Checking Avatars

 

Episode 1730 Scott Adams: The Golden Age Is Upon Us,
Trump Was Right Per Chomsky. Wow. What A Show

I don't think Scott will mind if I refer to his Youtube screen image as an avatar.  I'll be my own avatar too, on your screen.  That's not the Hollywood TV studio vocab exactly, as we're admittedly a different ethnicity here in Weird City (or Crow City), but a neighboring one.

As Scott lets us know, he has a war chest thanks to his Dilbert characters, who charmed our lives for decades in comic strips, and will continue to do so.  More avatars, but subsidiaries of Scott's psyche, insofar as office archetypes are anyone's personal property.  Scott applies the final spin, Homer Davenport style (but with a different type of penmanship).

I know from Dr. Potkin that Scott Adams likes to play for the Righties, the ones with a home advantage in English, as Leftie sounds more sinister right out of the gate.  That gives Lefties their own kind of edge, and opposites attract, and in this vid Adams is up to singing Chomsky's praises, because the latter has the intellectual honesty to point to Donald Trump as a voice of relative rationality, when it comes to taking sides, or not, in the Game of Global Gangland.  

Scott reveals some of his intellectual honesty too, in crowning Chomsky his King of the Lefties.

Then he serves to clarify the "by mistake on purpose" rhetoric of the Democrats.  Joe Biden was excoriated for letting slip those various signals that the deployment NATO forces was in the cards. He was seen as senile and divulging his fantasy life.  The spin doctors learned their lesson, and commentary on Nancy Pelosi's "slips" were more deviously circumspect.  We'll be eating ice cream in the Kremlin soon, right?  Nod nod wink wink.

Scott is clearly a mainstream establishmentarian in holding up DC's celebs as high ranking.  Many of us in the frontier lands grew up distancing ourselves from the Hunger Games capital, so to speak, seeking our own destiny, more like citizens in Alaska or even Texas, potential "seed states" for tomorrow's version of Global Gangland.

Scott's notion of "affordable speech" is enlightening and spelled out clearly, but are we all in agreement it's somehow preferable to our "free" ideal?  "Affordable speech" sounds more like "affordable air" with only a minority able to buy enough oxygen.

To my ears he's asking us to drastically lower expectations if we're neither rich nor geezers, by becoming minions for the privileged oligarchs we best like.  Play on Browder's team or Putin's, for example (not an example he gives).  The two are supposedly at loggerheads, but also have enough in the bank, respectively, to engage in risky speech, not to mention other undertakings, in which speech plays a vital role.

I guess I shouldn't worry though, as he clearly sides with "smart people" in wanting the censorious "we know best" folks to dissipate back into the woodwork or wherever they came from.  That's typical of how elitists with considered opinions see the lower half of the bell curve, and those who get by with cookie cutter beliefs they want universalized, or at least seconded by a mainstream.  

Most main streamers by definition hate finding themselves holding esoteric views that put them in the spotlight as unique individuals, or worse.  

Better to say best what everyone else is already saying.  

Show them how it's done.  Win the beauty contest, be a star.  Stand with Ukraine.

Speaking of Ukedom, and warring oligarchs (remember CrowdStrike?) and their proxies, Scott goes into the question of Putin's sanity etc. perhaps expressing a peculiarity of his ethnicity.  The same question came up in the car today, me driving.  Did I imagine Putin was crazy?  So far she couldn't see that he was.  

My focus is more the masses, one could say the movements, catalyzed by PR and advertising, with lots of think tanks just beneath the surface.  I'm more into Cambridge Analytica style collective psychology than any kind of Freudian style psychoanalysis of lone individuals, although I did go through a phase (around 8th grade) wherein the latter would have interested me a lot more.

But hey, this is a blog post about Scott and his views.  We can talk about me some other time, like when and if I make another Youtube.  I have some hundreds of hours of those on file already, an acquired taste I'd imagine, but great for those enjoying my style of "spherical pinball machine" didactic discourse.

Buckaroo Bizmo

The meme of "truck stop" figures in these writings with strong echoes of "oasis" including a surround "oasis community". I'm thinking of Hoon and environs, where I've never been.  I have some maps from dads old shelves, as a regional planner.

I think of truckers as "citizen diplomats" with a polymath's skill set, on top of driving, involving algorithms and data structures one could call it.  Like airplane pilots, they follow a rule book in order to safely share the public skies and public roads.  You don't want your pilots or drivers asleep at the wheel, either figuratively or literally.

I've been test piloting a kind of truck or van, a somewhat Buckaroo Banzai bizmo, that gathers intelligence about a route for the benefit of trucker simulators, kind of a Google Street View.  However the anthropology trained personnel are scoping out more than road conditions and bottlenecks.  They're more like Michelin, in the sense of tour guides.  Their product tends to be software delivered and runs inside other trucks.

Since "man is the measure of all things" i.e. since we empathize with our own engineering, I'm fine with pretending to be my own bizmo, puttering about.  Bucky played similar mind games, being the phantom captain of his own meat puppet ship.  Through the power of metaphor and analogy, I'm able to combine my being human with other experiences to make some pretty detailed mind's eye science fiction about Trucker World of the future. Pause to make truck noise and operate my ghost steering wheel.

What's a "bizmo"?  Business Mobile, duh.  No one calls them that.  They could be double deckers, sure, but might only stay within North and South Dakota, per terms of the contract  You might have several workstations.  You might have a caravan, with sleeping quarter bizmos a different type.  Traveling circus.  We're talking gypsies here.  As always.

Rendering Unto Caeser

Tax time tends to be problematic for Quakers, especially the relatively well off ones, and these are numerous, given the conservative investment and savings strategies of their ancestors.  Paying lots of money into Empire coffers looks bad on one's resume.  

On the other hand, one wants to do social good, so one goes the route of the big money people:  earmark for charity, so that your own judgment stays a part of the picture.  Fund the NGOs you choose (many of whom get government contracts, so one ends up on the same side of the fence in many cases).

I'm a big believer in institutional wealth, and not sticking out like a sore thumb as one of the affluent.  On a battleship, or say a pirate ship, maybe everyone feels rich and that they're cooperatively sharing responsibility for a socially owned asset.  

Some would call that military socialism and indeed, many a career military office has never had to find a job in the private sector.

Indeed, unless one knows how to keep mobilizing wars, it's hard to stay employed as a full time soldier.  Job number one is to make wars seem not only necessary, but admirable.  Cheerleaders line the sidewalks and encourage those marching towards destiny with brave resolve.  We've seen it a million times, in the movies if not in real life.

I dutifully paid my taxes but realize I haven't tied up all the loose ends, such is by filing by business tax exemption with the city (a formality for small timers with no employees I think they told me). I go to H & R Block for tax advice.

So like this Bizmo idea, where we have this fleet of utility vehicles helping out with the Trucker Exchange Program, gathering intelligence on the routes and facilities.  They have other uses too, in terms of recruiting for universities or other academic programs that include bizmotica.  Ecologists in the field already have their mobile lab trucks.

Without being the personal owner of such a fleet, without being the Elon Musk of Global Data, I could see tooling around in an institutional shared asset.  Or call it non-military socialism. Think of the various port authorities and the airport and harbor facilities these maintain.  These are not private sector institutions with oligarchs at the top, unless we're discussing the case of Robert Moses or some other outlier.

Robert Moses, for those who don't know his story, figured prominently at the beginning of the freeway era, which was all about providing vast numbers of private cars, most of them suburbia based, with access to, and parking within, central business districts (CBDs).  In Robert's case, the CBD was NYC itself.

Shooting the Breeze

This book came by UPS today. 
You'd think I would have read this by now.

