When I put on this figurative pair of glasses, in which I want my prez to be a dark comedian, I see talent. Biden is definitely a contender. I'm ready for a space case, over President Id (GWB was Alfred E., sorry Mayor Pete).
Communications experts sometimes speak of the "8th grade level" as a kind of gold standard, as in an age post knowledge explosion, there's an on-ramp into any discourse and "8th grade" maybe means "in layman terms" (i.e. I'm not yet an initiate, nor may I ever be).
That mantra or rule of thumb has "trickled up" in that I'm seeing "high school" as that semi-uniform sampling in which few prerequisites are required. You're starting with a white belt in whatever. If you were back in high school as an older adult, this might seem like a threatening reset, as if you'd suffered brain damage.
"Why would I be in high school, I'm a doctor of (master of) whatever!?" and of course that's an understandable sentiment when HS is regarded as "once in a lifetime". However I'm positing that, with longer lifespans and a faster pace, the need to "reset" is perennial. If you live long enough, you might go through "high school" a few times.
To take a concrete example, my generation went through high school when hand-held calculators were all the rage. In a generation before ours, people understood slide rules, and therefore logarithms a lot better. I'd say people were a lot more practical about approximation in some ways.
At the other end of the spectrum, I push into arbitrary precision territory, partly to break more of us free from using calculators.
Here in 2020, on the other side of the free open source community ethic, I'm seeing the PWS (personal workspace) as the focus, or what we might call a "cubical" (except that divorces office work from other work). A personal workspace should come with more than just slide rulers and calculators I'm thinking.
Utopian literature from the 1960s comes to mind, Education Automation in particular. That was Buckminster Fuller, always seemingly the wide-eyed optimist, telling us we were needed at home to study, in personal workspaces that didn't drive the people in them crazy.
The Dymaxion House was about taking drudgery out of housework, and financial concerns off a family's back, such that raising children and domestic chores could be relatively stress free and enjoyable.
When my daughter took drivers' ed, the instructors led a session with the parents, explaining how what we were taught, and what was currently taught, had somewhat changed over the years. The sideview mirrors would be further apart now, and you were to have headlights on at all times. That's right, it didn't used to be that way. Welcome to the new high school.
Now look at literature. Somewhere in there, we're going to run across a tight little geometry we don't want to just bleep over, or at least some of us don't. We'll need our embedded vista viewpoints. We didn't gaze at high definition 360 panoramas from Mars (Curiosity) either, when I was a kid. Nothing like the "Martian Math" I like to riff off today.
Where will Tomorrowland's teachers take this stuff? I look for signs, as I know it's all about feedback cycles. The stuff my generation has been feeding in, will come back to us in some new way. Steering into chaos was ever thus.
A journal used to be a diary, which maybe, one thought, might be discovered and published. Many Quaker journals did see the light of day in that way.
Once blogging was invented, and world readable text, I'd say the practice changed a bit. More people could see the point of journaling. But what was the point? Advertising? When what you write is potentially public, that changes the rules a little.
But maybe not by much. A diary or journal has another function, more Jungian, which is to process or work through, something language seems to be for in general. Some of us just need to write, and the journal format, nay blog, seems like something we prayed for. Why be ungrateful then?
The technology keeps shifting though. I've used a Flash widget programmed in Shockwave to share slides, but I gather that's something 3rd party. The browsers are phasing out Flash. Will I convert everything to another format? Or let it go? I converted Xmas 2013 tonight, just to assure myself there's a process.
Taking pictures has been another part of holding it together for me. My way of creating some syntropy in the face of entropy. But is it that my pictures really matter that much? An opportunity was afforded me to enjoy them while they lasted, and share some while I could.
Now I'm thinking of the whole Peter Janney story. What might be found of interest? James Jesus Angleton apparently had the same question, according to sources, poking around Mary's studio soon after her murder.
When I try to imagine civilian socialism, versus the corporate military socialism we have now, I think of government issue smartphones and laptops to any students who don't have them. Use them from home. Other GI swag includes backpack and water bottle, first aid kits. Be prepared.
Free education will show you how to use both, fight off malware and spyware.
The laptop comes with lots of great free open source stuff like the DARPA supported Anaconda. You won't need a calculator now that you have one of these. Calculators aren't forbidden of course, slide rules either (learn about logs).
The GI smartphones come with the apps you need to navigate government bureaucracies.
Socialist bars charge only $3 a pint with no tips expected.
Asylum cities, waystations for refugees, dot the globe, thanks to world organization.
Do we still have a private sector? Of course. Mom and pop businesses, private banks, airlines, restaurant chains. We're less of a ghetto though, thanks to a lot of the smartest most compassionate people wanting to work in government.
Imagine a school that actually sets aside time to share about specific smartphone apps. The school's crypto-currency, good inside school, used by alumni too, works thanks to specific apps.
Various games (language games) pay out, in credits good against several catalogs. Academic work has its immediate rewards, perhaps in the form of more time on the internet, slacking, exploring, checking out stuff.
This talk was helpful in that it took me back to my "thick client" early days, pre web browser, when my Visual FoxPro stack, ODBC to big servers, was dealing in read-only health procedure data from the Cath Labs and operating rooms (CVOR). My RDBMS tables mapped every artery of every patient affected by stenosis or other coronary pathology. Complications led to procedures and their outcomes, some of which might be the inherited complications of a next procedure and so on.
The scene has changed since those days, as data turned into big data, and as analysis tools started combing over larger server farms, using map-reduce (Hadoop) and a host of Apache projects (Spark, Flink, Kafka). The speaker takes us from those old days to how we do things today, assuming the need to scale up without falling over. How does one deal with the pressure to grow? That's like sails to the wind if you have a seaworthy craft.
