Lightfoots Visit

:: wilma, howard and bill lightfoot ::

My relatives bounced down on Amtrak for lunch in the Pearl district. I met them at Union Station.

They only had about two hours in Portland all told, but then riding the Coast Starlight both ways was part of the adventure.

Bill pioneered the day trip by train experience a few weeks ago and had a fun time.  Why not share the experience with Howard and Wilma?

I started the day with panel discussions, on the relationship twixt Stats and Data Science, and another on Deep Learning, so-called.  A lot of terminology has developed, unsupervised by any overarching Philosophy or even Theology department.  We're not doing trivium / quadrivium anymore.

Later, when back in my bat cave, I got to fiddling with my LinkedIn profile some more.  We wade into social media at different times, with some people just keeping the door open with a kind of stub resume.  The Ux pressures for something more, which is fine, LinkedIn has work to do, a real job.

I'm continuing to explore the implications of a "lambda calc track" through Oregon high schools, consulting with Ted Kosan, Joseph Austin and others.

I'm liking this website on Anti-patterns in Python, which Jurgis Pralgauskis kindly shared on edu-sig.  It's not like I've had time to speed read it all, just it's a decent stab at a thorny topic.

Another Prince

Some will say, at the end of my little story, that something had caught my eye and got filed away unconsciously.  Others may say I'm lying, but then stories of this type are common enough.

I was relaxing on the weekend, plowing through some stand up comedy Youtubes, when I came across one by a semi-famous movie-maker, recounting his recent interactions with Prince.

That tipped me into watching a documentary on Prince; I let Youtube just keep playing.  I became quite interested and started seeking out specific tracks the talking heads had been raving about.

As you might gather from the above, I was coming from outside the Prince sphere, peripheral to the scene.

Portland has its Pedalpalooza Festival, bicycle-oriented, and one ritual ride has long celebrated both David Bowie and Prince as the two major avatars (long story).

Lindsey (not in Portland) wondered how that would go this year, I'd expect a large turnout.  So yes, some of my closest friends are Prince fans.  I'd told her my synchronicity story, Deb too.

What's outstanding about this story, from my point of view, is only after at least three hours of spinning in the Prince vortex did I finally realize the whole of pop culture had been doing that for some days.

Prince had died just days before.  I hadn't known that.

I just got caught up in the spirit of the times.

Having watched Ingmar Bergman's movie The Seventh Seal with Lindsey, I wrote her back that what I'd pieced together is Prince was playing chess against death -- hardly a Sherlock Holmes statement, as we're all doing that (some more consciously than others, at any given time). 

My friend David Koski expressed the pride Minnesotans take in their Prince, an all around good guy. He was loved by nearly all women it seemed, which made some men jealous -- that was David's take.

Having just immersed myself in the story, I agreed he was phenomenal.

The Room (movie review)

"The Room" is just Room in the five year old's vocabulary, no definite article required.  Bucky Fuller used Universe the same way, saying "Universe" (as in "Room") not "the universe" (a more lowercase 3rd person view, not as place-based).

We're treated to "the omniscient camera" in its purest form in this well-crafted film.  "Camera" itself means "Room" in Italian.  Our "room" is the camera's "space of events" which includes hearing the child's thoughts.

We hear his little voice narrating, a somewhat metaphysical patter, as he sorts out Universe (Room), reviews his cosmology.

There's so much "place" outside Room that "time is spread thin" like too little peanut butter spread thinly on bread, and with everyone therefore stretched (stressed, pulled) to "hurry up" to cover all that Place.

In Room, Place was held constant so Time was less stressed.  Next week and next year still ran together as time was more immaterial.

Given our privileged Angelic viewpoint, we see far more than any one character.  We appreciate how really intelligent that back seat police officer is, putting a picture together of what crime to phone in.

Throwing a little kid on the ground and stalking off is a great way of calling attention to oneself.  Old Nick was a man of zero skills in the HR sense of the word.  He needed a room of his own.  The fictional Dexter, likewise a psychopath, was far more dangerous to others.

I immediately appreciated the parallels between The Room and 10 Cloverfield Lane.  Both are claustrophobic, about prisoners of a seemingly all-knowing patriarch.  Both feature the omniscient camera and its Angelic point of view.

The newscaster's questions don't really penetrate to the heart of what we've seen, and we know the newscast viewers will probably never understand.   The newscaster wonders if the mom had been selfish in not getting her baby out earlier, not appreciating how Old Nick could have tossed a baby off a bridge with a heavy weight in the bag. 

The mom took a calculated risk with a highly optimized plan that worked out.  She's right up there with those Covert Affairs characters, in engineering their ingenious escape.  She's not just a good mom, she's a highly professional mom.

What we don't see with our omniscient camera is what Old Nick was up to between tossing the kid down and heading back to the shed in his truck.  Given his temper, he could only have been thinking murderous and vengeful thoughts, and the mom was certainly expecting retaliation, but hoping the police would come first.

We're tracking with the police at that point in the story, are in the back seat with the kid, his Guardian Angel (angle) and then see a mother running towards us from the darkness, but not actually from the shed. 

We know Old Nick is still alive, but that's about all we know.  The police sirens may have had a deterring effect. 

So actually we're not omniscient at all, just have a unique angle, but with no ability to give testimony.

Shape Arithmetic

David Koski was reminding me tonight of the happy mnemonics twixt ancient Greek results and our Synergetics concentric hierarchy.

A cone inscribed in a cylinder of same base and height has 1/3rd its volume.

A cone having half the cylinder's height, its tip at the equator line, has 1/6th its volume.

Lets define two cylinders, one twice the height of the other, called "oil barrel" and "tuna can" respectively.

Two tuna cans stacked up = one oil barrel.

Then we have the following volumes table:

Oil Barrel:  6
Tuna Can: 3

Cone in Oil Barrel: 2
Cone in Tuna Can: 1

Sphere in Oil Barrel: 4
Two Tuna Can Cones: 2

Oil Barrel - Two Tuna Can Cones (hourglass looking) = 6 - 2 = 4 = Sphere in Oil Barrel. [link]

Also:  Cone in Oil Barrel + Sphere in Oil Barrel = Oil Barrel (2 + 4 = 6). [link]

We could make the following identifications and size accordingly:

Oil Barrel = Rhombic Dodecahedron (6)
Tuna Cone = Tetrahedron (1)
Sphere = Octahedron (4)

We could pour sand from objects on the left into corresponding objects on the right.

Hominid Diaries

Ian Tattersall sees a pendulum swinging in paleo-anthropology.  Darwin was peculiarly distant from the actual human fossil record so far assembled in his own time.  A new and challenging specimen apparently made it into his hands.  He wrote about it in a letter, but it's nowhere mentioned in Descent of Man.

Perhaps we forget how radical his thinking seemed at the time?  He was unwilling to stick his neck out much further, in an area so sensitive?  Old bones went to anatomists for examination, not to this new kind of dirt-digging, Galapagos-visiting geek.

The pendulum went towards an excess of invented species after that, multiplying without much rhyme or reason in the creative writings of many a chronologist.

Then swung back, to where we had maybe only the one track, with three successive phases (Sapiens the third).

The picture these days is settling down to something in between and more complex.  Many lineages of hominids come and go.  Nature always seems to have a next hominid up her sleeve, starting at least three million years ago.

