In Defense of Public Medicine

Dr. Fauci gets a lot of criticism for "lying" and "moving the goalposts" etc. however let's think about medical practice more generally.

 
I may wish the doctor to only address my rational ego, to enlist the support of the persona I might imagine myself to be, and yes, that's important, but long practice has taught the doctor it's also a good idea to scare the bejeezus out of me a little, hit a button.

Flip side: the doctor knows I might live longer and more happily if I don't get the full "benefit" of knowing in detail all that could go wrong, given whatever condition. If I'm a worrier, I'll dredge that all up, but no need for the doctor to encourage such fantasies.

Don't tell the patient they'll very likely be dead in a year, if having a positive outlook has the effect of adding quality time. That's just not good medicine. Don't be all negative and extinguish all hope. You're a doctor, not a philosopher, let's remember.

When Dr. Fauci lied about the efficacy of masks, it was to triage the supply of PPE to front lines medical workers. 

"Just level with us doctor, if it's about saving masks for the front liners, just say so, we promise not to hoard."

 
An "honest Dr. Fauci" might reply: "yes you will hoard. Everyone will want their precious children to have the very best N95s, a black market will develop, and many of you will buy cases and cases of the things to sell from your basements, look at toilet paper. Our front liners will have to do what they're doing now, reuse surgical masks for days, like in Haiti. I know you. You'll break your promises in a heartbeat when confronted with the actual situation."

What's great about Dr. Fauci is he comes out later and reveals his technique, like a magician explaining his trick. 

Or he'll even tell you at the same time as he's "lying": "yes, I'm moving the goalposts because if you're tantalized by the prospect of 'herd immunity' you might start acting even dumber, idiot human that you be" (that's "honest Dr. Fauci" again). 

In sum, the medical profession includes psychology, and much as we like to imagine ourselves as rational beings, the model must be developed empirically, not just on wishful thinking.
Doctors as a part of their professionalism are not allowed to take our so-called "rational selves" too seriously.

 
Advertising, for better or worse, also includes psychology, and the lesson there is the same: if you want to induce a specific behavior pattern, it's more effective to bypass the rational "talk to me" earnest individual who erroneously regards itself as an in control sole proprietor of its psyche. Better to talk to the subconscious demon who actually runs the place. Politics 101.

Sometimes we get lonely, we rational cogitos, so well educated and introspective, because none of the institutions are really wanting to communicate with us as reasoning brainiacs. They're all too busy manipulating us to give us that courtesy.

 
But hey, that's a strategy based on results, and not entirely misguided. I'm for cutting public medicine (its practice) some slack.

The Great Unraveling

The way the Washington Post quickly jumped on Cozy Bear as a culprit, in connection with the SolarWinds narrative, undermines Russiagate.  The evidence-free fingering of the GRU makes the CrowdStrike story inside the Mueller Report less credible. Two pigs in the same blanket.

Likewise the Navalny shennanigans vis-a-vis novichok, have further undermined the Skripal story (Salisbury).  

The doubling down, on both fronts (hacking and chemical attacks) is backfiring. The facade is crumbling. 

Memoirs of a Princetonian (Class of 1980)

Withholding More Than Taxes

A curriculum introducing the concentric hierarchy of volumes 1, 3, 4, 6, 20 with other volumes (including irrational) interspersed, in the context of closest packing (non-XYZ lattice), does not have to purge itself of XYZ. It goes directly to the imagination and fills your head. Cartesian coordinates are welcome (but we glance at Quadrays for a different perspective).

You get comfortable with these geometric concepts early (in connection with natural and human designed architectures) and that means you get the history too: this bold futurist (tons of materials) returned from obscurity, thanks to his invisible army (fans, colluders, many of them Chinese speakers), and now it's not all doom and gloom, even though peak oil and climate change are still real (not denied). That bold futurism has returned.

All it would take is like a cooking show with polyhedron measuring bowls and some cartoons (animations). Given Youtube, you don't even need to wait for the classroom teachers to get on board (they tend to be extensions of big publishers -- I used to work at McGraw-Hill and saw it from that angle). But you do need to give kids some clues. Needles in haystacks take a long time to find (especially if you're not even looking for them).

We're one popular program away (like Sesame Street) from kids being fluent enough to know of their Dymaxion Map (Fuller Projection) and all those other conceptual tools he bequeathed to them, that the "corporate personae" (the liability limiting master controller pseudo adults) are now sitting on, withholding, deliberately suppressing, precisely because our American heritage is not consistent with the Great Tragedy scenarios they have in store for us humans (endless war, misery for the many, unfettered greed for the few --- we've already been herded around their block a few times, sacrificing the kids instead of teaching them).

(from somewhere on Facebook)

Bizmo Diaries (On the Road...)

Refugee City

The Economic Refugee Zone that I've focused on in these blogs (see sidebar for blog list) is taking shape here in Portland, out by the airport (PDX), as I've detailed in EPCOT West.

As of today, here in Plague Times (covid-19) we've seen no action by "powers that be" to enact any of the EPCOT West scenario planning.  We have no real "powers" at the moment, only baronies, like the Water Bureau.

The vista is pretty bleak at the moment.  For PR purposes, all we can do now is keep the images flowing, letting the world know you don't want Americans backseat driving your development plans. 

We've got major PR firms on top of it I'm sure.  Don't look at me.  Check my Asylum City playlist.  I'm the guy who saw it coming.

Remember LaTeX From Camp?

Hey high schoolers, remember Camp?

What might look like super hard STEM, with all those Ramanujan Identities, turns out, from another angle, to be typesetting.  As the typesetter for the mathematicians, you did not need a degree in whatever they were going on about, but you did need some skills when it came to arranging symbols.  That's setting type.

Thanks to Steve Jobs, who rescued business computing from being the unimaginative dullard monster  Microsoft / IBM had in mind, we got highly developed fonts a lot earlier than we might have.  

The only other technology that might have saved us, from the dreary fate MS DOS had laid out for us, was LaTeX, the brainchild of Donald Knuth. 

As it is, we got Apple LaserWriters and PageMaker and desktop publishing, and I got a job at CUE (Center for Urban Education).  That's when I picked up some of my skills as a trainer, and to some extent a desktop publisher.  

I usually got high marks for working with people.  Some of my lecture presentations might have been too weird for some tastes.  I wasn't auditioning for prime time commercial television, let's put it that way.

Anyway, coming back from Memory Lane:  remember our Covid Camp earlier this year?  Some of you might still be following.  

We didn't do a lot with LaTeX but we did explore Jupyter Notebooks, and their ability to make use of the LaTeX layer, a built-in JavaScript library I assume?  Right, the MathJax JavaScript library.

