More Compositions

:: daring a candle ::

:: a coupler ::

:: low frequency bizmo ::

A Quick Account

I sampled the gym today, running in place for just 30 minutes, then whipped through a Trader Joe's in time to drop off the frozen goods (including salmon for dinner) before heading on down Division.

The new Coxeter bio arrived from Amazon, and I looked in the index for Fuller overlaps. No mention of Applewhite (part of the fullerene story). I found some juicy bits though, which I read after watching some Lost with Tara.

I can't really fault the author (to whom I apologize for earlier referring to as "he") for steering clear of Synergetics, as this is a book about H.S.M. Coxeter and his geometry, not about Bucky Fuller's philosophy, although Ludwig Wittgenstein is mentioned, even depicted (pg. 107).

Wittgenstein thought mathematicians didn't usually make strong philosophers -- true of his student Coxeter (whom he liked, plus used his room for meetings) but so what? He was a true King of Geometry and ain't that plenty?

Sculpture (with found objects)

"some weird North American religion?"
(click for closer view)

Edgefield: Home of the Black Rabbit

"a peaceful view"

The Water Tower

Judy, Sam, Alexia, Tara, Dawn

photos by me
and the Olympus Stylus 500

Chatting With Mom

Mom and I had an interesting conversation this morning. She was joking about her disabilities and I was exulting how sharp she was, and credited the military-industrial complex for keeping her sane. She fights it all day, tells it to disarm. Keeps her in shape.

Meanwhile, down the hall, I'm like this pro DARPA person, because when Guido was a nobody, and brilliant (now he's a somebody, still brilliant), his bold Computer Programming for Everybody manifesto attracted DoD attention. What a boon to democracy it would be, to have Americans at least (more if willing) computer literate.

Here's an article from Salon about what happened instead: teachers actually dropped all mention of programming for the most part, and now maybe think they'll get away with blaming the PC engineers.

Sorry to disappoint, but the freedom to download and run free languages has never been greater. If your curriculum is in trouble, don't come whining to the engineers about it. They've met you more than half way. Think of some other excuse?

That being said, we have a long way to go with improving the technology. That's why we recruit so avidly, hoping to bolster the civilian sector with high caliber talent. We need next generations to help us make life better. We're not done yet, not even close.

But where will this talent come from, if we ignore golden opportunities to educate when it matters, before they've become hardened-in-their-ways adults, possibly all Eloi, hardly a Morlock among them. That'd be bad for our time, and we don't need any "time machine" to tell us that.

So anyway, Mom and I basically agreed we're working at opposite ends of the same spectrum. I deal with dark sider tooth/fang stuff all day, while she gets to work with wise women (I'm not saying which is easier). She's glad my campaigns are going well, both HP4E and 4D.

Merging Traffic Patterns

The painters are back, doing a smart job. We're operating on schedule.

Mom's United flight from O'Hare was late, but lets face it, this many people flying around the world is a dream come true as well, a case where futurism paid off. You'll see Amish on Catalina (I did, visiting from a cruise ship), and isn't that a blessed thing. Mom's trip originated in London. Now she's back in her office, joining in conference calls.

I drove out to PDX to retrieve her. Our curved IVM archway, protecting us from the rain while suspending two bridges, is an engineering marvel. Speaking of which (rain), that's what it's doing right now (raining). And yet the painters don't care. They like living in a rainforest (our SiliconForest is one of those too).

Dawn uses the iPod to listen to dharma talks, meaning I get to lurk in from time to time. I also have Dyxy Chyx Not Ready to Make Nice music video (a strong performance) and EBN's EBCS, now a Google Video in low rez.

More on Project Earthala

From earlier today, responding to some talk about what a disaster global warming might be, in real human terms:

---

Re: [wwwanderers] Global warming: practical approach

This is where I usually start saying biting things about Economics as a discipline, proposing that General Systems Theory (GST) is less likely to feed a collapse, because more science-savvy in so many dimensions (ergo less prone to breakdown).

But that'd be for a whole 'nuther thread.

Anyway, I do think the ongoing high price of oil will help with my horse camps in the Arizona desert, where we do these permaculture domes and pretend we're these hippie Quakers, except with Internet and flatscreens, and biodiesel dirt bikes.

Oh, and we talk about Synergetics like it was the Bible or sumthin' sometimes quoting chapter and verse -- i.e we talk like buckaneers (even eat BBQ sometimes).

Most people just visit as tourists. We're kinda cliquey sometimes.

