Friendly Art

prompted from Hilbert Space, praise the King

Church and State

:: six fingers jammin Sam ::

You may have seen in the movies where certain underground cults have gone ga ga for an iconography, such as that of a nation. In torch-lit ceremonies, whatever logo gets used, some motivational symbol, such as the Olympic Games deploys, or Nike. Not that either of these are “cults” in popular parlance. The spin on key terms here is colored by its ballpark.

My own bias is to think of n8v tribes that went bigly for the Stars and Stripes as a motif in their beadwork. I also think of Grateful Dead, the band, on the road, and its merging with Uncle Sam imagery. That’s a goldmine we’ve been mining to this day, exploring what the new AI dream machines might do.

From a more legal code angle, the picture is not one of a government foisting itself upon others, so much as a subculture partaking of the same mythic sources. The same George Washington under the same elm tree waves the new flag, but some of the troops complain about the miniature Union Jack in the upper left, and Betsy Ross makes sure it’s replaced. That’s straight outta Critical Path (St. Martins Press) check archive dot org.

So say a subculture, like the Masons, is into a lot of the same pyramid eye stuff as the Union of States, the Federation. Good icons are hard to find, let alone great ones. Some of these cults predate the USA obviously. So it’s not so much like government encroaching on the church as the church asserting its intellectual property rights in the realm of the Zeitgeist.

The story need not be adversarial at all, as in the case of George Washington, who had no problem with Masonic rituals. The Quakers might be cast as synergyzing with n8vs per the early days in Sylvania (William Penn’s), comparing notes on governance and community building, only to bring their newly won insights to their new circuit designs, the ones that started up in Philadelphia but eventually moved to that former swamp called DC (District of Columbia).

I live in “DC West” meaning the Columbia River has its watershed, a district. I’m in that district, near the confluence of said great river and one of its tribs, known as the Willamette.

So lets say here in DC West, a tribe of Quakers get very into Uncle Sam iconography, along with some brewpub already promoting the Grateful Dead. Would George Washington seem out of place? Certainly the Masons have been embraced (by the McMenamins brewpubs, talking about Oregon and Washington). I’d say “Deja vu”.

Headless Nations

Excuse me? Who are you calling “headless” in this picture?

Today’s YouTube thumbnails are saying “Joe Biden” and or “the US” is giving the green light to this or that, through the New York Times. Clearly someone is feeling authorized to make stuff happen, as the Davos crowd seems to be surging in a particular direction. 

Yet public attention has been elsewhere, possibly making this feel like a window of opportunity to these political actors.

How all this lashing out is supposed to advance US interests is hard to decipher. One presumes some last grasper is hoping to express manhood or otherwise address a perceived failing. Everyone knows there’s no “commander in chief” at the helm and that we’re running on reflexes. 

We’re back to the usual fun game of headless chicken.

How is the world to deal with zombie juggernauts? 

My Silicon Forest is far away from The District and has its own circuitry. We do microchip fab a lot, with Intel here, in Hanoi, in New Mexico. We’re not “Atlanticists” here on the Pacific Rim, somewhat by definition. 

We haven’t green lighted anything from here. 

The Empire attacked us with storm troopers ala Star Wars not that long ago. We continue to flaunt federal restrictions on controlled substances and sometimes break the human trafficking laws, by providing asylum.

Anyway, there’s no danger of me saying “we” when it comes to whoever is doing the signaling with those green lights. We’ve known since Reagan that the deep state is all about working around Congress and carrying out business plots regardless of whatever “oversight” the so-called government attempts to exercise. Evidence: the Nord Stream extrajudicial special military operation.

People still talk about the Constitution a lot and brand themselves as defenders thereof, but I don’t see where Congress gets to seriously debate anything anymore. We see orchestrated symbolic votes but not actual discussion. The whole debate process has been privatized. 

The executive branch simply executes, disconnected from any legislative controls. And yet they claim we have a system governed by laws, not egos. In these circumstances, some see it as their duty to disobey.

The Science of Infinity

A friend is leaving Portland, and is letting me get some mileage out of his book collection until he arranges for them to join a library. He’ll likely outlive me so he imagines this will be his karma. I’ve already been enjoying earlier portions of his collection, including the extensive set of titles about or by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a corpus we’ve both studied.

I spent much of yesterday extracting two bookcases that had been squeezed between the wall and Carol’s bed, to give them more breathing room in what used to be the back office. Now I have the 2nd floor office to claim if H&R Block suggests filling out such a schedule:  a home office may not double as sleeping quarters, a tough rule for folks in those tiny apartments.

Lots of these books are about maths, Such as Philosophical Introduction to Set Theory by Stephen Pollard, the 2015 Dover edition of the original 1990 Notre Dame Press copy. Back in the day, I’d debate math ideas with other math heads, such as Dr. Wayne Bishop at California University. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics eradicated this archive however. The Math Forum, as we called it, started at Swarthmore, then moved to Drexel.

