Over on Wikipedia, I sassed the AFSC posting in the discussion area, finding parts of it "silly".
My daughter wanted some info on fractional exponents, so we did some algebra on that topic, deriving how A to the one half would be 2nd root of A.
In Python:
AFSC emailed this banner ad around, urging a moratorium on misguided military missions in Afghanistan, mostly of benefit to private mercenary groups and warlords, in some cases the same ones terrorizing American civilians, given the global game of weapons and drug trafficking (also human trafficking, stop loss, abductions).
I dropped Carol at some rendezvous, for the sojourn in Salem. Then I posted to Math Forum. Then I hoofed it to Wanderers for an in depth look at the Mandelbrot Set, running Java. Bill Shepard is hosting.
David Tver is here, then maybe a first timer. I'm in and out of the meeting room, attending to 2nd world business. Glenn Stockton, Jim Buxton...
We could produce this fractals segment for any teacher with a projector. Having students take turns zooming in needn't be a mind-numbing activity provided some of the lore is woven in. This is the Argand Plane after all, integral within academe since oh, a long time ago. No excuse to be boring. We could do this at Cleveland, Grant... Winterhaven.
In my spoof skit of this session, we zoom in on the small happy village where Waldo lives in the woodwork, munching on fractal PB&J.
So John Gilbrough helped Bill write this fractal explorer (which ran great on my Ubuntu Starling I'm happy to say -- in no rush for Karmic Koala). That's the same guy who did the rotating polyhedra in stereo, via Java and GWT (Google Web Toolkit).
Four of us went to Pepino's afterward, immersed ourselves in Martian Math talk a little. I need to send out some links.
Thanks to Sean for this link to a BBC program on Wittgenstein and his philo.
What might count originally as a turn-off -- the unfamiliarity of some given material -- might be made into a turn-on instead; "a feature not a bug" as we say in the industry.
By making it Martian (the mathematics we're providing), we get to underscore its alien-seeming attributes, such as its tetrahedral units of volume.
The nomenclature of Mites, Sytes and Kites, already developed, is handsomely documented with no serious ambiguities, so it's not a matter of redoing everything from scratch.
Nor has the marketing moniker "gnu math" been abandoned, at least not by me.
In bringing in the ET spin, I'm clearly feeding the science fiction writers' market.
Our competitors would likely have this space-age geometry, perhaps did in Contact already.
Or (alternatively, additionally) we could simply project a future human technology, suitable for Mars, already making waves in the early 21st century. Having geodesic structures on Mars would make plenty of sense, plus we already have that sphere packing landing.
So that'd be Martian Math in yet another sense (advanced human vs. ET).
We're setting up at Duke's for our private undercover party, discreetly advertised only through select channels. The producers each have their own ways of promoting clandestine events. DJ Troy is managing logistics, including lighting. I'm on projector, Walker on sound.
The framework is to support others showing up and wanting to take the floor, give us a presentation. A fully developed genre, say the autobiography, might be a theme for an evening, to be continued at a later date. Our event this time is more political, given our Laughing Horse Collective connection, although I argued for a stronger engineering approach on the way over, warming up for providing my piece of the gig.
Perhaps a missing ingredient, for adding down the road, is a community access television component. What community again? Well, we'd like to include Portland, given that's where we are, and given the already mature cable TV market.
On the other hand, mixing our various media feeds is probably not best accomplished in real time? Just having our videographers present will possibly supply sufficient grist for our mills, plus give us more control over what goes out over the wire.
In contrast with ISEPP lectures, more like its plans for salons, this format presumes a choppier format, with Lightning Talks of five minutes or less strongly emphasized in early promotions.
We're in a mid-sized venue pre-equipped for multi-media. Not every gathering will expect a DJ and live music, VHS tapes playing on random monitors, smoke machine, projected Internet content.
Lots of mix and match.
I'll also plan on showing some hypertoons, computed on the fly vs. pre-recorded.
Dick: Your new emotional restraint, I will appreciate it while it lasts.
I thought Quakers were about promoting peaceful alternatives to violence. Or is that wrong. Maybe Quakers are peaceful when it is convenient. I have no idea. Except I do know plenty of words are slung and thrown around at the meetings, not for happy reasons, or so I am informed by participants I know.
Kirby: When you've turned away from outward use of outward weapons, that doesn't preclude you from being a vicious attack dog Karl Rover. Quakers are not about being polite all the time.
They were always being offensive, heckling preachers, refusing to doff their hats, inciting the masses. They were imprisoned routinely.
