Happy New Year from Crow Town

Data Science for All

I was listening to one of Starmer's StatsQuests again, this one on Entropy, and it really hit me why I'm glad for data science having taken off, not leaving statistics in the dust so much as giving it a much needed makeover. That was my old lingo in the 1990s: math was overdue for a makeover, by which of course I included the need to phase in more Synergetics. That much hasn't changed. "More than Cosmetic" was a slogan, to counter the stereotypes "makeover" comes with.

In my high school, statistics was, like trig, one of those semester courses one could take towards filling a math credits requirement, even while opting to get off the main track: pre-calc + calc. The latter was considered the more stringently "college prep" path, whereas if one already knew the goal was a business degree and not to shoot for a "next Einstein" award, then why not take statistics, a kind of knucklehead math that'd be useful in Economics, a knucklehead science? 

I was happy to take stats and trig, but I took pre-calc + calc also, and was good in them. I placed straight into honors calc at Princeton, with Dr. Thurston as my prof. Then I went on to study linear programming (featuring its simplex algorithm) with one of the leaders in the field, Dr. Harold Kuhn. I'd circle back to linear algebra much later, when getting into the geometry of rotating polyhedra (we use matrices for that, if not quaternions).

My point here is I no longer have that old prep school mindset. I'm happy to see calc (Newtonian delta calculus) postponed until college, and have it feature inside a major, such as physics, or why not more stats? 

Slicing and dicing into infinitesimals is at the limit of discrete math (where we meet the so-called manifold), which math (discrete) became the focus of my lobbying at the state level. Let kids take a discrete maths approach all the way through high school if they like, with less focus on calc (by definition) and increasing focus on number and group theory, say, with computer programming.

Data science is providing the glue though, in bringing it back to everyday coping, like people do, with words like expectation and surprise, entropy and probability. Likelihood. These are the everyday words of common experience, and to see them treated mathematically, with notation, with symbols, is a kind of music to my ears in the sense of providing segues to what many find a turn-off.

Hey, I hadn't realized that Edward Teller and his wife, more Martians (Hungarian heritage), had contributed to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) taking off, as later abetted (translated to stats language) by Hastings.

Data Science connects us to Information Theory, signal versus noise, entropy and cryptography, but by anchoring some of our everyday bread and butter notions as agentic humans in Universe. Bayesian thinking connects to machine learning, which is also the kind we do when push comes to shove.

Merry Xmas 2024

by DAF w/ AI

A Synopsis

Europe was headed in the direction of relative utopia with Nord Stream 2 about to come online, but Social Darwinists in The District wouldn't have it. 

What if the French working class were actually able to stabilize around that much vacation time, with Club Med level leisure class facilities, and what if socialized health care actually worked over the long haul?  The American public would become dissatisfied with their lot.

Condoleezza Rice could see the writing on the wall. The rapacious license to exploit, called the American Way, would fall into disfavor and the accompanying grotesque lifestyles might become a thing of the past.

So Europe's ruling cast quislings consented to have their own workers' jugular sliced so they could more effectively concentrate power in the hands of the few with less of a threat to their "system". 

Military Socialism (e.g. NATO) would continue to rule, with its veneer of Cowardly Capitalism. 

Their consent would be in exchange for making Russia weak again, so that their future energy imports might be controlled by Wall Streeters and post WW2 financial institutions created by the military-entertainment complex.

Europe would share in the glory of the American Empire.

Fuller predicted in the 1980s in Critical Path, that LAWCAP's greed would eventually lead it to attack the Russians. 

Perhaps the honesty of his financially and engineeringly informed poetics helped open a window of optimism that such a scenario might be avoided, and giving the USSR a chance to reform. 

However, in the aftermath of Grunch of Giants we got the message: LAWCAP would not morph into something spanking new without a fight. 

Fuller's writings would be relegated to the "subversive" pile (his reputation would be smeared) and good doobie apprentice capitalists would be insulated from such futurism going forward. That was the plan anyway. I'm not suggesting it was ever realistic.

The Business Plot

Although it’s not a no brainer, it’s almost that, to recognize Major General Smedley “Fighting Quaker” Butler for his bravery not only in the company of his men, but later in life, as more of a loner, when he published War is a Racket and had to expose the creeping private sector, anxious to keep devouring the public space.

What public space? In some ideologies there’s no such thing. The world inherently belongs to this or that people, championed by this or that cult, and if not the whole world, then at least a part of it, with the intention to expand. That’s to claim the land on behalf of a people as private to them, which becomes the rallying cry of citizens once they have it. But do they have it?

We know about public spaces and public services, which happen when private interests collaborate to achieve something no one could afford to undertake solo. That would be the space program for example, in its more writ large aspects, and certainly that would be war.