Famous BizMo

:: Henry Ford Museum ::

Election Postmortem

The Trump legal team is amping up a public perception that the vote favored Trump out of the gate, but then the blue horse mysteriously (i.e. deceptively) overtook the red horse just in these corrupt blue cities, places akin to Portland, where chaos reigns. Anti-Trump votes flooded in from nowhere, even after polls had closed. That's the hand wavy scare 'em story Guliani tells. It's the most obvious thing in the world this was all planned in advance.

That's close to the mark in that this was all expected (different from planned). Same with expecting another sars. People say you planned, but you merely anticipated the likelihood.

What the chanting mob doesn't hear are the sober voices, even ahead of the election, offering a likely scenario: Trumpers think it patriotic to hit the polls on election day, pro forma, as that's the Norman Rockwell all American Apple Pie GOP thing to do. Dems, on the other hand, realize there's a plague, are in lockdown and are voting absentee. More than in any other election in history, especially in big cities, it's about voting absentee.

So what happened, in many a big city is: they counted election day votes first, as they came in, and then turned their attention to these piles and piles, many coming in after election day anyway, but postmarked that day or before. We all know the scene, I'm reciting a litany.

Same day patriot MAGA votes made it look like Trump was roaring ahead. But this was anticipated and named: the Red Mirage. The big blue cities do have more Dems, and those votes were counted last. When all were counted, Blues dwarfed Reds. It's not nefarious. Not only is evidence of fraud lacking, but the "big obvious fraud" they want you to see, has an innocent explanation.

Random Facebook Groupthink

:: sugar lobby ::

A big problem is the journalism always stays shallow, like are you for or against Medicare for All (M4ALL)? As if that's what matters. Who says it's even possible?

"But other countries...." Don't give me that. The states have only recently gelled into a federation and just a couple generations ago the whole experiment nearly fell apart in a civil war (the whole idea of a "civil" war is a bug in the horse and buggy English language). "America" (as in the "the United States") is indeed exceptional, but maybe not in the sense people mean. I'm more in Ann Coulter's camp: the USA doesn't really exist. Never has, not really. Not by her criteria (control of borders and so on).

If you want government involved in healthcare, think prevention, think how we used to see vicious anti-tobacco ads, gross lungs (like on Canadian cigarette packs even now). Imagine many vigorous ad campaigns aimed at fast food, dangerous toxins, exposing past crimes (like that movie about DuPont, Dark Waters). Imagine free detox camps on federal lands, like scouting for adults, where friendly government employees teach you life skills and help you get your life back. Just imagine. A completely different world.

Today's non-existent wimpy destroyed carcass of a government does not dare stand up to the cowardly capitalists, who need to hide behind its Big Daddy skirts, pointing at scary competition (Huawei, Citgo, TikTok...). The Corporate Cowards are too busy using the dead carcass of Uncle Sam as their shield, to ward off competing profiteers. Your medical state, your health, has zero significance. You can die tomorrow. FEMA just has to pay for the refrigerated truck. That's the "public health system" you pay taxes for.

Americans are going down in history as the most ripped off population ever. They had a bright future there for awhile, but after WW2, the private sector started cannibalizing and cannibalizing. All that research, all that Manhattan Project, ended up enriching a few families. The Business Plot succeeded (the first time failed). But you wouldn't know that from reading the press, because the press is owned by the ones who did the good eating. Talk about "fat cats" but who draws those anymore? You must fear Russians. You must love your Corporate Persons and their fake news. They rule you. Obey.

A real public sector could afford to give every American citizen a fitbit if they wanted one. Several government channels would give unbiased health advice. Not paid for by the sugar lobby, what a concept. As it is, the sugar lobby has direct access to child optical nerves via cartoon commercials. No "government" push back, how could there be? When there's no government.

A real public sector could afford to give every American citizen a cell phone, stocked with apps needed to do business with government, claim benefits, schedule activities, volunteer. We all know having a phone is like a prerequisite for getting anything done, but there's no Verizon SafetyNet [tm] is there? Shareholder operations have no responsibility to citizens. The government does, but it's long gone. The USA (1776 - 1983) was a bold experiment.

Broken in What Sense?

I sense a lot of confusion when it comes to in what way the elections system is broken. On the face of it, just making people wait hours and hours in line is symptom enough of the abject poverty of (lack of investment in) public infrastructure (the whole idea of a "public sector" is somewhat fuzzy in this age of privatized warfare).

Greg Palast and others focus on voter roll purges, where little postcards go out (this is one technique) and if the occupant fails to respond, they're kicked off the eligible voter rolls. Another technique is to very sloppily share rosters of names across states and purge "likely duplicates" that aren't likely to be duplicates at all. This is done in the name of being "conscientious" and "protecting against voter fraud" (of a kind that's not at all common: voting multiple times).

Thanks to modern media and growing public awareness, this kind of systematic voter suppression is becoming harder to get away with, but it's also not the kind of cheating we're looking at on election night, in terms of ballot counting. In that case we have deeper concerns about closed source proprietary machines with possible back doors.

The time to address this real and legitimate concern is *not* in the middle of the election of course. Making all these simmering backburner issues come to a boil right now has everything to do with sowing chaos and confusion and weakening the legitimacy of the "ruling" party.

Again, as a 3rd partyist, I'm not against the DNC and GOP ripping into each other against the backdrop of both having diminishing relevance.

As a 3rd partyist, I'm not too chagrined if neither the GOP or DNC feels it has much of a mandate to do whatever, other than repair the public sector. We're doing our own research on what that means. Our state governor needs to publicly share plans for the vast economic refugee camps we may be needing soon. Unlike Syrians, we can't just walk to Europe.

New Curriculum Technologies in the Global U

Random Comments

I'm pleased with the new realism seeping into the political sphere, meaning people are waking up to the fact that organized crime is running things, with tacit approval from the benefitting authorities.

What's ineffective is to respond with moral outrage. Since when has "rule of law" applied internationally? The United Nations depends so much on donor nations, with the city-state of DC quite willing to pull the plug, should the UN get in the way of its world domination objectives (not shared by other city-states across the land, nor by Canada).

The idea of sovereign nations respecting one another's sovereignty sounds nice on paper (Kellogg-Briand Pact for example) but in practice it's still powerful crime families and various mafias vying for turf. There's a separate set of rules for the very rich. That's not at all new. That's history.

If you want to express outrage, I suggest it be towards infantilizing schoolish textbooks written by craven professors who have to pretend otherwise. It's our curriculum that's to blame for our awkward inability to face the world cooly, without a lot of self-pitying cynicism.

---

Poor immigrants, refugees, spread across North America in a couple hundred years and threw together a ramshackle, ad lib style of government based on the idea of individual freedoms and government staying out of everyone's business.