 

We're coming up on Carol's 93rd birthday.  She is the eye of one hurricane, I another.

Glenn was over.  He's our Chauncey Gardener if you've seen Being There.  But he's a lot more world savvy.  I give snippets of his biography throughout my blogs.

I'm going over the pandas and numpy syllabus yet again, not forgetting matplotlib.  These are in the toolkit of a high school student these days, at least in my curriculum writing.  Jupyter Notebooks?  Why wait until college.

Speaking of Jupyter Notebooks, there's some thought of linking to one of mine from the BFI / Synergetics page.  Although I was a first webmaster for this institute, working in cahoots with Kiyoshi Kuromiya to snag the domain name and create a cyber footprint, I haven't had anything like direct access for decades, and that's still the case today.

If that circuit closes, and I get the new web traffic to my Github site, I'll likely jump back onto Youtube and record that it happened.  Until then, I'll adopt a wait and see attitude.

Another focus:  those USA Olympiad training exercises and past solutions.  My students want more specific muscles in the puzzle-solving by program genre.  I did a couple for practice and others I've yet to code are haunting my brain.

Happy Birthday Matthew (belated, March 29 is the real date).  I took him to lunch at the Barley Mill, one of the original McMenamins.  I hadn't known about the new Ken Burns documentary series on Ben Franklin.  I brought him up several times in the conversation today.

Were the French foolish to take the USA's side in the war versus the United Kingdom?  One could argue they won that war.  On the other hand, ideas about democracy, equality and so on were proving infectious and would France itself be spared the fires of revolution?

The common wisdom is nation-states act in their own self interest.  I'd like to keep this truism filed under "debatable" instead.  "In the perceived self interest of the nation per some inner circle or cabal that considers itself in charge" would be closer to the truth.

One could say such an example is the quasi-state of Ukraine, too important to allow for the petty pace of democracy by the look of things.  The weak gravity that holds peoples together, by common ancestry, language, habits (in sum ethnicity), is often no match for the separating polarities that drive these same peoples apart.  

One seeks a balance, not the ultimate winner-take-all triumph of the will that the greedy are always going for.  The art, in statecraft and war alike, is to rest content with world domination without turning that into a mandate to vanquish one's foe, once and for all.

source

April First

I don't have anything especially foolish or foolhardy to say on April Fools' Day.  I will acknowledge "clowning around" from time to time.

Today, on my way down from Mt. Tabor, I dropped by QuarterWorld, a local arcade game palace now for those aged 21 and older, or maybe it was always that way?  There's a bar.

Given the pandemic, I haven't stuck my head in that place for years.  

Dr. D. joined me, his first time in that place, and promptly scored top score for the day one of his old favorites:  Joust.

I didn't play any games this time, but I did have a couple beers, including this brand I'd never tried before: Game On! from Level Beer.

Replit Demo

Warning:  this demo doesn't always work.  You might just get a swirling logo, after hitting Run.

If you want to see the fish, you'll need to hit the Run button and then select the Output window from the lower dash. That's where the fish are swimming. 

Mouse click to create more. The D key eliminates several but never the very last.

Group Theory for 8th Graders

Carol was reluctant to follow orders this morning.  I'm making it sound like a boot camp, but any nurse knows it's about being a bit bossy sometimes.  She's still pretty strong.  She cycles.

Speaking of cycles, I just finished another one of my Algorithms and Data Structures class, the one I usually drive out to. 

However, this morning, on top of cajoling Carol, I could not for the life of me find my car keys.  I eventually decided to swap my on-site Monday for an on-site Thursday instead.  Then I found the keys, under the paper towels I'd purchased the last time I shopped.

"What do cycles have to do with Algorithms and Data Structures?" you may well ask.  Well, I'm thinking in terms of cycle notation, where you take a Permutation, say of letters mapped to those same letters in a different order, and express the same mapping in terms of cycles.

Think of watching wheels turning, or at any rate wheels of different sizes.  When do they ever come back to the configuration in which they started?  That's where the LCM comes in, or lowest common multiple of cycle lengths.  The will give you size of your overall wheel.

Maybe all this sounds pretty hard and you've decided I'm just trying to show off as some kind of egghead. 

My point, though, is in this era beyond only calculator in the schools, we have hands-on access to such groups and are free to play with and flesh out the concepts while learning them.  Calculators don't have the symbolic abilities a language like Python or Julia does.

So here I am, teaching eighth grade, in much the way I'd like to be taught were I back in 8th grade myself, but with all these new toys at my disposal.  How could anyone expect me to slog through high school, without my Jupyter Notebooks?

That's what Oregon Curriculum Network is all about:  prototyping the curricula of tomorrow, which may also include sourcing them.

Rumble Test

Car Talk

I did manage to make TrimTabbers, after Bonnie's great talk, because FSI has a hard stop at a certain time. I joined the Zome workshop only a few minutes late.  My head was next to David Koski's in my Zoom mosaic.

Then later that day, Uncle Bill was to arrive at Union Station for one of his two-hour "bend the elbow" visits. We usually go to Ringler's on Burnside, just close enough to the station to allow a quick lunch. If Coast Starlight is a bit late, so much the better.  RingSide is up the street (further west), a steakhouse where Ed treated me to a great dinner that time.

However, en route to the station (Go By Train) by car, my car, I noticed the orange check engine light all of a sudden. A few moments later, the dashboard thermometer caught my attention.  It was going sky high. I reached the station, coasting when I could, but met Uncle Bill with the news:  driving anywhere would be problematic.

Coast Starlight had been early, by about 30 minutes. Bill, age 96, pushed his walker out to my parking space under the viaduct onto the Broadway bridge. I'd been in touch with AAA about whether I was up to date with my membership. I was. However it was too early to request a tow truck without at least checking the radiator's water level, being careful to let it cool first.

All the water had boiled away I believe, and now in retrospect I know a large crack was permitting quick escape. Jiffy Lube checked it out the next day, and suggested I get a new radiator on the spot, which I did, after checking their price with my usual mechanic.  The check engine light is still on.  Jiffy Lube suggested that had been about something else.  Mind blowing.  Dr. D. says Auto Zone will give me a readout for free.

So thanks to the water I bought at Union Station, three large bottles of the kind meant to be consumed by train passengers, and quite expensive for water (it pays for marketing and fast cars), I was able to fill the radiator after Uncle Bill and I had determined the station's swank restaurant was closed until evening. An onlooker reported no great leak at the bottom (the crack is near the top) as I poured in bottle after bottle.

So we went to Ringler's after all, for our brew pub style lunch. Bill had a Terminator (their signature stout) while I stuck to Hammerhead.  He shared his pizza with me, on top of the burger, so I must have consumed a good 3000 calories, and I wasn't done yet for the day.  I should blog about that stuff more, as it's customary when journaling to note facts about diet and health.

Fortunately, Coast Starlight was running 20 minutes late.  I had Uncle Bill back by about 3:30, but it was nice to have that cushion. I called him later, when he was already almost to Olympia.

On that topic of personal health,  I'll just add that Dr. D. and I strode about on Mt. Tabor yesterday, including ascending the west stairs to mid-reservoir.  I call them "the calculus stairs" because of the changing first derivative, and maybe 2nd and 3rd for all I know.  They get steeper towards the top.

Taking a Break

I'll be tuning out the lower decks insanity crisis (aka war hysteria) for much of today.  

I doubt I'll make Zome Workshop II given the overlap with FSI's presentation.  TrimTabbers have been good about recording, so lets hope I catch it later.  In the meantime, I'm looking forward to Bonnie's talk on the tetrahelix.

The phase-in of more nutritious "right brain content" -- to use the jargon -- is only by means of slow trickle osmosis that I can see.  The science journals, such as MIT Technology Review are mostly keeping out of it, while the literary journals tend to be online and few and far between.