Kirby

---

There's a pun lurking here, in that such ecovillage communities might likewise occur in South Africa, home to various "click languages" such as Xhosa.

As for the Project Earthala reference, I've got lots of other posts and allusions: [1][2]... [3] (some samples).

Other recent Wanderers posts focus on Chaco Canyon, and how global warming might not have been a big crisis/calamity for the people living through it back in the 1100s.

Tourist traffic tapered off and people went on to other businesses.

Civilizations, especially highly developed ones, don't always panic and fail when the climate changes. Some smoothly transform.

I also look at the case of Holland, which has a lot at stake where sea levels are concerned. I think we should fight alongside the Dutch, if their homeland is imperiled, in as smart a way as our global climate models will allow (and then some).

Belmont Street Fair

electric car prototype, 1921

more recent specimen

proud of her dog

the happy face of downtown

Razz

Investments

"privately enterprising"
(photo by K. Urner)

Obviously I consider my skills as a teacher bankable assets, and indirectly, so does my bank, in that they model me keeping an income sufficient to pay down the mortgage and maintain high "credit worthiness" (which computers keep track of).

My "earning capacity," along with my wife's (a dual-income household) allowed us to build equity in the house, typically the principal physical asset of a middle income family, next to the car and/or truck (no ATV or jet ski in our case).

Such physical assets are also principal assets of the neighborhood bank, which models average incomers as incapable of financing a home's purchase without credit, meaning a huge markup on the sticker price, but one you tend to not see unless you run the spreadsheets, and realize how good it is to be on the receiving end of exponential interest rates (where the "rich people" live, a lot of 'em bankers).

Banks get to mortage the same house multiple times, as people in varying financial straits assume title and secure financing. Homes are like DVDs in the video store, watched over and over and over again. It's a secure way to make a living, if you're in the business of loaning for homes.

Part of why LAWCAP fought Bucky so much is he derided this system of governance as somewhat pathetic, as it assumes dire straits for so many. But that's how LAWCAP tends to operate: overwhelming lack of life support is just a given. "We don't fight that state of affairs, we make money off it."

Not a popular strategy among the poor, and in a model democracy the government might take a different direction. That presents a puzzle: how to intimidate enough people into supporting the low living standards standard. You need a lot of ideology in overdrive, keeping people thinking straight and paying those mortgages.

Anyway, part of my responsibility as a stakeholder in this home (me and the bank share this asset), is to see to its upkeep. To that end, we just had some painters come by to make a bid. The "down to the wood" approach is the premium ten years guaranteed way to go, but most middle incomers not surprisingly go for the "feathered edge" (scape and power wash, but if the paint's tightly bonded, leave it be and paint over). The bid for the latter service was like $4,500 give or take, more like $11,500 for the former, with 10% off if we commit within the next three days (likely we will, after checking against other bids -- I liked their energy).

Now if I were a really good capitalist tool, I'd be using my intelligence to venture capitalize in various corporate ventures. By age 48 (my current age), I'd have a track record of having bet wisely and earned good returns. I might have lots of money, which I'd subtly advertise with various lifestyle cues, and various dependents, friendly companies (affiliates) would want to piggy-back their money on mine, i.e. let me manage their investments for them, so they could get rich the way I did.

What with a Princeton degree, no doubt some social connections, perhaps membership in one or more clubs, I could be living on easy street by now, with several homes, several cars, and a lot of satisfied (well off) customers.

However, I made a career building skills in the not-for-profit (aka public) sector, trying to think ahead the way Bucky did, anticipating new kinds of need, even new kinds of science. This is called "high risk" venture capitalizing, closer to what "crackpot inventors" seem to do. Some of them get rich, but mostly they end up remorseful, for having squandered so much energy on cold fusion or whatever.

But from my point of view, Synergetics was more of a "sure thing" in terms of its philosophical sophistication. I could see a bright future, if I only stuck to my guns, which is what I did, and I don't regret it. Now I'm this hot shot gnu math teacher, respected by my peers.

OK, gotta go now. Time to open a new bank account for my daughter. She had a summer job this year, earned some savings. Now I'd like to wire her account to a debit card and iTunes, so she can pay for her own music and video iPod downloads. She'll still get her allowance and all that, but I'd like her to consolidate and have a sense of managing her own affairs.

Back from the bank: snapped that cool bizmo on the way home (above picture).

Transaction: cheque from flextegrity.com pays for Portland Knowledge Lab's rent this month. I did some work on the web site (still very minimalist at this point).