A pandemic hits, not the first time, and thanks to a great freeway system and no precedent for "isolating" whole counties or states, huge numbers of Americans die.

The Americans don't have a real country yet, according to Ann Coulter (Adios America), as the "citizen" and "borders" issues were never settled and no serious national public health system was ever put into place. Americans like to put Americans in cages (prisons etc.) as that seems the easiest way to solve things ("just criminalize it" -- the national motto if there were one).

250 years is not much time, even in historical terms.

Amazing they managed to get a stimulus check out. Those computers (Hollerith machines) have proved their worth at least.

Mostly, the government, such as it is, is about protecting the interests of those who prop it up.

If we ever want something more, we'll need to consciously create it. An engineering feat. Not a job for mostly lawyers.

---

From my point of view the educational system extends to include the socialized military. Families send their males (mostly) to military academies, which are boarding schools. Pirate Party USA supports residential mixed age high schools, with same gender options, that need not be military oriented. Lots of magnet schools drawing from across the land. Mixed age because high school is something you need every 10 years or so, as the fundamentals change. Like today if you don't know HTML you're illiterate, yet eligible to serve in government (why?). Free high school (it pays students -- UBS *) would help boomers get a grip. Parents and kids often enroll in the same courses and do the same homework, no stigma in doing that.

* UBS = Universal Basic Scholarship = UBI but with income compensating work/study.

---

The border and citizenship issues that go with: 

(a) engulfing a huge amount of land in a hurry and 

(b) importing and depending on slaves and agricultural workers, can't be dealt with overnight. 

Covid has exposed our complete lack of a real public health system because we don't have much of a public sector. All that hype about how rich a country this is mistakes private for public wealth. We used to have more of the latter but since WW2 the public sector has been cannibalized to an extent it's no longer possible to tell the truth about it in "polite" society. 

People react with infantile outrage, instead of wanting to roll their sleeves up and deal with the karma. Better to let them believe in their "government" then. Let them sleep.

---

FEMA has played a very low profile during the Covid Crisis, perhaps having learned from the Hurricane Katrina debacle, to stay out of the limelight. 

The new approach was to push it out to the governors to handle the problems, and compete with them.
The "FEMA camp" meme is mostly used to terrify people, lest they actually be served by their government in times of need. If only the public sector could find a way to help refugees from the private sector.

A lot of our private sector economic refugees go into the military, and I'm sure the Pentagon would be unhappy if civilians could avail themselves of socialized services to the extent the military does, without the price tag of undergoing brainwashing and training in after birth abortion techniques (state sponsored homicide).

Americans have a huge internal refugee problem and yet have been conditioned to see any organized move to help them as the hand of a globalizing anti-Christian conspiracy.

The homeless population doubles and doubles, with malign neglect somehow morally superior to whatever the Chinese are doing (at least we have Chinese to accuse of human rights violations, a convenient "feel good" outlet).

If FEMA sets up tent cities for economic refugees, then pretty soon the public will expect treatment for drug addiction. Such expectations could only undercut Murder Inc., where the big bucks are still made. Killing humans still pays more than helping them. Economics at work, right?

Insurance Story

I've been putting off yakking with my car insurance lady, about an accident over a year ago by now. Exactly what was I paying for in terms of damages?  

We'd pulled over and talked, I didn't see any dings, everything looked fine and she agreed.  Then comes the call from her insurance about something that happened on a Saturday.  That's not when it happened.  Yet my account was dinged.  I need to follow up on that.  Scrounging around for a number...

OK, we had an excellent therapy session. We talked about 2017, and how the date of the accident is wrong. But no big deal. That's what I needed to hear, and what got charged (claimed and approved).

Now I'm in line to get a tracking app that will measure my mileage and adjust my rate accordingly. I'll be one of the guinea pigs.

What would Medicare for All really look like?  I still think GI phones, which you won't want to use in subterfuge because it's designed to track. Keep a private phone for other purposes.  At least poor kids at the border get the apps, because America is for Americans.

I also talked to customer support. If the rooster sound in the distant background was added, for texture, much as people on Zoom stage their heads (audio version), then brilliant.  I much prefer the "rural setting" picture of customer support.  Relaxed on a beach somewhere, with a data helmet?  Lucky me someday, right?

I know it never happened on a Saturday, since I was driving home from Sellwood Middle School. Probably a Friday then?  I gave her my business card for contact information.  I'm glad everything got settled.

History Repeats

The big story I'm following is what appears to be the crumbling of two stories, interconnected. The original plan was (a) link Trump to GRU (b) GRU to chem attack in Syria (c) chem attack to Skripal incident. British Intel failed to pull it off. Not surprising.

— Kirby Urner (@thekirbster) October 19, 2020

Moving Targets

I'm experimenting with high bandwidth self brainwashing techniques by tackling a series of difficult topics, but not ones for which I need a huge amount of prep.  MIT chemistry, with a focus on orbitals, was a good starting point, given the Linus Pauling House is such a topic (search these blogs?). 

But my resume shows I'm more an applications developer than a chemist.  Instead of chemical reactions, or nuclear reactors, shouldn't I be grokking React?  You read my mind.

However React hasn't been just sitting pretty, nor has Vue.  Both these Javascript frameworks, favored by Web developers, have their successive versions.  Hence the title of this blog post: moving targets.

Where to jump in?  

In high bandwidth brainwashing, our approach is not so linear.  Get a lot of dots on the sphere, even as you connect them.  We can think about the "best sequence" on a second or third pass.

PDX Code Guild was using JQuery when I started visiting.  By now they're using Vue, with a Django back end (another moving target).  Newbies should do well starting with Vue3, if jumping into web development through a Code School.

High Bandwidth Brainwashing

Back in the early days of the internet, I used to campaign for higher bandwidth formats. Sometimes what's hard about school is not that the teacher is going too fast.  The teaching is meted out at an agonizingly slow rate, aimed to last about twelve years. The teacher is under no obligation to keep pace with students.  It's a one way street.  Stay with the pace of the teacher or get singled out as too slow or too fast.

As expected, with the sudden tsunami of alternative channels, those wanting the higher bandwidths could produce and consume at their chosen frequency.  It's not like a given student always consumes at the same rate.  Per Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, one adjusts to match the content.  Other reading comprehension strategies pertain.  

I scored 790 with my best combined SAT scores.  Both times I was consistently high on both scales.  Add that I'm living in the Philippines and I'm easily interesting material, for whatever student body a recruiter might be building that year.

However all of the above doesn't mean I adore brain teasers and crossword puzzles. Nor do I esteem myself as a master of trivia.  My Go skills suck, Golang whatever.  However I enjoy movies and lectures about what I'm not good at.  Where I'm low performing, I look for complementary instructors and entertainers.

