From a Quaker Discussion List

Hi Rainer --

Thanks for your thoughts. Everyone says we need to be processing about "race" (whether we believe in such a thing or not) and we're doing it, in the context of anti-semitism no less, all red hot stuff in the eyes of many, yet we're just having a casual Quakerly conversation, very primitive and Friendly.

I appreciate your willingness to shoot the breeze ("even Quakers shoot the breeze" might go with my "Quakers play Quake" bumper sticker -- I sometimes wear a Stetson hat that says Gun Club inside, approved it through Oversight Committee, but said committee is no more, as that sounded too slavey, too antiquarian, for supervising taste testers -- I'm forgetting the new name).

My "math head" (a member of my "internal committee" aka politburo) says "pre science literate humans didn't just happen upon the eigentypes with their homebrewed notion of 'races'."

Do you understand him? Me neither, and yet he's one of my internal team (I like the committee approach taken by a certain Scottish Jungian I admire, also a student of P.D. Ouspensky's, one Maurice Nicoll:  we're all made up of many egos, none of whom you need to identify with if you're into doing the Work as he defines it).

Seriously, I get to teach data science online and I just spent a whole bunch of hours hearing Youtubers talk about "eigenfaces" which would be like the paradigm "template faces" of which all others could be mixtures. But has any science mag printed a few?  I think they'd say there's no way to render them as it's all numbers by then, nothing to see here, move on.

I think what my math voice is saying is that the superficial heuristics we called "the seven races" might have worked well at one time, long ago, for some people, and it's not the moral fault of anyone (not a tragedy either) that commercial airplanes and world travel (global wars, nasty fevers) messed that all up for good. Not everyone is caught up on that fact, but then people still believe in all kinds of dated stuff. What choice do we have?  Some would say waiting in silence for revelations.

The delicate fragile worldview based on the Biblical idea of a diaspora of Noah's kids at the Tower of Babel, didn't survive the 1800s intact (in depth psychology it did, as a myth, but not as history) and the subsequent Darwinism-meets-Bible hybrid, a Social Darwinism, likewise didn't stand up over the long haul. It has its half life as well. Bringing it back would require breaking the laws of thermodynamics.

That's not to say we're done with humans demonizing other humans (per Romeo and Juliet, Capulets versus Montagues).  We might have speciation on the basis of political party affiliation if things keep going the way they're going (joke).

Maybe before any genetic flip that makes reproduction impossible, there's just a growing antipathy in the sense of demonizing another group. That proclivity to demonize doesn't evaporate just because the racial sense of teams has disbanded. We still have teams.  We still have defectors.  Americans still have a problem with Russians somehow (fanned by years of profitable cashing in on said psychological complex).

I tend to zoom back and say "the human race" so I still use the term "race" myself.  But I don't mean subspecies by it.  I refer to people by their differences too.  That guy with the mustache, that black girl next to that brown girl.  I'm pinkish tan.  Where I was raised, saying "colored people" was discouraged as crassly  illiterate and to this day I hear "people of color" (same word bag) as not a nice thing to say.  But that's just me, I don't go around shushing people or writing to the editors or like that.

I listen to how English (the language) mixes "race" with "competitive running event, or anything involving a competition involving motion" (chess is not a "race" to checkmate, nor are card games "races" -- interesting, English is so buggy, so packed with exceptions).

With humans, I'd happily go with "breed" as a kind of loose Venn diagram on the fly talk, and yak about the NRA breed or the golfer breed or the TV wrestler breed (e.g. Trump). What channels you watch and what brands you buy is more interesting to the monster machine learning algorithms than whether your ancestors were slaves in Imperial Rome (although that could be interesting to discover, I admit). I tend to collapse "subculture" to "cult" for short, to short-circuit all those morally superior holier than thou types who don't regard themselves as cult members (nor ethnocentric in any way).

Remember The Time Machine by H.G. Wells? In that science fiction, racial bifurcation does occur, but not at all along the racial lines (pseudo-eigentypes) as "we the Social Darwinists" think of them. The engineering-savvy, number crunchy subterranean-janitorial Morlocks, split off from the more melodramatic crybaby politician surface dwellers, the Eloi.  Morlocks actually ate Eloi for lunch in the Wells dystopian nightmare.  His War of the Worlds is front & center in Martian Math (a math course I've pilot tested at Reed College). 

You could see it as satire, based around C.P. Snow's great divide (later bridged by American Transcendentalists) but then: Edwin Abbott's Flatland was likewise political satire and people still take it seriously as mathematics (one dimensional beings... hah hah, that's us for sure (hello Marcuse)).

I'm thinking speciation might happen around "wanting to live underwater" i.e. in those future cities where you have to scuba dive to visit friends. I imagine an assortment of gingers, dwarves, albinos, normal people, skiers, mathematicians, autistics (lots of overlap) all joining together to live under the sea, and pretty soon (in geological time) a few mutants sprout lungs that can breath underwater. Like fish! No need for expensive scuba (I used to scuba). Looking back, we can find the gene sequences that made this feature more likely to express in some people, but correlation with our "races" of 2020 was very low. 

It's only with hindsight that we see what the real races were (as you might put it, the proto-species).  We just don't see them today. We don't see the future.

Another species starts off with the Mars venture of 4230 CE. Those people can't return because of the G forces, we already knew that.  Meanwhile, Earth falls silent in 6798 (self nuked or something, the Martians have no way of knowing for sure) and so the Martians live on, but don't look like us after awhile (pretty quickly, like by 90874 given help from genetic engineering).  Some of them have black skin, or Asian features, some have white skin, others green, others orange.  They roll around like pool balls, as they're almost perfectly spherical.  Just kidding, I think...

Just saying: anyone can come up with these pleasant fictions, and the racist taxonomists of Old Europe, spreading their memes by missionary and school teacher to North America, had theirs. They promulgated their stories everywhere (talk about fake news!). We live with the consequences, North Americans among the most dumbed down, yet still struggling to breathe free of such dogmas.

South Africa was really more the laboratory, as it sits on a primarily black continent, so the whites were in no position to get that uppity, unlike here, where uppity whites are allowed to drive cars (just kidding again, a lot of them have been forbidden to drive, based on past violations).

South Africa worked through it and although not problem free, is nothing like the race war snakepit a lot of people were predicting for it.