Addendum: we also plunked down for two years of orthodonture for Tara; we like and trust Dr. Joe. Tonight: joining Wanderers on Barry's boat (Barry the banker).

Barry

The Lost City (movie review)

We gathered for BBQ with other Friends, three married couples enjoying a warm bug-free evening in the backyard. Larry and Susan went to Hollywood Video to make a selection, and came back with this R-for-violent tale of a family torn asunder by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 (about 8 months after my birth in Chicago).

Instead of the mellow "chick magnet Che" of Motorcycle Diaries, this time it's "psycho Che" already with many friends murdered. But neither he nor Fidel get much focus in this flick. The main character is a dinner jacketed Cuban on the Meyer Lansky side of the fence.

Lansky (played by Dustin Hoffman) gives our hero the creeps mind you, but as the owner of a successful music club, he has little choice but to rub elbows with organized crime which, upon being evicted from Havana, headed straight for Las Vegas (the movie alludes to this winged migration).

The pretty girl is like a Marilyn figure, wanting to use her head like a man's, to play on the world historical stage, even if only around a rotund Russian ambassador for starters. She wants to be someone in this life, not just someone's lover or wife. I respected her courage.

But the male principal, a man of principles, was not about to share her with a revolution that, from his perspective, had utterly destroyed his own family, leaving only heartbreak and remorse in its wake. Cuba as a "saxophone free zone" really sucked (and yes, so did the Belgian Congo). New York held more promise (that statue really helps).

But then, most Cubans didn't have "New York" as an option. The film isn't really focused on the lower decks of this particular Titanic.

Dawn's O2 went out half way through. She switched tanks but forgot to dial a level, and so breathed unassisted for an hour, leading to some chest pain towards the end. She enjoyed the film but, as with V for Vendetta, was put off by the violence level.

Maybe Bill Murry is what keeps this film watchable. He breezes through as the writer-comedian, perhaps emblematic of the screenwriter's viewpoint. He pokes fun at all players, out of familiarity more than fear, like some other-worldly being. He typifies high artistry, the kind of thing these high rolling bosses really traffic in anyway (all of them seek quality).

There's a lot of theater in politics, a lot of politics in theater. This film takes a raw reality and transmutes it into something worth watching, even if oft times unpleasant to contemplate.

Back to School

"dwelling machine rendering"
(by Andrew Owens)

"a child's workspace"
(photo by Dad)

Mathcasting About Phi

The Pentagon
Google Earth

In support of the president's NCLB initiative, I cooked up what I call the "NCLB Polynomial" over on the Math Forum. I didn't invent the polynomial itself (it's very old), but came up with the name because children should be learning about it, if wanting to keep up with their studies at all (NCLB = No Child Left Behind).

Its positive geometric solution, phi (pronounced fie or fee), is the ratio of a regular pentagon's diagonal to its edge.

A symbol dance might start with a Golden Mean derivation, with a voice saying "the smaller is to the larger as the larger is to the whole" as on screen we see: smaller:larger = larger:whole, where whole = smaller + larger.

Since it's a ratio we want, it's OK to arbitrarily set the smaller segment to 1, such that 1/L = L/(1 + L) -- L for larger. Multiplying both sides by (1+L), then L, gives (1+L) = L*L or (L*L - L - 1) = 0 (the NCLB Polynomial). The positive solution is (1 + sqrt(5))/2, which is phi.

useful trig info
ray tracing by K. Urner

Over on edu-sig (a special interest group in the Python community), we've been looking at a Python generator for 1/phi (phi's reciprocal), using Fibonacci Numbers. A generator yields an interim value in response to a next() method, while remembering its internal variables between calls.

Fibonacci Generator
Python 2.5 on Windows XP

I'm not saying we need to pack all this information into just one mathcast. The strategy is to grow a large archive of clips, so teachers can embed them within their own presentations as they see fit.

Given Fibonacci (1170-1250) depended on Iraqi intelligence for his Liber Abacci, it'd make sense to use Baghdad as a backdrop for some of these clips. Of course many of our most talented and effective math teachers are Iraqi.

Getting off the XY plane, we get to the pentagonal dodecahedron (12 pentagonal faces, 20 vertices) and its dual, the icosahedron (20 triangular faces, 12 vertices -- and buildable from three phi rectangles).

In Synergetics, we jitterbug between the icosahedron and cuboctahedron, showing both have the same number of balls in their outer shells (1, 12, 42, 92, 162...). This connects us to the geodesic spheres and domes, crystallography, virology and hexapent chemistry (see below).