Of course we say "brainwashing" is bad, because what's implied is an involuntary reprogramming. However when studying or cramming, wanting to get good at something fast, we actively seek out effective shortcut or time-saving techniques. If the connotation is "I'm brainwashing myself, with stuff I really need to know" then the innocuous meaning is you're seeking like a PhD in something.  We all wish for the magic pill that gives us Spanish, or Devanagari or whatever. 

Cosmography for Teachers (School of Tomorrow)

My arc in the Youtube stash as been towards integrating Synergetics into the philosophical literature. I've been announcing this as my project for some time, however announcing is not the same as doing, so inevitably, if into walking my talk, I'd have to do some walking. I hope my accounts come across as fleet footed and not overly pedestrian.

"Target acquisition" has ironic meaning if depicted as someone getting a target (e.g. "kick me") posted on his back. One may appear to purposely enter the crosshairs of others, trained to shoot at specific signs, by disguising oneself, on purpose, to get their attention.  In taking Harold Bloom on board, in my latest Youtube, has the School of Tomorrow painted itself into a corner?

My wiring diagram is pretty simple:  extend New England Transcendentalism through No More Secondhand God to Synergetics and its "geometry of nature". Technology is hers.  Automation is hers. Humans flail about in their Earthly Kindergarten, yet we see have gained traction, to the point of bearing some responsibility for the biosphere as a whole.  We are the Borgosphere already.

Back to Harold Bloom, he presages Jordan Peterson in bemoaning a turn of events within University, where ideological currents now run counter to his tastes.  Taste, like smell to Nietzsche, means a lot to opinionated scholars.  Dr. Bloom makes it clear that for him it's all about time management.  You have only so many hours to read, so why waste your time with not the best?  That's a compelling argument, unless maybe you're doing anthropology or natural language analysis.  Perhaps you're into observing, or seeking, some operational dialectic, Marxian or otherwise.  "Whence this 'taste'?" in other words.

Indeed, I've used the A where PATH crosses STEAM, to mean Anthropology, not Art, because I'm willing to subsume Art.  That's my heresy, shall we say.  Philosophy, as practiced by Wittgenstein, is in many dimensions turning the arts of Anthropology upon one's own matrix (subculture), thereby setting up some recursive vertigo in some disciples.

Back to Bucky, we need to remember one of his working assumptions was nationalism, a new kid on the block to begin with, would certainly morph in the face of jet travel and globally embracing telecommunications. He lived from the 1800s to the dawn of the internet, and was already fully into hypertext when he died.  Remember Dr. Vannevar Bush anticipated search engines in the 1940s.  Technology expresses through us, the invisible hand moving us, inclining us, by means of invisible chessboards, using pieces the ranks of which we scarcely guess.

In other words, Bucky was looking for signs of demise, among sovereignties, in the very concept of sovereignty.  When nation A carpet bombs nation B, that's an obvious sign of no sovereignty, i.e. that's not a relationship among coequal kingdoms, free to make their own alliances.  

The nations haven't really gelled, given the disrespect of sovereignty we have all witnessed.  Furthermore, the USA had proved itself incapable of passing an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) for women.  Those of us getting The Graduate Review (for esties), saw Dr. Fuller's essay foretelling the USA's demise as a likely consequence. By the 1980s, the Grunch had completed its "tunnels under Disneyworld" takeover, per Fuller's Grunch of Giants subversive narrative.

School of Tomorrow (Supermarket Math)

Supermarket Math? Check out Digital Math, a Silicon Valley offering.

Ulka's Python course is good too.

Wanderers Meet on Zoom

This was close to our standard Equinox Party, and in the absence of the pandemic, we'd be gathering at the Linus Pauling House around now.

We're catching up using this higher bandwidth technology, about changes in our lives since our last gathering, months ago.

Fall Term 2020: Kick Off Lectures

Update from Portland (School of Tomorrow)

August Sixth 2020

August Sixth has special meaning around here, and for the world, as it marks the first time an atomic weapon was used by humans against themselves, with strong intent. Another detonation would follow, over the city of Nagasaki.

Humans were nuking themselves in various "tests" as well, irradiating themselves and their environment. Many thought nuclear war was inevitable, and many still do, so low is the average faith in politicians and the political process.  Religion was marginalized earlier.  What's left?  A sense of self preservation maybe?

Portlanders have typically turned out for a simple ceremony, emphasizing Japanese-American friendship, in a park with that moniker.  That ceremony has been suspended this year, has have most formally planned group events for the summer.

We're hoping that friendship stays strong and remains mutual, much though it may have been tested since that darker age.

Visiting Faculty (School of Tomorrow episode)

More about Kailash Ecovillage: 

Camp C6XTY

Leela and Melody got to social distance in my backyard, much like old times.  We had a breezy summer evening.  Naturally the conversation turned to the protests downtown.  Melody has been studying the emergence of private militias in her neck of the woods.  Privatization has come a long way.

I've been continuing to recruit future faculty who might work Martian Math into some already favorite set of topics. My approach is to keep my content Humanities flavored (that sounds somewhat cannibalistic I realize), meaning I'm not spinning my home base as a place within STEM territory.  

We bridge to STEM, over the C.P. Snow chasm, with our C6XTY bridge (there's a marketing angle). The point of casting it this way is to not make STEM, mathematicians in particular, the bottleneck.  Given their track record, we can expect little to no help from the Mathematics Department on this one.  Philosophy has had to step up to the plate, with links to Literature.  We're more in PATH (Philosophy Anthropology Theater History) than in STEM.

You might think the rap above would have nothing to do with the Rastafarian | Pastafarian combo I'd like to see center stage at the Justice Center, once there's some serious equipment.  

Why not a full sound and light show, impromptu?  Food carts?  I'm not saying I'd go, because of Covid.  If the actual downtown presence shrinks yet continues to stream the process, I'll have felt part of something.

Seriously, I'd turn the downtown scene into a reggae festival, given the Blues Festival was denied us this year.  The link is the importance of streaming, and the fact of a larger audience watching from home. That's how our school works as well.  If you were following Lattice Gallery last winter, in downtown Portland, you were probably doing so remotely, perhaps from Japan or Korea.

Portlanders are missing all their favorite summer events and have needed to channel some of that disappointment into an already frustrating push for social change.  There's a need to keep it real and focused and not just go for fluff.  My suggestions qualify as "peanut gallery" as I'm more kibbitzer than producer in this picture.

Dr. D. and Glenn were also properly ordained for the occasion.  I'll plan to invite DB for the next one. We're still keeping the numbers down.  Blue House has been through many chapters.