I've lived in Southern Africa myself in the Kingdom of Lesotho, where my parents took up residence. They were planning to retire there, as Quakers uninterested in supporting the so-called United States (per Medal of Freedom winner, already bankrupt and extinct by the 1980s -- but the crybaby Eloi know nothing, bless their hearts). I'm a big fan of Die Antwoord BTW (punk RSA group, see movie Chappie for context).

Kirby

Rainer Möller said:

Kirby,

I must admit that the theory of evolution (i.e. evolution of new species via racial differentiation) is a mere theory.

Comparing Two PR Films

Greetings Friends. I may have embedded this one before, in an earlier blog post.

The theme is related to "bomb shelter" i.e. we're here to weather some kind of holocaust -- and strike back if necessary, is the undertone.

To "declassify" is to add to the authenticity of something, i.e. "this was once too important a secret to share with the likes of you." An attention getter.

However, over time, the secrets tend to come out and the narrative gets updated.

We call that "learning from experience" and it's often a slow process.

Data Science and Statistics: different worlds?

How do we share data science in place of any high school stats course?

Addendum (follow-up thoughts), copied from Facebook:

Kirby to CJ:

I think Polya's point, that inductive reasoning is no less prevalent in pure mathematics than anywhere, applies in the case of many of these Ramanujan formulae. They work out to some arbitrary precision negating any likelihood they could be wrong, and yet... the absence of proofs in some cases may be inevitable, according to Godel right? But if you manage a proof, so much the better. That's what mathematicians strive for, over conjectures (though even the latter may be plenty valuable).

CJ to Kirby:

I think Pólya's point is deeper: if we want to learn from experience we need induction. To get to any mathematical truth (whether one that is new or a rediscovery), we need to inductively explore the situation before we can find a proof. Indeed our inductive work frequently may suggest a proof, if we are attentive. Even if we cannot devise a proof, we may find good evidence for the conjecture. We can keep searching for more evidence or a proof as we have free time and interest to explore one question or another.

Chapter I in the book is excellent.

Kirby to CJ:

I agree he's making that broader point, and may not even reference Ramanujan, I haven't found yet where he does if so. That mathematics is replete with inductive structures, unproved conjectures, is definitely worth pointing out. Would these be synthetic judgements a priori ala Kant? We don't really know they're a priori unless proved, but the question remains where or how intuitions might give rise to such equations (as Ramanujan's). What muse "induces" such insights? Thanks for supplying that link, and the other to the video of Polya.

Covid Camps

Recycling Historic Slides

The situation is I have hundreds of embedded slideshows using deprecated Flash technology, which the browsers are warning they're discontinuing the supporting of. So I try going back and fixing them, updating to the new method. The slides are still there, organized in albums. At the time of this writing that is.

Gus Frederick is a curator of Homer Davenport cartoons, as a fellow resident of Silverton, Oregon. Davenport worked for the Hearst publishing empire among others, long story, achieving fame and glory for his talent and influence. He was a horse nut, imported some Arabians from Mesopotamia.

As something of a curator myself, why not revisit this history? Gus is a skilled videographer and also satirist. I admire his work.

Curriculum Development On Fast Forward

Given the covid crisis, there's more of a push to get some innovative high school level curriculum out there, where people can see it.  That means "open on Github, in a repo" to a lot of people.

I call it Camp MightyMoose, remembering my fascination with Mighty Mouse as a rug rat.

Just when I got hooked on TV by 2nd grade, the family unhooked at moved to Rome, Italy, a conservative Catholic town with RAI deferring broadcast until people could get home and watch it. Housewives had plenty to do without gazing at all these good looking guys in the soap operas, or whatever -- why not speculate?

Maybe they just didn't have enough content, not having their on LA (an entertainment capital, and TV savvy early in the game).  Spaghetti Westerns would be filling the void on the big screens.

So from TV addict, I went what felt like cold turkey.  I'm sure it was good for me.  I did a lot more reading, listened to the same few records over and over. One was Bob Newhart doing comedy. Another was just sound effects.

TV is a firehose of interesting content these days.  The allure of living out one's life vicariously in the matrix has never been more feedable.  Cocoon and bliss out.

Atop the early internet of passive asynchronous reading writing and viewing, the layer of live streaming has been added.  These pycamps I'm leading are a genre of live streaming.

That genre, in turn, depends a lot on talk radio, which in the old days was less often prerecorded. We shouldn't neglect the board meeting format, as another popular form of people-to-people live streaming.

When I do long format gigs, I look to artists such as Unirock and other immersive talk radio Youtubers.  They create an environment of immersive listening with constant chatter, some using musical breaks.  How campers chime in depends on group dynamics.

Wrong Again!

As we were ramping up towards the apex, of the novel coronavirus pandemic, I took advantage of a teachable moment and went over the Synergetics relationship to Virology and its contribution to our understanding of the morphology of the virus.

Although depicted as perhaps vaguely icosahedral, my understanding is this is one of the helical viruses, with its RNA all curled up inside a ball of fat with spikes on it.  The lipid ball, scavenged from a hapless eukaryote, naturally assumes a spherical shape, like a bubble, but the idea of "capsid counts" is somewhat out the window.

How it works in Synergetics is the 1, 12, 42, 92... growth pattern of the cuboctahedron, is likewise the pattern of the icosahedron.  The two relate through the Jitterbug Transformation.  Viruses that are icosahedron shaped, made from capsomeres, will sometimes come with these numbers, which is what got Fuller mentioned in the New York Herald Tribune (1924 - 1966) -- not the New York Times I don't think, as Bucky mistakenly recalls in some interview on Youtube.

"All of these numbers are in fact found in actual viruses, 12 for certain bacteriophages, 42 for wart viruses, 92 for reovirus, 162 for herpesvirus, 252 for adenovirus and 812 for a virus attacking crane-flies (Tipula or daddy-long-legs)" - The Natural History of Viruses by C.H. Andrews (W.W. Norton R Co., 1967).

Another link:  Synergetics is focused on the question "what is life?" in some contexts.  Dr. Fuller's collaborator, E.J. Applewhite, later wrote an entire book on that question, entitled Paradise Mislaid. As we hear in countless stories these days, "you can't kill the covid virus, because a virus is not alive".  But then let's remember anthropomorphism has always extended to natural forces.

