Simulators

We all know about simulators from Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, and maybe from Sims and SimCity if we have broader experience with the genre. 

In these blogs, I’ve tended to harp on truck driving simulators, owing to the Trucker Exchange program I introduce under the heading of citizen diplomacy. However, these days I’m exposed to farm life more, and tonight after dinner, the conversation turned to Farm Simulator software. Lots of people play FarmVille and its many variants.

That’s what some will call the game pods then, those “more than just cubicles” we’re using for School of Tomorrow centers, multi-generational, co-ed, mono-generational, single sex i.e. they come in many shapes and sizes. 

Some feature dormitories, which in military terms might be barracks. 

I’m hoping, in my simulations, to give people more privacy than mere barracks provide. Bucky Fuller was into that to (providing privacy, protection). But then pods aren’t the same as dorms. You could have a pod in your private dorm, or your pod could be on a floor or a concourse somewhere.

What “game pods” am I talking about?  These go back to my mixed use campus buildings, with dorms, cafeterias, gyms, and game floors. Simulators. You’re learning about your world through simulations designed to teach about infrastructure, institutions, chemistry, other natural phenomena. 

Here is where all that “gamification” comes in, in tandem with the Coffee Shops Network idea of raising funds through game heroics. Score high and benefit your causes. 

We’ve been working in this world for awhile now, if you see through the right lenses. I’m just taking stock and helping to organize what’s already in inventory.

I’m not saying we always postpone venturing into the field and actually doing the farm work that needs doing. I did some today in fact. 

This particular farm is about making long term investments in the ecosystem, friendly to wild species, whether or not those life forms literally pay the bills. Conservation does not mean demanding tuition from those given sanctuary.

Curriculum Queries

 

I do not boast lots of boots on the ground, inventing tests and tallying data. I might welcome such an army, using Python and Jupyter Notebooks perhaps. I share about pyplot and plotly.

I'm speaking with reference to such queries as where best to introduce figurate numbers, such as triangular and square, if we do, and when to make those polyhedral (icosahedral, cuboctahedral, tetrahedral...). I'm eyeing alternative vocabs. Sometimes it's the animation that matters, more than the script rendering language, a namespace.

What am I talking about pray tell? Like the numbers that go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... then keep accumulating: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15... it's like scooping up the snow: all the layers of balls (if we think in balls) make us a growing triangle.  The triangular numbers: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15... Then we have the squares: 1, 4, 9, 16, 25... You know the ones, right?

We've got that going on, and then we layer-pack around a nuclear ball, per a cuboctahedral shape (cube of sawed-off corners), thereby getting our famous "successive layers" sequence: 1, 12, 42, 92, 162... I say "famous" because it literally is in the center of our neighborhood (along with the cumulative Crystal Ball sequence). "We have statues dedicated to it" one could claim, especially if coining an idiom. So where does all that fit in?

"Nowhere!" comes the resounding (highly opinionated) voice from some quarters. Curriculum developers don't just accept these queries lying down, without some furious debate. 

I point to The Book of Numbers by Conway and Guy and maybe that mollifies some (ah, mainstream). I reassure teachers that we're connecting right brained shapes with left brain numbers even earlier than by means of coordinate framework addressing ala XYZ. 

We haven't even come to XYZ coordinates yet and we're already getting rhombic dodecahedra in their space-filling role. "Are we to expect IVM coordinates then?" sounds sardonic but yes, we have those for you, why not be curious?

Then finally comes this question whether we want to not only disclose the ratios here, but harp on them, taking sphere packing as a home base worth fighting for. We shift our balance from the XYZ to IVM framework for a change. What change? That remains to be beholden, for the most part, but as someone shifting my balance, I'm suggesting it's not that hard, nor some kind of one way street.  You're free to switch back and forth. I do, routinely.

What am I talking about again, am I making any kind of sense? That depends to some degree on what archeological layer you're reading from. 