School of Tomorrow: Place Based History Curriculum

See: Americana in Grain of Sand

Checking In from Portland

About Racism (Lesson Plan)

About Racism (a lesson plan)

Me: memetic, ethnic, cultural, software
Me: genetic, physical, hominid, hardware

Memes are not just miniature billboards on Facebook. I'm stealing from Dawkins ("borrowing") and making memes mean a lot more than commercial jingles or fragments from films. Memes comprise the "daydream" of what one muses about, considers. Memes come up in meditation, sometimes from deeper levels than Surface Me. A lot of memes come through television and other social media.

Genes do not always translate into visible traits and they don't define character, personality, moral qualities, other attributes of a soul. That's all epigenetic stuff. DNA does govern eye color, skin color, nose shape, physical features (inside and outside) more generally, and because physically inherited, is not nearly as transmissible or alterable (flexible) as memes or culture.

What is Race?

A given race is usually a mixed up soup, a mishmash, of both memetic and genetic traits, sufficiently memorable to form stereotypes, a kind of default mnemonic typology (like dwarves and elves). Racist cultures encourage thinking in such racial terms (by definition).

The notion of race closely relates to "breed" in animal husbandry, including the language of mixed or mongrel, versus pure (perhaps with pedigrees to prove lineage).

The names of the races and the stories behind them, form a kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting tableau, made from memes. The Book of Genesis is a good place to start, if looking for conceptual roots (i.e. memetic content), at least for some people.

We will be reading the stories of Noah, and the Tower of Babel to get a sense of how people thought (or even think today). We'll also be watching various animated and live action versions of these narratives. We will discover what forms of racism might be traced to this part of scripture by studying a variety of curricula.

Twilight Zone TV

We're aiming for a format Hollywood knows well:  a dedicated studio audience, providing a feedback loop, and in this case talent, as in a classroom where all are on tap to do Show & Tell. That was my Coding with Kids model when doing in-person classes in the local nearby schools.

If the plan is to keep going nightly through August, producing free content with lots of volunteer security, e.g. Wall of Moms, then the least we can do is corporately sponsor a nicer sound stage.  The idea of writing over the graffitti with other temporary graffiti, simply by slapping up a blank canvas, is being tried elsewhere in town.

The major audience, also taking in advertising, other current events, is what we might call the TikTok crowd, although of course many geezers are following on Facebook or one of those.  Social Media.  The camera people are likewise the audience self organizers. I've been one of the geezers, staying put in my own zip code and wearing a mask in public.  Except when I'm walking by myself or with a trusted-to-be-safe other... anyway, you know the code.

The melodrama spikes when the soap opera turns to images of the president gassing his own people and all that.  Not with lethal gasses.  Deep, long-lasting injuries are authorized. 

Public sympathy is with an underdog and if vandals are mobbing the monuments, per the Dork City narrative, then the federal marshals are underdoggy. 

The Wall of Moms removed some of the fencing getting in the way of the future sound stage maybe.  Bashing soccer moms is a symbolic way of hitting the insecurity button, which tilts the public the other way.

Our corporate sponsors will want to make it clear they're not encouraging tacky S&M (sadism + masochism) complete with costumes. Other banks are lending to that group. 

If you follow the money, we just wanted a better soundstage and some replacement graffitti, with volunteers doing most of the programming ala the public cable TV channel model.  Except we're more reliant on social media. 

We see and process the clips the next day e.g. the Wall of Moms being charged with MacArthur like forces (I'm referring to the attack on the Hooverville in Dork City that time -- Smedley wrote about it).

As with Occupy, I'm wondering where to take it indoors as the weather cools, summer's longest day behind us in this northern hemisphere.  

We didn't have covid in 2011.  I ended up moving the Ministry of Education into Washington High School.  Long time readers might remember that story. WHS was abandoned at the time, but for art colonies. 

In a later chapter, the revamped venue showcased the Buckminster Fuller Archives at Stanford University, set to music by Yo La Tengo.

Gothamite Bizmo

I know not whose bizmo this is.  American Gothic.

Thanks to social media, a lot more imagery flows across my metaphorical desktop (which is also literal in being a GUI desktop).

Part 2: Thinking Out Loud

Steffan makes the point that thinking about equi-distance arrays, either 2D or 3D, is likewise to think about social distancing in the abstract.

Six students in six hexagons around a central teacher.

In volume, twelve around one, at the corners of a cuboctahedron for maximum omni-symmetry.

Even without a literal arrangement, we're still thinking about compression and tension i.e. what strategies help keep social distancing more relaxing?

Packing people in a room and asking them to practice safe distancing is just creating a lot of stress, obviously.

Parts 1 & 2 appear together in Coffee Shops Network (CSN).

Campus News

Hey there patrons, investors, alums, future students, faculty...

I'm sure you're all eager beavers (Oregonian expression?) and want to learn everything about the roof of my house.  

That's been the order of business this morning, as in:  why doesn't it leak?  The High Powered Homes says it's three tab, common in the 1990s.  Not what's called "architectural" which is more the standard today.

Underneath though, is an older higher grade shaker.  Like they don't make anymore.  That accounts for why I've gotten away without re-roofing for this long.

The remodel to make this more like a Linus Pauling House, non-profit owned and operated, open to sojourning faculty, students, would include a new roof with more ventilation, other interior changes. 

The old metal and vinyl kitchen is still fully operational. What would the 2 Dickinson people do?  

I learned some of my adult livings skills at 2D.  The group home scene.  At Princeton University.  Lets do that again. 

So the estimator is sitting out in his truck.  We've been through the different grades of roofing, economy, performance, and high performance. 

The Owens Corning solution, backed by a transferable warranty, is an entire construction system. Their platinum installers get high marks for durable solutions.  High Performance Homes is one of those platinum installers.

I'm saying: hey, where's the university in this picture?  

Housing Services kinda sucks when you add all the solutions and divide by eight billion.  Let's talk about Food Services.  Welcome to the Global U, right?

So at the other end of Blue House would be these (sometimes remote) learning center experimental communities of tomorrow, that work with future prototype high tech and invite tourists, inspectors, auditors, critics.  

We're not trying to disappear behind some occult fog here.  The goal is transparency, more than you're used to perhaps.

The job would be in the ballpark of $20K < re-roof < $30K.  However, before tackling the roof, I need to get the trees and shrubbery cut back from the house.  Another stimulus might be needed.

Me on Facebook:

I had the roof looked at today. It's not leaking, just I lucked out that it has a good cedar shake roof under the 1990s 3-tab (I learned some new jargon). Just collecting numbers. I'm jealous of the Pauling House being owned by a nonprofit. How do I get to be a nonprofit too?

Happy Holidays!

