Laurelhurst Park

:: kim & jimmy ::

:: the pond ::

:: a denizen ::

Coffee Shop

So I just went back to Philosophical Coffeehouse, a Yahoo! eGroup, to queue another posting.

I'm really in a commercial coffee shop today.

I'm feeling penitent for having zoned my own home a coffee shop (a home where I drink coffee) just so I could relax my religious practice for this eGroup, of only posting to it from a bona fide coffee shop.

There was some moral laxity there, if you ask me.

Johnny Stallings swept through, updating me on T.S. Elliot's view of Walt Whitman, WW's relationship with Emerson, other stuff. This was pursuant to a conversation with Sam in the high desert, about his own poetic influences.

He drove off with Nick just now, Johnny did, having left a flyer with the barista (see above).

Earlier, using my cell, I transacted an Amtrak ticket for Nick, who is eying SUNY Oswego again this year, having just returned from Toronto, Ireland, Berlin, the southern coast of France, other places. Quinn might get back to me with the $44 but I'm in no rush on that score.

The pixel fault in my Olympus Stylus 720 SW was fixed and returned under warranty. I've returned the earlier model Stylus to Tara, who'd kindly let me shoot with it in the interim.

Newest Family Member

:: baby naga ::

Class Notes (session five)

:: student work ::

I solved the PSU parking garage puzzle only to have the login puzzle dog me in class. I solved that too, by starting from the bottom of my list and initializing new, unused accounts.

In addition to showing some animations, I gave a short lecture on vector algebra, focussing on the difference between left and right handed XYZ, and four vector ops: __add__, __neg__, __sub__ and __mul__ (note Python __rib__ syntax). See my CP4E write-up for more context.

On behalf of Saturday Academy, I handed out certificates of completion, with sa: staff coming by to collected the confidential student evals.

HB2M

:: detail ::

:: cutting the cake, llysa observing ::

* HB2M = happy birthday to me

Class Notes (session four)

design pattern: model, view, controller
(click for larger view)

I started today's class with a two page handout, and encouraged students to take some notes by writing on the handouts as I explained them.

Our Model is mathematically expressed in terms of vector vertices wired up into faces, per the Polyhedron subclasses. Our Views are VPython's, standing in for a real time game engine, and POV-Ray's, representing a render time ray tracer. Python serves as a Controller, connecting the Model to the Views per user selections.

two views: real time vs. render time
(click for larger view)

Viztoyz and Povtoyz have a lot in common, but are designed as controllers for two different views, a real time and render time view respectively.

Python + POV-Ray
(click for larger view)

I projected from the DVD Animusic 2, including some director's commentary, to demonstrate how render time output might nevertheless by synched with real time music, via some MIDI-to-Machinima API.

I also recounted my role in the Understanding Human Motion project, again helping to suggest how render time animations might be helpful in various kinds of simulation.

parking violation

I keep indulging in this utopian fantasy wherein Saturday Academy instructors are these elite academics with parking privileges in PSU's mostly-empty-on-Saturdays garage (vs. the other one, mostly full). This fantasy has so far cost me $60.

BarCamp Portland

I learned about BarCamp from Jason of Virtuous at the recent Python Meetup. The venue is CubeSpace, a rennovated cube farm formerly a US Bank back office on Grand Avenue.

Barcamp is a somewhat self-organizing investigation into contemporary geek culture.

During networking time, I met up with Marshall Kirkpatrick of Splashcast, and Chris Bretano of Download Squad, who'd actually reviewed Splashcast back in February.

I'm working to syndicate my flickr photos from this evening through a embedded Splashcaster, with Internet Explorer crashing a number of times as the Flash ActiveX object encounters problems.

I also met up with Jeff, Martin and Kevin, young Free Geeks I know from our CollabTech experience with HomeStreet. And with Ki Master George, a talented former student.

:: Portland barcamp 2007 ::

Pixel Fault

I noticed while doing the recent Sky Camp post that the pixel fault in the viewer, a persistent green dot, isn't the only problem with my Olympus 720 SW. I first noticed that flaw when trying to shoot (as in photograph) a racoon ahead of me on the sidewalk, while walking home some candles, which I dropped, breaking 2/3rds of their glass encasements, thereby missing my racoon shot (it scooted away).

But the flaw I've more recently noticed is in the pictures themselves, and that's worth fixing under my soon-to-expire warranty, hence my trip to the UPS Store on Hawthorne just now.