Related reading:
More About Geek TV (January, 2006)
Math Wars (continued) (March, 2006)
Brute force solutions (for phi, on edu-sig)
Ayatollah of the Tetrahedron (February, 2005)

HP4E

Chalmers, Göteborg
site of Europython '05 and Nanotubes '05

HP4E is a play on CP4E, Guido's DARPA-funded Computer Programming for Everybody initiative (with work, we could perhaps tie these back to HCE in Finnegans Wake, but that's for some other thread). HP = HexaPent in this namespace.

It's not really work to popularize the soccerball, already high on the recognition scale. Movies like The Cup well-document its cross-cultural appeal. But once we divide the field into soccerballs (a family) and buckyballs (another family), the game gets more technical. Here are the rules:

• Soccerball: looking over the fence from a pentagon, every neighboring lot is hexagonal; looking over the fence from a hexagon, faces alternate between pentagonal and hexagonal.
  
• Buckyball: all hexagons plus 12 pentagons, such that three lots (i.e. three fenced-in areas) come together at every fence post (i.e. vertex).

I got this taxonomy from Dieter Kotschick's article, The Topology and Combinatorics of Soccer Balls, in American Scientist, Volume 94 (pg. 350) -- except I'm making "soccerball" into one word, to go with "buckyball". Dieter credits a German high school math contest for the soccerball definition, although it added a rule that the facets be regular polygons (now a topologist, Dieter doesn't need to follow that one).

The buckyball stipulation (three edges must meet at each vertex) is lifted from carbon chemistry, and is characteristic of the fullerenes, i.e. the spherical hexapent carbon cages, first discovered in the 1980s and posthumously named (Fuller died on July 1, 1983).

Appropriately, three scientists shared the Nobel Prize for buckminsterfullerene's discovery: Kroto, Smalley and Curl Junior. C60, the fullerene with 60 carbon atoms, is topologically the same as the soccerball, i.e. the two above-defined sets intersect on this already-famous member. Kotschick says this is the only element common to the two sets (i.e. is their intersection).

But carbon-based chicken wire needn't be spherical. Consider the nanotubes, capped and uncapped ("buckytubes" some call 'em). Such nanotechnology is a hotly topical area for scientific research these days. When I went to Chalmers @ Gothenburg, Sweden for EuroPython in 2005, the nanotubes conference seemed to dwarf ours in size. Our populations mingled. Lots of scientists use Python, if they do any programming.

Here in Portland, we're gearing up to work on global matrix displays, meaning hexapent fly's eyes colored with global data. Whether or not these unfold into a Fuller Projection depends on the application e.g. it's protected from spoilage by war gamers preoccupied with political border disputes. The hand-held units might just show one hexagon at a time e.g. the one you're in now. Glenn also talks about logic gates and quantum computing a lot, but more with his PSU colleagues than with the Wanderers (two sets, partially overlapping).

My focus these days is the open source community and a "gnu math" curriculum, meaning in part that I want to keep the public up to date and informed about all this interesting scientific research.

Even positive developments meet with resistence, if people don't feel a democratic process has been followed, with lots of debates and town hall meetings. "Imposing from above" is not a popular style of government, and when it comes to HP4E (or CP4E for that matter), I'd like to avoid repeating some past mistakes (we learned a lot from the New Math debacle).

That being said, there're always hold-outs unwilling for change to happen, even if those changes mean higher living standards for a majority of folks. They like the advantages the status quo gives them, and believe in some foreordained right to command more than their fair share (perhaps on the basis of some religion?).

I'm not really interested in pandering to this crowd either.

The democratic process is not synonymous with the tyranny of some minority. If they don't like our global matrix hexapents or Fly's Eye dwelling machines, they shouldn't be forced to use 'em. But nor should the rest of us be denied our preferred brands of mathematics and/or science fiction on television.

Europython conferees wandering
through a nanotubes poster session
Chalmers, 2005


photos by K. Urner

Name Collisions

My take is the remoteness of the Synergetics vocabulary made some people nervous enough to credit Bucky with inventions he never conceived of -- although the more popular story is that he stole people's inventions (as in "pirated" them) without giving them their due.

I'm thinking of Clifford Nelson in particular. He invented some elaborate analytical apparatus involving the four planes of the tetrahedron and claimed to have found it in Bucky's corpus. But when I comb through Synergetics, I find no such Rube Goldberg contraption.