The book starts out drawing attention to the proliferation of mutually unintelligible subspecialties within maths, and the dangers this poses to a unificationist agenda. Pollard argues that only Set Theory has what it takes to keep Humpty Dumpty recognizably an egg (a whole), whereas Category Theory, an upstart grand unifier, hasn't yet proved itself more effective, in part because, as a relative new kid on the block, it's less established. But let's remember these words were penned in the 1980s sometime.

A core idea in Cantorian set theory is this idea that you cannot pair natural numbers with the reals because too many reals fall through the cracks as it were, per the "diagonal argument" and so on (pages 8-9). 

The targeted reals are allowed to have infinitely many digits after the decimal point whereas that way is barred to the left side: natural numbers with infinity digits are not actually natural numbers, by definition. 

Suppose one assigns a random number to any real number produced. Does the pairing process ever fail in that case? A rule to not break is that of uniqueness: one does not get to assign the same natural number to more than one real, for an operation to count as perpetual pairing.

Once a natural number is spoken for, it retires.  So what’s the problem?

Is the pool of eligible brides thereby diminished such that I’ll run out of Ns for my grooms in R? If I need more digits (given how many Rs you give me) I’ll add them. I’ll never repeat. Pairing works no?

The reason you can’t pair N and R simply by removing the decimal point is precisely because members of N are not allowed to have infinitely many digits. We wouldn’t be able to sequence them all if they did, even if subsets could still be ordered.

Even if N were to include infinity-digit members, like the reals do, we could still use them for counting sheep, as the finite digit Ns would still be in the N set as well.  

But then allowing infinity-digit Ns into contemporary maths would turn it into a wasteland (teenage or otherwise) set theoretically speaking, so lets us just keep things the way they are shall we?

The computer science mindset has made long digit sequences into strings, meaning we don't suffer headaches or vertigo in thinking how divergent (vs convergent) a number like ...3804951234... (random forever in both directions) must be. Digits are digits, with or without a decimal point. What impossibility are we talking about?

Random infinite strings of digits needn't "stand for" anything, e.g. we're not forced into picturing astronomically huge collections corresponding to the output of these noisy, chaotic, digit generators. Whereas these same random digits to the right of a decimal connotes ever more microscopic fine tuning and precision (convergence), which seems a lot more "believable" (the mental picture is more obvious).

Raining Pumpkins

In line with my keeping my curriculum quirky and idiosyncratic (weird), words used by detractors as well as friends, I'm allowing more autobiography, which is to personalize, to "icosahedronize" (add to dictionary). There's nothing amiss in being special case unique and indeed any other way is missing something.

"Allowing more autobiography" where? In this specific case I was thinking of my Github repo, School of Tomorrow, where I engage students with a variety of topics, from Python to Occupy Portland (OPDX) to our Mazeway of Polyhedrons. I just coined that here: "mazeway" thumbs up, sounds theme parky.

I link Occupy to Dr. Graeber and the N8V critique of Anglo-Euro-speak: that it's way too unimaginative when it comes to (a) pictureing lifestyles and (b) assuming one size ("way of life") must eventually fit all. Is the Earth a backdrop for some epic Capitalism versus Socialism extravaganza? Not exclusively. Live that melodrama if you like but don't pretend the rest of us don't have other core concerns. Like, we don't see the world in those terms, so sorry,  did you think we should?

We might wanna bring back Ancient Egypt with contemporary characteristics. In Egypt. Who is "we"? Not me specifically as my Sands of Time clock is running low and we haven't even done a WestWorld yet, except on TV.

I also link OPDX and the Elk Statue (undergoing renovation) specifically to the Bonus Army demonstration between the wars. Penny pinchers in Congress wanted the budget for pet projects whereas no one saw a way to deal with bitter veterans. Smedley "fighting Quaker" Butler was one of them, looking back on a life as a war racketeer, and realizing,  as Eisenhower warned us later, that war is an end in itself, not a merely a means, to supply chainers.

Smedley was in DC to see the Bonus Army, camped out in Hoovervilles, getting smacked down by General MacArthur, of whom he took a dim view. The war mad Manifest Destiny types ruined the American Dream for most of us, while trashing the smashing their way through the Philippines, Indochina, Central America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East. 

The pressure to spray out weapons is intense, with shareholder-backed pensions depending on it. Some boomer doomers fear dying off in droves if they're any less grim with their Genocide R Us grim reaper policies. Not that they won't die off in droves anyway, as it's getting to be That Time for them, given the Bell Curve.

Speaking of the Bell Curve, last night I demonstrated a basic Galton Board to my data science students, along with a simple Python program for simulating balls falling left or right, through rows of pegs. Most random falls will end up in the middle, but randomness allows for outliers and the pseudorandom integer generator I was using is certified to be that normal kind of random.

Bell Curve Dynamics

So what's up with the bacteriophage? That's our icosahedral and cuboctahedral numbers entry point, talking nucleocapsid and Jitterbug, as well as our War of the Worlds and Wells meets Welles, YouTube link in the Codacombs.