Black Mirror Episode?

Magnitsky died in a Russian prison being held on charges relating to working for this UK oligarch who was originally Putin's fan but later claims to be his greatest enemy. We all heard a lot about Magnitsky when that famous Trump Tower meeting with the Russian lobbyist occurred. She was not there to talk dirt on Hillary and everyone got super bored, as oligarch squabbles over big money and reputation backstabbing are too ordinary in those circles, where syndicates demonize one another incessantly (Hollywood is more friendly? Maybe all that Scientology is working for some?).

Browder says his lawyer was clubbed to death while chained to his death bed in prison, by the very people Magnitsky was accusing of financial fraud, as Browder's legal representative, or lawyer. But then there's a counter-narrative which is what makes this a rabbit hole, somewhat by definition (a vortex of contesting stories converging towards the same truths).

We heard about Browder again when Putin and Trump met in privacy in Helsinki and Putin offered to help out with the Mueller indictment of the GRU guys, in exchange for some interviews with Browder. No one would be in custody or under immediate threat of extradition. Maybe I'm wrong about the details of Putin's statesman-like offer (there's a treaty about nations giving each other mutual support in criminal investigations), as I was not privy to the meeting and back then had not yet connected the dots between Browder and Magnitsky. Trump comes out of the meeting saying this could work, probably knowing less about Browder (or Magnitsky) than I do at this point. Too boring. But he's soon told that Browder is Putin's number one foe and it all clicks into place. Who knows.

Anyway, fascinating stuff. The Magnitsky Act sails through Congress on the basis of this compelling testimony from Browder, and becomes the convenient hammer, the justification needed, to turn the screws everywhere on the Axis of Evil, always shifting (remember BRIC?), based on whatever the public will believe. The public is infinitely gullible and has rarely applied the brakes. Now that more of the public is being coerced into homelessness and unforgiving debt, the political model is to drop them from the unemployment roles and make counting their votes harder, as your tent on the sidewalk is not a registered voter address, by definition. Problem solved re that democracy business, a pipe dream. Back to the oligarch infighting channel, the one we most love to sponsor.

Facebook Rant

When a Medal of Freedom winner publishes a book saying "the USA we have known is now bankrupt and extinct" and that doesn't make headlines, we know right away that journalism lacks integrity. Walter Kaufmann (Princeton University) warned us about journalism. I sent "headlines we'd like to see" to WaPo at the time. "Medal of Freedom Winner Declares USA Bankrupt!" I was living in DC back then, making trouble with my typewriter.

WIRED and such have little choice but to fall into the trap of calling him a crackpot (as he hoped they would, Brer Rabbit style ("please don't throw me into the briar patch")). When you call someone with that many patents, awards, degrees, published works a "crackpot" you pay a price, as what does that make the rest of us by comparison? Setting the bar a little high are we? Idiocracy ensues, with WIRED paving the way.

So now we're in the situation where a thinker advertised to the world for his positive futurism (officially) is not read in schools because too much of a threat for speaking truth to power.

Like how could one possibly claim to know or teach American History and/or Literature and not include that bit about a top celebrity turning a top subversive? How can we claim to have any "public schools" whatsoever when the geometry for which Bucky was explicitly given an award is not shared? If you don't read Grunch of Giants in high school, let alone college, you must not have had real teachers. Phony baloney is what you got. Oh, and now they want you to pay back those loans? For what again? For the heritage you never got?

Instead of indulging in outrage, I can just sit back and laugh, knowing privatization is complete, the public schools are all dead, and Bucky was entirely correct in his prophesy and proclamation (as close to a declaration as we'll ever need).

The corporate media need very much to prop up their tawdry version of Uncle Sam (an imperialist psychopath), lest we see through it all and make Exxon pay for its own team of goons, rather than tapping into a privatized mercenary force funded by unrepresented Americans who's heritage was denied them in their schooling. 

They don't even share Bucky with the military do they? Grunch of Giants at West Point? Probably only the CIA reads it (required) as it's mentioned so often.

After two generations of not teaching easy simple streamlining tetravolume stuff to 4th or 8th  or 12th graders (already certified useful by highest authorities), I think it's more than obvious we don't have a free press or a real public education system.

I feel free to endlessly mock the true believers and their pathetic substitute for real learning.

*  *  *

It's not like I'm saying that just because MF winner publishes yadda yadda, that we must all agree it's true, i.e. "yes of course the US is bankrupt and extinct, the great Bucky hath spoken." 

Not at all. No one has that kind of power. The book jacket calls it satire.

It's just a once-adulated, much-awarded, icon of positive futurism, did in fact write that, and gave his reasoning and context, and then was awarded the MF (not tossed in jail). 

It's the historical facts of the matter I'm underlining, not that we have to treat Fuller's writing as edicts.

These facts are what're so amazing and crazy-interesting, especially when you factor in there's a newfangled kind of geometry, and geodesic domes and... wow. Why not in schools?  Are we really that afraid of our own past?

Lets just share the facts. Then be skeptical and critical, say why he's wrong and so on.

But to just claim he's a crackpot, so we're justified in our silence, no that doesn't fly it all. 

Too double standard. 

If Bucky's a crackpot, after so many faculty positions, awards, patents, inventions, then what are we, who think that way about him?

The Redacted Investigation

I keep going back to this story. Why not pursue?

It'd be like that Skripal case, where the accused GRU agents, posing as tourists to Salisbury (as if there were anything there) smuggled nerve agent in a sealed perfume bottle, latter discovered by hapless dumpster divers. 

Brits saw through their cover story immediately, having grown up on John le Carré spy novels and knowing a "likely story" when they see one. 

Put all these GRU guys, who supposedly jumped to their feet when Trump said "get those emails" (Hillary's missing), on CNN (like they did for Osama). 

They'd have to send a team to Russia and true, you're not in jail in America where the cowards threaten you even before trial. I don't want sleaze balls getting involved.

The reaction when Putin made this offer was "no fair, the president trusts Putin more than us". In light of what the president considered a "witch hunt" this was in no way surprising.

Still, it seems the Mueller investigation had nothing to lose by at least gathering more evidence. The GRU guys would be confronted with the same forensic evidence that convinced the grand jury. 

We could all learn a ton about the technology used to leave or remove fingerprints, as when trying to conceal one's own moves and/or frame others.

The public has proved that it has an appetite for this kind of stuff. Trump saw a way forward with potentially high TV ratings. Is it really too late?

I guess the FBI (special prosecutor) closed the investigation without ever caring to actually interview the indicted foreign nationals. They wanted to extradite first, get the alleged criminals into custody, where they could be put in solitary and otherwise mistreated (ala Chelsea Manning).

Obviously the Russians were not about to turn over their own military officers to a foreign power on flimsy charges, before ever seeing a shred of forensic evidence. 

Dismissing Putin's offer out of hand, after the US president said he thought it worth pursuing, proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the president has very limited power. 

Meme Spotting

The internet is abuzz with rumors, that Yang Gang is hoping to "steal" the mascot of the Trumpians, Pepe the Frog. The rumor is sketchy for a host of reasons, starting with Gamers who've adopted Pepe were not, to a player, loyal to that one camp to begin with.

Pepe grew up alongside Annoying Orange, after Evil Bert got too scary (mixed up with Al Qaeda, another story).  He needs to live on beyond the Trump Era, and so if he takes on some Yang vibe, is that really a radical transectomy, or more a re-shade and new slant?

A typical scenario for a Gamer is I'm doing well in a cool basement, holding down some part time work, underemployed but addicted to gaming anyway, and that's a lot of work in itself.  Youtubes show what a lot of work it is.

