Concluding Meetup

I know what my theater critics might say, but I thought my exit was pretty good, having already said my formal good-byes. I scrolled frantically through the last code cells of a Notebook, one they already had (the students did) and could easily run themselves any time.  

 "I have so much I still want to show you..." -- I consider that a great fade out line, from a screenwriter PV (PoV).  

We were getting towards the bottom of an example Capstone Project, looking over the shoulder of your typical boot camper, a fit Portland cyclist who comes to code school on a bicycle, perhaps a shared bicycle. Our data was from such a program.

Lets use a cooking analogy, factory based, making cookies.  We've all seen those shots of cookies, neatly arrayed, smoothly traveling on a conveyor belt, the staple of factories (we always show assembly lines, cars, whereas so much about factories revolves around moving belts, like at airports).

In this cartoon, the cookies move swiftly into the face of a Machine Learning model maker, a kind of "pagan god" (no disrespect) figurine, somewhat Tiki House / Disney, aka Polynesian per the lens of Anaheim.  The cookies are the records, the X.y, the rows of features. The eyes of the goddess (duo-sexed) spin wildly, as a model emerges.  Given enough cookies.  

Out pops a cartridge, like an 8-track, containing the finished model.  You can predict stuff with this, screen, filter, gather your gold.  You have your "precious" (giphy Gollum).  How much did it cost ya?

However our work as data analysts and visualizers was to meticulously clean and patch the rag doll data on its way in.  We were preparing food for the gods, baking cookies, sewing rags back together to form a picture in numbers and categories, with weather data from one database, number of bicycle checkouts from another.  We were like archeologists, curators, studying civic behavior patterns.

In Portland I know Nike had something to do with the system becoming established.  Having an athlete-oriented company step up to the plate made sense to people.

Nike as in the pagan assistant to Athena, daughter of Zeus.  A python is another familiar, through a tangled web of tales.  The version I favor:  the python was the source of the omen-ous vapors under Mount Parnassus, making Delphi famous, but then Apollonians moved in, a somewhat hostile takeover involving zero tolerance.  

Apollo himself chased down the Python (and here's where I diverge in my telling), however said magic dragon escaped to Nashville, with its Temple to Athena a fresh take on the heritage.  Python:  Just Use It.

Anyway, we had our last meetup after a lot of sessions, going back to "what is numpy?" and the like. I kept referring to the broad wake of a ship, helping them visualize how far we had come.  Part of what makes these journeys satisfying is what they leave in their wakes.

Checking Avatars

 

Episode 1730 Scott Adams: The Golden Age Is Upon Us,
Trump Was Right Per Chomsky. Wow. What A Show

I don't think Scott will mind if I refer to his Youtube screen image as an avatar.  I'll be my own avatar too, on your screen.  That's not the Hollywood TV studio vocab exactly, as we're admittedly a different ethnicity here in Weird City (or Crow City), but a neighboring one.

As Scott lets us know, he has a war chest thanks to his Dilbert characters, who charmed our lives for decades in comic strips, and will continue to do so.  More avatars, but subsidiaries of Scott's psyche, insofar as office archetypes are anyone's personal property.  Scott applies the final spin, Homer Davenport style (but with a different type of penmanship).

I know from Dr. Potkin that Scott Adams likes to play for the Righties, the ones with a home advantage in English, as Leftie sounds more sinister right out of the gate.  That gives Lefties their own kind of edge, and opposites attract, and in this vid Adams is up to singing Chomsky's praises, because the latter has the intellectual honesty to point to Donald Trump as a voice of relative rationality, when it comes to taking sides, or not, in the Game of Global Gangland.  

Scott reveals some of his intellectual honesty too, in crowning Chomsky his King of the Lefties.

Then he serves to clarify the "by mistake on purpose" rhetoric of the Democrats.  Joe Biden was excoriated for letting slip those various signals that the deployment NATO forces was in the cards. He was seen as senile and divulging his fantasy life.  The spin doctors learned their lesson, and commentary on Nancy Pelosi's "slips" were more deviously circumspect.  We'll be eating ice cream in the Kremlin soon, right?  Nod nod wink wink.

Scott is clearly a mainstream establishmentarian in holding up DC's celebs as high ranking.  Many of us in the frontier lands grew up distancing ourselves from the Hunger Games capital, so to speak, seeking our own destiny, more like citizens in Alaska or even Texas, potential "seed states" for tomorrow's version of Global Gangland.

Scott's notion of "affordable speech" is enlightening and spelled out clearly, but are we all in agreement it's somehow preferable to our "free" ideal?  "Affordable speech" sounds more like "affordable air" with only a minority able to buy enough oxygen.

To my ears he's asking us to drastically lower expectations if we're neither rich nor geezers, by becoming minions for the privileged oligarchs we best like.  Play on Browder's team or Putin's, for example (not an example he gives).  The two are supposedly at loggerheads, but also have enough in the bank, respectively, to engage in risky speech, not to mention other undertakings, in which speech plays a vital role.

I guess I shouldn't worry though, as he clearly sides with "smart people" in wanting the censorious "we know best" folks to dissipate back into the woodwork or wherever they came from.  That's typical of how elitists with considered opinions see the lower half of the bell curve, and those who get by with cookie cutter beliefs they want universalized, or at least seconded by a mainstream.  

Most main streamers by definition hate finding themselves holding esoteric views that put them in the spotlight as unique individuals, or worse.  

Better to say best what everyone else is already saying.  

Show them how it's done.  Win the beauty contest, be a star.  Stand with Ukraine.

Speaking of Ukedom, and warring oligarchs (remember CrowdStrike?) and their proxies, Scott goes into the question of Putin's sanity etc. perhaps expressing a peculiarity of his ethnicity.  The same question came up in the car today, me driving.  Did I imagine Putin was crazy?  So far she couldn't see that he was.  

My focus is more the masses, one could say the movements, catalyzed by PR and advertising, with lots of think tanks just beneath the surface.  I'm more into Cambridge Analytica style collective psychology than any kind of Freudian style psychoanalysis of lone individuals, although I did go through a phase (around 8th grade) wherein the latter would have interested me a lot more.

But hey, this is a blog post about Scott and his views.  We can talk about me some other time, like when and if I make another Youtube.  I have some hundreds of hours of those on file already, an acquired taste I'd imagine, but great for those enjoying my style of "spherical pinball machine" didactic discourse.