A Synopsis

Europe was headed in the direction of relative utopia with Nord Stream 2 about to come online, but Social Darwinists in The District wouldn't have it. 

What if the French working class were actually able to stabilize around that much vacation time, with Club Med level leisure class facilities, and what if socialized health care actually worked over the long haul?  The American public would become dissatisfied with their lot.

Condoleezza Rice could see the writing on the wall. The rapacious license to exploit, called the American Way, would fall into disfavor and the accompanying grotesque lifestyles might become a thing of the past.

So Europe's ruling cast quislings consented to have their own workers' jugular sliced so they could more effectively concentrate power in the hands of the few with less of a threat to their "system". 

Military Socialism (e.g. NATO) would continue to rule, with its veneer of Cowardly Capitalism. 

Their consent would be in exchange for making Russia weak again, so that their future energy imports might be controlled by Wall Streeters and post WW2 financial institutions created by the military-entertainment complex.

Europe would share in the glory of the American Empire.

Fuller predicted in the 1980s in Critical Path, that LAWCAP's greed would eventually lead it to attack the Russians. 

Perhaps the honesty of his financially and engineeringly informed poetics helped open a window of optimism that such a scenario might be avoided, and giving the USSR a chance to reform. 

However, in the aftermath of Grunch of Giants we got the message: LAWCAP would not morph into something spanking new without a fight. 

Fuller's writings would be relegated to the "subversive" pile (his reputation would be smeared) and good doobie apprentice capitalists would be insulated from such futurism going forward. That was the plan anyway. I'm not suggesting it was ever realistic.

The Business Plot

Although it’s not a no brainer, it’s almost that, to recognize Major General Smedley “Fighting Quaker” Butler for his bravery not only in the company of his men, but later in life, as more of a loner, when he published War is a Racket and had to expose the creeping private sector, anxious to keep devouring the public space.

What public space? In some ideologies there’s no such thing. The world inherently belongs to this or that people, championed by this or that cult, and if not the whole world, then at least a part of it, with the intention to expand. That’s to claim the land on behalf of a people as private to them, which becomes the rallying cry of citizens once they have it. But do they have it?

We know about public spaces and public services, which happen when private interests collaborate to achieve something no one could afford to undertake solo. That would be the space program for example, in its more writ large aspects, and certainly that would be war.

However these days the wars are privatized, not declared, and run irrespective on any meaningful oversight. Weapons and funding is easy to come by. All one needs are ideologues with a willingness to die for some cause. If not that, at least they can eat presuming the militia is able to support itself logistically, which is not always the case.

Do we have any public space left in education? I would say some. Without authorization from some private company, or better, with the authorization of only my own company, I have the right and ability to purchase public facing screen estate. Prospectors are able to scroll through my material. 

Smedley Butler was approached with a scheme to finally privatize the remaining public institutions that had survived thanks to FDR. The ruling elite wanted their country back. Smedley would have nothing of it and blew the whistle. After all he’d done to be loyal, he wasn’t about to go down in history as a traitor. Probably the business perps who tried to persuade him said they were doing it for the peoples’ benefit.

Fast forward and the push to privatize would reach an apex under president Reagan, coincident with a similar high water mark under Margaret Thatcher in England. The private sector would attempt to establish control without its takeover destroying the underlying legitimacy of their platform. One might call this Business Plot 2.0 and without a Smedley in the picture, it mostly worked, except that people were sensitive to the hollowness and lack of statesmen.

Fast forward some more and we have a eugenics-minded Social Darwinist private sector acting like we’re in the early 1900s again. The public sector is all but gone and a private mercenary army supports the highest bidders with WMDs. The USA to some extent still fights back, in part by keeping Smedley Butler relevant to the narrative.

More Curriculum Notes

:: photo by DBK ::

We have an army of geeks with M4 Mac Minis this Xmas, extrapolating from YouTubes, and a goodly number of them are running Blender. Some would like to break into Python teaching. I have some recommendations.

If you're a new kid on the block and want a ground floor entrance to an express freight elevator to the top, figuratively speaking, you might want to visit my latest Lesson Plan featuring S3, a number I was promoting to Epistemologists recently, at least to their admins.  S3 = 1.06066...

Polyhedrons may be related to one another versus studied only as individuals. For example, how the cube (3) and its dual (4) both nest, as short and long diagonals respectively, within the twelve diamond faces of the rhombic dodecahedron (6), should not come across as ungraspable mumbo-jumbo known only to esoteric clerics.

V + F == E + 2

We're talking common knowledge on the level of ABCs. The dual of the cube being the octahedron.

However just reading such stuff isn't to get the visualization necessarily and for that we could use Blender. I date myself with my POV-Ray based approach, but the final rendering step isn't as critical as the guts, which is where S3 comes in, in our computations of volume.