True, friends and I collaborated on Quadrays, which one might likewise liken to "4D" in some buckaneer manner (like, we've got a tetrahedron here too), but we never claimed to have found this apparatus actually lurking between the lines of Synergetics itself.

New stuff arises. Elastic Interval Geometry for example: it's not "just tensegrity". Life goes on. Snelson's model of the atom isn't "just tensegrity" either.

Had Bucky lived longer, he'd have enjoyed the collateral with us. Who knows, we might've had those ecovillages by now -- goofy parallel Universe talk, I realize, otherwise known as the subjunctive tense.

OK, now let's listen to Bucky spin it:

For example, quantum mechanics came many years after I did to employ the term spin. The physicists assured me that their use of the word did not involve any phenomena that truly spun. Spin was only a convenient word for accounting certain unique energy behaviors and investments. My use of the term was to describe a direct observation of an experimentally demonstrable, inherent spinnability and unique magnitudes of rotation of an actually spinning phenomenon whose next fractional rotations were induced by the always co-occurring, generalized, a priori, environmental conditions within which the spinnable phenomenon occurred. This was a case in which I assumed that I held a better claim to the scientific term spin. In recent years, spin is beginning to be recognized by the physicists themselves as also inadvertently identifying a conceptually spinnable phenomenon -- in fact, the same fundamental phenomenon I had identified much earlier when I first chose to use the word spin to describe that which was experimentally disclosed as being inherently spinnable. There appears to be an increasing convergence of scientific explorations in general, and of epistemology and semantics in particular, with my own evolutionary development. (250.31)

I think you'll admit, you don't hear spinning like that every day.

Related reading:
Psychology of Synergetics (January, 2000)
Synergeo #28469 (August, 2006)

Adventures in ToonTown

event log screen capture

We've set up a new workstation in the living room, using Toshiba + wireless peripherals, which is where I'm posting from, via http, to my blog. KTU2 is unusable for the moment -- a thread running through this tale...

We received an electric service interruption notice by USPO some days ago, a postcard, but I'd forgotten all about it.

Anyway, the battery backup kicked in, saving work on computers in the back office (but not Tara's Sims 2), Dawn switched to a tank for 02 (the oxygenator requires AC), and all was well.

Until the power came back on, just minutes later. Then, my troll of a computer decided to power down with short-to-no notice.

Lucky for Rybo. I was busy throwing chapter and verse at him, cutting and pasting from Synergetics on-line like some High Gothic Cleric, jealously guarding my Unorthodoxy (aka Synergetics.4D -- cite 527.712). I sometimes get into this mode contra the HyperCross Dogmatists, a competing school of thought (though containing many friends and relations, as well as bitter foes).

So lucky for Rybo the troll computer had a brain seizure and kicked over, per power outage, before I could hit the Send button. The irony is KTU2 got through the outage OK, on battery, and only died when the power returned. Fie, I say, fie.

Speaking of 4D, we were treated to a presentation by Nathaniel Bobbit from Eugene at the Pauling House last night. Here, I'll cut and paste his blurb from wwwanderers.org:

:: Tuesday ::
August 22 :: 7 pm

: : Nathaniel Bobbit : :
will present on why a new number system

Nathaniel Bobbitt’s groundbreaking work in lowering the acoustics of a flute by two octaves in 1993 resulted in an investigative method for modeling and notating nonlinear behaviors. Nathaniel Bobbitt continues research in direct models of higher dimensional spaces in his technology transfer center NABSLAB ::

Very eclectic this guy, and talented to boot. I encouraged him to go ahead and capture the Texas K-12 curriculum standards in one of his 4D fractals, so I could see what he's talking about. Or maybe we could make a science fiction short, in which his ideas went mainstream -- like I try to do around me, including on reality TV sometimes.

Once powered down, the Belkin battery stayed dead -- no blinkin lights. I unplugged it from the dusty maze of wires (AC, USB, phone) and hauled it to the kitchen. Just needed to hold down the little green button longer I guess -- still doesn't explain its going out in the first place (we probably sucked the battery dry in just those few minutes -- but so what, AC was back on so why didn't that register?).

So now he's reinstalled in his corner (Belkin battery with Bulldog for brains), but rebooting my troll computer (KTU2) takes like an hour, plus then I have to manually turn on various services (Control Panal | Administrative Tools), like Windows Audio and the Print Spooler.

Haven't gotten to it yet. Needed to clean a neighbor's C: drive (even though D: is like 99% free, every Windows game in the universe has this native C: fixation). Showed Harmony some stuff.

