TG 2021

I've been playing the Quaker card a lot more, being hellbent on pumping out some signature curriculum to my vast network of Quakerish schools, a global network, in the future.  

I might be long gone, a sort of psycho-historian (parsed through Asimov's Foundation).

Anyway, we had an authentic n8v American presiding, in a classic nuclear family setting.  Carol and I were the visitors.  She was able to climb the front steps on her own.  Both directions.

Urners are into dogs too.  Carol has some fear of pythons, which both families also have.

More Quaker History

I've been fussing around in /cryptography lately, as eliteschool/Crypto, the Jupyter Notebook, was not clear on the AKS primality test, what it is.  

It's still not entirely clear on that, but more because it talks about something else, relevant to primes and composites, that I take to be relevant to the proof of AKS also.

But really we're focused on Pascal's Triangle (PT), as always in our Gnu Math curriculum.

That PT property is one you likely know, if you've been following Numberphile and other "keep us current" mathological type channels.  Category Theory...  

That the row number of PT evenly divides the members (other than 1 of course) on that row, if an only if that number is prime.  Skipping 1 of course.  We talk about -1 elsewhere.

Like row 3, 1 3 3 1 defines the prime 3, whereas 1 4 6 4 1 fails the test (row number 4 fails to divide 6 without remainder).  The Jupyter Notebook features a PT generator, written in Python, and this test as a sieve or filter.

OK, that winds up my warmup. We were talking about /Crypto, where prime versus composite reigns supreme (as a distinction), so now lets segue to Elizebeth Friedman.

She fell in with Shakespeare early in her career, where she sharpened her code skills and met her future husband.  They and their sponsor climbed a steep learning curve ladder and ended up becoming like another Bletchley Park eventually.  Elizebeth faced her own enigmas.

In my Quakerish curriculum we're linking her to Prohibition and to the early Bucky who socialized with Al Capone.  That helps sync up the timelines for for these several protagonists we'll be following.

The tie-back to Shakespeare is convenient, given our Memory Palace focus ("the urb it orbs").  Globe Theater architecture was about the microcosm, as well as the play within the play.

I notice Github decided to break Jupyter Notebooks linking back to their own repo as the default option.  The benefits of cloning and owning the repo locally, versus viewing it online, has just increased.

Urbit Urbus

Fake School

Way back in the WayBack [tm], I was saying the Clintonistas were underestimating Qanon, precisely because it went to the concerns of younger netizens, too young to vote  in fact, about predatory adult practices I needn't get into with a sophisticated audience like this one.  

 Yes I'm talking about Pizzagate and so on, you may scroll back in my blogs.

These days though, and also in support of the kids, I'm mocking the Q folks for the shallowness of their research at the end of the day.  From our chat session on Zoom last Saturday:

10:39:45 From Kirby Urner to Everyone:
    Re conspiracy theories: The Qanons always boasted about doing their own research, following breadcrumbs, but were manifestly not good at doing that.  Even a cursory search on the web links their much vaunted “Mockingbird” to Ed Applewhite.  They don’t go there.  They’d find us. They’d lose control.

What am I talking about "They'd find us."?  Simply that Qanon pumps up Mockingbird as one of their dots to connect, but then fails to connect it.

C'mon kids, don't be as dense as your parents, my contemporaries.  Get a clue and study more of your heritage.  The Applewhite guy retired and went on to collaborate with his boyhood hero.  Who was that again?

C'mon kids, if you're not getting time with the bash shell, ask your doctor if that's good for you.  In the Beginning was the Command Line.  Read it yet?  If you're in high school, has any math teacher mentioned RSA (public key crypto, but also the Republic of South Africa matters too)?  

Yes?  Congratulations, there's hope for your high school.

Seriously, in this Internet Age, you have Net right there staring you in the face, all day every day. So if your school isn't talking Graph Theory, as in nodes & edges, as in V + F = E + 2, then maybe stop calling it that?  Why would you call that "school"?

