Increasing Military IQ

Here's a link to me weighing in on the topic of IQ again, along with Pam, a veteran of math-teach like I am. I've never met Pam, yet consider myself her fan (likewise of Lou Talman's), whereas I'm more a sparring partner for Haim.

Sean calls these "allegiances" and is happy to see them expressed on his Wittgenstein list, so long as we don't indulge in a lot of ad hominem. As a philosopher, he's more hip to the logical fallacies than most (mistakes in debating, errors in diplomacy) whereas the math teachers just seem to shoot from the hip, seem to have more of a Wild West attitude, though with the Asiatic influence, noted by Paul, we have the potential to regain our composure and behave more like Sean's House of Lords (long story).

Back to my analysis: I'm invoking some retro aesthetics, taking us back to a smarter golden age within the UMC, when orders from the Pentagon made more sense than they later would under Nixon.

The Cold War was in full swing and the thing to do against the USSR menace was to build these newfangled radomes as DEW Line protectors. Sure, H.S.M. Coxeter got angry when he found this exquisite "geometry of nature" already had a patent adhering, wasn't automatically open source. He was prescient in that way, obedient to his natural geek intuitions. Fuller's patent on the octet-truss was in some ways even more crazy-making (the IVM belongs to nature, not men).

Today they're even patenting naturally occurring gene sequences, or trying to. Why not patent the sky, charge royalties for seeing it? Our "legally-piggily" Idiocracy is pretty far gone, with the EU a bulwark against at least software patents (an abyss of pure craziness (a litigators' heaven, an engineers' hell)).

Given the Pentagon had already sourced radomes in this period, it made sense for all that KH-derived omni-triangulated global data, so central to Critical Path (Fuller's), to be made available to the world's school children via Google Earth and such services.

This was World Game in action, the start of a global Renaissance.

The "civilian-ization" of high technology is a trend we should circle and celebrate, along with its "ephemeralization" (doing more with less).

Those enlisting for military service, having served their terms, should expect civilian work making use of some of those same GIS/GPS skills.

Taking a next generation under one's wing, providing life skills for a place in the sun, is what it means to hand on a culture, and to receive one.

NASA News: Solar tsunamis are real.