Making Memes

This series of three shows a process for making a meme, using side-by-side images in this case, and suggesting Before and After.

As we find out in Part 3, the Before side is actually flawed, and it's in attempting to reconcile the two tables (exercising a conversion constant), that I discover and repair the Before side error.

As we approach a roll-over from 2019 to 2020, it's customary to make forecasts or suggestions, regarding what we plan to take on in the coming orbit.

America in Philosophy sounds interesting.

The whole idea of a "new world" was quite revolutionary.  Some people imagined striking it rich.  Others fantasized about utopian communities, including idyllic company towns or campuses.

Some of that same kind of brainstorming goes on here.  Could we have public schools that are also (A) boarding and (B) same-sex in addition to co-ed? 

These options abound in the private sector, but what if you're training to become functional in democracy?

My science fiction speculations are against a background of no public schools, given the American Transcendentalism I'm showing here is Verboten Math as far as the administrators are concerned. 

However, when it comes to art history and schools of thought in architecture, for starters, there's less censorship (strict editing) to contend with.

That I'm casting this curriculum as "high school level" makes sense, but let's remember that level is incorporated within higher level mindsets.  To introduce the "concentric hierarchy" at the high school level is to make changes in a parent or superclass, to employ and object oriented analogy.

Ways to carry the momentum forward through university level studies, such as in philosophy and engineering (e.g. tensegrity, flextegrity...), or even in a philosophy of engineering (cite Bristol, ISEPP), were pioneered in previous chapters, making it easier to work backwards, laying track coming from a future syllabus.

Planetary Tale

Commentary:  In this little screenplay, Tribe might be construed to mean Intelligence Community (IC) whereas Enemy looks like Ukraine in some manner.

[ play opens, reminiscent of obelisk scene in 2001, but sans obelisk ]

Biden is like this gorilla, beating his chest. 

Biden:  I made that tribe do the bidding of my tribe, brag brag.... 

Trump: check into this gorilla about that tribe thing.

Tribe: Trump said this to enemy Tribe. 

Enemy: No, we're your friends. 

Trump [beating chest]: Me perfect gorilla!

Tribe: [ confused ]... 

Welcome to the T in PATH: Theater. 

Now showing: Told By an Idiot.

As Seen on Facebook

Kirby Urner As a clue to my political views, I'd like to assist a class of globally-minded trucker establish a route-swap service that launches them to higher status as citizen diplomats. Truck stops around the world will be the place to go for podcasts of great debates. I don't know any other science fiction author working as directly on this story (parallel universe), however the components needed for my narrative to materialize are all out there. I'm not waiting for any breakthroughs in technology, nor interventions from ETs. Either might happen, I just wasn't waiting.

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Kirby Urner

1 hr · 

I've been studying WW2 again and see Hilter spared Britain because he found the British adorable (me too) and wanted to split the world with them, not wipe them out. A lot of his military advisers knew hesitancy and all out war are incompatible, but then Hitler saw himself more in the hearts and minds business; he was hoping to win with propaganda. His court psychologists were promising the moon at the time.

An eye-opener awhile ago was Dr. Seuss's role, as an American propagandist (an effective one I'm told, right up there with Charlie Chaplin). More recently, I've been back to Disney's role during wartime: the army was poised to seize his frivolous and inessential cartoon studios, but he convinced the military the rank and file would respond to cartoons, let Donald Duck star in training films.

Even more seriously, Disney adapted a military strategy book about projecting air power, and turned it into an animation, narrated by the book's author. The story is Churchill saw it first, convinced Roosevelt to watch it, and a new approach to war in the Pacific was developed. I'm no West Point academy grad, so correct me at will on the details of this narrative.

Kirby Urner What Jim Henson and Walt Disney had so much in common was their fervent belief that their media (puppets and cartoons respectively) were NOT repeat NOT just for kids. They both wanted to break into the adult world big time with their forms of art. Looking back, I'd agree that stereotyping these media to "children and childhood" was a mostly Brit Victorian invention (where a lot of the "childhood" concepts come from -- not being critical, a great invention).

A Wonderful Life

I found this to be a really fine documentary. Haven't I seen it before? Some scenes seem quite familiar, and yet as a whole, I didn't recognize it.

Over on Facebook, I'm taking this opportunity to meditate on my own mortality.  I'm but a year younger than when Wittgenstein passed, plus I've been watching lots about Walt Disney and Jim Henson, both of whom went rather suddenly.

They say our culture is in denial about death, doesn't handle it well.  That's a cliche in a way.  Why not turn the Halloween season into a time for embracing mortality.  To say it "sugar coats" death is an obvious truism.  What better excuse then, to add a dimension?

Regarding Wittgenstein's biography (above), I'm sure it seems dreary to many, given is ongoing depression, loneliness and suicidal proclivities.  On the other hand, he lived through two world wars. The world itself was objectively a dreary one.  He worked hard to make a serious contribution.

His story has finally come together in my mind.  The fact that he became a recluse in Norway before the outbreak of WW1, is a detail I've always needed to pin down.