Many got sick of that treatment and decided to create a relative utopia called Pennsylvania instead.
However, Quakers lost control of their state when the in-flooding immigrants, hot off the boat, wanted to use tax money to fight "Indians".
The Quakers had been enjoying peaceful relations with said native populations and wanted no war taxes levied. They were out-voted by a corrupt majority and Quakers have had relatively little influence on the internal affairs of Pennsylvania ever since.
The rising tide of stupidity that overwhelmed Pennsylvania then spread to the rest of the Lower48, now known as Dumbfuckistan to our inner circle (just kidding, there's no inner circle, if you've ever seen the "Quakers guts" poster -- a blog topic of late:
This film is somewhat paradoxical in that it sounds the death knell for a particular lifestyle made famous over the last seventy years or so by its practitioners, but without much mourning.
The city planners all decry urban sprawl as a disgraceful waste, have no special sentimentality towards low density single story strip malls consisting mostly of parking lots.
"If this was the American Dream, we're glad to be waking up" seems to be more of the message, even if the "awake state" (after taking the Red Pill with some OJ) proves sobering.
The film features a number of talking heads sounding the alarm at various levels, including Kenneth Deffeyes.
On the "scary talk" rating scale, you would think global warming talk ala Al Gore would be scarier than peak oil talk.
However I think the peak oil people are somewhat more effective at provoking a reality-based response, which is maybe not saying much given how the media response to date has consisted mostly of idle daydreaming about an impossible tomorrow (what we might call "bad philosophy" in some circles).
I watched this as a double feature with Over the Hedge, which likely colors my take.
This tightly edited documentary traces the beginnings of WWII to its dress rehearsal, the fascist bombardment of Spain by the Axis powers, Hitler and Mussolini puppeting Franco, who was in rebellion against the duly elected government in Madrid. The aerial bombardment of Guernica was memorialized by Pablo Picasso. Ernest Hemingway narrated a movie from the Loyalist perspective (those loyal to a democratic, parliamentarian Spain), showed it to the Roosevelts in their White House home.
As those reading their history remember, the USA was already sick of the whole WW1 experience and was not anxious to rejoin the European adventure. However the world was shrinking owing to the development of air transport, and those watching world events could see that failing to stop the invasion of Spain by the dictators would simply postpone the day of reckoning. Many Americans got into the fight early, and this film chronicles the dedication of those called to nursing, helping mostly men on the front lines. The horror of modern warfare was just becoming apparent through newsreels. That Americans weren't lining up to join in the madness is understandable, but the situation only got worse as Hitler and Mussolini were sensing their behavior was being reinforced, they had a free hand. The ostensibly democratic governments of the USA, France and Great Britain, weren't really doing anything to get in their way. The Spanish first stand against what would become a terrible enemy was echoed elsewhere in the world where newly literate classes were eager to manage their own affairs with less bullying from some power elite. Central governments were worried about communism. In the USA, the eugenics movement was strong. Plenty in the business class were backing fascism at first, not yet aware of the monsters in the making. Hitler was still writing Mein Kampf from prison, consuming racist pseudo-science from Cold Spring Harbor and places, well funded North American think tanks, as documented in War Against the Weak.
Whereas I agree that the mass published wood pulp textbook is no longer the most relevant distribution system for curriculum content, there's a lot of political pressure in Portland, and Oregon more generally, to "eat our own dog food" as an open source capital (Christian Science Monitor, 2005).
OSCON is returning next year (Open Source Conference) and we also have OS Bridge, all thanks to the Silicon Forest serving as a champion of FOSS (or FLOSS as some call it, L for Libre or Liberal, as in Liberal Arts).
This trend extends to empowering teachers to commit to Open Education standards, ala WikiEducator and so forth. Initiatives like Maria's Math 2.0 will likely play a greater role in future curriculum writing than any dinosaur mass publishers "back east" (we tend to be snobbish out here, see "the east" as about 10 years behind the times, with California only 3 years behind).
Math Labs may use mostly recycled hardware, hand-me-down machines from the corporate sector and government agencies, although some of the more well-endowed get grants for new equipment. Mostly the money needs to go for teacher training, as math teachers especially are expected to have IT-related skills (lest their "technology in the classroom" rhetoric sound empty and hollow -- just knowing how to use a scientific calculator is no excuse for numeric literacy, or "numeracy" any more).
So I'm anticipating a lot of skepticism regarding Detroit's adoption strategies. We'll expect to learn from Detroit's mistakes perhaps? Kirby