The success of the Sapiens, in terms of sheer numbers, but also degree of tool use, is of course entirely unprecedented on Planet Earth and should not be used as our guide to the past.  In geological time, this phenomenon has just started, and marks the start of a new chapter.

Let us not project ourselves and our patterns too forcefully upon our ancestors, was Tattersall's cautionary message.  Projecting back to Darwin's time is hard enough, and for then we have decipherable symbols (actual history we can dig up).

He doesn't think we have evidence of symbolic processing until 40K to 70K years ago, even though the physical architecture of Homo Sapiens had been in place well before that.

The hardware was there, but Humanity 1.0, the software, came later, mesh-networking we Sapiens into a platform, a noosphere, a cloud.  By 40K years ago, Southeast Asia had its symbol-using Sapiens.  They were starting to show up everywhere by then.

Turnover in tools, language being a tool, does not correspond to speciation.  A new species will continue making a previous specie's tools.  Dramatic changes in tool-making techniques do occur in the archeological record, but not in some simple correspondence with the type of hominid behind them.

Neanderthals made beautiful tools, but were they thinking with symbols?  That's dubious.  Which is not to say they were unsuccessful or unworthy in any way.

We could say the jury is still out on whether symbolic reasoning was such a great innovation, if species longevity is to be the measure.

Anyway, why be so judgemental?  Is it because Genesis has God seeing things as pretty good at the end of each day, that we presume Judgement is the whole point, of what's to be the Last Day as well?

Could having Good Judgement be more a matter of having Good Taste?  Around the time of Noah (The Flood) we're to understand God was getting a bad aftertaste from Humanity and had decided to snuff it out.  His sense of taste had been offended.  We weren't the right kind of hominid.

God's ambivalence towards Creation seems on display in Noah's day, with the rainbow an eternal promise to not give up again.  Next time He'd try an even more drastic measure, and send his only Son (the Christian story line) -- this lecture was in a church after all, but this is just me thinking, i.e. I'm not relaying Tattersall's rap at this point.

In any case, we needn't look for language and Sapiens to emerge in the same moment.  Any theory premised on the notion that such a moment must have occurred (suddenly, a new species of language-wielding hominid burst upon the scene) is perhaps over-indulging in science fiction, with an emphasis on the fictional part.

On the contrary, cultural ontogenesis seems to have no simple basis in physiology, though we may trace the arc of brain growth to trading away the protection of the trees, for the cooperative hunting and gathering model of the open savanna.  But that's not the saga of just one lineage, plus its closer to an hypothesis than an explanation of anything.

When did fire come on the scene and wouldn't that have added to brain power, by some natural selection process?

Nobody knows for sure, as the fossil record is mostly silent about the use of fire.

During the excellent catered dinner afterwards (salmon!), in the church basement, I asked him about the new finds in the deep crevices and limestone caves of Southern Africa.  He was well aware of the findings and praised the finder for adopting a more open source approach, more reminiscent of what "real science" used to mean (versus sitting on one's stash for cash).

Code School in Portland

:: near Tillikum Crossing ::

Back to Work

:: running a Pygame module by Peter Farrell ::

Should Oregon's high school math teachers have professional development opportunities through higher education institutions?  They do already, to some degree.  But to what extent do institutions of higher ed take advantage of their business incubator programs?

If you dig down, you may find a code school or two in your town, staffed by avid geeks who have competence and confidence in the software world.  This is the new world we're always rubbing up against in any high school mathematics class, and I'd argue in language arts too, as the Document Object Model (DOM) is what if not a model of a document?

Don't grammar, rhetoric and logic overlap with such a thing?  Do we still teach any music?  Video editing?  Part of learning to code is learning to communicate about technical subjects, and that means making videos, not just writing PDFs or web pages.

The code school curriculum could counter boredom and perhaps complacency with some unfamiliar mathematics, to go with the novelty of a computer language taking over for the calculator (obsolete).

As long as the content is new, why not go all the way in some cases and use this program to introduce not just new ways of teaching the same old stuff, but new ways of teaching some new (GNU) stuff as well?

My list of semi-novel topics includes:

• a Group Theory spin (established mathematics, centuries old, but atypical in a high school setting);
• Fractals, the Mandelbrot Set in particular (also a familiar topic but not in high school unless the Complex Plane is well covered);
• the Concentric Hierarchy of Polyhedrons and their modular decomposition, along with Quadray Coordinates (completely alien, part of what I call Martian Math).  

Giving code schools some GNU Math to share keeps them branded and outside the academic mainstream, by design.  They will be complementing more than competing with other professional development courses, in sticking with alternative content.

The laptop fan is on, given all the CPU-intensive compiling that's going on.  First comes compiling the compiler, the latest gcc, with Fortran enabled (gfortran).  Then comes another attempt to get Pygame working.

Homebrew warns against trying to work against an Anaconda install of Python; it's the framework Python 2.7 it wants to build against.  But then I saw a promising formula on StackOverFlow... etc.  OK, got it working.

Relatively painless was the install of MathPiper, a Java application.

:: solving polynomial and displaying in LaTeX 
using MathPiper by Ted Kosan 
(click for larger view in Flickr) ::

Road Trips

Carol is on the move again, having completed the Left Coast circuit.  She and Ellen Thomas are tackling the Right Coast now, trending inward (I'm actually not sure of their itinerary, just glad we've got our Verizon, with lots of coverage).

Why it's called "left" is highly conventional as from the inside of the Earth, as in The Mapparium (a walk-in globe, one of the first), we could see the Catalina side as "right".

This "looking out from the center" is the "Geoscope" idea, an extension of planetarium technology but as much for sharing biospheric data as stars capes.

I'm prepping for a trek north that in olden days would have taken long days by horse and buggy.  The motorcar option really opened up under Eisenhower, which followed Roosevelt (FDR) with public works galore.

We may have a hard time remembering those days (I have to fake it, born in 1958, soon after the dam at the Dalles opened).  The war toy biz is still impressive, in terms of energy expense, but that's closed off to most viewers.  Heavy construction is still in evidence but how much is devoted to infrastructure?

The Bureau of Public Roads (semi-fictional) took care of a lot of deferred freeway maintenance under the economic stimulus administered by the Obama administration, not unlike one of FDR's attempts to galvanize through public funding.

I drove long stretches of I-70 appreciating the upgrades going on, lane repaving etc.  If we're to continue with truck-based transport, however fueled.  That was during a St. Louis visit (cite of car rental pickup).  We were attending a Distance Education conference (USDLA).

By "prepping" I mean taking some down time, hiking and taking in some instructive videos.  That would include the Poverty, Inc. thing.  Walker came by, moving up our Friday tea date, and we shared some of the same observations.  We thought the Flossis would like it.

The film is an open letter to Bono almost, exposing the evils of dumping in the guise of aid.  The thing is, it's complicated, as the film itself points out:  not all NGOs, or even Gongos, are created equal.  Just like in the private sector.  Businesses differ in how they do business.

Hey, don't let me overwhelm you with my vast experience.  I'm just another guy in a time tube.  However I have seen quite a bit, thanks to an itinerant family and a career that gained me entre into quite a few lines of work, including cardiology and land use planning.  I continue to be interested in maps and visualization systems (especially for global / planetary data).