:: PDX ::

Lots going on!

July 4 was of course a somewhat muted affair, but a full moon, and I exercised what liberties I had, to goof off and stuff, but also to do some serious housework, and to accompany Carol on a supervised walk around the block. I was on a family call earlier.

July 5 is of course X-Day, big on the Subgenius calendar, and is my sister's birthday.  On X-Day, the cult members pray to be abducted by the flying saucers. When that doesn't happen, there's a ritualistic explanation, in terms of misinterpreted scripture. Great excuse for a picnic, but this year it's a virtual picnic.

And then, there's Christmas in July.  Long time readers of this blog know about my "king who came late" mythology. He has a name now: Mitra. He's a Friend in some way.  The other three kings have come and gone. What gift hath this new king brought?

The Xmas in July meme has been blatant about its commercialism from the beginning. The Santa Hat is Mithraic in origin as is as the Statue of Liberty crown and torch (like Columbia's). You may see where I'm going with this:  Quakers venture back into business ("feel their oats" as we say).

Not that they ever left entirely.  However the book Quakernomics makes clear that Quakers enjoyed something of an economic heyday in the age of early industrialization by means of steam and steal, electricity would come later.

Quakers had been a persecuted minority but were now enjoying their reputation for business integrity.  Lots of companies gave themselves a Quaker spin. Barclay's Bank. Lloyds of London. Cadbury... Nowadays Pepsi carries the banner forward, with the oats guy.

I'm not suggesting there's some way to make history repeat, only that Christmas in July is an opportunity to shape not just a specific date, but a season, almost an ethos.  I'm looking forward to more commercials that capitalize on this idea, although I know I won't become a fan of all of them.

Back to Subgenius, no I haven't seen the new Kickstarter funded movie. I know it's out and has been in theaters, and I've seen a trailer. My guru Rev. Onan Canobite has traveled I believe to Austin, TX for an opening. This was all pre covid of course.

We're on lockdown protocol per company orders and if I do anything it'll be from a social distance. However that's not as dire as it sounds. I have a small patch of land, big enough to accept delivery of another 92 C6XTY balls, with the expectation of doing a 3-frequency this time (I have a 2-frequency 42 baller already assembled in the staging area).

:: Quakernomics Talk, Linus Pauling House, 2014 ::

Police Story

Yes, I tell the same stories over and over. I meet with new listeners. Like on Facebook.

From Facebook:

Speaking of police work, I was contracted by a local police precinct back in the days of Napster because, get this, the police were tired of being used as the scary authorities asked to go into schools and scare the shit out of junior for illegally copying, like those FBI banners on VHS and DVDs that threaten you with higher fines and more years than manslaughter if you share what are in principle freely dupable digital assets.

The police had discovered they lived in the Silicon Forest, capital of open source, and the public schools were too fuckin' lazy to teach any of that stuff, just wanted to be mouthpieces for lawyers and big business, make the police be the enforcers.

Once the police put it together they said "fuck it, we'll teach Linux and stuff ourselves" and they hired me and this other guy to go into the police station to teach teens. They hoped to get a lot of Latino immigrant types because that's who was here for the American dream, but instead we got privileged white kids, really fun and smart I might add, who had less inherent fear of police.

So in that sense, the program failed. But I still say the police were thinking logically, and yes, the public schools are in many dimensions too lazy to be salvaged.

Dome History

Shoji references the Kabul dome, discussed below by Bucky.

He also talks about the Montreal '67 dome, Fuller's Taj Mahal.

Earlier, he mentions the DEW line side of the business, which would have included Ed Popko.

Later, he mentions the Union Tank Car Dome, the subject of the brilliant documentary, A Necessary Ruin.

More Esoteric Studies

I see Jason Reza Jorjani, the man being interviewed, got mixed up with the alt-right somehow.

He's pushing for a Persian Renaissance, as a globalist.

I'd link his thinking to Bucky's Humans in Universe, co-authored with Anwar Dil.

Related post at CSN.

More Public Discussion

I'd recommend skipping the step where we use the draft to force social protest and instead open up service options wherein those conscientiously opposed to violence aren't made to jump through hoops. 

A national chain of farms, hotels, gas stations... not government takeover of whole sectors, but get in there and get your hands dirty with transparent think tank designed versions of these institutions, showing imagination in ways the private sector wants to copy. 

The brain drain from public to private has been such that governments have been left to die in the desert at this point, except insofar as they provide a thin veneer of legitimacy for the mass murder that goes on. 

As long as mass media's job is to inflame the kind of virulent patriotism that makes 'em mindlessly bomb happy, we'll need government and religious icons to whip us into a frenzy.

-- some town hall on Facebook somewhere

My Parents' Perspective | 親からの観点 (movie review)

I'm calling these clips "movies" whether they conform to the cinematic definition or not.  They move. This is my first Youtube review labeled as a movie review, which is why I'm bringing it up.

The storytelling here is superb in that her parents get interviewed while Tiffany interpolates her comments, tying everything together efficiently and compactly in ways a longer winded documentary could never accomplish.  As both director and narrator, Tiffany takes a highly responsible role, contributing to the effectiveness of her communications.

Lots is going on here, in terms of flashbacks and camera angles.  Autobiography with a complex subject at its best.

I came to Tiffany's channel from researching a few others, on the topic of Americans of dark skin tone living in various parts of Asia.

Here's my (highlighted) comment on the Youtube itself:

kirby urner
3 days ago 

Brilliant interview thank you. I'm stuck in English for the most part (the language) but grew up around the world (not missionary, not military) and empathize with these fun new identities we're getting, a privilege and good for getting people unstuck in their assumptions.

Commenting while Retweeting

I never did it (isolation, mask practice, social distancing) because I was commanded to or asked. I exercised my own judgement. I'm still laying low and watching the numbers as we go through these "phases". I'm coming out of my shell, but ready to go back in. https://t.co/mPHAI7P7lq

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) June 8, 2020

Another Rant from School of Tomorrow

Mithras - Lord of the Cosmos

I've been studying Mathraism, exploring for memes we might use to glue together Quakerism (Amigos) and Sufism to form an interesting hybrid. Of course Nietzsche's Zarathustra might come into it. This isn't about fixating on only ancient sources, as if sources need to be ancient to be religious.

What Did Ancient Rome Look Like? (Cinematic Animation)

Debating Race on Q2

Thank you for your contribution to this discussion Aaron. I still brave coming here even though Chrome insists I'm at risk (some certificate configuration thingy). The red exclamation point next to the URI reminds me I'm here against Chrome's better judgement.