Disruption of the status quo would be noticed, whereas making the graphics more in accordance with what's found in nature (graphene, buckminsterfullerene...) is safe.  Like I said, it's a right brain diffusion, mostly under the radar of the left brain.

I was back to looking at the Urbit ecosystem last night.  However with two sections of Algorithms and Data Structures and the mini boot camp, I haven't had much time for recreation.

When I jumped on the Wordle bandwagon (I still have yet to play the official version) I didn't yet know about Stanford GraphBase and the list of 5-letter words at professor Donald Knuth's website.  

I thought I was somehow being original in discovering the relevance of such a list, of 5757 words, to the subject of Graph Theory.  A less original discovery I could not have made.

Trial Balloon Legislation

To my way of thinking, a lower house, such as of representatives, not the senate, is a place to properly float trial balloon legislation. The point of the first few iterations is less to get something passed than to see who shoots it down and for what reasons exactly.

For example, as a lower house rep for the Asylum District, a role I'll assume for the sake of debate, I'd propose Oregon extend friendship to the people of the breakaway republics in the crossfire between Cold Warring superpowers.  We know how it feels, to be trampled underfoot by military oligarchies.

Oregon has a lot of ethnic Russians who remember what Nazi aggression was like, and how certain elements within the Ukrainian oligarchy abetted this aggression with their own forms of tyranny and oppression. Some Ukes today actually feel nostalgia for those days.

Ever since WW2 and Operation Paperclip, the DC bureaucracy has made it a priority to recruit obedient former Nazis to the righteous cause of building a Fourth Reich where the third one had failed.  Lessons had been learned.  The Business Plot, frustrated by Smedley Butler, had come so close to succeeding.

Most of us know, from historian Edwin Black and others, that the eugenicist program to manage procreation based on the latest science, through forced sterilizations and bogus theories about "race", was much admired by Hitler's Germany, especially for how well the Americans were managing to pull it off.  Men of Anglo heritage, many of them in banking, were providing the blueprints, accounting for Hitler's reluctance to destroy them at the end of the day: they were Aryans, like him.

Fast forward and you get an alcoholic cocaine addled good old boy in the White House, running the show against the former Yugoslavia. Clinton was the Boris Yeltzin of those Monica Years, stumbling from crisis to crisis, as inept as they get, and then some.

I know, I know, we're supposed to romanticize his performance as "the first black president" or whatever it was (Obama the second? -- sounds racist to my ears) but I can't say I was ever that taken by either Clinton.  Ordinary schmoes at best.  Christopher Hitchens saw something more sinister.

Anyway, I'm long past trusting the DC-based imperial presidency to make wise choices and I support the separation of powers, between and among cities this time.  Any government wholly intra the District, is too ingrown to be other than monstrous.

Sure, lets have a trucker rally, but why not send the convoy to LA instead?  We all know the media power brokers live on the left coast.

Silicon Valley kicked the last US president's ass, hard, off both Facebook and Twitter.  Send the convoy to the real centers of power why not?  Bring your case to the Pacific Rim overlords.

DC is just a creaky old museum full of clueless old men, hoping to relive their glory days, for the most part.  The Pentagon: a giant nursing home, full of basket cases with awkward reflexes.  

Show some charity.  

Let other cities shoulder more of the burden of conducting themselves admirably against the backdrop of world history.  Stop pretending we need just the one CPU city.  DC is obviously in over its head, swamped.

Truckers Revolt

Whereas some around my household might be glued to the Beijing Olympics, my iPad is open on Ottawa a lot lately.  I can't say I'm getting it all in real time.  In this case, getting it asynchronously is sufficient.

I was telling Dr. D. on our recent walk up Mt. Tabor, that from my own selfish point of view, I feel enough has been done to protect me against coronavirus.  It's not in my name, not personally, that edicts and mandates go forth.  

What I want, for my fellow human, is for them to have a free choice to get vaccinated if they wish to.  Have vaccines available.  As long as much of the world is under-served, these noises about freedom of choice have little meaning.  Did anyone offer you a free set of shots, as they did me?  I took them up on it.

Whether you've been vaxxed or not, I'm as protected as modern science allows me to be.  I'm actually not paying that much attention to who is and who is not.  I empathize with these truckers who say there's plenty of science on their side.  I don't think it's so cut and dried that those who defy the mandates should be punished in severe ways.

We may need to grow the health care system though.  I'd say that goes without saying.  If ER beds are in short supply, then more ER beds would make sense.  That would involve a reallocation of resources away from the more homicidal approaches to the human predicament.  A lot of ideologies advocate killing our way to peace.  I've never been much of a fan of those belief systems.

Trucking needs to be interesting work involving intelligence gathering and diplomacy.  Truck stops replicate the ancient oasis, in terms of serving converging / diverging caravans and solo travelers.  These blogs, as well as my Medium writings, allow a glimmer of this possible future to filter in, enlightening our relatively dark age with more hope-filled premonitions.

Truckers should have a lot to look forward to.

Churning

For every thing there is a season, churn churn...

I'm pretty much in agreement with Glenn Greenwald regarding the neocons having conned the liberals into being neoliberals, or something along those lines. 

The more vocal pro-war pundits of the recent past, have been elevated on defense contractor TV, and made to sing those pro-war songs even louder, as folk music for liberals driving to work, listening to NPR.

However there's a two-way disconnect between the political grid of mayors and governors, and the Wall Street casino with arms bazaar roots.  The mayors create sister city relationships and compare notes on street camping, while the District of Columbia goes off the deep end into fighting a Qanon interpretation of world events.  

I'm not saying Qanon is winning (or whatever big lie theory), only that the general public has long since ceased to follow.  There's no real logic to it, so change channels.  Leave DC to fight its own inner demons.

Then what happened was: oligarchies like in the soap opera Dallas, continued their battles over tax havens and business jurisdictions. 

Europe is somewhat afraid to compete with Russian capitalism and is using a protectionist NATO to keep the old dead horse narratives alive.  

Is it working?  Will the people believe? So far it is not.  

The fear drums over Eurasia and the rush of action, merely advertises the willingness of these people to lavish money on their own melodramas, and neglect our more serious concerns.

The disconnect seems to be permanent, which doesn't preclude a somewhat business as usual attitude on the part of city governments.  

Work with the truckers and universities to make life more livable for people on the city campus.  

Reach out to rural areas for local supply agreements.  

Pass the torch to a next generation, regarding agriculture, mass production, and life long learning.

MLK / FBI

The title refers to a new movie, which we rented from Movie Madness and watched on MLK day (yesterday).  The movie focuses on the FBI's surveillance of Martin Luther King and his associates, in connection with the former's paranoia regarding communism, a memeplex deemed controlled by the Soviet Union.  

The military industrial memeplex embraced the threat of communism as its nuclear material, that which would justify all that followed, by fueling fears.

MLK was a product of his time and not really in a position to counter the psychosis of the over-simplifiers and their HUAC.  Weak thinkers such as Nixon would later make it clear how little structure or historical information really went into this toxic blend.  

One might blame Hegel in some ways.  

Americans just didn't know how to deal with their own European heritage and could barely help themselves when it came to staying out of elective wars they had no real business joining.

Germany was seized with a virulent nationalism focused on a "manifest destiny" sensibility just as surely as any expansionist power.  When ideological ambitions express themselves in the form of contiguous landmasses called "nations" (to be drawn and redrawn) we get that political data layer the Fuller Projection tends to dismiss as irrelevant.