Then some foreign policy wonks from Groupthink Inc. come along, and whisper in the ear of some all-gullible Columbia (the name of a District, and a mythical figure), that she needs to yank our boys away from their computer games and deploy them in Middle Eastern deserts, to right some wrong that's being done. "Go shock and awe someone son" says the latest "brought to you by..." Uncle Sam.

Many troops witnessed first hand that "doing good" and "spreading democracy" had a lot more to do with spreading terror, and that families back home were paying the price.

The Tulsi Gabbard followers include an overlapping constituency, many stuck overseas to this day, and deprived of much representation.  No wonder there's a Yang-Tulsi meme going.

Having siblings overseas in harm's way is no way to encourage concentration in school.

These wars needed to have been necessary, in retrospect, to justify the continued allegiance of the eligible classes of male and now also female resident, whether citizens or in line for said status.  Keeping that narrative intact has proved difficult among the English speakers (the UK has gone through some similar soul searching).

When Yang Gang comes along with new Silicon Valley think, and a kind of economics relating more to the thermodynamics of Planet Earth than we're used to, and fully conversant with automation, then Wall Street gets nervous.  The financial capitals have their own economics which they understand, and which is less like electrical engineering (with a solar power socket).

Pepe might be safely symbolic in the traditional financial sector, which has gained control of governments on many levels, but Silicon Valley has its own metaphysics, inheriting as much from Asia as the European families.  The Empire State is more comfortable with a mindset it well understands, even if it poses as despising same.  At least Trump's main focus is the Middle East.

Yang is happy to discuss his race, and what it's like to be bullied, but how that gives him no right to say he knows what it's like to be black, and stigmatized for it.  That part of his banter is nicely worked out, and then race becomes more of a non-issue.

Sure we're allowed to notice people's "race" (whatever that means to us), and talk about it (somewhat differently).  He's not at war with the many vernaculars.  He's comfortable with colloquialisms.

In that regard, Yang is media-fluent in a way Trump surprisingly is as well (for someone that old -- but groomed by TV to be ratings-worthy).

I don't see myself as the answer man, when it comes to how Pepe will tip.  I'm purposely not reading a lot of opinions on this topic, as I'd prefer to think it through independently.  I'll be watching.

I do know that a lot of draft age youths would prefer $1000 a month to play computer games, some of which could be educational and rewarding in other ways.  Ditto their parents and siblings.

As a Coffee Shops Network avatar, with gaming for charity blueprints, I'm obviously not trying to fight the Gamer community.  Quakers Play Quake is one of my imaginary bumper stickers.

Yang and I share an appreciation for truckers and trucking (the industry).  He doesn't know about Truckers for Peace (citizen diplomats, getting academic credit, with truck stops the new embassies in some ways -- including for the so-called "virtual" or "diaspora" nations).

On a First Day

The downstairs office doubles as a guest room for Carol, who is more than a guest (she's my mom), whereas the back room with all the telecommunications doubles as a guest room.  That leave's the daughters' bedroom upstairs, vacated by both, to serve as a full time office (there's no bed).  I feature it in my taxes, if that still matters.  It used to.

Said Carol wants to meet and greet an old friend moving to Portland, however her sleep schedule is such that making it to Multnomah Friends is far from easy.  At the moment, the jury is still out.  We've missed the main worship, which starts in four minutes, but then there's still social hour.  This is Meeting for Business day, meaning they'll be having a potluck.

My long term guest Lindsey, since departed and part time in Nepal, pioneered using the half finished basement as digs.  The telecomm office was leaking back then (literally), as you'll find out if you explore my Flickr album.  We both had our relationships with other people.  Having a floor between us worked well.  Later Jen moved into Carol's office.  She lives in LA.

Both Jen and Lindsey, and later Melody, were my housemates when Occupy rolled around.  I'd lived with several housemates in college, and afterwards. That Harrison Street resembled my previous lifestyle (e.g. 2 Dickinson Street, Princeton University) is perhaps not all that surprising.

Our kitchen had long been a hub for Food Not Bombs, more for auxiliary storage than front lines prep (church kitchens are much bigger).  During Occupy, Melody and Lindsey help FNB establish a serving site, which later moved when all those paper plate and disposable utensil people showed up.  I never moved to a tent, and instead maintained my logistical role as a food deliverer.

If you've curious about the Occupy chapter, it's documented in detail from my unique perspective in these blogs.  As for the global phenomenon, I don't know that there was one.  Attempts to connect Arab Spring to what was happening on Wall Street, in Portland, in Syria... I wasn't one to see those as tightly connected.  I had my OPDX point of view.

Art School

I'm thinking "art school" in the sense that we're seeking generic fluency with shapes in space. Just polyhedrons is more Platonic than time/size nudes, but only by a tad, as they need to be rendered in time and space, or imagined. A use of "porn" in common circulation is "any core theme of some pictures" so like a collection of pictures about trains is thereby "train porn" and so on. We've seen this use among geeks since BarCamp at least.

So "polyhedron porn" is a lot of what Art School is about, in terms of exercising those CAD muscles you'll need, for 3D printing, perhaps for sports (downhill skiing requires good spatial sense).

The content I pick up on is "level playing field" for the most part in that just about any audience is equally unfamiliar, unless part of some literati digerati that's been silently following along.  You've known about the Jitterbug for decades perhaps.  In that case, a lot of this content is recognized.

What might be less recognizable is the "S factor" banter I've bolted on in part two, as this jargon arises from telecommunications among Synergetics Explorer Award winners, little known among artists either, although I claim a few big names in my circle.  David organized the trip to see Magnus Wenninger.

The "S factor" is just a decimal number, or use any base, a quantity, and ratio between two volumes, one named "S module" the other named "E module".  These, in turn, come from a small vocabulary of modules evolved in a prose work in philosophy, on the shelves since the 1970s.  Some of us were already involved in similar explorations but found common ground in Fuller's vocabulary.

For a long time, David translated his findings into writings about the T module in Synergetics, which is shape-wise identical to the E, but has a different surface:volume ratio.  Some decades back, he gear shifted as he came to see he'd been studying the E, less so the T.

We did have a breakthrough on the T however, which is bumping up the T module RT's volume by 3/2, from 5 to 7.5, brings its vertexes into congruence with those of the volume 6 RD.

However, these two videos don't mention the RD or RT much at all.  The RD goes by in a flash, whereas I mine the RT just to get the E.  I need to derive S/E (the so-called "S factor") in order to get my Python generator (named "Jitterbug") to spit back next values (a sequence of volumes, as you're welcome to discover).

Jackpot Junk (memo to Nodes)

I understand how casinos themselves might like to have some control over the machines I've been talking about.  Over on CSN, the discussion has turned more to hardware, the actual arcade or casino style gambling machine, modified to pump crypto to charities.  Church bingo.

Retrofitting an old arcade game with the necessary internals is easier than getting a casino classic, most likely, though ironically.  The machinery of payout has been simplified, even in the classic setting.  Here, payout is to those fintech thermometers, or to this or that QR code.  You may actually "shoot money" out of a gun in some games, giving health and happiness to your cute and cuddly targets.

Yes, I'm talking about old junk and garage based experiments in some cases.  You need your own internal crypto to play with, the money of the house, the currency by which parents pay their kids sometimes, redeemable through the parental bank and/or catalog.  Do the dishes and you're credited with this or that cartoon.  Smart houses already include these, don't they?  Hey, Alexa!