I got to sit in on interesting meetings in my day, sometimes opening my mouth (expected), other times not so much.  I'm fine with sitting in the back row at Wanderers meetings, for example.  Other times I get to present.

Those protesting the dumping do have alternatives in mind, which sound very Reaganomic in sentiment, so I can't imagine much objection from the horse owning crowd.  Being one's own boss in a company of one's peers is a dream come true in capitalist heaven.

Haitian businessmen want to build, sell and install their own homemade solar powered street lights, which are not inferior.

NGOs come along with tons of free stuff and avalanche an economy with excess, keeping prices higher at home (desirable) and getting the write-off.  Call it a subsidy, call it whatever, it's the reverse of an import tariff, it's selectively wiping out small competitors.

The film's recipe for success is not one most NGOs would object to:  the rule of rules.  The flip side of that is simplicity called "corruption" but that's where an anthropologist's work begins.  Those with no organized network are easier prey, and herding is a natural instinct.

Making a movie to express a viewpoint is a coherent strategy, well done by Yes Men.  The documentary is an appropriate vehicle for dueling views.

Youtubes come with varying budgets and production values, but people who have something to say just need inexpensive recording equipment to have input.  Lindsey and Jordan proved this locally with some excellent footage.

Writing up how it actually works (descriptive) is often more valuable than imposing a new rule system.  Adjustments in something already working, however "corrupt", is often sensible and, as important, doable.

Corruption is a feature of the narrative, the accounting system imposed.  I'm not saying that to "justify" what's criminal, just treating every broken institution as a crime scene is not always the most productive approach.

I'm paid up with AAA and may cycle back to Jiffy Lube for fluids top-off prior to the upcoming road trip.  Owning a car is far from free.  Other DVDs are going down.  Amino acids.  PDB files.  I use another local mechanic as well.

I've been agreeing with the veterans / alumni on mathfuture that a code school needs advice from surrounding technology-intensive communities who might want to send talent scouts to our meetings, or accept interviews.  That'd be OHSU in our case, among others.

About Tauism

This Khan Academy classic is worth projecting in a classroom.  I know I would be eager to share it, if back in high school teaching, like in the good old days

I'm not suggesting I'd turn my whole curriculum over to Sal, just that I'm up for sampling choice pieces by authors I admire, Vi Hart another one (good at math video as an art form).  This retrospective by Khan, combined with a polemic at the end, seems a great high point to cite.

The math classroom of the future, in one of its many forms, casts the teacher in the role of VJ (video DJ) in a lot of ways.

Most clips might be of lesser length than Khan's average, although some teachers might invest in a full series of something, with their own time at the podium, as emcee and expert, to apply local spin, relate it to actual students more directly (personalize, make it real, take questions).

It's up to the teachers and lesson planners to glue the samplings into coherent pathways that come together to produce whole concepts.  The teacher may improvise a good portion of the presentation, yet there's a known terrain, the school's agreed-upon curriculum, what it's known for.

The fact remains that "citing video" is a lot like a VJ's job and editing video is the "anime" equivalent of doing "manga" or "stills" (picture Jupyter Notebooks with still graphics courtesy of matplotlib).

In the graphical arts, manga equals comic books, anime equals cartoons.

In mathematics, one needs both.

Sal covers a lot of ground in the above video, looking back, reviewing trig functions, radians, the whole idea of pi. 

Then comes his impassioned defense of tau (as 2 pi).  He uses tau's appearance on the stage as an excuse to quickly review the whole board once again, having set us up the first time with a critique of Euler's Formula, arguably the most beautiful in math, but having a flaw, a blemish.

I don't see any either/or here really.  Use tau in place of pi when it's prettier.  Why not?

However at this juncture it's worth mentioning another low intensity tug-o-war in which tau is involved.  Versus Phi.  There's been some debate about whether tau stands for .618... i.e. the reciprocal of 1.618... 

Some authors use tau for the latter, however the convention I'm most familiar with assigns Greek letter phi to 1.618... and tau to its reciprocal (0.618...).  In English or other romanized ("ascii-fied") texts, we may use phi in place of the Greek letter.  Then comes the low intensity debate whether to pronounce it "fee" or "fie".  A contingent says it both ways.  Maybe one should say "fee" on odd days of the week?

Quoting from Wikipedia:

Since the 20th century, the golden ratio has been represented by the Greek letter φ (phi, after Phidias, a sculptor who is said to have employed it) or less commonly by τ (tau, the first letter of the ancient Greek root τομή—meaning cut).

What I suggest coming from a liberal arts background is we remind students of mathematics that debate is a feature (not a bug) of their discipline and circle these simple examples, in preparation for investigating bigger debates in lessons to come.

When Sal comes back around again, reviewing the board, the trig functions, the unit circle, he shows that Euler's formula may be made even more beautiful.   By that time some of us are ready to vote for Sal's argument, especially with the caveat that pi is not hereby banned.  These constants do not compete so much as reinforce one another.

As for phi versus tau, I think we've pretty much settled on tau being the reciprocal of the golden mean, which golden mean is itself > 1, i.e. is 1.618... or (1 + rt2(5))/2 -- note that I sometimes replace sqrt() with rt2() as I don't want to push the mental model to favor "squares" too prejudicially, given the triangle-friendly balance of this curriculum (Martian Math inspired)).

Especially if tau is going of to do yeoman's service as 2 pi, replacing 2 pi r with tau r in many a Jupyter Notebook, all the more reason, then, to not force it to do double duty as the golden ratio as well.

That'd only add to the post Babel confusion, not that I expect any posting by me to serve as an edict.  The post Babel confusion (not everyone on the same page) is more what I'm drawing attention to, as another lens for viewing math.

Tune in the debates for a change.  Listen to arguments.

Kirby

Additional reading / links


[originally a post to mathfuture, a Google Group]

1-2-3 Testing

I just purchased Camtasia for Mac, a product for making screencasts especially.

The above represents my fresh out-of-the-box use of this tool, which I've used in a previous incarnation on Windows.

Snake Escape!

The Achilles Heel of a large snake aquarium is the lid, made of some kind of mesh with seams applied to four edges.  The other five sides are glass, but the lid has to be porous.  If a seam comes loose, good bye secure holding tank.  Barry got out.

Joel passed the news from Lindsey, staying in the Snake Room, that a python was on the loose near the deck door.  I'd cleaned the aquarium Friday before picking up Lindsey at PDX International.

Fortunately for us, I didn't have to turn the house upside down searching and had another much smaller aquarium at the ready that I could at least secure.  Tomorrow I'll need to check with the pet store on my options.  Barry can spend the night in this smaller tank.

In other news, the HTC One M9 came with Lollipop, which sent me into a First World Problem tizzy.  I was expecting Marshmallow.  Upgrading does not seem that hard.  William Brown, a former O'Reilly School student, came by and rescued me from my blue funk, treating me to 10 Cloverfield Lane at The Bagdad.

Sometimes one's karma gets heavy, like in said movie, wherein disaster is the theme.  What if the ETs do come?  They might not be friendly.  How friendly would we be if left to spread unchecked, across the galaxy?  Checking historical precedents, one might conclude "not very".

Those who specialize in the "science of worry" (risk management) try to prioritize what to fear.  Should we be defending against machines taking over?  Depends on what that means.  In many dimensions they already have.