If I understand Fuller correctly, he didn't see physical "meatspace" as the same as life, which latter he tended to equate with the metaphysical in his U = MP equation (M for metaphysical).  20th Century science was never comfortable with anything but U = P i.e. the universe is entirely physical.  That the virus is a kind of biomachine, or biorobot, was for Fuller an indication that whatever life is, it lacks physicality.  Does U=MP suggest a mind-body dualism?  Philosophers will have these debates.

I'll reproduce my comment on Ed's book:

E.J. Applewhite was a friend and I was aware of his process, albeit vaguely, in writing this erudite investigation into "what is life, really?". Having been a loyal collaborator on Synergetics, he was ready to contribute a magnum opus of his own. These chapters of his life were not disconnected, as the fact that a virus is just as much a machine or robot, informed Buckminster Fuller's view that the physical universe was not in itself alive. Discoveries in virology had proved there is no distinction. Life, then, was weightless and metaphysical. Per the review above, such thinking resulted in banishment. While Applewhite includes Fuller's views in his survey, he does not follow them blindly. He's content to invite us to the debating arena, and catch us up on the points that many have made.

Michael Goldberg fit more data points with the capsomere counts, using a formula more elaborate than 10*F*F + 2 (* for multiplication). 1, 12, 42, 92... was not the whole story.  Virology moved on, adding to our knowledge at a furious pace, as one of the most interdisciplinary of studies (especially once we factor in epidemiology).

I might get around to correcting myself on the Youtube channel, which is where I was bringing up these counts in the first place.  OEIS linked to my website (grunch.net) under Links, and I like to show that off, by following the link to my virus page.

Flakey Fragment

David Brian Koski on FB thread:

Two SYTES make a KITE, which Fuller says are two, KAT and KATE
(2) RITEs make a KATE
(2) BITEs make a KAT
(2) LITEs make what we called a KIT

Snarky Comment

Me on Facebook recently:

When I put on this figurative pair of glasses, in which I want my prez to be a dark comedian, I see talent. Biden is definitely a contender. I'm ready for a space case, over President Id (GWB was Alfred E., sorry Mayor Pete).

https://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/05/decoding-usa-culture.html

Also under discussion:  "McNamara's Morons" a desperate wartime measure by the losing side. Some vets involved in the conversation (asynchronously).

Welcome to Chaos High

Communications experts sometimes speak of the "8th grade level" as a kind of gold standard, as in an age post knowledge explosion, there's an on-ramp into any discourse and "8th grade" maybe means "in layman terms" (i.e. I'm not yet an initiate, nor may I ever be).

That mantra or rule of thumb has "trickled up" in that I'm seeing "high school" as that semi-uniform sampling in which few prerequisites are required.  You're starting with a white belt in whatever.  If you were back in high school as an older adult, this might seem like a threatening reset, as if you'd suffered brain damage.

"Why would I be in high school, I'm a doctor of (master of) whatever!?" and of course that's an understandable sentiment when HS is regarded as "once in a lifetime".  However I'm positing that, with longer lifespans and a faster pace, the need to "reset" is perennial.  If you live long enough, you might go through "high school" a few times.

To take a concrete example, my generation went through high school when hand-held calculators were all the rage.  In a generation before ours, people understood slide rules, and therefore logarithms a lot better.  I'd say people were a lot more practical about approximation in some ways.

At the other end of the spectrum, I push into arbitrary precision territory, partly to break more of us free from using calculators.

Here in 2020, on the other side of the free open source community ethic, I'm seeing the PWS (personal workspace) as the focus, or what we might call a "cubical" (except that divorces office work from other work).  A personal workspace should come with more than just slide rulers and calculators I'm thinking.

Utopian literature from the 1960s comes to mind, Education Automation in particular.  That was Buckminster Fuller, always seemingly the wide-eyed optimist, telling us we were needed at home to study, in personal workspaces that didn't drive the people in them crazy.

The Dymaxion House was about taking drudgery out of housework, and financial concerns off a family's back, such that raising children and domestic chores could be relatively stress free and enjoyable.

When my daughter took drivers' ed, the instructors led a session with the parents, explaining how what we were taught, and what was currently taught, had somewhat changed over the years.  The sideview mirrors would be further apart now, and you were to have headlights on at all times.  That's right, it didn't used to be that way.  Welcome to the new high school.

Now look at literature.  Somewhere in there, we're going to run across a tight little geometry we don't want to just bleep over, or at least some of us don't.  We'll need our embedded vista viewpoints.  We didn't gaze at high definition 360 panoramas from Mars (Curiosity) either, when I was a kid.  Nothing like the "Martian Math" I like to riff off today.

Where will Tomorrowland's teachers take this stuff?  I look for signs, as I know it's all about feedback cycles.  The stuff my generation has been feeding in, will come back to us in some new way. Steering into chaos was ever thus.

Quaker Journal

A journal used to be a diary, which maybe, one thought, might be discovered and published.  Many Quaker journals did see the light of day in that way.

Once blogging was invented, and world readable text, I'd say the practice changed a bit.  More people could see the point of journaling.  But what was the point?  Advertising?  When what you write is potentially public, that changes the rules a little.

But maybe not by much.  A diary or journal has another function, more Jungian, which is to process or work through, something language seems to be for in general.  Some of us just need to write, and the journal format, nay blog, seems like something we prayed for.  Why be ungrateful then?

The technology keeps shifting though.  I've used a Flash widget programmed in Shockwave to share slides, but I gather that's something 3rd party.  The browsers are phasing out Flash.  Will I convert everything to another format?  Or let it go?  I converted Xmas 2013 tonight, just to assure myself there's a process.

Taking pictures has been another part of holding it together for me.  My way of creating some syntropy in the face of entropy.  But is it that my pictures really matter that much?  An opportunity was afforded me to enjoy them while they lasted, and share some while I could.

Now I'm thinking of the whole Peter Janney story.  What might be found of interest?  James Jesus Angleton apparently had the same question, according to sources, poking around Mary's studio soon after her murder.

More Science Fiction

calculator of tomorrow: government issue

When I try to imagine civilian socialism, versus the corporate military socialism we have now, I think of government issue smartphones and laptops to any students who don't have them. Use them from home. Other GI swag includes backpack and water bottle, first aid kits. Be prepared.

Free education will show you how to use both, fight off malware and spyware. 

