Project Renaissance

I hear a lot of analysts dissing public-private partnerships as unholy. I think back to my early days, as a think tanky type, working for CUE (an NGO, in partnership with the USG), and even including NATO in my Project Renaissance paper.

I suppose I was more of the golden boy in those days, courted by the intel community, wined and dined, living in DC off and on. No wonder I considered myself some kind of "NATO professor". Pretty nutty right?

In my defense, I had the childhood and young adulthood of an expat, i.e. I was Third Culture, living my identity as a USAer from the outside, one could say from various "alien" perspectives.  No wonder I'd write about the ET point of view (ETPV I called it).  I was seeing Earth as a whole.  

I was (and still am) a globalist, meaning I can't help but think I live on a planet (is it different for you?).

I'd like to have longer conversations with these analysts, as I'm sure they have a lot of special case instances to go through, of when and how NGOs, funded by governments and other donors, were used for evil ends. CUE was working on refugee resettlement, in the aftermath of the American War in Indochina.

However, the whole pattern, of players in the public and private sectors, getting along and even coordinating to some degree, doesn't seem by definition wrong-headed.

I'll leave the door open, in other words, to people who want me to stop with the Project Renaissance talk already, which has evolved, but still has some of the same elements. 

I still throw around GST as competitive with the more LAWCAP-oriented thinking most think tanks still traffic in (yawn).  I still keep the Bucky stuff on the table and play the game of XYZ vs IVM (insider jargon).

But as a globalist, and a believer in various kinds of inter-sector (public and private) coordination, I'm not thereby turned into a clone of "the globalist" as if we're talking about some single mentality. Do we think nationalism is one, and only one, school of thought?  That'd be ridiculous right? I rest my case.

Back to School

As we resume our studies towards the end of August, Portland's grade schools just starting to open, we're still all thinking about ergonomics, i.e. how to configure the personal workspace, or "bubble" as the case may be (different schools, different lingos).

My school was using distance education tech in the 1980s, branching off from New Jersey Institute of Technology circuits I'd joined when at St. Peter's doing grad school stuff. I got switched to a front line position, as a full time faculty member, before I completed the degree. They could tell I was qualified. So I was getting classroom experience as well.

Fast forward and that combination has continued. Prior to the pandemic, I was driving around town dropping in on many schools, both public and private, for Coding with Kids, a company based near Seattle. I helped the word spread in Portland and did a combo of in-person and Zoom-based content, as we entered into the "lockdown" period. 

But I was doing Zoom content anyway, as Amazon (the company), for example, would pay for kids on the other end to take our classes. I had students in Compton, part of Greater LA. I had students in Ohio. We did Codesters a lot, which is Python in a browser sandbox, with enhanced graphics capabilities.

The Multnomah Friends (Quakers) are still doing Zoom too, and wearing masks, but I'd say not entirely because of concerns about contagions. Fuel prices, commuting, having to get all the way across town, or into town, is a real burden for many.  Having closed circuit ways of dropping in means more Quakers are able to attend more Meetings all around.

In other words, WFH (working from home) is tantamount to WRP (work in remote places) i.e. you're able to show up at offices all over, not just at the one building downtown or along the beltway someplace. The WFH person might have hours in Dubai, Beijing, Omaha, all in a 48 hour period. In my case, I've been syncing with places in Greater Europe e.g. to offices in Turkey. That was for my data science class.

Civil War

Tucker Carlson recently asked former US president Trump if he thought the country was headed for civil war. Mr. Trump said he didn't know.

I think (a) "civil war" is an oxymoron and (b) that old fashioned idea of "entirely localized to within a nation" no longer obtains in a world with no insulation twixt nations. Even the US civil war had its external trackers and backers. The revolutionary war was civil, until it was won. As is so often the case, the very point of contention is whether we're talking two nations or one.

Take the case of Ukraine: when was it ever a "civil war" in the sense of "not also a proxy war"? Never. External interests were weighing in on both sides, upping the ante. Plus as I said "civil war" is an oxymoron. War is the very opposite of civil.