Taking over where drudgery was the norm is not necessarily a bad thing.  But what counts as "drudgery" and so on.  Will humans be smart enough to let themselves not work at meaningless tasks, just to "earn the right" to have a life.

Engaging in useless tasks for no reason is called "not having a life" where I come from.

Lindsey was very calm about the snake on the loose.  She asked how long it had been free.  "At least a day" I speculated.  "Cool" she said.

Walker is feeling pretty weak in the meditation department.  I transferred her to friends in the FNB network for healing.  She needs to recover her strength.

Thanks to Ron Braithwaite for dropping by this afternoon and joining me on an errand.

Men's Retreat

I managed to overlap with the Quaker guys, plus the Great Bear Camp owners, all in one day this year.  I was rolling out of the driveway at 4:06 AM and back before midnight the same day.

Getting some time in the rain forest, seeing the cougar scratching posts, the new bridge and so on, made it worth all that driving.

Also, the Quaker men were good at telling life stories, talking about what it's been like for them to be dads, fathers, husbands, single men, boys, soldiers or whatever roles they've played.

Thanks to Carl Thatcher and Joe Snyder for setting the tone.  The theme:  Making Our Lives Count.

Tom Wittick reminded me to study the life of Houdini more.  Houdini knew Lovecraft, Teddy Roosevelt, Arthur Conan Doyle.  Tom is a font of interesting historical information.

On the way back from our hike to see the cougar scratch posts (trees whereon cougars sharpened their claws), the camp owner joked he was so off the grid that when he turned on the radio, he heard words the broadcasters took for granted, that he'd never heard.  Like "meme" (on NPR).

We talked about "memes" after that, singing commercial jingles as we emerged from the forest.  "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should".  There's no smoking at Bear Camp.

Sound Check

Trinkets are interactive / editable.  We're sharing about them on edu-sig this month.  Naomi and I are the new listowners.

Smoking Gun?

So what about taking the show on the road in a Bizmo (business mobile) and sending a heads up to the hinterlands that "code school" might be an option.  Consider a future in IT (part of STEM or STEAM).

I was ready to start with recruiting a couple decades ago at least, and started sharing my designs.   Later I started articulating the vision in my on-line journals (blogs), getting it out there.

A Control Room, or Dispatching Center, would keep the Bizmos busy.  Sounds like fun.

On the road with Global Data (or Global Matrix as the case may be).

However, the GNU Math meme (a pun on "new math") was also deeply tied to those stream-linings in spatial geometry, where we get all those pretty whole number volumes and a quantum leap in sophistication, in terms of being able to think geospatially, with more than just XYZ as a scaffolding (matrix).

We had the IVM (another matrix), we had Quadrays (different basis vectors).

Everything was published, in color, with animations, including to Wikipedia and Wikieducator.

Sources were cited, proofs were made.

Even H.S.M. Coxeter, King of Infinite Space, said the sphere packing formula as worth crowing about.  We did some crowing.

We've seen almost no interest, however, in any of the above.   Search the web, check if I'm right.  No need to take my word for it.  My fellow humans have other priorities, no time for follow-through.

I shared about Quadrays with PSU's Math Learning Center (MLC).

I delivered talks on the concentric hierarchy to any math class that'd let me in (quite a few did), as well as at Pycons, Europythons etc.

But all this flint clicking failed to start a fire apparently.  How soggy was the fuel?

Lets hope some future student of our time, maybe in a hundred years, comes up with some theories, as to why a promising future was disowned and disavowed.

I bet there's some story to unearth, maybe even a "smoking gun".

Notes From Hyperspace

Mom uses a walker, I've got some ankle problems (not too severe) and the dog can't walk at all, so our current cast at Blue House might be called a family of Hobbles (versus Hobbits), my lame attempt at some kind of joke.

I've been haunting magazine racks, the real ones, like at Fred Meyer's out by Oregon Clinic just now, where mom was getting an all clear on a lung spot they'd been watching.  Good news.

These particular magazine shelves opted out of of carrying the computer mags, other than one Tips for Windows 10 compendium.  Other Freddies have the comp mags.  Browsing mags is not a new habit for me.

Yes, I'm following the thread about Grunch locking out Uncle Sam while meanwhile planning 5G global telecomms all by its lonesome.  That's per Grunch of Giants predictions.  We used to call it the design science revolution.

Ms. Coulter and "the Donald" are right that there's a kind of "adios mentality" regarding some of the older mindsets.  They're stumping for higher voltage across national borders, more electric fences or whatever.  China goes through these cycles too.

Nationalism pushed to the extreme Coulter envisions has never been tried at the scale any future USA would need to attempt, if truly wishing to seal its borders against those without the proper paperwork.

The only reason the USA gets away with projecting itself as a global power is the hope that gives many a foreign national of one day emigrating.  The more selfish the USA becomes, the fewer the tenable bases of operation overseas.  Supranational corporations know this pattern well.

Mindsets go in and out of style, not as frivolously fast as hem lines go up and down maybe, but over much longer cycles, like Kondratiev waves (remember those?).

One of my students @ < guild /> ; introduced me to Quantopian, which I also stumbled upon while following the Jupyter story.  Jupyter is spin-off from the I-Python Notebook project, refactored to be more generalized, with the Python bits separate.  

I've been using nbviewer (Notebook viewer) for it's intended purpose:  to render public Jupyter Notebooks given the URL.  I have two examples saved at Github, which I yak about more on mathfuture.

Github also renders Jupyter Notebooks natively, but with more restrictions.  For example to see the embedded Youtubes in my example, one needs to let nbviewer do the rendering.

O'Reilly, a former employer, has been jumping on the Jupyter bandwagon, supporting an Open Source project of its own called Thebe.  Jupyter is experimenting with adding workflows that would enable the kind of work cycle we enjoyed at O'Reilly School.

However when it comes to learning programming, I don't see the Notebook as a replacement for the IDE.  These are two different genres of software.  That's why the Anaconda distro comes with Spyder (an IDE) and not just I-Python Notebook.

I'm upbeat about all this technology and its Open Source foundations and share about it with my bevy of students in California, to whom I recommend the Anaconda distro from Continuum Analytics.  I also share my enthusiasm for PythonAnywhere.

I've had three posts so far accepted for publication by the CERM Academy, a risk management focused cyber-place.

Thought for the day (TFTD):  given we call it "hypertext" as in HTTP and HTML, why not start referring to cyberspace as likewise hyperspace?

We reserve hyperspace for science fiction meanings only?  As a literary device, it explains near-instantaneous inter-planetary travel.

Given we do not really have that physics pinned down, but do have the cyber-thing going, why not loosen the grip of the fiction writers and take a step towards reality?

My friend Gene Fowler, the poet / ex-con who discovered Bucky and Synergetics "on the inside" (in San Quentin), thought "hyper" really meant little more than "wow" or "gosh" and so all this hypertext talk was to his ear was somewhat immature-sounding, like "wow-text" or maybe "golly-gee-wiz-text".

I would argue that thanks to science fiction, our meaning for "hyper" had evolved to a more geometric picture, of how locales could all interconnect, by means of "secret tunnels" if you will.  That image carries over in this proposed "new" application of the "hyperspace" concept.

Anyway it's not about Uncle Sam being "locked out", only not having the right to insist on Grunch dumbing itself down just to please the District of Columbia.