Play pinball, get to a level, and your winnings start meaning real money from the coffers of Big Company, with its Good Will line item.  The circuit diagrams make sense to electronics engineers, who understand about amplification already. 

If you've designed the games to be fine tunable, then you'll be able to excite performance as a way of valving "ions" (charged particles) to charity, leading to repeat business and reputation building.

I think of a cryptocurrency as "ions" (includes "anions") meaning particles with the ability to do work.  That's just a shorthand for "battery" i.e. a source of power or revenue on the chip. 

If you want your CPU to do its teraflops, you need to feed it, power the motherboard.  We seem a lot  less clear about people, whether to power them, despite their evident godliness (NIH -- not invented here).  We're suspicious.  Indeed, a lot of companies sell the implements of people slaughter (like Home Depot but focused on mayhem and demolition).

The CSN nodes are not about recruiting vast numbers into the people slaughter business, lucrative though that may be.  We have our standards. 

That being said, causes you'd willingly fund may also be causes you'd support by other means as well, such as by traveling to a work/study site.

Obviously the authorities don't want crypto to fund armed and dangerous organizations, which is why I'm leveraging my Quaker background to get out ahead with a brand that's clearly not about weapons trafficking. 

I'm not advertising a lot of other prohibitions though.  There's no ban in principle on serving boozes, such as rums.  Whiskeys.  In some regions, I understand local laws prevent such sales, however I'm just making it clear where the restrictions are coming from (i.e. not me).  The Nodes ("shops" in shoptalk) need morphological capabilities, and biodiversity.

Speaking of guns (implicitly -- we were talking about weapons), the North Americans treasure their privacy and private property rights as much as their right to bear arms in public places.  But what about on private property, if the owner has rights?  Can't Farmer Jones, a Quaker, keep all guns off his property?  The litigation piles up.

The etiquette of the West was to respect the wishes of a church, such that gun nuts would leave their pieces in the carriage, with the driver.  Naturally that's an invitation to cowards in search of unarmed victims, and some churches might post armed sentries at the door, assuming local police respect the practice.  Hotels.  Theaters.  Zoos.  Theme parks.  Not all of these belong to the government.

Am I saying Nodes will be "invitation only" and more like speakeasies?  Am I suggesting airport style screenings to get in?  No, not in general.  Those would be special case.  Think of night clubs you already know.  I'm not reinventing every wheel here. 

Remember the prototyping chapter.  You don't want the general public working your machines until you've had a chance to work out the kinks.  Every industry has its skunk works, its test pilots.

Business Concerns

Sometimes I drive around Oregon imagining where the campus facilities might go.  Something that's part of a wind farm and already hooked up to take care of power generating, makes it useful to staff from the start.  Add cultural radio (mixed bag).  If there's anyone in radius that is (sometimes I'm far off the grid, in ranch country -- you'll still have windmills though, if along the Columbia Gorge).

If you go back in my blogs and on Medium, you'll see where my head is at, as some kind of Sam Hill principal in some School of Tomorrow (experimental, prototype).  But would my expensing all that driving as "for business" make sense?  In a Quaker Meeting sense it might.  Warm Springs reservation was on my circuit.

I talk more about casinos in Casino Math, obviously.  That's a topic area in my Digital Math curriculum, established on Wikieducator and then put into practice (experimental, prototype) here and there, with willing risk takers.

People who march off to camp to try something new may be risk takers.  What needs testing might not be weapons of war, in my Civilian Service scenario, but in terms of getting outdoorsy, there's lots of overlap.  "Math is an Outdoor Sport" say my virtual billboards.  Using GPS and/or following a treasure map, takes some trigonometry.

I've been doing fly throughs of neurobiology on Youtube, the better to stimulate my hypertoon receptors.

More of My Story

Road Scholar

John Driscoll:

Nice history around Nick! A sad tale in a lot of ways. I remember one time I was trying to help find Nick a place to crash and I felt like I couldn't let him stay at my place because my landlord in Bolinas CA was pretty concerned with strangers coming around being in Bolinas so Nick ended up asking me just to drop him off basically along the side of the road headed to Petaluma. It was bitter cold that night and in retrospect I can't believe I left him to sleep under the stars on such a night but I did. Sorry Nick. It was nice of you to give him a crash pad when he was in Portland. However, Nick was incredibly strong. He used to hitchhike around with an enormous number of heavy bags (probably full of books) and his dulcimer which I never heard him play. The world knocked him around but he was a tough dude. Definitely not the lifestyle for your run of the mill road scholar.

Bob Quinn:

I picked Nick up hitchhiking the day before Thanksgiving 1988. Candy invited him to come for Thanksgiving dinner. He came by the next day and was a fixture in our lives until the day he died. I still remember driving home on Naito in Portland and fielding the call for theHillsboro police informing me Nick had died. In August under a blue moon rising over the hill in Pacific City I put his ashes in the ocean. The wind kicked up and I ended up inhaling a good bit of his remains. Blessings on him.

Click here, for a continuation of Nick's story.

Systems Science

Glenn and I hopped a bus 14 to join Portland State faculty and students at a brown bag lunch event.  We call it that, but no one was eating that I can recall.  We sandwiched into the Harder House meeting room, pretty much every seat taken, John Driscoll standing and delivering his presentation.

John took full advantage of his time, launching early into preliminary material about Hausdorff Dimension as computed with a "box counting" algorithm.

Applied to facades, or floor plans, generic grids, one may compute its fractional dimension d, or, conversely, create such vistas with d as input.

What would it mean to extrapolate random buildings within a fractal space, determined by a few hyperparameters?  John is exploring this question.  Could such a font of detailed fractal structures provide a kind of clay, which an architect could then sculpt?  Iteratively?

Given my obsession with spherical planet simulations, my imaginary invisible landscape was of city-like planets.

What if Roman Civilization were to be spread, by algorithmic generators, to create realistic vistas of cities never built?  Where would the aqueducts go?  Portland has some, from Bull Run.  The terminal reservoirs were Roman-Victorian in flavor.  I haunt the ones on Mt. Tabor.

Now try another civilization.  Add or subtract a technology.  The models would seem crude perhaps, yet educational.  Start with a river valley.  Now picture it urbanized.  Let the computer do the work, under the supervision of those with a strong sense of Feng Shui.

I'm always in classrooms where the students want to enter into a multi-user domain together, while they're all in the same room.  The game development platforms we use don't allow for this, but the competing commercial platforms do.

My math teacher brain, in the meantime, is thinking "why not harness this desire to socialize through game playing (remember bridge? remember card games?) and let us play something closer to SimEarth?".

That was a real game by the way, in addition to SimCity.  In SimCity, we got to think about power plants, grids, city taxes, city services, property values and so on.  What would a Henry George version of SimCity be like I wonder?

John has a kind of Machine Learning dynamic going, wherein software tools generate building after building, or block after block, with humans, perhaps licensed architects, registering aesthetic preferences.  "I like this one better than that".

In this way, human judgement and algorithm-developed architectures each play to their own strengths.  Algorithms generate a cornucopia of possibilities.  Human judges cull the field, leaving only a few noteworthy finalists.

Machine Learning algorithms know how to reshape themselves based on feedback, in the form of some error function to be minimized.

The idea that architects and movie directors could interact with fractal generator city simulators sounds completely realistic if we're talking about the movie industry.

You want to fly around on such planets, but not necessarily build them, nor even draw them by hand.  They provide context.  They provide game boards.

John and a long time colleague joined us afterward for lunch at Rogue Hall (Ione Building), part of Rogue Nation (the brewery).

