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.