1, 12, 42, 92, 162...

Since Piero della Francesca at least, in the 1400s, we've had a way to derive a tetrahedron's volume from its edges. Other such algorithms, starting from the six edges, have come along since. 

These formulae need to make a come back, as short computer programs, as we present an alternative to the XYZ approach vs-a-vs the tetrahedron's volume in our new paradigm, the one with the unit edge D, the unit volume tetrahedron. 

We may use the "from edges" approach instead, with S3 as a modifier, and/or use Gerald de Jong's method, which had no XYZ version in the first place.

We have two principal targets after establishing the new volumes table: great circle networks and sphere packing. Of course the two interrelate and of course both have multiplicitous applications within geography, computer games, and crystallography, even psychology.

We spin our cuboctahedron and icosahedron, for example, to net great circle networks of 25 and 31 great circle networks respectively, and we juxtapose them. 

The sphere packing starts with our D-edged tetrahedron itself (D = ball diameter). The CCP, with D-edged tetrahedral and octahedral voids, is our Matrix home base.

How we got here though, was over the S3 bridge, and in Silicon Forest Martian Math, in the context of Sapiens coming to better understand an ET intelligence.

The Mac Mini army has the compute to bring this literature into the foreground, perhaps in the form of anime. 

Sapiens and ETs meet on some Mesa and learn to collaborate on hydropower projects. The relationship is non-adversarial.

The lesson here is for those succumbing to phobias.

Humans have a track record of working together, and the global grids are what we're working on now, much to the chagrin of the phobia-ridden politicians who can't envision a world they don't control.

The attack on Nord Stream was an expression of the fearful reflex-conditioning of the more robotic lower half of the Bell Curve (less mindful), pampered juveniles groomed to feel entitled to management positions.

Tooting My Own Horn

I corrected myself later in a follow-up message. Margaret Fuller died at sea, with her new baby and Roman soldier husband (he'd fought for Roman independence against the Vatican), so clearly Fuller was not a physical descendent. She was his great aunt. Intellectually speaking, however, he was shaped by her writings and she was among the three women to whom he dedicated his Grunch of Giants.

 

T4P Caravan

search: t4p

conjured from Hilbert Space

Python Teaching Ideas

Friendly Art

prompted from Hilbert Space, praise the King

Church and State

:: six fingers jammin Sam ::

You may have seen in the movies where certain underground cults have gone ga ga for an iconography, such as that of a nation. In torch-lit ceremonies, whatever logo gets used, some motivational symbol, such as the Olympic Games deploys, or Nike. Not that either of these are “cults” in popular parlance. The spin on key terms here is colored by its ballpark.

My own bias is to think of n8v tribes that went bigly for the Stars and Stripes as a motif in their beadwork. I also think of Grateful Dead, the band, on the road, and its merging with Uncle Sam imagery. That’s a goldmine we’ve been mining to this day, exploring what the new AI dream machines might do.

From a more legal code angle, the picture is not one of a government foisting itself upon others, so much as a subculture partaking of the same mythic sources. The same George Washington under the same elm tree waves the new flag, but some of the troops complain about the miniature Union Jack in the upper left, and Betsy Ross makes sure it’s replaced. That’s straight outta Critical Path (St. Martins Press) check archive dot org.

So say a subculture, like the Masons, is into a lot of the same pyramid eye stuff as the Union of States, the Federation. Good icons are hard to find, let alone great ones. Some of these cults predate the USA obviously. So it’s not so much like government encroaching on the church as the church asserting its intellectual property rights in the realm of the Zeitgeist.

The story need not be adversarial at all, as in the case of George Washington, who had no problem with Masonic rituals. The Quakers might be cast as synergyzing with n8vs per the early days in Sylvania (William Penn’s), comparing notes on governance and community building, only to bring their newly won insights to their new circuit designs, the ones that started up in Philadelphia but eventually moved to that former swamp called DC (District of Columbia).

I live in “DC West” meaning the Columbia River has its watershed, a district. I’m in that district, near the confluence of said great river and one of its tribs, known as the Willamette.

So lets say here in DC West, a tribe of Quakers get very into Uncle Sam iconography, along with some brewpub already promoting the Grateful Dead. Would George Washington seem out of place? Certainly the Masons have been embraced (by the McMenamins brewpubs, talking about Oregon and Washington). I’d say “Deja vu”.

Headless Nations

Excuse me? Who are you calling “headless” in this picture?

Today’s YouTube thumbnails are saying “Joe Biden” and or “the US” is giving the green light to this or that, through the New York Times. Clearly someone is feeling authorized to make stuff happen, as the Davos crowd seems to be surging in a particular direction. 

Yet public attention has been elsewhere, possibly making this feel like a window of opportunity to these political actors.