The laptop comes with lots of great free open source stuff like the DARPA supported Anaconda. You won't need a calculator now that you have one of these. Calculators aren't forbidden of course, slide rules either (learn about logs).

The GI smartphones come with the apps you need to navigate government bureaucracies.

Socialist bars charge only $3 a pint with no tips expected.

Asylum cities, waystations for refugees, dot the globe, thanks to world organization.

Do we still have a private sector? Of course. Mom and pop businesses, private banks, airlines, restaurant chains. We're less of a ghetto though, thanks to a lot of the smartest most compassionate people wanting to work in government.

Imagine a school that actually sets aside time to share about specific smartphone apps. The school's crypto-currency, good inside school, used by alumni too, works thanks to specific apps.

Various games (language games) pay out, in credits good against several catalogs.  Academic work has its immediate rewards, perhaps in the form of more time on the internet, slacking, exploring, checking out stuff.

Cloud Native Programming

This talk was helpful in that it took me back to my "thick client" early days, pre web browser, when my Visual FoxPro stack, ODBC to big servers, was dealing in read-only health procedure data from the Cath Labs and operating rooms (CVOR). My RDBMS tables mapped every artery of every patient affected by stenosis or other coronary pathology. Complications led to procedures and their outcomes, some of which might be the inherited complications of a next procedure and so on.

The scene has changed since those days, as data turned into big data, and as analysis tools started combing over larger server farms, using map-reduce (Hadoop) and a host of Apache projects (Spark, Flink, Kafka).  The speaker takes us from those old days to how we do things today, assuming the need to scale up without falling over.  How does one deal with the pressure to grow?  That's like sails to the wind if you have a seaworthy craft.

The other revolution in cloud native ecology is the growth of containerized microservices ala Docker and Kubernetes.  Get a lot of producers and subscribers messaging one another, in response to the streamed data onslaught.  Push all the end user rendering cosmetics to the clients, with their web browsers and visualization tools.  Customize their dashboards.  Some workstations monitor, some upload new data, some report on trends and so forth.

I go around with my little laptop, like a guitar, and strum my sound, these days involving visualizing Flextegrity in a Jupyter Notebook.  I learn about cloud native environments from OSCON proposals and Youtubes, and O'Reilly Safari Online when I can afford it.  What would be the Python API to Kafka for example?

Asylum District Lore

A long gone mental hospital, run by one Dr. Hawthorne, is now memorialized by a food pod, a set of food carts, named Hawthorne Asylum. I focus on those local geographic and historical details for awhile, before jumping into a discussion of Man X, seemingly dodged by Joe Rogan.

Towards the end I mention my Quaker heritage, as I'm linking general systems theory (GST), a sometime subject in Quakernomics circles, with American Transcendentalism, a literary movement.

Although Edgar Allen Poe pooh poohed transcendentalism, lets not forget his Eureka essay.

I weave in Col. Prouty in other videos as well, as well as the war in Southeast Asia, around the start of which the OSS found itself supporting the resistance.

You'll find more high school level American literature memes championed throughout my channel.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Old man Werner reminisces about people he's worked with.

Golden Oldies

The embedded Youtube is Part 4 of a five part series, which I've watched before, and viewed again yesterday, before sharing it to Facebook.

Fuller is adroit in thinking metaphorically, but for most of us, science is a literalist affair, with the true grounded meanings. Metaphors are for embellishment, not for supporting weight.

However, Fuller's Universe is light and airy, highly tensile, remarkably devoid of brute force strength or forcing more generally.  He flits about, always resecuring his own technology, a synergetic language as dense as Heidegger's.  Equilibrium is the name of the game, but in a Universe intent upon success for its humans.

I've been endeavoring to shed some light on what Fuller branded as "the geometry of nature", a claim for which he takes flak. Does XYZ ever make such a claim?  Is the counter-position that geometry is merely a human invention? 

His scaffolding is the IVM ("octet truss"), a pattern found in nature for sure (CCP, FCC), with volumes 1 and 4 respectively.  Rectilinear patterns don't go away, as we've seen in C6XTY (another IVM-related space-frame design). His paradigm cubes have volume 3.

By some reckonings, synergetics offers but a small tweak at first, with this shift to tetravolumes, resulting in some simplifications (more whole number volumes).  Where that leads next is the next question.  Fuller points to intuition, but has intuition served him well?

Does 90 degree precession really pick up where 180 degree gravity ends?  He seems to think the Earth's orbiting and axially rotating are resultant behaviors given the Sun's pull.  Textbooks suggest a primordial kineticism for which "gravity" should not be blamed.  "Critical proximity" is where the changeover occurs.

Stuff "falling in" is not the usual thing with gravity, according to Fuller, as the whole-unpredicted-by-the-parts is more like stuff "wandering" (not "falling in").  The effect of bodies in motion on other bodies in motion seems chaotic and complex.  Is he seriously questioning Newtonian dogmas?

I get the tetravolumes meme and have taken that to heart, and when it comes to "metaphysical gravity" I see "precession" as Bucky means it.  Metaphysical == Metaphorical? 

He dives into speaking very specifically about literal gyroscopes.  When you tug a pole towards you, it yields in a different direction, thanks to its spinning disk.  That's precession for you, I agree.  But the initial spinning did not result from the tugging, right?

In always shying away from "cult leader" status, Fuller is free to exercise and share his private language, fact-laced and interdisciplinary.  His relative success as an inventor, his track record, becomes his evidence that his thinking outside the box (which takes courage) is what more of us might want to try.  "Come on in, the water's fine" is what echoes between the lines.

Fear and Longing

Chris pooh poohs that technology will save us, deus ex machina style. I agree technocracy sounds hollow if the only mantra is "learn to code" in the face of lifestyles vanishing.  A work/study lifestyle might have some coding in it, and you're not taking charity (sitting idle) by studying hard.  We need more serious students, not addicted to fantasy genres.  Like forget about coding.  Read Chris's books.

A safety net that features study (and not amassing huge debts in the process) is about taking care of a population and cultivating diverse skills.  Study includes places to practice, to develop technique.  My friend Glenn has all the makings of a makerspace (a term he despises) yet real estate is so dear in this town, there's no room left for "creatives" (spaces in which to create).