The way to test for a high civilization, fragile, ethereal, is to exercise its circuits, so no, I don't feel "guilty" attending to one pixel among many in my camera, when Darfur so much demands our attention.

That's a false either/or, but does remind me of Princeton's philo guy Dr. Kaufmann, raggin' on Dr. Kant in that lecture, 'cause the latter was supposedly bellyachin' about some exotic chocolates he'd craved that never arrived, whereas what was really goin' on, 'neath the surface, was people sufferin' and dyin' (probably drownin' mostly -- some shipwreck at sea).

I was exulting with my new optometrist the other day about how wise were those Victorians, or whatever we call 'em, for pouring so much intelligence into Optics, such that today we not only have eyeglasses and contact lenses, telescopes and microscopes, but also ray tracers, render farms. Optics was one of those problem domains within reach of that era's materials science. Investing lots of work in a robust and practical theory has paid off many times over, starting with prolonging one's ability to read, even the small print.

And in that tradition, I take my pixel faults seriously. How this culture values its hard won skills and kudos around the Optical Sciences remains a kind of barometer. And it's not just the visible spectrum we care about. The electromagnetic spectrum is a wonderful shared bonanza and Mother Nature doesn't begrudge us our accessing it.

But attentiveness is required, given how we use it in common. We're not supposed to just fall asleep at the switch. So again: let's take our technology seriously enough to attend to it, and keep it in good repair and/or amortize it accordingly, which means to really retire stuff when it's no longer safe to keep it operational -- maybe it has a next life in a museum or something, but don't be afraid to expire what's been on the books for too long.

I'm also having tremendous déjà vu around this whole "return camera to fix pixels" scenario, except I don't think it's déjà vu when it actually did happen, is it? I believe I undertook a similar excercise with the Fujitsu, around two cameras back. I guess I've cared about my pixels for awhile.

Class Notes (session three)

This week's animated short: Code Guardian by Marco Spitoni and friends. This WWII era fantasy features an improbable universe in which AI amounts to more than a hill of beans, plus the Nazis have a hexapent geoscope.

Marco is completely familiar with film's idioms. Close ups of the pilots in their cockpits sometimes include computer generated camera jitter. One point of sharing this was to emphasize how small a talented team, with the right skills, tools and computers, may nowadays create such a meticulously detailed rendering. All you need is a lot of free time, plus it helps to have a day job that you're good at.

Next we looked at Bill Sheppard's several Mandelbrot Set fractal generators, written in assembly language, runnable under Windows. Multiplication in the complex plane bears some relation to working with vectors, with quaternions even more. We'll look at fractals again in a future class.

Then it was back to our shared stash of Python source code, downloaded from 4D Solutions, and more talk of polyhedra.

By default we pass in a prickly sea urchin of radials, vector-spines emanating from a shared origin. The vector tips are the named vertices of our polyhedron, as in the case of the Icosahedron, originally defined by the 12 corners of 3 mutually orthogonal golden rectangles, with edges 1 x phi. Given the vertex-defining vectors are each named, i.e. keyed to strings of letters, we use a Python dictionary to store them.

Then come the faces, described as consecutive vertices going around each, a circumferential network of edges, each defined by two named vector-vertices. We distill unique edges from the face tuples.
The resulting polyhedron needn't be centered around the origin however; adding the same vector to each radial effectively translates the edges (30 in the case of the icosa (remember: V + F = E + 2)), and hence the entire polyhedral wireframe, to surround a different center. The Polyhedron class overloads __add__ to implement translation.

The generic Polyhedron class (from which the specific polyhedra are subclassed), also supports scaling. Each vector gets multiplied by a scalar this time, with the edge topology (faces) remaining unchanged. The Polyhedron class overloads __mul__ to implement scaling.

One classroom challenge was to dig through the vpython.org documentation to find how to make a scene show up in stereo, given these cheap red/blue frame cardboard glasses I had for each student (answer: pass stereo='redblue' as one of scene2's parameters, in viztoyz).

With class over, I grabbed a few more items at home, then swung by Baibi's to bring her along to NPYM's Spring Willamette Quarterly Meeting at Sky Camp, about 2.5 hours southeast of Portland by car, and where Tara had already gone the night before, with Dave and Jane.

I found Tara with the Junior Friends, playing Shona music on a mirimba.