DC is less powerful than Wall Street according to Bernie Sanders, who oughta know, and Wall Street watches the rest of the world in hopes of seeing its quantopian dreams coming true.

A track record of extremist, immoderate policies, both foreign and domestic, has dispelled any illusions that DC is to be given the car keys; too many DUIs, too much driving under the influence of debilitating mindsets.

Physics Youtubes

After staring at divided spheres all day, as in carved into triangles (windows), the concept of flux, charge flowing, blowing if you will, like the wind, lends itself to different pictures, than one of squares.

Squares are less happy on spheres.

The lines of latitude and longitude are not about making squares, much as we might kid ourselves.

Oliver Heaviside, same as in Heaviside-Gibbs (they collaborated), gets credit for the cuter form of Maxwell's Equations.

Charge density is the explosive content, which adds up to what emanates through all those triangles (Coulomb, Gauss).  Curl (swirl).  Magnetic flux (Faraday).

No accident early derivatives were named "fluxions" by Sir Isaac.

Here's an excerpt of something I posted to The Physics Learning Research List (PHYSLRNR-LIST@listserv.buffalo.edu), replying to my own post in this context.  One typo fixed ("tries" -> "trees").   

Date:  Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 9:12 AM 
Re: entropy video

I think polling educators in a subject regarding publicly / freely available teaching materials on that subject is a great way to foment productive dialog.  

I know Entropy is uber-basic to the core concepts the Physics curriculum wants to communicate effectively, so why not sample specimens on that topic in particular?  

What I've noticed is that in contrast to the magnetic field concept, which starts in many cases with the whole Earth being magnetic, there's no generalization regarding the Entropy of the planet (Earth).  Is it (A) increasing  (B) decreasing or (C) the question makes no physical sense.

We've talked about photosynthesis as a means of mass impoundment i.e. the total weight of trees as fixed hydrocarbons (water and carbon both) accounts for a lot of mass in the biosphere, but then the biosphere itself is but a thin film of negligible mass. 

If one were arguing whether Earth was gaining or losing mass on balance, I'd hazard (A) gaining, because of infalling space matter, however miniscule.  More matter is coming in than leaving and that's what matters, or am I wrong?

But what about Entropy?  It's not a physical quantity but a measure in a phase space.

Clearly Earth is *not* an isolated system, quite the opposite:  it's plugged directly into a star for fusion power energy.  So there's nothing in the equations of thermodynamics that says Earth *has* to be gaining Entropy right now, at this point it its existence.  So I see where (B) decreasing *might* be a sensible answer.

In any case, the contrast is stark:  those topics with a "whole Earth meaning / interpretation" such as "magnetic field" immediately use the whole Earth as an example to anchor the concept.   The Youtube videos are notoriously silent on this question of the Entropy of the Earth, that I can find, implying (C) the question makes no physical sense.  Too bad if so.

Code School Syllabus

I sent a memo around at work circling this forty-five minute contribution by Derek Banas as an unpretentious quick fly-through of the Python language, minus some bells and whistles like decorators and generators.

Some of those parens might come out i.e. keywords while, if and not are not callables, no keyword is, but that doesn't mean one can't nestle right up against them, parens keeping the object circled.  Two idioms one might say:

What is and is not callable takes some time to sink in.

Good job Derek, slick editing and nice job slicing off a big helping without worrying about wrapping our minds around each and every keyword.  That would come with follow-up clips, now that we've enjoyed a quick intro.

Additionally, I'd like to recommend the clip below for it's well-thought-out and communicated views regarding what languages to tackle in 2016.  A good list to choose from, but there's really no reason to limit the field to ten, other than to keep the attention span of the viewer.  Like, Scala and Clojure are both warming waters I'd add.

Put another way:  there's room for more than one Top Ten list.  This is as good a list as any.  I like having Python in the best technical schools but yet not having to defend the number one position, stressful in any case.  I need to take a look at C++11/14 it sounds like.  Britannica's 11th was one of its best too.

Cyberia: A Next Space

I was pleased to watch a goodly portion of this Southern Methodist University professor's lectures, on tap at the local library, Belmont branch.  He builds in the thesis that the easy availability of space for expansion is integral within the American psyche, as he defines it.  How much is that changing now?

Rather than give a facile answer, I do say we need to factor cyberspace into the picture.  The fight for land and property was often to get a bigger soap box and command of push media such as radio and TV broadcasting networks.  The way to have a voice heard was to emulate Hearst or someone equally powerful.  Cyberspace lets the hoi polloi, me one of them, short cut around all that.  We stand on the shoulders of giants.

In other words, I'm suggesting that Cyberia, which Americans (Amerikanskis) helped to pioneer is a factor, that this kind of space is still real.  People wanted a place "one mouse click away", not buried behind a few fat cats, a few hogs.  We're close to getting there.  The URLs are turning our pyramids into local anomalies within the graph, blips on the radar, no longer so overbearing or in the way of our having a voice as a people.

For David Bowie

:: a little man who fell to earth ::

The Berlin File (movie review)

I chose this pretty much at random from the foreign country shelves at Movie Madness.  I spent probably as much time with The Making Of.

I was maybe curious how a Korean-made film would work with Germany, but it wasn't that hard to make a seamless blend, as Korea, like Germany, has taken the full brunt of the Cold War.

I recall being in Berlin myself when the wall was still a serious obstacle to one's freedom of movement.  Our train from Scandinavia was through East Germany to East Berlin whereas our US passports granted us access to the West.  Dad liked crafting obscure itineraries like that.

Director Ryu portrays a divided Korea fighting a Spy vs Spy war against the back drop of Berlin.  The budget was about $10 million.  It's a full-blown award-winning international action thriller in style, but without the distribution of say a Miramax.  The film was made in 2012 on location (in Berlin) but also in Latvia and Korea.  Getting the weapons to match in all three places was something of an ordeal.

The director imagined the film as contemporary to the point of futuristic by a few years and didn't want any dated ordnance such as Korean audiences were already used to.

As a non-Korean, I miss a lot when it comes to catching any nuances about language and am glad the Making Of movie was explicit about that aspect of the movie. The elite / elitist spies on the North Korean side apparently spoke with an accent that signified their higher social class, reflective of spoiled brats from oligarchical families.

The paradox here is the Communist Republic is ideally class-free (the US value of "equality before the law" i.e no special rights, by dint of birth, is not that different), so having the spies wear their social class on their sleeves, so to speak, made for a more curious effect in the mind of a Korean viewer.

Apparently language usage patterns are by now different enough between North and South, that the South Korean actors found affecting realism a challenge  (the "bad guy" worried about getting it wrong).  Someone in the background was advising for authenticity.

Again, I missed a lot, though I did catch the reference to John le Carré (the book passed between NIS and CIA).  Indeed, towards the start of the film I lost track of who was who at first.

Being a spy requires keeping track of plots within plots, with the story always taking surprising twists and turns.  An inability to either hatch or follow intricate plots is a self-disqualifying trait if you wish espionage as your occupation.  Those eager for such a career path need films like this for practice.

As one of the narrators points out (the director himself as I recall), the story is about people with concealed identities struggling to find their way in a foreign country and getting left out in the cold, as the wheels turning in the home country power centers get out of sync with what's going on in the field.  Heroes are abandoned or betrayed by their own headquarters, a common theme in spy novels.