The other revolution in cloud native ecology is the growth of containerized microservices ala Docker and Kubernetes. Get a lot of producers and subscribers messaging one another, in response to the streamed data onslaught. Push all the end user rendering cosmetics to the clients, with their web browsers and visualization tools. Customize their dashboards. Some workstations monitor, some upload new data, some report on trends and so forth.
I go around with my little laptop, like a guitar, and strum my sound, these days involving visualizing Flextegrity in a Jupyter Notebook. I learn about cloud native environments from OSCON proposals and Youtubes, and O'Reilly Safari Online when I can afford it. What would be the Python API to Kafka for example?
A long gone mental hospital, run by one Dr. Hawthorne, is now memorialized by a food pod, a set of food carts, named Hawthorne Asylum. I focus on those local geographic and historical details for awhile, before jumping into a discussion of Man X, seemingly dodged by Joe Rogan.
Towards the end I mention my Quaker heritage, as I'm linking general systems theory (GST), a sometime subject in Quakernomics circles, with American Transcendentalism, a literary movement.
Although Edgar Allen Poe pooh poohed transcendentalism, lets not forget his Eureka essay.
I weave in Col. Prouty in other videos as well, as well as the war in Southeast Asia, around the start of which the OSS found itself supporting the resistance.
You'll find more high school level American literature memes championed throughout my channel.
The embedded Youtube is Part 4 of a five part series, which I've watched before, and viewed again yesterday, before sharing it to Facebook.
Fuller is adroit in thinking metaphorically, but for most of us, science is a literalist affair, with the true grounded meanings. Metaphors are for embellishment, not for supporting weight.
However, Fuller's Universe is light and airy, highly tensile, remarkably devoid of brute force strength or forcing more generally. He flits about, always resecuring his own technology, a synergetic language as dense as Heidegger's. Equilibrium is the name of the game, but in a Universe intent upon success for its humans.
I've been endeavoring to shed some light on what Fuller branded as "the geometry of nature", a claim for which he takes flak. Does XYZ ever make such a claim? Is the counter-position that geometry is merely a human invention?
His scaffolding is the IVM ("octet truss"), a pattern found in nature for sure (CCP, FCC), with volumes 1 and 4 respectively. Rectilinear patterns don't go away, as we've seen in C6XTY (another IVM-related space-frame design). His paradigm cubes have volume 3.
By some reckonings, synergetics offers but a small tweak at first, with this shift to tetravolumes, resulting in some simplifications (more whole number volumes). Where that leads next is the next question. Fuller points to intuition, but has intuition served him well?
Does 90 degree precession really pick up where 180 degree gravity ends? He seems to think the Earth's orbiting and axially rotating are resultant behaviors given the Sun's pull. Textbooks suggest a primordial kineticism for which "gravity" should not be blamed. "Critical proximity" is where the changeover occurs.
Stuff "falling in" is not the usual thing with gravity, according to Fuller, as the whole-unpredicted-by-the-parts is more like stuff "wandering" (not "falling in"). The effect of bodies in motion on other bodies in motion seems chaotic and complex. Is he seriously questioning Newtonian dogmas?
I get the tetravolumes meme and have taken that to heart, and when it comes to "metaphysical gravity" I see "precession" as Bucky means it. Metaphysical == Metaphorical?
He dives into speaking very specifically about literal gyroscopes. When you tug a pole towards you, it yields in a different direction, thanks to its spinning disk. That's precession for you, I agree. But the initial spinning did not result from the tugging, right?
In always shying away from "cult leader" status, Fuller is free to exercise and share his private language, fact-laced and interdisciplinary. His relative success as an inventor, his track record, becomes his evidence that his thinking outside the box (which takes courage) is what more of us might want to try. "Come on in, the water's fine" is what echoes between the lines.
Chris pooh poohs that technology will save us, deus ex machina style. I agree technocracy sounds hollow if the only mantra is "learn to code" in the face of lifestyles vanishing. A work/study lifestyle might have some coding in it, and you're not taking charity (sitting idle) by studying hard. We need more serious students, not addicted to fantasy genres. Like forget about coding. Read Chris's books.
A safety net that features study (and not amassing huge debts in the process) is about taking care of a population and cultivating diverse skills. Study includes places to practice, to develop technique. My friend Glenn has all the makings of a makerspace (a term he despises) yet real estate is so dear in this town, there's no room left for "creatives" (spaces in which to create).
As Bucky Fuller pointed out, if you take away the technology, you have mass starvation and uncontrolled outbreaks of disease within days. Civilization grinds to a halt. Technology currently sustains a population of billions. Take away the politicians ("send them around the moon in a spaceship"), as during the recent government shutdown, and the crisis is relatively less dire.
Chris has been a war correspondent in Mesopotamia and in the Balkans. He shares a bleak view. He's not in the habit of turning towards American Transcendentalism and seems relatively oblivious to Bucky Fuller's teleological post-nationalism.
Fuller is always quoting Einstein to the effect that human psychology boils down to a fear versus longing axis. Chris's audience is wondering about hope, longing for a brighter view of the future. Hedges is focused on ending tyranny by inspiring fear among the would-be tyrants. He has little patience for what he considers "hope mania" minus concerted resistance.
What is the positive future vision after that? What would winning mean? Where's the science fiction? A clear view of a more positive, yet attainable, future is ultimately subversive vis-a-vis any status quo dystopia, especially when the pathway forward is nonviolent.