However, we now have the notion of "culture wars", a kind of psywar that has the ability, at least on paper, to stay a war of words and memes, forms of name-calling. As to the question of whether the US is headed for a culture war, that's a no brainer: the US is a motherboard for culture wars, and computing through them. That's what a "melting pot nation" (not all of them are) is all about.

Meaty Math

I wouldn't say this video is freely associative in a rambling, wandering sense, like one of mine. However  I would say it connects a lot of dots nevertheless, especially when it comes to wiring in some CT (Category Theory). 

We have the generic sense of "coordinate system" to play with, i.e. making a hard problem solvable may involve using a different coordinate system, with a path to and from. 

Convert to, solve, convert from. 

However we might also think in terms of "namespaces". 

Translate into, solve, translate out of. 

But then what's lost in translation and do the analogies hold?

A good example from the high school level is the basis for the slide rule: turn a multiplication problem into an addition problem by adding the exponents instead, using lookup tables (in the old days) to go both ways.

Take the logs of the two numbers you want to multiply, add those, and get the anti-log of the sum to find the corresponding product. We sometimes draw that as a rectangle, like in the video.

 

Genius Bar

I'm using the better of my two MacPros on battery. Upon clicking on the battery icon, upper right, I'm informed said battery has degraded capacity and I'd do well to schedule a maintenance visit. So I did. I'm into being compliant these days, almost a good doobie.

However I'm not considering myself a genius as I tend to surround myself with sources of genius, such that I feel relatively low on the totem pole, and that's a good thing, as complacency about one's intelligence is clearly a pitfall when hoping to stay sharp.

People have different strategies for staying sharp. I know YouTube knows my demographic info and therefore the targeted commercials tend to guess at what might be concerning me these days, health wise. No doubt said commercials pay attention to my search history as well. Even if I'm searching on Alzheimer's "for a friend" (or relative) the fact that I searched means the topic is topical.

However, I'm not signing up for all the brain teaser programs that want to charge me for playing around in their obstacle course. Rather, I just need to keep using O'Reilly's Safari service to (a) get my money's worth from that subscription and (b) to tackle skills building in some way, shape or form. Today, that meant unplugging from power and enjoying the new aircon Dr. D installed, in the living room (where I could plug in, but why bother), and tackling Haskell.

I've tackled Haskell before, but not with a Jupyter Notebook open in Binder i.e. in the cloud. I don't need to install the program locally to get some mileage, some practice. I need practice at what I'm preaching in my YouTube:  developing the cuboctahedral (icosahedral) number series in a number of computer languages, not just Python.

Tackling Haskell does not require me to venture far outside my comfort zone, as rock climbing might require me to do. I've been a programmer for decades and am used to thinking in terms of types. So I'm exercising within a familiar gym.

The next task after getting battery service from Apple, is to take my car through DEQ, which is closed tomorrow. I've customarily used my blogs to chronicle car stuff, so look for a subsequent entry soon.

Momenta

We know the word "memento" meaning more like "souvenir" or "reminder" whereas I mean "momenta" in the sense of "momentum" yet pluralized. Mass in motion, basically, a phenomenon with some conservation properties. Momentum likes to be conserved, one could put it.  Sometimes, however, we say it's not, because "heat doesn't count" i.e. the ability to do any more work goes away after the explosion.

Then we have the more subtle momenta of what I've called "word meaning trajectories", which in a rather concrete sense characterize the many commercial brands that experience boom and bust economies. A brand will veer, sometimes based on advertising. Did we read the market wrong? Or maybe we got it really right this time. And so on.

From commercial brands we get to nation-states, the so-called sovereignties. Individuals seek out agents in any narrative, in hopes of moving said narrative forwards in a way that alleviates and/or avoids suffering by these individuals. "Make the story be me-friendly" is a prayer with which most will empathize.