Related reading: Class 1, Class 2, Python for Math Teachers, Focal Points, Getting Inventive with Vectors

Scenarios

I visited the Costco nearest the airport (PDX) twice yesterday, the first time to cancel Dawn's membership, the second time to prove my partnership status with Dawn Wicca and Associates (DWA), and start a new membership in my own name with that business, still a going concern (Dawn's membership had been through ISEPP).

Then I went shopping, choosing judiciously I think, resisting temptations (no HDTV today, thank you very much), focusing on prosaic mundane needs, such as detergent, coffee, work clothes... OK, so I got a case of Red Bull, 24 for like $32 (plus cases of Sprite and Thomas Kemper Root Beer for Tara, anticipating summer).

Then I went back to my spring cleaning, between calls for tech support, which I provided.

I've made great progress freeing Dawn's good name from any negative karma in the form of debts. The medical bills are all paid, except maybe one from Apria (still researching). There's still a pair of shoes to pick up.

The home equity line was retired per Dawn's plan, though I'm still slogging through the original mortgage (at least we bought in the Hawthorne District before prices skyrocketed, thanks to Laurie Todd -- we were just renting before).

Today I should visit some clients in person. Sure, we all like to VPN from our coffee shops, but there's no substitute for real face time. I'm not one to just telecommute and never set foot in a place -- a practice which helps keep my client list small, and therefore manageable.

We have a Phase Rule thing going with Naga-the-snake, where I recycled a 10 gallon (37.85 liter) aquarium tank in the garage but skimped on buying a lid (which explains her getting out the other day).

The current theory is poor ventilation made the internal climate too humid, hence the two barfed up mice. We've had her under observation at a more secure facility and hope to have her back shortly.

In the meantime, I have of course upgraded the lid to a world class mesh, providing plenty of air circulation.

Wanderers 2007.5.1

James Gardner, one of the original Wanderers, is a big draw tonight. We're packed in around the table, overflowing into the wings. I'm posting via Jennifer, a first.

Jim's book, Intelligent Universe, is a sequel to his Biocosm. He expects to come up with at least one more in the series.

Jim and I agree that we're not just a "carbon based life form" any more, in the sense that our form of life, including our thinking process, requires all this fast acting silicon.
Our version of humanity is already a hybrid of these two elements working in synergy.

But of course that's an oversimplification as well: the whole Periodic Table is expressed through our design. Let's not forget zinc!

It's just that we should acknowledge our tools, including our electronic environment, as a part of our eXistenZ.

Three Altars

:: altar R ::

:: altar G ::

:: altar B ::

Class Notes (session two)

:: borg qyoob ::

:: the matrix ::

I started today's session by projecting excerpts from Revolution OS, which chronicles the rise of the free and open source movement. The motivations were both philosophical and economic. Engineers needed more freedom.

Given Portland is an open source capital, students need some background as to what that means.

When the source code isn't secret, then global networking is a lot easier, as the teams won't degenerate into publicly expressing their recriminations and/or mutual suspicions over who "leaked it" (the source code).

Like, the code is on Sourceforge or Freshmeat or wherever, in CVS, Subversion, other version control infrastructure, and so "spilling the beans" just isn't an issue.

In exchange for this degree of liberalism around what might have been secret, you get the benefits of the bazaar type economy, whereby many eyeballs kill many bugs in a hurry -- often a recipe for robust products and thriving communities (like Python's).

Then, walking my talk, I whipped out my Corsair memory stick and made my source code available: viztoyz + stickworks. Students spent the rest of the class modifying my testing framework, learning by trial and error how VPython does shapes and colors, gradually absorbing the look and feel of this particular language, a stepping stone to many others as well as an end in itself.

A core concept in this course is how rendering the action frame by frame for a movie is different from computing geometries on the fly for an interactive game.

VPython is our engine for demonstrating this latter kind of computing, POV-Ray for the former, with Python itself the primary driver language in both cases.

Class Notes (session one)

:: computer lab ::

Today marked the start of a new Pythonic Math course for middle and high schoolers, offered through Saturday Academy and using the facilities of Portland State University. Pythonic Math is a subclass of Gnu Math, meaning we use free and open source software as our core math notation (MN).

We started in IDLE, using it as a calculator but immediately showing off some of the advantages (e.g. 2**10000). Later we imported the math module to show where to get the complement of scientific functions, plus previewed VPython to assure ourselves of Python's graphical (including graphing) capabilities.

POV-Ray is also on deck, our ray tracer for stills vs. VPython's real time OpenGL type environment.