As Bucky Fuller pointed out, if you take away the technology, you have mass starvation and uncontrolled outbreaks of disease within days.  Civilization grinds to a halt.  Technology currently sustains a population of billions.  Take away the politicians ("send them around the moon in a spaceship"), as during the recent government shutdown, and the crisis is relatively less dire.

Chris has been a war correspondent in Mesopotamia and in the Balkans. He shares a bleak view.  He's not in the habit of turning towards American Transcendentalism and seems relatively oblivious to Bucky Fuller's teleological post-nationalism.

Fuller is always quoting Einstein to the effect that human psychology boils down to a fear versus longing axis.  Chris's audience is wondering about hope, longing for a brighter view of the future.  Hedges is focused on ending tyranny by inspiring fear among the would-be tyrants. He has little patience for what he considers "hope mania" minus concerted resistance.

What is the positive future vision after that?  What would winning mean? Where's the science fiction?  A clear view of a more positive, yet attainable, future is ultimately subversive vis-a-vis any status quo dystopia, especially when the pathway forward is nonviolent.

World Game Player Reverie

Changing a Lightbulb

Changing the headlamp of a car is not supposed to be difficult.  It's a consumer vehicle.  Simple repairs, like changing a light bulb, don't require a mechanic.

That was my experience today, though it wasn't the headlamp, but the front turn signal, underneath. I knew that, but tackled the wrong bulb in any case.

But then it looked like it might've needed changing.

I rationalized the two trips to O'Reilly auto parts (not be be confused with the O'Reilly School I used to work at).

Earlier in the day, Flickr was down and my Youtube was a lot about that, figuring out it wasn't "just me".  Then service was restored and I was back to taking it for granted.  By the end  of the day, I'd decided to give up on that Youtube.  No longer relevant enough to be worth all the post production.

I made it to El Mercado, where I went with Dr. D. for Solar New Years.  Last night, a went to Laurelhurst and saw Knives Out with Dr. T., but I've not reviewed it yet.

Yesterday I tested out the collision detection exhibit I yakked about in the Youtube from a day earlier.  I'll likely use it again tomorrow as the curriculum is pretty much the same across the two zones (regional and anywhere).

Happy Chinese New Year

At the end of this one, I wish people Happy New Year on the "AD/BC calendar", an idiosyncratic name for the proleptic Gregorian.

Then I look ahead to "Chinese New Year" (now sometimes referred to as the Lunar New Year), which has since passed.

I'm linking here to a Chinese New Year video (scroll to end, after fanciful history).

Grunch of Giants

Quaker Curriculum (American Literature)

If you're paying to get your American Heritage, all the more reason to not bleep over Synergetics, for which Bucky Fuller received a Medal of Freedom from president Ronald Reagan.

If you don't know that piece of history by now, consider yourself pretty clueless when it comes to American History and/or Literature.

Our high school teachers will make sure you're not left in the dark.

American Literature (genre: spy novel)

Part 2 of my Recent American History for high schoolers.  Click here for Part 1.

A Synergetics Lecture (by Kirby)

Some Ridiculous Television (Aloha)

Bucky Revival 2020

Energy Slaves

I'm going back to thermodynamics with its energy and power concepts, along with syntropy and entropy.

These conversations deserve more than fleeting attention, so I spiral back to them.

From Code: Law

The news story about the intel community using AWS type services for intel work is not surprising, as the "elastic desktop" has become the new normal.  Your front end API is to what back end?  The answer may change from hour to hour.

The "code is law" movement, such as it is, may have its roots in operating system design, as preventing users from sabotaging the kernel, or each other, is really the responsibility of the design itself.  The model anticipates bad actors, misbehavers.  However the operating system boots with a decisive advantage.

Even with root access, your new powers may not give you an ability to damage hardware.  Once you've deleted all the files and reduced the software to unrunnable, an external procedure, involving reinstalling a fresh copy of the OS, may restore everything to normal.

In the DIY studios at the schools, take Free Geek for example (Portland campus), students are in a position to safely explore root powers and to otherwise practice in a sandbox.  The hardware has just been rescued from the dumpster in any case, and the OS, if it runs, is now running in an educational context, like in a college.  A FreekBox starts out like a corpse in a medical school, and is reanimated for students and then for the general public (if and when it passes all the tests).

The job of the OS is to protect the integrity of running processes, and the memory they expect (have reserved on their behalf).  In user space, the users expect their own files to not be world readable unless they want them to be.  One has degrees of protection.  However, if the root is compromised, what might that mean?  Risk assessment, with respect to cyber events, features in a growing set of roles.

Speaking of roles, I've seen the roleplay and cosplay communities converging in various places around Portland.  The "silly job title" trend is sometimes dismissed by the suits, but that's exactly the point:  we're in the process of freeing ourselves from the suits.  Owning the dress code is a first step.

Another Entry Point (School of Tomorrow)

I'd call these a Two Part video, although it continues themes from before and after (regarding the war in Vietnam for example).

The second one (below) goes somewhat deeper into already introduced turf.

Filmmakers, and I'd say comic strip cartoonists (graphic fiction and nonfiction), storyboard artists, well know this format.

Regional Place Based Education, with Uncle Bill

Curriculum Context (Asylum City)

Making Memes

This series of three shows a process for making a meme, using side-by-side images in this case, and suggesting Before and After.

As we find out in Part 3, the Before side is actually flawed, and it's in attempting to reconcile the two tables (exercising a conversion constant), that I discover and repair the Before side error.

As we approach a roll-over from 2019 to 2020, it's customary to make forecasts or suggestions, regarding what we plan to take on in the coming orbit.

America in Philosophy sounds interesting.

The whole idea of a "new world" was quite revolutionary.  Some people imagined striking it rich.  Others fantasized about utopian communities, including idyllic company towns or campuses.

Some of that same kind of brainstorming goes on here.  Could we have public schools that are also (A) boarding and (B) same-sex in addition to co-ed? 

These options abound in the private sector, but what if you're training to become functional in democracy?

My science fiction speculations are against a background of no public schools, given the American Transcendentalism I'm showing here is Verboten Math as far as the administrators are concerned. 

However, when it comes to art history and schools of thought in architecture, for starters, there's less censorship (strict editing) to contend with.

That I'm casting this curriculum as "high school level" makes sense, but let's remember that level is incorporated within higher level mindsets.  To introduce the "concentric hierarchy" at the high school level is to make changes in a parent or superclass, to employ and object oriented analogy.