The upshot is a conquered people, with Americans these days subjugated by Eastern philosophy, as much as the neo-Roman religion (heavily nationalist).  By Americans I of course as much mean the peoples of the Americas, the West.  I don't mean Anglo-Euros who carry these meme viruses and have succumbed to them, becoming creatures of the soulless corporations (animated by law).  Some of them seek enlightenment and liberation, but most seem content with their programming.

Four Directions

 

A lot of bellyaching goes on with regards to this concept of "cultural appropriation". I do agree that one culture may seize upon the memes of another, and from the standpoint of the originator, the new uses may come across as abuses.  "Are they mocking us?"  Maybe.  I'm not denying the "reality" of "culture wars" per se.

In my ethnicity, we have this idea of "class extends" as in Java.  The equivalent notion of "subclass" gives rise to different mental pictures.  The "extend" is to expand into a wide open space, it seems, wheres "to subclass" since like going inward to create yet a more specialized version of something.  Both connotations have their echo in actual computer programming.

Having done the Wy'East Lakota-based training, with sweat lodges, talking sticks, other accoutrements, especially the Medicine Wheel, I'm thinking to extend it (not steal it) to mean what it already means:  the four directions.  This is not a new thought for me, but perhaps my powers to propagate have amplified over time.

By "four directions" though, I mean "in space".  Paint the four faces of a tetrahedron:  yellow, white, black, red.  Four faces face the fullness of space by dividing it into four quadrants.  We might call this "the arrowhead" and its four points are likewise four pointers, indicative of space's 4Dness.

Wherever three face colors meet, the vertex might be of the missing color.

If made of stretched skin or hide, you'll have the connotation of "drum" and also "resonance".

New Circuit Designs

 Here's the deal:  the core geometry in the Bucky stuff was baked enough to go mainline forty years ago and nothing much has changed on that score.  

However the context is not "Bucky was right about everything" but "this is what the guy thought, a mover and shaker in this world."  Then we look at what "mover and shaker" meant in his case, and the thoughts. 

Linus Pauling:  to have great ideas, have a lot of ideas. 

Lots of historical data connects to his bio; he made it easy for us to cast his foreground (private sky) against a shared backdrop (world history as theater).  

We could start with World's Fairs (Expos) and talk about how the Congress opted out of hosting any more of them within the USA.  I was taking in another Youtube on that around 3 AM last night.

We might want one in the Shire anyway, no need for Mordor to get involved (we speak in code?).

We could start with the capsomere counts in the viral nucleocapsid, should it have an icosahedral one.  Sars-2 doesn't, as many do not. 

However the main thing is not to stop at domes and spheres, but to dive into the straight edged (hard nosed) concentric of polyhedrons as he conceived them, in a language game of his own devising.  

This was all ready to go mainline forty years ago (as already mentioned).

Said core geometry is Platonic and requires one major breakthrough insight, that our modeling of 2nd and 3rd powering didn't have to be expressed with squares and cubes.  

It's not that the right angle choice was wrong, as if Synergetics "disproves" our practice.  Practices weave into forms of life, and what proves them seaworthy is the test of time, which of course involves stresses.

High school minus any Bucky stuff is not really American enough for my taste.  

I'd expect our sprawling network to keep passing the torch, whatever that looks like.

TG 2021

I've been playing the Quaker card a lot more, being hellbent on pumping out some signature curriculum to my vast network of Quakerish schools, a global network, in the future.  

I might be long gone, a sort of psycho-historian (parsed through Asimov's Foundation).

Anyway, we had an authentic n8v American presiding, in a classic nuclear family setting.  Carol and I were the visitors.  She was able to climb the front steps on her own.  Both directions.

Urners are into dogs too.  Carol has some fear of pythons, which both families also have.

More Quaker History

I've been fussing around in /cryptography lately, as eliteschool/Crypto, the Jupyter Notebook, was not clear on the AKS primality test, what it is.  

It's still not entirely clear on that, but more because it talks about something else, relevant to primes and composites, that I take to be relevant to the proof of AKS also.

But really we're focused on Pascal's Triangle (PT), as always in our Gnu Math curriculum.

That PT property is one you likely know, if you've been following Numberphile and other "keep us current" mathological type channels.  Category Theory...  

That the row number of PT evenly divides the members (other than 1 of course) on that row, if an only if that number is prime.  Skipping 1 of course.  We talk about -1 elsewhere.

Like row 3, 1 3 3 1 defines the prime 3, whereas 1 4 6 4 1 fails the test (row number 4 fails to divide 6 without remainder).  The Jupyter Notebook features a PT generator, written in Python, and this test as a sieve or filter.

OK, that winds up my warmup. We were talking about /Crypto, where prime versus composite reigns supreme (as a distinction), so now lets segue to Elizebeth Friedman.

She fell in with Shakespeare early in her career, where she sharpened her code skills and met her future husband.  They and their sponsor climbed a steep learning curve ladder and ended up becoming like another Bletchley Park eventually.  Elizebeth faced her own enigmas.

In my Quakerish curriculum we're linking her to Prohibition and to the early Bucky who socialized with Al Capone.  That helps sync up the timelines for for these several protagonists we'll be following.

The tie-back to Shakespeare is convenient, given our Memory Palace focus ("the urb it orbs").  Globe Theater architecture was about the microcosm, as well as the play within the play.

I notice Github decided to break Jupyter Notebooks linking back to their own repo as the default option.  The benefits of cloning and owning the repo locally, versus viewing it online, has just increased.

Urbit Urbus

Fake School

Way back in the WayBack [tm], I was saying the Clintonistas were underestimating Qanon, precisely because it went to the concerns of younger netizens, too young to vote  in fact, about predatory adult practices I needn't get into with a sophisticated audience like this one.  

 Yes I'm talking about Pizzagate and so on, you may scroll back in my blogs.

These days though, and also in support of the kids, I'm mocking the Q folks for the shallowness of their research at the end of the day.  From our chat session on Zoom last Saturday:

10:39:45 From Kirby Urner to Everyone:
    Re conspiracy theories: The Qanons always boasted about doing their own research, following breadcrumbs, but were manifestly not good at doing that.  Even a cursory search on the web links their much vaunted “Mockingbird” to Ed Applewhite.  They don’t go there.  They’d find us. They’d lose control.

What am I talking about "They'd find us."?  Simply that Qanon pumps up Mockingbird as one of their dots to connect, but then fails to connect it.

C'mon kids, don't be as dense as your parents, my contemporaries.  Get a clue and study more of your heritage.  The Applewhite guy retired and went on to collaborate with his boyhood hero.  Who was that again?

C'mon kids, if you're not getting time with the bash shell, ask your doctor if that's good for you.  In the Beginning was the Command Line.  Read it yet?  If you're in high school, has any math teacher mentioned RSA (public key crypto, but also the Republic of South Africa matters too)?  

Yes?  Congratulations, there's hope for your high school.

Seriously, in this Internet Age, you have Net right there staring you in the face, all day every day. So if your school isn't talking Graph Theory, as in nodes & edges, as in V + F = E + 2, then maybe stop calling it that?  Why would you call that "school"?

Fake school is as real as fake news.

Imported Tweet

I would encourage Facebook and Google to leave the country before subsidizing irresponsible posers in DC and no I'm not talking about the recent election. So far Google hasn't use WMDs "by mistake". Whatever socially responsible investing it does, let it not be thru a faux USA.

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) November 15, 2021

Revaluation of Values

What did Nietzsche mean by a "revaluation of values"?  He didn't mean we should sit around passively awaiting the new code of conduct or whatever.  The work is a personal interior undertaking, the kind of work no one seems to get paid for, yet desperately needs to get on with.