I was reminded of The Americans, the TV show, because of the married couple under cover.  This Korean couple has given birth to no kids yet however (spoiler alert).  Also, Germany is not as much a direct target of the North Koreans' spying, whereas in The Americans the host country is also the primary country of interest.

I was also reminded of Farewell, for its centering on a Cold War fought by embassies in a European capital, though not Berlin.

From a Quaker BBS

:: "guilty dog" compilation ::

 Comment by Kirby Urner yesterday on QuakerQuaker, one typo fixed, links added:

I suppose a starting point is to what extent do we think guilt is built-in chemically, like a hormone, versus cultivated as an institution, a complex social practice, like a game.  I know people like to post Youtubes of "dogs looking guilty" however I sense some projection.  I'd say the basis for guilt is in mammal behavior but full-blown guilt is reserved for those with significant linguistic abilities.

In Nietzsche's code of ethics, any grudge-keeping, ax-grinding or resentment of any kind within oneself, is a troubling sign of mental weakness, a loss in personal power, a kind of retardation.  So in Will to Power and other works, the aphorisms and meditations are geared towards stamping out such things, as too base for a true Übermensch or whatever.

This code of ethics later surfaces in the San Francisco-based "est Training" wherein trainees were sternly warned against any "putting up with" or "trying to change".  Guilt came in for a drubbing as something slavers used to deter our exercise of true freedoms -- something like that (I went through a few of these est Trainings in the late 70s, early 80s, including with overseer responsibilities as a Centers Network volunteer -- like with Quakers! -- but each one was different; it's called The Forum today (Landmark Corporation)).

Zombie Dice

Library Science

work / study site (Princeton campus left, Route 1 center, A = where I worked

Sometimes I forget how, over the years, my interest in Library Science has materialized.  I'm remembering sitting in Firestone getting trained in rules for alphabetizing the card catalog.  Reading in Knuth's TAOCP volume 3 brought that back to me; he shows some of the rules applied, for keeping publication titles in sequential order.  Not as easy as it sounds.  Finding books in a library is a skill, not deprecated, even with URIs in the picture.

At Georgetown Library, I filed Arabic language titles back to their shelves, alphabetically.  Yes, I had studied Arabic, but had not learned much more than the alphabet, enough to interpolate book titles.  I've since tried to master Hiragana and Katakana alphabets, associating them with phonemes.  My smartphone helps me.  I'm not that great a student.  Learning languages easily is not one of my gifts.  I've often wondered about what kinds of immersive videos and hands on games might accelerate the progress of an average joe like me.

Wandering through open stacks gives me a charge in some way.  A commercial bookstore like Powell's on W Burnside will do the same.  I'm not talking about mystical healing powers so much as the excitement of cortical matter, or perhaps some glandular elixir is released -- it all depends what section of the bookstore one is perusing at the time, as to the explanation for its galvanizing powers.  I've been an habitual browser of bookshelves and count myself lucky, and in good company, for that reason.  Hypertext aided my browsing with dream-come-true tools (research tools, art supplies, raw "metaphysical materials" -- cyber-stuff -- of many flavors).

So that's at least two jobs in the library.  My time in Firestone might have coincided with my 1985 return to Princeton where I ended up working in a small business back office doing clerical tasks.  H.P. Clayton's on Princeton Square.  Or was that a summer job.  I also worked as a janitor at Forrestal Campus, cleaning up around the Tokamak makers (a fusion reactor prototype; I never saw it assembled just watched workers make parts for it).  Forrestal is close to the main Princeton campus, by car at least, along Route One.  I should Google Earth it.

Eleven Nations

This Voice of America website / blog denied my comment a public presence.

I introduced myself as "third culture" (Rome, Philippines...) and finding America weird, not unlike Portland.

But no one is talking "Civil War" Marcus (real name?) or rather, we Left Coasties aren't trying to start a fight.  Like we won already OK? :-D

As a Cascadian, I was simply grateful for WDC's retreating self-importance.  Why not?  Pacific Rim wasn't born yesterday right?

Anyway, a fascinating discussion.  I'm enjoying the science fiction aspects.

What is JQuery?

Remember the Browser Wars?

Back in the day, pre Web everywhere, I was typing odd-looking graph theory describing hypertext (the Web) and mailing it to the Library of Congress for some reason.

I was living in WDC and exploring their collection at the time, though it's hardly "open stack" like Firestone (Princeton campus), which would entail more monitoring.  I was galvanized by the idea of hypertext and not having it, felt like a palpable absence.  CERN felt it too.

A lot of us saw hypertext coming over the horizon (Ted Nelson a main avatar), but the devil is in the details, meaning W3C and Mosaic, the first freely downloadable graphical web browser, got the ball rolling on a particular implementation centered around Hypertext Markup Language or HTML.

Netscape followed shortly, with its Mozilla engine (the core of FireFox today) and the Browser Wars had begun, each vying for supremacy, though for what reason?  What was this War all about?

Zooming out even further, these types of wars boil down to whether a lead company or cabal will set the standard, leaving others to play catch-up, or whether a global standard gets established with companies agreeing to write to that standard.

Both patterns make sense, although the latter one sounds less cut throat i.e. more civilized.  But sometimes "groupthink" or "designs by committee" are less than optimum and a pioneering company trail blazes a better way.  More curious things have happened.

JQuery enters the picture when the Browser Wars have mostly ended, with W3C committees having settled the standards all major browsers now follow.  We're in a time of relative civility.

However the legacy of the Browser Wars lingers and JQuery provides a logical layer above the battlefield, masking off some of the scarring inconsistencies.

For example, the JQuery event wraps the original event as an attribute, but for the most part the JQuery user remains blissfully oblivious to browser-specific details.  One ring to bind them all!

However saying JQuery detects and handles events bleeps over its core design, which is to select and filter based on HTML tags, classes, ids, attributes, and then apply changes against whatever crop is harvested.

One might select all paragraphs, or some div with id="special", and then apply new css, such as adding a class attribute, specifically to these elements.

Now, knowing what all that means requires knowing the shoptalk of tags and elements, HTML and CSS, which we may have neglected to consider as part of Language and Communications at the high school level (Unicode etc.).

Our curriculum is full of holes.  Many school systems have promised to address them.  Some will even deliver on their promise.

If you're looking for a fast way into JQuery and have a training budget, I recommend jQuery Essential Training with Joe Marini on Lynda.com.  His presentation is well organized, moves at a good clip, and is a great introduction to this JavaScript tool, appreciated by many a web developer.

Wanderers 2016.12.29

Lindsey Walker is discussing her research in Newar Charya Nritya, a form of meditation centered in dance.  The fact that Portland has a Newar temple on the same city block as the Linus Pauling House, does figure in to this narrative.

She's tackling the Newar language, in conjunction with the Buddhist tradition, as the priests and gurus who know the disciplines tend to be native Newar speakers.  Many of the texts are in this language.  Newar is Sino-Tibetan, though rendered in Sanskrit.

She's working through Oregon State University.  Charya Geeti is the musical aspect, which she's studying through the Anthropology department.  She's also doing religious and international studies, with a boost from her credits at Florida State.  Kinesiology looks at the dance aspect.