Ways to carry the momentum forward through university level studies, such as in philosophy and engineering (e.g. tensegrity, flextegrity...), or even in a philosophy of engineering (cite Bristol, ISEPP), were pioneered in previous chapters, making it easier to work backwards, laying track coming from a future syllabus.

Planetary Tale

Commentary:  In this little screenplay, Tribe might be construed to mean Intelligence Community (IC) whereas Enemy looks like Ukraine in some manner.

[ play opens, reminiscent of obelisk scene in 2001, but sans obelisk ]

Biden is like this gorilla, beating his chest. 

Biden:  I made that tribe do the bidding of my tribe, brag brag.... 

Trump: check into this gorilla about that tribe thing.

Tribe: Trump said this to enemy Tribe. 

Enemy: No, we're your friends. 

Trump [beating chest]: Me perfect gorilla!

Tribe: [ confused ]... 

Welcome to the T in PATH: Theater. 

Now showing: Told By an Idiot.

As Seen on Facebook

Kirby Urner As a clue to my political views, I'd like to assist a class of globally-minded trucker establish a route-swap service that launches them to higher status as citizen diplomats. Truck stops around the world will be the place to go for podcasts of great debates. I don't know any other science fiction author working as directly on this story (parallel universe), however the components needed for my narrative to materialize are all out there. I'm not waiting for any breakthroughs in technology, nor interventions from ETs. Either might happen, I just wasn't waiting.

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Kirby Urner

1 hr · 

I've been studying WW2 again and see Hilter spared Britain because he found the British adorable (me too) and wanted to split the world with them, not wipe them out. A lot of his military advisers knew hesitancy and all out war are incompatible, but then Hitler saw himself more in the hearts and minds business; he was hoping to win with propaganda. His court psychologists were promising the moon at the time.

An eye-opener awhile ago was Dr. Seuss's role, as an American propagandist (an effective one I'm told, right up there with Charlie Chaplin). More recently, I've been back to Disney's role during wartime: the army was poised to seize his frivolous and inessential cartoon studios, but he convinced the military the rank and file would respond to cartoons, let Donald Duck star in training films.

Even more seriously, Disney adapted a military strategy book about projecting air power, and turned it into an animation, narrated by the book's author. The story is Churchill saw it first, convinced Roosevelt to watch it, and a new approach to war in the Pacific was developed. I'm no West Point academy grad, so correct me at will on the details of this narrative.

Kirby Urner What Jim Henson and Walt Disney had so much in common was their fervent belief that their media (puppets and cartoons respectively) were NOT repeat NOT just for kids. They both wanted to break into the adult world big time with their forms of art. Looking back, I'd agree that stereotyping these media to "children and childhood" was a mostly Brit Victorian invention (where a lot of the "childhood" concepts come from -- not being critical, a great invention).

A Wonderful Life

I found this to be a really fine documentary. Haven't I seen it before? Some scenes seem quite familiar, and yet as a whole, I didn't recognize it.

Over on Facebook, I'm taking this opportunity to meditate on my own mortality.  I'm but a year younger than when Wittgenstein passed, plus I've been watching lots about Walt Disney and Jim Henson, both of whom went rather suddenly.

They say our culture is in denial about death, doesn't handle it well.  That's a cliche in a way.  Why not turn the Halloween season into a time for embracing mortality.  To say it "sugar coats" death is an obvious truism.  What better excuse then, to add a dimension?

Regarding Wittgenstein's biography (above), I'm sure it seems dreary to many, given is ongoing depression, loneliness and suicidal proclivities.  On the other hand, he lived through two world wars. The world itself was objectively a dreary one.  He worked hard to make a serious contribution.

His story has finally come together in my mind.  The fact that he became a recluse in Norway before the outbreak of WW1, is a detail I've always needed to pin down.

I've gone back to my Princeton days in some ways, when I focused on his later philosophy and wrote a senior thesis about it.  I dashed out a kind of recapitulation of my thinking on Medium this afternoon.

Gallery Time

I've been spending some hours in Lattice Gallery, as an apprentice to the maestro, Sam Lanahan, who is orchestrating a whole series of happenings and events.  Flextegrity is the focus.  My curriculum content has for some years capitalized on my having access to Flextegrity, in its various iterations, as an educational supply.  You'll find lots on Flickr, as well as Youtube.

Glenn has an amazing collection of books, many of them on matters mythological and archeological.  He's well versed in a lot of this material, and admires Sumeria especially.  Therefore I'm smart to consult him as I continue to explore specific stories, looking for raw material for contemporary storytelling.  These days I'm focused on the Pythians of Pytho (later Delphi).

New to Glenn's collection: an amazing science museum gift shop type tome, featuring a plastic tarantula presented in layers.  As one turns the pages, the central spider is built, plastic parts fitting ingeniously into place, held to the pages by plastic.  The whole thing is somewhat delicate.  A rowdy kid, prone to throwing things or stepping on them, might soon destroy this work of art.

Regarding tarantula anatomy, I don't want to call it "simple" exactly, but it's a fine on ramp to the human system in any case.  The heart is single chamber of that pushes blood by peristalsis (the way I think of it), whereas the lungs simply interleave hemolymph with surrounding air. The transport of oxygen is accomplished using a protein that's copper-based, instead of hemoglobin.

You may be wondering at my choice of topics here, a seeming blizzard of non-sequiturs.  But then that's what hyperlinks are all about: providing context, where it might be needed.  I've been looking at protein folding lately, rejoining the Linus Pauling generation in terms of my narrative.  J. D. Bernal was a focus across two Youtubes.  His lab was about using the techniques of crystallography to make headway on the problem of folded proteins (how does it work, what does it do?).

How I get to crystallography is through these "lattice meditations" (lattice in the sense of matrix and/or honeycomb) and all that somewhat Platonic geometry stuff I'm into.  My work with Flextegrity is symptomatic of these fascinations.

Tech Talk (need coffee?)

I like that Wikipedia helped propagate the term "disambiguation" as indeed we have a need to disambiguated a lot of the time. From all the press given "machine learning", if you have that wired up with "AGI" (artificial general intelligence), you may be thinking we're on the brink of the Singularity.  Or you may think more as I do, that a radio hasn't a chance of inventing radio, no matter how sireny the songs.