Fake school is as real as fake news.

Imported Tweet

I would encourage Facebook and Google to leave the country before subsidizing irresponsible posers in DC and no I'm not talking about the recent election. So far Google hasn't use WMDs "by mistake". Whatever socially responsible investing it does, let it not be thru a faux USA.

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) November 15, 2021

Revaluation of Values

What did Nietzsche mean by a "revaluation of values"?  He didn't mean we should sit around passively awaiting the new code of conduct or whatever.  The work is a personal interior undertaking, the kind of work no one seems to get paid for, yet desperately needs to get on with.

Take "empathy" for example, sometimes defined as "putting oneself in an other's shoes". Normally this is seen as a positive, whereas "jealousy" is the name of a sin, not a virtue.  To bring "empathy" and "jealousy" closer together might seem more like opposing proton beams, bashing the grammar.  Precisely. Philosophical investigations resemble the work of CERN at some wavelengths.

For me to really wish for your lifestyle, I need to imagine it.  I'm jealous of your shoes, more comfortable, more durable than mine.  You have stuff that I want for myself.  I can imagine myself going through the day as you, happier and more satisfied than I am in my own life.  That all sounds like empathy to me i.e. I'm putting myself in your shoes to the point of wishing I were more like you.

Now we might trace all the caveat neutrinos emanating from this opposition.  Lustfully imagining oneself as another, directing that much libido into a fantasy life, is a root symptom of so many pathologies, whereas working on developing empathy and compassion is more generally seen as a cure.

Lets define narcissism as deep empathy with one's self.  You have a lot of compassion for yourself, and in a "me against the world" model, this is as it should be.  The healthy ego basks in its own source of warmth and doesn't need the company of others to stay strong.  However this also sounds a lot like the description of an egoless person, if such exist.  Is your classic narcissist on the verge of enlightenment, needing only to see self sufficiency as a divine duo, a state of grace?

Again, mixing "good" with "evil" values in your investigations, exploring the new polarities and tensions that result, is the form of exercise.  Consider it character building.  Consider keeping a journal, perhaps even online.  Quakerism traces to some of the same roots as Emersonianism, which I speculate would be found in a Mithraic context, pre-Christianity.  Thus Spake Zarathustra suggests such uber points of view.

Musings on Theme Park Planet

I was surfing in a Jungian Space yesterday evening, out for dinner with some heavy hitters I know or was getting to know.  Dwaraka was open for indoor seating, per our current zip code protocol (not that protocols are defined at the zip code level -- I refer to Asylum District, here along Hawthorne Boulevard, 97214).

Lets pause for a moment to cite Ken Kesey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, his novel and later a movie Ken didn't much care for.  That novel put Oregon in the map nonetheless, as thematically about mental health and/or the lack thereof.  Asylum State.  With the double-meaning of "asylum" as "sanctuary" and/or "hangout" and/or "safe space".

What might asylum mean today?  Where might you enjoy an outdoor concert while tripping in some way, without fear of arrest, but in potential need of medical attention?

I'm tempted to go on about Portland's particular place in PsyWar Space (the business of the "intelli-seers") but at this point lets talk about the space of meetups, newly facilitated by Zoomer culture, and also Meetup the website.  

The catalysis of online meetup culture, thanks to covid and people staying at home more, trading First Life (more driving and flying) for Second Life (more virtual) conventions, has sparked an acceleration in the conversation.  New equilibria get established through communities comparing notes, and not just through owner-controlled mass social media.

I'm thinking here of ISEPP Wanderers meetups 52 Thinking Ideas, with Thinking Society of Philadelphia and Humanists of Greater Portland as supporting actors.  This was happening in my backyard, but also through related listservs and emails. 

Humanists were already studying the job of ship crew worker, several weeks back.  I've been looking at the truck driver role for several years myself, not as a driver myself, but as a role play designer (call it "cosplay" if you must).  