I took many pictures and was looking forward to folding them into a next Youtube (I've been doing them daily), only to find out my SD card was acting up.  The computer wouldn't read it, nor would the camera after that.  Unusual.

I ended up reformatting, losing all the pictures.  Fortunately, John's colleague got it all on video.

Ammo for Philo

"Ammo for Philo" sounds like a contradiction, as "Philo" means love and is short also for "Philosophy" or "love of knowledge".  The "sophy" comes from "sophia" as does "sofa" (I made up "sofa" but I'm thinking of a kind of love seat where two are engaged.

The loner philosopher, perhaps a hermit, is stereotypically (and archetypically) not completely alone, but in a relationship with an otherness we might call Sophia.

They named an robotic doll "Sophia" recently, and made her famous.  The of course there's the movie Her.

However, I'm eager to get away from all male or all white when we talk philosophy, though I want to stay inclusive of same.  For starters, Grunch of Giants (important in my syllabus) is dedicated to three women: 

• Marilyn Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy;
• Margaret Fuller, a Transcendentalist and contemporary of Thoreau (and Poe); and
  
• Barbara Marx Hubbard, for whom my dad volunteer, briefly, when she ran for the Office of the Vice President (US).

Speaking of cliches and stereotypes, there's been this common wisdom that the US vice presidency is a mostly ceremonial position, right up there with First Lady.  Would people say First Dude in the case of a married-to-a-man president?

Not that First Guy or Gal is a fluff job either, but it's not constitutionally defined am I right?  A president is not required to have a spouse.

Anyway, in the case of the Veep having a nothing job, that was pure deception:  it's a covert operations gig, most typically.  Dick Cheney was not the first to stove pipe or traffic in state secrets.

Hubbard was pretty brave in running for that office directly, hoping a wannabe prez would pick her (I think she was hoping for John Glenn as a running mate, based on their mutual love the the space program).

My Oregon Curriculum Network is just a storefront, not even a nonprofit.  It's what I do as a business, with any time/energy I have left over, and then some.  I get no tax breaks for it, as I never tried to make it a standalone nonprofit.  I pay it (in the sense of fund it), not the other way around.

The OCN has been pumping out these videos, and in the philosophy department the theme is the foundations of mathematics, in connection with what a certain dead poet society considered a breakthrough, a gear shift, and game changer.

Professional mathematicians were cool to the whole idea and the society went underground, there to be discovered by the Religious Society of Friends, in the person of yours truly.

The RSoF already looked at Kenneth Boulding and Rufus Jones as heroes (more white guys).  The former was a pioneer of General Systems Theory while the later helped get American Friends Service Committee off the ground.

Rufus Jones was connected to Haverford, a college founded by Quakers in Pennsylvania (Penn himself being Quaker, and the state named after him at one time envisaged as a kind of Quaker utopia).

Anyway, OCN also brainstormed CSN (Coffee Shops Network), another "faux business" in the sense that it couches its philanthropic model in the form of a science fictional network of coffee shops.

Would I like this network to exist for real?  Of course.

The CSN is a puzzle piece that helps fund some of the other puzzle pieces.

So what's the "ammo" I'm talking about?

My hopes for philosophy have to do with its relevance.  In a world where religion proves divisive, might philosophy provide bridges?  We don't have to agree about what or whom is divine before coming to grips with the prospects for humanity (one of Bucky's favorite topics).

We have colorful polyhedrons, high definition screens, and a wealth of worthy themes.

Synergetics Hypertoons may not be a reality in your zip code just yet, but that can't stop you from sharing in the dream, regardless of gender or genetic profile.

Dymaxion Videos

Hello Blogosphere

Does anyone still call it that, the "blogosphere" I mean?  Wikipedia has an entry.  We wouldn't call the term "dated" yet would we?  The notion of "blog" itself is pretty recent, and bloggers still abound.

Anyway, I like how the term has "spheric" in it, which describes "a land without borders" as in "never coming to the edge".  A world that abruptly ended, at some cliff or river, would be not a sphere in that sense.  A sphere lets you stumble every which way, and still be on it.

Speaking of stumbling around the planet, I read and watched about the summit meeting in Hanoi, twixt the DC civilian team and DPRK.  I was happy enough with some side results to not be especially disappointed with a holding status quo.  Part of how nation-states establish their longevity is by moving at a glacial pace.  Be the hour hand.  Live forever.

Deeper things are going on in Korea that outsiders will appreciate, is what I'm thinking.  What Americans think and do about Korea is not what matters, or at least that's how it should be.  Americans should feel so relieved when the weight of the world is finally off their shoulders.

Is it because Plymouth Rock was all about Puritans, or for other reasons, that Americans are so prudish?  We burn through presidents on the basis of their peccadilloes quite a lot in seems to me.  The home folks want morality plays, another term for soap opera.

Congress is seeing new potential there, in hold highly televised hearings.  Are we finally getting somewhere, in terms of stirring voters out of their apathy?  The Kavanaugh hearings were like a pilot.

I understand:  the heroic partisans aren't really that offended by what's outwardly touted as the sin, but the less superficial reasons can't be prosecuted.  We keep it shallow on purpose and so on.  Didn't people vote for a playboy, a Hugh Hefner type?  That was a way to reassert a kind of male dominant prowess no?  Hawkish Hillary wasn't that different in some ways.

Forgive me if I get bored.  I'm just thinking we could have a lot funner planet with different screenwriting.  I didn't really like soap operas either.

They say it's not really about sex outside of marriage (with Clinton either, or with Kennedys), but the lying.  I've grown up with presidents lying all my life.  It's what they do.  So?  Goes with the territory.

Prohibition is and was interesting.  When government aims to be "secular" that's a way of saying the different ethnicities can regulate "what's moral" to some degree, that's not our business.  If your religion says it's OK to drink alcohol, then go for it -- as long as you're not a legal minor.

But this hands off attitude only goes so far, as we've seen, and the boundaries keep changing.

Secularism includes the idea of rules, and therefore of breaking them.  But does one follow rules to be "good"?  Does one play chess for the halo?

Marriage is a secular institution as well as a religious one.

Speaking of which (screenwriting), Patrick was full of great ideas today, regarding how Truckers for Peace (an academic program) might model itself after massage therapists who do the same thing (swap jobs and places to stay).

Which reminds me, I thought a genius piece of the Standard est Training was the "needs a ride or place to stay" segment.

Uh oh, I'm likely to veer into Scientology next.  Talk about segues.

Right when the Academy Awards were on, it turned out later, I was back in the old feud between the British BBC guy and the various factions of this powerful church, catching up on the movies (genre: documentary, expose).

You've gotta admit, it's a pretty gripping drama with all the elements, including families split down the middle, at the highest levels.

When will someone run for US president with Scientologist on their resume?

My rude and crude Youtubes (I'm proud of some of them) keep me cycling through the Virus Meme, somewhat by design.  I'll do another Medium story on that maybe.

I've been contributing more Youtubes (U2oobs) to the meme pool.  I mentioned some recent ones on edu-sig.  I collect them here and there in my blogs.

Staying Put

As it turns out, the weather was pretty normal, after the morning flurries.  But we didn't know that would happen waking up.  I woke up early, to an email from the auto mechanic very conveniently allowing me to reschedule.  Sure, why not?

I was up early because of time zones again.  Not the first time.  We in the on-line economy, when doing synchronous meetings, need to adjust for the global economy staying awake, somewhere, 24/7.  This was a follow-up appointment, having established the only remaining glitches were client-side.  This morning's meetup went off without a hitch.