A core teaching: cartoons like Shrek or Over the Hedge involve slowly ray tracing each frame using a render farm, whereas interactive games, perhaps even multi-user over the Internet, have to compute all those actions and textures on the fly, while sustaining a reasonably high frame rate: two very different challenges.

We practiced downloading modules over the Internet into site-packages, importing, editing, reloading.

dir(anymodule) helps us explore contents by dumping a list, as does dir(anyobject) where said object might be a wanderers.Dog, a visual.sphere, or some natively supplied type such as a list, integer, string or dictionary. Like dir(1) tells the integer 1 to "spill its guts" about it can do; "oooo, lots of __ribs__."

Students enjoyed feeding their wanderers.Dog instances various foods via the eat method. Before long we had dogs eating other dogs, as well as pairing to create new dogs (the __add__ method begets a new dog with a hyphenated name).

(click for larger view)

After such an intense lexical (left brained) workout, I decided to give 'em a break and projected one of my favorite cartoons: Warriors of the Net, about tcp/ip, routers, firewalls, corporate intranets versus the Internet and so on.

Towards the end of our 2.5 hours, and looking forward to our experiences with VPython and POV-Ray, I went over the basics with polyhedra, per the RBF concentric hierarchy.

I explained how I considered this more 2nd or 3rd grade level material, apologized for getting remedial on 'em, but that's just how it is. The pre-computer, calculator-vested K-12 math-teaching ethnicity still clings to its tired/pre-wired ways, leaving students somewhat ill-prepared for 21st century careers in the design sciences.

:: whiteboard ::

Phi Guy

original painting by Lynne Taylor

Dr. Mario Livio takes his history seriously, which means he doesn't just cut and paste what others have written, not even if they're "authorities" on a given subject. He does his own homework.

This approach is especially refreshing when numbers like Phi are involved (coined as such by Mark Barr in the 20th century), as it breaths life into "just the facts mam" skepticism.

So if the ancient Egyptians didn't actually write about the golden ratio, as best as we're able to decode, let's not just assume the Great Pyramid's face height to half-base length ratio of 1.62ish is really Phi in disguise. Likewise with the face of the Mona Lisa, even though Leonardo was of course well versed in the Phi literature.

Look for author intent, don't just work backwards from the outward artifact. Even a lowly overhead projector will have close-to-phi in it somewhere, regardless of its designer's mindset. And remember, HDTVs are 16:9 and neither is a Fibonacci number.

So by this reasoning, you might think nature isn't using Phi or any abstract mathematical irrationals. She doesn't intend does she? Well, yes and no. Our models of the problems nature needs to solve do lead to Phi in the context of a continuum, or to Fibonacci numbers in the more discrete cases.

Do these models exist in Nature (per some brands of natural philosophy) or just "in our own heads"?

That's a false dichotomy at least per Bucky's American Transcendentalist spin on U = MP. Where is "in your head" if not in Universe? Dreams do matter, including with regard to our Pentagon Math.

Apparently Livio takes the same myth busters approach to his biography of Galois. I look forward to reading it.

Another highlight: a first George and Eve Menger-Hammond award for a high school science teacher at Benson Polytechnic.

During the Heathman Dinner I sat opposite Becky Ohlsen and friends. She writes movie reviews for Willamette Week sometimes. I was so glad Judy could join me for this ISEPP lecture. I do enjoy sharing Portland's high culture with my high desert relatives.

:: phi guy (610 x 377 pixels) ::

More Modular Dissections

:: viewing a Q (actually a U) module ::
(note: no sound track)

Lots of different namespaces use a lettering scheme to identify various geometrical "building blocks." Tell Anderson came up with this "U module" nomenclature, which Koski has adopted as a part of his own geometric explorations, which may be started with this dissection of the Golden Cuboid with edges phi, 1/phi and 1. What Bucky and Koski call T modules are angularly identical, but may fit into different regimes in terms of starting volumes. Conversion constants may apply.

What's important to Koski is the T module decomposes into a phi-scaled version of itself, plus these other modules emerge at every level: the unresolved, the remainder, and this U, with each containing recursive ever-smaller versions of the others -- a kind of fractal or fractionation of a whole into self-similar parts.

The above Google Video was made using Camtasia Studio to view a .wrl file in the Cortona VRML client by Parallel Graphics. This .wrl (world) file was in turn generated by Scott Vorthmann's vZome, or "virtual zome" tool, written in Java, the edges and nodes having been put together by David on his Mac.