I've gone back to my Princeton days in some ways, when I focused on his later philosophy and wrote a senior thesis about it.  I dashed out a kind of recapitulation of my thinking on Medium this afternoon.

Gallery Time

I've been spending some hours in Lattice Gallery, as an apprentice to the maestro, Sam Lanahan, who is orchestrating a whole series of happenings and events.  Flextegrity is the focus.  My curriculum content has for some years capitalized on my having access to Flextegrity, in its various iterations, as an educational supply.  You'll find lots on Flickr, as well as Youtube.

Glenn has an amazing collection of books, many of them on matters mythological and archeological.  He's well versed in a lot of this material, and admires Sumeria especially.  Therefore I'm smart to consult him as I continue to explore specific stories, looking for raw material for contemporary storytelling.  These days I'm focused on the Pythians of Pytho (later Delphi).

New to Glenn's collection: an amazing science museum gift shop type tome, featuring a plastic tarantula presented in layers.  As one turns the pages, the central spider is built, plastic parts fitting ingeniously into place, held to the pages by plastic.  The whole thing is somewhat delicate.  A rowdy kid, prone to throwing things or stepping on them, might soon destroy this work of art.

Regarding tarantula anatomy, I don't want to call it "simple" exactly, but it's a fine on ramp to the human system in any case.  The heart is single chamber of that pushes blood by peristalsis (the way I think of it), whereas the lungs simply interleave hemolymph with surrounding air. The transport of oxygen is accomplished using a protein that's copper-based, instead of hemoglobin.

You may be wondering at my choice of topics here, a seeming blizzard of non-sequiturs.  But then that's what hyperlinks are all about: providing context, where it might be needed.  I've been looking at protein folding lately, rejoining the Linus Pauling generation in terms of my narrative.  J. D. Bernal was a focus across two Youtubes.  His lab was about using the techniques of crystallography to make headway on the problem of folded proteins (how does it work, what does it do?).

How I get to crystallography is through these "lattice meditations" (lattice in the sense of matrix and/or honeycomb) and all that somewhat Platonic geometry stuff I'm into.  My work with Flextegrity is symptomatic of these fascinations.

Tech Talk (need coffee?)

I like that Wikipedia helped propagate the term "disambiguation" as indeed we have a need to disambiguated a lot of the time. From all the press given "machine learning", if you have that wired up with "AGI" (artificial general intelligence), you may be thinking we're on the brink of the Singularity.  Or you may think more as I do, that a radio hasn't a chance of inventing radio, no matter how sireny the songs.

The science fiction world we each live in, really matters, to each one. But as a fish to water, so we are, to this ocean of ours.  Expressing it is nigh impossible in some ways.  That sense of a bubble with limits is still valid, however much we've turned to foams (cite Sloterdijk).

Perhaps your world features immanent AI takeover of human affairs.  Or maybe it features old people suckering for expensive "we'll upload your intelligence" schemes.  We've seen all these plots in the movies.  I'm not suggesting either world is original in the sense of widely unshared.

I'm back to a full teaching load and want to give my Youtubes more time to just sit there and undergo fusion, or fission, or whatever metaphor.  Translation:  I'm not making one today.  I've been on a roll lately, churning them out.

Am I positing a mental process out in rackspace somewhere?  Not exactly.

I'm suggesting more stochastic energy patterns, thanks to random search engine activity, with researchers wanting to track down some supposed factoid.

That there's a stash of Youtubes on all that "Bucky stuff" already out there becomes known, whether watched or not.  Nor is mine the only stash.

In my science fiction, we feature "grid talk" a lot, which includes appreciating California's commitment to open source (peer review).

Once a secretive security state thinks it's in charge, and responsible for covering up all hint of scandal, we've lost public oversight of a public utility.  The open source liberal arts were not about altruism first and foremost, so much as omni-triangulation and integrity.

You don't want to put all your eggs in a no-bottom or weak-bottom basket.

I've been going over some of the Youtubes about the prospects for AGI in the future.  What I look for is honesty about where we're at today i.e. I have little patience for hush hush "secret labs".

Regardless of where you stand on whether electronic circuitry might support consciousness, implicit endorsement of deliberately misleading science fiction doesn't look good in the rear view mirror.

Sunday Morning

I was awake at 7 AM to catch CBS Sunday Morning, which I'm not saying is my routine. I teased myself with the prospect of bopping over to Quakers', hopping on the 8:30 "slow-moving" (like a train, figuratively), an "adult discussion" (free-wheeling, worship-sharing format usually?).

I'm not one of the regulars these days. Loyal conductors see it through.

Speaking of loyal conductors, I caught the "exit interview" by outgoing DoD boss Mattis, an interview spread over two segments (commercial chopping block).  He'd been a skeptic on invading Iraq but when you're part of the manpower, following orders is the rule.

He'd been at loggerheads with two "hat-shaped office" holders.

The "loyal conductors" of SMAD (Sunday Morning Adult Discussion) would include Marson and Wish for sure, and also our friend Richard.  As we're of the liberal, unprogrammed persuasion (Quaker jargon) there's not as much interest in belief-system wheel-spinning during actual worship.