However, with snow coming down, the street already white, I wasn't about to rush out to have my door lock inspected.  My car is a junker (meant affectionately, and not out of disrespect to a still strong engine) and shows wear and tear everywhere.  Remember Columbo with Peter Falk?  I think my car is nicer than his at least.

I'll be getting back around to that soon though.  To postpone owing to snow is not to neglect, at least not in Portland.  We're allowed to take snow days.  The district schools were all closed.

I had an assignment in a district school yesterday.  There's a lot bureaucratic going on, in addition to all the Python learning.  I sent a note to the parents, reminding them of what we're doing around Codesters, an adaptation of the Python language that runs well in the browser.  These are middle schoolers and I'm not expecting them to have the same wishes around how to spend time.

Deke told me yesterday was Personal Chef Day, and that I am for my mom.  She does a pretty routine diet, thanks to the "food is medicine" mantra, and her pills interact with all the rest of it.  That makes the work easier.  She's able to fend for herself to a point, if need be.  And she'll want you to know:  she's not the only one known to leave a burner on.

Have I talked about Tulsi Gabbard yet?  The candidate for US president.  I remember:  I started a draft on Medium, but don't regard it as pithy and probably won't publish it.

In general I think like an Atlantic Monthly of some months ago, that the job of POTUS has become too undoable, in terms of demands and responsibilities.  As a consequence, I'm finding myself not wishing that office on anyone, as too cruel and unusual.  Tulsi deserves better.

An emperor-president is too oxymoronic a notion, we've been finding that out more and more over time.  The screenwriting just isn't believable.  The illusions have worn too thin.

Political bubbles have popped before.  I'm not scapegoating here.  No one president has brought about this state of affairs and indeed many of fought it, in ways we don't (and probably won't ever) know about.

Speaking of the job of POTUS, the scandal lights were flashing big time today as the public learned more about the personal wheelings and dealings of their chief executive, from his former lawyer.

The broad outlines of the story have been public for months.  However, the full circus potential of the scandal had not been exploited, in the manner of the Kavanaugh hearings, until this morning.  I was blissfully oblivious, until my daily briefing from one of my TV hound friends.  I did some catching up later, having decided to stay put.

Journal Entry on Racism

Copied over from Facebook.
Activity log: 
Feb 24, 2019, 11:43 AM
(commenting in an already long thread)

We can celebrate the expressiveness and adaptability of the human genome without buying in to the specific taxonomy of races invented mostly by white supremacist social Darwinists with an agenda to justify imperialism and/or slavery.

The racists use animal husbandry for their concepts, wanting to identify humans as either "pure specimens" of this or that breed (race), or "mongrels" (hybrids, mixed race). We could go much further in this direction if we wanted, with "Best in Show" specimens of whatever pure breeds the authorities decided to enshrine, perhaps inventing new races as time goes on.

In the meantime, racists forge ahead without any universally agreed upon taxonomy. It all keeps changing, and "race" gets hopelessly confused with "ethnicity" which is different. It's not that I don't see genetic differences (and/or ethnic ones), I just have little respect for the pseudo-anthropology that pretends to see a clear and clean taxonomy. A lot of academic white guys with snobby attitudes want to tell me, another white guy, what the races are. Are there five or seven? What are they again?

Their answers always sound stupid to me, from pretentiously pseudo-educated college and university types with a cave man's understanding of the world. I can't credit racists with any kind of intellectual integrity. They're a morally bankrupt camp and yes a lot of them have white skin and academic degrees. I consider racists inferior, intellectually, in so many ways. To believe in races is an ethnic trait. Not everyone suffers from that specific meme virus.

Following up;
Activity log: 
Feb 26, 2019, 6:54 PM

The original "I don't see race" post implies it's only whites who deny race, which is telling if true. I'm going to remain on the lookout for prominent thinkers of a variety of skin colors, eye shapes and so on, who think we might need to revise our thinking in this area.

If it's really true that only white-skinned people, palefaces, think the racial schema / taxonomy is a crazy-bad way to approach the reality of genetic differences (let alone cultural differences) I'd be surprised. But it's an empirical question. I should investigate more.

My thanks to the original poster for starting this useful thread. I hope we keep revisiting racism for as long as it takes. Ashley Montagu considered it our most dangerous myth. We should not let up and just accept it unquestioned.

 

Staggerers Party

The term "staggerers" jokingly derives from "wanderers", what we call ourselves, I think mostly for the wandering nature of our group meetups.  The conversation flits from topic to topic.

I'm not claiming we're unique like that.  When adults gather at dinner or cocktail parties, you note similar stream of consciousness chit chat.  We practice democracy in having inclusive conversations that give people frequent opportunities to change the subject if they wish to.

In other modes, we keep things more organized, even ritualized if in the realm of religion, legal rites.

Secular institutions are not without ritual.  But I wander.

"To stagger" in this context means to walk in a halting fashion, not gracefully.  However we're speaking metaphorically and just poking fun at ourselves.  I don't expect it's a term that will catch on.

I'm reminded of "Quakers" as by some accounts the term had the spin of a insult.  Without a time machine, it's no simple matter to recreate the psyche of a 1700s England.

Our youngest participant had suffered the most dire healthcare chapter lately, in terms of acuity. I remember my bout with appendicitis just out of college, staying with friends.

We gathered at my place, Carol gamely lurking in on the conversation, in the living room, where pizza was had.  We also have an upstairs.

You can see the place through my Oregon Curriculum Network website, where I use a Google Street View of it.  I think of myself as a for-profit business that funds a nonprofit, which is my work to uplift education practices in Oregon.  I'm far from being expert in all such practices.  I'm here to learn.

Speaking of learning, Don helped me tune in the Sallie Tisdale corpus.  I bought her book on female Buddhist personages, for Kindle.  That was but a couple hours ago and I haven't studied it yet.

David had a pinkish shirt with the NASA logo.  He used to work there.  I've got other blog posts about Dr. DiNucci.  Wanderers meet in the old Linus Pauling House in Asylum District.  I've been writing up many of the meetups in these blogs for over a decade by now.

Like what happens in many parties, gatherings, meetups, of an informal nature, if there's internet, speakers and screen, there's the possibility of dialing up (selecting) various video clips. 

The diner juke box is/was similar.  People take turns picking music. 

That's behavior that also traces to salons and parlors, developed as somewhat playful spaces by our Victorian ancestors.

Bob works as a nurse, these days on a night shift schedule.  He goes pretty far back in this blog, to an Esozone.  Don, a frequent visitor of Doug Strain, met Bob in his role as staff.  Bob is a jolly good fellow.

My curriculum was web based, not textbook based, and not behind paywalls.  As of this writing, a lot of my pioneering, such as my Numeracy Series, is still there.  However by the time you read this, a lot of that stuff may have gone off-line.  I haven't gotten to a place with Oregon where I think my domains will be long term relevant going forward.  Cyber-tourism is still in its infancy.

Welcome, to Planet of the Apes

try it on x2 speed?

Per a recent blog post, one of the Fuller Schoolers sent me a link to the Gutenberg Press version of an H.G. Wells piece.  Wells was attending a conference in Washington, D.C. in 1918, a gala affair with opening speeches by President Harding, aimed at heading off any more world wars.

WW1 (as no one called it yet) had just ended.  Everyone was saying, how do we stop that from ever happening again?  Civilization was having a hard time recovering.  Wells wondered if the illness was terminal.

Our man on the scene, as if sent by time machine, does his best to raise the awareness level, as we might say today, and without any use of psychedelics (Doors to Perception, by Aldous Huxley, came decades later).

