Ah, the salty cricket problem revisited. I think we are all either off
trekking in nepal or circle-jerking with our LLM of choice?
I'm in middle ground... like the middle of the hyper-huge-sky country of
the Siberian/Mongolian Steppe as I've been standing up a new (to me) 18'
Yurt manufactured in Mongolia (some hand-craft, but basically an
industrial product from a craft tradition). It came to me from a friend
who had lived in it for 5 years in La Puebla NM after waiting nearly 1
year to have it shipped (with dozens others) in a shipping container via
Flagstaff (a non-profit group from Mongolia who does this to raise
funds and awareness).
I had the help of a visiting BiosGroup escapee who lives in Spokane now,
but visits here virtually every year and yearns for the idio=syncracies
here vs those there, but has not pulled the trigger to move back.
The yurt/ger is nominally a tensegrity structure predating Bucky Fuller
by centuries if not millenia and one can recognize parallel evolved form
from the NoAm Teepee, Wickiup, Pit-House covers, Hogan, etc.
Guerin put a fine point on the system and the process of standing such
up as "a conversation among soft constraints". Acutely apt.
In my case, the Ger/Yurt sits atop a low, sunken stem-wall of
dry-stacked concrete blocks salvaged from a friend's backyard and locked
together by a bond-ring of 1x6 cedar fence material cut to fit,
overlapping and deck-screwed together as a platform for the base of the
yurt lattice (Khana) which woudl normally float on the earth surface (or
in 'murrica, a purpose built deck). My stemwall was multifold... to
rise the 5' walls to 6.5' allowing easier entry/exit for someone like me
with sasquatchian proportions while also sinking the floor below grade
(bermed as well) to support a heat/coolth bubble for more thermal
comfort. It yields a kiva-like affect before the yurt went up.
This more-traditional more-craft version helps me to understand my 25
year old Colorado manufactured version which still serves well despite a
reskinning and lots of rodent and insect wars to keep it human-only.
Mosquito-class stainless screening over the lattice under outer
covering rejects both classes of vermin along with EM if I were to
ground it more better. Rodent, insect, faraday cage. I have a similar
roll of stainless mesh ready to skin the new Mongolian for the same reasons.
I "designed" the foundation/kiva with the help of GPT and Sketchup...
approaching but never quite achieving a self-organizing model in Ruby to
have the elements "construct themselves" and then "find" their places in
the construction according to *a conversation among soft constraints* as
guerin refers to it post-hoc.
The conceit of this standup is to gift Mary her own girl-fort where I
don't interfere beyond getting the damned thing to stand up rain, wind,
and vermin-proof(ish) . A space she can decorate and arrange and use as
she pleases... a writing room a spare bedroom, a meditations space, a
refuge from the likes of me and my drivel.
The conversational partners are variously Khana (lattice), uni
(rafters), toono (compression ring/sky-dome/smoke-hole), bagana
(stabilizing poles in center, optional for smaller versions), bus
(belt-band tensioning khana to diameter.
As to your (glen's) articles of interest - I've always been fascinated
with the Lymphatic system, but Gary Larsen put a fine point on such with
his cartoon of pirates chanting "bucket of blood, bucket of lymph!" -
as I try to exclude the various flying and crawling pests of nature from
Mary's new Yurt/Ger the business of insect (and all life) speciation
fascinates me. This hyper-dry/hot year in NNM has lead to a significant
flux of animalia around our (constructed) pond. usually I see only 1 or
2 dragonflies (caballo de el diablo) whose territoriality yields
interesting aerial dogfights when more than 1 (or mated pair) try to
take up residence. This year we've had several visitors trying to get
a drink or even displace the residents of this faux oasis. My spectrum
of rodentia includes field and house mice (several live-trapped each day
here and there and hustled across the rio-grande to Edith Warner's
(abandoned) place. Playing out my own anti-immigrant expulsion? Also
chipmunks (rarely seen but often heard). ground squirrels (scroungy
little brothers to the scarce but not absent tree squirrels), packrats,
and of course gophers who pulled over 30 bean plants under the ground 1
or 2 at a time over a week or so...
Predictive processing tweaks my experience (or projected apprehension)
of LLM engagement... I encountered it first/best working with UNM on
predictive electromagnetic trackers for VR (fitting the noisy/laggy data
stream to a kinematic model of human anatomy)... It also triggers my
fascination with Jeff Hawkins' 1000 brains/cortical column model of how
abstract cognition might have emerged from (more mundane?) sensorimotor
prediction/surprisal minimization via something like quorum sensing.
Even this glance at the top layer of the archaelogical dig of papers
scattered on your desk is inspirational to me, even if the usual
perseverations which emerge here has gone quiescent for the moment?
Back to the gentle persuasion of khana, uni, toono, bogana, oolsor, bus
into a happy murmuring conversation with gravity and wind... and the
insects and rodents and birds and bees and flowers and trees...
why stop with "touch grass"?
oh yeh... we are past crickets here and on to (a few) locusts... no
junebugs to speak of nor miller moths... with few tomatoes, no tobacco,
no datura we have no hornworms nor their sphynx-moth duals...
Does Nick have a weather/biota report from Maine? Mary just spent a
week on the coast (Belfast) there... so green it hurts your eyes.
On 7/6/26 4:31 pm, glen wrote:
It's so dead, here, I figure it can't hurt to post arbitrary nonsense
I've run across lately:
Meningeal lymphatic architecture and drainage dynamics surrounding the
human middle meningeal artery
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113693
Constructing a lower-bound estimate of the global number of insect
species on a hyperdiverse empirical foundation
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2524283123
Predictive Processing: From Sensorimotor Skills to Higher Cognition
https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15999.003.0011
As always, I'm reading them in fitful bursts, interleaved across each
other and all the other open tabs and crap strewn about my desk. So
.... grain of salt and all.
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