Those in the immediate radius of Buckminster Fuller (not me, I came later), in his role as academic, would recognize "isotropic vector matrix" in many cases, especially in the late 1970s after Synergetics was published. I became aware of Fuller's philosophical language in the early 1980s, as I switched gears from being a philosophy major at Princeton (Rorty, Kaufmann... other stars), to being a high school teacher in a private school in Jersey City (not that far from Princeton actually, by dinky, Amtrak and PATH).

The idea is one of scaffolding or tiling in space. The all-cubes way of filling space is well known and isn't going anywhere. The next step, if starting there is to supplement. XYZ and IVM co-exist in a healthy manner. Imagine filling every other box with a growing sphere, a 3D checkerboard. Each ball, fully expanded, touches 12 neighbors as 12 mid-edges.

"All fine and good" you're thinking, "but the hypnotic brainwashing animations described here sounds a lot more like rave party projections, too hallucinogenic for a math-minded audience."  

I'd say fair enough to speculate in that direction, but you really don't have to carry it that far. Surely you too know what it means to daydream in a classroom. 

That's a form of right brain engagement. 

To encourage this faculty is to constructively entrain the imagination, as we do when teaching the value reading in fiction (which is not to "push drugs" (as if any talk of "the imagination" were dangerous witchcraft)) i.e. "you get to watch movies in your head" as a grownup might put it, promising payoff (I understand why watching adults just staring at print, with no pictures, is a turn off until experienced in the first person).

The ratios of which I speak have to do with the so-called voronoi cell encasings around each IVM ball. Every IVM center has its "domain" is another way to but it. These are not Platonics in the strict sense of meeting the "all corners identical" criterion; the faces are diamonds and meet in threes and fours around two sets of corners: those at the corners of a cube (shallow, 3 facets) and those at the corners of an octahedron (sharp, 4 facets). Volume ratios: RD (rhombic dodeca) : Octahedron : Cube :: 6 : 4 : 3.

Why don't those ratios seem as familiar as rain already? Maybe to some of us they do, but the answer is the cube of volume 3, not its canonical most regal volume in the orthodox hierarchy. What dares take its place? A tetrahedron? Heresy!

That's the crack in the pavement a lot of storytellers keep tripping over, in wanting to make believe it's not there. Those of us in the curriculum design business can't deny that tetravolumes are tempting, in some contexts, especially knowing we're not admitting anything. We never have to say "XYZ was wrong" or anything like that. So what's the issue? Descartes is still a hero. We also study his Deficit (720 degrees).

I'm anticipating comments (perhaps by email) that I'm wrestling with ghosts, as none of the MineCraft literature ever talks about "another paradigm" i.e. a space-filling pattern of tetrahedrons and octahedrons. What would that world look like? Now we're talking (and maybe even imagining).

Metabolics

I'm headed to the fat farm tomorrow, my internal name for it. I don't have the budget for any health club getaway at this time. The shift is more from low energy to low energy in a different shape.

Today, for example, my shape was "sports bar" i.e. Tom's on the corner of SE Chavez and SE Division. Deke the Geek as I've called him, is a U of O grad and dedicated athlete, at one time a track star, so he was aware that today was a big game: U of O versus Huskies at University of Washington. Not so many weekends ago, I'd watched this same Oregon team against another (winning that time, not this time).

As I probably mentioned in some other entry, I've bought in to the new dietary model focusing on insulin and insulin resistance. I've tended to be medically minded since at least the 8th grade, and this theory has the right level of complexity to match my expectations.

On Math 4 Wisdom, we've been discussing "what's a sweet spot?" in the sense the Complex numbers seem to be. The more rigid Real numbers are a tad under powered, give less prominence to rotation but through a more cumbersome trig. Or so it seems to Andrius and John Harlan. I have to say I see what they're talking about.

You'll have noticed the above lifestyle sounds a tad sedentary and you'd be right. With the games come some drinks. I'm not the one driving. We're within walking distance. None of that really matters when it comes to adding weight I don't need. The fat farm will help me fast. I'll still be thinking online using WiFi.

I've embedded my other work of the morning, and extension of my blogging into some vlogging (video blogging). I should add that watching a steady stream of YouTubes is another reason I'm so soft. Thanks to the Bluetooth brick, I'm at least able to move about and do chores when the screen does not require my undivided attention.