Take "empathy" for example, sometimes defined as "putting oneself in an other's shoes". Normally this is seen as a positive, whereas "jealousy" is the name of a sin, not a virtue.  To bring "empathy" and "jealousy" closer together might seem more like opposing proton beams, bashing the grammar.  Precisely. Philosophical investigations resemble the work of CERN at some wavelengths.

For me to really wish for your lifestyle, I need to imagine it.  I'm jealous of your shoes, more comfortable, more durable than mine.  You have stuff that I want for myself.  I can imagine myself going through the day as you, happier and more satisfied than I am in my own life.  That all sounds like empathy to me i.e. I'm putting myself in your shoes to the point of wishing I were more like you.

Now we might trace all the caveat neutrinos emanating from this opposition.  Lustfully imagining oneself as another, directing that much libido into a fantasy life, is a root symptom of so many pathologies, whereas working on developing empathy and compassion is more generally seen as a cure.

Lets define narcissism as deep empathy with one's self.  You have a lot of compassion for yourself, and in a "me against the world" model, this is as it should be.  The healthy ego basks in its own source of warmth and doesn't need the company of others to stay strong.  However this also sounds a lot like the description of an egoless person, if such exist.  Is your classic narcissist on the verge of enlightenment, needing only to see self sufficiency as a divine duo, a state of grace?

Again, mixing "good" with "evil" values in your investigations, exploring the new polarities and tensions that result, is the form of exercise.  Consider it character building.  Consider keeping a journal, perhaps even online.  Quakerism traces to some of the same roots as Emersonianism, which I speculate would be found in a Mithraic context, pre-Christianity.  Thus Spake Zarathustra suggests such uber points of view.

Musings on Theme Park Planet

I was surfing in a Jungian Space yesterday evening, out for dinner with some heavy hitters I know or was getting to know.  Dwaraka was open for indoor seating, per our current zip code protocol (not that protocols are defined at the zip code level -- I refer to Asylum District, here along Hawthorne Boulevard, 97214).

Lets pause for a moment to cite Ken Kesey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, his novel and later a movie Ken didn't much care for.  That novel put Oregon in the map nonetheless, as thematically about mental health and/or the lack thereof.  Asylum State.  With the double-meaning of "asylum" as "sanctuary" and/or "hangout" and/or "safe space".

What might asylum mean today?  Where might you enjoy an outdoor concert while tripping in some way, without fear of arrest, but in potential need of medical attention?

I'm tempted to go on about Portland's particular place in PsyWar Space (the business of the "intelli-seers") but at this point lets talk about the space of meetups, newly facilitated by Zoomer culture, and also Meetup the website.  

The catalysis of online meetup culture, thanks to covid and people staying at home more, trading First Life (more driving and flying) for Second Life (more virtual) conventions, has sparked an acceleration in the conversation.  New equilibria get established through communities comparing notes, and not just through owner-controlled mass social media.

I'm thinking here of ISEPP Wanderers meetups 52 Thinking Ideas, with Thinking Society of Philadelphia and Humanists of Greater Portland as supporting actors.  This was happening in my backyard, but also through related listservs and emails. 

Humanists were already studying the job of ship crew worker, several weeks back.  I've been looking at the truck driver role for several years myself, not as a driver myself, but as a role play designer (call it "cosplay" if you must).  

The idea here is to apply design principles (ala The Design Way) to lifestyle design, wherein lifestyles contain their workflows, such as truck driving, heavy equipment operating, jet engine development and so on. 

The so-called "dirty jobs" are not outside academic experience, per the polytechnical institute model.  Include housework in the above.  The focus of Fuller's Dymaxion House was its unique particularity along one dimension, but its function in family life along another:  as shelter against the mortgage holders and the related slave driver regimen of both parents working (or lose your home), kids abandoned (to daycare shelters).

In place of polytechnic, think polymathic just as readily.  The "maths" in "polymath" come from "mowings" etymologyically, i.e. the condensed harvest from any "field".  The Silicon Forest is polymathic and its curricula are designed accordingly.  Like check out mine.

How this all connects around on Planet Jung is The Design Way by Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman invokes James Hillman and other Jungians, and dwells on the importance of the unconscious in creating "organic" solutions that are "with the grain" of a situation.  

A commitment to comprehensivity (polymathy) gets the ball rolling, providing a wholesome starting context, with experienced judgement suggesting when to transition from analysis to implementation. "Analysis paralysis" is a stalling out to avoid, although maybe not in sciences wherein simply describing the status quo is the final objective. "Paralysis" might mean "arrived at the station" in that case (mission accomplished).

Harold Nelson doesn't use the term "Feng Shui" that I could find, but I'm sure many of his followers do.  On Planet Jung (in the space of depth psychology) we permit Alchemy, Feng Shui and Astrology (interconnected "failed paradigms" and/or "pseudo-sciences" to some), to perpetuate some of their ideals, not as scientific truths, but as intentional associations and mnemonic systemic structures of potential value upon selective amplification.  We live as players, not as cogs.

The Design Way posits Truths, Realities, Ideals as orthogonal axes.  

Ideals must be served by Truths in the long run, and the Realities provide the necessary feedback, without which steering would not occur. 

"Are we leaving the ideal path because our truths are wrong, or because we have been lazy in updating our truth tables?"  We sometimes get behind in telling the truth.  Reality overtakes our storytelling.

Again, if you don't bother to have at least these three independent axes in your model, you may more easily become disoriented, as you'll confuse ideals with facts in need of proof, or special case realities, with what's true in general.  

Whatever the case, keep in mind your worldview is (a) yours to keep designing and (b) never finished.

What would Disneyland be without all the "fairy tales" it weaves together using some of the highest tech of the day?  Even "humans making a success of themselves" (Fuller) is but a fairy tale we may embrace, or laugh off as somehow beneath or beyond our ken.  Did we have some better story in mind then?

Does choosing to remain oblivious make us devils?  

Humanity bereft of any cause for hope might pass for the subhuman-tormented, as lost souls, in some dark novel (science fiction?) about mental illness.  "Ill to the point of losing our humanity" reminds us of the benefits of getting our collective mental health back.  "Humanity" still registers as a positive, even if, as creatures (monsters), we abandon our ideals and reconcile ourselves to cruelty and inhumanity as our lot.  

Will the pendulum now swing the other way then?  There's always the hope that these dystopian moods are but cyclic.

Just Say Space

Should I write a memo or something? I just had a realization in marketing space.

CMO here, Chief Marketing Officer for CSN (Coffee Shops Network). So why don't I post on that blog instead? Isn't this company business? Yes and no.

The realization is this: our marketing is being done for us when it comes to "namespaces" (pointing back to PSF Python, see below), in that the pros are just saying "space" and "spaces" and have been for some time.

It's OK to drop the "name" in front.

"I work in the space of advertising" sounds about right. As a phrase in the new vernacular, and also what I do in CMO mode.

I promulgate the idea of (design a space for) playing games for charity, stealing the acceptability of church bingo and drawing from casino space for some of my aesthetics, not to mention video lottery games.

You choose where the money goes, from a menu of options. Build a profile in the process. Be a hero.

Actually that's more spelling out a business model, but leaving out the circuit diagrams I've buried at the CSN blog, to keep patent trolls at bay.

There's a bigger picture around designer giving, the strategic application of funds to specific scenes in the various movies we're making.

Now I'm starting to wear my Asylum City hat, which is not that different when it comes to emphasizing prototyping. Asylum City draws experience from refugee camps, outdoor music venues (sound stages), the Oregon Country Fair, and even Occupy Portland (OPDX).

So that's the memo: just saying space is OK in this space i.e. when we're talking about the various namespaces we're operating with or within.