Future Shock

So I thought I'd swing by Multnomah Friends this morning, attending the Marsons' adult education circle once again, for old time's sake. Ron and I just had lunch recently, had some follow-up email contact, so why not?

Last I knew, the Quakers had passed on their opportunity to acquire the neighboring Masonic Lodge and its solid gold (in terms of value to Friends on a First Day) parking lot. The dreary truth was the place was more likely to go for condos, each with its own car, or two. The feeling of infill would be oppressive. Maybe the Mason's could be persuaded to stay in business?

So today I get there and the Lodge says Mazama Mountaineering Center on it, in bright blue. And the parking lot has been drastically upgraded, resurfaced, landscaped. And the house next to the Meeting House on Stark, where we've met all these years: gone, just a mud hole in the ground.

I shook my head in semi-disbelief and came home to heal the scars of future shock. OK, done.

:: ron & kirby ::

About Earthala TV

Over dinner at Dave 'n Jane's last night I was discussing Project Earthala, a designed community with lots of Quaker heritage (especially in business meetings), perhaps even with a foot print at Ghost Ranch, NM -- but with some facilities so remote you'd need a helicopter to get to 'em (unless you enjoy backpacking for several days).

Our remote campus satellite dish receivers pick up lots of global TV however (we tune 'em ourselves), plus we open source a lot of our own shows. Multi-track editing is one of the skills our students get good at, thanks to their public schooling. We generate lots of interesting programming, and don't mind if you share it peer to peer or remix it using Intel's Viiv (we do that too).

On this touchy subject of TV programming, I admit to this censorious reflex that'd lead me to ban all sitcoms with fake laugh tracks. Like Woody Allen, I consider laugh machines unethical and damaging to viewer reflexes, as viewers get exposed to hours of phony/inauthentic emoting making up for what're often lame/lazy scripts -- a form of brain damage if you ask me.

Then I remembered I'm not a dictator plus I might like to use those laugh machines for my own purposes. Better, and thinking more as a teacher, I could wire it up so you could watch those stupid sitcoms, but your grade in my courses might suffer as a result, i.e. there'd be such a thing as "academic debits" as well as credits, and your prized A might become a mere B if you self-indulged in too much phony laugh track television.

That's still kinda "V chip" thinking though -- a tad too big brothery. Oh well, I'll keep thinking about it.

Volume Ratios

:: part 1 of 2 ::

:: part 2 of 2 ::

Xrefs:

• Synergetics Storyboards [1] and [2]
• Focal Points
• Practicing Multiculturalism
• Zome @ SUNY Oswego 2005

Ecovillage Update (Synergeo #33452)

So Project Earthala continues in its early phases. We have a Rose Queen already, one ACF or AFC, Aimeé, hospice nurse and survivor of a plane wreck, like in Lost, but landing right here in Portland, I kid you not. My late wife Dawn helped organize the reunion, including one of the pilots as I recall -- just as traumatic for him.

Tim, if Nick's still around tell him I keep getting the Sprint bill for some frontloaded plan he dabbled with. I just shred 'em -- not my business. The physical equivalent of > dev/null (that's bash shell talk and means "send to trash irretrievably").

Where are the writings? Project Renaissance (pr.html) has been world readable from grunch.net/synergetics for a long time now, so it's pretty easy to see what the trajectory has been over more than a decade. Extrapolation becomes easier and more secure, as we see the data points lining up in the rear view mirror (which is no excuse for a bumper sticker on the windshield -- still gotta supervise the road ahead, duh).

And at the Math Forum more recently. If you're gonna live in a JavaDome, best if you know some Java. But when will you find the time? In grade school if lucky, in adult rehab (prison?) if less so.

Either way, it pays to know how to subclass a House (aka dwelling machine) and know how to tweak it to better fit your needs and your tastes. Just staring at the factory-delivered and going "duh....." with no knowledge of how to access it, is like trying to use a cell phone minus any features but dial-send. Speaking of which, I push university think tank types to think about public schools as distro points for more than just free software (per kiosk system in South Africa) but for essentially free hardware as well, like those one laptops per, and those GPS enabled cell phones helping to track lost children.

The buzzword in Portland is XRL: eXtreme Remote Livingry, or simply Extremely Remote Living. That's venturing into the true boonies with only lightweight hardware with an eye to temporary staging followed by removal with no long term environmental impact, except maybe some geocached time capsules (could be tiny). There's no reason to trash the environment simply because we want to immerse ourselves in it and experience it safely (a two way street -- what humans tend to forget in their hubris, thinking it's always about them and them alone (not at Earthala it isn't, Wanderers either)).