SMAD is a place to exercise a more systematic approach.  We use Meeting to build strengths we'll need in civil society.

As things turned out, I caught the interview and then tuned out, turning to various other social media for continuity (and fewer commercial distractions).

A faction of the voting population plans on supporting Tulsi independently of CNN-DNC apparently, banking on her Wonder Woman appeal.  I'm sensing "Russian bots" in the area, meaning an intelligentsia into ersatz samizdat has developed a keen interest in so-called "progressives" (always a volatile term of fuzzy meaning).

Speaking of words with fuzzy meanings, I mean to search for websites telling us whether ancient Egypt was more socialist or capitalist.  Do we assume Rome was fascist then?  I sometimes say "neo-Roman" with reference to some of the Manifest Destiny memes.

As I've mentioned previously, conducting debates in terms unlikely to hold persistent meanings, because historically not well-established enough, may prove too time-wasting.  Risk assessment gurus keep testing the waters, regarding whether to brand as more socially responsible.  The character of the various corporate personhoods is being tested.

GST (decoded elsewhere) looks to engineering and design science a lot more, leaving political science to get more inventive if that's what it needs to do.  Customary namespaces have ways to provide continuity to their customers, while making room for noob discourses.  Or maybe not so noob, just a bit other-worldly.

Speaking of other-worldly, Glenn Stockton and I had an interesting conversation about abduction stories in the UFO literature, over a couple IPAs at the local supermarket oasis.

For those of you just joining us, "Abducted by Quakers" is one of my jokey bumper stickers, with a Spaghetti Monster icon (perhaps in silhouette) in the background, connoting a "friendly to atheists" vibe.  I'm also allowed to drink beer.

The "good without God" demographic is quite capable of Friendship we've found, including when it comes to the more ouija board parts (not a seance) wherein we allow for movements of the spirit.

Contemporary depth psychology has explained how "woo woo stuff" may still happen in a post Nietzschean world (i.e. strongly secular, with fewer fairies and angels).  Jungians presciently predicted "abduction by aliens" episodes might become symptomatic.  Today many abductees have their own Youtube channels.

Random CCP Tetrahedrons

These three videos form a series, and a rather simple trajectory. First, I show what a theorem about CCP tetrahedrons actually means in practice, by randomly generating CCP-vertexed tetrahedra and showing they have whole number tetravolumes, within the limits of floating point accuracy.

But why settle for the limited precision of floating point numbers?  In the 2nd part, I dive into using an extended precision number type from the 3rd party Python module called gmpy2.  We go from 100 bits to 200 bits in precision, confirming our tetrahedrons are ever more closely approaching whole number volumes.

The third video serves as a synopsis by bringing the first two Jupyter Notebooks side by side within JupyterLab.  I review how to make changes to the content, fixing a typo and changing an embedded Youtube in the derived copy.  I insert the above Youtube into the Notebook itself.

Also, during Part 3, I launch into a bit of a Quaker rant about how my curriculum is "more American" than that of the competition, in that I'm including, not censoring, the "Bucky stuff".

Buckminster Fuller was the USA's premier futurist until LAWCAP decided it wasn't quite ready for GRUNCH yet, and hit the brakes.  Those of us who were ready, kept moving forward and took the lead.

Place Based Education

In place-based education, we typically frame lessons (teachings, dharmas) against the backdrop of a kind of tourism: exploring a geographical area, providing both timeline and trajectory.
Hyperlinks to focal topics, presuming we have some, may play off environmental features, such as architecture as a link to geometry (octet-truss) or Earth's rotation (pendulum) or literature (Narnia, C.S. Lewis).

Accessing entirely "other" worlds is often accomplished not by "zooming out" so much as by "zooming in": a specific detail (perhaps a flyer stapled to a phone pole, a restaurant menu, a free newspaper, a festival booth) takes us off on an instructive tangent.

Yet we have our place to which we return, thereby anchoring the narrative to a contextualizing (and increasingly familiar) context.  Sesame Street (a TV program for children), but also many other TV shows, are "place based" in design, although the "place" is often fictional.

Fictional places are OK too, however consider the possibility of leveraging whatever reality you actually live in.  Investing time in studying your own environment (for real) is a big part of what place-based education is all about.  Students will benefit by gaining traction within a non-fictional viewpoint, which may yet seem "otherworldly" or "alien".

Place-based education is both a way of learning, and a way of sharing or teaching. Learn the stories of your place, then weave those in, with your own spin and interpretation, as you share your place with others. I'm providing examples.

Note that place-based education does not require touring far afield. If your lifestyle features a lot of travel, the place may keep changing. However rooting yourself in a specific place (e.g. both these slide shows feature Portland, Oregon) is perfectly legit and will, over time, take your students deeper into the lore, while facilitating omni-triangulation (connecting the dots) regarding your locale.

Euler's Formula (Part Two)

 Would you like to see Part One?  Part Three?