I invoked Kierkegaard's name recently, on M4W, thinking mainly of his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, but then it's been a long time since I actually raked my eyes through that. 

People would love to have an algorithm to follow that makes their actions above reproach. They won't be facing inquiries later, because "doing what the machine says" is a safe course of action. The existential predicament is we don't get to closure in that way i.e. our science is not up to the task of proving we did the right thing looking back. Yet we must act anyway. Thinking in terms of justifications is not atypical. One imagines oneself before some board of inquiry, as in Oppenheimer.

Whether that's a good interpretation or not, of Soren's philo, I wanted to jot down his other focus: that of the undivided Will. Since the will was ultimately for the good, or of God, it's a good bet having an undivided will (whatever that means operationally) would be blissful. Ties to Taoism go here, clearly.

I'll be cutting out the alcohol at the fat farm. I've gone over a year without beer, not counting the alcohol free kind (which I've sampled). Again, it's more about calories. If I allow myself beer, I over allocate and/or exceed my quota.

Technical Topics

Not surprisingly, my science fiction turned to creating an Asylum City, in a hurry, especially for the Gazans who wanted to move here, at least temporarily. The city would be designed for mass evacuations, more a way station than a destination, and not the last of its kind.

While I’m doodling in my head along those lines, I’m showcasing the bread and butter stack and content. Everyone in my business has a stack. I’m wearing a Supermarket Math hat now, thinking in terms of what’s in inventory. Does anyone remember LAMP? Linux Apache MySQL P-language (e.g. Perl, Python, PHP). That’s a good example of a classic stack, and a doorway into cloud-based architecture.

I told Paul I thought we were in some National Geographic article, about Oregonians in October, harvesting something like beer hops, but with crazier names for strains.  Paul and I have a collaborative relationship based on a practice Glenn established.  

I’ve been thinking about Glenn a lot today, and of my mother, two people I lost in the last year. Paul is a retired chef with a luxury hotel background, specializing in Anglo-French cuisine. He reminds us of our buddy Steve Holden who used to live in the same apartment complex. Yes, a past chairman of the Python Software Foundation and conference organizer who helped get the Pycons going.

You may find more about Steve by searching these journals. I tended to accompany him to these conferences he would organize, as one of the people on hand to keep things on track. Djangocon, Apachecon… some even more obscure ones, always excellent in their own way, as Steve knew a thing or two and relied on Nancy and her team, out of Orlando.

Regarding the showcasing I’m doing, the embedded screen shot above is one you can click on to gain access to its original context, where a much bigger and higher resolution view is available. Here’s a direct link. You’ll find I’m going on about a certain “NCLB Polyhedron” where NCLB = No Child Left Behind, a meme from the Obama years. I was trying to get Phi (the golden ratio) a more exalted place in the curriculum. 

The meme was somewhat tongue in cheek, more like something a MAD magazine might run with, versus a sober upstanding mass-published mathematics textbook devoid of social commentary. I was engaged in the andragogical practice of preserving a level of comic edginess that helps me retain the attention of certain readers (mainly fans of mine).

Any number of secular mathematicians will testify that Phi is harmless and is easily shared in a curriculum context that has nothing to do with demons or devils (we’re coming up on Halloween here). I hope I’m not being too cryptic. The golden mean crops up in connection with five-fold symmetry geometric gizmos long associated with various cults (or call them subcultures) savvy about this specific aesthetic.

This version of the Notebook does not yet contain much in the way of graphics. I’m focused on sympy, the Python library, and its equation-solving capabilities.

Asylum City would provide more opportunities for denizens to watch shows and start catching up on their own situation as seen from different angles. The Gazans, like the Ukrainians, would get that the world cares about them and in turn is eager to develop its generic ability to manage refugees in a humane way. If climate change hits the way some think it will, we’ll be glad for the practice.  However the need is real even today.

We have the need for skillful rehabilitation programs on a large scale almost everywhere, as people seek a better life in another set of circumstances.

Fractal Universe (Mandelbulb 3D fractals)

Fractal Universe (Mandelbulb 3D fractals)