The idea here is to apply design principles (ala The Design Way) to lifestyle design, wherein lifestyles contain their workflows, such as truck driving, heavy equipment operating, jet engine development and so on. 

The so-called "dirty jobs" are not outside academic experience, per the polytechnical institute model.  Include housework in the above.  The focus of Fuller's Dymaxion House was its unique particularity along one dimension, but its function in family life along another:  as shelter against the mortgage holders and the related slave driver regimen of both parents working (or lose your home), kids abandoned (to daycare shelters).

In place of polytechnic, think polymathic just as readily.  The "maths" in "polymath" come from "mowings" etymologyically, i.e. the condensed harvest from any "field".  The Silicon Forest is polymathic and its curricula are designed accordingly.  Like check out mine.

How this all connects around on Planet Jung is The Design Way by Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman invokes James Hillman and other Jungians, and dwells on the importance of the unconscious in creating "organic" solutions that are "with the grain" of a situation.  

A commitment to comprehensivity (polymathy) gets the ball rolling, providing a wholesome starting context, with experienced judgement suggesting when to transition from analysis to implementation. "Analysis paralysis" is a stalling out to avoid, although maybe not in sciences wherein simply describing the status quo is the final objective. "Paralysis" might mean "arrived at the station" in that case (mission accomplished).

Harold Nelson doesn't use the term "Feng Shui" that I could find, but I'm sure many of his followers do.  On Planet Jung (in the space of depth psychology) we permit Alchemy, Feng Shui and Astrology (interconnected "failed paradigms" and/or "pseudo-sciences" to some), to perpetuate some of their ideals, not as scientific truths, but as intentional associations and mnemonic systemic structures of potential value upon selective amplification.  We live as players, not as cogs.

The Design Way posits Truths, Realities, Ideals as orthogonal axes.  

Ideals must be served by Truths in the long run, and the Realities provide the necessary feedback, without which steering would not occur. 

"Are we leaving the ideal path because our truths are wrong, or because we have been lazy in updating our truth tables?"  We sometimes get behind in telling the truth.  Reality overtakes our storytelling.

Again, if you don't bother to have at least these three independent axes in your model, you may more easily become disoriented, as you'll confuse ideals with facts in need of proof, or special case realities, with what's true in general.  

Whatever the case, keep in mind your worldview is (a) yours to keep designing and (b) never finished.

What would Disneyland be without all the "fairy tales" it weaves together using some of the highest tech of the day?  Even "humans making a success of themselves" (Fuller) is but a fairy tale we may embrace, or laugh off as somehow beneath or beyond our ken.  Did we have some better story in mind then?

Does choosing to remain oblivious make us devils?  

Humanity bereft of any cause for hope might pass for the subhuman-tormented, as lost souls, in some dark novel (science fiction?) about mental illness.  "Ill to the point of losing our humanity" reminds us of the benefits of getting our collective mental health back.  "Humanity" still registers as a positive, even if, as creatures (monsters), we abandon our ideals and reconcile ourselves to cruelty and inhumanity as our lot.  

Will the pendulum now swing the other way then?  There's always the hope that these dystopian moods are but cyclic.

Just Say Space

Should I write a memo or something? I just had a realization in marketing space.

CMO here, Chief Marketing Officer for CSN (Coffee Shops Network). So why don't I post on that blog instead? Isn't this company business? Yes and no.

The realization is this: our marketing is being done for us when it comes to "namespaces" (pointing back to PSF Python, see below), in that the pros are just saying "space" and "spaces" and have been for some time.

It's OK to drop the "name" in front.

"I work in the space of advertising" sounds about right. As a phrase in the new vernacular, and also what I do in CMO mode.

I promulgate the idea of (design a space for) playing games for charity, stealing the acceptability of church bingo and drawing from casino space for some of my aesthetics, not to mention video lottery games.

You choose where the money goes, from a menu of options. Build a profile in the process. Be a hero.

Actually that's more spelling out a business model, but leaving out the circuit diagrams I've buried at the CSN blog, to keep patent trolls at bay.