A keyword here is "identification" which comes up a lot in "identity politics". Who or what does one identify with and with what level of agreement? Anyone might step forward and claim to be a spokesperson for X, but that's why we have titles and credentials, to keep control over who gets to speak for whom. Words like "legal" get their momentum, their trajectory, from real special cases involving this principle of representation and identification, as in "she is my legal representative".

In coining a term like "dymaxion" like Bucky did, with a little help from his friends, one is throwing one's hat in the ring as an influencer. However coining neologisms is but one of many tools. More commonly one seeks, in media campaigns, to wire in associations, such that if one thinks about A, one is likely to move on to B, whereas B might not have been an oft chosen option, previous to a campaign.

A lot of companies, starting with Cambridge Analytica around the time of the 2016 US presidential election, claim to be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in coming up with strategies for swaying votes or repositioning political leaders. However, in this subtle world of spin doctoring, Real Intelligence (RI) is still regarded as more likely to succeed in coming up with winning spins. Using "AI" for marketing advantages is itself a case in point. I'm using AI too then (in addition), in not planning to be left behind in RetroLand.

Speaking of RetroLand: I hadn't been to Seattle Center in a long time and my narratives have become unsynchronized with various new realities. For example, the Experience the Music Project, and the Museum of Science Fiction, have been amalgamated into the newer Museum of Popular Culture. The institution has rebranded itself in a longer term form, with an easier to grok meme and mission. Pop culture encompasses anticipatory design science (future studies) as well as music mnemonics (where we've been, the way we were). The museum's momentum is largely preserved.

M4W Pow Wow

Ryan's bus from Roseburg was running early, so Andrius and I were able to pick him up downtown, not far from Union Station, and return to headquarters in time for the broadcast.  Math 4 Wisdom (M4W) was hosting a talk on Pascal's Triangle and the Binomial Theorem, but from a novel viewpoint.  

I was the "warmup band" doing something Pythonic. I introduced the idea of a Python generator. We had five participants on the two part call (with 10 minutes intermission), with three of us (Ryan, myself, Andrius) all here in the one node (house), with Bill and Jerre in widely separated locations.

Next, after 80 minutes of program (40 + 40), we were ready for breakfast. I treated my guests to a house tour first, only to have the door lock behind us on the second floor deck. I could call Derek, who was on his way anyway with the Monday haul, but my cell was inside and I hadn't memorized his number. 

Would I have to slice the screen or risk climbing down?  Neither prospect was enticing. Then I realized I had my keys. Duh. Sigh of relief. It's just not a door I usually close behind me.

Breakfast at Tom's was great, a business expense for Oregon Curriculum Network for sure, as I was having really high level discussions with these guys. 

Ryan is quite young (in his early 20s) and is as yet unspoiled by academia, unlike Andrius and I, thoroughly spoiled by some in-depth brainwashing, though not the same brainwashing. 

My claim: none of us gets but a dumbed-down version of the others, given how this world is put together. I'm not saying without exceptions.  Sometimes another seems more comprehensible than one's self, at least with regard to some specific topics.

Our foray into Category Theory was experimental. I was using the language of Supermarket Math, considering what sounded like special case workflows (e.g. adding to a shopping cart, checking out), unique to supermarkets, but I was using them metaphorically, more operationally. 

Like the idea of "paying for it at checkout" had corresponding actions in both worlds (our local Fred Meyer's and a supermarket in Vilnius), such that a Functor between them would carry the weight of translating and/or mapping between the two. In ordinary reality, CT tends to be about sets, vector spaces, real numbers, and like that -- not supermarkets per se.

Oregon Curriculum Network has a four-fold approach to maths in its inventory, the four aspects being:

* Supermarket Math: transportation, logistics, databases, pricing, marketing (how shall we live?)
* Casino Math: probability and permutations, risk taking and avoidance (what's worth trying?)
* Neolithic Math: maths from the present day looking backwards (where have we been?)
* Martian Math: casting maths predicatively forward, as in science fiction (what's coming up?)