He's skeptical that even he, a well-anchored man, will be able to muster the necessary sobriety of spirit to help regain an even keel.  He notices he's too giddy, one might say hysterical.  He's like a doctor walking among patients in a psychiatric ward, except we've lost track of which are which. 

Russia has just saved France's butt against the Germans, and is now not invited to the table, because of those mean Bolsheviks.  Yes they were mean, as were the Zionists (Wells doesn't mention those).   Germany was to repay everyone.

The lessons learned were in meanness, and vengefulnes, for the most part.  Kids realize it's cruelty that counts, which becomes like their rite of passage to the despair of adulthood.  We won't get bullied again.  Next time, it's our turn to be the bully.

And what about Japan, with its population pressures?  Could it really afford to give up its designs on China, and would it, if no one else did?  H.G. Wells was thinking out loud (not unlike Bucky -- the two did meet, in another chapter).

We've already been through many generations of European imperialism and colonialism by this time, one could say back through Rome.  Like Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, Wells is far from infatuated with imperialism.

In bringing up all these questions as a journalist, Wells was hoping to inspire deeper thought and more appropriate action on the part of his fellow planetarians.  He was doing the world a service, in sketching himself, the paradigm Englishman, in contrast to these impetuous Americans, and easy-to-get-along-with Chinese.

He's taking risks, as well as helping to define his own character.

I'm not through the whole work yet.  I saw the name "Briand" popping up here and there, and started wondering about "Kellog" as in "Kellog-Briand Pact".

Would that Treaty be the outcome of this Washington based process work?

Not immediately, for sure.

That Treaty wasn't signed until 1928, and proved unenforceable against the warmongers (see embedded Youtube).

When you get right down to it, the people who specialize in implements of torture and coercion, get to have their way quite a bit.

We all live daily under the threat of nuclear annihilation, and will tend to obey that within ourselves that would put off that terrible conflagration.

Naturally there's push back against the warmongers, many of whom have already invested in reinforced bunkers.  The warmongers crave some proof they were right to be prepared, and stoke the self-fulfilling prophecy machine (the same siren songs, over and over).

As Wonder Woman would learn in Humans 101, a demonic force is hiding behind humanity, a Lucifer (they used a different name), determined to make this place a living Hell.

Humanity sorely needs true defenders, and some pray for help from ETs.  I understand why a deus ex machina might have some appeal around now.  We have this sense of needing rescuing.

Where's a mother ship when you need one?  Beam me up Scotty.

In the words of one of my favorite Martians:

In his preface to the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, Wells had stated that his epitaph should be: 

"I told you so. You damned fools".

-- Wikipedia

Scary Roads

Reminds me of Bhutan. Druk-yul.

Regarding Domiciles

A Dream Deferred

 

You’re probably thinking of a lot of frustrating delays, and of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. If you don’t know about MLK, you likely won’t recognize RBF either, though most will know JFK and USSR.

However, I’m thinking of a delay you may not be: the postponement of “smart” houses (I’m putting off a definition). Instead, the Big Promise has been “driverless cars” (aka “people movers” if you lived through the 1970s).

The autonomous vehicle fantasies have eclipsed the next generation of Florida mobile home.

If a hurricane hits, Uncle Sam might have a FEMA trailer for you, but R&D halted on better shelter technologies, except in the area of high end camping (an outdoor sport).

You may be wondering when “smart houses” were ever a dominant fantasy, in which case I’ll point you first to the DDU (Dymaxion Deployment Unit), admittedly obscure, and then to the first true Dymaxion House, which hung from a utility mast but didn’t sway in the wind.

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Copy Pasted from Facebook

I'm sometimes called "expat" but that's when I was living outside the country (exterior to the homeland, where the "pats" or patriots live). I've been "back home" (but not in Chicago) since the 1970s which is a long time ago, so nowadays I blend in as perfectly normal, except for the token Bob Dobbs face here and there (a symbol of my lingering abnormalcy, actually a badge as I'm still proud of not being a "pure" homelander -- many in Congress have never seen much of the world, and it shows).

People Movers

Remember "people movers"?

These were a staple at World's Fair type expos, wherein the public would be treated to preview what could be the norm but a decade hence.  The five and ten year horizons were conventionally bright, in those days, before science fiction got darker and more "blade runny".

The "cars" typically ran on tracks, like at theme parks, but were small and intimate enough for single parties or a family traveling together, the same anthro units as with private vehicles.  Some units were wheel chair accessible, at least on the drawing boards.

However the reality was miles of asphalt and precious few train tracks to switch.  Everything family carriage like was parked in a garage and fed gas from a family budget.  How would we get to People Movers from there?

Answer:  make each car semi-autonomous enough to navigate its own way through the system, distributing the problem to its many nodes.  No central "brain" had to prevent collisions.  It's every car for itself but not without cooperative features.

What's needed are not phony farms where the cars get trained, after which they're injected into Las Vegas as taxis.  The better deal would be an experimental prototype community where people agreed to live, as prototypers.  None of the cars have drivers.  There is more of a central brain.

You might think I'm talking about building from scratch, and I am, to an extent, but then I'm thinking of the movie industry and its "sets".  We're not building "forever cities" so much as stocking "prop inventory" with more intelligent components we might use to "throw together" a city "overnight" as they say, or at least quickly. 

Yes, we'll build New Rome in a day, as a publicity stunt.

Consider Old Man River City for example.  We could have done some cartoons there at least, sparking young imaginations.  But we're afraid to screen positive futurism lest the whip fall across our backs, as management reminds us that "rising expectations" is a "national security threat" (no kidding).

The engineers in China have been showing off their ability to do cities from scratch.  What would it take to retrofit a few of these as Prototyping Zones? 

We're not running every experiment everywhere, and the participants are not kept clueless.  Interesting TV comes out of these places. 

You're paid to live there, not out of pity for the poor or anything, but because prototyping is real work / study.  There's risk.

So am I just talking about Global U campus development per business as usual then? 

Yes and no. 
 
I'm reminding readers that conscious planning is required for these cities, and lots of training, meaning jobs. 

Saying the money has just now run out on building cities after some 20K years and more is not going to make sense, so if there's a good reason for not moving forward with prototyping, make sure it's not that.  We see they've been trying some stuff in various cities already.

Making Math at the Library

Unaffected, at least superficially, by the partial government shutdown, is the Multnomah County Library system.  Portlanders prize their public library infrastructure and it does offer some gems, such as this maker space in the Rockwood neighborhood.  I drove out there on Sunday for some free assistance with my 3D printing project:  to create three sizes of S module (S, S phi up, and S phi down).

Starting with a professionally developed CAD file donated by a Flextegrity developer, we printed a left-handed S-module shell + lid, at 50% scale, as the first 3D printer we tried would not have been able to accommodate the 100% scale version.

Then, even after switching to a Lulzbot Taz with a bigger bed, we stuck with 50% as the home position.  From there, phi down is about 30.9% (50% times 0.618) while phi up is about 80.9% (50% times 1.618) of the original size.

As the Youtubes explained, I'd be going from STL files to slicer software such as Cura, which would create the route for the nozzle to squirt its goo.

The smaller Lulzbot was loaded with glow-in-the-dark filament, which might've been cool, however I was happy to go with the silver metallic look and the bigger bed.

In case you're hazy about the so-called "S module", that's a tetrahedron defined in Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking by R. Buckminster Fuller, which occupies a corner in American Literature.

Bizmo Relatives

The recreational vehicle (RV) was the original inspiration for the Business Mobile (BizMo), which latter is less about enjoying retirement and more about getting work done.

