A Summer Marketing Campaign

[first posted to Synergeo, enhanced blogged edition]

I think we'll try marketing XYZ as "old fart math" and the hypercross version as "XYZ on steroids" ergo by the transitive property "old fart math on steroids". Of course this is somewhat juvenile, but we go with the army we've got in the summer (not the most serious krew).

What we need for Synergetics is: (a) trig (b) GIS/GPS (c) stats (d) some topology (e) some chemistry and (f) some physics. We're free to mix physics and chemistry as a higher level brew called biology, use "biomass" as an entry point to the general systems theory basis for Home Economics (high school subject in Pleasantville USA, home of the Square and Qyoobist Authoritarians aka "old farts").

These manga ideas go with some of the others I've been storyboarding, blogging about, including a certain castle with a moat and everything, httpRequest and httpResponse suitcases traveling too and from (a kind of Spirited Away scene, like where they come on the boat).

At the core of the castle is our SQL "keep", or maybe it's a CouchDB thing for a throne, but either way, the client wants to visualize, which is where the guilds come in, the templaters and boilerplaters (hammer men).

In Django we talk about MVT, which is really just MVC but toning down on "controller" (more just passive switchboarding).

These castles appear in my posts about Boosting Bandwidth e.g. giving students more continuity in terms of a place based education, mixing fantasy worlds with their more immediate environment (not willy nilly, but in a constructive way i.e. simulations impart real skills). Supermarket Math has to do with that biomass, sun-powered and dirt fed, water cooled, ending up as food groups with lots of vital stats on the label. Kids learn their arithmetic less in terms of dollars and cents and more in terms of calories and amino acids.

Focusing on food without feeding them would be cruel of course, so that's considered criminal, out of bounds (not a real school, more a prison or torture chamber in design -- or an under-served hospital).

Where the Synergetics comes in is where you'd expect in many cases, and we have ways of attributing to Conway and Guy where they think Synergetics is too subversive, certain zip codes in Massachusetts maybe? The uphill battle in Lower48 is around NCLB, as teachers don't want to do much around Phi or "golden cuboid" and yet this is critical to higher order thinking, not to mention reading Da Vinci Code (or see da movie with Tom Hanks).

The "NCLB Polynomial" and "NCLB Polyhedron" were brushed aside as so much silliness, as those crazy teachers went on and on with their droning, teaching their Old Fart Math (OFM) and, in college, OFM on Steroids. Really stinks, to be so bigoted and non-inclusive of others all the time (but then hobbits are like that, both parochial and proud, Rivendale coulda told ya that).

So the solution was to say "fuck Loser48" and go with the Anglophone Philippines, other places, and this is really paying off. What fun to work with people with some IQ for a change, plus it overlaps with the OLPC and AFSC work we're doing. I feel like one of those cypherpunks back when public key was verboten, pumping out PGP from New Zealand. Very hip hop, very gangsta rap, very "talk like a pirate".

Synergetics fits in other places too, but I'm mostly just using it as a vehicle for Pythonic Math, helping to jump start interest in blander topics (e.g. "casino math" aka "probability" (= stats)) with the coolest eye candy on the block, bar none ("we've got the bling!").

Teachers in other schools don't do Watermans (really pretty), don't play with free and open source software (FOSS), have never heard of the octet-truss (e.g. Tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, also Bell's stuff).

So our tech track feels faster, better, stronger, more packed with useful tips and tricks (e.g Django on SQL, Ruby on Rails... what ya need for that school intranet you're supposed to already have). We have better toyz, brighter vistas. Let them vote with their feet (where voting is permitted, not saying in your zip code, where you may be oppressed by know-nothings, the status quo in many a backward swamp -- maybe try to escape?).