Anyway, I understand how human languages branch and fork into family trees.  Computer languages do that too (branch and fork, have ancestor influences and descendents). much as rivers do, and the notion that Semitic languages form one such family, on purely philological grounds, seems pretty plausible, if not outright indubitable. Sanskrit fits into this puzzle too.

Then you get a rather different concept, of Semite as "a race". That's crossing a threshold into new territory in my book, as we're no longer discussing communication codes.  Now we're talking animal husbandry, and family planning.  The stakes seem higher and the danger of animosity greater.  I'm heeding Ashley Montagu's warnings, about "race" as man's most dangerous myth, a myth going way back to before genetic science, or Ancestry.com. 

I've remarked earlier in this discussion how these racial undertones give off a vibe or smell that reminds me of Aryan supremacist ideology, so vested in notions of "super-race" (an ideology requiring of the concept of "race" in the first place, and therefore "pure" versus "hybrid" strains or classes, i.e "mixed race" or "mongrel" versus "pureblood"). 

Semite in the sense of "race" gets traced back to scripture (to Genesis) by many scholars, religious and not, who point to the descendents of Noah as the begetters of N races where N = Number of Noah's sons (a patriarchal reckoning is taken for granted). Bible School websites teach the story of Noah in the same breath as they plant the seeds of racism.

Then, after the Flood, in a following chapter came the Tower of Babel debacle, which ended up in these Races dispersing around the world (a first diaspora).  And so, children, this is how the Races of Man came to be.  

I don't believe contemporary genetic science has any corresponding theory of such a severe, near-extinction level cataclysmic event for all humans, let alone all species, although bottlenecks there may have been according to the mitochondrial record etc. 

Our species has certainly enjoyed its share of disasters (more to come), with many of them self inflicted, or so it seems to appear in some god's eye view, to which we are mysteriously privy (something about a shared "image"); certainly the Babel debacle was one of those. The disaster was our wasting time on single-mindedly building that silly tower, not the liberating solution that God devised for us.

Genesis gets to stay meaningful as a profound myth: the Tower of Babel story is quite powerful in my book.

[ I've seen the Youtube channel Genesis Apologetics, which seems to want to re-literalize those Bible stories. There's always the temptation to saddle the ancestors with our contemporary cosmology, seems comforting.  Manifestly, the "curse of many tongues" was never lifted (pssst: because it's not really a curse, praise Allah for our biodiversity and freedom from groupthink) ]

What I sense within some branches of Judaism is a strong interest in Ancestry.com type concerns i.e. genetic heritage and lineage, which is something we can trace in geographic terms (genetic markers moving around on a globe). When you get to the age of jet air travel, the record gets more confused. 

Christianity, as a latter day state organized and supported religion (historically speaking) of monarchs and emperors, satellite nobles, is of course all caught up in pedigree and distinguishing royalty from the unwashed masses etc., the animal husbandry derived genetic science of selective breeding, originally based in theories about "blood" (a lazy pseudo-scientific language perpetuated to this day among the common folk (smile)).

[ Christians who think Jesus survived the crucifixion to have children tend to have more focussed genetic obsessions, however said "Da Vinci Code" minority may be branded heretical. Likewise are Quakers (the sect) so branded by many a shocked flock. ]

I'm a fan of Isaac Asimov for his three rules of robotics, a way of talking and thinking about ethics, human to human as well.

Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek introduced the Prime Directive (a doctrine of non-interference), so much the opposite of colonizing or beaming down missionaries. Star Trek communicated a more secular / catholic / universalist / liberal ("live and let live") code of conduct. Mark Twain and Thomas Paine are in the background (more influences).

Given such hallmarks of Americana inform my thinking, I say "far be it from me to try deprogramming every cultish devotee I come across".  Like if you choose to believe in "races" (what I'd call a "whiteman concept" in my homebrewed vernacular given its Social Darwinist roots) go right ahead, free country.  Your bag of beliefs (worldview) is your cross to bear (karma).  Debate me if you want to.

However, even as I leave people to their bags of belief, I make room within Quakerism for a Planet Earth = Promised Land revelation (ongoing). We've been chosen by God to cherish or trash it, make it our heaven or our hell. A big responsibility, especially with free will. Lucifer's angels are betting we fail, and torture us with our own shortcomings.

Given the confusion of tongues (a gift!), we maybe thought (or at least some of us did), that some patch of land in the Middle East is what a few tribes of humans were destined to inherit, to be given the gift of, by our Lord. That was the whole point of those stories, those myths. 

However, in hindsight, some of us see it was more than that. We now have a more clear-eyed view of the species predicament, and we're are grateful for this opportunity to prove ourselves worthy.  Amen. Some of us might confess our convincement as Jewish, others not (without being anti-Jewish about it, in contradiction of what's been revealed).

From a Quaker Discussion List

Hi Rainer --

Thanks for your thoughts. Everyone says we need to be processing about "race" (whether we believe in such a thing or not) and we're doing it, in the context of anti-semitism no less, all red hot stuff in the eyes of many, yet we're just having a casual Quakerly conversation, very primitive and Friendly.

I appreciate your willingness to shoot the breeze ("even Quakers shoot the breeze" might go with my "Quakers play Quake" bumper sticker -- I sometimes wear a Stetson hat that says Gun Club inside, approved it through Oversight Committee, but said committee is no more, as that sounded too slavey, too antiquarian, for supervising taste testers -- I'm forgetting the new name).

My "math head" (a member of my "internal committee" aka politburo) says "pre science literate humans didn't just happen upon the eigentypes with their homebrewed notion of 'races'."

Do you understand him? Me neither, and yet he's one of my internal team (I like the committee approach taken by a certain Scottish Jungian I admire, also a student of P.D. Ouspensky's, one Maurice Nicoll:  we're all made up of many egos, none of whom you need to identify with if you're into doing the Work as he defines it).

Seriously, I get to teach data science online and I just spent a whole bunch of hours hearing Youtubers talk about "eigenfaces" which would be like the paradigm "template faces" of which all others could be mixtures. But has any science mag printed a few?  I think they'd say there's no way to render them as it's all numbers by then, nothing to see here, move on.

I think what my math voice is saying is that the superficial heuristics we called "the seven races" might have worked well at one time, long ago, for some people, and it's not the moral fault of anyone (not a tragedy either) that commercial airplanes and world travel (global wars, nasty fevers) messed that all up for good. Not everyone is caught up on that fact, but then people still believe in all kinds of dated stuff. What choice do we have?  Some would say waiting in silence for revelations.

The delicate fragile worldview based on the Biblical idea of a diaspora of Noah's kids at the Tower of Babel, didn't survive the 1800s intact (in depth psychology it did, as a myth, but not as history) and the subsequent Darwinism-meets-Bible hybrid, a Social Darwinism, likewise didn't stand up over the long haul. It has its half life as well. Bringing it back would require breaking the laws of thermodynamics.