The science fiction world we each live in, really matters, to each one. But as a fish to water, so we are, to this ocean of ours.  Expressing it is nigh impossible in some ways.  That sense of a bubble with limits is still valid, however much we've turned to foams (cite Sloterdijk).

Perhaps your world features immanent AI takeover of human affairs.  Or maybe it features old people suckering for expensive "we'll upload your intelligence" schemes.  We've seen all these plots in the movies.  I'm not suggesting either world is original in the sense of widely unshared.

I'm back to a full teaching load and want to give my Youtubes more time to just sit there and undergo fusion, or fission, or whatever metaphor.  Translation:  I'm not making one today.  I've been on a roll lately, churning them out.

Am I positing a mental process out in rackspace somewhere?  Not exactly.

I'm suggesting more stochastic energy patterns, thanks to random search engine activity, with researchers wanting to track down some supposed factoid.

That there's a stash of Youtubes on all that "Bucky stuff" already out there becomes known, whether watched or not.  Nor is mine the only stash.

In my science fiction, we feature "grid talk" a lot, which includes appreciating California's commitment to open source (peer review).

Once a secretive security state thinks it's in charge, and responsible for covering up all hint of scandal, we've lost public oversight of a public utility.  The open source liberal arts were not about altruism first and foremost, so much as omni-triangulation and integrity.

You don't want to put all your eggs in a no-bottom or weak-bottom basket.

I've been going over some of the Youtubes about the prospects for AGI in the future.  What I look for is honesty about where we're at today i.e. I have little patience for hush hush "secret labs".

Regardless of where you stand on whether electronic circuitry might support consciousness, implicit endorsement of deliberately misleading science fiction doesn't look good in the rear view mirror.

Sunday Morning

I was awake at 7 AM to catch CBS Sunday Morning, which I'm not saying is my routine. I teased myself with the prospect of bopping over to Quakers', hopping on the 8:30 "slow-moving" (like a train, figuratively), an "adult discussion" (free-wheeling, worship-sharing format usually?).

I'm not one of the regulars these days. Loyal conductors see it through.

Speaking of loyal conductors, I caught the "exit interview" by outgoing DoD boss Mattis, an interview spread over two segments (commercial chopping block).  He'd been a skeptic on invading Iraq but when you're part of the manpower, following orders is the rule.

He'd been at loggerheads with two "hat-shaped office" holders.

The "loyal conductors" of SMAD (Sunday Morning Adult Discussion) would include Marson and Wish for sure, and also our friend Richard.  As we're of the liberal, unprogrammed persuasion (Quaker jargon) there's not as much interest in belief-system wheel-spinning during actual worship.

SMAD is a place to exercise a more systematic approach.  We use Meeting to build strengths we'll need in civil society.

As things turned out, I caught the interview and then tuned out, turning to various other social media for continuity (and fewer commercial distractions).

A faction of the voting population plans on supporting Tulsi independently of CNN-DNC apparently, banking on her Wonder Woman appeal.  I'm sensing "Russian bots" in the area, meaning an intelligentsia into ersatz samizdat has developed a keen interest in so-called "progressives" (always a volatile term of fuzzy meaning).

Speaking of words with fuzzy meanings, I mean to search for websites telling us whether ancient Egypt was more socialist or capitalist.  Do we assume Rome was fascist then?  I sometimes say "neo-Roman" with reference to some of the Manifest Destiny memes.

As I've mentioned previously, conducting debates in terms unlikely to hold persistent meanings, because historically not well-established enough, may prove too time-wasting.  Risk assessment gurus keep testing the waters, regarding whether to brand as more socially responsible.  The character of the various corporate personhoods is being tested.

GST (decoded elsewhere) looks to engineering and design science a lot more, leaving political science to get more inventive if that's what it needs to do.  Customary namespaces have ways to provide continuity to their customers, while making room for noob discourses.  Or maybe not so noob, just a bit other-worldly.

Speaking of other-worldly, Glenn Stockton and I had an interesting conversation about abduction stories in the UFO literature, over a couple IPAs at the local supermarket oasis.

For those of you just joining us, "Abducted by Quakers" is one of my jokey bumper stickers, with a Spaghetti Monster icon (perhaps in silhouette) in the background, connoting a "friendly to atheists" vibe.  I'm also allowed to drink beer.

The "good without God" demographic is quite capable of Friendship we've found, including when it comes to the more ouija board parts (not a seance) wherein we allow for movements of the spirit.

Contemporary depth psychology has explained how "woo woo stuff" may still happen in a post Nietzschean world (i.e. strongly secular, with fewer fairies and angels).  Jungians presciently predicted "abduction by aliens" episodes might become symptomatic.  Today many abductees have their own Youtube channels.

Random CCP Tetrahedrons

These three videos form a series, and a rather simple trajectory. First, I show what a theorem about CCP tetrahedrons actually means in practice, by randomly generating CCP-vertexed tetrahedra and showing they have whole number tetravolumes, within the limits of floating point accuracy.

But why settle for the limited precision of floating point numbers?  In the 2nd part, I dive into using an extended precision number type from the 3rd party Python module called gmpy2.  We go from 100 bits to 200 bits in precision, confirming our tetrahedrons are ever more closely approaching whole number volumes.

The third video serves as a synopsis by bringing the first two Jupyter Notebooks side by side within JupyterLab.  I review how to make changes to the content, fixing a typo and changing an embedded Youtube in the derived copy.  I insert the above Youtube into the Notebook itself.

Also, during Part 3, I launch into a bit of a Quaker rant about how my curriculum is "more American" than that of the competition, in that I'm including, not censoring, the "Bucky stuff".

Buckminster Fuller was the USA's premier futurist until LAWCAP decided it wasn't quite ready for GRUNCH yet, and hit the brakes.  Those of us who were ready, kept moving forward and took the lead.

Place Based Education

In place-based education, we typically frame lessons (teachings, dharmas) against the backdrop of a kind of tourism: exploring a geographical area, providing both timeline and trajectory.
Hyperlinks to focal topics, presuming we have some, may play off environmental features, such as architecture as a link to geometry (octet-truss) or Earth's rotation (pendulum) or literature (Narnia, C.S. Lewis).

Accessing entirely "other" worlds is often accomplished not by "zooming out" so much as by "zooming in": a specific detail (perhaps a flyer stapled to a phone pole, a restaurant menu, a free newspaper, a festival booth) takes us off on an instructive tangent.