However these days the wars are privatized, not declared, and run irrespective of any meaningful oversight. Weapons and funding is easy to come by. All one needs are ideologues with a willingness to die for some cause. If not that, at least they can eat, presuming the militia is able to support itself logistically, which is not always the case.

Do we have any public space left in education? I would say some. Without authorization from some private company, or better, with the authorization of only my own company, I have the right and ability to purchase public facing screen estate. Prospectors are able to scroll through my material. 

Smedley Butler was approached with a scheme to finally privatize the remaining public institutions that had survived thanks to FDR. The ruling elite wanted their country back. Smedley would have nothing of it and blew the whistle. After all he’d done to be loyal, he wasn’t about to go down in history as a traitor. Probably the business perps who tried to persuade him said they were doing it for the peoples’ benefit.

Fast forward and the push to privatize would reach an apex under president Reagan, coincident with a similar high water mark under Margaret Thatcher in England. The private sector would attempt to establish control without its takeover destroying the underlying legitimacy of their platform. One might call this Business Plot 2.0 and without a Smedley in the picture, it mostly worked, except that people were sensitive to the hollowness and lack of statesmen.

Fast forward some more and we have a eugenics-minded Social Darwinist private sector acting like we’re in the early 1900s again. The public sector is all but gone and a private mercenary army supports the highest bidders with WMDs. The USA to some extent still fights back, in part by keeping Smedley Butler relevant to the narrative.

More Curriculum Notes

:: photo by DBK ::

We have an army of geeks with M4 Mac Minis this Xmas, extrapolating from YouTubes, and a goodly number of them are running Blender. Some would like to break into Python teaching. I have some recommendations.

If you're a new kid on the block and want a ground floor entrance to an express freight elevator to the top, figuratively speaking, you might want to visit my latest Lesson Plan featuring S3, a number I was promoting to Epistemologists recently, at least to their admins.  S3 = 1.06066...

Polyhedrons may be related to one another versus studied only as individuals. For example, how the cube (3) and its dual (4) both nest, as short and long diagonals respectively, within the twelve diamond faces of the rhombic dodecahedron (6), should not come across as ungraspable mumbo-jumbo known only to esoteric clerics.

V + F == E + 2

We're talking common knowledge on the level of ABCs. The dual of the cube being the octahedron.

However just reading such stuff isn't to get the visualization necessarily and for that we could use Blender. I date myself with my POV-Ray based approach, but the final rendering step isn't as critical as the guts, which is where S3 comes in, in our computations of volume.

1, 12, 42, 92, 162...

Since Piero della Francesca at least, in the 1400s, we've had a way to derive a tetrahedron's volume from its edges. Other such algorithms, starting from the six edges, have come along since. 

These formulae need to make a come back, as short computer programs, as we present an alternative to the XYZ approach vs-a-vs the tetrahedron's volume in our new paradigm, the one with the unit edge D, the unit volume tetrahedron. 

We may use the "from edges" approach instead, with S3 as a modifier, and/or use Gerald de Jong's method, which had no XYZ version in the first place.

We have two principal targets after establishing the new volumes table: great circle networks and sphere packing. Of course the two interrelate and of course both have multiplicitous applications within geography, computer games, and crystallography, even psychology.

We spin our cuboctahedron and icosahedron, for example, to net great circle networks of 25 and 31 great circle networks respectively, and we juxtapose them. 

The sphere packing starts with our D-edged tetrahedron itself (D = ball diameter). The CCP, with D-edged tetrahedral and octahedral voids, is our Matrix home base.

How we got here though, was over the S3 bridge, and in Silicon Forest Martian Math, in the context of Sapiens coming to better understand an ET intelligence.

The Mac Mini army has the compute to bring this literature into the foreground, perhaps in the form of anime. 

Sapiens and ETs meet on some Mesa and learn to collaborate on hydropower projects. The relationship is non-adversarial.

The lesson here is for those succumbing to phobias.

Humans have a track record of working together, and the global grids are what we're working on now, much to the chagrin of the phobia-ridden politicians who can't envision a world they don't control.

The attack on Nord Stream was an expression of the fearful reflex-conditioning of the more robotic lower half of the Bell Curve (less mindful), pampered juveniles groomed to feel entitled to management positions.

Tooting My Own Horn

I corrected myself later in a follow-up message. Margaret Fuller died at sea, with her new baby and Roman soldier husband (he'd fought for Roman independence against the Vatican), so clearly Fuller was not a physical descendent. She was his great aunt. Intellectually speaking, however, he was shaped by her writings and she was among the three women to whom he dedicated his Grunch of Giants.

 

T4P Caravan

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conjured from Hilbert Space

Python Teaching Ideas