Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Wanderers 2010.7.28

I was late to the meeting this morning, as I'd been working out in this conversation with math teachers, as to the relevance of philosophy within their discipline. I sense some divergent views.

Hansen says philosophy and science went their separate ways over 400 years ago.

Haim keeps invoking Marx and various "isms" commonly known as "ideologies" (e.g. Communism, Capitalism... Anarchism). Is all this philosophy then?

Math teachers aren't always clear on their definitions at first, yet share some commitment to get more definite over time (math aficionados are accustomed to definitive thinking).

Now I'm at Lyrik, waiting for a meeting to start. I call this my "corner office" and use it to connect some dots, e.g. to Martian Math.

Apropos of this history, I got to chatting with Jody via Gchat. She's the former owner of this place, when she named it Fine Grind, after which I named my Fine Grind Productions when needing to produce some backdrop video for my theatrical appearance at Portland Center Stage, as "dymaxion clown" (went over well, as a lecture on election night to the IEEE -- not what Bruno was doing back then).

I bring up Martian Math because of the course I'm starting next week, after a quick trip up north (I'll be driving the torture taxi). Tomorrow morning, Glenn and I plan to scope out the site again, maybe walk in the canyon. He's doing Neolithic Math.

It's a summer camp and they've got segments spread across the time-line. My segment is "the future" and of course is science fiction in that sense -- but I won't skimp on having real math in the picture.

One question is: how flaky is J (I've requested the J-language be installed in the lab, a rock-stable language but there may be something "special" about this installation, I've been warned by the staff).

So the fun at Wanderers this morning was tracking Jim Buxton as a dot on Google Maps. We had the option of a Street View based on his spatial coordinates. Of course the stills we were seeing were whatever the Google immersive camera car was taking in on that day, not some live video feed from "the bizmo" itself.

He was somewhere in North Dakota. Don tried to hail him by cell, let him know we were looking over his shoulder (slowed to 47 mph going through Bismarck), but got switched to voicemail. We used an Apple Powerbook and a computer projector to share the experience with everyone around the table, including a couple visitors just passing through.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Media Campaigns

Re: Happy talk, aka. More philosophy...

--- In synergeo@yahoogroups.com, "John Brawley" wrote:
>
> "Keeping the flame alive" is almost defeatist. Smacks of Fate.
> How about "renewing the truth" or "running with the torch" or some such?
> You guys should act like _insurgents_, not like semi-hopeless monks burying
> books in sandy caves....
>
> JBw


I'm sticking with my story of Bucky hoping to keep the flame of hope alive in Grunch of Giants. I thanked Dick for quoting the passage I was thinking of.

That's all that I said.

I'm accused of happy talk, but then I was talking about someone else, not me.

Fuller was indeed a great source of hope for many people, a great leader in many dimensions. Awesome guy.

I'm not trying to come off as "the next Bucky", any more than I'm trying to be "the next Einstein".

I'm more into running these little media campaigns to see where they go. Some of my recent ones:

Stop-loss is Slavery
Starvation is Torture
Ban Fast Food in Cuba
Evacuate (then bomb) Gitmo
End Qyooban Boycott
XYZ = Old Fart Math
Aristotle was Right!

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Swap Meet

Proposal to Swap Left and Right

I was thinking, politically speaking the right enjoys an unfair advantage simply in having seized upon "right". "Left" still goes with "sinister" and you'll see how the whiteman textbooks all have "positive X" to the "right" while "negative" is always "left".

Things started to seem more equal when "left" and "right" brain got into the act, as the "left brain" was all that lexical rationality, so maybe left was OK. Ah, but that is to forget the great switcheroo: your right hand is controlled by your left brain, so same guy on top, in other words (they're in cahoots).

Anyway, the proposal is to swap left and right. Everyone keep your positions, keep being "radical" or "far" or "far out" if you need to be, but just take the other side's word for the time being, say for the next year or so, then maybe swap back. This is to eliminate the hidden bias of the "right" (a left brain conspiracy). So like Rush is far left and Chomsky is far right.

Think you can handle it?

Just for a year?

Your IQ might go up a tick, might be worth it.

Thursday, July 08, 2010

Smooth Motion

Monday, July 05, 2010

Generating Random Cities



Noted on edu-sig.

Some Futuristic Math from today's writings.

New Circuit Designs for Motherboard Earth (1995)

Happy Birthday Julie!