Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Pre Thanksgiving

It's that time a year again, and I truly am grateful, to have time with family and friends. This year is unusual in that mom has stayed long enough to reach this holiday in a Pacific Northwest setting. Since around 2001, her practice has been to be in warmer climes by now, to escape our dreaded winter.

CBS News was interesting: myth busting around this idea that TG is the busiest day when it comes to flying. Not true, never has been. Also: many in congress are corrupt and in the pocket of war profiteers (I think we knew that). Obama pardoned a turkey, condemned it to DisneyLand instead. We participate in the psychology of a nation, patch in, work to make it stronger and better (thinking of USA OS again, waxing nostalgic).

Having visited ONAMI today, I'm going to pound the table on math-teach some more: the line:area:volume exponents of 1, 2 and 3, are what make nano-substances take on new properties (more with less), are what made Fuller's "dome over Manhattan" not a "crackpot idea" but an "andragogical device" (more like one of Laffoley's gizmos -- we learn from them).

Our thread was on perimeter versus area, and how you may easily disrupt the relationship. However, if you keep all the angles the same (i.e. shape), insist on self-similarity, then scaling an object results in these important power relationships that need to be included in our gnu math curriculum (per those Wikipedia pages).

OK, go ahead and nod off now, more math than you needed right before some big meal eh?

Tara is cooking a double batch of Teresina-style lentils, which I always associate with Together Friends. Speaking of Quakers and their historic allegiances, this is a season wherein many North Americans celebrate indigenous pre-Europeans, pay respects to the many lineages (story lines, still informing) already snaking through North America long before DC annexed a bunch of states for world game playing purposes.

In some virtual reality, a nation (a mindset) gets to be responsible for the whole globe and judged accordingly, by God one might say, as there's no ET audience (that we know of). The Chinese have this virtual reality philosophy already encoded in some of their emperor talk. People have been doing cybernetics for a long time, just calling it different things, like feng shui or whatever (adapting to one's environment, assuming a modicum of control).