Education Automation

I've chosen the title of one of Bucky Fuller's books for a blog post title.  "Automation" sounds cold, minus the warmth of human touch and attention.

For those who've received a lot of grief from humans, mostly negative feedback, a little automation may be a godsend.  Household appliances have freed up many hours for time with family.  Without a posse of servants, a single human is able to keep up with a lot of tasks, even with one or more dependents.

However, I'm getting off topic.  I just saw the documentary Waiting for Superman again and wanted to weigh in with fresh memories, and before I reread my blogged review.

Here's director Guggenheim giving Bill Gates and others a vehicle to express their vision, which is pro school choice, anti teacher union, pro merit pay, anti tenure.

The myth (which has some truth in it, how much is a key question) that what's between life in poverty and a comfortable place in the professional classes, is "a good education" provides much of the premise for this film.

Define "good"?  Is it what rich people got?  Maybe not in all cases?  You can be a rich know-nothing with few skills and no ethical sense.

What I'm concerned about is students not having any management responsibilities over accounts and files in cyberspace, because they don't get a safe workplace.  Schools focus on herding from room to room, not scheduling quality time in study quarters. The "safe study space home base" (or PWS) become more the reality in college -- but why not before?

As an after school teacher, I drive around with a phone full of login credentials, sometimes Chromebooks, which I give out to my students.  These are for accessing such cloud-based learning platforms as MIT Scratch, Codesters, Animatron, Clara.io and Codepen.io.

We're teaching a lot of techie stuff, but a lot of it's arty too.  Arty / techie is what some call "design" and with enough science:  "design science".  Many generic skills.

Back to Fuller (a master of "design science"):  he worked to counter the Protestant myth that we only deserve life support if we agree to do "jobs" for the owner classes, and that those without jobs are without merit and unentitled to any life support.

He supported minimum income philosophies, as a way to help keep us out of trouble.  Engineering could distribute the sun's munificence, according to some Food Not Bombs philosophy.  At least no one would go starving.

If all you do is work, when do we study, and if study is work, why isn't it paid (compensated)?  Shouldn't civilizations reward behaviors necessary for their own perpetuation?  One might think so.

When do parents get to stay home with their kids and learn skills together as a team?

Using education systems to split parents from children in order to homogenize and dilute ethnic differences is likewise a big use of television.

A mixed use skyscraper or larger building is more like a village in that people get to sleep, eat, study, work, exercise, and so forth, without commuting across town.  Just take an elevator.  More like living on a Starship Enterprise in some popular TV show.

When schooling is better integrated into the local economy, with apprenticeships and part time roles, that can help too, in producing well-rounded individuals.

Saying you've "dropped out" to serve as a cashier in a small family store (or on a military base), is pretty extreme.  We need systems that let you opt in and out easily over the course of a lifetime.  Some people don't see the value in education until they've had more life experience.

Getting some work experience at a young age need not be some fateful decision that keeps you away from other opportunities forever.

I want kids to have opportunities to read and write programs, manage websites, make movies, tend to databases (not only SQL) starting from whatever age they have the attention for it, a mental age more than a physical one.  But when do they get an opportunity?  I bring them login credentials.

Developing these skills usually means tending to a file tree somewhere, a software workbench, and also having a work/study environment relatively free of distractions, like we hope students have when doing homework.

Kids need cubicles, study carrels, as much as the adults do.  All some get is a storage locker.

Lots of professionals, curriculum developers, engineers, have visions similar to Bucky's:  lets make advancing through a curriculum a paying proposition, even if only in terms of crypto-currencies.

Reward the work of study, with greater access to educational resources.  Compensation isn't always in terms of cold cash, much as anonymous currencies have proved, and will continue to prove, useful.

What we need to set up are pilot projects, staffed and developed by people willing to "eat their own dog food" i.e. those designing the lifestyle also need to enroll in the programs to find out what it's like to experience various brands of "education automation" from the inside.

No one size fits all.

Lets see some more sizes.

Mine these blogs for ideas.

T4P Studies

I'm reminded of my road trips in Bhutan.  T4P or Truckers for Peace is about giving people in trucking more opportunities to share gigs and learn about different cultures for credit.

Another Math Summit

This morning I got to meet Peter Farrell and his twin brother Steve at the local diner, Tom's, for ongoing discussions about pedagogy (teaching kids) and andragogy (teaching adults).

Peter has just finished Math Adventures with Python through No Starch Press and I've been pouring over an electronic copy. The synergy of coding and doing mathematics is an obvious draw for a lot of us, whereas another school of thought (represented on Forum 206) says coding and doing math should be kept far apart and tested separately.

The separatists pretty much won their battle, meaning the coding people have had to wedge their way, hour by hour, into K-16, without math curriculum writers and publishers lifting a finger.

Their track, the math track, is just fine as is, whereas the coders needed to start over from scratch and often ended up focusing on "games" because they're trying to appeal to their new audience.

Against that default background, you'll find an assortment of creative teachers, left any freedom to innovate, will keep mixing it up.

My hybrid blend goes by "GNU Math" sometimes, deliberately a pun on New Math (we do look at sets, but maybe not as a be all end all ala Bertrand Russell), given Stallman's encouragement of wordplay and cleverness.

"Digital Math" is another name for it.  We've had a lot of discussion of the genre over the years, in Forum 206 and on edu-sig (@Python.org).

In the middle of Digital Math, I draw this arching bridge over the STEM-PATH chasm (cite C.P. Snow), into literature and anthropology.  "Imagine a tribe" (as Wittgenstein would say) "which "multiplication" means this different thing".

We already have multiple meanings for "the product of" in the world of binary operations (two complex numbers, two matrices...), so my injecting some alternative sixty-degree-based geometric model of multiplying, from American literature, scarcely makes a ripple. Said operation (__mul__ in Python) is already over-determined.  What's one more meaning?

However, I'm not suggesting every secular (public or charter) and private school needs to include American literature.  That's a niche, and features such expats as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, back to Walt Whitman and before (Coleridge's romanticism informs both pragmatism and transcendentalism, and whatever Poe was into with Eureka and so on).

We see this graph of connecting authors against a wartime backdrop a lot of the time.

Studying poets, such as Bucky, takes us into History (the H in PATH) pretty quickly.

Math Adventures with Python leverages having powerful CPUs and GPUs at our disposal.  The halcyon days of the scientific calculator are in the recent past.   

Mathematica, or Wolfram Language, operates in the same domain as GNU Math a lot, and much of the PR from Wolfram's corner fits with the larger "learning math through programming" campaign's.

Russiagate Update

[Jimmy] Dore's view is "yes Russians troll, so does everyone doing net stuff" and to gain a following you start dealing in juicy memes, becoming one of the thought leaders somehow (who knows how, that's where the "research" comes in; Cambridge Analytica had their OCEAN etc.). 

Then when you have a following you can spam them for business reasons i.e. sell advertising (turn around to companies and say "you pay me and I'll tell my following about your thing"). 

Whereas DNCers see Internet Research Agency dealing in political memes with an agenda to tip the election, the Dore crowd see "business as usual" where oligarchy is concerned, and which the Russian mafia plays along with everybody else, with more interest in getting or staying rich than in trying to directly play "king of the White House" (just be sure you have some access once the slug fest is over -- what an embassy is for). 

That's pretty much my view too: there's no need to risk exposure (e.g. FBI detection) hacking federal elections machinery, when social media already provide a legal means to play mind games with the public. 

I believe Russians actively engage in social media, most definitely, and echo the DNI report in saying RT is up on its game.
 