===

(base) Kirbys-MacBook-Pro:elite_school mac$ python -m this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
(base) Kirbys-MacBook-Pro:elite_school mac$

Trucking and Social Media

Some readers might be surprised to learn that I've long used the cab of the long hauler truck as my paradigm PWS (personal workspace) in GST, even more than the cubicle.  The cab of a truck is a work-study space, and driving may take fierce concentration.  You may also sleep in your study carrel. 

The Trucker Exchange Program is a meme more than a program, even if I've taken inspiration from such as Bob Textor, whom I didn't know well, but I joined his drinking party anyway.  Thirsters at McMenamins. 

He had to do with sensitizing the budding Peace Corps to the importance of Anthropology (the A in STEAM says no one but me).  In terms of diplomatic corps, State Department types, I knew my dad of course, and James Lambert.

Since I'm propagating memes more than I'm administering program, I don't have to worry about taking credit for the rising self esteem among truckers, where "self" stands for "role" i.e. "job".  The idea of a "role" is more appealing I think.  

Theater is it.  World Game.  A play within a play within a play... Disney beat me to it, with cast members instead of employees. We see that holds all the way up, to Top Mouse.

The romance of the trucking lifestyle, if only as a glimmer in the Eye of Possibilities, is enough to keep the would-be future trucker generations circling.  Let's make it a reality while we can. Like while we're not truckers, in my case, but active truckers may join us too.

I'm some member of the movie crew in one scenario, following some experienced long haulers doing OBOR (Silk Road) or something in Africa, or Texas, or in Oregon or Australia.  

I help with curriculum around trucking, to provide continuity, helping to design a global exchange regarding work-study opportunities.  The job (role) involves more tourism and diplomacy.  We depend on truckers to work things out.

A Battle for Market Share

The joke about 5G is that "it isn't about mind control" whereas of course it is.  Not in a tin foil hat sense, but in a marketing sense. The FCC needs you to be OK with 5G, as does Qualcomm, and really, what's your problem with it?  

Do you intend to obstruct the right of free peoples to make use of those frequencies?  We already use them, for cooking.

The PR maze makes it look like the anti-5Gers have a problem understanding the difference between nuclear bomb type fallout radiation, and the kind we all use to listen to the BBC on FM.  

5G is way down below the visible spectrum with radar, microwave, and other ice cream melting frequencies.  5G has nothing to do with gamma rays.  The G does not stand for Gamma, you sillies.  You conspiracy theorists who think people haven't done their homework.

That other animals besides humans might already be making use of invisible frequencies is in many circles considered balderdash, except in the sense that loud sonar or rocket blasts could break the hearing and peace of mind, to the point of self destruction, of various species.  

If SpaceX blasts the surrounding turtle space with trauma and drama, it's not a given the sacred species will "bounce back".  

The science will tell us, if and when, but by then it may be too late.

Research seems to show that animals brought up in the presence of 5G suffer no ill effects presuming just a trickle of power.  Blasting power through devices not meant to handle it, usually causes damage, to phones and IoT devices included, not just nervous systems (wiring is wiring). 

Ear drums get damaged when subjected to 2G rock and roll (when the giant amps and speakers made their debut, and kids stood right up next to 'em).  Stand right in front of a radar at the wrong time, and you're asking for trouble.

But are all the concerns around next generation telecommunications owing to concerns about brains in a radio frequencies ocean?  Not at all.  Other paranoias run just as deep if not deeper.  Stay tuned.

City of Transients

In the ordinary English I inherited from birth, a "transient" is someone who hangs out around the Greyhound bus station, not really from around here, and soon to move on (with our encouragement, "we" being the people who live here).  You could use "transient" interchangeably with "undesirable".

The revenge of the "transients" came with "tourists" who would come through laden with the gift of a hard currency. One's role in life was now to be authentic, loyal to one's traditions, so the outsiders could gawk at one's behaving so quaintly. The Amish could set up a roadside gift shop, and get the hard cash needed to procure from "the grid" (or "the English" in their jargon).

"Transient City" is more fun than just a giant dreary Greyhound bus station, however I admire the Greyhound brand and so wouldn't mind working it in.  "Disneyland for Bums" doesn't get it right either, because a Wanderer is possibly a college professor, someone else skilled, serious, hard working.  Among the bums be anti-bums. The quantum physics of "particles in transit" includes a representative percentage of every human variety (even the rare types).

I'm fine with working backward from the scandalized of the future.  Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg) does this with the anti-AI circus, wherein the anti-AI bash the AIs (the robots). My time-tunnel scenario was through the 1960s and Woodstock. Harlem had a blow-out around the same time (a giant party). 

Music is core to Asylum City, as is the willing participation of government agencies ala Oregon's Vortex 1 festival, brought to my attention by Alan Potkin and tracked by me ever since.  

The Oregon Country Fair in Eugene, Oregon is another model.  Expand that to include a whole suburb of a larger City, with sound stages and FM radio bubbles, and lots of internet with storefront gamer shops.  Wait, didn't I just describe the 1990s?  

Where are the sports stadia and intramural events?  At the schools of course.  Scholars and athletes are encouraged to cavort, and even be the same persons if possible (a Greek ideal).

The transient nature of tourists coming here, to live awhile, then move on, based on new connections and situations, leads to a camaraderie one finds among tourists.  Some are too full of stories to ever shut up about and are hard to be with, especially if one is bursting with stories as well.  Others have an endless supply of travel tips and whet the appetite of Asylum seekers to get out, to see the world, to quit the venue of Wanderers, Flaneurs, Tourists and rejoin a more static community, a Terminus (station, placement).

Not all my visions of Asylum City are this sprawling.  As I write, I find myself picturing current situations, the shanty towns, the refugee camps, stretching for miles.  How do we shape these into more festival centric "tourist traps" destined to drain, eventually, of those truly wishing to move away for awhile (they deserve a vacation), while serving as strange attractors for others.  

Those who leave, may return (e.g. to Gaza), to see how a steady flow of tourism may shape a place that's ideal for transients.  Airport transit lounges provide a clay for our imaginative play.  Ambient Music for Airports.  Hello Brian Eno.

Scheherazad Numbers

On the Zoom call yesterday, with simultaneous chat (text dialog), I found myself weighing in on what I thought Bucky Fuller was up to with these uber-composite numbers, pregnant with prime factors, and going for a large number of digits.

We're used to large digit integers from cryptography these days, and the idea of a "wrap around" gear wherein our composite is the modulus for totatives, co-primes to N.  Scheherazad Numbers would have those too, but maybe not as many as we'd expect (depending who "we" are), given their size.

Flash to the Antikythera mechanism, reconstructed from ancient blueprints (a rusted specimen, subjected to X-ray analysis), and we find a gearworks up to tracking local astrophysical phenomena.  Integers can do it pretty well, if at high enough frequency.  So could a computerized Antikythera with Scheherazad Number limits to precision, hold its own?

The theory includes trig tables and all manner of digital operation, within the confines of this high frequency integer space, however expressed as a decimal.  The Numbers provide a degree of resolution, without dictating a specific scale, much as RGB provides "millions of colors" and no more.

In Buckyverse we have this "nature is not using pi" trope, which stands for the whole phenomenological argument over whether pi has trillions of digits of significance in any future physics, or does Planck insure a limit on precision / certainty (Heisenberg too)?  Bucky comes down on the side of uber-precision being attainable, but infinite precision being the fetish of infinitists, a school of thought he's pitted against.

In other words, nature gets through the day without needing our trillion digits computer generated versions of "pi in theory", as fun as this target is to reach for.  Incommensurability is a real phenomenon sure enough. I don't think of Synergetics as "in denial" vs-a-vis what Euclid proved:  that the 2nd root of two could never fully resolve as some p/q with p, q integers.  Rationals have their limited exactitude, but then what doesn't in phenomenological space and time?

