts featuring two voices discussing a target text, in this case Bucky Fuller's Synergetics. 

The content of the dialog is no competition for a well-versed human teacher, yet succeeds in providing quite a bit of context and overview.

DAF orchestrated the process during the course of an online meeting of the Knowledge Engineering group, Math4Wisdom coven. 

NotebookLM only took a few minutes to come back with an audio file.

The End Of Programming As We Know It

Since AI is what everyone's talking about... I could add my two cents regarding CHOP (chat oriented programming), which I first learned about (the acronym that is) at a Python User Group here in Portland. I've been chopping and hacking and finding Gemini in Google Colab more helpful than just StackOverflow. I love the term "chop slop" and plan to keep using it.

However, my use of chatbots is more of a natural language processing flavor in that I'm not looking for source code prototypes as often as I wanna lurk in on gossip. For example, I made up a query about spin doctors wanting to rebrand these LLMs as "whisper chambers" and getting back a lot of inside scoop on how marketers are thinking these days, when it comes to sounding sincere.

Beyond lurking in on the disciplines, I like to mine history. If you prompt the right way, giving a lot of proper names and context, you're likely to get back something that hangs together. I was able to overlay what we call the Naga Story in my classrooms, with something more scientifically credible, and yet still a myth, as the book that includes it comes up as poetical in its approach. Hello Ezra.

One of the big stories I've been trying to tell is the Westward Ho! migration, eventually along the Oregon Trail, of European high culture, such that Portland, Oregon would become a capital of open source and glass bead games. German Idealism via Kant and Hegel, forking to Marx, with another fork through Pragmatism, yet reuniting with a Transcendentalism. Emerson. Whitman. Back to Coleridge and Kant.

You might be thinking: these paths are all known. Romanticism was a backlash against the ugly side of industrialism (automating stuff) after which New Englanders followed, with their first take on Transcendentalism, already encountering more Asian thought patterns, foretelling the Californian subcultures, theosophy and so on. Yes, true, but such complicated stories bear retelling with the benefit of hindsight. Call it revisionist if you like, but lets keep it neutral on whether "revisioning" is a bad thing. That depends. Could be enlightening.

The evolution of the women's movement in the context of voting democracies figures in, along with two world wars galvanizing their participation in both the factory and the office space, blue collar and white, thereby finding out first hand what their husbands had been doing. Have men been exploring in the other direction. The roles need to be studied and experienced from all sides for the society to understand itself well enough to cohere. I start with women more than equal to men as intellectuals. That's a reference to my Graph Theory slide deck.

Graph Theory 2025

:: narrating my Google slides (February 2025) ::

Contemporary Synopsis

This House, January, 2025

Rebooting K-16