How all this lashing out is supposed to advance US interests is hard to decipher. One presumes some last grasper is hoping to express manhood or otherwise address a perceived failing. Everyone knows there’s no “commander in chief” at the helm and that we’re running on reflexes. 

We’re back to the usual fun game of headless chicken.

How is the world to deal with zombie juggernauts? 

My Silicon Forest is far away from The District and has its own circuitry. We do microchip fab a lot, with Intel here, in Hanoi, in New Mexico. We’re not “Atlanticists” here on the Pacific Rim, somewhat by definition. 

We haven’t green lighted anything from here. 

The Empire attacked us with storm troopers ala Star Wars not that long ago. We continue to flaunt federal restrictions on controlled substances and sometimes break the human trafficking laws, by providing asylum.

Anyway, there’s no danger of me saying “we” when it comes to whoever is doing the signaling with those green lights. We’ve known since Reagan that the deep state is all about working around Congress and carrying out business plots regardless of whatever “oversight” the so-called government attempts to exercise. Evidence: the Nord Stream extrajudicial special military operation.

People still talk about the Constitution a lot and brand themselves as defenders thereof, but I don’t see where Congress gets to seriously debate anything anymore. We see orchestrated symbolic votes but not actual discussion. The whole debate process has been privatized. 

The executive branch simply executes, disconnected from any legislative controls. And yet they claim we have a system governed by laws, not egos. In these circumstances, some see it as their duty to disobey.

The Science of Infinity

A friend is leaving Portland, and is letting me get some mileage out of his book collection until he arranges for them to join a library. He’ll likely outlive me so he imagines this will be his karma. I’ve already been enjoying earlier portions of his collection, including the extensive set of titles about or by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a corpus we’ve both studied.

I spent much of yesterday extracting two bookcases that had been squeezed between the wall and Carol’s bed, to give them more breathing room in what used to be the back office. Now I have the 2nd floor office to claim if H&R Block suggests filling out such a schedule:  a home office may not double as sleeping quarters, a tough rule for folks in those tiny apartments.

Lots of these books are about maths, Such as Philosophical Introduction to Set Theory by Stephen Pollard, the 2015 Dover edition of the original 1990 Notre Dame Press copy. Back in the day, I’d debate math ideas with other math heads, such as Dr. Wayne Bishop at California University. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics eradicated this archive however. The Math Forum, as we called it, started at Swarthmore, then moved to Drexel.

The book starts out drawing attention to the proliferation of mutually unintelligible subspecialties within maths, and the dangers this poses to a unificationist agenda. Pollard argues that only Set Theory has what it takes to keep Humpty Dumpty recognizably an egg (a whole), whereas Category Theory, an upstart grand unifier, hasn't yet proved itself more effective, in part because, as a relative new kid on the block, it's less established. But let's remember these words were penned in the 1980s sometime.

A core idea in Cantorian set theory is this idea that you cannot pair natural numbers with the reals because too many reals fall through the cracks as it were, per the "diagonal argument" and so on (pages 8-9). 

The targeted reals are allowed to have infinitely many digits after the decimal point whereas that way is barred to the left side: natural numbers with infinity digits are not actually natural numbers, by definition. 

Suppose one assigns a random number to any real number produced. Does the pairing process ever fail in that case? A rule to not break is that of uniqueness: one does not get to assign the same natural number to more than one real, for an operation to count as perpetual pairing.

Once a natural number is spoken for, it retires.  So what’s the problem?

Is the pool of eligible brides thereby diminished such that I’ll run out of Ns for my grooms in R? If I need more digits (given how many Rs you give me) I’ll add them. I’ll never repeat. Pairing works no?

The reason you can’t pair N and R simply by removing the decimal point is precisely because members of N are not allowed to have infinitely many digits. We wouldn’t be able to sequence them all if they did, even if subsets could still be ordered.

Even if N were to include infinity-digit members, like the reals do, we could still use them for counting sheep, as the finite digit Ns would still be in the N set as well.  

But then allowing infinity-digit Ns into contemporary maths would turn it into a wasteland (teenage or otherwise) set theoretically speaking, so lets us just keep things the way they are shall we?

The computer science mindset has made long digit sequences into strings, meaning we don't suffer headaches or vertigo in thinking how divergent (vs convergent) a number like ...3804951234... (random forever in both directions) must be. Digits are digits, with or without a decimal point. What impossibility are we talking about?

Random infinite strings of digits needn't "stand for" anything, e.g. we're not forced into picturing astronomically huge collections corresponding to the output of these noisy, chaotic, digit generators. Whereas these same random digits to the right of a decimal connotes ever more microscopic fine tuning and precision (convergence), which seems a lot more "believable" (the mental picture is more obvious).