That's not to say we're done with humans demonizing other humans (per Romeo and Juliet, Capulets versus Montagues).  We might have speciation on the basis of political party affiliation if things keep going the way they're going (joke).

Maybe before any genetic flip that makes reproduction impossible, there's just a growing antipathy in the sense of demonizing another group. That proclivity to demonize doesn't evaporate just because the racial sense of teams has disbanded. We still have teams.  We still have defectors.  Americans still have a problem with Russians somehow (fanned by years of profitable cashing in on said psychological complex).

I tend to zoom back and say "the human race" so I still use the term "race" myself.  But I don't mean subspecies by it.  I refer to people by their differences too.  That guy with the mustache, that black girl next to that brown girl.  I'm pinkish tan.  Where I was raised, saying "colored people" was discouraged as crassly  illiterate and to this day I hear "people of color" (same word bag) as not a nice thing to say.  But that's just me, I don't go around shushing people or writing to the editors or like that.

I listen to how English (the language) mixes "race" with "competitive running event, or anything involving a competition involving motion" (chess is not a "race" to checkmate, nor are card games "races" -- interesting, English is so buggy, so packed with exceptions).

With humans, I'd happily go with "breed" as a kind of loose Venn diagram on the fly talk, and yak about the NRA breed or the golfer breed or the TV wrestler breed (e.g. Trump). What channels you watch and what brands you buy is more interesting to the monster machine learning algorithms than whether your ancestors were slaves in Imperial Rome (although that could be interesting to discover, I admit). I tend to collapse "subculture" to "cult" for short, to short-circuit all those morally superior holier than thou types who don't regard themselves as cult members (nor ethnocentric in any way).

Remember The Time Machine by H.G. Wells? In that science fiction, racial bifurcation does occur, but not at all along the racial lines (pseudo-eigentypes) as "we the Social Darwinists" think of them. The engineering-savvy, number crunchy subterranean-janitorial Morlocks, split off from the more melodramatic crybaby politician surface dwellers, the Eloi.  Morlocks actually ate Eloi for lunch in the Wells dystopian nightmare.  His War of the Worlds is front & center in Martian Math (a math course I've pilot tested at Reed College). 

You could see it as satire, based around C.P. Snow's great divide (later bridged by American Transcendentalists) but then: Edwin Abbott's Flatland was likewise political satire and people still take it seriously as mathematics (one dimensional beings... hah hah, that's us for sure (hello Marcuse)).

I'm thinking speciation might happen around "wanting to live underwater" i.e. in those future cities where you have to scuba dive to visit friends. I imagine an assortment of gingers, dwarves, albinos, normal people, skiers, mathematicians, autistics (lots of overlap) all joining together to live under the sea, and pretty soon (in geological time) a few mutants sprout lungs that can breath underwater. Like fish! No need for expensive scuba (I used to scuba). Looking back, we can find the gene sequences that made this feature more likely to express in some people, but correlation with our "races" of 2020 was very low. 

It's only with hindsight that we see what the real races were (as you might put it, the proto-species).  We just don't see them today. We don't see the future.

Another species starts off with the Mars venture of 4230 CE. Those people can't return because of the G forces, we already knew that.  Meanwhile, Earth falls silent in 6798 (self nuked or something, the Martians have no way of knowing for sure) and so the Martians live on, but don't look like us after awhile (pretty quickly, like by 90874 given help from genetic engineering).  Some of them have black skin, or Asian features, some have white skin, others green, others orange.  They roll around like pool balls, as they're almost perfectly spherical.  Just kidding, I think...

Just saying: anyone can come up with these pleasant fictions, and the racist taxonomists of Old Europe, spreading their memes by missionary and school teacher to North America, had theirs. They promulgated their stories everywhere (talk about fake news!). We live with the consequences, North Americans among the most dumbed down, yet still struggling to breathe free of such dogmas.

South Africa was really more the laboratory, as it sits on a primarily black continent, so the whites were in no position to get that uppity, unlike here, where uppity whites are allowed to drive cars (just kidding again, a lot of them have been forbidden to drive, based on past violations).

South Africa worked through it and although not problem free, is nothing like the race war snakepit a lot of people were predicting for it.

I've lived in Southern Africa myself in the Kingdom of Lesotho, where my parents took up residence. They were planning to retire there, as Quakers uninterested in supporting the so-called United States (per Medal of Freedom winner, already bankrupt and extinct by the 1980s -- but the crybaby Eloi know nothing, bless their hearts). I'm a big fan of Die Antwoord BTW (punk RSA group, see movie Chappie for context).

Kirby

Rainer Möller said:

Kirby,

I must admit that the theory of evolution (i.e. evolution of new species via racial differentiation) is a mere theory.

Comparing Two PR Films

Greetings Friends. I may have embedded this one before, in an earlier blog post.

The theme is related to "bomb shelter" i.e. we're here to weather some kind of holocaust -- and strike back if necessary, is the undertone.

To "declassify" is to add to the authenticity of something, i.e. "this was once too important a secret to share with the likes of you." An attention getter.

However, over time, the secrets tend to come out and the narrative gets updated.

We call that "learning from experience" and it's often a slow process.

Data Science and Statistics: different worlds?

How do we share data science in place of any high school stats course?

Addendum (follow-up thoughts), copied from Facebook:

Kirby to CJ:

I think Polya's point, that inductive reasoning is no less prevalent in pure mathematics than anywhere, applies in the case of many of these Ramanujan formulae. They work out to some arbitrary precision negating any likelihood they could be wrong, and yet... the absence of proofs in some cases may be inevitable, according to Godel right? But if you manage a proof, so much the better. That's what mathematicians strive for, over conjectures (though even the latter may be plenty valuable).

CJ to Kirby:

I think Pólya's point is deeper: if we want to learn from experience we need induction. To get to any mathematical truth (whether one that is new or a rediscovery), we need to inductively explore the situation before we can find a proof. Indeed our inductive work frequently may suggest a proof, if we are attentive. Even if we cannot devise a proof, we may find good evidence for the conjecture. We can keep searching for more evidence or a proof as we have free time and interest to explore one question or another.

Chapter I in the book is excellent.

Kirby to CJ:

I agree he's making that broader point, and may not even reference Ramanujan, I haven't found yet where he does if so. That mathematics is replete with inductive structures, unproved conjectures, is definitely worth pointing out. Would these be synthetic judgements a priori ala Kant? We don't really know they're a priori unless proved, but the question remains where or how intuitions might give rise to such equations (as Ramanujan's). What muse "induces" such insights? Thanks for supplying that link, and the other to the video of Polya.

Covid Camps