So you could envision REI being involved, as we're really talking about camping, our biggest outdoor sport once you include hiking and hunting as subclasses thereof, next maybe to the downhill kinetic sports, which only require day trips and/or hotel stays (e.g. hotel in Hood River and environs, look for B&Bs option, maybe share a Bonneville powered electric ski bus to/from Hood Meadows or Government Camp ski bowl, other destinations).

The missing component, as always, is aerospace, with the cultural divide between hippies and their ecovillages, and hard core engineers, taking over a generation to bridge. The open source movement has been critical in synergizing those two. In retrospect, we're able to see how Bucky's predicted design science decade was catalyzed to occur, with accomplished Fuller Schoolers like Kiyoshi and Jay Baldwin (many others, this isn't hall of fame time) moving in to bridge the C.P. Snow chasm.

I helped rally the philosophy department, in part by putting a Wittgensteinian spin on Synergetics, helping to explain precession thereby, in terms of Fuller's deliberately remote synergetics vocabulary (e.g. fuller.4d vs. coxeter.4d and/or einstein.4d).

Python's implementation of the namespaces idea gives notational form ("dot notation") to this LW notion of "language games" out to "forms of life" (grammars, namespaces).

I also use Python to code coords.py (classic Gibbsian vectors, now including Chakovian option) and rbf.py, a set of Polyhedron subtypes all with hard-coded dimension and volume information per Fuller's concentric hierarchy. This is from whence my implementations of Hypertoons derive, many samples on YouTube and linked from the BFI.

So that's the scene in a nutshell: Portland leverages local sports with traditionally high tourist quotient, to galvanize XRL gear industry, which is also high tech and moving us beyond "mere tents" to something more protective of expensive flatscreens. The dwelling machines are slated for NGO-funded experimental prototype communities of tomorrow, designed by tree hugging engineers. More in the Math Forum and other Project Renaissance literature. And no, I'm not forgetting about the bizmos, GO and NGO recruiting vans, evangelizing in the schools (lots of dog and pony shows, including mine [1]).

Kirby

[1] doesn't have to mean literally dog and pony, even though I may have easy access to both -- more likely a screencast or mathcast of some kind (like check out my Google Videos).

Further Reading:
Project Renaissance
Brainstorming on Bucky Works

Family Album

:: bridge to Cheri near Thimphu ::

:: a picture Dawn liked ::

High Desert

:: chopping wood ::

:: crooked river ::

:: teepee + contrail ::

photos by K. Urner

Meeting Minutes

Thanks Ken, for chronicling my wife's passing on Synergeo (#33127). We have so many partially overlapping communities in life, and in death also. For those of you entirely unfamiliar with my wife's story, and also for her friends, I tried to give a sense of it in Grain of Sand.

Per a posting to Synergeo just prior to yours (#33125), I'm seeing mental arithmetic getting a new partner in arms: mental geometry. Our students need both kinds of training, and computers will help. I'm thinking lexical and graphical, times tables and hypertoons.

Dawn ran a tight ship around here, a business as much as a household. She and I were business partners for years before we got married, and our Dawn Wicca and Associates will persist as a business. She just paid Dick Hannah today, for extending the life of our Razz, per the post below. A factory new clutch was transplanted into the vehicle. These Subaru Legacy models are meant to last well into the hundreds of thousands, with proper care and feeding.

I had a good talk with DeeKay this evening about Steve Baer's dissection of the enneacontahedron, into A thru E modules, hexahedral zonohedra, one of 'em almost flat. He's got 'em all done in Zome these days and ratioed to the phi-scaled T modules, per his trademark "language game" (Wittgenstein). He especially likes how the Baer B module gets composed.

Koski has already registered koskiskiosk.com but hasn't gotten around to hosting it yet. All in good time. It's not like he hasn't been sharing his information.

S. Baer's Zonohedra in Zome, by Koski
Top: B, E - Bottom: D, C, A

Dust to Dust

The girls and I went to this classic American funeral home in Tigard this morning, to choose some urns and pay for services and death certificates.

The girls enjoyed playing with this sweet little dog (as did I -- dachshunds were a big part of my boyhood).

I've included this picture of Razz in front of the funeral home because she's close to death herself, given how hard I've been driving her. She's scheduled for the car hospital tomorrow.

We call this our "time capsule," an art deco feature that came with the house (hides a chimney). Every household needs a place to display mementos. To the left on the wall is our Quaker marriage certificate.