Front Burner / Back Burner

replit with Julia and OEIS number sequences

My pedagogy around teaching any computer language is to have the target language e.g. Python on the front burner but then compare and contrast with one or more back burner languages e.g. Julia, Clojure... 

Replit makes it easy to walk my talk in this respect.

I'm eager to demonstrate starting a new Jupyter Notebook and having a choice among languages. Ju for Julia, Pyt for Python, Er for R.

The focus is ball packing: triangular and square numbers (figurate on a plain (plane)); tetrahedral and cuboctahedral (= icosahedral) in space.

A student is co-developing a lexical skill (coding language) with a graphical skill (visualizing balls packing in space). 

Python replit and OEIS A005901

This way we get an algebra-geometry bridge before (independently of) a coordinate system (which comes next).

Bizmo Redesign

 

Yes, humorous.

Critical Path

We discussed this silly story: science fiction about a rogue Soviet branch of the KGB that leaked about its rogue activities to Bucky, who shared them in Critical Path, during our meetup the other day.  

Just kidding. Bucky has a similar weapon, a submarine aircraft carrier, but not quite like we see in this toy design.  Bucky is an experienced cold warrior and gives Russian intelligence a level of credibility.

Americana

The Lobbyist

I used to blog about myself as a "lobbyist" which probably conjures images of living the high life and lunching with high level mucky mucks.

As it turns out, I did have a consulting gig with Associated Oregon Industries (AOI), directly across from the legislature in Salem. They want the rule makers to know: "we're watching you like a hawk" (paraphrase). Me? I was a lowly application developer, writing Visual FoxPro for their LAN.

Anyway, as a lobbyist I was in league with those pushing "digital mathematics" as an alternative way to fulfill math requirements. The Silicon Forest economy is all about bits and bytes, so the idea was to convert an old and rotting vocational track, into a more computer science like track, and let students opt out of college prep calculus and go through something more like engineering (cue Terry).

What really happened is the code school economy grew up between high schools and universities.

After the 20- and 30-somethings decide they're sick of low pay grunt work, they raise their sights to more computer skills for better income, the trophy being "full stack engineer". The industry itself (picture old Chamber of Commerce) will certify you're job-ready, no need for an expensive four year degree from some dot ee dee yu.

If we think of life as a game of Snakes & Ladders, we know it's good to find ladders and climb them. The snakes have a way of sneaking up and providing themselves. No work necessary, to ride a slide.

Fast forward to today and I have a bevy of pre high school kids, on the brink of high school, and I'm bagging up all of high school math, as I learned it, and mixing it up with more discrete / digital / computer science type stuff, per my former "career" as a lobbyist, and feeding it back to them.

JupyterLab, Python, crypto, group and number theory... I call it "lambda calc" (with real lambda calc a core logic) in contrast with the "delta calc" of Leibniz and Newton. They're both math tracks through high school, per my chalkboard diagrams of the curriculum.

I'm accelerating at high speed into what I see as a bright future for schools that don't have to compromise as much, when it comes to their certifications. I picture those Quaker boarding schools, but add much higher tech (electric ATVs) and better animals (like we have here in Oregon).

From My Outbox

Here's an exercise.  I'll do two exhibits (think of World Game Museum), one connecting Bucky into the Humanities, the other bridging to Sciences more, pursuant to your question. I'll try to keep it pithy.  Anyone might do this exercise, thereby strengthening the IVM Bridge.

The Humanities

Allegra liked The Pound Era, she told me.  I think in the early days we all thought what we needed was a next Hugh Kenner, someone of high literary caliber.  Ed expressed strong affinity for Kenner as well, and maybe tried to be the missing literary figure in writing Paradise Mislaid, tackling that biggest question: what is life exactly?

However, before closing the book on these connections, we should remember the circumstances of Pound's era:  he was repatriated in shackles having been caged by the US Army for his joining the Italian fascists and broadcasting their worldview on radio.  

He faced the death penalty, but so many of his friends were in high places and they managed to get him committed to a mental hospital instead.  For like twelve years.  After which he went back to Italy, from when we get that famous Bucky-Ezra picture, Noguchi there too.

I've speculated that one of "those in high places" who helped keep Ezra's living situation at St. Elizabeth's remain livable all those years, was cold warrior James Jesus Angleton.  Ezra was allowed to entertain, and did.  James in his younger days had traveled to Italy and met Ezra then, before Mussolini and all that rot. Angleton then published a poetry mag, named Furioso, with Ezra's input.

A lot in the Angleton file is still under wraps I gather, as an Intercept reporter discovered recently, hoping to score a story.  Georgetown University had the papers by then.  The article says they were originally curated by another CIA guy, by the name of Ed Applewhite.  

I uncovered and shared in my Youtube channel how the CIA has a document on file, with Buckminster Fuller in a footnote, for having recommended for service a British journalist.  Mission: contact Ho Chi Minh and secure his cooperation against the Japanese.  This was before the great betrayal, as some would see it, which made HCM public enemy number one.

“Fenn’s was the only name [Gordon] would agree to.” Charles Fenn, born in the United Kingdom, emigrated to the United States in his early twenties. He became a news photographer and journalist; joined the Associated Press in 1941; and covered the war in North Africa and Asia, including the Japanese invasion of Burma. In 1943, in New York, Buckminster Fuller, an advisor to OSS, recruited him. He was commissioned as a Marine lieutenant and sent to Burma to run MO operations, in which he excelled. In June 1944, he was sent to China, where his duties expanded to include intelligence collection operations under the cover of AGFRTS.   Source: Bartholomew-Feis, The OSS and Ho Chi Minh, 96

The Sciences

Why was C60 named "buckminsterfullerene"?  

Sir Harold Kroto, who shares a Nobel Prize for its discovery, tells the story in my blog.

[ blog post snipped ]

Orientation for New Recruits (School of Tomorrow)

Rules of the Road

In our day and age, it's push​-​button simple to ​"​hit record​"​ and, without anyone else on the call ​being notified, ​and ​the video meetup gets saved to storage media.  

I'm not necessarily talking about the host or moderator making a recording, in which case others might see a pulsing red dot or other signifier, reminding them a recording is happening.  On the contrary, when any random person on the call hits record, that person gets a copy of the screen action, without raising any flags.  What happens to the recording after that?

The Grateful Dead were well aware of this issue at their concerts.  Anyone could tape the event, with the new devices.  Their policy was "go ahead" rather than to try policing and even punishing those creating, and even selling, "bootleg" tapes.

We have the same situation with television.  I have the ability to record whatever is coming over the "telly" (UK) or "TV" (USA).  I still have older VHS equipment able to do this.  Nowadays more people use DVR.  

One motivation for recording TV shows is "time shifting" i.e. the programs get broadcast at time X, but you'd rather watch them at time Y.  You may also wish to watch them more than once.

​Another motivation is mashups.  With raw material from several sources, an editor might cobble together overview reviews of specific online conferences, each with multiple venues (channels, tracks).  

Perhaps the audio track is supplied by some narrator providing a personal view of the activities.  Videos from Burning Man have this flavor.​ A chief attraction of Burning Man, a major spectacle, is the opportunity to take and make videos.

The awkward approach is to let these new technological superpowers go unacknowledged and then, after the fact, invent rules and policies designed to rein them in.

Do others on the call have to promise not to record unofficially?  ​Must they sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement)?  

​Do we insist that only those with hosting privileges have the right to hit a record button?  

When do we grapple with such questions?

The hosting body might reserve the right to produce the "official" version of the content, perhaps later edited, yet explain to participants, including invited guests, the possibility of "unofficial" taping by anyone on the call.  