From a posting to TrimTab Book Club this morning:

How about, as an experiment we (some workshop group) don't credit humans for any of our concepts for a change? In this "new" way of thinking, humans only "channel" ideas but never "create" them. I put "new" in quotes because this model is more like in the old days, in ancient times, when divine beings (e.g. Athena) did all the thinking and humans were mere mouthpieces, spokespeople. Lets say Athena coined the word "radio" which a number of humans then picked up on and shared. "Credit the gods and only the gods" might be the language game in this WestWorld. Most so-called westerners learned to stop crediting the Holy Spirit in the so-called Enlightenment Period, a time of many colorful revolutions e.g. the American and French ones.

Without having read any of the above, Ryan spontaneously shared his sense, after breakfast, that mathematics was using him, pretty much as a puppet, to think out loud to himself. We then sat around the table, sharing concepts, more in the mode of channelers than as originators, of our concepts. The various math-informed viewpoints got to iteratively interoperate, whether we as individuals comprehended, was another matter. Sort of. To a degree.

I've been having a similar conversation with Richard Hawkins, regarding AI. 

Lets look at language as a non-sentient pattern or program of action, an evolving dance. We get carried along, perhaps away. ChatGPT (the generative large language model implementation) is not that different in principle, even if following different rules. ChatGPT aspires to be predictable, whereas some plans or stratagems discourage predictability.

The centerpiece of M4W is not the Bucky stuff, which I talked about some today anyway, but Wondrous Wisdom, a cognitive framework developed by Andrius Kulikauskas over several decades. 

He's looking to build a network of close collaborators. I'm doing what I can on a logistical level at least, and institutionally as well, as the Oregon Curriculum Network guy. I'm helping more people become aware of their option to work with Andrius, without insisting that they do so, as some kind of prerequisite for working with me. I'm independently accessible.

For example today's meetup dealt with the theme of a Bell Curve of combinations between extremes, all or nothing, as demonstrated by successive rows of Pascal's Triangle.  All and/or Nothing bracket a permutation space of alternative scenarios, sometimes characterized in a binary manner, as left versus right, or positive versus negative. Forks in the road. Roads not taken.

At the extremes though, we're getting more existential, talking about the difference between Being or not Being, versus the many distinctions inside of Being.  

Pretty abstract huh?  M4W is like that. An acquired taste.

The Role of USA President

I like that Shoe on Head did a Barbie movie review. I'm a fan of hers. She reminds me of New Jersey girls, whom I got to know as a high school faculty guy at an academy for young women.  And elsewhere.  A certain toughness and irreverence, with an accent...

However my rant today is not about Barbie, although one could argue it's about social roles, and the role of US president in particular.  I'm one of those who thinks a president should not go in with a fixed agenda of all the stuff she or he wants to change, some crusader reformer.  Rather, a president should simply preside, observing the machinery of government, and report back to the people what's going on, like an insider with outsiders for an audience.

Instead, voters think the president is some kind of monarch with overarching powers to make stuff happen. That stereotype helps effect wars, as presidents get to play commander in chief in a war situation. The USA likes to keep a war simmering, sometimes boiling over, just to give the president a semblance of power that voters understand. 

Outward war is a way of dumbing it down enough for everyone to follow.  That's my elitism showing. War is a cheap way to prop up a chief executive. "Cheap" in the sense of tacky.

Presidents are going to get educated and their views will change. More important than sticking to their guns, is explaining to voters what their transitions are all about. Why the shift? What did you learn?

Unfortunately, what a lot of careerists want to do with a president is use scare tactics. Frighten this elected leader into obeying the right cues. Presidents with a high degree of suspicion versus automatic trust, are more likely to create a conscious record of how they're being influenced...

In practical terms, it doesn't matter much to me exactly what RFK Jr. believes about vaccinations. I see that he believes in doing his homework and he's willing to take some unpopular positions. However the details don't matter much, because as president RFK Jr. would have very limited authority over future health policy. 

Presidents are not authority figures in my book, so much a witnesses to history. Of course they may see themselves differently.