Praying for Dawn

:: dawn wicca in thimphu
with anzir, one of mom's students
and the family vehicle ::

Dawn slipped away quietly, seeming to nudge me awake as she went, as I was slumbering nearby, with other family. I was the first to see that her breath was gone, then awakened Sam, then we awakened the girls.

Friends arrived and we carried out Dawn's final wishes, using a shroud in a somewhat Jewish design pattern, other icons and symbols. She wanted to die at home in our living room among us.

Here was my email to her healing circle:

Greetings Friends --

Dawn died quietly and peacefully in her sleep tonight, around 12:45 AM, surrounded by family. After a few friends arrived we surrounded her with mementos and symbols of her practice and faith (drum, double dorji, a bead necklace made by her dear friends), then wrapped her in a shroud contributed by Carolyn.

Elizabeth sprinkled some holy water on her body, from the holy wells they'd visited in Ireland.

I feel in a position to send you her deepest personal thank yous for all your love and support these last few days and weeks.

A memorial service is planned probably for early April. Please watch for another email with more details. We will all miss her very much, although she will still be with each one of us in our hearts.

Kirby

We haven't set a memorial date yet, and until we do, I won't be submitting anything to The Oregonian.

I continue keeping a vigil, firing up several altars with one of the little icons (a little dead pirate guy) representing me, and moving from station to station.

from The Oregonian, pg. D6, 2007.3.24

Quaker Community

Dawn's support team swung into high gear this afternoon, rearranging furniture to give her the best possible view, with the couch for more visitors, the reclining chair, from Golf Lakes Estates (belonging to my mom's parents in Bradenton, Florida (came here by truck)) now optional.

Movement is painful, her legs frail. Mostly, she'll be needing the bed.

My own sense is of grieving and gratitude, as I've seen brave individuals doing their professional and familial best to help Dawn extend her life in a good way. I've been her coach and sometimes hard taskmaster, wanting to really work in my role. But now I understand she's ready for me to back off and let nature take its course, while continuing along faithfully by her side, eternally her friend and partner.

Alexia has moved up her visit, originally scheduled for May, in response to swiftly changing events. Friends are pulling together, assisting us in every way.

I appreciated the call from Wanderer Glenn Stockton, about the event at Powell's Books today, even though I couldn't make it. And thank you to Kim for her expert assistance and meat loaf.

Élise brought strong horse medicine, her forte. She'd hauled her two large animals for hundreds of miles on the freeway, with her young daughter, to an intensive retreat on equestrian massage near Silverton, with Ruth at a horse camp in Redland.

When Dawn and I first met, she was hooked up with Élise in this horsey reality, doing bookkeeping for CUE, plus they were both doing Wy'East, a training very much in the Lakota medicine wheel tradition with sweat lodges and everything.

This was many moons ago. I joined Wy'East as well but dropped out around when it came time to make your own drum, with a dried skin from a taxidermist -- like I'd already gotten the girl by this point.

Philosophy Talk

Quinn phoned to alert me to FM 91.5's Philosophy Talk last night, a rebroadcast of the March 4 program on Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of my favorite philosophers.

I tuned in just as our stage lion Popper, his regal mane flickering in the firelight, was fending off a menacing Ludwig. So brave, so heroic, these Englishmen, so unflummoxed by Austrian faux aggression.

Had I phoned in, I'd have circled in on Philosophical Investigations Part II, which I think talks up the relevance of what we'd later call "gestalt switches" in psychology. The "meaning as use" bullet doesn't really fly minus this dropping of the other shoe: "seeing according to an interpretation."

Vis-a-vis philosophy's more diabolical conundrums like "the problem of other minds," the PI suggests a more right brained "waking up" experience versus some sort of left brained logico-lexical sorting out, though such work paves the way in many cases.

Of course "gestalt switches" are something of an anathema to logicians as they smack of divine revelations, visitations by angels, other varieties of religious experience, all of which tend to short circuit perfectly good arguments, plus tend to lead to a lot of private language jabber.

But this is where I think Wittgenstein would point to what's right about solipsism, namely that these dharmas, or awakenings, are only intended for you, like those gates to the law in that famous Kafka parable. Don't make the mistake of thinking your insights will necessarily be of relevance to the philosopher sitting right next to you -- like est taught us that.

I thought Boston U's Juliet Floyd held her own amidst all the clever banter and repartee, standing up for the Tractatus as an attack on totalitarian visions of some positivist triumph.