First Person: From the Fleet

I sometimes watch first person chronicles shared by truck drivers.  Part of my T4P work, and of course anticipating more Bizmo action.

Notes from Bizmo World

Wow, they're not kidding at Steemit, when they say keep track of your own damn password. A lotta geeks dismiss that one, knowing reset with verification is a possibility, meaning you can just reset the password once you have the victim's cell phone.  Not so with this blockchainer.  You don't have the password in memory, which is too long to remember, and you don't get to reset it if you forget it.  You'll never access your account again, another waste of a great moniker.

I was pdx4d.  They generate the passwords for you.  They look like bitcoin addresses.  You're getting warmer.  I did find where I'd backed up the Steemit address, having followed protocol.

Steemit is but one of many social media the next geek generation has cooked up.  You weren't expecting the world to stop with Facebook were you?

I'm using Facebook, as it's not either/or, but as a columnist in Bizmo World, I'm expected to keep pushing to a next horizon.  Have you signed on to Meat yet?  Just kidding.

Lets make it real here and talk about malls.  Sears Discount is suffering from low attendance, another reason to go in, great customer service.  They had their two models of microwave ovens at really low prices, but with a Walmart right next door (next store), that wasn't saying much.

I came in like a robot, checked the LG, had my measuring tape, ended up with the Oster, about the same price but more swoopy or something.  Walmart had some other things I needed.  Then Fubonn, the Asian supermarket complex.  More ramen.  Kimchi.  Couldn't find the soy sauce, will solve it next time.

Portland's 82nd Avenue, an Oregon State road, is our homage to freeway gentrification everywhere, except it's not the freeway, but the business route running north-south parallel to I-205, itself the business route branch-off of I-5, that goes through the center, branching to I-405 to the super-center.

By "freeway gentrification" I mean the strip mall culture of one-story restaurant franchises and assortment of big and little box stores, supplied by truck, the premier vehicle of the I-net, from a layer of warehouses around any hub city, especially those with ports.  Portland has humble freight traffic, and that keeps us connected in a global economy.

You may be wondering what bizmo rig I'm driving through all these parking lots and you'd be right to be wondering, since a bizmo log or chronicle typically features such a vehicle, with its quirks and problems.

Instead, I'm in a four-door Nissan from the late 1900s.  Long time readers of these blogs may remember Razz, a Subaru, and Robin Blue even before that.  Cars get proper names much as we give variable names to other features in a program, including actors, agents, whatever observables.  Mars has a name.

The archetypal bizmo shimmers in the archetypal landscape, between the lines, as we're still busy constructing the lifestyle.  T4P only came along recently.  For now, I'm just blending in as one more noodle lover.  The Oster is working great, and sensed by itself when the baked potato had released sufficient humidity.  There's some real science going on in that appliance.  No Instapot yet, thinking about it.

Fubonn is on 82nd, like the two Walmarts I saw (the one I went into is further south, in Clackamas, whereas the second came after the Entering Portland sign, me coming north).  I go there more often, as it's closer and Walmart - Amazon might be my online supplier of delivered goods, where I'm not the one in the fossil fuel business.

Speaking of which, I have a work sponsor ready to heat more of my building so we've got a truck on the way on Monday.  I'm not a new customer, having been at my current location since 1995 or thereabouts.  Newly married with child.  We used to call Montag but their customer list was acquired by another company.

The microwave just decided to blow one day, kinda like mom's knee (though the latter had more of an excuse). The Magic Chef gave up the magic, after over a decade of service I'm reckoning.  My range is a Magic Chef too, avocado green like from the 1960s, came with the house. 

The antique stove fits with my overall decor, which is likewise vintage, lots of vinyl paneling.  We had the wood paneling in the living room removed, along with the shag rug.  Pine floors.  Looks like a ski lodge where the wood takes some punishment.

A skilled repair person could likely have identified a fried wire in the Costco-bought Magic Chef and made it good as new.  Our consumer culture encourages us to replace, not repair, these small appliances, though there's more of an aftermarket for the bigger ones, like washers and dryers.

I'm not the expert.  I'm the consumer, and some consuming I did.  Thanks to my knowing how to teach Python, I'm able to afford a building with replaceable and irreplaceable gadgets and doodads.  Python and Martian Math as a combo.  That's another popular dish.  We're like a food cart, in a town of food pods (lots of competition).

DIY Bizmo

Truck Versus Rail

There's a bit of an apples to oranges flavor to my Blogger post title comparison "Truck Versus Rail" as what corresponds to the rail system are not trucks, but the whole infrastructure of highways, freeways, toll pikes and yes, boulevards. Highways and byways.  Upon those, the trucks ride.  As do trains with engines on rail.  So the apples to apples might be: train engines to trucks.  Both diesel in many cases.

As a kid, I preferred rails to roads because of the added requirement for such things as switches, and switching yards.  Trains brought their own set of challenges.  Round houses.  Trucks had (have) their rectangular warehouses, sometimes solar paneled.

The forklifts run around inside, or even autonomous vehicles, routed to take stuff from here to there.  Switch around among trucks, go multi-modal to trains.  Truck and train actually work very much on the same team.  Both truck trailers (with wheels), and shipping containers (without wheels, stackable), are multi-modal, with an overlapping spectrum of modes.

In adult life, I began to think more about the trucking infrastructure, a prominent feature of the North American economy.  I'm no expert on trade agreements or substance control.  My focus has been university developed exchange programs whereby driver crews gain experience on routes usually considered to be beyond their scope.

Think "Peace Corps for truckers" but don't feel you have to thrust it into the State Department as some official government program.  We're giving analogies, not stating identities.  That being said, I could imagine the existing Peace Corps adding "trucking" to its categories, or maybe it's there already, I wouldn't know.

I did not serve in the Peace Corps however our family sometimes met with, even offered hospitality to, Peace Corps volunteers in the field.  "Volunteer" doesn't mean "unpaid" so much as "not conscripted" as joining the Peace Corps is not some obligatory form of public service, as serving in the military used to be for US citizens.  We were US citizens living outside the US in places where Peace Corps people often work, such as the Philippines (but not in Bhutan).

However, my focus on trucking lately hasn't taken me entirely away from trains.  The different ways to use a rail system other than for "high speed" go through my storyboarding.  Roads and tracks are not that different anyway, in terms of needing to obey constraints on grade.  Both steepness and curvature are considerations, though rail and road follow different constants.  Trucks turn very sharply compared to trains, which need a relatively huge radius to accomplish the same turn.

Imagine your university dorm and classroom is a four train car affair, and as rather button down.  Is this Princeton?  The keg party folks charter a different service, not that we can't serve regional beers, or whatever's local.  You're studying the region you're going through, learning the language, history, tastes.  You're getting academic credit -- as a lot of those truckers are -- from your time on the rails, often intentionally side-lined without an engine, per plan and schedule.

Hooked to all this is the idea of the Personal Workspace (PWS).  Trains might not always carry sleepers.  Most do not.  They could be modeled with offices, work and study spaces.  Ping pong tables make sense when you're parked.

The North American riding public in large degree switched to jets in order to minimize travel times over long distances.  Commuter hops were and are train and bus oriented.  Some American cities have invested lots in rail, Philadelphia especially.  Others rely almost exclusively on the "rubber" tire.

One might also experiment with trains that facilitate hopping on and off.  The moving sidewalk platform has been proposed, and used by Disney with some success.  The train slows to run at the same speed as the mounting belt and the passenger simply steps on or off the train.  Slower belts (moving sidewalks) run parallel and after a few transfers, the passenger is back to standing stationary at the station (why we call it that).