The same hosting body might decide to release no official recording whatsoever.

What if excerpts from unofficial recordings make it to public forums?  Is this a travesty, a transgression?  What were the rules ahead of time?

In this day and age of rapidly evolving technology, it's a mistake to assume we all share the same codes of conduct and that it's OK to take for granted specific practices​, as if we're all on the same page by default.​

The past is not a sufficient guide to create the future, which is why explicit discussion and hammering out of the rules ahead of time is essential for any organization planning to wade into th​is new​ set of realities I call Cyberia (cyberspace).

On My Radar

Yes, in claiming to have a "radar" (not really a claim, more semantic heritage, an allowed metaphor) I'm thinking of Krystal and Saager, whom have kept me company, unbeknownst to them of course, through a first chapter of Covid.  

North Americans called it "lockdown" and I thought that too extreme, as in most zip codes we were free to move about, albeit with fewer places to go.  More a "lockout" in that we were kept out of businesses (bars and restaurants, libraries, anywhere "inessential").  Paris was more heavy handed than New York City by a long shot, or so was my impression.  

Saager and Krystal were the stars of The Hill channel's Rising, and then moved on, rather recently, to start their own channel.

Youtubers are the new rock stars, joining together and splitting up, just like the bands of old, and making music together, in duets, trios, perhaps in solo.  Hey, I'm one of them, way off in the weeds somewhere and barely looked at, given the esoteric content of what's on my shelf.

I spent the morning gawking at the floods in Belgium-Austria-Germany along those major river basins, all swollen with torrential rains.  I'm also following societal meltdowns (ostensibly state failures) in South Africa (Durban especially), Cuba, Lebanon and of course Haiti, where a foreign mercenary force murdered a president.

I'm watching Boomers and Millennials debate about who's to blame for the falling living standards, if that's what's in the cards.  I'm tracking TYT breaking away from anti-imperialist channels (Jimmy Dore's a flagship), in the ongoing oligarch-funded think tank wars.  I catch excerpts of Joe Rogan from time to time.  I tune in debates about Critical Race Theory.

For my day job, I continue hammering away at my example high school curriculum.  The feedback I got on NCTM Math Forum, at least from some corners, was the work that I do is terrible.  My detractors do not necessarily admire Jupyter Notebooks regardless of who is authoring them.  

But they also may have a beef about my content.  I keep hearkening back to a specific "Zen garden sculpture" (one of my names for it), a set of nested polyhedrons, almost a logo for a School of Thought (invisible college), with its own relationship to the various think tanks.

Back in the day, I used to express worry about the "cannibalization" of Synergetics.  The cookbook Synergetic Stew had been disturbing on that score.  However as time went on, I came to see this sculpture (with moving mechanisms) as akin to a beating heart, which could be surgically disentangled from the rest of Synergetics and held aloft by an accomplished doctor.  I would try my hand in that role.

I'd tell the Millennials that Boomers were too quick to dismiss the Bucky stuff, nor are most Millennials passing that torch to the GenZers.  How many does it take, to pass it on?  

Anthropologists know the pattern:  grandparents (an older generation) bond with the grandkids (a younger generation) while working parents, the middle generation, stay focussed on their careers.  

Boomers are looking back, GenZers ahead, with Millennials mired in their own fleeting now moment, on the treadmill (referring to the gym or to work), racing in the maze (the "rat race" we've called it).

Celebrating Allegra

Since the heatwave, which took Portland, Oregon to Las Vegas level temperatures, we've had pleasant summer weather. This morning I was able to do outdoor chores even in late morning, mowing, weeding and the like.

We live without air conditioning, although it's been offered. Power fans do the job. I'm still using oil heat in the winter as this house came with a muscular model and we're not hooked up to municipal gas lines.

Last night I shared about Allegra's passing with her friends and admirers on Curt McNamara's Trim Tab Book Club listserv. "Call me Trim Tab" it says on her dad's gravestone, a fitting epitaph.

I sat outside in the backyard with Glenn, as twilight spread, reminiscing about my several encounters with Allegra and her family over the decades.

I was lucky to be a contemporary, with a partially overlapping scenario.

D.W. Jacobs writes today on Facebook:

Today, is Bucky Fuller's birthday. Bucky was born July 12, 1895. Yesterday morning, his daughter, Allegra, passed away. I met her in early July, 1995, in San Diego at the Centennial celebration of Bucky's birthday. She was a major force in the world of dance. She danced in Balanchine's company, but then moved into dance ethnology. She was Chair of the UCLA dance department for 25 years, where she founded the Center for World Arts and Culture. 💖She was the best of friends and a mentor and guide for so many people all over the world. http://allegrafullersnyder.com/

Canonical Lesson Plan

Sometimes I get a request for a canonical lesson plan, one that will capture the flavor and style of Synergetics, by which they mean the Bucky stuff.

What I'm coming to on that score is the four random walkers starting from the same lamp post in the CCP (=IVM), and wandering for t time cycles.  

The four randomly arrived at balls define the corners of a tetrahedron which, upon having its six edge lengths get run through our volume computer, will turn out to always have a whole number volume.  In tetravolumes, that is. Four CCP balls define our D-for-diameter-edged tetrahedron of volume one.

In order to calculate the random walks, we use Quadrays as syntactic sugar.  The IVM ball packing is their sweet spot, which is why they're "IVM coordinates" by some accounts (including mine), in contrast to XYZ.

In order to calculate the sixth edge lengths, we simply perform vector subtraction between adjacent corners. Quadrays have essentially the same vector algebra as XYZ when it comes to adding, subtracting, and scaling.

Finally, in order to calculate the tetrahedron's volume, we use Gerald de Jong's formula, even though he has lost his derivation.  There's no denying it works well.  

Six edge lengths go in, fanning out from any apex and circuiting the opposite base, and the tetravolume comes out, natively, with no need for a modifying constant.  

The corresponding XYZ volume is computed accordingly, as IVM volume times 1/S3 (S3 being the Synergetics Constant for converting volumes).

In sum, we needed to learn what the IVM was, and to visualize movement within it as a process of hopping in one of twelve directions, by distance D, at each turn to play.  Then we needed to absorb the concept of tetravolumes.  

Getting whole number tetravolumes for the tetrahedra helps shock us into a mindset that might be open to the concentric hierarchy, wherein those rhombic dodecahedral cells around each sphere, each have a volume of six.

All of the above, along with figurate and polyhedral numbers more generally, including kissing point counts, form our IVM-XYZ bridge over troubled waters, the C.P. Snow chasm.

Heuristics for Teachers (continued)

City of Roses

 Try reading this as a kind of poetry.  It's about a rose, after all.

As Korzybski, the founder of general semantics, pointed out, the consequence of its single-tagging is that the rose becomes reflexively considered by man only as a red, white, or pink device for paying tribute to a beautiful girl, a thoughtful hostess, or last night's deceased acquaintance. The tagging of the complex biological process under the single title rose tends to detour human curiosity from further differentiation of its integral organic operations as well as from consideration of its interecological functionings aboard our planet. We don't know what a rose is, nor what may be its essential and unique cosmic function. Thus for long have we inadvertently deferred potential discovery of the essential roles in Universe that are performed complementarily by many, if not most, of the phenomena we experience. But, goaded by youth, we older ones are now taking second looks at almost everything. And that promises many ultimately favorable surprises. The oldsters do have vast experience banks not available to the youth. Their memory banks, integrated and reviewed, may readily disclose generalized principles of eminent importance.

 Exercise:  mine for memories of meanings for "rose" and be favorably surprised.

Mapping Out a Curriculum

Thinking with Mike Episode 5:  My Favorite Martian Mathematician