Whoah! was just about to Publish, when Toshiba here went into sudden hibernation. Unbeknownst to me, she'd been unplugged. Fortunately, hibernation actually works on this model, and no work was lost. Publishing now...

Appending from Synergeo #28435 (Rybo quoted in red):

> The metaphysical mathematics of XYZ 90 degree
> coordination are inherently associated to
> metaphysical mathematics of A, B, C, D 60 degree
> planes of a tetrahedron.

I'll meet you half way: IVM.4d == XYZ.3d

i.e. what we mean by Synergetics.4D is *close* to what others mean by HighSchoolMath.3D.

Then we go "4D++" to mean "instances of prefrequency concepts" while the 3D people say things like "reality is not 'just more dimensions'!" or something (except then they talk about kilowatts as dimensional, so go figure).

More re 4D++ ( = synergetics computer language):
http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2006/08/4d.html

Kirby

:: young Nat, NYC ::

Phenomenal Photos

disturbing bizmo on Belmont

fission or fusion?
artist unknown


photos by Kirby Urner with thanks to Trevor Blake

Mathcast Storyboard

Structure: split pane, left/right, two realms of action, synchronized.

Format: I'd recommend targetting HDTV's 16:9 format.

Left pane: Victorian in the movies look, pulling some leather- bound volume, perhaps fiction, off the shelf (looks like some library in Borges, or maybe @ Sunnydale High, Giles standing by).

Right pane: more futuristic graphical instrumentation, showing exploded DocBook XML in an illuminated tree diagram (more like some Klingon control panel).

Action: actor on left thumbs through book, her or his focus (sometimes 1st person) flitting to pictures, across pages; while meanwhile the illumating cursor jumps around in the scrolling XML tree to the corresponding nodes.

Audio: paper shuffle, muffled reader noises (sotto voce perhaps) mixed with electronic bling.

The point of this action: record that the parts of a book may be represented in a tree structure, and encoded in human-readable, machine-parsable XML.

Curriculum objective: gradually increase a student's comfort level with XML, with previews of and forays into such markups as SVG, XHTML, MathML, DocBook, X3D plus roll-your-own XMLs (and/or SGMLs if you must).

Obviously such a storyboard could be implemented in lots of different ways, even given these stylistic stipulations (sort of "Victorian meets Vulcan"). That's OK. A storyboard is like a class template, capable of spawning any number of special case instances.

Experiment with switched panes, top/bottom etc. Keep in mind that future includers may be looking for convenient splice points inside your segment.

Master Gamer

Les with Flextegrity model

BizMo Shopping

Showroom @ Fred's RV, near Sandy, Oregon

We drove out to Fred's on the Mt. Hood side of Sandy, Oregon, to check out the Class Bs (van body) and a few Class Cs (6 wheels), like Pleasure-Way and Kodiak. Steve steered us through the show room and to a few more in inventory. On the way out, Tara glommed on to a Tioga Montara, in-service, not for sale (she's always liked that over-the-cab feature).

Mentally, I was trying to connect to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or whatever, seeing it on a screen in the mind's eye, wireless keyboard on some surface, and surrounded by more nautical decor (I'm put off by "grandma's kitchen kitsch" (grandma'd've liked more nautical too)). I was reminded of the time we toured Orlando timeshares and then asked about wifi. They seemed so shocked we'd be into it. Plus where would we put Dawn's oxygenator, which could run off the AC? We could envision solutions.

Anyway, I didn't bother Steve with any of these fantasies (except some talk about the oxygenator). I'm clearly a special case, and he doesn't need to know about all my language game puzzles. Still, you'd think there'd be more of a market for wireless offices on wheels already. But then, I think that about eco-villages too, and I don't see many of those out there, either (at least not on the channels Comcast lets me see).

The trip was tiring for Dawn, plus the $69-85K price tag seemed out of reach, for a life style we don't really have. I'm too young to retire, average middle class. Teaching philo/math on the road might be an honest living, but as for just making oil companies rich... I'd have to sell all my stock in BP (if I had any).

So it's back to the drawing board in a way. Tara found a 1995 Tioga and gmailed a link. Dawn is thinking maybe a Eurovan, something more volksy. She just wants some place to lie down if we drive any long distances. I'm the one with the big idea of doing teacher training in these roadshow circus environments, whole caravans of us sometimes. I'd like to get lost in a crowd of bizmos, all doing basically the same kind of thing, assisting affiliates, and maybe recruiting some new ones.

Tara liked the Tioga