Quakerism, as I've experienced it, includes a cast of mostly women who appreciate the relevance and power of movement, and they would lead workshops in this area, but if you want deeply rooted ritual practices, Vajrayana Buddhism is where to look.

The masters of Charya Nritya realized back in the 1950s that their at one time semi-secret practice was in danger of dying out.  A few experimental solutions were devised and Lindsey is involved in some of them.

The North Indian raga system is complex and provides the basis for Charya Geeti.  The other basis would be the religious texts themselves (the "lyrics" or "verses").

We had some interesting discussions about low budget travel, such as Lindsey was doing on her first trip to Nepal.  She actually slept nine days in a forest, in addition to staying with random strangers who offered her shelter.  Barry reminisced about his Peace Corps experience.

Lindsey brought examples of the texts she's working with and sang a few notes.  We had some professional musicians in the audience.

Students of Synergetics would do well to map the dorje (or vajra, as held by Vajra Satto), to Fuller's "bow-tie" icon.

Hannah Arendt (movie review)

Tara found a nifty wall projector I'd somewhat misplaced (as in lost) and the original plan was to hook that up, renting from Amazon (not my habit).

I'm trying to get out of my box, shake loose old habits.  However, just getting the DVD from the Germany section at Movie Madness proved simple as pie (I also made pie, x2 pumpkin) and we ended up watching Hannah Arendt on the Sony Trinitron, not even an HDTV.  Talk about stuck in a pattern (but one that works!).

Besides, if I'd rented it on Amazon would I get the lengthy extras, including the panel discussion at Deustsches Haus / NYU?  Maybe, I dunno.

Heidegger has been bubbling up in conversation.  I think I'll develop my narrative around Hannah and Ayn Rand as a kind of dynamic duo.  Checking with Google, I see that's hardly a new idea.  I'm entering a well-plowed field.  Excellent.

I've been chipping away at my own self portrait, the better to fit in as a puzzle piece.  Whereas I make direct ties to Vienna Circle figures (Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Menger for example, and lets throw in Jung and Freud), I'm somewhat distant from the Continental line, coming from Princeton, though my thesis adviser, Richard Rorty, did help me to tune in.  Walter Kaufmann was happy to send Heidegger to the back of the queue, in terms of readings we might choose.  So why not approach those thinkers through leading women instead?

I hadn't realized the Eichmann trial in Israel had occurred on my watch, much less that Hannah was there for the New Yorker.  I was still somewhat oblivious at age two or whatever it was.  By the time of the Kennedy assassinations, I was tracking, and when we got to Nixon's bombing of Cambodia I was fully aware, though still just in middle school.

So Hannah and I partially overlap on the timeline.

The movie makers underline the challenge that adds, as many in their audience will, like me, have lived through this period.  Affecting realism is harder when the judge has a practiced eye.  We know what a phone sounded like when ringing.  They got it right.

I think I'll add Margaret Fuller Ossoli as another thinker here, on assignment for the New York Tribune at one time, then editor of Dial, and Dora Marsden, the British "anarcho-feminist".  How these dots connect is for later.  The movie got me in the mood to link to thinking women.

Wanderers: Winter Solstice 2015

Yesterday was high stress for me, for the same reason it is for many this time of year:  the miracle of jet travel and the possibilities that opens, for missed and cancelled flights (and of course disasters and broken hearts).

In Tara's case, car troubles and an optimistic schedule left her in tears at the ticket counter in Dayton, Ohio, with me likewise calling United for options.  We lucked out:  she arrived through Chicago instead of Denver, at 10:28 PM instead of 1:30 PM, same day, same ticket.

Lindsey, another former denizen of Blue House, now a full time student at Oregon State, doing her field work in Patan (Nepal), likewise had last minute issues, with China Southern suddenly deciding to yank the  Kathmandu-Guangzhou flight.

She was able to re-vector through Bangkok and Seoul just hours before flight time.  Patrick and I met her flight from Seattle.

So for me, December 18 was a milestone positive day with the Christmas gift of family and friends showing up as I'd hoped.  We celebrated the solstice at the Linus Pauling House.  Deke joined us as well.

Lindsey, forty hours traveling, ended up crashed out in the living room and Tara was still in route on UA 518 so neither was at our Wanderers party.  I went from the party back out to PDX, bursting with gratitude that I would be reunited with my daughter.

We had a classic solstice with Glenn bringing his signature chili, Barry the ribs, and I brought along my signature lentil dish.  Bob Boreman played some excellent electric jazz guitar.  He's been practicing a lot.  We were impressed.

Also going on down the street:  what used to be Blue Butterfly, run by Micheal (also at our party) is now called the Fernie Brae and was showcasing a new edition of Alice In Wonderland.  Dave DiNucci has played a role in this literary project and reminded us of this interesting cultural opportunity.

The pictures are all new (though in a period style), by David Delamare, one of the gallery's top artists.  The text has been revisited as well, in light of scholarship around this original tale by Lewis Carroll.  Deke was given some prints for his bedridden friend Suzanne Pardue.

Michael is now based in Bali, bringing his Southeast Asian wares to the basement of Gold Door for selling during the winter season.

Later today, Alexia, her friend John, Tara, Lindsey and myself, plan to see the new Star Wars at The Bagdad.

Philosophical Remarks

Drat, I was up all hours sampling documentaries (browsing; always my habit), and missed getting the garbage out in time.  I was awake early enough, but too preoccupied with nursing duties to remember this was Tuesday... I'm care-taking for a dog, on her last legs.

Anyway, last night I came across the above (amidst some Mars rover and giant black hole videos).  Lots of fun "making math look cryptic" -- the language of high priests no doubt, like the ones at CERN.  I'm a Mario Livio fan, glad to see him in action again.

Phi and Fibonacci numbers -- a favorite topic.  Pascal's Triangle is also good (they're connected).

The mathematician who wonders if he's being radical in saying the universe is mathematics, versus the mathematics being just an attribute of same...  when do they ever interview philosophers on whether grammar really matters that much.

Saying it is mathematics sounds dizzying in its implications... a sense of wonder / vertigo is sometimes welcome in documentaries, I don't deny it.  The thrill of a new way of looking.  Grammar (in Wittgenstein's sense) is all part of the math.

Philosophical investigations:  explorations in the geometry of -- the grammar of, shape of -- thinking (concepts, fitting together... or not).  Will we condescend to see topology in the plot structure of a novel or film?  In what dimensions, these meanings?

Saying nature is mathematics, not just a user thereof, might help bring the humanities into closer association with computation.  The book of nature:  a running program (event driven?).

Funny how when they turn to Pythagoras we're into the nightclub scene, and jazz.  Not that I have a problem with that.  I liked the mathematician-musician they interviewed.  Talented, and with a message:  studying is hard work.

I'm just thinking how Disney applied a somewhat similar spin, way back when, in the 1960s.

Global Data / Global Matrix

Glenn and I have much in common.  He has Global Matrix, I have Global Data.  Both are rubrics of some kind.  He sees Global Matrix as a technology which the Institute for Integral Design would share.

What's Global Matrix?  It has to do with spherical shells for a "Z axis" and hexapents for each of the concentric layers.  One could show not only the Earth's surface, but beneath the surface characteristics.  Showing MRI-like cross-sections of neurons would be another application of an hexagonally pixelated display.