Someone, I forget who, made a snarky crack about Rorty (my thesis advisor) which no one bothered to decode. I think that's what we expect when philosophers hobnob: snide asides and insider jokes designed to get the true believers chuckling knowingly.

Human Subjects

My information on Body Worlds 3 @ OMSI is this is not the same exhibit I saw in both London and Seattle, which had a somewhat straight laced medical theme, but the more arty version, such as I glimpsed in Miami in the latest 007 movie, Casino Royale.

So is this exhibit symptomatic of an horrific, pathological culture that has no sensitivity regarding human dignity and/or the sanctity of human life? Some people think so, or are at least strongly suspicious in this regard.

On the other hand, per Da Vinci's notebooks, other art of the Italian Renaissance, admiration for nature, as opposed to disdain for creation as "fallen" and/or "sinful" might be what's going on.

Above is the human figure in an heroic pose, somewhat in the style of socialist realism, but in this case with with a touch of surrealism and/or symbolism too, as he's griping a large snake.

Such commemorative displays serve to acknowledge personality traits we feel deserve to be celebrated, such as bravery and loyalty.

We also display the human figure in department stores, usually with slender torsos and long necks.

Some would consider all of the above forms of idolotry, a practice associated with dolls, statues, relics, puppets and animations, imbuing them with a misplaced sacred significance.

One could argue that the practice of shunning dolls as idolotrous is in itself idolotrous, in that it attaches too much unholy significance to them.

Per usual, it takes one to know one where sinners are concerned.

Synergetics Dictionary

The four volume Synergetics Dictionary: The Mind of Buckminster Fuller, created by E.J. Applewhite, is an inventory of Fuller's precise usage patterns around sometimes familiar words (but here with a new spin).

Fuller attached a lot of importance to clear communication, saying he'd rather be not understood than misunderstood.

Depicted above is the beginning of a multi-panel foldout at the beginning of the first volume (A-E).

Here Fuller is noting that the number of ways n random experiences completely interconnect is the triangular number (n+1)*n/2 or 0, 1, 3, 6, 10, 15..., which triangles may be stacked into a growing tetrahedron of experiences -- a primitive model of Universe in Synergetics.

"I am not a creator, I am a swimmer, a dismisser of irrelevances" J. Baldwin quotes from the dictionary, in his blurb for the Whole Earth Review (Summer, 1987).

Applewhite uses this motif, of six relationships among four experiences, as a graph (the "linear tetrahedron"), and explicitly as a tetrahedron, as a colophon to the dictionary (Garland Publishing, New York and London, 1986).

This fold-out illustration by Fuller (Sept 11, 1963) is double sided, so what's shown above is only the 2nd half of it.

My copy was a gift from Ed himself, retrieved from the attic of his Georgetown apartment that time Matt and I visited, enroute from Montclair, NJ to Whittier, CA, driving my sister's car (she'd moved across country). This treasure made it home safely and I've consulted it ever since.

Add, Multiply or...?

abstract algebra
(a "gnu math" approach)

I'm somewhat proud of this little storyboard I published to Math Forum this morning, which is mostly straight group theory, but then I mention a third operation, neither addition nor multi- plication, using the symbol for the artist formerly known as Prince.

I hope he's OK with that.

When two of these Zoombini-like cartoon characters collide, they do whatever's the currently displayed operation.

Like if the name of the game is "to multiply" and the partners just happen to be reciprocals, like 2 and 1/2, then you get that special one particle.

But if the op is "to add" and the characters are like -2 and +2, then their collision begets a zero, these being the multiplicative and additive identities respectively (1 and 0).

The prince op (shortened name) would have its own notion of inverse, and its own identity element. I haven't shown it in the above "logic gates" view of balls combining (members of Q, the rationals), thinking to leave this op to the students' imaginations.

Note that we don't really consider subtraction and/or division to be ops in their own right, as in abstract algebra we define these as "adding the additive inverse of" and "multiplying by the multiplicative inverse of" respectively.

All this fantasizing about colliding sprites in a Scratch-like playspace got me thinking about Luxor 2 I think, as that's where I ended up, further advancing my career as some Egyptian glass bead gamer.

Algebra Two with Python

I decided to redo the sound track for this one, first recorded in January, mostly because of the big drop off in volume half way through, which I was unable to fix.

Then I decided a fresh narrative would be an improvement for other reasons. However, given these are just archived pilots, I don't expect to be squandering much energy on polishing them.