Yet we have our place to which we return, thereby anchoring the narrative to a contextualizing (and increasingly familiar) context.  Sesame Street (a TV program for children), but also many other TV shows, are "place based" in design, although the "place" is often fictional.

Fictional places are OK too, however consider the possibility of leveraging whatever reality you actually live in.  Investing time in studying your own environment (for real) is a big part of what place-based education is all about.  Students will benefit by gaining traction within a non-fictional viewpoint, which may yet seem "otherworldly" or "alien".

Place-based education is both a way of learning, and a way of sharing or teaching. Learn the stories of your place, then weave those in, with your own spin and interpretation, as you share your place with others. I'm providing examples.

Note that place-based education does not require touring far afield. If your lifestyle features a lot of travel, the place may keep changing. However rooting yourself in a specific place (e.g. both these slide shows feature Portland, Oregon) is perfectly legit and will, over time, take your students deeper into the lore, while facilitating omni-triangulation (connecting the dots) regarding your locale.

Euler's Formula (Part Two)

 Would you like to see Part One?  Part Three?

Self Updating

I play in the ML / DL playground sometimes, however I'm not the dedicated machine learner this guy is, on Medium.

From him, I learned about CatBoost, which I hadn't heard of.

Time to update my terminology.

Map Wars

This is a "back to school topic" brought to you by... The School of Tomorrow.

The Descartes stuff enters in because it's that difference between flat and curved that he's talking about. Now lets go back to what scares people away from the Dymaxion Map: grid talk.

Such talk was typical in World Game workshops, but went nowhere much after that...

... until the Paradise Fire in California, which helped motivate Cal Tech (and California more generally) to open source more of the thinking and planning process (I learned this at OSCON 2019).

Synergetics for English Majors

In having Synergetics be directed to English majors, I'm helping journalists see they don't have to sit around waiting for some verdict from STEM professionals.

The ripples in English are happening already.

More Place Based Sharing

Does your place-based curriculum include sharing curated stories and exhibits with strangers who wish to orient themselves to your locale?  In recent videos, we've been exploring Hawthorne Boulevard between SE 39th and 50th.  In the humble episode above, we jump south to the next major thoroughfare:  SE Division.

Some communities have hosted museums about their own roots for a long time, having enjoyed an endless stream of tourists, assuming "enjoyed" is the word.  Others have no such experience and upon facing the challenge, are not sure where to begin.  Where is our common history archived?  With the newspapers?  With City Hall?

Sometimes the visitors (so-called tourists) are invaders, planning to deprive the locals of continued access to life support in their region, in which case momentos of the indigenous culture may be on the list of things to destroy.

History is a source of case studies.  I learned a lot from seeing life unfold in the Philippines.

The Oregon Curriculum Network doesn't have a budget for something like the Birmingham Civil Rights museum, an excellent example of a place based set of exhibits. 

However I'm more just into demonstrating the concept.  We have lots of local schools, each capable of hosting media in the process of sharing a place-based curriculum with the students.

As a local tourist, when you land in a new place, you might consider several institutions as sources of history.  They may actually have an agency geared precisely to the needs of tourists. 

However, to the extent that "place based curricula" catch on, one might expect the local schools to become sources of reference materials, in conjunction with libraries. 

A lot of these materials are online.  However physical galleries with exhibits may likewise be in the picture.  Check local listings.

Tractor Graphics

What you'll find in many curricula that take up coding, is code that builds upon itself.

Taking advantage of what we've done already, we branch this way and that, exploring different topics.

A rigid march through a terrain is different from exploring it. The latter job is for scouts and surveyors, the ones who map out a territory.

The marchers usually come through when preplanned routes have been paved, or call them roads.  We're bringing people through at high volume at a steady pace.  The route may have some known obstacles or rough patches.

Then you get the Roman soldiers and what not.

In Placed Based Education, we encourage students to learn about, and share about, their immediate neighborhood, looking for ways to contextualize what's local in contained scopes.

For example, in these videos, we're exploring Asylum District (centered around one Hawthorne Boulevard, named for the first doctor to run a mental asylum in the state of Oregon).

I use the local scene as a jumping off point to begin exploring more of American History, which includes Americans in the north asserting their Manifest Destiny over peoples (other Americans) to the south.

This pattern has a lot of inertia and we see more consequences of this ideology in our own time.

In the Youtube below, I get the wrong Roosevelt, saying "FDR" instead of "Teddy".  In the subsequent Youtube, I go back over that history, fix the mistake, and take a somewhat deeper look.

The Bizmo Meme

This one gets deeper into the Bizmo meme, suggesting one of the hallmarks: institutional wealth (as in the military, but then universities have their fleets of this and that).

I'm not looking to privately own and maintain this one particular business mobile.

Rather, I would at least like to download some playlists and connect to work environments, to stay productive en situ.

This is a lifestyle I've been seeking to promulgate, knowing it won't work for me if it won't work for others, by definition.

Safe Campus Cities

Any talk of holding or detention centers (on what charge? for what offense?) sparks worries that cross the road to ignite corresponding concerns in our plans and storyboards for campus facilities aimed at accommodating people with only a few assets.

If you have a lot of assets back at home, you're not expected to store all these on campus, unless your goal is to contribute to the pool of recyclables.  Let people mix and match.

Large open spaces for assembly scare people, although the sound stage motif is very common. Corporate events, such as celebrating a new computer language, may use a sound stage and go for a "rock concert" look and feel.  Any lack of large open spaces for assembly also scares people.  You need those.  Thriving communities have those.

We're clearly entering Christopher Alexander territory in looking for the pattern language of the campus.  Occupy went here, exploring for models.  We didn't have a lot of pods to play with, wired to both receive and transmit.

I'm aiming for the "comfy carrel" or "cave" that's not locked from the outside.   You will say I'm avoiding designing prisons.  I'll say that's correct, not a proficiency.  However I'm a student of institutions and learn from fact and fiction regarding many.

The dystopian Black Mirror type episodes, around some cultural innovation, provide points of resistance and give people pause.  "Do we really want to go there?"  Oft times, we really don't, and yet there's somewhere else, close by, same neighborhood, we consider a worthy destination.  We need to aim.

Python Generators (School of Tomorrow)