At lunch today Glenn shared the latest of issue of Nature.  E.J. Applewhite would have been pleased about it I think as Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is given top billing and is included on Adam Rome's short list of five influential tomes on sustainability, all from the same time period, late 1960s, early 1970s.  Applewhite always saw Nature as the gold standard, when it came to acceptability within the sciences.

Another of those tomes is by Kenneth Boulding, the Quaker systems theorist.  General Systems Theory overlaps with economics.  He's sometimes called an economist.

The GUAC chart (those are the four bases of RNA, with U replaced by T in DNA), in American Scientist (vol 97.) showing how to get the 20 amino acids from 64 combinations of GUAC (4 x 4 x 4) is plenty instructive.  The sixty-four trigrams of the I-Ching, isomorphic to the sixty-four possibilities depicted, figure into Glenn's Global Matrix for sure.

The literature mapping sixty-four hexagrams to DNA sequences is fairly well developed -- the same permutations of four possibilities is at work in both.  Glenn's background in applied cryptography (NSA / Vietnam) gives him a nose for, an appreciation for, such literature.  "Connecting the dots" is the name of the game.

World Pax

A lot of Democrats are shocked by the unseemly belligerence showed towards Persia, whatever disputed borders may obtain, on the part of Republicans, uniformly condemning of the deal.

They maybe remember that Kissinger, a Republican loyalist, advised "tilting towards Iraq" and that was official policy in terms of where the ordnance went, to support Saddam's side.  The Iranians were the "bad guys" in this chapter, all the more so after the hostage crises.  Or was that when the dynamics changed?  Under Reagan the threat was suddenly south of the border.

NATO/Handout/CNP/Corbis 
Donald Rumsfeld, then ambassador to NATO,
with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
and President Richard Nixon, Brussels, June 26, 1974

So after Carter came a tilt the other way, with Republicans negotiating an end to said hostage crisis, and Ronald Reagan becoming president, with Bush his Vice President (Casey in CIA, preparing for Iran-Contra).

That there had been some kind of pivot, post the Carter administration, took even Saddam by surprise and he assumed his invading Kuwait would not be the trigger it was for a major shift in weight under George HW Bush as president.

Under the next George Bush (son of George Bush) the US would inflict uber-damage on a former ally, calling it "shock and awe".  Some saw it as betrayal.  Wasn't Iran the enemy, not Iraq?  Not since Ollie North sought Iran's help against Cuba-supported Nicaraguans.  Wasn't that an "Iran Deal" of sorts, until exposed?

But by now the Shah was out of power and the Ayatollah Khoumeni had replaced him with a different lineage.  Taking Iran for granted was no longer in the cards; it could not be bullied so easily.  To make a long story short, Saddam became the next Noriega, Iraq the next Panama. Rumsfeld and Cheney would help with both the tilt (under Nixon) and the counter-tilt (under Bush).

By the sound of things, I'm planning to recount some lengthy and dreary story about the Orient, or Arabia or whatever.  I must be into oil or something.  Do I have a point or what?

I'm just trying to explain why the Republicans may have a harder time swallowing an "Iran Deal" given their thinking hearkens back to English Empire days in trying to imagine "what a superpower would do" in these circumstances.  Their answer (by the sound of things):  just restore that old Pax Americana and let America rule the world once again!  They're thinking more like Allen Dulles maybe?  He's more their role model.

The thing is, there never was any Pax Americana, that's a myth.  The 1800s were about a Civil War (in the US) and the 1900s were about Global Wars (involving the US), so there's really no "pax" in this picture and the US is lucky to still be here in any shape we might recognize.

I'm all for Pax on Earth myself, in the sense of Peace or Mir.  I don't see that one nation, under God or otherwise, needs to enforce it, as that tends to stir resentment.  More, it takes a willingness to allow it on the part of many nations.  Allowing is more natural than forcing.  The world is sick and tired of wars and has the ability to heal if given half a chance.  More ordnance is not what's most needed.

Democrats see the Pax more like that, a co-production, whereas those still under the spell of the Manifest Destiny meme virus (still rampant in some circles) need to see a Stars & Stripes on everything if they're to believe it's really real.  To the rest of us, less infected, all that "faux superpower" nonsense looks really phony.  No empire needs restoring.  No empire is what's best.

I'm glad that Congressmen from both parties, and from more parties as they arise, get to travel a lot, especially out of the country, as a perk of the job.  Sometimes I forget, as an expat who grew up while wandering the planet, that many in Washington DC were never so privileged.  Their education takes time, just as mine did.  Even presidential candidates need more experience sometimes.

Speaking of Memes...

I've not yet tackled the Richard Dawkins corpus but understand he's the source of the "meme" meme (i.e. the meme "meme"), though for him, twaz / is the "gene" that is selfish, i.e. our DNA may be cast as "prime mover" in some way Aristotle might understand.

I'm really grateful for the "meme" meme, and do think that "meme" itself is quintessential, in showing off its power as a meme, even in defining what a meme is.  Like GNU, the "meme" meme is recursive (self referential).  I acknowledge "memetics" as a legitimate area for study and so on.

I do want to make the case for "selfish memes" with a reminder of the Standard est Training, in which the Mind was the ultimate in Selfish, masking Being (authentic self).  Yeah, I know, sounds like a pile of Heidegger.  But the point was well made:  ideologies will throw people to the fire in droves, as it's precisely the DNA we're willing to sacrifice, so long as our core meme set or "way of life" lives on (continues to make sense to us).

Switching gears to a Quaker story, our founder George Fox is famous for answering, when asked why he didn't carry a sword (or handgun), that "you can't kill the Devil" with such a primitive outward physical device.  What he was saying is the physically animated body in front of him, the human being in corporeal form, was never the enemy.  The fight is with something maybe she or he saw on TV.  Why go around slaying couch potatoes, or the ones acting out?  These "meat puppets" of the various "meme-plexes" (ideologies) need some countering intelligence, whereas martyrs to memes help spread them more widely.

Let's talk about "psychological warfare".  Immediately we think of people in camo (OK, maybe only some of us do), but lets admit it sounds a lot more military than civilian.  But who gets us hooked on cigarettes and other killer substances we know are bad for us?  They look more like cartoons and clowns don't they?  The "Mad Men" of Madison Avenue, the legendary birthplace of "spin doctors" in the world of advertising, are for the most part not paid as military officers.  Yet isn't suggesting you inhale what will kill you just a tad bit like chemical warfare, just a little?  Psychology is certainly involved.

Again, it's hard to see how our DNA benefits from smoking cigarettes, whereas it's easy to see how selling these things turns a pretty penny.  Having the advantage of legality is always worth having.  As a citizen of the State of Oregon, rolling back Prohibition has been on our agenda too.  Although not big on cigs, I imbibe spirits.  A lot of these memes have had their way with me and my DNA.

So that's how I'd preamble my question for Dr. Dawkins:  why "selfish gene" and not "meme".  Just asking.  He may have answered this very question a million times.  There may be a FAQ about it.  Forgive me for thinking out loud and advertising my ignorance in that case.  Inquiring minds want to know.

Before I sign off, I want to circle "Open Source" as a meme that I care about, and yes I'm all for keeping the discussion alive about "Free" and what that means.  It doesn't "get old", not that fast.  New generations have come on the scene.  Revolution OS is worth seeing.  I'd screen at least excerpts of that in my Saturday Academy classes.