This book came by UPS today.
You'd think I would have read this by now.
We're coming up on Carol's 93rd birthday. She is the eye of one hurricane, I another.
Glenn was over. He's our Chauncey Gardener if you've seen Being There. But he's a lot more world savvy. I give snippets of his biography throughout my blogs.
I'm going over the pandas and numpy syllabus yet again, not forgetting matplotlib. These are in the toolkit of a high school student these days, at least in my curriculum writing. Jupyter Notebooks? Why wait until college.
Speaking of Jupyter Notebooks, there's some thought of linking to one of mine from the BFI / Synergetics page. Although I was a first webmaster for this institute, working in cahoots with Kiyoshi Kuromiya to snag the domain name and create a cyber footprint, I haven't had anything like direct access for decades, and that's still the case today.
If that circuit closes, and I get the new web traffic to my Github site, I'll likely jump back onto Youtube and record that it happened. Until then, I'll adopt a wait and see attitude.
Another focus: those USA Olympiad training exercises and past solutions. My students want more specific muscles in the puzzle-solving by program genre. I did a couple for practice and others I've yet to code are haunting my brain.
Happy Birthday Matthew (belated, March 29 is the real date). I took him to lunch at the Barley Mill, one of the original McMenamins. I hadn't known about the new Ken Burns documentary series on Ben Franklin. I brought him up several times in the conversation today.
Were the French foolish to take the USA's side in the war versus the United Kingdom? One could argue they won that war. On the other hand, ideas about democracy, equality and so on were proving infectious and would France itself be spared the fires of revolution?
The common wisdom is nation-states act in their own self interest. I'd like to keep this truism filed under "debatable" instead. "In the perceived self interest of the nation per some inner circle or cabal that considers itself in charge" would be closer to the truth.
One could say such an example is the quasi-state of Ukraine, too important to allow for the petty pace of democracy by the look of things. The weak gravity that holds peoples together, by common ancestry, language, habits (in sum ethnicity), is often no match for the separating polarities that drive these same peoples apart.
One seeks a balance, not the ultimate winner-take-all triumph of the will that the greedy are always going for. The art, in statecraft and war alike, is to rest content with world domination without turning that into a mandate to vanquish one's foe, once and for all.