There's a bigger picture around designer giving, the strategic application of funds to specific scenes in the various movies we're making.

Now I'm starting to wear my Asylum City hat, which is not that different when it comes to emphasizing prototyping. Asylum City draws experience from refugee camps, outdoor music venues (sound stages), the Oregon Country Fair, and even Occupy Portland (OPDX).

So that's the memo: just saying space is OK in this space i.e. when we're talking about the various namespaces we're operating with or within.

===

(base) Kirbys-MacBook-Pro:elite_school mac$ python -m this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
(base) Kirbys-MacBook-Pro:elite_school mac$

Trucking and Social Media

Some readers might be surprised to learn that I've long used the cab of the long hauler truck as my paradigm PWS (personal workspace) in GST, even more than the cubicle.  The cab of a truck is a work-study space, and driving may take fierce concentration.  You may also sleep in your study carrel. 

The Trucker Exchange Program is a meme more than a program, even if I've taken inspiration from such as Bob Textor, whom I didn't know well, but I joined his drinking party anyway.  Thirsters at McMenamins. 

He had to do with sensitizing the budding Peace Corps to the importance of Anthropology (the A in STEAM says no one but me).  In terms of diplomatic corps, State Department types, I knew my dad of course, and James Lambert.

Since I'm propagating memes more than I'm administering program, I don't have to worry about taking credit for the rising self esteem among truckers, where "self" stands for "role" i.e. "job".  The idea of a "role" is more appealing I think.  

Theater is it.  World Game.  A play within a play within a play... Disney beat me to it, with cast members instead of employees. We see that holds all the way up, to Top Mouse.

The romance of the trucking lifestyle, if only as a glimmer in the Eye of Possibilities, is enough to keep the would-be future trucker generations circling.  Let's make it a reality while we can. Like while we're not truckers, in my case, but active truckers may join us too.

I'm some member of the movie crew in one scenario, following some experienced long haulers doing OBOR (Silk Road) or something in Africa, or Texas, or in Oregon or Australia.  

I help with curriculum around trucking, to provide continuity, helping to design a global exchange regarding work-study opportunities.  The job (role) involves more tourism and diplomacy.  We depend on truckers to work things out.

A Battle for Market Share

The joke about 5G is that "it isn't about mind control" whereas of course it is.  Not in a tin foil hat sense, but in a marketing sense. The FCC needs you to be OK with 5G, as does Qualcomm, and really, what's your problem with it?  

Do you intend to obstruct the right of free peoples to make use of those frequencies?  We already use them, for cooking.

The PR maze makes it look like the anti-5Gers have a problem understanding the difference between nuclear bomb type fallout radiation, and the kind we all use to listen to the BBC on FM.  

5G is way down below the visible spectrum with radar, microwave, and other ice cream melting frequencies.  5G has nothing to do with gamma rays.  The G does not stand for Gamma, you sillies.  You conspiracy theorists who think people haven't done their homework.

That other animals besides humans might already be making use of invisible frequencies is in many circles considered balderdash, except in the sense that loud sonar or rocket blasts could break the hearing and peace of mind, to the point of self destruction, of various species.  

If SpaceX blasts the surrounding turtle space with trauma and drama, it's not a given the sacred species will "bounce back".  

The science will tell us, if and when, but by then it may be too late.

Research seems to show that animals brought up in the presence of 5G suffer no ill effects presuming just a trickle of power.  Blasting power through devices not meant to handle it, usually causes damage, to phones and IoT devices included, not just nervous systems (wiring is wiring). 

Ear drums get damaged when subjected to 2G rock and roll (when the giant amps and speakers made their debut, and kids stood right up next to 'em).  Stand right in front of a radar at the wrong time, and you're asking for trouble.

But are all the concerns around next generation telecommunications owing to concerns about brains in a radio frequencies ocean?  Not at all.  Other paranoias run just as deep if not deeper.  Stay tuned.